He sighed, as if about to put on the little boy act. He wasn’t that sort, plainly. His face showed no illusions, though there was more than a hint of them having worked their way out. ‘I was brought up to walk in the path of the righteous, to know the truth and to speak the truth. But given the way I must have been before I was born, it was a fatal course. I was bound to be the opposite when I grew up and got to know myself.’
‘What caused it?’
‘Let’s say that it was politics.’
She wondered what he saw in her features, though guessed it wasn’t half as much as what she was beginning to see in his. ‘We all have to mature in that way.’
He paused awhile, then: ‘But not the way I did.’
The closer he came to words of importance the more relaxed was his voice, but his body was as tense as a loaded crossbow. She had never imagined such talk after making love, but she hadn’t foreseen being stranded, either. In her fantasies she would have been in a sunfilled bedroom, or strolling through beautifully dappled bluebell woods for more dalliance with her ardent lover. ‘It strikes all of us differently.’ She wanted him to continue talking, so as to have as much as possible to remember him by, fighting the faint echo of desolation which told her she might not see him after tonight.
‘I swear you to secrecy, though it won’t be for long.’
Her surmise was right, yet his words sounded like some kind of boyish ceremony. ‘That goes without saying,’ she said.
‘Nothing ever goes without saying. At least it never did in my life.’
‘All right, then, I promise.’ She tried to sound nonchalant, so as to encourage him to talk. He frowned neat furrows along his brow, and she knew she must look serious, and even feel so, however difficult at such a careless time, since he was in a state to detect it if she didn’t.
‘When I woke up this morning I wasn’t to know that in twenty-four hours I would cease to exist. On the other hand, I have the consolation of knowing that the same applies to quite a few other people.’
‘You can go out of your own house and be mown down by a juggernaut ten minutes later, but it doesn’t do to worry too much about it.’ She had never got anywhere near such a conversation with Stanley, which fact made her curious as to who Stanley did have his heart to hearts with.
‘That,’ he responded, ‘is pure petty chance.’
‘So is the blizzard.’
He seemed to think about that, and then said, disappointingly forlorn: ‘Is that all there is?’
Didn’t you know? she wanted to ask, which would be flippant, something Stanley often accused her of being, whereas she had thought it a virtue to make fun of the futility of life. With Daniel she decided to be more guarded: ‘Well, it could be.’
‘There’s always a moment when the bomb begins to tick.’ He saw, in her lovely rawboned English face, that she didn’t understand. He wanted to tell her everything, unable to stop even if only because he was unwilling to do so. ‘It began when those damned bikers turned up.’
He didn’t seem so timid as to be afraid of them. ‘They’re stranded like us, that’s all. I expect they’re harmless enough.’ Her arms were stiffening, she wanted to get dressed and go downstairs for a drink, see what was happening. Someone passed the door on their way to bed, as if the party might be over already.
‘Oh, you’re right there. I taught them at school. They’re the usual louts, but nice enough when tamed. The fact is, though, they found my van in the lay-by and brought it here. That’s the crux of the matter. God knows what evil intentions allowed them to get it through the snow. Perhaps they saw it as just a lark, and didn’t know that they were God’s chosen in what they were doing. If they hadn’t got it here everything might have been all right.’
To find out what was in the van she would have to be quiet. Her skin had cooled even more, and she pulled him closer so as to stop shivering, and as if to recall their passion. He hadn’t made love for months, he had said, and fucked her till she was limp and empty. How lucky to find someone who had been so taken with other matters that he had forgotten the divine urge!
His tone was so faded she could hardly catch the words, breath warming her ear when she put it close. ‘The van is loaded with high explosives, rimed to go off at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. It was meant for some street or other in London. Or maybe Birmingham. I don’t know their plans exactly.’ He felt the vacuity which was nearer still to happiness, his only wish now to disembarrass himself of treacherous words and stop talking. ‘It began a long time ago.’
In silence she might have been distraught, and let him sense her terror, but he was talking still, so she encouraged him to talk more, as if only that would help, since he was a madman wielding his power and trying to destroy her as well. But he had the wrong person, which she hoped was true, dried up inside as she now was, the medieval ballroom of spectacular dimensions and lubricious debauchery a long time faded. Married to someone eminently sane would help her to deal with this situation. Even to be herself was enough.
She listened to him telling her why he worked for terrorists. She said yes and no, feared to nod her head but stroked the warm hard limbs as she rehearsed the story to Stanley, about how she had coped oh so wonderfully with this lunatic trying to scare her by saying his van of explosives would blow them and the hotel to kingdom come and halfway back again, a dreadful tale with not a grain of truth in it, but so convincing in his mad, intimidating way that she had been half frightened out of her life, it being his kooky idea that she should be, of course.
She would not be able to tell Stanley, and her eyes welled as if tears would fall. Stanley was her husband, and he wouldn’t stay much of a friend either if she told him how she had got into such a fix. For all she knew he would call her a slut for the rest of her life or divorce her on the spot, and that would be that, an outlook worse than hell itself, though if what Daniel was saying was true she wouldn’t be able to tell her adventure even to herself because she and the rest of them would be dead. Stanley had always made a great thing of loyalty, which was why she had never quite trusted him, so it would be better not to confide in him at all.
TWENTY
Eileen lay with legs apart, and he stared at the dark patch and lips: ‘Aren’t you cold?’
‘Is that all you can say? I love you looking at my cunt.’
He passed a cigarette. ‘As long as you’re warm enough.’
‘You won’t have any left soon.’ She blew smoke, which he boxed away.
‘I expect there are plenty more downstairs. Do you think I’m mesmerized by your charms?’ he smiled.
‘I might be if I was where you are, only I couldn’t be, could I, because I’m a woman. Trevor would never look at me when I was starkers like this. It frightened him, unless he was drunk.’
He frowned, ‘I don’t want to hear about him. Ever again. Do you understand?’
‘All right. You’re my boy friend now.’
‘Aren’t I too old?’
‘How old are you?’
He told her.
‘Well, it was lovely being in bed with you. You made me come.’
‘I couldn’t stop you. It’s good when it happens. It means a woman’s in love – though it might not last more than the time it takes. But it’s good, all the same.’
‘I don’t come with a man. Only when I do it myself. I must have been wanting it. And I love you.’
‘No, you don’t.’
‘You said that’s why it happens.’
He lay by her side, not wanting to smash the place to pieces any more, getting more kisses from her than ever in the same space of time, which left him feeling he also might be in love.
‘It sounds as if they’re having a barney downstairs.’
‘Shall we go and take a look?’
She came to him. ‘Not yet. Let’s be together again. I don’t want the night to stop. I never knew a day to start so rotten and finish up so good.’
‘Nor me.’ He was trut
hful for once, needing her smile. After Gwen’s body was found he would have no life for twenty years. Hanging was too good for murderers, he had always said, which was why Gwen had supposed he would never do it. Her intuition ought to have told her that only a man like him would.
‘You know I love you,’ she said, ‘don’t you? I love you very much, in fact, and when I say it, I mean it. I don’t care whether you love me or not. But I think you do a bit, don’t you?’
It didn’t hurt him to say yes, especially since it seemed more than likely to be true, certainly as much as he had ever loved anyone. ‘Of course I love you.’
‘No, you don’t.’
‘How can I convince you?’
‘I don’t know. I believe you when you laugh like that, though. What a terrible rumpus is going on down there. It sounds as if they’re breaking up the happy home.’
She had a way with phrases, the ‘happy home’ always to be smashed by those who had moulded one out of impossible circumstances. To build and break was the armature of ambition, to find love and, while you had it, look for another love to avoid the heartbreak of when the present one went rotten in the sun, the worm at the heart of the fruit. Such thinking had led him into a cul-de-sac from which there was no turning back, so all he wanted to do was enjoy the time left. ‘There must be some new arrivals.’
‘A pop group called The Abominable Snowmen,’ she said. ‘Who else could it be in weather like this? Or the police have arrived in a chopper and they’re clearing the bar. Your laugh turns strange, sometimes.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘As if you’re frightened. You don’t look like somebody who could be frightened, though.’
Silence was golden, and if that phrase hadn’t been in use for thousands of years he would surely have invented it in this situation. ‘No, I’m not. I only know that it’s a miracle being here with you. Life’s very simple: you find whatever you need when you won’t be able to enjoy it for long.’
‘We enjoyed it then, didn’t we?’
A straight yes was easy because his body had plainly said so, and she accepted it as spoken without thinking that the lack of a word might be insulting. Nuance and telepathy had over the years been replaced by the venom of belligerence, when his determination to say nothing invariably ended in a spiritual bloodbath. Such anguished battles were not part of his temperament but had become so, whereas Gwen had thrived on the bold stance, the lit eyes, the triumphant mouth at having harried him to become someone he was not, imagining she could always drive him to the brink of violence and then induce him to pull back.
‘Didn’t we?’
He felt benign, in his own world again – for however long it would last. ‘I’d get you some flowers if I could pull them out of the snow. You’ve made me happy.’
‘Talking will do. I love talk. At home they used to tell me to shut up, I talked so much. But it wasn’t all that much. Only they thought so. It wasn’t that they didn’t talk, though they didn’t talk all that much, either. It was just that I wasn’t supposed to.’
He laughed as she stroked him between his shoulders.
‘You can monkey-jabber as long as you care to with me.’ It was more than comforting to have someone you were half in love with talk and yet say little. Only in saying something – the telling, the asking for explanations, the no uncertain demands for an answer – did affection fade. ‘I can’t hear your voice enough.’
‘You’d better be careful, or I’ll never leave you.’
‘You might have to. Things happen.’
‘Well, you lousy sod, if I have to I’ll have to. But not until.’
He kissed her lovely pliant lips. ‘That’s what I hoped you would say.’
‘Every time you open your mouth you make my day. I’ve lived a year with you already.’
He stroked her nipples with his lips. ‘This is how I like to open my mouth.’
She shivered against him. ‘I’m not cold. That’s all I want you to do. That’s right. Just there. You know how to do it. It won’t take long.’
He was roused enough to go into her when she had finished, but work as he might he couldn’t ejaculate, and at last flopped out. ‘We need distraction.’
‘Well, we can’t go to a dance. Buses aren’t running.’ She wiped between her legs on a corner of the sheet. ‘We’ll be in this room for ever.’
‘I wish that were true.’ The walls shuddered, telegraphic thuds resounding, followed by a scream and the breaking of glass. He jackknifed off the bed to reach for pants and trousers. ‘Mayhem’s got loose. Wait while I see what’s happening.’
‘Not likely.’ She pulled her knickers on, was dressed before he had buttoned himself up. ‘Where you go, I go. I’m not going to be left on my own.’
Oh, but you are, he thought, you are. ‘On your own head be it. Come on, then.’
Fred’s squinting eyes led people to assume he was sharp enough to miss nothing of what was going on around him. His solid girth and spherical face gave the impression of a sergeant-major who knew how to take firm control of that part of the world in which he worked.
Though Fred did see what went on, as far as his all-embracing pigeon vision would allow, he never imagined what might be around the corner, or try to guess in unusual circumstances what the next five minutes would bring. He had always assumed that the host of an inn had the authority of a ship’s captain. Backed by the law, his word was law. He couldn’t put anybody in chains, or hang them from the yardarm, or maroon them on an island of clinker and ash, but he could certainly refuse to serve anybody who, he had reason to believe, was drunk, lousy, delinquent, or not the right kind of person to inflict on the other guests.
The English ship and the English inn were unique and special, and a hotel- or innkeeper was responsible for the wellbeing of everyone within its walls. Any violence, either threatened against him or others in his own house, was rank mutiny, an end to ordered life if not of civilization itself.
When Garry and Wayne, one at either end, lifted the wooden settle bodily above their heads, he was unable to speak. As they swung to face him, part of it smashed into the print of The Great Western on its turbulent sea, glass and frame crunching under Wayne’s boots. ‘Where shall we hurl it?’
‘Over the fucking bar, if he won’t serve us a drink.’
‘I can’t hold on much longer.’
Fred gave a strangulated cry, a hand raised. ‘Don’t! It’s an antique. It’s real. I’ll get you whatever you want.’
‘Lad’s being sensible,’ Garry said, ‘so we’ll put it down. Over to the left – right?’
Two tables and a chair were flattened, a crash that shook the rest of the furniture, and rattled bottles behind the bar so that two fell forward and smashed. Logs displaced in the fire sent sparks up the chimney, rushing as if they would rather join the snow outside than stay in this madhouse.
‘You vandals!’ Fred saw a brace of gibbets, two swaying dead men surrounded by an approving crowd and overlooked by the wrathful features of God. ‘I’ll get you twenty years for this,’ he screamed. ‘Your feet won’t touch the ground between here and Strangeways. I’ll show you. You won’t get a drop now, unless I can find a bottle of three-star poison.’
‘He’s hysterical,’ Garry said. ‘What shall we do with him?’
‘Chop him up for firewood, except we’ve got plenty.’ Wayne took a bottle of whisky from the bar and poured three glasses. ‘You only won the hotel playing at Monopoly. Here, drink this, and calm down.’
Fred knocked the glass away, and went after it at a swing from Garry’s fist. ‘Waste not, want not, you daft prick. What a way to behave.’ He turned to Wayne. ‘Cheers, then, mate. Now we can get stuck in.’
‘I even put a tenner in the till,’ Wayne said, ‘so he needn’t have refused to drink with us. We was only being polite, but he must have been dragged up. Do you think he’s hurt?’
‘He deserves to be,’ Garry said, ‘the unsociable bastard.’
Fred rubbed his pained elbow, and would say no more. He dragged a chair to the bar and sat down, nothing to be done at the threat of such force from the scum of the planetary system, who must in any case know that justice was always done. Or was it? But he would get every brass farthing back, and maybe even a bit to spare.
Four years ago, after Doris had come into a legacy from an aunt, he decided not to manage a pub any more, nor she to be the drudge of a publican’s wife. His life savings nearly equalled her windfall, and the rest of the money for The White Cavalier was raised by a bank loan. But last year Doris had had enough of the even worse toil of keeping a hotel, and departed with the cook to run a fish and chip bar in Brighton. She wrote now and again, to make sure of getting her share of the money, because Fred had talked of finding another place.
Since taking The White Cavalier (which Doris in her more bitter moments had referred to as The White Elephant) they had been hoping to get the establishment into Michelin or The Good Hotel Guide, but some detail was always not quite right when the inspector called, or maybe they had just been unlucky. To be favoured by one or two such prestigious lists would put Fred’s asking price up no end, though now he wondered how long it would take to fix the damage these savages had wrought.
‘Look at the miserable sod.’ Garry poured half a tumbler. ‘Dead from the neck up. Deader than that stuffed bloody peacock on the wall. Just because somebody wants a good time. He can’t stand that.’
‘Lance’s still having it away upstairs,’ Wayne said. ‘She took a shine to him because he writes them leery pop songs. He’s letting the side down, the bloody traitor.’
‘Good luck to him,’ Garry said. ‘We’d do the same.’
Wayne aimed a splash of whisky at the peacock. ‘You have a drink as well, my old bird. Imagine walking into a disco with that on your arm.’
Garry kicked a beer tin across the lounge. ‘We ought to slip it in his bed. It’d frighten the life out of him, all them feathers. Her, as well. She’d think it was her husband back from the hat shop. We’ll pull the sheets off and throw it in. Come on, let’s get it down.’