The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  She was terribly lonely, really.

  The ugly, empty feeling of Oxford, the sense that everyone there was conducting a riotous social life in which they all knew each other and had resolved, before even arriving at the place, to exclude Jane and her big ridiculous chin from it, was massively extended into Jane’s sense of London. Her friends here were, for the moment, the same friends she’d had in Oxford, obstinately maintained. She felt humbly lucky that she lived near Sarah Willis and her boyfriend Dave, who included her quite often, but somehow she hadn’t managed to forge an independent bond with any of their friends. Most of them were Dave’s friends from the hockey club and their girlfriends. Sometimes, towards the end of an evening, that sort would start mimicking the way she talked, ask her to say “bath” and “path” and even, stupidly, “cart;” Sarah had kept the way she talked, too, but they never asked her to perform like that. If Jane ever saw any of them in Clapham, she’d say hello, and they’d say hello back, but after a surprised, contemptuous interval as they dragged Dave’s girl Sarah’s little friend to mind.

  The toy-makers weren’t much help, either; they hadn’t taken on a graduate for some time, and everyone else in the office was married or old. They’d asked her to dance, one after the other, at her first Christmas party, as their wives looked on benevolently, jigging about at more than arm’s length, smiling bravely at her before handing her on to another colleague. Anyone would have thought she was the poor ugly girl, and not just marked out by being young and on her own.

  The sense of loneliness was a new one on her; she’d felt it first at Oxford, combined with a horrible, stupid, snobbish sense of social inadequacy, and then, renewed, it had taken hold in this bigger city, in London. But she hadn’t articulated it to herself until it was forced upon her. This was how loneliness in London ended, she thought, sitting at the Australian’s funeral. She wouldn’t die like that, exactly, but she could shut the door and go to bed and never get up again; how long, as in the Australian’s case, until anyone noticed she was missing? From wondering that, the bigger question of who would miss her at all painfully rose.

  There was so much to go and see, so much to visit in London; parks and walks, exhibitions and concerts and films and plays and even, she supposed, operas and ballets. In the couple of days after bumping into Francis, she gave them all detailed thought. She tried to remember everything she could about him, too, but nothing much came to mind except his height, the way he’d always sort of folded himself around himself, his limbs trying to make themselves smaller, his head drooping down between his shoulder-blades. His family hadn’t always lived there—actually, Jane remembered quite well the summer they’d moved in—but she remembered his sister more than him. He’d sometimes been around when they were a bit older, and when they’d had that gang who used to go down to the lower crags and sit there drinking bottles of illicitly acquired cider, he was sometimes around at the edges of the group. She remembered, too, there was a new year’s party once at his parents’ house. It was her upper-sixth year; she’d had the letter three days before Christmas from Oxford, and she’d been glowing for ten days. “Jane’s just been accepted by Oxford,” she remembered her mother saying to everyone at the party, and then, with a shameful grasp of the idiom, “LMH. She goes up in October.”

  “I’m sure she’ll get the grades,” Mr. Sellers—Bernie, wasn’t it?—had said and meant it kindly.

  “Oh, I don’t think they trouble about all of that,” Jane’s mother had hooted embarrassingly, and Jane had stood there like a lemon, as if she were supposed now to start performing or something.

  She’d ended up talking to Francis then, and they’d had quite a good conversation. A deep conversation, as they used to call it, about life, the universe and everything. “I don’t believe in God,” Francis had said, with an air of bravery.

  “Well, I don’t think I do either,” Jane had said, surprised, and before long they were on to the distances between stars and galaxies and how long it would take you if you travelled at the speed of light and how insignificant it made everything seem, and then, seamlessly, on to nuclear war. “You sound like my brother’s friend Stig,” Jane had said.

  “I hope not,” Francis had said, with a flash of likeability—Stig was a new friend of Tim’s, always around these days, scowling and making sarcastic comments about everything. When people found out she was clever, they often embarked on a conversation that was meant to be deep, and some of the grown-ups at this party had actually started lengthening their vowels as if in deference to Oxford. But Francis laughed at Stig and probably would have laughed at Tim, too. She’d liked him for that, she remembered: she wondered why she hadn’t bothered more with him afterwards.

  “Weren’t you a vegetarian?” Francis said as they were going back for the second half. “That’s what I mainly remember about you, that you were a vegetarian.”

  He was as tall and drawn-out in shape as someone else’s shadow, and climbing the steps to the upper half of the stalls, she felt as if the crowd was staring at them; the girl who had stood for the Rossini overture with a man a foot taller than her. What she felt like saying was, what I mostly remember about your family is that once, eight years ago, I was walking past my brother’s room, my elder brother Daniel; and I looked in, and there was your sister, with a smeared attempt at lipstick on her spotty stupid face, and bright green eyeshadow on her closed eyes, and she had her school blouse wide open and her bra undone. This was in my family’s house, Francis, remember; that was what she wanted to say. And she was in Daniel’s bedroom, but it wasn’t Daniel who was face down in her stupid tits and making stupid noises. It was my eleven-year-old brother. That’s what I mostly remember about your family, Francis.

  “No, I stopped all that,” Jane said. “Being vegetarian. It was more trouble than it was worth, in the end. Are you on your own here?”

  “Yes, I am,” Francis said.

  “Someone stood you up, too?” she said lightly.

  “No, not at all,” he said. “I like coming to these things on my own.”

  “You can sit with me, if you like,” Jane said, as they stood at the end of their respective rows. “I’ve got an empty space next to me.”

  “If you’d like,” Francis said stiffly, and then she wondered whether he might really mean what he said, that he preferred coming to these things on his own. He’d spoken to her, though.

  It was a bigger noise that began now, and a sense, despite the brightly lit and optimistic hall, despite the luminous blacks and whites of the orchestra, of plunging into some forest gloom. Something was slowly moving down there, an immense movement, a beast made of a single muscle, like a snake; it took form, and rose, and mounted into a single gesture. She disliked the sensation; before, she had been looking at small exact objects in a glass case, as if she could choose when to move on, but this wouldn’t let her do that. It seemed crude, even ugly, but after a while she forgot to think whether she liked it or not. It was just a kind of obliteration, and she had no idea how long it had been going on when it rose into a kind of massive, lowering density, and came to an end. She looked at Francis; he was pale, wide-eyed. She looked at the programme note, but she couldn’t understand it; the next part was a set, it said, of “double variations,” whatever that meant. All she knew, for the next three-quarters of an hour, was the sense of slow, immense mutation, like layers of geology moving easily, softly and massively under the feet.

  “Did you enjoy that?” Francis said, at the end as they were leaving.

  “I don’t know,” Jane said. “I’ve never heard anything like it, though.”

  “You haven’t heard Bruckner before?”

  “No,” Jane said. “But it’s sort of like how you imagine classical music’s going to be if you’ve never heard any.”

  “I know what you mean,” Francis said, obviously a bit disappointed.

  “I don’t really know whether I liked it or not,” Jane said. “Or whether I was bored or not. I was sort of
listening, but it was more like just being in a place, like—”

  “It’s difficult describing music,” Francis said.

  “We ought to do something,” Jane said, thinking that it probably wouldn’t be a concert. She didn’t exactly know why. Francis seemed, perhaps, like the sort of person who might quite easily start explaining to her about double variations; men liked to explain about what they did or what they liked to do, all of them. She knew that well enough.

  “I’d like that,” Francis said outside the Festival Hall, as if saying goodbye, but they’d both forgotten for the moment that they lived in the same direction on the Northern Line, and from Waterloo to Clapham Common they had to find something else to talk about. Jane told him about her Australian lodger; that seemed to do.

  The right outing for Francis came to her, and a couple of days after bumping into him, she made an effort and called him. He sounded pleased to hear from her; agreed that the weather was nice enough now to go for a walk; liked a walk; had nothing planned for Sunday; agreed to meet at Putney station and go for a walk along the river. He didn’t say anything annoying, like “Do you mind if I bring my girlfriend?” either. She put the phone down; had a thought, looked at the A–Z, realized an ambiguity, phoned back and explained that she meant Putney tube station, not the overground station. He laughed, commended her clarity.

  On Thursday morning, she was in the bath when the telephone rang. It could only have been half past seven; her alarm clock was set for seven fifteen, and she was just settling in. The bathroom was peach and purple, brown flowers printed on the beige tiles, an old-lady taste, but it was a flimsy insertion, put in when the house was greedily converted into too many flats, twenty years before, and the telephone seemed to ring right next to your ear through the hardboard partition. Jane got out, wrapping herself in her old-lady’s bathrobe. There was no point in waiting for the Australian to get up and answer it—he wasn’t an early riser—and she hadn’t quite got the knack of just leaving a call to be dealt with by the answering-machine.

  She couldn’t think who would call so early, but the blunt, lazy voice at the other end, announcing itself as Lee—at the hoarse high pitch that could be a man or a woman—said it was calling about the ad in the paper. Jane was surprised: the paper, she understood, only came out today. Whoever it was must have picked it up immediately, and started phoning. “Come round at eight o’clock tomorrow night,” Jane said firmly.

  “Where is it?” the Australian voice asked, and Jane told it. There was a pause. “Gee, I don’t know—that sounds like quite a way. We couldn’t meet somewhere more central, could we?” the voice asked.

  “Don’t you want to see the flat?” Jane said, amused, and wondering why someone would want to live in a flat that seemed too far out to visit even the once.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” the voice said, pulling itself together. Perhaps this was just one in a series of undertakings, and it had had to remind itself, at this early hour, that it was dealing with flat-sharing, not lonely hearts or the exchange and sale of a campervan. They made an appointment.

  She had just got into the bath when the telephone rang again, but this time Jane didn’t get up, and sure enough another shouty Australian voice could be heard against the clanking background of a railway station spelling out his details, and immediately afterwards a third. She had had no idea this was going to prove so popular—it hadn’t been so before. You could have congratulated the dead Australian on his timing. As if to confirm the thought, her hand, reaching behind her head for her shampoo, gripped not her bottle of Timotei but the cheap brand, half-empty and not worth packing with his effects, which the dead Australian had used. The water was getting cold; she shivered. By the time she was dressed and ready to go out, there were eleven messages, which seemed enough; she took their names and numbers to work, and all morning arranged appointments the next night with the ones who could be reached. They all seemed perfectly nice.

  “Going out?” the Australian said the next day, wandering into the sitting room where she’d been talking.

  “No,” Jane said. “I’m going to stay in and watch the telly.”

  “You’ve forgotten, then,” the Australian said.

  “Forgotten what?”

  “The new lodgers, they’re coming round, yeah? They’ve been phoning all day to confirm.”

  “God, yes,” Jane said. “Have we got any wine in?”

  “Wine? You’re going to give them wine?”

  “It might be friendly. I wish I’d remembered to ask Sarah to come, too. She always knows about people. I never do.”

  “I wondered what she was doing here when I came round first,” the Australian said. “I thought maybe it was that you didn’t want to be left alone with a man, you know, like that woman who disappeared that time.”

  “Yes,” Jane said, not knowing what he was talking about—he had that way of thinking you had access to the precise thoughts his vaguer words delineated. “I never know what to ask them.”

  “Yeah, I can see that,” the Australian said, not unkindly. “They’re not going to tell you the truth if you ask them anything directly—like, are you a tidy person, or, do you do drugs or get drunk and smash up my granny’s favourite ornaments.”

  “I don’t have any of my granny’s favourite ornaments,” Jane said. “But you think they’ll say, ‘Yes, I’m too tidy really, people complain about how quiet and self-effacing I am—’”

  “What does that mean, self-facing?”

  “Effacing, quiet,” Jane said. “Do you want any dinner?”

  “If it’s no trouble.”

  “No trouble,” Jane said. “You know, when I was applying for jobs, the first interview I went to, they said, ‘Do you have any faults, would you say?’ and I’d heard, from my friend Sarah, really, that the thing to say was ‘Well, to be honest, I think I’m really too much of a perfectionist—’”

  “Everyone says that, it’s stupid.”

  “I know. I said it that once, the first interview I had, and it must have come out a bit wrong, because they all laughed like drains, and I thought, I’m not saying that again. It must have been the tenth time they’d heard it that morning.”

  “I thought everyone knew that they ask it, you say exactly that, you all ignore it and move on, because if they employ you they’re going to find out what your faults are anyway and you aren’t going to tell them anything serious, like, ‘My main fault in life is that I can’t stop myself stealing stuff from my employers.’”

  Because half the cutlery in the flat, Jane had recently discovered, had been acquired from the restaurant where the Australian worked. She didn’t know why: when she’d moved in, she’d bought a box of cutlery from Habitat, a set of six of everything with red melamine handles, plenty, and the increase in cutlery had in practice just meant an increase in the amount of stuff sitting in the sink, since the Australian never did any washing-up until everything had been used up.

  “I’m trying to work out what your fault was that you told them,” the Australian said, going into the kitchen and opening the fridge to see what was there.

  “Go on, then,” Jane said. “I got some mince on my way home. It’s on the bottom shelf.”

  “I’m not mental,” the Australian said. “I’m not going to tell you what your faults are, the real ones.”

  “I don’t know that I’ve really got any.”

  “Everyone’s got faults,” the Australian said, when he’d stopped laughing. “But what did you tell them?”

  “Oh, I said I thought I was a bit of a chatterbox,” Jane said, “because—What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing,” the Australian said. “You’re right, I wouldn’t have guessed you’d say that.”

  “Well, I don’t see why it’s funny,” Jane said. “I thought it was quite good, because actually you wouldn’t mind working with someone who talks all the time—well, maybe you would if it was all the time. Anyway, it seemed like quite a positive thing, to talk a bit t
oo much, and in any case I said it at the interview for Deacon Barkin and I got the job, and they’ve been finding out, I suppose, what my real faults are ever since.”

  “When are they arriving?”

  “The first one’s at eight,” Jane said. “I don’t know what we’re going to ask them. We ought to have a list of questions, psychological tests, find out what they’re like.”

  “Got to be a bit creative about it, ask them questions they’re not expecting,” the Australian said. “I don’t know what.”

  “What are you cooking?” Jane said.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” the Australian said, calling through the serving-hatch—it was obviously some sort of amazing mess, to be served up burnt round the edges.

  “I know,” Jane said. “There used to be this story, about when you went to Oxford to be interviewed, that someone went into the room of the don—the lecturer, I mean—and the man was sitting behind a newspaper and didn’t put it down, and the boy sat down and then from behind this newspaper, this voice came, and he just said, ‘Entertain me.’”

  “That was the question?”

  “It’s supposed to be,” Jane said.

  “I wouldn’t know what to do.”

  “The story goes that he set fire to the newspaper.”

  “Did he get in?”

  “I don’t know, I can’t remember. I don’t think it’s true. It’s just a story they tell you to make you expect anything.”

  What did they ask you at your interview?”

  “Er, about what I’d done at school, what books I liked, if I was in any clubs, that sort of thing.”

  The Australian came to the kitchen door. Behind him a mass of steam, the soiled indignant smell of mince frying at too high a temperature with a lot of things that had never, in the history of the world, been fried with mince before. His mouth hung open, as he digested this story. All at once, he started to laugh, barking away; you had to join in when someone laughed like that.