Brighton Rock (34 page)

He knew the Morris wouldn’t be on the rank, but all the same he had to go and see for himself. Its absence was like a voice speaking quite plainly in his ear. ‘Suppose she kills herself. . . a pact may be murder, but they don’t hang you for it.’ He stood there hopelessly, not knowing what to do. Beer clouded his brain: he passed a harassed hand across his face. He said to the attendant, ‘You see that Morris go out?’

‘Your friend and his girl took it,’ the man said, hobbling between a Talbot and an Austin. One leg was gammy, he moved it with a mechanism worked from his pocket, lurching with an air of enormous strain to pocket sixpence, to say ‘It’s a fine night’; he looked worn with the awful labour of the trivial act. He said, ‘They’re goin’ up to Peacehaven for a drink. Don’t ask me why.’ Hand in pocket he pulled the hidden wire and made his unsteady and diagonal way towards a Ford. ‘The rain won’t hold off long,’ his voice came back, and ‘Thank you, sir,’ and then again the labour of movement as a Morris Oxford backed in, the pulling at the wire.

Dallow stood there hopelessly at a loss. There were buses. . . but everything would be over long before a bus got in. Better to wash his hands of the whole thing. . . after all he didn’t
know
; in half an hour he might see the old car coming back past the Aquarium, Pinkie driving and the girl beside him, but he knew very well in his heart that it would never come, not with both of them, that way. The Boy had left too many signs behind him—the message at the shooting-range, at the car-park: he wanted to be followed in good time, in his own time, to fit in with his story. The man came lurching back. He said, ‘I thought your friend seemed queer tonight. Sort of lit up.’ It was as if he were talking in the witness box, giving the evidence he was meant to give.

Dallow turned hopelessly away. . . fetch Judy, go home, wait. . . and there was the woman standing a few feet away. She’d followed him and listened. He said, ‘God’s sakes, this is your doing. You made him marry her, you made him. . . ’

‘Get a car,’ she said, ‘quick.’

‘I’ve not got the money for a car.’

‘I have. You better hurry.’

‘There’s no cause to hurry,’ he said weakly. ‘They’ve just gone for a drink.’

‘You know what they’ve gone for,’ she said. ‘I don’t. But if
you
want to keep out of this, you’d better get that car.’

The first rain began to blow up the parade as he weakly argued. ‘I don’t know a thing.’

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘You’re just taking me for a drive, that’s all.’ She burst suddenly out at him: ‘Don’t be a fool. You better have me for a friend. . . ’ She said, ‘You see what’s come to Pinkie.’

All the same he didn’t hurry. What was the good? Pinkie had laid
this
trail. Pinkie thought of everything, they were meant to follow in due course, and find. . . He hadn’t got the imagination to see what they’d find.

9

The Boy stopped at the head of the stairs and looked down. Two men had come into the lounge: hearty and damp in camel-hair coats they shook out their moisture like dogs and were noisy over their drinks. ‘Two pints,’ they ordered ‘in tankards,’ and fell suddenly silent scenting a girl in the lounge. They were upper-class, they’d learned that tankard trick in class hotels: he watched their gambits with hatred from the stairs. Anything female was better than nothing, even Rose; but he could sense their half-heartedness. She wasn’t worth more than a little sidelong swagger. ‘I think we touched eighty.’

‘I made it eighty-two.’

‘She’s a good bus.’

‘How much did they sting you?’

‘A couple of hundred. She’s cheap at the price.’

Then they both stopped and took an arrogant look at the girl by the statuette. She wasn’t worth bothering about, but if she absolutely fell, without trouble. . . One of them said something in a low voice and the other laughed. They took long swills of bitter from the tankards.

Tenderness came up to the very window and looked in. What the hell right had they got to swagger and laugh. . . if she was good enough for him. He came down the stairs into the hall; they looked up and moued to each other, as much as to say—‘Oh well, she wasn’t really worth the trouble.’

One of them said, ‘Drink up. We better get on with the good work. You don’t think Zoe’ll be out?’

‘Oh no. I said I might drop in.’

‘Her friend all right?’

‘She’s hot.’

‘Let’s get on then.’

They drained their beer and moved arrogantly to the door, taking a passing look at Rose as they went. He could hear them laugh outside the door. They were laughing at him. He came a few steps into the lounge: again they were bound in an icy constraint. He had a sudden inclination to throw up the whole thing, to get into the car and drive home, and let her live. It was less a motion of pity than of weariness—there was such a hell of a lot to do and think of, there were going to be so many questions to be answered. He could hardly believe in the freedom at the end of it, and even that freedom was to be in a strange place. He said, ‘The rain’s worse.’ She stood there waiting; she couldn’t answer: she was breathing hard as if she’d run a long way—and she looked old. She was sixteen, but this was how she might have looked after years of marriage, of the childbirth and the daily quarrel: they had reached death and it affected them like age.

She said, ‘I wrote what you wanted.’ She waited for him to take the scrap of paper and write his own message to the coroner, to
Daily Express
readers, to what one called the world. The other boy came cautiously into the lounge and said, ‘You haven’t paid.’ While Pinkie found the money, she was visited by an almost overwhelming rebellion—she had only to go out, leave him, refuse to play. He couldn’t make her kill herself: life wasn’t as bad as that. It came like a revelation, as if someone had whispered to her that she was someone, a separate creature—not just one flesh with him. She could always escape—if he didn’t change his mind. Nothing was decided. They could go in the car wherever he wanted them to go; she could take the gun from his hand, and even then—at the last moment of all—she needn’t shoot. Nothing was decided—there was always hope.

‘That’s your tip,’ the Boy said. ‘I always tip a waiter.’ Hate came back. He said, ‘You a good Roman, Piker? Do you go to Mass on Sundays like they tell you?’

Piker said with weak defiance, ‘Why not, Pinkie?’

‘You’re afraid,’ the Boy said. ‘You’re afraid of burning.’

‘Who wouldn’t be?’

‘I’m not.’ He looked with loathing into the past—a cracked bell
ringing,
a child weeping under the cane—and repeated, ‘I’m not afraid.’ He said to Rose, ‘We’ll be going.’ He came tentatively across and put a nail against her cheek—half caress, half threat—and said, ‘You’d love me always, wouldn’t you?’

‘Yes.’

He gave her one more chance: ‘You’d always have stuck to me,’ and when she nodded her agreement, he began wearily the long course of action which one day would let him be free again.

Outside in the rain the self-starter wouldn’t work again: he stood with his coat-collar turned up and pulled the handle. She wanted to tell him he mustn’t stand there, getting wet, because she’d changed her mind: they were going to live—by hook or by crook, but she didn’t dare. She pushed hope back—to the last possible moment. When they drove off she said, ‘Last night. . . the night before. . . you didn’t hate me, did you, for what we did?’

He said, ‘No, I didn’t hate you.’

‘Even though it was a mortal sin.’

It was quite true—he hadn’t hated her; he hadn’t even hated the act. There had been a kind of pleasure, a kind of pride, a kind of—something else. The car lurched back on to the main road; he turned the bonnet to Brighton. An enormous emotion beat on him; it was like something trying to get in; the pressure of gigantic wings against the glass. Dona nobis pacem. He withstood it, with all the bitter force of the school bench, the cement playground, the St Pancras waiting-room, Dallow’s and Judy’s secret lust, and the cold unhappy moment on the pier. If the glass broke, if the beast—whatever it was—got in, God knows what it would do. He had a sense of huge havoc—the confession, the penance and the sacrament—and awful distraction, and he drove blind into the rain. He could see nothing through the cracked stained windscreen. A bus came upon them and pulled out just in time—he was on the wrong side. He said, suddenly, at random, ‘We pull in here.’

An ill-made street petered out towards the cliff—bungalows of every shape and kind, a vacant plot full of salt grass and wet thorn bushes like bedraggled fowls, no lights except in three windows. A radio played, and in a garage a man was doing something to his motor-bike which roared and spluttered in the darkness. He drove a few yards in, turned out his headlights, switched off his engine.
The
rain came noisily in through the rent in the hood and they could hear the sea battering the cliff. He said, ‘Well, take a look. It’s the world.’ Another light went on behind a stained-glass door (the laughing Cavalier between Tudor roses) and looking out as if it was he who’d got to take some sort of farewell of the bike and the bungalows and the rainy street, he thought of the words in the Mass—‘He was in the world and the world was made by Him and the world knew Him not.’

It was about as far as hope could be stretched; she had to say now or never—‘I won’t do it. I never meant to do it.’ It was like some romantic adventure—you plan to fight in Spain, and then before you know the tickets are taken for you, the introductions are pressed into your hand, somebody has come to see you off, everything is real. He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out the gun. He said, ‘I got it out of Dallow’s room.’ She wanted to say she didn’t know how to use it to make any excuse, but he seemed to have thought of everything. He explained, ‘I’ve put up the safety-catch. All you need do is pull on this. It isn’t hard. Put it in your ear—that’ll hold it steady.’ His youth came out in the crudity of his instruction: he was like a boy playing on an ash-heap. ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘take it.’

It was amazing how far hope could stretch. She thought: I needn’t say anything yet. I can take the gun and then—throw it out of the car, run away, do something to stop everything. But all the time she felt the steady pressure of his will.
His
mind was made up. She took the gun; it was like a treachery. What will he do, she thought, if I don’t. . . shoot. Would he shoot himself alone, without her? Then he would be damned, and she wouldn’t have her chance of being damned too, of showing Them they couldn’t pick and choose. To go on living for years. . . you couldn’t tell what life would do to you in making you meek, good, repentant. Belief in her mind had the bright clarity of images, of the crib at Christmas: here goodness ended, past the cow and the sheep, and there evil began—Herod seeking the child’s birthplace from his turreted keep. She wanted to be with Herod—if
he
were there. You could win to the evil side suddenly, in a moment of despair or passion, but through a long life the guardian good drove you remorselessly towards the crib, the ‘happy death’.

He said, ‘We don’t want to wait any longer. Do you want me to do it first?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘no.’

‘All right then. You take a walk—or better still I’ll take a walk an’ you stay here. When it’s over, I’ll come back an’ do it too.’ Again he gave the sense that he was a boy playing a game, a game in which you could talk in the coldest detail of the scalping knife or the bayonet wound and then go home to tea. He said, ‘It’ll be too dark for me to see much.’

He opened the door of the car. She sat motionless with the gun on her lap. Behind them on the main road a car went slowly past towards Peacehaven. He said awkwardly, ‘You know what to do?’ He seemed to think that some motion of tenderness was expected of him. He put out his mouth and kissed her on the cheek; he was afraid of the mouth—thoughts travel too easily from lip to lip. He said, ‘It won’t hurt,’ and began to walk back a little way towards the main road. Hope was stretched now as far as it would go. The radio had stopped; the motor-bicycle exploded twice in the garage, feet moved on gravel and on the main road she could hear a car reversing.

If it was a guardian angel speaking to her now, he spoke like a devil—he tempted her to virtue like a sin. To throw away the gun was a betrayal; it would be an act of cowardice: it would mean that she chose never to see him again for ever. Moral maxims dressed in pedantic priestly tones remembered from old sermons, instructions, confessions—‘you can plead for him at the throne of Grace’—came to her like unconvincing insinuations. The evil act was the honest act, the bold and the faithful—it was only lack of courage, it seemed to her, that spoke so virtuously. She put the gun up to her ear and put it down again with a feeling of sickness—it was a poor love that was afraid to die. She hadn’t been afraid to commit mortal sin—it was death not damnation which was scaring her. Pinkie said it wouldn’t hurt. She felt his will moving her hand—she could trust him. She put up the gun again.

A voice called sharply ‘Pinkie’ and she heard somebody splashing in the puddles. Footsteps ran. . . she couldn’t tell where. It seemed to her that this must be news, that this must make a difference.
She
couldn’t kill herself when this might mean good news. It was as if somewhere in the darkness the will which had governed her hand relaxed, and all the hideous forces of self-preservation came flooding back. It didn’t seem real—that she had really intended to sit there and press the trigger. ‘Pinkie,’ the voice called again, and the splashing steps came nearer. She pulled the car door open and flung the revolver far away from her towards the damp scrub.

In the light from the stained glass she saw Dallow and the woman—and a policeman who looked confused as if he didn’t quite know what was happening. Somebody came softly round the car behind her and said, ‘Where’s that gun? Why don’t you shoot? Give it me.’

She said, ‘I threw it away.’

The others approached cautiously like a deputation. Pinkie called out suddenly in a breaking childish voice, ‘You bloody squealer, Dallow.’

‘Pinkie,’ Dallow said, ‘it’s no use. They got Prewitt.’ The policeman looked ill-at-ease like a stranger at a party.