Derek Beaven - His Coldest Winter

The earth was silver. The farms and woodlands stretched away to either side under a darkening sky, supernaturally luminous.

‘Sorry about that,’ he said.

‘We’d have been in a pickle, wouldn’t we, stuck out here?’

Geoffrey trained his eyes on the road. He could feel her face turned towards his. He believed her eyes were amused, her lips slightly parted. He could see her without looking, knew her already. He felt the blush creep up from his collar and into his cheeks, and he cleared his throat. ‘Now. Where am I supposed to be taking you?’

‘Boxmoor. You go by there, don’t you? I’ve seen you a few times. Sure I have.’

‘Have you?’

‘You must have seen me, too. At the bus-stop. Blackbirds Moor, by the cut.’

‘No. Never.’ He took a risk. ‘Wish I had, though.’

Cynthia made no reply. They crossed the motorway and came to the heights of the new town. His heart thumped. She’d dealt him a card: he could offer to take her in to work. Something would begin whose end it was impossible to foresee. Perhaps, just while the snow lay, there was a brief dispensation, an angel of mise-en-scène under whose wings they were allowed to meet. How easy she seemed with the flirtation – for flirtation it undoubtedly was. He flicked an eye sideways again at the skirt over her knees, and at her boots.

They drove down the hill from Adeyfield. Hemel Hempstead shopping centre raised its modernist blocks, and lights blazed from the strict mathematical forms. Geoffrey negotiated the roundabout named Paradise, felt it apt and ebbing. The Mini nosed towards Boxmoor under the very faintest western glow.

‘Now. Whereabouts am I to drop you?’

‘Oh, anywhere will do. It’s an easy walk from here. I don’t want to put you to any trouble.’

‘Honestly, it’s no trouble. No trouble at all. It’ll save you a bit of time. After all, Friday night, a girl like you … I expect the boys’ll be queuing up to take you out. And women always need ages to get ready, don’t they?’ He was crass. But he continued, because he was doing nothing wrong, ‘Take my wife, for example …’

She crossed and uncrossed her ankles. ‘The boys I knock about with,’ she said, ‘you’d call them rough and ready. Till you get to know them, that is. Teds, really. We go out on the bikes. That’s what I like.’

‘On the bikes?’

‘Yes. There’s nothing like it. When you’re on the back and the world’s coming at you and you’re going faster and faster and there’s nothing you could ever do. So you just hang on. And all at once there’s a moment when you’re not afraid any more, you’re not left out, or alone, or different, and it’s like … I don’t know. Like you’re winning.’ Her voice was animated. ‘Like that’s the only time, the only chance you’ve ever got. When any second … the next second, you might die and you don’t care. You just don’t care. Blokes think they own you. One kiss and you’re property, you don’t exist any more. But on the bikes you come back to life.’

Geoffrey’s throat was tight. He tried to swallow. ‘I’ve never ridden a motorbike,’ he said.

‘You should try it.’ She sounded sincere. ‘You might like it.’

She showed him the turn-off. It took him to the road behind the pub called the Fishery, a snow-blank lane with only tyre tracks between the cottages. ‘Just here. Next to that lamppost. Thank you ever so much. I’m really grateful.’

He stopped, and she opened the door her side. And he watched her swing her boots away and lever herself lightly out of the car. Her feet sank deep into the white drift. She turned and looked in at him. ‘Thanks again, then.’ Her voice seemed suddenly serious, a little sad.

He heard himself say, ‘This weather’s so awkward if you haven’t got transport. Tell you what. If I see you Monday morning and it’s still like this, I’ll stop. How about that?’

‘Oh,’ she said. He saw her hesitate. ‘All right. That would be nice.’

‘Could be any time between eight and half past. I can’t guarantee …’

‘Till Monday, then. Perhaps.’ She smiled and shut the car door. ‘Thanks, Geoff.’

He watched her go up to the little house. She turned once more and waved briefly before disappearing inside.

All along the valley road, between the occluded farms and the occasional pubs, he felt such elation, and such guilt. His blood pumped. His legs shook so that he could hardly manage the pedals. Almost, he wished there’d be a thaw over the weekend – for by that the deed would be undone.

But there was no thaw. Instead, most unusually for temperate southern England, the mercury dropped like a stone, and the winds got up again. The weather was about to strut and ad lib. On the Saturday night blizzards west of the Malverns would drift twenty feet deep. By the Sunday, cars and houses not so very far from Geoffrey’s home would be completely buried, with never a train able to move. Sheep on the Welsh hills would disappear along with their shepherds. Birds in mid-flight would fall lifeless from the air.

THE PHONE RANG. Cynth had got hold of his number. Alan hurried downstairs into the hall to pick up the receiver. He stood barefoot on the floor tiles in his pyjamas, the memory of her lips still touching his.

It was his mother. She sounded strained, far more distant than his aunt’s house in Kent, her voice almost scrambled. His father had been called away, unexpectedly, on business, and she’d be returning home alone. But not until the weather eased. Travelling just now was next to nigh impossible. Was Alan coping? Would he pass on the message about Lionel to the Fairhursts, as their phone line seemed to be down?

‘Called away?’

‘Yes. On business.’

‘What business?’ He could hardly hide his disappointment.

‘You know, dear. The firm.’

‘Oh. Just like that? Out of the blue?’

‘Sometimes it isn’t for us to ask … Apparently, there’s an emergency. He is still important, Alan, in spite of what you seem to think. They’re sending a car to take him to the airfield at Northolt. I’m only worried he won’t have enough to wear.’ His mother sighed; the sound was crackly, metallic. ‘So can you manage to go up to the Fairhursts for us? About getting to work. Geoffrey and … Louise, I think her name is. You know who I mean, don’t you?’

‘More or less. Give me the address, then.’

He heard her calling to his father. The name of the road was indistinct.

‘What was that?’

‘Cowper.’

‘Oh, right,’ he said. ‘Up past the almshouses.’

‘That’s it, dear. Your dad says it’s on a corner. The point is he doesn’t remember the exact number. But my address book should be on my dressing table. You’ll keep the boiler going, won’t you? We don’t want burst pipes. And you’ve got enough to eat?’

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Bye.’ He put the phone down.

He had to pull himself together to attend to his mother’s message. Of course it wouldn’t have been Cynth. His father had been called away, and he was to tell the Fairhursts. He bit his lip and turned back to the stair. Then he stopped. Called away.

He’d paid no heed to the spy theory since the Busy Bee. The absurd notion of Lionel in the pay of the Kremlin had simply bobbed up in the wake of his scare, and, with equal facility, it had bobbed down again. All his imagination had been taken up with the girl in blue. Come when the snow clears away. The snow this morning lay deeper than ever. It was four days since he’d seen her.

Still, there was a grainy, B-movie quality to his mother’s news. He noted how on edge she’d been. He recalled her sideswipe for his lack of respect. And the scene she’d evoked was open to interpretation. Under the cover of darkness, later that afternoon, an unmarked car would appear out of the murky, snow-covered backstreets of south-east London. It would halt before the house in Wickham Lane, engine running, headlights flaring. A peremptory knock at the door would be followed by the emergence of his father, and an awkward farewell would take place in the presence of two men in raincoats, who would then whisk Lionel off – to Northolt, she claimed. Taken with a dose of Harry Lime, it had all the elements of an arrest by MI6, or even a lift-out by the Russians. At the very least it was a coincidence: as if his own lurid suspicions had already exposed his dad, as if a weird mirror life of his whole family had started to materialise.