"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, 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 onto 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 of him as she switched her large thoughtful eyes towards him, 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."
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. Drewitt: "God damn her. She's late."
Mr. Drewitt said: "It's the privilege of a bride."
Bride and groom: the mare and the stallion which served her j 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. Drewitt 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 Marie Stopes: Married Love. 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, shifted his foot uneasily, so that it trod in a dog's ordure.
"What's wrong with being a priest?" the Boy said.
"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, twovalve, Married Love, 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 Love reflected his young and hopeless face. "She put her head on the line," he said, "up towards 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. "Billy's wife read them. You know the sort. Lady Angeline turned her starry eyes towards Sir Mark. They make me sick. Sicker than the other kind" D allow 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 love," he said, grinning mirthlessly up at Dallow. "It's fun. It's the game."
"The world's got to go on," Dallow said uneasily.
"Why?" the Boy said.
"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 Drewitt 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 on a year or two.