Brighton Rock (2 page)

‘It won’t make any difference having one drink. A soft drink.’

‘It’ll have to be a quick one,’ the boy said. He watched Hale all the time closely and with wonder: you might expect a hunter
searching
through the jungle for some half-fabulous beast to look like that—at the spotted lion or the pygmy elephant—before the kill. ‘A grape-fruit squash,’ he said.

‘Go on, Lily,’ the voices implored in the public bar. ‘Give us another, Lily,’ and the boy took his eyes for the first time from Hale and looked across the partition at the big breasts and the blown charm.

‘A double whisky and a grape-fruit squash,’ Hale said. He carried them to a table, but the boy didn’t follow. He was watching the woman with an expression of furious distaste. Hale felt as if hatred had been momentarily loosened like handcuffs to be fastened round another’s wrists. He tried to joke, ‘A cheery soul.’

‘Soul,’ the boy said. ‘You’ve no cause to talk about souls.’ He turned his hatred back on Hale, drinking down the grape-fruit squash in a single draught.

Hale said, ‘I’m only here for my job. Just for the day. I’m Kolley Kibber.’

‘You’re Fred,’ the boy said.

‘All right,’ Hale said, ‘I’m Fred. But I’ve got a card in my pocket which’ll be worth ten bob to you.’

‘I know all about the cards,’ the boy said. He had a fair smooth skin, the faintest down, and his grey eyes had an effect of heartlessness like an old man’s in which human feeling has died. ‘We were all reading about you,’ he said, ‘in the paper this morning,’ and suddenly he sniggered as if he’d just seen the point of a dirty story.

‘You can have one,’ Hale said. ‘Look, take this
Messenger
. Read what it says there. You can have the whole prize. Ten guineas,’ he said. ‘You’ll only have to send this form to the
Messenger
.’

‘Then they don’t trust you with the cash,’ the boy said, and in the other bar Lily began to sing, ‘We met—’twas in a crowd—and I thought he would shun me.’ ‘Christ,’ the boy said, ‘won’t anybody stop that buer’s mouth?’

‘I’ll give you a fiver,’ Hale said. ‘It’s all I’ve got on me. That and my ticket.’

‘You won’t want your ticket,’ the boy said.

‘I wore my bridal robe, and I rivall’d its whiteness.’

The boy rose furiously, and giving way to a little vicious spurt
of
hatred—at the song? at the man?—he dropped his empty glass on to the floor. ‘The gentleman’ll pay,’ he said to the barman and swung through the door of the private lounge. It was then Hale realized that they meant to murder him.

‘A wreath of orange blossoms,

When next we met, she wore;

The expression of her features

Was more thoughtful than before.’

The commissionaire slept on and Hale watched her from the deserted elegant lounge. Her big breasts pointed through the thin vulgar summer dress, and he thought: I must get away from here, I must get away: sadly and desperately watching her, as if he were gazing at life itself in the public bar. But he couldn’t get away, he had his job to do: they were particular on the
Messenger
. It was a good paper to be on, and a little flare of pride went up in Hale’s heart when he thought of the long pilgrimage behind him: selling newspapers at street corners, the reporter’s job at thirty bob a week on the little local paper with a circulation of ten thousand, the five years in Sheffield. He was damned, he told himself with the temporary courage of another whisky, if he’d let that mob frighten him into spoiling his job. What could they do while he had people round him? They hadn’t the nerve to kill him in broad day before witnesses; he was safe with the fifty thousand visitors.

‘Come on over here, lonely heart.’ He didn’t realize at first she was speaking to him, until he saw all the faces in the public bar grinning across at him, and suddenly he thought how easily the mob could get at him with only the sleeping commissionaire to keep him company. There was no need to go outside to reach the other bar, he had only to make a semicircle through three doors, by way of the saloon bar, the ‘ladies only’. ‘What’ll you have?’ he said, approaching the big woman with starved gratitude. She could save my life, he thought, if she’d let me stick to her.

‘I’ll have a port,’ she said.

‘One port,’ Hale said.

‘Aren’t you having one?’

‘No.’ Hale said, ‘I’ve drunk enough. I mustn’t get sleepy.’

‘Why ever not—on a holiday? Have a Bass on me.’

‘I don’t like Bass.’ He looked at his watch. It was one o’clock. His programme fretted at his mind. He had to leave cards in every section: the paper in that way kept a check on him; they could always tell if he scamped his job. ‘Come and have a bite,’ he implored her.

‘Hark at him,’ she called to her friends. Her warm port-winey laugh filled all the bars. ‘Getting fresh, eh? I wouldn’t trust myself.’

‘Don’t you go, Lily,’ they told her. ‘He’s not safe.’

‘I wouldn’t trust myself,’ she repeated, closing one soft friendly cowlike eye.

There was a way, Hale knew, to make her come. He had known the way once. On thirty bob a week he would have been at home with her; he would have known the right phrase, the right joke, to cut her out from among her friends, to be friendly at a snack-bar. But he’d lost touch. He had nothing to say; he could only repeat, ‘Come and have a bite.’

‘Where shall we go, Sir Horace? To the Old Ship?’

‘Yes,’ Hale said. ‘If you like. The Old Ship.’

‘Hear that,’ she told them in all the bars, the two old dames in black bonnets in the ladies, the commissionaire who slept on alone in the private, her own half dozen cronies. ‘This gentleman’s invited me to the Old Ship,’ she said in a mock-refined voice. ‘Tomorrow I shall be delighted, but today I have a prior engagement at the Dirty Dog.’

Hale turned hopelessly to the door. The boy, he thought, would not have had time to warn the others yet. He would be safe at lunch; it was the hour he had to pass after lunch he dreaded most.

The woman said, ‘Are you sick or something?’

His eyes turned to the big breasts; she was like darkness to him, shelter, knowledge, common sense; his heart ached at the sight; but, in his little inky cynical framework of bone, pride bobbed up again, taunting him, ‘Back to the womb. . . be a mother to you. . . no more standing on your own feet.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m not sick. I’m all right.’

‘You look queer,’ she said in a friendly concerned way.

‘I’m all right,’ he said. ‘Hungry. That’s all.’

‘Why not have a bite here?’ the woman said. ‘You could do him a ham sandwich, couldn’t you, Bell,’ and the barman said, Yes, he could do a ham sandwich.

‘No,’ Hale said, ‘I’ve got to be getting on.’

—Getting on. Down the front, mixing as quickly as possible with the current of the crowd, glancing to right and left of him and over each shoulder in turn. He could see no familiar face anywhere, but he felt no relief. He thought he could lose himself safely in a crowd, but now the people he was among seemed like a thick forest in which a native could arrange his poisoned ambush. He couldn’t see beyond the man in flannels just in front, and when he turned his vision was blocked by a brilliant scarlet blouse. Three old ladies went driving by in an open horse-drawn carriage: the gentle clatter faded like peace. That was how some people still lived.

Hale crossed the road away from the front. There were fewer people there: he could walk faster and go further. They were drinking cocktails on the terrace of the Grand, a delicate pastiche of a Victorian sunshade twisted its ribbons and flowers in the sun, and a man like a retired statesman, all silver hair and powdered skin and double old-fashioned eyeglass, let life slip naturally, with dignity, away from him, sitting over a sherry. Down the broad steps of the Cosmopolitan came a couple of women with bright brass hair and ermine coats and heads close together like parrots, exchanging metallic confidences. ‘“My dear,” I said quite coldly, “if you haven’t learnt the Del Rey perm, all I can say—”’ and they flashed their pointed painted nails at each other and cackled. For the first time for five years Kolley Kibber was late in his programme. At the foot of the Cosmopolitan steps, in the shadow the huge bizarre building cast, he remembered that the mob had bought his paper. They hadn’t needed to watch the public house for him: they knew where to expect him.

A mounted policeman came up the road, the lovely cared-for chestnut beast stepping delicately on the hot macadam, like an expensive toy a millionaire buys for his children; you admired the finish, the leather as deeply glowing as an old mahogany table top, the bright silver badge; it never occurred to you that the toy was for use. It never occurred to Hale watching the policeman
pass;
he couldn’t appeal to him. A man stood by the kerb selling objects on a tray; he had lost the whole of one side of the body: leg and arm and shoulder, and the beautiful horse as it paced by turned its head aside delicately like a dowager. ‘Shoelaces,’ the man said hopelessly to Hale, ‘matches.’ Hale didn’t hear him. ‘Razor blades.’ Hale went by, the words lodged securely in his brain: the thought of the thin wound and the sharp pain. That was how Kite was killed.

Twenty yards down the road he saw Cubitt. Cubitt was a big man, with red hair cut
en brosse
and freckles. He saw Hale, but he made no sign of recognition, leaning carelessly against a pillar-box watching him. A postman came to collect and Cubitt shifted. Hale could see him exchanging a joke with the postman and the postman laughed and filled his bag and all the time Cubitt looked away from him down the street waiting for Hale. Hale knew exactly what he’d do; he knew the whole bunch; Cubitt was slow and had a friendly way with him. He’d simply link his arm with Hale’s and draw him on where he wanted him to go.

But the old desperate pride persisted, a pride of intellect. He was scared sick, but he told himself, ‘I’m not going to die.’ He jested hollowly, ‘I’m not front page stuff.’ This was real: the two women getting into a taxi, the band playing on the Palace Pier, ‘tablets’ fading in white smoke on the pale pure sky; not red-haired Cubitt waiting by the pillar-box. Hale turned again and crossed the road, made back towards the West Pier walking fast; he wasn’t running away, he had a plan.

He had only, he told himself, to find a girl: there must be hundreds waiting to be picked up on a Whitsun holiday, to be given a drink and taken to dance at Sherry’s and presently home, drunk and affectionate, in the corridor carriage. That was the best way: to carry a witness round with him. It would be no good, even if his pride allowed him, to go to the station now. They would be watching it for certain, and it was always easy to kill a lonely man at a railway station: they had only to gather close round a carriage door or fix you in the crush at the barrier; it was at a station that Colleoni’s mob had killed Kite. All down the front the girls sat in the twopenny deck-chairs, waiting to be picked, all who had not brought their boys with them; clerks, shop-girls, hairdressers—you
could
pick out the hairdressers by their new and daring perms, by their beautifully manicured nails: they had all waited late at their shops the night before, preparing each other till midnight. Now they were sleepy and sleek in the sun.

In front of the chairs the men strolled in twos and threes, wearing their summer suits for the first time, knife-edged silver-grey trousers and elegant shirts; they didn’t look as if they cared a damn whether they got a girl or not, and among them Hale went in his seedy suit and his string tie and his striped shirt and his inkstains, ten years older, and desperate for a girl. He offered them cigarettes and they stared at him like duchesses with large cold eyes and said, ‘I don’t smoke, thank you,’ and twenty yards behind him, he knew, without turning his head, that Cubitt strolled.

It made Hale’s manner strange. He couldn’t help showing his desperation. He could hear the girls laughing at him after he’d gone, at his clothes and the way he talked. There was a deep humility in Hale; his pride was only in his profession: he disliked himself before the glass—the bony legs and the pigeon breast, and he dressed shabbily and carelessly as a sign—a sign that he didn’t expect any woman to be interested. Now he gave up the pretty ones, the smart ones, and looked despairingly down the chairs for someone plain enough to be glad of even his attentions.

Surely he thought,
this
girl, and he smiled with hungry hope at a fat spotty creature in pink whose feet hardly touched the ground. He sat down in an empty chair beside her and gazed at the remote and neglected sea coiling round the piles of the West Pier.

‘Cigarette?’ he asked presently.

‘I don’t mind if I do,’ the girl said. The words were sweet like a reprieve.

‘It’s nice here,’ the fat girl said.

‘Down from town?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well,’ Hale said, ‘you aren’t going to sit here alone all day, are you?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ the girl said.

‘I thought of going to have something to eat, and then we might—’

‘We,’
the girl said, ‘you’re a fresh one.’

‘Well, you aren’t going to sit here alone all day, are you?’

‘Who said I was?’ the fat girl said. ‘Doesn’t mean I’m going with
you
.’

‘Come and have a drink anyway and talk about it.’

‘I wouldn’t mind,’ she said, opening a compact and covering her spots deeper.

‘Come along then,’ Hale said.

‘Got a friend?’

‘I’m all alone.’

‘Oh then, I couldn’t,’ the girl said. ‘Not possibly. I couldn’t leave my friend all alone,’ and for the first time Hale observed in the chair beyond her a pale bloodless creature waiting avidly for his reply.

‘But you’d like to come,’ Hale implored.

‘Oh, yes, but I couldn’t possibly.’

‘Your friend won’t mind. She’ll find someone.’

‘Oh, no. I couldn’t leave her alone.’ She stared pastily and impassively at the sea.

‘You wouldn’t mind, would you?’ Hale leaned forward and begged the bloodless image, and it screeched with embarrassed laughter back at him.

‘She doesn’t know anyone,’ the fat girl said.