‘Not likely.’ She pulled her knickers on, was dressed before he had buttoned himself up. ‘Where you go, I go. I’m not going to be left on my own.’
Oh, but you are, he thought, you are. ‘On your own head be it. Come on, then.’
Fred’s squinting eyes led people to assume he was sharp enough to miss nothing of what was going on around him. His solid girth and spherical face gave the impression of a sergeant-major who knew how to take firm control of that part of the world in which he worked.
Though Fred did see what went on, as far as his all-embracing pigeon vision would allow, he never imagined what might be around the corner, or try to guess in unusual circumstances what the next five minutes would bring. He had always assumed that the host of an inn had the authority of a ship’s captain. Backed by the law, his word was law. He couldn’t put anybody in chains, or hang them from the yardarm, or maroon them on an island of clinker and ash, but he could certainly refuse to serve anybody who, he had reason to believe, was drunk, lousy, delinquent, or not the right kind of person to inflict on the other guests.
The English ship and the English inn were unique and special, and a hotel- or innkeeper was responsible for the wellbeing of everyone within its walls. Any violence, either threatened against him or others in his own house, was rank mutiny, an end to ordered life if not of civilization itself.
When Garry and Wayne, one at either end, lifted the wooden settle bodily above their heads, he was unable to speak. As they swung to face him, part of it smashed into the print of The Great Western on its turbulent sea, glass and frame crunching under Wayne’s boots. ‘Where shall we hurl it?’
‘Over the fucking bar, if he won’t serve us a drink.’
‘I can’t hold on much longer.’
Fred gave a strangulated cry, a hand raised. ‘Don’t! It’s an antique. It’s real. I’ll get you whatever you want.’
‘Lad’s being sensible,’ Garry said, ‘so we’ll put it down. Over to the left — right?’
Two tables and a chair were flattened, a crash that shook the rest of the furniture, and rattled bottles behind the bar so that two fell forward and smashed. Logs displaced in the fire sent sparks up the chimney, rushing as if they would rather join the snow outside than stay in this madhouse.
‘You vandals!’ Fred saw a brace of gibbets, two swaying dead men surrounded by an approving crowd and overlooked by the wrathful features of God. ‘I’ll get you twenty years for this,’ he screamed. ‘Your feet won’t touch the ground between here and Strangeways. I’ll show you. You won’t get a drop now, unless I can find a bottle of three-star poison.’
‘He’s hysterical,’ Garry said. ‘What shall we do with him?’
‘Chop him up for firewood, except we’ve got plenty.’ Wayne took a bottle of whisky from the bar and poured three glasses. ‘You only won the hotel playing at Monopoly. Here, drink this, and calm down.’
Fred knocked the glass away, and went after it at a swing from Garry’s fist. ‘Waste not, want not, you daft prick. What a way to behave.’ He turned to Wayne. ‘Cheers, then, mate. Now we can get stuck in.’
‘I even put a tenner in the till,’ Wayne said, ‘so he needn’t have refused to drink with us. We was only being polite, but he must have been dragged up. Do you think he’s hurt?’
‘He deserves to be,’ Garry said, ‘the unsociable bastard.’
Fred rubbed his pained elbow, and would say no more. He dragged a chair to the bar and sat down, nothing to be done at the threat of such force from the scum of the planetary system, who must in any case know that justice was always done. Or was it? But he would get every brass farthing back, and maybe even a bit to spare.
Four years ago, after Doris had come into a legacy from an aunt, he decided not to manage a pub any more, nor she to be the drudge of a publican’s wife. His life savings nearly equalled her windfall, and the rest of the money for The White Cavalier was raised by a bank loan. But last year Doris had had enough of the even worse toil of keeping a hotel, and departed with the cook to run a fish and chip bar in Brighton. She wrote now and again, to make sure of getting her share of the money, because Fred had talked of finding another place.
Since taking The White Cavalier (which Doris in her more bitter moments had referred to as The White Elephant) they had been hoping to get the establishment into Michelin or The Good Hotel Guide, but some detail was always not quite right when the inspector called, or maybe they had just been unlucky. To be favoured by one or two such prestigious lists would put Fred’s asking price up no end, though now he wondered how long it would take to fix the damage these savages had wrought.
‘Look at the miserable sod.’ Garry poured half a tumbler. ‘Dead from the neck up. Deader than that stuffed bloody peacock on the wall. Just because somebody wants a good time. He can’t stand that.’
‘Lance’s still having it away upstairs,’ Wayne said. ‘She took a shine to him because he writes them leery pop songs. He’s letting the side down, the bloody traitor.’
‘Good luck to him,’ Garry said. ‘We’d do the same.’
Wayne aimed a splash of whisky at the peacock. ‘You have a drink as well, my old bird. Imagine walking into a disco with that on your arm.’
Garry kicked a beer tin across the lounge. ‘We ought to slip it in his bed. It’d frighten the life out of him, all them feathers. Her, as well. She’d think it was her husband back from the hat shop. We’ll pull the sheets off and throw it in. Come on, let’s get it down.’
Fred walked towards them, fingers twiddling at his waistcoat. ‘Don’t touch that. I draw the line there. It’s part of the hotel.’ He didn’t want the ship to go down without a fight: the deck raked with grapeshot, all rigging splintered, a glowing cannonball sizzling into the magazine, and when Garry reached for the peacock’s tail he broke an empty whisky bottle against his skull, blood trickling through sparse hair.
Garry, not realizing how wounded he was, or that he was wounded at all, turned from the resplendent bird and went with murderous hands towards Fred who, gasping at what he had set going, stepped back in the direction of the fireplace. He had only imagined the action, but now that it was done, and in so little time, he changed tack and skittered between tables to the door that was blocked by Wayne as if keeping goal.
‘Let’s kill the bastard,’ Garry said.
She put off the light and packed the bedclothes gently around him, lulling his body in an Aga patch of heat, taking no chances on letting the cold alert him. He would sleep while she found someone to tell.
She slipped her pants on, tights wrinkled but they would have to stay, one nipple caught but the bra soon adjusted, everything in silence, hardly moving, then the shirt and skirt put on while he slept. She had to stop her teeth clicking from fear or cold, going with shoes in hand towards the door. Thumps and screams from below might not disturb him but a mouse-creak out of the worm-eaten boards would bring him in a mad leap across her path. ‘I can’t sleep, I’m going for a walk,’ she would say, if hands gripped her wrists, or fingers pressed at her throat.
He sat up, stark and clear in the darkness, as if filings of phosphorus glistened around him. Perhaps he saw her only in his crazy mind, imagined her still providing the heat, for he lay on his side as if to face her for more of the comfort she had given — and began to snore.
The latch took time to lift, no one to hear as she drew the door slowly towards her, sufficiently to slide her body out and be gone. Who would believe her? Would she give credit to someone who with manic eye buttonholed her in a hotel lounge and said that a huge amount of terrorist’s explosives parked in the yard was due to go off in ten hours’ time? She would think them a fugitive from the local funny farm and run a mile.