‘You mean your wife gave it to you.’ She didn’t want his lighter, nice as it was. She could always buy a box of matches and read the joke on the back. ‘I don’t care. All nice men are married.’
‘Are they?’ He sounded so angry that she wondered what his wife was like, and how his wife’s face would change to wild and fierce if she suddenly opened the door and saw what they were about to do. And then she thought maybe we shouldn’t do it, it’s wrong, but nothing can stop us, she told herself, whatever we think, because I love him and he loves me, and it’s all right for his wife to turn funny about it, but she’s got all the nice things of the world and I’ve got nothing but this and me and where I am, though whether I really love him I can’t yet tell. ‘Married men know how to look after women, don’t they?’
‘I’m not so sure about that.’
‘Well, they’ve had practice.’
He hoped her assumption would turn out to be right.
‘You are married, aren’t you? That’s why I said it. I don’t know any other married men. I never have. I just supposed.’ She seemed upset, a blush showing the promise of some sensibility.
‘I feel as if I’ve known you a long time,’ he said.
‘Why don’t you take the rest of your kit off, then?’
With women more or less of his own sort he would have had them off in an instant, but because he had never known anyone like her he needed to take more care, to seem polished and reasonable in his behaviour. He couldn’t decide why. It would be easy to flash-fuck her, and leave it at that. ‘You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. I mean it.’
‘Hold me, then. Nobody’s said that to me before. I thought you thought I was awful. I thought you thought I was a bucket of Aids or something. Anyway, I’m not, I’m clean. I’ve never been with anybody like that.’
He kissed her lips, not caring to be a lousy bastard who gave such an impression, and she gripped him as if never to let go, teeth pressing against his lips.
‘Your cigarette’s burning the table.’ He eased her away. ‘Put it in the ashtray, or’ – he conjured up something she would understand – ‘it’ll be another fifty pounds on my bill.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Not that it would faze me.’ He wanted to make amends. ‘But it’s a pity to ruin the table.’ He was going to add: as gimcrack as it is, but he didn’t because to her it might seem the best of furniture. While she carefully pressed out her cigarette he took off his trousers and pants, drew the curtains. ‘To stop the snowmen peering in.’
‘You look good with no clothes on.’ She eyed him from across the room as if he were a specimen she hadn’t seen before either. ‘You aren’t fat, are you?’
‘I try not to be.’
‘I mean, at the belly.’
‘I take exercise.’
She smiled. ‘With dumb-bells?’
‘I jump up and down. I go swimming. I play squash.’
‘Whereabouts?’
‘At my club.’
‘Just so’s you won’t get fat?’
‘I do it to keep healthy.’
She was staring again. ‘Your nose – it’s got a bend in the middle.’
He laughed. ‘So it has. I got it broken a few times at boxing.’
‘In the ring?’
‘No, at school. And in the army. I broke a few, as well.’
‘I’m sure you did.’ She drew him onto the bed. ‘It makes you more good-looking!’
FOURTEEN
Daniel’s mother had said that a watched pot never boiled. He had proved her wrong. The saucepan spilled over and the stew was ruined. When she said a clock hand didn’t move if you looked at it he spent the hour of her absence making sure that it did. Recalling such wayward experiments of childhood, the sustaining fire at his back and the soothing timemark of the grandfather clock demanded that he act instead of mindlessly waiting.
A glance through the window showed the snowstorm in a state of St Vitus’s dance, a growth in the all-enclosing drifts. His resolution was broken by knowing that to go into it meant death. Though patience beat the stew to the boil, and forced the minute-hand of the clock to move, living at such a slow rate if you wanted something to happen was tantamount to sloth.
His patience was born out of a rock, solidified early on after fire had come into collision with ice, indicating that he was in no way the same as other people. Anything which set him apart helped to make the disguise, to consolidate the split which enabled him to live as a schoolteacher while devoting his other half to the Cause. He distrusted anyone who assumed they had something in common with him, lest they divine his infinite capacity for patience and probe into what he was trying to conceal. Being two people allowed him to peer out through a facade that others assumed to be all of him. He spoke, but his real voice stayed silent, the voice he used being a cover to keep the other quiet. Such mechanism made plain hinted that his ability to dissimulate might be about to desert him.
‘The only thing to do on such a night,’ Parsons said, ‘is to get a few drinks inside you.’
The third whisky which had encouraged Daniel towards speculation also told him that they must know by now that he would not be delivering the van. He was lost, and they had no way of getting at him. ‘You’re probably right.’
‘Probably!’ Parsons said scornfully. ‘There’s not much else you can do. I wouldn’t mind a party, though. A real slap-up raving mad-night to shiver the floorboards and flip the roof off – no holds barred. What do you say, Jenny?’
‘Make your own party. I’m tired.’
‘Why don’t you go upstairs for a kip, then?’
‘I’ll go when I’m ready. I’m not your wife, poor thing.’
‘I ought to nobble you for that uncalled-for remark. I love my wife, and she loves me.’ He drained the rest of his jar and, when Fred showed at the door, asked for another. Fred came with alacrity, deciding that the best he could do was let them drink themselves sleepy (it was also good for business) and then go off to bed, so that he could put all lights off and turn in himself.
‘I’m a full-time trade union official,’ Parsons called to Aaron, ‘and she’s driving me back to nappies. She thinks I’m after her.’ A hiccup jerked his whole head, hand to his mouth while pulling the chair closer to Aaron. ‘Well, who wouldn’t be? I ask you. I’m only flesh and blood. Or I was last time I looked.’ A whisper, but clear enough for her, as he tapped his breast pocket. ‘I’ve still got near two thousand quid in union money, and I would give every last penny for ten minutes with her. But ten real minutes, you know. A handful of lovely fifty-pound notes with our dear Queen’s head printed on them – all ready for disbursement! Come on, my duck, lift your pretty finger and say yes.’
He had disturbed her desert heart, as most men did when they spoke to her. ‘Leave me alone.’
Percy appeared at the door, white hair wispy as if his head boiled and steam came out. His blank eyes took on a sudden glitter, cheeks putty-like, a scrap of pink paper resting on a small circle of blood from a shaving wound below the left ear. Lips pursed, as if about to whistle a tune out of bygone years that no one in the room could know, he walked erect and steady to the nearest chair, and held onto the back.
‘You should be in bed, Dad.’ Fred just avoided a wave of his arm, wondering whether the old codger wasn’t either drunk or mad.
‘I want a double whisky and a black-and-tan,’ Percy said. ‘And don’t call me Dad. I’m Mr.Stone to you, and never forget it.’
‘At least somebody knows how to knock back the booze,’ Parsons said, as if any recruit would be valid for his wild shindig.
Daniel also called for another whisky. ‘It’s rare to find someone who knows what he wants.’ And lets nothing block his way till he gets it.
‘I’ve always known what I want,’ Parsons said with drunken pride.
‘How about you?’ Aaron asked Jenny.
‘I’ll have some coffee, then.’
‘Coffee!’ Par
sons screamed. ‘Well, I never! Why don’t you thaw yourself out with a brandy at least? Or a nice tot of rum?’
‘Because I don’t want to.’ I love my desert heart, she told herself. It keeps me safe.
‘Ladies should only drink champagne,’ Percy said.
‘By God, you’re right. Why didn’t I think of that?’ Parsons said. ‘Champagne! I’m too bloody slow, that’s my trouble. A sheltered life I’ve had, well, except when me and the lads went on delegations to Communist countries, then we had some fine old times, I can tell you.’ He let his head roll, and looked at the ceiling as if a map of his travels might be printed there. Then his eyes came back to the horizontal: ‘What good times they was! But they don’t do it any more, I’m sorry to say. I’ve been smashed in Moscow, sloshed in Sofia, kay-lied in Leningrad, paralytic in Prague, blindo in East Berlin, and blotto in Bucharest. A group from our area went to Lake Baikal once. They took us on a bus from Irkutsk. We was already drunk, and still had two bottles of duty-free. When me and a bloke from Barnsley fell through the ice we was still singing “The Internationale” when the Russians fished us out! The sturgeon and the caviar we scoffed, and the vodka we put back! It don’t bear thinking about, except that it does on a lousy night like this. The comrades used to try and drink us under the table for the sake of international peace and friendship. Drink to this, and drink to that. Toast after toast. Working-class solidarity was all the rage, and we meant it, though it’s all over now. But we could hold our own with the booze, I can tell you. We used to drink champagne as well. Yes, my love, I’ll get you a bottle of bubbly, but real French, none of that Russian stuff. There’s nowt like it to cheer you up.’
‘Don’t bother.’
‘“Don’t bother” she says. It ain’t no bother.’ He set a fifty-pound note on the beer mat. ‘That’s for us. And don’t say I never look after you.’ He wagged a finger, which she found common and hateful.
‘I’ll try not to,’ she said wearily.
‘Because I do. You’re never out of my mind. I always think of others. That’s the way I was brought up. My mother, God bless her, she used to din it into me as a lad. “Always think of others,” she would say, “then somebody will be there to think of you when you’re in trouble.” She was lovely, my mam was. “You only get out of life what you put into it,” she told me, and she was right. She worked her fingers to the bone, she did, but a lot the old man cared.’ His voice broke, as if a cinder burned in his throat which needed the liquid of a sob to put it out. ‘He only wanted his pint, or a quart if he could get it. He treated my mother like dirt – till I grew up and put him in his place.’
‘You’re maudlin.’ Percy was loud and clear. ‘Drunk and sentimental. The worst thing a man can be. A person’s only as good as what a person gets, that’s all I know.’
Enid came in with a tray of sandwiches, and the old man put his arm out like a train signal, a brush at her skirt happily unnoticed except by Aaron, who dwelt on the fracas between age and beauty if by any chance the hand had touched her legs.
FIFTEEN
A hum came from a refrigerator, lulling yet melancholy, otherwise silence. At half-past nine no one was willing to go to bed, as if all that could happen hadn’t yet done so: reading, dozing, staring into space or up at the ceiling to create their own versions of past and present. During his marriage Aaron had worried about his sister Beryl, which may have been why he did not stay married long. And yet, forcibly kept from her by the gale, instead of thinking about his uncertain future, he felt wonderfully calm. The whisky had subdued his toothache, and he knew that he should observe whatever went on so that he would have something to tell her beyond another dull garnering of books along the staid south coast.
What he was waiting for he did not know. To have neither plans nor hope was a living death in this uncanny tomb of snow, but because he was a forger of signatures and a falsifier of manuscripts the police would be waiting when he got home. Even so, for the moment anyway, he was unable to care that the future was murky and uncertain.
Fred drew the flimsy curtains, as if to protect them from prowling nightmares beyond the glass. Outside the range of the fire the air was bleak, unless you had a few tots glowing inside you. Aaron’s feet were so cold he got up to pace, but it was like walking in buckets of ice.
No windows fastened flush. Cracks brought singsong windtone, a cat’s moan for kittens doomed. He went up the creaking stairs and into his room for a packet of cigars, then out again, a drone of talk and a girl’s laughter from behind a door. His weight did not let him tread lightly. Back from a dead end along another corridor he heard a prolonged high cry as if out of a bad dream, though he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a trick of the wind in this old Aeolian harp of a place.
A small window looked out of the back, and his hose almost touching drew a snow smell through the glass. The frosted oblong bulb above the shed door cast a glow around the nearest drifts, cars only recognizable as vehicles on the lee side. Snowbits diagonally floated then turned up as if seeing no purpose in completing their journey, an advance guard of spies with enough to report.
A light shone, and he heard the grind of an engine, and a van pulled slowly into the yard, stopped side-on against the wall, and three men in helmets and black jackets jumped into the snow like a local police team wanting to see that all was well at the hotel. Or they had come for him, to get him even here, except that there was no blue light, and the men were scooping snow to throw at each other, stick people supernaturally animated, he couldn’t think from where.
One filled his helmet and tried putting it on the head of another, who avoided it by leaping away. They were like soldiers who, having subdued a strongpoint, were celebrating that they were still alive. He marvelled at the resilience of the young, let the curtain go, and went back to the lounge, where two flattish glasses on slim stems waited, one on either side, as Parsons turned the bottle slowly clockwise, pressing the ball of his thumb forcefully against the steel-capped dome of the cork, easing it so subtly out of the neck, Aaron and Jenny assuming that at the precise second he would remove the cork then calmly decant the amber liquid.
Fred recognized his nihilistic glint. ‘If you damage my ceiling, you’ll pay for it.’ Enid ran for the door as if it wasn’t the first time she had been close to such an experiment.
Tom could let the cork out silently, with a skill he had often seen in others, when the opening smoke preceded the tamed liquid into a glass, or let the cork fly along any spectacular trajectory of his choice.
Aaron considered the uncertainty to be half the fun, and when Tom tilted the bottle as if it were a gun the cork hit the fireplace like a shell exploding in the desert, sending up a cloud of ash. Then by a twist of the hand he put the spout over a glass and didn’t lose a drop.
Percy looked up from his whisky and water. ‘Nowt but a show-off, if you ask me.’
‘Here’s to you!’ Parsons beamed good luck on them all. ‘There’s no better drink this time of the year. A tot of the old bubbly, and then to bed. When we wake it might be summer.’
She clinked his glass, a bare touch but he was more than happy. With her you had to measure progress in millimetres, which was something good to be said for metric.
‘I expect it’ll make me sleep,’ she said, but immediately recalled something close to a giggle as she heard her voice say it.
Aaron stood at the bar. ‘It’s amazing that people are still turning up. I can’t imagine how they get here.’
A splash of whisky onto wood, and Daniel couldn’t speak for a moment, gripping one hand with the other to stop the shakes. ‘People? What people?’
‘Oh, three lads. Would you believe it? They’re throwing snowballs at each other. It must be marvellous to be young.’
‘You’re never anything else,’ Tom Parsons shouted, ‘if you’re worth half your salt, eh, Mr Stone?’
But Percy was in the desert of the wandering, head back and mouth open, mind gone to where no one could gue
ss. ‘Just leave him,’ Alfred said. ‘He’s never much trouble.’
Daniel looked out of a front window, drifts building across the road. A single snowflake had lost its way, so went back up as if to join the Gadarene rush elsewhere. Such a winter seemed new to him, though he took it as a sign of getting old when you thought the weather patterns were changing. From feeling free of trouble he was overwhelmed by anxiety, and went back to the tables. ‘How did they get here?’
‘They looked like bikers,’ Aaron said, ‘but I think they came in a van.’
‘We passed ’em a few hours ago,’ Percy called. ‘I told you already. A Commer van in a lay-by. They were having the time of their lives, but who wouldn’t? I got up to some right tricks at their age. I never told you, did I, Alfred?’
Parsons poured Jenny a second glass. ‘It’s the one drink that makes me want to live for ever, and I hope it does the same to you.’
‘I only want it to put me to sleep.’
‘Sleep! She wants to sleep! You’ll get all the sleep you need after you’re dead. Life’s for wearing yourself out, for the big cosy bed in Heaven!’
‘I wish you’d all go to sleep.’ Fred had heard on the radio that there were twelve-foot drifts in the county. If he jumped into one from the roof he would be lost to the world, as if he had never existed, because there would still be seven feet under him. Yet he didn’t want to sleep, either, as if psychic emanations from the vast padding of snow were keeping the eyes open, the senses expectant. In the last big snowstop of a few years ago, all those stranded had gone upstairs like zombies by nine o’clock, unable to stay awake. It was hard to say what made this fall so different.
Daniel peered out of the back window into the beautiful pure world, thinking of the dismal black slush when the thaw came. Where had the bikers gone? Maybe people were imagining weirdos and jack-o’-lanterns shaped out of the snow, clothed and given life by some malignant god to torment him alone.
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