saw you. You're a good sport, Fred. What's that crowd, there?' she asked with joyful curiosity, pointing to the gathering of neat and natty trousers, of bright blouses and bare arms and bleached and perfumed hair.
'With every watch I sell,' a man was shouting in the middle of it all, 'I give a free gift worth twenty times the value of the watch. Only a shilling, ladies and gents, it's only a shilling. With every watch I sell...'
'Get me a watch, Fred,' Ida said, pushing him gently, 'and give me threepence before you go. I want to get a wash.' They stood on the pavement at the entrance to the Palace Pier; the crowd was thick around them, passing in and out of the turnstiles, watching the pedlar; there was no sign anywhere of the Morris car.
'You don't want a wash, Ida,' Hale implored her. 'You're fine.'
'I've got to get a wash,' she said, 'I'm sweating all over. You just wait here. I'll only be two minutes.'
'You won't get a good wash here,' Hale said. 'Come to a hotel and have a drink.'
'I can't wait, Fred. Really I can't. Be a sport.'
Hale said: 'That ten shillings. You'd better have that too while I remember it.'
'It's real good of you, Fred. Can you spare it?'
'Be quick, Ida,' Hale said. 'I'll be here. Just here. By this turnstile. You won't be long, will you? I'll be here,' he repeated, putting his hand on a rail of the turnstile.
'Why,' Ida said, 'anyone'd think you were in love,' and she carried the image of him quite tenderly in her mind down the steps to the Ladies' Lavatory: the small rather battered man with the nails bitten close (she missed nothing) and the inkstains and the hand clutching the rail. He's a good geezer, she said to herself, I liked the way he looked in that bar even if I did laugh at him, and she began to sing again, softly this time, in her warm winy voice: 'One night in an alley Lord Rothschild said to me...' It was a long time since she'd hurried herself so for a man, and it wasn't more than four minutes before, cool and powdered and serene, she mounted into the bright Whitsun afternoon, to find him gone. He wasn't by the turnstile, he wasn't in the crowd by the pedlar; she forced herself into that to make sure and found herself facing the flushed, permanently irritated salesman. 'What? Not give a shilling for a watch, and a free gift worth exactly twenty times the watch? I'm not saying the watch is worth much more than a shilling, though it's worth that for the looks alone, but with it a free gift twenty times--' She held out the ten-shilling note and got her small package and the change, thinking: 'he's probably gone to the Gents; he'll be back', and taking up her place by the turnstile, she opened the little envelope which wrapped the watch round. 'Black Boy,' she read, 'in the four o'clock at Brighton,' and thought tenderly and proudly: 'That was his tip. He's a fellow who knows things,' and prepared patiently and happily to wait for his return. She was a sticker. A clock away in the town struck half past one.
The Boy paid his threepence and went through the turnstile. He moved rigidly past the rows of deck chairs four deep where people were waiting for the orchestra to play. From behind he looked younger than he was, in his dark thin ready-made suit a little too big for him at the hips--but when you met him face to face he looked older-- the slaty eyes were touched with the annihilating eternity from which he had come and to which he went. The orchestra began to play; he felt the music as a movement in his belly: the violins wailed in his guts. He looked neither right nor left but went on.
In the Palace of Pleasure he made his way past the peep shows, the slot machines, and the quoits to a shooting booth. The shelves of dolls stared down with glassy innocence, like Virgins in a church repository.
The Boy looked up: chestnut ringlets, blue orbs, and painted cheeks; he thought Hail Mary... in the hour of our death. 'I'll have six shots,' he said.
'Oh, it's you, is it?' the stall-holder said, eyeing him with uneasy distaste.
'Yes, it's me,' the Boy said. 'Have you got the time on you, Bill?'
'What do you mean the time? There's a clock up there in the hall, isn't there?'
'It says nearly a quarter to two. I didn't think it was that late.'
'That clock's always right,' the man said. He came down to the end of the booth, pistol in hand. 'It's always right, see?' he said. 'It doesn't stand for any phony alibis. Never again,' he said. 'A quarter to two, that's the time.'
'That's all right, Bill,' the Boy said. 'A quarter to two. I just wanted to know. Give me that pistol.' He raised it; the young bony hand was steady as a rock: he put six shots inside the bull. 'That's worth a prize,' he said.
'You can take your bloody prize,' Bill said, 'and hop it. What do you want? Chocolates?'
'I don't eat chocolates,' the Boy said.
'Packet of Players?'
'I don't smoke.'
'You'll have to have a doll then or a glass vase.'*
'The doll'll do,' the Boy said. 'I'll have that one the one up there with the brown hair.'
'You getting a family?' the man said, but the Boy didn't answer, walking rigidly away past the other booths, with the smell of gunpowder on his fingers, holding the Mother of God by the hair. The water washed round the piles at the end of the pier, dark poison-bottle green, mottled with seaweed, and the salt wind smarted on his lips. He climbed the ladder onto the tea terrace and looked around; nearly every table was full. He went inside the glass shelter and round into the long narrow tea room which faced west, perched fifty feet above the slow withdrawing tide. A table was free and he sat down where he could see all the room and across the water to the pale parade.
'I'll wait,' he said to the girl who came for his order. 'I've got friends coming.' The window was open and he could hear the low waves beating at the pier and the music of the orchestra faint and sad, borne away on the wind towards the shore. He said: 'They are late. What time is it?' His fingers pulled absent-mindedly at the doll's hair, detaching the brown wool.
'It's nearly ten to two,' the girl said.
'All the clocks on this pier are fast,' he said.
'Oh, no,' the girl said. 'It's reel London time.'
'Take the doll,' the Boy said. 'It's no good to me.
I just won it in one of those shooting booths. It's no good to me.'
'Can I reely?' the girl said.
'Go on. Take it. Stick it up in your room and pray.' He tossed it at her, watching the door impatiently. His body was stiffly controlled. The only sign of nervousness he showed was a slight tic in his cheek, through the soft chicken down, where you might have expected a dimple. It beat more impatiently when Cubitt appeared, and with him Dallow, a stout muscular man with a broken nose and an expression of brutal simplicity.
'Well?' the Boy said.
'It's all right,' Cubitt said.
'Where's Spicer?'
'He's coming,' Dallow said. 'He's just gone into the Gents' to have a wash.'
'He ought to have come straight,' the Boy said.
'You're late. I said a quarter to two sharp.'
'Don't take on so,' Cubitt said. 'All you'd got to do was come straight across.'
'I had to tidy up,' the Boy said. He beckoned to the waitress. 'Four fish and chips and a pot of tea.
There's another coming.'
'Spicer won't want fish and chips,' Dallow said.
'He's not got any appetite.'
'He'd better have an appetite,' the Boy said and, leaning his face on his hands, he watched Spicer's pale- faced progress up the tea room and felt anger grinding at his guts like the tide at the piles below.
'It's five to two,' he said. 'That's right, isn't it? It's five to two?' he called to the waitress.
'It took longer than we thought,' Spicer said, dropping into the chair, dark and pallid and spotty. He looked with nausea at the brown crackling slab of fish the girl set before him. 'I'm not hungry,' he said. 'I can't eat this. What do you think I am?' and they all three left their fish untasted as they stared at the Boy like children before his ageless eyes.
The Boy poured anchovy sauce out over his chips.
'Eat,' he said. 'Go on. Eat.' Dallow suddenly grinned. 'He ain't got no appetite,' he said and stuffed his mouth with fish. They all talked low, their words lost to those around in the hubbub of plates and voices and the steady surge of the sea. Cubitt followed suit, picking at his fish; only Spicer wouldn't eat. He sat stubbornly there, grey- haired and sea-sick.
