Parsons yawned, worn out by his emotional power skirmish. ‘Near half a mile we had to walk, the blizzard coming right at us, but I made her get behind me, and I took every inch of the blast. I’m not a brute. Still, I suppose you’re right. But everything I ask her to do she does as if it’s a hard grind and she’s too good for it. Maybe I don’t make allowances. You have to make more allowances than you did in the old days. Not that anybody ever made any for me.’ He laughed like a good-tempered overgrown boy, hedgerow eyebrows moving up and down. ‘Anyway, men and women’s supposed to be equal these days, aren’t they? I drove the car up from London, so I don’t see why she shouldn’t order me a pint and a few sandwiches.’
Jenny came back. ‘They’ll be here in ten minutes, Mr Parsons.’
He stood, arms extended, like a cat finding the radius of its physical limits. ‘In the meantime I’ll go to the back, for a you-know-what.’
‘You’ve driven up from London?’
She nodded, a hand still on the briefcase. ‘He nearly got us both killed once or twice.’
‘It’s not exactly motoring weather. I set out from the south coast this morning, and it got worse every mile.’
‘It always does, summer or winter.’ She gave a bitter smile. ‘That’s my experience.’
He puffed clouds of wellbeing from his Schimmelpenninck. ‘You don’t seem to like it. Sorry I can’t offer a cigarette.’
‘I like the smell of cigars. Do you?’
‘I don’t mind it,’ he said. ‘I smoke them.’
‘I mean, like it up North?’
He laughed. ‘I live there.’
‘You weren’t born there, though?’
‘Well, no.’
‘Nor me.’ The conversation seemed to refresh her. ‘I’m from Guildford, originally.’
‘And I was born in Devizes.’
She drew her eyes along the titles in a tall mahogany glass-fronted bookcase containing antiquated volumes of the activities of the county hunt, dusty school classics from before the First World War, and a few battered copies of Who’s Who and Burke’s Peerage. ‘I thought I caught a bit of the accent.’
He mentioned a couple of bookshops in Guildford which he had rummaged through. ‘I can’t afford not to, though it’s so hard trying to park I’ll give them a miss from now on. It took half an hour to get out of the place yesterday. But why do you live in the North if you dislike it so much?’
‘Marriage, of course. Bloody marriage. My husband, as was, worked for an estate agent. Imagine trying to sell houses in a mining town! Then he left me. At least he hasn’t gone off with another woman, I thought. Then I heard through the usual grapevine that he was living with my best friend. Funny I haven’t heard from her for so long, I was beginning to tell myself.’
He noticed that she had jettisoned the wedding ring already. ‘Life’s like that.’
‘How do you know?’ she snapped.
Similar experience, he could have answered, cursing himself for making such a flippant remark. ‘How do you know I don’t?’
‘Dunno, really. So then I got a job as a general dogsbody for the local Union branch. Then I sold our biggish house and bought one at the end of a row. Don’t know why I’m telling you. You’re not saying much about yourself.’
‘I haven’t had time.’ He was annoyed at being attacked in such a way that he was unable to defend himself. She had obviously had much practice and experience, or she had been born that way. Then he was annoyed at being annoyed.
‘It’s because you’re a man, I suppose.’
‘If you believe that, you’ll believe anything.’
Parsons came back. Knowing himself to be the centre of the world — wherever he was — put a light on his face that Aaron couldn’t wish him free of. ‘I thought I would never stop peeing. Didn’t even know I wanted to go. It was like the River Nile! It must be the bloody weather.’
A girl came in with a tray, and stood as if not knowing which of them to throw it at. ‘Who wanted this, then?’
‘Over here,’ Jenny called.
Parsons lifted his arm, the immaculate cuff of a white shirt showing a gold link. ‘I’m the starvo, my love.’
‘I’m not your bleeding love. My name is Enid.’ The mouth of her bony face was made smaller by forward-pushing teeth, though Aaron noted signs of a fine figure under her apron. Her puffed-up, copious hair was a glorious russet, as if a light shone from inside, so Parsons hoped she was nice enough to risk a joke. ‘I thought you’d gone off to grow the wheat, and kill the turkey.’
Plate and pint mug clattered down. ‘If I’d known we was going to be so busy I wouldn’t have come in tonight. I could have been chewing pills with my boy friend. It would have been better than rotting in this cemetery.’
‘Never mind, love, we can go back into the snow and have a nice time dying, if it’ll make you happy. Give the lass fifty pence for her trouble,’ he said to Jenny.
She opened her purse, souvenir of a holiday in Morocco with Raymond, and put the coin on the tray. Enid walked out, head tilted as if she had been insulted.
Parsons turned to Aaron. ‘If anybody had given me a tanner at her age I would have thought it was my birthday. Not even a thank you. I suppose the little trollop’s got so much in the bank she don’t know what to do with it.’ He rubbed his cheek with the gold ring as if it might bring her back in a better temper. ‘Would you like some of this sandwich?’ He offered it around, then sank half the pint and eliminated the supper as if it had strayed into his cleverly laid ambush.
EIGHT
It would, Alfred said to himself. It would, for all the good that could come of it.
Well, it would snow, wouldn’t it? Something like this had to happen, on the journey of a lifetime.
Wouldn’t it, then, you silly old so-and-so?
But the silly old — he could think of many things worse — was his eighty-year-old father, Percy Joseph, sitting beside him like a ventriloquist’s rag-and-putty doll, as flocks of white came against the windscreen like horses at Aintree ridden by the cleverest jockeys in the world.
His poor old geriatric dad stared as if happiness hemmed him in and there was nothing to worry about. And so here he was, Alfred, taking the useless old bore to where he could die in peace and be no more bother.
A man such as himself, fifty last birthday, should not be beholden to this batty old chap who had gaffered him since birth and only stopped now that he drooled and forgot what he said from one minute to the next, though he sometimes came to and recalled in marvellous detail what his old so-and-so of a father had said when he was five years of age.
His eyes might not see much but he had wandering hands. ‘I can’t put up with it any longer,’ Betty from next door said. ‘I don’t mind tidying the place up after him and giving him his dinner, but he puts his hands all over me when I’m standing at the stove cooking his stew. He touches me — well, you know, in all them places.’
Sexual harassment, wasn’t that what they called it nowadays? ‘I’ll have a word with him.’ His sigh would have blown down Parliament.
‘I wish you would.’
‘I’ll tell him to put more time in on his garden. That’ll give him something to take his mind off it.’
‘Yes, do tell him. I try, but he don’t do as I say.’
Well, he wouldn’t, would he, because you’re only the cleaning woman, aren’t you? And why he should want to touch a fifty-year-old slag with five grown kids and a figure like a bag of Nutty Ashless God alone knows, though I suppose he thinks you’re Joan Bakewell or somebody like that.
‘Do you know, Father, I think I’ll take you to see our Brian down in Bournemouth for a few days.’