Brighton Rock

  Whoever the owner was, he had come a long way to land up here. The pram-wheelbarrow was covered with labels—the marks of innumerable train journeys—Doncaster, Lichfield, Clacton (that must have been a summer holiday), Ipswich, Northampton—roughly torn off for the next journey they left, in the litter which remained, an unmistakable trail. And this, the small villa under the racecourse, was the best finish he could manage. You couldn’t have any doubt that this was the end, the mortgaged home in the bottom; like the untidy tidemark on a beach, the junk was piled up here and would never go farther.

  And the Boy hated him. He was nameless, faceless, but the Boy hated him, the doll, the pram, the broken rocking horse. The small pricked-out plants irritated him like ignorance. He felt hungry and faint and shaken. He had known pain and fear.

  Now, of course, was the time, while darkness drained into the bottom, for him to make his peace. Between the stirrup and the ground there wasn’t time: you couldn’t break in a moment the habit of thought: habit held you closely while you died, and he remembered Kite, after they’d got him at St Pancras, passing out in the waiting-room, while a porter poured coal-dust on the dead grate, talking all the time about someone’s tits.

  But ‘Spicer’, the Boy’s thoughts came inevitably back with a sense of relief, ‘they’ve got Spicer’. It was impossible to repent of something which made him safe. The nosy woman hadn’t got a witness now, except for Rose, and he could deal with Rose; and then, when he was thoroughly secure, he could begin to think of making peace, of going home, and his heart weakened with a faint nostalgia for the tiny dark confessional box, the priest’s voice, and the people waiting under the statue, before the bright lights burning down in the pink glasses, to be made safe from eternal pain. Eternal pain had not meant much to him: now it meant the slash of razor blades infinitely prolonged.

  He sidled out of the garage. The new raw street cut in the chalk was empty except for a couple pressed against each other out of the lamplight by a wooden fence. The sight pricked him with nausea and cruelty. He limped by them, his cut hand closed on the razor, with his cruel virginity which demanded some satisfaction different from theirs, habitual, brutish and short.

  He knew where he was going. He wasn’t going to return to Frank’s like this with the cobwebs from the garage on his clothes, defeat cut in his face and hand. They were dancing in the open air on the white stone deck above the Aquarium, and he got down on to the beach where he was more alone, the dry seaweed left by last winter’s gales cracking under his shoes. He could hear the music—‘The One I Love’. Wrap it up in cellophane, he thought, put it in silver paper. A moth wounded against one of the lamps crawled across a piece of driftwood and he crushed it out of existence under his chalky shoe. One day—one day—he limped along the sand with his bleeding hand hidden, a young dictator. He was head of Kite’s gang, this was a temporary defeat. One confession, when he was safe, to wipe out everything. The yellow moon slanted up over Hove, the exact mathematical Regency Square, and he daydreamed, limping in the dry unwashed sand, by the closed bathing-huts: I’ll give a statue.

  He climbed up from the sand just past the Palace Pier and made his painful way across the parade. Snow’s Restaurant was all lit up. A radio was playing. He stood on the pavement outside until he saw Rose serve a table close to the window, then went and pressed his face to it. She saw him at once; his attention rang in her brain as quickly as if he had dialled her. He took his hand from his pocket, but his wounded face was anxiety enough for her. She tried to tell him something through the glass: he couldn’t understand her; it was as if he were listening to a foreign language. She had to repeat it three times, ‘Go to the back,’ before he could read her lips. The pain in his leg was worse; he trailed round the building, and as he turned, a car went by, a Lancia, a uniformed chauffeur, and Mr Colleoni—Mr Colleoni in a dinner jacket with a white waistcoat, who leant back and smiled and smiled in the face of an old lady in purple silk. Or perhaps it was not Mr Colleoni at all, they went so smoothly and swiftly past, but any rich middle-aged tycoon returning to the Cosmopolitan after a concert in the Pavilion.

  He bent and looked through the letter-box of the back door: Rose came down the passage towards him with her hands clenched and a look of anger on her face. He lost some of his confidence; she’s noticed, he thought, how done in. . . he’d always known a girl looked at your shoes and coat: if she sends me away, he thought, I’ll crack this vitriol bottle. . . but when she opened the door she was as dumb and devoted as ever she’d been. ‘Who’s done it?’ she whispered. ‘If I could get at them.’

  ‘Never mind,’ the Boy said and boasted experimentally, ‘you can leave them to me.’

  ‘Your dear face.’ He remembered with disgust that they were always said to like a scar, that they took it as a mark of manhood, of potency.

  ‘Is there somewhere,’ he asked, ‘where I can wash?’

  She whispered, ‘Come quietly. Through here’s the cellar,’ and she led the way into a little closet, where the hot pipes ran and a few bottles lay in a small bin.

  ‘Won’t they be coming here?’ he asked.

  ‘No one here orders wine,’ she said. ‘We haven’t got a licence. It’s what was left when we took over. The manageress drinks it for her health.’ Every time she mentioned Snow’s she said ‘we’ with faint self-consciousness. ‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘I’ll fetch some water. I’ll have to put the light out or someone might see.’ But the moon lit the room enough for him to look around; he could even read the labels on the bottles: Empire wines, Australian hocks and harvest Burgundies.

  She was gone only a little while, but immediately she returned she began humbly to apologize, ‘Someone wanted a bill and cook was watching.’ She had a white pudding basin of hot water and three handkerchiefs. ‘They’re all I’ve got,’ she said, tearing them up, ‘the laundry’s not back,’ and added firmly, as she dabbed the long shallow cut, like a line drawn with a pin down his neck: ‘If I could get at them. . . ’

  ‘Don’t talk so much,’ he said and held out his slashed hand. The blood was beginning to clot: she tied it unskillfully.

  ‘Has anyone been around again talking, asking questions?’

  ‘That man the woman was with.’

  ‘A bogy?’

  ‘I don’t think so. He said his name was Phil.’

  ‘You seem to have done the asking.’

  ‘They all tell you things.’

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ the Boy said. ‘What do they want if they aren’t bogies?’ He put out his unwounded hand and pinched her arm. ‘You don’t tell them a thing?’

  ‘Not a thing,’ she said and watched him with devotion through the dark. ‘Were you afraid?’

  ‘They can’t put anything on me.’

  ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘when they did this,’ touching his hand.

  ‘Afraid,’ he lied, ‘of course I wasn’t afraid.’

  ‘Why did they do it?’

  ‘I told you not to ask questions.’ He got up, unsteady on his bruised leg. ‘Brush my coat. I can’t go out like this. I’ve got to be respectable.’ He leant against the harvest Burgundy while she brushed him down with the flat of her hand. The moonlight shadowed the room, the small bin, the bottles, the narrow shoulders, the smooth scared adolescent face.

  He was aware of an unwillingness to go out again into the street, back to Frank’s and the unending calculations with Cubitt and Dallow of the next move. Life was a series of complicated tactical exercises, as complicated as the alignments at Waterloo, thought out on a brass bedstead among the crumbs of sausage roll. Your clothes continually needed ironing, Cubitt and Dallow quarrelled or else Dallow went after Frank’s wife, the old box telephone under the stairs rang and rang, and the extras were always being brought in and thrown on the bed by Judy who smoked too much and wanted a tip—a tip—a tip. How could you think out a larger strategy under those conditions? He had a sudden nostalgia for the small dark cupboard room, the silence, the pale
light on the harvest Burgundy. To be alone a while. . .

  But he wasn’t alone. Rose put her hand on his and asked him with fear, ‘They aren’t waiting for you, are they, out there?’

  He shrank away and boasted. ‘They aren’t waiting anywhere. They got more than they gave. They didn’t reckon on me, only on poor Spicer.’

  ‘Poor Spicer?’

  ‘Poor Spicer’s dead,’ and just as he spoke a loud laugh came down the passage from the restaurant, a woman’s laugh, full of beer and good fellowship and no regrets. ‘She’s back,’ the Boy said.

  ‘It’s her all right.’ One had heard that laugh in a hundred places: dry-eyed, uncaring, looking on the bright side, when boats drew out and other people wept: saluting the bawdy joke in music halls: beside sick beds and in crowded Southern Railway compartments: when the wrong horse won, a good sportswoman’s laugh. ‘She scares me,’ Rose whispered. ‘I don’t know what she wants.’

  The Boy pulled her up to him. Tactics, tactics, there was never any time for strategy, and in the grey night light he could see her face lifted for a kiss. He hesitated, with repulsion, but tactics. He wanted to strike her, to make her scream, but he kissed her inexpertly, missing her lips. He took his crinkling mouth away, and said, ‘Listen.’

  She said, ‘You haven’t had many girls, have you?’

  ‘Of course I have,’ he said, ‘but listen. . . ’

  ‘You’re my first,’ she said. ‘I’m glad.’ When she said that, he began again to hate her. She wouldn’t even be something to boast of: her first: he’d robbed nobody, he had no rival, no one else would look at her, Cubitt and Dallow wouldn’t give her a glance: her indeterminate natural hair, her simpleness, the cheap clothes he could feel under his hand. He hated her as he had hated Spicer and it made him circumspect; he pressed her breasts awkwardly under his palms, with a grim opportunist pretence of another man’s passion, and thought: it wouldn’t be so bad if she was more dolled up, a bit of paint and henna, but this—the cheapest, youngest, least experienced skirt in all Brighton—to have me in her power.

  ‘O God,’ she said, ‘you’re sweet to me, Pinkie. I love you.’

  ‘You wouldn’t give me away—to her?’

  Somebody in the passage shouted ‘Rose’; a door slammed.

  ‘I’ll have to go,’ she said. ‘What do you mean—give you away?’

  ‘What I said. Talk. Tell her who left that ticket. That it wasn’t you know who.’

  ‘I won’t tell her.’ A bus went by in West Street. The lights came through a little barred window straight on to her white determined face: she was like a child who crosses her fingers and swears her private oath. She said gently, ‘I don’t care what you’ve done’ as she might have denied interest in a broken window-pane or a smutty word chalked on someone else’s door. He was speechless; and some knowledge of the astuteness of her simplicity, the long experience of her sixteen years, the possible depths of her fidelity touched him like cheap music, as the light shifted from cheek-bone to cheek-bone and across the wall, as the gears ground outside.

  He said, ‘What do you mean? I’ve done nothing.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘Rose,’ a voice cried, ‘Rose.’

  ‘It’s her,’ she said, ‘I’m sure it’s her. Asking questions. Soft as butter. What does she know about us?’ She came closer. She said, ‘I did something once too. A mortal sin. When I was twelve. But she—she doesn’t know what a mortal sin is.’

  ‘Rose. Where are you? Rose.’

  The shadow of her sixteen-year-old face shifted in the moonlight on the wall. ‘Right and wrong. That’s what she talks about. I’ve heard her at the table. Right and wrong. As if she knew.’ She whispered with contempt, ‘Oh, she won’t burn. She couldn’t burn if she tried.’ She might have been discussing a damp Catherine wheel. ‘Molly Carthew burnt. She was lovely. She killed herself. Despair. That’s mortal sin. It’s unforgivable. Unless—what is it you said about the stirrup?’

  He told her unwillingly. ‘The stirrup and the ground. That doesn’t work.’

  ‘What you did,’ she persisted, ‘did you confess it?’

  He said evasively, a dark stubborn figure resting his bandaged hand on the Australian hock, ‘I haven’t been to Mass for years.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ she repeated. ‘I’d rather burn with you than be like Her.’ Her immature voice stumbled on the word, ‘She’s ignorant.’

  ‘Rose.’ The door opened on their hiding-place. A manageress in a sage-green uniform, glasses hanging from a button on her breast, brought in with her the light, the voices, the radio, the laugh, dispelled the dark theology between them. ‘Child,’ she said, ‘what are you doing here? And who’s the other child?’ she added peering at the thin figure in the shadows, but when he moved into the light she corrected herself: ‘This boy.’ Her eye ran along the bottles counting them. ‘You can’t have followers here.’

  ‘I’m going,’ the Boy said.

  The woman watched him with suspicion and distaste: the cobwebs had not all gone. ‘If you weren’t so young,’ she said, ‘I’d call the police.’

  He said with the only flash of humour he ever showed, ‘I’d have an alibi.’

  ‘And as for you,’ the manageress turned on Rose, ‘we’ll talk about you later.’ She watched the Boy out of the room and said with disgust, ‘You’re both too young for this sort of thing.’

  Too young—that was the difficulty. Spicer hadn’t solved that difficulty before he died. Too young to close her mouth with marriage, too young to stop the police putting her in the witness box, if it ever came to that. To give evidence that—why, to say that Hale had never left the card, that Spicer had left it, that he himself had come and felt for it under the cloth. She remembered even that detail. Spicer’s death would add suspicion. He’d got to close her mouth one way or another: he had to have peace.

  He slowly climbed the stairs to the bed-sitting-room at Frank’s. He had the sense that he was losing grip, the telephone rang and rang, and as he lost grip he began to realize all the things he hadn’t years enough to know. Cubitt came out of a downstairs room, his cheek was stuffed with apple, he had a broken penknife in his hand. ‘No,’ he said, ‘Spicer’s not here. He’s not back yet.’

  The Boy called down from the first landing, ‘Who wants Spicer?’

  ‘She’s rung off.’

  ‘Who was she?’

  ‘I don’t know. Some skirt of his. He’s soft on a girl he sees at the Queen of Hearts. Where is Spicer, Pinkie?’

  ‘He’s dead. Colleoni’s men killed him.’

  ‘God,’ Cubitt said. He shut the knife and spat the apple out. ‘I said we ought to lay off Brewer. What are we going to do?’

  ‘Come up here,’ the Boy said. ‘Where’s Dallow?’

  ‘He’s out.’

  The Boy led the way into the bed-sitting-room and turned on the single globe. He thought of Colleoni’s room in the Cosmopolitan. But you had to begin somewhere. He said, ‘You’ve been eating on my bed again.’

  ‘It wasn’t me, Pinkie. It was Dallow. Why, Pinkie, they’ve cut you up.’

  Again the Boy lied. ‘I gave them as good.’ But lying was a weakness. He wasn’t used to lying. He said, ‘We needn’t get worked up about Spicer. He was milky. It’s a good thing he’s dead. The girl at Snow’s saw him leave the ticket. Well, when he’s buried, no one’s going to identify him. We might even have him cremated.’

  ‘You don’t think the bogies—’

  ‘I’m not afraid of the bogies. It’s others who are nosing round.’

  ‘They can’t get over what the doctors said.’

  ‘You know we killed him and the doctors knew he died natural. Work it out for yourself. I can’t.’ He sat down on the bed and swept off Dallow’s crumbs. ‘We’re safer without Spicer.’

  ‘Maybe you know best, Pinkie. But what made Colleoni—’

  ‘He was scared, I suppose, that we’d let Tate have it on
the course. I want Mr Prewitt fetched. I want him to fix me something. He’s the only lawyer we can trust round here—if we can trust him.’

  ‘What’s the trouble, Pinkie? Anything serious?’

  The Boy leant his head back against the brass bedpost. ‘Maybe I’ll have to get married after all.’

  Cubitt suddenly bellowed with laughter, his large mouth wide, his teeth carious. Behind his head the blind was half-drawn down, shutting out the night sky, leaving the chimney-pots black and phallic, smoking palely up into the moonlit air. The Boy was silent, watching Cubitt, listening to his laughter as if it were the world’s contempt.

  When Cubitt stopped he said, ‘Go on. Ring Mr Prewitt up. He’s got to come round here,’ staring past Cubitt at the acorn gently tapping on the pane at the end of the blind cord, at the chimneys and the early summer night.

  ‘He won’t come here.’

  ‘He’s got to come. I can’t go out like this.’ He touched the marks on his neck where the razors had cut him. ‘I’ve got to get things fixed.’

  ‘You dog, you,’ Cubitt said. ‘You’re a young one at the game.’ The game: and the Boy’s mind turned with curiosity and loathing to the small cheap ready-for-anyone face, the bottles catching the moonlight on the bin, and the word ‘burn’, ‘burn’ repeated. What did people mean by ‘the game’? He knew everything in theory, nothing in practice; he was only old with the knowledge of other people’s lusts, those of strangers who wrote their desires on the walls in public lavatories. He knew the moves, he’d never played the game, ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘it won’t come to that. But fetch Mr Prewitt. He knows.’

  Mr Prewitt knew. You were certain of that at the first sight of him. He was a stranger to no wangle, twist, contradictory clause, ambiguous word. His yellow shaven middle-aged face was deeply lined with legal decisions. He carried a brown leather portfolio and wore striped trousers which seemed a little too new for the rest of him. He came into the room with hollow joviality, a dock-side manner: he had long pointed polished shoes which caught the light. Everything about him, from his breeziness to his morning coat, was brand new, except himself and that had aged in many law courts, with many victories more damaging than defeats. He had acquired the habit of not listening: innumerable rebukes from the bench had taught him that. He was deprecating, discreet, sympathetic and as tough as leather.