The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  “What was the place we said we’d stop?” the chief remover said.

  “Leicester Forest East, wasn’t it?” the driver said.

  Sandra had watched the packing from an upstairs window, and only at the end had she thought of asking if she could travel with the men. She was fourteen; she had noticed recently that you could stand in front of a mirror with a small light behind you, approach it with your eyes cast down, then lift them slowly, and raise your arm across your chest, as if you were shy. You could: you could look shy. Whatever you were wearing, a coat, a loose dress, a T-shirt, or most often the new bra you’d had to ask your mum to buy to replace the one that had replaced the starter bra of only a year before, the shy look and the protective arm had an effect.

  The old house had been stripped, and everything the upper floor had held was boxed and piled downstairs; the house had drained downwards, like a bucket with a hole. Sandra had been born in that house. She had never seen these upstairs rooms empty, and they now looked so small. Her clean room’s walls were marked and dirty. Only the window looked bigger, stripped of the curtains she had been allowed to choose and hadn’t liked for years—the pink, the peacocks, the girly rainbows and clouds. The net curtains were gone too—and if she had anything to do with it, they’d not be going up in her new room.

  Her father was downstairs in the hall, telling the foreman a funny story—the confidential anecdotal mutter deciphered by bursts of laughter. Her mother, probably exhausted, was perhaps looking for Francis, who was lazy and clumsy, and had a knack of disappearing when anything needed to be done. She looked out of the window to where the van, its back open, was being steadily loaded with the house’s contents, exotic and unfamiliar when scattered across the drive. There were two men, one middle-aged, the top of his bald head white and glistening like lard, the other a boy. She waited in the window patiently, and soon her mother came out with cups of tea. The boy turned to her mother. He was polite, he said, “Thank you, Mrs. Sellers,” and when her mother went back inside, he was still facing in the right direction. She did that thing she knew how to do, and it worked; he looked upwards. Her gaze was shy, lowered. It met his modestly, and she gently drew her hand across her chest. Brilliant. She might have slapped him, the way he turned away, but he was the one who blushed. She realized that the driver and Mr. Griffiths from next door, nosing about in his front garden, had also seen her. Mr. Griffiths, who’d always been fond of her, and Mrs. Griffiths too; from the look on his face now, they’d have something to think about if they ever thought of her ever again.

  “Have you seen your brother?” her father said, as he thudded up the stairs.

  “No,” Sandra said. “He’s probably down the end of the garden. Can we—” she began. She was about to ask if they could have a tree-house at their new house, but she’d had a better idea. She was fourteen. “Can I go up to Sheffield with the movers in their van?”

  Bernie looked startled. “There’ll not be room. A bit of an adventure, is it?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. Don’t ask your mother. She’ll have a fit.”

  So there she was, wedged into the van, clear of London, for the sake of the boy she had glimpsed—a movement of the arms, a flash of blue from the deep-set shadow under the surprising blond eyebrows. But he was saying nothing, and she was settling for enchanting the driver and the chief remover.

  “People do this all the time,” she said.

  “Move house?” the chief remover said. “Enough to keep us busy.”

  “No, I meant—” But what she had meant was that people leave London by car, drive on to the motorway, set off northwards all the time, perhaps every day. She never had, and her mother, her brother and she had only ever left London when they went on holiday. She had never had any business outside London. “People either move a lot or not at all, don’t they?” she said. “I mean,” sensing puzzlement, “there’s the sort of people who never leave the house they were born in and die there. Dukes. And there’s the sort of people who move house every year, every two years. I don’t know what would be normal.”

  “The average number of times a person moves house in his lifetime,” the boy said, “is seven, isn’t it?” He had a harsh, grating voice, a South London voice not yet settled into its adult state.

  “Take no notice of him,” the driver said. “He’s making it up. He doesn’t know.”

  “But the figure is increasing all the time,” he continued.

  “He makes up statistics,” the chief remover said. “That’s what he does. Once we were dealing with a musician, moving house for him— a sad story, he was divorcing his wife, and we had to go in and pick out the things that were going and the things that were staying. And we were moving his stuff and he said he’d be taking his cellos, because he had two, with him in a taxi, and wouldn’t let us touch them, though we handle your fragile things all the time. And all of a sudden this one says, ‘There are a hundred and twenty-three parts in a cello,’ as if to say, yes, it’s best you handle it yourself. He’d only gone and made it up, the hundred and twenty-three parts. There’s probably about thirty.”

  “It sounds about right, moving seven times,” Sandra said. “There’s a girl in my class who’s moved house seven times already. She’s only fourteen.” Sandra thought she might have told them she was sixteen: she sometimes did that. Even seventeen. “This was two years ago,” she added. “So she’d used up all her moves already, if you look at it like that.”

  “Fancy,” the boy said.

  “Do you see that sign, young lady?” the driver said. “A hundred and twenty miles to Sheffield.”

  They were clear of London now; the banked-up sides of the motorway no longer suggested the outskirts of towns, but now, behind stunted trees, there were open fields, expansive with scattered sheep. In the distance, on top of a hill like a figurine on a cake, there was a romantic, solitary house. She wondered what it must be like to look out every morning from your inherited grand house and see, like a river, the distant flowing motorway. It was never empty, this road.

  “New home,” the chief remover said sweetly. “Sheffield. And The North, it said.”

  “Have you ever noticed,” the driver said, “that wherever you go, anywhere, you see motorway signs that say ‘The North’? Or ‘The South’ when you’re in the north? Or ‘The West’? But wherever you go, and we go everywhere, you never see a sign which says ‘The East’?”

  “No, you never do,” the boy agreed.

  Sandra felt her story hadn’t made much of an impression. It was difficult, squashed in like this, to push back her shoulders, but she tried.

  “This girl,” she went on, “you always wondered whether it was good for her to move so often. I mean, seven times, seven new schools. She never stayed long, so I don’t suppose she ever made proper friends with anyone. I tried to be friends with her, because I thought she’d be lonely, but she didn’t make much of an effort back. She’d only been in our school for three, four weeks when we found out the sort of girl she was.”

  “What sort was she?” the boy said.

  “At our school, see,” Sandra said, “you didn’t hang about after school had finished. Because next door there was the boys’ school. And maybe some girls knew boys from the boys’ school—if they had brothers or something—but this girl, I said to her one day, ‘Let’s walk home together.’ And she said to me, ‘No, let’s hang around here and see if we can bump into boys because they’re out in ten minutes.’ We didn’t get let out together, the boys’ school and girls’ school. And she jumps on to the wall, sits there, grins, waiting for me to jump up too. Because she just wanted to meet boys. That’s the sort of girl she was.”

  “Dear oh dear,” the driver said. She had hoped for a little more concern: the older men might have had daughters of their own. The levity of the sarcastic apprentice had spread to them.

  “So you didn’t stay friends with her, then?” The chief remover pushed
back his cap and scratched his bald head.

  “No,” Sandra said. Sod them, she thought. “Five months later, she had to leave the school because she’d met a boy and gone further. In a way I don’t need to specify”—the adult phrase rang well in her ears—“and she had to leave the school because she was having a baby. Can you imagine?”

  “No,” the driver said. He almost sang it, humouring her, and now it was over, the whole invented rigmarole seemed unlikely even to Sandra. “Probably best for you to leave a school where things like that go on.”

  “That’s right,” the chief remover said, very soberly, looking directly ahead.

  “That’s right,” the boy said. He plucked at his chin as if in thought. But he was trembling with laughter; the big blue van at their backs rumbled and trembled with suppressed laughter.

  The blue pantechnicon, ahead of Bernie, Alice and Francis, formed a hurtling, unrooted landmark.

  “I don’t know which way he’s heading,” Bernie said. “Expect he knows a route.”

  Alice opened her handbag, brown leather against the brighter shine of the Simca’s plastic seats. She popped out an extra-strong mint for Bernie and put it to his mouth, like a trainer with a sugar-lump for a horse—he took it—then one for herself. They were on Park Lane. The van was a hundred yards ahead—no, that was a different blue van. Theirs was ahead of it.

  “We don’t need to follow them all the way,” Bernie said, crunching his mint cheerfully. “We could be quicker going down side-streets. They’ll be sticking to the A-roads through London.”

  “I’d be happier, really,” Alice said. That was all. Everything she had, everything she had acquired and kept in her life, had gone into that van—the nest of tables they’d saved up for, their first furniture after they had married, the settee and matching chairs that had replaced the green chair and springy tartan two-seater Bernie’s aunts had lent them …

  “That’s all right, love,” Bernie said. “If you want to keep them in view, we’ll keep them in view.”

  … the mock-mahogany dining table and chairs, green-velvet seated, from Waring & Gillow, brass-footed with lions’ claws, the double divan bed only a year old—their third since she had first come home with Bernie, him carrying her over the threshold and not stopping there but carrying her upstairs, puffing and panting until he was through the door of their bedroom and dropping her on to his surprise, a new-bought bed, and her not knowing she was pregnant already—and the carpets …

  “I know it’s silly,” Alice said, “but I won’t feel easy about it unless we follow them.”

  “Well, we’ve lost them now,” Bernie said. “We’ll catch up.”

  It was true. London had spawned vans ahead of them, blue and black and green, rumbling and bouncing to the street horizon; the Orchard’s van was there somewhere, but lost. They ground to a halt in the dense traffic.

  “It can’t be helped,” Alice said bravely. The carpets, all chosen doubtfully, all fitting their space. (She had no faith in the Sheffield estate agent’s measurements. The woman bred Labradors, which she’d mentioned more than once when she ought to have been paying attention.) The unit for the sitting room, a new bold speculation, white Formica with smoked brown glass doors, the Reader’s Digest books, the china ladies, the perpetual flowers under glass; the mahogany-veneer sideboard, a wedding present, once grand and solitary in the sitting room before furniture started to be possible for them; curtains, yellow for the kitchen, purple Paisley in the sitting room, red in their bedroom, the rainbow pattern Sandra had chosen …

  “Look on the bright side,” Bernie said. “If they do get lost, or if they steal it and run away to South America, Orchard’s can buy us a whole new houseful of furniture. Insurance.”

  “They aren’t going to lose it, are they?” A voice came from the back seat. It was Francis; even at nine, his knees were pressing hard into his mother. Goodness knew how tall he’d grow.

  “No, love,” Alice said. Her own worry disappeared in her love for her son. He worried about these things, as she did. Once, on an aeroplane, she had found her own nervousness about flying vanished as she did her duty and comforted him. “They won’t lose it, and if they did steal it, they wouldn’t get far on the proceeds. Do you think they’d get much for Sandra? She’s up there with them, keeping an eye on things.”

  “I wouldn’t give you two hundred quid for Sandra,” Bernie said, concentrating on the road. “Maybe if she’d had a wash first. What do you reckon, son?”

  “I don’t know where you go to buy and sell people,” Francis said. “There aren’t people shops, are there?”

  She hadn’t told Francis they were going to move to Sheffield until it was certain. She wasn’t sure, herself, how it had happened. Bernie had worked for the Electricity Board for years, the only member of his fast-talking family not to make money in irregular, unpredictable ways. They were at the outer edges of respectability, in most cases only having their churchgoing to take the edge off their quickness. Alice had first met Bernie at church, him and his family in their Sunday best. If it had been a deft illusion, it hadn’t been a long-lasting one; you couldn’t be surprised with Bernie—he was as open to view as an Ordnance Survey map. His family were proud of him and his proper job, his steadily rising salary, at head office, and Bernie paid back their pride by not renouncing his own quick ways, his broad mother’s broad manners.

  But in the last couple of years, the job, London, had worn away at him. The series of strikes—every power-cut had driven him to a personal sense of grievance. “Don’t say that,” Alice had said, the first time the house had gone dark, the television fading slowest, giving out a couple more seconds of ghostly blue light before the four of them were in pitch darkness, Bernie swearing.

  “Don’t say what?” Bernie said, almost shouting.

  “You know what you said,” Alice said.

  “I can’t think of a better word for them,” Bernie said, getting up and groping for the fucking candles.

  Though the power-cuts, random and savage, affected and infuriated every adult in the country—not the children, who across the nation took to it with delight, like camping, and in later years were to ask their parents when the power-cuts would start again, as if it were a traditional, seasonal thing—they affected Bernie worst. In part, it was the way neighbours, like the Griffithses, or the regular commuters on Bernie’s train would inquire pointedly when Bernie and his colleagues were going to get a grip on the situation. Everyone had a story of the power coming on and sparking up an abandoned iron, still plugged in, in the middle of the night, waking up Mrs. Griffiths, as it happened, with a stench of burning, which proved to be her husband’s best shirt for the morning. “And a miracle the house didn’t burn down,” Mr. Griffiths said, suggesting that someone more honourable than Bernie might offer to pay for a new best shirt for the morning out of his own wallet. It drove Bernie mad.

  On top of that the winter of 1973 was a hard one, and three or four times the train from the City to Kingston had failed. The first time, Bernie phoned Alice, who went to Morden Underground station to pick him up in their ancient black Austin, the same car they’d had when they first married, a cast-off from Bernie’s brother Tony. It had refused to start again in the car park at Morden, and Alice had had to phone Mrs. Griffiths, begging her to give the children something to eat while the garage came out; they didn’t get home until after midnight. So the second time it happened, even though by that time Bernie had bought a new car, the Simca, he only called to say he’d be a bit late, got the Tube to Morden and walked from there. The third and fourth time, too; it seemed to be going on all winter, like the winter.

  But by then he’d heard of a new job, a promotion, out of London. That would never have seemed like a recommendation before. “Bernard,” his widowed mother had said, when they’d gone to tell her in St. Helier, the ranks of crocuses lining up firmly along the path outside. “Bernard. You’ve never lived anywhere but London. You couldn’t stand it for
a week.” She ignored Alice, apart from a savage glance or two; the whole thing, she could see, was the boy’s wife’s idea. In a corner, Bernard’s shy uncle Henry sipped tea from a next-to-best floral cup, not getting involved; he would have to stay and hear the worst of it afterwards. But if it was unfair of anyone to think it couldn’t have been Bernie’s idea, you could see why they believed that. His whole manner—the way he blew his nose, the way he ate with his elbows out, as if always demolishing a pie in a crowded pub, his soft London complexion, even—made it impossible to think of him outside London. But it was only Bernie who wanted to move. Alice had been born near the Scottish borders, and had moved to London at the age Francis was moving to Sheffield, nine, at the war’s end when no one was moving into capital cities. It was Alice, though, who loved London; she dreaded the North’s forgiveness, the way it would look at her when she returned.

  But there was no arguing with Bernie and, it was true, the job was a good one. Bernie had been offered the deputy managership of a power plant. It was the best way forward, to take a hands-on, strategic role, Bernie said. He’d left it quite late; but the industry was expanding.

  He was like that: he could sell you anything with his enthusiasm. It was for her, however, to sell the move to the children, and she had nothing but her love to draw on there.

  Outside the car, the landscape was changing. London had gone on for ever, its red-brick houses and businesses clinging to the edge of the motorway, like small rodents to a balloon suddenly in flight. The soft green of the southern counties, too, had gone, with the cows and sheep, and now harder, more purposeful facts were looming across the landscape. A herd of vast-waisted cooling towers, steaming massively; a terrain untended, brown and barren; one town after another with no name, just a mass of black and brown smoke and soot. It was getting worse; Francis could see that.

  He had never thought that his mother would, one night, come into his bedroom and, sitting on the edge of his bed, explain that they might be moving to Sheffield. It was not that he had thought they would go on for ever where they were; it was simply that, at nine, no concept of change had ever entered his head. She had sat there, her face worried, when she’d finished, and he’d wanted to comfort her.