"I saw Crab. He said you were at the police station."
"Crab?"
"You weren't at the station then?"
"I was having a friendly talk about Brewer."
"Not about?"
"About Brewer." The Boy suddenly put his hand on Spicer's wrist. "Your nerves are all wrong, Spicer.
You want a holiday." He sniffed with contempt the tainted air. "You drink too much." He went to the window and threw it open on the vista of grey wall.
A leatherjacket buzzed up the pane and the Boy caught it in his hand. It vibrated like a tiny watch spring in his palm. He began to pull off the legs and wings one by one. "She loves me," he said, "she loves me not. I've been out with my girl, Spicer."
"The one from Snow's?"
The Boy turned the denuded body over on his palm and puffed it away over Spicer's bed. "You know who I mean," he said. "You had a message for me, Spicer.
Why didn't you bring it?"
"I couldn't find you, Pinkie. Honest I couldn't.
And anyway it wasn't that important. Some old busybody asking questions."
"It scared you all the same," the Boy said. He sat down on the hard deal chair before the mirror, his hands on his knees watching Spicer. The pulse beat in his cheek.
"Oh, it didn't scare me," Spicer said.
"You went walking blind straight to There."
"What do you mean there?"
"There's only one There to you, Spicer. You think about it and you dream about it. You're too old for this life."
"This life?" Spicer said, glaring back at him from the bed.
"This racket, of course, I mean. You get nervous and then you get rash. First there was that card in Snow's and now you let your picture be stuck up on the pier for anyone to see. For Rose to see."
"Honest to God, Pinkie, I never knew that."
"You forget to walk on your toes."
"She's safe. She's stuck on you, Pinkie."
"I don't know anything about women. I leave that to you and Cubitt and the rest. I only know what you tell me. You've told me time and again there never was a safe polony yet."
"That's just talk."
"You mean I'm a kid and you tell me good-night stories. But I've got so I believe them, Spicer. It don't seem safe to me that you and Rose are in the same town. Apart from this other buer asking questions.
You'll have to disappear, Spicer."
"What do you mean," Spicer said, "disappear?"
He fumbled inside his jacket and the Boy watched him, his hands flat on his knees. "You wouldn't do anything," he said, fumbling in his pocket.
"Why," the Boy said, "what do you think I mean?
I mean take a holiday, go away somewhere for a while."
Spicer's hand came out of his pocket. He held out a silver watch towards the Boy. "You can trust me, Pinkie. Look there, what the boys gave me. Read the inscription: 'Ten Years a Pal. From the Boys at the Stadium.' I don't let people down. That was fifteen years ago, Pinkie. Twenty-five years on the tracks.
You weren't born when I started."
"You need a holiday," the Boy said. "That's all I said."
"I'd be glad to take a holiday," Spicer said, "but I wouldn't want you to think I'm milky. I'll go at once.
I'll pack a bag and clear out tonight. Why, I'd be glad to be gone."
"No," the Boy said, staring down at his shoes.
"There's not all that hurry." He lifted a foot. The sole was worn through in a piece the size of a shilling.
He thought again of the crowns on Colleoni's chairs at the Cosmopolitan. "I'll need you at the races." He smiled across the room at Spicer. "A pal I can trust."
"You can trust me, Pinkie." Spicer's fingers smoothed the silver watch. "What are you smiling at?
Have I got a smut or something?"
"I was just thinking of the races," the Boy said.
"They mean a lot to me." He got up and stood with his back to the greying light, the tenement wall, the smutsmeared pane, looking down at Spicer with a kind of curiosity. "And where will you go, Spicer?" he said.
His mind was quite made up, and for the second time in a few weeks he looked at a dying man. He couldn't help feeling inquisitive. Why, it was even possible that old Spicer was not set for the flames, he'd been a loyal old geezer, he hadn't done as much harm as the next man, he might slip through the gates into but the Boy couldn't picture any eternity except in terms of pain. He frowned a little in the effort: a glassy sea, a golden crown, old Spicer.
"Nottingham," Spicer said. "A pal of mine keeps the Blue Anchor in Union Street. A free house. High class. Lunches served. He's often said to me: 'Spicer, why don't you come into partnership? We'd make the old place into a hotel with a few more nickers in the till.' If it wasn't for you and the boys," Spicer said, "I wouldn't want to come back. I wouldn't mind staying away for keeps."
"Well," the Boy said, "I'll be off. We know where we are now anyway." Spicer lay back on the pillow and put up the foot with the shooting corn. There was a hole in his woollen sock, and a big toe showed through, hard skin calcined with middle age. "Sleep well," the Boy said.
He went downstairs; the front door faced east, and the hall was dark. He switched on a light by the telephone and then switched it out again, he didn't know why. Then he rang up the Cosmopolitan. When the hotel exchange answered he could hear the dance music in the distance, all the way from the Palm House (th6s dansants, three shillings) behind the Louis Seize Writing Room. "I want Mr. Colleoni." The nightingale singing, the postman ringing the tune was abruptly cut off, and a low Semitic voice purred up the line.
"That Mr. Colleoni?"
He could hear a glass chink and ice move in a shaker. He said: "This is Mr. P. Brown. I've been thinking things over, Mr. Colleoni." Outside the little dark linoleumed hall a bus slid by, the lights faint in the grey end of the day. The Boy put his mouth close to the mouth of the telephone and said: "He won't listen to reason, Mr. Colleoni." The voice purred happily back at him. The Boy explained slowly and carefully: "I'll wish him good luck and pat him on the back." He stopped and said sharply: "What's that you say, Mr.
Colleoni? No. I just thought you laughed. Hullo.
Hullo." He banged the receiver down and turned with a sense of uneasiness towards the stairs. The gold cigar lighter, the grey double-breasted waistcoat, the feeling of a racket luxuriously successful for a moment dominated him: the brass bedstead upstairs, the little pot of violet ink on the washstand, the flakes of sausage roll.
His board school cunning wilted for a while; then he turned on the light, he was at home. He climbed the stairs, humming softly: "The nightingale singing, the postman ringing," but as his thoughts circled closer to the dark, dangerous, and deathly centre the tune changed: "Agnus dei qui tollis peccata mundi..."; he walked stiffly, the jacket sagging across his immature shoulders, but when he opened the door of his room "Dona nobis pacem" his pallid face peered dimly back at him full of pride from the mirror over the ewer, the soap dish, the basin of stale water.
PART FOUR
IT WAS a fine day for the races. People poured into Brighton by the first train; it was like bank holiday all over again, except that these people didn't spend their money--they harboured it. They stood packed deep on the tops of the trams rocking down to the Aquarium, they surged like some natural and irrational migration of insects up and down the front. By eleven o'clock it was impossible to get a seat on the [142] BRIGHTON HOCK buses going out to the course. A Negro wearing a bright striped tie sat on a bench in the Pavilion garden and smoked a cigar. Some children played touch wood from seat to seat, and he called out to them hilariously, holding his cigar at arm's length with an air of pride and caution, his great teeth gleaming like an advertisement. They stopped playing and stared at him, backing slowly. He called out to them again in their own tongue, the words hollow and unformed and childish like theirs, and they eyed him uneasily and backed further away. He put his cigar patiently back between the cushiony lips and went on smoking. A band came up the pavement through Old Steyne, a blind band playing drums and trumpets, walking in the gutter, feeling the kerb with the edge of their shoes, in Indian file. You heard the music a long way off, persisting through the rumble of the crowd, the shots of exhaust pipes, and the grinding of the buses starting uphill for the racecourse. It rang out with spirit, marched like a regiment, and you raised your eyes in expectation of the tiger skin and the twirling drumsticks and saw the pale blind eyes, like those of pit ponies, going by along the gutter.