"Oh, yes, you'll be safe. It's me who runs all the risk. You know I killed Spicer. Drewitt knows. It only wants Cubitt and I'll need a massacre to put me right this time."
"You oughtn't to talk that way to me, Pinkie.
You've been all bottled up since Kite died. What you want's a bit of fun."
"I liked Kite," the Boy said. He stared straight out towards France, an unknown land. At his back beyond the Cosmopolitan, Old Steyne, the Lewes Road, stood the downs, villages and cattle round the dewponds, another unknown land. This was his territory: the popillous foreshore, a few thousand acres of houses, a narrow peninsula of electrified track running to London, two or three railway stations with their buffets and buns. It had been Kite's territory, it had been good enough for Kite, and when Kite had died in the waiting room at St. Pancras, it had been as if a father had died, leaving him an inheritance it was his duty never to leave for strange acres. He had inherited even the mannerisms, the bitten thumb nail, the soft drinks. The sun slid off the sea and like a cuttlefish shot into the sky the stain of agonies and endurances.
"Break out, Pinkie. Relax. Give yourself a chance.
Come out with me and Cubitt to the Queen of Hearts and celebrate."
"You know I never touch a drink."
"You'll have to on your wedding day. Whoever heard of a dry wedding?"
An old man went stooping down the shore, very slowly, turning the stones, picking among the dry seaweed for cigarette ends, scraps of food. The gulls which had stood like candles down the beach rose and cried under the promenade. The old man found a boot and stowed it in his sack, and a gull dropped from the parade and swept through the iron nave of the Palace Pier, white and purposeful in the obscurity: half vulture and half dove. In the end one always had to learn.
"All right, I'll come," the Boy said.
"It's the best roadhouse this side of London," Dailow encouraged him.
They drove out in the old Morris into the country.
"I like a blow in the country," Dallow said. It was between lighting-up time and the real dark when the lamps of cars burned in the grey visibility as faintly and unnecessarily as the night lights in nurseries. The advertisements trailed along the arterial roadj bungalows and a broken farm, short chalky grass where a hoarding had been pulled down, a windmill offering tea and lemonade, the great sails gaping.
"Poor old Spicer would have liked this ride," Cubitt said. The Boy sat beside Dallow, who drove, and Cubitt sat in the rumble. The Boy could see him in the driving mirror bouncing gently up and down on the defective springs.
The Queen of Hearts was floodlit behind the petrol pumps: a Tudor barn converted, a vestige of a farmyard left in the arrangement of the restaurant and bars, a swimming pool where the paddock had been. u We ought to 'ave brought some girls with us," Dallow said. "You can't pick 'em up in this gaff. It's real class."
"Come in the bar," Cubitt said and led the way.
He stopped on the threshold and nodded towards the girl who sat and drank alone at the long steel bar under the old rafters. "We better say something, Pinkie. You know the kind of thing he was a real good old pal, we sympathise with what you feel."
"What are you clapping about?"
"That's Spicer's girl," Cubitt said.
The Boy stood in the doorway and took her reluctantly in: hair fair as silver, wide vacuous brow, trim little buttocks shaped by the high seat, alone with her glass and her grief.
"How's things, Sylvie?" Cubitt said.
"Awful."
"Terrible, wasn't it? He was a good pal. One of the best."
"You were there, weren't you?" she said to Dallow.
"Billy ought to 'ave mended that stair," Dallow said. "Meet Pinkie, Sylvie, the best one in our mob."
"Were you there too?"
"He wasn't there," Dallow said.
"Have another drink?" the Boy said.
Sylvie drained her glass. "I don't mind if I do. A sidecar."
"Two Scotch, a sidecar, a grapefruit squash."
"Why," Sylvie said, "don't you drink?"
"No."
"I bet you don't go with girls either."
"You got him, Sylvie," Cubitt said, "first shot."
"I admire a man like that," Sylvie said. "I think it's wonderful to be fit. Spicie always said you'd break out one day and then oh, gosh, how wonderful!"
She put down her glass, miscalculated, upset the cocktail. She said: "I'm not drunk. I'm upset about poor Spicie."
"Go on, Pinkie," Dallow said, "have a drink. It'll jerk you up." He explained to Sylvie: "He's upset too." In the dance hall the band was playing: "Love me tonight, And forget in daylight, All our delight..."
"Have a drink," Sylvie said. "I've been awful upset. You can see I've been crying. Aren't my eyes awful?... Why, I hardly dared show myself. I can see why people go into monasteries." The music beat on the boy's resistance; he watched with a kind of horror and curiosity Spicer's girl friend: she knew the game.
He shook his head, speechless in his scared pride. He knew what he was good at: he was the top: there was no limit to his ambition: nothing must lay him open to the mockery of people more experienced than he.
To be compared with Spicer and found wanting... his eyes shifted miserably and the music wailed its tidings "forget in daylight" about the game of which they all knew so much more than he did.
"Spicie said he didn't think you'd ever had a girl,"
Sylvie said.
"There was plenty Spicer didn't know."
"You're awful young to be so famous."
"You and n*e had better go away," Cubitt said to Dallow. "Seems we're not wanted. Come an' lamp the bathing belles." They moved heavily out of sight.
"Dallie just knows when I like a boy," Sylvie said.
"Who's Dallie?"
"Your friend, Mr. Dallow, silly. Do you dance why, I don't even know your proper name?" He watched her with scared lust: she had belonged to Spicer; her voice had wailed up the telephone wires making assignations; he had had signed letters in mauve envelopes, addressed to him; even Spicer had had something to be proud of, to show to friends "my girl." He remembered some flowers which had come to Billy's labelled "Brokenhearted." He was fascinated by her infidelity. She belonged to nobody unlike a table or a chair. He said slowly, putting his arm round her to take her glass and pressing her breast clumsily: "I'm going to be married in a day or two."
It was as if he were staking a claim to his share of infidelity: he wasn't to be beaten by experience. He lifted her glass and drank it; the sweetness dripped down his throat, his first alcohol touched the palate like a bad smelclass="underline" this was what people called pleasure this and the game. He put his hand on her thigh with a kind of horror; Rose and he; forty-eight hours after Drewitt had arranged things; alone in God knows what apartment what then, what then? He knew the traditional actions as a man may know the principles of gunnery in chalk on a blackboard, but to translate the knowledge to action, to the smashed village and the ravaged woman, one needed help from the nerves. His own were frozen with repulsion: to be touched, to give oneself away, to lay oneself open he had held intimacy back as long as he could at the end of a razor blade.
He said: "Come on. Let's dance."
They circulated slowly in the dance hall. To be beaten by experience was bad enough, but to be beaten by greenness and innocence, by a girl who carried plates at Snow's, by a little bitch of sixteen years...
"Spicie thought a lot of you," Sylvie said.
"Come out to the cars," the boy said.
"I couldn't, not with Spicie dead only yesterday."
They stood and clapped and then the dance began again. The shaker clacked in the bar, and the leaves of one small tree were pressed against the window beyond the big drum and the saxophone.
"I like the country. It makes me feel romantic. Do you like the country?"