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Geoffrey stood blinking as Lance’s words sank in. It took him several seconds to lose his pastoral innocence: if Lance was right, his whole life had shifted gear. He stared at his colleague, now bent over an optical device for classifying the specimens. Everything belatedly added up. What if the buildings, the expansion, the investment were all military? Once the old man retired, the factory premises could be painlessly rejigged – to make pocket-sized guidance systems for missiles. A technology was about to take off, but its production was already earmarked by the government. He, the well-meaning Geoff Fairhurst, was about to become absorbed into the armaments and aerospace frenzy that occupied the lee of the Chilterns from Stevenage right down to Aldermaston.
What a simpleton he’d been. His body gave that shiver again. The agricultural landscape he’d grown up in – the fertile plain, the windy chalk hills and sloping beechwoods, the ancient estates with their cottages, brakes and streams – was taking on a seamy side, a sense of underworld. For it might not be coincidence that the big V-bombers flew slowly and protectively over the factory like great grey bats. And maybe British intelligence already had a strong presence in the area. There might really be enemy agents, sympathisers, potential traitors somewhere out there. Eyes and ears might even now be sending details of his own life, his own name, directly to London … or to Moscow.
And suddenly, the pompous ‘any species of conduct’ did apply to him. His heart thumped. ‘C.S.’ He unscrewed the ball of paper, smoothed it with the side of his hand and scratched again with his pen at the initials he’d written at the top. Cynthia Somers was nothing real, nothing tangible. There’d been no furtive fumblings in corridors. Assignations had not been made. It was all pure as the driven snow, and he was a happily married man. No substantial alteration would occur if he never saw Cynthia again. Yet he wasn’t being honest with himself. In truth, she was a gamble with his deepest feelings, Cynthia, the missing term of an equation. His cover seemed almost blown, the sense of threat sharpening itself to a point.
Down in the basement, the microscope preserved its vacuum and waited. It was indeed a tool that could scry into the invisible. Before long, dressed in his special spacesuit, he’d be approaching it once again. A bead of sweat moistened the armpit of his shirt.
Now he had to see her, simply to reassure himself. He needed to be certain it was all in his own mind, this infatuation, that it was his own fire he was playing with, that he wasn’t at risk of making a complete and dangerous fool of himself.
LANCE WAS ABSORBED with the specimens; Terry was labelling them. Geoffrey went over to the lab window. A flake or two spiralled in the airstream against a dull hurry of clouds. Track-marked snow covered the car park a foot deep. Snow lay upon the pavements and window sills of the old quarter, above whose fairy-tale roofs towered the Norman abbey of St Alban the Martyr. The great building shimmered at the heart of things. He understood nothing of women – no one understood them, not even themselves.
There were pencilled circuit diagrams on Lionel Rae’s desk. He picked a few up, complex, hurriedly sketched logic gates with their spiky symbols and jotted values – emblems, he thought in passing, of Rae’s extraordinary mind. The man calculated like a machine, as fluent in electronics as ordinary people were in English. But the pages would do to cloak his mission. He held the sheaf out purposefully in front of him. ‘I’m going up to the drawing office,’ he said.
The drawing office lay at the far end of the block. Just before it, he could contrive to pass the room where the six girl typists sat at their desks. All down the ground-floor corridor with its run of identical newly painted flushpanel doors he was amazed at the lengths to which his emotions were taking him. The large, metal-framed windows looked over crystallised rose beds to whitened, wooded parkland. Children in the distance were sledging down a bank.
‘Morning, Geoff.’ Someone barged past his shoulder, and he turned, startled, uncertain to whom the retreating back belonged. Others were arriving ahead of him, scarfed up in greatcoats, disappearing into offices. He nodded to one or two as he passed; the place was filling up, coming to life. For form’s sake, he put his head in to exchange a few words with Clive Powell, the production manager, and again felt he had no outer shell, that his thoughts were leaking out somehow to betray him, and that was why Louisa …
But with Cynthia Somers it was not sex. It was precisely because his feeling for her would not ‘render any one of us liable’ that there was nothing to feel ashamed of.
Blushing again, he made his way on through the double doors and up the main staircase. It led straight to photolitho on the second floor. But a narrow passage on the first led to the test shop stair at the far end, and, half-way along, there was a glass partition which looked into the typists’ room. Once he reached it, Geoffrey allowed himself to hesitate and glance sideways. Four of the girls were there under the strip lighting, rattling away at their machines, pausing every now and then, elbows in, to flick the carriage levers across in that upright, female way they had. Cynthia’s chair was empty.
Someone was working the Roneo. He craned his neck to see. At the same moment, the girl gave over cranking the handle, turned and stared back at him – not Cynthia but the freckly redhead from accounts, June Something-or-other. His spirits plummeted as he looked hastily away, shocked at the extent of his disappointment, at how much he’d anticipated seeing her again. Then another girl caught his eye, and he retreated, diagrams in hand.
They’d spoken several times, Cynthia and he. Once in the spring, she’d come with some files for Lionel Rae, and had stopped by Geoffrey’s piece of bench to look over his shoulder. He’d been examining photographic results, swirling iridescent images and beautiful sliced forms that could sometimes take on all kinds of impressions. They could almost stand as pictures in their own right. He’d got up in his white coat to explain them to her, though words had seemed only to mar a shared sense of wonder. Then he’d even taken her down to show her where the probe was, outlined its principles as simply as he could, chattered on at times too freely – at others with a formality that verged on the tongue-tied – about the semi-magical properties of silicon, and about his own scanning electron beam. It could penetrate, he’d said, more deeply into nature’s enigma than anything before it.
A flicker of a smile had crossed her face. But she’d seemed genuinely interested; and it was flattering, since she was so attractive. That was when he’d first felt the understanding between them, a meeting of minds. Most definitely, he wasn’t sexually in love with her. In fact he’d have liked to protect her from the sexual tide coming in, an intelligent girl who might all too easily be damaged. She was younger, and he was married. She had her own life, of which he could, and should, know nothing.
It scared him to feel quite so devastated at her absence from the typing room. He stuffed the papers into his jacket pocket. She scared him, even as she thrilled him with her sense of difference, of selfhood, the crisp, faintly provocative way she wore her clothes, the cut of her hair, the tightness of her skirt.
THERE WAS NO thaw overnight. More snow fell. On the next day, a Friday, the earth had another new beginning, without smutch or stain. Then a wind got up from the east that set ranks of silver-grey clouds streaming in the middle air. It plucked the traceries from stalks and wires, dislodged the frosting of empty boughs, and brought great swags of snow from shifting evergreens thudding down on to the white carpet below. Any wakeful creatures hoping to scavenge food it sent back to their burrows.
The roads were more perilous than ever. Driving off from his house, Geoffrey skidded most of the way down Cowper Road. The only visible patches of tarmac showed on the High Street, the long straight road which neatly bisected his home town along the valley floor. Attempts had been made to put down salt and grit. He watched the market people while he waited behind a van at the traffic lights. The fishmonger had shovelled up two huge sugary pyramids on the wide pavement in front of the old Town Hall. He was setting out his stock under the arches, wearing fingerless gloves and an Arsenal bobble-hat, and whistling at the favour of sub-zero temperatures. The packed fish lay incalculably cooled, head to tail in their propped-up boxes.
Few other people were on foot. A dark-coated City commuter was starting down King’s Road towards the station, his bowler resolute, his rolled umbrella held out to the side like a ski stick. The market boys by WH Smith’s were larking round their trailer with handfuls of snow. A woman pushed a pram in the direction of Woolworths.
The lights changed to green and Geoffrey’s wheels slipped as he accelerated behind the van. Then the old road bottlenecked between Victorian shopfronts and the fine eighteenth-century houses with discreet brass plates of solicitors and accountants. He nose-to-tailed it past the medieval church on the left and the modest cinema on the right.
Five ancient routes converge towards London through the chalk knuckles of the Chilterns. The small market town that was home to both Geoffrey and Alan was on the middle one of these, its fold the Roman Akeman Street. A canal and a mainline railway ran in addition, hidden by the tangled lanes yet squeezed to within almost touching distance of the road. Somehow, the valley accommodated a ruined castle, a ruined gasworks, an aerosol factory and a Tudor public school. Most of the houses were old and higgledy-piggledy, though there was nothing outrageously quaint, nor very ugly, nor very remarkable. Geoffrey had grown fiercely fond of the place. He’d imagined it would be a home for a family. He believed it still could be.
The cars in front of him crept past the Eagle and Child. Run-down timbered cottages marked the town’s end by Swing Gate Lane. Then the hedges after Bankmill were all but covered, and the road seemed one ruck in a stark white bedsheet, along which Geoffrey crawled for three interminable miles. When he turned off at Two Waters to cross the Grand Union, the canal appeared oddly to craze and steam in the shelter of its bridge.
There was another queue right into Hemel Hempstead new town and up through the housing estate. The hill was steep. On one side, the local boys had made a strip of ice and were taking turns to slide down; on the other, a stream of younger children were dragging toboggans up towards Jarman’s Field, their progress mostly faster than the cars. He turned off at the crest to cross the bridge over the motorway, but St Albans Abbey only came into view after another five-mile slog against the grain of the landscape. Built from the stone slabs of Watling Street, it marked the next Roman route around the capital.
But at Lidlock there was still no sign of Cynthia, even though he found pretexts enough to pass the typists’ room, to check post and reception, to roam the stores and the workshops. He gained no more than enquiring looks, and was left to deal with a sense of loss he hadn’t bargained for. It had been, he ruefully acknowledged, in the nature of an experiment.
More staff had made it into the lab: Bill Hollingworth, Royston Gaines, Millicent Throssel, the female metallurgist. Lance was there, of course. Geoffrey stood beside Rae’s empty desk looking out of the window at the white expanse between himself and the parked cars. He felt strangely old and set up for life. In his sports jacket and flannels, with his honest looks – the sandy hair just a little unruly, the blue eyes engaging, the smile a fraction too ready and disarming – he’d tried to pull this masculine world around him. He had slide-rule and praxis at work, his good wife at home. He drew a promising salary.
So he stared at the featureless white outside, as at a screen on which his past life could be projected. A village youth, he’d courted Merriam, from the prefabs. She’d caught the same bus to school. As it jolted towards Aylesbury Grammar, she’d seemed so perfect, two rows in front, half-obscured by the rail at the back of her seat. Her sleeve, her shoulder, the line of her neck, the clusters of her auburn hair – he’d been struck to the quick when she’d turned round to look at him.
One day, he’d encountered her, and there was nothing for it but to ask her out. They’d been to the Gaumont matinee, and for cycle rides together. They’d lain in the long grass at the edge of Lodge Hill and he’d kissed her romantically. So far, so good. But the lips of an unknown girl he kissed at a party game suddenly tasted far sweeter, and filled his sexual imagination to bursting for more than a week. He was flummoxed. Shortly afterwards, the illusion collapsed and he hadn’t loved Merriam at all.
A similar disenchantment happened a year later. He was left thinking he’d misunderstood the whole business, and this was exactly when his intellectual engagement had been caught by the inspired science master. Science was manly, and above all hectic fictions of his heart. He’d met Louisa while they were both students in London, and married her, on the basis that what he’d felt before was infatuation, not love at all. He loved Louisa.
IT WAS CYNTHIA who woke those first feelings again, still stranger and more knowing. She focused him, as if one of the electromagnetic lenses he worked with had been switched on. Her skin, her eyes, the colours she wore, the weave of her clothes, things she’d touched assumed a special quality – but he couldn’t imagine sleeping with her as he slept with Louisa. Neither could he fancy her privately, as he fancied any number of women rather more than his wife.
This time, however, he knew what was happening. He’d read of Huxley’s experiments with mescalin. Vision was chemical; the lucid phenomenon of the girl at work was some brainstorm of illusion. The mind was a frontier, and there was a secret gambler in him. He’d elected to observe himself ‘falling in love’.
He was paying a price, of sorts. Now the lab had its own alteration. Its metallic surfaces, lit oddly from the whiteness outside, were too smooth, too grey, their edges too hard. It was suddenly a barren place. Nor could he lose himself in the work. Dr Gill was being cryptic, full of nods and winks, but seemingly producing nothing for his attention. Geoffrey could only attend to a backlog of routine tasks: on the microscope, he checked supply voltages, performed unnecessary recalibrations. He couldn’t run the electron beam itself because he lacked any detailed brief.
Lance took him to a pub in the cattle market for lunch. They sat by the fire with beer and sandwiches, surrounded by the smoke and backchat of stockmen. ‘Things all right, Geoff? You were looking a bit down in the mouth this morning.’
‘Was I? Yes. Fine, thanks.’
‘Not your normal chatty self.’
‘Haven’t been sleeping too well. Maybe it’s a bug. There’s one going around, isn’t there? Louie’s been a bit off colour this last week or so.’
‘Oh, well, that explains it. Not getting enough. That’s your problem, old son.’
‘It’s nothing like that.’ Geoffrey laughed uncomfortably.
In the afternoon, morbid thoughts of Cynthia crowded in on him: she’d left the firm; she was seriously ill; some Brylcreemed boyfriend with a car had smashed her up in an accident on the ice, her legs, her spine, her face; some thug in leather and jeans had lured her on to his motorbike.
There came a point where he managed to tell himself these imaginings were false, and that, as a true researcher, he should be taking note of them. He reached for a pad. But pen on paper would leave a trail of evidence. With Butterfield’s memo still in his mind, he paused, biro unclicked. Again, it was as though his thoughts were on display, as though his skull had been can-openered and the brain laid bare.
At last, with darkness beginning to fall, the frenzy seemed to drain away. Cynthia Somers was just a nice girl, nothing more – maybe not even a nice girl. Perhaps he really had been fighting off a bug of some kind. Maybe it was something he’d eaten.
With great relief he worked on for two hours, setting up a control programme of silica-film deposit tests for the following week. And he felt reconciled to the firm. Government patronage needn’t just be military. In any case, someone had to invest in initial research. Great benefits had come out of the hectic experimentation of the war years – nuclear power, for one. Lionel Rae hadn’t necessarily been hired to steer the firm into dark waters, no matter what Lance believed. Rae was all right, he thought. Rae would look after him. On his way home, he’d stop and buy Louie something nice.
Lance looked up at him. ‘That’s more like it, Geoff,’ he said.
There was permission to leave early. Geoffrey quit the building at four thirty, and the freezing crust in the car park crunched under his feet. But the Mini started first time. He set the electric heater, and the demisters, and turned on the lights. Gloved and scarfed, he nudged his way out of the gates and crept along the skirt of town. There was the frailest early sunset: strips of pale yellow were brushed on the cloud cover just above the horizon. He crossed the Verulam Road, where slush churned up by the day’s traffic had frozen into brown heaps. The car struck one of them. It made a dull sound against the bodywork.
Then, at the bus-stop on Bluehouse Hill, just beside the tract of ground that covered the Roman town and the site of the martyrdom, he saw Cynthia in the queue. He was sure he did. She was wearing calf-length boots, black, quite breathtaking. He braked involuntarily, and the wheels locked. The car slithered to a halt five yards past the stop, stalling the engine as his foot slipped off the clutch. In the mirror, he saw the six or so people in the queue staring at him.
PLATITUDES SPILLED FROM his mouth as he stepped through the foot-deep kerbside snow towards her: ‘Thought I recognised you … too cold to be hanging about for a bus that might never come … wondered whether I was going your way.’ He felt they would do, in front of the onlookers. She had that smile on her face.
Now she was next to him in the car, and they were heading off along the Hempstead road. He drove in silence, horrified at himself, and intrigued. He could see out of the corner of his eye the tight grey pencil skirt that folded over her knees, the tops of her boots.
She seemed to read his mind. ‘Kinky boots,’ she said. She lifted the right one as far as the skirt would allow and angled it towards him.
He pretended to take his first look. The boots were soft leather that hugged her calves, wrinkled at the ankle and stretched smoothly, sexily, over a high heel. ‘They’re lovely.’ He looked back at the road.
‘When the bus didn’t turn up yesterday, I took the day off and bought them with my Christmas money.’ She seemed completely natural. ‘Aren’t they fabulous? They’ve just come in. Everyone wants a pair.’
‘I didn’t know they were allowed,’ he said.
She laughed. ‘Oh, yes.’ She was delightful.
‘So yesterday the bus didn’t show up?’
‘I nearly froze to death waiting.’
‘But today?’
She seemed once again to know what prompted his questions. ‘Oh, today Butterfield’s Doreen was off and they couldn’t find anyone to take his shorthand, except me. So I was drafted queen bee for the day. Makes a change, I suppose.’
Geoffrey believed he might have heard an apology in her tone. He stole a glance at her face. She was gazing straight ahead through 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.
II (#ulink_3c5e6e8b-2142-57dd-b2de-9c8632a22ee4)
