Snowstop

THIRTY

The back door was as much in the lee of the tempest as any part of the hotel could be, Keith nevertheless leading Wayne and Lance into a meteorological topsy-turvyness similar to when he had yachted with boat-loving colleagues in gales around the Orkneys. The spirit was with them and the flesh was also willing, but icy snowbits drove against their cheeks, and Keith wished he too had a helmet instead of a balaclava around his head. Wayne and Lance wielded their spades and chopped a footpath through waist-high snow till a blade clanged against the back door of the van.

Lance mouthed a joke no one heard, the flashlight brushing his visor, sound stopping all but their own Royal Banshee shouts of glee. Keith did not know who was who: one at the side door hammering with the spade handle to break the ice that crusted it shut, while whoever other it was slid between the van and the wall and after a few uppercuts with the handle opened a door.

He got in and lay flat across the seat, pulling himself up like a spayed animal. One out and one in, between them they forced the other door to slide back, a thud that sounded out the wind. They sat in a row, damp upholstery and mock leather smelling above the cold, snow padding the windscreen. ‘Now what?’

Lance turned the key in the ignition, and the dull red spot came on and then went out, a lifeless click on trying a few more times. ‘Just what I thought. The fucking battery’s as flat as a pancake. Now we’re fucked, and no mistake.’

Keith cleared water from his watchface — at four o’clock. There were two possibilities, he told himself. Only two, but listen, he said to them: ‘Either we find a car ready primed with a full battery and a set of jump leads in the boot so that we can start the motor from a boost out of the good one, or we unload the explosives and fuses into another car in which the engine will start, and drive that one away.’ But there were two disadvantages to consider. The first was that while manhandling the lethal cargo they might disturb it and — goodbye all.

‘Not yet,’ Wayne said. ‘I love the world still.’

The second snag was that a car would be less able to negotiate the snowdrifts than the robust van. So they must get back in the hotel and find out whose car had a full battery, or who thought their car had, and whether or not it was equipped with a set of jump leads to make the transfer of power. The prospect of finding that other car, supposing it existed, and assuming it could be found, and uncovering it from the snow, and manoeuvring it into position to get the two engines close, then opening both bonnets and attaching the jump leads with freezing clumsy fingers was, to put it mildly, awesome.

‘Let’s get moving, then,’ Lance said. ‘My nuts are knocking from the cold, even though they’re twenty-two-carat gold.’

They tumbled into the snow like black polar bears — if there were such things in the Far North — and went back to the porch, while Keith stayed to make certain that the van doors weren’t entirely closed so that they wouldn’t lose the same sweat getting in again.

Wayne kicked and Lance thumped, but the door to the hotel held, their efforts silent in the high pitch of the wind. Keith pushed at solid wood. If every little operation took so long they would still be arsing about by the deadline of eight o’clock. The Yale latch had been on when they came out, and had clicked behind. What they needed was luck, and you put yourself in the way of that only when you worked your hardest. They were willing and capable, so could afford to be hopeful, though all the force they could muster wouldn’t move the door.

Aaron sheltered the last inch of his drink, as if a man out of the desert would come in and slurp it up. He wanted to make it last. The day was dire, he had known from the start that it would be, because every time he saw a word on a signpost or shop door he had tried to say it backwards. He often did this for amusement and to cultivate his dexterity with anagrams, but when the habit persisted, and he was unable to stop, it meant that something irritating or just plain unlucky would occur before the day was out.

Duffle coat, scarves and gloves were heaped on the carpet while he waited for Keith and his myrmidons to come in cursing and exhausted, and tell him to have a go. He did not want to, saw no reason to, they were trapped and there was nothing to be done. The besetting sin of the English was idleness. At least Robert Burton had said so, and Burton should have known, writing but one book in his life. Maybe that makes me more English than most, he thought, because the others are labouring hard enough.

Beryl worked harder, never still, even now she would be sitting at home in the room with the old-fashioned miner’s grate which shone because she black-leaded it every day to make it look traditional. At the table she would check the titles and prices for the next catalogue, or make sure the house accounts were in order. She took note of every penny spent, and of every pound that came in, a rigid framework he liked. Into such a dream world of work, love and lodging he would introduce Enid.

He drank the last of his whisky. He thought it might come back up, but his stomach, like an old friend, let it rest. It was all lies, a pitiable deception of a lost and honest girl, because the offered job did not exist. The police were onto him for forgery. Even without that upheaval Beryl would have said we can’t afford her, the spare room is full of books, she will be more trouble than she’s worth. And he would have to tell her she was right, for to lose Beryl (and she was always threatening to go) would make life untenable. Any rift between them, and she would die, she said at the same time. So might he, the dread of the hostile world on him, because she had become his and his alone.

Every month she stood for hours at the parlour window looking at the moon, weeping at the emptiness of her life, always after days of sullen complaint against everyone she had known: their parents, friends, him — most, he thought, not justified. Or she would rave about slights that had happened so long ago they did not deserve to be remembered, brewing herself into a pitiable crisis of nerves, raving as if a wolf were loose in her, possessed by a longing for the side of the moon she would never see. No inducement, persuasion, or show of affection could break that barrier, every fit as painful to him as if he were witnessing it for the first time.

The end was always the same. Exhausted by unexplainable suffering, she allowed him to lead her to his bed, which he did with intense feelings of shame and joy. In the morning her eyes were clear, brow smooth, heart calm, levity for herself and subtle commiseration for him, and a wistful kind of gratitude that he had helped the storm go by. For him one evil cancelled out another, but what would happen if he took Enid home?

The fire glowed between two half-burnt logs that would never sufficiently meet to give a warming flame, kept that way by Fred’s attack of manic parsimony. Alfred put his father close, laid his cashmere coat across to keep the blood from coagulating unto death. The old man’s teeth clattered like Ezekiel’s bones, stopped and then began again, eyes intently shut as if to let him listen more appreciatively to the rhythm. Alfred eased up his trousers, and the flesh above the socks was of a cold that would keep rising, an ice age in reverse going towards the warmer Pole.

Jenny knew there wasn’t, but had to ask. ‘Is there anything I can do?’

‘He needs a warm hospital,’ and the sight of a lovely-looking nurse or two.

She wondered at the smile when his cheeks were wet with tears. ‘So might the rest of us, before the night’s over.’

Percy’s eyes took time to settle and focus. ‘I should be out there, giving the lads a hand.’

He’ll get at me with his last breath, Alfred thought. He means why aren’t I with them. They don’t need me yet, he could say, but it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference.

Percy called out in self-reproach: ‘But I’m not up to it. I’ve got these awful aches in my shoulders.’

‘Try to rest,’ Alfred said. ‘You’ll be fit to travel in the morning then.’

Aaron thought they should get him upstairs to bed, but Alfred waved him away: ‘I want to keep an eye on him down here.’

Enid was putting the various drinks together, like to like — beer, whisky, wine, gin and sherry. ‘We always do this when we clear up. Fred tips the spirits back in the bottles, but he lets me have the other dregs before I go home. The beer and wine makes me sleep better. Only I’m not going home tonight.’

‘I’ll never get to the palm trees,’ Percy sighed. ‘I know it’s a geriatrics’ home you’re taking me to, and who wants to go to one of them? I twigged we wasn’t going to our Brian’s. I’m not so bloody daft.’

A ship had come, to pull Alfred away from the island where he had been marooned with his father since birth. Or that’s what it seemed. The old man was dying, and he wanted him to, but at the same time he hoped he would go on living. ‘I was only trying to do what was best.’

The rattle in the throat declined to a cynical laugh. ‘Oh, I know you was. I was a pest at times, wasn’t I? Everybody is, though. You’ll be a pest one day. Maybe even a bigger one than I’ve ever been. If you aren’t a pest to somebody you aren’t alive. And everybody’s alive, so everybody’s a pest, aren’t they?’

His hands seemed to be searching around the inside of a refrigerator for his favourite leftovers. ‘Sing “Greensleeves” to me, Alfred.’

‘I can’t sing, you know that.’

‘I allus loved it. It brings everything back. Your mother loved it, as well. There’s a lot to say goodbye to. Life’s a bit of a pushbike at times, ain’t it?’

Why don’t you die, you old bastard? — which Alfred didn’t entirely mean, Percy’s words (and his) a row of taps releasing more tears. ‘Don’t leave me, Dad.’

‘I’m not going, you silly sod. What makes you think so? It’s just that I don’t know where I’m coming to.’

No one was going anywhere on a night like this, Eileen thought, the gale thumping and bumping at every brick. She should have stayed in Buxton. Even a doss in a shop doorway would have been cushier, though the police might have prodded her on a few times.

Fred came in with a heap of blankets, the captain of the ship once more, or The Flying Bloody Dutchman, though even that was something to smile about. ‘It’s too late,’ Aaron said, ‘though you might as well cover him. But it was more than blankets he needed, so don’t feel bad about it.’

‘Oh, I don’t. We expect casualties on a trip like this. Even though I run a tight ship you can’t stop the odd accident. We crossed the North Atlantic in such weather once, and lost three chaps. One died of an ulcer, one had a brain haemorrhage, and the third disappeared over the side from no apparent cause. It was the worst crossing I’d ever been on. I left the ship as soon as I could. I trod on a bloody great rat as I went down the gangplank.’

‘Did you?’ Eileen said.

‘You should have heard it squeal. I had a heavy kitbag on my shoulder, and I weighed more than I do now.’

Eileen sniffed. ‘Poor bloody rat.’

‘I didn’t think so. I hated ’em.’

Alfred took the other end of the blanket, to spread it over the body. Talking right to the end: I might have known. If he could talk, and get on at you at the same time, he was alive, nobody more so. I thought he would never let go of the rail, but he’s gone now, back to his tadpoles in jamjars as a kid, and the way sense was knocked into him at school, then to working and college at the same time on the engineering side, living for next to nothing a week and being happy on it because fags were a shilling for twenty and beer a tanner a pint, when courting was courting because you had to be careful of VD and putting a girl in the club — back to hiking and the bike, hard work and cold water, football on the wasteground, the pictures once a week if you were lucky and the music hall when you were flush — back to the happy days you couldn’t get back to till you died, and then you were lucky to find anything at all, though he was sure his domineering old bugger of a father would get all he wanted, even on the other side.

Daniel looked around the room as if he hadn’t seen it before — limitless in the gloom, people slumped in their chairs as if in the waiting room to Hell and hoping for the doors to open soon. He could do as he liked now that he was doomed with the rest of them, wouldn’t bother to tell that the van battery was all but flat, only good if you kept the wheels turning, having barely got it going again when it stalled at traffic lights outside Warrington. He stood, a demented-looking figure with a bloodsoaked towel around his head. ‘They won’t come back.’

‘You look like a real fucking terrorist now,’ Eileen said. ‘One of them Arabs. But if you don’t stop saying things like that, I’ll go in the kitchen for a carving knife and finish you off. I won’t fuck around with a bit of old bottle.’

Garry raised a fist, as if to indicate that no one would deserve it more. His tongue wouldn’t do as it was told. He slept and woke. Words spoken in the room came through to his dreams, and when no one took his advice on what they should do with Daniel he assumed they couldn’t hear, being too much in the shadow. In more light they might have heard him better, done something. When Jenny came to hold his hand, a fragment of warmth went momentarily back into his body.

Fred bent from the waist to look. ‘This young rating could do with a few blankets’ — spreading over him what remained. ‘You’ll sleep like a top under these.’

Aaron took the flashlight. ‘Let’s fetch more. They’re going to be needed.’

‘What for?’ Enid wanted to be left alone. Heat was supposed to rise, when there was any, but upstairs it was like entering headfirst into a layer of ice. ‘I’m perishing,’ she said at the landing.

He kissed her lips, hoping to warm her. ‘Go back, then. I’ll do it on my own.’

‘No, I want to help you. It’s like a morgue down there. I’ll only go back if you come with me.’

‘We’ll find some blankets first.’ His light picked out the exit sign, which he read as TIXE, then focused on wetness spreading from the corner of the ceiling, the wind sounding as if packs of dogs were assembling to go on a journey.

She gripped his hand, as if the building had been abandoned years ago. ‘The place ain’t the same any more.’

‘It will be, when the lights come on again, and the heat gets going.’ He led her into the spare room where the ladder rested against the open trap door. Air streamed from the attic as cold and strong as a river in the tundra. He put a foot on the ladder. ‘I’m going up to have a look.’

‘Don’t leave me in the dark.’

He held her in his arms till she stopped shivering. ‘Only for a moment. I promise.’

Sally followed him to the window. The same dull whiteness bulged at the panes. ‘What are you thinking about?’

He saw only her eyes, nothing of the rest of her face, so turned to the snow, fatally drawn. ‘We must get out.’

She wanted to unravel the towel that made him look as unreasonable as his words. A pocket had been torn from his jacket, his trousers were ripped at the knee. His power, such as remained, was in thinking they had a future. She touched his arm. ‘Where?’

‘Away,’ he said, ‘anywhere,’ as casually as if suggesting a walk through summer glades, with no more danger than a cooling shower of rain. ‘We’ll be all right, the two of us. One alone might not be, but two can find a wall, and build a shelter. We’ll make a palace in the snow.’

She was cold against him, even inside, ice coming through and freezing the sentiment. The sound of a grown man sobbing by the fire told her there was no more hope. She wanted to shout for him to be his age, pull himself together, it wasn’t natural for a man in his fifties to cry because his father had died. No man should cry. Her father never had, and she wouldn’t when he died. Nor when her mother passed away, come to that. ‘We have to stay here. They’ll get rid of the van, and then everyone will be all right.’

A palace of snow would make them impermeable to cold, halls of ice for eternal lovers to shelter in. They belonged together. ‘I believed you when you said you loved me.’

She stood with folded arms, warmed by her coat. Yes, it had been love, nothing more so, but it would be suicide to go into the blizzard, though whether she would or not if the time came, and she had no way of stopping him, she couldn’t say.

No guidance expected, she looked around. Jenny knelt, head on the blankets covering the injured leg of that horrid biker. Parsons’ whining snore dominated, until Eileen poked him, at which he stared as if she were mad, then turned into another position and slept more quietly. The old man was dead, his son mourning him like a child who had lost his mother. Enid and Aaron were prowling around upstairs, though God knows what they expected to discover. Keith and his pair of yobbos were in the snow at the back trying to move the van, and Fred was in the kitchen assembling food for their comfort. He would only think there would be less to feed if she ran away with Daniel.

Aaron’s light at the beams showed a tile ripped free by the wind, others following like bats in a mass panic, spinning into the turmoil of snow. Much of the roof was uncovered, half-frozen grit on the attic floor. Fred’s hotel would no longer be viable after the thaw. Making sure the trap was closed, he was careful to put one foot after the other on the ladder.

‘I thought you was never going to come back,’ she said. ‘That’s snow on your coat.’

‘If we’re here much longer it’ll be in the lounge as well. It won’t be any use telling anyone.’ They went into the rooms to gather as many blankets as could be found.

Spades were weapons of war. Sweat saves blood, as Keith had heard said, such fervour from one old soldier he would believe it for life. Work the body and you saved the spirit, which in turn looked after the body, and so you guarded both. In other words, treat every problem with care. Lavish it with time as well as mental labour, then sweat over it by digging into all the possible whys and wherefores. Such meticulous care for detail helped to win people to his way of thinking. You pondered on what intelligence was collected, while they drifted happy-go-lucky along, and when the problem fell into its many parts you fitted them together like the components of a machine gun, till you saw a way through and, with the illumination thus gained, took everyone with you.

The spades Fred had found were barely fit for peace, never mind war, especially against elemental malice in the heart of the blizzard, and when they were cutting at the solid door he was so afraid the handles would snap that he dragged them towards a window because glass was easier, leaded or not, enough particles soon freed from the frame to let them help each other over the sill and into the kitchen, stamping on putty and glass to get warm again.

The lounge was rank with woodsmoke after the outside air, Fred economizing his supply by pulling green logs from the top of the pile. ‘He’s trying to gas us or freeze us, just in case we get the van safe away.’ No blaze, the fire also gave less light, like one you’d made in a wood, Wayne thought, that a keeper or a farmer kicked to bits and chased you away from.

Keith found the place as squalid as a camp in the Arctic after nine months of winter. Where were the brushes and cleaning rags to fight off signs of the crack-up? People in the rear echelons should set to, and present an ordered place for destruction — if the hotel had to go. And if it didn’t, what then? Nothing was wasted. A clean front to life or death was all that mattered.

A circle of snow flopped around Wayne when he jumped: ‘My hot-aches are killing me. I’ll have frostbite soon, if I haven’t got it already. And look at the sweat running down my wrists. It’s like being in a sauna inside all this clobber.’ He smiled at the shadows, happy with his purpose in life. ‘I’d better not undo it, though, or I’ll croak from pneumonia.’

Lance crashed his helmet against the table. Jenny kissed him, and leaned across to light his cigarette. ‘It’s lovely weather for an Eskimo.’ He wiped the visor with a beer-soaked serviette. ‘I used to want to emigrate to Canada, but I think it’ll be Australia, if ever I do, unless I get a call from the Grand Old Opry to go to Nashville!’

Keith felt inexpressibly tired, wrung out, ready to sleep or die: but he knew he must rouse himself, fight free from a sudden onset of total ineptitude. ‘We want the keys to the Volvo, because it’s the nearest car to the van. I’m sure the battery’s good on that, as well.’ From shadows by the fireplace came a sound halfway between that of a kid robbed of his toffees and someone who thought he had cut his finger but then sees his hand’s dropped off. ‘Who’s making that noise?’

‘The old man died,’ Aaron told him.

‘Is that all?’ Wayne said. ‘I wish my old man would. I’ve asked him to, many a time. He’d never do it for me, though.’ He reached a ham sandwich from the tray, then swung his rawboned hand, missing Fred by a millimetre, Fred wishing at the rush of air that they were still on inches and the gap bigger. ‘You’ve been at that titty-bottle again. I can tell. You stink rotten.’

‘Leave him alone,’ Keith said.

Wayne smiled. ‘I was only trying to get my blood going. It’s like mud, and it hurts. He’s more than half-pissed, though.’

Life and limb wasn’t worth tuppence to these types. The only respect you got, Fred knew, for what it was worth, came from people who looked on you as lower than a dog. He levelled his bow tie. ‘We’ve had two away, Mr, Blackwell. Three, if you count old Mr Percy, though he’s still here, in body at least.’

Food gave energy, beat the tiredness. Keith paused in his eating. ‘Who are they?’

‘The woman Sally, and her boy friend.’

Murderous fingers gripped his knife, though he couldn’t have said whether to slice that incompetent fool or himself. You curbed the impulses of the rabble at your peril. He should have allowed Wayne to kill them both. ‘Why did you let them go?’

‘I wonder how Garry is, with his bad leg?’

‘He’s asleep,’ Jenny said. ‘I’m keeping an eye on him.’

‘I hope he’s all right.’ Lance saw him lying back in the half-dark. ‘If he isn’t, I’ll smash that Daniel to bits.’

‘I couldn’t stop them.’ Fred stood back a few paces, as if to show he knew his place, and also because his place seemed a safer spot at the moment to stand in. Any trouble, and he would be more limber than anyone could know in those electrified seconds before they decided to take a witless poke at him. ‘I was in the kitchen doing the sandwiches. The others were asleep.’

‘She had the Volvo, didn’t she?’

‘Yes, sir.’ He sensed the rebuke that he should have kept everyone awake with words or threats, but he knew he hadn’t the backbone to make a captain, something he had always felt. He wasn’t discouraged to be reminded of it, as long as he could act the part now and again. He had often been the life and spirit of the ship with his impersonations of those who were more successful in achieving rank. Funny, how a situation such as this took you back to a time when your next minute also did not bear thinking about. But bosun at least he could call himself. ‘I’ve got the number in the book.’

‘And her handbag’s gone, with the keys?’ His own car would be far more trouble to get into position, though at least he carried jump leads.

‘Something smells good,’ Wayne said.

Jack of all trades was also a cook, and glad to sidestep the foetid air of recrimination. ‘I’ve got the biggest pot I could find on the stove: the soup of soups. I chucked in vegetables, tinned and raw, a bottle of olive oil, lard, onions, rice and a few spuds, as well as a chopped-up chicken and a pound of bacon. Anybody who goes out into the snow is going to have their bellies full. I wouldn’t be me if they didn’t. And those who don’t have to shake hands with the blizzard will have a breakfast they’ll never forget.’

‘I hate fucking soup.’ Wayne liked fun. Fun stopped him knowing a self he might not like and therefore turn dangerous. He winked at all but Fred. ‘I broke my mother’s heart over soup, so she had to make stews. I love stew. I love her cakes, as well. She’s the best cakemaker in all Derbyshire. She made a big sponge cake for my twenty-first birthday. It was shaped like a motorbike, icing and all, twenty-one candles on the topbox. Dad said she’d never be able to do it, but she did.’

Fred stepped over broken glass to flick a crumb off the table, ‘I’d give her a job here.’

‘She wouldn’t work for a cunt like you. Twenty-one candles on the topbox, and every one of them was lit!’

‘You must have been spoiled all your life,’ Eileen said, enviously.

‘I was, duck. That’s why I’m so rotten!’

‘Another thing’ — Keith turned to Alfred, scornful at such open manifestation of his misery — ‘get rid of that corpse. Parsons, Aaron, help him to push it into the snow. I don’t want to see it there when we get back.’

Fish slid around the pool, and vanished. But they didn’t vanish. They turned a corner and were no more seen. So, little Alfred fixed his eyes on them to see where they went, while his father on the bank took out cakes and lemonade, tea and cheese sandwiches for himself. The sun made them warm and lazy, though not the fish coming out from the muddy bank and sliving towards the middle. This time he followed it, but the cake stuck in his mouth, and when he choked his tall and frightened dad gently banged his back so he would spit it out and breathe again. He had read a book once which called them ‘halcyon days’. ‘Put him outside? Do you know what you’re saying?’

‘The body will be better preserved. Open a window and drop him out. You’ll find him again when it thaws.’

‘We could cremate him,’ Wayne said. ‘That old furniture in the spare room would burn a treat. Then there’s the tables in here. A funeral pile, like in India. I suppose it would stink, though, inside here. And we’re not fucking savages, are we?’

Eyes convexed under Alfred’s lids, then bulged dangerously. ‘He’s staying with me. You’re not the gaffer here.’

‘I am, for the time being anyway,’ Keith said. ‘Somebody has to be, and I can’t see anyone else willing to take over the job. I expect to find that body gone when we come back. And if you don’t do as I say you’ll be dead as well.’ He pushed by and drew the blanket back. They hadn’t closed those staring pot-white orbs that had widened at the shock of death: the eyes of the head being smashed again and again at the wooden bannister made him throw the cloth over. There were no rules any more, no laws, only the ones he made. He didn’t say that, though they had to know he would slaughter anyone who stood in his way. There could only be one voice in the Republic of Possible Catastrophe, though the illusion of reason and consensus must be fostered. ‘It’s unhygienic to have a body in the room. We have to live here for the next few hours, maybe for days.’

‘He’s my father,’ Alfred wept.

‘He’s dead. Throw him outside. Come on, lads, time’s running out, and there’s a lot of work to do.’

Lance and Wayne donned gloves and helmets, ready for the wind and snow. Watching them go, Alfred knew he had to defend his rights. His father would have laughed: ‘You’re still a little lad, and don’t know what it’s all about. Either shut up and let them get on with it, or get the biggest carving knife you can find and take one with you. Two would be even better, but oh, for God’s sake, don’t whine or waffle.’

Nor did Parsons like a corpse in the room. ‘It’s bad for morale, and it’ll smell soon. If we plonk him out of the back door he’ll keep as fresh as a daisy. We’ll ask Fred to get a Bible from upstairs and say a prayer over him.’

THIRTY-ONE

Powdery snow thrashed up by the wind made his cock so small it must have gone into the furthest fold of his pants, but his fingers had to find it, since the only way to unfreeze the lock of the BMW was to send out a jet of hot piss. No need to explain, he thumbed around, found the end and worked the rest through: work, you idle bastard, earn your keep for once in your life. Iced tips rattled at his back while the amber stream went like a spinning garden hose, Wayne’s torch spot on target.

The door opened as if the car had been six months in the dry, but that was the easiest part. Keith’s smile was returned by a thumbs up in their gloves, which he knew was a gesture embedded in himself as well, the old sign of success and complicity crossing all boundaries.

They crammed in for shelter and he turned the engine on, the soft purr a tuning fork to the wind, then a roar as Keith stamped the accelerator. All systems go, the magic wands of the wipers grated over particles of frozen snow and picked up speed.

A gully was created the size of the car, sides of snow mounting as they dug. He hadn’t believed work could be done so quickly, but they laboured without discussion, Lance near the boot and Wayne lost in the snow behind, and soon the sunken tracks became apparent and their trenches joined, wider than the car and down to the level of the wheels till a spade struck tarmac.

More space than Keith needed, but more was always better. The heaters cleared all Perspex, and he backed into the space till the rear window showed only snow. Like born surveyors they had set the angle at which the car would come side on to the van, digging as if any minute the shelling would begin, their previous excavation joining the one they worked on now.

Like a heavily-encased astronaut stepping on a Siberian-scaped moon, gravity pushing him around the storm and, hardly able to see, Lance wished for windscreen wipers on his visor, a minuscule motor to turn them, as well as heated clothing like an aviator’s as he worked at cold dust and pale blue by the spadeful coming up in woolly slabs and going high to left or right, the snow light compared to soaking worm-laden soil. An intense ache along both arms slowed him, though there would be no honour in resting until they got the van clear and made everybody safe. Cold sweat under his leathers weighed, which was why he thought he might be on the moon, his blood running and his stomach warm, though the body turned so sluggish he wanted to lie in the snow and sleep.

Wayne navvied the spade, gripping the handle, pushing well under, drawing each swaying load towards him and upping it clear. Snow is my worst enemy. Everybody loves me except the snow. They think I’m handsome but the snow shouts that I’m ugly. Snow doesn’t love me because I hate it. The only thing to do with snow is make a fire and chuck it on till it melts away, then it wouldn’t matter if it didn’t love me.

Because I’ll never get to the end I’ve got to go on, but you can’t tell in the dark how much is left. If I make a neat roadway at the same time I might push through to sunshine and green pastures. Sweat saves blood, but what I’ve leaked already matches the blood in my body three times over, enough to sink the bloody Bismarck, though I’ve got to go on till I drop, which I will in not too soon if I don’t have a break, I’m even ready for a basin of Fred’s stew, except he’s put that old man’s corpse in, thinking waste not want not, looking at it with that glassy left eye as he stirs it up: as long as I don’t break my filling on a button.

They leaned on their spades — cripples and supplicants, wounded soldiers, phantom gravediggers — Keith fixing them in the headlights. Close to dead beat, the last of their stamina was called for. Snow swirled a film over the macadam so far uncovered and, both standing to guide him in, he drove forward, and as he slowly passed they presented arms with their spades like two busby-headed swaddies on guard in Whitehall. In their exhausted state they were laughing, and so was he, out of gratitude at them making fun of the common plight for his and their enjoyment, in defiance of the blizzard, and mocking whatever the explosives in the van could do.

Such an assessment might be sentimental, a summary of his liking for traditional values and the comfort they gave, the refuge they provided whether real or not, yet he didn’t care, because in the charade their innermost spirits were sending a signal they knew was acceptable. Nobody could see, the noise overshouted it, and when he laughed again so did they, as if to say: What are we doing here, and what the hell’s going on?

They were digging again, if more slowly, knowing that before they could draw the van back till it was head to head with his car they must clear a track behind. He prayed no spade would make a spark, strike the van, metal against metal. Perhaps in their weariness they would curb their new enthusiasm, but he tapped Lance for the spade, who refused and cut another slab from the bank.

Neither would Wayne allow him to take a turn, not caring to have his motions broken. This was his job, not some posh shagbag’s up from London who had never held a spade in his lily-white hands, tough nut or not. Wayne hated work, but wouldn’t give up a job once begun till it was finished. If somebody else did a bit in between he wouldn’t be able to say that he himself had done it, and if he couldn’t say that, what would have been the use in starting?

Miniature clouds of snow drove at their coverings, no defence but to shake the head and stumble like the moving semi-frozen stones they were turning into, doing what had to be done before sinking under the weight growing heavier and heavier from the inside. They excavated, shifted, stacked, and stamped down with their boots. Steel claws gripped Keith’s feet as if he wasn’t wearing socks, let alone boots and two thick pairs inside. When there seemed nowhere else to put the snow he moved the van so that they could shove it from front to back in the space they had made.

He unclipped both bonnets and slotted them safely open, his own battery neat at the terminals but the torch showing the van’s corroded to a sickly, almost glowing green. He scraped them free with his penknife, hoping for enough live acid and distilled water within to conduct the jolt to its destination. Positive to negative to make a circuit, he unravelled the jump leads, sorted the black and red ends, and fastened the croc-grips with freezing fingers.

The dashboard glistened red in the wilderness. Jump the red light and you might be dead, but this was friendly and comforting, a means to an end, a red eye you drove through the spot-middle of to get into action. The engine gagged with life after a few spasmodic jumps, power unhealthy and threatening self-extinction any second. He told himself the odds were too great, but he must keep such ruminations to himself and go on working, mentally thanking them for every effort, as if they were doing it for him alone. Tackling one problem at a time, you didn’t think much about those still strung in line ahead like differently shaped and coloured beads waiting to be sorted. You took the setbacks and, prime mover, kept the end in sight, so he put his head down and went on to consider the next hurdle.

A stench of smoke and petrol filled the van. Spades clanked across the windscreen, erasing harder nuts of snow, till the wipers — reluctantly — took the rest. Changing into reverse, the engine slugged dead, but it was easy for Lance to bypass the ignition because, at fourteen, up to no good one day, Albert Green explained the mechanics of hot-wiring, doing it like the best teacher: by example. They were topped and tailed by the flashing blue lights and screaming horn of a Jam Sandwich. His father was an old Desert Rat, no less, who with the rest of his tank crew had shaved and trimmed up to look dead smart for the drive into Tripoli. He had grovelled before the local powers, wearing his suit with the permanent medal ribbons, a believer in war and justice, to prove that he loved Lance his son, a man who always had a good morning smile to any passing copper, and if he hadn’t then Lance would surely have landed something more than two years on probation.

He kept a blank slate ever since, and if once or twice he had been close to another scratch of red chalk due to his biking forays, he wondered nevertheless what the old man’s face would look like when he learned that his son had been blown to bits, as he himself nearly was a few times in the war.

Keith eased the engine, coaxed it to a roar whether or not vibrations jostled the van’s frail insides. If they deserved a medal, and they surely did, what bit of flesh would the Queen pin it on? The laugh got him into reverse and several yards towards the clear, turning sufficient progress of degrees to aim for the gate. Headlamps picked up needles of wandering snow, their way blocked by a bank that even a plough would find hard to shift.

Snow was semi-solid water, an ever-present enemy you had to vanquish. Man would always vanquish, a fight without quarter and even to the death against the earth which had never been anything but his enemy, otherwise how could you believe in God?

Daniel fought his way, made a track for Sally to follow. It was no use turning to see if she did. The demon’s howl blocked his ears, so maybe she wasn’t there any longer, had gone back to betray him a second time, or had given in by accepting the warmth of endless sleep.

Like thin wet carpets, his clothes drew in the cold and stored it to send to the soft marrow at the middle of his bones. Drifts were crust-hard in places, and sometimes sinking as if he were unable to stop until engulfed, he would flounder in panic, but quickly right himself, as if even in such visibility he was being observed by everyone in the world.

The fire in him could not be put out by snow, though the vicious wind might extinguish it before shelter was reached. He knew he would not die, the blaze giving no say in the matter, a question of live now and perish later if you must, because if the police didn’t kick him into a catatonic state or put him in a place for so long that he would wish he had died, then the people waiting in Coventry would track him down and, as the awesome phrase had it in order to terrify, ‘blow him away’.

So up and over the powdery snow, into a stinging veil of wind that whoever was caught in it felt it was out to get them and nobody else. Followed by a woman so close he sometimes fancied he could hear her breathing even above the tigerish rage of the gale, he couldn’t see her when he turned, the sound being his own. As he scrambled hands and knees to the summit of the wave, no energy to spare for looking back, she was the last person in his life, and he must go on loving her for that.

He was the only person in her life, and she had nowhere else to go because her own sort had cast her out, and there was no turning back except that she didn’t know how the move had been made, always the blinding light of non-comprehension, snaring her in like a moth trap, the process then carrying her along. She had followed mutely after a kiss, overcoats and galoshes quickly sought in case someone should try to hold them back, then the door closing fatally behind.

Floundering with frozen hands he used an interior compass to try for the lay-by where he had left his van which the unthinking bikers had brought to the hotel, didn’t know why he wanted to get to that blemished spot, but followed the markings of the road between wall tops visible now that his eyes were accustomed to the darkness through swirling snow.

Map and compass would be useless in this continent of wild attacks from every direction. He had done orienteering on Dartmoor in winter for the school. A boy in a stream netting specimens had lost a shoe, sucked off by the current. Daniel splashed in bare feet to rescue it, and gave the boy his own dry socks and shoes after yanking him clear. The boy never realized his peril, and Daniel hoped he would not lose his own feet from frost-bite before reaching safety.

He saw flashes as of light bulbs breaking because of too much light, eyes as exhausted as his limbs, eyes unmercifully bombarded that could take no more, pain so great he kept them closed as on and up and through, he had to get there, though no longer knew where there was, nor what he would find.

Sally had to draw back so as not to collide with his hunched form, wondered whether he wouldn’t collapse before reaching a farm. She was freezing alive, starting to burn in a fire, wasn’t tired yet dreaded ice and fire in collision forcing her to stop. Reality had come back after leaving the hotel and its awful people, life had meaning again, the urge to win through. Never had she thought to meet such types (didn’t they call them ‘punters’?) who wouldn’t show the vaguest comprehension of a man like Daniel, no sympathy with ideals which, though leading to unjustified violence, needed to be forgiven. Faced with the unfamiliar, they turned into killers set on murdering him and her as well, so better go into the snow, Daniel had said, as they stood by the window.

She followed him towards the door, the storm drawing her fatally because she wanted to find out whether she could defeat what the elements were able to throw against her. And as for whether she had done right, now that she had done it she must believe that she had.

Absence of landmarks sapped his power, and he didn’t know if he would recognize the lay-by when he reached it. He prayed to the moon, a different man to the one who had been in charge of explosives for the Cause: rational, courageous, certain of himself, unthinking you might say. Wherever the moon was, knowledge of its existence permitted him to go on, praying to it because it was the last ally he could have.

Hope pulled him as if with a rope attached, told him that in a few days he would be back at school, no one living to connect him to the explosion. Those in the hotel couldn’t possibly get the van out of the courtyard, and would be obliterated. Even the men in Coventry would hardly blame him for his failure. Life must go on, but what about the woman behind, who was the only witness?

THIRTY-TWO

If allowed to go on working they would use that reserve of strength which should only be kept for the final effort, so Keith signalled a way back to shelter. ‘The snow’ll need clearing again in half an hour,’ Lance said as they went in. ‘Look how it’s coming down.’

‘It’s only dusting,’ Wayne told him. ‘We’ll scuff it away with our toecaps. It won’t stop the tyres.’

Arms of light went up the walls and across the ceiling like rapid columns on an army map, flames arrowing almost to the mantel shelf. Lance unzipped. ‘Where did all that wood come from?’

Alfred, a hump of grief near the fire, reached for another broken chair and threw it on as if it were the imp from hell that had caused all his troubles. Fred had given up on spinning out his supply of fuel: the wood pile had melted down, and he was rummaging for half planks and bits of old beam, the remnants of builders’ rammel coated with dust and congealed whitewash which gave off spectacular tongues of green flame.

‘He’s already cleared the spare room.’ Parsons was encouraged and made cheerful by this systematic gutting of the hotel, and nodded towards Alfred. ‘I expect he’ll start on the stuff in here next.’

‘Not if I know it.’ Fred laid soup plates and spoons on three tables put together, which Enid had spread with the whitest cloth from one of his personal cupboards in a box room off the kitchen. Where the devil did she find the key? he wondered but, saying nothing to her about it, turned on Alfred and Parsons. ‘You two are like a pack of barmy schoolkids. You should have a bit more respect for other people’s property. Not that I expect you to understand a thing like that, though.’

‘At least Alfred’s making the place a bit more cheerful.’ Parsons spoke to Keith so that none of the others could hear. ‘We took a kitchen knife off him half an hour ago. He would have done a tidy bit of damage with a weapon like that. Aaron jumped him from behind. It was quite a scuffle.’

With such people the administration of the crisis took on its own momentum, Keith smiled. The bomb maniac and his woman would die in the snow, and good riddance. And that lunatic who’d had his father die on him had given himself the duty of keeping them halfway warm, lips jabbering out the list of his misfortunes.

I must be a fool, Alfred said to his own picture not far in front of his staring eyes, and feeling an intense conviction he hadn’t noticed in himself for a long time, to get so upset at seeing my father’s worn-out carcass tipped unceremoniously into the snow, when I was wanting him dead during the drive here. That’s the proof you love somebody, when you wish every day they would kick the bucket. His, after all, sudden departure for the happy hunting grounds had put the kaibosh on Bognor, and no mistake. I won’t break my heart twice a day from now on wondering if they’re doing the right thing by him, or forget to post off the monthly cheque. When this bit of bother’s over I’ll give him a decent burial, and then get back to happy working days.

He took the leg from a chair and hit the frame of one already on the fire. Sparks singed his face but he let them fade out rather than take any trouble in brushing them off, then threw the rest of the chair on, telling the sparks to be more careful with his skin next time round. The fire was a wolf trying to come for them out of the snow, flames its arms, sparks its claws, a raving animal which would stay in its place only for as long as plentiful wood was slung into its jaws, and he thought about the even more than halcyon days now that his father had departed. Funny how you didn’t imagine dying yourself till your father had copped it, God in Heaven’s way of letting you know for sure that one day the same would happen to you.

Fred, in his cook’s white hat, scooped the ladle round and round the large tureen to let the smell of soup fill the room, looking at everyone and waiting for their words of appreciation.

‘Oh, wonderful,’ it would have been easy to hear them braying, ‘wonderful, it’ll save my life!’

‘Serve it quick. I can’t wait!’

‘Good old Fred!’

‘You can always rely on him!’

‘For he’s a jolly good fellow!’

Keith ended the silence. ‘Wayne and Lance first at the food.’

‘Yes, sir. That’s understood,’ Fred said.

Every part was stone, Jenny couldn’t warm him, his ice-cold body at rest, impossible to know where the spirit had gone. Fear ached her, she had sat too long in one position, only half alive herself, panic making her want to run outside, to wait no longer. She had champagned her faculties into and out of sleep, but was awake now and so cold she had to sit at the table.

Wayne placed his elbows to either side of the plate, his stare fighting with blue and white mixing into droplets of snow, still seeing drifts surrounding the cars, squalls continually buffeting. ‘I’m not hungry.’

‘Nor me.’ Lance picked up a spoon, hunger changing his mind. ‘A piece of chocolate might do.’

‘That’ll be for dessert.’ Fred was eating: he’d always enjoyed his own cooking. ‘I found a few slabs in the stores.’

Keith thought the best way to live might be to regard every minute as your last. Look forward to nothing, and whatever came that was more than nothing would be an unexpected bounty, and perhaps beneficial enough to deserve consideration. If he had realized this from the beginning then that other existence with Gwen might not have seared his spirit.

‘It’s a lovely stew.’ Eileen imagined that if she got blown to bits her father would say in twenty years’ time: ‘I ain’t seen our Eileen lately. Where do you suppose she went?’ And her mother would no doubt reply: ‘How the hell should I know? She’ll come back when she’s ready.’ No, she was being unjust: they would wait no more than two years before asking the Salvation Army to get on her trail.

‘It’s a stew to put lead in your pencil,’ Parsons laughed.

‘If you’d been out there,’ Lance said, ‘you wouldn’t have enough lead left in your pencil to scribble a betting slip.’

Keith tried to eat, but the food died in his mouth. It was impossible to search back far enough in his life and find the turning point which had set him on a course ending in murder, no more than you could wind back the reel of history and sidetrack the wars of the century. He had been driven to where the crime was waiting for him, and he had lost control, the mind becoming a vacuum in which he had for a fatal moment ceased to think, an unforgivable surrender never to be made good. He felt her hair in his hands (that crown of all her glory!) and the merciless mindless banging till the weight of her unconscious body meant that strength had jettisoned reason and she was dead.

Alfred finished his bowl, Fred noting how often he had seen the grieving eat more than most, after they had made the first food in their mouths go down.

‘Aren’t you hungry, sir?’ Wayne said. ‘I’m not, but I’m on my second helping, so I suppose I must be. We need a bit of packing inside us for going out again.’

Keith, finding it good counsel, finished eating, and guided Fred into the corridor between lounge and kitchen. Now what? Fred was irritated at not getting a word as to why. These high-handed types got on his bloody wick, but he wasn’t able to say them nay, or not listen. To make a fuss would damage his pride more than giving in to their whims. Even so, he would like to tell them where to get off, but knew he never could.

Keith gave him a slip of paper with the make and licence number of the van. ‘If we don’t come back, give this to the police. Is that clear?’

‘Yes, sir. I’ll do that. I’ve thought about it already. We can’t let that bugger go scot-free. Not that I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody like that didn’t manage it, but we’ll do all we can to have him pulled in.’

‘I also want you to witness this sheet of paper. It’s a Will. Sign underneath my signature, and put the date.’

Another trade! Would they never stop coming? Commissioner for Oaths now. They’d heckled him as a mess-deck lawyer a time or two on the ship. ‘Is this it, sir? To her a third?’

His tone hardened. ‘Will you do it, or won’t you?’

‘If you say so.’

‘I do. Now get me an envelope.’

‘Yes, sir.’

You could not live imagining that each second might be your last. Such innocence, the anarchism of the naive, would end civilization. Even to think one hour ahead was a step forward. When men began to wonder where the next meal was coming from, and who might attack them for the food they hunted, the ability to live in the present had gone for ever, though in truth it could never have existed, the state of Eden only tolerable to the mad, who can’t or won’t see any future. Crimes committed were a price that had to be paid. ‘Wait here, till I’ve been to the toilet.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The door wouldn’t close. Had one of the bikers kicked it off its hinges, or was the building already subsiding under the weight of snow? He folded the four crisp fifty-pound notes in with his Will, and sealed the envelope.

‘Take good care of this,’ he told Fred. ‘I want your solemn promise.’

‘On the Holy Scriptures, sir. If we get through this mess all right, then good luck to her.’

A star was sharp and bright beyond the hole of cloud, but having no others to fasten it to he did not know what name to give. Two made a connection, three a pattern, four a picture, but a single one was an astronomical trickster and to be ignored.

The engine was healthy, chains fitted, and they were already digging a way for him to back into. He preferred them some yards ahead so that if the van exploded they might have a chance. Not much of one, true, but it was the best he could do — every second the final call for me as well, whether I like it or not, and I surely don’t. There was only the snow, and the job to be done, glad when the deceptive star was covered, nothing to think about except work.

At the wheel, a cigarette burning, he watched them clearing and flattening so that the chains would grip. Uneven drifts further from the buildings were not more than a foot above the macadam, and when they were close to the gate he went anxiously forward, praying for luck, for the others, and also, he was half-ashamed to note, quite fervently for himself, thinking that if he came through all right he would stay with Eileen for as long as she could tolerate him.

Daniel could no longer feel his feet and hands, but burning faith divided the freezing snow, a forlorn imprint of his passing. The inner glow was brighter now that he was alone. He should have realized from the beginning that only then did you come to full power. Even so, the purest of the pure can be diverted from the clear beam of their inspired way, though not for long. The debilitations of his enormous wound were annulled by him being able to go on, power provided by not knowing where that inner fire came from. Nor did he want to think, eschewing curiosity so that even if he had wanted to succumb to the storm like any ordinary person, he could not.

His inexplicable spirit took him through the blizzard. When the border between his transcendental state, and the reality of wet clothes clinging around even colder flesh became indistinct, he rekindled the light by an act of will, pure will, the victory of the will. He kept the road’s edges at an equal distance, fighting for the economy of a straight line along which to measure progress by unfolding a finger for every hundred yards.

Already the others were dying. He would outlive them, being one of the elect. The old man had died, the woman who had so stupidly followed him was dead. So would everyone be, none to unravel the mystery.

Such reflections made the body immediate, reduced him to a moving corpse encased in icy clothes, matted within a miserable cocoon, each foot an anchor to drag now that he had lost count of the paces, which caused him to panic for a moment, because no will could alter the fact that he was a fragile mortal caught in the storm and lost for ever. Tears of chagrin froze onto his flesh, but he went on, veered to one side then back to the other, increasing the distance from the hotel, wanting only to sleep, sensing he was no more at last than a failed and miserable hibernologist staggering to perdition.

Head and body were covered with ice, boots frozen into a stone and feet giving out the purest pain. He leaned against a window half hidden by snow, a window into what was impossible to say and, moaning hic jacet, he fell into the drift, a scream when he bruised himself on some metal object which he then tried to grasp. The outlines seemed those of a long hut, and he was wondering how he could get inside when a door was pushed against him and he fell.

I haven’t handled one of these for thirty years, Alfred would have said if the gale hadn’t assailed his ear-drums to extinction, except to play around now and again in my little bungalow garden, and I didn’t have much truck with it then, hard labour being something I decided not to make a career out of. He was doing his level best with the shovel because the flood of the headlights would show him up as a shirker if he didn’t. An old football scarf around head and ears held a cap underneath, but his gloves and cashmere overcoat were the sort it behoved the boss of a haulage firm to wear. He worked as well as, if not better than, Aaron on one side and clapped-out Parsons on the other. The bikers were placed up front to draw the oldies on, unless Keith had decided they would be less in danger if the blast came. Thank you very much. What did he have to live for now that his father had gone? He laughed with the joy of freedom, though couldn’t help shovelling as if the old bugger still needled him with his gimlet eyes.

Aaron had lifted boxes of books up and down stairs, bending at the knees to avoid back pain or a hernia, carrying heavy volumes into or from the car, and he was satisfied to find enough wind in his pipes for shifting snow. If he had done it straight from the laboratory job ten years ago he would have been on his knees and gasping his lungs out. He liked the cold blaze of gusting snow, the bite against ears and nose. If he went to prison for not having been clever enough with his false signatures he would look on this shovelling as the best of times. And if the flash of obliteration caught him unawares he would not have to decide any more what was and what was not worth recalling.

The door clunked open, and Eileen wriggled across the seat. Before Keith could throw her out or say anything she fastened her lips on his. ‘I was fed up in there.’

Stuck-up Jenny sat by that half-dead biker not saying a word but crying now and again, Enid was flopped in an armchair with what blankets were left, and barmy Fred whistled to himself while making little brew-ups and concoctions in the kitchen, telling her to piss off whenever she went in and tried to talk.

‘You can’t stay here,’ Keith said. He didn’t want her to go, though the longer he didn’t tell her the more certainly she would have to.

‘I love you,’ she said. ‘I want to be with you. My place is here, darling, darling, darling.’ She felt herself burning into a blush: such a word would have made any other man laugh: posh, false, not for them, but with him there was no other to fit. ‘I want to stay. I don’t care what happens.’

The only way was to get her by the throat and bundle her into the snow. Haul her to the hotel and lock the door. He couldn’t, and for once felt the same passion. ‘I love you, but I have work to do. I can do it better on my own.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘you don’t love me. Not like I love you. You don’t know what love is. I’m beginning to think no man does. If you did you wouldn’t want to get rid of me. You can drive this rotten old van just as well if I’m sitting here, can’t you?’

Chains clanked and bit around the wheels as he reversed several yards and then went forward, more precious distance gained. ‘You don’t know me. You know nothing about me. If you did you wouldn’t want to know me.’

‘I don’t care about knowing you. What does that matter? I love you, don’t I? Anyway, what do you know about me? But you said you loved me. I don’t know whether to believe you, if you keep on telling me to go. I just love you, and that’s that.’

He felt warmer at hearing words of such simple and unsolicited devotion — at this time of his life. ‘You have to believe I love you.’ Wondering whether she would when he knocked her senseless, he was afraid to hit her, even out of love and protection, because would he be able to stop?

‘I want to be with you. After, I want to live with you. I know you’re married, so I don’t mind if you can’t see me often. I love you, but you don’t know what that means.’ She began to cry, her body moving up and down in its covering of clothes. She seemed to have taken every coat in the hotel, as if really meaning to stay with him in the snow for ever. ‘I want you, so let me stay. I want everything. I want to have a baby with you.’

They were level with the stone pillars of the gate, a lion surmounting each. A ditch by the roadside full of snow must be avoided, Lance signalling him clear with a flashlight.

‘Do you know what you’re saying?’

‘Oh yes. I don’t always, but I do now.’

‘If you love me it would be better for you to remember me than get killed with me.’

‘No, it wouldn’t. I don’t want to live if you get killed. I’ll go mad. I’ll be out of my brain as long as I live. I won’t be able to work, or talk to anybody for the rest of my life. I’ll go around not wanting to live. I’ll drift from squat to squat with all I own in two plastic bags. I’ll be the youngest bag-lady in Manchester.’ She was laughing. ‘Look at that snow! Life’s marvellous, isn’t it? Well, I think so. So just let me stay, and don’t think about what might not happen.’

Not to think, to accept, to let everything go. She promised paradise, but how stupid if they both died. ‘I want you to live, because I love you, and if you live, then I live. Whatever happens, you won’t be poor. Fred will tell you why.’

‘Oh, fuck off,’ she cried, the heart wrenched out of her. ‘I don’t know what you’re on about. I said I loved you, didn’t I?’

No one could hear it better expressed — at any other time. He felt eighteen again, unable to trust himself, so said: ‘A few days ago I left my wife. I killed her, then I left her.’

‘It won’t work. Tell me another.’

‘No, listen. She taunted me. She said our daughter wasn’t mine. She said she’d had an affair at the time she was conceived. We’ve hated each other for years, and more or less gone our own ways, as far as we were able to. Why she told me what she did I don’t know, though it was at the end of a long argument, and I’d said things which must have hurt her as well. So she came back with something to finish all our arguments. I’d thought all my life that no matter how much we loathed each other there was one mark of the love we must have felt at first. But she’d never felt it. She’d gone out and got pregnant by a boy friend, then told me the child was mine. I knew she was right, but in any case she assured me of it, swore it was true, and gave details which I’d suspected all along. I killed her. Then I loaded the car with enough things to live rough, and drove up to the Lakes. I was going back to give myself up, when I met you. I don’t know where I was going. Maybe the police are looking for me already, though she might not have been found yet. I didn’t mean to kill her, but that won’t help me in court. Nor do I deserve it to. I could live with you happily, because I love you, but please go into the hotel, and I’ll come later. Then we’ll decide what to do. You can bet I’ll be all right. I’m in no danger. But give me another kiss first.’

THIRTY-THREE

The high platform was covered with sacks, and when Daniel moved across he saw three men playing cards below, a white pint mug of steaming tea by each. Cigarette smoke mixed with the whiff of fuel from a primus, and he picked out a blackened kettle, teapot, an opened packet of sugar, a carton of milk, a frying pan and plates, an inventory helping him not to scream from pain in every fibre of his body.

‘It seems he’s awake,’ someone said, as if he had no right to be. ‘Hey, mate, you up there, welcome to the best little removal van in Christendom, or anywhere else, come to that. Let’s get him down, and see what we can find out.’

The inside of the black pantechnicon was lined with plywood tea chests, and a pair of stepladders rested near a porter’s barrow by locked doors at the far end. The plates of a split-up Pirelli calendar pasted along the sides had been jabbed by stoves and bedsteads brought in and carried out. ‘We pulled you in, when we heard you go bump in the night.’

‘Where am I?’

He came up the ladder to Daniel’s level, a man in a khaki button-front overall smock. ‘Somewhere in bloody Derbyshire, I suppose. We only cut through this way to save petrol, which the gaffer always likes to hear about, though he’s not going to be happy at us getting stuck. Do you think you can manage down this ladder? My name’s Charlie. That’s Bill. Paul, the one who’s sneaking a look at my hand of cards, will get knifed when I get back, if he don’t put ’em down.’

‘It ain’t worth it.’ Paul was a cadaverous man in a grey three-piece suit, such apparel possibly lifted from some trunk or other during a move. ‘I dealt you such a piss-poor hand.’

‘I’ll be all right,’ Daniel said, ‘with a little assistance.’ Bill came to help, more solid in body than the others, wearing dark-blue dungarees — all three men unified by their Day-Glo scarves and woolly hats against the cold. The van swayed from a heavy fist of wind, and Daniel screamed on slipping down the bottom few rungs.

Bill grasped, to break his fall. ‘You seem in a bit of a mess, mate.’

‘I’ll do another brew.’ Paul threw the cards into a common heap, and began cranking the primus. ‘We all need it, and he looks as if he’ll die if he don’t get summat into him. It’s bloody perishing, even in here.’

They laid Daniel on the floor. ‘He needs a doctor.’ Charlie unknotted his tie, then covered him with a dust sheet and several large sacks till only the head showed.

‘My car broke down.’ The weight of coverings made him feel worse, so he pushed them aside. ‘I got stopped. Must have hit a post. Couldn’t tell. I was knocked out. I don’t know how long for. But then I woke, and thought I’d get some help.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Bill said. ‘You’re in good hands. I reckon you should have stayed with your car, though. That’s what they tell you to do.’

‘He probably didn’t know what he was doing,’ Paul said, ‘after the knock on his napper. He just thought he’d get out and walk, poor sod. Look at him. Frost-bite all over. He looks as if he’s crawled out of a fire, and fell on a broken bottle. His face’s all cut up, where it ain’t turning black. There ain’t much we can do for him. He’s shaking like a leaf.’

‘Some tea might help. And what about a couple of aspirins, Charlie? There must be some in that chemist’s shop you carry about everywhere.’

Daniel contained his agony, trying to smile. ‘I’ve fallen among Good Samaritans.’

‘That you have,’ Bill said, ‘that you have, mate. We might be common-or-garden removal men, but we’re also gentlemen of the road, out to help distressed travellers.’

‘Unless he’s a social worker,’ Charlie snarled. ‘We’d draw the line at social workers. They tried to take my kid away once.’

Daniel wanted to tell them he was a teacher, but maybe they didn’t like teachers, either. There seemed no hard surface under him, he was floating in distilled pain, his instinct telling him to reach for a tree branch or door handle and stop falling. He tried to compute how far he was from the hotel, and crawled through more and more snow into the nightmare of a sudden thaw, his refuge visible from an upper window, and people coming to get him, each with a coil of stiff hard rope, led by a woman with skeletal head and demented eyes, limbs bare and hands sprouting claws, on an unstoppable route towards him as if all the rage of the world was pouring from her hurt lips at his cruelty.

‘His bloody screams are getting on my wick,’ Bill said. ‘Let’s either chuck him outside, or give him his tea. ’Appen he’ll choke on it and give us some peace.’

‘Wake up,’ Charlie said sharply at Daniel’s ear.

He looked, eyes swelling with terror. ‘Where am I?’

‘If you’ll stop screaming a minute I’ll tell you,’ Paul said. ‘You’re in The Blue Herald, one of Ramble’s furniture vans, so you’re safe and sound. Lift yourself up a bit and drink this. It’s strong tea, with plenty of sugar and milk. Here’s three aspirins as well.’ He showed them in the palm of his hand. ‘They’ll do you the world of good.’

He sweated and shivered, but the nightmare had gone, and the lukewarm tea tasting of paraffin nectarized his veins nevertheless, easing him into a sleep in which he only dreamed of being in agony.

‘Thank God,’ Bill said, ‘now we can have another game. I only hope we don’t get any more refugees parking themselves on us.’

‘Maybe we’ll be here for weeks,’ Paul said. ‘They’ll eat all our supplies and take our jobs, though if we do run out of something to eat we can have a game and serve the loser up for dinner. Or we could carve a slice off you know who.’

‘He’ll be rotten before he dies,’ Bill said. ‘You can smell him already, even in this cold den. I don’t mind starving to death, if it comes to it, but I’m buggered if I’m going to die in agony eating tainted food.’

‘We’ve got to be prepared for all eventualities,’ Paul said. ‘Don’t you recollect what happened to old Jack Bailey and his crew on the way back from Brindisi after doing that Greek run? They took a short cut through Switzerland, and got stuck in the snow for three weeks. Luckily, they’d picked up a hitchhiker near Milan. Jack told me he’d bought a bottle of olive oil and a bag of dried mushrooms in Italy, so that helped as well. When it thawed they sank what was left of him chained to an old tyre in one of them Swiss lakes. Jack’d stop at nowt to get his teeth into a good dinner.’

Bill reached for the primus. ‘I don’t think I would be reduced to that, though, as long as I had plenty of tea and sugar, and a few cartons of fags.’

‘Mind you,’ Paul went on, ‘if it came to that sort of crisis there’d be no option, would there? Not that I do think we’re going to be here anything like three weeks. The cold’s not as sharp as it was. Yes, I will have another mug of tea. It’s no use offering that poor bugger any. It’ll be wasted on him. He fetched half the last lot up.’

The house was bigger than he had imagined, not a bungalow at all, but floor after floor and bits going off in all directions. Somebody had got there before him, because it was already fully plumbed up, unless he had done it in another life and forgotten. Maybe his estimate had been too high, or Alfred had spotted some fault in the details, though you couldn’t think so to see how no expense had been spared. The baths were porcelain and the taps were gold, and in every room there was one of them funny little bidets which he had seen in even some of the cheaper places in France where he had stayed with Wayne and Lance. Every bathroom was tarted up like a picture from a catalogue so that you would think the Queen was going to live there.

The trouble was, they had fucked up the central heating, and he would never have done that. He couldn’t see a radiator anywhere, and as for a fireplace, forget it. It was the coldest house he had ever been in, though there was bright blue sky at every window, and lights on in every room. He climbed a spiral staircase to see what was on the next floor but funnily enough couldn’t go any further because some steps were missing. There was no carpet and they were so filthy with broken glass and wet dead leaves he nearly went arse over bollocks. Then his breath was torn out like a flame, and when he tried to jump to where the steps began, instead of backing down like a sensible lad, he fell, and kept on falling.

Clouds were dividing, such gaps showing the Big Dipper. Aaron’s pleasing fantasy was to have it turn into an actual scoop, and clear a ten-mile lane through the snow, along which they could walk to freedom. Beyond the gate, Lance and Wayne leaned against the side of the van as if asleep. His watch showed six o’clock, eyes closing, and the ache in his arms total. He went a few paces back towards the hotel and, no coordination in any limb, fell sideways.

The wind beat as if to power the massive sails of a ship, at war with stillness, not the random drumming of the blizzard, but gusting with some new purpose not yet apparent. Alfred and Parsons had given up half an hour ago. The clean and welcome smell momentarily revived him. Drawing his spade out of the snow, like Excalibur from the Stone, he cradled it for fear he would lose such a prime tool of their endeavours.

The even piping of jet engines came from thousands of metres up in blue sky and sun, telling those living near an airport that another ordinary day was soon to start, a sound reminding him that the trap they were locked in could not stay closed for ever.

The van stood out, stark and dark green, coils of pale smoke from its exhaust, almost alive in relishing its power to destroy them all. Keith looked dispiritedly at the ramp of snow, and at the Trojan Horse it seemed impossible to budge more.

Wayne took off his helmet, a smile followed by the gesture of a hand across his throat signifying that he’d had enough. Lance turned his visor towards Keith as if to say that whoever owned the head inside would do no more. But Keith knew there was always more energy where that came from, an untapped abundance in everyone still, that last black rock of reserve waiting to move the van another hundred yards.

They followed him like a patrol of yetis, Lance in the lead, Aaron and Wayne together. The glow of false dawn about the yard faded as clouds closed. Snow flurries irritated his face, a hand sliding over the greased features, stung his eyes that were barely able to see.

He stood alone in the dark between the cars, did not know why. An animal sound mimicked the wind, a note of despair turning to a tone of wonder at surface snow flying into clouds of mist to find a better position and becoming more and more irritable at knowing they never would. The issue of life and death had lost its bite. Utter exhaustion stopped him knowing where he was. Belonging nowhere softened the spirit, till he remembered that the job was not yet done, and forced himself to go in after the others.

Fred needed no help, but Eileen followed him from lounge to kitchen, and from bar to store room — like a little dog, the lucky bitch, because she surely knows about the bit of paper that rustles in my pocket where’er I walk.

He was jealous of his work, work being precious, work being like gold to him. He made each task last, spun it out because while there was something to do he wasn’t worrying about past or future, nor the present which could end more abruptly than he wanted and which therefore didn’t bear thinking about.

He had never known what happiness was, only that if he worked he was not unhappy. Work was a luxury — especially in this situation — as long as enough money came with it to keep him in food and shelter, and the little packets of those cigars that he puffed with such relish. He had faith that Keith would bring them sound in wind and limb through the night, and keep the bikers working so hard that they wouldn’t have the energy to torment him any more.

By dawn, if you looked at the way things were going, the hotel would no longer be habitable. The attics were full of snow and debris, the ceilings of the bedrooms were patched with damp, icy wind was coming down the stairs. In other words, it would be a write-off. He would claim full insurance, and begin the great work all over again — like that bloke who kept pushing a boulder up a hill because God or whoever at the top always rolled it back to the bottom. This time though he would buy a place on the coast in a more benign climate. Maybe he would even start up somewhere in Spain, because Doris would be sure to come back to him then.

‘I love the smell,’ Eileen said, as he laid strips of streaky bacon from a five-pound pack on a hotplate over the fire. ‘It’s the best meal in the world.’

‘I prefer the smell of roast turkey,’ he said, ‘when it comes out of the oven at Christmas.’ She was complimenting him on his work, so he could almost take to her. ‘Turkey and stuffing: it’s the best smell in the world.’

She moved from the warm rail to let him throw more logs into the stove, his best dried logs held back from the fire in the lounge. ‘Did you have a party, then?’

‘At this hotel we did. I set up a Christmas Special, at twelve quid a head. All anybody could eat. And did they eat! It did me good to see ’em, except that they were robbing me blind. They said I made the best garlic bread they’d ever tasted. I came out on top, though, financial-wise. And I didn’t mind, anyway, because it was good for trade at other times, except that it’s been falling off a bit lately.’

She leaned forward to light some paper for her cigarette: ‘I wish I’d been there.’

He struck a large kitchen match for her. ‘You should have been.’

‘Well, I was elsewhere, wasn’t I?’

‘Where was that?’

‘At my boy friend’s. We had a can of beer and a pizza between us.’

‘That’s not much to celebrate on.’

‘We enjoyed it, though.’

‘If I’ve got a place by next Christmas,’ he said, ‘you can come and eat all the stuff you like. I shan’t charge you anything.’

‘I don’t want charity. If I’ve got no money I’ll do some work for you to earn it.’

‘No, you won’t. I’ll treat you. For old times’ sake.’

If what Keith had said was true, she thought, he would either be dead or in prison. She still didn’t know. But she had to believe what he had said about his wife, because nobody would tell a whopping lie like that.

‘Now what are you crying for? He’s alive, isn’t he? Listen, I can hear them coming in. It’s a good job we’ve got these bacon sarnies on the go. Everybody loves a bacon sandwich.’ It might be better if he was dead, though, he told himself, and then she would have his money. The daft young thing don’t know how lucky she is. No, she would only lose it in six months, so he’d better stay alive.

The first run they had done was to the West Country, and Lance remembered them belting down the M5 like skirmishers trying to get in front of an army, Garry in front, followed by Wayne, and then him, weaving between the cars of happy holidaymakers with noddy toys hanging in the back and kids either puking up or howling out for water. All three heading next summer for Devon they would gun along in the sun, stopping for a cream tea at a place Garry had known from his earliest roadworthy days. But even with such a picture he felt so dead tired it was a struggle to keep both hands at the bacon sandwich and chew it down.

Fred went with his tray to Aaron and Alfred. ‘How is he, then?’

‘I wouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t dead.’

Parsons lay, mouth fallen open, soundless, eyes upwhite and seeing nothing. Fred used the force of both hands to close the mouth, then pressed on the eyelids to conceal the ghastly stare, and arrange arms across the chest. He was dead all right, but what could you do? We all had to die sometime. ‘I can put undertaker down on my list of trades now, and that’s for sure.’ He spread a blanket: ‘A man in his condition shouldn’t have been sent out. Anybody might have known he’d have had a heart attack.’

He didn’t care how many went, now that his father had gone. ‘Try telling it to that stuck-up swine. All I can say is: God preserve us from bloody heroes.’

‘I did. Parsons could have got out of it if he’d wanted, but he insisted on doing his turn. He must have known the score. Everybody I’ve ever known always knew that kind of score. Have another bacon sarnie?’

‘Thanks, I will. I thought I was about to cop it as well, a time or two. You won’t get the MBE I laughed to myself, but you might end up with the MCA pinned to your chest. That’s what they said my brother-in-law died of — massive cardiac arrest. But I’ve never worked so hard out there, and I hope I’ll never do anything like it again.’ He ran a hand over himself, as if hoping to find another coat to button up against the chill. ‘I might as well chuck some more wood on the fire.’ He reached out for a chair and, gripping top right and bottom left worked the legs loose till all the blood from his body seemed to be in his face. He riffled the ashes with a poker and threw the bits on. ‘We may be in out of the snow, but I’m still bloody freezing.’

‘Why don’t you take a hatchet and start on the beams?’ But Alfred didn’t hear, and Fred knew that you just couldn’t get into the haybox of some people, not even with sarcasm as blunt as a cold chisel.

Giving all her warmth to Garry had done him no good, and Jenny felt that she had no spark remaining, not even for herself. Lance’s face was coated with grime and grease, eyes deadened with fatigue, flopped hair adhering from sweat. She didn’t care to imagine what her own face looked like, on coming to the table, or think about what she had turned into since entering this house of death. She didn’t have a job any more, but what would it matter if none of them lived beyond the night? If they did she would go back south and stay at her parents’ till she found a job and a room of her own. They’d always told her that Raymond was no good, that she shouldn’t have married him, and as for going off to live in the north … she would put up with any taunts to live in a more civilized place. No, it wasn’t that, because wherever you were you couldn’t escape from yourself, always a real Piranesi prison if ever there was one.

Lance thought this is how a soldier feels, not knowing you’re going to be alive the next second, though not caring too much either because to do so would break you into a thousand bits even before a bomb or shell could do it. Still, it isn’t in the Falklands, and I’ve got this lovely woman holding my hands, though hell, I don’t know what to say to her except: ‘Love you, Jenny.’

Jenny was surprised by a smile that she felt improved her features. ‘I hope you’ll be all right out there.’

‘I don’t think about it,’ he said. ‘It’s in the bag, though the Chief’ll never say so. All the time I was digging I was thinking about us in bed together.’

His inexperience had been made up for by guidance and abandon, and his energy. ‘I’m glad. I was thinking of you.’

‘Even when you was holding Garry’s hand?’

‘It was a way of holding yours.’

‘He’s still asleep,’ Wayne said. ‘Fancy sleeping all through this. He don’t know how lucky he is. It’s not like him, though. That terrorist caught him a real packet. I hope he’s burning in hell.’

‘He’s dead,’ Lance said. ‘You can bet on it.’

She drank her tea, not wanting anybody dead, yet not able to care if they were. It was cold. So was Garry, dead and cold, but they would discover it when their work was done, or nobody would find anybody if they were unlucky.

Keith sat with Eileen, and she held his hand, nothing to say, she just didn’t want him to eat alone. Not even a dog should. Though he was in charge, and had done so much, he looked beaten, finish written on his face in streaks and wrinkles, lips more down than when they had been fighting their way through the snow to get here. His eyes were dark and fallen-in, his skin cracked and in places peeling into the grease. Maybe pain made him look at the end of his strength. Everybody else’s face was in a rotten state, masks breaking up, except when they smiled or said something. He squeezed her hand, but she held from telling that it hurt, and pressed back gently when his fit of whatever it was had passed.

After one of the last quarrels with Gwen, when everything had been said on both sides to cause the maximum hurt, he went out of their Chelsea bijou gem — as she scathingly called it: she had never stopped telling him how much she disliked it, in spite of the half-million it would fetch on the market, and not being by any means so bijou — and drove over the bridge along the Inner Ring Road, comforted by traffic lights opening onto green-go when a hundred yards away.

Lulled by the light traffic he lost himself somewhere in Lewisham, circling but glad to note that for a while Gwen hadn’t dominated his mind. Even realizing her absence only brought her back for a moment. He stopped by a pub to orientate himself with his atlas, to find a route out of town for the Kent coast, where he would go to a hotel and sleep the night in peace.

He wound the window down to let out cigar smoke, and heard singing from the pub. All windows were squares of light, and though the singing was hardly the King’s College choir, he stood on the pavement to listen. The music rose and fell in waves of boisterous noise, till after a few choruses he made out the words, and began to laugh. Ain’t it grand, to be bloody well dead! They struck him as well off-centre, for of course it could never be grand to be bloody well dead, though going by the sound of their happiness it might be exhilarating to say so.

Expecting to see harridans with false teeth and candyfloss hair he went inside to find a dozen girls, with punk or otherwise elegant hairdos, sitting at a long table with linked arms, swaying from left to right and singing at the height of their voices, all healthy, confident, with good teeth, nice individual clothes to each.

Men along the bar and a few older women looked as if such merriment wasn’t taking place and there was nothing between them and the wall but silence and empty tables. Keith mimed a clap of applause, and one of the girls waved, her smile a flower thrown for him alone, to wear till it faded from his lapel. Sipping brandy and smoking a cigar, he enjoyed the crude yet funnily inspiring songs, as if the girls had inexplicably taken to such old-time melodies for the verve and gusto of their music.

They cared for no one, young women who worked hard and had money to spend, not the sort who would tolerate the marital anguish he was locked into, though maybe they would have to later. When he got home he could answer Gwen’s taunts with such equanimity that they went to bed without further quarrelling.

Sixty yards out on the road, the blast would sweep through the hotel like a thousand knives and kill everyone inside, so one more attempt was needed to get the van clear, and at half-past six there was no more time to play with.

‘Another stint.’ He touched Lance on the shoulder. ‘Just one more,’ he said to Wayne. ‘I want you as well, for as long as you can do anything to help,’ he told Alfred and Aaron.

They followed without complaint.

Every trade had a different apron, the escutcheon of skill and industry, but Fred of many trades had only one. He had bought a dozen of the strongest cloth, and picked them out himself. Doris chose everything else, which was right, but the aprons were his. Never let anyone choose your aprons, not even your employers, the butler at his first job had said. If the slave bought his own chains they wouldn’t feel as strong.

Funny things you thought of when you could be blown up at any time. He wore an apron so as not to sully his suit, narrow grey and white stripes that made him look a little longer in the body. He listed the trades he had been forced into on this long night which was not yet over. Barman and waiter at the beginning, then cook and bottlewasher, doctor for the wounded and priest for the dying, and undertaker if you thought about it, which he did as he whistled with apparent cheerfulness between the tables, collecting pots and cutlery, hearing the baleful groans of the gale and half expecting the floor to heave under him as it had in the old days at sea. In a great gale he had been aware that the waves were big enough to tip the whole caboodle into oblivion. Any second could come and without anybody’s by-your-leave decide to be their last.

So he had been in that state before this awful night, had learned that you couldn’t be frightened out of your life for more than a few minutes. And anyway, he had told the young lad with him in the galley, the system could only take so much uncertainty, so you might just as well settle down and forget it, which he had known how to do ever since. All you needed was something to occupy yourself, and you could cock a snook at God Almighty Himself, if you cared to. And then you could rely on the God of Israel to look on you grimly (but with a hidden smile somewhere) and say: ‘Carry on, then, lad.’ You could always find a place in God’s favour if you were working.

THIRTY-FOUR

Eileen felt better if she talked. She had been born knowing that there was no greater way of easing the heart but, if that was the case, why was it that all the people she had known hadn’t wanted to hear what she had to say? While Keith was outside doing what he had to do (and she would never be absolutely convinced that he had to do it, no matter what anyone said the danger was), every second that went by was a painful cut somewhere on her skin, so that if she didn’t talk there would be so many cuts she would bleed to death.

Maybe she ought to try singing, but she would sound like a wailing cat, and didn’t want to frighten anybody more than they were already. Let the wind do that, moaning around like a man who hadn’t got any ciggies just before Bank Holiday.

Enid slept on two armchairs pushed together, as far from Parsons’ corpse as she could get, a dead body Keith hadn’t told anybody to throw out because he seemed too knackered to bother, maybe too disappointed at how things were going. Jenny at the table, hands by the side of her face, looked as if a bit of a natter might not do her any harm. ‘I wonder how much longer we’ll have to go on waiting?’ Eileen asked.

The light from two Calor lamps at different ends of the room barely reached each other. Chairs had gone into the fire, which spat and subsided, as if it had taken umbrage and would warm them no more. The wind through gaps and cracks gave the bit of candle nicked from the kitchen a hard time in staying alight. Jenny looked at this poor young drab in the man’s overcoat Fred had found for her. ‘Is all this waiting around getting on your nerves?’

‘I’ve been waiting all my life, so it ain’t much different now.’ She kicked a piece of broken bottle back under the table. ‘It’s just that I ask myself now and again what I’m waiting for, and how long it’s likely to go on.’

Jenny laughed, but it was no laugh. ‘I thought you were being serious, for a moment.’

‘Well, I was. I always am, though everybody thinks I’m not. The only person I’ve ever met who took me seriously was Keith. And he’s out there with his bikers pushing that van around.’

‘They’re trying to save our lives. Don’t you know?’

‘Of course I do. And I’m waiting for it to be finished, and for them to come back, and for all of us to be safe. We ought to be shovelling as well, but they think we can’t do it because we’re women. I’m as hard as any of ’em. That’s what I said to Keith, but he made me get out of the van and come back in here. So I’m waiting, and it’s getting on my nerves. But it’s like you say, it stands to reason I’ll always be waiting.’ She was silent for a while, and Jenny missed her prattling, wondering when she would speak again, and thinking Eileen too young to have been knocked about by life, which was why she found it so easy to chatter.

‘I don’t think that time will come for me.’

Jenny laughed at such gloom from a young girl. ‘That’s a bit pessimistic. Aren’t you in love with him? I’d want to die if Lance was killed, whatever we might mean to each other.’

‘I’ve never been in love before so I don’t know. I once told a boy friend I’d never had an orgasm when he was talking about a book he was reading on sex, and then he made me come and said: “That’s an orgasm!” Well, I’d had plenty before, but now I knew. So as for being in love, well, with Keith it feels like people say it ought to feel. Only it’s no good being in love with him.’

‘Why not? Doesn’t he love you?’

‘He must, after what he said to get me away from that van. I wanted to stay, in case it exploded, because if he got killed I wouldn’t want to live. So I suppose that’s what being in love is, because I know he wanted me to stay. But he couldn’t let me. I thought he was going to thump me and throw me out, like one of my boy friends would have done. But he did it another way because he loved me. At least that’s what I like to think. I won’t stop waiting till he’s safe and we’re together again, and then I’ll never wait for anything for the rest of my life. Only it’s never going to happen. So I’ll be waiting all my life, except that I won’t. If you wait all your life it’s no life, is it?’

‘No.’ She heard the hard response in her voice, but went on, words coming out that she had often drilled into order: ‘You can always make up your mind to stop waiting. It’s useless. It’s killing. You can just say no to waiting, and start to live.’ Then she knew her words were foolish, because she wasn’t capable of any such thing.

‘I can’t.’ Eileen wiped her face with a serviette. ‘I haven’t lived yet, so I won’t even try. But if I wait for Keith I’ll have to wait a long time, because he’s on the run.’

‘What, him? He can’t be.’

‘When the police get him he’ll be put away for twenty years. He told me, to get me out of the van. But I know it’s true.’

Jenny was convinced that men were worse than born rotten. They had been rotten for generations before they were born, and their descendants — if the world was unlucky enough to have them — will be rotten for generations to come. In fact rotten was mild to what they were really like. Imagine a man like that telling such vile lies to a young girl he had just been to bed with and wanted to get rid of. ‘I can’t believe it.’

Eileen lowered her voice, though there was no one else to hear. ‘He killed his wife.’

‘Oh, God, that’s too bloody much. I’ve heard of some tricks, but that’s the limit. And you believe him?’

‘Yes. And you would have done, as well.’

‘I wouldn’t.’

‘You would if you’d been me.’

‘Did he tell you to keep it secret? To tell nobody else?’

‘He didn’t need to, though I don’t suppose he expected me to be such a flapmouth.’

Jenny felt Eileen ought to be protected from such a predatory swine, and though on a night like this he had his uses, she would say when he came in: ‘What the hell do you think you’re up to, telling a young girl you’ve just murdered your wife? Is that how you cook up your fun?’

All she had intended was to talk to Jenny, and since Keith couldn’t have lied, what would it matter how many people knew? ‘He didn’t want me to get killed, so he told me the only thing that would frighten me away. It proved he loved me, so how can it be bad? But he still killed his wife.’

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘You’re no fucking good to talk to at all.’

Jenny had a sudden dread that the explosion was about to happen. Talk had made her forget, but now she felt tense, almost tearful at what seemed sure to come. She soothed herself with the fact that whenever she had felt a warning premonition in the past nothing had taken place. It was only at those times when no sign was given that the unimaginable happened. ‘I’m sorry about that,’ she said in response to Eileen’s protest. ‘It’s just that I’ve learned to believe nothing men say. They’re liars, all of them. It’s bred in the bone for them to lie. As soon as they meet a woman they start lying, as if to mummy, all over again. Why it is, I don’t know. I think every man’s afraid of every woman. A person only lies if they’re frightened. The only total thing about women is that they have a vagina, but the one factor men have in common is that they all lie.’

Eileen laughed. ‘Christ! What a mouthful! I suppose most men are liars, but some must be different.’ The blizzard changed its tune to a high-pitched continual note, and though the windows stopped clattering the pressure against the frames caused more insidious anxiety. Another fall of debris sounded from upstairs. ‘Keith didn’t lie, so there’s one who’s different. My old boy friend Trevor lied all the time, when he condescended to speak. And women lie as well, I know that for a fact. Haven’t you ever lied?’

She needed little time to answer, but wondered whether she hadn’t missed something in her life. ‘No, never.’

‘I’ve had to, sometimes, so that I wouldn’t get a black eye, or to calm somebody down.’ It would be getting light soon, and she hoped the wind was having its last fling. ‘What about Lance, then? Doesn’t he lie? I know you went to bed with him.’

She smiled. ‘In the time we spent together he didn’t need to. Or I didn’t give him the opportunity.’ She didn’t want to think about him or be reminded of anything, good or bad, in her life at the moment. She wanted to sleep, and when she came out of it find that all nightmares had vanished at the onset of daylight.

‘I’ll bet he fucks like a rabbit in a thunderstorm,’ Eileen said.

‘Mind your own business.’

‘I was once forced by a biker. But I didn’t tell the police. Not on your life.’

‘You should have.’

‘It’s none of their business, either. It ended all right. We stayed together three months, and he was very good to me in the end. He looked after me. When I got pregnant he coughed up the money for an abortion.’

Jenny wondered if there weren’t more than a few liars among women, the way she told her story. ‘And how did you feel afterwards?’

‘Lousy. I wanted to do myself in. I felt so rotten he left me. Maybe I got preggers after being in bed with Keith last night. I hope so, because I’d have it. I don’t care what he says, if he’s here to say it. Anyway, if I do have a kid maybe I’ll be able to get a flat out of the social workers. I’ll look after it till my dying day.’

She was crying again. Who wouldn’t? At least you were living if you could cry. ‘Yes, never get rid of it.’ It was a hateful phrase, but one that would be readily understood.

‘I won’t.’ She was laughing, sucking in her tears. ‘If it’s a boy I’ll make its middle name Blizzard!’

They were both laughing, arms around each other, cheeks still touching. ‘And what if it’s a girl?’ Jenny said.

‘I’ll call her Snowdrop!’

With Alfred’s spade and then Aaron’s to help, Keith made them concentrate on levelling the way ahead so that he would be able to drive a further fifty yards. A range of snowhills from the digging had their own valleys and heights, the escarpment of a cutting mark here and there where human quarrying had been at work. Otherwise white, a blue glow in the dark, a false solidity you couldn’t travel over or through without sinking. The stars were paler, and contours of snow beyond their excavations vaguely outlined, undulations more or less flattened. They made their road into unexplored territory, seemingly to no purpose since its colour would never change enough to indicate what they might find.

A short stint, and Keith forced poisonous meditations out of his mind as he motioned them in, arms signalling that for them it was the end with shoulder and shovel, though unexpected energy came from somewhere when they walked quickly through the courtyard.

‘After we’ve had something to eat we’ll all move into the spare room, as far away as we can get.’ He was amazed at how fresh and neat Fred looked. He had taken off his apron and, cold as it was, wore no more than his smart waistcoated suit. Keith imagined him putting his head under the tap every half hour, spraying his face with a reasonable brand of aftershave, combing his hair, and wiping his shoes with a rag. As the only one able to go on with his normal trade, he was a being apart.

‘You ought to sleep,’ Fred told him. ‘It looks as if your battery’s drained. It wouldn’t do for you to fold up on us, sir.’ He turned, and pulled Enid out of her sleep. ‘I want some help in the kitchen. And no bloody cheek, or you’ll feel the flat of my hand.’

She smiled, no need to give him what-for, though he turned before she could do so. He felt light in the head, at the first pale hint of dawn coming back to the windows. Pulling the curtains open, to be more welcoming to the day, they ran completely off the rails, so with an operatic flourish he scooped them up and threw them on the fire, wondering why the hell he was doing such a thing.

‘Now you’re trying to choke us to death, you daft old bastard.’ Smoke clouding the room, Wayne pulled the drapes clear and ran to the door, black flocks falling as he flung them out.

‘What a mess my hotel is.’ Fred noted a lilt of hysteria to his laugh, and curbed it. ‘You wouldn’t think it used to be such a fine old place. All in a few hours.’ He walked towards the kitchen, shaking his head and wondering why it was that yesterday seemed weeks away. ‘You just never know what Fate is about to bring, do you?’

‘It serves him right.’ Enid followed at a certain distance, as if he were a wounded animal who, not yet knowing the extent of his disablement, might suddenly realize the pain and turn round to rend her.

‘It doesn’t serve him right,’ Aaron admonished, though gently.

‘Not if he hadn’t deserved it,’ Alfred agreed when she had gone. ‘And we’ve no reason to believe he has.’

‘We all deserve our fate, though.’

‘Do we? I don’t know about that. Anyway, what harm have we done?’ He poked Aaron in the chest, which Aaron felt as being too familiar, even vaguely insulting. ‘I’ve got nothing on my conscience.’ He had taken Jack Smythe’s trade and chased him out of business, but it hadn’t done any vital damage to Jack Smythe, who had then obtained a job as a long-distance lorry driver, and had also moved into a smaller house, which surely must be more convenient. There was nothing wrong with that because not being threatened with ulcers, how could he complain?

‘I’m in trouble with the police,’ Aaron said. ‘That’s what I mean.’

Alfred opened his coat and stuck a thumb in the armhole of his cardigan, a comforting stance which made him feel more himself, not even the old man’s image to chinwag him mercilessly into the slough of indecision whenever he had to do something about the business. After drumming up sufficient respect at the funeral, and arranging a spread of baked meats that the old bugger would be chagrined not to be present at, he would be finally on his own, able to go to the Devil or wherever else the inclination might take him. The mixing of freedom and exhaustion made him feel as if he’d had too many eggnogs at Christmas, and not in any mood to hear another man going on about his troubles. ‘Did you knock into another car, and not report it? Ah, here comes Fred with some tea, bless him!’

‘Worse than that, I’m sad to say.’

‘And he’s got beans on toast as well. I can’t think how he does it.’ He took out his soft leather wallet and put a tenner on the tray: ‘That’s for my favourite waiter.’ Two bob’s more than enough, his father would have said.

‘I’ll see that he gets it.’ Fred folded the note in four to fit the bottom right of his waistcoat, then left them talking like childhood pals, himself amazed at how Old Nick’s tantrums and the Sword of Damocles could bring such different breeds together. Not that the situation made Enid seem much sweeter when she beamed her needle eyes at him, but she was only a kid so what could you expect? All the same, she was sweet enough on that bookseller who was far enough over the hill to be her father. I don’t know how people have either the gall or the luck: but you’d think I was running a knocking-shop the way they screwed each other blind upstairs last night.

‘You mean,’ Alfred said, ‘that you can get more money for a book if you write the author’s name in front?’

‘That’s about it.’ Aaron didn’t know why he had told him. ‘Among other things.’

‘And the police can nick you for it?’

‘They certainly can.’

Alfred picked up the slice of toast, beans falling as he chewed. ‘You’re in a bit of a fix, though I’ve heard of worse pickles.’ Having swallowed his food, he laughed wide enough to show a couple of gold fillings. ‘You might get off with a caution from the judge if you sign him a copy of the Bible!’

Fred doled out refills from an enamel jug as long as his arm. ‘To the top,’ Wayne said. ‘If we get out of this place in one piece we’ll always call here for a drink on our way to somewhere else. We’re pals now, aren’t we?’

‘I reckon so. You’ll be very welcome.’ Like hell you will, he told himself.

‘Fill a mug for our mate Garry,’ Lance said. ‘It’s time we woke him up from his long night’s sleep.’

Fred walked away saying he would make a fresh pot. ‘He’s sure to appreciate it’ — wanting to be out of range because too many people in the world were insane, the sort who overtook on the inside lane of the motorway, or walked into plate-glass windows on coming out of a pub at afternoon closing, or hit their wives if the home team lost or only drew — such types as you had to avoid for your own good by staying in the kitchen which in any case was the best place to be alone in.

‘I hope he’ll bring plenty of sugar,’ Wayne shouted to the others. ‘If Garry’s tea ain’t sweet he’ll be cross, and I’ve never seen anybody as happy as Garry when he’s cross. Even I get frightened.’

Keith touched Eileen’s hand before beginning to eat. An old scar fanning from his left eye had whitened out of the grime. She hadn’t noticed it before, normally so blind she needed years to take in what another person looked like, and as for knowing them after forty-eight hours, well, she hoped Keith wouldn’t mind if she went on staring, wanting to remember him whether she saw him again or not, because if he got sent down for twenty years that’s how it would be, unless he gave her a photo. ‘I don’t want you to leave me. I couldn’t stand it. I never want us to be apart. I love you.’

Words failed at her lips. She hated tears but couldn’t stop them.

‘I love you.’ He did, whether or not she would always remain a mystery. ‘Don’t worry.’

She was satisfied with that, would have to be, but she would also expect him to let her make up later for her silence, how much later she didn’t know, an uncertainty that kept her tongue still. She wouldn’t worry either about both of them being blown to bits, or getting carried to the hospital. She couldn’t think about it because it was impossible to imagine.

‘There’s no problem,’ he said. ‘We’ll be together, no matter how long we’re apart. Forget the circumstances. They won’t kill either of us. Now you’re crying again. Please don’t do that.’

She was crying for him, in inexplicable rage, about something lacking all significance, crying out of an agony of spirit meant for him alone, and because of what he had told her about Gwen. ‘I’m just so fucking happy,’ she sobbed.

‘So am I. But you’ll have to stop swearing if you want to convince me.’ He held her warm fingers. ‘It’s not necessary to swear. I believe you, without you swearing every time.’ He thought he would do her a favour, so that she might have some kind of chance in life.

‘I’ll try never to swear again.’ She leaned forward to kiss him, and knocked over an empty glass. ‘But it often comes without me knowing.’

‘I can’t believe it,’ Alfred said. ‘The signatures are still in the books, whether they’re true or false. So what are they complaining about? They aren’t going to disappear. They’ll give you a slap on the wrist and tell you not to do it again. Nobody gets sent down for a thing like that.’ He lit a cigar and passed it across, then ignited his own. ‘In two years, maybe less, you’ll be back on course, wondering what the fuss was all about. Mind you, a chap like you should never have left that chemistry job. There’s too many temptations for people who set up on their own. Don’t I just bloody well know it?’

During the snow-shifting his toothache hadn’t much bothered Aaron, when it surely ought to have done, but now his whole mouth ached so that he didn’t know where the bad tooth was. ‘It’s my sister I’m most concerned about.’

‘Never worry about a woman.’ Alfred leaned closer, pale at the idea that Eileen or Jenny might hear and take him up on such views. His married life had been one long time-and-emotion study, which was why he still lived in the usually happy home. ‘Women are always all right. Society takes more care of them nowadays than it does a man, which is fine by me, because I’m old-fashioned. Your sister will let it flow over her without too much harm. Anyway, when we get out of here I’ll keep an eye open for your case, to see if it gets in the papers. I can follow it up, now that I’ve met you.’

Parsons was dead, though she wasn’t convinced there was any need to feel either guilty or bereft. You can’t save anyone from their folly, and to assume any responsibility for it is unjustified pride. She could have helped him more than she had, made it easier for him to cope, but only if she had been another person. If they had put the body out of the room and not left it under blankets she wouldn’t expect any moment to see an arm move, a head rise and a mouth call for champagne. The dead weren’t dead till they were buried or cremated, and then you couldn’t always be sure. She thought of him as he had been when alive, weak and good-natured (unless gerrymandering Union meetings), often kind to her. After Raymond left she had moved into a smaller house, and Tom got a friend’s lorry to shift her stuff, all for the price of the petrol and a few drinks. He even made two journeys in his own car to transport the fragile items.

‘I suppose my old man’s worried to death,’ Lance said. ‘When I first got a motorbike he never went to bed till I was in. He used to sit all night by the phone in case I’d had a spill, so he told me. He still does, I expect, though I’m not such a madhead any more.’

‘Phone him,’ Jenny said, ‘as soon as you can.’

‘You think I won’t? I’d send a carrier pigeon if I could. He’d love that. He’d think he was back in Libya.’

‘My old man’s counting his blessings,’ Wayne said. ‘He’s in bliss when I’m not there. Or he’s totting up his matches. He don’t trust me, not since he opened my cupboard and saw enough matches to start the Great Fire of London. I was smoking in bed last year and the eiderdown caught fire. It weren’t my fault, though. I nearly bloody choked on the smoke.’ He stood, on seeing Fred come out of the shadow with Garry’s tea. ‘I’ll take it to him. A cup and saucer, eh? He’ll think he’s at the Ritz. It’s too good for him.’

‘I suppose you think we’re a rough lot?’ Lance moved his chair closer. ‘We don’t mean anything by it.’

‘I know.’ Jenny envied him, that they were so easy with each other, and seemed to enjoy their lives. Nobody could fault them for that. The pain of existence would overtake them soon enough.

He kissed her. ‘I think you’re marvellous. I’d like to live with you. I’ll bet you could teach me a lot.’

‘I don’t know about that.’ She would ruin him in no time, as she would any man, though the hope of possible happiness wouldn’t leave her alone.

‘We’ve been to bed together, but I don’t know you yet.’

What a quaint notion, that you could get to know someone at all by going to bed with them. ‘And when you do know me, you won’t want to know me.’ She regretted what she had said, on seeing his eyes wince.

‘How do you know?’ he asked. ‘How can you be so sure? Even somebody like you. I wish you wouldn’t say it.’

Wayne still held the cup and saucer. ‘Come over here’ — tea splashing over his boots. Then he skimmed the saucer, lethal fragments ricocheting from the back of the fireplace.

‘What’s going on?’ Alfred shouted.

Wayne wanted a suitable target for the cup as well but, seeing nothing worthy of the effort, and no person whose possible injury would lessen the shock, sent it skittling among bottles above the bar. Then he caught hold of a table, and beat the floor with it till all legs were smashed, his bull-like grunts sounding out even the whining bandsaw moaning of the wind. Lance did not know whether to tell him to pack it in, or himself join in a last celebratory bursting to pieces of the hotel. ‘Come and see.’ Wayne pulled him close. ‘I’m sure he’s dead.’

Fred pushed broken bottles from the bar with a piece of folded cardboard. ‘Even doctors that cost hundreds of pounds a visit have people die on them,’ he murmured to Keith, ‘and as for me, I did my best.’

‘He died some time ago,’ Jenny said, ‘but what was the point of telling anyone?’

Keith was glad she hadn’t, since it would have disturbed their work. But he was responsible, for having encouraged them to attack a madman. He should have let Daniel starve in the cold, put off attacking him for a few hours and left him too weak to throw slates. His instinct had told him to go up himself, but he had played God and unleashed the bikers: ‘All right, lads, take him out. One in front, one in support, and one in reserve.’ No, that wasn’t it. ‘You go left, you to the right, and you in the middle.’ Not that, either. His heart had never been one for breaking, but you didn’t like losses. Call them together. Give them a talk: ‘Sorry, lads. The fault is mine.’ Another death that can’t be made good. Time punishes, because once a crime has been done there’s no calling back the good days, the score only wiped out when you die yourself. They wouldn’t understand that, either.

‘It’s not your fault,’ Jenny said.

‘No, but something else is.’ Even one death added up to too much. You lived with whatever you had done, existed with the insupportable. A week ago he was one sort of man, and today he was another. It happened to untold numbers, but they became the kind of people incapable of ever meeting each other. A killer lived with his internal injuries, never able to atone by bringing back the one whose life had been wasted.

‘Eileen told me. Is it true?’

One way of getting back to conventional simplicity was to give in to anger, but he curbed the temptation, such a distasteful route leading to mindlessness and defeat. ‘I’d give my life for it not to be.’

‘What a world.’ Nothing more to say, she left him to his breakfast, and looked at Lance moving the blankets one by one, as if not to cause pain to a corpse, until he came to two white legs streaked with blood, all below the waist awash. He had seen no more blood than that of a cut finger. They say you faint at the sight of blood, but I won’t. He flopped the blankets aside like enormous floorcloths, knowing it was the stench that put you in danger of throwing up. ‘It would have been better to go off the road doing a ton than peg out like this. He was dying while we were outside.’

‘We should have let the snow alone, and then we might have gone together.’ Wayne groaned. ‘His mam will go off her head when she knows.’

‘No, she won’t. Everybody hated him, except us.’ Lance shivered, out of control, legs melting under him, drew a chair close and sat down to cry. ‘It’s all that teacher’s fault. After Garry’s death, with my last breath. But it won’t work.’

‘Ferret’s dead,’ Wayne said. ‘But if he ain’t now, he will be. If it thawed we could track him down. I’ll get him. Even if he’s put inside for life I’ll be waiting to top him when he comes out. He deserves to be roasted over a slow fire. But if Keith hadn’t got us on snowshifting we could have stayed with Garry, and then maybe he would have been all right.’

‘The ifs don’t do any good,’ Lance said.

‘I know, but somebody’s done it, and it wasn’t us. Keith stopped us killing him when we was up in the attic, didn’t he? And then he wouldn’t let us hang him, like Garry wanted to.’

‘He’d been hit by that slate already,’ Lance said. ‘He should have gone straight to hospital, and he would have if the snow hadn’t blocked everything off. Another if, though.’

‘They’re right,’ Keith said to Eileen. ‘Five dead, and I’m still here.’

‘Take no notice,’ she told him. ‘They don’t know what they’re saying. You can’t blame ’em, though.’

One more push, another fifty yards. He would draw the van back, take it at a rush, up the well-prepared slope, then it would be far enough away not to kill anyone, a last effort before coming back to sleep till the storm was over and the police arrived.

Wayne and Lance sat silent, with heads down, settled by misery, flashes of the good times going by. Keith touched Lance’s shoulder, and said when he looked up: ‘I’m sorry about this.’

‘It ain’t your fault.’

If there was work to be done it would be easy to get them out, even kindness in it, and they would toil as never before, giving no sign of exhaustion or grief. ‘I’d like to thank you for all you did.’

Lance smiled, on hearing his own dead voice: ‘Any time.’

‘Just let us know,’ Wayne said.

He walked to Eileen, wondering what there was to say. Killing puts you beyond redemption, the solution always too late. He kissed her out of sleep. Her hands had gone cold, but she was warm and young. ‘I must just go to the toilet.’

‘Love you, love you, love you,’ she murmured, then smiled and closed her eyes, sure of him at last.

They were frozen and blocked, but he used one. Washing his hands in the kitchen, he turned to Fred. ‘Get all of them to safety. I don’t care how you do it.’

‘I hope you know what you’re up to.’

‘Another few yards, and then we’ll be safe.’

He went with head lowered towards the van, the blizzard come to life again and trying to beat him back.

Eileen waved. ‘Love you!’ she called, joy in her heart.

THIRTY-FIVE

‘We should have landed at Portsmouth,’ Charlie said, ‘and cut up through Oxford, then we wouldn’t have been two hours tangling with the Blackwall Tunnel. And if that CB radio hadn’t packed in we wouldn’t have copped all this and driven round in circles till we got stuck. So give that wireless a fucking good kick and call international rescue.’

Bill, never lucky at cards, threw his hand in. ‘I was trying all the way out. The gremlins must have crawled in it for a rave-up.’

Light came from two windows in the back doors and directly parallel with his sight, the changing badge of a new day that Daniel hadn’t expected to see. They had manhandled him up the ladder and onto his mattress above the driver’s cabin because of the smell and his disturbing groans, neither of which he was aware of.

The men ceaselessly playing cards and making tea below looked like bandits in a cave whose ceiling he had levitated to, instead of the decent-minded trio who had lifted him out of the claws of the blizzard. He had heard them say they couldn’t be bothered with him any more because he was dying, though he felt a long way from it except that the pain made him so tired he wanted to sleep for ever.

‘Our job might be easier,’ Charlie said, ‘when the Channel Tunnel opens.’

Paul stretched out on his mattress. ‘There’ll be a queue as far back as York to get on in summer.’ He nodded upwards. ‘If he goes on like this we’ll have to tip him outside. It’s making my guts heave. No wonder I lose every game.’

‘We don’t want to dump him while he’s alive,’ Bill said, ‘but we could be here for another week. Some people take a bloody age to snuff it, even if they’ve got gangrene all over like he has. It might be a kindness to all parties concerned if we chuck him out to die in the snow. In the meantime, let’s have some char. I’m as dry as the top end of a bulrush.’

Daniel didn’t know whether he was dreaming their talk, or redreaming their dreams. The drift of their unmusical voices made yesterday seem so long ago he could never have been there.

‘I envy that couple near Montpellier,’ Paul said. ‘They’ve finished sorting their few sticks out by now, and are on that lovely terrace with a bottle of Martini and a basin of olives.’

‘They’ve worked all their lives for it,’ Charlie said.

Bill’s laugh was dry. ‘Maybe they’re train robbers.’

‘What? That nice grey-haired woman, and that old gent in his fancy waistcoat? They gave us a hundred francs each to get a meal with.’

‘We could sweat two lifetimes and not retire to France.’ Charlie handed fags around. ‘Who’d want to die among strangers, though?’

‘If I could pull off a good job and get hold of half a million quid I wouldn’t mind,’ said Paul. ‘A few palm trees and a rooftop swimming pool would do me. Do you remember that geezer in Morocco, when we was watching them belly dancers?’

Bill choked on half a laugh. ‘Them belly dancers was boys, you stupid fucking berk.’

‘Well, whatever they was they looked all right in them yeller frocks.’

‘Christ, wait till I tell his missis.’

‘He wanted to fit the van up with packets of white powder, didn’t he?’

‘I nearly pushed my fist into his fat chops,’ Bill said. ‘They throw away the key for things like that.’

‘They’d never have found it,’ Paul said. ‘Not the way I’d have hidden ’em. I’ve been thinking up a scheme that can’t go wrong.’ His thin face was raddled by a greed which his ambition had never been able to satisfy, the reason being that bad luck had always made things go wrong, or people he dealt with had a secret grudge against him which he couldn’t have known about because he thought he had never done anyone harm. Or it hadn’t been people at all, but a timetable he had not read properly, or a list not fully taken in, an inventory not rightly assessed, or a page of instructions his sight slid over, thinking he understood everything when he hadn’t by any means, and even half knowing he hadn’t because he wasn’t that stupid but with more pertinacity and attention to detail he could have been much cleverer — and yet, after all, assuming it would be all right ‘on the day’ with someone as finally sharp as himself. And neither had he ever called on anyone to be his partner in business, because he hadn’t known who could be trusted, not so easy when nobody trusted you. The present scheme, unlike others, would be different, however, would net such a big sum that he wouldn’t either have to pit his brains against the world again or work with these two deadbeats any more. ‘Thinking about that couple whose furniture we just took to Montpellier …’

‘Whose mattresses we’re lying on,’ Bill laughed. ‘And I’ll be wearing their wellies to dig my garden from now on. So what about ’em?’

‘Sometime or other, they’re going to die.’ Paul’s eyes were almost as bright as the gas lamp standing on a box. ‘There must be thousands who’ll want to get shipped back to dear old Great Britain and have a proper Christian burial.’

‘I follow you,’ Bill said impatiently, ‘but I’m lost. Anyway, they have nice refrigeration trains for that journey.’

‘I know,’ Paul said impatiently, ‘but it would be cheaper for them to use the nice refrigerated van that our set-up would have.’

‘If we cut it so cheap, where would the profits be?’

‘Now you’re talking. Listen, what if the stiffs was filled with them neat little bags of white powder that the bloke in Tangiers talked about? We wouldn’t get it there, though, because I know somebody in Marseilles. We’d run the bodies to his warehouse, and a few medical students in need of a bob or two would be standing around trestle tables in white coats, with lots of buckets and hosepipes. They would make enough space in each body to pack a dozen little plastic bags, and when our black van rolled off the ferry and went through the Nothing to Declare slot, HM Customs’ boys and girls would stand to attention with hats under their arms and respectfully salute.’

‘This pretty scheme merits more thought.’ Bill scratched his head, then put his cap back on as if to get started. ‘Methinks the corpses would be dancing a fucking jig with all that head-banging stuff inside ’em when we came off the ro-ro at Dover.’

‘You’re not with me,’ Paul complained.

‘Too fucking right I’m not. What bad dream did you get that stunt from? I’m glad it’s getting light at last, that’s all I can say.’ He let out a particularly fruity belch. ‘We’ll have another fry-up soon.’

‘It’s foolproof,’ Paul resumed, though well knowing that if the plan failed they would blame him to the death, and that if it came out right their lips would be too solidly glued to the brandy bottle to spare a common thank you. ‘I’ve worked it all out. We place an advert in the International Herald Tribune.’ He pulled a stub of pencil and a piece of scruffy paper from the ticket pocket of his suit. ‘“Does it worry you what will happen when you’re dead? We would not be surprised. So why not go back to Blighty by refrigerated lorry? Our competitive rates will be right up your street.” Well, something like that. You two see if you can do any better. There’ll be so many enquiries we’ll need a secretary and an office to deal with ’em. We’ll do it for half of what the railways charge, and then …’

A light whiter than snow filled both windows, a thunderclap pushing the rictus of agony back into Daniel’s head. Pebbled glass swirled like shrapnel, and waves of force travelled along snowdrifts to hit the pantechnicon rear-end on, lifting the wheels so that the heavier front sent vibrations backwards like a dog shaking off water. Daniel, nothing to reach for, fell into the vortex of his screams.

The mattresses were yanked away and, as if with a life of their own, came back and tried to smother them. All three heard shouts of panic and shock, wondering where they came from, and what they had done to deserve whatever was happening, as pots and lamps and the stove flew. They rolled and collided within the doors that had stayed bolted, and Bill found himself clutching the stove, hoping to God it wouldn’t ignite as paraffin squirted over his arm.

The receding echo held more terror than the great bang, a malice implying the threat of returning to finish the job. Charlie held the frying pan but was curious as to how it came into his hand, as if he had been placed on guard should anyone try to get in or out. He ran a finger down his cheek and saw blood. ‘What the hell was that, then?’

Paul’s laugh was as if from a parrot which had just reached out and torn into someone’s finger. He took a card from the scattered deck which turned out to be a middle grade nonentity, squinting because the other eye wouldn’t open, and trembling that it might stay shut for the rest of his life. ‘It sounds like the fucking atom bomb went off.’

They looked at him while the wind, as if awed by the explosion, stayed quiet. Charlie released the frying pan for fear he would hurl it at Paul. ‘God took umbrage, and quite rightly so, at your cock-eyed scheme. Corpses! We was nearly able to begin on ourselves.’

‘Look at the mess.’ Bill smiled at finding he could stand. ‘We’d better get some sacks and nail ’em at the windows. If we hadn’t been dug into the snow the van would have gone like matchwood. Maybe it was a tanker carrying chemicals.’

A mattress had burst, foam rubber like imitation shards of dark steel scattered among the tea chests. ‘I thought it was what’s-his-name up there’ — Charlie wiped a gritty tear from his cheek — ‘but he’s down here now, and he’s dead.’ They looked at the face, and the tortured body. ‘I reckon he’s better off. Now we can tip him outside.’

‘He had a long way to fall, and that’s a fact,’ Bill said. ‘He’s broken every bone in his stupid fucking body, by the look of it. Some people just shouldn’t come out in the snow.’

Fred whistled, shoes crunching bricks and glass in what was left of the lounge. Another one away, and that was for sure, over the sticks, up the slope, and off to the happy hunting grounds. Them as dies will be the lucky ones, as he’d read somewhere. Maybe more than Keith had caught a packet, because Wayne and Lance hadn’t been able to leave their dead mate, due to loyalty and friendship, which wasn’t as old-fashioned as he had thought. In their peril they were not provided with the heartless wherewithal to leap for safety, or the sense to drag him after them. God knows, he weighed little enough after losing all his blood. And as for that young tart running out into the blizzard, she must have taken much of the blast when it came. I don’t suppose she looks very pretty now, so if I don’t see her again I can burn that envelope he left me with.

‘That’s it, then.’ Enid smoothed her headscarf and the borrowed coat. ‘That’s it at last. Now we can relax again.’

‘I’ll need a week or two to get used to it.’ Alfred, the lower parts of his eyes like saucers filled with blood, needed three matches to light his cigar. ‘We’re all right, but what about the others?’

The wall was cold at Aaron’s back, dust and rubble around his feet. A beam had fallen in the opposite corner, where luckily no one had sheltered. ‘I’ll take a look.’ He stood up to go after Fred.

‘At least it’s daylight,’ Enid said, arms tight across her chest. ‘I want to get home and tell everybody I’m all right. They’ll be worried to death, I hope.’

‘You’d better not leave too soon after the authorities get through,’ Alfred said, ‘or you won’t be on television. You might even get a film contract if you primp your lovely self up a bit.’

‘Fuck off, you sarky old bastard.’

‘If my daughter Joan had said half as much to me I’d give her a bloody good hiding. But she’s well behaved, and I’ll have a house built for her as well one day. She went to the High School, she did.’

Fred called from a gap in the wall: ‘I can’t get through to the bikers. But they’re swearing worse than my old parrot, so come and give me a hand.’

‘It might be a farm,’ said Charlie. ‘Somebody else have a look.’

Bill put his spade down, and focused the field glasses. ‘The roof’s off. It’s derelict.’

Paul took them. ‘It’s a hotel. Or it was. I can see a sign. It must have killed everybody. There’s bits of a motor car. Or it might have been a van. We ought to get over there now it’s not blowing so much.’

‘It’s a good half-mile away,’ Charlie said, ‘though I suppose it might be better than staying in this truck for the next three days. It must have been a hundred tons of gas. I once read about a whole caravan park being wiped out from one bottle.’

‘It’d be more sensible,’ Bill said, ‘to get our engine started, then have another go at the radio. It’s got a two-year guarantee, so there can’t be all that much wrong with it. If you give me the flashlight I’ll try and get a word through to Smokey.’

Charlie put the binoculars back in their case. He loved his binoculars. They made him feel like General Montgomery. ‘Let’s go inside. We can cook our breakfast and think about it. If we have to trek through the snow we’ll need our bellies full.’

‘The first thing to do is get that corpse out. I can’t stand the smell.’ Paul cleared more snow from the top of the van. ‘If he stays much longer he might bring us bad luck, and we’ve had enough of that already.’

‘It’s changing, though,’ Charlie announced. ‘I swear blind it’s got a bit warmer since we came out. Anyway, let’s eat, then Marconi can bodge up that wireless and give the world a bit of Heavy Metal from the tape recorder.’

‘Are you hurt?’ Jenny said. ‘Can you stand up?’ Lips at her ears to beat the blizzard’s muffle. No blood, and the lion-headed stone pillar by the gate had kept her safe, a lucky chance in her rackety life. She had come out to find her, even before looking for Lance, because she knew he had to be all right. It had to be women and girls together, because no man would make it his first thought to help them. And Fred had gone to look out for the bikers.

The breasts and bellies of snow were pure to one side, but out towards the fields, along where the road was supposed to be, were twisted wheels, black ripped-out pieces of chassis, a door buckled beyond use, a steering wheel like a plastic toy some child had stamped on with disappointment, broken items she could not recognize, pieces of flesh she sought not to, odd bits of tubing like sections of dead snake, a sleeve with an arm still in it, blue striated with red, couldn’t not see, scarves of blood, grey guts, a butcher’s shambles: bits of cardboard, coils of wire, the half page of a road atlas splashed with red like Chinese writing, spinning over and over in the wind, chasing a scalp, odd crimson rags and half a head.

‘Don’t go.’ Jenny used all her strength to bring her face against her chest. Then she closed her own eyes and said: ‘Let’s not look,’ before being more sick than she could ever remember.

THIRTY-SIX

The place that had seemed so staid a refuge in the blizzard, plugged into the earth and beyond all notions of destruction and, what’s more, eternally welcoming with warm punch and womb-like shelter, had in fact been rotten with woodworm, rising damp and deathwatch beetle, as if reinforced only by the faith of those who were stranded under its roof.

Thus Aaron felt as he took off his coat and jacket, determined to pull rubble clear, with Alfred at the other end, and Fred taking position in the middle. The beam was brown below and black on top, a ponderousness pinning laths, plaster, chairs and tables, making a rapidly diminishing prison that Wayne and Lance must be pulled out of before everything slid, because half a bed hung through the ceiling, a counterpane waved to warn or encourage, and foul water descended the wall below a buckled window frame. He would lift the beam or die in trying, though to have survived the explosion and then throw the gift of life back into God’s face would be opposing nature.

Fred heaved at the wood. ‘The pipes must have split.’ Some, against the regulations, had been plastic, and snow melting around them stank like soot.

‘Stop fucking nattering,’ came Wayne’s faint voice, ‘or I’ll never do a kickstart again. My ribs have gone, and I’m getting snow on my face.’

‘Take your sweat. We’re getting there.’ Fred looked anxious, though not upwards, such a gesture bad for morale. ‘The whole lot might tumble.’

The beam was of hernia weight, and Aaron had previously suffered one from lifting too many logs after cutting down old trees in the garden. Beryl said he should get a lad from the village to help, but such work in solitude was precious in the peace it brought.

Both hands under, he remembered in Les Misérables how the escaped convict Jean Valjean had put himself beneath a cart and raised it to save a man’s life, though such a feat made him known to a policeman looking on. Aaron couldn’t tell whether the frog-croak came from planks at the far end of the beam, or from the ceiling, but the strain at his back and stomach turned into a dread ache, as if his legs would also crack. ‘Sweat for England, you bastards.’ Lance’s voice sounded above the blizzard. ‘A rat’s staring at me, and I don’t like rats.’

Alfred groaned at the load he worked at, sweat dripping onto the rubble. He slid bricks and wood under the beam to get it higher, twigging the stress of the situation as if he had inherited the brain of his engineer father, because should Aaron let go, the beam would only fall an inch or two. ‘I wanted to see the explosion,’ Wayne complained, ‘not have the whole shop fall on top of me.’

Clothes chilled from plastery mud, Aaron raised a weight to last the rest of his life, stomach hardening as wood, a matter of holding on and hoping the body would sustain him: ‘I’ll count up to fifty, and then let go.’

The effort separated him from the world. Fred and Alfred pulled at bricks to make the gap bigger. Far from book-dealing, or the self-indulgent fits of his sister, or his evil encouragement of her plight, and distant also from his nihilistic streaks of cheating, Aaron knew that everything you did affected someone else and had to be allowed for, no resolution except by pain of spirit and the extreme use of grit and sinew.

‘I’ll count up to fifty, and then let go,’ but when he got there he said, no one to hear because the voice of the blizzard was even louder among the ruins: ‘I had better make it a hundred, though it’ll be impossible to go on longer. And when they’re safe I’ll ask Enid if she wants to come away with me. We’ll drive to the south coast and stay in a hotel. I don’t think she will, because she can hardly bear to look at my raddled grandad face twisted with toothache.’

At the hundred mark he said: ‘I’ll manage ten more, and try not to brood on my squalid fate for ever.’ Then he endured without counting, eyes closed because he couldn’t bear to check how the loads were shifting, till it came as almost a shock that no more effort was needed.

Wayne limped to the broken door, gasping, hands pressed against his ribs. Fred helped Lance away: ‘I think this young soldier might have broken his leg.’

Aaron stepped aside, and the spike of lath that had gone through his trousers at the calf still waved as he hurried to safety.

‘It’s lovely. Not a cloud in the sky.’ Paul knew those days that started so well: sun on snow which protected and kept warm the little goings-on underneath. Such weather could turn very nasty between dawn and dusk. Visibility was good across moors and hills, scratchmarks of walled hedges in the distance, showing how local the blizzard had been but might not be if it began again. The wind was muzzled of its howl, turned direction and settled from the northwest, God alone knowing what it would do in the next few hours. He lay at full length, checking wires leading to the little black box.

Bill shone the torch. ‘Did you ever get a licence for this CB radio?’

‘Don’t ask, or you’ll make me laugh. I might bang my head. The screw’s so loose the wire ain’t making contact. And the aerial’s unplugged. I’m surprised they didn’t hear that bang twenty miles away and send a chopper to investigate. My fingers are so dead I can’t make the two ends stay together.’

Charlie passed a cigarette. ‘They wouldn’t know which way to look, would they?’

‘The trouble is,’ Bill said, ‘you need a licence for the CB, and we ain’t got one, so the coppers’ll nick us when they jump out of the chopper even before they offer a fag and a mug of tea to the injured. It might mean a two-hundred-pound fine. They’re bound to ask for our licence.’

Paul rubbed his fingers till they were supple and live enough to knot the wires. Static sounded like chips thrown into a pan of smoking oil and, damping the volume, he pushed buttons to bring voices loud and clear from the outside.

Five gone, and none had stopped on their way to pay what they owed. Well, they wouldn’t, would they? Fred mused that just as the dead could tell no tales, neither were they capable of settling their scores, though you could be sure they would be called to account when they got to the other side, if there was such a place which, considering the list of misdemeanours he had built up against himself, he sincerely hoped there was hot. In what was left of the kitchen he spent the remaining provisions like a generous sailor. The fridge and deepfreeze had been cut off from the start, and he couldn’t imagine any of his guests staying many more hours, in which case they would eat royally of sausages, chops, steak and all manner of vegetables. ‘It’s no use shoving an emergency stock into the snow, because foxes and wild cats will get their noses at it,’ he said in answer to Aaron, as if the time for common sense had long been over.

‘What about my father’s body, then?’

‘Animals roam all over the place in a blizzard,’ Fred told him gleefully. ‘You always find a few sheep gnawed to the bone.’ No longer the manager of a hotel, of which there wasn’t much left in any case, it didn’t matter who he offended. ‘You’re not going to bring his body back inside, either.’ He was well muffled up, for in spite of a woodstove in the kitchen, half of one wall was down. ‘It won’t be hygienic, not by this time. It won’t be very pretty.’

Wayne turned his steak over. ‘Every time I chew, my ribs ache summat rotten. I’ll have to wait for a proper blow-out till after Garry’s funeral.’

‘A mass funeral,’ Lance said. ‘He would have loved it.’

‘You lot just don’t care about him, do you?’ Enid shouted. ‘I hate you. He was all right. But you lot haven’t got any sense or feeling to talk like that. You make me sick.’

Wayne stood up unsteadily, holding his knife and fork as if he might make her part of his meal. ‘What do you know about feelings?’ he wheezed. But with his cracked ribs he wanted to curl up in a darkened room with a bottle of whisky. ‘Next time a maniac goes around the country in a blizzard with a van like that we’ll arrange for you to get stranded with some nice posh civilized people. Then you’ll be raped, drawn and quartered before you can wiggle your tight little arse.’ He pushed his plate aside, unable to eat. The hotel had fallen in, and the world could do the same as far as he was concerned. ‘We’ll never forget Garry, so shut your gob.’

She turned to Aaron. ‘Are you going to let him insult me like that?’

‘Let’s get on with our meal,’ he said.

Fred came into the kitchen with a tray of soiled pots. Those in the lumber room were belching, farting, or puffing cigarettes and groaning from their injuries. He was sorry about that. The lads were more hurt than they let on, so he would leave them alone and hope the medics got here soon to mend ’em and bandage ’em. Even so, they seemed more harmless under their tribulations than before they had known about the van, and that couldn’t be bad. It was amazing how pain and peril turned tearaways into heroes. He would show his appreciation by rustling up something tasty for dessert. What they really needed was a good plate of spotted dick smothered in a rich egg custard, or hot dumplings running with treacle, but neither time nor cooking facilities allowed of that. He kicked at a large rat running across broken glass to safety under the sink. ‘Not another one away?’

‘She’s fainted,’ Jenny said. ‘Is there a dry bed somewhere?’

He pointed to a mattress. ‘I kipped on it myself now, and again last night. What happened?’

‘She saw the mess.’

‘I told her not to go out.’

‘Well, now she knows. And so do I.’

He set the tray on the sink. ‘We don’t even have any water. Everything’s frozen, or burst. I hope we’ll be out of it soon. It’s getting intolerable, even to me.’

She let Eileen gently down, thinking it typical of him not to help. The struggle of getting her in from the storm had been almost too much, as if both might never reach shelter.

He turned doctor again. ‘I’ll find some brandy.’

Eileen lay on her back, arm over eyes, mouth shaped in the perpetual horror of a half-formed cry. Someone had punched her into a nightmare, and she was running up and down tunnels unable to find a way out. Her forehead, was cold, the pale skin unwrinkled, and Jenny hoped that soothing fingers would do some good. Eileen’s breathing was even, as if she were asleep, shocked out of herself but into something she had never known about, senseless from the exhaustion of terror and utter loss. Jenny touched her lips, then quickly took the hand away at the thought of being bitten, a melancholy smile at such an unlikely occurrence.

Fred shook the bottle’s insides to a froth, snapped out the cork, and put it to her nose. ‘This is better than any brandy. A ship’s carpenter once gave me the formula. But I wonder where she’ll go when she leaves here? Keith picked her up off the road.’

Snow had melted into her clothes, but her warm sweet breath came through the odour. ‘I’ll take her home with me.’

She surprised herself, because what would she do about Lance? Let things happen as they might or might not, she’d see him or she wouldn’t, surely no need to worry about wanting her when you had spent a night dying and being born again. She would love who she liked. No, that’s not it. I’ll never be able to change, nor will she, but if we can’t live with each other, at least for a while, who the hell can we live with? ‘I’m out of a job as well, but we’ll manage.’

‘Better you than me,’ he said.

‘It never could be you, could it?’ she responded sharply.

‘It’s having some effect. She’s coming round, but you’d better stay with her.’

‘I will.’

‘Poor thing needs somebody. And when you get her home, give her this envelope.’

‘What is it?’

‘How the hell should I know? Keith left it for her. Maybe it’s a last will and testament. A Dear Eileen letter, for all I care.’

Alfred dragged a mahogany table from the fireplace and set a box under it where a leg was missing. He stacked jumble around the walls, sorted stuff for burning. A boot through the unhinged door of a wardrobe sent clouds of snuff and splinters towards that part of the ceiling still able to cover them from driving snow. ‘We can sit it out here a treat.’ He was proud of the order he had made. ‘The bikers are asleep, and they deserve to be. I wish I was their age again.’

‘You had a good time when you were, I suppose?’

‘I worked too hard,’ he said to Aaron. ‘I never had the guts to be more myself than I dared. With my father in the offing all the time I had to watch my Ps and Qs. He had to know about every little thing. I suppose it did my character some good, by the time I was forty anyway. It seems funny now he’s gone. Mother died ten years ago — or was it twelve? — so I’m an orphan! What a bloody silly thing to be, at my age! All I want is to see my daughter married, and get back to business, though the first thing’ — he lit a cigar from a burning stick which he threw down before his eyebrows singed — ‘will be to get my father decently buried. I have a son, but he cleared off five years ago to live in London, where he’s working on computers. He’s got two kids of his own, and pays for ’em to go to a private school. He had more guts than I did, and didn’t want me breathing down his neck, though I tried not to when he was little. His grandfather was as nice as pie to him, would you believe it? So I hope he’ll come up for the funeral, though it wouldn’t surprise me if he didn’t. I even offered to buy him a car last year, but he said he’d already got one. That’s the modern generation for you.’

Enid looked at Aaron as if, he thought, she had never seen him before. ‘I’ll go home as soon as I can, and let my parents know I’m all right. I don’t like them to be worried. When they’re worried they get upset.’

‘I’m not surprised.’

‘I’ll write to you about that job.’ She didn’t think she would, but she might. You never knew how you would feel in the morning, and why should you? If you knew how you would feel from one day to the next you might as well be dead, and who wants to be dead when you can go on enjoying yourself? She patted his folded hands. ‘I promise I won’t bite my nails any more. My mam and dad will be ever so pleased.’

Fred came in with a tureen of fruit salad. ‘I went out to empty the slops, and saw a helicopter over the tor a couple of miles away. I expect it’s the police. Or maybe the RAF.’

Wayne yawned, and whispered in his pain. ‘Go and wave a white sheet, then.’

‘You damned idiot,’ Fred said. ‘They won’t see it in the snow.’

‘I’ve got to go to court next week for speeding,’ Wayne grumbled. ‘I was doing a ton near Youlgreave. They won’t let a biker live these days. I didn’t even kill anybody. I hope that was a chopper and there’s a doctor on board who can fix my ribs up. They’re giving me bloody hell.’

‘All I ever hit was a dog,’ Lance said, ‘and I was only doing thirty. I’ll be scarred for life with this bloody gash in my face. The blood’s congealed, though, so it’s not running any more. The poor bloody dog ran right out of a garden. The little girl who owned it broke her heart, but the farmer admitted it wasn’t my fault.’

Fred set down bowls and spoons. He would stay in Nottingham with his old shipmate Tommy Blidworth who had a fuel delivery service, work with him till he could get a job, or until he made up his mind about buying another hotel, unless it paid him to insist that the insurance build up this one to exactly what it was like before. He had done nothing but send Doris insulting letters since she left, but if he wrote nice things and posted some flowers maybe she would come back. We’ll start all over again. I’ll need a bit of help in a new place. Her cook’s bound to be fed up with her by now. The only thing worse than being together is living apart.

‘We’ll have a concrete motorbike built on Garry’s grave,’ Lance said. ‘A sculptor can do it, set him up in full riding gear, and put some dandelions in an Ogri mug.’

Alfred was ready with money. ‘We’ll have a subscription list, a whip-round. I’ll put fifty quid in, if you like.’ He pushed his scraped dish away. ‘You lads did wonders last night and this morning. And Keith as well. I feel bad that he had to go. He was one of the best.’

‘Shut your stupid gob,’ Wayne said. ‘Everybody gets what they deserve. We all did what we could, that’s all.’

‘Now what have I said wrong?’

‘Nothing.’

It’s no use, Lance said to himself. I’ve got to get out of this, though I can’t say what this is, except it’s everything and I’ve been in it all my life. I’ve only enjoyed being in it because there was nowhere else to be, but it’s finished, because I know I don’t belong, and ought to find somewhere else. I don’t know where that else is, either, but I’ll get there soon. Garry’s dead and gone, and there’s no one left at where I am, but I would want to skedaddle in any case, otherwise I’ll fly head-on into a juggernaut and die like Garry if I don’t escape from this foggy pothole I’ve been in too long. Now that I can see the future I might write some good songs.

‘You look as if you’ve swallowed a fairing,’ Wayne said. ‘I feel a bit like that. I just can’t believe that maniac killed him, not to mention Keith. The wind’s not howling like it was, so maybe we can go out and find him. I’ll kick him from here to Tipperary if I get my hands on him.’

‘I wouldn’t waste my time,’ Lance said. ‘Let him rot. Anybody who has anything to do with something like that was rotten as soon as he was born, if not sooner.’

‘How are we going to pass the time, though? Fred said he’s seen a chopper, but we might be here all day. I’m bored to death now I’m not waiting to be blown up. And when I think of Garry I want to cry.’

Lance lay as far away as he could get, also wanted to cry but knew you never could. The mattress was damp and the wind cold, but his face burned at the pain in his leg, and he thought he was going to sleep, or faint.

‘We should make an effort to welcome them,’ Fred said. ‘Stand outside and wave. They’ve found us, and they’re circling to find a landing place.’

No one seemed bothered. He straightened his jacket, brushed dust and cigar ash from his waistcoat, and took a comb out of his lapel pocket like a concert party magician who had proved it to be empty a moment ago. If he could find a better suit he would change into it, though who could be a pretty picture after such a night?

All of them looked wounded, walking wounded thrown into a bombed-out building after a skirmish, sprawled any old how, and dead to the wide, unable or unwilling to care, couldn’t even put hands over their ears to stop the roaring of the blades, though it seemed like the best of music to Fred.

The fun was about to begin. Welcome to The White Cavalier Hotel — as was, gentlemen, as was — though having been the host, and still am even over the ruins, I have put a bottle of something very extra old and special on the table for you to partake of on this wintry but nonetheless soon to be beautiful morning.