His Coldest Winter

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PARALLEL COURSES (#ulink_3c5e6e8b-2142-57dd-b2de-9c8632a22ee4)

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.

He went to the sitting room. The grey-white glare struck up through the undrawn curtains. It scoured the hastily textured ceiling, exposed the jazzy walls, the geometric light fittings, the scratch-resistant wood-block floor, the teak-style sideboard. It clung to the one beauty, the polished piano, where Alan and his mother found a degree of sympathy. The Rayburn in the fireplace had gone out. He switched on the electric heater in the dining area and stood over it, shivering, holding his breath.

Then he switched it off. Four days – because of the snow. Or was that merely an excuse? Cynth could hardly have predicted the weather. All he had to do was swap brooding for action. And there was no need to take the bike. All he had to do was get over to her door somehow and knock, while the snow kept the gangs away. He’d walk if he had to, set off as soon as he’d run his mother’s errand. He must simply get dressed, snatch something to eat, wrap up. Four days. There was only the Fairhursts’ address. Only that one thing. He went up to his parents’ bedroom.

The address book lay on her dressing table, exactly where she’d said. He found the house number and closed it again. His fingertips rested on the cover. The book was right next to her lipsticks, her powder jars and sprays. Her scent still lingered in the air; her dresses filled the cupboard. Fastened to tangled nylons in her drawer was an elasticated garment she wore next to her skin. Before he knew it, before he even knew why, he was wavering. Cynth would never know, neither would his mother. It was just a game. He could give it up when he liked. Four days was long enough – a good stint, even.

Now he was remote, almost an onlooker. Someone had said there was a tart in the fourth year, if you gave her a quid … Tarts with Teds, bike boys with painted girls, grubby, trodden articles from Tit Bits, The People, Reveille – some women liked it, were insatiable. There was a place you could touch them and they’d do anything. The complicated female clothes fastened awkwardly here, zipped clumsily there, and soon Cynth was queen of the bypass. After that, in his mother’s threefold mirror, it didn’t take him long. A few minutes, and it was all over.

But the feeling afterwards was bitter as ever. Poor boy, he hated himself. He wished he had been killed at the Elstree. It wasn’t the deed – trivial, a pantomime – but the shame. Why did this shitty side of things always have to show through, this script of a dirty planet, hurriedly made-up, abruptly shoved in, scrawled across unsullied teenage love? His life was worthless. He was paralysed, crippled, because his father so respected his mother, cared so assiduously for her, showed nothing the least sexual in his approaches to her. Lionel in this so triumphed over his oddities – while he, Alan, was the sick, perverted one. He alone wore the family’s missing sexuality.

ALAN CLEANED HIS face and put the garments back, still covering his traces. He thought of the bike death he’d escaped and Cynth picking him out, and he tried not to cry. She was real and waiting for him, and he’d just disqualified himself from ever going near her. He’d let her and everyone down, because of what he was.

He stood for a moment on the stair, oblivious to the cold. Called away. Come when the snow clears away. As his hand strayed over the splodgy, embossed wallpaper, a peculiar train of thought struck him: Cynth and the disappearance of his father were somehow connected. He snorted and carried on down. But there was a logic to it so perfect and tempting – just as at the Bee – that he stopped once again to let the idea sink in. It was like one of those flip-flop circuits his father went on about. If he let Cynth go, Lionel would be back in a day or two. If, on the other hand, Alan went after Cynth – as he still longed to, as she herself had invited him to – the eerie conviction grew that his Commie dad would never show up again. The hairs stood up on the back of his neck as he recognised exactly the quantum condition his father had joked about. Lionel, just like the cat in the story, was in two situations at once, and the determining factor was Alan himself.

He laughed out loud and dismissed the whole notion. It was a thought experiment, the sort of ridiculous parlour game Lionel himself might have dreamed up – if he’d ever played parlour games. No one could shape things retrospectively. The bells of St Peter’s began in the town.

His mother had been concerned about the heating. The so-called chalet was deceptively spacious; two of its four bedrooms were tucked like polar caves under the ground-floor eaves. In one was a huge cast-iron boiler, which Lionel had found in Exchange and Mart, its pieces so heavy they’d almost crushed the car’s suspension. His father, fired up himself, had assembled it, persisting with calculation and design.

The other bedroom he’d already turned into a workshop for his projects, installing a bench and a Gothic, industrial lathe. For the boiler, he’d burst forth to rip the home apart, tunnelling through walls, wrenching up floor-boards, creating ventages and installing thermostats, wiring and cursing again. Flung hammers had missed Alan, the dutiful apprentice, by inches. For all this sweat and telemetry, the heating system had failed to heat. A fault lay at its heart so basic as to be childlike – a complete misimagination of the heat transfer from copper to ducted air. Prime Lionel, of course, unworldly and bitterly funny; but an image came to Alan before he could stop it, of his father already under interrogation, his face bloodied, his legs jerking. He hooked an iron handle into the boiler’s lid, lifted it and peered inside.

Only embers remained from the night. He opened the draught as far as it would go, before dumping in fresh coke from the scuttle. Then he prowled for food. Back in his bedroom, he dressed himself beside one of Lionel’s grilles, and the breeze raised goose pimples on his legs.

He hitched up his jeans. Sadly, he scooped Brylcreem on to the palm of each hand, and swept it through his thick dark hair. He had to stoop to see in his own mirror – quite like his mother as it happened, sultry, maybe a GI’s kid, even. He combed his quiff, checked this profile, now that, touched at definite sideburns with his razor. The good looks were a cruel irony; it was a cold hard world. Lionel had said so often enough – and Lionel should know.

Listlessly, he zipped his suede jacket, picked up his gloves and silk scarf. He went down to run his drab errand – all that was left of an impulse so hopeful only minutes before. A pair of his dad’s wellingtons stood by the door to the boiler room. He plunged his feet in them, because there were no others to fit him.

CRYSTALLINE BETWEEN CHALET and garage, the snow was chest high. He kicked a path. The slot of sky was leaden. The frontages, all open-plan, were mapped into one steep slope by the overnight fall. A neighbour was clearing a drive; a child, wrapped up in coats and scarves, patted a snowman. The church bells began again, echoing back from the opposite side of the muffled town, and the sound touched him – strident, so public.

He screwed the key and swung the garage door up from its white wedge. His Triumph stood on the oil-stained cement gleaming dimly, its mudguards spotless, the chrome of its two silencers lustrous from his efforts. He sat astride the tangerine-and-cream petrol tank and the big twin wafted up its greased-burnt metal smell. He squeezed at the clutch and clicked the gear change with his toe. The handlebars swerved in his grip when he twisted the throttle.