The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  “If you say so,” Anne said, not quite convinced.

  “Well, it’s like that with my mum,” Jane said. “Every day it’s ‘Nick says this, Nick did that, Nick likes ketchup with his chips.’”

  “Everyone likes ketchup with their chips,” Anne said. “That doesn’t prove anything, if you ask me.”

  “Yes,” Jane said, gathering the logic of her case. “Yes, that’s it, though. If everyone likes ketchup on their chips, why’s she bringing up Nick especially? You see what I mean?”

  “You’re daft, you,” Anne said, “I think you’re just romancing. Anyway, you don’t want your mum and dad to split up, do you?”

  “I don’t know,” Jane said. “It’s nothing to do with me.”

  “Who’s this Nick, then?”

  “He’s her boss. She got a job, working in a flower shop. In Broomhill, it is.”

  Anne sighed. She was eight months older than Jane: sometimes she took advantage of this difference to make an emphatic point. “I would say,” she said heavily, “there’s nothing in it. I’m glad my mum doesn’t have to go out to work.”

  “My mum doesn’t have to either,” Jane said. “She just wants to. I know what. I’m going to go down there one day after school, I want to have a look at him. Do you want to come?”

  “What’ll that prove one way or the other?”

  “Are you going to come?”

  “If you insist,” Anne said, and then, from downstairs, her mother called something. She rolled her eyes. The call came again. She got up from her squatting position, and impatiently flung open the door. “What do you want?” she shouted rudely.

  “There’s squash, girls,” the polite voice floated up. “And biscuits. I know the sort you like.”

  “We’re busy,” Anne yelled. “We’re talking about Jane’s mum. She’s got a lover.”

  There was a short silence downstairs. Jane could feel herself blushing. “I wish—” she said.

  “Oh, I’m sure she’s not, not really,” Anne’s mum called. “There’s squash and biscuits. Shall I bring them up?”

  But the idea of going down Broomhill the next afternoon had been agreed on. The next day they had geography last thing; Anne had volunteered the pair of them to put away the Plasticine contour map of Yorkshire the class was making, and the labelled cut-away of the strata of rock underneath a coal-mine. The task had been occupying them for weeks—it was supposed to be ready for Christmas Parents’ Day and they were all sick of it and Miss Barker’s shrill exhortations: “I don’t care whether it’s done or not, you’re only showing yourselves up.” For weeks, as if it were tainting them with the nightmarish horror of its incompletion, there had been a rush to the door as the bell rang. But this evening Anne lingered, tugging at Jane’s skirt as she, like the rest, got up, slinging her bag over her shoulder. Miss Barker had been about to collar someone at random as usual, but, with a mistaken glitter in her eye, she alighted on Jane and Anne, fingered them as dawdlers for the punishment of putting the stuff away. Anne and Jane, they weren’t good girls—they’d already been done for giggling five minutes into one of her lecture-reminiscences, and would have been done worse if Miss Barker had known that Jane had giggled at Anne saying, “It’s her wants a lover,” meaning Miss Barker. So she couldn’t have known that Anne’s dawdling was in aid of volunteering for the task, or at any rate—you wouldn’t want to show Miss Barker that much willing—allowing herself and Jane to be landed with it. Jane thought she might have been consulted—“There’s good girls,” Miss Barker said when they were done, which was enough to make you puke—but she saw the point when they’d finished folding the plans, scraping the mess of the afternoon’s Plasticine off the tables, put the whole almond-smelling bright geologies back into 4B’s geography cupboard, and gone out, fifteen unhurried minutes after the end of school. It was as empty as a weekend glimpse; everyone had gone, swept off in the fifty-one bus. She and Anne shouldered their bags and turned in the other direction, of Broomhill, without having to explain to anyone, and that was a good thing.

  All the schools were turning out: the big boys and girls from the George V in their standard black blazers, and the snooty ones, the girls in purple from St. Benet’s, where you paid to go, like Sophy next door to Anne, where she claimed you got to learn Russian and, like drippy, bleating Sophy, to produce the horrible sheep-like noise of the oboe, too. They were all heading in the same direction, the opposite one to Jane and Anne. Jane felt like a truant, the two of them in their ordinary clothes.

  “Do you think Barker cares?” Anne said.

  “Cares about what?” Jane said.

  “About Parents’ Day,” Anne said. “She goes on about it enough.”

  “I reckon she’ll get the sack if it’s not ready,” Jane said, “if it’s not perfect, that geology thing.”

  “I hope she does,” Anne said. “We might get someone who doesn’t—”

  “‘When I was in Africa,’” Jane quoted, a favourite conversational opening of Miss Barker’s, liable to lead to any subject, and they laughed immoderately, clutching their stomachs and saying it three or four times.

  “She made me eat cabbage once,” Anne said, “when she was sitting in the teacher’s place on our table at dinner. I hate cabbage.”

  “She’ll have had to eat worse in Africa,” Jane said. “She’ll not have sympathy for you, being fussy over a plate of cabbage, when you think what she’s had to force down.”

  “Missionaries from a pot,” Anne said. “I dare say.”

  “Worms and grubs,” Jane said. “Toasted over an open fire.”

  “Only like marshmallow,” Anne said.

  “Not much like,” Jane said.

  “But cabbage, it’s horrible,” Anne said. “She made me eat it, she said it didn’t taste of much. I think it tastes right horrible.” Jane agreed, and they went on.

  “‘When I was in Africa,’” Anne quoted again, but she hadn’t thought of how it could go on after that and fell silent. Missionaries, cannibals, and that right funny film in Geography with a black man in a wig like a lawyer’s where they’d laughed and Miss Barker’d turned the lights up to talk in low serious tones about (one of) her disappointments.

  There was the Hallam Towers on the left, and on the right, the gloomy ericaceous drive that led up to the blind school—there were dozens of blind children up there: you never saw them. And then the library, and then they were in Broomhill. It was a journey you took with your mum and dad, perhaps; it wasn’t a schoolday journey. So they were a little bit solemn as they turned the corner into Broomhill proper, with its parade of shops, marking not what they passed but what they were heading towards.

  Jane suddenly thought how unwise this idea had been, to turn up without warning her mother. What if—her novelist’s imagination creaked into gear and saw, clear as anything, her mother and a young lover, a David Cassidy perhaps, embracing and kissing in a bower of flowers in the shop window. But it could not be helped now. For some unspoken reason, they did not cross the road. Over there, the flower shop’s awning, pink and domed, the only one sheltering the Broomhill street, like a flushed, guilty, cross and bad forehead, and, inside, a figure, two figures, moved, gathering, circling, busy.

  They stood opposite, watching. Jane clutched her bag. “Let’s—” she said feebly, but it was too late. They had been seen. The figures had paused as if surprised, then one came to the broad window, resolving its dark outline into her mother, not bearing the surprised, suspicious expression Jane had envisaged, but a flash of uncustomary delight as the other figure came up behind her. Jane raised her arm to wave, but was arrested by an insight as she took in the worried face beside her mother.

  It was Anne’s insight, too. “But he’s old,” she said. “I thought—”

  “What did you think?” Jane said, snapping a little. She already felt defensive about this man.

  “He doesn’t look like anyone’s lover,” Anne said.

  “I never said he was,” Jane
said irrationally. She didn’t need to come closer: she somehow knew what this man was like, better than her mother could, and she could surely see that what animation he possessed was a matter of sparks thrown off by a chill and flinty interior. She was right: Nick had aspects of fire, could briefly blaze, but they were mere sparks, giving little light and no heat, capable only of a short spectacle, of the casual infliction of harsh smarts on anyone standing by, foolishly admiring.

  As for Nick: he ran that shop for another ten years. But whenever he looked out of the shop window and saw someone, two people, on the opposite side of the road, inspecting his façade, he always felt that same sudden way. He always felt the same as he did that first afternoon. And then, they were only two schoolgirls.

  “It’s my daughter,” Katherine said. “And her friend. They never said.”

  “Ask them in,” Nick said.

  It had been eighteen months or so before when Nick and Jimmy had had the idea. They’d been in Jimmy’s new house in Fulham. Jimmy said Chelsea, though it was really Fulham. Miranda, Jimmy’s wife, certainly said Chelsea. She was as decisive about that as she was about the fact that Nick, and Jimmy’s other not very desirable but probably useful colleagues could be offered drinks at five thirty, but shouldn’t expect to stay for dinner. Colleagues! Ha! After all, the nanny’d be bringing little Sonia in her best dress down for dinner: a nice thing—as Miranda said, voice rising—if she grew up mixing with people like Nick.

  “You won’t have any difficulty finding a taxi on the street,” Miranda would say, drifting through and interrupting their conversation. “This is Chelsea, after all. It’s not, it’s not fucking, what, Streatham or somewhere.” Miranda’s hair curled out in a single wave backwards about her features. She’d flick it back, give Nick or whatever-his-name-was a level stare, her mascaraed or false eyelashes held painfully apart, go to the bamboo-fronted bar, and, with leisurely disdain, mix herself a Dubonnet and gin, three fat ice cubes and a straw, before returning to the kitchen to shout at Solange, the put-upon au pair, acquired, like so much else in this house, in one of Jimmy’s fits of sexual ambitiousness, and now hanging around, disappointing him and annoying Miranda.

  The house in Fulham was a step up from the two-bedroom flat in Islington. The money had been flooding in so fast that Jimmy had had a job knowing what to do with it, keeping it in fat bundles (he’d once confided) in a painted oak chest under little Sonia’s bed and taking it out periodically to press it into the hands of shop assistants. The results—a pair of gold-tasselled sofas glowering at each other across the drawing room like a pair of retired rival strippers, a whole pack of waist-high china hounds glistening throughout the open-plan living area, vast surfaces of built-in brown smoked mirrors, ankle-high white shagpile and two at least of those horrible leather rhinoceroses you saw in Liberty’s. The results all bore something of the bewilderment of the moment of their liberation, as Jimmy brought out a wad of crinkled fivers and counted out several dozen of them in a more than respectable shop. He’d have paid cash for the house if he could; as it was, he was reduced to transferring it from bank to bank to bank first. Nick put the money Jimmy handed over irregularly but lavishly into a bank account and worried about that all the time, though it wasn’t an account in his own name.

  “I’m fed up of it,” Nick had said. “I’ve done this too often. I’m getting too old for it.”

  “No reason why you can’t go on for ever,” Jimmy said. He stretched out in his armchair—a vast leather job, like an intricate wooden puzzle in its manoeuvrability of parts, given to strange hummings and shiftings at Jimmy’s fingertip command. He looked as if he might stretch out his arm for, what?, an august cigar. Or just another whisky to go with the one nestling in his fat groin.

  “I don’t like it,” Nick said. “I’ll do it one more time, I promised, but that’s it. I’m too old for it, you’ve got to find someone else to help us out.”

  “The older you get,” Miranda said, wandering in—she’d been listening through the serving hatch, “the better you get at it. More believable. No one’s looking at you. When you’re bald and seventy—”

  “Thanks, darling,” Jimmy said. “Now go and—” He flicked parodically in the air, readjusting an imaginary blonde hairdo, not taking his eyes off Nick.

  “Fuck off,” Miranda said, not aggressively, but she went.

  “Silly bitch,” Jimmy said.

  “How hilarious,” Nick said.

  “Hilarious,” Jimmy said.”Unless you’re married to it.”

  “She’s all right, Miranda,” Nick said.

  “I know,” Jimmy said, and it was his voice rising now. “I wouldn’t. Have her any. Other way. But what are you saying?”

  “Nothing, I suppose,” Nick said.

  They sat there for a moment. Jimmy got up and refilled his glass, a heavy crystal pail. It might have been chosen for its effectiveness when thrown in marital rows. He didn’t offer to refill Nick’s. In any case he had half an inch or so of gin and tonic left.

  “I tell you what,” Jimmy said, coming back and flinging his legs over the side of the vast leather contraption.

  “What?” Nick said.

  “We’ve got to sort something out,” Jimmy said. “This might work out all right.” He was talking about the money problem. Nick had meant him to. He’d evidently been on at Miranda about it; Miranda had been on at him. He recognized the rhythm of the complaint. “I reckon a nice quiet little business, you in charge, everything looks hunky-dory. Somewhere outside London.”

  “Come on,” Nick said. “I’ve always lived in London.”

  “Not in London,” Jimmy said.

  “Forget it,” Nick said.

  “Christ, you’re difficult,” said Jimmy, who was not Nick’s brother. They went right back: Nick’s mum had lived in the same street as Jimmy’s family when they were children, Nick an occasional holiday visitor—his parents divorced, it was his father who hung on to him mostly, paying for the good school, though his mother got him half the holidays. Jimmy was a permanent resident of the shabby suburb. They’d hated each other, thrown stones, shouted names, then one day they’d met each other down at the shopping-trolley-stuffed Wandle, had tortured frogs together one wide-eyed afternoon with a bicycle pump, and that had been that. “I’m suggesting something might suit you. A nice little shop somewhere, I don’t know—Leeds, Manchester, Nottingham, Derby, Exeter, Sheffield, Bristol. Sells stationery. Whatever. Looks nice. You do the books every Friday, no one troubles you, all looks nice and proper, even pay the taxes the end of the year. Why not? Posh boy like you, they’d lap you up.”

  “Why not London?”

  “You don’t want to be in London,” Jimmy said.

  “No,” Miranda called through, “you don’t.”

  “Why doesn’t he want to be in London?” little Sonia said, coming in in her regulation evening outfit, an inflammable party dress shining like royal icing, red ribbons popping in and out of the hem to match her red patent slingbacks.

  “That’s enough,” Miranda said, following her; she might have meant it for Sonia, but she was looking at Nick. He went.

  It seemed to him that nothing had been settled, that it was just an idea of Jimmy’s, which had come and would go. Certainly, through all the arrangements for the next trip, he didn’t mention it again, or suggest that this might be Nick’s last. Nick was more nervous than he’d ever been: the guys out there, they knew him well and obviously thought his demeanour odd. It was almost as if, without him wanting it, his body was conspiring to bring this occupation to an end by crippling his boldness with the appearance of guilt. But he got back all right, and after the last stages had been gone through, the money safely logged and counted, Jimmy had brought the whole thing up again.

  It was Miranda’s day off, and Jimmy asked Nick to come with him and Sonia (“Don’t tell Miranda, and you, don’t tell Mummy about him coming with us, darling, and if you’re good I’ll buy you—what do you want most, darling?”) t
o, of all places, the zoo. It was a dank day, not quite raining but in its London way not quite not raining either; the air was heavy with moisture. Behind bars, the show-stoppers cowered, the lions flat out on their sides, like half-eviscerated carcasses on their way to being rugs. Even the polar bears, presumably used to worse than the gloom of a London November afternoon, had a disgruntled air, casting hungry eyes upwards.

  “I like them,” Sonia said.

  “They’d eat you up in one gulp,” Nick said humorously. He was not much good with children, who generally knew this.

  “Don’t go putting nightmares into her head,” Jimmy said. “They wouldn’t eat you, darling.”

  “I know that,” Sonia said. “He’s just being stupid, this man. I can’t listen to things like that, I can’t remember them, neither.”

  “All right,” Nick said. “Fair enough.”

  “I’d like to have one,” Sonia said. “I know you can’t have one, not in a house, but I’d like one, to have rides on, maybe, and you could put your face in his fur, sometimes I reckon.”

  “Yeah, that’d be nice,” Jimmy said. “You ask your mum. Maybe she’ll get you one.”

  “Don’t be so silly,” Sonia said. “I want to see the penguins now. They come from the same place as these polo bears.”

  “No, they don’t,” Nick said. “They come from the other end of the earth. The polar bears live in the north, penguins live in the south.”

  “It’s a bit cold, isn’t it, darling?” Jimmy said to his daughter. “Don’t you want to go and see some inside animals?”

  “No,” Sonia said. Today she was in a heavily embroidered Afghan coat over a puffed and ruched red-and-green dress, more ribbons, but now sort of gypsy ribbons. Nick’s nightmare: that Sonia be abducted from his company, and he be obliged to describe her wardrobe to the police. “I think what I want is to see the penguins now, on their slides. I like their slides. I’d like to have a go on one, I reckon. I went inside once and I looked at the inside animals. And I liked the first one, because it was small and furry and you could put it in your sleeve and then it would look out at you and go—” she gestured at her nose with her little fist in its fur mitten, making a small squeaking noise “—but then in the next case there was another small and furry animal and that wasn’t quite so nice. And the lady I was with”—adult, drawling boredom—“oh, you know that lady I mean”—normal voice—“that lady I meant, she made me go round every case in the inside part of the zoo, and do you know? Every case, it had in it a different small furry animal, apart from the ones where the animal was supposed to be hiding at the back. And I liked the small furry animals at first but after a while I got really a little bit bored of them all. But she made me go round all of them, and I think really they were all the same animal. They were quite sweet, but they weren’t very exciting. I think I want to see the penguins now and the real slide.”