Summary
In the first chapter, shocked by the Pinkie's revelation that he killed Spicer, Cubitt decides to switch to Mr. Colleoni's side. He chats with Crab over a drink and asks him to put in a word for him with Mr. Colleoni. Just as Crab leaves, Ida comes in and begins to ask Cubitt about Pinkie.
In the second chapter, Mr. Prewitt brings Pinkie and Rose to the registrar, where they get a civil marriage. They all have a drink in celebration, and then Pinkie and Rose go off on their own. They try to get a room at the Cosmopolitan, but to Pinkie's humiliation, they are rejected. They go down to the pier, where Rose has Pinkie record a message on a gramophone record; without Rose hearing, Pinkie records a message cursing her. They then go back to Frank's house, where they have sex for the first time. Cubitt shows up pounding on the door asking for money, but Pinkie turns him away.
Analysis
The scene in which Pinkie and Rose lose their virginity together, one of the climaxes of the novel given the importance, almost greater than that of the murders, of sexual innocence and experience to Pinkie, takes place through a very unusual kind of narration. Just as the murders of Hale and Spicer are not explicitly depicted in the novel and for that reason cast an unnatural and threatening shadow over much of the actually depicted events, the acts of intercourse which are only elliptically alluded to, even in the scene of their happening, have a strange kind of energy that at least on one level serves as a direct reflection of Pinkie's state of mind.
Throughout the sex scene, Cubitt's ringing the doorbell serves not only as a kind of farcical interruption but also as the intrusion of a kind of mundane force, which in fact registers the change in Pinkie's attitude; at first he is annoyed and feels somewhat threatened by it, but once he feels relief (and some little bit of pleasure) from completing sex, the same noise strikes him as non-threatening, something he can easily take care of.
Rose, meanwhile, is blotted out almost entirely from the scene. Pinkie hears her, as we hear her speech reported, but he is so caught in the revels in his own mind that he does not even really sense her presence: Rose says "Don't go. I'm scared, Pinkie," and the narration (free indirect discourse in Pinkie's mind) continues immediately: "But he had a sense that he would never be scared again….Now it was as if he was damned already and there was nothing more to fear ever again" (198). He has picked up on the notion of being scared, but he changes it entirely from concern about Rose to an egoistic reflection on his personal victory.
