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 pressur
e 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 laug
hed 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.’