Phil Corkery sat down; it wasn't like summer at all in this glass breakwater; he looked cold in his grey flannel trousers and his blazer with the old somethingor-other arms on the pocket; a little pinched, all passion spent. "It's them," he said wearily. "How did you know they'd be here?"
"I didn't," Ida said. "It's fate."
"I'm tired of the sight of them."
"But think how tired," she said with cheery relish, "they are." They looked across a waste of empty tables towards France, towards the Boy and Rose and a man and woman they didn't recognise. If the party had come there to celebrate or something, she had spoiled their fun. The Guinness welled warmly up into her throat; she had an enormous sense of wellbeing; she belched and said: "Pardon me," lifting a black gloved hand. She said: "I suppose he's gone too?"
"He's gone."
"We aren't lucky with our witnesses," she said.
"First Spicer, then the girl, then Drewitt, and now Cubitt."
"He took the first morning train with your money."
"Never mind," she said. "They're alive. They'll come back. An' I can wait thanks to Black Boy."
Phil Corkery looked at her askance: it was astonishing that he had ever had the nerve to send her to send that power and purpose postcards from seaside resorts--from Hastings a crab from whose stomach you could wind out a series of views--from Eastbourne a baby sitting upon a rock which lifted to disclose the High Street and Boots Library and a fernery; from Bournemouth (was it?) a bottle containing photographs of the promenade, the rock garden, the new swimming pool.... It was like offering a bun to an elephant in Africa. He was shaken by a sense of terrific force... when she wanted a good time nothing would stop her, and when she wanted justice... He said nervously: "Don't you think, Ida, we've done enough?..."
She said: "I haven't finished yet," with her eyes on the little doomed party. "You never know. They think they're safe; they'll do something crazy now." The Boy sat there silent beside Rose; he had a glass of drink but he hadn't tasted it; only the man and the woman chattered about this and that.
"We've done our best. It's a matter for the police or no one," Phil said.
"You heard them that first time." She began to sing again: "One night in an alley..."
"It's not our business now."
"Lord Rothschild said to me..." She broke off to set him gently right. You couldn't let a friend have wrong ideas. "It's the business of anyone who knows the difference between Right and Wrong."
"But you're so terribly certain about things, Ida.
You go busting in... Oh, you mean well, but how do we know the reasons he may have had?... And besides," he accused her, "you're only doing it because it's fun. Fred wasn't anyone you cared about."
She switched towards him her large and lit-up eyes.
"Why," she said, "I don't say it hasn't been exciting." She felt quite sorry it was all over now.
"What's the harm in that? I like doing what's right, that's all."
Rebellion bobbed weakly up "And what's wrong too."
She smiled at him with enormous and remote tenderness. "Oh, that. That's not wrong. That does no one any harm. That's not like murder."
"Priests say it is."
"Priests!" she exclaimed with scorn. "Why, even Romans don't believe in that. Or that girl wouldn't be living with him now." She said: "You can trust me.
I've seen the world. I know people," and she turned her attention heavily back on Rose. "You wouldn't let me leave a little girl like that to him? She's vexing, of course, she's stupid, but she don't deserve that."
"How do you know she doesn't want to be left?"
"You aren't telling me, are you, that she wants to die? Nobody wants that. Oh, no. I don't give up until she's safe. Get me another Guinness." A long way out beyond the West Pier you could see the lights of Worthing, a sign of bad weather; and the tide rolled regularly in, a gigantic white splash in the dark against the breakwaters nearer shore. You could hear it pounding at the piles, like a boxer's fist against a punchball in training for the human jaw, and softly and just a little tipsily Ida Arnold began to recall the people she had saved: a man she had once pulled out of the sea when she was a young woman, the money to a blind beggar, and the kind word in season to the despairing schoolgirl in the Strand.
"Poor old Spicer too," Dallow said, "he got the same idea he thought he'd have a pub somewhere some day." He slapped Judy's thigh and said: "What about me an' you settling in with the young people?"
He said: "I can see it now. Right out in the country.
On one of those arterials with the charabancs stopping: the Great North Road. Pull in here. I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't more money in the long run..." He stopped and said to the Boy: "What's up?
Take a drink. There's nothing to worry about now."
The Boy looked across the tea room and the empty tables to where the woman sat. How she hung on!
Like a ferret he'd seen on the down, among the chalky holes, fastened to the hare's throat. All the same this hare escaped. He had no cause to fear her now. He said in a dull voice: "The country. I don't know much about the country."
"It's healthy," Dallow said. "Why, you'll live to eighty with your missus."
"Sixty-odd years," the Boy said, "it's a long time."
Behind the woman's head the Brighton lamps beaded out towards Worthing. The last sunset light slid lower in the sky and the heavy indigo clouds came down over the Grand, the Metropole, the Cosmopolitan, over the towers and domes. Sixty years: it was like a prophecy a certain future, a horror without end.
"You two," Dallow said, "what's got you both?"
This was the tea room to which they had all come after Fred's death Spicer and Dallow and Cubitt.
Dallow was right, of course: they were safe Spicer dead and Drewitt out of the way, and Cubitt God knows where (they'd never get him into a witness box: he knew too well he'd hang he'd played too big a part the prison record of 1 923 lay behind him).
And Rose was his wife. As safe as they could ever be. They'd won out finally. He had Dallow right again sixty years ahead. His thoughts came to pieces in his hand: Saturday nights; and then the birth, the child, habit, and hate. He looked across the tables: the woman's laughter was like defeat.
He said: "This place is stuffy. I got to have some air." He turned slowly to Rose. "Come for a stroll," he said. Between the table and the door he picked the right thought out of all the pieces, and when they came out on the windy side of the pier he shouted to her: "I got to go away from here." He put his hand on her arm and guided her with terrible tenderness into shelter. The waves came breaking up from France, pounding under their feet. A spirit of recklessness took him; it was like the moment when he had seen Spicer bending by his suitcase, Cubitt begging for money in the passage. Through the glass panes Dallow sat with Judy by the drinks; it was like the first week of the sixty years the contact and the sensual tremble and the stained sleep and waking not alone j in the wild and noisy darkness the Boy had the whole future in his brain. It was like a slot machine: you put in a penny and the light goes on, and the doors open and the figures move. He said with agile tenderness: "This was where we met that night. Remember?"
"Yes," she said and watched him with fear.
"We don't want them with us," he said. "Let's get into the car an' drive" he watched her closely "into the country."