Cooper shivered. There was an unrelenting coldness in the house. Partly, it was the sort of chill that came from years of inadequate heating and a Pennine dampness that had soaked into the stone walls. And now the winds that spiralled down oft Kinder and moaned through the empty fields had found their way into Malkin’s house tor the winter. The draught had crept under the back door and slithered through gaps in the frames of the sash windows, wrapping itself round the furniture and draping the walls in invisible (olds. The chill seemed to Cooper like a solid thing; it moved of its own accord, butting against his neck as he walked across the room, and hanging in front of him in every doorway, like a wet curtain.
‘It’s none too warm today,’ said Malkin, watching Cooper turning himself slowly in front of the fire in an effort to absorb some warmth from the flames.
‘No, it isn’t.’
‘This old house takes a bit of heating in the winter. But I suppose I’ve got used to it. I grew up here, you see, and lived here all my life. I’ve never known any different. They reckon your blood gets thinner — to compensate, like.’
There was no escape from the chill anywhere. Even when Cooper stood directly in front of the coal fire, there was only warmth on one side; the cold still fastened to his back like a parasite, draining his body heat and sucking at his kidneys. Its presence was part of the house, an icy phantom that would need exorcizing with central heating, double glazing and a good damp-proof course.
‘You certainly get a bit of weather up here. Do you get snowed in much?’
‘Oh, aye. It’s the first place that gets filled in when it snows. It comes down the valley there, you see, and the hills funnel it right into Harrop. When there’s a bit of wind behind it, there
O 1 ‘
are some grand drifts to be seen down here. You should have been here in the winter of 78. That was a winter and a half, if you
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like. We lost our car for days on end. A Ford Escort it was, as I recall. When we finally dug it out, the engine compartment was solid with frozen snow. Aye, there were people walking along the toppings of the stone walls out the tront here, because the
lane was so deep in snow the walls were the only solid surface
r j
you could see for miles.’
‘Actually, I do remember it,’ said Cooper. He had, after all, been six years old at the time, and he had missed school for a few davs. Probably he hadn’t been let out in the snow at all, but had watched it from his bedroom window with his nose pressed to the cold glass, drawing patterns on the frost on the inside. Perhaps his parents had finally allowed him to go out when most of the snow had gone. Me remembered being pelted by his brother Matt with snowballs that felt as hard as mahogany when they hit him, but which melted into cold, wet slush inside the hood of his anorak and ran clown the back of his neck. There hadn’t been snow like that since then, as far as he could remember. Not real snow.
‘Come on through to the room,’ said Malkin. ‘Get yourself warm.’
What Malkin called ‘the room’ was a kind of sitting room, dominated by a large oak table. Its legs only stood on a carpet at one end. At the other, the carpet had been rolled back to expose the bare floorboards, which looked as though they were still drying out from recent damp. Because the boards were old, there were large gaps between them. Where Cooper stood, he could feel icy draughts rising around him as if he were standing on top of an open chest iree/er. A bottle of milk and an unsliced loaf of bread stood on the window ledge alongside some steel cutlery, and several weeks’ worth of old newspapers were stacked near an old armchair under a standard lamp. An oil painting on the wall showed a herd of brown cattle against a sombre winter landscape. The mountains behind the cows looked more Switzerland than Derbyshire. Real peaks.
‘Fancy anybody remembering the Lancaster crash,’ said Malkin. ‘A long time ago, that was.’
‘Fiftyseven years,’ said Cooper, trying to (md a patch of carpet to stand on.
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‘I was only eight years old then.’
‘You haven’t forgotten, though, have you?’
‘No, of course I haven’t forgotten. It made a big impression on me. Those things do, when you’re that age. I’m getting so as I can’t remember what I did five minutes ago, but I remember that plane crash as clearly as if I was there now.’
‘You’re not all that old,’ said Cooper. ‘Sixty-five? It’s nothing these days. Retirement age, that’s all.’
‘Retirement? They retired rne a few years back. These days, vou’re useless long before you get to sixty- five.’
A mantelpiece supported ornaments, knick-knacks and assorted junk, and there was a television set standing on what might have been a Victorian aspidistra stand. In an alcove, an electric socket had been pulled out of the skirting board and the wires had been left hanging.
‘You were a farmer, weren’t you?’ said Cooper.
Malkin laughed. He had a rattling laugh, with phlegm shifting noisily in his throat. ‘Farmworker. Hired labour, that’s all. Shepherd I was, and a good ‘un, too. But it doesn’t matter how good you are at your trade when it comes down to cutting costs. It’s the hired labour that goes first. Sixty-five? Maybe. But it’s not a matter of how many years you’ve lived. It’s carrying on doing something useful that stops you being old. The minute you stop being useful, you might as well be dead.’
Malkin’s middle-aged spread and the roundness of his belly were emphasi/cd by the tightness of a hand-knitted green sweater that must have been a si/c too small even when it was made. Of course, farmers weren’t as physically active as they used to be. They could spend days sitting in the heated cab of a tractor or combine harvester, hours punching buttons on feed mixers or filling in endless paperwork. Just like coppers, in fact. A modern farmer didn’t toss bales of hay or carry stranded sheep on his back any more than a bobby was expected to pound the beat or pursue a suspect on foot. Modern methods made for a different shape of man a man with a body moulded to the shape of padded seats and computer workstations.
‘I wondered if you had kept any souvenirs from the crash,’ said Cooper.
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‘Souvenirs?’ said Malkin.
