'Take a long honeymoon,' Cubitt said and grinned, and an owl cried with painful hunger swooping low over a filling station, into the headlights and out again, on furry and predatory wings.
'I'm not going to marry,' the Boy said.
'I knew a geezer once,' Cubitt said, 'was so scared he killed himself. They had to send back the wedding presents.'
'I'm not going to marry.'
'People often feel that way.'
'Nothing's going to make me marry.'
'You've got to marry,' Dallow said. A woman stared from a window of Charlie's Pull-in Caf waiting for someone: she didn't look at the car going by, waiting.
'Have a drink,' Cubitt said: he was more drunk than Dallow. 'I brought a flask away. You can't say you don't drink now: we saw you, Dallow and me.'
The Boy said to Dallow: 'I won't marry. Why should I marry?'
'It was your doing,' Dallow said.
'What was his doing?' Cubitt said. Dallow didn't reply, laying his friendly and oppressive hand on the Boy's knee. The boy took a squint at the stupid devoted face and felt anger at the way another's loyalty could hamper and drive. Dallow was the only man he trusted, and he hated him as if he was his mentor.
He said weakly: 'Nothing will make me marry,' watching the long parade of posters going by in the submarine light Guinness Is Good for You, Try a Worth*ngton, , Keep that Schoolgirl Complexion a jtong series of adjurations, people telling you things: Own Your Own Home, Bennett's for Wedding Rings.
And at Billy's they told him: 'Your girl's here.' He went up the stairs to his room in hopeless rebellion: he would go in and say I've changed my mind, I can't marry you. Or perhaps: The lawyers say it can't be managed after all. The bannisters were still broken and he looked down the long drop to where Spicer's body had lain. Cubitt and Dallow were standing on the exact spot laughing at something; the sharp edge of a broken bannister scratched his hand. He put it to his mouth and went in. He thought: I've got to be calm, I've got to keep my wits about me, but he felt his integrity stained by the taste of the spirit at the bar.
You could lose vice as easily as you lost virtue, going out of you from a touch.
He took a look at her. She was scared when he said softly: 'What are you doing here?' She had on the hat he disliked and she made a snatch at it as soon as he looked. 'At this time of night,' he said in a shocked way, thinking there was a quarrel to be picked there if he went about it in the right way.
'You've seen this?' Rose implored him. She had the local paper; he hadn't bothered to read it, but there on the front page was the picture of Spicer striding in terror under the iron arches. They'd been more successful at the kiosk than he'd been. Rose said: 'It says here it happened '
'On the landing,' the boy said. 'I was always telling Billy to mend those bannisters.'
'But you said they got him on the course. And he was the one who '
He faced her with spurious firmness: 'Gave you the ticket? So you said. Maybe he knew Hale. He knew a lot of geezers I didn't. What of it?' With confidence he repeated his question before her dumb stare: 'What of it?' His mind, he knew, could contemplate any treachery, but she was a good kid, she was boundaried by her goodness; there were things she couldn't imagine, and he thought he saw her imagination wilting now in the vast desert of dread.
'I thought,' she said, 'I thought...' looking beyond him to the shattered bannister on the landing.
'What did you think?'
His fingers curled with passionate hatred round the small bottle in his pocket.
'I don't know. I didn't sleep last night. I had such dreams.'
'What dreams?'
She looked at him with horror. 'I dreamed you were dead.'
He laughed. 'I'm young and spry,' thinking with nausea of the car park and the invitation in the Lancia.
'You aren't going to stay here, are you?'
'Why not?'
'I'd have thought ' she said, her eyes back again in their gaze at the bannisters. She said: 'I'm scared.'
'You've no cause to be,' he said, tickling the vitriol bottle.
'I'm scared for you. Oh,' she said, 'I know I'm no account. I know you've got a lawyer and a car and friends, but this place ' she stumbled hopelessly in an attempt to convey the sense she had of the territory in which he moved: a place of accidents and unexplained events, the stranger with a card, the fight on the course, the headlong fall. A kind of boldness and brazenness came into her face, so that he felt again the faintest stirring of sensuality. 'You've got to come away from here. You've got to marry me like you said.'
'It can't be done after all. I've seen my lawyer.
We're too young.'
'I don't mind about that. It's not a real marriage anyway. A register's doesn't make any difference.'
'You go back where you came from,' he said harshly, 'you little buer.'
'I can't,' she said. 'I'm sacked.'
'What for?' It was as if the handcuffs were meeting. He suspected her.
'I was rude to a customer.'
'Why? What customer?'
'Can't you guess?' she said, and went passionately on: 'Who is she anyway? Interfering... pestering .., you must know.'
'I don't know her from Adam,' the boy said.
She put all her full experience drawn from the twopenny library into the question: 'Is she jealous?
Is she someone... you know what I mean?' and ready then, masked behind the ingenuous question like the guns in a Q ship, was possessiveness: she was his like a table or a chair, but a table owned you too by your finger prints.
He laughed uneasily. 'What, she? She's old enough to be my mother.'
'Then what does she want?'
'I wish I knew.'
'Do you think,' she said, 'I ought to take this' she held out the paper to him 'to the police?'
The ingenuousness or the shrewdness of the question shocked him. Could one ever be safe with someone who realised so little how she had got mixed up in things? He said: 'You got to mind your step,' and thought with dull and tired distaste (it had been the hell of a day): I shall have to marry her after all. He managed a smile those muscles were beginning to work and said: 'Listen. You don't need to think about those things. I'm going to marry you.
There are ways of getting round the law.'
'Why bother about the law?'
'I don't want any loose talk. Only marriage,' he said with feigned anger, 'will do for me. We got to be married properly.'
'We won't be that, whatever we do. The father up at St. John's he says '
'You don't want to listen too much to priests,' he said. 'They don't know the world like I do. Ideas change, the world moves on....' His words stumbled before her carved devotion. That face said as clearly as words that ideas never changed, the world never moved: it lay there always the ravaged and disputed territory between the two eternities. They faced each other as it were from opposing territories, but like troops at Christmas time they fraternised. He said: 4 'It's the same to you anyway and I want to be married legally.'
'If you want to...' she said and made a small gesture of complete assent.
'Maybe,' he said, 'we could work it this way. If your father wrote a letter...'
'He can't write.'
'Well, he could make his mark, couldn't he, if I got a letter written?. *. I don't know how these things work. Maybe he could come to the magistrate's. Mr.
Drewitt could see about that.'
'Mr. Drewitt?' she asked quickly. 'Wasn't he the one the one at the inquest who was here?...'
'What of it?'
'Nothing,' she said. 'I just thought...' but he could see the thoughts going on and on, out of the room to the
