The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  “Shouldn’t I go and change first?” Nick said, gesturing at his déshabille with an apologetic hand.

  “Oh, nonsense,” Laura said, hardly looking at what he was wearing. “It’s only Jimmy.” He understood her to mean “It’s only you.” “The other thing is,” she went on, “you can send a guest off to his room and then you never see him again.”

  “Are your guest rooms as irresistible as that?” Nick said heartily.

  “It’s not as much a rabbit-warren as it seems at first,” Laura said, ignoring his comment, turning into another room with the height of a cinema and in much the same grottily gilded style, also not the library. “We only really live in about a dozen or fifteen rooms. Heaven alone knows what goes on in the rest.”

  A dozen?

  “And here he is,” Laura said, pushing open a pair of double doors into the library. “I told you he’d be in time for tea, darling.”

  Against Nick’s expectations, the library really was a library; one whole wall lined with sets of bound books, up to the ceiling. The case was ecclesiastical, Gothic, with pendentives and ogives and, with a shock, Nick recognized that the whole construction was a huge scale model of St. Pancras railway station. No, not quite that, but almost. The shelves went up to the twelve-foot ceiling, encrusted with more doomy Gothic plasterwork, but the single ladder had at least four rungs missing, and the top shelves must be more for show than use. Nick wondered what could be up there: mice nesting in antique pornography, probably. In any case, a few of the bottom shelves had been cleared out for what books Jimmy owned, and among the ranks of bound sermons, fat paperbacks screaming LUDLUM, coffee-table volumes of illustrated popular anthropology and Learning to Paint With Nancy Kominski were closer to hand. The windows here were floor-to-ceiling, giving on to a long vista of terrace, sad, intricate, twiggy garden with blackened statuary and leaf-filled dry fountain bowls, a grizzled pepper-and-salt meadow where sheep piled up in the shade of the Cedars of Lebanon. Beyond, the railway line, the glistening meander of the river, the glistening lines of the pylons, and a flash of mirrored windows as the London–Bristol traversed the valley. Inside, the room was dense with the flight of dust-motes, the long torn red velvet curtains, their cream lining poking through, in a collapse over the windows like a two-day-old pudding.

  “And you were right,” Jimmy said, rising from the heavily padded green leather sofa. He greeted Nick with a wave that just failed to become a handshake, and a showy kiss for his new wife, who patted him reassuringly on the back, detached herself and left them alone.

  “You’d have told her to shut up and piss off once,” Nick said, “if she’d said that to you.”

  “Who? Laura?” Jimmy said. “Never.”

  “Not Laura,” Nick said. “I didn’t mean Laura, I meant, I don’t know, Miranda.”

  “Why’d you say Laura, then?” Jimmy said, but mildly, curiously.

  “What I meant was if, in the past, Miranda had said to you even ‘I told you he’d be here for tea,’ like, ‘I told you I was right and you were wrong,’ you’d have said, straight away, ‘Piss off and shut up.’ It must be the country life.”

  “Christ, it’s hot,” Jimmy said. “One of the hottest. Went out this morning, thought about walking down to the lake, see how the trout are coming on. Twenty feet out of the door, couldn’t stand it, too fucking hot. Ten thirty in the morning, mind. Not hot travelling down?”

  “Very hot,” Nick said. A silence fell.

  “She’s a fantastic woman,” Jimmy said miserably. “I bought it for her, you know.”

  “The—?”

  “The house, you berk,” Jimmy said. “Or hadn’t you noticed?”

  “Oh, I noticed all right,” Nick said. “Going it a bit, aren’t you?”

  “You’re telling me,” Jimmy said.

  The last move of Jimmy’s was only a mile or so westward, but in its own way a colossal one. There’d been a rationale behind Fulham; Jimmy, he let you know, could have afforded something flasher but you’d be running a risk, making yourself conspicuous. Nick wasn’t convinced, and the Fulham house was flash enough. Sure enough, in time there was a new house overlooking a Chelsea square with nannies in uniform and old generals in scarlet frock-coats, most of the first and second floor interrupting the splendid stucco with a vast studio window. Some painter had lived there when painters could afford Chelsea. Soozie had wanted to keep it as a studio, Nick remembered, with a barre and a mirror and a white grand piano, but Jimmy’d refused. There he’d stopped, and Torcombe was a new addition rather than a replacement for the Chelsea house.

  “You must be doing all right,” Nick said.

  “I’m doing all right,” Jimmy said. He reached over to the table by his side, where there was a plate of sandwiches and a cake, but instead of tea, a glass of whisky. “Some of it was mine, and some of it was Laura’s. You know her husband died? Just died, when I met her. Another tea-head. Usual story. She’d cleaned herself up, found out she’d got more money than she expected, met me.”

  “Did you know her before?”

  “Knew the husband a bit. Everyone knew the husband. Lord, wasn’t he? Viscount or something. She’s all right, Laura. Educated. Knows about all this stuff—” a wave of the hand at the Victorian age “—and I reckon it makes her laugh, cleaning up and then marrying into the business when it don’t interest her no more, the goods. Makes me laugh, too. Never thought I’d marry a customer, despised them. She’s all right.”

  “She seems great.”

  “I tell you what,” Jimmy said. “It’s just us this weekend, but there’s a fan of yours coming down. Might be here already, don’t know. Remember Sonia? Thrilled to bits when she heard you were here too. Remembers you.”

  “Little Sonia,” Nick said. “I haven’t seen her since she was eight. I didn’t know I made such an impression on her.”

  “She’s nearly twenty now,” Jimmy said. “Bought her a house, too, in the—get this—in the East End, Spitalfields. My old mum’d never in a million years contemplate living in Spitalfields. Sonia, she’s studying art, I bought her this mouldy old house falling down round her ears and she loves it. You never know about kids. I think it’s mostly floorboards and plaster falling off the walls still. Didn’t cost much, or I’d have had a job stretching to this monstrosity. Did I tell you about it?”

  “No, not at all,” Nick said.

  “Do you want the guided tour?” Jimmy said. “Laura’ll give you that—she knows all about it, where Mata Hari slept and the pisspot King Edward used in 1906 and which Chinese emperor made what vase and all that. So we get married and I thought Laura, she loves the country, so I’ll surprise her. I’ll buy a house in the country. Now I was thinking rectory, five bedrooms, couple of acres, rose garden, that’ll do me. But I went out and looked and rectories, that’s exactly what you can’t find any more, they’re all done up and twice what they should be costing. And then, suddenly, I was driving round this neck of the woods with a local estate agent and he mentions that the family here are thinking of selling up after I don’t know how many generations. And no one in their right minds wants a place this size, so it’s going for a song.

  “You should have seen them. There was just an old brother and sister left, and one housemaid who I think had been their nanny, she must have been eighty, and they lived in three rooms, just a bedroom each and a little room they sat in and watched an old black-and-white telly. Poor as church mice. All the money had gone, and they’d sold all the land they could sell. But I looked around, and, you can see, it’s not in first-class nick, but there’s nothing much wrong with it—it doesn’t leak much. So I took it off their hands and they’re living in a nice little cottage in the village with central heating for the first time in their lives, and four hundred thousand pounds in the bank. Happy as Larry. They left most of the furniture, too—they hadn’t seen it for thirty years. It’d been under dust sheets. I don’t say I like it much, but it fills the house, and you can’t fill a house this siz
e straight off. Do you know how much it costs just to put curtains up in one room?”

  “No idea,” Nick said.

  “No, I don’t know either,” Jimmy said. “But it couldn’t be done. Couldn’t stretch to it.”

  Nick looked around him. They lived in a dozen rooms, the wife had said, which didn’t seem a lot until you totted up the rooms in your own house—five, not counting kitchens or bathrooms, and that seemed plenty to Nick. There were more rooms out there for Jimmy and Laura to colonize as time went on, too—billiard rooms, morning rooms, smoking rooms, menageries, the long-gone paraphernalia of wealthy lives. How had even this been stretched to? Nick knew to a penny how much of Jimmy’s finances went through the Broomhill flower shop; it was a good deal, but it wouldn’t have begun to fund this on its own. He had always assumed that, despite the close bond between him and Jimmy, there were others in exactly his position, channelling Jimmy’s heroin money through launderettes, newsagents, sweet shops, stationers, all serving an apparently decent purpose in provincial cities. He had no idea who those other people were or might be. But there had to be a lot of them.

  Over the few years the decency and usefulness of his own flower shop had been creeping up on him. Next door to Reynold’s, there was a madam shop, run by a handsome haughty Jewess, selling “robes” to the middle-aged ladies of the area. The mannequins were old-fashioned, based on the sort of Parisian models that the New Look had hung off in the 1940s, and on them Mrs. Grunbaum hung well-made suits and dresses, expensive and heavy with buckles to show where the money was spent, and a few years out of fashion. Nothing too alarming.

  For a time Nick had assumed that Belinda’s, as Mrs. Grunbaum’s shop was called, was the sort of madam shop gifted by an elderly businessman to his mistress. Mrs. Grunbaum’s title was certainly a courtesy one; she had laughed hoarsely when it came out that Nick thought there had ever been a Mr. Grunbaum. But Belinda’s was, in fact, all Mrs. Grunbaum’s work—there had been no wealthy lover to give Mrs. Grunbaum the money and indulgently help her choose the pink-and-white toile-de-Jouy style of the showroom, patiently listen to her agonizing over stocks, or assist her in a commanding, humorous way when she burst into tears over the books. That was the way it would have been in London; there were Jewish madam shops all over London exactly like Belinda’s, and every one run by someone’s mistress as a surprisingly successful hobby. In Sheffield, Mrs. Grunbaum had taken the money her mother had been saving up for years—“God knows for what, Nicholas”—had sold the house in Ranmoor and bought a shop with a flat over it in Broomhill. “I’d always longed to be in the fashion industry, Nicholas, but my people, they’d always looked down on people of our sort doing that sort of business.” She did well, Mrs. Grunbaum; she knew what sold, and what wouldn’t.

  Nick, it seemed, had always longed to be in the floristry business. It was just that, unlike Mrs. Grunbaum, it hadn’t been a long-nursed and exact desire. He hadn’t known he’d wanted it until he had it. His assumption about the funding of Mrs. Grunbaum’s shop had been, as well as an inference from previous experience of similar shops, a projection of his own situation. It seemed quite normal, the idea that Mrs. Grunbaum would be set up in business by an admirer for reasons of convenience since that, more or less, had happened to him. He hadn’t, he supposed, thought of the fishmonger, the newsagent, the little greengrocer’s in this light, or as anything other than old family businesses, but it came as a shock, the idea that he might be the only shop in the parade funded by a large donation of capital by a backer who expected no particular financial return, who thought of his business, inevitably, as a sort of light-hearted hobby.

  This sense of the shop had been sustained by Katherine, whose employment was not, in any sense, a serious one. She was, at first, just company and they shut the shop if they felt like it, and were able to deal with customers in an unctuous or a dismissive way for no other reason than their own amusement. But after that ugly mistake, the after-hours encounter in his own house, the single occasion that they circled round without comment for months, their light-hearted relationship altered somewhat and so, he eventually realized, did his attitude towards the shop. They carried on working there together, and he concentrated as never before on the shop’s success. Before, he had simply bought more or less what he felt like buying, never troubling about discounts or analysing what sold and what didn’t. It hardly mattered if you ended your Saturdays throwing away twenty pounds’ worth of browning tiger lilies. But he could see where the new awkwardness between him and Katherine would end, and he began taking an interest in the shop itself, having nothing much else to think about. The wastage of stock fell right off; the shop became more heavily frequented, as if the people of Sheffield had been given their first opportunity to buy flowers and had discovered a need they had never known they had. Perhaps for Katherine the enterprise became less fun, more like work. She couldn’t say that, though, without admitting what the whole enterprise had been about for her in the first place.

  “Those narcissi went well,” she remarked out of the blue one May evening. “They were pretty. You could get some more next week.”

  “They were nice,” Nick said. “I thought people would go for them—they’re cheap, but they’re quite unusual. People who don’t like to buy daffodils because they’re a bit—”

  “A bit newsagent,” Katherine said.

  “Exactly,” Nick said, and indeed Price’s opposite had three bright orange buckets of custardy daffodils and tragic dyed carnations plonked down on the pavement next to the ruffle-like display of papers outside. He held up a last narcissus; looked at its curious, inquisitive face, pulled a face of his own.

  “I thought that’d be no good for us when he first did it,” Katherine said. “I mean, he never thought of selling flowers until you opened. But I suppose people look at his”—she gestured over the road at the orange buckets, each with its star-shaped lurid green tag in cardboard, with its felt-tip price—“and think, Ooh, flowers—I know, I’ll buy some nice ones, and cross the road.”

  “Maybe,” Nick said. “I might try jonquils next.” That was the sort of conversation they tended to have, about the business. The narcissi were lovely, it was true: there was a bridal virginity about their blanched virtue, costing almost nothing, which, properly presented, could lure customers in. But it wasn’t disguising anything to talk about them in terms of turnover. He couldn’t deny it: one of the things he liked best about this new line was that it had sold incredibly well. “How’s your son getting on?” he said, returning from the backyard with the empty mock-lead container the narcissi had been in. “He moved out, didn’t he?”

  “Daniel?” Katherine said. “He’s fine, I think. He’s got a room, a big bedsit, really, at the top of a house in Crookes. I haven’t been there since he moved in, but I think he’s coping all right. He was always a tidy boy. Still comes home with his washing.”

  “Oh, I was like that,” Nick said, but for some reason Katherine blushed.

  “I don’t know about this new job, though,” she said. “I’d have preferred him to go to university, and his A levels were good enough, but he said he didn’t know what he wanted to study so there didn’t seem much point.”

  “He’s in an estate agent’s, isn’t he?”

  “Eadon Lockwood and Riddle,” Katherine said promptly. “He likes it. He sold his first house all on his own last week. It suits him much better than the last job. I knew it wouldn’t suit him, working in a building society like his dad. He likes to be out and about a bit, and with this, he gets a company car soon, of course, which you certainly don’t with the Midland Bank. No sign of any steady girlfriend, too busy breaking hearts. I dread the mother of some poor girl turning up on my doorstep. He keeps telling us about houses he’s seen, as if we were ever likely to move.”

  “No, you’re all right where you are,” Nick said. They carried on for a time in silence, Katherine stripping away the leaves on some long-stemmed red roses—one of those things t
hat never sold at 40p a stem, but you had to have them, like a gesture of high class. Nick, behind the desk, watched her. A customer came in, not a regular but passing trade, discussed her requirements at some length, went away with a big load of stargazers and two blocks of oasis. A lengthy debate could lead to that or a fistful of carnations.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Katherine said eventually, having turned off her smile. She seemed to be concentrating on her task. “How long have I been working here?”

  “As long as we’ve been open,” Nick said. “Five years, is it? Six? I remember you came in on my first day. We didn’t know anything, then, did we?”

  He knew what she was going to say, and in a way didn’t mind the prospect of it. But for the moment he’d try to fend it off with a cosy reminiscence.

  “You hadn’t a clue,” Katherine said. “Do you remember trying to smash that vase in the backyard?”

  It was still there, on the shelf: no one would ever buy it, and it was a sort of mascot for the whole enterprise.

  “The thing is,” Katherine said. “I’ve been thinking about what I really want to do.”

  He listened, kindly, as she explained that she’d enjoyed it, but she might as well stop; she might, she thought, even do an Open University degree now that the kids were grown-up. “Of course,” she said, “I’d stay until you found someone to replace me.”