"It can't be done after all. I've seen my lawyer.
We're too young."
"I don't mind about that. It's not a real marriage anyway. A register's doesn't make any difference."
"You go back where you came from," he said harshly, "you little buer."
"I can't," she said. "I'm sacked."
"What for?" It was as if the handcuffs were meeting. He suspected her.
"I was rude to a customer."
"Why? What customer?"
"Can't you guess?" she said, and went passionately on: "Who is she anyway? Interfering... pestering .., you must know."
"I don't know her from Adam," the boy said.
She put all her full experience drawn from the twopenny library into the question: "Is she jealous?
Is she someone... you know what I mean?" and ready then, masked behind the ingenuous question like the guns in a Q ship, was possessiveness: she was his like a table or a chair, but a table owned you too by your finger prints.
He laughed uneasily. "What, she? She's old enough to be my mother."
"Then what does she want?"
"I wish I knew."
"Do you think," she said, "I ought to take this" she held out the paper to him "to the police?"
The ingenuousness or the shrewdness of the question shocked him. Could one ever be safe with someone who realised so little how she had got mixed up in things? He said: "You got to mind your step," and thought with dull and tired distaste (it had been the hell of a day): I shall have to marry her after all. He managed a smile those muscles were beginning to work and said: "Listen. You don't need to think about those things. I'm going to marry you.
There are ways of getting round the law."
"Why bother about the law?"
"I don't want any loose talk. Only marriage," he said with feigned anger, "will do for me. We got to be married properly."
"We won't be that, whatever we do. The father up at St. John's he says "
"You don't want to listen too much to priests," he said. "They don't know the world like I do. Ideas change, the world moves on...." His words stumbled before her carved devotion. That face said as clearly as words that ideas never changed, the world never moved: it lay there always the ravaged and disputed territory between the two eternities. They faced each other as it were from opposing territories, but like troops at Christmas time they fraternised. He said: 4 'It's the same to you anyway and I want to be married legally."
"If you want to..." she said and made a small gesture of complete assent.
"Maybe," he said, "we could work it this way. If your father wrote a letter..."
"He can't write."
"Well, he could make his mark, couldn't he, if I got a letter written?. *. I don't know how these things work. Maybe he could come to the magistrate's. Mr.
Drewitt could see about that."
"Mr. Drewitt?" she asked quickly. "Wasn't he the one the one at the inquest who was here?..."
"What of it?"
"Nothing," she said. "I just thought..." but he could see the thoughts going on and on, out of the room to the bannisters and the drop, out of that day altogether.... Somebody turned on the radio down below: some jest of Cubitt's perhaps to represent the right romantic atmosphere. It wailed up the stairs past the telephone and into the room, somebody's band from somebody's hotel, the end of a day's programme.
It switched her thoughts away and he wondered for how long it would be necessary for him to sidetrack her mind with the romantic gesture or the loving act, how many weeks and months his mind wouldn't admit the possibility of years. Some day he would be free again; he put out his hands towards hers as if she were the detective with the cuffs and said: "Tomorrow we'll see about things, see your father. Why" the muscles of his mouth faltered at the thought "it only takes a couple of days to get married in."
He was scared, walking alone back towards the territory he had left oh, years ago. The pale green sea curdled on the shingle and the green tower of the Metropole looked like a dug-up coin verdigrised with age-old mould. The gulls swooped up to the top promenade, screaming and twisting in the sunlight, and a well-known popular author displayed his plump, toofamous face in the window of the Royal Albion, staring out to sea. It was so clear a day you looked for France.
The Boy crossed over towards Old Steyne walking slowly. The streets narrowed uphill above the Steyne: the shabby secret behind the bright corsage, the deformed breast. Every step was a retreat. He thought he had escaped for ever by the whole length of the parade, and now extreme poverty took him back: Salome's shop where a shingle could be had for two shillings in the same building as a coffin-maker who worked in oak, elm, or lead; no window dressing but one child's coffin dusty with disuse and the list of Salome's prices. The Salvation Army Citadel marked with its battlements the very border of his home. He began to fear recognition and feel an obscure shame as if it were his native streets which had the right to forgive and not he to reproach them with the dreary and dingy past. Past the Albert Hostel ("Good Accommodation for Travellers") and there he was, on the top of the hill, in the thick of the bombardment. A flapping gutter, glassless windows, an iron bedstead in a front garden the size of a table top. Half Paradise Piece had been torn up as if by bomb bursts: the children played about the steep slope of rubble--a piece of fireplace showed houses had once been there, and a municipal notice announced new flats on a post stuck in the torn gravel and asphalt facing the little dingy damaged row, all that was left of Paradise Piece. His home was gone: a flat place among the rubble may have marked its hearth; the room at the bend of the stairs where the Saturday night exercise had taken place was now just air. He wondered with horror whether it all had to be built again for him--it looked better as air.
He had sent Rose back the night before and now draggingly he rejoined her. It was no good rebelling any more; he had to marry her; he had to be safe.
The children were scouting among the rubble with pistols from Woolworth's; a group of girls surlily watched. A child with its leg in an iron brace limped blindly into him; he pushed it off; someone said in a high treble: "Stick 'em up." They took his mind back and he hated them for it; it was like the dreadful appeal of innocence, but there was not innocence: you had to go back a long way further before you got innocence j innocence was a slobbering mouth, a toothless gum pulling at the teats, perhaps not even that; innocence was the ugly cry of birth.
He found the house in Nelson Place, but before he had time to knock the door opened. Rose had spied him through the broken glass. She said: "Oh, how glad I am!... I thought perhaps..." In the awful little passage which stank like a lavatory she ran quickly and passionately on. "It was awful last night ... you see, I've been sending them money... they don't understand everyone loses a job some time or another. "
"I'll settle them," the Boy said. "Where are they?"
"You got to be careful," Rose said. "They get moods."
"Where are they?"
But there wasn't really much choice of direction: there was only one door and a staircase matted with old newspapers. On the bottom steps between the mud marks stared up the tawny child face of Violet Crow violated and buried under the West Pier in 1936. He opened the door and there beside the black kitchen stove with cold dead charcoal on the floor sat the parents. They had a mood on: they watched him with silent and haughty indifference a small thin elderly man, his face marked deeply with the hieroglyphics of pain and patience and suspicion; the woman middle-aged, stupid, vindictive. The dishes hadn't been washed and the stove hadn't been lit.