Sixty yards out on the road, the blast would sweep through the hotel like a thousand knives and kill everyone inside, so one more attempt was needed to get the van clear, and at half-past six there was no more time to play with.
‘Another stint.’ He touched Lance on the shoulder. ‘Just one more,’ he said to Wayne. ‘I want you as well, for as long as you can do anything to help,’ he told Alfred and Aaron.
They followed without complaint.
Every trade had a different apron, the escutcheon of skill and industry, but Fred of many trades had only one. He had bought a dozen of the strongest cloth, and picked them out himself. Doris chose everything else, which was right, but the aprons were his. Never let anyone choose your aprons, not even your employers, the butler at his first job had said. If the slave bought his own chains they wouldn’t feel as strong.
Funny things you thought of when you could be blown up at any time. He wore an apron so as not to sully his suit, narrow grey and white stripes that made him look a little longer in the body. He listed the trades he had been forced into on this long night which was not yet over. Barman and waiter at the beginning, then cook and bottlewasher, doctor for the wounded and priest for the dying, and undertaker if you thought about it, which he did as he whistled with apparent cheerfulness between the tables, collecting pots and cutlery, hearing the baleful groans of the gale and half expecting the floor to heave under him as it had in the old days at sea. In a great gale he had been aware that the waves were big enough to tip the whole caboodle into oblivion. Any second could come and without anybody’s by-your-leave decide to be their last.
So he had been in that state before this awful night, had learned that you couldn’t be frightened out of your life for more than a few minutes. And anyway, he had told the young lad with him in the galley, the system could only take so much uncertainty, so you might just as well settle down and forget it, which he had known how to do ever since. All you needed was something to occupy yourself, and you could cock a snook at God Almighty Himself, if you cared to. And then you could rely on the God of Israel to look on you grimly (but with a hidden smile somewhere) and say: ‘Carry on, then, lad.’ You could always find a place in God’s favour if you were working.
THIRTY-FOUR
Eileen felt better if she talked. She had been born knowing that there was no greater way of easing the heart but, if that was the case, why was it that all the people she had known hadn’t wanted to hear what she had to say? While Keith was outside doing what he had to do (and she would never be absolutely convinced that he had to do it, no matter what anyone said the danger was), every second that went by was a painful cut somewhere on her skin, so that if she didn’t talk there would be so many cuts she would bleed to death.
Maybe she ought to try singing, but she would sound like a wailing cat, and didn’t want to frighten anybody more than they were already. Let the wind do that, moaning around like a man who hadn’t got any ciggies just before Bank Holiday.
Enid slept on two armchairs pushed together, as far from Parsons’ corpse as she could get, a dead body Keith hadn’t told anybody to throw out because he seemed too knackered to bother, maybe too disappointed at how things were going. Jenny at the table, hands by the side of her face, looked as if a bit of a natter might not do her any harm. ‘I wonder how much longer we’ll have to go on waiting?’ Eileen asked.
The light from two Calor lamps at different ends of the room barely reached each other. Chairs had gone into the fire, which spat and subsided, as if it had taken umbrage and would warm them no more. The wind through gaps and cracks gave the bit of candle nicked from the kitchen a hard time in staying alight. Jenny looked at this poor young drab in the man’s overcoat Fred had found for her. ‘Is all this waiting around getting on your nerves?’
‘I’ve been waiting all my life, so it ain’t much different now.’ She kicked a piece of broken bottle back under the table. ‘It’s just that I ask myself now and again what I’m waiting for, and how long it’s likely to go on.’
Jenny laughed, but it was no laugh. ‘I thought you were being serious, for a moment.’
‘Well, I was. I always am, though everybody thinks I’m not. The only person I’ve ever met who took me seriously was Keith. And he’s out there with his bikers pushing that van around.’
‘They’re trying to save our lives. Don’t you know?’
‘Of course I do. And I’m waiting for it to be finished, and for them to come back, and for all of us to be safe. We ought to be shovelling as well, but they think we can’t do it because we’re women. I’m as hard as any of ’em. That’s what I said to Keith, but he made me get out of the van and come back in here. So I’m waiting, and it’s getting on my nerves. But it’s like you say, it stands to reason I’ll always be waiting.’ She was silent for a while, and Jenny missed her prattling, wondering when she would speak again, and thinking Eileen too young to have been knocked about by life, which was why she found it so easy to chatter.
‘I don’t think that time will come for me.’
Jenny laughed at such gloom from a young girl. ‘That’s a bit pessimistic. Aren’t you in love with him? I’d want to die if Lance was killed, whatever we might mean to each other.’
‘I’ve never been in love before so I don’t know. I once told a boy friend I’d never had an orgasm when he was talking about a book he was reading on sex, and then he made me come and said: “That’s an orgasm!” Well, I’d had plenty before, but now I knew. So as for being in love, well, with Keith it feels like people say it ought to feel. Only it’s no good being in love with him.’
‘Why not? Doesn’t he love you?’
‘He must, after what he said to get me away from that van. I wanted to stay, in case it exploded, because if he got killed I wouldn’t want to live. So I suppose that’s what being in love is, because I know he wanted me to stay. But he couldn’t let me. I thought he was going to thump me and throw me out, like one of my boy friends would have done. But he did it another way because he loved me. At least that’s what I like to think. I won’t stop waiting till he’s safe and we’re together again, and then I’ll never wait for anything for the rest of my life. Only it’s never going to happen. So I’ll be waiting all my life, except that I won’t. If you wait all your life it’s no life, is it?’
‘No.’ She heard the hard response in her voice, but went on, words coming out that she had often drilled into order: ‘You can always make up your mind to stop waiting. It’s useless. It’s killing. You can just say no to waiting, and start to live.’ Then she knew her words were foolish, because she wasn’t capable of any such thing.
‘I can’t.’ Eileen wiped her face with a serviette. ‘I haven’t lived yet, so I won’t even try. But if I wait for Keith I’ll have to wait a long time, because he’s on the run.’
‘What, him? He can’t be.’
‘When the police get him he’ll be put away for twenty years. He told me, to get me out of the van. But I know it’s true.’
Jenny was convinced that men were worse than born rotten. They had been rotten for generations before they were born, and their descendants — if the world was unlucky enough to have them — will be rotten for generations to come. In fact rotten was mild to what they were really like. Imagine a man like that telling such vile lies to a young girl he had just been to bed with and wanted to get rid of. ‘I can’t believe it.’
Eileen lowered her voice, though there was no one else to hear. ‘He killed his wife.’
‘Oh, God, that’s too bloody much. I’ve heard of some tricks, but that’s the limit. And you believe him?’