'I don't know.'
He pushed open his own door and switched on the naked dusty light. 'There,' he said, 'take it or leave. it,' and drew aside to expose the big brass bed, the washstand and chipped ewer, the varnished wardrobe with its cheap glass front.
'It's better than a hotel,' she said, 'it's more like home.'
They stood in the middle of the room as if they didn't know what their next move should be. She said: 'Tomorrow I'll tidy up a bit.'
He banged the door to. 'You won't touch a thing,' he said. 'It's my home, do you hear? I won't have you coming in, changing things....' He watched her with fear to come into your own room, your cave, and find a strange thing there... 'Why don't you take off your hat?' he said. 'You're staying, aren't you?' She took off her hat, her mackintosh this was the ritual of mortal sin: this, he thought, was what people damned each other for... the bell in the hall clanged. He paid it no attention. 'It's Saturday night,' he said with a bitter taste on his tongue, 'it's time for bed.'
'Who is it?' she said, and the bell jangled again its unmistakable message to whoever was outside that the house was no longer empty. She came across the room to him; her face was white. 'Is it the police?' she said.
'Why should it be the police? Some friend of Billy's.' But the suggestion startled him. He stood and waited for the clang. It didn't come again.
'Well,' he said, 'we can't stand here all night. We better get to bed.' He felt an appalling emptiness as if he hadn't fed for days. He tried to pretend, taking off his jacket and hanging it over a chair-back, that everything was as usual. When he turned she hadn't moved; a thin and half-grown child, she trembled between the washstand and the bed. 'Why,'' he mocked her with a dry mouth, 'you're scared.' It was as if he had gone back four years and was taunting a schoolfellow into some offence.
'Aren't you scared?' Rose said.
'Me?' He laughed at her unconvincingly and advanced, an embryo of sensuality he was mocked by the memory of a gown, a back, 'I loved you that first time in Santa Monica...' Shaken by a kind of rage, he took her by the shoulders. He had escaped from Paradise Piece to this; he pushed her against the bed.
'It's mortal sin,' he said, getting what savour there was out of innocence, trying to taste God in the mouth: a brass bedball, her dumb frightened and acquiescent eyes he blotted everything out in a sad brutal now-or-never embrace: a cry of pain and then the jangling of the bell beginning all over again.
'Christ,' he said, 'can't they let a man alone?' He opened his eyes on the grey room to see what he had done: it seemed to him more like death than when Hale and Spicer had died.
Rose said: 'Don't go. Pinkie, don't go.'
He had an odd sense of triumph: he had graduated in the last human shame it wasn't so difficult after all. He had exposed himself and nobody had laughed.
He didn't need Mr. Drewitt or Spicer, only a faint feeling of tenderness woke for his partner in the act.
He put out a hand and pinched the lobe of her ear.
The bell clanged in the empty hall. An enormous weight seemed to have lifted. He could face anyone now. He said: 'I'd better see what the bugger wants.'
'Don't go. I'm scared, Pinkie.'
But he had a sense that he would never be scared again: running down from the track he had been afraid, afraid of pain and more afraid of damnation of the sudden and unshriven death. Now it was as if he was damned already and there was nothing more to fear ever again. The ugly bell clattered, the long wire humming in the hall, and the bare globe burnt above the bed the girl, the washstand, the sooty window, the blank shape of a chimney, a voice whispered: 'I love you, Pinkie.' This was hell then; it wasn't anything to worry about: it was just his own familiar room. He said: 'I'll be back. Don't worry. I'll be back.'
At the head of the stairs he put his hand on the new unpainted wood of the mended bannister. He pushed it gently and saw how firm it was. He wanted to crow at his own cleverness. The bell shook below him. He looked down: it was a long drop, but you couldn't really be certain that a man from that height would be killed. The thought had never occurred to him before, but men sometimes lived for hours with broken backs, and he knew an old man who went about to this day with a cracked skull which clicked in cold weather when he sneezed. He had a sense of being befriended.
The bell jangled: it knew he was at home. He went on down the stairs, his toes catching in the worn linoleum he was too good for this place. He felt an invincible energy he hadn't lost vitality upstairs, he'd gained it. What he had lost was a fear. He hadn't any idea who stood outside the door, but he was seized by a sense of wicked amusement. He put up his hand to the old bell and held it silent: he could feel the pull at the wire. An odd tug of war went on with the stranger down the length of the hall, and the Boy won. The pull ceased and a hand beat at the door. The Boy released the bell and moved softly towards the door, but immediately behind his back the bell began to clap again, cracked and hollow and urgent. A ball of paper 'Lock your door. Have a good time' scuffled at his toes.
He swung the door boldly open, and there was Cubitt, Cubitt hopelessly and drearily drunk; somebody had blacked his eye and his breath was sour: drink always spoiled his digestion. The Boy's sense of triumph increased: he felt an immeasurable victory. 'Well,' he said, 'what do want?'
'I got my things here,' Cubitt said. 'I want to get my things.'
'Come in and get 'em then,' the Boy said.
Cubitt sidled in. He said: 'I didn't think I'd see you...'
'Go on,' the Boy said. 'Get your things and clear out.'
'Where's Dallow?'
The Boy didn't answer.
'Billy?'
Cubitt cleared his throat; his sour breath reached the Boy. 'Look here, Pinkie,' he said, 'you and me why shouldn't we be friends? Lake we always was.'
'We were never friends,' the Boy said.
Cubitt took no notice. He got his back to the telephone and watched the Boy with his drunken and cautious eyes. 'You and me,' he said, the sour phlegm rising in his throat and thickening every word, 'you and me can't get on separate. Why,' he said, 'we're kind of brothers. We're tied together.'
The Boy watched him, standing against the opposite wall.
'You an' me it's what I said. We can't get on separate,' Cubitt repeated.
'1 suppose,' the Boy said, 'Colleoni wouldn't touch you not with a stick, but I'm not taking his leavings, Cubitt.'
Cubitt began to weep a little it was a stage he always reached; the Boy could measure his glasses by his tears: they squeezed reluctantly out, two tears like drops of spirits squeezed out of the yellow eyeballs.
'You've no cause to take on like that,' he said, 'Pinkie.'
'You better get your things.'
'Where's Dallow?'
'He's out,' the Boy said. 'They're all out.' The spirit of cruel mischief moved again. 'We're quite alone, Cubitt,' he said. He glanced down the hall at the new patch of linoleum over the place where Spicer had fallen. But it didn't work: the stage of tears was transitory what came after was sullenness, anger....
Cubitt said: 'You can't treat me like dirt.'
'That how Colleoni treated you?'
'I came here to be friendly,' Cubitt said. 'You can't afford not to be friendly.'
'I can afford more than you'd think,' the Boy said.
Cubitt took him quickly up. 'Lend me five nicker.'
The Boy shook his head. He was shaken by a sudden impatience and pride: he was worth more than this this squabble on worn linoleum under the bare and dusty globe with Cubitt. 'For Christ's sake,' he said, 'get your things and clear out.'
'I've got things I could tell about you....'
'Nothing.'
'Fred...'
'You'd hang,' the Boy said. He grinned. 'But not me. I'm too young to hang.'
