under his hand. He hated her as he had hated Spicer and it made him circumspect; he pressed her breasts awkwardly under his palms, with a grim opportunist pretence of another's man's passion, and thought: it wouldn't be so bad if she was more dolled up, a bit of paint and henna, but this the cheapest, youngest, least experienced skirt in all Brighton to have me in her power.
'Oh, God,' she said, 'you're sweet to me, Pinkie. I love you.'
'You wouldn't give me away to her?'
Somebody in the passage shouted: 'Rose'; a door slammed.
'I'll have to go,' she said. 'What do you mean give you away?'
'What I said. Talk. Tell her who left that ticket.
That it wasn't you know who.'
'I won't tell her.' A bus went by in West Street; the lights came through a little barred window straight onto her white determined face: she was like a child who crosses her fingers and swears her private oath.
She said gently: 'I don't care what you've done,' as she might have denied interest in a broken window pane or a smutty word chalked on someone else's door.
He was speechless; and some knowledge of the astuteness of her simplicity, the long experience of her sixteen years, the possible depths of her fidelity, touched him like cheap music as the light shifted from cheekbone to cheekbone and across the wall as the gears ground outside.
He said: 'What do you mean? I've done nothing/*
'I don't know,' she said. 'I don't care.'
'Rose,' a voice cried, 'Rose.'
'It's Her,' she said, 'I'm sure it's Her. Asking questions. Soft as butter. What does she know about us?' She came closer. She said: 'I did something once too. A mortal sin. When I was twelve. But she she doesn't know what a mortal sin is.'
'Rose. Where are you? Rose.'
The shadow of her sixteen-year-old face shifted in the moonlight on the wall. 'Right and wrong. That's what she talks about. I've heard her at the table. Right and wrong. As if she knew.' She whispered with contempt: 'Oh, she won't burn. She couldn't burn if she tried.' She might have been discussing a damp Catherine wheel. 'Molly Carthew burnt. She was lovely.
She killed herself. Despair. That's mortal sin. It's unforgivable. Unless what is it you said about the stirrup?'
He told her unwillingly: 'The stirrup and the ground. That doesn't work.'
'What you did,' she persisted, 'did you confess it?'
He said evasively, a dark stubborn figure resting his bandaged hand on the Australian hock: 'I haven't been to Mass for years.'
'I don't care,' she repeated. 'I'd rather burn with you than be like Her.' Her immature voice stumbled on the word: 'She's ignorant.'
'Rose.' The door opened on their hiding place. A manageress in a sage-green uniform, glasses hanging from a button on her breast, brought in with her the light, the voices, the radio, the laugh, dispelled the dark theology between them. 'Child,' she said, 'what are you doing here? And who's the other child?' she added peering at the thin figure in the shadows, but when he moved into the light she corrected herself: 'This boy.' Her eye ran along the bottles, counting them. 'You can't have followers here.'
'I'm going,' the Boy said.
She watched him with suspicion and distaste: the cobwebs had not all gone. 'If you weren't so young,' she said, 'I'd call the police.'
He said with the only flash of humour he ever showed: 'I'd have an alibi.'
'And as for you' the manageress turned on Rose 'we'll talk about you later.' She watched the Boy out of the room and said with disgust: 'You're both too young for this sort of thing.'
Too young that was the difficulty. Spicer hadn't solved that difficulty before he died. Too young to close her mouth with marriage, too young to stop the police putting her in the witness box, if it ever came to that.
To give evidence that why, to say that Hale had never left the card, that Spicer had left it, that he himself had come and felt for it under the cloth. She remembered even that detail. Spicer's death would add suspicion. He'd got to close her mouth one way or another: he had to have peace.
He slowly climbed the stairs to the bed sitting room at Billy's. He had the sense that he was losing grip, the telephone rang and rang, and as he lost grip he began to realise all the things he hadn't years enough to know. Cubitt came out of a downstairs room, his cheek was stuffed with apple, he had a broken penknife in his hand. 'No,' he said, 'Spicer's not here. He's not back yet.'
The Boy called down from the first landing. 'Who wants Spicer?'
'She's rung off.'
'Who was she?'
'I don't know. Some skirt of his. He's soft on a girl he sees at the Queen of Hearts. Where is Spicer, Pinkie?'
'He's dead. Colleoni's men killed him.'
'God,' Cubitt said. He shut the knife and spat the apple out. 'I said we ought to lay off Brewer. What are we going to do?'
'Come up here,' the Boy said. ' Where's Dallow?'
'He's out.'
The Boy led the way into the bed sitting room and turned on the single globe. He thought of Colleoni's room in the Cosmopolitan. But you had to begin somewhere. He said: 'You've been eating on my bed again.'
'It wasn't me, Pinkie. It was Dallow. Why, Pinkie, they've cut you up.'
Again the Boy lied. 'I gave them as good.' But lying was a weakness. He wasn't used to lying. He said: 'We needn't get worked up about Spicer. He was milky. It's a good thing he's dead. The girl at Snow's saw him leave the ticket. Well, when he's buried, no one's going to identify him. We might even have him cremated.'
'You don't think the bogies?'
'I'm not afraid of the bogies. It's others who are nosing round.'
'They can't get over what the doctors said.'
'You know we killed him and the doctors knew he died natural. Work it out for yourself, I can't.' He sat down on the bed and swept off Dallow's crumbs. u We're safer without Spicer.'
'Maybe you know best, Pinkie. But what made Colleoni?'
'He was scared, I suppose, that we'd let Tate have it on the course. I want Mr. Drewitt fetched. I want him to fix me something. He's the only lawyer we can trust round here if we can trust him.'
'What's the trouble, Pinkie? Anything serious?'
The Boy leant his head back against the brass bedpost. 'Maybe I'll have to get married after all.'
Cubitt suddenly bellowed with laughter, his large mouth wide, his teeth carious. Behind his head the blind was half drawn down, shutting out the night sky; leaving the chimney pots, black and phallic, palely smoking up into the moonlit air. The Boy was silent, watching Cubitt, listening to his laughter as if it were the world's contempt.
When Cubitt stopped he said: 'Go on. Ring Mr.
Drewitt up. He's got to come round here,' staring past Cubitt at the acorn gently tapping on the pane at the end of the blind cord, at the chimneys and the early summer night.
'He won't come here.'
'He's got to come. I can't go out like this.' 9 He touched the marks on his neck where the razors had cut him. 'I've got to get things fixed.'
'You dog you,' Cubitt said. 'You're a young one at the game.' The game: and the Boy's mind turned with curiosity and loathing to the small cheap readyfor-anyone face, the bottles catching the moonlight on the bin, and the word 'burn,'
'burn,' repeated. What did people mean by 'the game'? He knew everything in theory, nothing in practice; he was only old with the knowledge of other people's lusts, those of strangers who wrote their desires on the walls in public lavatories. He knew the moves, he'd never played the game. 'Maybe,' he said, 'it won't come to that. But fetch Mr. Drewitt. He knows.'
