The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  “But you’re talking, and it’s really great, you might be having a deep conversation like about life and the universe, like what’s the meaning of life, and you realize that she’s really not bad at all. She’s called Barbara.”

  “Daniel,” Sandra said, in a mock-adult, reproving voice. “Is this a true story you’re telling me? It isn’t a story that’s happened to you by any chance, is it?”

  “It might be,” Daniel said, grinning.

  “Well, I’ll never hear how it turned out,” Sandra said, because now they were coming up to his house, with the blue curtains in the upstairs windows, the vase of stargazer lilies and red tulips on the downstairs window-ledge, and to hers, with the red and yellow curtains in the upstairs windows, the handmade model of a tea clipper in the downstairs window.

  “Don’t you want to hear?”

  “Oh, I can’t wait to hear how it turns out,” Sandra said sarcastically, even though she did.

  “OK, then,” Daniel said. “Come on, let’s go down the bottom crags.”

  “I’ve got my bag,” Sandra said. Daniel shrugged, and took it from her shoulder—through her school blouse she could feel the manly rasp of the skin on his fingers, and how, indifferently and impersonally, his hand pressed in an investigative way on the strap of her bra. He took his bag with hers, and threw them both behind the neatly trimmed hedge in the Glovers’ front garden. They fell into the flowerbed.

  “Come on,” he said.

  “Your dad’ll kill you,” Sandra said, because she had by now found out quite a lot about the Glovers, their interests, even if the hard neatness of their garden had needed any kind of explanation. “You can’t start chucking stuff at his flowers like that.”

  “No one’ll see your bag there,” Daniel said, as if that was the point of it.

  “There’s nothing valuable in it,” Sandra said. “I don’t care if anyone nicks it or not, they’re welcome to my German textbook, my German homework book. It’s only stuff like that.”

  “I hate German,” Daniel said.

  “I don’t know whether I hate it or not,” Sandra said, knowing this was the sort of remark Daniel liked. “I never listen to any of it. It might be quite interesting for all I know.”

  Daniel cracked up and, all of a sudden, they were running together, before Daniel’s mother could come out and upbraid them. Not that she would: she probably wasn’t home yet. She worked in a florist, came home by six or sometimes an hour or so later. (There was stuff to do after the shop shut, Daniel had explained, now that his mother had been given a bit more responsibility, wasn’t just an assistant any more.) They ran down the road, howling madly, and when they reached the bottom, instead of following it round to the right, they turned left, where a track quickly petered out and you were on the moors. This was the bottom crags. The top crags, a wind-blasted path along a low cliff leading you all the way to Lodge Moor Hospital, ran along the edge of the bleak golf course; the bottom crags a rough path between sheep pastures, running quickly into moorland.

  At the beginning of the path, glowering over it, was a huge limestone rock, just sitting there, crusty with blots of moss, strangely worn and hollowed. A single crack ran through the whole thing that you could just about wriggle through, a favourite challenge presented to fat kids. You could nestle into one of the hollows and hide there for ever, doing whatever you felt like doing, snogging, smoking, nattering, or something really stupid. Daniel’s sister Jane had been spotted there making notes in a notebook, writing a poem possibly. It loomed over the path, and Daniel, followed by Sandra without any complaint or ladylike demur, climbed it in five or six quick grips. It wasn’t as hard as it looked, and then, posted on top, you were invisible from the path, conspicuous to the whole world and the miles and miles of purple moor, the miles and miles of double-vistaed sky.

  Of course, since the top of the rock was invisible, sometimes you got up there to find that someone had beaten you to it, which meant standing around for a sharpish two minutes saying, “What a fantastic view,” in his father’s style to nobody in particular before silently cursing and climbing down again. That sort of thing, in Daniel’s experience, definitely put the kibosh on things where girls were concerned.

  But, of course, today he wasn’t there for snogging, he was there with Sandra.

  “Go on,” she said, when they’d recovered their breath.

  “I’ve got a stitch,” Daniel said. “Go on what?”

  “We’ve come down because you wanted to finish your story,” she said. “Or,” she went on, “so I thought.”

  “Yes,” Daniel said patiently. She’d get bored of it in time. “Yes, I was telling you my story. So I met this girl, I’d known her, who she was, but I’d never talked to her until Pete’s party, when his parents went away for the weekend. And as I say she seemed a right laugh, and before you know it, you know, she looks up at you and you look down at her, and it’s like two balls rolling towards each other, crash! You can’t help it, the way your heads fall together, your face and hers, and then you’re snogging without knowing it.”

  “Is that how it happens?” Sandra said.

  Daniel laughed. It was funny how you could talk to Sandra like that. You couldn’t talk to girls like that. Most of them believed in love, insisted on all that going on about love. Sandra, he reckoned, was just interested in where love could get her, and that was how he thought about it. He could talk to girls about love all day long, could widen his eyes and slightly open his mouth and run his thumb, very gently, down the front of his chest in a tight T-shirt. But that wasn’t talking to a girl about love, not in the way he talked to Sandra. “The thing I sort of didn’t think of,” Daniel said, in his most worldly way, “was that she was having her period at the time.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Sandra said. “How can you tell?”

  “How do you know I didn’t find out?” Daniel said.

  “Oh, you didn’t find out,” Sandra said. “You wouldn’t have got as far as all that. I can guess what sort of girl she is, holds it out, then says, ‘Oh, Daniel, we mustn’t.’”

  Daniel tried to be offended, but couldn’t. “OK, I didn’t,” he said. “I didn’t get that far. But you can tell, they go all spotty, and I remember, she was right spotty at Pete’s party—she almost apologized for it.”

  “So what?” Sandra said. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “I heard,” Daniel said, “that girls, women, they’re much more horny when they get their period because, it stands to reason, they’re fertile then, so Mother Nature, she’s going to make them want sex a lot more around then so that they’ll have babies.”

  “That’s rubbish,” Sandra said, but she wasn’t sure.

  “The problem is,” Daniel said, “that Mother Nature also makes women really spotty and ugly during their period so that even if they want to have sex you don’t want to have sex with them because they look like a right warthog, like an oatcake, they can be that spotty. But it’s true.”

  “It’s never,” Sandra said.

  “Finger a filly at full moon,” Daniel said, evidently concentrating, “and she’ll follow a fellow to Folkestone.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I made it up.” Daniel stretched out on his back, arching into the odd lumpy contours of the gritty rock. Above him, the clouds scudded across their background of remote white veils, unmoving, high in the sky, and between him and those floating white beasts, a flash of swallow, darting. He liked the clouds, the birds though his respect was with the immovable.

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “It’s true. And that’s what happened to Barbara. She just got a bit keen on me.”

  “For instance.”

  “For instance, she phoned me on Sunday, the day after the party.”

  “Oh, you’d not spent the night together in mad passion, then?” Sandra said, inspecting him scrupulously.

  “Gi’o’er,” Daniel said, quite as if he was blushing. “She phoned me, and s
he was all lovey-dovey. And I don’t know where I came in her list of people to phone, but when I go into school on Monday, everyone, all the girls, they just look at me and giggle, you know how it is—”

  “Yes,” Sandra said, though she was thinking of ridicule and hostility rather than sexual triumph, “I know what you mean.”

  “And then apparently we’re going out together, though I don’t remember that part of the agreement, and going out together means that you spend every break and every dinnertime together, mostly snogging, and you walk home with her, but she only lives in Crosspool so it’s not much of a walk, and then you get home and the phone rings and it’s her again, probably been ringing you for the last half an hour just in case you’d managed to fly home in a helicopter or something, and you’re on the phone with nothing to say, and most of that saying goodbye to each other.”

  “Oh, I know,” Sandra said.

  “And then, before you know it, she’s hanging about outside your house, because she’s just passing, and then it’s the tears and the tantrums and she’s offering to hand over the thing you’ve been asking for. Only now you don’t much want it.”

  Sandra burst out laughing. She poked Daniel, hard, just underneath where his stubby tie ended, on his bony chest. “And so you turn her down flat,” she said.

  “You sounded quite Sheffield when you said that,” Daniel said admiringly.

  “I know I dost,” Sandra said.

  “Not then,” Daniel said.

  They sat there for a while. You could see for ever from up here, in any direction you wanted. Only when you looked behind you, and there it was just Sheffield. But even in that direction you could still see the moors, the hills, the valleys the houses had been built over.

  For a while now Katherine had been staying late at the florist’s, one day a week. “Don’t bother telephoning,” she’d said, when this arrangement was first mentioned. “Nick doesn’t answer the phone after the shop’s closed. We’ve got too much to do.”

  After the two days of Malcolm’s disappearance, everything had altered. Nick had moved out of his rented house into a little old cottage on the other side of the ridge, in Ranmoor. He seemed indifferent to the statement of this. His house, a stone-built cottage with four big windows square on, a sloping tile roof, and a door with a red lintel and flowers around it, sat squarely behind a little garden divided by a path, a dry stone wall in front and a blue wooden gate. It was like the houses Katherine’s children had so liked to draw; it almost had a round smiling yellow sun above it.

  Nick had hardly seemed to cherish or value its prettiness, or what seemed most distinctive about it: that it had been there before Sheffield had spread and surrounded it. Around it, there were quiet leafy roads, and Nick’s neighbours lived in what had once been the vast mansions of steel magnates, set back hugely from their big-bellied front walls. A professor lived just there; an old man, a Mappin, one of the last of the family that had given an art gallery to the city, lived over the road and collected books. Nick’s house was not grand, but his surroundings were. The place had risen up and surrounded, a hundred years before, what had once been a lonely little house on the raw unclaimed moors. Nick had slipped into this august corner of Ranmoor casually, and hardly seemed to notice.

  He had apologized to her, fervently, for not coming to her party, and then, just once, as if he had not been able to prevent himself, had turned her round, had wiped her face, had kissed her. When he took possession of his little house in Rowan Grove, he had offered her a lift home if she wanted to come and look at it. They’d got out of his little van, he’d opened the creaking blue gate, the SOLD notice still over the wall, like a flag stiff in the wind. “This is all going to be wistaria,” Nick said, gesturing at the dead-looking vines covering most of the front of the house.

  “Going to be?” Katherine said.

  “I mean, it is now, only it looks a bit dead,” Nick said. “It’s not quite right, inside I mean,” he went on, opening the door with an unpractised shake and thrust of the Yale key.

  “Well, I wouldn’t expect it to be that,” Katherine said lightly. She’d never seen his furniture—she hadn’t been to the rented house, and he had been keeping his furniture in storage, he said—but it made a curious impression in this new house.

  It was all bold and new, Nick’s collection of possessions. The furniture was expensive, black and metal and bleak, and all with some design behind it. Nothing seemed to harmonize: there was no matching of armchairs and sofas, just a blank standing around of angles and polish. On the table, just above ankle height but long and expensive as a seven-foot glass grave slab, stood a vase. It was rough in texture but as thin as paper; the flowers were placed elsewhere, and this one stood empty and impassive. “It’s a Lucie Rie,” Nick said, seeing her looking at it, and then he was off, ascribing all his furniture to one name or another, all of it important and all of the names unknown to her.

  She was impressed, but all she said was “I don’t suppose you bought any of it with a house like this in mind,” thinking that the vase was so unlike anything Nick had bought for the shop’s use, and wondering about the seriousness that lay behind the shop. He seemed to mount everything for his own amusement in Broomhill, and it was with the same lightness of voice that he would say “Astonishingly, we’ve made forty pounds clear profit this week” or “How tragic—we’re going to have to throw those lilies away,” with a giggle and an allusion to the spectre of the workhouse. Everything there was funny; and if he’d never turned her round from the bank of yellow roses, said, “Don’t,” in that stricken, serious voice and kissed her, she’d never have been prepared for the tone in which he’d said, “It’s a Lucie Rie.” Nick’s ironic detachment, though very extensive, was not all-encompassing, and in his new house, he quickly showed himself when explaining a possession he liked.

  “No,” he said. “I didn’t buy any of it for one house in particular. You don’t think it looks right?”

  “Well,” Katherine said, “it’s unusual at the moment.”

  “You’re so right,” Nick said, seeming relieved by this. “It’s the wallpaper, that’s all.” And, indeed, the wallpaper, as Nick tore at it ineffectually, comically, with his stubby-nailed hands, had been installed by its previous owner with appropriateness in mind. Trellises of spring and summer flowers, in as unnatural and unseasonal profusions as in the florist’s shop, ran through the hall and—Nick’s word—drawing room against an underimagined yellow ground. It was as if the entangled twiggy growths covering the front of the house had withdrawn, hibernated, and flowered lavishly inside in more extravagant forms. “We don’t want any of this,” Nick said.

  “Leave it,” Katherine said, laughing. “Plenty of time to do it properly.”

  It was all going to be white, plain white, Nick said, though the carpet—he gestured at the plain tufted pale brown, not so different from the through carpeting Katherine had—would do perfectly well. Then the furniture wouldn’t look so strange. She could see that but, still, it seemed to her that Nick had acquired an unusually picturesque house that, even if stripped of the rather too bucolic wallpaper, would retain the windows, diamond-leaded like a witch’s, the same cosy low-ceilinged proportions and, unless something very radical happened, the same adorable fireplace. It was never going to look very London, Katherine reflected. A thought struck her. “Don’t you have any pictures?” she said.

  “No,” Nick said. “I don’t know why. Or books, in case that was your next question.”

  “Actually,” Katherine said, “I was going to suggest we could look at the kitchen.”

  Nick laughed heartily. “Now that,” he said, “I don’t think I can face. It’s really the worst of it, and I know you’re going to say that you really like it. It looks like the sort of kitchen someone would put in a house like this.”

  It seemed the right moment for a retreat, an apology. “I keep meaning to say,” she said, “the other day, when—” she struggled for a point of referenc
e “—when I was so upset—”

  “There’s really no need,” Nick said. “Let’s forget about it.”

  “Yes,” Katherine said. “That’s best.” She turned and smiled, a real smile of relief, sagging with pleasure and, in exact unison, he did exactly the same. They hadn’t looked directly at each other for days, had been communicating with each other through glimpses, catching sight of each other through the corner of their eyes, turning away in politeness whenever the other showed signs of looking back, like some game of return and defence. It was immense, their mutual relief, and it made no sense and all the sense in the world when Nick, in pleasure and relief, took a step forward and, quite naturally, hugged her, and, after a relieved and relaxed minute or two, lowered his face to hers and kissed her. She kissed back. It made no sense; it made all the sense in the world.

  All at once it was as if the room had changed, not her and not Nick; changed, with the sudden incursion into it of the acts of adultery, and Nick’s possessions, into something like a hotel room, planned for this exact purpose, its outer borders now torn and shabby, as if in disgrace. They were turning as they kissed, his mouth and hers the only point of contact between them, their arms flailing about as if seeking an embrace in the dark. She had never noticed until then that she was taller than he was, her neck craning downwards, and as they moved about each other, she sank a little on her knees. He sank too, misunderstanding, and in a second her ankles in their heeled shoes gave, and she collapsed on to the white sheepskin rug. She brought him with her, and then, wildly, he reached round her and pulled the loose cushions from the sofa, throwing them to the floor as he had torn at the wallpaper. “Yes,” she said, detaching herself and reaching for the loose seat of the armchair. He threw a glance at the window at the front of the house, small and leaded and half covered with thick unflowering wistaria branches, bare of leaves—“It’s all right,” Katherine said, breathless, meaning the window, but he could have understood almost anything. She half rose and, fumbling, shakily undid the hook at the top of her zip fastener, tugged at it, her shoulders twisting, pushed down the straps of her dress, undid and pulled off her bra in a disorderly and indecisive sequence, then thrust the dress down to her waist.