Already the others were dying. He would outlive them, being one of the elect. The old man had died, the woman who had so stupidly followed him was dead. So would everyone be, none to unravel the mystery.
Such reflections made the body immediate, reduced him to a moving corpse encased in icy clothes, matted within a miserable cocoon, each foot an anchor to drag now that he had lost count of the paces, which caused him to panic for a moment, because no will could alter the fact that he was a fragile mortal caught in the storm and lost for ever. Tears of chagrin froze onto his flesh, but he went on, veered to one side then back to the other, increasing the distance from the hotel, wanting only to sleep, sensing he was no more at last than a failed and miserable hibernologist staggering to perdition.
Head and body were covered with ice, boots frozen into a stone and feet giving out the purest pain. He leaned against a window half hidden by snow, a window into what was impossible to say and, moaning hic jacet, he fell into the drift, a scream when he bruised himself on some metal object which he then tried to grasp. The outlines seemed those of a long hut, and he was wondering how he could get inside when a door was pushed against him and he fell.
I haven’t handled one of these for thirty years, Alfred would have said if the gale hadn’t assailed his ear-drums to extinction, except to play around now and again in my little bungalow garden, and I didn’t have much truck with it then, hard labour being something I decided not to make a career out of. He was doing his level best with the shovel because the flood of the headlights would show him up as a shirker if he didn’t. An old football scarf around head and ears held a cap underneath, but his gloves and cashmere overcoat were the sort it behoved the boss of a haulage firm to wear. He worked as well as, if not better than, Aaron on one side and clapped-out Parsons on the other. The bikers were placed up front to draw the oldies on, unless Keith had decided they would be less in danger if the blast came. Thank you very much. What did he have to live for now that his father had gone? He laughed with the joy of freedom, though couldn’t help shovelling as if the old bugger still needled him with his gimlet eyes.
Aaron had lifted boxes of books up and down stairs, bending at the knees to avoid back pain or a hernia, carrying heavy volumes into or from the car, and he was satisfied to find enough wind in his pipes for shifting snow. If he had done it straight from the laboratory job ten years ago he would have been on his knees and gasping his lungs out. He liked the cold blaze of gusting snow, the bite against ears and nose. If he went to prison for not having been clever enough with his false signatures he would look on this shovelling as the best of times. And if the flash of obliteration caught him unawares he would not have to decide any more what was and what was not worth recalling.
The door clunked open, and Eileen wriggled across the seat. Before Keith could throw her out or say anything she fastened her lips on his. ‘I was fed up in there.’
Stuck-up Jenny sat by that half-dead biker not saying a word but crying now and again, Enid was flopped in an armchair with what blankets were left, and barmy Fred whistled to himself while making little brew-ups and concoctions in the kitchen, telling her to piss off whenever she went in and tried to talk.
‘You can’t stay here,’ Keith said. He didn’t want her to go, though the longer he didn’t tell her the more certainly she would have to.
‘I love you,’ she said. ‘I want to be with you. My place is here, darling, darling, darling.’ She felt herself burning into a blush: such a word would have made any other man laugh: posh, false, not for them, but with him there was no other to fit. ‘I want to stay. I don’t care what happens.’
The only way was to get her by the throat and bundle her into the snow. Haul her to the hotel and lock the door. He couldn’t, and for once felt the same passion. ‘I love you, but I have work to do. I can do it better on my own.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘you don’t love me. Not like I love you. You don’t know what love is. I’m beginning to think no man does. If you did you wouldn’t want to get rid of me. You can drive this rotten old van just as well if I’m sitting here, can’t you?’
Chains clanked and bit around the wheels as he reversed several yards and then went forward, more precious distance gained. ‘You don’t know me. You know nothing about me. If you did you wouldn’t want to know me.’
‘I don’t care about knowing you. What does that matter? I love you, don’t I? Anyway, what do you know about me? But you said you loved me. I don’t know whether to believe you, if you keep on telling me to go. I just love you, and that’s that.’
He felt warmer at hearing words of such simple and unsolicited devotion — at this time of his life. ‘You have to believe I love you.’ Wondering whether she would when he knocked her senseless, he was afraid to hit her, even out of love and protection, because would he be able to stop?
‘I want to be with you. After, I want to live with you. I know you’re married, so I don’t mind if you can’t see me often. I love you, but you don’t know what that means.’ She began to cry, her body moving up and down in its covering of clothes. She seemed to have taken every coat in the hotel, as if really meaning to stay with him in the snow for ever. ‘I want you, so let me stay. I want everything. I want to have a baby with you.’
They were level with the stone pillars of the gate, a lion surmounting each. A ditch by the roadside full of snow must be avoided, Lance signalling him clear with a flashlight.
‘Do you know what you’re saying?’
‘Oh yes. I don’t always, but I do now.’
‘If you love me it would be better for you to remember me than get killed with me.’
‘No, it wouldn’t. I don’t want to live if you get killed. I’ll go mad. I’ll be out of my brain as long as I live. I won’t be able to work, or talk to anybody for the rest of my life. I’ll go around not wanting to live. I’ll drift from squat to squat with all I own in two plastic bags. I’ll be the youngest bag-lady in Manchester.’ She was laughing. ‘Look at that snow! Life’s marvellous, isn’t it? Well, I think so. So just let me stay, and don’t think about what might not happen.’
Not to think, to accept, to let everything go. She promised paradise, but how stupid if they both died. ‘I want you to live, because I love you, and if you live, then I live. Whatever happens, you won’t be poor. Fred will tell you why.’
‘Oh, fuck off,’ she cried, the heart wrenched out of her. ‘I don’t know what you’re on about. I said I loved you, didn’t I?’
No one could hear it better expressed — at any other time. He felt eighteen again, unable to trust himself, so said: ‘A few days ago I left my wife. I killed her, then I left her.’
‘It won’t work. Tell me another.’
‘No, listen. She taunted me. She said our daughter wasn’t mine. She said she’d had an affair at the time she was conceived. We’ve hated each other for years, and more or less gone our own ways, as far as we were able to. Why she told me what she did I don’t know, though it was at the end of a long argument, and I’d said things which must have hurt her as well. So she came back with something to finish all our arguments. I’d thought all my life that no matter how much we loathed each other there was one mark of the love we must have felt at first. But she’d never felt it. She’d gone out and got pregnant by a boy friend, then told me the child was mine. I knew she was right, but in any case she assured me of it, swore it was true, and gave details which I’d suspected all along. I killed her. Then I loaded the car with enough things to live rough, and drove up to the Lakes. I was going back to give myself up, when I met you. I don’t know where I was going. Maybe the police are looking for me already, though she might not have been found yet. I didn’t mean to kill her, but that won’t help me in court. Nor do I deserve it to. I could live with you happily, because I love you, but please go into the hotel, and I’ll come later. Then we’ll decide what to do. You can bet I’ll be all right. I’m in no danger. But give me another kiss first.’