The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  “I know what you mean, sweetheart,” Jimmy said. He didn’t seem to have been listening, but Nick knew what she meant: the world was full of small furry animals with large eyes, and only the first ones you came across would you feel like putting up your sleeve. After that, you’d be wise to their small furry ways, and could step past their cases with a light step. He’d rather go and see the penguins now, too.

  “It’s all settled,” Jimmy said, when they were at the penguins’ enclosure, watching their antic waddle.

  “Yeah?” Nick said, not following.

  “The shop,” Jimmy said. “The shop I was on about.” The penguins hesitated: over their pool was a double slide, a double helix, and at the top of it they crowded, as if with empty bravado. It had once been white, but the paint was peeling, the concrete coming through in patches, the penguins projecting nerves. At the top, they jostled each other, as if trying to pick on one to shove down first. Nick had seen it before, and knew that as soon as one was sent down, the rest would follow.

  “Oh, the shop,” Nick said. And then the whole thing was settled.

  My God, Nick thought, the first time he saw it. There wasn’t much for him to organize: Jimmy was taking charge, dealing with everyone from the end of a phone. The hardware merchant had gone, leaving an interior prickly with shelves and pigeonholes, all painted the same unrenewed cream. The pigeonholes were still labelled “2½’,” “60 watt,” “mortices,” the letters punched out white on those black plastic strips, now, many of them, peeling off and some littering the floor with a detritus of wood-shavings, nails, the screwed-up balls of newspaper used for packing. They would go: a florist’s would demand no extraordinary expertise—he’d been on a course, anyway, Jimmy’d thought of that. But the point was that the shop had to be run. It couldn’t be like little Sonia, upstairs with last year’s Christmas present, an eighteen-inch toy greengrocer’s with imperishable plaster-of-paris cauliflowers, pretending to weigh them out and demanding, as Sonia tended to, real money in exchange.

  Nick wasn’t sure he was up to it. He’d never done such a thing. He’d been a waiter; he’d worked in bars; he’d tried more ambitious jobs, a bit of responsibility, a job in local government, which—you couldn’t lose that sort of job, his mum had said—ought to have done him. But it turned out you could lose that sort of job, if you were Nick. And then he’d bumped into Jimmy again, and his life had taken that particular nervous but lucrative direction. It seemed a lot to undertake, running a flower shop.

  But without him having to do anything very much, the shop took shape. The workmen came and went, and Nick only opened the door and made them cups of tea as they tore down the shelves and sanded the stained and knobbly floor. “Dost a gnaw—” one workman asked the first day, and broke off, laughing, when he saw that Nick did not understand even that. And he did not know. Nick did not know where—as it turned out he was being asked—the nearest hardware supplier was, this one being thoroughly stripped down and a drill bit needed. After that, whenever a decision was needed, it was to Jimmy they appealed; even the first time a dilemma arose, and they had to have been under Jimmy’s instructions in this regard not to appeal to Nick who, they knew, would be the shop’s proprietor. They kept a pile of two-pence pieces by the door, on the shelf, like a church’s cumulative charity; at least once a day, the foreman took the upmost half-dozen to the phone box to clarify things with Jimmy. Nick made more tea; there was, as yet, no working toilet and they had to nip into the pub at lunchtime or, after two thirty, piss in the yard out the back.

  For a few days Nick hovered, an ingratiating smile on his face, then got tired of it, and took himself off. He started to appreciate, with unwelcome clarity, the overt diffidence about him that had made him so useful to Jimmy in the past. Though the diffidence would shortly become useful again, he had only really been aware of it when, as now, it made him risibly ineffective in the eyes of workmen. The area seemed appalling to him. The mincingly genteel tea-shop; the 1950s American-modern laundromat and Co-op; further back, the dismal Victorian philanthropy of the black-pillared Greek-style museum, with its leaking prehistoric beasts, its dismal paintings of local industries or, up the hill, that same Victorian philanthropy, the same Greek pillars in front of a library, and no more alluring. Sometimes, the layers of change were manifest on a single site: a men’s boutique, with a psychedelic shop sign in purple, had kept hanging outside the three balls of the pawnbroker who must have preceded it. The changes of the district: Nick started to be aware of them as time passed, as the weather improved and a surprising yellow spurt of, what was it?, crocuses, could that be it?, emerged from a crack in the pavement outside the shop and, hardly less cheering, a pod of mushrooms bubbled up beneath the carpet they’d laid in the lavatory. Became aware of those slower changes as his business took shape. The scoured-smooth emptiness of the hardware shop began to be filled. The plasterwork was finished off, and the Regency striped wallpaper piled up, ready for application; a display unit, rather like an Olympic podium, but with spaces for five rather than three winners, was installed and painted a nice dark maroon; a reproduction desk was brought in at, apparently, Jimmy’s order—he hadn’t shared this decision with Nick. Like other decisions passed up-country by Jimmy—his insistence that the flowers should bear no prices—it added that crucial sense of class to the enterprise.

  All that strange period, Nick behaved and thought much more like a client than the instigator of a business. Jimmy had booked him into a hotel while he found somewhere to live, saying he should take his time about it; but Nick had done nothing in that direction. He returned to the Hallam Towers every night, dined richly—after five weeks his waistband was uncomfortable with the lobster sauces and no exercise—and settled down to an early night after his daily phone conversation with Jimmy. After a few weeks, it looked as if he had set up camp within the room, the walls lined with bagged laundry, a short shelf of borrowed thrillers by the bedside.

  The workmen knew all about this impermanent existence, returning to their own wives and children after a day spent not asking for Nick’s instructions about anything. So did the hotel staff, and so did Jimmy. “Have you got yourself a supplier yet?” Jimmy said one night.

  “Supplier?” Nick said, rather thrown by Jimmy’s familiar term.

  “Flower supplier,” Jimmy said. “You been to the market yet?” There was the sound of Jimmy heavily waiting at the end of the phone.

  “I’m planning to go the day after tomorrow,” Nick said.

  “You should have gone by now,” Jimmy said. “Important to strike up a relationship. I want it up and running by—what did we agree on?”

  “Two weeks yesterday,” Nick said.

  “Two weeks yesterday,” Jimmy said. “You think they’ll be done by then?”

  “I would say so,” Nick said. “It looks almost ready now.”

  “Well,” Jimmy said, “this is what you want to do.”

  The question of the market hadn’t gone from Nick’s mind, but he’d put it aside as if someone were to deal with it on his behalf. After this conversation with Jimmy, he told the workmen in the shop he wouldn’t be around the next day, and asked the receptionist at the hotel for a four thirty a.m. wake-up call. “Hilarious, I know,” he said dismally.

  The flower market was fifty miles away, in a more urbane, less industrial city that could stretch out its lines of supply in all directions into very different places, some more austere even than Sheffield. Nick had had the whole thing arranged for him, and instructions had been passed down. At a layby on the A1, shortly before six, his hands in fingerless red woollen tradesman’s gloves clutched a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich, the hand-drawn map pinned to the bonnet of his little van with an elbow. He knew he would get lost.

  But it seemed to work in an all but professional manner, and in only half an hour he was parking outside a grimy Victorian market hall, open to the elements, pillared with flaking green paint over rusting green metal, and everywhere ornamented wi
th idealized brick bouquets, now blackened and snotlike. His laisser-passer was accepted, and he went in.

  His breath condensed before him. It seemed early, but he could see that the market had, even now, passed the peak of its exchanging, and men and women were pushing wheeled pallets full of ranked blooms towards him on their way out. The market ways were still banked with flowers but great holes had appeared in them as the marauding buyers had carried off the best. Well, he was not here to buy, not today; and that was a useful commercial lesson to have learnt, he told himself. The buyers, the marauders, were men and women, some genteel-looking, the women in capes and ponchos, the men in Harris tweed coats, like Nick, but others rough boys, carrying off the helpless innocent blooms to smaller, more diverse markets, to sell chrysanths beside meat stalls, greengrocers, fishmongers, cheap clothing stalls, provision merchants.

  He walked on until he came to what seemed one of the biggest stalls in the market, its depleted fields of carnations and tulips stretching out like blankets. He stood there, irresolute. The man in charge registered him, shook his head in a knowing way and, as his subordinates smirked at this demonstration of who he was, leant forward to spit richly, the abundant phlegm of a smoker’s early-morning mouth splattering like puke on the floor.

  “Help you?” the man said.

  “Yes,” Nick said firmly. “I hope so.” He explained his situation, or some of it: a new flower shop, a need for a regular relationship with a supplier, and—it did no harm—a frank though not exactly explicit acknowledgement that it was all new to him, he hadn’t a clue about what stock to take. Mr. William, he said his name was—Nick was pleased with this: it suggested to him an old-established family in the trade, where the long-retired dad in the nursing-home might be the name on the board referred to as Mr. Gracechurch, the hard-nosed chief remaining Mr. William until his father’s death. Nick addressed him as Mr. William in what he hoped was a respectful way at least three times during the conversation. Mr. William was serious, helpful—“You’re not thinking of buying today, I take it, sir,” he said. In twenty minutes advice had been given about stock—“Though, of course, you’ll come to know your customers PDQ”—and an agreement made about the days Nick would turn up—a little earlier, Mr. William suggested, than he had today. It all seemed quite easy. Nick just hoped he hadn’t made a mistake in choosing his supplier; in fact, he’d hardly chosen him at all. He took what comfort he could from the greetings Mr. William threw behind his back at passing florists; a popular and—yes?—respected man around here.

  “One last thing, though,” Mr. William said, as they shook hands. “If we’re to do business on a regular like basis, let’s not be getting each other’s names wrong. My name’s Williams, Roy Williams. It’s got an s on the end.”

  “How hilarious,” Nick said, aghast. “Not hilarious, sorry, I didn’t mean—just—sorry,” he said, stumbling backwards and, for some reason, bowing. The man wasn’t a Gracechurch at all, and though Nick had never heard of the Gracechurch family before half an hour ago, the revelation of Mr. William as the acquirer of the guise of Gracechurch made the original owners seem unattainably grand, the present owner tainted for ever with the suspicion of dishonesty, as if Nick had made a mistake not starting twenty years before, and dealing with those imagined excellencies of the fabled Gracechurches. The embarrassing exchange made him, finally, feel the entire fraudulent nature of the enterprise.

  He drove off, face burning, and when, after breakfast, a charity shop presented itself with, in the window, a rigid array of donated vases, there was only one thing he could do. He went in and bought the lot. At least I can, he thought, driving away with the hideous clanking load in the back, at least I can—but reassurance wouldn’t come. It would not come, either, when he arrived back in Broomhill and and, in front of all the builders, he had to unload seven unbelievably ugly vases. They had done a good job, the builders, in producing an elegant interior for his shop; they had to see how ugly these vases were. But they said nothing.

  It was to this state of concentrated hopelessness that Katherine presented herself. Until then he hadn’t thought of taking on an assistant but, of course, shops had them. It was easy for him to understand why he’d taken her on: she had come through the door and, immediately, reassuringly, he had seen someone who was projecting an idea of herself with even less competence than Nick did. She seemed to take him at his word, swallowing brothers in New York. He felt himself growing bigger in her eyes. He didn’t despise her for it—in fact, he rather liked the way her presence made him feel about himself. He liked, even, the way she said “Nick” to him, saving herself up, then using his name, enjoying it.

  It seemed a good idea. It was a very good idea and, surprisingly, Jimmy agreed. “Why not?” he said. “Don’t let her near the books, that’s all.”

  From then on, things improved. Three weeks after the shop’s opening, when he looked out of the window and saw two figures opposite, observing his front of a business, he felt only a small shudder of alarm, which subsided immediately as he saw they were two young girls.

  Katherine said, “It’s my daughter. And her friend.”

  “Ask them in,” Nick said. It was going to be all right.

  It was a Sunday morning, a month or two after Katherine had started her new job, when Jane’s father put down the Sunday Express and said, “We ought to go out somewhere.”

  Jane had been looking forward to the Sunday Express. There was the Foreign News page, a page she always enjoyed, with the story about the man coming back early and disturbing his wife with her lover in an unusual hiding-place—the names and the nation changed from week to week but the story was the same. She’d been looking forward to a boring Sunday, maybe a bike ride down the crags.

  “Go out where?” her mother said.

  “It’s a nice day,” Malcolm said. “We could go out somewhere after lunch.”

  “We never go out somewhere after lunch,” Daniel said. He was sitting on the piano stool, one sock off, picking at his feet, absorbed as a grooming monkey. “On a Sunday. Mrs. Kilwhinney, right, she said to us, ‘Do you ever go out into Derbyshire with your family, on a Sunday?’ and only this one kid, this right spastic, said he did. But no one else.”

  “I don’t quite understand the point you’re trying to make,” Malcolm said, with the heavy irony he sometimes used in Daniel’s direction. “But this afternoon, this family is going to get in the car and go for a drive in Derbyshire. Is that understood? And have a nice time. All right?”

  Malcolm got up from the breakfast table and, without exactly storming, walked emphatically out of the room and upstairs; he often retreated to the study and his military books at moments of stress.

  “What was that?” Daniel said.

  “It’s you that’s supposed to have tantrums and slam doors,” Jane said, neatly swiping the Sunday Express. “The problems of adolescence in the young male.”

  “You read too much,” Katherine said mildly. “It’s nothing unusual. Your father wants to go for a drive in Derbyshire. I don’t know why that’s so strange. Lots of people do it.”

  “It’s strange for us,” Jane said. “We only do it when Nana comes.”

  “Well, perhaps it would be a good thing if we started doing it,” Katherine said. “There’s some of the most beautiful country in England out there, and we look at it once in a blue moon. I don’t see that it’s ‘spastic,’ Daniel, and I’ve asked you once—”

  “Okay, okay,” Daniel said, and put his sock back on.

  “It’s disgusting,” Katherine said. “But the other day, Nick, at work, he mentioned he’d been to Haddon Hall at the weekend, this would have been last weekend, and he was saying to me how beautiful it was. Well, I was really quite embarrassed to have to admit that even though I’ve lived forty years in Sheffield, not fifteen miles from Haddon Hall, I’ve never been there. Of course, Nick, he’s interested in beautiful things, he’s sensitive to them—a florist, it’s to be expected. But don’t you t
hink it’s terrible that we live here and we never bother to go and enjoy all the beautiful things on our doorstep, and someone who’s only lived here for three months, he’s making so much more of an effort?”

  “We went to Haddon Hall.” Tim sounded aggrieved. “Martin Jones was sick in the coach into a bag and Miss Taylor threw it out of the door of the coach without it stopping. I told you we went. You never listen.”

  “Well, it was only an example,” Katherine said. “Of course I remember you going.”

  “It was boring. I don’t think I like beautiful things.” Then Tim thought hard for a moment, and said, “Haddon Hall, more glass than wall.”

  “That’s Hardwick Hall,” Jane said. “You’re mixing up beautiful things.”

  “No, it was Haddon Hall,” Tim said, in a kindly, regretful tone. “Hardwick Hall we didn’t go to. I did a project about it, though. I got seven out of ten and I drew pictures. Oh.”

  “It was Hardwick Hall, wasn’t it?” Jane said. “That’s got more glass than wall?”

  “I don’t care which one it was,” Tim said. “It might be both of them probably.”