But there was not much to practise for, and even those competitions on the horizon, they wondered whether they could justify the expense of travel and accommodation. Not that they’d say so to each other. The practising only took up a couple of hours a day; in the evenings there were books to read; there was the trip, once a week, to Rotherham to the library to change their books—they both liked biography, Shirley at the moment reading a life of Disraeli, Philip on the third volume of a life of Tchaikovsky. The house had never been so clean, the garden so well weeded. People left them alone. Everyone knew what Phil’s position was. He wasn’t a blackleg, but he wasn’t part of the strike either, and anyone with any sense would have worked out that he wasn’t far off retirement, and wouldn’t much care if the pit closed down. It was all right for him: he’d take the redundancy money and he’d have his pension soon enough.
But they were left alone, and it was clear how much Philip had enjoyed his audience in the first days of the strike, how much he’d enjoyed explaining to them why he wasn’t going to join in, why they were wasting their time, what he thought of Arthur Scargill, all in all. He hadn’t said to them that he thought Mrs. T was doing a good job for the country, Falklands nonsense notwithstanding, but if they’d persevered, it would have come in time to that. What he missed, now, was an audience. He’d allowed himself to assume that the professional duty of the NUM men, coming round to lecture him, would go on indefinitely, allowing him to ask them awkward questions and lecture them more extensively as long as the strike lasted. Perhaps he’d thought that once Thiselton had run out of things to say, he’d bring in the regional heads of the NUM to talk to Philip, and so on upwards until Philip found himself, with great joy, talking down Scargill himself in his own front room. What he hadn’t imagined was that Thiselton would just give up, go away and leave Philip in peace, with no one to lecture on the iniquities of the strike, the foolishness of the whole enterprise and its inevitable disaster, no one but Shirley. Shirley couldn’t give up. She had to put up with it.
She was dusting in the front room when, through the curtains, she saw Helen coming up the path with a young man she didn’t know. Her first reaction was relief, fast followed by wonderment at what the young man seemed to have on. She dashed to the front door, taking off the housecoat she wore for cleaning and hanging it quickly in the cupboard under the stairs. She wanted to have a better look.
“You could have phoned,” she said, looking him up and down. “And who’s this?”
The young man was wearing the sort of clothes—well, she wouldn’t want to say what first came to mind. But the second thing that came to mind was the sort of pantomime they’d taken the children to at Christmas. His shoes were black and shiny, and witchily pointed—you’d fall over your feet in shoes like that. His trousers were jeans, but black and tight enought to cut off his circulation. The young lads in Tinstone liked to get dressed up, and that was only to be expected. But they wouldn’t wear a shirt like that, though it was brilliantly white and obviously brand new; the sleeves billowed like a girl’s blouse, and the collar was just daft, a butterfly collar of the sort old rich people used to wear with dinner jackets and bow-ties. He wasn’t wearing a bow-tie, though, but had two buttons undone; a dark flurry of hair, trimmed short like pencil strokes, showed at the top of his chest. He was a handsome young man, with shining white teeth, long eyelashes about his dark blue eyes, and a little flush of pink in his dark face as he smiled, but his clothes couldn’t have been more ridiculous.
“This is Daniel,” Helen said. “I’m sorry about his car, lowering the tone of the neighbourhood, but it couldn’t be helped.”
“We don’t care anything about things like that round here,” Shirley said, ushering them in. She turned and had a look; it was a long yellow car, badly bashed in, but she wasn’t in much of a position to say anything, and this might be the sort of young man, like a student or something, for whom a car like that might be amusing. They used to drive old London taxis, young men like that, years ago, she remembered. “I think your dad’s in the garden.”
Once they were in the front room, the young man produced a cellophane-wrapped cake, a shop cake, from behind his back. “We thought we’d contribute something in case you were going to make us a cup of tea,” he said cheekily.
“That’s nice of you,” she said, but she recognized it as one of the cakes you could get from Rita’s shop in Tinstone. She didn’t think much of shop-bought cakes, and the sort that Rita sold, she wouldn’t ever have offered those to a guest. If they were going to bring a cake, they could have got one in Sheffield or even in Rotherham.
“Daniel wanted to see where I grew up,” Helen said.
“Well, there’s not much to see,” Philip said, coming in from the garden. Helen introduced Daniel to him. “There’s where you went to school, and the playing-fields out the back, but I wouldn’t go anywhere near the mine this afternoon. They’ve been having trouble down there.”
“Is it the police?” Daniel asked.
“No,” Philip said. “It’s a lot of idiotic hot-heads with nothing better to do than sit there day after day. It’s worse elsewhere, I hear—they’re throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at each other down at Orgreave coking plant. But it’s bad enough here.”
“There’s people down there never worked at Tinstone,” Shirley said. “People never been down a mine, come to that, don’t care anything for it, just want to make trouble.”
Daniel blushed for some reason. “Are those your cups?” he said, getting up and looking at the mock-mahogany display cabinet, crowded with trophies, large and small; they were almost an extra source of light in the little room, they shone so sharply. “I’ve heard about your winning prizes for dancing.”
“Ballroom dancing,” Philip corrected mildly. “In the Latin.”
“I’ll put the kettle on,” Shirley said.
“I was telling him on the way over,” Helen said, putting her bag on the floor and sitting down, “about the Latin competitions you’ve won. I was saying—”
But Daniel’s attention had been caught by the way Helen sat down, in a single graceful movement, and by the way her knees, popping out from her above-knee skirt like bashful bald angels, held together and slid with somehow the same grace to the side of the armchair, her lovely unclad calves making an ideal chevron to the floor. It was beautifully done, something only a finishing school or perhaps a dancing school in Rotherham could have taught; or, perhaps, something to be acquired by natural elegance. It could have been Princess Diana sitting there, and he himself sat down with a feeling of comparative lumpiness. You wouldn’t have thought this little parlour, with its ugly highlights of the elaborate cups in a glass-fronted cabinet, could have produced such natural discreet elegance.
“My dad just asked you a question,” Helen said.
“I’m sorry, Philip,” Daniel said. “I was away admiring all your trophies.”
“Oh, aye,” Helen’s dad said, with what might have been amusement; Daniel must have been staring at Helen’s legs clearly enough. “I just wondered where you met our Helen.”
“Oh,” Daniel said. “I think we first met at Casanova’s, in Sheffield, the nightclub. We’ve got friends in common,” he added, in a rush, in case they should think their daughter was the sort of girl who picked up strangers.
“There’s a lot of skill in disco dancing,” Shirley said gnomically, calling through from the kitchen; it wasn’t far to call. “There’s competitions for it.”
“Of course, we’re too old for that,” Philip said. “High kicks and that. I’ve not seen our Helen do it. Is she good at it?”
“It’s not like that, Dad,” Helen said sharply, and Daniel could see the difference between “disco dancing,” as Philip and Shirley had perhaps seen it executed on stage in a Blackpool ballroom, men in all-in-one rhinestone-encrusted Lycra doing their damnedest to kick their own eyebrows, and the sort of “dancing” that happened on the under-lit dance-floor at Casanova’s, which
was basically estate agents in suits, like him, shifting from one foot to another, and making odd clay-modelling gestures with their hands.
“Oh, I dare say,” Philip said. “Do you like dancing, Daniel?”
“I’ve never really learnt,” Daniel said, seeing this as the easiest reply. “I enjoy it, and I’m sure I’d enjoy it more if I knew what to do properly.”
“He’s an embarrassment on the dance-floor, this one,” Helen said.
“Try and be a bit more polite, love,” Shirley said, coming through with, obviously, the best china, the milk in a little pink floral jug and the shop-bought cake in neat slices on top of a pile of matching floral plates. “You want him to come again, don’t you?”
“He’ll think you weren’t brought up to know how to behave,” Philip added, with that married-couple thing, not exactly finishing each other’s sentences, but chiming in with matching responses. “Would you like to learn?”
“Learn to dance?” Daniel said.
“I can show you the first rudiments of the tango,” Philip said, and was, incredibly, up on his feet in a second, his arm outstretched. Daniel couldn’t believe he was serious, and was half expecting the two women to burst out laughing—apart from anything else, there was no space to dance in this little room, with its bulging fat tasselled three-piece suite decorated with a brown forestry pattern around the low coffee-table. But Helen and Shirley were looking at Philip with shy indulgence; they knew what a generous thing he was offering to a non-dancer like Daniel.
Daniel’s hesitation was clear, and Helen said, “Go on, he’s just going to show you the first position.” So Daniel did, and with his elbows stiff, allowed himself to be held by Philip, a good eight inches shorter than him.
“That’s no good,” Philip said. “I can see you’ve not learnt to dance. It looks like a stiff dance, but you can’t hold yourself as stiffly as that,” and he took one of Daniel’s arms, then the other, shaking it until it seemed to move in a single wave from wrist to shoulder. “There,” Philip said, “and try not to hold your head like that, and your feet like—no, not quite, more like—” he kicked Daniel’s right foot, then nudged it, then the left “—no, don’t move your right foot, that was just right, and then, soon as I touch your left, you move it, let’s try again.”
It took half an hour before Daniel was remotely in the correct starting position for a tango; Helen and Shirley had drunk the teapot dry, and when Daniel finally collapsed, amazed and exhausted, into the armchair, Shirley had to go out to boil some more water for the pot. Philip looked at him, his eyes shining with laughter.
“It’s not as easy as it looks, is it?” he said.
“It’s not as easy as it looks,” Daniel said to Helen, later in the car, as they were driving back towards Sheffield.
“It’s easier if you start learning when you’re younger,” Helen said. “You’ve got used to putting your body in all sorts of strange positions, so standing naturally, it doesn’t seem natural at all to you. You could still learn, though.”
“Really?” Daniel said. “It’s not one of those things you have to start when you’re six?”
“Well, if you wanted to be really good, you’d have to start young,” Helen said. “I don’t say you couldn’t learn to do it so that it would look all right.”
“I’d like that,” Daniel said. “Do you think I could learn?”
“I don’t see why not,” Helen said. “I don’t know what your mother was thinking of, not sending you to dancing lessons. Everyone ought to learn how to dance.”
“I’ll find a dancing school in Sheffield,” Daniel said. “Do you know one?”
“You want to ask my mum and dad to teach you,” Helen said. “You won’t find anyone in Sheffield knows as much about the tango as them. It’d be good for him. It wouldn’t always be him holding you, you know. You’d mostly get to dance with my mum.”
“Oh, that makes all the difference,” Daniel said. “Wouldn’t I get to dance with you?”
“You can dance with me at Christmas,” Helen said. “When you’ve reached the required standard. I’ve not the patience of my mum and dad.”
“Would they really teach me?”
“I don’t see why not,” Helen said. “It’d give them something to do. They might even start thinking about taking on other pupils. They’re not going to be competing much longer, and my dad’s going to retire from the mines as soon as he reasonably can. They ought to have something to do other than sit around moaning about Scargill and the NUM. The heavens bless us, what’s that terrible noise?”
That terrible noise, just there on the Golden Mile where everything else was decrepit and broken and closed, was the bang and slap and howl of a broken fan-belt. It was the one thing Daniel hadn’t thought about in his worries for the Cortina’s ability to get them there and back. The car limped to the side of the road.
“What are we going to do now?” Daniel said. “Shall I call the AA?”
“If I were you, Daniel,” Helen said, laughing hilariously, “I’d leave this wreck where it’s landed up, and forget about it. I think it’s a bit beyond the care of the AA.”
“You can get in trouble for just abandoning a car,” Daniel said. “And how are we supposed to get home?”
“Well, let’s see,” Helen said. “There’s a bus stop over there’ll take us into town, and from there you can get the fifty-one all the way home. It’s what normal people do, Daniel. And I tell you what, tomorrow, if you like, you can go out and buy a brand new car. I bet you’ve got enough money. How does that sound?”
“Gi’o’er,” Daniel said. “Are you cross, love?”
He’d never called her love before, but she didn’t seem to mind. “No, I think it’s right funny,” she said. “Are we going to get that bus, then?”
There was nothing else to be done. Daniel emptied the car of anything he wanted to keep, and locked it one last time. It was quite sad, standing at the bus-stop looking at the rusted, reproachful expression of its front grille.
“Do you want to do something later this week?” he said eventually.
“Oh, I’m coming home with you,” Helen said, with astonishment. “What did you think, Daniel?”
It seemed both as if the day would never come, and as if every day it slouched a little closer, lumpily approaching from across the moors as the seasons came and went. Whatever tasks occupied a day, at some point the thought of the court case would elbow its way in, and it was always a painful one; her heart would kick off, the sensation of ants running up and down her arms. Katherine could be in town, or doing the housework, or cooking, or out for the day in the car, or in anyone’s company. If she managed to go on talking—and nobody raised the subject, even Malcolm through kindness or renunciation, an unspoken decision that it had nothing to do with him—then it would keep at bay. She could go on about the weather. She could agree with Anthea or Kenneth Warner or any of the neighbours that the state of the road was shocking for something only thirty years old, that the council certainly neglected this side of town out of envy. She could talk about the coal strike. She could discuss anything trivial and meaningless, expounding on the children’s careers. Daniel had taken to coming for Sunday lunch almost every week, and often these days bringing his friend Helen too. They were good at talking about their lives, what they’d been up to, and Katherine was grateful that for days afterwards she could keep conversation going with any number of people with the news of what Helen’s father thought of the coal strike, or the interesting and surprising fact that Daniel had started taking informal dancing lessons from him—he’d been a champion ballroom dancer until very recently. All these topics of conversation, carefully cultivated and mentally practised, and brought out with care for each listener—she tried to remember not to bring them up more than once, though of course it happened—successfully kept the ugly hot thought from her head. The thought that before long she was going to have to go to court, and be questioned in public as a witness against Nick.
If she made an effort, she could take an interest in whatever they had been up to, as well, and that would have the same sort of effect, too. But if silence fell, as it sometimes did even when she was sitting with Anthea and Caroline in Anthea’s lounge in the morning, she could guarantee that the immediate horrible thought of her approaching day in court would come to mind, draining her features and tensing her wrists. “Are you all right?” Anthea said once. “You look quite pale.”
Nick’s trial had a horrible Christmas-like aspect, the way it trod closer and closer with gleeful and unwarning annunciations. Nobody was opening Advent-calendar windows, or reminding the world in shop windows that there were only twenty-seven days to go until Nick’s trial. But as time went on she was contacted by the authorities; had to be interviewed again by the police; had to be informed of the practical questions of being a witness in a criminal trial. These she kept to herself, only telling an unresponding Malcolm afterwards. They were horrible not in themselves but as reminders of the unexperienced unpleasantness that was still to come. The worst of it was that she could not believe Nick was going through a tenth of this dread. Wherever he was—was he in prison, was he out on some kind of licence?—she knew that his temperament would accept whatever was coming for him with acquiescence, and would, if it came to that, take prison with the same spirit. Sometimes she was encouraged to believe that the fatalist in him would let him plead guilty and make a fair end of it. But that wouldn’t happen. He was one of those who would be surprised, in any circumstances, to learn that anyone could think him guilty, and he certainly didn’t believe himself to be anything but innocent. In any case, she knew she would never see him again.
The Northern Clemency Page 54