The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  “That’s a nice big car you’ve got there,” Alice said.

  “I know,” Katherine said. “I don’t know what Malcolm was thinking of. I suppose once you’ve had three children hanging round the house and all wanting lifts at the same time, you go on thinking in those terms even when two of them are gone.”

  “Useful if you ever wanted anything moving,” Alice said, and they giggled a little.

  “Ah, well,” Katherine said, and they took a regretful sip from their glasses of white wine. “I suppose I’d better be getting back.”

  “No hurry,” Alice said, reaching for the bottle.

  “No, they can wait,” Katherine said. “I know what we’ll be getting all evening, anyway, from Chairman Mao over there. No point in hurrying the inevitable.”

  Since Katherine had given up her job, she’d taken to dropping in at Alice’s around four thirty or five. It was at Alice’s suggestion, and they both enjoyed the regularity of it. Of course, at first they’d had a cup of tea and a cake, but one day Alice had said, when Katherine was getting up to go, “Do you fancy a glass of wine?” And Katherine, of course, had said, “Oh, I didn’t know it was as late as that,” and Alice had assured her that it was a real offer, not one to get rid of her. Since then, they’d dropped the tea, taking turns to bring a little bottle of wine. It was nothing too awful, a bottle lasted them two days, and they’d carried on with the cake, but there was no nonsense about cups of tea. “Oh, Mother,” Alice’s boy Francis would say, before he’d left home, if he happened to come in, but not seriously, and it was generally only when Bernie came back that Katherine put her glass down and, regretfully, went.

  “I saw that Nick the other day,” Alice said. “In the post office in Ranmoor. He was struggling with the mysteries of recorded delivery.”

  “Did you say hello?”

  “Oh, he wouldn’t know me from Adam,” Alice said. “Do you not miss working there?”

  Katherine considered, taking a ladylike sip. She could have been remembering anything.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. Then, eventually—it was not a logical answer, Alice had not asked it but she was answering the question that was hanging in the air—she said, “It was only that once. And that was ages ago. It seems ridiculous for it to have become something to make all this fuss over.”

  Between the two of them, they had gradually, over the years, slipped back to the point they had started from, attained by degrees their initial level of intimacy. It had come about by degrees, by little allusions on Katherine’s part when she felt ready, and by an ordinary decent pretence on Alice’s part that she didn’t know any of it. These were necessary steps, and by this mutual process of respect and pretence they’d got to the point of being able to talk frankly and openly about the situation when no one else was about. It was almost the most interesting thing that had ever happened to Katherine—the most interesting thing she’d ever done. In return, Alice had been able to tell her all of the most interesting things that had ever happened to her. They were not, by comparison, all that interesting or tellable, but she talked expansively to Katherine as best anyone could who had, after all, met her husband when she was eighteen, who had married him at twenty-two, who had never been to bed or been tempted to go to bed with anyone else. Alice’s story was less forceful than Katherine’s, which tended to circle round one episode, one event, one afternoon, even, but it had aspects that she couldn’t tell to anyone else.

  “It wasn’t exactly just that one time, though,” Alice said reprovingly.

  “Oh, but it was—”

  “I mean, that’s not what’s worrying you,” Alice said. “You might only have done it, taken that step, once, done what you’re not supposed ever to have done, but in your head it went on a lot before that and a lot after.”

  “I suppose there’s something in that,” Katherine said.

  “It was the thinking about it in advance, and the extracting yourself from it afterwards, that’s what did the damage.”

  “I suppose so,” Katherine said humbly. “Though the afterwards part, that was when the whole situation became a lot easier. It was doing it when I didn’t want to any more.”

  “They’ll be wondering where you are,” Alice said, nodding at over the road. “Have a bit more.”

  “I will,” Katherine said.

  “But afterwards …”

  “Well, afterwards,” Katherine said practically, “naturally, I couldn’t feel the same about him, I didn’t even like him that much. I couldn’t see what it was all about, and then I noticed that in the six months before I’d actually called in sick three times. Of course, I’d not been sick, I’d just found I had other things to do those days. Before—you know, I couldn’t have imagined being sick on a day when I might see Nick, spend a day with him putting stupid flowers in vases. I’d have dragged myself in even if I’d had bubonic plague. And then all at once I was looking at him one day, and I thought how completely stupid and—you know, somehow unmanly he looked, stripping the foliage off lilies. I never compared him to Malcolm, I never let myself go down that route, but then I thought, you know, what Malcolm does, it’s just a bit better, a bit more dignified. And then Malcolm got this promotion, and he gets bonuses now, and he said at the time—in a way this was funny—he said, ‘You don’t seem all that keen about going to work any more. You used to look forward to it and talk about it more.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I suppose that’s true.’ I thought about it for a minute. I’d rather not be doing anything.”

  “Even though there’s less to do around the house, I suppose,” Alice said.

  “That’s true,” Katherine said. “Though Daniel, even with his little flat in Crookes, he still comes home with his washing, to save time. Jane’s always been a bit more self-reliant, I imagine she’s coping quite well in London—at least she never says anything that makes you think otherwise. We were going to go down next month, Jane’s got a sort of sofabed in the sitting room she says we can sleep on, a kind of Japanese thing called a futon, though Malcolm says he doesn’t much fancy that and what about a hotel—”

  “London prices,” Alice said. “Stick to your Japanese affair, save yourself a hundred pounds.”

  “That’s what I said,” Katherine said comfortably.

  “What did Nick say in the end?” Alice said.

  “I think he was secretly a bit relieved,” Katherine said. “That sounds terrible, but I think he was. Anyway, he’s got a school-leaver. It all seems to have worked out very well. Here’s Bernie, I’ll have to be off.”

  “All right, Katherine?” Bernie said, coming into the kitchen. “Don’t dash off on my account, it’s nice to have company.”

  “No, I saw my boys coming in twenty minutes ago,” Katherine said. “I’ll have to go and make the peace.”

  “Make the peace?” Bernie said. “Hello love,” he said, kissing Alice.

  “They’ll be hammer and tongs by now,” Katherine said. “You don’t know how lucky you are.”

  “Oh, we all have our little crosses to bear,” Bernie said, smiling because, after all, they didn’t really. “Is that a letter from Sandra I saw?”

  “Alexandra,” Alice said. “Yes, I left it until you got home. The post didn’t come till ten.”

  “Shocking,” Bernie said, and together they said goodbye to Katherine, before together going into the sitting room, opening the envelope with the Australian stamps, and Bernie, as they’d got used to, reading it out loud to Alice.

  Tim had got to the city library, as was his habit, within half an hour of its opening. Sometimes when the porter opened the yellowish varnished double doors at nine thirty he was already waiting on the chalky white steps with his two old plastic supermarket bags, one filled with pads and paper, foil-wrapped sandwiches, biros and books, the other with a towel and swimming trunks, soap and shampoo for later. The porter had a pitted beetroot for a face, and, neckless, chomped on his ill-fitting dentures as he let in Tim and the other two or three impatien
ts. He never acknowledged these early regulars as his jaw rose horribly into the middle of his face like a horrible motor. Tim did not acknowledge him, either: his blue uniform with its insistent badges, shiny as if it had been through a rainstorm, put him on the far side of some line of demarcation.

  There were three doors leading out of the echoing marble lobby; in front, the general library, for anyone who thought reading was for entertainment, cheap sops to keep them quiet, and to the right, the business library, full of telephone directories. Tim despised them both. Two at a time, he went up the august marble stairs to the first floor, where the reference library was. If you carried on up, or took the strangely two-doored lift, which made the exact same clank at the exact same spot in its ascent, you got to the art gallery with its op-art café, furnished with tables and chairs all red and plastic and circular. Tim despised that, too, with its sense of money and fatuous donation. But he liked the reference library, liked the sudden squeak of the floor under your shoes as you came through the double doors, liked the newspaper smell of it, and the light through the high, many-paned windows. He didn’t go into the main library. That was where his dad went.

  There was a new security check at the entrance, a sort of arch detecting some small slip of metal in each book. Until six months ago, you could still get a small book out in the inside pocket of your parka, hidden in the orange quilted lining, as Tim’s bookshelves at home demonstrated. Quite big books, too, though he couldn’t now remember taking the illustrated survey of European reptiles, and it had been so long since he’d looked at it, he’d often thought of smuggling it back in. But he didn’t know if the detecting device worked in both directions, or just when you were leaving.

  The girl at the entrance was settling herself for the morning. It was the blonde one, the Alice-in-Wonderland one with the hairband and the high-necked dresses with flowers on them. Tim knew all her dresses. She raised her head a little when he came in, but not enough to look at him. Some of the other librarians did look at him, the older ones, boldly, and making comments to each other, but she never did.

  He made his way to his place. Marx had had his desk in the British Library where he wrote all of Das Kapital, a copy of which Tim now had in his plastic bag, the book bag. Tim had his own table, D3. It was in the politics niche. The compressed thoughts of ideal lives rose lavishly around him. Politics was not a school subject, and though in other niches, schoolgirls attempting revision nested with their notes in their round, vacant handwriting, whispering and giggling, the only people Tim ever shared a table with were serious idealists, their lives’ works in frayed plastic bags too. It was good to have left school. There was nobody here to mark what he did, and his own approval was unalloyed by dissent. Sometimes he thought of showing one of the old men over the table the sheer body of his notes, preparing for something, he didn’t know what, just knowledge in the urgent spiky handwriting, half pressing through the thin paper. He knew his own handwriting so well and approved of it so much. He could effortlessly construct their ideal responses.

  Taking his seat, he placed his bags on the table before getting out his block of blank lined paper, and his copy of the first volume of Das Kapital. It wasn’t the mock-shouty edition Penguin published, but the fat blank one, the size of your hand, that a small English publisher kept going by the Soviets published. The cover was thick and flocculent, like beige blotting paper, and the title printed in plain red ink. He put the bags underneath the table. He’d spent a good deal of time making it look read, before bringing it out in public. But now he really had worn it down with reading, little vertical lines next to important points, stabs of exclamation marks next to really important points, all like streaks of blue rain at the edges of each page.

  On the other side of the table, Mad Mary was putting down her books and bags. She was a regular. Recently, he’d even started having his sandwich with her, though she had nothing to talk about except her neighbours’ unreasonable complaints about her six cats. “I ask you,” she always ended up, “is it really too much to ask for, to be left in peace?” She had an exploded air: her hair, the contents of her pockets, her stuffing almost escaping from the gaps in her surface, held together inadequately with safety-pins and amateurish tacking. She must have been nearly fifty, and spoke sometimes of her mother with unspecifying regret. Where she lived, he didn’t know; or what she was working on. She liked to build up piles of books about anarchism, truffling through them, snuffling with amusement for, surely, Tim’s benefit. She wouldn’t speak to him until she was settled, and he watched her, muttering, “Let’s see—ah—I think …” gather twelve books, one by one, laying them carefully on the table. Tim regretted, as ever, not foiling her in some small way, perhaps by claiming that biography of—who?—Ba-ku-nin, he read upside-down, before she got here.

  “Good morning, Tim,” she whispered noisily over the table when, at last, she was settled. “Awful developments chez Brewster. I’ll tell you later what the swines said to me last night.”

  “Oh dear,” Tim said, and got his head down, with his blue biro chewed to bits at one end, not encouraging her.

  The library filled steadily in the course of the morning. By twelve thirty, he was hungry, and faintly radiant with the sense of absorbed wisdom. How right Marx was! How he saw through everything! If only people could be given the opportunity to read what he said, everything surrounding them would crumble into dust, and something never yet seen on the face of the earth would come into being to solve everything. He rummaged in his bag for the foil-wrapped sandwiches and the little Thermos of tea. It was a nice day, and he’d have it sitting on the wall outside the theatre. Better, he genuinely couldn’t remember what the sandwiches were this morning. A nice surprise. Mad Mary was too fast for him and, pretending to be finished with her work at exactly the same time as him, entirely by chance, stood up with her own lunch bag in her fist.

  “I thought one might go to the Peace Gardens today,” she said, in her grand, throaty gurgle. “I don’t suppose you’d care to join me?”

  “Why not,” Tim said wretchedly, only hoping that the Sparts weren’t outside, selling the paper, to witness his horrible friend again.

  “The most frightful thing happened,” Mad Mary said, sweeping out of the library. It was an oddity of hers that, while working, she was hot on shushing anyone who made a noise, even an accidental dropping of something, but as soon as she stopped, she would scamper through the library talking at normal volume without noticing that she, sometimes, was being hushed in her turn. “Those awful neighbours of mine. They said that Arthur had done his business in their garden. They came round and accused me, face to face. Well, of course, they don’t know Arthur from any of the others, they think all cats are the same, and they didn’t say Arthur, naturally, but I knew it was Arthur they were accusing.”

  With a series of encouraging hmms, Tim got Mad Mary through the doors and down the library steps. The Sparts weren’t there, thank goodness; probably down Fargate supporting the comrades’ struggle in the mines. Mad Mary’s story wended on. It seemed to be heading towards actual violence but, as most of her stories did, ended up demonstrating her absolutely admirable grasp of the issues involved. Still, she was an anarchist.

  They ate their lunch on a bench in the Peace Gardens, people staring at them as they passed, a teenage boy with his mad granny, listening to her stories of cats. Afterwards he gave her the slip, walked three times round the City Hall before returning to the reference library. The Alice-in-Wonderland girl was out, having her lunch. Tim thought of going straight to the swimming-pool, but his mother’s warning about cramp and death if you swam after eating intervened. He went back to his desk.

  After lunch it was never the same and, to be honest, he footled with Marx for an hour or two, his head bent over the rumpled book with its stains and deliberate coffee-mug rings, not taking much in, just enjoying the thought of himself reading Marx and how he must look to everyone else. The girl at the desk. His eyes went repeat
edly over phrases; he came back in his head to Mad Mary and her seven cats. He was not sure what he thought, what he ought to think, about animals and their rights. Trudy thought one thing; Stig thought another. They’d argued about it, whether it was at the root of everything, or whether it was a distraction, even if it was a symptom of something else. Stig and Trudy had gone on, quite late into the night once or twice, in Trudy’s flat on the fourth floor with its twinkling view of Sheffield and the remote hoot of the last trains into the station at the bottom of the valley. Tim wasn’t sure what he thought. But there was something to be thought about ownership, and private property, and Mad Mary’s seven cats were definitely that, in a sort of illusory way.

  He always started to get a little sleepy around three.

  Tim packed his things, trying as ever to look as if he was just popping out with both his bags and would be back soon. A “goodbye” with Mad Mary often turned into a hissed revival of her last anecdote, now that she’d had time to brood further over it. But today she just waved vaguely.

  The swimming-bath at Glossop Road was usually quiet between three thirty and five. The school parties had gone, and the few after-work swimmers not yet arrived. It was an old bath, with still some slipper baths in the basement—he had no idea whether anyone still used them, now that everyone had bathrooms at home. He thought of the 1930s, a grand pity coming over him as he undid his shirt in one of the many little lobbies and odd square corners of the changing rooms. He’d never much enjoyed coming here from school—he was always a bit shy, and hadn’t liked the noise or the violence or the smell of mould everywhere, ascending the joints in the tiles like trained creepers. He liked it now, though: the stern square ford of the disinfected trough at the exit, the ugly bluish light from over the swimming-pool, always with one humming on and off, throbbing like a migraine, and the weird ranks of seating in the gallery for some swimming gala that would never happen.