only figure watching them was tall and ragged-looking, the one they’d called Nob. He was standing at the entrance under the sign, his scars catching the fitful glow like lines on a mask.
She took no notice of the sidecar, but brushed off the pillion and seated herself, while he tore off the L-plates. Once he’d lowered himself into the saddle in front of her, he felt a warmth despite the icy wind. It was like the heat of a fantasy – but one suddenly sanctioned, and given approval.
Three times he bobbed up and down on the kick-start before the engine fired. As he nudged the rig cautiously out on to the road, she put her hands in the pockets of his jacket and drew her arms tight around his waist. He could feel her fingertips. He looked down and saw her thin red shoes on the footrests, and her parted thighs. He felt her tuck her knees into the crooks of his and nudge her cheek close against the back of his neck. Her body on his was the one warm thing, and he thought he’d always known her, that she’d lain next to him since the start of things.
The full storm had crept up on them. Now it matted the air and blotted out the road. The few cars crawled in each other’s tracks, the snow piling up in ridges either side. Drivers peered through freezing slots scraped in their windscreens; lights narrowed and swung. He guessed at the chaos on the low road and took his chance along the motorway. Five minutes later they were slogging up past Bricket Wood with the snow sweeping at them from over the hills, and the cold so intense he kept calling back just to make sure she was alive. Each time, she gripped more tightly and pressed herself more closely against him.
At last, he took the exit and cut down past Hemel new town, driving under its hard sodium lights, beside its rows of council terraces, until she called out where she lived – in Boxmoor, she said, near the Fishery pub. He took her down towards the canal, and from there along a lane to a cottage which backed right on to the tow-path. And he was sure her family had lived there for centuries. And for ever, he reckoned, he’d known about them and longed for the girl in the pale blue coat.
She got off the bike. He sat still, keeping the Triumph idling.
‘Thanks for the lift.’ She was halfway to her door.
‘Wait!’ He let the bike fail and went after her, his shoe skating on the path. He thought she looked frightened for a moment. ‘Will I see you again?’
‘Do you want to?’
‘What do you think?’
She hesitated.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ he said. ‘I don’t even know your name.’
‘It’s Cynthia. Didn’t I tell you? But everyone calls me Cynth.’
‘Jesus! I mean … sorry.’ He was alarmed. ‘I’m Alan. I suppose I’d better…’ His voice dropped, suspicious. ‘Why did you ask me for a lift?’
She shrugged. ‘It was a hunch. I needed to get away. Didn’t I?’ She looked down. Then she said again, ‘Didn’t I?’ as though he must understand.
‘Can I see you?’
‘All right,’ she murmured.
‘What was that?’
‘I said all right.’
‘When? I don’t live round here. Tell me!’
‘I don’t know. Come when the snow clears away. If you want to.’
‘You mean that?’
‘If you want to.’
‘Of course I do!’ On an impulse, he put his gloved hands on either side of her shoulders. Before he knew it she was close up against his chest, her arms clutching on to him. She didn’t let go.
The embrace lasted a minute, long enough for her warmth to seep into him again. When they broke apart, she lifted her face and allowed her open lips to touch his. For a second, he tasted her mouth. Then, before he could respond, she’d turned away and was at her door, the key already in her hand, the lock already clicking. ‘Cynthia!’
Her door was open. He took a step towards her.
She raised her hand once, swinging round in the frame. ‘I’il see you, then, Alan. Come when the snow clears away.’ She smiled.
He raised his own hand. The door closed behind her. He called out softly, wary of rousing the house, ‘OK. I’ll do that. When the snow clears away!’
He kick-started the bike. ‘I’il see you, then, Cynth. I’ll see you!’ Revving the engine, he turned the machine around in the road and drove out by Two Waters.
All along the valley road, picking his way in the wheel-marked drifts through little Bourne End, steering the last two miles by pub signs or gate lanterns, skidding kerbless and guideless in the white-out between farms, he felt her kiss still on his lips and her name still on his tongue. He felt her embrace still behind his own back. And he knew somehow, somewhere, it was behind his father’s back, too, and he was betraying him.
A SOUND SLICED through a dream. Geoffrey Fairhurst opened his eyes enough to aim the flat of his hand at the stud on his alarm clock. Broad daylight was seeping from the curtain edges. He cursed the clock for making him late for work, because, as the simplest fool knew, at twenty past seven in the tail end of December nothing half so bright was supposed to occur. And what mocking brightness it was – a sweet limpidity that washed pearl the moulded ridges in the ceiling’s plaster and stole almost a yard along the papered walls. Wearily, he raised himself.
His wife, Louisa, began to stir. ‘Louie?’ He put a hand to her shoulder, and she made a series of indefinable noises before turning over and huddling further into the blankets.
He didn’t blame her. The room was even colder than the past few mornings, and, as he groped on the bedside table for his watch, the air bit wickedly at his ears and nostrils. It reminded him there’d been a snowstorm. In the same breath, it explained the light outside.
His spirits lifted. An uncomplicated man in a plainer tale – so he’d have described himself – he felt a childhood excitement that made him throw off the covers and climb out of bed. He grabbed his dressing gown around him, tiptoed shivering across the rug to the window and parted the curtains.
A radiance from the frostwork on the glass bathed him from every angle. It was like the illumination of some white rock, exuberant, cleansing, touching his good-natured, standard-English profile, probing his already slightly receding hairline. It lit up the stubble under his chin. But the panes were so scribbled over and spangled he could see nothing of the world outside. And the ice was so coarse that when he rubbed at it with the heel of his hand it stung his skin and cost him seconds of a delicate tingling pain before he’d melted a patch large enough to squint through.
The effort was worth it. The fall had been as heavy as any child could have wished. He remembered looking out over the Vale of Aylesbury from the tied cottage on the Waddesdon Estate, where he’d been born twenty-three years previously. Now, he lived only a dozen miles away – in a self-possessed little Chiltern town suddenly buried under snow. From the window of his house on Cowper Road, through the dip and up the slope to the new so-called chalets opposite, each roof was laden a foot thick, every branch above the blanketed ridges was freighted with finely balanced icing, and each smoking chimney exhaled almost clandestinely from an overcoat
