The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  “The really big thing was the shyness, though. I’d always been shy. I never liked meeting new people. I was scared of making a phone call. I couldn’t ever go first into a room, even into a classroom. And then one day I thought, I’m going to stop being shy. It suddenly seemed really stupid to be shy. It wasn’t hurting anyone else, it was only a problem for you, getting in the way of what you’d really like to do. I’ll give you an example. You know Bigg and Cleaver, the bookshop?”

  “Yes, I know,” Jane said. “Off Division Street. I used to go to the café next door.”

  “Diamond—no, I can’t remember what it’s called.”

  “Ruby Tuesday,” Jane said. “It’s a Beatles song they’ve named it after.”

  “That’s it,” Francis said. “Well, they’ve got second-hand records in the back room. You can get good things there, and you know I like music. I signed on over the summer before I went to university, and after a few weeks a cheque came for a hundred and twenty pounds, and I thought, I’ll spend it on records. So I went to Bigg and Cleaver, but there’s a big notice over the door saying, ‘Please leave your bags at the front,’ and I had a bag. I can’t explain it, but I was that shy, I couldn’t go up and say, ‘Can I leave my bag?’ or whatever it is you’d say.”

  “You wouldn’t have to say anything,” Jane said, incredulous. “You’d just put it down.”

  “But,” Francis said, “but—well, I thought, you’d have to say something, so they knew it was you who’d left it, or they might challenge you when you came to collect it, or they might think you were weird for not saying anything to them or—”

  “I’ve never heard anything like it,” Jane said. “You really used to worry about all of that?”

  “Yes, of course I did,” Francis said. “I thought everyone did.”

  “So what did you do?” Jane said. “With the bag.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Francis said. “I didn’t go in the back room and I didn’t spend my hundred and twenty pounds. When I got home and thought about it I almost felt like crying.”

  “I don’t wonder,” Jane said. She felt herself growing more Sheffield in her speech. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “I know,” Francis said. “So I just decided, like that, without telling anyone, I was going to stop being shy.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Oh, all sorts,” Francis said. “I went up to strangers, I started conversations on buses, I went on my own to pubs, I began arguments. All sorts.”

  “I wouldn’t do any of that,” Jane said.

  “It worked a bit too well,” Francis said, “because, of course, when I wasn’t shy any more, it was like I’d woken up and I was in Leeds, and I wondered why it was that I was in Leeds. I wasn’t the same person as I was when I’d applied there. I could have had a go at Oxford, I reckon. You went to Oxford, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did,” Jane said. “You’re probably right, you don’t need to be that intelligent to get into Oxford. There were some people there who wouldn’t have been at the top of an A-level class at Flint. You’d have been all right.”

  “Well, thanks,” Francis said. “In any case, it was too late, I was at Leeds, and I kept thinking, the only reason I applied here was because I was shy and I thought it would be quite like Sheffield, and it wouldn’t be far from Sheffield, and if I thought I could get in there then it would probably be full of people like me. Of course I didn’t say any of that. Do you know what I said at the time?”

  “You know, actually, I do. Because someone told me what you were going round saying. You were saying you wouldn’t want to go to Oxford or Cambridge or back down south, even though you’d come from there in the first place, because there weren’t any hills and you wouldn’t like a town without any hills. I thought it was the most stupid thing I’d ever heard, because I’d just finished at Oxford, or maybe I was in my last year, and I thought, There’s lots of things to object to about it, but one of them isn’t that there aren’t any hills.”

  “That’s horrible,” Francis said, “having people remember stupid things you said. Anyway, it all went wrong. I carried on with my programme for not being shy, and it got a bit out of hand, and I didn’t like it at all because it was a bit like meeting yourself when you were younger, living in a decision that a stupid version of yourself had made. I was living in this hall of residence, basically a huge tower with the walls made out of grey breeze blocks and I didn’t like one single person, I don’t think, so after two terms I left. I’d have failed the first-year exams anyway.”

  “What were you studying?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  Francis had finished his story. It seemed like a sad story, but he’d told it before, and now he’d told it evenly. A bell sounded behind them; it was the two cyclists who had been resting by the river. Francis and Jane moved to one side and let them pass, clattering as they went. “Did you see—” one called over his shoulder to the other, not caring, “—did you see that giant?” and they were a hundred yards down the path. Jane looked at the ground; Francis wasn’t so enormously tall, she’d seen taller, though not much. It was really just the way he held himself.

  “I love that building,” Francis said bravely—it was the Harrods Depository, or so a huge sign said, flushed red and lavishly curlicued, smothered in brick fruit and flowers. “It’s just a warehouse, I don’t know why they’d make it so fanciful.”

  “I’ve never seen it,” Jane said. “I suppose Harrods would naturally want to have the best of everything, even their warehouse, it would have to be—”

  “The thing is,” Francis said, breaking out in a sort of frustration, “the thing is I was wrong, I’m sure I was wrong, deciding not to be shy. I really think that now. Because if you’re not shy you go out into the world, but if you are shy then you stay at home, and it’s really better to stay at home. You’re going to be happy if you stay at home. I wish I hadn’t come to London, really. I hate where I live, I hate the people I live with, I hate my job. I don’t feel I belong here.”

  “But you were born here,” Jane said. “Weren’t you?”

  “It doesn’t feel like it,” Francis said.

  She left it.

  “I’m really glad I met you,” Francis said. “It just made me feel like Sheffield again.”

  She couldn’t answer; she had felt something like that, too, but at the same time not what Francis had felt. What she rested on was the conviction that you had to value what you had. You might want something, and most times you ought to realize that what you wanted was what you already had. You couldn’t move on restlessly, trying to annex new possessions in the hope, like Sarah Willis with her expanding address book, that what you wanted might be out there somewhere; but on the other hand you couldn’t stay exactly where you were. You had to leave your family. She felt, looking at the Harrods warehouse, filled with the stuff of acquired lives and the stuff of possible rooms, that hanging in the air between them was an expectation that she, now, would invite Francis to come and live with her in her flat. She saw herself coming home from work, getting out a bag of potatoes and a leg of lamb, starting to chop and peel to the smug noise of Bruckner making the walls shake; she saw herself in twenty years’ time with three gawky children, never having found the right moment to say to Francis that, in fact, in reality, she had never cared all that much for Bruckner, it had never been any kind of bond between them. So she said nothing.

  “I’ve enjoyed this,” she said, when they were getting on to the train at Hammersmith together. It was a long journey, but she’d get off at Sloane Square and take the bus to Clapham, leaving him. She might as well say the polite thing, the Sarah Willis thing, now. “We must do it again soon.”

  “Or a concert,” Francis said, almost angrily; she felt confirmed.

  “Where’ve you been?” the Australian said, as she let herself in.

  “Hey, Scott,” Jane said, with real pleasure. She hadn’t known how
much she was looking forward to him being in.

  “You’ve been out hours,” he said.

  “Oh, I’ve been on this enormous walk,” she said. “I met someone I used to know, years ago, and he wanted to go for a Sunday-afternoon walk down the river. I’m knackered.”

  “I’ve done nothing,” the Australian said. “I was trying to find something to watch on the telly, but it’s all crap. Have you seen this crap?”

  She looked; it was three old actors, mugging embarrassingly on a hill in Yorkshire. “You’re right, it’s crap,” she said. “Let’s go out.”

  “You’ve just come in,” he said. “Your friend Sarah called. She said you could go there for dinner if you liked. And some people about the room, but I just told them to piss off.”

  “I’d rather just go to the pub,” she said.

  “What, with me?”

  “Unless you’ve got any objections,” Jane said. The whole question of the third lodger seemed to have been abandoned; and perhaps that was right. They would manage the rent between them, surely.

  “You’re on,” Scott said. “Put your coat back on.”

  Book Three

  GI’O’ER

  The great mass of Torcombe, seen from the London–Bristol railway line, which ran a mile or two away along the foot of the valley, was blurred in its outlines as if by charcoal scribbles. Its many blackened pinnacles, towers, minarets and chimneys extruded upwards, as innumerable gargoyles and waterspouts extended horizontally from an architectural body already complex with cubes and domes, its shape symmetrical in no direction. All along the battlements stood shroud-like shapes in blackened stone, statues of some sort. Originally they had been regularly positioned, but now gaps had appeared in the ranks like spaces in an old boxer’s teeth. The sheep in the meadows stood and gazed at the hideous prodigy, all year round. For decades, people had been saying that it would come to be seen as beautiful as well as remarkable—“After all,” they tended to say, “the Brighton Pavilion …,” the point of comparison trailing away in their voice. But the moment never quite came, and its appreciation stuck at a few specialists in the field, and occasionally someone wrote an article about its Indian features. (It was built by a jobbing architect in retirement from a career in Calcutta, and the gardens, in a moister climate, retraced the plans of the gardens at the Taj Mahal, in raised brick beds with a single central fountain.) Sometimes the BBC had come to see if it would do for a house in a Sunday-afternoon serial, but the novel had never been written that could contain Torcombe, and they always went away again.

  It had all the fractal elaborations of a wart. The valley it looked over, too, had its disappointed aspects. The railway line was older than the house, and as long as the house had been there, hundreds of passengers every day had used it as a bold, ugly landmark on their journey. The river at the bottom of the valley was a slow, shallow, muddy affair with no fishing of any account, meandering cursively through the sodden meadows like a handwriting exercise. In this heat, the river flowed even more slowly, a smog rising off the morning meadows like the air of a pub saloon bar. Almost as soon as the house and estate had been put together, the mercantile fortune that had funded it had turned out to be inadequate, and within a decade or two the slow process of disrobing had begun. The estate had once stretched right down to the river, but that had gone in the 1920s, and a sour line of electricity pylons strode through the valley. The land had gone in pieces, until there was just a couple of acres of garden, the drive and the house. And then that had been sold, too, and these days the letters from the producers of BBC serials got a rude rebuff, or no response at all.

  Nick saw none of the embarrassments of the estate as he turned off the main road to Salworthy on to Torcombe’s drive. He saw only his own colossal embarrassment. It had never seemed worthwhile, in Sheffield, acquiring another car when Reynolds’s van did perfectly well. You could get your shopping in it, or drop in on Rose, his new girlfriend, in her cottage in the Rivelin valley, or go out to the pictures or the theatre or even a pub in Derbyshire in it. It was perfectly serviceable, even a little bit jaunty to go about with your business advertised on the side. He hadn’t thought of this aspect when Jimmy had said, a couple of years ago, “Got myself a big new place in the country,” or, a fortnight ago, “Well, if there’s something you want to discuss, you’ll have to come down to my place in the country for the weekend. Nice idea. Show you over.” If he’d envisaged it, he’d probably thought of a prosperous farmer’s house, but not this. It was the sort of place you glimpsed in passing and wondered who the hell managed to keep up a pile like that, these days.

  Steeling himself, and certain that the van, his shabby suitcase and the two changes of clothes inside it wouldn’t do, Nick drove up the overgrown drive and round the circle of dry, unkempt grass in front of the massively windowed façade. He’d misjudged, badly. The worst of it was the last horrible thought: that the van’s gold Roman lettering on deep purple, to match the shop front, always had the effect, in Sheffield, of class.

  It was extraordinarily hot. He’d set off in a T-shirt and shorts, quite cheerful in the early-morning sunlight, but by Derby and after breakfast, he’d had to peel off the T-shirt. His back and thighs had been clinging to the plastic seat, despite the wide-open windows; his hands, gripping the steering-wheel, were almost wrinkled with sweat. His hair, drenched with sweat, dried in the breeze. Outside this huge and alarming house, he put on his T-shirt again, at any rate. He was rather hoping it had occurred to him to put his summer jacket into the bag as well as a pair of summer trousers.

  He got out, hanging his head, and slammed the van door. What the hell did you do when you came to a place like this, anyway? Did you ring the doorbell, or just walk in? He was getting his shameful bag out when the vast door opened, and there—oh, Christ—was what could only be a butler. Nick steeled himself to explain, before the bugger could send him round to the tradesman’s entrance, that he’d been invited, that, yes, he sold flowers in a shop, but he was—Christ, these days, how did you say, “I am a gentleman”? The bloke came over, not at all butler-like in his demeanour, but slouching and shuffling his shoes through the gravel. Maybe he was just one of Jimmy’s, but then he said, ludicrously, “Welcome to Torcombe. The master’s expecting you.” He was suppressing some kind of accent in a kind of gurgling yodel. He took Nick’s bag, hardly hesitating, and led the way in his crisp uniform, Nick following in his shamefaced 10CC rock-concert T-shirt, bright red shorts and sandals. The butler still looked cooler, in this heat, than Nick did.

  Miranda was long gone—divorced and, by all accounts, making a success of her own business on the pay-off. She had a keep-fit studio, a gym they were calling them now, in Covent Garden “and good luck to her,” Jimmy always said, as if they really were, as he went on to claim, “on the best of terms.” Gone too, the next wife—Susie, or stupidly-spelt Soozie, it had been, one of the girls Jimmy had always picked up from time to time but on that occasion, light-hearted and released from Miranda’s minatory supervision, had unaccountably gone and married. Eighteen months of trying to meet Soozie’s showbusiness demands, culminating in a disastrous week when she’d played a cat in a musical before being rudely sacked, and that had been that. The one who came forward now to meet Nick in the cigar-box entrance hall, glaucously lit by stained-glass windows and fragrant with mould, was the latest trading-up; gentry, Jimmy’d said or, more exactly, “Posh tea-head. She’s over the needle, all that, now. Name of Laura.”

  “You must be Nick,” Laura said, bonily attractive, her voice low and grand, leaning forward as if she might put out her hand to be shaken. She was wearing a simple white dress, hung with two straps over her buttered-toast-coloured bosom. It looked as if it had cost nothing, had come from Marks & Spencer, but something about the way it swung as she came forward, some suggestion of asymmetry in the cut suggested immense expenditure of a sort not visible to people such as Nick. She smelt deliciously of jasmine-scented soap, and no perfume.

/>   “And you must be Laura,” Nick said, smiling, wondering what on earth he must smell like. “What an amazing house. I had no idea.”

  “No?” Laura said, her smile now chilling a little. Nick understood. There was to be no reference to the acquisition of Torcombe, anything to suggest that it hadn’t been in Jimmy’s family for generations. “You’re just in time for tea—”

  Tea?

  “—and I think he’s in the library. Thank you. Take Mr. Reynolds’s luggage up to his room.”

  Library?

  It was, of course, to be expected that Jimmy would obstinately hunker down in some baronial spot, waiting for a supplicant like Nick to be ushered into the presence. In fact, given what Nick had come here to say, he wasn’t sure that he wasn’t as frightened as Jimmy wanted him to be. But the idea of Jimmy in a library was a new one; Nick could remember when he had said “front room,” and he wondered what slips from Jimmy and well-mannered corrections from Laura had edged him into the state where he had tea—real tea, not tea-head tea, presumably—in the library in the afternoon, and perhaps even describing it in that exact way.

  Laura led him from the hallway, not into the library but into a sort of long gallery, gloomy and heavy with mahogany, but here and there, recognizably, a piece of furniture from the old Fulham house. Hardly any of the day’s fierce sunlight filtered through to illuminate these rooms; their atmosphere was as of undergrowth in which familiar objects nested. Here was a white sofa placed where no one, surely, could want to sit on it. Further along, surely, a white polar-bear rug, bought, if he remembered, at little Sonia’s insistence. It had overwhelmed even the generous spaces of the Fulham sitting room, but here it looked sadly isolated, as if it expected to greet a yawning mate at the far end of the gallery. The rest of the furniture, the paintings, the shabby carpets, you couldn’t imagine Jimmy choosing them, or even owning them.