Snowstop (6 page)

He wanted to stop, make tea on the stove, put biscuits into the munching machine, but he didn't fancy the fight with spade and sacking to dig wheels out of the ruts. Hands shook as he passed the cigarettes. ‘Light me one.'

‘Can I smoke as well?'

No one else would have asked. He didn't need her any more, but if he stopped, and strangled her, and was then unable to get the car out of the lay-by, what a laugh that would be. He wondered where such notions came from. ‘Please do. We've both earned it.'

She laughed like a child. He was thanking her, oh so fucking politely. Oh no, thank
you.
Who did he think he was? ‘Lovely fags. Thanks.'

‘That was a close call. Let's hope there won't be any more.'

Hot water burned her bladder, cold always making her want to piss pints, but it wasn't the time to speak. With Trevor she wouldn't wait for anything, why should she, though that mean beer-belly would never give way to anything she wanted no matter how next to nothing her request might be. This bloke was sweating blood to keep the car going, so she would cross her legs and keep her trap shut, otherwise he might chuck her out.

The road went fairly level, easy enough to take, but flakes thickened, falling as if someone was gleefully splitting eiderdowns above. How could that be, but it was. Maybe it wasn't his car, belonged to who he worked for, yet it seemed too good for that, though some firms did give such motors to their reps.

Globules on the warm windscreen were swept aside, like people, she thought, asking for money on the streets to buy a cob and a cup of tea. As for him, each turn of the wheels meant more time that would never come back, and he couldn't think that was anything but good.

SEVEN

Bowlegged fire irons supported a basket of logs warming the lounge of The White Cavalier Hotel. A huge copper bucket of wood stood in reserve, while a chimney hood big enough to suck up an ordinary room drew out the smoke. The fireplace was backed by a wall of small bricks that had once been red, Aaron surmised, spreading his large hands towards the heat. Most were now fairly blackened, but the pattern of mortar was plain.

Beryl had given him top marks for common sense when he had telephoned that he was stranded for the night, but the news she had passed on in return was not good, suggesting that his career as a bookdealer and manuscript merchant might be over. He didn't care to think about it, after escaping the peril of being iglooed up for as long as nobody could tell.

A man whom he supposed to be the proprietor came down the stairs. He was short, with a solid girth, the jacket of his pinstriped suit showing a waistcoat half undone. He had a healthy spherical face with narrow eyes, large ears, and a grin that most of the time he didn't know how to turn off, though the expression may have been more from nervousness than humour, showing teeth so even they could hardly have been his own. Thick ginger hair was swept back over a broad head, and after buttoning his waistcoat with deft fingers he picked the cellophane off a small cigar and began to smoke.

Ivy plants and aspidistras grew from plain terracotta pots along the corridor, and Aaron felt like a snowman standing at the reception desk to ask for a room. He knew the place wouldn't be cheap, but on a night like this there was no alternative to the bed-and-breakfast rate of twenty-five pounds, as he signed the ledger, and wrote his address in perfect block capitals, so slow about it that the landlord impatiently shook a small length of ash from his cigar.

‘It's a nice old place.' Aaron screwed the top back on his pen. A few inches had matted the road on driving into the courtyard towards the line of garages that had once been stables. So many outbuildings gave it the aspect of a hamlet which, when lit up, would draw benighted travellers from miles around.

‘It is,' the landlord answered, ‘if you know how to run it. Nineteenth century, it seems. And well preserved as well, much of it.'

On the lounge wall by a window was a peacock, with an enormous green grass brush of a tail speckled with royal-blue medallions on brown almond patches, the extremities of its fronds shivering due to a slight draught through the window fittings. The head was long, and deep blue wings joined the body like strongly hunched shoulders.

Aaron stood before it. ‘What a wonderful specimen!'

‘You like it?' Fred the landlord's chest expanded. ‘So do I. I wouldn't part with it for what tea there's left in China. I don't think I've got anything I like better. Everybody comments on it. I got it years ago from an auction, for next to nothing. I don't suppose anybody knew what to do with such a thing, but I did. I thought of changing the name of the hotel to The Peacock, but it would have meant too much paperwork.'

Aaron looked at the bar through the doorway, with its plain chairs and tables, and the empty dining room opening off from the reception area. ‘Are there many people in tonight?'

Fred grimaced, as if not caring to fraternize with a possible tax inspector. ‘We do mini-breaks on some weekends. It's busier then, even in winter.'

To one side of the fire a wooden settle with plain arms set against the wall was padded with a fitted bolster of flower and acorn pattern. A bare bulb in the large fireplace lit up hooks and fire irons, a copper fender gleaming in front. By the settle was a small round table, and the armchair in which he sat. A dozen other tables were scattered about on a fitted carpet of deep marine blue peppered with small rosebuds. The walls were white, bordering on cream from generations of clay pipes and large fires.

What luxury to have a pot of coffee promptly served (albeit watery) and a plate of (tasteless) turkey sandwiches. The folded
Sun
and
Guardian
hadn't been opened, so he read both, having forgotten to buy a morning paper. Above the fireplace hung a large framed print of
The Great Western
in full steam and sail on a menacing green sea. Strange to see nautical pictures in an inn as far from the coast as you could get. At a seaside place the subject would probably be green fields and thatched cottages. A square-faced grandfather clock with superb Roman numerals chimed dully as if tuned not to disturb the tranquillity of the guests.

He felt grateful for this unsolicited break from reality, until morning when mechanical shovels would clear the road. Warmth and food powered his sense of wellbeing, life's little (and some not so little) anxieties seeping away.

Two people came into the lounge and he tried not to stare, despite the excuse of being stranded. Her face suggested an oriental mixture from centuries back, but quintessentially English features sometimes did, especially in women. Most evidence was in the eyes and the shape of her pale cheeks, an unusually small mouth and thin lips. Perhaps such faces had come over from Siberia before the island was snapped off from the mainland. She was about thirty, and while the man flopped wet and exhausted to the fire, she sat with a large black mock leather briefcase by her legs as if someone might manifest out of the wall and snatch it.

‘Just our rotten luck.' The man's cap thrown violently into the hearth hissed on the hot bricks. He was about fifty, and bald, with a large florid face and downcurving wide lips, dressed in a checked pullover and a sports jacket, and wearing steel-framed spectacles. A row of coloured felt tips decorated the top of his lapel pocket like medal ribbons from some war of long ago.

‘At least we didn't freeze to death.' She wore grey trousers and, when bending to take off her laced shoes, nondescript hair straggled over a thick Fair Isle sweater. Wet stockinged feet went towards the blaze. ‘Only nearly. Some poor souls must have got stuck. It's like the Antarctic out there. I wouldn't like to be in their shoes.'

The man turned, unwillingly diverted from the fire. ‘Why don't you go and rescue them, then? They'd appreciate it, I'm sure.'

Aaron put his newspaper down, to let them know that someone else was in the room. ‘We've certainly found a nice little refuge, all the same.'

‘Who the hell wants your opinion?' the man said to the flames, his only allies at the moment.

‘I don't know, and I don't very much care,' Aaron replied, ‘but if you want to know who's giving it, my name's Aaron Jones. Maybe we'll be stuck here for a week, in which case I hope you don't mind if I ask yours.'

He hudged even closer to the fire. ‘Ask all you like.'

The woman pulled her woollen gloves off, stage by stage, as if at earlier times she had been used to dealing with far thinner ones. ‘Nice to know you. I'm Jenny Groves, and I happen to be his secretary, of a sort, and for the time being anyway.'

‘Tom Parsons, that's who
I
am.' He put out a hand, regretting his surliness. ‘I thought I'd tell you before she called me Dracula. We've been cat-and-dogging it all the way up from London. Getting stuck and having to plough through half a bloody mile of icing sugar was the limit. I'm sorry if I was a bit sharpish just then, but the trudge wore me out. Even if I just stood in it I'd start to lose weight. I'm not a lad any more.'

True enough, Aaron agreed. ‘I can recommend the coffee and sandwiches. The dining room won't be opening for meals, so I was told.'

Tom laughed. ‘A pint of Greattorex's Bitter will warm me up more than the coffee and tea piss they serve people in these places.'

Curtains of white still fell beyond the window, a faint moan of wolf weather from the wolds of snow. Aaron thought it strange that a wall and a few squares of glass could protect the cosy parlour so completely from annihilation.

‘When I was a nipper I ran around in plimsolls and no topcoat. Not even a bit of jersey on my back. Then I worked twenty years down the pit. Well' – his laugh was grating – ‘at least down there I was warm and well enough shod.'

‘Stop showing off,' Jenny said. ‘You're wearing good shoes now, aren't you?' – which Aaron thought was unfair because it had nothing to do with what he was talking about.

You couldn't trust his humour, though. He was amiable one minute, brittle and offensive the next. ‘I've got to be well shod nowadays. The lads wouldn't own a Union official as didn't have good elastic-sided boots on his feet. I'd go down the pit again any day, but they need me more at this job. Order me some sandwiches and a pint of jollop, love. I'm famished after that little struggle outside.'

She put her other foot towards the heat as if not able to bear the sensual comfort of warming two at the same time. ‘Why don't you ask for it yourself? All you have to do is move your lips.'

His power lay in moody silence, in gesture, for he turned his bullocked shoulders to the fire, hands outspread, until she gave in, and walked out of the room. ‘Get some supper for yourself as well,' he called after her. ‘Secretary she's supposed to be! I've shit 'em – before breakfast.'

Aaron looked up from his reading. ‘Perhaps she's tired after the trouble of getting here.'

Parsons yawned, worn out by his emotional power skirmish. ‘Near half a mile we had to walk, the blizzard coming right at us, but I made her get behind me, and I took every inch of the blast. I'm not a brute. Still, I suppose you're right. But everything I ask her to do she does as if it's a hard grind and she's too good for it. Maybe I don't make allowances. You have to make more allowances than you did in the old days. Not that anybody ever made any for me.' He laughed like a good-tempered overgrown boy, hedgerow eyebrows moving up and down. ‘Anyway, men and women's supposed to be equal these days, aren't they? I drove the car up from London, so I don't see why she shouldn't order me a pint and a few sandwiches.'

Jenny came back. ‘They'll be here in ten minutes, Mr Parsons.'

He stood, arms extended, like a cat finding the radius of its physical limits. ‘In the meantime I'll go to the back, for a you-know-what.'

‘You've driven up from London?'

She nodded, a hand still on the briefcase. ‘He nearly got us both killed once or twice.'

‘It's not exactly motoring weather. I set out from the south coast this morning, and it got worse every mile.'

‘It always does, summer or winter.' She gave a bitter smile. ‘That's my experience.'

He puffed clouds of wellbeing from his Schimmelpenninck. ‘You don't seem to like it. Sorry I can't offer a cigarette.'

‘I like the smell of cigars. Do you?'

‘I don't mind it,' he said. ‘I smoke them.'

‘I mean, like it up North?'

He laughed. ‘I live there.'

‘You weren't born there, though?'

‘Well, no.'

‘Nor me.' The conversation seemed to refresh her. ‘I'm from Guildford, originally.'

‘And I was born in Devizes.'

She drew her eyes along the titles in a tall mahogany glass-fronted bookcase containing antiquated volumes of the activities of the county hunt, dusty school classics from before the First World War, and a few battered copies of
Who's Who
and
Burke's Peerage.
‘I thought I caught a bit of the accent.'

He mentioned a couple of bookshops in Guildford which he had rummaged through. ‘I can't afford not to, though it's so hard trying to park I'll give them a miss from now on. It took half an hour to get out of the place yesterday. But why do you live in the North if you dislike it so much?'

‘Marriage, of course. Bloody marriage. My husband, as was, worked for an estate agent. Imagine trying to sell houses in a mining town! Then he left me. At least he hasn't gone off with another woman, I thought. Then I heard through the usual grapevine that he was living with my best friend. Funny I haven't heard from her for so long, I was beginning to tell myself.'

He noticed that she had jettisoned the wedding ring already. ‘Life's like that.'

‘How do you know?' she snapped.

Similar experience, he could have answered, cursing himself for making such a flippant remark. ‘How do you know I don't?'