Dallow turned hopelessly away... fetch Judy, go home, wait... and there was the woman standing a few feet away. She'd followed him and listened. He said: "God's sakes, this is your doing. You made him marry her, you made him..."
"Get a car," she said, "quick."
"I've not got the money for a car."
"I have. You better hurry."
"There's no cause to hurry/* he said weakly.
"They've just gone for a drink."
"You know what they've gone for," she said. "I don't. But if you want to keep out of this, you'd better get that car."
The first rain began to blow up the parade as he weakly argued. "I don't know a thing."
"That's right," she said. "You're just taking me for a drive, that's all." She burst suddenly out at him: "Don't be a fool. You better have me for a friend...."
She said: "You see what's come to Pinkie."
All the same he didn't hurry. What was the good?
Pinkie had laid this trail. Pinkie thought of everything, they were meant to follow in due course, and find... he hadn't got the imagination to see what they'd find.
The Boy stopped at the head of the stairs and looked down. Two men had come into the lounge; hearty and damp in camel hair coats they shook out their moisture like dogs and were noisy over their drinks. "Two pints," they ordered, "in tankards," and fell suddenly silent scenting a girl in the lounge. They were upperclass, they'd learned that tankard trick in class hotels; he watched their gambits with hatred from the stairs.
Anything female was better than nothing, even Rose; but he could sense their half-heartedness. She wasn't worth more than a little sidelong swagger, "I think we touched eighty."
"I made it eighty-two,"
"She's a good bus."
"How much did they sting you?"
"A couple of hundred. She's cheap at the price."
Then they both stopped and took an arrogant look at the girl by the statuette. She wasn't worth bothering about, but if she absolutely fell, without trouble ... one of them said something in a low voice and the other laughed. They took long swills of bitter from the tankards.
Tenderness came up to the very window and looked in. What the hell right had they got to swagger and laugh... if she was good enough for him? He came down the stairs into the hall; they looked up and moued to each other, as much as to say: "Oh, well, she wasn't really worth the trouble."
One of them said: "Drink up. We better get on with the good work. You don't think Zoe'll be out?"
"Oh, no. I said I might drop in."
"Her friend all right?"
"She's hot."
"Let's get on then."
They drained their beer and moved arrogantly to the door, taking a passing look at Rose as they went.
He could hear them laugh outside the door. They were laughing at him. He came a few steps into the lounge--again they were bound in an icy constraint. He had a sudden inclination to throw up the whole thing, to get into the car and drive home, and let her live. It was less a motion of pity than of weariness there was such a hell of a lot to do and think of: there were going to be so many questions to be answered. He could hardly believe in the freedom at the end of it, and even that freedom was to be in a strange place. He said: "The rain's worse." She stood there waiting; she couldn't answer; she was breathing hard as if she'd run a long way and she looked old. She was sixteen but this was how she might have looked after years of marriage, of the childbirth and the daily quarrel--they had reached death and it affected them like age.
She said: "I wrote what you wanted." She waited for him to take the scrap of paper and write his own message to the coroner, to Daily Express readers, to what one called the world. The other boy came cautiously into the lounge and said: "You haven't paid."
While Pinkie found the money, she was visited by an almost overwhelming rebellion she had only to go out, leave him, refuse to play. He couldn't make her kill herself--life wasn't as bad as that. It came like a revelation, as if someone had whispered to her that she was someone, a separate creature not just one flesh with him. She could always escape if he didn't change his mind. Nothing was decided. They could go in the car wherever he wanted them to go; she could take the gun from his hand, and even then at the last moment of all she needn't shoot. Nothing was decided there was always hope.
"That's your tip," the Boy said. "I always tip a waiter." Hate came back. He said: "You a good Catholic, Piker? Do you go to Mass on Sundays like they tell you?"
Piker said with weak defiance: "Why not, Pinkie?"
"You're afraid," the Boy said. "You're afraid of burning."
"Who wouldn't be?"
"I'm not." He looked with loathing into the past a cracked bell ringing, a child weeping under the cane and repeated: "I'm not afraid." He said to Rose: "We'll be going." He came tentatively across and put a nail against her cheek half caress, half threat and said: "You'd love me always, wouldn't you?"
"Yes."
He gave her one more chance: "You'd always have stuck to me," and when she nodded her agreement, he began wearily the long course of action which one day would let him be free again.
Outside in the rain the self-starter wouldn't work; he stood with his coat collar turned up and pulled the handle. She wanted to tell him that he mustn't stand there, getting wet, because she'd changed her mind they were going to live, by hook or by crook but she daren't. She pushed hope back to the last possible moment. When they drove off she said: "Last night ... the night before... you didn't hate me, did you, for what we did?"
He said: u No, I didn't hate you."
"Even though it was a mortal sin?"
It was quite true he hadn't hated her; he hadn't even hated the act. There had been a kind of pleasure, a kind of pride, a kind of something else. The car lurched back onto the main road; he turned the nose to Brighton. An enormous emotion beat on him; it was like something trying to get in, the pressure of gigantic wings against the glass. Dona nobis pacem. He withstood it, with all the bitter force of the school bench, the cement playground, the St. Pancras waiting room, Dallow's and Judy's secret lust, and the cold unhappy moment on the pier. If the glass broke, if the beast whatever it was got in, God knows what it would do. He had a sense of huge havoc the confession, the penance, and the sacrament an awful distraction, and he drove blind into the rain. He could see nothing through the cracked stained windscreen.
A bus came up on them and pulled out just in time he was on the wrong side. He said, suddenly, at random: "We pull in here,"
An ill-made street petered out towards the cliff bungalows of every shape and kind, a vacant plot full of salt grass and wet thorn bushes like bedraggled fowls, no lights except in three windows. A radio played, and in a garage a man was doing something to his motor-bike, which roared and spluttered in the darkness. He drove a few yards in, turned out his headlights, switched off his engine. The rain came noisily in through the rent in the top and they could hear the sea battering the cliff. He said: "Well, take a look. It's the world." Another light went on behind a stained glass door, the Laughing Cavalier between Tudor roses--and looking out as if it was he who'd got to take some sort of farewell of the bike and the bungalows and the rainy street, he thought of the words in the Mass: "He was in the world and the world was made by Him and the world knew Him not."
It was about as far as hope could be stretched; she had to say now or never "I won't do it. I never meant to do it." It was like some romantic adventure you plan to fight in Spain, and then before you know it the tickets are taken for you, the introductions are pressed into your hand, somebody has come to see you off, everything is real. He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out the gun. He said: "I got it out of Dallow's room." She wanted to say she didn't know how to use it, to make any excuse, but he seemed to have thought of everything. He explained: "I've put up the safety catch. All you need do is pull on this. It isn't hard. Put it in your ear that'll hold it steady."