The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  But that hadn’t taken long, and in only three or four weeks he and Katherine were sitting in a pub, the mysteriously soignée school-leaver left in charge on a Thursday lunchtime, having a farewell drink. It was busy, for a Thursday lunchtime, and embarrassingly they had to settle for a fragile little table in a nook, hidden from the rest of the half-lit mahogany interior, just like adulterers. The time, unexpectedly, flew by—Katherine was thinking of taking a little holiday, a City Break perhaps to Munich, which she’d heard was nice, just her and Malcolm, leaving fifteen-year-old Tim to fend for himself, and they looked over her brochures together. It was surprising when the landlord rang the bell for time at half past two. They’d managed to have a conversation for once without awkward corners, and would still see each other, of course … Privately, Nick doubted it.

  That had been two years ago, and his relationship with Amanda, the school-leaver, had gone in a quite different direction. He’d even found himself ticking her off when, very occasionally, she turned up late. There was no question of her being anything but an employee, with her boyfriends and her silly concerns, and with her being—how had that happened?—young enough to be Nick’s daughter. The shop, too, seemed to change with Katherine’s departure, less like a game or a toy, with its Regency stripes and its absurd, comic vases that nobody would ever buy. Some vases people did start buying came into the stock: massive, greenish glass vases from Czechoslovakia, oblongs, hourglasses, rosebowls, simple and modern, and for the first time when Nick did the books he paid attention to what the real figures would have been, and realized that beneath the shop’s apparently spectacular profits lay a small but true one; enough, certainly, to live on. It seemed to be growing, too, and for two years he’d been summoning up the energy to do what he was doing now: spending a weekend with Jimmy in the country and telling him at the end that he was very grateful for everything, and would like to pay him back his original investment, and run the shop as a straightforward business from now on. That was what he was here to do. He saw no reason why Jimmy would be difficult about it. It seemed perfectly reasonable to him that, having run a shop for Jimmy’s benefit for ten years, and having gone on who knows how many dodgy and frightening journeys to Morocco, and Iran before that, Jimmy would be happy to hand over the shop as a kind of retirement reward. Jimmy was doing well: perhaps he’d even give it to him without asking Nick to pay back the capital. No, he wouldn’t do that—Nick couldn’t see him standing in the hot, creaking hallway, handing over the deeds with tears in his eyes—and in a moment a more plausible scenario arrived, in which Jimmy and the thuggish “butler,” by the side of the lake, a good hearing distance from the house, kicked Nick to the ground and beat him into gratitude.

  Well, it still had to be done, but probably as late in the weekend as possible.

  Jimmy yawned, theatrically, in the library. “Tea” was over, in the form of four fat whiskies for Jimmy, and, eventually, to coincide with the last, one for Nick—“There’s no ice, though I could get some, I suppose.” A smiling maid had come in at half past five to clear Jimmy’s glass and the tray; she had looked broad-faced and foolish, like a milkmaid with a touch of mongolism. The air in the library was stale and heavy as tweed. The yawn might have been connected to some bell-pulley system; in a moment or two Laura came in noiselessly, suddenly appearing by the side of Nick’s chair.

  “Nick’ll be wanting to see the grounds,” Jimmy said. “You’re not deep in anything, are you, darling?”

  “Nothing I’d like better,” Laura said. “You’d like to see the grounds, would you?”

  “I’d be fascinated,” Nick said.

  “Where’s Sonia?” Jimmy said. “She’s here, is she? Thought she was looking forward to meeting her old friend again.”

  “I’m amazed she remembers me,” Nick said weakly. “I can only have met her—”

  “She’s up in her room on the phone,” Laura said, ignoring Nick.

  “Never off it,” Jimmy said. “Well, off you go. We’ll have dinner at eight.”

  “Do you dress for dinner?” Nick said ironically, and in any case he had nothing to dress in, probably not even a jacket.

  “What—for the pub?” Jimmy said. “No, fuck off. Tell Sonia if you see her that she can come out with us too this evening.”

  They went. Laura ruffled Jimmy’s hair as she crossed the room, getting a grunt in return. She pushed one of the tall windowed doors, shards of paint falling as the door opened, and stepped out on to the terrace. Nick followed her. “We’re getting there, I believe,” she said. In the puff sleeve of her dress was a handkerchief and a pair of sunglasses; there was nowhere else to keep anything, and she pulled out the sunglasses and put them on. “At least, there always seems to be some little man or other tinkering away at something or other. I expect it’s a bit like the Forth Bridge—once we get to some kind of presentable state the little men’ll just start doing it all over again.”

  “It’s amazing,” Nick said, meaning it, and following Laura down the terrace. The sun was obese and orange, entangled with the upper branches of the hill-cresting grove on the horizon, and the terrace faced it. A little man had been at work, perhaps today, and though half of the terrace was thick with grass, growing through the interstices of the paving-stones and even through the cracks, the other half had been recently stripped and scrubbed, the bald stones clean. The workman or-men had gone; they had worked up to where a crudely carved statue, a shrouded and weatherworn figure, lay in three broken pieces on the paving-stones, themselves broken and sagging like a mattress.

  “Fucking nora,” Laura surprisingly said. “I thought we were supposed to be doing something about those wretched statues. Jimmy! Jimmy!”

  Jimmy, in time, appeared at the open double doors of the library. “What is it? Oh, fuck,” he said. “They’re supposed to be fixing those things. How can they still be falling off? You could understand if there was a gale or something.”

  “When did that fall off?” Laura said. “You’ve been in the library all afternoon. You’d have heard it, surely to God.”

  “I nodded off for a bit,” Jimmy said. “But it might have been this morning, when we were down in the village. I’ve not been out here all day. Christ knows how my fucking statues keep just falling off. It doesn’t make no sense. That’s four gone in a year and a half. You think I’m going to shell out to replace them?”

  “No, darling,” Laura said. “I don’t think anything whatsoever. In any case, they’re going to keep on falling.”

  He came up and, scowling, bent over to inspect the four-foot figure, its head separated like a carved-up fruit from its shawled torso, its torso from its swathed stumpy legs, joined together. “I can’t understand it,” Laura said. “It’s awfully bad-quality stone, though. You see how it breaks when it falls—it must be, I don’t know, shale or sandstone or something.”

  “I know it breaks when it falls, darling,” Jimmy said. “I don’t know why it should fall in the first place when there’s not a puff of wind.”

  “You know,” Laura said. “It’s so hot, and it’s been like it for days. It might be that, you know, being made out of low-grade stone, it dries out and then, I don’t know, it cracks and falls over, bang. Something like that.”

  Jimmy scratched his head, hunkered down, poked ineffectually at the statue. The stone was something grainy, blackened at its old surfaces but orange as old butter where it had cracked open. At the bottom was carved a single word: DEMOSTHENES. Nick wondered why, since it could hardly be read from the ground and, if the figure had ever been supposed to be identifiable by anyone, the stone’s carved features had long since worn away to a snowman-like anonymous bluntness. From the base, three rusty iron spikes protruded where it had once been attached.

  “I don’t know about that,” Jimmy said reasonably. “I don’t see where it’s supposed to have cracked in the heat. It looks as if it fell over in one piece to me, just like the other one last month.”

  “Come on, I’l
l show you the rest,” Laura said.

  “Don’t go too close to the house,” Jimmy said, walking back, waggling his arms as he went, flexing his fingers like a pianist against the sticky heat. “Or the philosophers’ll get you.”

  “What philosophers?” Nick said, when they were safely down the steps into the formal Italian garden, out of the range of any more projectile statues.

  “They’re all philosophers, supposedly,” Laura said. “You saw the statues, caryatids, whatever, round the top of the house. The one that just fell over. There’s supposed to be twenty-four, they’re all supposed to be the world’s most famous philosophers or something. Most of them have togas on—well, I think they all do, even the ones who weren’t Greek, probably because, you know, it’s easier to carve a toga than whatever it would have been that Kant”—“Carnt,” she said, and Nick had to struggle for a moment to recover a strange pronunciation of a barely familiar name—“would have worn. I don’t know whether Kant”—“Carnt,”—“is actually up there, we’ve not made a proper list of them. Well, we know one of them now, the one who fell down. Did you see who it was?”

  “Domestos,” Nick said. “Or something.”

  “That doesn’t sound right,” Laura said. “The man who built the house, he had an interest in those old Greeks, supposedly, and when he wanted to put up twenty-four statues around the house, he decided to make it philosophers, though of course even by thinking up ones called Domestos he’d have run out of names. Strange thing to choose, philosophers, on a country house. The sort of thing you see on a school or a library or something in Oxford but here you’d have thought he’d choose, I don’t know, something a bit more countrified.”

  “Fox-hunters,” Nick said.

  “Not exactly that,” Laura said, looking sidelong at him. “Do you know? I believe Sonia pushes the statues off whenever she feels bored.”

  “Surely not,” Nick said.

  “Well, it’s always when she’s here that it happens,” Laura said. “Not that you could tell that to Jimmy. Tell me, how long have you known him?”

  The Indian garden was intricate, tawdry and spikily barren, like an ugly Victorian mourning brooch. It had recently been heavily overgrown, you could see, and had been cut back to its raw brick raised beds, the dried-up shrubs trimmed back to the recently moistened black earth. Here and there a new shoot was spurting out; at the centre of the knotty brick garden, a marble fountain copied from the courtyard in some Cairo palace, dry and stained with tears of soot. Nick started to tell her the whole story, but her attention was taken by something beyond the fountain, emerging from the hedges that bordered the whole formal garden. It was a slim graceful figure in cream; its clothes were a little middle-aged, a pair of elegant slacks and a plain man’s shirt, and the way the hair was piled up on top of the head, too, was middle-aged. But the shy walk, sidling through the narrow gap in the hedge, approaching them as if their meeting would be a matter of the sheerest coincidence, was that of a girl.

  “You don’t remember me,” the girl said, coming up to Nick and Laura, who stood with her arms folded, waiting obscurely for some apology. “But I remember you. You came with us to the zoo when I was awfully little—you showed me the penguins. I must have been a terrible pain. I’m Sonia.”

  “I remember you very well,” Nick said, after a moment. Standing in the heat of the afternoon, it dazed him. He would never have seen the child in this tall and inspecting girl, the child’s spoilt demands and insistence turned in a matter of a decade into a cool, assessing gaze that would get its own way. In that decade he had sat in a flower shop in Sheffield, and learnt to think of that as the limits of his own possibilities; the same period had transformed Sonia, and she looked at him with the eyes of one proposing to buy a mechanical vehicle. “I took you to the zoo,” he said, and both Sonia and Laura laughed at his dazedly confirming what she had happened to say.

  But he saw her that moment as if down a long event-lined vista of years, as if with this meeting, not the first but a meeting so transformed for him as to give it a sense of primacy, he had embarked on something he would always preserve and keep in a safe padded box, to take out and play with in special treasured conversations. Around them the caged beasts seemed to press against their bars and pause as they watched, and at so many points in the future he seemed to see himself saying, “I think I fell in love at once.” Sonia stood by him, with her bundled-up hair the shining colour of cold tea, the translucence of her skin and the luminous ox-like darknesses of her eyes, and was transformed from the small girl he recalled, if at all, as a scowling blonde juvenile with curls, her demands reshaping her remembered features into what a spoilt child should look like. Her features, once bunched together and resentfully squashed in a round scowling face, like a tight-pressed Brussels sprout, had spread and smoothed as she had grown, and no tension was in her calm milky face.

  It had never happened before with such an unladen freight of stupidity falling on him all at once; love had come to him differently, whether for Caroline Stacey, the tennis-playing girl down the road he had followed and lurked after when he was fifteen, or in other crushes, growing shorter and more comic with age, the girl who cut his hair and pressed her bosom to his head with, in the summer months, a dizzying wash of metallic flesh odours, who (he discovered only when he turned up one month) had married three Saturdays back and moved to Peterborough, or the tiny Indian girl, Gita, who had lived above him for six months, tormenting him with her tight black T-shirts and her heart-breakingly tiny mini-skirts, tormenting him too with her love of terrible pop records and her noisy illicit boyfriend, who stayed over Friday and Saturday nights, Marc Bolan’s breathy moans and squeals or Gita’s for some weeks giving him real anguish through the floorboards before she moved and, unexpectedly, the anguish and even the memory of her face and walk, once so vivid, evaporated in just a day or two. The girlfriends, too, though they came to mind more slowly and with less sense of a lesson to be learnt, shy clinging Susan French who had cried so, or Margaret Bollom, who had taken charge of everything, from his virginity but not hers with quiet efficiency, or Rose who he’d been seeing for the last three years in exactly that Gita-like way of staying over at weekends at her cottage in the Rivelin valley. She might have proved to do quite well for him until this very second. It had never happened before to him in such a way, such an infliction of a moment as it now happened, dazed in a hot Devon garden of ugly elaboration. It seemed an unwanted gift, when he wanted nothing to tie him further to Jimmy, least of all a daughter, and he tried to translate that vista of years into an effective barrier, the line of years between him, nearly forty and hopeless, and Sonia at only eighteen. It couldn’t be done.

  “I don’t mind,” he said, realizing with astonishment that he had been following the conversation and Sonia had asked him whether he would object if she, rather than Laura, carried on showing him round. “If you don’t mind,” he went on idiotically.

  “No,” Sonia said. “I don’t mind one bit.”

  So it was that he found himself walking with careful steps, as an amputee trying out his new-given legs which would never wear out, as a funambulist who can see the narrow woven path in the air and knows that he can, surely, walk the rope he feels beneath his rolling soles, through the garden behind this beautiful girl. She was talking about the garden—

  “I can’t see how it’s ever going to come right,” she was saying. “They’ve ripped everything up, but no one seems to know what to do next. I don’t think anyone’s even thought about planting anything, it’s just what was there before, hacked down a bit.”

  “It’s strange,” Nick said. The geography of the garden was clear to him; he felt the need to explain what he had seen. “In these houses, it all relaxes into wildness, doesn’t it?”

  “If you say so.”

  “As you get further from the house, I mean. You get the terrace, with the pots and the bay trees, and then there’s the garden with beds, where—you know—where I met you�
��”

  “That’s really ugly,” Sonia said, picking her way through an untrimmed gap in the hedge, the one she’d come through, into a lawned expanse.

  “Then there’s this,” Nick said. “It’s probably got a name.”

  And here the trees stood about in small groups, irregular and picturesque, as if by nature; but Nick saw the same principle of flower-arranging, that you grouped in odd numbers, and these threes and fives, the carefully varying sizes of the trees planted together had the air of cunning natural disposition. The rough lawn ran down to a ha-ha, and beyond it a water-meadow, the river, the railway-line.

  “My dad just calls it the parkland,” Sonia said. “I don’t know what it’s called properly. I suppose it’s just a bit of countryside that somebody put a wall round and decided it was theirs once. You’d have to let it go a little bit wild after a bit. You couldn’t keep it up otherwise.”

  “I suppose so,” Nick said. “Don’t you like it?”

  “Me?” Sonia said. “What? The whole caboodle? The whole malarkey? The entire kerfuffle?”

  “The whole caboodle,” Nick said, smiling. “I don’t think you really mean kerfuffle.”

  “Oh, I suppose I like it,” Sonia said. “Kerfuffle Towers. I don’t know why my dad decided to buy it. He keeps saying he bought it for Laura’s sake, that she liked this sort of thing, or even that he bought it for me, which is rubbish. I quite like bits of it, but I just wish it wasn’t so incredibly ugly, every bit of it.”

  Nick laughed.

  “I wasn’t expecting something quite like this, it’s true,” he said.

  “Well, you couldn’t reasonably,” Sonia said. “Unless you were prone to nightmares, you couldn’t imagine anything that looked like that. The thing is, I don’t believe my dad really wanted to live in the country. He’s much happier in London.”

  He paused, and let himself look at Sonia as she walked ahead, her loose-jointed walk across an English lawn. Her talk of ugliness seemed remote and exotic, like the appearance of a word looked at so long that it has lost its meaning.