The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  “What does she think happened?” Bernie said, aghast.

  Francis shuffled with his hands. “She thinks—sorry, this is a bit difficult,” he said. “She thinks what happened was that you were both worried about me, that I didn’t have enough money, or something, and agreed that you would both—that you would enter into a suicide pact. And she thinks she tried to do it but you decided that you wouldn’t do it.”

  “That’s—” Bernie said, but “ridiculous” didn’t seem to cover it.

  “Look, I’ve been explaining to her it wasn’t like that,” Francis said. “She can’t remember—not just since the haemorrhage, but what was happening just before, with the cat and everything. Me bringing the cat up, I mean. I’ve been explaining to her what really happened.”

  “Is she all right now?”

  “I don’t know,” Francis said. “She was quite angry at first, she thought you’d told me to tell her another story, but I told her that wasn’t true. I talked to a doctor. They’re going to explain to her again what’s happened to her, that she couldn’t possibly have done it to herself.”

  “I wish she’d said something,” Bernie said.

  “It’s not easy,” Francis said, and Bernie had to agree with that; he had seen how hard it was to talk even to your son about what you were feeling and what you believed, and there had been as little of that in his own marriage. The trust that had existed between them had been most beautifully unspoken, and there had never been any misunderstanding before. He had relied on silence and love, as Alice had.

  Francis had arranged for a doctor to come and explain the facts to Alice, but it seemed as if he had broken Alice’s belief with the conversation. He and Bernie came in together, Bernie feeling, of all things, shamefaced, and there was an immediate difference in the way Alice looked at him. She looked at him with quickness, alertness, surmise, and when he kissed her, she did not turn away from him. There was an expression of abashed silliness in her face, like a small child caught out and preparing an apology, and once they had talked it over in careful steps, and the doctor had come in to explain the events of the last few weeks, they felt that the worst of it had been dispersed.

  It was difficult for Francis to tell his father this; as he went through the explanation, he felt like a headmaster laying out a child’s wrongs. And Bernie felt this too, because he seemed to flush as if at something brought out into the open. There was nothing Francis could do: it was his plain duty to tell his father, and the doctor, what he had extracted from his mother. And the next day, as if to take the place of this delusion, another delusion arose. He arrived, and within ten minutes, his newly talkative mother was telling him that John Major had been paying a visit to the hospital the day before, that he had greeted her and asked her how she was. She was quite serious about it, making perfect sense, and by now Alice had returned so much to the state of reason that Francis found himself excusing himself, as if to go to the lavatory, and asking a nurse whether, by any chance …

  For some reason, the delusion about the prime minister proved much harder to shift from Alice’s mind than the one about her husband. She had let her belief about Bernie go swiftly, and gratefully, after a couple of anguished assurances; and there must always have been some deep-buried anchor of love in her which had known that he could not have done such a thing, that, indeed, whatever her brain was telling her, he had not. But Alice knew that the prime minister visited hospitals, and his name had been planted firmly in her mind by the twice-daily question; she grew insistent, then impatient, then finally angry with Francis when he maintained that her mind was playing tricks on her. These delusions continued; Bernie was better than Francis at securing agreement when Alice needed to be assured that she had had a brain haemorrhage and had not attempted suicide unsuccessfully, that the prime minister, but, oddly, never the Queen, had been speaking to her, that Sandra had visited the night before, after they had left. If it had been up to Francis, he would have humoured her, have allowed her to go on believing whatever she wanted to believe in that now borderless no man’s land between memory and dream. It could do no harm. It was his father who firmly refused to stop correcting her. He had seen the nurses, who happily humoured her, saying, “That’s nice,” when she wondered out loud whether the prime minister had enjoyed his visit, and what prevented him saying the same sort of thing was the fact that, as they said, “That’s nice,” even though they were by Alice’s bed, they raised their voices and enunciated. There was nothing wrong with Alice’s hearing. It was just their habit when talking to anyone old or demented, and it was the raise of the voice that convinced Bernie and made him insist to Francis that to give way to Alice was to give up on her. So they went on correcting, and gently insisting, and Alice, finally, would allow her delusion to be erased. Once it had gone, she never went back to it; but there was no shortage of others to replace it.

  To Francis, his mother was running through the literary genres, one after another, and after a long period in which she was a baffling complex of clues, laid out like a room for the forensic reconstructive narrative of a Sherlock Holmes, after a period when, in her reawakened state, she spoke the murmurs and cryptic nonsense of an Imagist poem, after the nineteenth-century limelit melodrama, the collapses and the unexpected revivals, of her attack and its consequences and the bildungsroman of her slow improvement, there seemed here to be a science-fiction epic of the most abstruse, tawdry and terrifying variety. It seemed to Francis that his mother was in some H. P. Lovecraft fantasy of body-snatching and remote control, in which thoughts, beliefs, a whole new external world were being inflicted on her by some malevolent outside power. The world had been erased, or partly erased; what was familiar to her had been extracted and placed within a new, unreal world of delusions and phantoms. It was not, however, from outside that this parallel narrative was being imposed: it was coming from within Alice, as her passively receiving and interpreting brain burst all its bounds, as love or blood or rivers did, and finally created a world for her. They would recede in time, the doctors said, and took not much specific readerly interest in even the most elaborate of Alice’s constructions.

  The alternative narrative taking place for Alice, in which an attempt at suicide, foiled, was rewarded by visits from the prime minister and, perhaps most upsettingly, from Sandra, tormented Francis in his three-day weekends, and in the end he thought, were he to write any of this down, he did not know whether he would choose to describe what had happened to him, or whether he would go on being the creator of the Gurganian Empire, and follow his mother’s sad and consoling delusions. Her beliefs, it seemed to him, made more narrative sense, had more narrative power, than what had actually happened; and, more than that, they contained within them some promise of redemption and defeat. The doctors were talking about the insertion of a tiny silver coil, to seal the source of the bleed. That seemed a fiddly result, a solution dramatic only to one who was actually present, compared to the bounding heroes so clearly implied and required by the account his mother’s brain was giving of the thing which had happened to it, to her.

  “But what about love?” the man who had called himself Timothy said. He was glittering as if with fever. The end of his nose, the corners of his glistening eyes, his mouth plumped with a rush of blood—pink as a white rabbit’s. “Have you thought, ever in your life, about that? What about love?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Sandra said, bravely in the circumstances. “Go fuck yourself.”

  They glared at each other.

  The sun had long since set. For a while, she had been switching on one small lamp after another as the hours had gone by and the room sank into gloom. Each time she had done so with a feeling of being permitted to do so, as if he were her jailer in her own home, his eyes following her as she got up and turned on a light. From the restaurant terrace in the street below the calls of waiters had been succeeded by its usual music starting up—the old rumba you got so familiar with, night after night—and now the ebb and
flow of conversation from its arriving crowd of customers. From the front, a block or two away, could be heard the hooting of car horns leisurely crawling up and down, promenading like humans. The phone had rung twice in the previous hour and a half, and it had been Stewart. The first time he’d left a message, the second time he’d put the phone down without speaking, though she’d known it had been him. She hadn’t made a move to answer the phone, and now, as it started ringing again, she decided not to answer the phone, not to make any kind of sudden move.

  “We’d get on a lot better,” she said, after a long, conciliatory silence, “if you’d just sit down.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said in the end. He was, quite firmly, between her and the front door.

  An hour and a half before, she had let him into her flat, had said, “Remind me,” with a faint stirring of memory. “And how did you get in?”

  “I used to live opposite you, in Rayfield Avenue.”

  “Oh, right,” Sandra said. “Sheffield. So—welcome to Australia. You should have phoned, though. Are you here on holiday?”

  “I tried to phone,” the man said, “but I never got anything but the answer-phone message. I thought it would be best to turn up and surprise you.”

  “You’ve certainly done that,” Sandra said. “Are you here on holiday?” she asked again.

  “Where shall I put these?” Tim said, holding her bags of shopping. “I’m here for ten days. I flew in yesterday.”

  “It’s nice to see you,” Sandra said. “But you should have phoned. I might easily not have been around, and it’s not all that convenient now—I’m going to have to rush out in an hour or two.” She paused and looked at him. “Yes,” she said slowly. “Yes, I remember you.”

  He stared at her. “I never thought you wouldn’t.”

  “Well, I do.”

  “You sound—” He stopped, looked away from her, as if thinking of the right word.

  “I’ve got to sound pretty Australian,” Sandra said. “I know, if that’s what you were about to say.”

  “Australian?” Timothy said, turning with a wild expression in his eyes.

  “Is it the jet lag?” Sandra said, and tried what she used to call, jokingly, a light sociable Manly laugh. This was an old acquaintance, dropping in from England. “You seem pretty confused. It can really mess with your head. You’re in Australia.”

  “That wasn’t what I was going to say,” Timothy said. “When you said—what you said—and I said—I said you sound—you sound like it’s surprising, like it’s some feat of memory that you remember me at all. I wasn’t going to say you’d got an Australian accent.”

  She wandered over to the kitchen, kicking off her shoes against the breakfast bar, poking them back upright with her toes as she went. She opened the fridge door and began to put away the groceries, which Timothy had left on the kitchen counter. “Do you want a beer?” she said. “They’re cold.”

  “No thanks,” he said.

  “Well, I’m going to have one, if you don’t mind,” Sandra said. She wondered what she was supposed to do with this guest; how she could get rid of him. In his behaviour it seemed as if she had invited him round, and instead of him explaining what the hell he was doing there, he was waiting for her to unveil the surprise outing she’d planned. She could hardly remember him; there was an obvious explanation for why he was here, but she couldn’t imagine he was a likely ambassador from any source. She’d half expected someone to appear like this, but she’d expected, really, her brother. “What are you doing in Australia?” she said, pouring the beer with a judicious eye down the inner slope of a glass.

  “It’s hard to say,” he said.

  “I know what you mean,” she said. “I don’t know why I came to Australia. I just came and I stayed. I thought there’d be kangaroos everywhere. That’s the only idea I had of Australia. But I stayed anyway. Have you just got here?”

  “Yes, only this morning.”

  “You must be jet-lagged,” Sandra said, sitting down on the edge of an armchair. “And you came straight over to see me?” She had a bit of a sinking feeling. “I’m really flattered.”

  “I thought I wouldn’t waste time.”

  “And are you going to travel?” Sandra said, seeing in this a way to turn this obviously pointless visit into a purposeful one, and to get rid of what might be a clinging self-invited guest to Perth, Darwin, the outback, Ayers Rock, or Uluru, as it was called these days.

  “I hadn’t thought,” Timothy said, and tried a smile in response to hers. Like those trick two-dimensional portraits, his eyes followed her as she moved about the room, tidying up. “I’ve got two weeks. Where would you go, if you were me?”

  She hadn’t been a great traveller herself since she arrived here. “Well,” she said. There’d been trips with boyfriends to the Blue Mountains, now and again. There’d been the odd week on the Gold Coast. A few times she’d had to go to Darwin or Hobart to sort out the regional offices there—she’d always meant to stay on in Tasmania especially. There’d been that bloke from Melbourne she’d met at Irene’s—he’d been Greek, her cousin, not a dentist—who’d seemed quite interested. For his sake, she’d spent half a dozen weekends in that unexpectedly Manchester-like city of industrial magnates and over-endowed palaces of art and insurance; in the end, she’d concluded that she’d always have to spend evenings with him chewing over where he’d gone wrong with his ex-wife, and called an end to it. There’d been, too, a girls’ week in Fiji—they’d all taken half a dozen different bikinis, one for each day and the white one for towards the end when they’d got really brown, where they’d seen nothing of Fiji except a vast piss-cloudy swimming-pool of inlets and artificial waterfalls and flumes and lagoons, densely fringed with skirted waiters bringing cocktails to a hell of a lot of other Australians. It had been a blast. “I’m not much of a traveller myself,” Sandra said, “but you ought to see as much as you can. Ayers Rock. The Great Barrier Reef. The Blue Mountains.”

  Timothy’s eyes went beseechingly over her face, not looking at her, but as if searching for imperfections. “I hadn’t really made any plans,” he said.

  “I must have changed a lot,” Sandra said. “Would you have recognized me?”

  “Oh, yes,” Timothy said, with fervour. “I’d have recognized you.”

  That look, as of a spaniel being promised a held-up biscuit, had not left the man’s face since he’d arrived. It seemed to be exaggerated by the fact that he had nothing in his hands, not even a drink. Sandra got up hastily and, without asking, went to the kitchen cupboard. She got one of the heavy blue Czech tumblers for whisky and, without asking, filled it with ice and a mixture of lemonade and orange juice from a carton. “Try this,” she said, handing it over as if the drink was some secret recipe, handed down through her family.

  He took it with surprise, but he took it, and sipped it cautiously. His eyes never left her; she realized that she’d handed it over and stood there watching him, like a strict-but-kind nurse. It occurred to her that, after all, she only had his word for who he said he was: the grown-up version of a little boy she barely remembered. He could—she supposed—be anyone. Looking at his sallow awkward English freckled skin hanging off his cheekbones, his awkwardnesses at elbow and knees, she could discern no clue to a lost memory of anyone. She just could not call the face to mind; only a single memory.

  “I remember,” Sandra said slowly, “the first time I saw you, you were screaming and shouting.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Timothy said.

  “I remember,” Sandra said. “It was the day we were moving in. Your mother came out of the house with a snake in both hands, and you were behind her, trying to get the snake off her, and screaming your head off. And she sort of threw it down and stamped on it, and you went into hysterics.”

  “Yes,” Timothy said. He looked disinclined to think of this as a funny episode. “I remember.”

  “It was the strangest thing to see when you’re movi
ng in somewhere new,” Sandra said. “At first I thought—I didn’t know anything about the North—at first I thought, just for a moment, that there must be snakes in the north, like in that story you read at school, with the mongoose, and your mother had just found one and thrown it out.”

  “That wasn’t it,” Timothy muttered.

  “No,” Sandra said. “I guess it wasn’t.”

  “Are there snakes here?” Timothy said, and suddenly she saw him as he had been, grinding out questions like a rusty machine, hardly caring what the answer was, whether there was any answer.

  “Not that you’d notice,” Sandra said.

  “Eight out of the ten most venomous snakes in the world,” Timothy said, “live in Australia. And the most venomous of all is the inland Taipan.”

  “Is that a fact?” Sandra said.

  “It is,” Timothy said, coming out of what might have been a small trance of memory. “I’d forgotten I knew that. I used to be mad keen on snakes when I was a kid. That’s what all that was about.”

  “The—” Sandra mimed Katherine, a snake above her head in both hands, flinging it down, stomping on the head, grinding her heel round “—whole performance? I never really heard the story.”

  “There wasn’t much to it,” Tim said briskly. “I got crazy about snakes. You know how some kids always have some passionate interest on the go.”

  “I guess so,” Sandra said.

  “Well, with me, it was snakes. I don’t know why!”

  “I wasn’t accusing you of anything.”

  Tim shrugged, finished his lemonade and orange juice in a single gulp.

  “I got interested,” he said, in a more reasonable tone. “I read a lot about snakes. I used to dream of finding one of those English snakes, an adder or a grass snake, down on the lower crags, you know?”

  The lower crags: something very like a memory started up in Sandra. It was as if, on an old automatic gramophone, the needle had come to the end of an LP, had lifted, returned, lowered and once more begun to play unsuspected, familiar strains. The lower crags: this man was who he said he was.