The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  “Mummy,” Francis said. He had come back into the kitchen, was standing at the door.

  “Yes, love?” Alice said, summoning herself and smiling as she turned.

  “There’s something so interesting,” he said. “I found it. I didn’t know anything about it.”

  “What is it?” she said.

  “Come and have a look,” he said. “In the garden.”

  “I’ll just—” she said, but changed her mind. “What is it?” she said, following him out, leaving the rest of the shopping on the kitchen counter.

  “It’s a surprise,” he said. They went together, Alice following him, through the house, into the dining room and the room at the back, the one they had no particular use for, full of the removers’ empty boxes still, and Francis opened the back door, into the garden.

  “Was that unlocked?” Alice said—she was sure the doors were locked, always.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “I unlocked it. I went into the garden.”

  “We must do something about the garden,” Alice said. They were none of them all that keen on it. They’d inherited the one in London, and Mr. Griffiths, next door, he’d come over from time to time and trimmed shrubs for them, that sort of thing; he rather liked doing it, Bernie always said, and accepted the offer. Bernie could mow the lawn, and he left it at that. They’d inherited this one, too, but, apart from a mow or two when they’d moved in, Bernie cursing at the length the grass had been allowed to reach during the house’s uninhabited months, saying it needed a scythe, they’d not done much, and it was a little overgrown. Between the stones of the patio, the beginnings of grass were sprouting up, and even, here and there, tiny delicate plants with the promise of tiny flowers to come.

  “Come on,” Francis said, his eyes bright, and led her across the lawn. He paused for a moment, and fingered a dark-leaved, waxy plant, leggy and white-flowered, glossy with mysterious health.

  “Is that it?” Alice said, amused, but Francis shook his head.

  “It’s the pond,” he said. “Come on. I didn’t know there was a pond there, not at all.”

  “Didn’t you?” Alice said. “Well, I’d not thought of it but, yes, they showed it to us when we were looking over the house. I don’t suppose we’d given it a lot of thought or I’d have mentioned it.”

  The garden had been partitioned out, as if into rooms, and it was behind the jutting spur of a bed, planted densely with conifers, curving round secretively, that the pond lay. They rounded the bed, and Francis stood there with her. “But it’s not just the pond,” he said. “Look.”

  The pond was dank and dark; it could not be deep, but the water was gloomy, rich with slimy green life, and could have been profound. On the surface, some sort of freckled bright green plant-life, spreading unchecked, and underneath, the lifeless cold depths. The conifers had been planted there so as not to shed on the pond, she supposed, but leaves had blown on to it from elsewhere in the garden, and lay there dead on the surface, slimy and brown.

  “Is that all?” Alice said. “I’ve got dinner to get ready. Oh—”

  Something had moved in the pond; a stretch, or so it seemed, of pure muscle, a hank of orange flesh moving in a leisurely, incurious way from the depths to the surface. It was a fish, ten inches long.

  “Look,” Francis said again, delighted.

  “It’s a fish,” Alice said, amazed. “How on earth—”

  “Didn’t you know?” Francis said.

  “No,” Alice said. “No, I’m sure not. They didn’t mention that. We just took a look at the pond, said, ‘Very nice,’ and that was it. I’d almost forgotten about it. They certainly didn’t mention anything about fish.”

  The fish surfaced again, investigating them, investigating it, and then, without any announcement, a second fish, paler and smaller, but that was wrong: the second fish was the first one they’d seen; it was the other that was still bigger, richer in colour. Francis hunkered down on his haunches, and so did Alice; after a moment of joint-cracking, she twisted and knelt on the cold ground, not minding.

  “How could they survive?” Alice said. “We haven’t been feeding them. I’d have thought they would have starved to death.”

  “Or frozen,” said Francis, because the winter had been a cold one.

  “Or frozen,” Alice said. And now, as if this was the first interesting thing to have happened to the fish in months, a third one, even, appeared, and for a moment the three fish, fat and sleek, slid over each other, performing some underwater ballet of meaning and touch. “I feel guilty now.”

  They stayed there for a while, just watching the fish, waiting for each new variation as they moved up and down in the dark pond.

  “I suppose we ought to start feeding them,” Alice said. “Though they seem to have got on quite well without anyone paying them any attention. I wonder what they’ve been living on.”

  “There might have been food left in the pond,” Francis said. “Maybe there was enough for a few months.”

  “We ought to find out,” Alice said. “Fancy the people not mentioning it. It would have been terrible to remember the pond one day and come out to find three dead fish floating in it.”

  “The birds would have eaten them,” Francis said. “They wouldn’t have left them.”

  Alice looked at him; he was a strange boy.

  “Perhaps the birds would eat them anyway,” Francis said, pursuing his line of thought. “Come down, swoosh, carry them off.”

  “I’d like to see the bird that could carry that one off,” Alice said. “That fat one.”

  “Maybe we ought to bring them inside,” Francis said.

  “Inside?” Alice said. “Where are you going to keep them? In the bath?”

  “No, not that,” Francis said seriously. “You could get a tank, they could swim around in that.”

  “They seem quite happy as they are,” Alice said. “If they survived that winter, they must be pretty tough.” As they swam up and down into darkness, with each slow circuit of the surface of the pond colliding and slipping over each other, they looked like fat and gorged beasts left when everything else had succumbed.

  Francis had had his triumph; he had discovered something, and his gestures were magnanimous as he moved back to let his mother watch. Hardly intending it, she let her fingers dangle on the surface of the pond, stirring the green algae like soup. The fish rose to that, too. Perhaps they were expecting food. They stupidly met Alice’s red-painted fingernails, retreated, and in a moment tried again.

  “Amazing,” she said. “I don’t know what they eat.”

  “Can they be mine?” Francis said.

  “Yours?” she said. “To look after, you mean?”

  Francis nodded violently, as if to say more might spoil his chances.

  “I don’t see why not,” she said. “That’s your father—go and tell him.”

  He got up and ran into the house. It was the chugging of the Simca’s engine she’d recognized, and the clang of the garage door coming down. In a moment Bernie would come out and look at the fat fish, with all the amazement she’d just felt. She could hear, through the open back door, her son explaining the whole thing, excitedly, hardly able to let him get his coat off. In a moment he’d be out and they’d be looking at them together; she could show them to him, and there would be just the same excitement in that as in the way Francis had shown them to her. That ought to be exciting. So why was it that she held this moment for herself, wanted to stay here, just for the moment, with no one else to intrude upon her, and the dank little pond strewn with leaves and bright algae, and the fish, rising, observing, falling, as if that was all they’d ever wanted to do, their whole lives long? Through the hedge she saw Bernie and Francis coming across the lawn, Bernie with his coat and jacket off, in shirtsleeves and his work tie, and realized with a feeling of relief that now she wouldn’t have to tell them the story, all at once filled with shame and ugly distortion, of the woman who so loved the royal family, the woman who li
ved just over the road.

  In the house down the unmade road, the witchy house with collapsing gables and rotting window frames, Mary Jameson prepared to go out.

  Henry had come into her room that morning, and had spoken to her. He had brought a cup of tea, as he often did, and at first he had spoken in his soft voice, supporting her in her nest of pillows, tempting books, the upper half of his heavily bearded face radiating its usual concern in the greeny light of the curtained room. But what he said was not supportive, not helpful to her at all.

  “I’m sorry, Mary,” he said. “I know it’s difficult, but you have to start going down to the hospital.”

  She stared at him. She knew it; she knew that all the time, he resented doing anything for her, and didn’t take her troubles seriously. No one who loved her could ever ask her to do such a thing. She just couldn’t believe it. “I can’t,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. “You know I can’t.”

  “I wouldn’t say it if the situation was in any way different,” Henry said, “but you have to go down there. You know as well as I do what’s happened to Andrew.”

  “I know,” she said. “That’s why I can’t cope with anything any more.”

  “That’s not true,” Henry said. “Before Andrew went into hospital, you were finding it impossible to get up and leave the house. This isn’t the cause of it.”

  She plucked at her bedcovers, at her tatty red cardigan she’d taken to wearing as a bed-jacket, picked up the nearest book, sandwiched between two pillows, and raised it between his face and hers. She couldn’t believe he was telling her she was lying; or, rather, she always knew that he had secretly thought that.

  Henry reached out, and firmly lowered the book. His mouth was set. “I don’t underestimate how difficult this is going to be,” he said. “But you have to think that Andrew might never leave the hospital again.”

  “It was just a broken leg,” Mary said. “I don’t know what they’re talking about.”

  “You know what they’re talking about,” Henry said. “It isn’t just a broken leg. It broke so easily because of—”

  “Yes, I understand,” Mary interrupted. They wouldn’t make her talk about it, not in detail. That, she couldn’t bear; it wasn’t to be borne that she should be made to talk about it on top of everything else.

  Henry let silence fall between them. She looked at the green bedside clock, its unused alarm bells sitting foolishly on its head, a green Humpty-Dumpty with earmuffs. It was half past ten; Henry should long ago have been at work. She didn’t know what he was playing at.

  “There is such a thing as duty,” Henry said. “You can’t just refuse to go to the hospital. He needs you.”

  “He’s got everyone else.”

  “He’s a little boy,” Henry says. “He’s frightened, he doesn’t understand—or, rather, he does understand. He keeps saying that it’s quite all right, that he knows you can’t come to the hospital. I can tell you, it could break your heart.”

  It was so unlike Henry to use an expression like that. Mary looked up, directly at him. But his face was steady and unweeping. “But he says it’s quite all right,” she said.

  “If you can’t—” Henry said. It was almost as if he were about to raise his voice, but he checked himself. “It’s quite simply your duty.”

  But now Henry had gone too far. She knew that they would all start ordering her about sooner or later. She knew all that tiptoeing around and pretending to be sorry with cups of tea and things on toast was just an act, that they all hated her and wanted to get rid of her. Sometimes she’d heard them laughing downstairs as she was crying. “Duty,” she said. “How can you talk about my duty? Don’t you understand what I’m going through? I can’t be made to do things when all this is hanging over me. You don’t seem to understand how difficult I’m finding it to cope with anything at all, the slightest thing.”

  “Of course,” Henry said, getting up from the bed, speaking drily. “I had forgotten that, after all, this whole situation—it is, after all, mostly about you. I’m sorry for forgetting that.”

  She had a horrid morning, one of the worst, but by lunchtime she’d given herself a good talking-to. It would show Henry if, after all, she punished herself as they all wanted her to. So, in small journeys from bedroom to bathroom, back to bed, and then to the wardrobe and back in tiny weeping spurts, she put herself together. She brushed her hair in front of the crowded mirror, and then, step by step, she went downstairs to look for her coat. It wasn’t her fault if this would return her to bed for weeks. It was what Henry had bullied her into.

  He’d left the number of a taxi company by the telephone, and she called it. Her voice sounded small to her, but the difficult instructions of how to find the house, not used for months, came back to her quite readily. It took her ten minutes to find her coat, beneath the others in the cloakroom, and by the time she’d found it, the car was hooting outside. In a rush, she forced herself to open the door, and pulled it to behind her before she could think about it.

  “You’re tucked away here,” the driver said.

  She agreed, getting into the back.

  “Children’s hospital, is it?”

  She agreed again.

  “Never mind, love,” the driver said, reversing into the empty garage and setting off. “I’m not much of a talker either.”

  She felt sick all the way, and had to close her eyes when there were too many people. All too soon they were there. She remembered it now—ten years before, Lucy had had her appendix out. That was when she could go out. It was on a main road, an elaborate, flushed palace of red brick, striped with glazing, ornamented with ruffles and cartouches, half château, half public lavatory. The founders of it had built it opposite the university and the park; she supposed they thought that the sick children could look out at the pleasures they’d return to, and think about their future.

  “I’ll let you out here,” the driver said on the main road, just by the entrance. She made herself think of Andrew. It was so unfair, what Henry had said. She was a caring person. She paid the driver.

  But, inside, she grew angry again. She forced herself to ask the receptionist—Henry knew how she couldn’t deal with strangers—where Andrew was but quickly afterwards she got lost, hardly having listened to the brisk directions. Didn’t they know how ill her son was? Couldn’t they have spared someone to take her up, the mother of the sick boy? Quickly she was in strange wards; the corridors were lined with terribly sad pictures, done by dying children, all of animals and smiling nurses. And behind a door she glimpsed a horrible menagerie, the drawn animals made plush and stuffed, a whole room of ugly common toys, left there by children who had died and no one had collected them.

  “You know where you’re going?” A small nurse accosted her.

  Mary explained quietly. It was, it seemed, on the next floor up; the nurse took her all the way to the stairs, but left her there. “It’s just one flight up,” she said again, but laying a hand on her arm.

  “He’s just there,” the sister explained, “in room three, on his own. He’s got his little friend with him, the one who comes every day.”

  No one offered to take her any further, and she walked to the door of the room. There was a square of wire-strengthened glass set into it, and she peered in. There was Andrew, very pale and thin against the propped-up pillows, and next to him in a chair, a boy his own age. He had his back to the door, and was leaning close to Andrew. He was talking, very quietly. Andrew’s face was drawn and worried. He closed his eyes, and swallowed; she could see the effort. Then he opened them again, and looked beyond his friend at the door. He saw her face, his eyes opening wide. She went in.

  The boy got up, not looking at her. “I’ve got to go,” he said roughly.

  “It’s my mummy,” Andrew said, in relief. “You don’t have to come back—” but the boy was gone, making his way roughly past her.

  “It’s me,” Mary said.

  “I’m glad it’s
you,” he said, and she sat down and took his hand. “You’ve had your friend here,” she said.

  He closed his eyes. She couldn’t understand. It was almost as if he didn’t want any of it.

  “You know when people start loving you a bit too much?” Daniel said.

  Sandra agreed.

  “It’s ridiculous, they can’t help making themselves ridiculous,” Daniel said. “It starts out as a bit of fun. Say your friend, he has a party on a Saturday because his mum and dad, it’s their twentieth wedding anniversary and they’ve gone away for the weekend, for a dirty weekend to rekindle the sparks of their dying marriage, and they leave your friend in charge because he’s sixteen and he’s supposed to be responsible now that everyone thinks he’s mature. So he has a party, like a secret party that no one knows about until two or three days before.”

  They were walking down their road now. There was a brisk wind off the moor, puffing the fat white clouds along; behind them, far above, a screen of unmoving high clouds like a rippling veil. The sky like a diorama, its dramas in clean flat layers. Almost every day now they caught up with each other at some point on the walk home, and fell into conversation. He made her laugh; she, it seemed, could make him laugh too, make him throw his head back and croon with hilarity. She had seen him leave the house in the morning, and his shirt was buttoned up, his tie was pulled up to his neck. He didn’t greet her then, he didn’t greet her if they passed each other in the corridors at school, but when they met, six hours later, as if by chance on the walk home, the top button of his shirt was undone, or the top two buttons, and his tie, if it was still on, was loosened into a five-inch-wide knot, the tie itself a jutting fat three inches of defiance. He made her laugh with his going on about love.

  “And you find yourself in the kitchen, say, or, I know, on the stairs letting people run up and down, and everyone’s supposed to be in and out the bedrooms with everyone else, there’s someone being sick in the downstairs toilet, because he’s only got lager and cider in and everyone’s mixing them. Well, you’re on the stairs, you know, and without knowing how it happened you’re talking to a girl who’s in your maths set, you know her but you’ve never talked to her, really.