'Could you spare some small sum like that, my boy? Don't let me rob you--though, of course, 'I have done the state some service.' '
'You can have it tomorrow on conditions. You got to leave by the midday boat stay away as long as you can. Maybe I'll send you more.' It was like fastening a leech onto the flesh he felt weakness and disgust. 'Let me know when it's finished and I'll see.'
'I'll go, Pinkie when you say. And you won't tell my spouse?'
'I keep my mouth shut.'
'Of course. I trust you, Pinkie, and you can trust me. Recuperated by this holiday I shall return '
'Take a long one.'
'Bullying police sergeants shall recognise my renewed astuteness. Defending the outcast.'
'I'll send the money first thing. Till then you don't see anyone. You go back to bed. Your indigestion's cruel. If anyone comes round you're not in.'
'As you say, Pinkie, as you say.'
It was the best he could do. He let himself out of the house and, looking down, met in the basement the hard suspicious gaze of Mr. Drewitt's spouse; she had a duster in her hand and she watched him like a bitter enemy from her cave, under the foundations. He crossed the road and took one more look at the villa, and there in an upper window half concealed by the curtains stood Mr. Drewitt. He wasn't watching the Boy he was just looking out hopelessly, for what might turn up. But it was a Sunday and there weren't any typists.
He said to Dallow: 'You got to watch the place. I don't trust him a yard. I can just see him looking out there, waiting for something, and seeing her...'
'He wouldn't be such a fool.'
'He's drunk. He says he's in Hell.'
Dallow laughed: 'Hell. That's good.'
'You're a fool, Dallow.'
'I don't believe in what my eyes don't see.'
'They don't see much then,' the Boy said. He left Dallow and went upstairs. But, oh, if this was Hell, he thought, it wasn't so bad: the old-fashioned telephone, the narrow stairs, the snug and dusty darkness it wasn't like Drewitt's house, comfortless, shaken, with the old bitch in the basement. He opened the door of his room and there, he thought, was his enemy he looked round with angry disappointment at his changed room the position of everything a little altered and the whole place swept and clean and tidied. He condemned her: 'I told you not to.'
'I've only cleared up, Pinkie.'
It was her room now, not his: the wardrobe and the washstand shifted, and the bed of course she hadn't forgotten the bed. It was her Hell now if it was anybody's he disowned it. He felt driven out, but any change must be for the worse. He watched her like an enemy, disguising his hatred, trying to read age into her face, how she would look one day staring up from his basement. He had come back wrapped in another person's fate a doubled darkness.
'Don't you like it, Pinkie?'
He wasn't Drewitt: he'd got guts; he hadn't lost his fight. He said: 'Oh, this it's fine. It was just I wasn't expecting it.'
She misread his constraint. 'Bad news?'
'Not yet. We got to be prepared, of course. I am prepared,' He went to the window and stared out through a forest of wireless masts towards a cloudy peaceful Sunday sky, then back at the changed room.
This was how it might look if he had gone away and other tenants... He watched her closely while he did his sleight of hand passing off his idea as hers. 'I got the car all ready. We could go out into the country where no one would hear...' He measured her terror carefully and before she could pass the card back to him, he changed his tone. 'That's only if the worst comes to the worst.' The phrase intrigued him, he repeated it: the worst that was the stout woman with her glassy righteous eye coming up the smoky road to the worst and that was drunken ruined Mr. Drewitt watching from behind the curtains for just one typist.
'It won't happen,' he encouraged her.
'No,' she passionately agreed. 'It won't, it can't.'
Her enormous certainty had a curious effect on him it was as if that plan of his too were being tidied, shifted, swept until he couldn't recognise his own. He wanted to argue that it might happen 7 he discovered in himself an odd nostalgia for the darkest act of all.
She said: 'I'm so happy. It can't be so bad after all.'
'What do you mean?' he said. 'Not bad? It's mortal sin.' He glanced with furious disgust at the made bed as if he contemplated a repetition of the act there and then to thrust the lesson home.
'I know,' she said. 'I know, but still '
'There's only one thing worse,' he said. It was as if she were escaping him; already she was domesticating their black alliance.
'I'm happy,' she argued bewilderedly. 'You're good to me.'
'That doesn't mean a thing.'
'Listen,' she said, 'what's that?' A thin wailing came through the window.
'The kid next door.'
'Why doesn't somebody quiet it?'
'It's a Sunday. Maybe they're out.' He said. 'You want to do anything? The flickers?'
She wasn't listening to him--the unhappy continuous cry absorbed her; she wore a look of responsibility and maturity. 'Somebody ought to see what it wants,' she said.
'It's just hungryor something.'
'Maybe it's ill.' She listened with a kind of vicarious agony. 'Things happen to babies suddenly. You don't know what it mightn't be.'
'It isn't yours.'
She turned bemused eyes towards him. 'No,' she said, 'but I was thinking it might be.' She said with passion: 'I wouldn't leave it all an afternoon.'
He said uneasily: 'They haven't either. It's stopped.
What did I tell you?' But her words lodged in his brain 'It might be.' He had never thought of that; he watched her with terror and disgust as if he were watching the ugly birth itself, the rivet of another life already pinning him down, and she stood there listening with relief and patience, as if already she had passed through years of this anxiety and knew that the relief never lasted long and that the anxiety always began again.
Nine o'clock in the morning; he came furiously out into the passage; the morning sun trickled in over the top of the door below, staining the telephone. He called: 'Dallow, Dallow!'
Dallow came slowly up from the basement in his shirt sleeves. He said: * 'Hallo, Pinkie. You look as if you hadn't slept,'
The Boy said: 'You keeping away from me?'
'Of course I'm not, Pinkie. Only you being married I thought you'd want to be alone.'
'You caU it,' the Boy said, 'being alone?' He came down the stairs; he carried in his hand the mauve scented envelope Judy had thrust under the door. He hadn't opened it. His eyes were bloodshot. He carried down with him the marks of a fever the beating pulse and the hot forehead and the restless brain.
'Johnnie phoned me early,' Dallow said. 'He's been watching since yesterday. No one's been to see Drewitt. We got scared for nothing.'
The Boy paid him no attention. He said: 'I want to be alone, Dallow. Really alone.'
'You been taking on too much at your age,' Dallow said and began to laugh. 'Two nights...'
The Boy said: 'She's got to go before she ' he couldn't express the magnitude of his fear or its nature to anyone: it was like an ugly secret.
'It's not safe to quarrel,' Dallow said quickly and cautiously.
'No,' the Boy said, 'it won't ever be safe again. I know that. No divorce. Nothing at all except dying.
All the same,' he put his hand on the vulcanite for coolness. 'I told you I had a plan.'
'It was crazy. Why should that poor kid want to die?'
He said with bitterness: 'She loves me. She says she wants to be with me always. And if I don't want to
