‘I’m not blind.’ He stilled his rage. ‘Why don’t you do it?’
‘There’s too much on, I’m afraid.’ Fred realized the danger, seeing this face blazing like red mercury going up a thermometer, so he turned away thinking how hard a night it would be if more such types came in.
Eileen gargoyled her features, zipping up her jacket. ‘Don’t bother. I’ll go.’
If she wanted to pay him back for the ride it would be churlish to stop her. ‘Are you sure?’
‘No sweat.’ A score of solid and heavy keys fitted the grapple of her fingers. ‘I said so, didn’t I?’
‘There’s a small brown case in the boot. Just get that.’
Their inward track was smoothed into yeti hollows of white between door and car. Head down, she pushed her shoulder against the malign force. Overhead a big door stopped her seeing the stars, someone up there holding it shut, a grizzly-bearded old bastard in his warm cottage whose starving slaves outside worked at wind machines, perishing everyone in the wilds of earth to let them know, as if they didn’t already, that life was hard. She hated snow more than anything, but whatever you hated was bound to come more often than anything else.
Clearing the keyhole saturated her fingers to deadness through woollen gloves, dreading to drop the key-bunch and not find it again, at which the grizzly-bearded old bastard up top would laugh his guts out till breakfast, if he ever laughed at anything, and if he ever had breakfast, since somebody like that would be scoffing all the time. Such a pack of keys would sink from their weight and not be found till the thaw, so many keys to unlock cars, houses, suitcases, but she had never opened anything in her life that belonged only to her, wouldn’t mind such a key letting into a house all her own, though you had to unlock a dream first, and how much would that key weigh?
Eartips frozen, the boot lid sheltered her till the case was out. Hand dashed to feet and clutched the keys immediately when they dropped, fingers burnt and sticky as they went into her pocket. She pushed the sluggish case like a sledge to cut a channel through, effing and blinding at the sting of air, and her brittle left arm, wondering what he had in luggage that would be heavy even if it was empty. She had seen him sign the hotel book, curious as to what her name was for the night, didn’t mind what she might be in for, because though he was a stranger the kiss was still on her lips and he wasn’t bad-looking, it seemed she had known him weeks already, and fancied him a bit, licking the sting till it warmed her, blue with hunger, white with cold, black with a zest for adventure if she didn’t peg out before getting to the door, which had never seemed as far off as any in her life, saturated as she was to the waist and bleeding to death inside but warmer and warmer in the drift that suddenly seemed taller than herself.
Keith stared into brandy the colour of amber and tasting like the one-star throw-outs of a supermarket decanted into a VSOP bottle, foul to that in his flask, but after fighting the storm it was good to sit down and be served by no less than the landlord himself. Such hostelries, as sham as they came and shamelessly expensive, at least kept the rabble at their Berni houses and in bed-and-breakfast bungalows.
‘So you got stuck, as well?’ An idiotic cheery face poked a finger towards the window. ‘It’s enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.’
Keith had never come across such a primate in his reading of natural history, though why dispute the point with someone who would certainly have lodged at a cheaper place had it not been for the blizzard. As it was, he would be so much out of pocket after being benighted at The White Cavalier that he would drink no lager for a month. ‘I suppose it is.’
Tom’s smile colonized the rest of his face, at this jumped-up smarm-chops whose nose was at the back of his head, barely deigning to pass a civil word in his direction. ‘It would have had mine off, if I’d stayed out a minute longer, and I wouldn’t like that to happen, because even at my age they still have their uses. In other words, I would positively miss ’em, though I suppose there’s some as wouldn’t.’
‘I’m sure you would.’ It was a feeble riposte, but he wanted to stay undisturbed, ruminating on a life that had led him into the cul-de-sac of an endless swamp. His ambition had been to acquire so much money that he no longer needed to work, no matter how hard he must work to achieve it, and in the last ten years he had put enough by to make it possible. To live, yet not to work, to meet only those people of his choice, and live in a climate where thoughts came out of yourself instead of bouncing from the mediocre minds of others. Ambition had driven, energy was fierce, brain deft, hand and eye in trim for every chance. Ninety thousand pounds a year was his salary, and shares brought in enough from the Cayman Islands to beef up his various accounts. Ingenuity pointed a way out of the tax trap, and using talent to the full generated more energy by the example it set, and the more energy there was in the country the more prosperity for everyone.
The foulest pig-brandy or not, it mellowed the steel in him, because wasn’t it a fact that a country was like one big extended family? You had every right to relax, much being permitted within it, and you did not abandon a good country for selfish reasons like avoiding the ubiquitous taxes. Or at least you should not, and no doubt he wouldn’t, but he had to get out now because his passion had turned violent and ruined everything. He would go as soon as the snow cleared. Gwen wouldn’t be found until the au pair returned from Germany, so he had time to reach a place where he could not be brought back.
‘The roads get blocked every year.’ Tom wouldn’t take silence for a put-down. ‘Farms and villages are cut off, but this time it’s a real clinker. You’d think the county council would be a bit more ready, wouldn’t you? I sometimes don’t know what we pay our rates and taxes for.’ He wondered why he let himself complain before a shitbag yuppie-mug like him. The sweat he had doled out in his time on PAYE must have paved a good few roads and cleared the odd drain. Society was run for the common good: good for him, good for them, good for everybody, and you had better think that way, otherwise it was back into the trees, the undergrowth a tangle of Tory aspidistras.
Keith was unable to resist saying, though he smiled: ‘I saw on the road that they had declared this area a Nuclear-Free Zone. It’s a pity they can’t do that with the snow as well.’
Jenny took out a little circular compact and tapped powder onto her face, hoping a heightened colour would improve her aspect on looking into the mirror. The toilets were clean, not like some on the way up from London. She stopped using make-up after Raymond left but, feeling at the bottom of her handbag, as if playing a game of lucky dip, fished some out and used it, didn’t know why. Hard to know why she did anything the moment it was done. Her tights had become twisted, so she opened her slacks to adjust them.
The make-up burned, caked her skin so she wanted it off, skin as well for preference, her fingers would touch, find what was underneath and, knowing at last, start to live again. She wondered where he was, what he was doing, not even three years had rubbed out the wound of loss. The more rotten he was the more he was missed, but would he have burned for her if she had gone first?
Returning to the lounge in such a state, Tom would notice, and start in on his baby talk. She stood in the cold-floored corridor, her smile a crack down her cheeks that no make-up would obscure. By the back door she heard a thump on wood, the wind having hands as well as feet. Raymond was trying to get in. The blizzard was eating him alive, as if he were on fire out there. She would let him die — if only it was him. Maybe the snow would freshen her burning face.