The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  “Do you know what?” Katherine said, when she and Malcolm were alone. “I’ve got myself a job.”

  Malcolm looked at her in assessment; she looked back, firmly; he dropped his gaze to his empty plate. You could see him recalculating the steak, which had been only enjoyment, a treat.

  “We’re not that short of money,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. “I’ve worked before. I like having a job. I haven’t had one since the children were born.”

  “What’s all this, then, all of a sudden? You’ve not said anything.”

  “I know,” she said. “I wasn’t looking for one. It’s just landed in my lap, in a manner of speaking.”

  “We’re not short of money,” he said again.

  “It’s to keep myself busy,” she said. “Don’t you want to know what it is?”

  “All right, then,” Malcolm said.

  She told him about the shop, which he hadn’t noticed although he drove through Broomhill twice a day. That confirmed something she’d instinctively felt. Malcolm, with all his fussing and tweaking at the plants in the garden, the membership of and regular attendance at the garden club, hadn’t had his attention drawn by a new florist’s. Nick’s business and Malcolm’s Thursday-night interest, both apparently concerned with the same thing, were in reality sharply separated. He wouldn’t have connected the shop with his own interest. They were, mysteriously, different things, and she felt the affront she was offering him.

  “Well, I don’t see why not,” Malcolm said. “If you don’t like it, you can always give up. Who’s in charge of the shop?”

  “He’s not in charge,” Katherine said. “It’s his own business.”

  “Oh, I thought it must be a chain,” Malcolm said. “Interflora. Well, it might not work out for him, either.”

  And then Katherine told him about Nick.

  It had been easy, really. He’d given way limply, and she didn’t know why she’d made such a business about it in her head. She’d had an argument practised and rehearsed in her mind, marshalled her points; and they lay there now like gleaming clockwork devices for someone to come and claim them. She was almost disappointed. All those arguments had been, in their different ways, attacks on him. It was only afterwards, sitting in front of the telly, Daniel out somewhere, Tim and Jane upstairs, heads in books, that she started to feel a little annoyed; the things he’d just accepted, the things he hadn’t asked about. Shouldn’t you ask about the wages, apologetic though they are? She wondered, angrily, about his politeness to her.

  At ten, Daniel came in—he’d been at his friend Matthew’s, playing that board game they played. At eleven, Malcolm got up, switched the television off, unplugged it, remarking that it was a relief all those power-cuts had stopped at last. He made the same remark twice a week. They went upstairs. As usual, she went to the bathroom first, stripped off her makeup, creamed her face. Malcolm had left his jacket on the back of a chair, and was just putting it away in the fitted wardrobe. She started to undress, unbuttoning her skirt. He went to the bathroom next; she put on her clean nightdress and, as she always did, took off her bra and knickers underneath it, like a shy bather fumbling with a towel. Through the wall, she could hear the fierce sizzle of his piss in the toilet. She got into bed, taking a book and her reading glasses from the bedside table.

  He came back, and undressed without saying anything. She looked at him covertly over the top of her book. His hair was getting longer; untidy, though, and he’d be having it cut soon. He pulled his shirt, blue with a white collar, over his head. The first time she’d seen him naked, three months before they’d married, she’d been struck by the hair on his body; the little tufty patch between his nipples, almost circular, not quite amounting to a hairy chest. He turned now, and there was the other patch she’d not known anyone could have, a rough growth at the bottom of his spine, a monkey flourish. He wasn’t a hairy man; he’d not have a thick beard if he grew one. She noticed now that the rest of his back, which used to be spotty, was now lightly furred. Odd, the way you went on changing as you got older; that was what ageing meant.

  He had an order to things: after the shirt, he took off his trousers, then his socks—his thin white legs! Then he put on his pyjama top, fastening one or two of the buttons, before taking his underpants off. Beneath the hem of the pyjamas, the little purplish tip of his penis, dangling absurdly; she’d had no idea about the penis, apart from Michelangelo’s David, and it had seemed long and thin, ugly with veins, a little bit sad, always had. It was something she’d read men worried about. Just then the possibility of sex came to her; she’d creamed her face, but she could wipe it off, strip her nightdress from her; her husband could take off his pyjamas again, and then, all that. It hadn’t been very much like that, ever; she didn’t know why she thought of it like that now. We could get flowers for the house, she thought. All the time; even in the bedroom. Nick, in her head, handed a huge bunch of unsold lilies to her, bearded, solemn, pagan. My life is on the point of change, she said.

  And then Malcolm got into bed, and reached for his own book. For fifteen minutes, he read about the English Civil War; for fifteen minutes, before they put the lights out, she read, with less concentration, about an uninvolving girl called Pierrette in a château in Provence.

  Although she had started work, Katherine’s morning routine remained the same. From the first morning, she took out a more careful outfit, though, one she’d decided on the night before: a neat jacket with a floral scarf, a pussy-bow tied at the neck. When the weather worsened, she would wear a poncho over it; she’d found and bought a purple one in Debenhams, the end of the week before. She’d sneaked it into the wardrobe, and if Malcolm noticed, she’d say, “Oh—this? I don’t wear it often, I know.” He often didn’t notice. It was her money, she reminded herself.

  When she arrived, Nick was already in the shop, the flowers in the boxes. It was fifteen minutes before opening time, and when she rapped on the door, smiling, he looked up, first surprised and then, oddly, relieved—had he thought she wouldn’t turn up?

  “I realized,” he said, letting her in, the key fumbling in the thick chamois leather of his glove, “I don’t have your telephone number. I forgot to ask.” He locked the door behind her.

  “I’ll write it down for you,” Katherine said. “Now. Where have we got to?”

  “Well, let’s see,” he said. “First things first. A cup of coffee. I’m dying for one.”

  He started to pull off his gloves. He was nervous in some way; after all, it was a new business, the flower shop.

  “Let me,” Katherine said. “You carry on with what you’re doing. Where are the things?”

  “I bought a mug for you,” he said. “And the milk’s in the fridge. I remembered to get it on my way in.”

  “I tell you what,” she said, “let’s have a kitty, and I’ll be in charge of the coffee and biscuits. I’ll need to know about your favourites.”

  “I can see we’re going to get on,” Nick said, going back to stripping the stems of the yellow roses. “My favourite biscuits. Well, I like those pink ones, wafers. Or Iced Gems.”

  “My son likes those,” Katherine said. “My younger son.”

  “They’re not a very grown-up sort of biscuit,” Nick said. “I’m sorry for that. But I don’t think I could face the austerity of Rich Tea.”

  “My nan liked those,” Katherine said. “My grandmother. She used to dip them in her tea. As I suppose you’re meant to. So now you know about the biscuit preferences of most of my family.”

  “I didn’t know you had a family,” Nick said. “Though of course you’ve got a family. And what are your preferences in the biscuit line?”

  “Me?” Katherine said. “Oh—anything. I just get what the children like, usually.”

  “The other thing I meant to say—I don’t mind if you don’t want to work on Saturdays.”

  “Saturdays?” Katherine said.

  “Your family,” Nick said. “I’ll
manage.”

  “Oh,” Katherine said. She hadn’t considered that; the arrangements had been vague. She didn’t want to reject what, for Nick, was evidently some thought-out kindness, and things could change later. “That’s very good of you. You’ll manage all right?”

  “I’ll manage,” Nick said again. “Now. Let’s have that coffee and no biscuits—I remembered the milk, the biscuits didn’t occur to me—and we’ll go through the tasks of the week. It’s the same every week.”

  Twice a week, on Tuesday morning—“but I went on Monday this week”—and on Friday morning, before the Saturday rush, Nick went in the little van to the flower market. He’d be back before opening time, and together they’d strip the flowers’ foliage, plunge them into the buckets. “I’ll just get what tempts me,” Nick said. “I suppose in a bit we’ll find out what sells and what doesn’t.” That was the fresh stock, which he was dealing with. Apart from the flowers, there were leaves and other greenery, used in making up bouquets. There was, too, a range of dried flowers and grasses so the shop, even at the end of a busy day, wouldn’t look denuded. Some of that, too, could go into a fresh bouquet, like the shining coins of honesty, and some more exotic things: there were crabbed and arthritic fingers of willow twigs, and, against the wall, a fan of peacock feathers. “People come in sometimes, and they just buy honesty and peacock feathers,” Nick said. “The trouble is they last for ever, so we won’t see them for another year, and we won’t get rich on that.”

  There was, too, a range of vases for sale. “You’d be surprised,” Nick said, “—at the number of people—I’ve already discovered this and I’ve only been here a week—who come in and buy a bunch of flowers, they’re the ones who’ve got something to apologize for, to their wives usually, I suppose, and then they remember they haven’t got a vase. You can charge what you like for those.” Katherine looked at the strange collection: some big square greenish glass ones, a Chinese-looking one with dragons, and half a dozen in brownish pottery, a few Victorian ones with blurred transfers of fruit and vegetables.

  “Well,” Nick said, “I had a flurry of custom on Monday, just after you came in—it must have been you, bringing me luck—and a little bit on Tuesday, but then it died down a bit. I had a good day on Friday, though, and actually, Saturday too. We were closer to running out of stock than I’d expected. Curiosity, I expect—we’ll see what it looks like in a month.”

  “And the vases?” Katherine said, picking at a stuck-on rose on a goblin fantasy of fruit and flowers, bulging like goitres.

  “Don’t you like them?” Nick said. “I was in York a week or two back, and I saw a florist’s, just closing down. I went in and I bought the stock. It must have been there years. He was glad to get rid of it. I thought it was a good omen.”

  “A good omen?” Katherine said. “Yes, I suppose you could see it like that.”

  Nick looked at her solemnly, his boyishly blue eyes, his untidy blond hair; she wondered if he knew what he was doing. All at once, he was laughing. “I see what you’re getting at,” he said. “If they wouldn’t buy them in York, they’re not going to buy them in Sheffield.”

  “I didn’t mean that, exactly,” Katherine said, blushing. She shouldn’t kick off by criticizing him.

  “But you don’t like them,” Nick said.

  “Well,” Katherine said, “not all of them. That one, for instance.” She ran her hand over it. It bore a jazz-modern pattern, orange and yellow and brown, the sort of thing Malcolm’s mad aunt Susan had had since before the war. “That’s fairly horrible.”

  “You don’t think it’ll come back into fashion?” Nick said, still laughing.

  “And in the meantime we’re to have it cluttering up the shop and frightening off the customers?”

  “I see what you mean,” Nick said. He took off his chamois gloves and, with his slight hands, picked up the vase. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll christen the good ship Reynolds.”

  She followed him to the back of the shop. He gave a sturdy kick to the door. It flung open. The brick courtyard was shaggy with weeds, and a cat threw itself up a wall. “Right,” Nick said. “Do you want to do it or shall I?”

  “Do what?”

  “Christen the shop,” Nick said. “All right. I name this good shop—” he hurled the vase with one movement against the wall “—Reynolds.”

  The vase bounced, then rolled along the ground, coming to rest at their feet. They looked at it, soberly.

  “It must be melamine,” Katherine said. “Or some such.”

  “I suppose it must,” Nick said. “How hilarious.” And then they were laughing and laughing; they did not stop until the bell at the front of the shop announced their first customer of the day.

  That night, at supper, Katherine told the story; she tried to make it funny.

  “I don’t understand,” Malcolm said. “Why would he try to smash a vase he’d bought?”

  “It was so ugly,” Katherine said. “I don’t know why he bought it in the first place.”

  “Someone might not have thought so,” Malcolm said seriously. “You can’t assume that everyone’s going to have the same taste as you. He’s not going to make a success of it if he goes on smashing his stock like that. I expect he could put it down to accidental damage, though it wouldn’t be exactly honest. If I were you—”

  Daniel groaned.

  Malcolm looked at him in astonishment. “What’s up with you?” he said.

  “It’s funny,” Daniel said. “He sounds a right laugh, Mum’s boss.”

  “Yes,” Malcolm said. “That’s what I’d expect someone of your age to think.”

  Daniel groaned again.

  “That’s quite enough, Daniel,” Katherine said. She looked down at her plate: the jazz-modern orange and brown pattern they’d always had. She ought to do something about it. And she agreed with Daniel: Nick was a right laugh.

  She soon discovered that Nick needed someone like her. The shop was, of course, just a business. It took in perishable stock, relying as well on imperishable steady sellers—Nick ran an illogical but quite profitable line in minor stationery by the till as well as a carousel of cards, and it was surprising the number of people who popped in for a card, some of whom found themselves leaving with some flowers as well. (The cards were much more artistic—Monet!—on the whole than the dismal and ancient range to be had in the newsagent’s opposite and, being blank inside, were superior to his faintly common specifications of particular birthdays and particular family recipients.) It was, if you thought of it in an abstract, Malcolmish way, like many other retail businesses.

  And yet it was not, because there was the question of the flowers that Nick went to fetch twice a week. Nick, you might easily assume, was a person who had little idea: he projected a kind of uselessness, and a casual Malcolmish auditor might conclude that he had no particular attraction to flowers and no particular aptitude that would make the business a success. But when Nick came in twice a week with his van of flowers, she perceived, without his having to say anything, a kind of magic. That twice-weekly unloading made her feel as if she had carried out some act of betrayal against Malcolm and, in particular, his garden. Malcolm’s garden was a matter of mulch and compost, of feeding and pruning, of weeding and trellises, espaliers, reading. Then for two or three weeks the flowers passed the baton of display from one to the next, with perhaps a brief spurt of mass exuberance in late summer; sometimes, despite all the weeding and reading and feeding, it did not happen at all. One January the three camellias had failed to do anything, just stayed there leggily with their glossy dark leaves, like the picture on a jar of face cream; and Malcolm had raised the question at his horticultural society at the church hall in Crosspool. Then, with all the conflicting advice he’d gathered, he’d come back and read some more. “Throw them out,” she always wanted to say; and Malcolm had observed that he’d see what happened next year, infuriatingly.

  The unloading of Nick’s van was a direct affront to
that. Thirty perfect roses in each colour, red, white, pink, yellow and, once, exotically green; the masses of carnations, routine and nuptial; the lilies casting their high scent throughout the shop as they slowly opened, the stargazers, the tigers; those were the standards of the shop, and any found not to be perfect was discarded, not nurtured. The glassed-in gardens, heated with oil-stoves, that bred these frail fantasies, she longed to see those. They had to come all year round, the lilies for the Christmas table, the red roses for Valentine’s Day, because the dates when people wanted flowers—a wedding, a funeral, what turned out to be the frantic rush of 14 February and the guilty expressions before Mother’s Day—did not coincide with the natural lives of the flowers. And along with them came the exotics, things that had caught Nick’s eye. Some sold; some, like the almost tawdry beauty of the bird-of-paradise flowers at seventy pence a stem, did not. And Katherine knew that a man who had pinned his future on things that would burst out in colour for a few days and die was not someone who might as well be selling cabbages. That was Malcolm’s phrase for anything like that; Malcolm, whose garden, when it flowered, never ventured as far as the numbing scents of the flower shop. It was not precisely disapproving. The bookshop, the art gallery at Hunter’s Bar, the new record shop at the end of the moor where Daniel spent his Saturdays, casting out a deafening racket, painted an intimidating black inside, the scarlet legend VIRGIN on the shop face—Malcolm dismissed in them any higher aspirations, any apparently counter-cultural tendencies, with the observation that they were there to make money, they might as well be selling cabbages. But of Nick’s shop that was not true.

  “I went to university here,” Nick said. “My brother too. Actually, I came here because he did. Studied the same thing he did, too. Law.” He was watching her put together a bouquet; she had thought she knew how to do it, but he’d taught her how to do it properly. Start with one, make a spiral round it, alternating the flowers and the foliage, holding the bouquet in the left hand, adding with the right, and there it was: clip with the secateurs, a twist of ribbon and into the cellophane. Easy, after the first five.