A man in the hall needed the payphone more than she did, anxiety crushing his thin face. He leaned against the wall as if about to ask for mercy before letting the tears rush out.
Clutching the phone between cheek and shoulder, Daniel lit a cigarette, dropped the still-flaming match from shaking fingers and put his well-polished shoe on it. ‘It’s safe.’ He was trying to talk so that no one else might hear. ‘I left it about half a mile away.’ He listened a few moments. ‘What do you mean? Timed for what? I can’t hear you. Timed for when? And primed for what, for Jesus Christ’s sake? Eight o’clock, did you say?’
She speculated that he was an entertainer overdue for his performance, or the props he carried would be late for the opening scene, and he was getting it hot from someone in a warm house, generous with blame for a victim of the weather.
The voice rasped, the rhythm lifting in its bleak insistence that if the van did not get to its destination in a couple of hours an avalanche would bring darkness everlasting on him and anybody else who happened to be within a few hundred yards. ‘So get back, and drive it out. Get on the road. Is that understood?’ They wanted it by midnight, so that someone else could take the cargo to its place of devastation.
Operation Stromboli they called it, and strings on maps from point to point allowed for no hitch in the weather. Blood sweated down the inner linings of his stomach. ‘I left it safe, and it’s covered in snow. There’s nothing I can do. It’s an Act of God.’
‘You’re bigger than God,’ he heard, ‘or you had better be. So dig it out from under the white stuff, push it free, drive on, we’re waiting. Get to work.’
Work is noble, his father had said, who had never worked, or so Daniel imagined he had heard in those days of no date.
‘I’ll do my utmost.’
‘You’d better mean it.’
The receiver burned his dampened hand, and he put it down. Fight the blizzard, and you would disappear for ever. Forgive them, Lord, they knew not what they said. But they did, and if he didn’t try they would kill him, so as a fillip to his morale he meditated on the joyful scene of destruction as the van went up, felt that lilt of the heart when, should the excitement be increased one more ratchet, the heart would cease to exist, as would the body which relied on it.
The back window showed him curtains of snow shaking into banks against the walls, oblong tombs where cars had been. In the lay-by his van would be indistinguishable from landscape, and a thermal suit would be necessary to walk on the moon of snow and search for it.
A car appeared, as if to deny notions of anyone venturing out, sepulchral engine sounding through the gale, slid towards the hotel door, stopped a few inches before the treat of metal-crunch against the wall. An overcoated wendego drudged across the headlights, regardless of the battery running down, and opened the other door, mouth calling yet silent in cross-hatching flakes.
Daniel looked on as at a theatre, at the big man cajoling, in the middle of an argument, or impatient because of the snow. He ran back to turn off the lights, a muffled door-slam, then he was pulling another person out, protecting him as if he were wounded, and planting him one foot before the other towards the inn door.
Daniel helped to get them in.
‘Thank God,’ Alfred said. ‘I couldn’t see a thing. That was a kindly action on your part. Thank you.’
He stood aside, hating the thank you while knowing he could never be thanked enough. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘He’s a bit frozen, that’s all.’ Nothing the sight of two shapely tits wouldn’t cure. ‘And he’s tired. He’s an old man.’
‘You were lucky to get here.’ Daniel felt light in the brain: Jamaica Inn, full of wreckers. Or is it The Laughing Cavalier? He spoke like the quiet schoolmaster again. ‘I only just made it myself. I had to leave my van down the road.’
In the corridor Percy pushed them aside and walked on his own. ‘I’m not so doddery, you cheeky pair of devils. Still on my pins, any road up. In the old days rough weather like this was ten times worse.’ Emerging from the straitjacket of his overcoat he was tall enough to stare Daniel into evasion, steel blue to cold blue, knife to knife. ‘Who’s this damned lunatic? I wouldn’t trust him an inch.’
The daft old card would insult anybody, after being fairly quiet all day. ‘He’s only a kind man trying to help us, Father.’
A framed hunting scene showed a Derbyshire pack taking the stone wall, close in up the emerald hillside, a man leaning on a gate to watch it out of sight. ‘Steer clear of him, that’s all I say.’
Alfred nudged, hard. ‘Why don’t you keep your stupid trap shut?’
Back in the world of the humanly vivified, touch cloth, press flesh, feeling nothing but worry and exhaustion, Daniel forgot the lethal package of his van. ‘We could do with a glass of something hot, I think.’
Percy leaned against the wall. ‘Are we there, Alfred?’
‘Halfway house, Father, providing they’ve got a room for both of us.’
‘I’ll get some help,’ Daniel said.
‘No, don’t bother.’
‘It’s no bother at all’ — thinking how lucky a man he was to have his father with him in middle age.
‘We’ll manage.’ The less people saw what a shameless old load he was carting around the better. Daniel offered his cigarettes, and Percy’s hand reached out, the three of them lighting up like mates after a long journey back from the away-game. ‘You’re stranded as well, then?’ Alfred said.
‘Who isn’t, in a place like this?’ Two big soft boxing gloves held it fast. ‘My green Commer got stuck in a drift.’
Percy’s drooping fag straightened as his teeth took hold, an alert countenance shining back into the land of the living. ‘We passed it, didn’t we? Three bikers in their leathers doing a fandango. I rode a motorbike thirty years ago. I used to take you pillion, didn’t I, Alfred? We often went to Mablethorpe. Even Llandudno once. Bloody good times, weren’t they?’
Daniel, in his sweat of terror, could only think the stupid old grandad truly gaga, surreal images from his deliquescence floating in the icy fagsmoke. He joined in the son’s dislike when the old man went on: ‘Young ’uns have got the energy for doing a knees-up outside a Commer van in the snow. It’s nowt to young lads. It looked a treat, though. I just caught a flash of them as we went by. Alfred didn’t see. Well, he wouldn’t, would he? All eyes on the road. He didn’t want to prang with his dad in the car, did he?’
A loving reach for his son’s cheek was driven away. ‘Come on, let’s get you inside.’
Pain in the brain, Daniel thought, as Percy’s face bunched into a cry. Even I would treat him better — still longing for his own generous long-dead disgraced father dying by inches in his bury-box, the father his mother had robbed him of, having brought him up according to the rules of emotional predators.
Alfred’s bullying of his father was humanly acted, out of a normal up and down life that time had warped. He clutched him, a fist in his armpit, which might have been painful, but it set him moving towards the reception counter. Waiting for the manager, he put an arm around him, then turned him roughly across the way and flopped him into a chair as if he were a ventriloquist’s doll after an unsatisfactory performance.
‘I want no drunks in here.’ Fred’s arm went out like a signpost. ‘Blizzard or no damned blizzard.’ His pink-dotted bow tie was a compass needle stuck at east-north-east, eyes shot with blood at rage unexplainable, jacket stained from a spilled drink.
‘He’s not drunk, you bloody toffee-nosed fool. He’s all-in, can’t you see? We want a room for the night.’ The threatening arm drew back. ‘Two beds in it. We’ll be on our way first thing in the morning. And get us a couple of whiskies while you’re about it. We’re frozen stiff.’