He began softly to intone: 'Dona nobis pacem.'
'He won't.'
'What do you mean?'
'Give us peace.'
He thought: there'll be time enough in the years ahead sixty years to repent of this. Go to a priest.
Say: 'Father, I've committed murder twice. And there was a girl she killed herself.' Even if death came suddenly, driving home tonight, the smash on the lamp post there was still: 'between the stirrup and the ground.' The houses on one side ceased altogether, and the sea came back to them, beating at the undercliff drive, a darkness and deep sound. He wasn't really deceiving himself he'd learned the other day that when the time was short there were other things than contrition to think about. It didn't matter anyway... he wasn't made for peace, he couldn't believe in it. Heaven was a word; Hell was something he could trust. A brain was capable only of what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never experienced; his cells were formed of the cement school playground, the dead fire and the dying man in the St. Pancras waiting room, his bed at Billy's and his parents' bed. An awful resentment stirred in him why shouldn't he have had his chance like all the rest, seen his glimpse of Heaven if it was only a crack between the Brighton walls?... He turned as they went down to Rottingdean and took a long look at her as if she might be it but the brain couldn't conceive he saw a mouth which wanted the sexual contact, the shape of breasts demanding a child. Oh, she was good all right, he supposed, but she wasn't good enough--he'd got her down.
Above Rottingdean the new villas began: pipedream architecture; up on the down the obscure skeleton of a nursing home, winged like an aeroplane. He said: 'They won't hear us in the country.' The lights petered out along the road to Peacehaven; the chalk of a new cutting flapped like white sheets in the headlight; cars came down on them, blinding them. He said: 'The battery's low.'
She had the sense that he was a thousand miles away his thoughts had gone on beyond the act she couldn't tell where--he was wise; he was foreseeing, she thought, things she couldn't conceive eternal punishment, the flames... She felt terror, the idea of pain shook her, their purpose drove up in a flurry of rain against the old stained windscreen. This road led nowhere else. It was said to be the worst act of all, the act of despair, the sin without forgiveness; sitting there in the smell of petrol she tried to realise despair, the mortal sin, but she couldn't; it didn't feel like despair. He was going to damn himself, but she was going to show them that they couldn't damn him without damning her too; there was nothing he could do she wouldn't do; she felt capable of sharing any murder. A light lit his face and left it; a frown, a thought, a child's face; she felt responsibility move in her breasts; she wouldn't let him go into that darkness alone.
The Peacehaven streets began, running out towards the cliffs and the downs; thorn bushes grew up round the To Let boards; streets ended in obscurity, in a pool of water and in salty grass. It was like the last effort of despairing pioneers to break new country.
The country had broken them. He said: 'We'll go to the hotel and have a drink and then I know the right place.'
The rain was coming tentatively down; it beat on the faded scarlet doors of Lureland, the poster of next week's Whist Drive and last week's Dance. They ran for it to the hotel door; in the lounge there was nobody at all white marble statuettes and on the green dado above the panelled walls Tudor roses and lilies picked out in gold. Syphons stood about on blue-topped tables, and on the stained-glass windows mediaeval ships tossed on cold curling waves. Somebody had broken the hands off one of the statuettes or perhaps it was made like that, something classical in white drapery, a symbol of victory or despair. The Boy rang a bell and a boy of his own age came out of the public bar to take his order; they were oddly alike and allusively different narrow shoulders, thin face, they bristled like dogs at the sight of each other.
'Piker,' the Boy said.
'What of it?'
'Give us service,' the Boy said. He took a step forward and the other backed and Pinkie grinned at him. 'Bring us two double brandies,' he said, 'and quick.' He said softly: 'Who would have thought I'd find Piker here?' She watched him with amazement that he could find any distraction from their purpose; she could hear the wind on upstairs windows; where the steps curved another tombstone statuette raised its ruined limbs. He said: 'We were at the school together. I used to give him hell in the breaks.' The other returned with the brandies and brought, sidelong and scared and cautious, a whole smoky childhood with him. She felt a pang of jealousy against him because tonight she should have had all there was of Pinkie.
'You a servant?' the Boy said.
'I'm not a servant, I'm a waiter.'
'You want me to tip you?'
'I don't want your tips.'
The Boy took his brandy and drank it down--he coughed when it took him by the throat, it was like the stain of the world in his stomach. He said: 'Here's courage.' He said to Piker: 'What's the time?'
'You can read it on the clock,' Piker said, 'if you can read.'
'Haven't you' any music?' the Boy said. 'God damn it, we want to celebrate.'
'There's the piano. An' the wireless.'
'Turn it on.'
The wireless was hidden behind a potted plant; a violin came wailing out, the notes shaken by static. The Boy said: 'He hates me. He hates my guts,' and turned to mock at Piker, but he'd gone. He said to Rose: 'You'd better drink that brandy.'
'I don't need it,' she said.
'Have it your own way.'
He stood by the wireless and she by the empty fireplace; three tables and three syphons and a Moorish- Tudor-God-knows-what-of-a-lamp were between them--they were gripped by an awful unreality, the need to make conversation, to say: 'What a night' or: 'It's cold for the time of year.' She said: 'So he was at your school?'
'That's right.' They both looked at the clock; it was almost nine, and behind the violin the rain tapped against the seaward windows. He said awkwardly: 'We'd better be moving soon.'
She began to pray to herself: 'Holy Mary, Mother of God/ 7 but then she stopped she was in mortal sin; it was no good praying. Her prayers stayed here below with the syphons and the statuettes--they had no wings.
She waited by the fireplace in terrified patience. He said uneasily: 'We ought to write something, so people will know.'
'It doesn't matter, does it?' she said.
'Oh, yes,' he said quickly, 'it does. We got to do things right. This is a pact. You read about them in the newspapers.'
'Do lots of people do it?'
'It's always happening,' he said; an awful and airy confidence momentarily possessed him; the violin faded out and the time signal pinged through the rain.
A voice behind the plant gave them the weather report storms coming up from the Continent, a depression in the Atlantic, tomorrow's forecast. She began to listen and then remembered that tomorrow's weather didn't matter at all.
He said: 'Like another drink or something?' He looked round for a Gents' sign 'I just got to go an' wash.' She noticed the weight in his pocket it was going to be that way. He said: 'Just add a piece on that note while I'm gone. Here's a pencil. Say you couldn't live without me, something like that. We got to do this right, as it's always done.' He went out into the passage and called to Piker and got his direction, then went up the stairs. At the statuette he turned and looked down into the panelled lounge. This was the kind of moment one kept for memory the wind at the pier end, Sherry's and the man singing, lamplight on the harvest burgundy, the crisis as Cubitt battered at the door. He found that he remembered it all without repulsion; he had a sense that somewhere, like a beggar outside a shuttered house, tenderness stirred, but he was bound in a habit of hate. He turned his back and went on up the stairs. He told himself that soon he would be free again they'd see the note: he hadn't known she was all that unhappy because he'd said they'd got to part; she must have found the gun in Dallow's room and brought it with her. They'd test it for finger prints, of course, and then he stared out through the lavatory window: invisible rollers beat under the cliff. Life would go on. No more human contacts, other people's emotions washing at the brain he would be free again: nothing to think about but himself. Myself: the word echoed hygienically on among the
