Beauty laughed a great deal. The more she laughed the more noisily did Trevor continue. He laid his head on the table and affected to sob. The girl rocked in her chair, her newly painted lips open wide apart.
Then Dixie started to laugh.
Dougal shoved his chair back and stood up. Elaine jumped up and held his arm.
‘Let be,’ she said.
Humphrey, whom the story of Dougal’s weeping in the canteen had not yet reached, said to Dixie, ‘What’s up?’
Dixie could not tell him for laughing.
‘Let be, mate,’ Elaine said to Dougal.
Dougal said to Trevor, ‘I’ll see you up on the Rye outside the tennis court.’
Elaine walked over to Trevor and gave him a push. ‘Can’t you see he’s deformed?’ she said. ‘Making game of a chap like that, it’s ignorant.’
Dougal, whose deformed shoulder had actually endowed him with a curious speciality in the art of fighting, in that he was able to turn his right wrist at an extraordinary back-hand outward angle and to get a man by the throat as with a claw, did not at that moment boast of the fact.
‘Cripple as I am,’ he merely said, ‘I’ll knock his mean wee sex-starved conceited low and lying L.C.C. electrician’s head off.’
‘Who’s sex-starved?’ Trevor said, standing up.
Two youths who had been sitting by the window moved over the better to see. A Greek in an off-white coat appeared, and pointed to a telephone receiver which stuck out of the wall behind him in the passageway to the dim kitchen.
‘I’ll use that phone,’ he said.
Trevor gave him one of his long sleepy looks. Then he gave one of them to Dougal.
‘Who’s sex-starved?’ he said.
‘You are,’ Dougal said, while counting his money to pay the bill. ‘And I’ll see you on the Rye within the quarter hour.’
Trevor walked out of the cafe and Beauty hastily wriggled into her coat and tripped out after him. After them both went the Greek, but Trevor’s motor-scooter had just moved off.
‘Hasn’t paid for coffee,’ said the Greek, returning. ‘What name and address he is, please?’
‘No idea,’ Dougal said. ‘I don’t mix with him.’
The Greek turned to Humphrey, ‘I seen you here before with that fellow.’
Humphrey threw half a crown on the table, and, as the four departed, the Greek slammed his glass doors behind them as hard as he judged the glass would stand up to.
The two girls got into Humphrey’s car, but he at first refused to drive them up to the Rye. Dougal stood and argued on the pavement.
Humphrey said, ‘No, not at all. Don’t go. Don’t be a fool, Dougal. Let it pass. He’s ignorant.’
‘All right, I’ll walk,’ Dougal said.
‘I’m going to send Trevor Lomas home,’ Humphrey said. He left Dougal and started up the car and drove off with the girls, Dixie in front and Elaine behind agitating, too late, to be let out.
Dougal arrived at the tennis courts six minutes later. Some seconds before he arrived he had heard a sound as of women screaming.
Between two distant lamp-posts, in their vague oblique light, a group was gathered. Dougal discerned Humphrey and Trevor with a strange youth called Collie who was without a coat and whose shirt was unbuttoned, exposing his chest to the night air. These figures were apparently molesting three further figures who turned out to be Dixie, Elaine, and Beauty, who were screaming. Soon it appeared that the men were no” molesting but restraining them. Dixie had a long-strapped shoulder bag with which she was attempting to lay about her, largely in the direction of Elaine. Elaine, who was at present in the grip of Trevor, managed to dig Beauty’s leg with her steel stiletto heel. Beauty wailed and struggled in Humphrey’s grip.
‘What’s going on?’ Dougal said.
Nobody took any notice of him. He went and hit Trevor in the face. Trevor let go of Elaine so that she fell heavily against Beauty. Meanwhile Trevor hit out at Dougal, who staggered backwards into Humphrey. Beauty wailed louder, and struggled harder. Elaine recovered herself and used her freedom to kick with her stiletto heel at Trevor. Dixie, meanwhile, was attempting to release herself from the grasp of that strange youth, Collie, with the bared chest, by biting the arm that held her. The screams grew louder. Dougal’s eyes were calculating his chance of coming to adequate terms with Trevor Lomas amidst the confusion when a curious thing happened.
The confusion stopped. Elaine started to sing in the same tone as her screaming, joylessly, and as if in continuation of it. The other girls, seeming to take a signal from her, sidled their wails into a song,
meanwhile casting their eyes fitfully over the Rye beyond the trees.
The strange youth let go of Dixie and began to jive with Elaine. In a few seconds everyone except Dougal was singing, performing the twisting jive, merging the motions of the fight into those of the frantic dance. Dougal saw Humphrey’s face as his neck swooped upwards. It was frightened. Dixie’s expression was, with a decided effort, bright. So was Elaine’s. A one-sided smile on the face of the strange boy, and the fact that, as he bent and twisted in the jive, he buttoned up his shirt, made Dougal look round outside the group for the cause of this effect. He saw it immediately. Two policemen were quite close to them now. They must have been observed at a distance of three minutes’ police-pace when Elaine had started to sing and the signal had gone round.
‘What you think this is – a dance hall?’
‘No, constable. No, inspector. Just having a dance with the girls. Just going home, mate.’
‘Well,
‘It was Dixie,’ said Humphrey to Dougal on the way home, ‘that started the fight. She was over-tired and worked up. She said that tart of Trevor’s was giving her looks. She went up to the girl and said, “Who you looking at?” and then the girl
Rain started to fall as they turned up past the old Quaker cemetery. Nelly Mahone took a green-seeming scarf from a black bag and placed it over her long grey hair. She cried: ‘The meadows are open and the green herbs have appeared, and the hay is gathered out of the mountain. The wicked man fleeth when no man pursueth, but the just, bold as a lion, shall be without dread.’
‘Pleasant evening, though a bit wet,’ Dougal said.
Nelly looked round after him.
Up in his room Dougal poured Algerian wine and remarked as he passed a glass to Humphrey,
‘The cupboards run the whole length of the attic floor.’ Humphrey put the glass on the floor at his feet and looked up at Dougal.
‘There was a noise in the cupboard,’ Dougal said, ‘the night before last. It went creak-oop, creak-oop. I thought it came from my cupboard here, but I think maybe it didn’t. I think maybe it came from your cupboard through the wall. Creak-oop.’ Dougal bent his knees apart, then sprang up in the air. He repeated this several times. ‘Creak- oop,’ he said.
Humphrey said, ‘It’s only on wet Saturday nights when we can’t go up on the Rye.’
‘Isn’t she heavy to carry upstairs?’ Dougal said.
Humphrey looked alarmed. ‘Did it sound as if I was carrying her upstairs?’
‘Yes. Better to let her walk up in her stockinged feet.’
‘No, she did that once. The old woman came out and nearly caught us.’
‘Better to lie in the bed than in the creaky cupboard,’ Dougal said. ‘The chap in the room below will hear it.’
‘No, the old woman came up one night when we were in the bed. We were nearly caught. Dixie had to run and hide in the cupboard.’
Humphrey lifted his glass of wine from the floor by his feet and drank it in one gulp.
‘Don’t worry yourself,’ Dougal said.
‘It’s a worry what to do. All right on fine Saturday nights; we can go up on the Rye and Dixie gets home about
