'Have another drink?' the Boy said.
Sylvie drained her glass. 'I don't mind if I do. A sidecar.'
'Two Scotch, a sidecar, a grapefruit squash.'
'Why,' Sylvie said, 'don't you drink?'
'No.'
'I bet you don't go with girls either.'
'You got him, Sylvie,' Cubitt said, 'first shot.'
'I admire a man like that,' Sylvie said. 'I think it's wonderful to be fit. Spicie always said you'd break out one day and then oh, gosh, how wonderful!'
She put down her glass, miscalculated, upset the cocktail. She said: 'I'm not drunk. I'm upset about poor Spicie.'
'Go on, Pinkie,' Dallow said, 'have a drink. It'll jerk you up.' He explained to Sylvie: 'He's upset too.' In the dance hall the band was playing: 'Love me tonight, And forget in daylight, All our delight...'
'Have a drink,' Sylvie said. 'I've been awful upset. You can see I've been crying. Aren't my eyes awful?... Why, I hardly dared show myself. I can see why people go into monasteries.' The music beat on the boy's resistance; he watched with a kind of horror and curiosity Spicer's girl friend: she knew the game.
He shook his head, speechless in his scared pride. He knew what he was good at: he was the top: there was no limit to his ambition: nothing must lay him open to the mockery of people more experienced than he.
To be compared with Spicer and found wanting... his eyes shifted miserably and the music wailed its tidings 'forget in daylight' about the game of which they all knew so much more than he did.
'Spicie said he didn't think you'd ever had a girl,'
Sylvie said.
'There was plenty Spicer didn't know.'
'You're awful young to be so famous.'
'You and n*e had better go away,' Cubitt said to Dallow. 'Seems we're not wanted. Come an' lamp the bathing belles.' They moved heavily out of sight.
'Dallie just knows when I like a boy,' Sylvie said.
'Who's Dallie?'
'Your friend, Mr. Dallow, silly. Do you dance why, I don't even know your proper name?' He watched her with scared lust: she had belonged to Spicer; her voice had wailed up the telephone wires making assignations; he had had signed letters in mauve envelopes, addressed to him; even Spicer had had something to be proud of, to show to friends 'my girl.' He remembered some flowers which had come to Billy's labelled 'Brokenhearted.' He was fascinated by her infidelity. She belonged to nobody unlike a table or a chair. He said slowly, putting his arm round her to take her glass and pressing her breast clumsily: 'I'm going to be married in a day or two.'
It was as if he were staking a claim to his share of infidelity: he wasn't to be beaten by experience. He lifted her glass and drank it; the sweetness dripped down his throat, his first alcohol touched the palate like a bad smell: this was what people called pleasure this and the game. He put his hand on her thigh with a kind of horror; Rose and he; forty-eight hours after Drewitt had arranged things; alone in God knows what apartment what then, what then? He knew the traditional actions as a man may know the principles of gunnery in chalk on a blackboard, but to translate the knowledge to action, to the smashed village and the ravaged woman, one needed help from the nerves. His own were frozen with repulsion: to be touched, to give oneself away, to lay oneself open he had held intimacy back as long as he could at the end of a razor blade.
He said: 'Come on. Let's dance.'
They circulated slowly in the dance hall. To be beaten by experience was bad enough, but to be beaten by greenness and innocence, by a girl who carried plates at Snow's, by a little bitch of sixteen years...
'Spicie thought a lot of you,' Sylvie said.
'Come out to the cars,' the boy said.
'I couldn't, not with Spicie dead only yesterday.'
They stood and clapped and then the dance began again. The shaker clacked in the bar, and the leaves of one small tree were pressed against the window beyond the big drum and the saxophone.
'I like the country. It makes me feel romantic. Do you like the country?'
'No.'
'This is real country. I saw a hen just now. They use their own eggs in the gin slings.'
'Come out to the cars.'
'I feel that way too. Oh, gosh, wouldn't it be fine?
But I can't, not with poor Spicie..,'
'You sent flowers, didn't you, you been crying...'
'My eyes are awful.'
'What more can you do?'
'It broke my heart. Poor Spicie going off like that.'
'I know. I saw your wreath.'
'It does seem awful, doesn't it? Dancing with you like this and him...'
'Come to the cars.'
'Poor Spicie,' but she led the way, and he noticed with uneasiness how she ran literally ran across the lit corner of what had once been a farmyard towards the dark car park and the game. He thought with sickness: 'In three minutes I shall know.'
'Which is your car?' Sylvie said.
'That Morris.'
'No good to us,' Sylvie said. She darted down the line of cars. 'This Ford.' She pulled the door open, said: 'Oh, pardon me,' and shut it, scrambled into the back of the next car in the line, and waited for him. 'Oh,' her voice softly and passionately pronounced from the dim interior, 'I love a Lancia.' He stood in the doorway and the darkness peeled away between him and the fair and vacuous face. Her skirt drawn up above her knees she waited for him with luxurious docility.
He was conscious for a moment of his enormous ambitions under the shadow of the hideous and commonplace act: the suite at the Cosmopolitan, the gold cigar lighter, chairs stamped with crowns for a foreigner called Eugenie. Hale dropped out of sight, like a stone thrown over a cliff; he was at the beginning of a long polished parquet walk, there were busts of great men and the sound of cheering, Mr. Colleoni bowed like a shopwalker, stepping backwards, an army of razors was at his back: a conqueror. Hoofs drummed along the straight and a loudspeaker announced the winner--music was playing. His breast ached with the effort to enclose the whole world.
'You've got the doings, haven't you?' Sylvie said.
With fear and horror he thought: next move, what is it?
'Quick,' Sylvie said, 'before they find us here.'
The parquet floor rolled up like a carpet. The moonlight touched a Wool worth ring and a plump knee.
He said in a bitter and painful rage: 'Wait there. I'll get Cubitt for you,' and turned his back on the Lancia and walked back towards the bar. Laughter from the bathing pool deflected him. He stood in the doorway with the taste of the alcohol on his tongue watching a thin girl in a red rubber cap giggle under the floodlighting. His mind tracked inevitably back and forth to Sylvie like a model engine electrically driven. Fear and curiosity ate at the proud future, he was aware of nausea and retched. Marry, he thought, hell, no; I'd rather hang.
A man in a bathing slip came running down the highboard, jumped and somersaulted in the pearly brilliant light, struck the dark water--the two bathers swam together, stroke by stroke, towards the shallows, turned and came back, side by side, smooth and unhurried, playing a private game, happy and at ease.
The Boy stood and watched them, and as they came down the pool a second time he saw in the floodlit water his own image shiver at their stroke, the narrow shoulders and the hollow breast, and he felt the brown pointed shoes slip on the splashed and shining tiles.
Cubitt and Dallow chattered all the way back, a little lit; the Boy stared ahead into the bright core of the darkness. He said suddenly with fury: 'You can laugh.'
'Well, you didn't do so bad,' Cubitt said.
'You can laugh. You think you're safe. But I'm tired of the lot of you. I've got a good mind to clear out.'
