The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  “What do you mean?” the Australian said. “Is that some Pommy way of telling me I’m not welcome round here any more?”

  “No,” Jane said, “not at all. I thought you might be uncomfortable about living here after what happened.”

  “I don’t care,” the Australian said. “Well, I do care, but it would be the same anywhere. Poor bugger.”

  “Good,” Jane said.

  “This is nice,” he said. “Where’d you learn to cook?”

  “Anyone can cook,” Jane said. It was just a plate of pasta with bacon and peas and cream. “It’s not hard.”

  “You’d be amazed,” the Australian said. “When I was at uni, I used to make this pasta bake, and it was a tin of tuna and a tin of corn, and all sorts of vegetables, whatever you could find, and then you poured a cheesy sauce out of a packet over it and put it in the oven.”

  “That sounds incredible,” Jane said. “Did you just invent that?”

  “No, it was kind of passed down to me,” the Australian said. “The great tradition of student cooking, passed on from mouth to mouth over the years. I even cooked it for other people, would you believe it?”

  “I used to be vegetarian,” Jane said.

  “Oh, yeah,” the Australian said.

  As if he’d asked why she stopped, she went on, “But one day I just found myself making a bacon sandwich, and I didn’t really care.”

  “Yeah, bacon sandwich, you couldn’t give that up and not miss it.”

  They ate contentedly for a while.

  “The thing is,” Jane said, “I think I was probably only doing it in the first place to be annoying. It used to drive my mother up the wall.”

  “Oh, yeah,” the Australian said. “I bet your mother went crazy when she heard you’d started eating bacon sandwiches again the second you’d left home and were having to cook for yourself.”

  “You’re right, actually. She put the phone down on me,” Jane said. “My dad thought it was funny. I was thinking—”

  “You’re going to have to think about getting another lodger,” the Australian said, interrupting her. He’d obviously been thinking about it. “There’s no point in putting it off.”

  “God,” Jane said.

  “Just got to be sensible about it. You can’t help but think about it with the room being empty like that. Put someone else in, and it’ll be their room before you know it.”

  “I can’t imagine anyone would want to rent a room where, you know …”

  “You’re not thinking of telling them, are you?” the Australian said. “Of course they won’t, if anyone tells them. Jesus, sleep in a room where a bloke wanked himself to death three weeks before? No, I don’t think so.”

  The extraordinary normality of the situation kept startling Jane; she placed an advert in the free Australian news-sheet in exactly the same way that she had a few months before, and it cost exactly the same. The girl at the other end of the phone didn’t recognize her details, didn’t say, “So it didn’t work out, then?” or “Yeah, I heard the bloke died with his dick in his fist.” There was no reason to think the advert would be any different from any other advert, and Jane had to admit that the flat, even to her, looked pretty much the same as it had when she moved in. No sinister atmosphere had descended on it; in fact, horribly, it was more as if something had been removed from it, and she and the shy Australian had come together into a baffled domesticity.

  That Thursday the Australian surprised her by suddenly suggesting going out to a pub. “Why not?” she said, surprising herself in turn. It would never have occurred to her; she went to pubs so seldom that she hardly saw them, like the way betting shops didn’t impinge on your awareness. But the Australian, it seemed, knew all the pubs in Clapham, wondering out loud about the Prince of Wales, the Sun, the Feathers, the Alexandra before settling on a pub in a back-street, halfway between the square and the doctor’s. Jane had never even noticed it. She wondered if he might be a favourite, a regular at the pub, but they didn’t seem to know or remember him. Perhaps that was just London. They drank steadily, sociably; a large television hung precariously in one corner, and a succession of game shows took place. She quite enjoyed the Australian’s obscene running commentary on all the contestants and presenters and prizes, and when they’d had three or four drinks, she let him teach her how to play one of the gambling machines in the corner. She’d always thought that the point of these machines was to win money, but this one fizzed and bonged without any suggestion of reward; she called it a “one-armed bandit,” he liked that. It was something to do, the game, with an intergalactic space war.

  “They have lock-ins here,” the Australian said, but in fact the pub closed like any other at eleven, the landlady folding her arms and refusing when he tried to ask for another couple of drinks at five past. “I reckon she thinks you look like a policewoman,” he said, returning empty-handed to their table.

  “That’s a terrible thing to say,” Jane said.

  “Well, you do a bit,” the Australian said.

  “No, I don’t,” Jane said. “I think that’s about the rudest thing you could say to a woman.”

  “Oh, come on,” the Australian said. “I’m only joshing. It’s the Australian in me. I insult you, and then you insult me back, and then we’re best mates, yeah?”

  “That sounds insane,” Jane said. “You want me to insult you back? You really want me to?”

  The Australian was about to say yes, but he caught her eye; there must have been some expression in it, something positively alarming. “Maybe not,” he muttered, and they got up and went home.

  She’d drunk more than she was used to, but she wasn’t expecting the painful hangover the next morning; woken by the noise of the Australian leaving the house at nine, she raised her head before lowering it again, convinced she was about to be sick. It was eleven thirty before she managed to leave the house. By then, the Northern Line had calmed down from its rush-hour insanity; she actually sat down for once.

  “Your friend Sarah Willis called,” her supervisor, Ian, said when she got in. “Are you sure you’re well enough to come in? You look awful.”

  “I think there’s something going round,” Jane said.

  “Well, stay away from me,” Ian said cheerfully, but he was always sniffing and honking away from some cold one of his three small children had picked up at school or playgroup.

  “I took the morning off,” Jane said, into the telephone. “I told them I was sick, but really it was just a hangover. I felt terrible.”

  “That’s awful,” Sarah said. “You don’t want to make a habit of that. Listen, I’m really sorry, but you know this evening …”

  “Er—oh, God, yes, this evening.”

  She’d quite forgotten, but a few weeks ago, they’d looked at the South Bank brochure and decided to go to a concert tonight together. Last year, they’d so enjoyed Amadeus at the National Theatre, and Sarah Willis had said she’d never thought she’d like Mozart so much, they must go to a concert, a proper concert of his music some time. There it had rested until Jane had booked tickets for tonight.

  “It can’t be helped. My boss, my big boss, is over from the States and we’re all to go out for a brainstorming dinner with him tonight. I’m really sorry, but you’ll get the money back on the ticket, won’t you?”

  There was never anything much like that in Jane’s life. The big boss, her ultimate boss, worked upstairs, and though he was much richer than Jane, he went home to Enfield every night at five thirty. Nobody had ever been known to stay late at the toy-maker’s.

  At six, Jane left the office and walked down Southampton Row. It was a sunny afternoon, and the trees on either side cast a bucolic air over everything, even the hooting traffic, even the four tramps who huddled, as always, in their nests of blankets and rags and possession-filled supermarket trolleys under the pillared porch of the disused old church. She walked over Waterloo Bridge, her soft slim brown leather briefcase, much like a music-case,
by her side, and felt she looked somehow different from everyone else hurrying over the bridge at this time. It was a beautiful view, the grand buildings lining up along the green flood as if they were holding back something torrential. As if in planned response, a boat hooted, somewhere down towards the City, its blast echoing between the sides of the canyon, and Big Ben replied with its half-hour chime. She was starting to love this city.

  Jane took her seat in the concert hall twenty minutes before the start. She knew that was something her father always did, on their rare visits to the theatre or to a Messiah at the City Hall at Easter, and she’d always found it ridiculous. But you couldn’t sit in the bar on your own for long, smiling brightly, unless you really were waiting for someone. She put her bag in the thirty-pound empty seat, and realized that Sarah Willis hadn’t offered to pay for the wasted ticket. She read the programme notes, her eyes passing over the superior and baffling explanations, and then, with more pleasure, the adverts, the names of the people playing in the orchestra, the Hollywoodish photographs of the conductor and soloist, the message from the London Borough of Lambeth about fire exits. In time, the hall filled, in pairs and parties, and then, all at once, the orchestra, slouching on in their white ties and tails, a crowd of penguins hovering on the brink of the ice, waiting for the first one to take the plunge. It must be odd to wear such things all the time. From the muddle of sound of an orchestra warming up, little fragments of melody, somehow familiar, as they had one last chance to try to get an awkward corner right; and then it all fell silent and, like a crowd all gathering round a single object, they agreed on the same note, hooting and responding like the boat on the river.

  A piece by Rossini was listed as coming first, but before that the conductor pointed at the percussion, and a drum-roll. Jane began to struggle to her feet, with a little surprise: she knew that concerts at the City Hall in Sheffield often started with the National Anthem, but she’d always assumed that London wouldn’t bother with it, since they could see the Queen’s house any time they chose. But she’d made a mistake: no one else was getting up, and she sat down again promptly. It wasn’t the National Anthem: it was just the way the first piece began, with a drum-roll. Her face burnt. To her left, a couple nudged each other, smiling. She couldn’t listen to the first piece, and applauded at the end with some relief, as though it had been devised only for her discomfiture.

  The second piece was Mozart, a piano concerto, and the reason, really, they’d decided to come. But it seemed so hard to Jane to find the pleasure she’d had at Amadeus, and though the programme note said that the piece was famous, she couldn’t work out whether she’d heard it before or not. The music was shiny, clean and insolent, not really asking anything of her. Only when it came to the second movement did anything start to make sense; she looked at the programme note again, wondering why she recognized this, and it explained that it had been used as the music to a famous Swedish film. That didn’t explain the familiarity; Jane was sure she’d never seen the film, which was called Elvira Madigan. She must have heard it somewhere, the way music became familiar without you noticing it, and all of a sudden it came to an end. She hadn’t been listening. She’d been thinking about something else entirely.

  At the end of the piece, when they’d all applauded the pianist, and he’d come back three times, the last time artificially cranking up the applause when it had threatened to die out prematurely, the audience began to shuffle and rise. Behind her, an emphatic voice spoke.

  “Of course, it’s all very well,” the voice was saying, “but I think you’ll find that you get much better performances on a Friday night at the Sheffield City Hall from the Hallé Orchestra. Many’s the time I’ve gone back to Rayfield Avenue in Sheffield, quite bowled over by—”

  Jane turned in surprise. Behind her there was a man—no, he looked older than he was, his pale hair thinning on top of a pink scalp like mist on a hilltop. He was wearing a slightly crumpled grey suit with an ink stain at one trouser pocket and a blue shirt, but no tie. His knees were pulled up halfway to his chest; he was immensely tall, even sitting down. He grinned at her. “I know you,” he said. “You’re Jane, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said, wondering. Then she remembered—he was the little boy who used to live over the road in Sheffield. He’d been tall even then. Daniel had been friends with his sister.

  “Francis,” he said, reminding her. “Francis Sellers.”

  “I didn’t know you were in London,” she said.

  “I’d heard you were,” he said. “Your mother’s great friends with my mother.”

  “I remember you now,” Jane said. “And your sister, she’s—”

  “Sandra? She’s just moved to Australia.”

  “Emigrated?” Jane said idiotically. She didn’t know what she had been on the point of saying about his sister; she was probably glad he’d interrupted her.

  “Yes,” Francis said, looking amused as the people excused themselves around him. It was odd to see him grown-up, with grown-up responses; he was still gangling, but didn’t have that conspicuously hovering appearance any more. If anything, he was lounging in his seat.

  “That’s a coincidence,” Jane said, for something to say. But then she realized how foolish her comment really was.

  “What is?”

  “Oh, nothing,” Jane said, not really able to say that she shared a flat with an Australian. “Where are you living now?”

  “In Balham,” Francis said. “And you?”

  “I’m in Clapham,” she said. “I don’t know why we haven’t bumped into each other before.”

  “Actually, I think I’ve seen you,” Francis said. “I thought it was you, but I wasn’t sure. On the Northern Line.”

  “We ought to meet up,” Jane found herself saying.

  “Well, we’ve met up now,” Francis said. “Do you want to get a drink?”

  He liked music, he explained as they went to the bar. It had come on him in Sheffield. “A lot of adolescents take to music in a big way, I know,” he said, and it struck Jane as a strange thing to say; it would have been indecent to use the word “adolescent” five years before, and she almost envied Francis for being able to distance himself from his biological experience in so fast and lordly a way. He hadn’t, it seemed, gone to university—he didn’t say why, and he’d always seemed like a clever boy. “Do you like Bruckner?” he asked, and she said she didn’t know, but pointed out what, of course, he must know, that that was what the orchestra was going to play in the second half. He came often to these things, he said. Jane listened; she didn’t quite know how to talk about the way she took this sort of thing, in London.

  London was full of opportunities, of interesting things to see and interesting places to visit. For her own sake, Jane was scrupulous about arranging an outing with a friend during the week, perhaps to a concert at the Wigmore Hall or a film, or now and again to the theatre. She’d seen lots of famous actors in all sorts of things, and kept her programmes, some signed, in a folder. There’d never been any choice in Sheffield, just one thing a month at the Crucible and a concert a week at the City Hall, most of which you wouldn’t want to go to. At Oxford there’d been a choice, but you had to admit, after a term of going to everything, that hardly any of it was worth going to or listening to. It was really a crime not to go to what London had to offer, and she’d really started enjoying it; she was proud of having seen Antony Sher in Richard III and shelling out for tickets near the front. The way he’d hurtled straight at them on his crutches, like a black missile dismantling in flight; Jane had gone home knowing what “starry-eyed” meant, her eyes feeling weighty and luminous on the Northern Line. She’d gone straight to her room and done something she hadn’t done for years: written a poem about it. Even Sarah Willis, who wasn’t so keen on keeping up with the culture, had to admit that she was glad Jane had asked her to that, though of course the month after she’d yawned her way through a concert—or did you say recital?—of the Amadeus Quarte
t playing Schubert at the Wigmore Hall.

  The outings in the week were interesting and enjoyable, though they sometimes didn’t leave much time for talking to your friend. If it was a long evening and they had to get up in the morning, quite often they’d shoot off without having a pizza afterwards, which wasn’t really very satisfactory. But there were the weekend outings, too. Jane made a point of visiting a different part of London every weekend. Sometimes she went to a museum or a gallery, either a famous central one—she was doing the National Gallery and the Victoria and Albert and the British Museum conscientiously, two or three rooms at a time—or a local one. She hadn’t realized what an enormous walk it was from the tube stop to Kenwood in Hampstead, but of course it was an interesting walk if you hadn’t been to that bit of London before. There was the Horniman Museum, the John Soane, the Wallace collection—oh, she’d been all over.

  There were other walks to be had. It was interesting to go for long walks through the parks, through the snooty velvet hills of Hampstead Heath and Richmond Park, the kite-flyers in the one, the deer raising their heads and, all at once, running; Kew Gardens, which rather daunted her with the sense that everything was interesting here if only she knew anything about plants. She’d have to bring her dad here, he’d enjoy it. She went for Sunday walks, too, through particular parts of London, discovering Spitalfields with its blank-faced and picturesque decrepitude, its crumbling brick façades like the long, ruined face of a drunkard. Or the City, so strangely empty on a Saturday. She’d thought it like a horror movie about the end of the world, and then, to confirm her feeling, she’d come across a film crew shooting a film about exactly that, thirty extras horrifically made up like the living dead, sitting around having cups of tea quite naturally. It was all very interesting, and there was never any shortage of things to tell her mum and dad when, once a week, she telephoned them to tell them what she’d been up to.