'There's Spicer too.'
'Spicer fell down there.'
'I heard you...'
'You heard me? Who's going to believe that?'
'Dallow heard.'
'Dallow's all right,' the Boy said. 'I can trust Dallow. Why, Cubitt,' he went quietly on, 'if you were dangerous, I'd do something about you. But thank your lucky stars you aren't dangerous.' He turned his back on Cubitt and mounted the stairs. He could hear Cubitt behind him panting; he had no wind.
'I didn't come here to give hard words. Lend me a couple of nicker, Pinkie. I'm broke.'
The Boy didn't answer 'For the sake of old times' turned off at the bend of the stairs to his own room.
Cubitt said: 'Wait a moment and I'll tell you a thing or two, you bloody little geezer. There's someone'll give me money twenty nicker. You why, you I'll tell you what you are.'
The Boy stopped in front of his door. 'Go on,' he said, 'tell me.'
Cubitt struggled to speak: he hadn't got the right words. He flung his rage and resentment away in phrases light as paper. 'You're mean,' he said, 'you're yellow. You're so yellow you'd kill your best friend to save your own skin. Why' he laughed thickly 'you're scared of a girl. Sylvie told me ' but that accusation had come too late. He had graduated now in knowledge of the last human weakness.
He listened with amusement, with a kind of infernal pride--the picture Cubitt drew had got nothing to do with him: it was like the pictures men drew of Christ in the image of their own sentimentality. Cubitt couldn't know. He was like a professor describing to a stranger some place he had only read about in books statistics of imports and exports, tonnage and mineral resources and if the budget balanced when all the time it was a country the stranger knew from thirsting in the desert and being shot at in the foothills. Mean ... yellow... scared--he laughed gently with derision: it was as if he had outsoared the shadow of any night Cubitt could be aware of. He opened his door, went in, closed it, and locked it.
Rose sat on the bed with dangling feet like a child in a classroom waiting for a teacher in order to say her lesson. Outside the door Cubitt swore and hacked with his foot, rattled the handle, and moved off. She said with immense relief she was used to drunken men: 'Oh, then it's not the police.'
'Why should it be the police?'
'I don't know,' she said, 'I thought maybe '
'Maybe what?'
He could only just catch her answer. 'Kolley Kibber.'
For a moment he was amazed. Then he laughed softly with infinite contempt and superiority at a world which used words like innocence. 'Why,' he said, 'that's rich. You knew all along. You guessed.
And I thought you were so green you hadn't lost the eggshell. And there you were' he built her up in the mind's eye that day at Peacehaven, among the Empire wines at Snow's 'there you were, knowing.'
She didn't deny it; sitting there with her hands locked between her knees she accepted everything.
'It's rich,' he said. 'Why, when you come to think of it you're as bad as me.' He came across the room and added with a kind of respect: 'There's not a pin to choose between us.'
She looked up with childish and devoted eyes and swore solemnly: 'Not a pin.'
He felt desire move again, like nausea in the belly.
'What a wedding night!' he said. 'Did you think a wedding night would be like this?'... the piece of gold in the palm, the kneeling in the sanctuary, the blessing... footsteps in the passage, Cubitt pounded on the door, pounded and lurched away, the stairs creaked, a door slammed. She made her vow again, holding him in her arms, in the attitude of mortal sin: 'Nothing to choose.'
The Boy lay on his back in his shirt sleeves and dreamed. He was in an asphalt playground: one plane tree withered; a cracked bell clanged and the children came out to him. He was new; he knew no one; he was sick with fear they came towards him with a purpose. Then he felt a cautious hand on his sleeve and in a mirror hanging on the tree he saw the reflection of himself and Kite behind middle-aged, cheery, bleeding from the mouth. 'Such tits,' Kite said and put a razor in his hand. He knew then what to do: they only needed to be taught once that he would stop at nothing, that there were no rules.
He flung out his arm in a motion of attack, made some indistinguishable comment, and turned upon his side. A piece of blanket fell across his mouth; he breathed with difficulty. He was upon the pier and he could see the piles breaking a black cloud came racing up across the Channel and the sea rose; the whole pier lurched and settled lower. He tried to scream; no death was so bad as drowning. The deck of the pier lay at a steep angle like that of a liner on the point of its deadly dive; he scrambled up the polished slope away from the sea and slipped again, down and down into his bed in Paradise Piece. He lay still thinking: 'What a dream!' and then heard the stealthy movement of his parents in the other bed. It was Saturday night. His father panted like a man at the end of a race and his mother made a horrif ying sound of pleasurable pain. He was filled with hatred, disgust, loneliness; he was completely abandoned: he had no share in their thoughts for the space of a few minutes he was dead, he was like a soul in purgatory watching the shameless act of a beloved person.
Then quite suddenly he opened his eyes; it was as if nightmare couldn't go further; it was black night, he could see nothing and for a few seconds he believed he was back in Paradise Piece. Then a clock struck three, clashing close by like the lid of a dustbin in the backyard, and he remembered with immense relief that he was alone. He got out of bed in his half-drowse (his mouth was clotted and evil-tasting) and felt his way to the washstand. He took up his tooth mug, poured out a glass of water, and heard a voice say: 'Pinkie?
What is it, Pinkie?' He dropped the glass and as the water spilt across his feet he bitterly remembered.
He said cautiously into the dark: 'It's all right. Go to sleep.' He no longer had a sense of triumph or superiority. He looked back on a few hours ago as if he had been drunk then or dreaming he had been momentarily exhilarated by the strangeness of his experience. Now there would be nothing strange ever again he was awake. You had to treat these things with common-sense she knew. The darkness thinned before his wide-awake and calculating gaze he could see the outline of the bedknobs and a chair. He had won a move and lost a move: they couldn't make her give evidence, but she knew.... She loved him, whatever that meant, but love was not an eternal thing like hatred and disgust. They saw a better face, a smarter suit... The truth came home to him with horror that he had got to keep her love for a lifetime--he would never be able to discard her; if he climbed he had to take Nelson Place with him like a visible scar; the registry office marriage was as irrevocable as a sacrament. Only death could ever set him free.
He was taken by a craving for air, walked softly to the door. In the passage he could see nothing--it was full of the low sound of breathing from the room he had left, from Dallow's room. He felt like a blind man watched by people he couldn't see. He felt his way to the stairhead and on down to the hall, step by step, creakingly. He put out his hand and touched the telephone, then with his arm outstretched made for the door. In the street the lamps were out, but the darkness no longer enclosed between four walls seemed to thin out across the vast expanse of a city. He could see basement railings, a cat moving, and reflected on the dark sky the phosphorescent glow of the sea. 'It was a strange world; he had never been alone in it before.
He had a deceptive sense of freedom as he walked softly down towards the Channel.
The lights were on in Montpellier Road--nobody about, and an empty milk bottle outside a gramophone shop; far down the illuminated clock tower and the public lavatories--the air was fresh, like country air. He could imagine he had escaped. He put his hands for warmth into his trouser pockets and felt a scrap of paper which should not have been there. He drew it out a scrap torn from a notebook big, unformed, stranger's writing. He held it up into the grey light and read with difficulty: 'I love you, Pinkie. I don't care what you do. I love you for ever. You've been good to me. Wherever you go, 111 go too.' She must have written it while he talked to Cubitt and slipped it into his pocket while he slept. He crumpled it in his fist ^ a dustbin stood outside a fishmonger's then he held his hand. An obscure sense told him you never knew it might prove useful one day.
He heard a whisper, looked sharply round, and thrust the paper back. In an alley between two shops, an old woman sat upon the ground j he could just see the rotting and discoloured face: it was like the sight of damnation. Then he heard the whisper: 'Blessed art thou among women,' saw the grey fingers fumbling at the beads. This was not one of the damned--he watched with horrified fascination: this was one of the saved.
PART SEVEN
IT SEEMED not in the least strange to Rose that she should wake alone she was a stranger in the country of
