"If anything's happened... you can tell me...
I'm not scared. There must be some way, Pinkie, not to..." She implored him: "Let's talk about it first,"
He said: "You're fussed about nothing. I want you to go all right, you can go," he went savagely on, "to ..." But he stopped in time, raked up a smile, "... go and enjoy yourself."
"I won't be gone long, Pinkie." He heard the door close, but he knew she was lingering in the passage the whole house was hers now. He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out the paper "I don't care what you do.... Wherever you go, I'll go too." It sounded like a letter read in court and printed in the newspapers. He heard her feet upon the stairs going down.
Dallow looked in and said: "Drewitt should be starting now. I'll feel better when he's on that boat.
You don't think, do you, she'd get the police to hunt him out?"
"She hasn't got the evidence," the Boy said. "You're safe enough when he's out of the way." He spoke dully as if he'd lost all interest in whether Drewitt went or stayed it was something which concerned other people. He'd gone beyond that.
"You too," Dallow said. "You'll be safe."
The Boy didn't answer.
"I told Johnnie to see he got on the boat safe and then phone us. He'll be ringing up now almost any time. We oughta have a party to celebrate, Pinkie. My God, how sunk she'll feel when she turns up there and finds him gone!" He went to the window and looked out. "Maybe we'll have some peace then. We'll have got out of it easy. When you come to think. Hale and poor old Spicer. I wonder where he is now." He stared sentimentally out through the thin chimney smoke and the wireless masts. "What about you and me an* the girl, of course shifting off to some new place?
It's not going to be so good here now with Colleoni butting in." He turned back into the room. "That letter" and the telephone began to ring. He said: "That'll be Johnnie," and hurried out.
It occurred to the Boy that it wasn't the sound of feet on the stairs he recognised, it was the sound of the stairs themselves he could tell those particular stairs even under a stranger's weight; there was always a creak at the third and seventh step down. This was the place he had come to after Kite had picked him up he had been coughing on the Palace Pier in the bitter cold, listening to the violin wailing behind the glass; Kite had given him a cup of hot coffee and brought him here God knows why perhaps because he was out and wasn't down, perhaps because a man like Kite needed a little sentiment, like a tart who keeps a pekinese. Bate had opened the door of No .63 and the first thing he'd seen was Dallow embracing Judy on the stairs and the first thing he had smelt was Billy's iron in the basement. Everything had been of a piece: nothing had really changed; Kite had died, but he had prolonged Kite's existence not touching liquor, biting his nails in the Kite way, until she came and altered everything.
Dallow's voice drifted up the stairs: "Oh, I dunno.
Send some pork sausages. Or a tin of beans."
He came back into the room. "It wasn't Johnnie," he said. "Just the International. We oughta be hearing from Johnnie." He sat anxiously down on the bed and said: "That letter from Colleoni, what does it say?"
The Boy tossed it across to him. "Why," Dallow said, "you haven't opened it." He began to read: "Well," he said, "it's bad, of course. It's what I thought. And yet it's not so bad either. Not when you come to look at it." He glanced cautiously up over the mauve notepaper at the Boy, sitting there by the washstand, thinking. "We're played out here, that's what it comes to. He's got most of our boys and all the bookies. But he doesn't want trouble. He's a business man he says a fight like you had the other day brings a track into disrepute. Disrepute," Dallow repeated thoughtfully.
"He means," the Boy said, "the suckers stay away."
"Well, that's sense. He says he'll pay you three hundred nicker for the goodwill. Goodwill?"
"He means not carving his geezers."
"It's a good offer," Dallow said. "It's what I was saying just now we could clear out right away from this damned town and this phony buer asking questions, start again on a good line or maybe retire altogether, buy a pub, you an' me an' the girl, of course." He said: "When the hell's Johnnie going to phone? It makes me nervous."
The Boy said nothing for a while, looking at his bitten nails. Then he said: "Of course you know the world, Dallow. You've travelled."
"There's not many places I don't know," Dallow agreed, "between here and Leicester."
"I was born here," the Boy said. "I know Goodwood and Hurst Park. I've been to Newmarket. But I'd feel a stranger away from here." He claimed with dreary pride: "I suppose I'm real Brighton" as if his single heart contained all the cheap amusements, the Pullman cars, the unloving week-ends in gaudy hotels, and the sadness after coition.
A bell rang. "Listen," Dallow said. "Is that Johnnie?"
But it was only the front door. Dallow looked at his watch. "I can't think what's keeping him," he said.
"Drewitt oughta be on board by now."
"Well," the Boy said with gloom, "we change, don't we? It's as you say. We got to see the world....
After all I took to drink, didn't I? I can take to other things."
"An' you got a girl," Dallow said with hollow cheeriness. "You're growing up, Pinkie like your father."
Like my father... The Boy was shaken again with his nocturnal Saturday disgust. He couldn't blame his father now... it was what you came to... you got mixed up, and then, he supposed, the habit grew... you gave yourself away weekly. You couldn't even blame the girl. It was life getting at you... there even were the blind seconds when you thought it fine.
"We'd be safer," he said, "without her," touching the loving message in the trouser pocket.
"She's safe enough now. She's crazy about you."
"The trouble with you is," the Boy said, "you don't look ahead. There's years... And any day she might fall for a new face or get vexed or something... if I don't keep her smooth... there's no security," he said. The door opened and there she was back again; he bit his words short and smirked a welcome. But it wasn't hard she took deception with such hopeless ease that he could feel a sort of tenderness for her stupidity and a companionship in her goodness they were both doomed in their own way. Again he got the sense that she completed him.
She said: "I hadn't got a key. I had to ring. I felt afraid soon as I'd gone out that something might be wrong. I wanted to be here, Pinkie."
"There's nothing wrong," he said. The telephone began to ring. "There, you see, there's Johnnie now," he said to Dallow joylessly. "You got your wish."
They heard his voice at the phone shrill with suspense: "That you, Johnnie? Yes? What was that? You don't mean...? Oh, yes, we'll see you later. Of course you'll get your money." He came back up and at the right place the stairs creaked his broad brutal and innocent face bore good news like a boar's head at a feast. "That's fine," he said, "fine. I was getting anxious, I don't mind telling you. But he's on the boat now an' she left the pier ten minutes ago. We got to celebrate this. By God, you're clever, Pinkie.
You think of everything."
Ida Arnold had had more than a couple. She sang softly to herself over the stout "One night in an alley Lord Rothschild said to me..." The heavy motion of the waves under the pier was like the sound of bath water; it set her going. She sat there massively alone no harm in her for anybody in the world minus one--the world was a good place if you didn't weaken} she was like the chariot in a triumph behind her were all the big battalions right's right, an eye for an eye, when you want to do a thing well, do it yourself. Phil Corkery made his way to weirds he*. behind him through the long glass windows of the tea room you could see the lights of Hove; green copper Metropole domes lay in the layer of last light under the heavy nocturnal clouds slumping down. The spray tossed up like fine rain against the windows. Ida Arnold stopped singing and said: "Do you see what I see?"