His Coldest Winter

There was an exhaust roar outside. Another. He looked up, startled. Headlights flashed through the window and sparked the dribs of tinsel hanging down. Bikes were arriving, maybe twenty of them, revving and thundering in the car park. They wove in and out of each other, accelerating and braking, turning this way, now that, in an intricate dance. The din was shattering.

SHOUTS AND IRONIC Christmas greetings came from the door. Young men were unknotting scarves from their faces, combing quiffs, primping their damp leather, brushing at snow. They laughed, jeered, lit up fags. They strutted in tight jeans and tight shoes, catcalled at the owner behind the counter, punched buttons on the jukebox. Alan kept his head down over his tea, but a group of four or five were heading straight towards him, shouting their orders to friends in the queue.

‘Mind if we join you?’

He fixed his attention on a smear in the rim of his cup.

‘Oi! Got a tongue in your head?’ Immediately, they clustered round.

‘What? Sorry. Sure.’ He gestured. ‘Take a seat.’

Three lads sat down at his table. ‘All right, mate? How you doing, then?’

Involuntarily, Alan glanced at his watch. It was too early for trouble, tonight of all nights when everyone was still supposed to be at home pulling crackers. ‘Fine, thanks.’

‘Nice watch. What time is it?’

‘Half seven.’ ‘Hound Dog’ came banging out of the record machine.

‘Not thinking of going, were you?’

‘No. No, I wasn’t.’

The young man opposite him grinned knowingly. He had a narrow face beneath his blond, fifties, Teddy-boy wave, the skin pale, except where cold had turned the spots under his cheekbones a raw red. He shot a glance at Alan’s goggles and gloves on the table. ‘What bike you got, mate?’

‘’59 Bonnie.’

‘Fuck off. How old are you, then?’

‘Seventeen.’

‘Yeah? Santa come down the chimney, did he?’

‘My uncle’s a mechanic. Works with bikes down in Kent. He knew I was looking and sorted me one out.’

The newcomer sniffed and eyed him. ‘Not Watford, then, you?’ he enquired, as though idly.

‘Me? No. Stopped off for a cup of tea. I’ve got a few miles to go yet. Mate.’

‘Got a few miles to go, have you?’ The lad mimicked Alan’s speech and grinned at the other two. ‘That’s lucky for you, son. See …,’ he spread his hands like the crooked charmer in a cowboy film, ‘we’ve come looking for Watford boys. Got a bone to pick with Watford. Haven’t we, men?’

The others laughed. Alan felt his own cheeks crease. ‘Where are you lot from, then?’ he said.

The rider beside him spoke for the first time. ‘Fucking Stanmore, ain’t we.’ Then he laughed again, and swore, breathing out his cigarette smoke. His teeth were irregular. They showed like points beneath his top lip. ‘Yours that sidecar rig out there?’ he said.

The crease stuck in Alan’s face. He forced a chuckle. ‘Bloody thing just nearly killed me.’

His neighbour leaned towards him. ‘Why don’t you tell us your name?’

‘Alan.’ He could smell the breath. It was heavy, slightly tarry. ‘What’s yours?’

‘I’m Mac. Mr Macbride to you.’ His friends laughed. ‘See Nobby there?’ Mac pointed behind him to a tall figure standing at the counter. ‘Nob got banned, didn’t he. Doing eighty down fucking Clamp Hill. Oi! Nob! Has to ride up behind ever since. Or in a sidecar. Don’t you, Nob!’

Alan looked. A tall figure was staring back at them. He was older, grimmer than the rest, seeming to stoop slightly in his black, fringed jacket, the black hair straggling on the collar at either side. But the face … Nob’s pock-marked skin had been slashed. The scars ran in meaty weals on both cheeks, as though someone had played noughts and crosses on him.

‘Over here, Nob. This kid says he’ll give you a lift in his chair if you want one.’ Mac turned back extravagantly to Alan. ‘Where was it you said you was going?’

‘Over past Hemel.’ Alan pulled his gaze from the scars.

‘Hemel, Nob. Any use?’

Nob was just coming over, a bottle of Pepsi in his huge dirty hand, when a ruckus started in the far corner. It was with the boys who’d been there all the time. They were the locals, Watford. Alan swung round again, but his view was screened by the rows of leather backs. He heard threats and counter-threats, then a short, winded scream, a boy’s – or maybe a girl’s. For when a torrent of swearing rose over the jukebox guitars, and the crowd seemed to sigh, it was a girl who answered back, her voice spirited, her words unexpectedly eloquent. Someone shouted her name, Cynthia, and the scuffle began again, because she was the fucking cause of it all. A cup smashed against a wall.

Presley’s last chords clanged on the hush. Then the lads round Alan were on their feet, half-sneering, half-cheering, and he stood, too, relieved. He let himself be swept up in the action, even became part of it, shouting with the rest. Only the two lorry drivers remained unconcerned, their sports pages propped in front of their fry-ups. A round-faced Ted from the far side of the room stood on a table: Fight! Fight! Fight!’

The man in the vest called from behind the counter, ‘If you bloody lot want a bloody punch-up you can bloody do it outside. Go on! Get out of it! All of you!’ With his cleaning cloth over his shoulder, he stood unmoved at his urn. The mood hung for a second, steamy, and Alan felt his neck prickle. One instant could ruin another face. He clutched his goggles and gloves, alert for the click of the first knife. Then, as if at a signal, everyone crowded for the door. And Alan Rae went with them, thrust by the night into the thick of things.

VIOLENCE WAS A chimera – no one quite believed in it. That was a quirk left by the war: Alan’s mother had walked to work over broken glass, his uncle had seen a Normandy hedge trimmed by machine-gun bullets, the A-bomb had blown the Japs out of the fight. Violence lacked shape. Teds and bike boys seemed its only ministers. Wisecracking, fire-cracking, they were ambiguous as devils in an old pageant.

Light flared from the café windows. The car park was white where the bikes made a natural arena. They seemed to herd the rival gangs together, closing in with their welded angles and shimmering chrome. A ring had already formed, and Alan glanced to where his Triumph was parked, fifty yards from the exit. He heard the wind sough, felt the snow fall as cars passed by in the road, their engines muffled, the swish of their tyres powdery. The flecked gust, slicing through the trees at the far side, began to sting his cheek.

Two figures stood primed in the bleak little space, champions of Cynthia – whoever she was. They were identically clad, both the same height, but the Watford boy was thinner, and his face looked desperate in the harsh light. People were calling out his name. ‘Go, Pete!’ ‘You can get him, Pete!’ Pete’s eyes were hooded, his shoulders hunched too soon, defensive. He looked out from behind his fists, shifting his weight nervously from foot to foot. The other lad was chunkier, more robust, and his mates flanked him, egging him on. His hook-nosed profile was caught in silhouette as he quipped confidently to one of them.

One of the girls was crying, and people craned to see. The sobbing rose to a wail until a puffy, high-heeled creature wearing only thin slacks and a jumper broke from the ranks opposite and entered the ring. ‘You don’t have to, Jimmy!’ she called. ‘She don’t mean nothing! Just leave it, Jimmy, why don’t you!’ The snow fluttered at her heaped-up hair.

‘I ain’t fucking leaving it.’ A great laugh went up. ‘Stupid tart.’

Alan watched the girl turn away. He scanned the faces, saw Nob, caught a glimpse of Macbride. The names echoed grimly in his head. He’d already spotted a length of chain hanging from someone’s hand. His heart pounded softly as the two boys at the centre began to circle each other.

The initial blows were feints. Fists skidded off leather, grazing a sleeve or missing a shoulder. Then Pete took a punch to the face and rocked back. The Stanmore gang roared as he rubbed his cheek, and Jimmy paraded in the applause. But Pete was canny, seized the moment to dart in, and came up under the other boy’s guard with a smack that glanced his eye. The sound was like fabric tearing. Instantly, the two were clutching one another, wrestling and sliding amongst the flakes while the crowd swayed. People ran this way and that to the rough shove and rhythm of the fight, and Alan moved with them in a wild, weird ballet. Whenever the combatants lurched towards him, he heard their breath as though it were his own, and watched the sharp, committed gusts snatched out of their mouths by the wind.

Now there was a lull, and the fighters were locked, resting on each other’s grip. A different girl was across from him, framed momentarily in a gap. Fair-haired, she wore a blue scarf at her neck and a pale blue coat over her jeans. Their eyes met, and it was she who dropped her gaze first. Then the crowd swirled, and when he looked again she was nowhere to be seen, and the two fighters were tangling, kicking each other’s legs. It was Pete who slipped. He hit the icy gravel so hard it forced a noise out of him. The chants went up for Jim-my! Jim-my! Jimmy raised his arm and made to drop down with a finisher; but his victim rolled clear and was instantly, spiritedly, back on his feet, half-crouched, coming on with both fists, with the Watford lads yelling for him and Alan yelling, too, until the pair of them spun away and the ring broke up.

Now it was all a whirl of limbs and faces in the slip and slide. Alan elbowed himself to the front. Two heads still bobbed and ducked in a fierce exchange, two bodies were still grappling. One flailed, the other got heaved up. One lost his footing and they were both scrabbling on the ground, here the point of a thin shoe, there a hand trying to get a hold on leather or fleece. But the hand went limp at the sound of a body blow, and another cry went up, and suddenly the figures were apart. It was a chase.

The gangs cheered and surged after them, two forms reeling and stumbling in the dark between the bikes. Alan slid and fell himself in the rush. As he got to his feet, a shape came skipping past him with an outlandish, mocking step, turning first this way, now that – like a matador, the leather jacket open like waistcoat wings. It stopped in front of the café window and waited. The other caught up, floundered, lunged, slipped, and skidded front first into the snow.

Something was spattering out of its face, dark drops falling faster than snowflakes, and it was Jimmy, staggering up, twisting away now and gasping, his hands on his thighs. Still more of the dark stuff was spilling down in the wind, leaving black garlands in the bright, fluorescent white.

He tried to straighten, not in time. Pete came in hard, gave him three punishing jabs to the body, one more to the cut face, and a vicious dead leg with his knee. Jimmy screamed and dropped where he stood. He cringed in the white scuff, covering his head with his arms. ‘OK!’ His voice was thin. ‘OK!’ A couple of his mates went over to him. Pete stepped back, and looked away, dusting the snow off his sleeves and the backs of his jeans.

Nobody in the car park moved or spoke. The mere exchange of a look seemed the riskiest thing in the world. Even the wind died, the fat snowflakes coming straight down while the cold plucked once more at the exposed skin of Alan’s throat and neck. A lorry from the main road revved in low gear and began lumbering in at the gate, its lights flashing and sweeping the rows of bikes.

Then the mood broke. Someone from Stanmore cracked on at Jimmy that he was a fucking useless cunt. The insult was buoyant, the relief almost palpable. A roar of merriment went up. Alan felt drunk with events as some great wave of generosity and good humour threatened to make them all lifelong friends. Christ, it was a fucking good dustup, a fucking good Christmas, because that Pete had a few tricks up his sleeve and he bloody gave Jimmy Chapman something to fucking think about. Yes, he fucking did.

JOSHING AND LAUGHING, the two gangs were returning inside to drink tea and talk bikes. Alan was at the doorway when he heard a voice at his shoulder.

It was the fair girl again. She was adjusting her scarf over her head. He could see by the neon flicker and the snow-glaze from the café window her heavily made-up eyes, and her hair under the fabric, fashionably backcombed. Quite tall, she was handsome rather than pretty, seemingly preoccupied with tying the two ends under her chin. Her pale blue mac hung open to reveal her sloppy-Joe jumper, and the tight fit of her jeans. ‘They said you were going to Hemel.’ She brushed at the flakes just settling on her shoulders.

‘Sort of.’ He stared at her, then briefly down at his hands.

But she was matter-of-fact, still glancing round, as though unconcernedly. ‘You couldn’t give me a lift, could you? It’s getting worse, isn’t it?’

‘What, Hemel? D’you mean now?’ It was illegal for him to take a passenger.

‘I told my parents I’d be back before ten. You needn’t if you don’t want.’ She spoke with an unexpected formality. Then she suddenly smiled straight at him, and the smile and her eyes – another blue – brought him back to that moment he’d first seen her during the fight. ‘Except that my … Except that no one in there…’ Her voice was disarming, musical. She gestured towards the café, and shrugged again at the weather. Her hair clustered at her brow inside the scarf. She was too attractive.

He nodded. ‘OK.’ All at once, they were walking together through the bikes towards his own snow-powdered machine. He snatched a look back at the Bee. The 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 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.