"There you are," he said, "that's country. We can talk there. There's things we got to get straight."
"I thought we were going to walk."
"This is walking," he said roughly, pushing her up the steps. "You're green. You don't know a thing.
You don't think that people really walk? Why it's miles."
"When people say: Come for a walk, they mean a bus?"
"Or a car. I'd have taken you in the car, but the mob are out in it."
"You got a car?"
"I couldn't get on without a car," the Boy said, as the bus climbed up behind Rottingdean: red brick buildings behind a wall, a great stretch of parkland, one girl with a hockey stick staring at something in the sky, with cropped expensive turf all round her.
The poison drained back into its proper glands: he was admired, no one insulted him, but when he looked at the girl who admired him, the poison oozed out again. He said: "Take off that hat. You look awful."
She obeyed him: her mousy hair lay flat on the small scalp; he watched her with distaste. That was what they'd joked about him marrying: that. He watched her with his soured virginity, as one might watch a draught of medicine offered that one would never, never take; one would die first or let others die. The chalky dust blew up round the windows.
"You told me to ring up," Rose said, "so when "
"Not here," the Boy said. "Wait till we're alone."
The driver's head rose slowly against a waste of sky: a few white feathers blown backward into the blue; they were on top of the downs and turned eastwards.
The Boy sat with his pointed shoes side by side, his hands in his pockets, feeling the throb of the engine come up through the thin soles.
"It's lovely," Rose said, "being out here in the country with you." Little tarred bungalows with tin roofs paraded backwards, gardens scratched in the chalk, dry flower beds like Saxon emblems carved on the downs. Notices said: "Pull in Here,"
"Mazawattee Tea,"
"Genuine Antiques"; and, hundreds of feet below, the pale green sea washed into the scarred and shabby side of England. Peacehaven itself dwindled out against the downs: half-made streets turned into grass tracks. They walked down between the bungalows to the cliff edge; there was nobody about; one of the bungalows had broken windows, in another the blinds were down for a death. "It makes me giddy,"
Rose said, "looking down." It was early closing, and the store was shut; closing time and no drinks obtainable at the hotel--a vista of To Let boards running back along the chalky ruts of unfinished roads. The Boy could see over her shoulder the rough drop to the shingle. "It makes me feel I'll fall," Rose said, turning from the sea. He let her turn; no need to act prematurely; the draught might never be offered.
"Tell me," he said, "now who rang up who and why?"
"I rang up yo u, but you weren't in. He answered."
"He?" the Boy repeated.
"The one who left the ticket that day you came in.
You remember you were looking for something."
He remembered all right the hand under the cloth, the stupid innocent face he had expected would so easily forget. "You remember a lot," he said, frowning at the thought.
"I wouldn't forget that day," she said abruptly and stopped.
"You forget a lot too. I just told you that wasn't the man you heard speak. That man's dead."
"It doesn't matter anyway," she said. "What matters is someone was in asking questions."
"About the ticket?"
"Yes."
"A man?"
"A woman. A big one with a laugh. You should have heard the laugh. Just as if she'd never had a care. I didn't trust her. She wasn't our kind."
"Our kind"; he frowned again towards the shallow wrinkled tide at the suggestion that they had something in common and spoke sharply: "What did she want?"
"She wanted to know everything. What the man who left the card looked like."
"What did you tell her?"
"I didn't tell her a thing, Pinkie."
The Boy dug with his pointed shoe into the thin dry turf and sent an empty corn-beef tin rattling down the ruts. "It's only you I'm thinking of," he said. "It don't matter to me. I'm not concerned. But I wouldn't want you getting mixed up in things that might be dangerous." He looked quickly up at her, sideways.
"You don't seem scared. It's serious what I'm telling you."
"I wouldn't be scared, Pinkie not with you about."
He dug his nails into his hands with vexation. She remembered everything she ought to forget, and forgot all that she should remember the vitriol bottle.
He'd scared her all right then he'd been too friendly since: she really believed that he was fond of her.
Why, this, he supposed, was "walking out," and he thought again of Spicer's joke. He looked at the mousy skull, the bony body, and the shabby dress, and shuddered involuntarily, a goose flying across the final bed. "Saturday," he thought, "today's Saturday," remembering the room at home, the frightening weekly exercise of his parents which he watched from his single bed. That was what they expected of you, every polony you met had her eye on the bed; his virginity straightened in him like sex. That was how they judged you; not by whether you had the guts to kill a man, to run a mob, to conquer Colleoni. He said: "We don't want to stay round here. We'll be getting back."
"We've only just come," the girl said. "Let's stay a bit, Pinkie. I like the country," she said.
"You've had a look," he said. "You can't do anything with the country. The pub's closed."
"We could just sit. We've got to wait for the bus anyway. You're funny. You aren't scared of anything, are you?"
He laughed queerly, sitting awkwardly down in front of the bungalow with the shattered glass. "Me scared? That's funny." He lay back against the bank, his waistcoat undone, his thin frayed tie bright and striped against the chalk.
"This is better than going home," Rose said.
Where's home?"
"Nelson Place. Do you know it?"
"Oh, I've passed through," he said airily, but he could have drawn its plan on the turf as accurately as a surveyor: the barred and battlemented Salvation Army gaff at the corner, his own home beyond in Paradise Piece, the houses which looked as if they had passed through an intensive bombardment, flapping gutters and glassless windows, an iron bedstead rusting in a front garden, the smashed and wasted ground in front where houses had been pulled down for model flats which had never gone up.
They lay on the chalk bank side by side with a common geography, and a little hate mixed with his contempt. He thought he had made his escape, and here his home was: back beside him, making claims.
Rose said suddenly: "She's never lived there."
"Who?"
"That woman asking questions. Never a care."
"Well," he said, "we can't all 'ave been born in Nelson Place."
"You weren't born there or somewhere round?"
"Me. Of course not. What do you think?"
"I thought maybe you were. You're a Roman too. We were all Romans in Nelson Place. You believe in things. Like Hell. But you can see she doesn't believe a thing." She said bitterly: "You can tell the world's all dandy with her."
He defended himself from any connexion with Nelson Place: "I don't take any stock in religion.
Hell it's just there. You don't need to think of it not before you die."
"You might die sudden."
He closed his eyes under the bright empty arch, and a memory floated up imperfectly into speech.
"You know what they say 'Between the stirrup and the ground, he something sought and something found.' "
"Mercy."
"That's right: Mercy."
"It would be awful though," she said slowly, "if they didn't give you time." She turned her cheek onto the chalk towards him and added, as if he could help her: "That's what I always pray. That I don't die sudden. What do you pray?"