Read Online Snowstop by Alan Sillitoe - Free Book Online Page B

through his boots, a poultice of water against flesh. Her feet must be beyond stone, though at twenty years younger he supposed she felt yet didn’t feel.
    Steely-tipped dust stung his cheeks. She pulled him because the wind had gone mad. Let her think she was helping, but the foot-deep icy floss clutched her knees as they pushed a way to the door. Under the outside light he watched her bony face, deprived for generations, a phosphorous intensity in her visage that he might only witness again if they passed whatever was left of their lives together – a strange idea. Their faces close, he touched her cold lips with a finger, then she drew closer and they kissed, she holding him tight, both wondering why, even whether they had kissed at all in the bitter flurry of the wind.
    Feet on fire and arms aching, she wanted shelter and warmth, drew apart and pulled the dopey sod on so’s they wouldn’t be all night in the deep freeze. It wasn’t so bad for him with a warm coat and solid boots, but for her it was chronic – as she gave her best smile and hoped it would have some effect. Her fingers found the latch, and when she vanished before him he followed inside.
    The flagstone corridor was bordered by dark panelling, beams crossing above. They shook off the snow by an umbrella stand and a rack for walking sticks and guns. ‘Like two dogs!’ She imagined a woolly-bully cuddle with an amiable beast, far from the snarling Rotties that Trevor had hoped to get into his furnished room.
    The dyspeptic short-arse of a landlord asked what he could do for him, not looking at her, so that she felt like telling him to crawl up his own hole and die, except that the pong would kill everybody inside ten miles. He could see they were caught in the storm, Keith thought, lighting a cigarette. ‘We’d better take a room, I suppose.’
    â€˜A double with bath will be forty pounds, sir.’
    â€˜Bank card all right?’ Mr and Mrs Robinson would do in the book, though he couldn’t think why it shot into his mind. Usually it was Smith.
    â€˜What about your luggage, sir?’
    He put keys on the counter. ‘It’s outside, in the BMW. Have someone bring it in, and take it to our room.’
    â€˜I’m afraid I can’t, sir.’ Fred smoothed his waistcoat. ‘Our chap hasn’t come in tonight. Nor has anyone except the girl.’ He nodded towards the window. ‘You can see why.’
    â€˜I’m not blind.’ He stilled his rage. ‘Why don’t you do it?’
    â€˜There’s too much on, I’m afraid.’ Fred realized the danger, seeing this face blazing like red mercury going up a thermometer, so he turned away thinking how hard a night it would be if more such types came in.
    Eileen gargoyled her features, zipping up her jacket. ‘Don’t bother. I’ll go.’
    If she wanted to pay him back for the ride it would be churlish to stop her. ‘Are you sure?’
    â€˜No sweat.’ A score of solid and heavy keys fitted the grapple of her fingers. ‘I said so, didn’t I?’
    â€˜There’s a small brown case in the boot. Just get that.’
    Their inward track was smoothed into yeti hollows of white between door and car. Head down, she pushed her shoulder against the malign force. Overhead a big door stopped her seeing the stars, someone up there holding it shut, a grizzly-bearded old bastard in his warm cottage whose starving slaves outside worked at wind machines, perishing everyone in the wilds of earth to let them know, as if they didn’t already, that life was hard. She hated snow more than anything, but whatever you hated was bound to come more often than anything else.
    Clearing the keyhole saturated her fingers to deadness through woollen gloves, dreading to drop the key-bunch and not find it again, at which the grizzly-bearded old bastard up top would laugh his guts out till breakfast, if he ever