The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  It was at least another hour after Leicester Forest East before the car felt normal again. It felt to Francis like a bubble of discomfort taking its time to rise upwards in him and burst. It was no one’s fault; whatever Sandra had done or said, it had been forgiven by the family without inquiry. Bernie’s affability towards the men had not crumbled, but his posture had stiffened, a protective, resentful attitude with which there was no argument. But in time the atmosphere cleared; in an hour Francis thought only he was trembling with that strange Francis-dread, the sort of fear that could be stirred in him by what had happened to someone else, or by events that were not about to transpire, that, imagined, could end in some catastrophe, none worse to contemplate than being shouted at. Sandra had been shouted at, in some way, yet she, his mother and father had passed from a stiff front of bravery to a real sense of being in the right. If, indeed, they hadn’t forgotten about it.

  That Francis-dread came with a smell, a taste in his mouth as of sour clashing metals; it came from inside, and took time to go. He wondered sometimes if he gave off the smell of fear; animals, they said, always knew when you were frightened. Aunt Judith with her dog, making a beeline for him, making him cringe, because the dog could smell the emotion in his mouth. Yes.

  But that smell and taste, so strong to him but unnoticeable, he guessed, to the other three in the car, was now being beaten down by a smell of the earth. The landscape had been changing, presenting familiar sights in unfamiliar arrangements—those bald, hopeful trees—as well as the unfamiliar, the monstrous. Hills were rising up, black and softly yielding, the great dunes of a black Sahara; and here, a building, a huge black box on sort of was it stilts, there were windows—were they?—but white, opaque, just a grid of white squares. It looked like something you would draw if you couldn’t draw, the idea of a big house but just a big black and white square. And out of the side, like a giant lolling arm, an immense conveyor belt. You could see the wheels running, carrying something, some kind of rubble up or down. The most terrible thing: there were no men. It was just a huge machine, a factory—a factory?—like a big black flimsy box, a black hill both flimsy and vast, and that terrible motion of the belt and wheels. Puking out, or forcing down the throat, an endless motion of forced ingestion or rejection, stone and gullet. It would carry on all night, all day. You could see that. The only thing human about it was the retching smell.

  It was vivid and complicated, and it went by so fast that in a moment Francis was closing his eyes and trying to see it again, a moment after that, wondering if he had seen it at all. But there was that smell. And it seemed there were people, too, who lived in this smell, because there was a town, an estate, of matching red-brick houses. Just below the motorway. But they had somehow left the motorway now. A sign came up: City Centre.

  “What city?” Francis said. His voice croaked a little.

  “This is Sheffield,” Bernie said. “We’re almost there. New home. Did you see that factory—the works—some kind of, I don’t knew, coking plant? Is that right?”

  “How on earth do you expect me to know?” Alice said, smiling.

  “You know everything,” Bernie said.

  “I hate this,” Sandra said. “I don’t want to come here.”

  Francis was shocked at her bad manners: she shouldn’t say what he was thinking.

  After they had returned from Sheffield the first time, when they had found the house, Francis had written to the magazine Sandra liked to read. He liked to read it, too, though it was less use to him. Jackie, it was called, with the kindly fashion advice that coloured girls could get away with wearing lovely bright shades, and the page of brisk nice answers from Cathy and Claire to girls who worried about what they should let their boyfriends do to their faces, mouths, breasts, vaginas. (Francis was horrified, not about to need the information.) He wrote, not to decent Cathy and Claire, but to the page before the appeals for foreign pen-pals, the place where readers described their home towns. He was egging himself on, he acknowledged that now, sitting in the back of the Simca with the choking smell of the coking plant in his throat. “When my friends first heard that we were moving to Sheffield …” he began, then ran through the events of their week in the Hallam Towers Hotel, blithely equating them with what might be judged the principal attractions of the town. “Don’t forget to spend a morning browsing in Broomhill,” Francis advised. He had read similar sentiments in his father’s Sunday Express.

  He had not posted what he had written. And now he was glad of it. It seemed as if the Sheffield he had experienced had been created at the tip of a blue biro and had never truly existed. That city of hotels and attentive waiters, of dense Victorian villas dispersed through a verdant forest, breaking out like the frilled edges of amateur maternal pancakes into lavender moorland. It had been replaced by this stinking black city of vast boxes and artificial black hills and unattended vast machinery.

  They went on. And poor Francis’s selfish focus and fear stopped him seeing the city he was entering, in 1974, its greatness, its sweep, the reason for those black hills and the stink. It was entering on the last phase of its industrial greatness, and Francis, in his little selfish fear, did not see it.

  There it was: Sheffield, 1974. Francis saw the artificial black hills, the slag heaps piled up by the side of the motorway. But there were seven red hills in Sheffield too. The city was founded on them. The six rivers, too, the black-running Don, the Sheaf, naming the city, the Porter, the Rivelin, the Meersbrook, the Loxley. Each had its valley, some green and lovely, some lined with grimy warehouses, but all ran together, and they were the reason for the city. The waters, long before, had been harnessed to power forges, small hammering enclaves in dells; the steel masters had built their works, outgrowing the forces of the rivers, and the city had locked its blaze and fire inside those huge blank buildings, rising up on either side of those narrow streets like cliffs. The great noise, mysterious in the streets, continued day and night; those blast furnaces could never be shut down, and men poured in and out at unexpected times. Each man had his fiery function, and as they left their work, their eyes seemed soft, dazzled by the white-hot glare even through their smoked goggles. Francis saw none of it: he did not see the city that had made fire out of water. The rivers were hidden under a mountain of brick; the fires were deep inside those mausoleums. Only occasionally did a black river burst out for a stretch; only occasionally did a warm orange glow against a dark window suggest the fury happening within.

  The city had been made by fire out of water. And there was the earth, too, which Francis did see something of. Around the city, in earthworks and diggings, coal was still heaved to the surface. It was everywhere. The city made its money from steel; it was driven by its waters; it was built on coal.

  Francis saw almost none of this, as they drove into Sheffield for the first time. He saw a nightmare terror of a landscape; he ascribed evil to it. He had no means of seeing the money and power that these sights produced; he saw black waste, and bursts of fire, and smelt that hard, mineral smell. But he should have looked: in 1974, Sheffield’s splendour was coming to an end.

  And the motorway, with its raw, uncouth society of fire and mineral gave way now to something like a town: shops, offices, glass buildings, bridges and, at last, people. “I don’t remember any of this,” Sandra said. It was a shock to hear a voice in the car: they’d been quiet since the Sheffield turn-off.

  “No, you wouldn’t,” Bernie said. “We came up by train, don’t you remember?” She subsided again; that wasn’t what she’d meant, Francis could tell. She was mostly just complaining.

  “I’d feel a lot easier if we could see the van,” Alice said.

  “It’ll be at the house by now,” Bernie said. “We’ll go up there to make sure, and then we’ll go off to the hotel. The men won’t want to start unpacking tonight.”

  “Where are they going to stay?” Francis asked.

  “They’ll have made arrangements,” Alice said.

&nbs
p; . . .

  Daniel, Jane and Tim drew the curtains and switched on the television. They watched Why Don’t You?—Tim fervently, Daniel making sarcastic remarks about the sort of kids who go on telly. Tim wanted to watch Blue Peter, but Daniel got up before it started and turned over to watch The Tomorrow People. Then the cartoon—it was Ludwig, which was rubbish. “Where’s Mum and Dad?” Jane said. They were always home by now—they generally coincided, except on Fridays when Malcolm stayed late and Katherine came home before him on the bus.

  The news started. It was boring. There was going to be an election. There’d been one before, Daniel remembered, and that had been boring too, because at school they talked to you about it and tried to get you to say who you’d vote for if you’d got a vote. At school, most of the kids said they were Labour but that was only because their parents were. There was one kid who said he was Liberal but everyone called him a poof, because the Liberals were poofs, everyone knew that. Sometimes Daniel said he was Labour but at others he said he was Conservative and once he told a girl he thought Communism was best. He didn’t really care. They were all old and boring.

  “I think the Conservatives are going to come first,” Tim said, “and the Labour are going to come second and the Liberals are going to come third. That’s what I think.”

  “Why do you think that?” Jane said, but Tim didn’t know.

  They’d stopped talking. Even when Nationwide came on, and there was a story about a dog that drank beer, they didn’t say much. It was nearly seven o’clock before they heard the key in the lock. It was their mother. She looked tired and angry; for once her hair was untidy—she’d not really done it since the party the night before.

  “Has your father not called?” she said.

  “No,” Jane said. “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “He didn’t come to pick me up. I tried to call the office but they’d all gone home. I came home on the bus.”

  “These two’ve been in all day,” Daniel said. “He didn’t call, did he?”

  “No,” Tim said. “No one’s called.”

  “I don’t understand it,” Katherine said.

  For some reason, Jane felt she couldn’t say she’d seen him at lunchtime. He hadn’t wanted to be seen; she didn’t feel she should let on.

  But Daniel said, “He came home at lunchtime. And then he went out again.”

  Katherine looked at him. “What did he do that for?”

  “How should I know? I didn’t see him. I was at the pool all day. Jane saw him.”

  “Jane,” Katherine said, “did he say anything? I don’t know where he’s got to. If he’d gone to the pub he’d have phoned, surely.”

  “He never goes to the pub,” Daniel said, “except on Fridays.”

  “But did he say anything about being late?”

  “I only saw him,” Jane said. “I didn’t speak to him. I was in the garden. He didn’t see me, I don’t think.”

  Katherine looked at her. It sounded strange, your family avoiding each other, hiding and not speaking. But it made sense to all of them. “I expect he’s been held up,” she said. “Let’s not worry just yet.”

  “He’s never held up,” Tim said, his voice emphatic. “He’s always home by now.”

  “He’s got a good reason, I’m sure,” Katherine said. “Let’s not worry. Have you had your dinner?”

  The children looked at each other, surprised. The idea of making their own dinner was a new one. No one had ever suggested it.

  “All right,” Katherine said. “Just let me get changed. There’s the food from last night to finish up. That OK?”

  “Aren’t we going to wait for Dad?” Daniel said.

  “He’ll be home soon,” Katherine said.

  They’d forgotten about the party food, which was sitting in the fridge on two big plates under foil, not separated out now, but the remains of half a dozen dishes jammed together. The vol-au-vents were flaking, soft and clothy, the Coronation Chicken a little brown and crusty round the edges; the rice salad, flecked with red peppers, hadn’t really been touched the night before, and it didn’t look nicer now. Everything seemed sad and unfestive, like tinsel in the full light of day. Jane and Daniel took it out, and she set the table with five places. There was some lettuce and tomatoes too; she made a salad, put out the salad cream.

  “I don’t like rice,” Tim said, following her from the kitchen to the dining room. “I don’t like that yellow stuff either. I want beans on toast.”

  “You be quiet,” Jane said. “You’re too fussy about your food.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  Katherine came down, her face washed and recomposed. “Good girl!” she said brightly, when she saw Jane had set the dinner out. They ate; there was nothing to wait for with the food. Daniel ate quickly; he was always hungry, and nothing got in the way of that. Katherine filled a plate for Tim, ignoring his protests; he poked at it, eating a little here and there. Neither he nor Daniel was thinking about their father. Jane put food on her plate—a strange assortment, like the hopeful random selection you make at a party, not necessarily meaning to eat everything but taking a bit of each. She watched her mother nervously; she was looking around her, on edge, not eating. After a few minutes, Tim said, “I don’t like rice,” again. “I don’t like those red things, those peppers, in it.”

  “Then don’t eat it,” Katherine said abruptly. “Go hungry.” She got up sharply—almost as if she were going to strike him—and went into the hall. They could hear her rifling through the address book by the telephone. Jane and Daniel exchanged a short, scared look. Their parents had suddenly altered. From the hall, the noise of dialling.

  “Hello?” Katherine said. “Hello, Margaret? This is Katherine Glover, Malcolm’s wife … Yes, that’s right, at the Dennises … Yes, I remember. I know this sounds a little strange, but did Malcolm have anything—Oh, I see … Really? That sounds unusual … No, I didn’t. Well, I’m sure there’s some perfectly innocent explanation—he’ll be home soon, I expect. Thank you so much—I hope I’m not disturbing you …”

  And she put the phone down, then came back into the dining room. She didn’t sit down and go on with her dinner. She just stood there. “That was your father’s secretary,” she said, “Margaret. She said he left the office at lunchtime and didn’t come back.”

  “He was here at lunchtime,” Jane said, “and then he went out again. I thought he’d gone back to work.”

  “Yes,” Katherine said. “You said.”

  She went to the window, peered out through the net curtains. She seemed lost in thought. “Look,” she said, “the new people are moving in. There’s a removal van.”

  “It came this afternoon,” Daniel said, still eating. “They’ve left it, they’ve not started unpacking the furniture.”

  “Did you see them?” Katherine said absently.

  “No,” Daniel said. “They’ll be moving in tomorrow, I suppose.”

  “I wonder,” Tim said, “where my dad’s gone.”

  “You don’t think there’s anything wrong, do you?” Jane said. She remembered the stories she’d constructed in the garden as she saw the figure in the window. It seemed odd already that she’d imagined burglars.

  “No,” Katherine said firmly. “There’s nothing wrong.”

  But then she went out again and started making phone calls, to the hospitals first and, finally, the police. One by one the children took their plates to the kitchen; Jane washed up, listening to the repeated query in her mother’s politest, most telephone voice. It seemed to her that there was something of blame and guilt in it. She could not understand it.

  For years Katherine had been in the habit, in the mornings, of getting into the car with the children and Malcolm. First, Malcolm dropped off Daniel at Flint, the senior school—he insisted on being dropped a good three hundred yards from the gates, and she knew for a fact that most of his friends had exactly the same arrangement with their parents—then Tim,
at his primary school, and Jane at the new middle school, less self-consciously getting out at the gate. Finally Malcolm dropped her in Broomhill with its parade of shops and went off to work.

  That had been her routine since Tim started school. She did it almost every day, saying, as if it needed justifying, that it was nice to have a regular routine each day, and hers was to buy the groceries before ten each morning, then head back to do the housework. In reality, she hadn’t minded the housework when Tim was too small to go to school, just as she didn’t really mind it when the children were on their school holidays. It was the days when the four of them set off, leaving her on her own, with no one to talk to and nothing but dull tasks to do, that wore her down. The noise of Radio 2, so mild a burbling complement to breakfast, had to be turned off, or had to be listened to as if it were company; so, by the time Tim was seven, she had taken to getting into the car, going to Broomhill and filling the morning with the day’s small shopping—the fishmonger or the pork butcher, the little supermarket, the greengrocer—maybe the bank, and definitely the little tea-shop for a cup of coffee and a piece of cake.

  Crosspool was closer to shop in, of course, but it was a 1920s development, a shabby parade with holes in the Tarmac and a hardware shop with Chinese-made plastic flowers in the window, and no tea-shop. Broomhill was stone-built Victorian villas—it was a part of the city that hadn’t been bombed in the war. It had a dress shop, a bookshop, and the greengrocer sold courgettes. It was a nicer place, so Katherine put up with the tinny flavour of the brown-coloured filling in the cakes at the tea-shop, the burnt crusty nubbings of Mrs. Milner’s rock cakes a guarantee of Broomhill’s middle-class, non-shop-bought authenticity. They couldn’t have afforded a house there, though.

  Malcolm, not really thinking, often said it would be more sensible to go to the supermarket once a week, and was talking about buying a chest freezer to put in the utility room, but she discouraged him. At the words “chest freezer” she saw her life retreating: lifting deep-frozen carcasses from their bed of ice, spending days watching joints defrost, drip by pink drip. In any case, he didn’t know that when she said she’d done the shopping by ten, she was dissembling: it was rare that she was home before two—she had so many ways of passing the time. A different woman, she often thought, would have dropped in at the pub for a gin and tonic; the Admiral Codrington was eminently respectable, apparently.