The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  “Let us move on,” the barrister said.

  By the time Katherine was dismissed, she was exhausted. Under her warm green tweed suit, her blouse was wringing wet. She looked up, helplessly, at the public gallery. There was not only Daniel and Helen and Malcolm, but, unexpectedly, Alice Sellers, too. Alice was the only one looking directly at her, and on her face was an expression of relief. Katherine was surprised; and then she realized that, horrible as it had been, they had come near to the horrible story of her real relation with Nick but had failed to discover it. The whole thing was over. There seemed no hope for Nick, but there was no reason now to think that anyone would ever discover any of it. She could, if she liked, go home.

  The court broke for lunch, and in a moment, Malcolm and the others were there outside the courtroom.

  “Thank God that’s over,” Malcolm said. “It makes me so angry, your being dragged into all of that.”

  “It was horrible,” Katherine admitted. She couldn’t say anything else.

  “You can listen to the evidence, now, can’t you?” Helen said. “Now that you’ve done what you had to do.”

  “I suppose I can, love,” Katherine said, surprised. She had thought of going home now; but of course they would want to stay to hear what Nick had to say. His evidence would be that afternoon, the lawyers had told her.

  There was a canteen and, depositing Katherine at a table with Alice, they bought a range of dried-up sandwiches, children’s fizzy drinks and bags of crisps—a lunch for a school outing. Katherine ate it all, gratefully, shrinking into herself, not saying anything much. She kept her head down to the table. There was no risk of seeing Nick. He would be shuttled in vans between the dock and prison each day; he would be taken down to the cells between the morning and the afternoon sessions. She had no real doubt that, at the end of this, he would be sent to prison and never appear in their lives again. She was safe from him now. But she still kept her head down to the table. She felt that the barristers, with their wigs and their robes off, but still with their white bands, the instructing solicitors in their neat suits, all had listened to what she had had to say and had interpreted it lewdly, had heard the obscene innuendo in the barrister’s questions. If she raised her head, they would stare at her.

  There was no conversation to be had, or made, surely: but steadily she found herself being drawn out of her inturned concern, and found herself listening to a conversation, which seemed all but natural, about Helen’s parents, and particularly her father. Katherine knew that he was a miner, and she knew that he must be on strike, but hadn’t enquired any further. It was out of a combination of good taste and self-absorption.

  “Why doesn’t he go back to work if he feels like that?” Malcolm asked. He seemed genuinely puzzled.

  “It’s not as simple as that,” Helen said. “He could, of course he could, but they live in a small place. Everyone knows everyone in Tinstone, and there’s a bit of—I don’t know how to explain it.”

  “They call them scabs,” Malcolm said. “I know that much.”

  “And not only calling names,” Helen said. “It’s not a playground thing. They’d paint it on your house, and throw bricks through your window. The police, they can bus you in every morning but they can’t mount a guard outside your house night and day. And it would go on after the strike was over. They never forget that sort of thing in a place like Tinstone. There was a lad I were at school with, some of the other kids weren’t allowed to associate wi’ im because he were the son of a scab. That’d be during 1972, his dad were a scab, but people in Tinstone, they went on crossing the road when they saw any of them coming for years after. They probably still would, but they upped sticks and moved to Nottingham.”

  “How terrible,” Katherine said. “It’s like bullying in the playground.”

  “Well, my dad,” Helen said, “he doesn’t feel that strongly about keeping the mine going, anything like that. But he hates Scargill and he hates the union men.” It was apparent that, even here at the table in the noisy canteen, she had lowered her voice.

  “I’m sure a lot of miners feel like that, really,” Malcolm said.

  “You’d never find out, though,” Helen said. “What time does it start up again?”

  They looked at the big digital clock on the wall; surprisingly, the hour had passed.

  “I wonder how the judge stays awake in the afternoon,” Helen said sociably, as they got up. “I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to. It’s like wading through treacle between three and four for me.” Then she seemed to realize that Katherine, at least, could not fall asleep during these hearings and, squeezing her arm, said, so as to be heard only by her, “I bet you’re glad to have that over.”

  “Yes, I am,” Katherine said.

  “It can’t have been pleasant,” Helen said. “You came through it all right, though. Here we are.”

  Here was the public gallery. From here, the courtroom looked larger, and was filling up with people she had hardly observed before. Giving evidence had been like an intimate exchange between three or four of them, the larger crowd and the officials a blur, like intricate wallpaper. Katherine settled herself, making a single ineffectual gesture at her hair, and all at once, just behind her, there was a conspicuous arrival: the girl she had noticed, the girl in cream with the perfect hair. She made no kind of signal in Katherine’s direction, which was unnatural: she had spent an hour that morning staring most intently at her, and there might have been some kind of observation, the sort of covert investigation that most of the other inhabitants of the public gallery were carrying out. Instead, Katherine found herself taking stock of this girl; her long thin bony legs out of the mini-skirt, the perfect clarity of her skin, and the jacket—there was something unfamiliar and yet intended about the odd cut of it, like no jacket Katherine had ever seen close up before. She felt herself dressed in what a chain store could manufacture.

  There was a call from below; the court, the judge, the accused assembled themselves in their intricate order, fulfilling their roles. The public gallery grew quiet; the accused was Nick. At length, the agonizingly non-directed conversation was over, and she went back with Daniel, Helen and Malcolm into the public box. There was no harm, apparently, in her listening to Nick’s evidence on his own behalf now that she had given hers. She had avoided looking at him, and only now, in the witness box, did she see how quite unchanged he was. She hadn’t seen him so unaltered during the whole period of her working there, when he would, every few months, undertake a change in his hair, sweeping it from one side for a few weeks before another, having it trimmed right down; acquiring a whole set of pullovers in a previously unenvisaged shade, taking to turning up every day in a green tweed suit or in a sequence of dreadful T-shirts and shorts, as if he were playing with what might be his identity. His face, too, was the first to display the slightest change in his weight, sometimes puffing out after Christmas or narrowing after two weeks’ holiday in the sun. Now it was as it had been at bottom. He was always in a state of flux, but now, oddly, he was as he always had been, in a grey hound’s tooth jacket and a sombre blue-and-purple striped tie; that had always seemed to her to be, as it were, his default position. He took a vow; his evidence began.

  “Yes, that’s correct.”

  “Yes.”

  “I had a succession of not very interesting or important jobs. Offices, temporary jobs, serving in shops, that sort of thing.”

  “No, I didn’t have any kind of education for anything better. I thought I was lucky, to be honest.”

  “No, I’ve never had any such connections. I’ve never even seen anyone smoking a joint, to tell you the truth.”

  “Yes, that’s correct.”

  “I went there on holiday.”

  “Yes, I know—I liked Morocco a good deal, I’d made friends there. What—don’t you ever go back on holiday to places you’ve had a good time in?”

  “Mr. Reynolds,” the judge said.

  “I’m sorry, Your Honour,
” Nick said, before the judge could say anything more, but the judge explained anyway that this was a serious matter, and that it was not for him to ask questions of counsel.

  “Mr. Reynolds,” the lawyer said, “when did you have the idea to start a flower shop?”

  “It must have been around 1972.”

  “What made you decide this?”

  “I had an aunt who died, and left me some money,” Nick said bravely.

  “We will return to this aunt, but what I was really asking was, why should you have opened a flower shop? Did you have any great interest in flowers?”

  “Yes, I always liked them.”

  “And yet we have heard from Mr. Williams, your supplier at the time, that when you began buying from him, he was struck by your almost complete ignorance, not just of business but of flowers. We have his word for it that: he wondered who had told you to get into the business. How would you respond to that?”

  “I don’t know how I gave that impression,” Nick said. “I always loved flowers, it was always my dream to sell them.”

  The wrangling went on a little.

  “Let us return to the question of your aunt. In what way was she a relation of yours?”

  “The relationship was complicated—she was really a sort of cousin, I think. I never met her.”

  “Could you tell us, however, what her name was?”

  There was just the faintest flutter around Nick’s eyelids as he came out with the name; a lowering and a hovering of the gaze; whatever this name was, it wasn’t one that had ever belonged to any human being. Katherine could not bring herself to look at the jury. The lawyer went on remorselessly, exploring the biography of the aunt/ cousin who had left all her money to Nick, despite never having known him, with something close to sarcasm.

  “And, Mr. Reynolds, could you perhaps explain to us why, exactly, it might be that an elderly maiden aunt living in Cheltenham might channel her financial business through a banking organization in Belize?”

  The court, horribly, burst into laughter and was reprimanded. The girl behind Katherine did not laugh; you could feel her knees being drawn together, her face becoming prim with disapproval.

  “I put it to you …” the lawyer said, grasping his advantage, and went on to outline a tale of a Mr. Big, funding Nick’s little flower shop in Broomhill, laundering money through it, all of it connected to Nick’s suddenly sinister repeated trips to Morocco. To Katherine, who had sat for long hours in Nick’s little shop making up bouquets, trimming bits of stalk and thorn off roses, talking nonsense for hours on end, it seemed hardly less unlikely than Nick’s tale of a maiden aunt. Deep down, she still believed roughly what Nick had told her about the basis of the flower shop, long ago. That seemed the most probable thing.

  “That, Mr. Reynolds, is the plain truth, is it not?” the lawyer said.

  The lawyer for that side came to an end, and the lawyer for Nick’s side took charge.

  “My learned friend has set out a scenario under which your flower shop was funded, and a secret purpose it was designed to serve. Is there any truth in this scenario?”

  “It isn’t true, and it couldn’t possibly be,” Nick said. “If it was, everyone else would have known about it.”

  “Who do you mean by everyone else?” the lawyer said.

  “For a start,” Nick said, “my assistant would have known all about it. She would have had to.”

  Katherine felt herself becoming the subject of interest again; in her armpits a prickle of shame began.

  “Are you referring to—” a quick glance downwards “—Mrs. Katherine Glover?”

  “Yes,” Nick said. “We were very close, she would have noticed if anything was amiss.”

  “You had a close professional relationship, you are saying.”

  “More than that,” Nick said. “We had an affair.”

  There was no intake of breath, no cross-court murmur in the way there always was in American films of courtroom scenes; there was no kind of movement in the well of the court or the public gallery. Was it Katherine’s imagination that the observation of everyone around her stayed absolutely fixed on where they had been, that they would not, did not shift back to look at her?

  “I must object,” the lawyer for the other side said, rising. “I really don’t see what possible relevance this has.”

  “Does this form part of your client’s defence? Mr. Reynolds is entitled to defend himself,” the judge said, dismissing the objection.

  “Could you explain the nature of your relationship with Mrs. Glover?” the lawyer said, and they proceeded, together, on to the cooked-up story. It was absolutely horrible; it was almost entirely invented; from a single episode had spun out a passionate, two-year affair, brought to an end through Mr. Reynolds’s feelings of honour.

  “Yes, I loved her—I adored her. I would never have kept anything from her.”

  “And yet she knew absolutely nothing of any such scenario as the one my learned friend has presented to you.”

  “She would have known. She knew exactly what I knew. She was probably much more in love with me than I was with her. She would have taken the opportunity to find out everything she could about me—you know how people are when they’re deeply in love, almost obsessive. She had exactly the same degree of access to the books and to the financial arrangements of the shop that I did. She was telling you the truth, she didn’t know anything wrong. Anyway, I absolutely trusted her.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Because she had a lot more to lose than I did.”

  The other lawyer objected, and this time the judge decided that they had heard quite enough of all of that. Katherine could hardly move, could hardly breathe. There was no question of it: Nick’s testimony was so full of holes, so patently absurd, such a complete mess of lies that he was going to go down for this. For a moment she thought of tying her innocence to that string of lies, of assuring everyone that he was making up a ridiculous story, making it up to save his pasty skin. It might have done, and much of what he’d said did sound like a pathetic lie, all that about loving her, adoring her. It was simply that one unnecessary addition: the suggestion that she had loved him much more than he had loved her. Everyone who had known her at the time would have recognized the truth of that. She really had, and it was horrible to hear it put out in this way, in a courtroom, in front of everyone. At the front of the public gallery, the men from the Star and the Morning Telegraph lazily scribbled her adultery in the loops of their shorthand. She’d once have been able to read it; she’d had the training.

  She hardly listened to the rest of Nick’s evidence, and only when he had quite finished did she really bring herself back into the room, focus on him as he was being dismissed. He looked up, into the public gallery, and she tried her best to look outraged. But his gaze wasn’t seeking her. He hadn’t even been thinking of her. He was looking, with amazement and pain, beyond her, trying to fix the gaze of the tall-boned girl in a cream suit. She was ignoring him, making her own exit, pulling her lovely toffee-coloured bag to her side, rising and excusing herself in a drawling-posh-Cockney tone, pushing past. Katherine didn’t know who she was; but she’d come to see something, and Nick knew who she was, and it pained him. Only then, as she turned quite away from the court, did he happen to notice Katherine; and his eyes dropped from her, quite abruptly. He knew he was going to prison. There was no point in anything that he had said about her. Alice, sitting next to Katherine, took her hand and squeezed it tight, between both of hers. Katherine was grateful for that.

  . . .

  Every Thursday evening now, after work, when the men outside the pit had settled down to a small handful, loitering about something that wasn’t there, it being too warm for braziers, Daniel came to the little community centre in Tinstone and danced. Helen sat on a box of donated tins; Philip sometimes sat, only to leap up, as if there was something hot underneath him, and brush Shirley aside to demonstrate something, taking Daniel clinically in
his arms without any meaning. “You should have started all this before you were ten,” he’d say, but demonstrate anyway, and sometimes Daniel got it right, sometimes he was allowed to dance a little with who he wanted to dance with, Helen. The battered old tape-machine with its one unvarying tape sat on a ziggurat of tinned charity, wheezing through the same seven Argentinian tangos every week, and Daniel adored it. Mostly he danced with Shirley, who was neat and precise in all her movements. He could not see how; when she moved, she moved so swiftly like a dart to its board, but she gave him the sense in his arms of slowness, of stillness, even. “You might be getting it,” Philip started to concede; they did it every week, and Helen came along, pretending to mock and laugh, but her eyes shining. She remembered what it was to dance in such a way.

  And that Thursday, Alice sat down in the quiet of her house and, while she waited for Bernie to come home, made a start on replying to Sandra’s last letter. It had come yesterday; Bernie had made a point, tired though he was, of sitting up and reading it with Alice. When the weekend came, he’d write his own reply to it, but Alice made a start now. She read it again; she looked at the photographs of Sandra’s new flat, of an evening out with some new friends, lined up around the heel of a table and smiling, of Sandra on a beach rug raising a glass of wine to her new friend Basil, who must have been the one taking the photograph. Basil was Chinese, but had come to Australia as a baby. There was a photograph of a kangaroo, too, not in a zoo but sitting on a lawnlike expanse of country, under a tree that might be a eucalyptus. If you looked, Sandra said in her letter, you could see the kangaroo’s baby, his little nose poking out from the lumpily filled pocket. Alice looked, not for the first time, and saw the little nose. “I’m glad …” she began. “I had no idea …” she went on. “Your new flat looks …” she continued. “I’ll think about whether it might be possible to come …” she wrote. “We’d love to meet Basil …” she responded. Everything she wrote was a reply to something Sandra had said. “I hope … I hope … I hope …” her letter went, disconsolately. There was nothing much of her own to say. She couldn’t think Sandra would be interested in the Glovers’ goings-on, and about Francis there was little enough that she knew, what might be happening to him. Bernie was doing something important, but she could leave all that to him. She’d got into the habit of turning out the lights in the house when she wasn’t in each room, though Bernie had never said anything. She sat in the warm pool of light cast by the green-shaded Tiffany lamp over the green-topped leather desk in the spare room. With her father’s old fountain pen, on the heavy embossed Italian writing paper Francis had given her last Christmas, both saved for special occasions such as a letter to Sandra, she went on writing, perseveringly.