'All right,' Hale said, 'I'm Fred. But I've got a card in my pocket which'll be worth ten bob to you.'
'I know all about the cards,' the boy said. He had a fair smooth skin, the faintest down, and his grey eyes had an effect of heartlessness like those of an old man in whom human feeling has died. 'We were all reading about you,' he said, 'in the paper this morning,' and suddenly he sniggered as if he'd just seen the point of a dirty story.
'You can have one,' Hale said. 'Look, take this Messenger. Read what it says there. You can have the whole prize. Ten guineas,' he said. 'You'll only have to send this form to the Messenger.'
'Then they don't trust you with the cash,' the boy said, and in the other bar Lily began to sing: 'We met 'twas in a crowd and I thought he would shun me.'
'Christ,' the boy said, 'won't anybody stop that buer's mouth?'
'I'll give you a fiver,' Hale said. 'It's all I've got on me. That and my ticket.'
'You won't want your ticket,' the boy said.
'I wore my bridal robe, and I rivall'd its whiteness.'
The boy rose furiously and, giving way to a little vicious spurt of hatred--at the song? at the man?--he dropped his empty glass onto the floor. 'The gentleman'll pay,' he said to the barman and swung through the door of the private lounge. It was then Hale realized that they meant to murder him.
'A wreath of orange blossoms,
When next we met, she wore;
The expression of her features
Was more thoughtful than before.'
The commissionaire slept on and Hale watched Lily from the deserted elegant lounge. Her big breasts pointed through the thin vulgar summer dress, and he thought: I must get away from here, I must get away: sadly and desperately watching her, as if he were gazing at life itself in the public bar. But he couldn't get away: he had his job to do, they were particular on the Messenger--it was a good paper to be on, and a little flare of pride went up in Hale's heart when he thought of the long pilgrimage behind him: selling newspapers at street corners, the reporter's job at thirty bob a week on the little local paper with a circulation of ten thousand, the five years in Sheffield. He was damned, he told himself with the temporary courage of another whisky, if he'd let that mob frighten him into spoiling his job. What could they do while he had people round him? They hadn't the nerve to kill him in broad day before witnesses--he was safe with the fifty thousand visitors.
'Come on over here, lonely heart.' He didn't realize at first she was speaking to him, until he saw all the faces in the public bar grinning across at him, and suddenly he thought how easily the mob could get at him with only the sleeping commissionaire to keep him company. There was no need to go outside to reach the other bar, he had only to make a semi-circle through three doors, by way of the saloon bar, the 'ladies only.'
'What'11 you have?' he said, approaching the big woman with starved gratitude. She could save my life, he thought, if she'd let me stick to her.
'I'll have a port,' she said.
'One port,' Hale said.
'Aren't you having one?'
'No,' Hale said, 'I've drunk enough. I mustn't get sleepy.'
'Why ever not on a holiday? Have a Bass on me.'
'I don't like Bass.' He looked at his watch. It was one o'clock. His programme fretted at his mind. He had to leave cards in every section: the paper in that way kept a check on him--they could always tell if he scamped his job. 'Come and have a bite,' he implored her.
'Hark at him,' she called to her friends. Her warm port-winy laugh filled all the bars. 'Getting fresh, eh? I wouldn't trust myself.'
'Don't you go, Lily,' they told her. 'He's not safe.'
'I wouldn't trust myself,' she repeated, closing one soft friendly cow-like eye.
There was a way, Hale knew, to make her come. He had known the way once. On thirty bob a week he would have been at home with her; he would have known the right phrase, the right joke, to cut her out from among her friends, to be friendly at a snack bar.
But he'd lost touch. He had nothing to say; he could only repeat: 'Come and have a bite.'
'Where shall we go, Sir Horace? To the Old Ship?'
'Yes,' Hale said. 'If you like. The Old Ship.'
'Hear that?' she told them in all the bars, the two old dames in black bonnets in the ladies', the commissionaire who slept on alone in the private, her own half-dozen cronies. 'This gentleman's invited me to the Old Ship,' she said in a mock-refined voice. 'Tomorrow I shall be delighted, but today I have a prior engagement at the Dirty Dog.'
Hale turned hopelessly to the door. The boy, he thought, would not have had time to warn the others yet. He would be safe at lunch; it was the hour he had to pass after lunch he dreaded most. The woman said: 'Are you sick or something?'
His eyes turned to the big breasts; she was like darkness to him, shelter, knowledge, common-sense; his heart ached at the sight; but, in his little bitten inky cynical framework of bone, pride bobbed up again, taunting him 'back to the womb... be a mother to you... no more standing on your own feet.'
'No,' he said, 'I'm not sick. I'm all right.'
'You look queer,' she said in a friendly concerned way.
'I'm all right,' he said. 'Hungry. That's all.'
'Why not have a bite here?' the woman said. 'You could do him a ham sandwich, couldn't you, Bill?' and the barman said, Yes, he could do a ham sandwich.
'No,' Hale said, 'I've got to be getting on.'
Getting on. Down the front, mixing as quickly as possible with the current of the crowd, glancing to right and left of him and over each shoulder in turn.
He could see no familiar face anywhere, but he felt no relief. He thought he could lose himself safely in a crowd, but now the people he was among seemed like a thick forest in which a native could arrange his poisoned ambush. He couldn't see beyond the man in flannels just in front, and when he turned, his vision was blocked by a brilliant scarlet blouse. Three old ladies went driving by in an open horse-drawn carriage: the gentle clatter faded like peace. That was how some people still lived.
Hale crossed the road away from the front. There were fewer people there: he could walk faster and go further. They were drinking cocktails on the terrace of the Grand, a delicate pastiche of a Victorian sunshade twisted its ribbons and flowers in the sun, and a man like a retired statesman, all silver hair and powdered skin and double old-fashioned eyeglass, let life slip naturally, with dignity, away from him, sitting over a sherry. Down the steps of the Cosmopolitan came a couple of expensive women with bright brass hair and ermine coats and heads close together like parrots exchanging metallic confidences. 'My dear, I said quite coldly, if you haven't learnt the Del Rey perm, all I can say...' and they flashed their pointed painted nails at each other and cackled. For the first time in five years Kolley Kibber was late in his programme. At the foot of the Cosmopolitan steps, in the shadow the huge bizarre building cast, he remembered that the mob had bought his paper. They hadn't needed to watch the public house for him: they knew where to expect him.
A mounted policeman came up the road: the lovely cared-for chestnut beast stepping delicately on the hot macadam, like an expensive toy a millionaire buys for his children; you admired the finish, the leather as deeply glowing as an old mahogany table top, the bright silver badge; it never occurred to you that the toy was for use. It never occurred to Hale, watching the policeman pass; he couldn't appeal to him. A man stood by the kerb selling objects on a tray; he had lost the whole of one side of the body: leg and arm and shoulder; and the beautiful horse as it paced by turned its head aside delicately like a dowager. 'Shoelaces,' the man said hopelessly to Hale, 'matches.' Hale didn't hear him. 'Razor blades.'
Hale went by, the words lodged securely in his brain: the thought of the thin wound and the sharpness of the agony. That was how Kite was killed.
Twenty yards down the road he saw Cubitt. Cubitt was a big man, with red hair cut _en brosse_ and freckles.
He saw Hale, but he made no sign of recognition, leaning carelessly against a pillar box watching Hale.
A postman came to collect and Cubitt shifted. Hale could see him exchanging a joke with the postman and
