The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  He loved the society. He’d always been interested in that sort of thing, but he kept his collection of books about the Afghan wars, the Zulu wars, the wars in the Sudan and the Boer wars upstairs in his study. When they’d moved into the house in 1969, at a preferential mortgage rate, the two things he’d liked about it on seeing it were the south-facing garden, well sheltered (the abundance of rocks in the soil he wouldn’t find out about till later) and the decent-sized fifth bedroom. With Tim only a serious toddler, his face usually screwed up in concentration and hardly needing a room of his own yet, Malcolm and Katherine hadn’t quite realized their different plans for the house. For her, it was what she wanted, some sort of guarantee of gentility, a spare bedroom, more than you needed so that you could ask people to stay overnight or for the weekend. (Who, though?) Malcolm saw it as a study, even, he said pretentiously to himself, a library. In their previous house, his growing collection of books had been kept, forbiddingly, in the hallway or in a dark wood-effect case, vying for space in their bedroom with Tim’s small bed. A temporary measure, like Tim sleeping in his parents’ room. In the new house, another bookcase joined those two, but upstairs, in the fifth room, and it had become a collection. With the discussions and recommendations from the group, the third bookcase filled up too. Not just with library books and paperbacks. He was doing well at work, and the accidental third child hardly seemed to make any difference to any of their standing arrangements, despite what they’d feared. They weren’t the sort of people for expensive foreign holidays; he found himself buying new, expensive hard-backed books on a whim, not always ones about his main interests in life.

  Daniel agreed to take part in the first re-creation, though not quite as readily as Malcolm might have liked. Malcolm couldn’t have asked Katherine or Jane if they’d like to put a cavalier’s breastplate on. Anyway, someone had to look after Tim, but they would all come and watch. At the meeting the week before, all the extras, the schoolchildren, wives, colleagues, relations, crowded into the school hall. There was a festive atmosphere, and the usual members of the society stood at the front, like a gathering of officers before their troops. He felt bold and self-confident, but also self-aware—Daniel was in the front row, chatting happily to someone’s daughter. The room smelt of old cheese, and of dust burning on an element, and piled-up black-out curtains left to moulder in corners. Malcolm wasn’t expected to say anything, but he felt nervously self-conscious just the same.

  Prince Rupert gathers his forty men on the ridge, the other side of Burbage Rocks, beyond the car park; they line up. Their broom-handles, their silver-painted trilbies glitter in the morning sun. The picnickers can see the royal forces, shuffling themselves into line like a pack of cards, shambling about each other on the top of the ridge, a fine defensive position. (Unless the enemy approaches from the back, over the bridge and up the A-road.) Finally, the magnificent army, forty of them, the flower of divine-right chivalry, mostly made up of other men’s wives, is inspected by a chemistry teacher. Prince Rupert’s thin voice, exhausted by years of yelling at third years about Bunsen burners, drifts across the purple-tufted flank of the moor, across the pleasant noise of the brook, to where the civilians, men, women and helpless children dip their boiled eggs into little heaps of salt in silver foil.

  But on the other side, just beyond the brook and the picnicking spot, Thomas Fairfax is drilling his fifty troops. The sympathies of the crowd are already enlisted, and Sir Thomas Fairfax, as he got out of his red Cortina in the car park, silver-sprayed cricket pads and squat silver helmet in hand, was surprised to be booed, at very short range, by two well-briefed chemistry pupils. Now, the parliamentarians, mostly faithful attenders of the society, form themselves into tiny battalions. Over the small rise now comes Cromwell and his thirteen thousand troops, marching in close step; all twenty are grudgingly applauded by the onlookers on their tartan rugs, the faint noise muffled by their holding pork pies, slices of quiche, bags of Quavers and raspberry yoghurts, and soon carried away by the wind. Even from here, you can see their grim-faced determination. They are just by the A-road, the two forces conspicuous on their elevations though separated by the little brook, and the battle is about to begin.

  Earl Margaret has the whistle, and is the designated instigator of the hostilities. She scrambles down the heather to a sort of mid-point, raises her whistle, does a little curtsy-cum-courtly bow to both sides, and then to the spectators, who are greatly enjoying all this. But before she can blow it, from the road behind comes a furious hooting and a shriek of brakes. A driver in his car has seen the first stages of 14 June 1645 as he descended the rise, and, open-mouthed and inattentive, has wandered on to the wrong side of the road, clipping the wing of a white Mini going in the opposite direction. Everyone, even the soldiers, abandons their position and runs over to see what has happened; Sir Thomas Fairfax remarks to Prince Rupert, as they stand and enjoy the furious altercation between the drivers, that it might not have been a very good idea to mount this event within such close sight of an A-road. “It’s all about convenience,” Prince Rupert says. “We had this out, we decided it was as well to have it close enough to the car park that we’d not be clambering over miles of moorland before we could start. There was the question of the toilet arrangements, too. It’s quite handy here.”

  Now Earl Margaret does blow the whistle, and the battle begins. Fairfax’s men begin to file along the top of the ridge, perhaps overdoing the head-hung exhaustion. After five minutes, Prince Rupert’s men—Earl Margaret having rejoined them—mount an attack. Some of the lady royalists break ranks, running down the hill waving their broom-handles and dustbin-lids about their flowing locks like cavemen, uttering very uncourtly yelps and howls, and have to be called back by means of Prince Rupert’s rude and blunt-vowelled commands. He wishes he, too, had brought a whistle.

  They cross the brook, some treading across delicately on the stepping stones, even queuing politely, others flinging themselves heartily into the stream with warlike shrieks, and when they are all over, mount a charge on Fairfax’s cavalry. There are no horses, and, after long discussion, there are no indications of horses, either. “I’m not standing there with a sodding hobby-horse between my legs,” was the general view in the society’s meetings, and you just have to know that the ten at the back are Fairfax’s cavalry. They wheel and retreat, to the spattering applause, like rain on this sunny day, of the onlookers. “Who’s that meant to be, then?” the newly arrived driver asks his hosts—it turns out he didn’t know there ever was a civil war in England, even, and everything has to be explained from scratch. They all explain from scratch, even the seven-year-old. The royalist cavalry has been routed, and the infantry (six of them) soon follow, stumbling away across the moor. One of Fairfax’s men is killed, pinned violently to the moor with a pike, stabbed again and again. This is the first death—they thought they’d just have the one at this stage—and everyone applauds as the first casualty milks his scene, rising up three times before succumbing. He stands up, once thoroughly killed, and bows to everyone, left, right, centre, to general amusement and gratification.

  But already the Fairfax forces have summoned aid, and over the hill, just like a Western, the car-driver remarks, come Cromwell and his men. They’ve been drilled better, and advance in a grim silence, their pikes held out straight. The royalists re-form into battalions, and finally the two armies engage.

  The whole thing comes briefly to a halt, with the arrival of the photographer/journalist from the Star, who had promised good coverage in the paper but had got the starting time wrong, and then it resumes; they all chase about for ten minutes, and finally return to a position in front of the spectators, where the royalists are ceremoniously killed with bayonets, broom-handles, pikes, most of them for the fourth or fifth time now. The spectators applaud; the dead stand up; they all bow.

  Afterwards, the state of his marriage was clear to Malcolm. Other families came along and cheered and joined in; were interested. It h
ad never occurred to him that Katherine might show an interest, and he put her next to the other sorts of wives, the ones who turned up rarely, if at all, the ones who made carping comments, complained about the cold, or ignored their husbands’ interest. Ed’s wife was like that, by his account, thought the whole thing such a waste of time and money (you could see her, pink candlewick bedspread drawn up to her cold-creamed face, sour eyes watching and nagging), and Ed had been driven to ask Malcolm seriously if he could open a building-society account for his small club and warfare expenditure, all correspondence going to some other designated address. Malcolm couldn’t help him, and things weren’t as bad as that in his own household. Amused tolerance was about as strong as it got.

  On the other hand, there were women like his secretary Margaret, Richard Thwaite’s wife, who’d thrown herself into it heart and soul, and obviously had the whale of a time, marching up and down the roped-in irregulars, shouting “Give me a B … (B!), give me a U … (U!),” until the picnicking onlookers laid down their hard-boiled eggs and clapped along with her bugger-chant.

  Most of the wives, like Margaret, treated it as a jolly, a day out in knickerbockers that might as well end in throwing a half-eaten Bakewell pudding slap in the side of Cromwell’s face as he was making his victory speech. Cromwell hadn’t asked for his wife, Margaret, Earl of Arlington, to throw puddings at him, however merrily.

  Malcolm didn’t fancy either the open ridicule or the enthusiastic joining in, which seemed to be the two main alternatives. He would settle for amused disdain. But he hadn’t noticed that amused disdain was, in fact, what he’d got until the car, in those days a brown Morris, had stopped in the car park by Burbage rocks and Malcolm could place Katherine next to the others. He hadn’t asked her to show an interest in his interests, and any curiosity had only shown itself in airy, smiling allusions. She dusted his books, but never opened one; never commented, either, like Ed’s wife, on the stupidity of the cost of all of this, and for that he was more or less grateful. What he mostly wanted was to be allowed to get on with his interests undisturbed, and he ran through the various alternatives—an informed interest, a lively uninformed one, down to open opposition—before coming to the conclusion that Katherine’s attitude wasn’t the worst one, though she seemed capable, if comments afterwards could be read correctly, of mildly insulting one or two of the more serious members of the society. “As long as I live,” she said, laughing hilariously, “I’ll never forget the look on that Richard Thwaite’s face when he realized that his own wife had thrown the pudding at him. Talk about outraged dignity.” What, if anything, he was grateful for was that she wouldn’t be embarrassed by any of this. It took a lot to embarrass Katherine and, unlike most people, if she found herself doing something, then by definition it was clearly not an embarrassing thing to be doing.

  All the same, it wasn’t until the battle of Naseby that it became quite clear to Malcolm what his marriage was, and what it looked like. It had taken thirteen years and a Civil War battle to show that.

  “Katherine enjoy it, did she?” Ed asked at the next meeting, flushed with success.

  “Yes, I think so,” Malcolm said, taking off his duffel coat and adding it to the pile at the edge of the stage.

  “We’ll have to persuade her to take a part next time,” Ed said, but this was so evidently unlikely that he faltered while he was saying it. Perhaps he envisaged Katherine in her pale blue summer frock with a pattern of daisies, a white cotton-knit cardigan with mother-of-pearl buttons over her shoulders, her skirt spread over a groundsheet and, by her side, an insulated picnic box in pink plastic to keep everything cold.

  “I don’t think she’d enjoy taking part half so much,” Malcolm said. “She enjoyed it as a spectacle mostly, I would think.”

  He felt he could live with this; it seemed to him like a stable situation, a sustainable one, and perhaps only in the more concentrated exposure of their two-weeks’ holiday each year did it seem as if the long repayments on the initial commitment, as it were, might not reach the agreed term. One fortnight on a barge on the Norfolk Broads, the usual amused allusions, the rather tarter comments made directly to the children on the reading matter their father had seen fit to bring along, turned into something worse. It had rained every day, and the cramped ingenious space, smelling of mould and other people’s old dinners, found itself brownly listening to something unfamiliar to Malcolm and Katherine: raised voices and the endless games of Monopoly definitively abandoned long before the end of the evening. It wasn’t much of a success, they privately and ruefully agreed later, but the failure had been Norfolk’s, the weather, blamed on the idea of managing a barge through the narrow canals. That last one had been Katherine’s conclusion. Malcolm felt that he and Daniel had done quite well between them. But he hadn’t contradicted her, in the circumstances.

  It was only after she’d taken the job in that flower shop that he’d really started to wonder. That was what he said, once, to Margaret and to Richard too, who’d turned up at the office Friday-night drink at the Dog and Duck, the redecorated pub at the end of Division Street, in the nook by the horse-brass-festooned fireplace. “I really start to wonder,” he’d said at the tucked-away table, only space for three of them.

  “How do you mean, Malcolm?” Richard had said. Katherine had never made much of an effort to get to know them, and he guessed Richard and Margaret only had a broad impression of her.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, almost scared by what he’d said. “I suppose we all have these patches.”

  “Some of us have nothing but patches,” Margaret said cosily, “and very cross patches too,” punching Richard, but looking oddly at Malcolm, who always seemed to go on so evenly. He couldn’t imagine a marriage that worked by making a spectacle of its difficulties, and of small punches in public. After that, he didn’t confide in anyone.

  After Katherine’s party there had been those stupid two days. He always thought of them like that. Even at the time they had been stupid. What the hell are you doing? he said to himself, over and over in that strange clean room, asking questions of the unfamiliar pictures, the unfamiliar wallpaper. All he’d done was move into a hotel for two days, and tell no one about it. It was stupid because it couldn’t last longer than a very few days—he couldn’t in all conscience stretch beyond that if he was ever to return; a week and it would be easier never to come back and answer the questions about what he’d spent that sum of money on. The day after the party, he’d been left with a feeling of appalling exhaustion, like that after intense physical effort. He’d been tight-pulled for weeks, ever since she’d announced it, or before. He’d had no doubt who this party was meant for, and he waited with his jaw firmly gripped for this man Nick, hardly knowing what he looked like, and it made no difference that he hadn’t, in the end, come. Maybe there was an agreement between the two of them.

  So Malcolm changed his route home. There was an obvious way to drive from work to home. You went up Division Street, right and past the university, through Broomhill, right up the Manchester Road past Crosspool and left up Coldwell Lane, just before the city came to an end, and then you were almost home. Now he changed his route. After the university, he turned right, before Broomhill, which he wouldn’t drive through. He went an extra half-mile through Crookes, every night, humming a little tune that was no tune at all but just one note leading to the next, very calmly. He didn’t even express it to himself. It was just a different route home, one he sort of preferred, these days—but he didn’t end up driving through Broomhill. He wouldn’t have to see the flower shop, open or closed. He wouldn’t have to catch any kind of glimpse of Nick. He wouldn’t have to drive past the shop, in particular, on those nights when, Katherine said, “Nick” (so Malcolm called him, inverted commas poisonous in his mind) needed her to stay late, just an hour, stay late in the shop to go through the books. He wouldn’t have to drive past the darkened closed shop on such a night, Katherine’s explanation that morning as clear i
n his ears as if on a cassette repeating itself in the car’s tape-player, to reach home telling himself that there must have been a change of arrangements, the children watching television and waiting for both him and Katherine. He’d made that mistake once. He wouldn’t make it again.

  The supper that had so alarmed Malcolm, before he’d discovered who it was really for, occupied Katherine more, perhaps, than it should.

  “What does Sandra like to eat?” she asked Daniel in the end.

  “You never asked that when Antony came to tea,” Tim said immediately. They were walking down the Moor, going to Marks & Spencer. Tim needed a new shirt, having come home from school with the sleeve of a new blue one half ripped off in some act of playground violence. Once, she might have mended it—it had torn neatly at the seam—but now she was damned if she could be bothered to muck about with a needle and thread.

  “No,” Katherine said heartlessly. “That’s quite right. I didn’t bother.”

  “It’s not fair,” Tim said. “Just because it’s Daniel’s girlfriend coming you want to butter her up—”

  “And pop her in the oven at regulo three,” Katherine said, making a witchy face.

  “What does that mean?” Tim said.

  “You said butter her up,” Daniel said. “She’s not my girlfriend—” girl, friend, almost singing it. “She’s just—”

  “I thought she was,” Katherine said. “I thought you’d got rid of Barbara and taken up with Sandra.”

  “Everyone in this family’s so immature,” Daniel said, evidently unable to specify the particular acts that, committed, had made Barbara his girlfriend and, left alone, had put Sandra into a different category. “I don’t see why people can’t have friends who are girls.”

  “No,” Katherine said. “I don’t see that either. But generally people, as you call them, don’t. So, you’re still going out with Barbara?”