Then she saw that it was only a trench coat that he was carrying and she began to shiver violently and twist her hands.
“Alice,” he said gently. “Alice, you’re frightened. You’re cold.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll put my coat over you, Alice.”
“Yes, I’m cold.”
He put the coat around her shoulders. It felt strange and rough against her skin, but she drew it closer.
Philip took Johnny’s car. He had no car of his own and they had never offered him one. When Isobel Heath was alive she would send him down to the Conservatory in her own car with her chauffeur at the wheel. Philip would sit in the back seat with his music across his knee, never at ease because any moment the chauffeur might glance in the mirror and catch him off guard looking awed and excited, not belonging at all to the car or the life it implied. And the chauffeur’s eyes would be mildly contemptuous, or else frankly disrespectfuclass="underline" Come up here, buddy, where you belong.
But when he could forget the chauffeur the car gave him a pleasant feeling. He could look out of the window and pretend to people that he was very bored by the whole thing. It was very hard to look bored. It almost seemed as if you had to be very rich, or very tough, you couldn’t let yourself be excited by little things, like taking Alice to the opera. She had only gone with him once because she didn’t like opera. When he was sitting in the box beside her he kept glancing at her out of the corner of his eye and thinking that she looked like a princess, and he tried to look bored and accustomed to princesses.
“You’re like a fish out of water,” Alice had said. “Can’t you sit still?”
Princess voice, soft and lazy. Oh, yes, whatever else you could say about Alice you liked being seen with her. It was funny to think that if she had run in her stocking or if her slip showed, her whole pose might disintegrate. She might blush, or look furtive or try to hurry, she might become a shopgirl quite suddenly. It showed how important it was, not just money but the air that money could give you.
He turned south on Yonge Street. At the first stoplight he looked around and saw people staring at the yellow roadster. For a second he was ashamed and sick that he didn’t look like Johnny, that he didn’t fit this car any more than he had fitted Isobel’s car. But the feeling passed. In his way he probably looked better than Johnny because he had more brains. The people who stared at the car would surely recognize this: Intelligent young fellow, not one of those idle rich.
A girl walked in front of the car. Philip watched her hips swinging under the cheap skirt. She turned her head and her glance stabbed his eyes and went right through out the back of his head as if his skull was made of paper.
He flushed and thought, slut, little slut. But when he drove on his hand on the wheel was unsteady and his eyes were hot and uneasy. He had been tried and found wanting by a girl in a cheap skirt. He wanted to turn the car around and follow the girl, to reason with her, convince her: You have no right not to see me. I am Philip James. I play the piano. I gave a concert.
He jerked at the gearshift and it made a grinding noise and people turned their heads toward him. He got away from them, he drove fast to escape their eyes, though here too he wanted to go back and explain that he was really a good driver, that he was nervous, he didn’t often grind the gears, he was nervous.
Every time he stopped the car he had new wounds to lick. A policeman shouted at him because he went through on a yellow light. A child, crossing, thumped his fist on the fender of the car and grinned. An old lady with an armful of parcels looked bitterly at him and her mouth moved over something ugly. And with every wound his eyes darted quickly, wildly, from one side to the other, seeking other wounds.
When he got to Charles Street he was scraped and lacerated, tom by his own teeth. But Charles Street soothed him. The houses were so old and shabby and the yellow car so new and he was driving the yellow car. He began to look bored again and the wounds began to close, one after another. The people who had hurt him were no longer static in his mind, they went on with their business and faded. The girl in the cheap skirt went on walking, the grinning boy crossed the street, the policeman shouted at someone else, the old woman carried her parcls home.
He stopped the car and got out and began to walk along the street, peering at the numbers of the house, saying them aloud: “Eighty-eight. Tourists. Running Water. Special Rates by Week or Month.”
His voice reassured him. He didn’t want to think about Mamie Rosen just yet, and if he could keep talking even to himself he wouldn’t have to think about her.
“Ninety-four. Board and Room.”
He pulled his hat down over his eyes. He didn’t want anyone to see him, recognize him. He even put his hands into his pockets as if to hide everything of himself that he could.
“Ninety-eight. One hundred and two. Tea Cups Read. Have your Fortune told.”
He went past that one fast, almost afraid that his fortune might come at him out of a window if he didn’t hurry, a grimy fortune floating out of a grimy window, floating faster than he could walk.
“One hundred and six.” That was better. A row of shrubs and a pram on the veranda. He didn’t want children himself but he liked to think of other people having them. It gave him a sense of security, of continuance and respectability. He called them kiddies, and if they hadn’t dirty noses he sometimes said, “Hello, there!” If they had dirty noses he hurried past, feeling surreptitiously in his pocket for his own handkerchief. A little later he would have to blow his nose, he would blow it hard and hurry on, and once he had thrown the handkerchief away into the road.
A man was standing on the curb ahead of him reading a newspaper. Philip pulled down his hat brim again and hunched inside his coat. He looked around once, then walked quickly past the man, his head bent forward like a goat about to charge.
One hundred and ten.
The man with the newspaper raised his eyes then and looked at Philip’s back.
Now that’s a hell of a funny way to walk, he thought. If it was winter now and he was cold you could figure he was trying to keep warm.
He didn’t pretend to read the paper any more. It just fell out of his hand. He thought, he’s got a gun in his pocket. Well, that’s all right, so have I.
He said, “Hey!”
Philip was nearly at the door. He made a quick half-turn.
“Hey!” the man said. “Come here!”
For a second neither of them moved. Then Philip’s hands came out of his pockets and he used them to swing his body around, to help him run, propel him along the street. His movements were mad and violent as if every muscle was straining to help him get away. His breath rasped, his arms flailed, his feet hit the sidewalk, heavy and powerful. He was running, escaping from the man with the newspaper, the girl with the skirt, the grinning boy, the policeman. He was escaping from Alice and Johnny, from Isobel in her urn and Kelsey on her table in the morgue and Geraldine and Sands and Mamie.
He began to shout, “Eeeee! Eeeee!” swept by a surge of ferocious joy in running, getting away, escaping them, never to see any of them again, never, never...
He was running bent almost in two and when the bullet pierced his back he fell on his face and his nose squashed against the sidewalk like a splash of rotten fruit.
He had a moment left, a moment to hear someone shout, “Murillo!” to move his mouth in protest, to taste his own blood, and to feel in the last part of the last moment that he was glad to die like this on a velvet rug with some warm soothing liquid pouring over his face.
“I got him. Shoot to kill, they said. Is he dead?”