The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  Two years before, Mrs. Milner had said to her, “There’s a florist’s opening where Townsend’s the ironmonger’s used to be.” She was sitting at Katherine’s table: she liked to take the weight off her feet when they weren’t too busy and, in any case, the eight or nine women who came in regularly, sometimes inviting each other to share a table, more often calling across if the conversation became more than usually interesting, hardly counted as customers to make a fuss of.

  “That’s a shame,” Miss Johnson, the retired bank clerk, said. “It was useful, Townsend’s, for anything small about the house. I’d been hoping there’d be something useful opening up in its place.”

  “You can always buy a box of screws in Woolworth’s, I dare say, Mary,” Mrs. Milner said.

  “It’s not the same,” Miss Johnson said. “It was a useful shop to have round the corner, and I don’t believe I’ve bought a bunch of flowers since Mother died, so a florist’s no use to me.”

  “I like a sprig of rosemary with lamb,” Mrs. Goldsmith said, intruding into another conversation. “I think it brings out the flavour.”

  “I don’t suppose Townsend’s found it easy to keep going, you buying a picture hook once every two years,” Mrs. Milner said to Miss Johnson. “Those old family firms with everything in little drawers and the assistant taking fifteen minutes to find anything, they’re on the way out, you mark my words. I think it’ll be lovely to have a florist nearby. I might even invite them,” she went on grandly, “to supply the tea-shop with regular bouquets.”

  “That’ll be an improvement,” Miss Johnson said, somewhat nettled, and poking at the limp anemone in a thumb-sized vase on her table. “Goodness, what a day—you’d never think it was June.”

  “I’ve never known June such a wash-out,” Mrs. Milner said, ignoring Miss Johnson’s rudeness. “As for the florist’s, they’ll all be buying flowers from it once it’s there, I think you’ll find.”

  “It’s a nice idea,” Katherine said. “You never know—it’s on the way home from my husband’s work. He might take to stopping off there.” None of the other ladies knew Malcolm, but politely suppressed ribaldry ensued.

  “It’s terrible, the parking in Broomhill,” Janet Goldsmith said. “I’d remember that, Katherine, before you get your hopes up. Have you seen the new knee-length skirts in Belinda’s? Well worth a look.”

  “Buy yourself flowers and save the heartbreak,” Mrs. Milner said, but just then a man, a stranger, came in, bringing a burst of rain with a flapping umbrella, and she got up to fetch him the list of cakes.

  Katherine hadn’t noticed the shop-fitting work going on at Townsend’s old premises, but over the next few weeks she took some interest in its progress. As the work came towards a conclusion, it became obvious that it was going to be a high-class florist’s, a cut above the two or three purveyors of scrubby chrysanthemums, tired-out roses and oversized daisies in unnatural colours to be found in the town centre. As soon as the plastering was finished, the decorators put up wallpaper in thin Regency stripes, red and white. Katherine had thought about Regency stripes for her own hall—and she watched with approval when the shop sign, in good solid brass Roman lettering on a dark-blue painted background, went up: REYNOLDS, just that. It wasn’t long before the shop opened, and Katherine went in on the first morning. She had plans.

  Katherine had had jobs in the past. Before she knew Malcolm, she had worked in a solicitors’ office, a family firm in Sheffield that had taken her on when her father put her in the way of one of his old golfing cronies. She’d liked that job. Nice, it had been, hurrying out of the office in Peace Square, down the steps of the Georgian building, sandstone and worn hammocky, at five thirty to meet her young man waiting there with, often, a protective umbrella held high—Katherine had a beehive, high and shiny as precariously roped-on furniture. It was a shock to remember that the young man must have been Malcolm. There hadn’t been any other young men. He’d been too shy to come in and wait with the senior partner’s secretary even when it was raining, apparently seeing a solicitors’ firm, with offices in a Georgian house in Peace Square, as in a social category above that of a Yorkshire building society.

  The beehive had lasted after their wedding, but not long after, the changes of fashion and of her own status dismissing it. And the job at the solicitors’ went, too, Mr. Collins having opinions about married women in the office that even then he acknowledged as old-fashioned. She didn’t mind, never having been brought up to stay where she wasn’t wanted, and got another job, actually, in a private boys’ school, a day school, a decade old but housed, like the solicitors,” in a building meant for more domestic and gracious purposes, a mill-owner’s townhouse in Broomhill, blackened with soot. A neat line of iron stumps, like orphaned children’s teeth, marked the line where the railings had been before the war. There was no prohibition on married women here, and, indeed, they were employed in preference to virgins, though not through any valuing of motherliness—it was not that sort of school, or that sort of time. The masters wore gowns and often carried, actually carried canes through the corridors; rather, it was presumed that the experience of coition had removed from women any illusions about the male nature. Katherine helped out, her tasks too vague and multiple in that scandalous school to remember, let alone define. They went from sticking plasters on knees and sweeping up leaves to “playing the pianoforte” in assembly and taking the boys to Forge Dam on a local-history expedition, shivering informatively in the laid-on rain. Everything fell under her title, calculated to distinguish not her but the school in the eyes of prospectives, of Headmaster’s Secretary. She was a sort of alternative to the headmaster’s wife, who was a hooting mem-sahib with the week’s dinners on a list. She’d quite liked that job too; at the end of her day, she could come home and, as never before or since, make Malcolm laugh about it. She had wondered if he wasn’t a little too serious, even as she was marrying him; now he was relaxing, and laughing. It was a happy time. It never occurred to her that stories about terrible schools are always funny to anyone.

  The jobs ended with Daniel, and then there was Jane. Maybe, as Jane was going to school for the first time, maybe then Katherine was starting to say to herself the sorts of things that women, even in Sheffield, were saying to themselves in the mid-to-late 1960s, with a sense of what very mid-to-late 1960s things they were to be thinking at all. She might well have been thinking that she could, after all, go back to work in some way. But then Timothy came along—how had that happened? She couldn’t remember having sex after 1962—but she couldn’t remember buying Malcolm’s socks either, although she must have done. Maybe it had been a part of her unremarkable domestic routine that had gone on automatically. It was a couple of years after Tim had started school before she dared to think of working, and it was only the florist’s opening that put it into her head.

  “Ah,” the man said, as she came through the door of Reynolds’ that morning. The door was open, the flowers still in boxes, the ranks of gerberas like rows of medals, the chrysanthemums like mop-headed boys, the tulips shocked and upright as corn. The empty vases and buckets were arranged on the shelving display, which ramped up against one wall; the other was covered with a sheet of mirrored glass. “Ah—good morning. Good morning,” he said again, more cheerfully.

  “Are you open?” Katherine said.

  “Yes, absolutely,” he said. “Just setting everything out. It’s our first morning.”

  “I know,” Katherine said. “We’ve been looking forward to it. Well, you’re getting there steadily.”

  “And you’re our first customer,” he said. “How hilarious. That calls for something, I feel. I don’t know what, exactly. There’s no kettle, so I can’t offer you a cup of tea, I’m afraid. Perhaps I can give you your choice of flowers gratis, as my first customer. We’ve got plenty of those.”

  “No,” Katherine said. “Start as you mean to go on.”

  “That’s all right, then,” the man said, with a littl
e gesture of relief. “Why don’t you sit down? You’re not in a hurry, are you? Sit down and talk to me. I’m just putting the flowers out and then you can choose properly. I’m Nick, by the way.”

  “I’m Katherine,” Katherine said. “Is it just you working here?”

  “Well, at the moment,” Nick said, lifting a row of yellow gerberas from their box in a single fine movement. “I haven’t had time to find an assistant, though of course I’ll be needing one. I suppose I’ll have to advertise and interview and my brother’ll want to have a say, and it all seems a bit …”

  Just then Miss Johnson walked past the front window, her green tartan shopping trolley rattling behind her; she peered into the shop and saw Katherine, sitting on the one chair, apparently at ease with a young man struggling with flowers. Her mouth shut sharply. She walked on. She must have been on the point of greeting the new florist, but now she wouldn’t, and Nick would never know he might have been forgiven.

  At home, Katherine did not immediately tell anyone that she’d taken a job at the new florist’s in Broomhill. She put the jazz-modern yellow and brown plates, twenty years old, in front of Malcolm, Daniel, Jane and Tim; with oven gloves she put one down for herself. On the dining-table was a red tablecloth. She went back to the kitchen, took off the oven gloves and returned. Nothing was really hers. The plates had been a gift from Malcolm’s mother—a wedding present. She’d chosen it, Malcolm’s mother, as the sort of thing a young couple would like, near on twenty years ago. Now, it looked exactly that: something nobody in particular had ever liked, just some postulated abstract entity of a young couple. The dining-table, another gift or cast-off; a repro of something Edwardian, again Malcolm’s mother’s—“Your father liked it,” she’d said, in a challenging tone, as if Katherine and Malcolm were proposing to get shot of it and not her. Anyway, they’d taken it when Malcolm’s father died and his mother had announced that she’d be moving to a cottage in Derbyshire. Snowed in every winter now, too. Katherine put down the five plates, with chilli con carne on them, a new way to make mince interesting mid-week. Malcolm looked at his, perhaps at the patina of violent orange grease surrounding the mound of meat, then started to eat. Really, only the red tablecloth and the melamine-handled cutlery in this room had been her choice. The rest of it represented agreements, and all of it was potential lumber in Katherine’s mind. And that summed it up. She felt all she’d brought to this family were innumerable and faintly pathetic minor possessions, effortlessly chosen but easily replaced with something similar, or something quite different. The substantive structures of their existence, like the table they ate around every night, had been foisted on her without anyone ever considering that she might like to choose something herself.

  She would start work a week later—no point in hanging about, Nick had said, with evident relief. She’d dropped in once or twice since then to talk over her tasks—it wasn’t necessary, Nick said, but she was in Broomhill anyway, as she often was.

  “Here, let me,” she’d said, on one of her drop-ins, approaching him with opening arms to take a sheaf of sixty yellow roses from him. His lightly bearded face had a suddenly pagan look, a spark of alarm, like an intelligent animal’s.

  “No, no,” he said, controlling the emotion, looking now amused, boss-like. “I can’t let you work yet, not until I start paying you.”

  “Well, I could start properly today,” Katherine said. “You wouldn’t have to pay me the full day. You obviously need help.”

  “I can’t,” Nick said. “I haven’t had a chance to talk it through with my brother. It’s half his money.”

  “Where is he?” Katherine said.

  “New York,” Nick said. “I’ll mention it at the weekend.”

  “Is he coming over, then?” Katherine said, treading cautiously. She was inexperienced in lives and brothers like that, New York brothers; she felt in danger of saying something that showed where she was and where she’d seen. What she was.

  “No,” Nick said. “I’ll speak to him on the phone.”

  “Can you do that?” and “That’s an awful expense,” came to Katherine, but she managed to say, “Of course,” in quite a natural way, and went away quite soon afterwards.

  This brother was a new, tantalizing fact, a good one for the tea-shop, but she’d not be in a rush to share it. In repetition, under the unsparing investigation of the Broomhill matrons and virgins, that urbane “of course” would not save her, and she could hardly pass as a woman to whom phone calls to New York brothers were an ordinary matter. Pretence with a Jacqueline Susann flavour made those women’s eyes widen, their lips licked even if it were true, a holiday in Morocco with photographs from Boots; she could not associate herself with this bold life without examining her own, and it started with the furniture.

  She could not revolt from the second-hand, passed-down nature of her house’s furnishings—hadn’t she always said she liked old things, family things?—uncomfortably eliding a guilty table her mother-in-law had bought thirty years before with the notion of a “family heirloom.” It was rather the sense that her life would pass among superseded objects, things too vast and bulky to throw away without life-changing resolution. She saw herself, elderly, negotiating her own house like a mountaineer with crampons. There was some betrayal of her own existence, too, in the choice of a flower shop. Responsibility; waste; luxury; gardens. That was what it was about. When the time came, she would put on her orange rubber gloves and throw away the stock at the end of the week with a flash of excitement like the anticipation of adultery. Goodness. She would set her face. Nick would fold his arms, study her. She saw the whole scene quite clearly, and she was starting there on Monday. What she had betrayed had, quite suddenly, become not her existence but her husband’s.

  That oasis of mutable beauty, bought wholesale, was a startling addition to Broomhill’s black and, where cleaned, yellowish sandstone. Nick’s flowers were the only things sold there both useless and shortlived. Frivolous, unnecessary and lovely.

  “Have you seen the new shop? The flower shop?” Miss Johnson said, bumping into Katherine a day or two after it had opened. They were outside the post office; this was Miss Johnson’s way of letting Katherine know she had been seen sitting casually with the young man, and had not been seen at all.

  “Yes,” Katherine said. “Don’t you think it looks lovely?”

  “Lovely?” Miss Johnson said. “Yes, it does. It does look—” she tried the word out “—lovely. It would be nice to have that and an ironmonger’s. You see, I’m not in a forgiving mood. I don’t know where I’ll go for the practical side of things now Townsend’s is gone.”

  “You could go to Marshall’s in Crookes,” Katherine said, a little impatient at being dragged away from the topic of Nick after so promising a start. “There’ll always be ironmongers.” She’d been thinking, and couldn’t come up with another florist’s in the whole of the west of Sheffield, even in the splendid beech-sheltered ramparts of Ranmoor.

  “Well, some people might think there’s more of a need for ironmongers,” Miss Johnson said. “But you’re right, Marshall’s is perfectly satisfactory.”

  Katherine wouldn’t let on she’d be working at Nick’s the next week, and left Miss Johnson to read as best she could the scene she’d witnessed. She was clearly busting to know. She satisfied herself by remarking that the young man seemed nice, and went on. She didn’t mind the prospect of acquiring a reputation for slyness when the news got out in the tea-shop.

  Malcolm had to be told, of course, and the evening had to be chosen carefully. He was out two and a half nights a week. Tuesday was his battle re-creation society; Thursday the gardening club; Friday he liked to go out with the staff for a drink in the pub and wasn’t home before eight. “Liked to” in the sense of “thought it a good thing to do”: he didn’t have much of a drink, and said they enjoyed it more than he did. Probably enjoyed it more when he’d gone, Katherine always thought. She toyed with the idea of saving it for on
e of those nights when he’d come in half an hour before bedtime, to limit the discussion. But there probably wouldn’t be much of a discussion anyway. On Wednesday she thought hard and recalled what Malcolm’s favourite dinner was. She shopped and bought it to soften him up. She even thought about getting a bottle of wine, but that seemed too blatant.

  “Steak!” Malcolm said. “And mushrooms!” He was standing in the kitchen doorway, having changed out of his suit. The room was steamy, loud with the radio and the steak’s sizzle. Most food he said nothing much about. But at either end of the scale, he had two responses: after anything new, he’d set down his fork and say, discour-agingly, “Makes a change, at least.” The other thing, the massively keen one, was what he said now, not even after finishing but before. “Haven’t had steak for an age.”

  “What’s so funny?” Daniel said, wandering into the kitchen, looking for something to eat once his dad had gone.

  “Your dad,” Katherine said, though really it was herself, the neatness of the plan. “Don’t start picking, your dinner’s nearly ready.”

  “I’m starving,” Daniel said.

  “The inexhaustible appetites of the adolescent male,” Jane said, coming down the stairs.

  “Gi’o’er,” Daniel said, lapsing into school talk.

  She didn’t change the tablecloth, she didn’t get out anything but their usual weekday plates. For pudding there was, deliberately, the trifle left from the day before—a delicious one with strawberries in it: she’d been softening them up. The whole thing, apart from Tim saying, at one point, “I don’t like steak” (“Why not?” “It’s got tubes in it”) was a great success. It was almost a pang to remember what she’d done it for; it was quite a glimpse of a perfect family, all sitting up neatly and eating their delicious steak dinner. The kids might as well have said, “May I get down?” at the end.