‘Just our rotten luck.’ The man’s cap thrown violently into the hearth hissed on the hot bricks. He was about fifty, and bald, with a large florid face and downcurving wide lips, dressed in a checked pullover and a sports jacket, and wearing steel-framed spectacles. A row of coloured felt tips decorated the top of his lapel pocket like medal ribbons from some war of long ago.
‘At least we didn’t freeze to death.’ She wore grey trousers and, when bending to take off her laced shoes, nondescript hair straggled over a thick Fair Isle sweater. Wet stockinged feet went towards the blaze. ‘Only nearly. Some poor souls must have got stuck. It’s like the Antarctic out there. I wouldn’t like to be in their shoes.’
The man turned, unwillingly diverted from the fire. ‘Why don’t you go and rescue them, then? They’d appreciate it, I’m sure.’
Aaron put his newspaper down, to let them know that someone else was in the room. ‘We’ve certainly found a nice little refuge, all the same.’
‘Who the hell wants your opinion?’ the man said to the flames, his only allies at the moment.
‘I don’t know, and I don’t very much care,’ Aaron replied, ‘but if you want to know who’s giving it, my name’s Aaron Jones. Maybe we’ll be stuck here for a week, in which case I hope you don’t mind if I ask yours.’
He hudged even closer to the fire. ‘Ask all you like.’
The woman pulled her woollen gloves off, stage by stage, as if at earlier times she had been used to dealing with far thinner ones. ‘Nice to know you. I’m Jenny Groves, and I happen to be his secretary, of a sort, and for the time being anyway.’
‘Tom Parsons, that’s who I am.’ He put out a hand, regretting his surliness. ‘I thought I’d tell you before she called me Dracula. We’ve been cat-and-dogging it all the way up from London. Getting stuck and having to plough through half a bloody mile of icing sugar was the limit. I’m sorry if I was a bit sharpish just then, but the trudge wore me out. Even if I just stood in it I’d start to lose weight. I’m not a lad any more.’
True enough, Aaron agreed. ‘I can recommend the coffee and sandwiches. The dining room won’t be opening for meals, so I was told.’
Tom laughed. ‘A pint of Greattorex’s Bitter will warm me up more than the coffee and tea piss they serve people in these places.’
Curtains of white still fell beyond the window, a faint moan of wolf weather from the wolds of snow. Aaron thought it strange that a wall and a few squares of glass could protect the cosy parlour so completely from annihilation.
‘When I was a nipper I ran around in plimsolls and no topcoat. Not even a bit of jersey on my back. Then I worked twenty years down the pit. Well’ – his laugh was grating – ‘at least down there I was warm and well enough shod.’
‘Stop showing off,’ Jenny said. ‘You’re wearing good shoes now, aren’t you?’ – which Aaron thought was unfair because it had nothing to do with what he was talking about.
You couldn’t trust his humour, though. He was amiable one minute, brittle and offensive the next. ‘I’ve got to be well shod nowadays. The lads wouldn’t own a Union official as didn’t have good elastic-sided boots on his feet. I’d go down the pit again any day, but they need me more at this job. Order me some sandwiches and a pint of jollop, love. I’m famished after that little struggle outside.’
She put her other foot towards the heat as if not able to bear the sensual comfort of warming two at the same time. ‘Why don’t you ask for it yourself? All you have to do is move your lips.’
His power lay in moody silence, in gesture, for he turned his bullocked shoulders to the fire, hands outspread, until she gave in, and walked out of the room. ‘Get some supper for yourself as well,’ he called after her. ‘Secretary she’s supposed to be! I’ve shit ’em – before breakfast.’
Aaron looked up from his reading. ‘Perhaps she’s tired after the trouble of getting here.’
Parsons yawned, worn out by his emotional power skirmish. ‘Near half a mile we had to walk, the blizzard coming right at us, but I made her get behind me, and I took every inch of the blast. I’m not a brute. Still, I suppose you’re right. But everything I ask her to do she does as if it’s a hard grind and she’s too good for it. Maybe I don’t make allowances. You have to make more allowances than you did in the old days. Not that anybody ever made any for me.’ He laughed like a good-tempered overgrown boy, hedgerow eyebrows moving up and down. ‘Anyway, men and women’s supposed to be equal these days, aren’t they? I drove the car up from London, so I don’t see why she shouldn’t order me a pint and a few sandwiches.’
Jenny came back. ‘They’ll be here in ten minutes, Mr Parsons.’
He stood, arms extended, like a cat finding the radius of its physical limits. ‘In the meantime I’ll go to the back, for a you-know-what.’
‘You’ve driven up from London?’
She nodded, a hand still on the briefcase. ‘He nearly got us both killed once or twice.’
‘It’s not exactly motoring weather. I set out from the south coast this morning, and it got worse every mile.’
‘It always does, summer or winter.’ She gave a bitter smile. ‘That’s my experience.’
He puffed clouds of wellbeing from his Schimmelpenninck. ‘You don’t seem to like it. Sorry I can’t offer a cigarette.’
‘I like the smell of cigars. Do you?’
‘I don’t mind it,’ he said. ‘I smoke them.’
‘I mean, like it up North?’
He laughed. ‘I live there.’
‘You weren’t born there, though?’
‘Well, no.’
‘Nor me.’ The conversation seemed to refresh her. ‘I’m from Guildford, originally.’
‘And I was born in Devizes.’
She drew her eyes along the titles in a tall mahogany glass-fronted bookcase containing antiquated volumes of the activities of the county hunt, dusty school classics from before the First World War, and a few battered copies of Who’s Who and Burke’s Peerage. ‘I thought I caught a bit of the accent.’
He mentioned a couple of bookshops in Guildford which he had rummaged through. ‘I can’t afford not to, though it’s so hard trying to park I’ll give them a miss from now on. It took half an hour to get out of the place yesterday. But why do you live in the North if you dislike it so much?’
‘Marriage, of course. Bloody marriage. My husband, as was, worked for an estate agent. Imagine trying to sell houses in a mining town! Then he left me. At least he hasn’t gone off with another woman, I thought. Then I heard through the usual grapevine that he was living with my best friend. Funny I haven’t heard from her for so long, I was beginning to tell myself.’
He noticed that she had jettisoned the wedding ring already. ‘Life’s like that.’
‘How do you know?’ she snapped.
Similar experience, he could have answered, cursing himself for making such a flippant remark. ‘How do you know I don’t?’
‘Dunno, really. So then I got a job as a general dogsbody for the local Union branch. Then I sold our biggish house and bought one at the end of a row. Don’t know why I’m telling you. You’re not saying much about yourself.’
‘I haven’t had time.’ He was annoyed at being attacked in such a way that he was unable to defend himself. She had obviously had much practice and experience, or she had been born that way. Then he was annoyed at being annoyed.
‘It’s because you’re a man, I suppose.’
‘If you believe that, you’ll believe anything.’
Parsons came back. Knowing himself to be the centre of the world – wherever he was – put a light on his face that Aaron couldn’t wish him free of. ‘I thought I would never stop peeing. Didn’t even know I wanted to go. It was like the River Nile! It must be the bloody weather.’
A girl came in with a tray, and stood as if not knowing which of them to throw it at. ‘Who wanted this, then?’
‘Over here,’ Jenny called.
Parsons lif
ted his arm, the immaculate cuff of a white shirt showing a gold link. ‘I’m the starvo, my love.’
‘I’m not your bleeding love. My name is Enid.’ The mouth of her bony face was made smaller by forward-pushing teeth, though Aaron noted signs of a fine figure under her apron. Her puffed-up, copious hair was a glorious russet, as if a light shone from inside, so Parsons hoped she was nice enough to risk a joke. ‘I thought you’d gone off to grow the wheat, and kill the turkey.’
Plate and pint mug clattered down. ‘If I’d known we was going to be so busy I wouldn’t have come in tonight. I could have been chewing pills with my boy friend. It would have been better than rotting in this cemetery.’
‘Never mind, love, we can go back into the snow and have a nice time dying, if it’ll make you happy. Give the lass fifty pence for her trouble,’ he said to Jenny.
She opened her purse, souvenir of a holiday in Morocco with Raymond, and put the coin on the tray. Enid walked out, head tilted as if she had been insulted.
Parsons turned to Aaron. ‘If anybody had given me a tanner at her age I would have thought it was my birthday. Not even a thank you. I suppose the little trollop’s got so much in the bank she don’t know what to do with it.’ He rubbed his cheek with the gold ring as if it might bring her back in a better temper. ‘Would you like some of this sandwich?’ He offered it around, then sank half the pint and eliminated the supper as if it had strayed into his cleverly laid ambush.
EIGHT
It would, Alfred said to himself. It would, for all the good that could come of it.
Well, it would snow, wouldn’t it? Something like this had to happen, on the journey of a lifetime.
Wouldn’t it, then, you silly old so-and-so?
But the silly old – he could think of many things worse – was his eighty-year-old father, Percy Joseph, sitting beside him like a ventriloquist’s rag-and-putty doll, as flocks of white came against the windscreen like horses at Aintree ridden by the cleverest jockeys in the world.
His poor old geriatric dad stared as if happiness hemmed him in and there was nothing to worry about. And so here he was, Alfred, taking the useless old bore to where he could die in peace and be no more bother.
A man such as himself, fifty last birthday, should not be beholden to this batty old chap who had gaffered him since birth and only stopped now that he drooled and forgot what he said from one minute to the next, though he sometimes came to and recalled in marvellous detail what his old so-and-so of a father had said when he was five years of age.
His eyes might not see much but he had wandering hands. ‘I can’t put up with it any longer,’ Betty from next door said. ‘I don’t mind tidying the place up after him and giving him his dinner, but he puts his hands all over me when I’m standing at the stove cooking his stew. He touches me – well, you know, in all them places.’
Sexual harassment, wasn’t that what they called it nowadays? ‘I’ll have a word with him.’ His sigh would have blown down Parliament.
‘I wish you would.’
‘I’ll tell him to put more time in on his garden. That’ll give him something to take his mind off it.’
‘Yes, do tell him. I try, but he don’t do as I say.’
Well, he wouldn’t, would he, because you’re only the cleaning woman, aren’t you? And why he should want to touch a fifty-year-old slag with five grown kids and a figure like a bag of Nutty Ashless God alone knows, though I suppose he thinks you’re Joan Bakewell or somebody like that.
‘Do you know, Father, I think I’ll take you to see our Brian down in Bournemouth for a few days.’
Percy looked up from a topless dolly on Page Three, eyes glinting at the prospect of seeing some real ones on the beaches. ‘I should like that. Bournemouth’s a nice place, or so I’ve always heard.’
He leered, fingers already roaming. Alfred slapped them down. You had to be sorry. You might be like that yourself one day – though he hoped he’d be able to blow his brains out first – but at the moment he was a bit of a pest, causing so much bother when he needed every minute to organize the coming and going of his dozen lorries, keep them on the road every day so as to make the firm pay. Finding a woman willing to look after him had meant all sorts of trouble and expense, but now he had to be put away, helped to pack his suitcase for the longest weekend ever known in his lifetime.
He hadn’t been senile while sorting his kit, because he thought he was going to see Brian. He imagined pivoting a telescope onto the beach – as if women sported nude in midwinter, and him not feeling the difference any more between hot and cold. His wavering hands indicated the snowflakes. ‘Are we there already?’
‘I think we’re going to be stranded.’
‘I love snow. We used to play in it when we was kids. We chucked it at each other till we couldn’t feel our fingers. Do you know, Alfred, we used to put stones in the snowballs, or bits of coal. Caught each other a treat on the noddles. Gang against gang it was. Ah, you’re only young once.’
Tell me another. Alfred glanced at him. He had been a pit engineer, a tall strong man, with five kids who no longer wanted to own him, and a wife who was dead and buried. Alfred recalled him in his domineering glory, a pain in the arse to everyone with his mixture of beer-swilling and womanizing when he had half the chance, and now there was the job of putting him out of the way because he could neither be looked after nor take care of himself. Brian was in Bournemouth, Ted was in Australia, Arthur was dead in a car smash, and Phil in Scotland was like the rest who wanted nothing to do with him. So he had to be boarded out, and wasn’t going to Bournemouth at all, but Bognor, though he wouldn’t know the difference once he was among the other geriatrics.
It was hard to say when they would get there, with this little lot coming down. He didn’t relish getting stuck, because even though the old man might perish as quietly as a lamb, maybe he himself would go under as well, which wasn’t on the cards at all if he could help it. They would have to stop at the next civilized outpost, and set off again in the morning. ‘Are you cold, Father?’ He changed gear, hoping to get up the hill. ‘Cold, Dad?’ he shouted.
‘All right, don’t break my ear-drum. I’m as warm as toast in here.’
You would be. No sense, no feeling.
‘Are you cold, Alfred?’
The old bugger was normal again, which pressed on Alfred’s heart and made him fit to weep. ‘No, Father. I’m OK.’
‘A bit o’ weather makes me feel young again. I courted your mother when it was like this. Kisses warmed us both. The smell of her coat with melted snow on the cloth, and flakes of it on her lovely fair hair. You can’t forget things such as that, not till the day after you’re dead, Alfred. Her lips were cold, but her heart was hot and rosy. She had breath like strawberry leaves.’
‘You’ve had a long life, Father.’
He touched his son’s hand on the steering wheel, held on warmly. ‘Not long enough, my old son. Anyway, I feel young still, don’t you worry.’
He was relieved when the grip relaxed. I suppose everybody does, till they kick the bucket. Percy showed himself awake, to prove he hadn’t been asleep, or inattentive, or in any way wandering. ‘The cottages we lived in when we was young shared a pump, and I would take a bucket out at five in the morning to dip my head in before walking three miles to work. It livened me up no end.’
Alfred felt close enough to follow his thoughts, knew the great effort made by his father, who in turn sensed that Alfred had understood, so he laid his head back into a rest he reckoned he deserved because of the willpower used. Nobody was going to think him senile if he could help it.
Alfred saw lights, and the hotel sign. It wasn’t safe to go any further. He turned into the courtyard of a posh-looking hostelry called The White Cavalier Hotel, making his own tracks and parking between a car and a van. What the hell there was – or had been, or would ever be – to laugh about in this wide world he would never know, but lugging your semi-crackpot of a dad from one e
nd of the country to the other, a man you had loved as much as yourself and even more – and hated even worse, at times – was no joke at all. Tears came while saying: ‘Come on, wake up, Father. We’re here, for a while, anyway.’
NINE
‘Send a St Bernard dog if I fall down and sprain a kneecap.’ Eileen pantomimed a sluggish curving track towards the distant glimmer, nothing important in life except wanting to survive, a force buried deep enough to be undisturbed by any levity. ‘I would drink its brandy, then send it back for more while I had a little zizz.’
‘You’d die,’ he shouted, finding her tone more acceptable when she was trying to be funny, ‘from hypothermia.’
‘Who’s he when he’s at home? One of them Latin doctors?’ She clutched his hand. ‘If I died I might wake up and live. I’ve been waiting all my life for that.’
What else she said the jealous wind took away. The cold went through his boots, a poultice of water against flesh. Her feet must be beyond stone, though at twenty years younger he supposed she felt yet didn’t feel.
Steely-tipped dust stung his cheeks. She pulled him because the wind had gone mad. Let her think she was helping, but the foot-deep icy floss clutched her knees as they pushed a way to the door. Under the outside light he watched her bony face, deprived for generations, a phosphorous intensity in her visage that he might only witness again if they passed whatever was left of their lives together – a strange idea. Their faces close, he touched her cold lips with a finger, then she drew closer and they kissed, she holding him tight, both wondering why, even whether they had kissed at all in the bitter flurry of the wind.
Feet on fire and arms aching, she wanted shelter and warmth, drew apart and pulled the dopey sod on so’s they wouldn’t be all night in the deep freeze. It wasn’t so bad for him with a warm coat and solid boots, but for her it was chronic – as she gave her best smile and hoped it would have some effect. Her fingers found the latch, and when she vanished before him he followed inside.
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