‘No, I want to help you. It’s like a morgue down there. I’ll only go back if you come with me.’
‘We’ll find some blankets first.’ His light picked out the exit sign, which he read as TIXE, then focused on wetness spreading from the corner of the ceiling, the wind sounding as if packs of dogs were assembling to go on a journey.
She gripped his hand, as if the building had been abandoned years ago. ‘The place ain’t the same any more.’
‘It will be, when the lights come on again, and the heat gets going.’ He led her into the spare room where the ladder rested against the open trap door. Air streamed from the attic as cold and strong as a river in the tundra. He put a foot on the ladder. ‘I’m going up to have a look.’
‘Don’t leave me in the dark.’
He held her in his arms till she stopped shivering. ‘Only for a moment. I promise.’
Sally followed him to the window. The same dull whiteness bulged at the panes. ‘What are you thinking about?’
He saw only her eyes, nothing of the rest of her face, so turned to the snow, fatally drawn. ‘We must get out.’
She wanted to unravel the towel that made him look as unreasonable as his words. A pocket had been torn from his jacket, his trousers were ripped at the knee. His power, such as remained, was in thinking they had a future. She touched his arm. ‘Where?’
‘Away,’ he said, ‘anywhere,’ as casually as if suggesting a walk through summer glades, with no more danger than a cooling shower of rain. ‘We’ll be all right, the two of us. One alone might not be, but two can find a wall, and build a shelter. We’ll make a palace in the snow.’
She was cold against him, even inside, ice coming through and freezing the sentiment. The sound of a grown man sobbing by the fire told her there was no more hope. She wanted to shout for him to be his age, pull himself together, it wasn’t natural for a man in his fifties to cry because his father had died. No man should cry. Her father never had, and she wouldn’t when he died. Nor when her mother passed away, come to that. ‘We have to stay here. They’ll get rid of the van, and then everyone will be all right.’
A palace of snow would make them impermeable to cold, halls of ice for eternal lovers to shelter in. They belonged together. ‘I believed you when you said you loved me.’
She stood with folded arms, warmed by her coat. Yes, it had been love, nothing more so, but it would be suicide to go into the blizzard, though whether she would or not if the time came, and she had no way of stopping him, she couldn’t say.
No guidance expected, she looked around. Jenny knelt, head on the blankets covering the injured leg of that horrid biker. Parsons’ whining snore dominated, until Eileen poked him, at which he stared as if she were mad, then turned into another position and slept more quietly. The old man was dead, his son mourning him like a child who had lost his mother. Enid and Aaron were prowling around upstairs, though God knows what they expected to discover. Keith and his pair of yobbos were in the snow at the back trying to move the van, and Fred was in the kitchen assembling food for their comfort. He would only think there would be less to feed if she ran away with Daniel.
Aaron’s light at the beams showed a tile ripped free by the wind, others following like bats in a mass panic, spinning into the turmoil of snow. Much of the roof was uncovered, half-frozen grit on the attic floor. Fred’s hotel would no longer be viable after the thaw. Making sure the trap was closed, he was careful to put one foot after the other on the ladder.
‘I thought you was never going to come back,’ she said. ‘That’s snow on your coat.’
‘If we’re here much longer it’ll be in the lounge as well. It won’t be any use telling anyone.’ They went into the rooms to gather as many blankets as could be found.
Spades were weapons of war. Sweat saves blood, as Keith had heard said, such fervour from one old soldier he would believe it for life. Work the body and you saved the spirit, which in turn looked after the body, and so you guarded both. In other words, treat every problem with care. Lavish it with time as well as mental labour, then sweat over it by digging into all the possible whys and wherefores. Such meticulous care for detail helped to win people to his way of thinking. You pondered on what intelligence was collected, while they drifted happy-go-lucky along, and when the problem fell into its many parts you fitted them together like the components of a machine gun, till you saw a way through and, with the illumination thus gained, took everyone with you.
The spades Fred had found were barely fit for peace, never mind war, especially against elemental malice in the heart of the blizzard, and when they were cutting at the solid door he was so afraid the handles would snap that he dragged them towards a window because glass was easier, leaded or not, enough particles soon freed from the frame to let them help each other over the sill and into the kitchen, stamping on putty and glass to get warm again.
The lounge was rank with woodsmoke after the outside air, Fred economizing his supply by pulling green logs from the top of the pile. ‘He’s trying to gas us or freeze us, just in case we get the van safe away.’ No blaze, the fire also gave less light, like one you’d made in a wood, Wayne thought, that a keeper or a farmer kicked to bits and chased you away from.
Keith found the place as squalid as a camp in the Arctic after nine months of winter. Where were the brushes and cleaning rags to fight off signs of the crack-up? People in the rear echelons should set to, and present an ordered place for destruction — if the hotel had to go. And if it didn’t, what then? Nothing was wasted. A clean front to life or death was all that mattered.
A circle of snow flopped around Wayne when he jumped: ‘My hot-aches are killing me. I’ll have frostbite soon, if I haven’t got it already. And look at the sweat running down my wrists. It’s like being in a sauna inside all this clobber.’ He smiled at the shadows, happy with his purpose in life. ‘I’d better not undo it, though, or I’ll croak from pneumonia.’
Lance crashed his helmet against the table. Jenny kissed him, and leaned across to light his cigarette. ‘It’s lovely weather for an Eskimo.’ He wiped the visor with a beer-soaked serviette. ‘I used to want to emigrate to Canada, but I think it’ll be Australia, if ever I do, unless I get a call from the Grand Old Opry to go to Nashville!’
Keith felt inexpressibly tired, wrung out, ready to sleep or die: but he knew he must rouse himself, fight free from a sudden onset of total ineptitude. ‘We want the keys to the Volvo, because it’s the nearest car to the van. I’m sure the battery’s good on that, as well.’ From shadows by the fireplace came a sound halfway between that of a kid robbed of his toffees and someone who thought he had cut his finger but then sees his hand’s dropped off. ‘Who’s making that noise?’
‘The old man died,’ Aaron told him.
‘Is that all?’ Wayne said. ‘I wish my old man would. I’ve asked him to, many a time. He’d never do it for me, though.’ He reached a ham sandwich from the tray, then swung his rawboned hand, missing Fred by a millimetre, Fred wishing at the rush of air that they were still on inches and the gap bigger. ‘You’ve been at that titty-bottle again. I can tell. You stink rotten.’
‘Leave him alone,’ Keith said.
Wayne smiled. ‘I was only trying to get my blood going. It’s like mud, and it hurts. He’s more than half-pissed, though.’
Life and limb wasn’t worth tuppence to these types. The only respect you got, Fred knew, for what it was worth, came from people who looked on you as lower than a dog. He levelled his bow tie. ‘We’ve had two away, Mr, Blackwell. Three, if you count old Mr Percy, though he’s still here, in body at least.’