bannisters and the drop, out of that day altogether.... Somebody turned on the radio down below: some jest of Cubitt's perhaps to represent the right romantic atmosphere. It wailed up the stairs past the telephone and into the room, somebody's band from somebody's hotel, the end of a day's programme.
It switched her thoughts away and he wondered for how long it would be necessary for him to sidetrack her mind with the romantic gesture or the loving act, how many weeks and months his mind wouldn't admit the possibility of years. Some day he would be free again; he put out his hands towards hers as if she were the detective with the cuffs and said: 'Tomorrow we'll see about things, see your father. Why' the muscles of his mouth faltered at the thought 'it only takes a couple of days to get married in.'
He was scared, walking alone back towards the territory he had left oh, years ago. The pale green sea curdled on the shingle and the green tower of the Metropole looked like a dug-up coin verdigrised with age-old mould. The gulls swooped up to the top promenade, screaming and twisting in the sunlight, and a well-known popular author displayed his plump, toofamous face in the window of the Royal Albion, staring out to sea. It was so clear a day you looked for France.
The Boy crossed over towards Old Steyne walking slowly. The streets narrowed uphill above the Steyne: the shabby secret behind the bright corsage, the deformed breast. Every step was a retreat. He thought he had escaped for ever by the whole length of the parade, and now extreme poverty took him back: Salome's shop where a shingle could be had for two shillings in the same building as a coffin-maker who worked in oak, elm, or lead; no window dressing but one child's coffin dusty with disuse and the list of Salome's prices. The Salvation Army Citadel marked with its battlements the very border of his home. He began to fear recognition and feel an obscure shame as if it were his native streets which had the right to forgive and not he to reproach them with the dreary and dingy past. Past the Albert Hostel ('Good Accommodation for Travellers') and there he was, on the top of the hill, in the thick of the bombardment. A flapping gutter, glassless windows, an iron bedstead in a front garden the size of a table top. Half Paradise Piece had been torn up as if by bomb bursts: the children played about the steep slope of rubble--a piece of fireplace showed houses had once been there, and a municipal notice announced new flats on a post stuck in the torn gravel and asphalt facing the little dingy damaged row, all that was left of Paradise Piece. His home was gone: a flat place among the rubble may have marked its hearth; the room at the bend of the stairs where the Saturday night exercise had taken place was now just air. He wondered with horror whether it all had to be built again for him--it looked better as air.
He had sent Rose back the night before and now draggingly he rejoined her. It was no good rebelling any more; he had to marry her; he had to be safe.
The children were scouting among the rubble with pistols from Woolworth's; a group of girls surlily watched. A child with its leg in an iron brace limped blindly into him; he pushed it off; someone said in a high treble: 'Stick 'em up.' They took his mind back and he hated them for it; it was like the dreadful appeal of innocence, but there was not innocence: you had to go back a long way further before you got innocence j innocence was a slobbering mouth, a toothless gum pulling at the teats, perhaps not even that; innocence was the ugly cry of birth.
He found the house in Nelson Place, but before he had time to knock the door opened. Rose had spied him through the broken glass. She said: 'Oh, how glad I am!... I thought perhaps...' In the awful little passage which stank like a lavatory she ran quickly and passionately on. 'It was awful last night ... you see, I've been sending them money... they don't understand everyone loses a job some time or another. '
'I'll settle them,' the Boy said. 'Where are they?'
'You got to be careful,' Rose said. 'They get moods.'
'Where are they?'
But there wasn't really much choice of direction: there was only one door and a staircase matted with old newspapers. On the bottom steps between the mud marks stared up the tawny child face of Violet Crow violated and buried under the West Pier in 1936. He opened the door and there beside the black kitchen stove with cold dead charcoal on the floor sat the parents. They had a mood on: they watched him with silent and haughty indifference a small thin elderly man, his face marked deeply with the hieroglyphics of pain and patience and suspicion; the woman middle-aged, stupid, vindictive. The dishes hadn't been washed and the stove hadn't been lit.
'They got a mood,' Rose said aloud to him. 'They [206] BRIGHTON ROCB. wouldn't let me do a thing. Not even light the fire. I like a clean house, honest I do. Ours wouldn't be like this.'
'Look here, Mr. ' the Boy said.
'Wilson,' Rose said.
'Wilson. I want to marry Rose. It seems as she's so young I got to get your permission.'
They wouldn't answer him. They treasured their mood as if it was a bright piece of china they alone possessed, something they could show to neighbours as 'mine.'
'It's no use,' Rose said, 'when they get a mood.'
A cat watched them from a wooden box.
'Yes or no?' the Boy said.
'It's no good,' Rose said, 'not when they've got a mood.'
'Answer a plain question,' the Boy said. 'Do I marry Rose or don't I?'
'Come back tomorrow,' Rose said. 'They won't have a mood then.'
'I'm not going to wait on them,' he said. 'They oughter be proud '
The man suddenly got up and kicked the dead coke furiously across the floor. 'You get out of here,' he said. 'We don't want any truck with you,' he went on, 'never, never, never,' and for a moment in the sunk lost eyes there was a kind of fidelity which reminded the Boy dreadfully of Rose.
'Quiet, Father,' the woman said, 'don't talk to them,' treasuring her mood.
'I've come to do business,' the Boy said. 'If you don't want to do business,..' He looked round the battered and hopeless room. 'I thought maybe ten pounds would be of use to you,' and he saw swimming up through the blind vindictive silence incredulity, avarice, suspicion. 'We don't want ' the man began again and then gave out like a gramophone. He began to think; you could see the thoughts bob up one after another.
'We don't want your money,' the woman said.
They each had their own kind of fidelity.
Rose said; 'Never mind what they say. I won't stay here.'
'Stop a moment. Stop a moment,' the man said.
'You be quiet, Mother.' He said to the Boy: 'We couldn't let Rose go not for ten nickers not to a stranger. How do we know you'd treat her right?'
'I'll give you twelve,' the Boy said.
'It's not a question of money,' the man said. 'I like the look of you. We wouldn't want to stand in the way of Rose bettering herself but you're too young.'
'Fifteen's my limit,' the Boy said, 'take it or leave it.'
'You can't do anything without we say yes,' the man said.
The Boy moved a little away from Rose. 'I'm not all that keen.'
'Make it guineas.'
'You've had my offer.' He looked with horror round the room: nobody could say he hadn't done right to get away from this, to commit any crime... when the man opened his mouth he heard his father speaking; that figure in the corner was his mother--he bargained for his sister and felt no desire.... He turned to Rose, 'I'm off,' and felt the faintest twinge of pity for goodness which couldn't murder to escape.
They said that saints had got what was the phrase?
'heroic virtues,' heroic patience, heroic endurance, but there was nothing he could see that was heroic in the bony face, protuberant eyes, pallid anxiety, while they bluffed each other and her life was confused in the financial game. 'Well,' he said, 'I'll be seeing you,' and made for the door. At the door he looked back; they were like a family party. Impatiently and contemptuously he gave in to them. 'All right.
Guineas. I'll be sending my lawyer,' and as he passed into the evil passage Rose was behind him panting her gratitude.
He played the game to the last card, fetching up a grin and a compliment: 'I'd do more for you.'
'You were wonderful,' she said, loving him among the lavatory smells, but her praise was poison: it marked her possession of him--it led straight to what she expected from him, the horrifying act of a desire he didn't feel. She followed him out into the fresh air of Nelson Place. The children played among the ruins of Paradise Piece, and a wind blew from the sea across the site of his home. A dim desire for annihilation stretched in him, the vast
