The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  In a moment, the two of them went inside. Unseen by anyone, Tim drew his curtain again, and in ten minutes the light in his bedroom went out.

  Katherine started walking at an ordinary pace, hardly knowing where she should go—she walked so seldom, unless it was to the post-box at the corner of the road. But she reached the corner and did not turn right, following the greasy line of yellow lights, but left, off the road, on to the crags. Here, at the very edge of the city, was the big old house behind its double gateposts. An old woman lived there, a posh old woman whose family had owned it for years, perhaps for ever, perhaps had built it. Katherine had invited her to a party once; she’d accepted, then written a kind, regretful note of apology, as if she’d remembered she’d ignored the estate growing up round her big square sandstone house on the edge of the moor, and couldn’t start acknowledging it now. Katherine went past, on to the stony irregular path, walking more quickly as she went, and to her surprise the windows on the moor side of the house were lit up, curtainless, empty of people observed or observing, like a lighthouse to a broad dark sea.

  She went on, almost trotting, into the darkness of the path, her ankles bending impossibly from step to step. The light cast by the big house faded after a couple of hundred yards. On the right, a steep rise of hillside grazing where sheep sometimes wandered, their flanks striped with a slash of blue or green. To the right, a sharp fall of rocks, almost a fifteen-foot cliff. She could see neither, only down below the glowing sequence of street-lights masking the road. It was the Manchester road, just losing its name and turning into the pass over the Pennines. Katherine went fast, her breath catching. She never walked down here, hadn’t since the children were old enough not to want her company when they explored or escaped. She hadn’t missed those maternal outings, and she knew they’d all come here on their own. Daniel with girls, Jane to dream, Tim to bury himself in a crevice and hide, she guessed. She couldn’t be sure of the path—her feet wouldn’t carry her unthinkingly over the rubble-strewn way, but she hurried on. It hardly mattered, what would become of her, and her thoughts ran, not on Nick or even on her husband and children, still less on that specific chain of circumstance, but on all that, transformed and melting into a black cloud of dread. It was bigger and more horrible than the mere idea of public prosecution, even prison; bigger even than the notion of being found out and having to account, as she had tried so haplessly to do in that thin-windowed interview room, for a broad stretch of her own behaviour. It was just a weight, a blanket of dread spreading out to the dark horizon and covering half the starless sky, like the embroidered ownerless moors, with great strata sleeping deep beneath it.

  Her right foot went through something, a gap between two rocks. She pulled, but her heel was caught fast. She tugged again, letting out a little cry, and all at once she felt the narrow heel snap. Even here, the immediate thought was of cost. They were new shoes; that was why she’d put them on. She bent down, gasping, and felt. It had snapped off cleanly, leaving her only the sole to walk on, and though she rummaged around in the loose detached fragments of the wild earth, she could not find the heel. For a moment Katherine paused, scrabbling for breath—she had been almost running—and without stopping to debate her immediate thought, walked directly to the right, where the precipice must be. That was the best thing to do.

  But she fell, not a bone-breaking ten yards, but directly forward, on to grass and heather. All at once the exact image of the lower crags in daylight came to her. Sideways in her vision, in the garden of the big house, a new light appeared. It was like a torchlight in the garden, moving about with pendulum regularity, a little hand-held light, a fleck like a glow-worm. It could have moved, pointed in her direction and shown her fallen, not tragically, but absurdly flat on her face in a damp, cold field. There was only a drop at the very beginning of the path. After that, the fields rose up to meet it. She lay, awkwardly twisted, bruised but no more than uncomfortable, and looked at her ridiculous position. After all, it seemed as if she hadn’t wanted to fling herself off a cliff at all. She hadn’t wanted to die, but rather, for once in her life, to fall over like a risible idiot, unwatched. Had she ever, since she was a girl, fallen in such a way? With this fall, her shoe broken, lying helpless like an overturned beetle, Katherine felt that the worst had now happened to her, happened in a fall, a second. Nick, the police, authority could peer at her, and do their worst. But she didn’t know what grey position in this new configuration of inspectors was occupied by Malcolm. She lay there until the damp and prickle of the undergrowth took the place of all other thoughts and sensations.

  The shoes were unbearable, and she carried them one in each hand, all the way home. By the time she let herself quietly in, her tights were worn through at the heel and under the balls of her feet. Her feet felt as if she had been a day walking over cheese graters. She paused at the kitchen and switched its light on. In the dark house, the strip-lighting had the same metallic sour quality of a glass of water drunk on waking at four in the morning. Noiselessly, she dropped the new shoes, one broken, one whole, into the kitchen bin on top of a heap of potato peelings. It seemed so long since her last domestic task, and Tim had left the washing up from dinner time just where it had been left, in the sink.

  A voice from upstairs, frail and sleepy, calling in the dark: “Is that you, Katherine?”

  “Yes,” she said, not raising her voice. “I just felt like some air.”

  The door to their bedroom opened, rustling against the thick pile of the fitted carpet. Presently, a thin figure, slightly hunched, pulling the skirts of his dressing-gown to him, coagulated at the top of the stairs looking down like a dark spook on the landing.

  “You’ve been a time,” Malcolm said, in his normal, quiet voice.

  “I wanted some air,” Katherine said. “Can I bring you anything up?” She hitched up her skirt, and in a broad gesture, hooked her thumbs under the waist of her tights, pulling them off with their ruined heels. They crackled over her legs; she’d shaved them last a week ago. She screwed them up into a ball and threw them at the kitchen bin.

  “What happened to your shoes?” Malcolm said, but mildly, as if reminding her of something she might for very good reason have forgotten or mislaid. “And what—”

  But that was evidently to hold her too much to account, and he stopped, leaving Katherine to survey her torn skirt, with a thick gash of mud and crushed grass down her left hip, where she’d fallen and slid.

  “I don’t know,” Katherine said, but it sounded stupid. “I thought I’d walk down the path—you know, what the kids call the lower crags—”

  “In the pitch dark?” Malcolm said.

  “Well, I broke the heel of my shoe,” Katherine said reasonably. “In the dark. And I fell over, as you see. So you’re right, it wasn’t a good idea.”

  By now they were in their bedroom. Katherine handed over the unrequested second glass of water she’d brought up, as she did every night, one on each side of the bed, on his bedside table, on hers. Malcolm in his old pyjamas with the drawstring waist and his woollen tartan dressing-gown; it was the same evidently comforting one, much washed and faded in its now soft fog of colours, running into each other, that she’d bought for him a Christmas soon after they’d married. He looked so like an aggrieved big-eyed child, one ill with some harsh wasting disease rendering him old before his time. He spoke, too, with the sort of grievance a child might have.

  “Now, Katherine, what’s all this about—”

  Or more accurately, a child trying his best to be terribly adult. It infuriated her, instantly.

  “Is that how you speak to customers at the building society? The bad ones?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The ones who’ve fallen behind with their payments?”

  “Katherine, there’s really not a lot of point—”

  “Do you think there’s a single woman in the world would put up with being spoken to like that? Malcolm?”
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  “I don’t mean to put your back up,” Malcolm said, blinking in his most owl-like way. “I know you’ve had a shock, an unpleasant experience—”

  Katherine almost delighted in that, though her face remained perfectly solemn. He hadn’t expected her to throw up so solid a wall to block the customary allusions and retreats of their customary way of speaking to each other, the ways in which he always tried to head off her capacity for the blunt statement of a situation by the shy exhibition of a patch of tender skin. Nothing was to be gained by not speaking plainly, she felt, about their situation if not her particular one, and she saw her way forward quite clearly.

  “I’m worrying about you,” Malcolm said in the end. “And about how you—I don’t know—about how this has all come about. It must be—” he said, hanging on in case she should ask where, exactly, he thought the blame lay “—it must be some stupid mistake, a silly misunderstanding.”

  “That would be the easiest thing,” Katherine said. She remained standing, taking off her clasp earrings. It was a surprise that they were both still there. The familiar physical release, at the end of a long day, was like an exhalation.

  “Katherine,” Malcolm said. “I don’t understand why you’re talking to me like this. Anyone would think it was my fault you seem to be in trouble with the police.”

  “That’s really not fair,” Katherine said, lowering her voice. “And not accurate. I’m not ‘in trouble with the police.’ I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “It’s Nick, I know,” Malcolm said. “But what did he get you involved in, that’s what I’d like to know.”

  “I see,” Katherine said. “So you and Daniel, you’ve been puzzling it all out between you—”

  “No,” Malcolm said quizzically. “It’s more, really, that you came out and said, ‘It’s Nick.’”

  Had she?

  “I didn’t know what I was saying.”

  “Do you now?”

  Katherine sat down—not next to Malcolm, on his side of the bed, but in the armchair they’d always had in the bedroom, Lord knew why. Perhaps no one had ever sat in it before, with its hard red chintz and its narrow hipless seat. But Katherine sat in it now. She was quite calm, not hysterical, as Malcolm seemed to think—he was treating her gently, as a woman who couldn’t remember what he’d said, one who had no grasp of the situation. Clarity was best and, actually, clarity was what she had to spare. She had walked out into the unlit country to clear her head, and her head was now quite clear.

  “What’s that noise?” she said.

  Malcolm cocked his head; in a moment the same rasping sound came again. Of course, she knew it; she didn’t know why it had seemed so unfamiliar. “It’s Daniel snoring,” he said. “He must have left his bedroom door open.”

  “I’d got used to not hearing it at night,” she said. “I’d practically forgotten what a noise he makes. Why did he come home with us?”

  “He left his car,” Malcolm said. “I suppose he thought he might as well stay overnight, drive in tomorrow.”

  “He’ll have to be up early in the morning,” Katherine said. “Is there still an alarm clock in there anywhere?”

  “Oh, I’ll wake him up,” Malcolm said. “I’ll even give him a lift to work, don’t worry.”

  “I thought you said he’d got his car.”

  “Yes,” Malcolm said. “That’s right, he’s got his car. I don’t know what I was saying. Of course he’s got his car.”

  “The best thing,” Katherine said. “The best thing all round is if we get divorced.”

  The curtains were drawn, the room small and full of stuff; on the floor, a pile of books had been kicked over and tangled with his abandoned shoes. There was a chaos in the room that never used to be there; they’d always been good, the pair of them, about putting things away, dirty clothes in the bedroom laundry basket or folding them neatly on the back of the armchair. Somehow, the room wasn’t like that now; it was full of detritus. There’d been an effort recently: she’d put a little vase of chrysanthemums on the bedside table, on his side, a week ago. They were starting to brown and wilt; a few curled-up petals, like monkey fingers, lay on top of his book. Malcolm got up and, with his bare foot, poked aside his shirt from where he’d dropped and left it, a gesture of disgust. He went to the window, pulled the curtain aside a little, looked out. There was nothing out there; he looked at the silence.

  “You’re not straight in your mind,” he said after a while.

  “Stop saying that,” she said, gripping the arms of the chair. “I’m perfectly straight in my mind. The best thing all round is if we decide to get divorced.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” Malcolm said, coming back. He raised his hands; he might have been about to hold her face in them.

  “I’m saying,” Katherine said, “it’s best all round if we get divorced. I’ll move out in the morning. I won’t need much stuff, it’ll go in a suitcase, and I’ll find a hotel first, and then a bedsit, maybe like the one Daniel lives in, and—and—”

  Her plans ran out. She shook her head, as if to shake some notions loose into speech.

  “Just go to sleep,” he said, sitting down on the bed and pulling the cover over his knees. “It’ll all seem different in the morning.” But he didn’t get into bed; he stayed there in a halfway position, waiting for the rest of the conversation.

  “No, it won’t,” she said savagely. “Whatever it seems like, it’ll all be the same in the morning. Don’t speak about it, don’t look at it, don’t think about it—it’s always there, whatever you do. I don’t know how you can—”

  Her speech was failing her now, perhaps in exhaustion, like a garaged car on a frosty morning.

  “You want to speak about it?” he said levelly. “Katherine, I’m telling you, you’ve had a shock. Don’t say anything you won’t want said in the morning, because you don’t really mean it. Whatever it is.”

  “But you’ve said it now,” Katherine said, and then, parodically, “whatever it is. You’ve said yourself there’s something I won’t want said in the morning. You might as well come out with it now.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t want to know.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  Outside, remotely in the night, perhaps as far down as the Manchester Road but carrying across the outdoor open silence of the suburban night, there was a piercing remote noise, the yowl of a siren. Katherine, convulsively, got up out of the chair and went to the window, a bone cracking in her bare ankles as she went. She pulled the curtains tighter shut, held them with her fists.

  “They wouldn’t put the sirens on for you,” Malcolm said. “Anyway, they’re done with you tonight, they said.”

  “I don’t know how you can—” Katherine said. “You’ve no idea, what it was like in there.”

  “I can imagine,” Malcolm said. “And you’re right, I know. I just don’t want to know.”

  “You don’t know anything,” Katherine said. It was the worst thing she could have said to her husband, worse than any confession, a frank statement of unretractable contempt.

  “I didn’t think I did,” Malcolm said, holding the bedclothes tight to him. “Till a couple of weeks ago.”

  “A couple of weeks ago?” Katherine said.

  “Yes,” Malcolm said. “He told me then.”

  “He?”

  “Listen,” Malcolm said, getting up with a convulsive gesture, “just let me tell you, and then, you know, everything’s been said, like you want. I was out in the garden, I was pruning the abutilons, I remember because it said in the Telegraph gardening column that it was this weekend you ought to be pruning shrubs back, and I thought, That’s funny, shows I’m on top of things because that was one of the things I’d definitely decided to do that weekend, trim back the abutilons—”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Malcolm,” Katherine said. “Shut up about the shrubbery. I can’t bear it. It’s nothing to do with the abutilons.”
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br />   “Katherine,” Malcolm said, not raising his voice. “Just sit down and let me tell the story in my own way. And if abutilons come into it, then they come into it. There’s not everything in my head that’s all about you. Some of it’s abutilons, and some of it’s stuff which I go out into the garden and do to get you out of my head, and the kids, and everything that sometimes makes me want to think about something else entirely for an hour or two. Right? It was still quite cold out there—I had my gloves on—so it was strange when Tim came out. He watched me for a while. I ignored him. Actually, I probably went out so I didn’t have to talk to him, I just couldn’t face it. And then he said, ‘I don’t know how you keep it up,’ or something he’d been thinking about saying, something horrible. I pretended I thought he was being interested, so I started saying that with a garden you had to keep it up, just a little attention now and again, going round doing a bit of weeding, a bit of pruning, a bit of planting, and the plants’d look after themselves, or it seemed like it. You had to keep it up.

  “I probably gave him a bit of a speech about gardens, and he just listened for a while, and then he smiled and said, ‘I wasn’t talking about shrubbery,’ exactly that, exactly the thing you’ve just said. I don’t know where you get ‘shrubbery’ from but I know where he got it from, it’s just what you say when I’m out in the garden. Teaching your children contempt for their father, that’s a nice thing for you to do. Wait a second, I’m not done. ‘That’s a shame,’ I say to Tim. ‘It might do you good to take a bit of interest in something.’ And I thought he was going to start on the urban proletariat again, that, you know, there were more important things than hobbies, as he calls them, there’s the revolution, blah blah. It doesn’t take a lot to set him off, you know as well as I do. But he didn’t, he just said, ‘I wasn’t talking about gardening. I was talking about your wife.’ ‘Your mother,’ I said. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘how you can take an interest in something and pretend nothing wrong when your wife’s behaving like she behaves.’”