His Coldest Winter

Dedication

For Sue with loveAnd to Laura with many thanks

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

I: First Sight

II: Parallel Courses

III: Honour

IV: Switching

V: Grace

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

Some Notes on the Story of the Silicon Chip

P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features …

About the Author

While the Ice Lasts: Derek Beaven talks to Travis Elborough

Life at A Glance

Top Ten Favourite Novels

About the Book

Between Gods and Groundlings: Intuition and the Art of Fiction

Read On

Have You Read?

If You Loved This, You Might Like …

About the Author

Praise

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

I

FIRST SIGHT

THE NIGHT AIR was like broken glass, a black rush that crammed his mouth, cut his cheeks. Snow from the headlight sliced up at his eyes and splintered past his ears. He was seventeen – it was his first time on a motorbike and he’d just driven straight across London. His back ached, his arms ached, his shins ached. The rest of him was numb.

He was on his way home from the family Christmas at his aunt’s. At last, the capital was behind him, its High Streets ended, its festive, undrawn curtains done with. He’d struggled through Child’s Hill, pressed on past Hendon Central. Apex Corner had been a snarl, a ring of trade names and used cars for sale, a jostle for inches by neon signs or tinselled star-buys. Everyone in town had seemed to be elbowing a way out of it before the weather turned. Now, with the traffic thinned almost to nothing and snow falling in earnest, he was on his own.

His bike hammered under him. Two miles passed without a waymark, three … A rise foreshadowed the Chiltern hills, and he stared up the dual carriageway, waiting for detail. None came. A chain of red dots glimmered far ahead, then vanished. Oncoming headlamps swung once through his line of vision, and were gone. Some winter conspiracy seemed to have swapped the city for a void, in which the merest extra throttle caused a gale to drag his face as though he were a rocket pilot being tested.

Then a roundabout showed at the crest. Alan braked hard, his fingers half-frozen in the glove. He could hardly feel the pedal against the tread of his left shoe; he nudged the gear change with the toe of his right, sending an icy vibration up through his knees and backbone. The big machine whined and slowed as the frame shook to the cog. Two other riders buzzed by him out of nowhere, their stop lights scoring arcs this way, now that, into the bends.

They were racing. It was the bypass already, and they’d just shown him up. Too powerful for its rig, his own Triumph made him wait for each line to straighten before he dared accelerate, and the awkward sidecar – which the law required, and which his father and uncle had helped him bolt to the frame just that Boxing Day morning – felt like a child’s stabiliser. He tried to hurry, but the pair were out of sight before he was halfway round, leaving only their tyre tracks on the whitening ground.

A flurry blew without warning. Torn flock seemed to swoop across the central hummock, flying up in wads against the headlight. There was a car half-blocking the exit, the driver climbing out to clear his windscreen; Alan skirted him. But the bike hit ice and his whole rig kicked sideways. He wasn’t spooked. Spurred on by the racers, he flung a challenge to the elements, bit back whatever pain he could still feel and opened up the throttle. The power was breathtaking, the flurry just turbulence left behind him as he shot like an arrow into the darkness.

The Watford Bypass gave him his bearings. He’d been along it countless times – with his parents on their visits to London, or on theatre trips with various teachers. From here, he reckoned he knew the lie of the land. The road heads exactly north-west, giving the merest flick to either side, then tilts slightly downhill. After that, it lies true as a whip in a wound for three and a half miles, tree-lined, across fields and thickets and former country lanes. It used to come into its own about nine every night: the bike boys fancied themselves creatures of darkness. They gave the strip its mythology, and its ghosts.

Rain or shine, this was the routine. When they’d finished at Oddhams the printers, or Metal Box, or the Rolls-Royce aero-engine factory at Leavesden, when they’d wolfed their suppers and tinkered with their bikes, they’d put on their jeans and black USAF leather jackets and ride over to the Busy Bee, the transport café in the dip, next to the Red Lion. And there, to Elvis records on the jukebox, they’d suck fizzy orangeade through straws until the summer sun went down; or, while the winter moon scuttled family men off to their wives, they’d sit and drink cup after cup of hot, sweet tea, waiting.

Others would arrive in packs, from the Ace on the North Circular, from the Dugout, or the Cellar by the bridge at Eton. Once it was night, they’d improvise illicit races along the black main road. They’d burn it up, in twos or threes or whole packs, trying for the ton, the machines shuddering, the engines thrashing under the cold stars. The bypass was all for racing. It took, on average, one lad per week.

The straight was the lure, flawless but for an extra roundabout that lets the little Elstree Road cross down to the film studios just behind a row of trees. That one scrubby oblong leads a gradual left into a right chicane. It’s a test of skill. Regulars could have reminded Alan – you need to watch out for the kink. But he was untutored that night, and if ever he’d made a note of the Elstree through the back window of his parents’ car he didn’t recall it. What with the bike and the weather thickening, he had no idea what was coming.

Two dim red lights glowed in front before he even reached it. He swerved, barely in time to overtake a doddering pre-war saloon, and, all at once, he couldn’t make out the tarmac. No use to slap at his goggles. Only when he reached down to swipe the snow from his headlamp did he see the fugitive island, its reflective black-and-white zigzags brilliantly revealed against shadowy, onrushing vegetation. He dug into the pedal far too late and yanked once more with the fingers of his right hand.

The brakes hardly registered. He clung on blindly while the kink wooed and pocketed him, tightening all the time, racing him in until there was nothing for it – he was forced to steer right. For a second, the handlebar was muscled like a snake. Then it went limp, and he was skidding. Only just in time, the tyres gripped and the brakes bit and he felt his wheel miraculously cheat the kerb.

But a shape filled the beam, an oncoming rush of wagon-side and big wheels. He glimpsed a painted trade name, heard the blaring of a horn already past. The one chance, pulling left, was the direction that could flip him and his sidecar like a tossed coin.

He was sure he was about to die, watching the artic’s rusted girder go on for ever along that terrible curve, until somehow, by another stroke of fate, the tailbolt missed him. Still everything remained cruelly drawn out, and all he could feel in one broken moment of night and ice and careering snowscape was that his father, whom he loved, was somehow waiting to gather him out there, to receive him and hide him in his coat as he’d done against the cold, years before. In a kind of dream he saw him, on a dark snowy plain, trackless under the moon – in Russia would it be, far off, or America – a figure growing ever larger under the birches, his coat warm and protective, his arms stretched to embrace his son. Half out of the saddle, Alan lunged his whole weight over to bring the sidecar down.

He found himself on the wrong side of a clear road. It was so strange. He was completely unharmed and the straight lay ahead. All that remained was a drench of fear, like the secret thawing of his bones. As though nothing had happened, he let the bike drift back across the tarmac, then screwed open the throttle. The snow thinned into shards again, and cold air jagged his lips and cheeks. At sixty-five the Triumph began a front-wheel shudder; at seventy, it calmed. He was exalted, untouchable.

SCRAWLED ON THE angled, space-age frontage, the neon spelled a challenge: The Busy Bee. Why not? He’d won his spurs. Enough glare came from the café’s windows to shine up the row of bikes outside – choice specimens, glinting, spotless, with their clip-on handlebars and alloy tanks, their racing seats and TT silencers. He drove nearer, jolting on the rutted car park. A Norton Dominator and a BSA Gold Star with a cut-away fairing were still hot, their cylinder fins hissing in the snowfall. He let his engine die beside them, dragged off his goggles and dismounted.

The cold sleeve he wiped across his forehead undid his elation. Trying to shrug off the pain in his back and get the blood moving in his fingers, he was checked by a flash of the fate he’d so narrowly avoided. It left him momentarily gauche, a jumped-up kid who ought not to have stopped at all, should rather have pressed on home and put himself to bed. The Bee, of all places … He searched his pockets for a comb, imagining the stares as he walked in; though merely slicking his soaked hair into a Teddy-boy quiff would hardly do the trick, hardly make him one of the lads.

Yet he’d done it, hadn’t he, that whole journey through the capital, his first time on a bike, in the dark and in a snowstorm? The family had tried to talk him out of it, but he’d been determined, and if this didn’t vindicate him he’d like to know what would. Once he’d passed his test and got rid of the sidecar, he’d pull some cash together, do his own modifications.

The wind seemed altogether different now. A snowflake melted on the newly exposed skin under his eye. Two truck drivers approached from the other side of the car park, and one of them nodded to him. As they filed through the slamming doorway, a snatch of rock-and-roll music leaked from the Bee’s interior. Alan thrust back his fears and followed them.

Scratched plywood tables set in ranks, tube-framed chairs bolted to a scuffed, grimy floor, steam under paper chains mingling with the strains of Eddie Cochrane – the legend had never laid claim to smartness, but the inside was a let-down. It was cavernous, yellow-tiled, strip-lit, and for all the cowboy hats beside the Christmas tree, for all the automobile posters dreaming of sunshine freeways, there was a very English air of fag-ends and fly papers. A kicked panel disfigured the serving counter. Behind it, a man in a vest tapped boiling water from a huge tin urn. The woman next to him chatted to the truckers, elbows raised, pinning up her hair. Her cigarette wagged between her lips as she flicked a glance in Alan’s direction.

The bike boys were almost lost in the emptiness. About a dozen of them sat at the far side, marked out by their leather jackets and winkle-picker shoes. One lad had his feet up on the table; another’s shoulders still glistened with melted snow. There were a few girls with them. Alan looked down at his own fake suede windcheater, baggy and snow-stained, with only a thin, synthetic sheepskin showing at the lapel. The silk college scarf he’d commandeered from his father was ridiculous with maroon stripes. His ruined black shoes were chiselled, not pointed. In his oil-stained sweater, he might just pass for a down-on-his-luck grease monkey. All the tube lights seemed to sting the damp folds in his jeans.

He bought tea and sat at a table near one of the front windows, but the agonised curve of his near miss began instantly replaying in his head. He’d nearly been smashed to pieces. If he hadn’t lurched himself over to slam the wheel back on the tar … Suddenly, his legs were trembling so much he half-wondered how he was ever going to climb back on the bike. Shivering despite the fug of the café, sipping his tea and cradling the heat in his hands, he tried to think of home. His house was only another half-hour away. But there was the lorry again, racing into his mind’s eye. It came on and on. He clutched hard at the white china mug, recalled that dazed vision of his dad, like God, like Father Christmas, waiting to take him. For Christ’s sake, he’d looked death in the face and it had been almost soothing! He forced his arms against the edge of the table, feeling faint, rickety, remembering a dark pool he’d seen once under the water mill at Gaddesden. A girl went over to the jukebox. ‘Teenangel’ played to the smell of frying bacon.

His tea was nearly cold before he got a grip on himself. Then he saw how foolish he’d been, how puffed up and vainglorious. He’d persuaded his parents he could handle the bike and manage the long drive. He’d assured them he’d be fine on his own in the empty house for a day or so. Now he wished he’d never set out. He thought of the dinner the day before, the lighted fires, the reflections in the Christmas tree baubles. He smelled the smells of his aunt’s terraced house, pictured the cramped conviviality, and tried to nestle back into the family atmosphere.

He tried and failed. To his surprise, what wouldn’t hold now was the idea that his family quite belonged to him at all. How disorientated he felt, as though the night had already changed him and lent a cold regard he’d never known. The feeling stole over him that he could travel neither back, nor forward, and he wondered exactly what it was that had just happened, precisely what kind of experience his almost-accident had been.

There they’d all gathered – as so often on Christmas Day – in the house on Wickham Lane, just over Shooters Hill, where London fringed into Kent. There they’d all met, the ten of them at the festive table, his aunt with drops of perspiration on her brow, his uncle, the mechanic, sucking at his new false teeth as he carved the bird, his grandfather sitting stoical with that Edwardian watch-chain stretched across his best brown waistcoat, his nan, his cousins, their gran. He and his parents were the unwelcome guests.

Unwelcome, that was it. He wondered how on earth he’d always failed to notice such tension under the pleasant surface of things. Had he been blind? Why, if ever he’d stopped to think, it was obvious. Feelings simply bristled between the two sides of the family; they barely tolerated each other. To tell the truth, it was as clear as daylight: he and his mother and father weren’t liked, they didn’t fit in, never had done.

He knew the cause of it immediately. That stood out a mile. It was his father, of course. But he’d never have guessed it in the normal run of events, never in a million years got such a dispassionate angle on his own kith and kin. He was seventeen, sacrificial, entranced – only something like the crisis at the Elstree roundabout could have shaken the awkward truth out of him. It was his dad.

LIONEL. ALAN HAD watched him, between the gravy-boat and the tureen of sprouts. Lionel – he savoured the slight unfamiliarity of his father’s Christian name … Lionel had worn the yellow paper crown out of his cracker in a spirit of pure misrule. The slim, Nordic face of the wedding photograph, that innocent face, not so much handsome as candid, the face which at home in the brown album tied up with fine cord once used to remind Alan of royalty, had grown ill-defined. And what suddenly showed through wasn’t the loved father at all, but some aspect of clown, jester, agent provocateur. Lionel’s hair contrived to stick up in odd spikes through the paper hat. His clothes! Shrunk and over-ironed by Alan’s mother, his striped pullover hung round him like a smock. The tie, the shirt-sleeves … Lionel was bizarre.

It wasn’t just the squeamishness of youth. Alan’s vision was immaculate. A kind of hypnosis had genuinely ended, an illusion peeled off, for his legs no longer shook and he felt calm and focused – on his father. Lionel was a spectacle of contradictions. He lacked any authentic shape. He was plump and he was puny, he was muscular and he was effete. Like some gigantic baby, he told his subversive jokes to himself, ate his turkey with a strange expression of exaggerated innocence. Catching Alan’s eye, as he would do, he made a pretence at being drunk, even though the one bottle of Sauternes between ten was regarded as daring, and quite celebratory enough. His behaviour was a local chaos, masked with abstruse, science-couched observations. It was a flagrant naughtiness that subtly, yet emphatically, disrupted the good intentions of the dinner. And all the while grandparents, aunt, uncle and cousins conspired to pass no comment at all.

The single-sash window framed the winter grey. The pink glass bowl chained overhead supplied the little dining room with an electric glow. A blazing coal fire scorched the back of Alan’s uncle’s mother, who would always deny discomfort. The party took their meal and put up with Lionel, the problematic star in their midst, the clever working-class child made so prodigiously good. In turn, Lionel, who’d travelled the world, who’d flown first class in Boeing Stratocruisers and had seen so many things that everyday folk never would, seemed to insist on remaining that child.

He was a star – government work. But the family never asked Lionel Rae about it, nor responded to his permanent, self-absorbed pantomime. They tolerated his dogmatic outbursts. Warily, they observed the formalities, praised the aunt’s labour and the uncle’s skill with the knife. They avoided any subject that smacked of politics, let alone of religion, lest the fault that ran through the little clan should widen and engulf them.

Lionel was clever. His was a frightening, almost artificial intelligence. He’d lightly remark to Alan that he was a soft, bloody machine for designing bloody hard ones. And Alan loved the complicated wit he shared with his father. All these years Lionel’s creature, his sense of possession left him bucked, even exalted. A couple of winters before, Lionel had been De Havilland’s senior telemetry engineer, when the big aerospace firm had been developing Blue Streak. Had the missile ever come to fruition, each warhead would have been targeted on Moscow, Leningrad, Novosibirsk. It was rocket science.

But his genius was of the cankered kind, as Lionel himself wryly acknowledged. Fate had targeted him, he said, because he refused to believe in her. Rockets had sent him on his travels, and Alan had the postcards to prove it: incredible images of tropical beaches with sand and palm trees, Californian scenes with fin-tail Cadillacs in sundrenched streets, the lush greens and impossibly quaint temples of the Far East. In Alan’s sock drawer at home there were still pairs of pale blue-and-white chaussettes, issued by PanAm Airlines against the cold of altitude and brought back by his dad as trophies. Somewhere in his long-untouched toy box, he kept the miniature plastic cruets made by Americans for air meals simply to throw away. Lionel had been in Nevada, he’d been at Cape Canaveral. He’d seen the Yanks put their man in orbit. When others in the family had never risen twenty feet above the ground, the magician Lionel had placed a foot on the threshold of space. Then the Ministry axed Blue Streak, and suddenly rockets had let him down, they’d jilted him. Now, he sat here at the Christmas dinner, claiming only half in jest to be a Martian.

He wasn’t drunk. Lionel hardly touched alcohol, never smoked. He didn’t sing or dance, read novels, listen to music. He had no time for art, less for films. He hated churches, the sun in summer, the rain in winter. He hated vicissitude, the Victorians, God, history, the city, the country, winding lanes, other drivers. He loathed the class system, the Tories, Labour, nature. But Alan had never minded these foibles of malediction so long as he could bask in their astringent, apparent comedy.

At the previous dinner, Lionel had invoked the death of Schrödinger – whom he’d actually met, but no one else had heard of – with the story of the cat that was alive and dead at the same time. Until you opened the box! It was the bones of a joke. As for his own death, he suggested, nothing would do but a perfectly controlled space capsule, a warhead womb stamped ‘Made in England’ and primed to fall right back on London. Neither would he stay in one job long enough to put down roots. Nor could he touch anything, he grinned, darkly, without it either going wrong or going down – including, so it seemed, the British Independent Nuclear Deterrent. And he was proud that no one had ever come up with a name for what might be the matter with him. He was too clever to be anything so ordinary as insane.

They lived in extraordinary times. Alan had no idea of it; then again he knew it well enough. Lionel had done no more than carry on the family tradition, hadn’t he, preparing to bandy shell fire? His own dad had been an artilleryman, and his father before him. The uncle had been in the Engineers. Lionel hadn’t. What better way to outdo them than with these intercontinental ballistics? His hubris had left the family little profit, though: Alan’s parents were hardly well enough off to lord it – they’d shifted ground too often to accumulate capital. Now Lionel was a mere circuit designer with a company called Lidlock.

Alan bit his lip. Something else filled his thoughts. No, it was outrageous, though there was dazzle in it, perfection. It seemed, for a fleeting second, to explain everything. But it was shocking, out of the question – the very notion of treachery and spying far too melodramatic, and Lionel wasn’t a melodramatic man. Steam hissed in the urn. A burst of laughter came from the bike boys. Lionel had no time for drama of any kind, and besides, Alan was the tainted one, the depressive, blotched soul of the family. But for the luck of old Harry, he should have died back there. And spies in the news were far too sensational, such very public curiosities: George Blake, Greville Wynne, William Vassall. It was far too convenient, in a way, to attach the notion of ‘working for the enemy’ to Lionel’s real life.

The café owner shouted to his wife. Alan let go his breath through his nostrils; he was losing his grasp, couldn’t trust himself. Some thrust of cold had always been inside him, whose tip he could only just feel. He’d been wretched the last couple of months, since the girl in the school choir had turned him down, since the world had been just hours from wiping itself out. Kruschev had backed down and ordered the ships around. But hadn’t the way his dad looked at him then made him complicit, somehow, in the whole performance? Once more, he shoved the thought away. No, and he still loved him. Though when his mother was around he hated him for her sake, loathed him both for his looks and his manners.

He licked his lips guiltily, and stole a glance to either side, because he’d put on Lionel’s brainy nonsense, and been taken up as if into a flying saucer. Father and son were bound together, partners in brilliance, hero and villain, doctor and patient, hurtling round a planet that couldn’t touch them, peering down every so often at his aunt’s simple family in the house on Wickham Lane, who gawped back and admired. He licked his lips again. That had been the sci-fi story of his life. No rival version had occurred, until, on the Watford Bypass, in the Busy Bee café, when his hand shook as he tried to hold his tea and his feet burned as they thawed back to life, some scale fell from his eyes. The rest of the family couldn’t stand Lionel, and, by extension, they couldn’t stand him.