"It's cold."
"It won't be in the car." He dropped her arm and said: "Of course if you don't want to come I'll go alone."
"But where?"
He said with studied lightness: "I told you. In the country." He took a penny out of his pocket and slammed it home in the nearest slot machine. He pulled a handle, didn't look at what he did, and with a rattle the packets of fruit gums came dropping out a bonus lemon and grapefruit and liquorice all-sorts.
He said: "I've got a lucky hand."
"Is something wrong?" Rose said.
He said: "You saw her, didn't you? Believe me she's never going to leave go. I saw a ferret once out by the track." As he turned one of the pier lights caught his eyes: a gleam, an exhilaration. He said: "I'm going for a ride. You stay here if you want to."
"I'll come," she said.
"You needn't."
"I'll come."
At the shooting range he paused. He was taken with a kind of wild humour. "Got the time?" he asked the man.
"You know what the time is. I've told you before how I won't stand..."
"You needn't get your rag out," the Boy said.
"Give me a gun." He lifted it, got the sight firmly on the bull, then deliberately shifted it and fired he thought: "Something had agitated him, the witness said."
"What's up with you today?" the man exclaimed.
"You only got an outer."
He laid the rifle down. "We need a freshener.
We're going for a ride in the country. Good night."
He planted his information pedantically, as carefully as he had had them lay Fred's cards along the route for later use. He even turned back and said: "We're going Hastings way."
"I don't want to know," the man said, "where you're going."
The old Morris was parked near the pier. The selfstarter wouldn't work; he had to turn the handle. He stood a moment looking at the old car with an expression of disgust; as if this was all you got out of a racket... He said: "We'll go the way we went that day. Remember? In the bus." Again he planted his information for the attendant to hear. "Peacehaven.
We'll get a drink."
They swung out round by the Aquarium and ground uphill in second gear. He had one hand in his pocket feeling for the scrap of paper on which she had written her message. The hood flapped and the split discoloured glass of the windscreen confined his view.
He said: "It's going to rain like hell soon."
"Will this hood keep it out?"
"It doesn't matter," he said, staring ahead. "We won't get wet."
She didn't dare ask him what he meant she wasn't sure, and as long as she wasn't sure she could believe that they were happy, that they were lovers taking a drive in the dark with all the trouble over. She put a hand on him and felt his instinctive withdrawal; for a moment she was shaken by an awful doubt if this was the darkest nightmare of all, if he didn't love her, as the woman said... the wet windy air flapped her face through the rent. It didn't matter; she loved him; she had her responsibility. The buses passed them going downhill to the town: little bright domestic cages in which people sat with baskets and books; a child pressed her face to the glass and for a moment at a traffic light they were so close the face might have been held against her breast. "A penny for your thoughts," he said and caught her unawares "Life's not so bad."
"Don't you believe it," he said. "I'll tell you what it is. It's jail, it's not knowing where to get some money. Worms and cataract, cancer. You hear 'em shrieking from the upper windows children being born. It's dying slowly."
It was coming now she knew it; the dashboard light lit the bony mind-made-up fingers; the face was in darkness, but she could imagine the exhilaration, the bitter excitement, the anarchy in the eyes. A rich man's private car Daimler or Bentley, she didn't know the makes rolled smoothly past them. He said: 4 'What's the hurry?" He took his hand out of his pocket and laid on his knee a paper she recognised.
He said: "You mean that don't you?" He had to repeat it: "Don't you?" She felt as if she were signing away more than her life Heaven, whatever that was, and the child in the bus, and the baby crying in the neighbour's house. "Yes," she said.
"We'll go and have a drink," he said, "and then you'll see. I got everything settled." He said with hideous ease: "It won't take a minute." He put his arm round her waist and his face was close to hers--she could see him now, considering and considering} his skin smelt of petrol; everything smelt of petrol in the little leaking out-dated car. She said: "Are you sure... can't we wait... one day?"
"What's the good? You saw her there tonight. She's hanging on. One day she'll get her evidence. What's the use?"
"Why not then?"
"It might be too late then" He said disjointedly through the flapping hood: "A knock and the next thing you know... the cuffs... too late..." He said with cunning: "We wouldn't be together then."
He put down his foot and the needle quivered up to thirty-five the old car wouldn't do more than forty, but it gave an immense impression of reckless speedy the wind battered on the glass and tore through the rent.
He began softly to intone: "Dona nobis pacem."
"He won't."
"What do you mean?"
"Give us peace."
He thought: there'll be time enough in the years ahead sixty years to repent of this. Go to a priest.
Say: "Father, I've committed murder twice. And there was a girl she killed herself." Even if death came suddenly, driving home tonight, the smash on the lamp post there was stilclass="underline" "between the stirrup and the ground." The houses on one side ceased altogether, and the sea came back to them, beating at the undercliff drive, a darkness and deep sound. He wasn't really deceiving himself he'd learned the other day that when the time was short there were other things than contrition to think about. It didn't matter anyway... he wasn't made for peace, he couldn't believe in it. Heaven was a word; Hell was something he could trust. A brain was capable only of what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never experienced; his cells were formed of the cement school playground, the dead fire and the dying man in the St. Pancras waiting room, his bed at Billy's and his parents' bed. An awful resentment stirred in him why shouldn't he have had his chance like all the rest, seen his glimpse of Heaven if it was only a crack between the Brighton walls?... He turned as they went down to Rottingdean and took a long look at her as if she might be it but the brain couldn't conceive he saw a mouth which wanted the sexual contact, the shape of breasts demanding a child. Oh, she was good all right, he supposed, but she wasn't good enough--he'd got her down.
Above Rottingdean the new villas began: pipedream architecture; up on the down the obscure skeleton of a nursing home, winged like an aeroplane. He said: "They won't hear us in the country." The lights petered out along the road to Peacehaven; the chalk of a new cutting flapped like white sheets in the headlight; cars came down on them, blinding them. He said: "The battery's low."
She had the sense that he was a thousand miles away his thoughts had gone on beyond the act she couldn't tell where--he was wise; he was foreseeing, she thought, things she couldn't conceive eternal punishment, the flames... She felt terror, the idea of pain shook her, their purpose drove up in a flurry of rain against the old stained windscreen. This road led nowhere else. It was said to be the worst act of all, the act of despair, the sin without forgiveness; sitting there in the smell of petrol she tried to realise despair, the mortal sin, but she couldn't; it didn't feel like despair. He was going to damn himself, but she was going to show them that they couldn't damn him without damning her too; there was nothing he could do she wouldn't do; she felt capable of sharing any murder. A light lit his face and left it; a frown, a thought, a child's face; she felt responsibility move in her breasts; she wouldn't let him go into that darkness alone.