it careless, he kept his eyes off Rose, but the words were weighted with shame.
'No ring?' the registrar asked sharply.
'We don't need any ring,' the Boy said. 'This isn't a church,' feeling he could never now rid his memory of the cold green room and the glassy face. He heard Rose repeating by his side: 'I call upon these persons here present to witness...' and then the word 'husband,' and he looked sharply up at her. If there had been any complacency in her face then he would have struck it. But there was only surprise as if she were reading a book and had come to the last page too soon.
The registrar said: 'You sign here. The charge is seven and sixpence.' He wore an air of official unconcern while Mr. Drewitt fumbled.
'These persons,' the Boy said and laughed brokenly. 'That's you, Drewitt and Dallow.' He took the pen and the government nib scratched into the page, gathering fur; in the old days, it occurred to him, you signed covenants like this in your blood. He stood back and watched Rose awkwardly sign his temporal safety in return for two immortalities of pain. He had no doubt whatever that this was mortal sin, and he was filled with a kind of gloomy hilarity and pride. He saw himself now as a full-grown man for whom the angels wept.
'These persons,' he repeated, ignoring the registrar altogether. 'Come and have a drink.'
'Well,' Mr. Drewitt said, 'that's a surprise from you.'
'Oh, Dallow will tell you,' the Boy said, 'I'm a drinking man these days.' He looked across at Rose.
'There's nothing I'm not now,' he said. He took her by the elbow and led the way out to the tiled passage and the big stairs; the mop was gone and somebody had picked up the flower. A couple rose as they came out: the market was firm. He said: 'That was a wedding. Can you beat it? We're ' He meant to say 'husband and wife' but his mind flinched from the defining phrase. 'We got to celebrate,' he said, and like an old relation you can always trust for the tactless word his brain beat on: 'celebrate what?' and he thought of the girl sprawling in the Lancia and the long night coming down.
They went to the pub round the corner. It was nearly closing time, and he stood them pints of bitter and Rose took a port. She hadn't spoken since the registrar had given her the words to say and Mr.
Drewitt took a quick look round and parked his portfolio. With his dark striped trousers he might really have been at a wedding. 'Here's to the bride,' he said with a jocularity which petered unobtrusively out; it was as if he had tried to crack a joke with a magistrate and scented a rebuff; the old face recomposed itself quickly on serious lines. He said reverently: 'To your happiness, my dear.'
She didn't answer; she was looking at her own face in a glass marked Extra Stout: in the new setting with a foreground of beer handles, it was a strange face. It seemed to carry an enormous weight of responsibility.
'A penny for your thoughts,' Dallow said to her.
The Boy put the glass of bitter to his mouth and tasted for the second time the nausea of other people's pleasures stuck in his throat. He watched her sourly as she gazed wordlessly back at his companions; and again he was sensible of how she completed him. He knew her thoughts: they beat unregarded in his own nerves. He said with triumphant venom: 'I can tell you what she's thinking of. Not much of a wedding, she's thinking. She's thinking it's not what I pictured. That's right, isn't it?'
She nodded, holding the glass of port as if she hadn't learned the way to drink.
'With my body I thee worship,' he began to quote at her, 'with all my worldly goods... and then,' he said, turning to Mr. Drewitt, 'I give her a gold piece.'
'Time, gentlemen,' the barman said, swilling not quite empty glasses into the lead trough, mopping with a yeasty cloth.
'We're up in the sanctuary, do you see, with the priest...'
'Drink up, gentlemen.'
Mr. Drewitt said uneasily: 'One wedding's as good as another in the eyes of the law.' He nodded encouragingly at the girl, who watched them with famished immature eyes. 'You're married all right. Trust me.'
'Married?' the Boy said. 'Do you call that married?' He screwed up the beery spittle on his tongue.
'Easy on,' Dallow said. 'Give the girl a chance.
You don't need to go too far.'
'Come along, gentlemen, empty your glasses.'
'Married!' the Boy repeated. 'Ask her.' The two men drank up in a shocked furtive way and Mr.
Drewitt said: 'Well, I'll be getting on.' The Boy regarded them with contempt; they didn't understand a thing, and again he was touched by the faintest sense of communion between himself and Rose she too knew that this evening meant nothing at all, that there hadn't been a wedding. He said with rough kindness: 'Come on. We'll be going,' and raised a hand to put it on her arm then saw the double image in the mirror (Extra Stout) and let it fall; a married couple, the image winked at him.
'Where?' Rose said.
Where? He hadn't thought of that you had to take them somewhere the honeymoon, the week-end at the sea, the present from Margate on the mantelpiece his mother 'd had; from one sea to another, a change of pier.
'I'll be seeing you,' Dallow said; he paused a moment at the door, met the Boy's eye, the question, the appeal, understood nothing, and sloped away, cheerily waving, after Mr. Drewitt, leaving them alone.
It was as if they'd never been alone before in spite of the barman drying the glasses: not really alone in the room at Snow's, nor above the sea at Peacehaven not alone as they were now.
'We'd better be off,' Rose said.
They stood on the pavement and heard the door of the Crown closed and locked behind them a bolt grind into place; they felt as if they were shut out from an Eden of ignorance. On this side there was nothing to look forward to but experience.
'Are we going to Billy's?' the girl said. It was one of those moments of sudden silence that fall on the busiest afternoon: not a tram bell, not a cry of steam from the terminus; a flock of birds shot up together into the air above Old Steyne and hovered there as if a crime had been committed on the ground. He thought with nostalgia of the room at Billy's he knew exactly where to put his hand for money in the soap dish; everything was familiar; nothing strange there; it shared his bitter virginity.
'No,' he said, and again, as noise came back, the clang and crash and cry of afternoon: 'No.'
'Where?'
He smiled with hopeless malice where did you bring a swell blonde to if not to the Cosmopolitan, coming down by Pullman at the week-end, driving over the down in a scarlet roadster? Expensive scent and furs, sailing like a new-painted pinnace into the restaurant, something to swank about in return for the nocturnal act. He absorbed Rose's shabbiness like a penance in a long look. 'Well take a suite,' he said, 'at the Cosmopolitan.'
'No, but where really?*
'You heard me the Cosmopolitan.' He flared up.
'Don't you think I'm good enough?'
'You are,' she said, 'but I'm not.'
'We're going there,' he said. 'I can afford it. It's the right place. There was a woman called Eugeen used to go there. That's why they have crowns on the chairs.'
'Who was she?'
'A foreign polony.'
'Have you been there then?'
'Of course I've been there.'
Suddenly she put her hands together in an excited gesture. 'I dreamed,' she said and then looked sharply up to see if he was only mocking after all.
He said airily: 'The car's being repaired. We'll walk and send them round for my bag. Where's yours?'
'My what?'
'Your bag.'
'It was so broken, dirty...'
'Never mind,' he said with desperate swagger, 'we'll buy you another. Where's your things?'
'Things...?'
'Christ, how dumb you are!' he said. 'I mean...' but the thought of the night ahead froze his tongue.