nervous.'
The Boy said nothing for a while, looking at his bitten nails. Then he said: 'Of course you know the world, Dallow. You've travelled.'
'There's not many places I don't know,' Dallow agreed, 'between here and Leicester.'
'I was born here,' the Boy said. 'I know Goodwood and Hurst Park. I've been to Newmarket. But I'd feel a stranger away from here.' He claimed with dreary pride: 'I suppose I'm real Brighton' as if his single heart contained all the cheap amusements, the Pullman cars, the unloving week-ends in gaudy hotels, and the sadness after coition.
A bell rang. 'Listen,' Dallow said. 'Is that Johnnie?'
But it was only the front door. Dallow looked at his watch. 'I can't think what's keeping him,' he said.
'Drewitt oughta be on board by now.'
'Well,' the Boy said with gloom, 'we change, don't we? It's as you say. We got to see the world....
After all I took to drink, didn't I? I can take to other things.'
'An' you got a girl,' Dallow said with hollow cheeriness. 'You're growing up, Pinkie like your father.'
Like my father... The Boy was shaken again with his nocturnal Saturday disgust. He couldn't blame his father now... it was what you came to... you got mixed up, and then, he supposed, the habit grew... you gave yourself away weekly. You couldn't even blame the girl. It was life getting at you... there even were the blind seconds when you thought it fine.
'We'd be safer,' he said, 'without her,' touching the loving message in the trouser pocket.
'She's safe enough now. She's crazy about you.'
'The trouble with you is,' the Boy said, 'you don't look ahead. There's years... And any day she might fall for a new face or get vexed or something... if I don't keep her smooth... there's no security,' he said. The door opened and there she was back again; he bit his words short and smirked a welcome. But it wasn't hard she took deception with such hopeless ease that he could feel a sort of tenderness for her stupidity and a companionship in her goodness they were both doomed in their own way. Again he got the sense that she completed him.
She said: 'I hadn't got a key. I had to ring. I felt afraid soon as I'd gone out that something might be wrong. I wanted to be here, Pinkie.'
'There's nothing wrong,' he said. The telephone began to ring. 'There, you see, there's Johnnie now,' he said to Dallow joylessly. 'You got your wish.'
They heard his voice at the phone shrill with suspense: 'That you, Johnnie? Yes? What was that? You don't mean...? Oh, yes, we'll see you later. Of course you'll get your money.' He came back up and at the right place the stairs creaked his broad brutal and innocent face bore good news like a boar's head at a feast. 'That's fine,' he said, 'fine. I was getting anxious, I don't mind telling you. But he's on the boat now an' she left the pier ten minutes ago. We got to celebrate this. By God, you're clever, Pinkie.
You think of everything.'
Ida Arnold had had more than a couple. She sang softly to herself over the stout 'One night in an alley Lord Rothschild said to me...' The heavy motion of the waves under the pier was like the sound of bath water; it set her going. She sat there massively alone no harm in her for anybody in the world minus one--the world was a good place if you didn't weaken} she was like the chariot in a triumph behind her were all the big battalions right's right, an eye for an eye, when you want to do a thing well, do it yourself. Phil Corkery made his way to weirds he*. behind him through the long glass windows of the tea room you could see the lights of Hove; green copper Metropole domes lay in the layer of last light under the heavy nocturnal clouds slumping down. The spray tossed up like fine rain against the windows. Ida Arnold stopped singing and said: 'Do you see what I see?'
Phil Corkery sat down; it wasn't like summer at all in this glass breakwater; he looked cold in his grey flannel trousers and his blazer with the old somethingor-other arms on the pocket; a little pinched, all passion spent. 'It's them,' he said wearily. 'How did you know they'd be here?'
'I didn't,' Ida said. 'It's fate.'
'I'm tired of the sight of them.'
'But think how tired,' she said with cheery relish, 'they are.' They looked across a waste of empty tables towards France, towards the Boy and Rose and a man and woman they didn't recognise. If the party had come there to celebrate or something, she had spoiled their fun. The Guinness welled warmly up into her throat; she had an enormous sense of wellbeing; she belched and said: 'Pardon me,' lifting a black gloved hand. She said: 'I suppose he's gone too?'
'He's gone.'
'We aren't lucky with our witnesses,' she said.
'First Spicer, then the girl, then Drewitt, and now Cubitt.'
'He took the first morning train with your money.'
'Never mind,' she said. 'They're alive. They'll come back. An' I can wait thanks to Black Boy.'
Phil Corkery looked at her askance: it was astonishing that he had ever had the nerve to send her to send that power and purpose postcards from seaside resorts--from Hastings a crab from whose stomach you could wind out a series of views--from Eastbourne a baby sitting upon a rock which lifted to disclose the High Street and Boots Library and a fernery; from Bournemouth (was it?) a bottle containing photographs of the promenade, the rock garden, the new swimming pool.... It was like offering a bun to an elephant in Africa. He was shaken by a sense of terrific force... when she wanted a good time nothing would stop her, and when she wanted justice... He said nervously: 'Don't you think, Ida, we've done enough?...'
She said: 'I haven't finished yet,' with her eyes on the little doomed party. 'You never know. They think they're safe; they'll do something crazy now.' The Boy sat there silent beside Rose; he had a glass of drink but he hadn't tasted it; only the man and the woman chattered about this and that.
'We've done our best. It's a matter for the police or no one,' Phil said.
'You heard them that first time.' She began to sing again: 'One night in an alley...'
'It's not our business now.'
'Lord Rothschild said to me...' She broke off to set him gently right. You couldn't let a friend have wrong ideas. 'It's the business of anyone who knows the difference between Right and Wrong.'
'But you're so terribly certain about things, Ida.
You go busting in... Oh, you mean well, but how do we know the reasons he may have had?... And besides,' he accused her, 'you're only doing it because it's fun. Fred wasn't anyone you cared about.'
She switched towards him her large and lit-up eyes.
'Why,' she said, 'I don't say it hasn't been exciting.' She felt quite sorry it was all over now.
'What's the harm in that? I like doing what's right, that's all.'
Rebellion bobbed weakly up 'And what's wrong too.'
She smiled at him with enormous and remote tenderness. 'Oh, that. That's not wrong. That does no one any harm. That's not like murder.'
'Priests say it is.'
'Priests!' she exclaimed with scorn. 'Why, even Romans don't believe in that. Or that girl wouldn't be living with him now.' She said: 'You can trust me.
I've seen the world. I know people,' and she turned her attention heavily back on Rose. 'You wouldn't let me leave a little girl like that to him? She's vexing, of course, she's stupid, but she don't deserve that.'
'How do you know she doesn't want to be left?'
'You aren't telling me, are you, that she wants to die? Nobody wants that. Oh, no. I don't give up until she's safe. Get me another Guinness.' A long way out beyond the West Pier you could see the lights of Worthing, a sign of bad weather; and the tide rolled regularly in, a gigantic white splash in the dark against the breakwaters nearer shore. You could hear it pounding at the piles, like a boxer's fist against a punchball in training for the human jaw, and softly and just a little tipsily Ida Arnold began to recall the people she had saved: a man she had once pulled out of the sea when she was a young woman, the money to a blind beggar, and the kind word in season to the despairing schoolgirl in the Strand.
'Poor old Spicer too,' Dallow said, 'he got the same idea he thought he'd have a pub somewhere some day.' He slapped Judy's thigh and said: 'What about me an' you settling in with the young people?'
He said: 'I can see it now. Right out in the country.
On one of those arterials with the charabancs stopping: the Great North Road. Pull in here. I wouldn't be
