The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  Presently it stopped and, as best she could, Alice unclenched herself. Bernie was tense, pretending to sleep. It was better than trying to find anything to say. The sound of heavy feet padding around the room next door, clearing up—good God, clearing what up?—was concluded with the sharp click of the light switch and, in a startlingly short stretch of time, with the gross rumble of a fat man snoring. Alice lay there against Bernie’s slowly relaxing body, counting up to five hundred, over and over.

  In the morning, they dressed and were about to leave the room when she heard the door of their wanking neighbour open and shut.

  “Hang on a second,” she said to Bernie. “I just want to brush my hair before we go down.”

  “You’ve just brushed it,” he said.

  “I want to brush it again,” she said. She picked up the brush, and in front of the tiny wonky mirror she brushed her hair again, thirty times, until it was charged with static and flying outwards, until the man, whoever he was, was downstairs and anonymous. But all the same, when the children had been collected and they were all sitting round the table in the “breakfast room,” she could not help letting her eye run round the room. Everyone else there was a man on his own, each at his little table, in various positions of respectability, and the four of them talked in near-whispers. It could have been any of them; she rather wanted to know now, to exclude the innocent others.

  “Well,” Sandra surprisingly said, when they were decanted into the green Simca, the hotel bill grumpily paid, “I don’t think we’ll be staying there again.”

  “Well, of course we won’t,” Bernie said, turning his head. “We won’t ever need to.”

  “That’s not really—” Sandra began.

  “I think the Hallam Towers was a better hotel,” Francis said. “From the point of view of quality.”

  “Yes, of course it’s a better hotel,” Bernie said. “I’m under no illusions there.”

  “If anyone asked you,” Francis said, “Mummy, if anyone asked you to recommend a hotel to stay in in Sheffield—”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Alice said, her temper now breaking out for the first time, “let’s just shut up about it, and never think about the bloody place ever again. I don’t know why we’ve always got to discuss everything.”

  “Your mother’s quite right,” Bernie said. “Give it a rest, Francis.” He smiled, amused and released from some of the tension of Alice’s bravely kept-up face.

  “You said ‘bloody,’” Sandra said, gleeful and mincing.

  “I know,” Alice said. “It was a bloody hotel. It’s the only word for it.”

  “Bloody awful,” Bernie said. “Bloody awful hotel,” he went on. “Arsehole of the world’s hotels.”

  “That hotel,” Francis began, “was really the most—”

  “That’ll do,” Alice said. “We all agree.”

  The thing was that Bernie had taught her to swear, and he liked it, sometimes, when she did. She wasn’t much good at it, she knew that. But she’d grown up in a house where you earned a punishment for saying “rotten;” anything much stronger she’d never heard, or heard and never understood. Bernie and his family, they swore; swore at Churchill on the radio (“Pissed old bugger”), at the neighbours (“Stupid old bastard”), at any inconvenience or none, at each other, at inanimate objects and, strangest of all, affectionately. His mother, his aunts, even; and she’d tried to join in, but she couldn’t really get it, couldn’t do it; she couldn’t get the rhythm right somehow, couldn’t put the words together right, and it obviously became a subject of fond amusement among the whole clan of them when Bernie’s shy fiancée hesitantly described the Northern Line as a bollocks, whatever bollocks might mean.

  It was a fine day. As they drove up the long hill towards their new house, a constant steady incline, three miles long, Bernie hummed; she had sworn and made him cheerful again. For some reason, it was nine o’clock by the time they turned into the road. “Here we are,” Bernie said. “There’s the van. Christ, look!” and, to their surprise, by the removal van, outside one of the houses, on the driveway and spilling out on to the pavement, was most of their furniture. It took a moment to recognize that that was what it was. In the sunshine, it looked so different, arranged in random and undomestic ways, like the sad back lot of a junk shop. The sofa against the dining-table, the dining-chairs against Francis’s bedroom bookshelf, one of the pictures, the pretty eighteenth-century princess hugging a cat, with no wall to be hung on, leaning against a unit. Their beds, too, stripped of sheets and mattresses like the beds of the dead, laid open to the public gaze, shamefully. Their possessions; they seemed at once many and sadly inadequate to fill a house. In the old place, they had stood where they stood for so long that you stopped seeing them. But on the lawn, in the driveway, under the sun, laid out as if for purchasers, you saw it all again. Some of it was nice.

  “There’s the men,” Bernie said. “Well, they’ve made a start, at any rate.”

  “They might have waited,” Alice said.

  “Look, Sandra,” Francis said. “There’s the men.”

  “I know,” Sandra said, angrily. The car stopped: they got out.

  “Morning,” the foreman said.

  From his bedroom window, Timothy watched the family get out. There were four of them. He had taken Geoffrey out of his case again, to let him watch the excitement. The father got out of the little turquoise car, like a box, and stretched his shoulders back. Timothy imitated him. And there was a mother too, holding her handbag tightly, a sweet nervous expression. The boy was tall, taller than his mother though Timothy thought someone had said that he and the boy were the same age. Timothy hated him already.

  But he was really looking at the girl by now. He had no interest in the others. She stood there in a cloud of frizzed hair, and yawned. As she pulled her arms upwards, her wrist in the other hand’s grip, her T-shirt popped loose of her waistband, pulled tightly against her chest. Even yawning she was lovely; even from here her beauty was defined. “Venus,” Timothy said to himself, and found he was stroking along his snake’s back, pointing Geoffrey’s head towards the lovely girl. The removers had seen him when he had stood here. But the girl did not seem to see him, to pay any attention to him. He wondered why not. He promised himself something about this sight; he knew it was important; he promised himself he would never forget it. He had heard of people seeing each other, and knowing immediately that was the person they were to marry. He filed it away.

  The husbands of the road left for work at seven thirty, at eight, at shortly after eight, to be at work by nine. Some had noted the removals van, blocking half the road; the later departures had observed the furniture being placed right across the pavement, and worried, some on behalf of the furniture, some on behalf of anyone wanting to walk down the pavement, as was their right, not obstructed by household chattels and trinkets. That was quite good, but when the interest of the road quickened with the arrival of the new family around nine o’clock, the curiosity was limited to the non-working wives. Most of them welcomed this; they preferred not to have to share their mood of observation with a man. It usually meant dissembling, pretending not to be all that interested. But if you were on your own, you could take a healthy interest, and not have to explain anything to anyone.

  Anthea Arbuthnot, in her flowered housecoat, was paying close attention. She had been finding important things to occupy her around every single one of the windows with a good view ever since the men had started unloading the van. Finally, she had drawn up a chair and a small table by her sitting-room window and made a show of reading the Morning Telegraph over a cup of coffee. “They’ll not have driven up from London this morning,” she said to herself, and started speculating about their arrangements.

  In Karen Warner’s house, her husband had gone to work an hour before. Her son, nineteen, a disappointment, lay at full length on the sofa. It was one of her rules: he might have nothing to do and nothing to get up for, but he would get up
every morning and not lie in bed. In practice, it meant he got up, dressed, stretched out on the sofa and remained horizontal all morning. The telephone rang.

  At the other end, Anthea Arbuthnot announced herself; Mrs. Warner agreed that it had been nice at the Glovers’, the other night, and nice to have had a chance to meet in a social manner. Karen wondered, rather, why Anthea Arbuthnot was telephoning at the expensive time of day when she was only a hundred yards away. But in a moment she pointed out that the new family had just arrived, that they were standing outside with their furniture spread across the road, and invited Karen to pop round to take her morning coffee with her at, say, eleven. Putting the telephone down, it seemed to Karen that Anthea might have invented some kind of purpose for her telephone call, some occasion to justify the invitation—the loan of the garlic-crusher she’d been so interested by the other night would have done.

  “Really, she’s no shame,” Karen said out loud.

  “Pardon?” her son said, after a minute.

  But Karen had been talking to herself—he wasn’t much company, her worry of a son. “I hope you’re planning to get something done today,” she said.

  “Probably,” he said.

  Further up the road, the nursery nurse had phoned in sick. Everything about her seemed to be swelling, not just her soft parts, her belly, her breasts, not even her joints, her ankles, her knees, her elbows blowing up like warty old gourds. Everything seemed to be swelling, even her bones, and her face was purple and tight and aching with the effort involved in lying flat on a bed for eight hours. The nursery was growing politely unbelieving—you could hear it in their voices. She knew they’d put the phone down, and start swapping stories about Chinese peasant women giving birth behind bushes in their lunch breaks. The phone rang and she felt it might be something important—she couldn’t ignore it.

  It was only the woman from down the road, the one they’d met the other night. “I let it ring,” Anthea Arbuthnot said, “because I know what it’s like. You’re at the other end of the house and by the time you get there it stops ringing just as you pick it up and you spend the whole day wondering who it might have been. How are you, my dear?” She apologized, she hadn’t noticed the new neighbours moving in; she agreed the other night had been nice; she demurred at the suggestion of coffee later, but there must have been some uncertainty in her voice, because in two more exchanges she had agreed to lug herself down the road. She put the telephone down, and scowled at it.

  Taking the key from a willing, smiling Bernie, Alice opened the door to the house. She thought nothing of all these neighbours; she gave no thought to their being surrounded by all those accumulated possessions which in her case were pressed into boxes or arranged haphazardly in the open air. Behind her, the children came in, at first cautiously, craning round corners, and then with increasing confidence of possession, Sandra striding boldly upstairs, already arguing over her shoulder with her brother over bedrooms, something already decided. Outside, Bernie was discussing matters with the men in high good humour: he was good with workmen. Alice thought it would be a relief when the house was straight; she thought, too, that after being left empty for all those weeks, it smelt like a cloakroom, like the smell of dust heating on a long-unused toaster, and, a little, of piss. It looked not empty to her but emptied, robbed, and a little pathetic. She walked through the empty rooms; they seemed small, but she reminded herself that empty rooms did seem small. You put furniture in them, and they started to seem larger; you went on putting furniture in them and at a certain point they started to seem small again.

  It was the curtains that gave each room its air of abandonment rather than emptiness. All the curtains had been left behind, and still hung limply at each window. It had made sense to Bernie, and to Alice too, at the time: your old curtains aren’t going to fit the new windows. And the house was going to be empty for weeks, maybe months. There wasn’t much you could do about that, but perhaps if there were curtains up, it might look to anyone passing that it wasn’t abandoned. You heard about squatters, these days.

  Bernie came in and, shyly, put his arm round her waist where she stood, at the back window.

  “Look at that,” she said. “Look at the garden.”

  “I know,” he said. “It’ll need some work. Nobody’s touched it for months.”

  “Maybe more than that,” she said. “Oh God,” she said.

  “What?” Bernie said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Just so much to do,” she said.

  “Not so much,” he said. “I tell you what. I’ll mow the lawn straight away, it won’t look so bad. And then we’ll leave it till spring.”

  That wasn’t really what she’d meant, but she said, “You’ll need more than a lawnmower. It’s too long for that, the grass. You know, I wish—”

  “What do you wish?” he said, smiling; it was something they had always come back to, her wishing, his asking to know her wish.

  “Oh, I was thinking about the carpets,” she said. “What’s it going to look like, none of the old carpets fitting properly? I wish we’d persuaded the Watsons—oh, well, never mind. You don’t suppose—”

  “What?” Bernie said.

  “I’ve just had an awful thought,” Alice said. She loosened Bernie’s arm, and turned round to look at the light fitting. “I can’t believe it.”

  “They haven’t,” Bernie said. “They can’t have done.”

  “Maybe they’ve just taken that lightbulb,” Alice said, without any hope.

  “Let’s go and look,” Bernie said.

  Room by room, they went through the house, and it turned out to be true. “What are you looking at?” Sandra said, as they came into the room where she and Francis were bickering, and her mother explained. The children stopped their argument, and followed their parents through the house. For whatever reason, perhaps after the negotiations over the curtains and the failed ones over the carpet, the Watsons had apparently, before leaving, gone through the house and carefully removed every single lightbulb. It was incredible. On Francis’s face was a look, a usual one with him, of something like fear; he felt these difficulties as catastrophes, personal catastrophes, Alice always thought.

  “Well,” Bernie said, when they had finished, and had settled, the four of them, on the sofa in the middle of the sitting room, “I’m going to write them a letter. Give them a piece of my mind. How many lightbulbs is it? Fifteen?”

  “Problem?” the foreman said, coming in with the smaller of the coffee-tables. Alice explained.

  “Happens all the time,” the foreman said. “You’d be surprised. Mostly out of meanness.”

  “My dad works for the Electricity,” Francis offered.

  “Well, he’ll know all about lightbulbs,” the foreman said jocosely.

  “No,” Francis said seriously. “It’s mostly other things.”

  Katherine had made her phone calls now, lying to everyone except the police. To the building society she said that Malcolm was unwell; he couldn’t come to the phone, he was sleeping after a restless night. She said this in her best, her bored telephone voice, consciously removing the fact that she had, the night before, called the same woman in a state of panic, telling her about Malcolm’s disappearance. She could hear the puzzlement at the other end of the line, and finally his secretary said, “But he seems all right.”

  Katherine said sharply, “No, he’s not well.”

  “He’s asleep at home?” his secretary said. “Are you sure about that?”

  “Are you suggesting—” Katherine said.

  “It’s just that he phoned five minutes ago,” the secretary said. “I was sorry to hear about his mother.”

  “His mother?” Katherine said. “Oh—his mother—”

  “Yes, being taken ill like that—what I don’t understand—” she went on, but Katherine interrupted her with apologies before putting the receiver down. She sat by the telephone, breaking out into a light sweat of sheer panic, her heart thumping, and in tw
o minutes she dialled the same number and apologized—the confusion with Malcolm’s mother, she’d meant to be phoning the children’s, Daniel’s school, it was Daniel, their son, who was ill. “I must be going round the bend,” she said amusedly, “ringing the number next to the school’s in the address book and saying Malcolm when I meant Daniel.”

  “That’s all right,” the secretary said, obviously thinking there were better things for her to be doing. She phoned the florist’s, and this time, to Nick, but with even more of a telephone voice, it was her that was ill. “Eaten something,” she said. “Awful bore.”

  Nick told her not to worry, he’d hold the fort; there was something almost enthusiastic about the way he said it, and then he apologized again for not making it to her party the other night. “I don’t know what I was thinking,” he said. She had forgotten all about that; almost all about that; but he had reminded her, and that absence, so painful and crucial, returned at once, shamefully battling in her mind against this now more urgent, more dutifully felt absence. To the police, she would have told the exact truth, but now she could only tell them that Malcolm had turned up safe and sound, and in a sense, so he had.

  Thank God, with five of them, the washing was constant; thank God that supplied her with something to do. As far as she could see, going through the piles, then, her heart beating, their joint wardrobe, Malcolm had taken no clothes. What that meant, good or bad, she couldn’t articulate even in her mind. She took it all downstairs, at least three loads, and deposited it on the utility-room floor. That was where the washing-machine, the boiler, the freezer, all sat together. It was a good thing with the washing machine; an efficient new one, its cycle went into passages of immense fury you couldn’t make yourself be heard over when it had been in the kitchen. Even in the utility room, it made the walls of the house shake at its juddering climaxes. She put a load of washing in. That would be something to fill the time, that and the ironing. She could have welcomed the children going off to school, or at least engaging in some kind of holiday activity that would have removed them for a while.