His Coldest Winter. Derek Beaven
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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 of slow grey white – that brightened even as he watched. All fuss and detail of things was covered. Even the bristly woods on the crown of the far hill were mere smudges, nothing but white heaps under the sky. Snow was still falling.
Then Louisa was standing beside him. She’d bundled herself in the eiderdown, and was melting her own view-hole. He waited for her to share the moment, but she made no comment on what she saw, only turned away after a few seconds to crouch at the paraffin heater. He watched her open the stove, light a match and touch it to the wick, until the flame spread around the rim of the burner. ‘Wonderful isn’t it, the snow?’ He put a hand on her hair.
She glanced back at him in the way that so confused him. ‘Yes, it is, isn’t it,’ she said, flatly, and began putting the flue back together.
He picked up the flannel trousers he wore for work and made his way across the landing, feeling angry and bewildered in ways he didn’t understand. He trod quietly on the bare boards, as though there were sleeping children in the next room, but it struck him that he didn’t quite belong any more in his own home.
A more mundane problem nagged him while he was shaving. It was his week to drive, and exactly how he was going to get his car across the other side of the valley to pick up Lionel Rae, who worked in the same lab, he couldn’t tell. Dressed and breakfasted, he remembered Rae was staying a couple of extra days at his sister’s somewhere down in Kent. So he was let off tackling the steep slopes round the chalets where Lionel and Judith lived.
It was odd he should feel so relieved, because as a rule he enjoyed Rae’s company. He felt lucky to have found someone he could get on with. Rae didn’t stand on ceremony, didn’t preen in his former glory, but was informal and approachable. Geoffrey already saw himself as something of a protégé. Rae encouraged him to question everything dusty or old-fashioned, and he liked the attention. To tell the truth, he liked Lionel better than his own equally brilliant, but rather remote and punctilious boss, Dr Raj Gill.
He didn’t reach the lab until ten thirty. The drive to St Albans was infinitely slow, pretty but dangerous, and there were abandoned cars all along the way. The snow would melt under the tyres of the little convoys, then freeze again in their tracks. His brisk white Mini did better than most, but still slid about badly, and a crawl was the best he could manage. By the time he turned into the factory car park, his nerves were jangled. Few of his colleagues appeared to have made it. His half-finished, makeshift lab space was entirely empty.
GEOFFREY STOOD AMONGST the electronic paraphernalia and metallic grey cabinets that defined his days. The lab was both futuristic and foetal: there were ducts and pipes, and cables angled across the walls like rationalised veins. It was warm. There was an audible mains hum, combined with an intermittent buzzing sound. Something was switching in and out. It made him think of Louisa again. A threat hung in the air between them, so recent and out of the blue that he couldn’t see why it should be, or exactly what he might have done wrong. Of course he loved her. He filled a glass beaker with water and placed it in the specimen kiln to heat up, then closed the snug steel door and paced about.
He went downstairs to the basement where the big new electron microscope was set up beyond the clean-room barriers. Just short of the airlock, he paused. He knew the