She smiled at his speed of thought, but had told them, so would say no more. They could take it or leave it.
‘I hope she’s having us on.’ Enid stubbed out her cigarette, as if that would be to blame for whatever might in any case happen. ‘We get that sort now and again, real fucking jokers. A man came in once saying he was Jesus Christ. The world was going to end in half an hour, he said, a big smile right across his clock. It didn’t, though, but we had a good laugh over it. He paid his bill next morning, and even left Fred a big tip. Old Fred didn’t know whether to throw it back in his face or run away wagging his tail.’
‘I’ve never been blown up before,’ Eileen said. ‘I wonder what it will be like? As long as I come back together again, I don’t suppose I’ll mind.’
‘My bits wouldn’t know how to find each other,’ Wayne said with a smile.
‘So what do we do?’ Garry said to Keith.
‘We’d better see if there’s anything in it. Would you and your mate like to do a little job? It shouldn’t take long.’ He turned to Sally. ‘What’s the room number?’
They seemed to believe her, so she agreed to talk again.
‘Do it with as little rough stuff as possible,’ Keith told them. ‘And that’s an order.’
‘You can trust us,’ Garry said. ‘As long as he’s a good lad. If he ain’t, we’ll pull him down in his birthday suit.’
He had to fasten the knot of his tie three times before the two ends were of equal length. In the old days he wore a brass tie-pin, but such things weren’t used any more. He only knew that the Cause was lost, or his part in it, if ever it had been found. The light before the mirror wasn’t good, and trembling hands didn’t help. She had gone down and told them everything, and now he must flee into the snow, curl up in a hollow and never see morning. The experience was so real he seemed to have done it already and come back to life, so now he needn’t do it, but he must still save himself, because if they believed what she told them they would kill him, and they would certainly believe such a ‘right sort’ of good-looking Englishwoman like her, accept it from her honest and open face as readily as he had been deceived by it. She deserved to be killed, but everyone would die anyway, therefore it didn’t matter. He should have begged with all his soul for her to stay the whole night, a decision to be regretted for ever because there was no explanation for it, the sort with which his life had been only too full.
He found himself at the top of another descending staircase in the large and complicated house. Where it led he didn’t know, but it must be a safer place than the one he stood in. They were surely out to find him. He hadn’t lived a double life not to know when the air was throbbing with danger for him and him alone, so he would get to some place of concealment, and rest until the whole establishment disintegrated, a blinding wave of flame and smoke.
When he was eight and a gang of rough boys from school cried out that they were going to get Daniel and have some fun, he ran into a wood of which he had always been afraid because some said it was haunted and others that it was full of snakes, but the bushes parted for his frantic passage, streams narrowing for the leap, giant elms smoothing their boles to draw him deeper into shadowy gloom till the boys were so far behind he could choose his hiding place. They soon tired of looking, but one boy, stout and cunning, the school bully, was more diligent than the rest. Daniel in his hideaway sharpened a stick to needlepoint with the penknife his mother had given him so that he could cut his daily apple at school, and pushed it with all his scared force into the boy’s leg after he had stood for some minutes wondering what direction to go in. Daniel jabbed again and again, like St George’s lance at the dragon, then dropped the crimson stick and ran from his howling victim. Before reaching the edge of the wood he was fearful that the boy would bleed to death or get gangrene so that his leg would have to be amputated. Daniel learned that the cunning have their pride and the vicious have their freedom, not knowing which word fitted him, but hoping now that he was both, and able to deal with anyone who was rash enough to get in his way.
‘I’d like to sleep with you for ever,’ Lance said. ‘You’re all the songs I’ve ever known rolled into one.’
‘You’re lovely as well. But we must get up and see what that racket was all about downstairs.’
He laughed. ‘You mean I’ll never see your lovely body again? I love your marvellous tits when you bend over me.’
‘Thank you very much. I’m sure you’ll see them whenever you like. And I’ll see you as often as I can.’ She couldn’t be sure of anything, but it was a delight to have someone as young as this, biker or not. She didn’t think he’d had many women before, but it was good all the same, making the past with Raymond seem less important which, she thought, was nothing short of brilliant.
‘It sounds like somebody’s at the door,’ he said. ‘Or is it a dentist’s drill for a pterodactyl’s toothache?’
She got into slacks and jersey, but Lance had nothing on when he let them in. ‘Oh, it’s you two. What’s up, then?’
‘It stinks like a Texas whorehouse in here,’ Garry said. ‘Have you seen that shitbag of a schoolteacher?’
‘He was downstairs, wasn’t he? What are you looking under the bed for?’
Wayne opened the wardrobe. ‘He ain’t in here.’
‘We want him,’ Garry said, ‘dead or alive.’
‘You’ve got to be joking.’
‘No fucking way. Did you know that that clapped-out van of his is full of explosives and Christ knows what else? About five thousand tons of it, and if it goes off we’ll give the world a bigger fucking show than the Dam Busters, except that we’ll be the ones to get busted.’
‘Half of Derbyshire, which includes this hotel, will go to the moon and back,’ Wayne said.
‘Old Ferret a terrorist?’ Lance stood on the bed to get his underpants on. ‘I can’t believe it.’
‘You’d better. He told it to that tart he slept with.’
‘You mean woman,’ Jenny said.
‘Yes, I suppose I do. We’re on the lookout for him. He ain’t in the room we were told he was.’ He threw Lance’s trousers and they snaked around his face. ‘You come with us as well. And you’d better go downstairs, miss. Maybe they’ll save you some coffee.’
‘Somebody’s having you on. Explosives in that van! We drove it here, didn’t we?’
Garry laughed. ‘Yes, and don’t expect anybody to thank us for it. Weren’t we the world’s biggest twits? When we get hold of that schoolteacher we might be able to find out what’s what. He’s bound to be in the hotel somewhere, and whoever finds him had better sit on him hard till the others get there. You can blind him, if you like, but don’t make him dumb. He’s got to talk.’
TWENTY-TWO
Parsons’ head was a globe of the world, four-fifths water and five continents clonking around — or was it six? Boiling lava was in the middle of it all, and he couldn’t lift it from the pillow, try as he might. Beer and champagne never mixed, as he ought to have known, and in spite of having lost count of the buckets he had put into himself his only need was for water to slake those fires in the middle of his globe.
He couldn’t even blame Jenny — the baggage. He had loved her since she started working for the office, but naturally she wouldn’t have anything to do with an old fartbag like him, though one or two young girls had before her. As for Kitty, his wife — well, she’s fifty-five, and acts like an old woman already, saying that the carpet they’ve just had laid (the best bloody Co-op Axminster) or the new coat he had got her from Griffin and Spalding’s in Nottingham, would see her out. I ask you! See her out! Who could live with that and not go after a bit of crumpet on the side now and again? At least if he packed her in and took up with a young woman he wouldn’t hear things like that. In any case, even if you were young you could be dead in half an hour, but at fifty-odd you don’t want to be reminded that a new chair or carpet will see you out. At fifty-odd you want to think you’re going to live for ever. Nevertheless, he loved his wife and kids, and you couldn’t live with a woman all that long and not think the world of her, no matter how mad she drove you now and again.