Snowstop Read Free Page A

die, treating each journey as the first, and whatever route you chose as terra incognita.
    Before he left on any trip Beryl was as shaky as if he was going off to the underworld and might never come back, not strange for the kind of person she was. No husband had been good enough for her, and he had been good enough for no wife. Village people had taken it that they were married, not brother and sister – as well they might, because on their walks she held his hand, would kiss him on his return even before he got through the door. Well, she was always anxious. Why do women worry so much? Beryl did because he couldn’t, so someone had to. The perfect couple, you might say. He would telephone in an hour when he turned off the main road, knowing she would be glad of that.
    Stopped at a lay-by, he smelt snow in the air, a peculiar damp wind caressing the back of his head as he stood by the hedge hoping he was wrong. Beyond LBC range and the soothing rasp of Brian Hayes he buttoned onto long wave for a weather forecast whose threatening prognostications he hoped to foil.
    Driving in the dark was a chore, but in winter you had no choice. He envied those in their safe houses, lights glowing, homely smoke from the chimneys. Half-past four seemed like midnight, but he would call at one last shop, branching fifteen miles off the trunk road to Morford, where the woman who ran the place didn’t pull down the shutters till six. He would be in plenty of time, but knew that whenever he made a special deviation he rarely found anything.
    Every rule had its exception, and he could not afford to turn any chance down, uneasy when the turning came and he forked off like a somnambulist. He had no say in the matter, never had in anything of importance in his life. He had always liked it that way, because that was how things worked best and, reasoning in the process of an unreasonable act, he knew that what he had done must, happen what might, turn out to be right after all. Having come to the end of such zigzag cogitation, the toothache reasserted itself.

THREE
    â€˜Do you always curse like that?’
    She came into the light, a young girl wearing a bomber jacket and carrying a portable radio, with dark bubbly hair and a snub-nose, haversack hanging loose. She laughed at the tall, slightly stooped man looking at her, a rare specimen with his short-back-and-sides haircut. Some blokes are born that way – though he seemed a bit harassed. ‘You mean how you swore? I heard you effing and blinding like a trooper. “What a dirty-mouthed bastard,” I said to myself. You went on so long I thought you’d never stop.’
    â€˜I suppose I did.’
    She nodded at the handkerchief over his wrist. ‘Did you trap your hand in the door?’
    He wasn’t happy at having her crash his privacy, damned if he would give her a lift. The only paradise in the world was to be on your own, encapsulated in a motor car and floating from point to point. Contact with people, even at parties and meetings, was hectic, nothing calm anywhere, the constant clatter of noise, pounding of torment. Yet he was known as being sociable, so had a right to claim at least that for himself.
    He packed mug and stove into their wooden box, all things fitting neatly, and she was too interested in his painstaking movements to broach a request for help. ‘Are you a sales rep?’
    â€˜Certainly not.’ He pushed by her, carrying the box to the boot. When he started the car she banged on the window, as he had known she would, and he smiled at her disappointed face and shouted message of abuse coming through the Plexiglas. He got out intending to pound her head into a pulp of turnip and blood, leave her dying under a drift of snow. No one would pester him from then on, except his conscience which, belonging to him alone, would also take a long time to discover. Spread fingers patted the side of his trousers, then opened a door to the rear