Brighton Rock (33 page)

The Peacehaven streets began, running out towards the cliffs and the downs: thorn-bushes grew up round the To Let boards; streets ended in obscurity, in a pool of water and in salty grass. It was like the last effort of despairing pioneers to break new country. The country had broken them. He said, ‘We’ll go to the hotel and have a drink and then—I know the right place.’

The rain was coming tentatively down; it beat on the faded scarlet doors of Lureland, the poster of next week’s Whist Drive and last week’s Dance. They ran for it to the hotel door. In the lounge there was nobody at all—white marble statuettes and on the green dado above the panelled walls Tudor roses and lilies picked out in gold. Siphons stood about on blue-topped tables, and on the stained-glass windows medieval ships tossed on cold curling waves. Somebody had broken the hands off one of the statuettes—or perhaps it was made like that, something classical in white drapery, a symbol of victory or despair. The Boy rang a bell and a boy of his own age came out of the public bar to take his order: they were oddly alike and allusively different—narrow shoulders, thin face, they bristled like dogs at the sight of each other.

‘Piker,’ the Boy said.

‘What of it?’

‘Give us service,’ the Boy said. He took a step forward and the other backed and Pinkie grinned at him. ‘Bring us two double brandies,’ he said, ‘and quick.’ He said softly, ‘Who would have thought I’d find Piker here?’ She watched him with amazement
that
he could find any distraction from their purpose. She could hear the wind on the upstair windows; where the steps curved another tombstone statuette raised its ruined limbs. He said, ‘We were at the school together. I used to give him hell in the breaks.’ The other returned with the brandies and brought, sidelong and scared and cautious, a whole smoky childhood with him. She felt a pang of jealousy against him because tonight she should have had all there was of Pinkie.

‘You a servant?’ the Boy said.

‘I’m not a servant, I’m a waiter.’

‘You want me to tip you?’

‘I don’t want your tips.’

The Boy took his brandy and drank it down; he coughed when it took him by the throat. It was like the stain of the world in his stomach. He said, ‘Here’s courage.’ He said to Piker, ‘What’s the time?’

‘You can read it on the clock,’ Piker said, ‘if you can read.’

‘Haven’t you any music?’ the Boy said. ‘God damn it, we want to celebrate.’

‘There’s the piano. An’ the wireless.’

‘Turn it on.’

The wireless was hidden behind a potted plant: a violin came wailing out, the notes shaken by atmospherics. The Boy said, ‘He hates me. He hates my guts,’ and turned to mock at Piker, but he’d gone. He said to Rose, ‘You’d better drink that brandy.’

‘I don’t need it,’ she said.

‘Have it your own way.’

He stood by the wireless and she by the empty fireplace: three tables and three siphons and a Moorish-Tudor-God-knows-what-of-a-lamp were between them: they were gripped by an awful unreality, the need to make conversation, to say ‘What a night!’ or ‘It’s cold for the time of year.’ She said, ‘So he was at your school.’

‘That’s right.’ They both looked at the clock: it was almost nine, and behind the violin the rain tapped against the seaward windows. He said awkwardly, ‘We’d better be moving soon.’

She began to pray to herself, ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God,’ but then she stopped—she was in mortal sin: it was no good praying. Her prayers stayed here below with the siphons and statuettes: they had no wings. She waited by the fireplace in terrified
patience.
He said uneasily, ‘We ought to write—something, so people will know.’

‘It doesn’t matter, does it?’ she said.

‘Oh yes,’ he said quickly, ‘it does. We got to do things right. This is a pact. You read about them in the newspapers.’

‘Do lots of people—do it?’

‘It’s always happening,’ he said; an awful and airy confidence momentarily possessed him: the violin faded out and the time signal pinged through the rain. A voice behind the plant gave them the weather report—storms coming up from the Continent, a depression in the Atlantic, tomorrow’s forecast. She began to listen and then remembered that tomorrow’s weather didn’t matter at all.

He said, ‘Like another drink—or something?’ He looked round for a Gents sign—‘I just got to go—an’ wash.’ She noticed the weight in his pocket—it was going to be that way. He said, ‘Just add a piece on that note while I’m gone. Here’s a pencil. Say you couldn’t live without me, something like that. We got to do this right, as it’s always done.’ He went out into the passage and called to Piker and got his directions, then went up the stairs. At the statuette he turned and looked down into the panelled lounge. This was the kind of moment one kept for memory—the wind at the pier end, Sherry’s and the men singing, lamplight on the harvest Burgundy, the crisis as Cubitt battered at the door. He found that he remembered it all without repulsion; he had a sense that somewhere, like a beggar outside a shuttered house, tenderness stirred, but he was bound in a habit of hate. He turned his back and went on up the stairs. He told himself that soon he would be free again—they’d see the note. He hadn’t known she was all that unhappy, he would say, because they’d got to part: she must have found the gun in Dallow’s room and brought it with her. They’d test it for finger-prints, of course, and then—he stared out through the lavatory window: invisible rollers beat under the cliff. Life would go on. No more human contacts, other people’s emotions washing at the brain—he would be free again: nothing to think about but himself. Myself: the word echoed hygienically on among the porcelain basins, the taps and plugs and wastes. He took the revolver out of his pocket and loaded it—two chambers. In the mirror above the wash-basin he could see his hand move
round
the metal death, adjusting the safety-catch. Down below the news was over and the music had begun again—it wailed upwards like a dog over a grave, and the huge darkness pressed a wet mouth against the panes. He put the revolver back and went out into the passage. That was the next move. Another statuette pointed an obscure moral with cemetery hands and a chaplet of marble flowers, and again he felt the prowling presence of pity.

8

‘They’ve been gone a long while,’ Dallow said. ‘What are they up to?’

‘Who cares?’ Judy said. ‘They want to be’—she pressed her plump lips against Dallow’s cheek—‘alone’—her red hair caught in his mouth—a sour taste. ‘You know what love is,’ she said.

‘He doesn’t.’ He was uneasy—conversations came back to him. He said, ‘He hates her guts.’ He put his arm half-heartedly round Judy—it was no good spoiling a party, but he wished he knew what Pinkie had in mind. He took a long drink out of Judy’s glass, and somewhere Worthing way a siren wailed. Through the window he could see a couple mooning at the pier end, and an old man got his fortune card from the witch behind glass.

‘Why don’t he get clear of her then?’ Judy asked. Her mouth looked for his mouth down the line of his jaw. She drew herself indignantly up and said, ‘Who’s that polony over there? What does she want lamping us all the time? This is a free country.’

Dallow turned and looked. His brain worked very slowly, first the statement—‘I never seen her,’ and then the memory. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘it’s that damned buer who’s been getting Pinkie rattled.’ He got cumbrously to his feet and stumbled a little between the tables. ‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘Who are you?’

‘Ida Arnold,’ she said, ‘for what it’s worth. My friends call me Ida.’

‘I’m not your friend.’

‘You better be,’ she said gently. ‘Have a drink. Where’s Pinkie gone—and Rose? You ought to ’ave brought them along. This is Phil. Introduce the lady friend.’ She ran softly on, ‘It’s time we all got together. What’s your name?’

‘Don’t you know what people get who poke their noses. . . ’

‘Oh, I know,’ she said. ‘I know all right. I was with Fred the day you finished him.’

‘Talk sense,’ Dallow said. ‘Who the hell are you?’

‘You ought to know. You followed us all the way up the front in that old Morris of yours.’ She smiled quite amiably at him. He wasn’t her game. ‘It seems an age ago now, doesn’t it?’

It was true all right—it seemed an age.

‘Have a drink,’ Ida said, ‘you may as well. An’ where’s Pinkie? He didn’t seem to like the look of me tonight. What were you celebrating? Not what’s happened to Mr Prewitt? You won’t have heard that.’

‘What do you mean?’ Dallow said. The wind got up against the glass and the waitresses yawned.

‘You’ll see it in the morning papers. I don’t want to spoil your fun. And of course you’ll know it sooner than that if he talks.’

‘He’s gone abroad.’

‘He’s at the police-station now,’ she said with complete confidence. ‘They brought him right back,’ she went elaborately on. ‘You ought to choose your solicitors better, men who can afford to take a holiday. They’ve got him for swindling. Arrested on the quay.’

He watched her uneasily. He didn’t believe her—but all the same. . . ‘You know an awful lot,’ he said. ‘Do you sleep at nights?’

‘Do you?’

The big broken face had a kind of innocence about it. ‘Me?’ he said. ‘I don’t know a thing.’

‘It was a waste giving him all that money. He’d have run anyway—and it didn’t look good. When I got hold of Johnnie at the pier—’

He stared at her with hopeless amazement. ‘You got hold of Johnnie? How the hell. . . ?’

She said simply, ‘People like me.’ She took a drink and said, ‘His mother treated him shameful when he was a kid.’

‘Whose mother?’

‘Johnnie’s.’

Dallow was impatient, puzzled, scared. ‘What the hell,’ he said, ‘do you know about Johnnie’s mother?’

‘What he told me,’ she said. She sat there completely at her ease, her big breasts ready for any secrets. She carried her air of compassion and comprehension about her like a rank cheap perfume. She said gently, ‘I got nothing against you. I like to be friendly. Bring over your lady friend.’

He glanced quickly over his shoulder and back again. ‘I better not,’ he said. His voice fell. He too began automatically to confide. ‘Truth is, she’s a jealous bitch.’

‘You don’t say. And her old man. . . ’

‘Oh, her old man,’ he said, ‘he’s all right. What Frank doesn’t see, he doesn’t mind.’ He dropped his voice still lower. ‘And he can’t see much—he’s blind.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ she said.

‘You wouldn’t,’ he said. ‘Not from his pressing and ironing. He’s got a wonderful hand with an iron.’ He broke suddenly off. ‘What the hell,’ he said, ‘did you mean—you didn’t know
that
? What did you know?’

‘There isn’t much,’ she said, ‘I’ve not picked up—here and there. The neighbours always talk.’ She was barnacled with pieces of popular wisdom.

‘Who’s talking?’ It was Judy now. She’d come across to them. ‘An’ what ’ave they got to talk about? Why, if I chose to put my tongue round some of their doings. But I wouldn’t like to,’ Judy said. ‘I wouldn’t like to.’ She looked vaguely round. ‘What
has
happened to those two?’

‘Perhaps I scared them,’ Ida Arnold said.

‘
You
scared them?’ Dallow said. ‘That’s rich. Pinkie’s not scared that easy.’

‘What I want to know is,’ Judy said, ‘what neighbour’s said what?’

Somebody was shooting at the range: when the door opened and a couple came in they could hear the shots—one, two, three. ‘That’ll be Pinkie,’ Dallow said. ‘He was always good with a gun.’

‘You better go an’ see,’ Ida gently remarked, ‘that he doesn’t do something desperate—with his gun—when he gets to know.’

Dallow said, ‘You jump to things. We got no cause to be afraid of Mr Prewitt.’

‘You gave him money, I suppose, for something.’

‘Aw,’ he said, ‘Johnnie’s been joking.’

‘Your friend Cubitt seemed to think. . . ’

‘Cubitt doesn’t know a thing.’

‘Of course,’ she admitted, ‘he wasn’t there, was he? That time, I mean. But you. . . ’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t twenty pounds be of use to you? After all you don’t want to get into trouble.. . . Let Pinkie carry his own crimes.’

‘You make me sick,’ he said. ‘You think you know a lot and you don’t know a thing.’ He said to Judy, ‘I’m goin’ to have a drain. You want to keep your mouth shut or this polony. . . ’ He stretched a gesture, hopelessly—he couldn’t express what she mightn’t put over on you. He went uneasily out, and the wind caught him, so that he had to grab at his old greasy hat and hold it on. Going down the step to the gents was like going down into a ship’s engine-room in a storm. The whole place shook a little under his feet as the swell came up against the piles and drove on to break against the beach. He thought: I oughter warn Pinkie about Prewitt if it’s true.. . . He
had
things on his mind, other things besides old Spicer. He came up the ladder and looked down the dock—Pinkie wasn’t to be seen. He went on past the peep machines—not in sight. It was someone else shooting at the booth.

He asked the man, ‘Seen Pinkie?’

‘What’s the game?’ the man said. ‘You know I seen him.
An
’ he’s gone for a ride in the country—with his girl—for a freshener—Hastings way.
An
’ I suppose you want to know the time too. Well,’ the man said, ‘I’m swearing nothing. You can pitch on someone else for your phoney alibis.’

‘You’re crackers,’ Dallow said. He moved away. Across the noisy sea the hour began to strike in Brighton churches: he counted one, two, three, four, and stopped. He was scared—suppose it
was
true, suppose Pinkie knew, and it was that mad scheme. . . Why the hell was he taking anyone for a ride in the country at this hour, except to a roadhouse, and Pinkie didn’t go to roadhouses? He said softly, ‘I won’t stand for it,’ aloud. He was confused, he wished he hadn’t drunk all that beer. She was a good kid. He remembered her in the kitchen, going to light the stove. And why not? he thought, staring gloomily out to sea; he was shaken by a sudden sentimental desire which Judy couldn’t satisfy: for a paper
with
your breakfast and warm fires. He began to walk rapidly down the pier towards the turnstiles. There were things he wouldn’t stand for.