The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  “You see, Jane,” one of the boys in the armchairs piped up, “the intended target audience have a high disposable income. The Pink Pound. The thing is, they don’t have—”

  “Yes, I know,” Jane said. She and Scott didn’t have any children, or any obligations to elderly relations, but no one was trying to lure them and their supposed riches to holiday camps in north Wales in February. It seemed like a lot of crap. “I know all that. Could I just ask a question? You said it was the boys in Design who queried the figure. Now, I don’t really know about these things, but I would have thought that Design is the place where, if anywhere, you were going to find, well …”

  She shrugged, looked at Damon. “I don’t follow,” Damon said.

  “Well, are none of the boys in Design, themselves, are any of them themselves …”

  Damon stared at her. “Are you asking whether they’re gay?”

  “Yes,” Jane said. “They often are.”

  “I honestly haven’t asked them,” Damon said, affronted. “I don’t think it would be an appropriate thing to start an inquisition into.”

  “I see,” Jane said.

  “The thing you have to remember,” the boy in the armchair said—a helpful type, “is that this is a sort of experimental exercise. The client’s never done anything like this before, and he wants to cover his costs and quite a bit more. After all, there might be a consequential effect on his core business—”

  “That was really quite a serious concern,” Damon said.

  “The families don’t want to sleep in beds where the queer-boys have been a week or two before,” Jane said, “so the queer-boys have to pay for getting the AIDS off the sheets too—is that it?”

  “Well,” Damon said, “I wouldn’t put it quite like that myself, but—”

  “Let’s have a look at this, then,” Jane said. More and more, she found herself thinking, quite happily, some awful word whenever someone passed her in the street, or sold her something in Boots, or even spoke to her on the telephone. Nig-nog, Jew-boy, Paki, queer-boy—it ran through her head like the nursery rhyme from hell as she walked the streets or waited for a tube train to arrive, counting them like cherry stones, and more and more often she found herself discovering excuses to say them out loud. If Scott died before her, she’d be a mad old woman within days, yelling obscenities in public, there was no doubt about that. “Well, it looks—”

  “What we’ve done,” Damon said happily, “is really more tweaking than anything else. It’s really quite similar to the mail-out the client always uses. We took out the family going down the water-slide and put in—well, you see, and the sort of glitterball there, there’s usually a clown with two kiddies instead of that. But the rest of it, it’s just the adjectives.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “We’ve just tweaked the adjectives in the copy. So, where it talks about the rooms—”

  “Fabulous double rooms.”

  “That’s it. Normally that says, ‘great double rooms.’ We ran it through the focus groups and they responded very positively to that. ‘Great’ is a terrific family word, families with two-point-four kids like that a lot, but the target market didn’t really go for it, it was too family. They like ‘fabulous’ a lot. A full twelve PCP more said—”

  “What?”

  “A full twelve percentage points more said that they were extremely likely or fairly likely to book this holiday when the change was made, and the not-at-all-likelies fell from twenty-seven per cent to thirteen. Which is amazing.”

  “Or fabulous,” Jane said. PCP, for heaven’s sake.

  “Yes, it’s a fabulous result,” Damon said, risking a drag-act squeal and throwing his hands in the air. Everyone duly laughed.

  “I’m going to call this meeting to a close now,” Jane said, “so that we can all look at this and think it over and brainstorm it and come back to you—what? Day after tomorrow? OK, thanks, everybody.”

  “Right,” Damon said, disconcerted. But they did everything differently at Barney Spacek Boughton, everyone knew that, no meeting lasting more than half an hour. They’d won awards. He picked his coat up from the back of a chair where he’d left it, and his team let themselves be shown out.

  Jane came back in five minutes, wearing her coat. They were all still milling around, passing the proposed advert between themselves. “I’m going out for lunch,” she said, her hands in her pockets, grumpily.

  “OK,” the juniors said. They knew these moods of hers, always after a presentation. Some people thought she was taking herself off to think about strategy, others thought that she quite often considered the whole thing a load of crap, though it was daring of them to float the possibility that anyone might think their business a load of crap. When she ended meetings abruptly with most questions undecided, or took herself off “for lunch” at a quarter to twelve, like now, it was, some people thought, to stop herself saying something unforgivable, unretractable. There’d almost been trouble a year or two back at a management training weekend she couldn’t have walked out of: three-quarters of an hour of direct questions to the facilitator about the exact meaning of the terms he was using, one after another, and, they said, that glare. She had some licence in the office. She was the only married person who worked there, for one thing. And she always came back from these two-hour absences, whatever she did in them, talking sense. The load-of-crap school was in the minority.

  “Do you want company?” Robert said mildly, calling over from behind a pot-plant.

  “Yeah, why not?” Jane said. The others watched them go.

  “Tell me something,” Jane said, as the two of them got out of the lift into the lobby, shared with twenty other companies on different floors. “This is a load of crap, isn’t it?”

  “Total crap,” Robert said comfortably. They had known each other, worked with each other, for ten years on and off, in different companies here and there. She’d come over to Barney Spacek Boughton when it was just starting up and Russell was looking for someone with a portfolio of tame clients. He’d brought the subject up, of all places, at their wedding, and she’d found herself discussing the salary and BSB’s client list in her wedding dress. She’d come back from the honeymoon safari to find an invitation from them to come over and talk a bit further, and she’d been there for four years now.

  “Jesus,” Jane said. “When he started on about ‘great’ and ‘fabulous,’ I really thought—”

  “Oh, we all know what you thought,” Robert said.

  “Was it as obvious as that?” Jane said, as they went into the car park.

  “Well, pretty obvious,” Robert said. “Obvious to me, anyway. It was like you’d already put your coat and hat on. Where are we going?”

  “To be honest, I was just going to drive around, let off steam a bit,” Jane said. “I suppose lunch was going to come into it at some point.”

  They set off in Jane’s new red saloon—she’d argued for a BMW but Russell said they couldn’t stretch to it and they couldn’t justify it just yet.

  “How’s Scott?” Robert said. “And the new house?”

  “Oh, it’s fine,” Jane said. “He’s fine. So much to do. New curtains, new carpets, the furniture looks all wrong, there’s no bookshelves, new kitchen, new bathroom. Improvement on the Scott front, though, now he’s not the entremetier any more—he gets in before two, these days, and he does something other than sleep on his days off.”

  “Remind me.”

  “What? Oh, entremetier—it means the vegetable cook,” Jane said. “Sorry, you pick up all this jargon. They made a new job for him, he’s canapier these days.”

  “Is that a word?”

  “Well, they didn’t know what to call it, but they invented canapier, he’s in charge of canapés and nothing else. People like those best—that and the petit fours. They don’t care much about anything in between. So he’s always thinking up new little canapés for them. What they like is miniature food, tiny versions of proper dinners. Not t
hat the rest of it isn’t fairly miniature anyway. He made a shepherd’s pie the size of your thumbnail, they liked that, and, you know, cold soup in a thimble, that sort of thing. He keeps trying to get something Australian in there—he had a go at kangaroo carpaccio with a dab of truffle oil, but it kept coming back to the kitchen untouched. They’ll eat anything when it’s that small, but they didn’t like the smell or something. Tripe in a garlic and champagne gravy, that wasn’t a success either.”

  “I can’t say I’m all that surprised.”

  “The good thing, as I say, is that he does get to come home a bit earlier—he’s really done by eight o’clock.”

  “Does he cook for you?”

  “Scott? Are you joking? Poor sod, I wouldn’t ask that of him.”

  The traffic was quite heavy, for some reason, and then, without warning, it ground to a halt in both directions.

  “What’s going on?” Jane said.

  “I should have said,” Robert said. “This is my way in, there’s roadworks.”

  “Now you say,” Jane said. They sat there for a minute or two, the traffic stationary.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I thought,” Jane said, “what about that pub in Farringdon, does proper food? You know?”

  “Yeah, go on,” Robert said. “At least you don’t get everything with a coulis or a sabayon in a pub.”

  “It’s a bit sabayon, strangely enough,” Jane said, “but not that much. Gastro-pub, they call it.”

  “Sounds like what you experience in the loo afterwards.”

  “It’s all right, it’s nice. I’m going to ask this policewoman what’s going on with the traffic.”

  “She looks off-duty,” Robert said. She did. Coming up the hill away from the roadworks, however far away they were, the policewoman was carrying her policewoman’s cap in her hand, and on top of her uniform was a black wet-look PVC raincoat, tightly belted. “That’s not uniform, surely?”

  Jane wound down the window and called across the road to the policewoman. She looked around her, then sauntered over, weaving between the unmoving cars facing the other direction. In her tightly belted raincoat, she had an exaggerated figure, heavy on top and bulky below; she was mid-thirties, somewhere between voluptuous youth and the heaviness of middle age. “Did you want me, love?” she said. Her voice was Northern; she was wearing a surprising amount of makeup.

  “I just wondered whether you could tell us how bad the traffic is ahead,” Jane said.

  “Jammed solid, love,” the policewoman said. “Where are you heading?”

  “Clerkenwell,” Jane said.

  “That’s a coincidence,” the policewoman said. “That’s exactly where I’m heading. Well, you’d be as well to do as I’m doing and get the tube. You won’t get there any time soon the way you’re going.”

  Afterwards, they said to themselves that they’d never seen a policewoman wearing a shiny PVC mackintosh, or taking the underground to get to where they had to go, and probably should have wondered about that. But Jane’s attention was taken by something else; she was looking the policewoman up and down with a puzzled expression.

  “Well, you’ll know me again,” the policewoman said, but not in a hostile way.

  “You’re not from Sheffield, are you?” Jane said.

  “Is it as bad as that?” she said. “Most people say Manchester down here, but they coon’t tell difference between Leeds and Liverpool ‘less you told them direct, like. He’s not from Sheffield.” She pointed.

  “No,” Robert agreed. “I’m from Maidenhead.”

  “You’re not Barbara, are you?” Jane said.

  The policewoman leant forward, lowering her head to the window in an interested way, as if a suspect had just let drop a valuable admission. “Who are you, then?” Barbara said.

  “You used to know my brother,” Jane said. She couldn’t really say that she’d recognized Barbara, not from her face, which had coarsened and grown wide and, anyway, was forced into a general approximation of what women should look like by too much makeup. She’d recognized her in a sort of dim flash of familiarity, from her shape, pulled in and falling out, almost comic, like a drawing of a woman by a twelve-year-old naughty boy; she’d seen that shape waiting outside in the dusk, years before. “My brother Daniel. Daniel Glover.”

  “Oh, aye,” Barbara said, leaning back and standing up straight as if she had now won her point. “I remember Daniel.”

  That seemed to be all there was to be said on the subject.

  “You couldn’t give me a lift, could you?” Barbara said. “I can’t be late. I’ll direct you, I know a better way than this.”

  “All right,” Jane said, and leant round to unlock the rear door. Nobody ever sat in the back of her car, and she had to pull her seat forward a little bit to give Barbara leg room.

  “Right, do a U-ey,” Barbara said. “And next left, no, next but one. I don’t remember you, love.”

  “I was only little,” Jane said. “You probably wouldn’t. You never came in, that’s what I remember about you.”

  “Wasn’t allowed to,” Barbara said. “Your brother!”

  Jane doubted this, but she said nothing. The car was already full of a chemical, heavy floral smell, more like a room disinfectant than any kind of perfume. “I’d never have thought,” she said, “that you’d end up like this, doing that.”

  “Like what?” Barbara said. “Oh, right,” she said, looking down, almost as if in surprise. She laughed. “Oh, I see. That’s surprising, is it?”

  “Well, it is a bit,” Jane said. “I must have had the wrong idea of you. Of course,” she said, turning to Robert, who was wearing a questioning expression, “I didn’t really know Barbara. All I knew was she went out for a bit with Daniel, my brother. He was a bit of a ladies’ man, to be honest, even then.”

  “He’s a bit of a twat, I know that much,” Barbara said.

  “No, he’s not,” Jane said evenly. “He just got through quite a lot of girls. They were throwing themselves at him. Still do. He’s spoken for now, though. Girl called Helen.”

  “Good-looking boy, your brother?”

  “Throwing themselves away on him,” Barbara said. “What’s he up to, now, then?”

  “He’s got his own business,” Jane said. “He used to work for an estate agent’s, then he gave it up. He’s converted an old steel mill, not in town, in the country, really. It’s half a dance school and there’s a restaurant upstairs. It’s doing all right.”

  “He’s never teaching dancing,” Barbara said.

  “No, it’s his girlfriend’s parents look after all that,” Jane said. “He was a miner, Helen’s father, he put his redundancy package in, Daniel found the rest. It’s doing all right.”

  “Strange combination of things,” Robert said. “Restaurant and dance school.”

  “I can’t imagine Daniel doing anything like that,” Barbara said. “Still less making a success of it.”

  “People change so much, don’t they,” Jane said. “It’s doing all right. It’s a lovely setting, it’s getting to be quite fashionable as a place to go of an evening. Some people go for a dance lesson, some for dinner. Daniel says quite a lot of them do the one then stay on for the other. It’d been derelict for years, the building—the council owned it, but they weren’t going to do anything much with it. They got quite a good grant just for restoring it.”

  There was a little silence in the car. “I didn’t really know Barbara at all,” Jane went on. “You know, if you’d said to me twenty years ago, what Barbara was likely to end up doing for a living, I’d never have guessed.”

  “Why’s that, then?” Barbara said.

  “Well, it just goes to show what a wrong idea you can have about someone,” Jane said. “To be honest, I thought, because you dressed like you did, and because you didn’t live in such a nice house as we did, and because Daniel would never let you come in and meet us, and because—” meeting offensiveness with the sort of frank
ness that always won “—because you were having it off with my brother, I just assumed you couldn’t be very good at school.”

  “Oh, aye?” Barbara said. “And what’s changed your opinion, then?”

  “Well, you know, to get in the police, you need O levels, don’t you? And A levels even? I never thought one of Daniel’s girlfriends would be the type to—”

  “Get through them, did he?” Robert said.

  “Quite a few,” Jane said. “A month or two and then that was generally it. They used to come and go. You’d not meet three or four in a row, just hear about them. He’s settled down now—Helen’s got him on a leash all right—but he used to just throw them away. I never thought you’d do well at school, Barbara, it never occurred to me.”

  “So what makes you think I did well at school?”

  “As I say, you’ll have had to have got O levels, A levels. They’re strict about that, aren’t they?”

  “What—before they’ll let you get your kit off in an Irish pub at lunchtime?” Barbara said. “Left again here.”

  “You—”

  “You thought I was in the police?” Barbara said. “I tell you what, it’s not me but you that must be a bit thick if you think real policewomen go round dressed like this and looking like this, lot of lesbians. Someone said I could be a model. No, love, you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. I’m a strippergram. I’m a sexy policewoman today—it’s an Irish lad’s twenty-first, his granddad’s laid me on as a treat for him. Other times I can be a sexy traffic warden, or—I tell you what, this is funny—I can be Jane. It’s a double act with a Tarzan. He’s gay, the Tarzan, you’d never know, though, big fella. Hundred quid a time, hundred and fifty for the double act. Your name’s Jane, in’t it? Or a sexy secretary, dressed up like you, in a suit. I’ll tell you love, no one’s going to pay you to take your clothes off. The next corner’s fine.”

  Jane braked abruptly. “You can walk from here,” she said, not turning round. “Nice to meet you. I’ll remember to tell Daniel I bumped into you and that you’re showing your hairy bucket to drunken Irishmen in pubs for a hundred pounds a time. He’ll be so interested, if he can remember who you were.”