'It was an awful night in the cafe,' the girl said.
'Everything went wrong. I broke two plates. And the cream was sour.' It all came out in a breath. 'Who was your friend?' she asked, peering into the darkness.
'He don't matter,' the Boy said.
'I thought somehow I couldn't see properly '
'He don't matter,' the Boy repeated.
'What are we going to do?'
'Why, I thought we'd talk a little here first,' the Boy said, 'and then go on somewhere Sherry's? I don't care.'
'I'd love Sherry's,' Rose said.
'You got your money yet for that card?'
'Yes. I got it this morning.'
'Nobody came and asked you questions?'
'Oh, no. But wasn't it dreadful, his being dead like that?'
'You saw his photograph?'
Rose came close to the rail and peered palely up at the Boy. 'But it wasn't him. That's what I don't understand.'
'People look different in photographs.'
'I've got a memory for faces. It wasn't him. They must have cheated. You can't trust the newspapers.'
'Come here,' the Boy said. He drew her round the corner until they were a little further from the music, more alone with the lightning on the horizon and the thunder coming closer. 'I like you,' the Boy said, an unconvincing smile forking his mouth, 'and I want to warn you. This fellow Hale, I've heard a lot about him. He got himself mixed up with things.'
'What sort of things?' Rose whispered.
'Never mind what things,' the Boy said. 'Only I'd warn you for your own good you've got the money if I was you I'd forget it, forget all about that fellow who left the card. He's dead, see? You've got the money. That's all that matters.'
'Anything you say,' Rose said.
'You can call me Pinkie if you like. That's what my friends call me.'
'Pinkie,' Rose repeated, trying it out shyly as the thunder cracked overhead.
'You read about Peggy Baron, didn't you?'
'No, Pinkie.'
'It was in all the papers.'
'I didn't see any papers till I got this job. We couldn't afford papers at home.'
'She got mixed up with a mob,' the Boy said, 'and people came asking her questions. It's not safe.'
'I wouldn't get mixed up with a mob like that,'
Rose said.
'You can't always help it. It kind of comes that way.'
'What happened to her?' Rose said.
'They spoilt her looks. She lost one eye. They splashed vitriol on her face.'
Rose whispered. 'Vitriol? What's vitriol?' and the lightning showed a strut of tarred wood, a wave breaking, and her pale bony terrified face.
'You never seen vitriol?' the Boy said, grinning through the dark. He showed her the little bottle.
'That's vitriol.' He took the cork out and spilled a littie on the wooden plank of the pier; it hissed like steam. 'It burns,' the Boy said. 'Smell it,' and he thrust the bottle under her nose.
She gasped at him. 'Pinkie, you wouldn't ' and 'I was pulling your leg,' he smoothly lied to her.
'That's not vitriol, that's just spirit. I wanted to warn you, that's all. You and me's going to be friends. I don't want a friend with her skin burned off. You tell me if anyone asks questions. Anyone, mind. Get me on the blower at Billy's straight off. Three sixes. You can remember that.' He took her arm and propelled her away from the lonely pier end, back by the lit concert hall, the music drifting landwards, grief in the guts.
'Pinkie,' she said, 'I wouldn't want to interfere. I don't interfere in anyone's business. I've never been nosy. Cross my heart.'
'You're a good kid,' he said.
'You know an awful lot about things, Pinkie,' she said with horror and admiration, and suddenly at the stale romantic tune the orchestra was playing 'lovely to look at, beautiful to hold, and heaven itself' a little venom of anger and hatred came out on the Boy's lips. 'You've got to know a lot,' he said, 'if you get around. Come on, we'll go to Sherry's.'
Once off the pier they had to run for it; taxis splashed them with water; the strings of coloured bulbs down the Hove parade gleamed like pools of petrol through the rain. They shook themselves like dogs on the floor of Sherry's and Rose saw the queue waiting all the way upstairs for the gallery. 'It's full,' she said with disappointment.
'We'll go on the floor,' the Boy said, paying his three shillings as carelessly as if he always went there, and walked out among the little tables where the dancing partners sat with bright metallic hair and little black bags, while the coloured lights flashed green and pink and blue. Rose said: 'It's lovely here. It reminds me,' and all the way to their table she counted over aloud all the things of which it reminded her, the lights, the tune the band was playing, the crowd on the floor trying to rumba. She had an immense store of trivial memories and when she wasn't living in the future she was living in the past. As for the present she got through that as quickly as she could, running away from things, running towards things, so that her voice was always a little breathless, her heart pounding at an escape or an expectation. 'I whipped the plate under the apron and she said: 'Rose, what are you hiding there?' ' and a moment later she was turning wide unfledged eyes back to the Boy with a look of the deepest admiration, the most respectful hope.
'What'll you drink?' the Boy said.
She didn't even know the name of a drink. In Nelson Place, from which she had emerged like a mole into the daylight of Snow's restaurant and the Palace Pier, she had never known a boy with enough money to offer her a drink. She would have said 'beer' but she had had no opportunity of discovering whether she liked beer. A twopenny ice from an Everest tricycle was the whole extent of her knowledge of luxury. She goggled hopelessly at the Boy. He asked her sharply: 'What d'you like? / don't know what you like.'
'An ice,' she said with disappointment, but she couldn't keep him waiting.
'What kind of an ice?'
'Just an ordinary ice,' she said. Everest hadn't in all the slum years offered her much choice.
'Vanilla?' the waiter said. She nodded--she supposed that that was what she had always had, and so it proved, only a size larger--otherwise she might just as well have been sucking it between wafers by a tricycle.
'You're a soft sort of kid,' the Boy said. 'How old are you?'
'I'm seventeen,' she said defiantly; there was a law which said a man couldn't go with you before you were seventeen.
'I'm seventeen too,' the Boy said, and the eyes which had never been young stared with grey contempt into the eyes which had only just begun to learn a thing or two. He said: 'Do you dance?' and she replied humbly: 'I haven't danced much.'
'It don't matter,' the Boy said. 'I'm not one for dancing.' He eyed the slow movement of the twobacked beasts: pleasure, he thought, they call it pleasure: he was shaken by a sense of loneliness, an awful lack of understanding. The floor was cleared for the last cabaret of the evening. A spotlight picked out a patch of floor, a crooner in a dinner jacket, a microphone on a long black movable stand. He held it tenderly as if it were a woman, swinging it gently this way and that, wooing it with his lips while from the loudspeaker under the gallery his whisper reverberated hoarsely over the hall, like a dictator announcing victory, like the official news following a long censorship.
'It gets you,' the Boy said, 'it gets you,' surrendering himself to the huge brazen suggestion: 'Music talks, talks of our love.
The starling on our walks talks, talks of our love, The taxis tooting, The last owl hooting, The tube train rumbling, Busy bee bumbling, Talk of our love.
