'They know what's what. They keep away' his whole mouth and jaw loosened--he might have been going to weep; he beat out wildly with his hands towards the window: Woman Found Drowned, twovalve, Married Love, the horror 'from this.'
'What's wrong with a bit of fun?' Dallow took him up, scraping his shoe against the pavement edge.
The word 'fun' shook the boy like malaria. He said: 'You wouldn't have known Annie Collins, would you?'
'Never heard of her.'
'She went to the same school I did,' the Boy said.
He took a look down the grey street and then the glass before Married Love reflected his young and hopeless face. 'She put her head on the line,' he said, 'up towards Hassocks. She had to wait ten minutes for the seven-five. Fog made it late from Victoria. Cut off her head. She was fifteen. She was going to have a baby and she knew what it was like. She'd had one two years before, and they could 'ave pinned it on twelve boys.'
'It does happen,' Dallow said. 'It's the luck of the game.'
'I've read love stories,' the Boy said. He had never been so vocal before, staring in at the paper plates with frilly edges and the two-valve receiving set: the daintiness and the grossness. 'Billy's wife read them. You know the sort. Lady Angeline turned her starry eyes towards Sir Mark. They make me sick. Sicker than the other kind' D allow watched with astonishment this sudden horrified gift of tongues 'the kind you buy under the counter. Spicer used to get them. About girls being beaten. Full of shame to expose herself thus before the boys she stooped... It's all the same thing,' he said, turning his poisoned eyes away from the window, from point to point of the long shabby street: a smell of fish, the sawdusted pavement below the carcasses. 'It's love,' he said, grinning mirthlessly up at Dallow. 'It's fun. It's the game.'
'The world's got to go on,' Dallow said uneasily.
'Why?' the Boy said.
'You don't need to ask me,' Dallow said. 'You know best. You're a Roman, aren't you? You believe...'
'Credo in unum Satanum,' the Boy said.
'I don't know Latin. I only know...'
'Come on,' the Boy said. 'Let's have it. Dallow's creed.'
'The world's all right if you don't go too far.'
'Is that all?'
'It's time for you to be at the registrar's. Hear the clock? It's striking two now.' A peal of bells stopped their cracked chime and struck one, two The Boy's whole face loosened again; he put his hand on Dallow's arm. 'You're a good sort, Dallow.
You know a lot. Tell me ' his hand fell away. He looked beyond Dallow down the street. He said hopelessly: 'Here she is. What's she doing in this street?'
'She's not hurrying either,' Dallow commented, watching the thin figure slowly approach. At that distance she didn't even look her age. He said: 'It was clever of Drewitt to get the licence at all, considering.'
'Parents' consent,' the Boy said dully. 'Best for morality.' He watched the girl as if she were a stranger he had got to meet. 'And then, you see, there was a stroke of luck. I wasn't registered. Not anywhere they could find. They added on a year or two.
No parents. No guardian. It was a touching story old Drewitt spun.'
She had tricked herself up for the wedding, discarded the hat he hadn't liked, a new mackintosh, a touch of powder and cheap lipstick. She looked like one of the small gaudy statues in an ugly church: a paper crown wouldn't have looked odd on her or a painted heart; you could pray to her but you couldn't expect an answer.
'Where've you been?' the Boy said. 'Don't you know you're late?'
They didn't even touch hands. An awful formality fell between them.
'I'm sorry, Pinkie. You see' she brought the fact out with shame, as if she were admitting conversation with his enemy 'I went into the church.'
'What for?' he said.
'I don't know, Pinkie. I got confused. I thought I'd goto confession.'
He grinned at her. 'Confession? That's rich.'
'You see, I wanted I thought '
'For Christ's sake, what?'
'I wanted to be in a state of grace when I married you.' She took no notice at all of Dallow. The theological term lay oddly and pedantically on her tongue.
They were two Romans together in the grey street.
They understood each other. She used terms common to Heaven and Hell.
'And did you?' the Boy said.
'No. I went and rang the bell and asked for Father James. But then I remembered. It wasn't any good confessing. I went away.' She said with a mixture of fear and pride: 'We're going to do a mortal sin.'
The Boy said, with bitter and unhappy relish: 'It'll be no good going to confession ever again as long as we're both alive.' He had graduated in pain: first the school dividers had been left behind, next the razor.
He had a sense now that the murders of Hale and Spicer were trivial acts, a boy's game, and he had put away childish things. Murder had only led to this this corruption. He was filled with awe at his own powers.
'We'd better be moving,' he said and touched her arm with next to tenderness. As once before he had a sense of needing her.
Mr. Drewitt greeted them with official mirth. All his jokes seemed to be spoken in court, with an ulterior motive, to catch a magistrate's ear. In the great institutional hall from which the corridors led off to deaths and births there was a smell of disinfectant. The walls were tiled like a public lavatory. Somebody had dropped a rose. Mr. Drewitt quoted promptly, inaccurately: 'Roses, roses all the way, and never a sprig of yew.' A soft hollow hand guided the Boy by the elbow. 'No, no, not that way. That's taxes. That comes later.' He led them up great stone stairs. A clerk passed them carrying printed forms. 'And what is the little lady thinking?' Mr. Drewitt said. She didn't answer him....
The bride and groom only were allowed to mount the sanctuary steps, to kneel down within the sanctuary rails with the priest and the Host.
'Parents coming?' Mr. Drewitt said. She shook her head. 'The great thing is,' Mr. Drewitt said, 'it's over quickly. Just sign the names along the dotted line.
Sit down here. We've got to wait our turn, you know.'
They sat down. A mop leant in a corner against the tiled wall. The footsteps of a clerk squealed on the icy paving down another passage. Presently a big brown door opened; they saw a row of clerks inside who didn't look up; a man and wife came out into the corridor. A woman followed them and took the mop.
The man he was middle-aged said: 'Thank you,' gave her sixpence. He said: 'We'll catch the threefifteen after all.' On the woman's face there was a look of faint astonishment, bewilderment, nothing so definite as disappointment. She wore a brown straw and carried an attach^ case. She was middle-aged too.
She might have been thinking: 'Is that all there is to it after all these years?' They went down the big stairs walking a little apart, like strangers in a store.
'Our turn,' Mr. Drewitt said, rising briskly. He led the way through the room where the clerks worked.
Nobody bothered to look up. Nibs wrote shrill numerals and ran on. In a small inner room with green washed walls like a clinic's the registrar waited: a table, three or four chairs against the wall. It wasn't what she thought a marriage would be like for a moment she was daunted by the cold poverty of a state-made ceremony.
'Good morning,' the registrar said. 'If the witnesses will just sit down would you two?' he beckoned them to the table. He was like a provincial actor who believes too much in his part: he stared at them with gold-rimmed and glassy importance; it was as if he considered himself on the fringe of the priestly office. The Boy's heart beat; he was sickened by the reality of the moment. He wore a look of sullenness and of stupidity.
'You're both very young,' the registrar said.
'It's fixed,' the Boy said. 'You don't have to talk about it. It's fixed.'
The registrar gave him a glance of intense dislike; he said venomously: 'Repeat after me,' and then ran too quickly on: 'I do solemnly declare that I know not of any lawful impediments,' so that the Boy couldn't follow him. The registrar said sharply: 'It's quite simple. You've only to repeat after me...'
'Go slower,' the Boy said. He wanted to lay his hand on speed and break it down, but it ran on: it was no time at all, a matter of seconds, before he was repeating the second formula: 'My lawful wedded wife.' He tried to make
