"Oh, well, dear, in that case" she bent and whispered confidentially "make your hubby buy you one"--then gathered the faded dressing gown around her and loped up the stairs. Rose could see a dead white leg, like something which has lived underground, covered with russet hairs, a dingy slipper flapped a loose heel. It seemed to her that everyone was very kind: there seemed to be a companionship in mortal sin.
Pride swelled in her breast as she came up from the basement. She was accepted. She had experienced as much as any woman. Back in the bedroom she sat on the bed and waited and heard the clock strike eight; she wasn't hungry; she was sensible of an immense freedom no time table to keep, no work which had to be done. You suffered a little pain and then came out on the other side to this amazing liberty. There was only one thing she wanted now to let others see her happiness. She could walk into Snow's now like any other customer, rap the table with a spoon, and demand service. She could boast... it was a fantasy, but sitting on the bed while time drifted by it became an idea, something she was really able to do. In less than half an hour they would be opening for breakfast. If she had the money... she brooded with her eyes on the soap dish. She thought: after all we are married in a way; he's given me nothing but that record; he wouldn't grudge me half a crown. She stood up and listened, then walked softly over to the washstand.
With her fingers on the lid of the soap dish she waited somebody was coming down the passage: it wasn't Judy and it wasn't Dallow perhaps it was the man they called Billy. The footsteps passed; she lifted the lid and unwrapped half a crown. She had stolen biscuits, she had never stolen money before. She expected to feel shame, but it didn't come only again the odd swell of pride. She was like a child in a new school who finds she can pick up the esoteric games and passwords in the cement playground, at once, by instinct.
In the world outside it was Sunday she'd forgotten that: the church bells reminded her, shaking over Brighton. Freedom again in the early sun, freedom from the silent prayers at the altar, from the awful demands made on you at the sanctuary rail. She had joined the other side now for ever. The half-crown was like a medal for services rendered. People coming back from seven-thirty Mass, people on the way to eightthirty Matins she watched them in their dark clothes like a spy. She didn't envy them and she didn't despise them; they had their salvation and she had Pinkie and damnation.
At Snow's the blinds had just gone up: a girl she knew, called Maisie, was laying a few tables the only girl she cared about, a new girl like herself and not much older. She watched her from the pavement and Doris, the senior waitress with her habitual sneer, doing nothing at all except flick a duster where Maisie had already been. Rose clutched the half-crown closer--well, she had only got to go in, sit down, tell Doris to fetch her a cup of coffee and a roll, tip her a couple of coppers she could patronise the whole lot of them.
She was married. She was a woman. She was happy.
What would they feel like when they saw her coming through the door?
And she didn't go in. That was the trouble. Suppose Doris should weep? How would she feel then, flaunting her freedom? Then through the pane she caught Maisie's eye; she stood there with a duster staring back, bony, immature, like her own image in a mirror. And she stood now where Pinkie had stood outside, looking in. This was what the priests meant by one flesh.
And just as she, days ago, had motioned, Maisie motioned a slant of the eyes, an imperceptible nod towards the side door. There was no reason at all why she shouldn't go in at the front, but she obeyed Maisie.
It was like doing something you'd done before.
The door opened and Maisie was there. "Rose, what's wrong?" She ought to have had wounds to show--she felt guilty at having only happiness. "I thought I'd come," she said, "and see you. I'm married."
"Married?"
"Kind of."
"Oh, Rose, what's it like?"
"Lovely."
"You got rooms?"
"Yes."
"What do you do all day?"
"Nothing at all. Just lie about."
The childish face in front of her took on the wrinkled expression of grief. "God, Rosie, you're lucky.
Where did you meet him?"
"Here."
A hand bonier than her own seized her by the wrist.
"Oh, Rosie, ain't he got a friend?"
She said lightly: "He's not got friends."
"Maisie," a voice called shrilly from the caf.
"Maisie." Tears lay ready in the eyes in Maisie's eyes, not Doris's she hadn't meant to hurt her friend.
An impulse of pity made her say: "It's not all that good, Maisie." She tried to destroy the appearance of her own happiness. "Sometimes he's bad to me. Oh, I can tell you," she urged, "it's not all roses."
But "not roses," she thought as she turned back to the parade, "if it's not all roses, what is it?" And mechanically, walking back towards Billy's without her breakfast, she began to think: What have I done to deserve to be so happy? She'd committed a sin; that was the answer--she was having her cake in this world, not in the next, and she didn't care. She was stamped with him, as his voice was stamped on the vulcanite.
A few doors from Billy's, from a shop where they sold the Sunday papers, Dallow called to her: "Hi, kid." She stopped. "You got a visitor."
"Who?"
"Your mother."
She was stirred by a feeling of gratitude and pity--her mother hadn't been happy like this. She said: "Give me a News of the World. Mum likes a Sunday paper." In the back room somebody was playing a gramophone. She said to the man who kept the shop: "Sometime would you let me come here and play a record I got?"
"O' course he will," Dallow said.
She crossed the road and rang at Billy's door. Judy opened it--she was still in her dressing gown, but underneath she now had on her corsets. "You got a visitor," she said.
"I know." Rose ran upstairs; it was the biggest triumph you could ever expect: to greet your mother for the first time in your own house, ask her to sit down on your own chair, to look at each other with an equal experience. There was nothing now, Rose felt, her mother knew about men she didn't know: that was the reward for the painful ritual upon the bed. She flung the door gladly open and there was the woman.
"What are you?" she began, then said: "They told me it was my mother."
"I had to tell them something," the woman gently explained. She said: "Come in, dear, and shut the door behind you," as if it were her room.
"I'll call Pinkie."
"I'd like a word with your Pinkie." You couldn't get round her: she stood there like the wall at the end of an alley scrawled with the obscene chalk messages of an enemy. She was the explanation it seemed to Rose of sudden harshnesses, of the nails pressing her wrist. She said: "You'll not see Pinkie. I won't have anyone worry Pinkie."
"He's going to have plenty to worry him soon."
"Who are you?" Rose implored her. "Why do you interfere with us? You're not the police."
"I'm like everyone else. I want Justice," the woman cheerfully remarked, as if she were ordering a pound of tea. Her big prosperous carnal face hung itself with smiles. She said: "I want to see you're safe."
"I don't want any help," Rose said.
"You ought to go home."
Rose clenched her hands in defence of the brass bed, the ewer of dusty water. "This is home."
"It's no good your getting angry, dear," the woman continued. "I'm not going to lose my temper with you again. It's not your fault. You don't understand how things are. Why, you poor little thing, I pity you," and she advanced across the linoleum as if she intended to take Rose in her arms.
Rose backed against the bed. "You keep your distance."
"Now don't get agitated, dear. It won't help. You see I'm determined."
"I don't know what you mean. Why can't you talk straight?"