He stood and held out the handset and Kelso cautiously put his ear to it. He could hear a number ringing in America, and then a man said, 'Newsroom.'
Kelso lit another cigarette and walked away from the Toyota. O'Brian was in the front seat with the light on and even with the windows closed his voice carried in the cold silence.
'Yeah, yeah, we're on the road . . . About halfway I guess ... Yeah, he's with me ... No, he's fine.' The door opened and O'Brian shouted, 'You're fine, aren't you, professor?'
Kelso raised his hand.
'Yeah,' resumed O'Brian, 'he's fine.' The door slammed and he must have lowered his voice because Kelso couldn't catch much after that. 'Be there about nine.., sure. . . good stuff. . . looking good...'
Whatever it was, Kelso didn't like the sound of it. He walked back to the car and flung open the door.
'Whoops. Gotta go, Joe. Bye.' O'Brian hung up quickly and winked.
'What are you telling them exactly?'
'Nothing.' The reporter looked like a guilty boy.
'What d'you mean, nothing?'
'Come on, I had to give them the bones, Fluke. Give them the gist -'
'The gist?' Kelso was shouting now. 'This was supposed to be confidential -,
'Well, they're not going to tell anyone, are they? Come on, I can't just take off without giving them an idea of what I'm doing.'
'Christ.' Kelso slumped against the side of the Toyota and appealed to the sky. 'What am I doing?'
'Want to make a call, Fluke?' O'Brian waved the handset at him. 'Call a wife? On us?'
'No. There's no one I want to call right now. Thank you.'
'Zinaida?' said O'Brian craftily. 'Why don't you call Zinaida?' He climbed out of the seat and pressed the telephone into Kelso's hand. 'Go ahead. I can tell you're worried. It's sweet. Zero-four, then the number. Only don't take all night about it. A fellow could freeze his balls off out here.'
He wandered away, flapping his arms against the cold, and Kelso, after a second's hesitation, hunted through his pockets for the scrap of paper with her address on it.
As he waited for the number to connect he tried to visualise her apartment, but he couldn't do it, he didn't know enough about her. He stared southwards down the M8 at the shadowy mass of departing clouds, fleeing as if from some calamity, and he imagined the route his call was taking -from the middle of nowhere to a satellite above the Indian Ocean, down to Scandinavia, across the earth to Moscow. O'Brian was right: you could stand in a great wilderness and the world still felt small enough to hold in your hand.
He let the number ring for a long time, alternately willing her to answer it so that he'd know she was safe, and hoping that she wouldn't, because her apartment was the least safe place of all.
She didn't answer and after a couple of minutes he hung up.
AND then it was Kelso's turn to drive while O'Brian slept, and even then the reporter couldn't be quiet. The sleeping bag was drawn tight up to his chin. His seat was tilted back almost to the horizontal. 'Yeah,' he'd mutter, and then, almost immediately, and with greater emphasis, 'yeah.' He grunted. He curled up and flopped around like a landed fish. He snorted. He scratched his groin.
Kelso gripped the steering wheel hard. 'Can you shut up, O'Brian?' he said into the windscreen. 'I mean, just for once, could you possibly, as a favour to humanity, and more particularly to me, put a sock in your great fat mouth?'
There was nothing to see except the shifting patch of road in the headlights. Occasionally a car appeared in the opposite carriageway, lights full beam, blinding him. After about an hour he overtook the big truck that had passed them earlier. The driver hooted cheerfully again, and Kelso hooted back.
'Yeah,' said O'Brian, turning over at the sound of the horn, 'oh yeah-'
The drumming of the tyres was hypnotic and Kelso's thoughts were random, disconnected. He wondered what O'Brian would have been like in a real war, one in which he actually had to fight rather than just take pictures. Then he wondered what he would have been like. Most of the men he knew asked themselves that question, as if never having fought somehow made them incomplete - left a hole in their lives where a war should have been.
Was it possible that this absence of war - marvellous though it was and so forth: that went without saying - was it possible that it had actually trivialised people? Because everything was so bloody trivial now, wasn't it? This was The Trivial Age. Politics was trivial. What people worried about was trivial - mortgages and pensions and the dangers of passive smoking. Jesus! - he shot a look at O'Brian - is this what we've been reduced to, worrying about passive smoking, when our parents and our grandparents had to worry about being shot or bombed?
And then he began to feel guilty, because what was he implying here? That he wanted a war? Or a cold war, come to that? But it was true, he thought: he did miss the cold war. He was glad it was over, of course, in a way - glad the right side had won and all that - but at least while it was on people like him had known where they stood, could point to something and say: well, we may not know what we do believe in, but we don't believe in that.
The fact was, almost nothing had gone right for him since The cold war ended. Here was a good joke. He and MamantOv twin career victims of the end of the USSR! Both bemoaning the trivia of the modern world, both preoccupied with the past, and both in search of the mystery of Comrade Stalin -He frowned, remembering something Mamantov had said.
'I'll tell you this, you're as obsessed as Jam.'
He had laughed it off at the time. But now that he thought o~ it again, the line struck him as unexpectedly shrewd -unsettling, even, in the quality of its insight - and he found himself returning to it again and again as the temperature dropped and the road uncoiled endlessly from the freezing darkness.
HE drove for more than four hours, until his legs were numb and at one point he actually fell asleep, jerking awake to find the Toyota veering across the centre of the highway, the white lines flashing up at them like spears in the headlights.
A few minutes later they passed a kind of truckers' lay-by. He braked hard, stopped, and reversed back into it. Beside him, O'Brian struggled blearily into consciousness.
'Why're we stopping?'
'The tank's empty. And I've got to rest.' Kelso turned off the ignition and massaged the back of his neck. 'Why don't we stop here for a bit?'
'No. We need to keep moving. Fix us some coffee, will you? I'll fill her up.'
They went through the same ritual as before, O'Brian stumbling out into the cold and hoisting a pair of jerrycans from the back of the Toyota, while Kelso wandered away for a cigarette. The wind had a sharper edge to it this far north.
He could hear it slicing through trees he couldn't see. Running water splashed somewhere, softly.
When he got back into the car, O'Brian was in the driver's seat with the interior light on, running an electric shaver over his big chin, studying the map. It was an unnatural time to be awake, thought Kelso. It meant nothing good. He associated it with emergency bereavement, conspiracy flight; the sad skulk away at the end of a one-night affair.
Neither man spoke. O'Brian put away his shaver and stuffed the map into the pocket beside him.
The reclined seat was warm and so was the sleeping bag and within five minutes, despite his anxieties, Kelso was asleep - a dreamless, falling sleep - and when he awoke a few hours later it was as if they had crossed a barrier and entered another world.