"No."
"This is real country. I saw a hen just now. They use their own eggs in the gin slings."
"Come out to the cars."
"I feel that way too. Oh, gosh, wouldn't it be fine?
But I can't, not with poor Spicie..,"
"You sent flowers, didn't you, you been crying..."
"My eyes are awful."
"What more can you do?"
"It broke my heart. Poor Spicie going off like that."
"I know. I saw your wreath."
"It does seem awful, doesn't it? Dancing with you like this and him..."
"Come to the cars."
"Poor Spicie," but she led the way, and he noticed with uneasiness how she ran literally ran across the lit corner of what had once been a farmyard towards the dark car park and the game. He thought with sickness: "In three minutes I shall know."
"Which is your car?" Sylvie said.
"That Morris."
"No good to us," Sylvie said. She darted down the line of cars. "This Ford." She pulled the door open, said: "Oh, pardon me," and shut it, scrambled into the back of the next car in the line, and waited for him. "Oh," her voice softly and passionately pronounced from the dim interior, "I love a Lancia." He stood in the doorway and the darkness peeled away between him and the fair and vacuous face. Her skirt drawn up above her knees she waited for him with luxurious docility.
He was conscious for a moment of his enormous ambitions under the shadow of the hideous and commonplace act: the suite at the Cosmopolitan, the gold cigar lighter, chairs stamped with crowns for a foreigner called Eugenie. Hale dropped out of sight, like a stone thrown over a cliff; he was at the beginning of a long polished parquet walk, there were busts of great men and the sound of cheering, Mr. Colleoni bowed like a shopwalker, stepping backwards, an army of razors was at his back: a conqueror. Hoofs drummed along the straight and a loudspeaker announced the winner--music was playing. His breast ached with the effort to enclose the whole world.
"You've got the doings, haven't you?" Sylvie said.
With fear and horror he thought: next move, what is it?
"Quick," Sylvie said, "before they find us here."
The parquet floor rolled up like a carpet. The moonlight touched a Wool worth ring and a plump knee.
He said in a bitter and painful rage: "Wait there. I'll get Cubitt for you," and turned his back on the Lancia and walked back towards the bar. Laughter from the bathing pool deflected him. He stood in the doorway with the taste of the alcohol on his tongue watching a thin girl in a red rubber cap giggle under the floodlighting. His mind tracked inevitably back and forth to Sylvie like a model engine electrically driven. Fear and curiosity ate at the proud future, he was aware of nausea and retched. Marry, he thought, hell, no; I'd rather hang.
A man in a bathing slip came running down the highboard, jumped and somersaulted in the pearly brilliant light, struck the dark water--the two bathers swam together, stroke by stroke, towards the shallows, turned and came back, side by side, smooth and unhurried, playing a private game, happy and at ease.
The Boy stood and watched them, and as they came down the pool a second time he saw in the floodlit water his own image shiver at their stroke, the narrow shoulders and the hollow breast, and he felt the brown pointed shoes slip on the splashed and shining tiles.
Cubitt and Dallow chattered all the way back, a little lit; the Boy stared ahead into the bright core of the darkness. He said suddenly with fury: "You can laugh."
"Well, you didn't do so bad," Cubitt said.
"You can laugh. You think you're safe. But I'm tired of the lot of you. I've got a good mind to clear out."
"Take a long honeymoon," Cubitt said and grinned, and an owl cried with painful hunger swooping low over a filling station, into the headlights and out again, on furry and predatory wings.
"I'm not going to marry," the Boy said.
"I knew a geezer once," Cubitt said, "was so scared he killed himself. They had to send back the wedding presents."
"I'm not going to marry."
"People often feel that way."
"Nothing's going to make me marry."
"You've got to marry," Dallow said. A woman stared from a window of Charlie's Pull-in Caf waiting for someone: she didn't look at the car going by, waiting.
"Have a drink," Cubitt said: he was more drunk than Dallow. "I brought a flask away. You can't say you don't drink now: we saw you, Dallow and me."
The Boy said to Dallow: "I won't marry. Why should I marry?"
"It was your doing," Dallow said.
"What was his doing?" Cubitt said. Dallow didn't reply, laying his friendly and oppressive hand on the Boy's knee. The boy took a squint at the stupid devoted face and felt anger at the way another's loyalty could hamper and drive. Dallow was the only man he trusted, and he hated him as if he was his mentor.
He said weakly: "Nothing will make me marry," watching the long parade of posters going by in the submarine light Guinness Is Good for You, Try a Worth*ngton, , Keep that Schoolgirl Complexion a jtong series of adjurations, people telling you things: Own Your Own Home, Bennett's for Wedding Rings.
And at Billy's they told him: "Your girl's here." He went up the stairs to his room in hopeless rebellion: he would go in and say I've changed my mind, I can't marry you. Or perhaps: The lawyers say it can't be managed after all. The bannisters were still broken and he looked down the long drop to where Spicer's body had lain. Cubitt and Dallow were standing on the exact spot laughing at something; the sharp edge of a broken bannister scratched his hand. He put it to his mouth and went in. He thought: I've got to be calm, I've got to keep my wits about me, but he felt his integrity stained by the taste of the spirit at the bar.
You could lose vice as easily as you lost virtue, going out of you from a touch.
He took a look at her. She was scared when he said softly: "What are you doing here?" She had on the hat he disliked and she made a snatch at it as soon as he looked. "At this time of night," he said in a shocked way, thinking there was a quarrel to be picked there if he went about it in the right way.
"You've seen this?" Rose implored him. She had the local paper; he hadn't bothered to read it, but there on the front page was the picture of Spicer striding in terror under the iron arches. They'd been more successful at the kiosk than he'd been. Rose said: "It says here it happened "
"On the landing," the boy said. "I was always telling Billy to mend those bannisters."
"But you said they got him on the course. And he was the one who "
He faced her with spurious firmness: "Gave you the ticket? So you said. Maybe he knew Hale. He knew a lot of geezers I didn't. What of it?" With confidence he repeated his question before her dumb stare: "What of it?" His mind, he knew, could contemplate any treachery, but she was a good kid, she was boundaried by her goodness; there were things she couldn't imagine, and he thought he saw her imagination wilting now in the vast desert of dread.
"I thought," she said, "I thought..." looking beyond him to the shattered bannister on the landing.
"What did you think?"
His fingers curled with passionate hatred round the small bottle in his pocket.
"I don't know. I didn't sleep last night. I had such dreams."
"What dreams?"
She looked at him with horror. "I dreamed you were dead."
He laughed. "I'm young and spry," thinking with nausea of the car park and the invitation in the Lancia.
"You aren't going to stay here, are you?"
"Why not?"
"I'd have thought " she said, her eyes back again in their gaze at the bannisters. She said: "I'm scared."
"You've no cause to be," he said, tickling the vitriol bottle.
"I'm scared for you. Oh," she said, "I know I'm no account. I know you've got a lawyer and a car and friends, but this place " she stumbled hopelessly in an attempt to convey the sense she had of the territory in which he moved: a place of accidents and unexplained events, the stranger with a card, the fight on the course, the headlong fall. A kind of boldness and brazenness came into her face, so that he felt again the faintest stirring of sensuality. "You've got to come away from here. You've got to marry me like you said."