The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  That sense of the deferring of respect might have led Daniel through the doors of Ruby Tuesday, four doors along, where he had once had lunch with Tim. But lingering propriety brought him into Bigg and Cleaver instead. It couldn’t be said that the shop had a hushed atmosphere, though: as Daniel came in, the record-player was just building up to a full-scale assault on a political prisoner with hurled drums and cymbals, oboes and saxophones at full shrieking pitch. Daniel stood there, a little unsure of what he was really there for, and then another motive asserted itself, a more immediate one: the feeling that what the restaurant needed was clutter. He could see it quite clearly: instead of that blue and green abstract on the short wall in the bar of Get High on Your Own Supply, a shelf of handsome brown old books. He’d never much liked that blue and green abstract; they’d bought two paintings, and then thought they might as well have a third rather than leave one wall blank.

  The man behind the counter, the record-player to his left hand, the till to the right, was no more contemptuously amused than Daniel had thought he’d be at the request. “We can do that,” he said. “People like you come in from time to time, asking for books for their pub, for their bar, for ‘the snug,’ whatever. They furnish a room.” His colleague, sorting through a box of LPs behind him gave out a honking laugh for some reason. “So, what’s it going to be? Do you want a big lovely set with matching gold bindings?”

  “Nothing too expensive,” Daniel said.

  “It won’t be expensive if it’s something no one wants any more,” the man said. “You’d be surprised how many twelve-volume sets of collected sermons got printed in the nineteenth century. They look wonderful.”

  “They used to hollow them out, didn’t they?” Daniel said, trying out a piece of bibliographical knowledge. “Put bottles of whisky inside.”

  “That’s a myth,” the man said. “It only happens in Benny Hill sketches. But, right, we’ve got a by-the-yard interior-decoration service. What’s the effect you’re aiming at?”

  “I sort of thought—well, not grand, not like a library in a stately home. More a bit homey, but not, you know, tatty old paperbacks, and—I don’t know. I know those bookshelves you see in pubs, they always look as if they’re full of books from a junk shop. They never really look like bookshelves in someone’s house, I don’t know why. I want it to look like a case of books from someone’s house. Does that make any sense?”

  “Well,” the man said, “we can do our best. I suppose what you want is a shelf of books that people might have heard of, and some runs of authors, maybe? Something that looks as if—let’s say—something that looks as if the person who put it together might have had some interests in life.”

  “Can you do that?”

  The man looked Daniel up and down, and there was now a definite amusement in his voice. “Can we do sincerity, you mean?” he said.

  “Yes, I suppose I do.”

  “Well, we can fake it,” he said.

  They agreed a price—Daniel might have tried to haggle upwards, it seemed pretty low—and he told Daniel to come back in three hours’ time, there’d be a decent couple of boxes for him. He knew a carpenter, too, to put up shelves; actually, his workshop was a few doors down on Division Street. Daniel went round there first, and the carpenter agreed to come round in two weeks’ time to put up two or three shelves. He apologized for it not being sooner: “You’re lucky it can be as soon as that,” he said. “We’ve got more work than we know what to do with, just these last few months.”

  He sounded disgusted, but pretending to complain about everything was just how Sheffield was, and Daniel limited himself to remarking, in the same sick-to-the-back-teeth tone, that it never rained but it poured. It was quite a cosy chat they had. Afterwards, knowing that he’d been given licence to fritter away three hours or so, Daniel wandered down towards Cole’s. There were all sorts of new shops and bars opening up down here; strange little fashion-student shops for the kids in the clubs, silversmiths not long out of college, a sweaty little cave painted black inside and selling techno records. There was a new bar next to the fire station, too; an enormous one. They must know what they were doing. He didn’t go into any of them; he went off to Cole’s, and extravagantly bought six white cotton shirts, all exactly the same. It was lunchtime, and Daniel, in accordance with his mood, went into a restaurant he’d never been in before, a new one, and, just for the hell of it, had one of the stalwarts off the Get High on Your Own Supply menu, the fish pie. He quite enjoyed it not being as good as theirs, too.

  “What in the name of Christ is that you’ve got there?” Helen said, as Daniel and Jerry lugged a box—the first of three—into the office. She didn’t turn round: she carried on looking at the spreadsheet on the computer screen.

  “I bought some books,” Daniel said, and explained. Helen spun the office chair round and looked at him in astonishment.

  “Clutter,” Helen said. Daniel and Jerry, who had been hovering and puffing, made some mysterious communication without looking at each other, and exited. They could see an argument coming.

  “Erm,” Daniel said. “Well, yes, clutter. I thought, what would be quite nice, just a bookcase, over there—a sort of, you know, cosy, homey, er—”

  “I despair,” Helen said. “It could be worse, I suppose. I thought you were thinking about knick-knacks and cushions. Personally, I think it’s going to look just a little bit stupid, one bookcase on its own, but I won’t stand in your way.”

  “Anything else you want to get off your chest?” Daniel said. “Do you want to start going on at me to lose some weight, like everyone else around here? What about that?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Daniel, get off your high horse, no one’s having a go at you,” Helen said.

  “You could have fooled me,” Daniel said.

  “All I meant was I thought we were supposed to be partners in this business,” Helen said.

  “Well, we are,” Daniel said. He had had practice in the last months in not saying the observations that came into his head, and now he thought: That’ll be all we are if things don’t improve around here from your side. He managed not to say it.

  “In my opinion,” Helen said, “the look of the restaurant is something we should discuss and agree on. You don’t just go out and spend a thousand pounds on something because you think it might be nice without talking about it.”

  “We talked about it,” Daniel said.

  “No, Daniel,” Helen said. “What happened was that you mentioned something in very general terms, I said I didn’t think so, and then you went out. There’s a difference.”

  Helen turned back to the computer as if she were right. There was plenty more to say from Daniel’s side, but the trouble was, most of it was wrong, and Helen was actually right. It probably was stupid to put up a bookshelf of randomly chosen books in a restaurant. There was no doubt Helen and everyone else was right when they said what they said, that he needed to lose some weight. He didn’t know how that had happened—it hadn’t happened to his dad or to his mum, both of them still perfectly trim in their sixties. Daniel, in what was really more of a performance of petulance than anything else, bent down and opened one of the boxes. On top was quite a new book; it looked as if it hadn’t been read, and he took it out, standing up with a bit of the heavy-breathing routine. He hadn’t known the shop was going to put new books in; he’d thought it would be entirely what lay underneath this book, a line of quite untempting-looking worn readers’ copies of classic-looking type thingies. It wouldn’t go along with those, this new hardback with a shiny dustjacket; he wondered why they’d put it in. He straightened up and, with a shake of the head, went off with this single book to the restaurant bar. There was never anyone there at this time of day; he pulled round a big armchair, facing the corner of the room, kicked off his shoes, put his book in his lap and began to read.

  It was three hours later when Helen came out of the office, yawning and stretching her arms in an arch above he
r head, then gripping them, hand in elbow, behind her back. As she often did when there was no one about, she took off her rings, two on her left hand, one on the right, laid them carefully on the bar and cracked her fingers, one after the other, pulling them, starting with the little finger and ending up with the thumb. They went off like firecrackers—“You’ll get arthritis,” she said silently to herself, a piece of playground wisdom. She put her rings back on, and went behind the bar. From the shelf underneath the till, she picked up the remote control from the CD player, and, not caring what was on, just pressed the play button. It was probably going to begin whatever had happened to be on the machine the last time anyone had used it. Often, in these circumstances, Helen had been startled by the irruption into a calm afternoon of the night before’s music. What the kids in the kitchen had put on to entertain themselves while they were finishing off when all the customers had gone. None of them could cook to music. She’d discovered that when a radio she’d bought as a kind thought had languished untouched in the corner of the kitchen for weeks. The music only came on when they were cleaning up and tidying away.

  Now she pressed the button and a woman’s scornful voice asked what she was looking at before a dance beat started up. It had been left at top volume, so that it would be heard in the kitchen through the doors, and from a chair in the corner of the bar—she hadn’t thought anyone was in it—a head, Daniel’s, leapt up.

  “Christ, you made me jump,” he said cheerfully. “Can you turn that racket down a bit?”

  “I was just about to,” Helen said, and did so.

  “What time is it?” Daniel said, then looked at his watch. “My God, I’ve been sitting here three hours.”

  “Did you drop off?” Helen said.

  “No, I’ve been reading,” Daniel said. “Don’t tell me off, I’ve got nothing much to do today anyway.”

  “What are you reading?” Helen said, coming over. “One of your books from this morning?”

  “I think it got in by mistake,” Daniel said, showing her the cover. He had his thumb in the book, a hundred or so pages in. “I only asked for tasteful-looking old books. This is a new one.”

  “What’s it about?” Helen said.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Daniel said. “It’s sort of about people like us, I think.”

  And he showed her the first page. “‘So the garden—’” she read.

  “I can’t be sitting around all day, love,” Helen said. “I’ll read it when you’re done. Is my dad finished upstairs?”

  “Must be nearly,” Daniel said, and yawned and stretched, watching her go, the movement of her rump, a dancer’s movements, with still that old pleasure. “I’ll not be putting up the bookcase,” he called after her. “I thought about it. It was a stupid idea, really.” She kept on going, and it was only by a sort of satisfied, approving movement of her head that he saw she’d heard him. He picked up the book, and weighed it in his hand. Soon the first customers would be arriving. His mum and dad had said they were coming down this evening with Jane and Scott and baby Archie, up for the weekend. He’d recommend the fish pie, and get Helen to sit down and eat with them. All those books: all made from what people remember. Memory, in a block, six inches by four by two. Maybe Helen was right when she said she knew why the second-hand bookshop was so glad to be shot of them. Or perhaps that was just in her fit of rage with him for spending the money so ineffectually and thoughtlessly. He watched her coming back from the bar, with a shining glass for him in her hand, a slice of lemon on top, and he smiled. And she smiled back. What he’d wasted today; it was only money, after all. And time, of course. There had never been any real doubt in his mind that she would forgive him.

  London—Khartoum—Topsham

  March 2007

  A Note About the Author

  Philip Hensher’s novels include Kitchen Venom, which won the Somerset Maugham Award, and The Mulberry Empire, which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Chosen by Granta as one of its best young British novelists, he is professor of creative writing at Exeter University and a columnist for the Independent. He lives in London.

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2008 by Philip Hensher

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Originally published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, London.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-27140-2

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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