The expression was eager in her offer of help, but he considered it useless to sacrifice her. ‘It’s nothing for me,’ she went on. ‘I can do it easily. It’s a brilliant idea.’
He sought a way to refuse that would not drive her to try more persuasion, which he might not be able to resist. He understood why she pleaded, and even felt envious at such a gallant way of cancelling her mistake with Daniel, but he couldn’t let her absolve herself at the cost of her life. He told them about Bluedale Tarn. ‘If the wind drops, I’ll think about it. Nobody can live in this weather, skis or not.’
‘You don’t trust me.’ She struggled not to cry or swear, or do both. Her face was dirty and bruised where Wayne had hit her. He mustn’t let that happen again. All of them looked like street cleaners in for their tea break, except for Percy and Fred. ‘You think I’ll get to safety, then leave you in the lurch,’ she said. ‘What a mind you have. As if I could leave him to your rotten schemes. You don’t know anything, however clued-up you might be in other ways.’
Gwen had come back to life in her, so to kill again would be easy. Let her have the skis, and go. Her death wouldn’t be on his conscience. But the matter was finished, and he felt better at disposing of it. Experience had scored into him that in the face of irrelevant accusations you either stayed quiet or set further talk off at a tangent. ‘The map was printed in 1942, so I wonder if any new buildings have been put up since? There could be a place closer than we think.’
‘Not that I’ve noticed,’ Fred told him, ‘and I know the area well.’
‘You can’t put me off,’ she said. ‘I still want to go.’
‘Have a dekko through the window,’ Parsons told her. The blizzard mocked their isolation, bumping around salients and inlets with the noise of despairing travellers trying to reach safety. ‘Or the back door. It’s an inferno.’
‘She wants to run the whole show,’ Garry said. ‘Keith’s the only one as could make it, but he can’t go because the gaffer’s got to stay at the controls.’
They were silent and waiting, but he hardly knew how to proceed, lit a cigarette and looked at their faces, features shifty and uncertain where they had once been clear. He assumed his to show the same puzzling blend of uncertainty.
‘It sounds like the wolves are after us,’ Lance said. ‘Eh, Ferret, what rhymes with wolf? I’m in the mood to write a song.’
‘There are no rhymes any more.’ Daniel took the cigarette that Sally had lit. ‘Neither rhyme nor reason. We’re beyond all that. Whatever he says, nothing will succeed.’
Daniel’s unwillingness to hide his glee enraged Wayne, who opened the short blade out of a Leatherman pouch and jabbed it towards him. ‘If we try, and whatever it is doesn’t work, you’ll die. I’ll make sure of that. I’ll slit your fucking throat.’
Keith, not as successful at keeping anxiety from his face as he thought, wondered how long he would be able to hold them in check and, if the final panic took the form of a blood bath, whose side he would be on. ‘Tell your boy friend to keep quiet,’ he said to her.
She smoothed her cheek over Daniel’s lips, held his hand and whispered that she loved him. His tormented features filled her with a longing to be with him where they could renew the delight of when she had known him yet not known him. He wanted to die and didn’t care, lived in a void and loved no one, which was why she would protect him even at the cost of her life, would die with him because there could be no life after him, no going back into the appalling emptiness of the past.
Percy startled them with his razor-honed pronouncement. ‘Them as can, do. Them as can’t, teach.’
‘I thought you were asleep, Father?’
‘I never sleep, you know that. A pit engineer catnaps. He can be called out any minute. When you turn the gas on, water pours out.’
He hated those who laughed. ‘Your mind’s wandering again,’ Alfred said.
‘And your brain’s zigzagging around the maypole if you think that plumber’s any good. You’d be better off getting a monkey from the zoo. He might be all right on a motorbike, but he couldn’t plumb a Wendy house.’
Keith wondered who would want to go on living with a father like that, with the chance that you would end up like him. Maybe others among them were also thinking that the effort wouldn’t be worth it. He had to persuade them otherwise by unrolling the last possible option.
Alfred seemed about to put his father into a sleep he wouldn’t wake up from. The old man’s only safe, Aaron thought, because we’re here, otherwise Alfred would have smothered him by now, though if we weren’t here he wouldn’t be so embarrassed and want to kill him. ‘I don’t need your opinion about my business,’ Alfred said, exasperated. ‘So go back to sleep.’
Garry had known it was a dream, to fix up a whole house and get himself into business. Even so, if anybody died in the snow, should they ever get that far, he hoped it would be the old man. The idea of the house had been good in hiding the pain in his thigh, which now came back as if hooked hands were inside and trying to rip a way out.
‘If you had taken my advice from the beginning you’d have been a lot richer than you are today,’ Percy went on. ‘And who was it got you started, anyway? Me. Who told you what to do and how to do it? Me. And who lent you five thousand quid to get your first lorries? Me. Without interest, as well, because I never expected to see it back.’
‘You did get it back, though, didn’t you?’ Alfred said mildly.
‘After twelve bloody years I did. You held off as long as you could. You had it in the bank making interest, because you hoped I would die, and you needn’t bother then. But I didn’t die, did I? And I won’t, either. I’ll see you out, you see if I don’t.’
Aaron stood. ‘Lay a few more bottles out, Fred. A double whisky for me.’ Not so much for conviviality as for his tooth. Tormented by draughts and chill, Hell was where you had toothache, and Paradise where you didn’t.
Fred was pleased to take orders, middle of the night or not. That was what he was here for, such action a sign of normal life, placing glasses on a tray and balancing their weights to keep it even, a tuneless whistle at the thought of the till ringing. Hidden from them at the other end of the bar, he told himself that if Doris was here to share the work, life would be fine. But she wasn’t and, considering the mess, it was just as well. If she were here she would never stop nagging — and I would never stop swearing. If only I hadn’t learned to swear! But then, I shouldn’t have been six years a sailor, because sailors swear, though when you think about it, who doesn’t? The only reason women don’t swear as much as men is that they nag and men don’t.
He flung the white towel over his arm, scrawled fingernails through his hair, took a sip of Aaron’s whisky as if to be sure it was a good brand, and strode into the lounge like one of the best waiters in the business.
TWENTY-NINE
How does a common fly get to where it is? Why does it land on any particular spot? A big black confident muff-footed specimen rested on the back of Keith’s hand, hairs for a jungle and between the veins for valleys, a summer fly that had survived the autumn in some warm cupboard and now came out sensing that there was no safe place even for a scavenging fly.
He couldn’t understand why everyone looked so cold: caps on, woolly hats donned, coats pulled together, overcoats buttoned and belted. He felt neither one nor the other, more proof (should he need it, though he forced himself not to) that he was different.
‘Our only hope is to start the van,’ he said, after they had settled with their drinks, ‘and get it as far from the hotel as possible. Fred tells me there are spades and tools in one of the stables. Two or three hundred yards should be enough. Then we shelter in the strongest room to escape the worst of the blast. I’ll drive the van myself, but I’ll need volunteers with spades and mattocks to clear the way.’