The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  “That’s generous of you,” Tim said.

  “She’s had a brain haemorrhage,” Daniel said. “It was lucky Bernie was in—he’d just got back from taking their son off to the station. What’s his name?”

  “Francis,” Tim said.

  “Francis, he was up from London, he was just going back. If it had happened when he was out, she’d have died, they reckon. She’s probably still going to die. She’s in a coma. They’re over there at the Northern General day and night. Mum’s been going every other day. I went with her, the day before yesterday, and Helen’s been once, too.”

  “Helen’s been?” Tim hardly knew Helen.

  “She’s quite upset about it. She felt she was just getting to know Alice. She liked her. I mean, she still likes her, she’s not dead.”

  “What caused it?”

  “I don’t think anything much, not in particular,” Daniel said. “Helen was there when the doctor came round. She went out, of course, she let him talk to Mr. Sellers and—Francis. Are you sure it’s Francis? But they told her afterwards—it could have happened at any point in her life, there’s some kind of weakness there anyway, and it just burst now. They showed us the scans. They’re horrific.”

  Tim controlled himself. It seemed to him that this was the moment he’d been waiting for over the course of years. Every patient stroke of his conduct, every irregular and unconventional turn in his professional and personal path had, it seemed, been directed with keen rationality towards this exact end, and directed, despite himself, by his own mind, full of planning. He had read a book called Love in the Time of Cholera and had thrilled to the idea that you might wait fifty, sixty years and your love would return to you. It had happened to him at twenty-nine. Everything from the previous years—his taking up with Trudy, which had always appeared a decision and not a gut feeling, the chain of progress along the same line in the same building, which represented his career, even the house in Nether Edge, which, ugly as it was, offered a spare room on the narrow top floor, which, of course, of course, was there to be hers—everything seemed now in retrospect to have been arranged for this exact moment. He had been led through high-hedged path after high-hedged path, unable to see over the top, not to be told whether this was a maze or a road to a destination, and now he had been rewarded. It all made sense, as if he had been handed a map when he no longer had any need of it. All that—everything since, twenty years before, she had taken his head and pressed it in a need that was hers alone, since he had not known the need until it was being fulfilled—had led him to this point. That long-remembered face was taking on flesh again, moving. He was in Sheffield when she would return; he was there to offer her everything she now needed. He had had dreams in which she returned from Australia in a wheelchair, blind, and he was on the Tarmac to push her. A dead mother was nearly the next best thing.

  “Has Sandra come back?” Tim said casually.

  Daniel shifted in his chair, uncomfortably. “I wondered that,” he said. “She hasn’t. I don’t think she’s planning to.”

  “She’s not coming back?” Tim said.

  “I don’t think so,” Daniel said. “I know. I’m surprised. I mentioned her to Bernie—he’s in a terrible state, Bernie. At the moment he’s got other things to worry about, of course he has. I’ve never seen anyone cry so much. I don’t think Francis is much use to him, either. Sooner or later, though, he’s going to start thinking about Sandra. I’m really surprised at her. Bernie said he’d phoned her and she said that she would come over, but she couldn’t at the moment. He wouldn’t say but I think she said it was too expensive to get a ticket at that short notice.”

  “She wouldn’t have said that.”

  “Maybe she didn’t. It was just that when he was telling me, he said, ‘I know everyone thinks she’s making a lot of money over there.’ But then he stopped himself. She must have said something of that sort.”

  “She must have been in Australia for ten years.”

  “More than that,” Daniel said. “She was only out of university a year when she went. She’s only been back once, and they’ve never gone at all. I know they keep in touch, though.”

  “What an old gossip you are,” Tim said.

  “Of course,” Daniel said, stung. “It’s nice of you to wonder immediately what you can do to help when someone’s in trouble. I know you’re so concerned about social problems.”

  Tim didn’t think that a single rich woman in hospital was “social problems,” but he also thought that if he said that, Daniel would immediately say that the Sellerses weren’t rich in any obvious sense. A few moments ago, however, a bold and extraordinary idea had been unfolding in Tim’s mind. If he had been disappointed to discover that, after all, the initial scenario of his helping, supporting Sandra at a time of need, would unfold another scenario, a more dramatic one, had immediately presented itself. He didn’t know how he was going to achieve it; it seemed, however, exactly the thing he ought to be doing, even if he had to walk out on Trudy to do it, even if he had to cancel all his classes, supplying Hester Carver with the flimsiest of excuses for the purpose. He saw exactly what he was going to do. There was no reason not to.

  “Where does she live?” Tim said.

  “In Sydney,” Daniel said, puzzled, because surely Tim would know this. “She calls herself Alex, these days. She lives in a place called Manly—I remember noticing, because I thought it was funny. She sends me a Christmas card most years … You know I was friends with her.” Daniel, not always the brightest person, looked assessingly now at Tim. “Listen to me—you’re not thinking of writing to her, are you?”

  “Of course not,” Tim said. “I don’t know her. I’m not going to write to her. The older I get,” he said, settling back—he’d finished his lunch, though the waitress took his empty plate and Daniel’s near-full one away quite indifferently, “the older I get, the less I think I understand women. Take my students …”

  And he had prepared this bit, explaining his menstruating fan club in non-carrying tones quite coherently. In fact, it was so coherent—he’d made so much sense out of it—that he couldn’t quite recall why he’d wanted to ask Daniel’s opinion. As he carried on, it seemed to Tim that he was talking in exactly the exuberant and amusing way that he’d heard other men talk at parties and at the ends of public bars about women, about the curious things their co-workers did, and were greeted with laughter; but Daniel’s face was hardening with distaste, pulling back into a sort of disgusted sneer, as if it were trying to escape from Tim as fast as it possibly could.

  “You’re completely sick,” Daniel said eventually. “You really want to see a psychiatrist.”

  None of that seemed to matter any more; he’d been handed a task, a big, shiny, beautiful task, and all he had to do was to carry it to the other side of the world. In fairy tales, that was the hardest thing of all, to go to the ends of the earth. These days, Tim thought, as he trudged into Bigg and Cleaver (there was an old Pelican he was looking for) to the welcoming fanfare of a drunk saxophonist falling out of a third-storey window and landing on a skip full of drums, that was a doddle. Anyone could go to the ends of the earth; after this, he was going to go to Thomas Cook and buy a ticket. Only then would he go home and tell Trudy where he was going, on his own.

  Twelve years before, in 1982, a white Mercedes taxi was driving in thin, drizzly rain along an Australian highway. The driver was dark and hairy; Lebanese, he’d told his passenger, and gone on to guess, without asking her, that she was English. “Pale, you see,” he’d said. He kept on talking, and was talking still; but Sandra’s—Alexandra’s—attention was fixed on the outside. It was extraordinary to get off and find rain here, too. It might have been the same rain that had been falling at Heathrow, twenty-four hours before, and it was certainly almost the same temperature. It seemed bizarre to have made so much effort; to have paid hundreds of pounds for the ticket; to have lugged two enormous suitcases across the country (a hundred and twenty pounds in
excess baggage), to have sat, cramped, nearly at the back row of a plane for a whole cycle of a day, though the sun was swerving crazily around the plane’s progress, making a sort of figure-of-eight; to have done all that to find exactly what she had left, a faint drizzle and only the accent on the car radio at all different. They had paused at Singapore, and she had gone out on to the airport terrace, and that had seemed worth travelling for: a huge slap of hot, wet air. Now it seemed as if they might as well have turned round and gone straight back to England.

  But of course they had not done so. Alexandra was desperately tired; her watch said six, but she couldn’t work out whether this grey drizzle was that of dawn or dusk. She focused on the world outside, and then, of course, it was different, gorgeously so, the gorgeousness residing only in the strange billboards, the boasting about what things cost in weird and unworkable currency, and behind them, some suggestion that this was a new country, an unfamiliar country; the trees were quite different. Could they be eucalyptus? She had no idea. She reminded herself that the stars, even, were different from the ones in England.

  “Out here on holiday?” the taxi driver said, having run through his monologue.

  “No,” Alexandra said. “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it. I don’t know how long I’m staying.”

  She didn’t know, it was true. The story was that she was here after a man; she’d told everyone that. There’d been an Australian in a bar in Zakynthos the August before last. He’d been travelling round Europe, and had ended up there. She’d ditched Michelle, her friend she’d gone on holiday with, and after one night, then a day on a boat trip to the nearest island with him, a second night, she’d gone back to her hotel in the morning and had moved her stuff into the flat Chris was renting. She’d left a note for Michelle with an apology; Michelle saw her and she saw Michelle, on her own, on the beach two days later, and she’d raised her book and ignored them both. They hadn’t been such friends after that, and Michelle made a point of telling her, when they were back in England, that she’d had a really boring time on her own. It had been fun. Part of it was that she’d made up a whole load of stuff about herself. People often thought she was posher than she was, what with the drawl and the Alice band and the Alexandra, and she generally played up a bit to it, saying she’d been born in London but brought up in Yorkshire. That was what you needed to do, these days; people liked posh, and though Alexandra herself had never fooled anyone genuinely posher than herself, she managed all right with the sort of people who had gone to Warwick, and with most people since then. She’d never gone the whole hog so much, though, as she’d gone with Australian Chris, and she suspected that part of her appeal for him was that he thought she was a dirty posh English girl, or however he put it to himself and, when they were alone, to his two pathetic “mates.”

  She’d put off her departure back from Zakynthos an extra week—it was at the end of the summer, she’d finished her summer job and wasn’t supposed to start her new, her proper job in the insurance firm until 15 September anyway. It was probably a mistake. She left it until after her flight back had gone to try to change it, and learnt that it was an unchangeable ticket, and she’d have to buy a new one, and at that time of year it wasn’t going to be easy to find anything. Chris, who’d been quite keen on her staying when she’d first suggested it, seemed to lose a little bit of interest when she really did stay. There was one day, too, when he just said in the morning that he was going off with Morgan and Ted, he hadn’t spent any time with them for a week, and she could do what she liked, go and tan her skinny white English arse on the beach. But at the end of the holiday, they’d said goodbye in the right sort of way: on the terrace of the rented apartment he’d hugged her and hugged her, and then he’d fucked her, right there on the tiled balcony, and then he’d hugged her some more and said they’d be seeing each other pretty soon, he reckoned. He was going back to Australia, once they’d gone to Germany, to Munich for the Oktoberfest to get royally pissed, and then he was going to have to start the hard graft to learn the ropes in his father’s garage. She did her best, and actually managed to cry a little bit; she treasured the memory of his face, looking, of all things, aghast, reaching round for anything and having to settle for his salt-encrusted T-shirt to wipe her face. She could remember that better than anything; better than the way his face looked. She only had three or four photographs of him to tell her that.

  Back in England, it had been all too easy to work up what, after all, had been only a holiday romance. She loved the word “romance” for it; there’d been no sort of red roses and tables for two, only her bent double over the bed frame, the headboard banging furiously against the wall and the noise of the pair of them hammering and yelping away into the cicada-still Greek night, only a quick and inspirational blowjob behind the rocks in the heat of the day. As for tables for two, there were usually the rat-like Morgan and Ted tucked in there too, whining about the cost, saying it was more expensive than they’d heard. That was her holiday romance, it seemed, but showing the three or four photographs of suddenly very handsome Chris around, his good white teeth glowing out of the underexposed darkness of his suntan, like an apparition’s, nobody thought it at all unlikely.

  Even to her family, she’d kept up the story. She knew it sounded like a holiday romance, she said, but he was a nice guy, and you could meet somebody nice just as easily on holiday as anywhere else, she supposed.

  “Did he and Michelle get on all right?” her mother had asked, and Alexandra had had to say—since Michelle was in England and could easily contradict that part of the story—that she hadn’t seen a lot of Michelle after she met Chris.

  “That’s awful,” her mother had said. “I hope you didn’t just dump her. Poor Michelle, I’d be furious if I were her.”

  But the important thing was that Alexandra had met a man—there’d been men before, but she could see that it was starting to become important that there should be a steady man, even if he was on the other side of the world and in no sense going out with her. It made all sorts of things much easier.

  Alexandra hadn’t bothered to find anywhere to live, that summer after she’d finished at Warwick and come home to start her job in a Sheffield insurance company, a good job, a management trainee. She had been planning to find a flat in the week between coming back from Greece and starting work, but as things ended up, there was only a weekend between coming back from Greece and starting work, so she stayed where she was, upstairs in her parents’ house. It was pretty dull. Francis was doing his A levels—he was going to go to Leeds University—and she didn’t have a lot to say to him anyway. The downside of having a half-existent boyfriend in Australia was that you couldn’t bring anyone else home, and if she was going to stay out, she’d have to arrange it in advance with some friend or other, give her a cover story. Which presupposed that there was anyone she wanted to mess about with; anyone she’d know about in advance, that was. In Alexandra’s eyes, to go on beyond a second or a third time was to turn sex into an affair; to push a one-night stand in the direction of marriage. “You’re not from Sheffield, are you?” more than one wide-eyed naïf had said to her, the morning after. For some people, a holiday romance might be an abbreviated thing; for Alexandra, that one was as long as she cared to let any relationship go on, and she counted the length of the relationship not in days or weeks, but in occasions of coupling. She had no real intention of discovering all the bored routine of marriage in what had originally been a chance encounter; and repetition carried the threat of exactly that.

  Still, a one-night stand could be done, and after a cautious month or two, she suggested to one of the other girls who had started at the big insurance firm at the same time that they go out on the town on a Friday night.

  “I don’t know where to go,” the girl, Sam, said, evidently a little surprised.

  “Oh, I know a few places,” Alexandra said. “I grew up here, actually.”

  Sam was even more surprised; Alexandra w
as aloof, hadn’t given much away, only occasionally gave the impression of joining in, as it were. She knew that Sam was living in a flat on her own, bought for her by her home-counties father, and told her parents, though she didn’t say anything to Sam, that she would be spending the night there, it being easier. If it came to nothing, she could always go home and say she had felt tired, had been offered a lift.

  It didn’t come to nothing; she went home with a student. It made her laugh, going back to a student hall of residence. She caught a glimpse of herself in the glass door of the hall of residence as he fumbled with the key and she fumbled with his crotch. In her little black dress, her slicked-back geometric bob and her slash of red lipstick, she looked like a fabulous beast in these striplit corridors, echoing with inconsiderate rock music at two a.m. She forgot his name; a month later, she went again to Casanova’s with Sam—they’d had a good time. And again she told her parents that was where she’d be staying.

  She should, perhaps, have been looking for somewhere to live, which would have made everything much easier. But she hated her job—hated it with a deliberate and instant hostility, and it hated her back, asking her if she was really committed to her profession through a succession of serious mouthpieces within a matter of months. In her head was always the memory of that dry little island in the Greek sea, a line of palm trees planted deliberately behind the beach for shade in place of the native pines, and a lithe hairy Australian banging her head against the headboard for whole quarter-hours. It seemed incredible, insulting to her, that she should have to live in the place she grew up, and incredible that she had been so stupid as to move back there after her chance to get away. Her mind filled with possibilities; she formed an idea of Australia.