His disembodied voice came again. ‘I never imagined my existence would end in happiness. I have to thank you for that. You’re the glorious person who will make it possible for me to die happy.’
‘I’m glad for you, if this is the effect I’ve had.’ He was being more poetic, even profound, about the experience than Stanley could ever have been. ‘I feel wonderfully satisfied as well, but it seems to have been more interesting for you. Tell me more about it. I love to hear you talk.’
‘You could hardly be expected to understand.’ His protective mood of detachment had been broken into, violated, though he wasn’t able to care. ‘It would make no sense.’
She borrowed his cigarette, as she had seen lovers do in films. Stanley had been irritated when she once tried. ‘Maybe you’re right. Why spoil our lovely time?’ Ease came back. No reason to feel guilty of a little affair in the night. What the eye didn’t see the heart didn’t grieve, as her mother used to say, but about things far less important.
His voice again sounded as if from a little box in the stratosphere, out of timbre with reality, and she didn’t want to lose him. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I never did know. I suppose it’s the human condition that we can never know till we die what it’s essential to know, and by then it’s far too late. My mother was convinced she would go to heaven, but for me it will be hell, like my father.’
Oh, that stale Catholic stuff. As far as she was concerned she wouldn’t go anywhere. But let him talk, it must be good for him, almost as good as it was fascinating for her to listen. Perhaps he had to make up for his unnatural silence during their exquisite session of love, though what he was saying was hardly flattering.
‘I don’t know whether I should tell you,’ he said.
‘All right then, don’t. I’m happy just lying here’ — floating listlessly between utter wellbeing and a concupiscent desire to make love again, touching him, smoothing his flank, but softly so as not to disturb his obviously fragile spirit while he struggled to get rid of some burden clearly impossible for her to comprehend.
‘I don’t know whether or not I can trust you, you see.’
He was so serious that she knew she had better listen, a faint alarm that she hadn’t known him long enough to rely on his sense of humour. ‘That’s for you to decide.’
‘I want to trust you,’ he said. ‘I need to. I suppose I’ll be compelled to, anyway.’
‘How do you mean?’ Talk, muffled or garbled according to distance, came from other parts of the hotel like waves of far-off traffic, as if the snow had now gone and the roads were dry and open, motors speeding in all directions. Then silence again, except for a sudden jolt of the ancient plumbing system. They were in a structure of enormous weight that would be part of the world till the world itself came to an end.
He sighed, as if about to put on the little boy act. He wasn’t that sort, plainly. His face showed no illusions, though there was more than a hint of them having worked their way out. ‘I was brought up to walk in the path of the righteous, to know the truth and to speak the truth. But given the way I must have been before I was born, it was a fatal course. I was bound to be the opposite when I grew up and got to know myself.’
‘What caused it?’
‘Let’s say that it was politics.’
She wondered what he saw in her features, though guessed it wasn’t half as much as what she was beginning to see in his. ‘We all have to mature in that way.’
He paused awhile, then: ‘But not the way I did.’
The closer he came to words of importance the more relaxed was his voice, but his body was as tense as a loaded crossbow. She had never imagined such talk after making love, but she hadn’t foreseen being stranded, either. In her fantasies she would have been in a sunfilled bedroom, or strolling through beautifully dappled bluebell woods for more dalliance with her ardent lover. ‘It strikes all of us differently.’ She wanted him to continue talking, so as to have as much as possible to remember him by, fighting the faint echo of desolation which told her she might not see him after tonight.
‘I swear you to secrecy, though it won’t be for long.’
Her surmise was right, yet his words sounded like some kind of boyish ceremony. ‘That goes without saying,’ she said.
‘Nothing ever goes without saying. At least it never did in my life.’
‘All right, then, I promise.’ She tried to sound nonchalant, so as to encourage him to talk. He frowned neat furrows along his brow, and she knew she must look serious, and even feel so, however difficult at such a careless time, since he was in a state to detect it if she didn’t.
‘When I woke up this morning I wasn’t to know that in twenty-four hours I would cease to exist. On the other hand, I have the consolation of knowing that the same applies to quite a few other people.’
‘You can go out of your own house and be mown down by a juggernaut ten minutes later, but it doesn’t do to worry too much about it.’ She had never got anywhere near such a conversation with Stanley, which fact made her curious as to who Stanley did have his heart to hearts with.
‘That,’ he responded, ‘is pure petty chance.’
‘So is the blizzard.’
He seemed to think about that, and then said, disappointingly forlorn: ‘Is that all there is?’
Didn’t you know? she wanted to ask, which would be flippant, something Stanley often accused her of being, whereas she had thought it a virtue to make fun of the futility of life. With Daniel she decided to be more guarded: ‘Well, it could be.’
‘There’s always a moment when the bomb begins to tick.’ He saw, in her lovely rawboned English face, that she didn’t understand. He wanted to tell her everything, unable to stop even if only because he was unwilling to do so. ‘It began when those damned bikers turned up.’
He didn’t seem so timid as to be afraid of them. ‘They’re stranded like us, that’s all. I expect they’re harmless enough.’ Her arms were stiffening, she wanted to get dressed and go downstairs for a drink, see what was happening. Someone passed the door on their way to bed, as if the party might be over already.
‘Oh, you’re right there. I taught them at school. They’re the usual louts, but nice enough when tamed. The fact is, though, they found my van in the lay-by and brought it here. That’s the crux of the matter. God knows what evil intentions allowed them to get it through the snow. Perhaps they saw it as just a lark, and didn’t know that they were God’s chosen in what they were doing. If they hadn’t got it here everything might have been all right.’
To find out what was in the van she would have to be quiet. Her skin had cooled even more, and she pulled him closer so as to stop shivering, and as if to recall their passion. He hadn’t made love for months, he had said, and fucked her till she was limp and empty. How lucky to find someone who had been so taken with other matters that he had forgotten the divine urge!
His tone was so faded she could hardly catch the words, breath warming her ear when she put it close. ‘The van is loaded with high explosives, rimed to go off at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. It was meant for some street or other in London. Or maybe Birmingham. I don’t know their plans exactly.’ He felt the vacuity which was nearer still to happiness, his only wish now to disembarrass himself of treacherous words and stop talking. ‘It began a long time ago.’
In silence she might have been distraught, and let him sense her terror, but he was talking still, so she encouraged him to talk more, as if only that would help, since he was a madman wielding his power and trying to destroy her as well. But he had the wrong person, which she hoped was true, dried up inside as she now was, the medieval ballroom of spectacular dimensions and lubricious debauchery a long time faded. Married to someone eminently sane would help her to deal with this situation. Even to be herself was enough.