"Never mind," the Boy said and boasted experimentally: "You can leave them to me."
"Your poor 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 said, "where I can wash up?"
She whispered: "Come quietly. Through here's the [158] BRIGHTON ROC* cellar," and she led the way into a little closet, through which the hot pipes ran, where a few bottles lay on 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 selfconsciousness. "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 apologise: "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 unskilfully.
"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 Billy'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 alinements 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 Billy'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 awhile...
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 Spacer'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's 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.
"Oh, 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 onto 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 cheekbone to cheekbone 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."