peace, of going home, and his heart weakened with a faint nostalgia for the tiny dark confessional box, the priest's voice, and the people waiting under the statue, before the bright lights burning down in the pink glasses, to be made safe from eternal pain. Eternal pain had not meant much to him; now it meant the clash of razor blades infinitely prolonged.
He sidled out of the garage. The new raw street cut in the chalk was empty except for a couple pressed against each other out of the lamplight by a wooden fence. The sight pricked him with nausea and cruelty.
He limped by them, his cut hand close on the blade, with his cruel virginity, which demanded some satisfaction different from theirs, habitual, brutish, and short.
He knew where he was going. He wasn't going to return to Billy's like this with the cobwebs from the garage on his clothes, defeat cut in his face and hand.
They were dancing in the open air on the white stone deck above the Aquarium, and he got down onto the beach where he was more alone, the dry seaweed left by last winter's gales cracking under his shoes. He could hear the music, 'The One I Love.'
'Wrap it up in cellophane,' he thought, 'put it in silver paper.' A moth wounded against one of the lamps crawled across a piece of driftwood and he crushed it out of existence under his chalky shoe. One day, one day he limped along the sand with his bleeding hand hidden, a young dictator. He was head of Kite's gang; this was a temporary defeat. One confession when he was safe to wipe out everything. The yellow moon slanted up over Hove, the exact mathematical Regency Square, and he day-dreamed, limping in the dry unwashed sand, by the closed bathing huts: I'll give a statue.
He climbed up from the sand just past the Palace Pier and made his painful way across the parade.
Snow's Restaurant was all lit up. A radio was playing.
He stood on the pavement outside until he saw Rose serve a table close to the window, then went and pressed his face to it. She saw him at once--his attention rang in her brain as quickly as if he had dialled her on an automatic phone. He took his hand from his pocket, but his wounded face was anxiety enough to her.
She tried to tell him something through the glass--he couldn't understand her: it was as if he were listening to a foreign language. She had to repeat it three times: 'Go to the back,' before he could read her lips. The pain in his leg was worse--he trailed round the building, and as he turned, a car went by, a Lancia, a uniformed chauffeur, and Mr. Colleoni, Mr. Colleoni in a dinner jacket with a white waistcoat, who leant back and smiled Qnd smiled in the face of an old lady in purple silk. Or perhaps it was not Mr. Colleoni at all, they went so smoothly and swiftly past, but any rich middle-aged Jew returning to the Cosmopolitan after a concert in the Pavilion.
He bent and looked through the letterbox of the back door; Rose came down the passage towards him with her hands clenched and a look of anger on her face. He lost some of his confidence: she's noticed, he thought, how done in... he'd always known a girl looked at your shoes and coat. If she sends me away, he thought, I'll crack this vitriol bottle... but when she opened the door she was as dumb and devoted as ever she'd been. 'Who's done it?' she whispered. 'If I could get at them.'
'Never mind,' the Boy said and boasted experimentally: 'You can leave them to me.'
'Your poor face.' He remembered with disgust that they were always said to like a scar, that they took it as a mark of manhood, of potency.
'Is there somewhere,' he said, 'where I can wash up?'
She whispered: 'Come quietly. Through here's the [158] BRIGHTON ROC* cellar,' and she led the way into a little closet, through which the hot pipes ran, where a few bottles lay on a small bin.
'Won't they be coming here?' he asked.
'No one here orders wine,' she said. 'We haven't got a licence. It's what was left when we took over.
The manageress drinks it for her health.' Every time she mentioned Snow's she said 'we' with faint selfconsciousness. 'Sit down,' she said. 'I'll fetch some water. I'll have to put the light out or someone might see.' But the moon lit the room enough for him to look around; he could even read the labels on the bottles: Empire wines, Australian hocks, and harvest burgundies.
She was gone only a little while but immediately she returned she began humbly to apologise: 'Someone wanted a bill and Cook was watching.' She had a white pudding basin of hot water and three handkerchiefs. 'They're all I've got,' she said, tearing them up, 'the laundry's not back,' and added firmly, as she dabbed the long shallow cut, like a line drawn with a pin down his neck: 'If I could get at them...'
'Don't talk so much,' he said and held out his slashed hand. The blood was beginning to clot; she tied it unskilfully.
'Has anyone been around again talking, asking questions?'
'That man the woman was with.'
'A bogy?'
'I don't think so. He said his name was Phil.'
'You seem to have done the asking.'
'They all tell you things.'
'I don't understand it,' the Boy said. 'What do they want if they aren't bogies?' He put out his unwounded hand and pinched her arm. 'You don't tell them a thing?'
'Not a thing,' she said and watched him with devotion through the dark. 'Were you afraid?'
'They can't put anything on me.'
'I mean,' she said, 'when they did this,' touching his hand.
'Afraid?' he lied. 'Of course I wasn't afraid.'
'Why did they do it?'
'I told you not to ask questions.' He got up, unsteady on his bruised leg. 'Brush my coat. I can't go out like this. I've got to be respectable.' He leant against the harvest burgundy while she brushed him down with the flat of her hand. The moonlight shadowed the room, the small bin, the bottles, the narrow shoulders, the smooth scared adolescent face.
He was aware of an unwillingness to go out again into the street, back to Billy's and the unending calculations with Cubitt and Dallow of the next move. Life was a series of complicated tactical exercises, as complicated as the alinements at Waterloo, thought out on a brass bedstead among the crumbs of sausage roll.
Your clothes continually needed ironing, Cubitt and Dallow quarrelled, or else Dallow went after Billy's wife, the old box telephone under the stairs rang and rang, and the extras were always being brought in and thrown on the bed by Judy, who smoked too much and wanted a tip a tip a tip. How could you think out a larger strategy under those conditions? He had a sudden nostalgia for the small dark cupboard room, the silence, the pale light on the harvest burgundy. To be alone awhile...
But he wasn't alone. Rose put her hand on his and asked him with fear: 'They aren't waiting for you, are they, out there?'
He shrank away and boasted. 'They aren't waiting anywhere. They got more than they gave. They didn't reckon on me, only on poor Spicer.'
'Poor Spicer?'
'Poor Spacer's dead,' and just as he spoke a loud laugh came down the passage from the restaurant, a woman's laugh, full of beer and good fellowship and no regrets. 'She's back,' the Boy said.
'It's her all right.' One had heard that laugh in a hundred places: dry-eyed, uncaring, looking on the bright side, when boats drew out and other people wept; saluting the bawdy joke in music halls--beside sick beds and in crowded Southern Railway compartments; when the wrong horse won, a good sportswoman's laugh. 'She scares me,' Rose whispered. 'I don't know what she wants.'
The Boy pulled her up to him; tactics, tactics: there was never any time for strategy; and in the grey night light he could see her face lifted for a kiss. He hesitated, with repulsion; but tactics. He wanted to strike her, to make her scream, but he kissed her inexpertly, missing her lips. He took his crinkling mouth away, and said: 'Listen.'
She said: 'You haven't had many girls, have you?'
'Of course I have,' he said, 'but listen...'
'You're my first,' she said. 'I'm glad.' When she said that, he began again to hate her. She wouldn't even be something to boast of: her first--he'd robbed nobody, he had no rival, no one else would look at her, Cubitt and Dallow wouldn't give her a glance her indeterminate natural hair, her simpleness, the cheap clothes he could feel
