"Not yet. We got to be prepared, of course. I am prepared," He went to the window and stared out through a forest of wireless masts towards a cloudy peaceful Sunday sky, then back at the changed room.
This was how it might look if he had gone away and other tenants... He watched her closely while he did his sleight of hand passing off his idea as hers. "I got the car all ready. We could go out into the country where no one would hear..." He measured her terror carefully and before she could pass the card back to him, he changed his tone. "That's only if the worst comes to the worst." The phrase intrigued him, he repeated it: the worst that was the stout woman with her glassy righteous eye coming up the smoky road to the worst and that was drunken ruined Mr. Drewitt watching from behind the curtains for just one typist.
"It won't happen," he encouraged her.
"No," she passionately agreed. "It won't, it can't."
Her enormous certainty had a curious effect on him it was as if that plan of his too were being tidied, shifted, swept until he couldn't recognise his own. He wanted to argue that it might happen 7 he discovered in himself an odd nostalgia for the darkest act of all.
She said: "I'm so happy. It can't be so bad after all."
"What do you mean?" he said. "Not bad? It's mortal sin." He glanced with furious disgust at the made bed as if he contemplated a repetition of the act there and then to thrust the lesson home.
"I know," she said. "I know, but still "
"There's only one thing worse," he said. It was as if she were escaping him; already she was domesticating their black alliance.
"I'm happy," she argued bewilderedly. "You're good to me."
"That doesn't mean a thing."
"Listen," she said, "what's that?" A thin wailing came through the window.
"The kid next door."
"Why doesn't somebody quiet it?"
"It's a Sunday. Maybe they're out." He said. "You want to do anything? The flickers?"
She wasn't listening to him--the unhappy continuous cry absorbed her; she wore a look of responsibility and maturity. "Somebody ought to see what it wants," she said.
"It's just hungryor something."
"Maybe it's ill." She listened with a kind of vicarious agony. "Things happen to babies suddenly. You don't know what it mightn't be."
"It isn't yours."
She turned bemused eyes towards him. "No," she said, "but I was thinking it might be." She said with passion: "I wouldn't leave it all an afternoon."
He said uneasily: "They haven't either. It's stopped.
What did I tell you?" But her words lodged in his brain "It might be." He had never thought of that; he watched her with terror and disgust as if he were watching the ugly birth itself, the rivet of another life already pinning him down, and she stood there listening with relief and patience, as if already she had passed through years of this anxiety and knew that the relief never lasted long and that the anxiety always began again.
Nine o'clock in the morning; he came furiously out into the passage; the morning sun trickled in over the top of the door below, staining the telephone. He called: "Dallow, Dallow!"
Dallow came slowly up from the basement in his shirt sleeves. He said: * 'Hallo, Pinkie. You look as if you hadn't slept,"
The Boy said: "You keeping away from me?"
"Of course I'm not, Pinkie. Only you being married I thought you'd want to be alone."
"You caU it," the Boy said, "being alone?" He came down the stairs; he carried in his hand the mauve scented envelope Judy had thrust under the door. He hadn't opened it. His eyes were bloodshot. He carried down with him the marks of a fever the beating pulse and the hot forehead and the restless brain.
"Johnnie phoned me early," Dallow said. "He's been watching since yesterday. No one's been to see Drewitt. We got scared for nothing."
The Boy paid him no attention. He said: "I want to be alone, Dallow. Really alone."
"You been taking on too much at your age," Dallow said and began to laugh. "Two nights..."
The Boy said: "She's got to go before she " he couldn't express the magnitude of his fear or its nature to anyone: it was like an ugly secret.
"It's not safe to quarrel," Dallow said quickly and cautiously.
"No," the Boy said, "it won't ever be safe again. I know that. No divorce. Nothing at all except dying.
All the same," he put his hand on the vulcanite for coolness. "I told you I had a plan."
"It was crazy. Why should that poor kid want to die?"
He said with bitterness: "She loves me. She says she wants to be with me always. And if I don't want to live..."
"Dally," a voice called, "Dally." The Boy looked sharply and guiltily round; he hadn't heard Judy moving silently above in her naked feet and her corsets.
He was absorbed, trying to get the plan straight in the confused hot brain, tied up in its complexity, uncertain who it was who had to die... himself or her or both....
"What you want, Judy?" Dallow said.
"Billy's finished your coat."
"Let it be," Dallow said. "I'll fetch it in a shake."
She blew him an avaricious, unsatisfied kiss and padded back to her room.
"I started something there all right," Dallow said.
"Sometimes I wish I hadn't. I don't want trouble with poor old Billy, an' she's so careless."
The Boy looked at Dallow broodingly, as if perhaps he knew from his long service what one did.
"Suppose," he said, "you had a child?"
"Oh," Dallow said, "I leave that to her. It's her funeral." He said: "You got a letter there from Colleoni?"
"But what does she do?"
"The usual, I suppose."
"And if she doesn't," the Boy persisted, "an' she began a child?"
"There's pills."
"They don't always work, do they?" the Boy said.
He had thought he'd learned everything now, but he was back in his state of appalled ignorance.
"They never work, if you ask me," Dallow said.
"Colleoni written?"
"If Drewitt grassed, there wouldn't be a hope, would there?" the Boy brooded.
"He won't grass. And anyway he'll be in Boulogne tonight."
"But if he did... or say I thought he had... there'd be nothing to do then, would there, but kill myself? And she she wouldn't want to live without me. If she thought... And all the time perhaps it wouldn't be true. They call it don't they? a suicide pact."
"What's got you, Pinkie? You're not giving in?"
"I mightn't die."
"That's murder too."
"They don't hang you for it."
"You're crazy, Pinkie. Why, I wouldn't stand for a thing like that." He gave the Boy a shocked and friendly blow. "You're joking, Pinkie there's nothing wrong with the poor kid except for liking you."
The Boy said not a thing--he had an air of removing his thoughts, like heavy bales, and stacking them inside, turning the key on all the world. "You want to lie down a bit and rest," Dallow said uneasily.
"I want to lie down alone," the Boy said. He went slowly upstairs--when he opened the door he knew what he would see; he looked away as if to shut out temptation from the ascetic and the poisoned brain.
He heard her say: "I was just going out for a while, Pinkie. Is there anything I can do for you?"
Anything... His brain staggered with the immensity of its demands. He said gently: "Nothing," and schooled his voice to softness. "Come back soon. We got things to talk about."
"Worried?"
"Not worried. I got things straight," he gestured with deadly humour at his head, "in the box here."
He was aware of her fear and tension the sharp breath and the silence and then the voice steeled for despair. "Not bad news, Pinkie?"
He flew out at her: "For Christ's sake, go!"
He heard her coming back across the room to him, but he wouldn't look up--this was his room, his life; he felt that if he could concentrate enough, it would be possible to eliminate every sign of her... everything would be just the same as before... before he entered Snow's and felt under that cloth for a ticket which wasn't there and began the deception and shame. The whole origin of the thing was lost: he could hardly remember Hale as a person or his murder as a crime it was all now him and her.