The Ice Age

by Margaret Drabble

  The prisoners and their visitors met in a canteen. They could have cups of tea. There was an anteroom where children were left: it contained some battered wooden toys and a chewed teddy bear or two, and looked not unlike the waiting room in an East End children’s hospital where Anthony had once had to sit with a girlfriend and her sick toddler. Desolate, defeated, ill. Each prisoner was allowed only one visitor at a time, so Anthony waited while Maureen went in: he waited with a row of other relatives and friends, some of whom were smoking nervously, some of whom stared at the floor, some of whom chatted, old hands, old friends, used to the pilgrimage. Overhearing, Anthony learned that a new bus service had been laid on by the social services from the nearest town; that the wife of a man named Darren had had nonidentical twins; that the wife of a man named George had shacked up with another fellow and that nobody was to let George know or there’d be trouble. Only the women talked, he noticed. As in a hospital, the visiting men—fathers, brothers, sons?—sat silently, grim, depressed, a strange array of physical types: small workingmen, bent old men, raw big young men. But the women had made a little home for themselves, even here, even in a waiting room. Some had brought their knitting, and they gossiped and exchanged the small coins of living, making something out of nothing, making a little company even out of this grim sojourn.

  Anthony had never felt very much at ease visiting the sick. Maybe he was as bad at it as these miserable-looking men, in their caps and scarves, with their cheap tobacco. What can one say to a person in a hospital bed, to a person in a prison? What can one tell them of the outside world that they will not bitterly resent? And how can one enter their own inner world? Two memories nudged at him, uneasily: a day at school, a Sunday, when his parents had come for the weekend to visit, to take him out for lunch, and he had sat in the local hotel eating Sunday lunch, beef and horseradish, trying desperately to think of something, anything, to say to these estranged parents, while his mind returned incessantly to the only thing that interested him, which was his never-to-be declared passion for his French master’s wife; a visit to Babs in hospital, after a D and C, when she had lain there still gray from the anesthesia and had talked to him with immense animation about fibroids and hysterectomies and mastectomies and all the other gynecological dramas of the ward, and he had been so grateful to dear sweet Babs for doing all the talking, for he had not the faintest idea of what he ought to say, what could one say, amongst those long white rows of suffering women? He must see Kitty Friedmann one day, he supposed.

  But now, Len Wincobank. He need not have worried about Len. He took Maureen’s place at the small table, and there Len was, himself still, not mysteriously transformed into a beaten-looking cloth-capped Northerner, as Anthony had irrationally feared. He looked fit, even lively. They shook hands, warmly, smiled, stared, smiled again. “Well, how is it?” said Len. “How are things?” And before Anthony knew where he was, he was telling Len the whole story of the Riverside deal, of Giles’s offer, of his own precarious finances, about his anxiety about the Erikson bank calling in its loan.

  Len listened, nodded, calculated, asked questions, added up in his head. Then he stopped and thought. Then he said—and as he spoke, Anthony knew exactly what he was going to say, but knew it only because he had, in some way, participated in Len’s silent additions, his silent assessments—he said, “Don’t touch it. Don’t touch it, man. Hang on. Don’t touch it. What would he make you an offer like that for, if he didn’t have something better for himself up his sleeve?”

  “But he was,” said Anthony feebly, a last throw, “he is an old friend.”

  Len smiled. “I’m not saying he isn’t,” he said. “But there are friends and friends in this world, aren’t there?”

  And there it was. It was so. Giles was trying to doublecross him. It was, of course, perfectly obvious. That was the kind of man Giles was. He had never claimed to be anything else.

  “All right, then,” said Anthony. “I’ll hang on.”

  “You trust my word,” said Len. “You wait and see. You’ve got to be a good judge of character in this business. You can’t afford to make mistakes. You can’t afford to remember that people are your friends. If they’re not.”

  Then Len lowered his voice, dramatically. “See that guy over there?” he said, nodding toward an elderly silver-haired gentleman, of strikingly different demeanor from most of the rest of the room’s occupants—for even Len, well though he looked, did not look exactly a gentleman, and never had. “Do you know who that is?”

  Anthony stared, as politely as possible. The man did indeed look familiar, but he could not place him.

  “That’s Callander,” said Len, in the same conspiratorial whisper. Anthony stared with renewed curiosity. So that was Callander: corrupted city architect.

  “What fascinating people you meet in here,” said Anthony. “What’s he like?”

  Len shook his head, pitying. “Can’t adapt, poor fellow. Too old. Can’t really believe it happened to him. Goes on and on about the dinners at the Rotary Club. Poor old boy. A terrible bore.”

  “You seem to have adapted all right,” said Anthony, risking a personal comment.

  “Oh, I’m all right, I get by. But I’m more at home in this kind of company, aren’t I? I’ll tell you what, I’m thinking of organizing a strike. About the heating. Bloody freezing it’s been in here this last week, we’ll all die of hypothermia if it goes on like this, and then what a scandal that would be. Do you know, there’s ice on the inside of the windows every morning? It’s a scandal. I’ve made suggestions, if they double glazed they’d halve the fuel bills, if they installed a Stafford heating system they’d save themselves thousands of pounds a year, and a lot of fuel. But they’re an unpatriotic lot, the officers. Don’t care about the energy crisis.” Len grinned. “So I’m thinking of organizing a little protest.”

  “Would people co-operate?”

  “Some of them would. Of course, there’s always those who are afraid of losing remission, or being refused parole, but there’s a lot of feeling about the cold at the moment. The time is ripe. Strike while the iron is hot. Or cold, as it might be.” He grinned, confident, ambivalent, amused by the image of himself, apostle of free enterprise, as union organizer.

  “We used to have ice on the inside of our bedroom windows at school,” said Anthony. “And we paid several hundred pounds a year for the privilege.”

  Len laughed. “They’re paying more than a few hundred a year to keep each one of us in here,” he said. “It’s a very uneconomic system. Perhaps I’ll go into prison building when I get out. I could give them a bit of really valuable advice, if only they’d listen.”

  “It’s a relief to see you looking so well,” said Anthony.

  “Christ, man,” said Len, “one’s got to keep going. And it’s not so bad. Nothing’s as bad as you think it’s going to be. And how’s Maureen? Keeping all right, would you say?”

  “She’s a good girl,” said Anthony. “She’s all right. She seems all right.”

  “When I get out,” said Len, “we’ll have a party. You hang on to that site, and see what happens in the next few months. And then, when I get out, we’ll have the best party you ever went to in your life. And then, I’ll begin again. I did it once, I’ll do it again. It’s the first time that’s difficult.”

  “You’re a confident man,” said Anthony. “I’m beginning to think I can’t have been cut out for this kind of life. I can’t stand the strain.”

  Len looked at him curiously. “I don’t know about that,” he said. “I wouldn’t be able to say, about you. I’d have thought you’d got better nerves than you think you have.”

  Anthony was flattered. No doubt about it, he admired Len Wincobank. Len had quite cheered him up, although that wasn’t what he was supposed to have come for.

  Len, returning to the dull routine after the excitement of visitors, writing labels for small trees in the well-heated greenhouse; working out a few telling phrases about th
e fact that it was warmer in the greenhouse than in the prison canteen, why put trees before men; thinking of Maureen, wondering if she’d stay with him, stick by him, wondering how much he’d mind if she didn’t, you couldn’t expect a woman to lay off for two years, thinking of her round bottom and her oddly sexy fondness for knee socks: even in this bitter weather she had bare thighs, from the top of her boots up under her skirt to that other place he’d managed to grab under the table; thinking of Anthony, Giles Peters, the I.D. Company, trying to rationalize his certainty that Giles was up to no good—if he thought about it enough, the answer would come to him, even in here he could still think, his instinct was still sound, he would guess right because he knew he was right—sweating, even in the cold, with frustration at his distance from the action; picturing Maureen and Anthony driving back together, alone, alone together, across the lonely moor. Absconding prisoners had been known to die of exposure on the lonely moor. There were gruesome prison stories, some true, some legendary. But Anthony and Maureen were going back to a house, a house with heating, and drinks, and double beds, and stairs (how one missed stairs), and doors that one could open and shut at will, and a television (he supposed wrongly that they had a television) that one could switch from channel to channel at will. Still, no point in complaining, as some did, that one should have appreciated these blessings more while one had access to them. It would have been impossible to have appreciated them more than Len Wincobank had done. A war baby, an adolescent of the years of austerity, with an invalid father and a mother who worked in the municipal washhouse in one of the worst paid jobs known to woman, he had certainly appreciated every blessing of the material life. The day they had electricity installed. He could actually remember it. The addition of bathroom and lav by the council. The day that his mum had bought a new table lamp, with a base like a dancing woman, and a plastic rippled shade: how Len had loved that lamp, the elegant glow of it, the discreet pool of warm light, the intense homely charm, the safety, the beauty. The turkey at Christmas, the extravagant Sunday roasts and Yorkshire pudding, the odd bar of scented soap, the trip to Scunthorpe, the piece of stair carpet—secondhand, but good as new—the whipped Carnation milk, as a treat, on the tinned fruit, for Sunday tea. Every little luxury Len had enjoyed, admired, and as he and his brothers started to work, began to bring home pay packets, how miraculously easy and warm life had become, with a hired television set, a new radiogram, and even, finally, a telephone, which had frightened his mother at first so much that whenever it rang she would jump up in her seat, rigid with alarm, and say imploringly, “You go, Len—or you, Kev, or you, Arthur.” How Len had loved the slow easing of the fifties, the glories of the sixties. And now here he sat, writing labels, as though back at school, his hands warm enough to write because too much frost would kill the little trees.

  Anthony and Maureen. They had had lunch, they said, somewhat guiltily, in the Queen’s Hotel. He thought of Leeds station. The fast train to London. He thought of Alison Murray, stranded in a foreign town, unable to speak a word of the language. Now that was a situation in which he, capable though he was, would never be able to cope.

  Trains. Airplanes. The modern world. Concorde, a beautiful glittering white angel of our time. Park Hill. The Hancock building. His mind worked. Leeds station. Northam station. Color supplements rhapsodizing about Broad Street and Marylebone Station, both obsolete spots, useless beyond anything. Yes. Suddenly he had it. Stations. Northam station. Building. All that waste space plashed into his head, like a whole three-dimensional map, ripe with possibility. That was it. If only nobody touched it till he got out. But they wouldn’t, they couldn’t, not with a recession like this, not with money as tight as this. No, no, nobody but himself would ever have thought of what should be done. How extraordinarily slow other people are. How slow he had been till this instant. Nobody would ever see it. Blocks rose and glittered in his mind. Look what a balls-up they had made, not building offices over Euston. How could he have missed it? Northam station. There were two stations in Northam, the old L.N.E.R., and the old L.M.S., one of which was now obsolete and disused, except for the occasional shunted goods train. The whole lump needed developing, desperately needed rebuilding. And a lot of that space didn’t even belong to the notoriously difficult (but surely desperately hard up?) British Rail. Some of it belonged to Batleys, the brewers, who also owned the old station hotel which looked like a BR hotel but wasn’t one—the old Royal Northern, stranded now by the disuse of the L.N.E.R. station, for it was too far to walk with a suitcase to the trains, too near to get a cab—oh yes, down would come the Royal Northern, up would go a new complex. He could see it all. He knew exactly what they wanted there. Hotel, shops (covered center?) office accommodation. Car park. Cinema? By 1978, when he was out again, the money would be on the move again, and they would be begging for him to come back and tell them what to do.

  Cupressus, he wrote on a little label. Prison labor is uneconomic, designed partly to waste time, he suspected. But he was damned if he was going to apply himself to a useful trade, and join the queue of those respectable prisoners who wanted to learn carpentry, printing, electronics. He had a trade already. He was a man of vision. Meanwhile, he would write little labels.

  It would be a pity to pull down the Royal Northern. It had been in its day, before the line was closed, the finest hotel in Northam. And it was still fine, fine and faded. High rooms, flowered wallpaper, an enormous staircase, some real marble and some fake marble, ancient waiters of great servility and gentility, chambermaids of fifty in black dresses with white aprons, high beds, white sheets, and those huge white dense old-fashioned pillows that one never finds except in such places. All that would have to go. England had undoubtedly been great in the days when the Royal Northern prospered. Len had worked there for a month, in the school holidays: laying carpet, putting up trestle tables for municipal functions, then dressing himself up like a monkey in a damnfool red jacket with brass buttons and collecting tips from drunken old aldermen and town councillors and freemasons. They would all have to go, too. The catering trade, the laundry business, and hair dressing are three of the worst paid jobs in Britain, and he, Maureen, and his mum had had a go at all three. Who would spend a life at that? He regretted nothing. He had had a go, he would do it again. Nobody would stop him. The material paradise. Find me a better one, thought Len Wincobank, and I’ll pursue it. But meanwhile, this one will keep me busy.

  The labels were finished. Soya bean shepherd’s pie for supper, very nourishing. The automatic sprinklers started up, spreading a fine warm spray over the tiny plants, over the working men. Len walked down the aisle to tell the officer he had finished, pausing to glance at the little cupressi. They had taken nicely. Little exiles, from a warmer clime, unnaturalized, little green-gray sprigs, branching bravely, like dry seaweed, delicate survivors, blue and gray and green, no leaves, but dry tight curled sprigs and needles, tough as well as delicate. Evergreen. Outside, the thick frost lay on the moor, on the brown heather and the bog cotton and the long dry reeds. Maureen and Anthony would be home by now. I can’t stand asking this mean-minded bugger permission to leave and go to the hut. I want just to walk out, without asking. I want to be my own man.

  But it’s not much worse, he said to himself, than National Service. What if it were for life?

  Anthony and Maureen got back after dark. She was to stay the night: it was Friday, no work in the morning. I’ll cook you a supper, she had announced cheerily, so they had stopped in Blickley for her to do some shopping. She had disappeared into the International Home Stores (part of a complex built, Anthony remembered, by Max Friedmann’s company in 1959, and very flourishing it looked, though not very esthetic) and came out again with a lot of plastic bags, sniffing hard; when she had shoved the bags in the back seat she sat down again by Anthony and sniffed and blew her nose and cried. Her nose tended to turn red in the cold at the best of times, and after a good cry it looked quite raw. “Oh, I do look a fright,” said
Maureen, getting out her powder compact and miraculously restoring the whole thing to a fairly normal color.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Poor old Len. It was so fucking cold. Wasn’t it?”

  “He’ll survive. He’s very tough.”

  “Some of them looked a bit weedy, though, didn’t they? And I bet they get a rotten supper. And just think of us, with that nice steak, and then this lovely frozen chicken.”

  “Never mind, love,” he said, and reached for her hand: they held hands, crossing the dark moor.

  “What a funny place to end up,” said Maureen, laughing uneasily as they wound their way up the last stretch of very frosty, very minor road.

  “I haven’t ended up yet," said Anthony, who was afraid he might have done just that.

  And to cheer them up, he switched on the car radio. By some unpleasant trick of fate, an American singer was belting out with heartfelt passion the song about tying yellow ribbons on the old oak tree:

  I’m coming home, I’ve done my time,

  I’ve learned to know what is and isn’t mine . . .

  It’s been three long years, do you still want me?

  he groaned, and they sat it out, to the end, where the whole damn bus was cheering at the hundred yellow ribbons round the old oak tree, and Anthony found himself near tears also, and Maureen naturally began to overflow again.