Which was good, Keith thought, unless gangrene’s the result. ‘We’ll look at you when we get back.’
Percy stood up, staring ahead, clean and spruce as if he had just finished a long dolling-up for a Saturday night at the pub with his wife. ‘Aren’t you going to take me? I fancy a walk on Bournemouth’s lovely sands. The sun’s coming through the window, which is funny, with the blizzard going on. Still, I’ll bet some lovely nurses are sunbathing out there in their birthday suits.’
In one swift walk, before Alfred could get to him, he was stroking Sally’s hair, a grin on his ancient maniacal face, large immaculate teeth fixed in her sight for ever. His hand roamed her shoulders and went down to a breast, gripped so hard she cried out and pushed him away, the fall-out of his body shaking the floor.
Eileen looked at Keith, and he felt that to kiss her would be too much like saying goodbye, an impression he didn’t care to give. He smiled and touched her hand. ‘We won’t do it all at one go. We’ll have to come back for more help.’
‘I love you,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve never loved anybody so much in my life, honest. I know that now.’
‘I feel the same. Don’t worry.’ And that would have to do, as he turned from a sweeter farewell than he had ever received from Gwen, or given her. But then, I never loved her — though in the beginning he had been infatuated, and eventually obsessed by her as she wove and stitched and knitted him into her possessive web, and he had gone along with it, not knowing that one day he would kill her. Or maybe I always knew, he told himself, as they went into the blizzard.
Part 3
THIRTY
The back door was as much in the lee of the tempest as any part of the hotel could be, Keith nevertheless leading Wayne and Lance into a meteorological topsy-turvyness similar to when he had yachted with boat-loving colleagues in gales around the Orkneys. The spirit was with them and the flesh was also willing, but icy snowbits drove against their cheeks, and Keith wished he too had a helmet instead of a balaclava around his head. Wayne and Lance wielded their spades and chopped a footpath through waist-high snow till a blade clanged against the back door of the van.
Lance mouthed a joke no one heard, the flashlight brushing his visor, sound stopping all but their own Royal Banshee shouts of glee. Keith did not know who was who: one at the side door hammering with the spade handle to break the ice that crusted it shut, while whoever other it was slid between the van and the wall and after a few uppercuts with the handle opened a door.
He got in and lay flat across the seat, pulling himself up like a spayed animal. One out and one in, between them they forced the other door to slide back, a thud that sounded out the wind. They sat in a row, damp upholstery and mock leather smelling above the cold, snow padding the windscreen. ‘Now what?’
Lance turned the key in the ignition, and the dull red spot came on and then went out, a lifeless click on trying a few more times. ‘Just what I thought. The fucking battery’s as flat as a pancake. Now we’re fucked, and no mistake.’
Keith cleared water from his watchface — at four o’clock. There were two possibilities, he told himself. Only two, but listen, he said to them: ‘Either we find a car ready primed with a full battery and a set of jump leads in the boot so that we can start the motor from a boost out of the good one, or we unload the explosives and fuses into another car in which the engine will start, and drive that one away.’ But there were two disadvantages to consider. The first was that while manhandling the lethal cargo they might disturb it and — goodbye all.
‘Not yet,’ Wayne said. ‘I love the world still.’
The second snag was that a car would be less able to negotiate the snowdrifts than the robust van. So they must get back in the hotel and find out whose car had a full battery, or who thought their car had, and whether or not it was equipped with a set of jump leads to make the transfer of power. The prospect of finding that other car, supposing it existed, and assuming it could be found, and uncovering it from the snow, and manoeuvring it into position to get the two engines close, then opening both bonnets and attaching the jump leads with freezing clumsy fingers was, to put it mildly, awesome.
‘Let’s get moving, then,’ Lance said. ‘My nuts are knocking from the cold, even though they’re twenty-two-carat gold.’
They tumbled into the snow like black polar bears — if there were such things in the Far North — and went back to the porch, while Keith stayed to make certain that the van doors weren’t entirely closed so that they wouldn’t lose the same sweat getting in again.
Wayne kicked and Lance thumped, but the door to the hotel held, their efforts silent in the high pitch of the wind. Keith pushed at solid wood. If every little operation took so long they would still be arsing about by the deadline of eight o’clock. The Yale latch had been on when they came out, and had clicked behind. What they needed was luck, and you put yourself in the way of that only when you worked your hardest. They were willing and capable, so could afford to be hopeful, though all the force they could muster wouldn’t move the door.
Aaron sheltered the last inch of his drink, as if a man out of the desert would come in and slurp it up. He wanted to make it last. The day was dire, he had known from the start that it would be, because every time he saw a word on a signpost or shop door he had tried to say it backwards. He often did this for amusement and to cultivate his dexterity with anagrams, but when the habit persisted, and he was unable to stop, it meant that something irritating or just plain unlucky would occur before the day was out.
Duffle coat, scarves and gloves were heaped on the carpet while he waited for Keith and his myrmidons to come in cursing and exhausted, and tell him to have a go. He did not want to, saw no reason to, they were trapped and there was nothing to be done. The besetting sin of the English was idleness. At least Robert Burton had said so, and Burton should have known, writing but one book in his life. Maybe that makes me more English than most, he thought, because the others are labouring hard enough.
Beryl worked harder, never still, even now she would be sitting at home in the room with the old-fashioned miner’s grate which shone because she black-leaded it every day to make it look traditional. At the table she would check the titles and prices for the next catalogue, or make sure the house accounts were in order. She took note of every penny spent, and of every pound that came in, a rigid framework he liked. Into such a dream world of work, love and lodging he would introduce Enid.
He drank the last of his whisky. He thought it might come back up, but his stomach, like an old friend, let it rest. It was all lies, a pitiable deception of a lost and honest girl, because the offered job did not exist. The police were onto him for forgery. Even without that upheaval Beryl would have said we can’t afford her, the spare room is full of books, she will be more trouble than she’s worth. And he would have to tell her she was right, for to lose Beryl (and she was always threatening to go) would make life untenable. Any rift between them, and she would die, she said at the same time. So might he, the dread of the hostile world on him, because she had become his and his alone.
Every month she stood for hours at the parlour window looking at the moon, weeping at the emptiness of her life, always after days of sullen complaint against everyone she had known: their parents, friends, him — most, he thought, not justified. Or she would rave about slights that had happened so long ago they did not deserve to be remembered, brewing herself into a pitiable crisis of nerves, raving as if a wolf were loose in her, possessed by a longing for the side of the moon she would never see. No inducement, persuasion, or show of affection could break that barrier, every fit as painful to him as if he were witnessing it for the first time.