Brighton Rock (28 page)

‘But I haven’t got anything to wear, only this.’

‘Oh well, dear, in that case. . . ’ She bent and whispered confidentially, ‘Make your hubby buy you one,’ then gathered the faded dressing-gown around her and loped up the stairs. Rose could see a dead white leg, like something which has lived underground, covered with russet hairs, a dingy slipper flapped a loose heel. It seemed to her that everyone was very kind: there seemed to be a companionship in mortal sin.

Pride swelled in her breast as she came up from the basement. She was accepted. She had experienced as much as any woman. Back in the bedroom she sat on the bed and waited and heard the clock strike eight. She wasn’t hungry; she was sensible of an immense freedom—no time-table to keep, no work which had got to be done. You suffered a little pain and then came out on the other side to this amazing liberty. There was only one thing she wanted now—to let others see her happiness. She could walk into Snow’s now like any other customer, rap the table with a spoon and demand service. She could boast. . . It was a fantasy, but sitting on the bed while time drifted by it became an idea, something she was really able to do. In less than half an hour they would be opening for breakfast. If she had the money. . . She brooded with her eyes on the soap-dish. She thought: after all we are married—in a way; he’s given me nothing but that record; he wouldn’t grudge me half a crown. She stood up and listened, then walked softly over to the washstand. With her fingers on the lid of the soap-dish she waited—somebody was coming down the passage: it wasn’t Judy and it wasn’t Dallow—perhaps it was the man they called Frank. The footsteps passed; she lifted the lid and unwrapped the half-crown. She had stolen biscuits, she had never stolen money before. She expected to feel shame, but it didn’t
come—only
again the odd swell of pride. She was like a child in a new school who finds she can pick up the esoteric games and passwords in the cement playground, at once, by instinct.

In the world outside it was Sunday—she’d forgotten that: the church bells reminded her, shaking over Brighton. Freedom again in the early sun, freedom from the silent prayers at the altar, from the awful demands made on you at the sanctuary rail. She had joined the other side now for ever. The half-crown was like a medal for services rendered. People coming back from seven-thirty Mass, people on the way to eight-thirty Matins—she watched them in their dark clothes like a spy. She didn’t envy them and she didn’t despise them: they had their salvation and she had Pinkie and damnation.

At Snow’s the blinds had just gone up; a girl she knew called Maisie was laying a few tables—the only girl she cared about, a new girl like herself and not much older. She watched her from the pavement—and Doris, the senior waitress with her habitual sneer, doing nothing at all except flick a duster where Maisie had already been. Rose clutched the half-crown closer; well, she had only got to go in, sit down, tell Doris to fetch her a cup of coffee and a roll, tip her a couple of coppers—she could patronize the whole lot of them. She was married. She was a woman. She was happy. What would they feel like when they saw her coming through the door?

And she didn’t go in. That was the trouble. How would she feel, flaunting her freedom? Then through the pane she caught Maisie’s eye; she stood there with a duster staring back, bony, immature, like her own image in a mirror. And
she
stood now where Pinkie had stood—outside, looking in. This was what the priests meant by one flesh. And just as she days ago had motioned, Maisie motioned—a slant of the eyes, an imperceptible nod towards the side door. There was no reason at all why she shouldn’t go in at the front, but she obeyed Maisie. It was like doing something you’d done before.

The door opened and Maisie was there. ‘Rose, what’s wrong?’ She ought to have had wounds to show: she felt guilty at having only happiness. ‘I thought I’d come,’ she said, ‘and see you. I’m married.’

‘Married?’

‘Kind of.’

‘Oh, Rose, what’s it like?’

‘Lovely.’

‘You got rooms?’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you do all day?’

‘Nothing at all. Just lie about.’

The childish face in front of her took on the wrinkled expression of grief. ‘God, Rosie, you’re lucky. Where did you meet him?’

‘Here.’

A hand bonier than her own seized her by the wrist: ‘Oh, Rosie, ain’t he got a friend?’

She said lightly, ‘He’s not got friends.’

‘Maisie,’ a voice called shrilly from the café, ‘Maisie.’ Tears lay ready in the eyes: in Maisie’s eyes not Rose’s: she hadn’t meant to hurt her friend. An impulse of pity made her say, ‘It’s not all that good, Maisie.’ She tried to destroy the appearance of her own happiness. ‘Sometimes he’s bad to me. Oh, I can tell you,’ she urged, ‘it’s not all roses.’

But ‘not roses,’ she thought as she turned back to the parade, ‘if it’s not all roses, what is it?’ And mechanically, walking back towards Frank’s without her breakfast, she began to think—what have I done to deserve to be so happy? She’d committed a sin? that was the answer: she was having her cake in this world, not in the next, and she didn’t care. She was stamped with him, as his voice was stamped on the vulcanite.

A few doors from Frank’s, from a shop where they sold the Sunday papers, Dallow called to her. ‘Hi, kid.’ She stopped. ‘You got a visitor.’

‘Who?’

‘Your mother.’

She was stirred by a feeling of gratitude and pity: her mother hadn’t been happy like this. She said, ‘Give me a
News of the World
. Mum likes a Sunday paper.’ In the back room somebody was playing a gramophone. She said to the man who kept the shop, ‘Sometime would you let me come here—and play a record I got?’

‘O’ course he will,’ Dallow said.

She crossed the road and rang at Frank’s door. Judy opened it; she was still in her dressing-gown, but underneath she now had on her corsets. ‘You got a visitor,’ she said.

‘I know.’ Rose ran upstairs: it was the biggest triumph you could ever expect—to greet your mother for the first time in your own house—ask her to sit down on your own chair: to look at one another with an equal experience. There was nothing now, Rose felt, her mother knew about men she didn’t know: that was the reward for the painful ritual upon the bed. She flung the door gladly open and there was the woman.

‘What are you—?’ she began, and said, ‘They told me it was my mother.’

‘I had to tell them something,’ the woman gently explained. She said, ‘Come in, dear, and shut the door behind you,’ as if it were
her
room.

‘I’ll call Pinkie.’

‘I’d like a word with your Pinkie.’ You couldn’t get round her; she stood there like the wall at the end of an alley scrawled with the obscene chalk messages of an enemy. She was the explanation—it seemed to Rose—of sudden harshnesses, of the nails pressing her wrist. She said, ‘You’ll not see Pinkie. I won’t have anyone worry Pinkie.’

‘He’s going to have plenty to worry him soon.’

‘Who are you?’ Rose implored her. ‘Why do you interfere with us? You’re not the police.’

‘I’m like everyone else. I want justice,’ the woman cheerfully remarked, as if she were ordering a pound of tea. Her big prosperous carnal face hung itself with smiles. She said, ‘I want to see
you’re
safe.’

‘I don’t want any help,’ Rose said.

‘You ought to go home.’

Rose clenched her hands in defence of the brass bed, the ewer of dusty water: ‘This is home.’

‘It’s no good your getting angry, dear,’ the woman continued. ‘I’m not going to lose my temper with you again. It’s not your fault. You don’t understand how things are. Why, you poor little thing, I pity you,’ and she advanced across the linoleum as if she intended to take Rose in her arms.

Rose backed against the bed, ‘You keep your distance.’

‘Now don’t get agitated, dear. It won’t help. You see—I’m determined.’

‘I don’t know what you mean. Why can’t you talk straight?’

‘There’s things I’ve got to break—gently.’

‘Keep away from me. Or I’ll scream.’

The woman stopped. ‘Now let’s talk sensible, dear. I’m here for your own good. You got to be saved. Why—’ she seemed for a moment at a loss for words. She said in a hushed voice, ‘Your life’s in danger.’

‘You go away if that’s all—’

‘All,’ the woman was shocked. ‘What do you mean, all?’ Then she laughed resolutely. ‘Why, dear, for a moment you had me rattled. All, indeed. It’s enough, isn’t it? I’m not joking now. If you don’t know it, you got to know it. There’s nothing he wouldn’t stop at.’

‘Well?’ Rose said, giving nothing away.

The woman whispered softly across the few feet between them, ‘He’s a murderer.’

‘Do you think I don’t know
that
?’ Rose said.

‘God’s sake,’ the woman said, ‘do you mean—’

‘There’s nothing
you
can tell me.’

‘You crazy little fool—to marry him knowing that. I got a good mind to let you be.’

‘I won’t complain,’ Rose said.

The woman hooked on another smile, as you hook on a wreath. ‘I’m not going to lose my temper, dear. Why if I let you be, I wouldn’t sleep at nights. It wouldn’t be Right. Listen to me; maybe you don’t know what happened. I got it all figured out. They took Fred down under the parade, into one of those little shops and strangled him—least they would have strangled him, but his heart gave out first.’ She said in an awestruck voice, ‘They strangled a dead man,’ then added sharply, ‘you aren’t listening.’

‘I know it all,’ Rose lied. She was thinking hard—she was remembering Pinkie’s warning—‘Don’t get mixed up.’ She thought wildly and vaguely: he did his best for me; I got to help him now. She watched the woman closely; she would never forget that plump, good-natured, ageing face: it stared out at her like an
idiot’s
from the ruins of a bombed home. She said, ‘Well, if you think that’s how it was, why don’t you go to the police?’

‘Now you’re talking sense,’ the woman said. ‘I only want to make things clear. This is the way it is, dear. There’s a certain person I’ve paid money to who’s told me things. And there’s things I’ve figured out for myself. But that person—he won’t give evidence. For reasons. And you need a lot of evidence—seeing how the doctors made it natural death. Now if you—’

‘Why don’t you give it up?’ Rose said. ‘It’s over and done, isn’t it? Why not let us all be?’

‘It wouldn’t be right. Besides—he’s dangerous. Look what happened here the other day. You don’t tell
me
that was an accident.’

‘You haven’t thought, have you,’ Rose said, ‘why he did it? You don’t kill a man for no reason.’

‘Well, why did he?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Ask him.’

‘I don’t need to know.’

‘You think he’s in love with you,’ the woman said, ‘he’s not.’

‘He married me.’

‘And why? because they can’t make a wife give evidence. You’re just a witness like that other man was. My dear,’ she again tried to close the gap between them, ‘I only want to save you. He’d kill
you
as soon as look at you if he thought he wasn’t safe.’

With her back to the bed Rose watched her approach. She let her put her large cool pastry-making hands upon her shoulders. ‘People change,’ she said.

‘Oh, no they don’t. Look at me. I’ve never changed. It’s like those sticks of rock: bite it all the way down, you’ll still read Brighton. That’s human nature.’ She breathed mournfully over Rose’s face—a sweet and winey breath.

‘Confession. . . repentance,’ Rose whispered.

‘That’s just religion,’ the woman said. ‘Believe me, it’s the world we got to deal with.’ She went pat pat on Rose’s shoulder, her breath whistling in her throat. ‘You pack a bag and come away with me. I’ll look after you. You won’t have any cause to fear.’

‘Pinkie. . . ’

‘I’ll look after Pinkie.’

Rose said, ‘I’ll do anything—anything you want. . . ’

‘That’s the way to talk, dear.’

‘If you’ll let us alone.’

The woman backed away. A momentary look of fury was hung up among the wreaths discordantly. ‘Obstinate,’ she said. ‘If I was your mother. . . a good hiding.’ The bony and determined face stared back at her: all the fight there was in the world lay there—warships cleared for action and bombing fleets took flight between the set eyes and the stubborn mouth. It was like the map of a campaign marked with flags.

‘Another thing,’ the woman bluffed. ‘They can send you to gaol. Because you know. You told me so. An accomplice, that’s what you are. After the fact.’

‘If they took Pinkie, do you think,’ she asked with astonishment, ‘I’d mind?’

‘Gracious,’ the woman said, ‘I only came here for your sake. I wouldn’t have troubled to see you first, only I don’t want to let the Innocent suffer’—the aphorism came clicking out like a ticket from a slot machine. ‘Why, won’t you lift a finger to stop him killing you?’

‘He wouldn’t do me any harm.’

‘You’re young. You don’t know things like I do.’

‘There’s things
you
don’t know.’ She brooded darkly by the bed, while the woman argued on: a God wept in a garden and cried out upon a cross; Molly Carthew went to everlasting fire.

‘I know one thing you don’t. I know the difference between Right and Wrong. They didn’t teach you
that
at school.’

Rose didn’t answer; the woman was quite right: the two words meant nothing to her. Their taste was extinguished by stronger foods—Good and Evil. The woman could tell her nothing she didn’t know about these—she knew by tests as clear as mathematics that Pinkie was evil—what did it matter in that case whether he was right or wrong?

‘You’re crazy,’ the woman said. ‘I don’t believe you’d lift a finger if he was killing you.’

Rose came slowly back to the outer world. She said, ‘Maybe I wouldn’t.’

‘If I wasn’t a kind woman I’d give you up. But I’ve got a sense
of
responsibility.’ Her smiles hung very insecurely when she paused at the door. ‘You can warn that young husband of yours,’ she said, ‘I’m getting warm to him. I got my plans.’ She went out and closed the door, then flung it open again for a last attack. ‘You be careful, dear,’ she said. ‘You don’t want a murderer’s baby,’ and grinned mercilessly across the bare bedroom floor. ‘You better take precautions.’