Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
It was amazing how far hope could stretch. She thought: I needn’t say anything yet. I can take the gun and then—throw it out of the car, run away, do something to stop everything. But all the time she felt the steady pressure of his will. His mind was made up. She took the gun; it was like a treachery. What will he do, she thought, if I don’t. . . shoot. Would he shoot himself alone, without her? Then he would be damned, and she wouldn’t have her chance of being damned too, of showing Them they couldn’t pick and choose. To go on living for years. . . you couldn’t tell what life would do to you in making you meek, good, repentant. Belief in her mind had the bright clarity of images, of the crib at Christmas: here goodness ended, past the cow and the sheep, and there evil began—Herod seeking the child’s birthplace from his turreted keep. She wanted to be with Herod—if he were there. You could win to the evil side suddenly, in a moment of despair or passion, but through a long life the guardian good drove you remorselessly towards the crib, the ‘happy death’.
He said, ‘We don’t want to wait any longer. Do you want me to do it first?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘no.’
‘All right then. You take a walk—or better still I’ll take a walk an’ you stay here. When it’s over, I’ll come back an’ do it too.’ Again he gave the sense that he was a boy playing a game, a game in which you could talk in the coldest detail of the scalping knife or the bayonet wound and then go home to tea. He said, ‘It’ll be too dark for me to see much.’
He opened the door of the car. She sat motionless with the gun on her lap. Behind them on the main road a car went slowly past towards Peacehaven. He said awkwardly, ‘You know what to do?’ He seemed to think that some motion of tenderness was expected of him. He put out his mouth and kissed her on the cheek; he was afraid of the mouth—thoughts travel too easily from lip to lip. He said, ‘It won’t hurt,’ and began to walk back a little way towards the main road. Hope was stretched now as far as it would go. The radio had stopped; the motor-bicycle exploded twice in the garage, feet moved on gravel and on the main road she could hear a car reversing.
If it was a guardian angel speaking to her now, he spoke like a devil—he tempted her to virtue like a sin. To throw away the gun was a betrayal; it would be an act of cowardice: it would mean that she chose never to see him again for ever. Moral maxims dressed in pedantic priestly tones remembered from old sermons, instructions, confessions—‘you can plead for him at the throne of Grace’—came to her like unconvincing insinuations. The evil act was the honest act, the bold and the faithful—it was only lack of courage, it seemed to her, that spoke so virtuously. She put the gun up to her ear and put it down again with a feeling of sickness—it was a poor love that was afraid to die. She hadn’t been afraid to commit mortal sin—it was death not damnation which was scaring her. Pinkie said it wouldn’t hurt. She felt his will moving her hand—she could trust him. She put up the gun again.
A voice called sharply ‘Pinkie’ and she heard somebody splashing in the puddles. Footsteps ran. . . she couldn’t tell where. It seemed to her that this must be news, that this must make a difference. She couldn’t kill herself when this might mean good news. It was as if somewhere in the darkness the will which had governed her hand relaxed, and all the hideous forces of self-preservation came flooding back. It didn’t seem real—that she had really intended to sit there and press the trigger. ‘Pinkie,’ the voice called again, and the splashing steps came nearer. She pulled the car door open and flung the revolver far away from her towards the damp scrub.
In the light from the stained glass she saw Dallow and the woman—and a policeman who looked confused as if he didn’t quite know what was happening. Somebody came softly round the car behind her and said, ‘Where’s that gun? Why don’t you shoot? Give it me.’
She said, ‘I threw it away.’
The others approached cautiously like a deputation. Pinkie called out suddenly in a breaking childish voice, ‘You bloody squealer, Dallow.’
‘Pinkie,’ Dallow said, ‘it’s no use. They got Prewitt.’ The policeman looked ill-at-ease like a stranger at a party.
‘Where’s that gun?’ Pinkie said again. He screamed with hate and fear, ‘My God, have I got to have a massacre?’
She said, ‘I threw it away.’
She could see his face indistinctly as it leant in over the little dashboard light. It was like a child’s, badgered, confused, betrayed: fake years slipped away—he was whisked back towards the unhappy playground. He said, ‘You little. . . ’ he didn’t finish—the deputation approached, he left her, diving into his pocket for something. ‘Come on, Dallow,’ he said, ‘you bloody squealer,’ and put his hand up. Then she couldn’t tell what happened: glass—somewhere—broke, he screamed and she saw his face—steam. He screamed and screamed, with his hands up to his eyes; he turned and ran; she saw a police baton at his feet and broken glass. He looked half his size, doubled up in appalling agony: it was as if the flames had literally got him and he shrank—shrank into a schoolboy flying in panic and pain, scrambling over a fence, running on.
‘Stop him,’ Dallow cried: it wasn’t any good: he was at the edge, he was over: they couldn’t even hear a splash. It was as if he’d been withdrawn suddenly by a hand out of any existence—past or present, whipped away into zero—nothing.
10
‘It shows,’ Ida Arnold said, ‘you only have to hold on.’ She emptied her glass of stout and laid it down on Henekey’s upturned barrel.
‘And Prewitt?’ Clarence asked.
‘How slow you are, you old ghost. I just made that up. I couldn’t chase over France for him, and the police—you know what police are—they always want evidence.’
‘They had Cubitt?’
‘Cubitt wouldn’t talk when he was sober. And you’d never get him drunk enough to talk to them. Why, this is slander what I’ve been telling you. Or it would be slander—if he were alive.’
‘I wonder you don’t feel bad about that, Ida.’
‘Somebody else would have been dead if we hadn’t turned up.’
‘It was her own choice.’
But Ida Arnold had an answer to everything. ‘She didn’t understand. She was only a kid. She thought he was in love with her.’
‘An’ what does she think now?’
‘Don’t ask me. I’ve done my best. I took her home. What a girl needs at a time like that is her mother and dad. Anyway she’s got me to thank she isn’t dead.’
‘How did you get the policeman to go with you?’
‘We told him they’d stolen the car. The poor man didn’t know what it was all about, but he acted quick when Pinkie pulled out the vitriol.’
‘And Phil Corkery?’
‘He’s talking of Hastings,’ she said, ‘next year, but I have a sort of feeling there won’t be any postcards for me after this.’
‘You’re a terrible woman, Ida,’ Clarence said. He sighed deeply and stared into his glass. ‘Have another?’
‘No thank you, Clarence. I got to be getting home.’
‘You’re a terrible woman,’ Clarence repeated; he was a little drunk, ‘but I got to give you credit. You act for the best.’
‘He’s not on my conscience anyway.’
‘As you say it was him or her.’
‘There wasn’t any choice,’ Ida Arnold said. She got up; she was like a figurehead of Victory. She nodded to Harry at the bar.
‘You’ve been away, Ida?’
‘Just a week or two.’
‘It doesn’t seem so long,’ Harry said.
‘Well, good night all.’
‘Good night. Good night.’
She took the tube to Russell Square and walked, carrying her suitcase: let herself in and looked in the hall for letters. There was only one—from Tom. She knew what that would be about, and her great warm heart softened as she thought: After all, when all’s said, Tom an’ I know what Love is. She opened the door on to the basement stairs and called, ‘Crowe. Old Crowe.’<
‘You, Ida?’
‘Come up for a chat an’ we’ll have a turn with the Board.’
The curtains were drawn as she had left them—nobody had touched the china on the mantelpiece, but Warwick Deeping wasn’t in the bookshelf and The Good Companions was on its side. The char had been in—she could see that—borrowing. She got out a box of chocolate biscuits for Old Crowe; the lid had not been left properly on and they were a little soft and stale. Then carefully she lifted out the Board, cleared the table and laid it in the centre. SUIKILLEYE, she thought. I know what that means now. The Board had foreseen it all—Sui, its own word for the scream, the agony, the leap. She brooded gently with her fingers on the Board. When you came to think of it, the Board had saved Rose, and a multitude of popular sayings began to pass together into her mind. It was like when the points shift and the signal goes down and the red lamp changes to green and the great engine takes the accustomed rails. It’s a strange world, there’s more things in heaven and earth. . .
Old Crowe came peering in. ‘What’s it to be, Ida?’
‘I want to ask advice,’ Ida said. ‘I want to ask whether maybe I ought to go back to Tom.’
11
Rose could just see the old head bent towards the grill. The priest had a whistle in his breath. He listened—patiently—whistling, while she painfully brought out her whole agony. She could hear the exasperated women creak their chairs outside waiting for confession. She said, ‘It’s that I repent. Not going with him.’ She was defiant and tearless in the stuffy box; the old priest had a cold and smelt of eucalyptus. He said gently and nasally, ‘Go on, my child.’
She said, ‘I wish I’d killed myself. I ought to ’ave killed myself.’ The old man began to say something, but she interrupted him. ‘I’m not asking for absolution. I don’t want absolution. I want to be like him—damned.’
The old man whistled as he drew in his breath. She felt certain he understood nothing. She repeated monotonously, ‘I wish I’d killed myself.’ She pressed her hands against her breasts in the passion of misery. She hadn’t come to confess, she had come to think; she couldn’t think at home where the stove hadn’t been lit and her father had got a mood and her mother—she could tell it in her sidelong questions—was wondering how much money Pinkie. . . She would have found the courage now to kill herself if she hadn’t been afraid that somewhere in that obscure countryside of death they might miss each other—mercy operating somehow for one and not for the other. She said with breaking voice, ‘That woman. She ought to be damned. Saying he wanted to get rid of me. She doesn’t know about love.’
‘Perhaps she was right,’ the old priest murmured.
‘And you don’t either,’ she said furiously, pressing her childish face against the grill.
The old man suddenly began to talk, whistling every now and then and blowing eucalyptus through the grill. He said, ‘There was a man, a Frenchman, you wouldn’t know about him, my child, who had the same idea as you. He was a good man, a holy man, and he lived in sin all through his life, because he couldn’t bear the idea that any soul could suffer damnation.’ She listened with astonishment. He said, ‘This man decided that if any soul was going to be damned, he would be damned too. He never took the sacraments, he never married his wife in church. I don’t know, my child, but some people think he was—well, a saint. I think he died in what we are told is mortal sin—I’m not sure: it was in the war: perhaps. . . ’ He sighed and whistled, bending his old head. He said, ‘You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the. . . appalling. . . strangeness of the mercy of God.’
Outside the chairs creaked again and again—people impatient to get their own repentance, absolution, penance finished for the week. He said, ‘It was a case of greater love hath no man than this that he lay down his soul for his friend.’
He shivered and sneezed. ‘We must hope and pray,’ he said, ‘hope and pray. The Church does not demand that we believe any soul is cut off from mercy.’
She said with sad conviction, ‘He’s damned. He knew what he was about. He was a Catholic too.’
He said gently, ‘Corruptio optimi est pessima.’
‘Yes, father?’
‘I mean—a Catholic is more capable of evil than anyone. I think perhaps—because we believe in Him—we are more in touch with the devil than other people. But we must hope,’ he said mechanically, ‘hope and pray.’
‘I want to hope,’ she said, ‘but I don’t know how.’
‘If he loved you, surely,’ the old man said, ‘that shows there was some good. . . ’
‘Even love like that?’
‘Yes.’
She brooded on the idea in the little dark box. He said, ‘And come back soon—I can’t give you absolution now—but come back—tomorrow.’
She said weakly, ‘Yes, father. . . And if there’s a baby. . . ’
He said, ‘With your simplicity and his force. . . Make him a saint—to pray for his father.’
A sudden feeling of immense gratitude broke through the pain—it was as if she had been given the sight a long way off of life going on again. He said, ‘Pray for me, my child.’
She said, ‘Yes, oh yes.’
Outside she looked up at the name on the confessional box—it wasn’t any name she remembered. Priests come and go.
She went out into the street—the pain was still there, you couldn’t shake it off with a word; but the worst horror she thought was over—the horror of the complete circle—to be back at home, back at Snow’s—they’d take her back—just as if the Boy had never existed at all. He had existed and would always exist. She had a sudden conviction that she carried life, and she thought proudly: Let them get over that if they can; let them get over that. She turned out on to the front opposite the Palace Pier and began to walk firmly away from the direction of her home towards Frank’s. There was something to be salvaged from that house and room, something else they wouldn’t be able to get over—his voice speaking a message to her: if there was a child, speaking to the child. ‘If he loved you,’ the priest had said, ‘that shows. . . ’ She walked rapidly in the thin June sunlight towards the worst horror of all.
Brighton Rock
The classic film adaptation of Brighton Rock was released in 1947. Graham Greene and Terence Rattigan wrote the screenplay. The film was produced and directed by the Boulting Brothers. Richard Attenborough starred as the razor-wielding Pinkie in perhaps his most iconic onscreen role. Famously, The British Board of Film Censors requested that Greene soften the story’s memorably cruel ending. Despite this change, Brighton Rock is widely viewed as one of the best British film noirs.
A remake is scheduled for release in 2010, featuring Sam Riley and Helen Mirren. Director Rowan Joffe plans to shift the setting from the 1930s to 1960s to give it a more modern feel.
Certificate: PG
Running Time: 92 minutes
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Copyright © Graham Greene 1938
First published in Great Britain in 1938 by William Heinemann
First published by Vintage in 2002
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ISBN 9780099541684
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Graham Greene, Brighton Rock
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