The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  When they were at the top of the road, Daniel was still talking about being vegetarian. She liked these deep conversations with him. She guessed that he’d never known another girl he could talk to like this.

  “The thing is,” he was saying, “that vegetarians think they’re saving the lives of animals, but they’re not.”

  “They’re not eating them, though,” Sandra said.

  “But the ones who are alive, they’ll still be killed,” Daniel said, “and I’ll eat them and you’ll eat them.”

  “That’s true,” Sandra said.

  “You see, if they’re not needed for food, they won’t exist at all,” Daniel said. “No one would call those hens into existence if everyone was vegetarian. Either way they’d be dead or never be born, so they don’t win whatever we do. As humans,” he finished grandly.

  “But do you think we should be allowed,” Sandra said, “to destroy the life of a chicken once we’ve created it?”

  “I see what you mean,” said Daniel. Sandra, too, had no particular feeling about whether this was a good or a sensible point to make. It might have been total rubbish. She didn’t care about the life of chickens, and really she thought it totally stupid of Daniel’s sister to alter her own life for the sake of something so totally trivial as the lives of however many thousand chickens.

  They stopped for a moment by a house where that woman lived who’d just had a baby; she was outside, staring up at the guttering, or perhaps at the sky. She still looked pregnant, but by her was a pram. The baby couldn’t be seen, but it must be getting the sun. The way they’d stopped, it was as if there were now three of them, or four, in a group.

  “What’s your purpose?” Daniel said, looking at the big blue pram in which a baby lay, absorbed by the sight of the blue sky.

  “To be eaten,” Sandra said lightly, and the woman heard this, and turned. She looked dazed; she hadn’t understood what Sandra said, but her lack of understanding had started long before Sandra said anything.

  “Come on,” Daniel said, and they started to walk again.

  They were nearly home. It was a clear day of fat clouds in the translucent blue, hanging there in a still way. Toys for baby, unreachable. The moon must be up there, and in an hour it would probably pop out of the blue, startling in daylight. She always liked that spectacle. In London, there had always been straight lines drawn in the sky. Every couple of minutes another plane making its way out into the world or back again. Here, there was never anything. The sky was what it must have been before Sandra was born.

  “What are you thinking?” Daniel said.

  “Nothing,” Sandra said. “What are you thinking? Deep thoughts?”

  “No,” Daniel said. “I was just remembering that my mum asked me if you’d like to come over for tea on Friday.”

  “Your mum did?” Sandra said.

  “I mean, only if you want to. You could watch my sister eating vegetables.”

  “With gravy. I might go vegetarian myself, keep her company.”

  Daniel laughed at this idea. She hadn’t thought it funny, but to Daniel there seemed no way she could suddenly become a vegetarian. She didn’t go into Daniel’s house today: she said untruthfully that she’d got a lot of homework to do. It was something to do with leaving space around Friday, to make her appearance then welcome, and not routine. They said goodbye; she shut her own front door behind her and went thoughtfully upstairs. In the pink bathroom, into which someone had thought it a good idea to put an avocado suite, she washed her hands, stained with today’s black ink and then her face. She dried her face on the pale blue towel and then, experimentally, she smiled, then bared her teeth in the mirror. Daniel was right, she saw. They were unmistakably the teeth of a meat-eater. She folded the towel, still smiling, but now for herself rather than for the mirror. It was odd. She hadn’t expected what had been there for some weeks, and she hadn’t really noticed it. It was more like a removal of heavy difficulties than anything positive. She wasn’t remotely in love with Daniel, she couldn’t be, but in the last few weeks she’d become happy. Her skin was better, too.

  “That was Katherine Glover,” her mother said, enunciating the name, coming back from the telephone. “I thought she had decided to ignore us.”

  “What—the woman over the road?” Bernie said. “What’s she want, phoning in the middle of dinner? Husband run off again?”

  “Well, she wasn’t to know when we eat our dinner,” Alice said. “She’s got a little boy, they probably eat earlier than we do.”

  “He’s in my class at school,” Francis said.

  “Is he really?” Alice said. “He looks very young. She was asking for you, Sandra—she wanted to know whether you could go over for tea on Friday night. Is she a friend of yours, her daughter?”

  “No,” Sandra said. “It’s Daniel I’m more friends with.”

  “Ah,” Bernie said, in a knowing voice, and they all got on with their lasagne.

  The phone call had come out of the blue, but after that, relations were restored to what they might have become sooner. The next morning, the exits of the two families coincided exactly, and rather than wave from the other side of the road, Katherine crossed, all smiles, and had a word with them. She was so pleased Sandra could come to tea—hoped there was nothing she didn’t like to eat—promised not to send her home too late. Bernie pointed out it wasn’t a school night so it didn’t matter within reason, and she turned her gaze on him—she’d hardly met him, they both seemed to realize at once—and agreed to use the phrase, within reason. “We’ve been so busy,” she said, apparently in relation to nothing in the conversation. It was some sort of acknowledgement, apology even, that eight months before she’d sat with Alice and told her everything, and until now there had been nothing between them, perhaps an awkward and half-returned wave.

  Katherine, until recently, when they’d seen that Sandra had become such friends with her son, had acquired a name at number eighty-four, and the name was “the mad lady.” They got into the car. In the mirror, Bernie watched her make her way back across the road to where her family stood, as if stuck still about their car in the drive. She seemed quite unembarrassable. He thought of launching a sardonic comment, but turned the key and started the car.

  When Malcolm heard from Katherine that they were expecting a guest to dinner on Friday night, he misunderstood. For most of their lives together, it had seemed to him that he was admitted only to the public downstairs rooms of Katherine’s mind. The more intimate spaces and speculations, the whole upstairs and attics of her thinking were kept from him. So when she told him two days before about this guest, he said wretchedly, “Oh, good,” taking the statement at face value. A guest—by which he thought she meant an adult guest—was coming. She made these statements in the tone of one to whom guests for dinner were commonplace and even a bore. She always had. It seemed obvious to him that the only person it could be was Katherine’s boss Nick. In a few minutes it became clear that it wasn’t a guest in the normal sense but a girlfriend of Daniel’s. Why Katherine had implied someone who would need impressing he couldn’t understand. He found it hard to forgive her, even for so small a misunderstanding.

  On Tuesday night he went to the battle re-creation society. He drove into Hillsborough, down in the valley. The houses here were packed more tightly together, a little shabbier. There was a crowd about, all wearing blue and white scarves, all trudging gnome-like in the same direction, towards the football ground. It was a steady crowd, with none of the urgency and those flurries of violence that would burst out later, after the match. He drove carefully, though, since even before the match there was foolishness in the air, and someone might choose to run out into the road. He made a note to drive back from the society the long way round, to avoid any trouble.

  The society met in a school hall over the brow of the next-but-one hill. The school let them meet in it for almost nothing, persuaded by John Ashworth. He taught chemistry there. It was convenient for him
, at any rate. There were already twelve cars in the car park when Malcolm drove in, though he was early. That meant twenty already, a good turnout.

  Some weeks the society met to plan their biannual re-creation of a battle, which wasn’t going to happen until next summer, a good long way off. For those re-creations the core membership of about forty expanded dramatically. Wives and children, colleagues of Richard Thwaite’s from the council, John Ashworth’s chemistry pupils, all and sundry were pressed into versions of Civil War uniform and given antique-looking guns, or gun-like objects. The quality of the outfits and the power of the delusion varied. Some members of the society were magnificent in hand-crafted uniforms, kept carefully in boxes, and put on appropriate-looking wigs, the illusion only broken, perhaps, by a pair of solicitor-like spectacles peeping out through a cavalier’s poodle wig. Others, roped in at the last moment, made do with a cardboard breastplate painted grey, an old trilby spray-painted silver (surprisingly all right from a distance) and a sawn-off broom-handle. These less plausible warriors were encouraged not to stand together, or at the front, but to melt into the general illusion, their props (of doubtful admissibility) borrowing authenticity from some more scrupulous adjacence. They had as good a day as anyone, and there were some in the society who argued that what they ought to be interested in was battlefield tactics, not the minutiae of breeches and flintlocks, and tactics could as interestingly be re-enacted by three hundred women in flowery skirts if it came to that. Others, more hardline, said that it wouldn’t feel right unless everyone was in the right dress for the period, and got into what in the end were surprisingly personal arguments about cuirasses. That was George Burke, who worked for the education authority and who refused to recruit any temporary participants for the re-creations, saying they would get in the way and mess things up. But he always lost the argument when it was pointed out that if you limited participation to people in the pedantically correct uniforms, you’d end up trying to re-create major clashes of civilization with twelve immaculately dressed obsessives. The other point, which no one raised but everyone bore in mind, was that it would also mean everyone submitting their uniform to the approval of George, who was not a generous fellow, in which case you might end up re-creating battles with only one person.

  Tonight it was Malcolm’s turn to talk. The society alternated planning meetings with evenings on which one of them would talk about an interest of his. It wasn’t necessarily the Civil War. People in the society had the widest possible interests—Agincourt, Thermopylae, Bosworth Field, Waterloo, Copenhagen (difficult to do on a moor), El Alamein. If only they could dig up large stretches of the moor, the first day of the Somme might be an enjoyable spectacle. But they’d stuck with the Civil War because the landscape was right, and they’d amassed properties and quite a bit of joint expertise on the subject. But they were all interested in each other’s more individual interests, and each gave a sort of talk from time to time. Malcolm’s particular interest was in the nineteenth-century little imperial wars. The long-bow membership thought it all very vulgar and coarse, he knew, but, a nuts-and-bolts man, he was going to enlighten them with a lot of interesting stuff about early machine-guns in the Sudan campaigns—the Gatling, the Martini-Henry breech loader, the Gardner and then, what Kitchener relied on, the Maxim gun, “which we have got and they have not.” It was a good story. He’d talked before about Fred Burnaby, but in a different context, and they’d enjoyed it.

  He’d been in the society for six years now. It’d only been going for a year when he joined. He hadn’t known such things existed. He’d been at the city library one lunch time and had come across a biography of Redvers Buller he’d not read—it was in the “recently returned” rack, and normally it was shelved with what he didn’t bother with, biography. He knew the military history shelves thoroughly, of course. “What’s that you’ve got there?” Margaret, his newish secretary, said to him as he came back through her room. He showed her the cover, a bristling moustached bruiser in a nineteenth-century uniform, stiff with medals, and with one blazingly mad eye, looking very much as you would expect a Redvers Buller to look.

  “Oh, are you interested in army things?” Margaret said. “You ought to meet my husband, he’s always on about guns and battles. He’s in a society for it.”

  “What sort of society?” Malcolm said.

  “A sort of restaging society,” Margaret said. “They restage, recreate, I should say, old battles. They’re all going up on Burbage moor next spring and we’re going to line up in troops and fight the battle of Naseby all over again, not with people being killed, of course. I’m in it, too, though I don’t go to the meetings or anything. I leave that to Richard. I’m going to be a cavalier, because of my hair—” she pulled out her recently permed long hair horizontally, to either side of her face “—and Richard said I can be killed early and then I’ll go up and sit on a hill, watch the rest from there.”

  “That sounds interesting,” Malcolm said.

  “You could come if you like. They need everyone they can get. I expect you’d be a roundhead, though.”

  “Oh, why?” Malcolm said, so plaintively that Margaret burst out laughing. It was funny for Malcolm to say that, he could see, but when they’d done it in school and whenever he’d read any kind of book about it since, that hadn’t been the side he’d seen himself on. He had been flying through the night on a horse, sleeping soundlessly up oak trees, like anyone else.

  “Well,” Margaret said, “it’s really just your hair. I expect they’d want you to be on the short-haired side, especially since they’re a bit overloaded on the other. You’ve to be grateful for whatever station they see you in.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t mind one bit,” Malcolm said fervently, and Margaret looked with some surprise at her nice but mousy boss. “Do you think I could join the society, really?” he said.

  “I’ll let Richard know of your interest,” Margaret said formally, and returned to a pile of questionable mortgage applications.

  At home, he’d mentioned it casually. Katherine was still busy with the little one, who was only three, and barely registered the information. It was a few months later he worked out that somehow she’d thought it was part of his Wednesday-night gardening club. How could she have got that impression? The misapprehension had only become clear when he’d wondered out loud whether Daniel might like to join in at the society’s big re-creation in the spring, to boost numbers.

  “Some sort of flower show?” Katherine said, and he’d explained about the battle of Naseby, and quickly discovered he had to go back to the beginning and explain what he’d been doing every Tuesday night. He thought then that it wouldn’t be difficult to have an affair behind Katherine’s back, if she showed so little curiosity in his doings. He had no candidate in mind: it was an instant, disappointing thought, what he could get away with, when there was nothing he wanted to get away from.