‘We got to go on being careful, that’s all.’
‘What did they mean by it, though? I don’t trust the doctors. A break like that’s too good.’
‘We got to be careful.’
‘What’s that in your pocket, Pinkie?’
‘I don’t carry a gun,’ the Boy said. ‘You’re fancying things.’ In the town a clock struck eleven: three strokes were lost in the thunder coming down across the Channel. ‘You better be off,’ the Boy said. ‘She’s late already.’
‘You’ve got a razor there, Pinkie.’
‘I don’t need a razor with a polony. If you want to know what it is, it’s a bottle.’
‘You don’t drink, Pinkie.’
‘Nobody would want to drink this.’
‘What is it, Pinkie?’
‘Vitriol,’ the Boy said, ‘It scares a polony more than a knife.’ He turned impatiently away from the sea and complained again, ‘That music.’ It moaned in his head in the hot electric night, it was the nearest he knew to sorrow, just as a faint secret sensual pleasure he felt, touching the bottle of vitriol with his fingers, as Rose came hurrying by the concert-hall, was his nearest approach to passion. ‘Get out,’ he said to Spicer. ‘She’s here.’
‘Oh,’ Rose said, ‘I’m late. I’ve run all the way,’ she said. ‘I thought you might have thought—’
‘I’d have waited,’ the Boy said.
‘It was an awful night in the café,’ the girl said. ‘Everything went wrong. I broke two plates. And the cream was sour.’ It all came out in a breath. ‘Who was your friend?’ she asked, peering into the darkness.
‘He don’t matter,’ the Boy said.
‘I thought somehow—I couldn’t see properly—’
‘He don’t matter,’ the Boy repeated.
‘What are we going to do?’
‘Why, I thought we’d talk a little here first,’ the Boy said, ‘and then go on somewhere—Sherry’s? I don’t care.’
‘I’d love Sherry’s,’ Rose said.
‘You got your money yet for that card?’
‘Yes. I got it this morning.’
‘Nobody came and asked you questions?’
‘Oh no. But wasn’t it dreadful, his being dead like that?’
‘You saw his photograph?’
Rose came close to the rail and peered palely up at the Boy. ‘But it wasn’t him. That’s what I don’t understand.’
‘People look different in photographs.’
‘I’ve got a memory for faces. It wasn’t him. They must have cheated. You can’t trust the newspapers.’
‘Come here,’ the Boy said. He drew her round the corner until they were a little farther from the music, more alone with the lightning on the horizon and the thunder coming closer. ‘I like you,’ the Boy said, an unconvincing smile forking his mouth, ‘and I want to warn you. This fellow Hale, I’ve heard a lot about him. He got himself mixed up with things.’
‘What sort of things?’ Rose whispered.
‘Never mind what things,’ the Boy said. ‘Only I’d warn you for your own good—you’ve got the money—if I was you I’d forget it, forget all about that fellow who left the card. He’s dead, see. You’ve got the money. That’s all that matters.’
‘Anything you say,’ Rose said.
‘You can call me Pinkie if you like. That’s what my friends call me.’
‘Pinkie,’ Rose repeated, trying it shyly out as the thunder cracked overhead.
‘You read about Peggy Baron, didn’t you?’
‘No, Pinkie.’
‘It was in all the papers.’
‘I didn’t see any papers till I got this job. We couldn’t afford papers at home.’
‘She got mixed up with a mob,’ the Boy said, ‘and people came asking her questions. It’s not safe.’
‘I wouldn’t get mixed up with a mob like that,’ Rose said.
‘You can’t always help it. It sort of comes that way.’
‘What happened to her?’ Rose said.
‘They spoilt her looks. She lost one eye. They splashed vitriol on her face.’
Rose whispered, ‘Vitriol? What’s vitriol?’ and the lightning showed a strut of tarred wood, a wave breaking and her pale, bony, terrified face.
‘You never seen vitriol?’ the Boy said, grinning through the dark. He showed her the little bottle. ‘That’s vitriol.’ He took the cork out and spilled a little on the wooden plank of the pier: it hissed like steam. ‘It burns,’ the Boy said. ‘Smell it,’ and he thrust the bottle under her nose.
She gasped at him. ‘Pinkie, you wouldn’t—’ and ‘I was pulling your leg,’ he smoothly lied to her. ‘That’s not vitriol, that’s just spirit. I wanted to warn you, that’s all. You and me’s going to be friends. I don’t want a friend with her skin burned off. You tell me if anyone asks questions. Anyone—mind. Get me on the blower at Frank’s straight off. Three sixes. You can remember that.’ He took her arm and propelled her away from the lonely pier-end, back by the lit concert-hall, the music drifting landwards, grief in the guts. ‘Pinkie,’ she said, ‘I wouldn’t want to interfere. I don’t interfere in anyone’s business. I’ve never been nosy. Cross my heart.’
‘You’re a good kid,’ he said.
‘You know an awful lot about things, Pinkie,’ she said with horror and admiration, and suddenly at the stale romantic tune the orchestra was playing—‘lovely to look at, beautiful to hold, and heaven itself—’ a little venom of anger and hatred came out on the Boy’s lips: ‘You’ve got to know a lot,’ he said, ‘if you get around. Come on, we’ll go to Sherry’s.’
Once off the pier they had to run for it; taxis splashed them with water; the strings of coloured bulbs down the Hove parade gleamed like pools of petrol through the rain. They shook the water off on to the floor of Sherry’s and Rose saw the queue waiting all the way upstairs for the gallery. ‘It’s full,’ she said, with disappointment.
‘We’ll go on the floor,’ the Boy said, paying his three shillings as carelessly as if he always went there, and walked out among the little tables, the dancing partners with bright metallic hair and little black bags, while the coloured lights flashed green and pink and blue. Rose said, ‘It’s lovely here. It reminds me,’ and all the way to their table she counted over aloud all the things of which it reminded her, the lights, the tune the band was playing, the crowd on the floor trying to rumba. She had an immense store of trivial memories and when she wasn’t living in the future she was living in the past. As for the present—she got through that as quickly as she could, running away from things, running towards things, so that her voice was always a little breathless, her heart pounding at an escape or an expectation. ‘I whipped the plate under the apron and she said, “Rose, what are you hiding there?”’ and a moment later she was turning wide unfledged eyes back to the Boy with a look of the deepest admiration, the most respectful hope.
‘What’ll you drink?’ the Boy said.
She didn’t even know the name of a drink. In Nelson Place from which she had emerged like a mole into the daylight of Snow’s restaurant and the Palace Pier, she had never known a boy with enough money to offer her a drink. She would have said ‘beer’, but she had had no opportunity of discovering whether she liked beer. A twopenny ice from an Everest tricycle was the whole extent of her knowledge of luxury. She goggled hopelessly at the Boy. He asked her sharply, ‘What d’you like? I don’t know what you like.’
‘An ice,’ she said with disappointment, but she couldn’t keep him waiting.
‘What kind of an ice?’
‘Just an ordinary ice,’ she said. Everest hadn’t in all the slum years offered her a choice.
‘Vanilla?’ the waiter said. She nodded; she supposed that that was what she had always had, and so it proved—only a size larger; otherwise she might just as well have been sucking it between wafers by a tricycle.
‘You’re a soft sort of kid,’ the Boy said. ‘How old are you?’
‘I?
??m seventeen,’ she said defiantly; there was a law which said a man couldn’t go with you before you were seventeen.
‘I’m seventeen too,’ the Boy said, and the eyes which had never been young stared with grey contempt into the eyes which had only just begun to learn a thing or two. He said, ‘Do you dance?’ and she replied humbly, ‘I haven’t danced much.’
‘It don’t matter,’ the Boy said. ‘I’m not one for dancing.’ He eyed the slow movement of the two-backed beasts: pleasure, he thought, they call it pleasure: he was shaken by a sense of loneliness, an awful lack of understanding. The floor was cleared for the last cabaret of the evening. A spotlight picked out a patch of floor, a crooner in a dinner jacket, a microphone on a long black movable stand. He held it tenderly as if it were a woman, swinging it gently this way and that, wooing it with his lips while from the loudspeaker under the gallery his whisper reverberated hoarsely over the hall, like a dictator announcing victory, like the official news following a long censorship. ‘It gets you,’ the Boy said, ‘it gets you,’ surrendering himself to the huge brazen suggestion.
‘Music talks, talks of our love.
The starling on our walks, talks, talks of our love.
The taxis tooting,
The last owl hooting,
The tube train rumbling,
Busy bee bumbling,
Talk of our love.
Music talks, talks of our love,
The west wind on our walks, talks, talks of our love.
The nightingale singing,
The postmen ringing,
Electric drill groaning,
Office telephoning,
Talk of our love.’
The Boy stared at the spotlight: music, love, nightingale, postmen: the words stirred in his brain like poetry: one hand caressed the vitriol bottle in his pocket, the other touched Rose’s wrist. The inhuman voice whistled round the gallery and the Boy sat silent. It was he this time who was being warned; life held the vitriol bottle and warned him: I’ll spoil your looks. It spoke to him in the music, and when he protested that he for one would never get mixed up, the music had its own retort at hand: ‘You can’t always help it. It sort of comes that way.’
‘The watchdog on our walks, talks, talks of our love.’
The crowd stood at attention six deep behind the tables (there wasn’t enough room on the floor for so many). They were dead quiet. It was like the anthem on Armistice Day when the King has deposited his wreath, the hats off, and the troops turned to stone. It was love of a kind, music of a kind, truth of a kind they listened to.
‘Gracie Fields funning,
The gangsters gunning,
Talk of our love.’
The music pealed on under the Chinese lanterns and the pink spotlight featured the singer holding the microphone closer to his starched shirt. ‘You been in love?’ the Boy asked sharply and uneasily.
‘Oh yes,’ Rose said.
The Boy retorted with sudden venom, ‘You would have been. You’re green. You don’t know what people do.’ The music came to an end and in the silence he laughed aloud. ‘You’re innocent.’ People turned in their chairs and looked at them: a girl giggled. His fingers pinched her wrist. ‘You’re green,’ he said again. He was working himself into a little sensual rage, as he had done with the soft kids at the council school. ‘You don’t know anything,’ he said, with contempt in his nails.
‘Oh no,’ she protested. ‘I know a lot.’
The Boy grinned at her, ‘Not a thing,’ pinching the skin of her wrist until his nails nearly met. ‘You’d like me for your boy, eh? We’ll keep company?’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’d love it.’ Tears of pride and pain pricked behind her lids. ‘If you like doing that,’ she said, ‘go on.’
The Boy let go. ‘Don’t be soft,’ he said. ‘Why should I like it? You think you know too much,’ he complained. He sat there, anger like a live coal in his belly, as the music came on again: all the good times he’d had in the old days with nails and splinters: the tricks he’d learnt later with a razor blade: what would be the fun if people didn’t squeal? He said furiously, ‘We’ll be going. I can’t stand this place,’ and obediently Rose began to pack her handbag, putting back her Woolworth compact and her handkerchief. ‘What’s that?’ the Boy said when something clinked in her bag; she showed him the end of a string of beads.
‘You a Roman?’ the Boy asked.
‘Yes,’ Rose said.
‘I’m one too,’ the Boy said. He gripped her arm and pushed her out into the dark dripping street. He turned up the collar of his jacket and ran as the lightning flapped and the thunder filled the air. They ran from doorway to doorway until they were back on the parade in one of the empty glass shelters. They had it to themselves in the noisy stifling night. ‘Why, I was in a choir once,’ the Boy confided and suddenly he began to sing softly in his spoilt boy’s voice: ‘Agnus dei qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.’ In his voice a whole lost world moved—the lighted corner below the organ, the smell of incense and laundered surplices, and the music. Music—it didn’t matter what music—‘Agnus dei’, ‘lovely to look at, beautiful to hold’, ‘the starling on our walks’, ‘credo in unum Dominum’—any music moved him, speaking of things he didn’t understand.
‘Do you go to Mass?’ he asked.
‘Sometimes,’ Rose said. ‘It depends on work. Most weeks I wouldn’t get much sleep if I went to Mass.’
‘I don’t care what you do,’ the Boy said sharply. ‘I don’t go to Mass.’
‘But you believe, don’t you,’ Rose implored him, ‘you think it’s true?’
‘Of course it’s true,’ the Boy said. ‘What else could there be?’ he went scornfully on. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘it’s the only thing that fits. These atheists, they don’t know nothing. Of course there’s Hell. Flames and damnation,’ he said with his eyes on the dark shifting water and the lightning and the lamps going out above the black struts of the Palace Pier, ‘torments.’
‘And Heaven too,’ Rose said with anxiety, while the rain fell interminably on.
‘Oh, maybe,’ the Boy said, ‘maybe.’
Wet to the skin, the trousers sticking to his thin legs the Boy went up the long unmatted flight to his bedroom at Frank’s. The banister shook under his hand, and when he opened the door and found the mob there, sitting on his brass bedstead smoking, he said furiously, ‘When’s that banister going to be mended? It’s not safe. Someone’ll take a fall one day.’ The curtain wasn’t drawn, the window was open, and the last lightning flapped across the grey roofs stretching to the sea. The Boy went to his bed and swept off the crumbs of Cubitt’s sausage roll. ‘What’s this,’ he said, ‘a meeting?’
‘There’s trouble about the subscriptions, Pinkie,’ Cubitt said. ‘There’s two not come in. Brewer and Tate. They say now Kite’s dead—’
‘Do we carve ’em up, Pinkie?’ Dallow asked. Spicer stood at the window watching the storm. He said nothing, staring out at the flames and chasms of the sky.
‘Ask Spicer,’ the Boy said. ‘He’s been doing a lot of thinking lately.’ They all turned and watched Spicer. Spicer said, ‘Maybe we ought to lay off a while. You know a lot of the boys cleared out when Kite got killed.’
‘Go on,’ the Boy said. ‘Listen to him. He’s what they call a philosopher.’
‘Well,’ Spicer said angrily, ‘there’s free speech in this mob, ain’t there? Those that cleared out, they didn’t see how a kid could run this show.’
The Boy sat on the bed watching him with his hands in his damp pockets. He shivered once.
‘I was always against murder,’ Spicer said. ‘I don’t care who knows it.’
‘Sour and milky,’ the Boy said.
Spicer came into the middle of the room. ‘Listen, Pinkie,’ he said. ‘Be reasonable.’ He appealed to them all, ‘Be reasonable.’
‘There’s things in what he says,’ Cubitt suddenly put in. ‘We had a lucky break. We don’t want to draw attention t
o ourselves. We’d better let Brewer and Tate be for a while.’
The Boy got up. A few crumbs stuck to his wet suit. ‘You ready, Dallow?’ he said.
‘What you say, Pinkie,’ Dallow said, grinning like a large friendly dog.
‘Where you going, Pinkie?’ Spicer asked.
‘I’m going to see Brewer.’
Cubitt said, ‘You act as if it was last year we killed Hale, not last week. We got to act cautious.’
‘That’s over and done,’ the Boy said. ‘You heard the verdict. Natural causes,’ he said, looking out at the dying storm.
‘You forget that girl in Snow’s. She could hang us.’
‘I’m looking after the girl. She won’t talk.’
‘You’re marrying her, aren’t you?’ Cubitt said. Dallow laughed.
The Boy’s hands came out of his pockets, the knuckles clenched white. He said, ‘Who told you I was marrying her?’
‘Spicer,’ Cubitt said.
Spicer backed away from the Boy. He said, ‘Listen, Pinkie. I only said as it would make her safe. A wife can’t give evidence. . . ’
‘I don’t need to marry a squirt to make her safe. How do we make you safe, Spicer?’ His tongue came out between his teeth, licking the edges of his dry cracked lips. ‘If carving’d do it. . . ’
‘It was just a joke,’ Cubitt said. ‘You don’t need to take it so solemn. You want a sense of humour, Pinkie.’
‘You think that was funny, eh?’ the Boy said. ‘Me—marrying—that cheap polony.’ He croaked ‘Ha, ha,’ at them. ‘I’ll learn. Come on, Dallow.’
‘Wait till morning,’ Cubitt sad. ‘Wait till some of the other boys come in.’
‘You milky too?’
‘You don’t believe that, Pinkie. But we got to go slow.’
‘You with me, Dallow?’ the boy asked.
‘I’m with you, Pinkie.’
‘Then we’ll be going,’ the Boy sad. He went across to the washstand and opened the little door where the jerry stood. He felt at the back behind the jerry and pulled out a tiny blade, like the blades women shave with, but blunt along one edge and mounted with sticking-plaster. He stuck it under his long thumb-nail, the only nail not bitten close, and drew on his glove. He said, ‘We’ll be back with the sub. in half an hour,’ and led the way bang straight down Frank’s stairs. The cold of his drenching had got under his skin: he came out on to the front a pace ahead of Dallow, his face contorted with ague, a shiver twisting the narrow shoulders. He said over his shoulder to Dallow, ‘We’ll go to Brewer’s. One lesson’ll be enough.’