His Coldest Winter. Derek Beaven

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