‘Nobody can take a joke,’ Parsons muttered. ‘The young ’uns always win. That was bloody well uncalled for.’
Lance hooked into her arm as they walked away.
‘You could take a job with us,’ Aaron said to Enid. ‘We certainly need someone.’ Living a quiet life produced unseemly fantasies that might one day turn magically real. He imagined she looked at him with love, while knowing himself to be older than her father. He would take her home after the thaw like the top prize gained in a raffle, and Beryl would give her the spare room, and slowly they would train her to the business, and he would marry her. He had never had children, and would be an old father, the world not short of such cases.
‘I like you,’ she said, ‘but you don’t have to fix me up with work.’
‘We need someone, and you would learn.’ What was power if you couldn’t use it for good? But when Beryl said that the police had called, it could only be for one thing. She would look after Beryl while he was in prison.
‘I want to go to bed with you,’ she said.
‘The snow seems to be taking everybody the same way.’ Parsons, unabashed, swabbed the cut lip with his handkerchief. ‘You’d think the booze had been laced with Spanish fly. Or maybe it’s the snow itself. Though I suppose it’s the booze: you never know what the landlord gets up to.’
‘Dirty old sod,’ Enid said. ‘They’re all the same.’
Fred came back from his own quarters, happy at seeing half the guests gone to bed. ‘What are you sitting down here for? You should be behind the bar, serving the clientele. This isn’t the Barbary Coast. What the hell do you think I’m paying you for?’
‘I suppose you mean me?’ Enid sneered, stood, and marched close. ‘Well, do you know something, Mr Fucking Frog Belly? I don’t work for you any more.’
‘I’d want a month’s notice, if you didn’t. So do as I say, and none of your lip.’
Aaron thought he was about to slap her, though the twitch of his hand might have been the onset of DTs. He took her by the elbow. ‘Sit down, Enid.’
‘You’ll get no notice out of me. I’ll be off first thing in the morning.’
She wouldn’t be easy to replace, bad as she was at her work. Most girls in the area were barely out of the Stone Age. ‘You can’t leave me in the lurch like this. You wouldn’t get a reference, anyway.’
‘You can stuff your reference. I’ve already got a job.’
‘You won’t have when I tell ’em how you left me.’
‘He won’t mind. He’s sitting here.’
Fred took it in. ‘Well, that’s the bloody limit, when the guests come and take my labour away.’
Aaron saw that he was right, but it was done, and he would stand by his offer, though he was sorry she hadn’t let Fred know more gently.
‘I’d like a drink.’ She sat down. ‘Tell him to get me a drink, Aaron. I feel like celebrating. We can drink to my new job.’
He wasn’t sure it would be tactful, ‘I’d like two whiskies.’
‘Not for her,’ Fred said. ‘Anyway, the bar’s closed. The towels are on. I’m not having any more of this. You can get out into the snow and die of the cold. This isn’t a pothouse — nor a knocking-shop, come to that.’
‘Oh, stuff it, then.’ Enid pulled Aaron by the hand. ‘Come on, let’s get up to bed. I’m dying for a bit of sex, after all this excitement.’
‘Can I come as well, duck?’ Wayne called when they reached the stairs. ‘I’ll be ever so quiet!’ He felt lively after the sleep, no longer hungry, and certainly thirsty due to the state of his pigsty mouth. ‘Get me a pint, mate. I want to console myself.’
‘One for me, as well.’ Garry stretched, and belched. ‘I ain’t had a drink for an hour.’
‘The towels are on,’ Fred told them. ‘You’re welcome to sit here until morning, but there’s no more to drink.’
‘It’s only ten o’clock,’ Wayne said.
‘My watch says ten minutes past. Everything’s closed up.’
‘How much more of his fucking lip are we going to have to take?’
‘I might as well clear off to bed myself.’ Parsons’ face still ached. ‘I’ve just come to the end of the longest day of my life. Good night, everybody.’
Fred wished some guests had stayed down, as witnesses or assistants should it come to violence. ‘I run a respectable house, and when I say time’s up, it’s up. I mean it.’
‘The best thing you can do’ — Garry took him by the lapel in such a way that if he struggled he would choke — ‘is sell us a bottle of whisky, and then get to bed yourself, where you’ll be safe. I can’t say fairer than that.’
‘You can’t frighten me.’ Fred pulled free. ‘I’m going to phone for the police.’
Garry sat in an armchair. ‘Do you have a secret CB radio in your room? Because that’s the only way you’d get through tonight. Me and Lance yanked the wires out before we came in. We’re dab hands at that, though I expect the line was down already. In any case, don’t you know that our lovely lads in blue are at this moment in time supping tea with their toes up against a stove? And who can blame them? Be sensible, and rustle us up a few drinks.’
‘I’ve told you. My mind’s decided, and when it is, it stays that way.’
Garry turned. ‘Where’s Lance?’
‘He’s up in a bedroom, having it off with that woman.’
‘Pity. He’s going to miss this.’
NINETEEN
He had said nothing, a muteness she deserved perhaps, and didn’t mind because he had moved in such a way during their lovemaking that she’d had her pleasure each time. She lay on her back, eyes opened in the dim light, clothes to her chin. Curled by her side, he seemed asleep, in the shape of a shorthand symbol studied in her teens.
But he wasn’t asleep, his voice startling, as if it were a facility which he’d never had before. ‘We’re all going to be dead by the morning.’
‘After that’ — even her laugh was dry — ‘I don’t think I’m going to feel alive ever again.’
‘You don’t know what I mean.’ Half out of bed, he reached for cigarettes in his jacket. ‘The joy of it is, nothing can alter the fact.’
‘Are you telling me we won’t see each other again?’ She hardly expected it, though to continue the adventure might be interesting, and certainly pleasant, albeit dangerous, unless she confined her activity to while Stanley was away.
He turned to her, leaning on an elbow. ‘I mean exactly what I say.’
‘But why say it so soon after such a good time? Wasn’t it marvellous for you as well? It seemed so to me.’
He held his cigarette away while kissing her. ‘It was the best thing that’s ever happened. I don’t mind dying.’
She supposed it was the old bite of sadness after sex — weren’t men said to feel it more intensely than women? — though he was putting it a bit strongly.
‘It won’t make any difference,’ he continued in the same weird tone, that she hadn’t picked up in him before coming to bed. ‘I wish it would, but it won’t. We might just as well lie here and let it happen. There’s no better way.’
She stroked his hard flesh. ‘Darling, tell me, what is it? Talk to me. I love you, don’t you know?’ And who wouldn’t, caught tightly in this blue world of snow? It must be snowing again, since even I sound different to myself.
He felt an unfamiliar contentment, dwelt alone on a confined levitated plane, which state he didn’t want to spoil by too much talk. ‘I’m happy, that’s all.’
‘So am I. It would be strange not to be.’ But she wasn’t, not entirely, recalling his anguished face when he had been on the telephone, the expression of a person in such trouble that he was afraid for his life.