'A man can't get along without a lawyer.'
She said: 'It's not where I always thought it would be.'
'Where what would be?'
'Someone asking me to marry him. I thought in the pictures or maybe at night on the front. But this is best,' she said, looking from Van Tromp's victory to the two looking glasses. She came away from the wall and lifted her face to him; he knew what was expected of him; he regarded her unmade-up mouth with faint nausea. Saturday night, eleven o'clock, the primeval exercise. He pressed his hard puritanical mouth on hers; and tasted again the sweetish smell of the human skin. He would have preferred the taste of Coty powder or Kissproof lipstick, of any chemical compound. He shut his eyes and when he opened them again, it was to see her waiting, like a blind girl, for further alms. It shocked him that she had been unable to detect his repulsion. She said: 'You know what that means?'
'What means?'
'It means I'll never let you down, never, never, never.'
She belonged to him like a room or a chair: the Boy fetched up a smile for the blind lost face, uneasily, with obscure shame.
PART FIVE
EVERYTHING went well: the inquest never even got onto the newspaper posters; no questions asked. The Boy walked back with Dallow, he should have felt triumphant. He said: 'I wouldn't trust Cubitt if Cubitt knew.'
'Cubitt won't know. Drewitt is scared to say a thing and you know I don't talk, Pinkie.'
'Fve got a feeling we're being followed, Dallow.'
Dallow looked behind. 'No one. I know every bogy in Brighton.'
'No woman?'
'No. Who are you thinking of?'
'I don't know.'
The blind band came up the kerb, scraping the sides of their shoes along the edge, feeling their way in the brilliant light, sweating a little. The boy walked up the side of the road to meet them; the music they played was plaintive, pitying, something out of a hymn book about burdens; it was like a voice prophesying sorrow at the moment of victory. The boy met the leader and pushed him out of the way, swearing at him softly, and the whole band, hearing their leader move, shifted uneasily a foot into the roadway and stood there stranded till the boy was safely by, like barques becalmed on a huge and landless Atlantic.
Then they edged back, feeling for the landfall of the pavement.
'What's up with you, Pinkie?' Dallow said.
'They're blind.'
'Why should I get out of my way for a beggar?'
But he hadn't realised they were blind; he was shocked by his own action. It was as if he was being driven too far down a road he wanted to travel only a certain distance. He stood and leant on the rail of the front while the midweek crowd passed and the hard sun flattened.
'What's on your mind, Pinkie?'
'To think of all this trouble over Hale. He deserved what he got, but if I'd known how it would go maybe I'd have let him live. Maybe he wasn't worth killing.
A dirty little journalist who played in with Colleoni and got Kite killed. Why should anyone bother about him?' He looked suddenly over his shoulder. 'Have I seen that geezer before?'
'He's only a visitor.'
'I thought I'd seen his tie.'
'Hundreds in the shops. If you were a drinking man I'd say what you needed was a pick-up. Why, Pinkie, everything's going fine. No questions asked.'
'There were only two people could hang us, Spicer and the girl. I've killed Spicer and I'm marrying the girl. Seems to me I'm doing everything.'
'Well, we'll be safe now.'
'Oh, yes, you'll be safe. It's me who runs all the risk. You know I killed Spicer. Drewitt knows. It only wants Cubitt and I'll need a massacre to put me right this time.'
'You oughtn't to talk that way to me, Pinkie.
You've been all bottled up since Kite died. What you want's a bit of fun.'
'I liked Kite,' the Boy said. He stared straight out towards France, an unknown land. At his back beyond the Cosmopolitan, Old Steyne, the Lewes Road, stood the downs, villages and cattle round the dewponds, another unknown land. This was his territory: the popillous foreshore, a few thousand acres of houses, a narrow peninsula of electrified track running to London, two or three railway stations with their buffets and buns. It had been Kite's territory, it had been good enough for Kite, and when Kite had died in the waiting room at St. Pancras, it had been as if a father had died, leaving him an inheritance it was his duty never to leave for strange acres. He had inherited even the mannerisms, the bitten thumb nail, the soft drinks. The sun slid off the sea and like a cuttlefish shot into the sky the stain of agonies and endurances.
'Break out, Pinkie. Relax. Give yourself a chance.
Come out with me and Cubitt to the Queen of Hearts and celebrate.'
'You know I never touch a drink.'
'You'll have to on your wedding day. Whoever heard of a dry wedding?'
An old man went stooping down the shore, very slowly, turning the stones, picking among the dry seaweed for cigarette ends, scraps of food. The gulls which had stood like candles down the beach rose and cried under the promenade. The old man found a boot and stowed it in his sack, and a gull dropped from the parade and swept through the iron nave of the Palace Pier, white and purposeful in the obscurity: half vulture and half dove. In the end one always had to learn.
'All right, I'll come,' the Boy said.
'It's the best roadhouse this side of London,' Dailow encouraged him.
They drove out in the old Morris into the country.
'I like a blow in the country,' Dallow said. It was between lighting-up time and the real dark when the lamps of cars burned in the grey visibility as faintly and unnecessarily as the night lights in nurseries. The advertisements trailed along the arterial roadj bungalows and a broken farm, short chalky grass where a hoarding had been pulled down, a windmill offering tea and lemonade, the great sails gaping.
'Poor old Spicer would have liked this ride,' Cubitt said. The Boy sat beside Dallow, who drove, and Cubitt sat in the rumble. The Boy could see him in the driving mirror bouncing gently up and down on the defective springs.
The Queen of Hearts was floodlit behind the petrol pumps: a Tudor barn converted, a vestige of a farmyard left in the arrangement of the restaurant and bars, a swimming pool where the paddock had been. u We ought to 'ave brought some girls with us,' Dallow said. 'You can't pick 'em up in this gaff. It's real class.'
'Come in the bar,' Cubitt said and led the way.
He stopped on the threshold and nodded towards the girl who sat and drank alone at the long steel bar under the old rafters. 'We better say something, Pinkie. You know the kind of thing he was a real good old pal, we sympathise with what you feel.'
'What are you clapping about?'
'That's Spicer's girl,' Cubitt said.
The Boy stood in the doorway and took her reluctantly in: hair fair as silver, wide vacuous brow, trim little buttocks shaped by the high seat, alone with her glass and her grief.
'How's things, Sylvie?' Cubitt said.
'Awful.'
'Terrible, wasn't it? He was a good pal. One of the best.'
'You were there, weren't you?' she said to Dallow.
'Billy ought to 'ave mended that stair,' Dallow said. 'Meet Pinkie, Sylvie, the best one in our mob.'
'Were you there too?'
'He wasn't there,' Dallow said.
