Brighton Rock

  ‘Poor old Spicer,’ Cubitt said, watching the bubbles rise in the whisky. A question floated up, ‘How did you. . . ’ but broke in the doped brain. ‘I want air,’ he said, ‘stuffy in here. What say you and I. . . ?’

  ‘Just wait awhile,’ Ida Arnold said. ‘I’m expecting a friend. I’d like you and him to be acquainted.’

  ‘This central heating,’ Cubitt said, ‘it’s not healthy. You go out and catch a chill and the next you know. . . ’

  ‘When’s the wedding?’

  ‘Whose wedding?’

  ‘Pinkie’s.’

  ‘I’m no friend of Pinkie’s.’

  ‘You didn’t hold with Fred’s death, did you?’ Ida Arnold softly persisted.

  ‘You understand a man.’

  ‘Carving would have been different.’

  Cubitt suddenly, furiously, broke out, ‘I can’t see a piece of Brighton rock without. . . ’ He belched and said with tears in his voice, ‘Carving’s different.’

  ‘The doctors said it was natural causes. He had a weak heart.’

  ‘Come outside,’ Cubitt said, ‘I got to get some air.’

  ‘Just wait a bit. What do you mean—Brighton rock?’

  He stared inertly back at her. He said, ‘I got to get some air. Even if it kills me. This central heating. . . ’ he complained. ‘I’m liable to colds.’

  ‘Just wait two minutes.’ She put her hand on his arm, feeling an intense excitement, the edge of discovery above the horizon, and was aware herself for the first time of the warm close air welling up round them from hidden gratings, driving them into the open. She said, ‘I’ll come out with you. We’ll take a walk. . . ’ He watched her with nodding head, with an immense indifference as if he had lost grip on his thought as you loose a dog’s lead and it has disappeared, too far to be followed, in what wood. . . He was astonished when she said, ‘I’ll give you—twenty pounds.’ What had he said that was worth that money? She smiled enticingly at him. ‘Just let me put on a bit of powder and have a wash.’ He didn’t respond, he was scared, but she couldn’t wait for a reply: she dived for the stairs—no time for the lift. A wash: they were the words she had used to Fred. She ran upstairs, people were coming down, changed, to dinner. She hammered on her door and Phil Corkery let her in. ‘Quick,’ she said, ‘I want a witness.’ He was dressed, thank goodness, and she raced him down, but immediately she got into the hall she saw that Cubitt had gone. She ran out on to the steps of the Cosmopolitan, but he wasn’t in sight.

  ‘Well,’ Mr Corkery said.

  ‘Gone, Never mind,’ Ida Arnold said. ‘I know now all right. It wasn’t suicide. They murdered him.’ She said slowly over to herself: ‘. . . Brighton rock. . . ’ The clue would have seemed hopeless to many women, but Ida Arnold had been trained by the Board. Queerer things than that had spidered out under her fingers and Old Crowe’s: with complete confidence her mind began to work.

  The night air stirred Mr Corkery’s thin yellow hair. It may have occurred to him that on an evening like this—after the actions of love—romance was required by any woman. He touched her elbow timidly, ‘What a night,’ he said. ‘I never dreamed—what a night,’ but words drained out as she switched towards him her large thoughtful eyes, uncomprehending, full of other ideas. She said slowly, ‘The little fool. . . to marry him. . . why, there’s no knowing what he’ll do.’ A kind of righteous mirth moved her to add with excitement, ‘We got to save her, Phil.’

  2

  At the bottom of the steps the Boy waited. The big municipal building lay over him like a shadow—departments for births and deaths, for motor licences, for rates and taxes, somewhere in some long corridor the room for marriages. He looked at his watch and said to Mr Prewitt, ‘God damn her. She’s late.’

  Mr Prewitt said, ‘It’s the privilege of a bride.’

  Bride and groom: the mare and the stallion which served her: like a file on metal or the touch of velvet to a sore hand. The Boy said, ‘Me and Dallow—we’ll walk and meet her.’

  Mr Prewitt called after him. ‘Suppose she comes another way. Suppose you miss her. . . I’ll wait here.’

  They turned to the left out of the official street. ‘This ain’t the way,’ Dallow said.

  ‘There’s no call on us to wait on her,’ the Boy said.

  ‘You can’t get out of it now.’

  ‘Who wants to? I can take a bit of exercise, can’t I?’ He stopped and stared into a small newsagent’s window—two-valve receiving sets, the grossness everywhere.

  ‘Seen Cubitt?’ he asked, staring in.

  ‘No,’ Dallow said. ‘None of the boys either.’

  The daily and the local papers, a poster packed with news: Scene at Council Meeting. Woman Found Drowned at Black Rock. Collision in Clarence Street: a Wild West magazine, a copy of Film Fun; behind the inkpots and the fountain pens and the paper plates for picnics and the little gross toys, the works of well-known sexologists. The Boy stared in.

  ‘I know how you feel,’ Dallow said. ‘I was married once myself. It kind of gets you in the stomach. Nerves. Why,’ Dallow said, ‘I even went and got one of those books, but it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know. Except about flowers. The pistils of flowers. You wouldn’t believe the funny things that go on among flowers.’

  The Boy turned and opened his mouth to speak, but the teeth snapped to again. He watched Dallow with pleading and horror. If Kite had been there, he thought, he could have spoken—but if Kite had been there, he would have had no need to speak. . . he would never have got mixed up.

  ‘These bees. . . ’ Dallow began to explain and stopped. ‘What is it, Pinkie? You don’t look too good.’

  ‘I know the rules all right,’ the Boy said.

  ‘What rules?’

  ‘You can’t teach me the rules,’ the Boy went on with gusty anger. ‘I watched ’em every Saturday night, didn’t I? Bouncing and ploughing.’ His eyes flinched as if he were watching some horror. He said in a low voice, ‘When I was a kid, I swore I’d be a priest.’

  ‘A priest? You a priest? That’s good,’ Dallow said. He laughed without conviction, uneasily shifted his foot so that it trod in a dog’s ordure.

  ‘What’s wrong with being a priest?’ the Boy asked. ‘They know what’s what. They keep away—’ his whole mouth and jaw loosened: he might have been going to weep: he beat out wildly with his hands towards the window: Woman Found Drowned, two-valve, Married Passion, the horror—‘from this.’

  ‘What’s wrong with a bit of fun?’ Dallow took him up, scraping his shoe against the pavement edge. The word ‘fun’ shook the Boy like malaria. He said, ‘You wouldn’t have known Annie Collins, would you?’

  ‘Never heard of her.’

  ‘She went to the same school I did,’ the Boy said. He took a look down the grey street and then the glass before Married Passion reflected again his young and hopeless face. ‘She put her head on the line.’ he said, ‘up by the Hassocks. She had to wait ten minutes for the seven-five. Fog made it late from Victoria. Cut off her head. She was fifteen. She was going to have a baby and she knew what it was like. She’d had one two years before, and they could ’ave pinned it on twelve boys.’

  ‘It does happen,’ Dallow said. ‘It’s the luck of the game.’

  ‘I’ve read love stories,’ the Boy said. He had never been so vocal before, staring in at the paper plates with frilly edges and the two-valve receiving set: the daintiness and the grossness. ‘Frank’s wife reads them. You know the sort. Lady Angeline turned her starry eyes towards Sir Mark. They make me sick. Sicker than the other kind’—Dallow watched with astonishment this sudden horrified gift of tongues—‘the kind you buy under the counter. Spicer used to get them. About girls being beaten. Full of shame to expose herself thus before the boys she stooped. . . It’s all the same thing,’ he said, turning his poisoned eyes away from the window, from point to point of the long shabby street: a smell of fish, the sawdusted pavement below the carcasses. ‘It’s fun. It’s the
game.’

  ‘The world’s got to go on,’ Dallow said uneasily.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You don’t need to ask me,’ Dallow said. ‘You know best. You’re a Roman aren’t you? You believe. . . ’

  ‘Credo in unum Satanum,’ the Boy said.

  ‘I don’t know Latin. I only know. . . ’

  ‘Come on,’ the Boy said. ‘Let’s have it. Dallow’s creed.’

  ‘The world’s all right if you don’t go too far.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘It’s time for you to be at the registrar’s. Hear the clock? It’s striking two now.’ A peal of bells stopped their cracked chime and struck—one, two—

  The Boy’s whole face loosened again: he put his hand on Dallow’s arm. ‘You’re a good sort, Dallow. You know a lot. Tell me—’ his hand fell away. He looked beyond Dallow down the street. He said hopelessly, ‘Here she is. What’s she doing in this street?’

  ‘She’s not hurrying either,’ Dallow commented, watching the thin figure slowly approach. At that distance she didn’t even look her age. He said, ‘It was clever of Prewitt to get the licence at all considering.’

  ‘Parents’ consent,’ the Boy said dully. ‘Best for morality.’ He watched the girl as if she were a stranger he had got to meet. ‘And then you see there was a stroke of luck. I wasn’t registered. Not anywhere they could find. They added a year or two. No parents. No guardian. It was a touching story old Prewitt spun.’

  She had tricked herself up for the wedding, discarded the hat he hadn’t liked: a new mackintosh, a touch of powder and cheap lipstick. She looked like one of the small gaudy statues in an ugly church: a paper crown wouldn’t have looked odd on her or a painted heart: you could pray to her but you couldn’t expect an answer.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ the Boy said. ‘Don’t you know you’re late?’

  They didn’t even touch hands. An awful formality fell between them.

  ‘I’m sorry, Pinkie. You see’—she brought the fact out with shame, as if she were admitting conversation with his enemy—‘I went to the church.’

  ‘What for?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know, Pinkie. I got confused. I thought I’d go to confession.’

  He grinned at her. ‘Confession? That’s rich.’

  ‘You see I wanted—I thought—’

  ‘For Christ’s sake what?’

  ‘I wanted to be in a state of grace when I married you.’ She took no notice at all of Dallow. The theological term lay oddly and pedantically on her tongue. They were two Romans together in the grey street. They understood each other. She used terms common to heaven and hell.

  ‘And did you?’ the Boy said.

  ‘No. I went and rang the bell and asked for Father James. But then I remembered. It wasn’t any good confessing. I went away,’ she said with a mixture of fear and pride. ‘We’re going to do a mortal sin.’

  The Boy said, with bitter and unhappy relish, ‘It’ll be no good going to confession ever again—as long as we’re both alive.’ He had graduated in pain: first the school dividers had been left behind, next the razor. He had a sense now that the murders of Hale and Spicer were trivial acts, a boy’s game, and he had put away childish things. Murder had only led up to this—this corruption. He was filled with awe at his own powers. ‘We’d better be moving,’ he said and touched her arm with next to tenderness. As once before he had a sense of needing her.

  Mr Prewitt greeted them with official mirth. All his jokes seemed to be spoken in court, with an ulterior motive, to catch a magistrate’s ear. In the great institutional hall from which the corridors led off to deaths and births there was a smell of disinfectant. The walls were tiled like a public lavatory. Somebody had dropped a rose. Mr Prewitt quoted promptly, inaccurately, ‘Roses, roses all the way, and never a sprig of yew.’ A soft hollow hand guided the Boy by the elbow: ‘No, no, not that way. That’s taxes. That comes later.’ He led them up great stone stairs. A clerk passed them carrying printed forms. ‘And what is the little lady thinking?’ Mr Prewitt said. She didn’t answer him.

  Only the bride and groom were allowed to mount the sanctuary steps, to kneel down within the sanctuary rails with the priest and the Host.

  ‘Parents coming?’ Mr Prewitt asked. She shook heir head. ‘The great thing is,’ Mr Prewitt said, ‘it’s over quickly. Just sign the names along the dotted line. Sit down here. We’ve got to wait our turn, you know.’

  They sat down. A mop leant in a corner against the tiled wall. The footsteps of a clerk squealed on the icy paving down another passage. Presently a big brown door opened: they saw a row of clerks inside who didn’t look up: a man and wife came out into the corridor. A woman followed them and took the mop. The man—he was middle-aged—said ‘thank you’, gave her sixpence. He said, ‘We’ll catch the three-fifteen after all.’ On the woman’s face there was a look of faint astonishment, bewilderment, nothing so definite as disappointment. She wore a brown straw and carried an attaché case. She was middle-aged too. She might have been thinking, ‘Is that all there is to it—after all these years?’ They went down the big stairs walking a little apart, like strangers in a store.

  ‘Our turn,’ Mr Prewitt said, rising briskly. He led the way through the room where the clerks worked. Nobody bothered to look up. Nibs wrote smooth numerals and ran on. In a small inner room with green washed walls like a clinic’s the registrar waited: a table, three or four chairs against the wall. It wasn’t what she thought a marriage would be like—for a moment she was daunted by the cold poverty of a state-made ceremony.

  ‘Good morning,’ the registrar said. ‘If the witnesses will just sit down—would you two’—he beckoned them to the table and stared at them with gold-rimmed and glassy importance: it was as if he considered himself on the fringe of the priestly office. The Boy’s heart beat: he was sickened by the reality of the moment. He wore a look of sullenness and of stupidity.

  ‘You’re both very young,’ the registrar said.

  ‘It’s fixed,’ the Boy said. ‘You don’t have to talk about it. It’s fixed.’

  The registrar gave him a glance of intense dislike; he said, ‘Repeat after me,’ and then ran too quickly on, ‘I do solemnly declare that I know not of any lawful impediment,’ so that the Boy couldn’t follow him. The registrar said sharply, ‘It’s quite simple. You’ve only to repeat after me. . . ’

  ‘Go slower,’ the Boy said. He wanted to lay his hand on speed and brake it down, but it ran on: it was no time at all, a matter of seconds, before he was repeating the formula ‘my lawful wedded wife.’ He tried to make it careless, he kept his eyes off Rose, but the words were weighted with shame.

  ‘No ring?’ the registrar asked sharply.

  ‘We don’t need any ring,’ the Boy said. ‘This isn’t a church,’ feeling he could never now rid his memory of the cold green room and the glassy face. He heard Rose repeating by his side: ‘I call upon these persons here present to witness. . . ’ and then the word ‘husband’, and he looked sharply up at her. If there had been any complacency in her face then he would have struck it. But there was only surprise as if she were reading a book and had come to the last page too soon.

  The registrar said, ‘You sign here. The charge is seven and sixpence.’ He wore an air of official unconcern while Mr Prewitt fumbled.

  ‘These persons,’ the Boy said and laughed brokenly. ‘That’s you, Prewitt and Dallow.’ He took the pen and the Government nib scratched into the page, gathering fur; in the old days, it occurred to him, you signed covenants like this in your blood. He stood back and watched Rose awkwardly sign—his temporal safety in return for two immortalities of pain. He had no doubt whatever that this was mortal sin, and he was filled with a kind of gloomy hilarity and pride. He saw himself now as a full grown man for whom the angels wept.

  ‘These persons,’ he repeated, ignoring the registrar altogether. ‘Come and have a drink.’

  ‘Well,’ Mr Prewitt said, ‘that’s a sur
prise from you.’

  ‘Oh, Dallow will tell you,’ the Boy said. ‘I’m a drinking man these days.’ He looked across at Rose. ‘There’s nothing I’m not now,’ he said. He took her by the elbow and led the way out to the tiled passage and the big stairs: the mop was gone and somebody had picked up the flower. A couple rose as they came out: the market was firm. He said, ‘That was a wedding. Can you beat it? We’re’—he meant to say ‘husband and wife’, but his mind flinched from the defining phrase. ‘We got to celebrate,’ he said, and like an old relation you can always trust for the tactless word his brain beat on—‘celebrate what?’ and he thought of the girl sprawling in the Lancia and the long night coming down.

  They went to the pub round the corner. It was nearly closing time, and he stood them pints of bitter and Rose took a port. She hadn’t spoken since the registrar had given her the words to say. Mr Prewitt took a quick look round and parked his portfolio. With his dark striped trousers he might really have been at a wedding. ‘Here’s to the bride,’ he said with a jocularity which petered unobtrusively out. It was as if he had tried to crack a joke with a magistrate and scented a rebuff: the old face recomposed itself quickly on serious lines. He said reverently, ‘To your happiness, my dear.’

  She didn’t answer; she was looking at her own face in a glass marked Extra Stout: in the new setting with a foreground of beer handles, it was a strange face. It seemed to carry an enormous weight of responsibility.

  ‘A penny for your thoughts,’ Dallow said to her. The Boy put the glass of bitter to his mouth and tasted for the second time—the nausea of other people’s pleasures stuck in his throat. He watched her sourly as she gazed wordlessly back at his companions; and again he was sensible of how she completed him. He knew her thoughts: they beat unregarded in his own nerves. He said with triumphant venom, ‘I can tell you what she’s thinking of. Not much of a wedding, she’s thinking. She’s thinking—it’s not what I pictured. That’s right, isn’t it?’

  She nodded, holding the glass of port as if she hadn’t learned the way to drink.