His Coldest Winter. Derek Beaven

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СКАЧАТЬ the windscreen, at the landscape. Then she smiled and turned to meet his eye. ‘I like the snow,’ she said. ‘Don’t you?’

      ‘Yes. Yes, I do, actually. I like it, too.’

      ‘I taught myself shorthand when I was still at school. My mum helped. It makes a difference. What about you? You’ve been working on all that hush-hush integrated-circuit stuff I was typing up for old Butterfield. You have, haven’t you?’

      He was silent for a moment. The snow in the headlights glistened. ‘I’m not really supposed to say. Cynthia.’ Her name.

      ‘Oh come on, Geoff.’ She’d spoken his. ‘I probably know more about it than you.’

      ‘Do you?’

      ‘We work for the same outfit, don’t we? Do you like records? Do you like the Beatles?’

      ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Should I?’

      ‘Only the group everyone’s talking about.’

      ‘Were they the ones who made “Walk Right In"?’

      She spluttered. ‘Not likely.’

      ‘Oh.’

      He thought the subject closed.

      ‘Love me, do,’ she said.

      Geoffrey’s foot flapped down on to the accelerator just when he should have been braking for a bend. Luckily, the wheels spun at the low speed, and the car simply skidded sideways. He brought it under control, unnerved.

      ‘It’s been in the charts for weeks.’

      ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Yes.’

      ‘I thought we were going into the hedge, then.’

      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.

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