'I don't know anything about women. I leave that to you and Cubitt and the rest. I only know what you tell me. You've told me time and again there never was a safe polony yet.'
'That's just talk.'
'You mean I'm a kid and you tell me good-night stories. But I've got so I believe them, Spicer. It don't seem safe to me that you and Rose are in the same town. Apart from this other buer asking questions.
You'll have to disappear, Spicer.'
'What do you mean,' Spicer said, 'disappear?'
He fumbled inside his jacket and the Boy watched him, his hands flat on his knees. 'You wouldn't do anything,' he said, fumbling in his pocket.
'Why,' the Boy said, 'what do you think I mean?
I mean take a holiday, go away somewhere for a while.'
Spicer's hand came out of his pocket. He held out a silver watch towards the Boy. 'You can trust me, Pinkie. Look there, what the boys gave me. Read the inscription: 'Ten Years a Pal. From the Boys at the Stadium.' I don't let people down. That was fifteen years ago, Pinkie. Twenty-five years on the tracks.
You weren't born when I started.'
'You need a holiday,' the Boy said. 'That's all I said.'
'I'd be glad to take a holiday,' Spicer said, 'but I wouldn't want you to think I'm milky. I'll go at once.
I'll pack a bag and clear out tonight. Why, I'd be glad to be gone.'
'No,' the Boy said, staring down at his shoes.
'There's not all that hurry.' He lifted a foot. The sole was worn through in a piece the size of a shilling.
He thought again of the crowns on Colleoni's chairs at the Cosmopolitan. 'I'll need you at the races.' He smiled across the room at Spicer. 'A pal I can trust.'
'You can trust me, Pinkie.' Spicer's fingers smoothed the silver watch. 'What are you smiling at?
Have I got a smut or something?'
'I was just thinking of the races,' the Boy said.
'They mean a lot to me.' He got up and stood with his back to the greying light, the tenement wall, the smutsmeared pane, looking down at Spicer with a kind of curiosity. 'And where will you go, Spicer?' he said.
His mind was quite made up, and for the second time in a few weeks he looked at a dying man. He couldn't help feeling inquisitive. Why, it was even possible that old Spicer was not set for the flames, he'd been a loyal old geezer, he hadn't done as much harm as the next man, he might slip through the gates into but the Boy couldn't picture any eternity except in terms of pain. He frowned a little in the effort: a glassy sea, a golden crown, old Spicer.
'Nottingham,' Spicer said. 'A pal of mine keeps the Blue Anchor in Union Street. A free house. High class. Lunches served. He's often said to me: 'Spicer, why don't you come into partnership? We'd make the old place into a hotel with a few more nickers in the till.' If it wasn't for you and the boys,' Spicer said, 'I wouldn't want to come back. I wouldn't mind staying away for keeps.'
'Well,' the Boy said, 'I'll be off. We know where we are now anyway.' Spicer lay back on the pillow and put up the foot with the shooting corn. There was a hole in his woollen sock, and a big toe showed through, hard skin calcined with middle age. 'Sleep well,' the Boy said.
He went downstairs; the front door faced east, and the hall was dark. He switched on a light by the telephone and then switched it out again, he didn't know why. Then he rang up the Cosmopolitan. When the hotel exchange answered he could hear the dance music in the distance, all the way from the Palm House (th6s dansants, three shillings) behind the Louis Seize Writing Room. 'I want Mr. Colleoni.' The nightingale singing, the postman ringing the tune was abruptly cut off, and a low Semitic voice purred up the line.
'That Mr. Colleoni?'
He could hear a glass chink and ice move in a shaker. He said: 'This is Mr. P. Brown. I've been thinking things over, Mr. Colleoni.' Outside the little dark linoleumed hall a bus slid by, the lights faint in the grey end of the day. The Boy put his mouth close to the mouth of the telephone and said: 'He won't listen to reason, Mr. Colleoni.' The voice purred happily back at him. The Boy explained slowly and carefully: 'I'll wish him good luck and pat him on the back.' He stopped and said sharply: 'What's that you say, Mr.
Colleoni? No. I just thought you laughed. Hullo.
Hullo.' He banged the receiver down and turned with a sense of uneasiness towards the stairs. The gold cigar lighter, the grey double-breasted waistcoat, the feeling of a racket luxuriously successful for a moment dominated him: the brass bedstead upstairs, the little pot of violet ink on the washstand, the flakes of sausage roll.
His board school cunning wilted for a while; then he turned on the light, he was at home. He climbed the stairs, humming softly: 'The nightingale singing, the postman ringing,' but as his thoughts circled closer to the dark, dangerous, and deathly centre the tune changed: 'Agnus dei qui tollis peccata mundi...'; he walked stiffly, the jacket sagging across his immature shoulders, but when he opened the door of his room 'Dona nobis pacem' his pallid face peered dimly back at him full of pride from the mirror over the ewer, the soap dish, the basin of stale water.
PART FOUR
IT WAS a fine day for the races. People poured into Brighton by the first train; it was like bank holiday all over again, except that these people didn't spend their money--they harboured it. They stood packed deep on the tops of the trams rocking down to the Aquarium, they surged like some natural and irrational migration of insects up and down the front. By eleven o'clock it was impossible to get a seat on the [142] BRIGHTON HOCK buses going out to the course. A Negro wearing a bright striped tie sat on a bench in the Pavilion garden and smoked a cigar. Some children played touch wood from seat to seat, and he called out to them hilariously, holding his cigar at arm's length with an air of pride and caution, his great teeth gleaming like an advertisement. They stopped playing and stared at him, backing slowly. He called out to them again in their own tongue, the words hollow and unformed and childish like theirs, and they eyed him uneasily and backed further away. He put his cigar patiently back between the cushiony lips and went on smoking. A band came up the pavement through Old Steyne, a blind band playing drums and trumpets, walking in the gutter, feeling the kerb with the edge of their shoes, in Indian file. You heard the music a long way off, persisting through the rumble of the crowd, the shots of exhaust pipes, and the grinding of the buses starting uphill for the racecourse. It rang out with spirit, marched like a regiment, and you raised your eyes in expectation of the tiger skin and the twirling drumsticks and saw the pale blind eyes, like those of pit ponies, going by along the gutter.
In the great public-school grounds above the sea the girls trooped solemnly out to hockey: stout goalkeepers padded like armadillos; captains discussing tactics with their lieutenants; junior girls running amuck in the bright day. Beyond the aristocratic turf, through the wrought-iron main gates they could see the plebeian procession, those whom the buses wouldn't hold, plodding up the down, kicking up the dust, eating buns out of paper bags. The buses took the long way round through Kemp Town, but up the steep hill came the crammed taxicabs a seat for anyone at ninepence a time a Packard for the members' enclosure, old Morrises, strange high cars with family parties, keeping the road after twenty years. It was as if the whole road moved upwards like an Underground staircase in the dusty sunlight, a creaking, shouting, jostling crowd of cars moving with it. The junior girls took to their heels like ponies racing on the turf, feeling the excitement going on outside, as if this were a day on which life for many people reached a kind of climax. The odds on Black Boy had shortened, nothing could ever make life quite the same after that rash bet of a fiver on Merry Monarch. A scarlet racing model, a tiny rakish car which carried about it the atmosphere of innumerable roadhouses, of totsies gathered round swimming pools, of furtive encounters in by-lanes off the Great North Road, wormed through the traffic with incredible dexterity. The sun caught it: it winked as far as the dining-hall windows of the girls' school. It was crammed tight: a woman sat on a man's knee, and another man clung on the running board as it swayed and hooted and cut in and out uphill towards the downs. The woman was singing, her voice faint and disjointed through the horns, something traditional about brides and bouquets, something which went with stout and oysters, and the old Leicester Lounge, something out of place in the little bright racing car. Upon the top of the down the words blew back along the dusty road to meet an ancient Morris rocking and receding in their wake at forty miles an hour, with flapping top, bent fender, and discoloured windscreen.
The words came through the flap, flap, flap of the old top to the Boy's ears. He sat beside Spicer, who drove the car. Brides and bouquets: and he thought of Rose with sullen disgust. He couldn't get the suggestion of Spicer out of his mind: it was like an invisible power working against him: Spicer 's stupidity, the photograph on the pier,
