What would Lynn say, he wondered. Jack it in or carry on?
He thought about poor bloody Ovid, mired now in bird shit, stranded and alone.
Later that evening, curtains partly drawn, glass of good Scotch at his side, he put the first of the Bessie Smith CDs on to play, Bessie's voice full and raw and strengthened, it seemed, by adversity. "After You've Gone," "Empty Bed Blues," and Resnick's especial favourite, "Cold in Hand," the young Louis Armstrong's muted cornet shadowing her phrase for phrase and note for note.
Cold in hand.
How had Ovid put it? Freezing his balls off in Constanta. Something about the snow?
One drift succeeds another here.
The north wind hardens it, making it eternal;
It spreads in drifts through all the bitter year.
Bitter. That wasn't going to be him. Old and bitter. He smiled. Lynn would never forgive him for that.