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‘I’ll have some coffee, then.’

‘Coffee!’ Parsons screamed. ‘Well, I never! Why don’t you thaw yourself out with a brandy at least? Or a nice tot of rum?’

‘Because I don’t want to.’ I love my desert heart, she told herself. It keeps me safe.

‘Ladies should only drink champagne,’ Percy said.

‘By God, you’re right. Why didn’t I think of that?’ Parsons said. ‘Champagne! I’m too bloody slow, that’s my trouble. A sheltered life I’ve had, well, except when me and the lads went on delegations to Communist countries, then we had some fine old times, I can tell you.’ He let his head roll, and looked at the ceiling as if a map of his travels might be printed there. Then his eyes came back to the horizontaclass="underline" ‘What good times they was! But they don’t do it any more, I’m sorry to say. I’ve been smashed in Moscow, sloshed in Sofia, kay-lied in Leningrad, paralytic in Prague, blindo in East Berlin, and blotto in Bucharest. A group from our area went to Lake Baikal once. They took us on a bus from Irkutsk. We was already drunk, and still had two bottles of duty-free. When me and a bloke from Barnsley fell through the ice we was still singing “The Internationale” when the Russians fished us out! The sturgeon and the caviar we scoffed, and the vodka we put back! It don’t bear thinking about, except that it does on a lousy night like this. The comrades used to try and drink us under the table for the sake of international peace and friendship. Drink to this, and drink to that. Toast after toast. Working-class solidarity was all the rage, and we meant it, though it’s all over now. But we could hold our own with the booze, I can tell you. We used to drink champagne as well. Yes, my love, I’ll get you a bottle of bubbly, but real French, none of that Russian stuff. There’s nowt like it to cheer you up.’

‘Don’t bother.’

‘“Don’t bother” she says. It ain’t no bother.’ He set a fifty-pound note on the beer mat. ‘That’s for us. And don’t say I never look after you.’ He wagged a finger, which she found common and hateful.

‘I’ll try not to,’ she said wearily.

‘Because I do. You’re never out of my mind. I always think of others. That’s the way I was brought up. My mother, God bless her, she used to din it into me as a lad. “Always think of others,” she would say, “then somebody will be there to think of you when you’re in trouble.” She was lovely, my mam was. “You only get out of life what you put into it,” she told me, and she was right. She worked her fingers to the bone, she did, but a lot the old man cared.’ His voice broke, as if a cinder burned in his throat which needed the liquid of a sob to put it out. ‘He only wanted his pint, or a quart if he could get it. He treated my mother like dirt — till I grew up and put him in his place.’

‘You’re maudlin.’ Percy was loud and clear. ‘Drunk and sentimental. The worst thing a man can be. A person’s only as good as what a person gets, that’s all I know.’

Enid came in with a tray of sandwiches, and the old man put his arm out like a train signal, a brush at her skirt happily unnoticed except by Aaron, who dwelt on the fracas between age and beauty if by any chance the hand had touched her legs.

FIFTEEN

A hum came from a refrigerator, lulling yet melancholy, otherwise silence. At half-past nine no one was willing to go to bed, as if all that could happen hadn’t yet done so: reading, dozing, staring into space or up at the ceiling to create their own versions of past and present. During his marriage Aaron had worried about his sister Beryl, which may have been why he did not stay married long. And yet, forcibly kept from her by the gale, instead of thinking about his uncertain future, he felt wonderfully calm. The whisky had subdued his toothache, and he knew that he should observe whatever went on so that he would have something to tell her beyond another dull garnering of books along the staid south coast.

What he was waiting for he did not know. To have neither plans nor hope was a living death in this uncanny tomb of snow, but because he was a forger of signatures and a falsifier of manuscripts the police would be waiting when he got home. Even so, for the moment anyway, he was unable to care that the future was murky and uncertain.

Fred drew the flimsy curtains, as if to protect them from prowling nightmares beyond the glass. Outside the range of the fire the air was bleak, unless you had a few tots glowing inside you. Aaron’s feet were so cold he got up to pace, but it was like walking in buckets of ice.

No windows fastened flush. Cracks brought singsong windtone, a cat’s moan for kittens doomed. He went up the creaking stairs and into his room for a packet of cigars, then out again, a drone of talk and a girl’s laughter from behind a door. His weight did not let him tread lightly. Back from a dead end along another corridor he heard a prolonged high cry as if out of a bad dream, though he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a trick of the wind in this old Aeolian harp of a place.

A small window looked out of the back, and his hose almost touching drew a snow smell through the glass. The frosted oblong bulb above the shed door cast a glow around the nearest drifts, cars only recognizable as vehicles on the lee side. Snowbits diagonally floated then turned up as if seeing no purpose in completing their journey, an advance guard of spies with enough to report.

A light shone, and he heard the grind of an engine, and a van pulled slowly into the yard, stopped side-on against the wall, and three men in helmets and black jackets jumped into the snow like a local police team wanting to see that all was well at the hotel. Or they had come for him, to get him even here, except that there was no blue light, and the men were scooping snow to throw at each other, stick people supernaturally animated, he couldn’t think from where.

One filled his helmet and tried putting it on the head of another, who avoided it by leaping away. They were like soldiers who, having subdued a strongpoint, were celebrating that they were still alive. He marvelled at the resilience of the young, let the curtain go, and went back to the lounge, where two flattish glasses on slim stems waited, one on either side, as Parsons turned the bottle slowly clockwise, pressing the ball of his thumb forcefully against the steel-capped dome of the cork, easing it so subtly out of the neck, Aaron and Jenny assuming that at the precise second he would remove the cork then calmly decant the amber liquid.

Fred recognized his nihilistic glint. ‘If you damage my ceiling, you’ll pay for it.’ Enid ran for the door as if it wasn’t the first time she had been close to such an experiment.

Tom could let the cork out silently, with a skill he had often seen in others, when the opening smoke preceded the tamed liquid into a glass, or let the cork fly along any spectacular trajectory of his choice.

Aaron considered the uncertainty to be half the fun, and when Tom tilted the bottle as if it were a gun the cork hit the fireplace like a shell exploding in the desert, sending up a cloud of ash. Then by a twist of the hand he put the spout over a glass and didn’t lose a drop.

Percy looked up from his whisky and water. ‘Nowt but a show-off, if you ask me.’

‘Here’s to you!’ Parsons beamed good luck on them all. ‘There’s no better drink this time of the year. A tot of the old bubbly, and then to bed. When we wake it might be summer.’

She clinked his glass, a bare touch but he was more than happy. With her you had to measure progress in millimetres, which was something good to be said for metric.

‘I expect it’ll make me sleep,’ she said, but immediately recalled something close to a giggle as she heard her voice say it.

Aaron stood at the bar. ‘It’s amazing that people are still turning up. I can’t imagine how they get here.’