The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  No, she hadn’t said that. That was Jane filling in. But all that conversation—talking to herself, really—about Nick had passed its long obsessive stage, the casual and constant ostinato to any conversation after which it was not only the overheard name, belonging to someone else in the street or at school that could embarrass Jane, but the coincidence of the mere monosyllable in another word, so that a teacher diverting to the health risks of nicotine, or describing an answer of Jane’s to a question about trade in Africa as “slightly cynical” could make her blush. That phase, both of her mother’s adoring references and Jane’s pained silent registering, went away after the party. Though the references continued, there was for some time an impatience about them and even a dismissive tone. But by the time they stopped, coinciding for no explicable reason with Nick’s moving into his new house, they had resumed their fond, almost obsessive tone. The last time Katherine had mentioned Nick to the family, she had been describing the handsome and uncottage-like style in which he had arranged his house. And a matter of months later she was affecting not to know, never to have known, where Nick lived and certainly never to have gone there alone. It was exactly like the way Jane had discussed with Anne the possibility of her mother having an affair, when it had seemed unlikely; when it had seemed altogether possible that she really was having an affair, hadn’t she herself stopped talking about it, resisting all enticements to say anything more about what she did or didn’t think? “How’s your mother’s affair going?” Anne’s mother had lightly asked once, and while Jane struggled not just for the right answer but for any answer, she’d said, “You’re such a romancer, young lady,” since she was one of those whom the news of Jane’s novel had amused more than impressed. It was just like that, really, her mother’s silence.

  “Here we are,” Katherine said, turning into a neat spot between two Volvos, one blue, one yellow. “Do you know,” she said, once they were inside Gateway and pushing a trolley with, for once, not too wobbly a set of wheels. “I haven’t seen that Barbara of your brother’s for a good long time. What’s happened to her?”

  “He got rid of her,” Jane said, surprised. It had been a good eight months ago. More than once she’d seen that Barbara, poor silly tart, crumpling to her knees almost at the gates of Flint, weeping and half howling in front of her shrugging brother, supported in all this making-a-spectacle-of-herself by two envious votresses, plain and grieving as stone allegories, one at each shoulder.

  There was plenty of material there, particularly in what they kept saying to poor silly Barbara, which was obviously not true: “You’re better than he is, Barb.” Barb was thicker than Daniel, less charming, didn’t live in so nice a house, was honestly a bit common and not really so good-looking with her straw-chewing features, the long upper lip calling out for what it would eventually get, a fat moustache. With her silly fat breasts and her silly fat friends, she wasn’t better than Daniel in any way.

  Daniel had gone his way, and these calumnies clearly worried him about as much as they offered effective consolation to Barbara’s red-eyed sorrow.

  “Look,” Jane said. “Look, that’s new—Coca-Cola flavour jam.”

  “How disgusting,” Katherine said. “What an idea.”

  “I think it sounds nice,” Jane said. “Can we get a jar?”

  “You’ll try it once and never touch it again, and it’ll still be in the cupboard in 1980,” Katherine said, “and then I’ll have to chuck it away, I suppose. No, put it back.”

  Jane put it back. “He chucked that Barbara,” she said. “It was months ago now.”

  “I thought I’d not seen her around,” Katherine said again. “I didn’t like her much, though of course I’d not wanted to say anything while they were going steady. Least said soonest mended. He’s breaking someone else’s heart now, I suppose. You never know anything off Daniel. He’s secretive.”

  “Well, it’s that Sandra,” Jane said, again surprised, though of course her mother was always at work until six or, one evening a week, seven. “You won’t have seen, he always walks home with her now.”

  “That’s nice, walking her home,” Katherine said, putting four tins of rice pudding into the trolley. “I hope it’s not far out of his way.”

  The Tannoy announced a good deal for today only in Gateway, ten pence in the pound off beef mince; a voice so weary with tragedy, it might have presided over the fall and decay of a thousand cities, each of them reducing beef mince by ten pence in the pound as its walls fell.

  “It’s that Sandra,” Jane said. “She lives over the road. She’s the daughter of those new people, the Sellerses.”

  Her mother stopped where she was. “Beef. Mince,” she said, belatedly reminded by the residue of the voice. “I was planning a shepherd’s pie.”

  “Cottage pie,” Jane said. “It’s only shepherd’s pie if you make it with lamb mince.”

  “Where do they find these things out?” Katherine said. “I don’t think I know the girl—I wouldn’t recognize her if I saw her.”

  “I don’t know that they’re exactly seeing each other,” Jane said. “I mean not going out together or anything, they just walk home together. But they do it every day. Walk home,” Jane concluded. She had recently discovered that the word “it” contained a million ruderies from the way the boys would laugh hoarsely with their new, deep, shouty voices at just such a sentence as that. But of course her mother didn’t laugh.

  “Daniel, he never lets on about anything,” Katherine said. “Bleach. He’s as bad as his brother, hiding that snake under his bed.”

  Jane remembered how that snake had ended and said nothing. She thought, out of good taste, her mother might have done the same. They went round the rest of the supermarket in silence, her mother only murmuring the names of products on her neat list. When they were finished and queuing at the check-out, the girl hammering away on her old-fashioned till—Gateway was that sort of shop, a greying one-off with flickering strip lighting greying the tomb-like aisles of frozen food, waist-deep—Katherine said, “Well, we’ll have to invite her over some time. Get to meet her.” She said it in her light social voice.

  Sometimes Jane wondered how her mother saw her own life: a matter of entertaining successive guests and at-homes in tea gowns. “She comes over,” Jane said. “Most afternoons.”

  “Does she now?” Katherine said. “I hope there’s nothing I’d have to apologize to her mother for.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Jane said, not liking this role of spy and informant. “They sit in the living room, and drink cups of tea and talk mostly, and then she goes home at half past five, before you get back. I mean, half past five, it’s before you get home, not that she goes to avoid you or anything. I don’t know why she doesn’t come round, the days you’re not working. She probably goes in time for tea, has to.”

  “She seems like a nice girl,” Katherine said.

  “She is, I think,” Jane said. She could see that her mother had shaped reality to suit her. Five minutes before, she’d had no idea of Sandra at all. Now she had a considered impression of her.

  “Perhaps she might stay for supper on Tuesday,” Katherine said. “I might cook some lamb chops. That would be suitable.”

  “Why do we eat meat every day?” Jane said. “I really don’t like it at all. I think I’m going to become a vegetarian.”

  “If you become a vegetarian, you can cook your own dinner,” Katherine said. “I’m not doing two lots of shopping and cooking two separate meals every night, if that’s what you thought.”

  “You wouldn’t have to,” Jane said. “Everyone could eat what I was eating. We could all have a vegetarian dinner.”

  “Very selfish of you,” Katherine said. “So no one’s allowed to eat what you don’t fancy all of a sudden?”

  “It’s not about fancying or not fancying something to eat,” Jane said. “Like not liking—raspberry jelly. It’s that I think it’s wrong.”

  “Heavens,” Katherine said,
infuriated, “how you remind me sometimes of—” she cast around, waving her hands, for an adequately frightful forebear “—of your father’s aunt Edith, you really do.”

  “I can’t imagine how,” Jane said, since Great-aunt Edith was one of her mother’s regular stand-bys. She had begun this conversation, tryingly, in a speculative way, trying out an idea she’d overheard. But now that it had been said it was hardening into a conviction. She saw herself at the front of a glowing army of vegetarians with their vegetarian banners, marching into the future at the head of a clean and grateful flock of liberated lambs.

  “Perhaps Friday would be better,” Katherine said, half to herself, fumbling in her purse for the £12.37 the girl was asking for. “It’s your dad’s military re-creation night on Tuesdays.”

  “What’s he doing next?” Jane said.

  “It’s going to be Cavaliers and Roundheads again, I believe,” Katherine said. “I can’t remember what battle it’s going to be exactly—Naseby, was it? Your dad’s going to be Prince Rupert, whoever Prince Rupert was. Not that I pay any attention. I expect we’ll all go and watch, but we’ll take a picnic and if it’s raining, we’ll sit in the car.”

  “It’ll have to be a vegetarian picnic,” Jane said, feeling that her decision had been lost a little.

  “If you make it yourself,” Katherine said. “Can you honestly see Daniel living off lettuce?”

  “You don’t have to live off lettuce,” Jane said. “There are lots of delicious meals you could cook that don’t have meat in them. You’d hardly miss it after a day or two.”

  “Macaroni cheese, most of them live off, and end up looking very pasty, too,” Katherine said. “Has someone been getting at you? I’d like to have a word with them.”

  “No one’s been getting at me,” Jane said, cross at her mother’s humouring tone as much as at her suspicion. “I’ve been thinking about it and I just think it’s disgusting, eating dead bodies.”

  “No one’s ever—” Katherine said, guiding the trolley laden with bags out through the supermarket doors.

  “And the way they experiment on dogs, too, making them smoke cigarettes—”

  “Fortunately,” Katherine said, “I don’t think the question of eating a dog that’s died of smoking too much is going to arise, since we don’t live in China. And I don’t think having a bacon sandwich is the same as eating a dead body. That’s a charming way of putting it. I hope you’re not planning to persuade any of your friends to take up vegetarian food along with you.”

  “I might do,” Jane said, now properly sulking, her arms crossed in the front seat of the car. “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t want Anne’s mother on the phone to me complaining that you’ve talked Anne into something like that,” Katherine said. “I know how you two do whatever the other one does. Is it her who’s talked you into it? I’d like to have a word with her mother, if that’s what’s happened.”

  “I can think for myself, you know,” Jane said.

  “Macaroni cheese,” Katherine said, “night after night. Or are you not allowed to eat cheese either?”

  “I’m not a vegan, Mother,” Jane said. “I’m going to go on eating cheese. And eggs and milk.”

  “How cruel,” Katherine said. “Snatching the milk from the mouths of tiny calves. I suppose that’s a relief. Anyway, you’ll have to put off giving up meat until I go for next week’s shop, I hadn’t taken it into consideration. It was probably too late to save the life of that particular chicken, in any case.”

  “What chicken?”

  “The frozen one I just bought, the one sitting in the boot. I think it was probably dead already.”

  “It’s not funny,” Jane said.

  “Oh, no,” Katherine said. “Perish the thought.”

  “You’d be wanting to go vegetarian yourself if Nick told you to,” Jane said, but she only muttered this, and her mother, her hands tightening on the car’s wheel, her mouth pursing, her head quarter-turning to give Jane a look as she slouched resentfully, didn’t hear or respond to the comment.

  Tim left school with the others at the same time every day. They’d stopped asking him, though, where he was going when he left them at the bus-stop and turned in the other direction, walking down towards Broomhill. He had something to do, somebody to see. He’d been doing it three times a week for a while. It was important, and they’d stopped trying to find out what it was. The mystery, solidly maintained, had long since lost its charm.

  He walked down towards Broomhill, but stopped before then, catching a bus—he didn’t want to walk past his mother’s shop. He got out at the university, crossed the road and went into the building. He didn’t need to ask anyone where to go: he just went up to the second floor. It was the fourth door on the left. The matron smiled at him as he passed, and he gave her a little wave. She was used to him now. He pushed open the door to the private room peeping through the gap in case anyone else was there. Today there wasn’t, and Tim went in. The face on the pillow turned to look at who it was, but the face on the pillow knew already who it was. There was no welcome or pleasure there. Tim didn’t mind, and he made himself smile as widely as he could. It was good to cheer people up when they were going through something very very sad.

  “Hello, Andrew,” Tim said. “It’s me again.”

  . . .

  “My sister’s gone vegetarian,” Daniel told Sandra, as they were walking home together one afternoon. It was a warm day; the sun was hotter than it ought to be in May, and underneath the canopy of old trees lining Buckleigh Road, it was moist, fragrant and languid, like the interior of a green canvas tent on a hot day. On the pavement, sticky sap from the trees sucked at the soles of their shoes.

  “What’s she done that for?” Sandra said. After eight months, she was starting to sound a little Sheffield—“doon that for”—but there was still a hesitancy in her speech, like a competent speaker of a foreign language bringing out a first sentence on holiday after long lack of practice.

  “She said she had a vision in the supermarket,” Daniel said.

  “Which one?” Sandra said.

  That made Daniel laugh in a flurry of hilarity, subsiding into a doggy shaking of his head. “Gateway,” he said eventually, and that set them both off.

  “I must go there,” Sandra said. “Or they could put it on their adverts—‘Gateway, it’s good for having visions in.’”

  “It might only be vegetarian visions,” Daniel said, “so they’d not put that in an advert. It’d be bad for business unless they could guarantee you’d not have your vegetarian vision until after you’d paid for your meat.”

  “What’s she eating, then?” Sandra said.

  “She’s just eating the vegetables, with gravy on,” Daniel said. “I’ve told her the gravy’s made out of dead animals too, but she won’t have it. She says it’s—what does she say?—a by-product so that’s all right, apparently. She tried to get my mother to cook something special for her, but she won’t, and she won’t let Jane cook anything for herself because there’s not room in the kitchen and she’ll leave too much of a mess and she doesn’t know how to cook. So she’s just eating the vegetables we all have.”

  “With gravy on,” Sandra said.

  “The thing is she doesn’t even like vegetables,” Daniel said. “She won’t eat broccoli, and she doesn’t like cooked tomatoes, or celery in any shape or form, and potatoes only if they’re roasted. She won’t eat them mashed.”

  “Won’t she eat chips?”

  “Oh, she’ll eat chips,” Daniel said.

  “Well, that’s potatoes,” Sandra said.

  “I suppose it is, when you come to think of it,” Daniel said. “I don’t know why she’s become vegetarian when she doesn’t like vegetarian food. It’s like going to live in—in Russia if you don’t like Russian food.”

  “What’s Russian food like?”

  “I don’t know,” Daniel said. “It’s probably horrible, like school dinners. It’s pr
obably grey and all mixed in together if you can get it at all. Probably cabbages.”

  “So why would anyone go and live in Russia?”

  “That was just an example—I might have said anywhere,” Daniel said. “When you ask her, she just says it’s wrong and she won’t eat dead bodies.”

  “That’s disgusting,” Sandra said.

  “That’s what she says,” Daniel said. “My dad keeps walking round eating cold bits of beef in front of her, saying, ‘Yum, lovely dead-body sandwich,’ because that’s one thing she really does like, cold beef sandwich with brown sauce on it.”

  “Your dad does that?” Sandra said, because the only time she’d glimpsed Daniel’s father was when he’d said hello, in a small, shy voice, as if he thought she might laugh or make fun of his tiny head, and then disappeared as soon as he could. He seemed more like a guest in that house than the man who owned it.

  Sandra paid a lot of attention to the way the people opposite, the Glovers, actually looked. Some of them looked normal and others were strange-looking. Daniel was the most normal-looking. People said he was a good-looking boy, and even sexy—she’d become more popular at school, some people in the class suddenly knowing her name without rudely asking a bystander first, once it had got out that she walked home with him most nights. He was that good-looking boy Daniel Glover a year above her, and she was his friend. But actually Daniel, among his family, wasn’t particularly good-looking, only normal. His head was the right size, his nose and mouth were the right size for his head, his skin was OK—better than Sandra’s, though the Clearasil her mother had bought her without any fuss after a rehearsed request was making some difference. He wasn’t thin or fat; he walked as if he was quite happy with the body he was in. His mother was normal-looking, too, though her hands and feet were scrubbed red and huge, like flippers.

  Sandra didn’t often meet them when she went round to Daniel’s. She hardly ever saw his mother close up, since, he said, she came home later from work than his father, the three days a week she worked, and once a week quite a lot later. She worked at a florist’s in Broomhill. Their house was always full of lovely flowers, not just the once-in-a-blue-moon vase of mixed tulips her mother treated herself to, buying them, she knew, from somewhere other than Daniel’s mother’s shop. The rest of the family either didn’t notice or, like Sandra, didn’t comment. But Sandra knew her mother loved that sight unconditionally, of bright clashing flowers in a vase, unarranged, lovely. Loved it more than Daniel’s mother did, she knew that. Daniel’s family weren’t often there together, and she liked to inspect them covertly from the kitchen window when they set off in the morning. His droopy sister, her hair lank and blonde, and never quite washed, hanging down in solid ribbons, her big ears poking through the gaps, peering through ugly glasses she couldn’t have chosen herself. She might have been one of those Jameson girls, the sisters of Francis’s little friend, one of whom was in Sandra’s class, never seeming to notice anything. The sister—Jane—she was a year below Sandra. She was weird-looking or, rather, she could have been all right if she didn’t always walk in a way that looked like someone nervously trying out a new and dangerous machine. But when the five of them walked out in the morning, always in dribs and drabs, the mother shouting for the last dawdler, which was usually Daniel, it was the weirdness of the father and the little boy that took your attention. They really did look objectively weird. She knew it wasn’t very mature to think of people in that way, but you couldn’t help it. When you saw the little boy, you thought that you’d never seen a kid with so tiny and round a head. It was like a bowling ball sitting on his shoulders. For some reason he’d had his hair cut in a short back and sides, probably nits, and his head, with its big nose and the same sticky-out ears as his sister, was really ridiculous. The three children looked strange when they stood together, their hair colour all so different, Daniel’s a dark flop over his forehead and falling into his eyes, Jane’s a dirty blonde, but the little boy a real ginger, which must have come from nowhere. You thought his ball-headedness took the prize, but his father had exactly the same tiny head. There was a word for the rest of him, and the word was “weedy.” Daniel’s mother wasn’t much taller than his dad, maybe only by a fringe and a nose, but with her big hands and generally bigger scale, the way she held herself and never scurried, ratlike, as her husband did, she looked much larger, much more normal. Sandra watched them, fascinated. She tried not to think, though, of her own family’s element of freakishness, the way anyone would when they saw them comment on the weird tallness of her own brother. Maybe all families were a bit weird from the outside, until you knew them. But with Daniel’s father, you forgot the pinheadedness close up. There was something much weirder: his fingernails. They were scrupulously clean, white as bone, but he had let them grow until they looked like fragile white claws. Not like women’s fingernails—they were square at the end and blunt—but they made your skin crawl. She had to stop herself shuddering whenever Daniel’s father moved his hands at the thought they might come anywhere near her.