The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  “Oh, my God,” Katherine said. “What on earth—”

  “No, there’s more,” Malcolm said. His voice was steady, and now he was almost in Katherine’s face. “I just looked at him, and I sort of knew what he was going to say, and I think I said to him what I just said to you, that there’s things that are best if no one says them even if everyone knows them, that if you don’t say them—no, I didn’t say this, but this is what I think—that if you don’t say something it can’t become important, but if you say it everyone’s ever after got to walk round it like a pile of rocks in the living room, and it might just go away. I thought it had gone away. I thought it really had. I thought I’d ignored it and you’d stopped it, whatever it was, and we were getting on all right again. We’ve been fine, the last three or four years, better than ever, there’s no reason—”

  “It’s Nick, isn’t it?” Katherine said.

  “There’s no harm in saying it,” Malcolm said. She hadn’t surprised him. He’d known one of them, soon, was going to say exactly that, and he swept on. “Or no more harm now, I suppose. That’s what he said. He said it wasn’t recent information, it was something he’d seen years ago. He said he’d been going down through Broomhill, what, six, seven years ago, he’d only be a little boy, and he looked in through the window of the flower shop to see if you were there. And, I suppose, to get a lift home—I don’t know what he was doing in Broomhill, coming back from town in the school holidays or something. But he looked in through the window and, he said, ‘You know what I saw? I saw your wife with her arms round that man she used to work for, and they were kissing.’”

  “That’s not true,” Katherine said.

  “Oh, come off it,” Malcolm said.

  “No, I’m completely serious, it’s not true, it can’t be true,” she said. She was incredulous that something like the truth should be represented by something so false. Tim had never seen anything of the sort, and it was ridiculous to pretend that he had. Never in her life had she embraced and certainly she had never kissed Nick in the flower shop, in the window of the shop where anyone passing, anyone in Broomhill, could have seen them. He had just made it up. “I’ve never kissed Nick in the flower shop, I’ve never put my arms round him. He can’t have seen that because it didn’t happen there.”

  Malcolm looked at her gravely. “I wish you hadn’t said that,” he said. “There’s been a point, I think you know the point, where we could just ignore it and the whole thing would come to an end, though I wouldn’t know when it came to an end, and then you’d stop thinking about it and so would I. And it would fade away in time without anyone ever talking about it. But you just said, ‘It didn’t happen there.’”

  She had heard herself saying, “It didn’t happen there,” but the time was too late to hold back confessions. Malcolm, too, was going to do it all for her. It was unfair of him to say that it was her fault it was coming out now.

  “I thought it was all over,” Malcolm said.

  “It is, it was, a long time back, it was hardly ever anything, it never started, it was a mistake, it’s—”

  “I don’t know why you want a divorce,” Malcolm said. “If it’s all so very much over and finished. I don’t know why you wouldn’t first want to forget all about it, or if that’s not possible because your husband’s found out, why you wouldn’t first ask him if he can forgive you, because that seems like the sensible thing to do in the circumstances.”

  That dropped like a stone. It was true: she didn’t want a divorce now. It seemed extraordinary that she had wanted a divorce only so that she wouldn’t have to talk, as a married woman, about the short affair she had had with Nick. The one occasion. It seemed a high price to pay so that she wouldn’t have to listen to anything he said in response, but she had said it, and had said it with a conviction that things were clear in her head. Now that, it seemed, they were about to have that conversation, her wishes had changed; her wishes, which had always been for convenience above all.

  “You see, the thing is,” Malcolm said—and it was exactly the voice in which, surely, he started raising objections to someone applying for credit when holes in their application had become apparent, “I thought we’d been through all that. I thought it was all over and nothing had come of it, and, really, I still think I was right. When you said first, ‘I want to go and get a job,’ I thought, Well, we don’t need the extra money, though extra money is always nice, but I’m not going to be selfish, I’m going to think about you. And maybe that was right. I know it can’t have been much of a life for you, being at home all day, looking after the kids, shopping, cleaning, tidying, cooking dinner, it would wear anyone down. And I know you used to like going to work—you used to go on about it, but I know you enjoyed working in the school, having a position of responsibility. You’re an educated woman, you’re not stupid. It’s not like Alice over the road who’s never worked and never missed it.

  “So I thought, Well, maybe that’s a good idea, though to be honest I didn’t really like the idea of the flower shop, and just you and Nick working there. I don’t know why. And then you started coming home and—well, I tell you what. When you used to work in that school, you’d come home and there’d be stories about what the headmaster’d said or what the headmaster’s wife’d done, or about that woman you used to work with, what she’d lost or what some boy had said to you, some funny story or an interesting story or something like that. I could see that when you stopped work, you missed that, because you weren’t that good at telling funny stories about what the kids had said or done today, mostly because, well, they’re my kids and I love them, even Tim, but they aren’t that interesting when they’re so small. I never thought that and I know you didn’t. So I sent you out to work—”

  “You didn’t send me out anywhere,” Katherine said. Her anger at the way Malcolm was putting things had been growing. “I went out and got a job and told you about it afterwards. And you didn’t let me go, either.”

  “Well, however you want to put it,” Malcolm said.

  “Yes,” Katherine said. “However I want to put it. I won’t let you put things for me. That’s how it was. I’m not yours to let go or keep in, I did what I wanted to do.”

  “But you didn’t ask me,” Malcolm said. “You didn’t even ask me.”

  “I know what you’d have said,” Katherine said. “You never ask me about—Listen, do you think I’ve never wanted to move house, move to a nicer house, a bigger one? You know I’ve always wanted a big old house and we could afford one—we could move to Ranmoor if we wanted to. But we never could, because this is where your garden is, and it’s where you want to live, and it doesn’t matter.”

  She caught a terrible glimpse of herself in the long mirror inside the wardrobe door, hanging open; her hair anyhow, mad and even drunk-seeming; there was a yellow streak of earth on her face, and her clothes—her beige blouse with its frills and furbelows torn to the elbow, her skirt thick with mud. Barelegged, barefoot, she seemed like a desperately refugee presence in her own bedroom.

  “Katherine,” Malcolm said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. We were talking about you working at the flower shop, and whether you want a divorce, and now we’re talking about whether we should move to Ranmoor or not. I can’t keep up with you.”

  “All right,” Katherine said. “Tell me everything about when I was working at the flower shop. You know all about it, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do,” Malcolm said. “I’ll tell you something, I know what it’s like when your wife comes home every day and she talks about her boss, how marvellous he is, how fantastic, how she goes weak inside whenever he speaks to her—”

  “That’s not fair, it’s not—”

  “—and the whole time listening to this, night after night, and knowing that your wife’s having an affair with someone and she can’t stop herself talking about her boyfriend, her fancy man, her lover, whatever you called it to yourself in your mind—”

  “That
’s not true, I never, ever—”

  “Oh, come on,” Malcolm said. “You must think I’m stupid. Going on like that? And in front of the children? If you didn’t, then don’t tell me you didn’t want to, and tried your hardest to make it happen. Tell me it never happened, not once, nothing, not even a little kiss and a cuddle in the back after closing time, and then we’ll forget about it.”

  She said nothing. She had been about to say, with perfect truth, “I never had an affair with Nick,” but the way he had put it, she could not answer and not tell a lie. She had not thought his standard of the unacceptable would be set so low when it came to voicing the situation. There was a heavy click from the bedside table; the digital alarm clock’s black and white numbers had flicked over. It was two o’clock. Suddenly she felt appallingly tired; she felt as though this conversation could now be put off until tomorrow, until never.

  “You see?” Malcolm said. “You see? You can’t. And the thing is that I’d stopped thinking about it, I’d stopped torturing myself over it, thinking about how humiliating the whole thing was and what it was going to be like when, eventually, you actually said to me, ‘I want a divorce.’ It wasn’t going to be in these circumstances. It’s almost like I’d forgiven you. I don’t know what happened, and I’m not going to ask, and I don’t want to know, but you just stopped going on about it, and then you said, I know, ‘I don’t want to work there any more.’ I thought the whole thing was over.”

  “What did you say to Tim?” Katherine said, after a long silence. She could not look at him. She could feel him staring heavily at her. It seemed so unfair that it was up to her to make the situation right again, and what she had proposed should be rejected so sharply. There was no question of their getting divorced, she could see that.

  “What do you think? What would anyone say? I told him it was a load of rubbish, that you’d never do anything like that, and I told him to shut up and never tell anyone what he said he’d seen.”

  “He hadn’t seen anything,” Katherine said. “He was making it up, the whole thing. He had to have been. Believe you me, he had to have been.”

  “I believe you,” Malcolm said.

  “I don’t know what we’ve done,” Katherine said, “to bring up a child like that. I hate him.”

  “Like what?” Malcolm said. You could say that his eyes were blazing, but eyes could not blaze. It was perhaps only a small physiological change, a rush of liquid from the tear ducts, made them shine brilliantly, angrily. “A liar, you mean?”

  She left that.

  “I’ve been quite successful in dealing with the whole thing,” Malcolm said. “Even after that, I never thought I’d have to talk to you about it. I thought it was all ancient history. But now what’s going to happen? Do you have any idea what’s going to happen?”

  “I don’t know,” Katherine said. “Malcolm, I’m exhausted, I can’t talk any more, I can’t—”

  “All right, I’ll tell you what’s going to happen, and then you can go to bed,” Malcolm said. “First off, we’re not getting divorced. Second, I’m going to stand by you all through this, whatever it is, because I still don’t understand and you still haven’t told me, because whatever Nick’s done, I don’t believe you knew anything about it and I don’t believe you knew you were doing anything wrong, whatever it is. But he’s a stupid man, a weak man. He’d never have done anything if you’d not made him do it, I mean the two of you, not whatever it is the police are after him for, and I just want you to accept that. And the last thing is, whatever it was between the two of you, I don’t want anyone else to know about it, ever, and I don’t want the children saying anything like that. I can stand it, knowing that my wife once went to bed with someone else, so long as nobody else ever knows, and he’s a bad person, but I don’t believe he’s the sort of person who would go round boasting about it, whatever it was that happened. Tell me it doesn’t make any sense, but I can cope with being in that position so long as I’m the only one who knows I’m in that position. Let me keep a bit of dignity here.”

  “Malcolm, everything you think is completely wrong,” Katherine said. “Or nearly everything.”

  “No, it’s not,” Malcolm said. “I know it’s not. It’s not like I set a private detective on you, but I know all the same. Don’t ask me why. Now I’m going to bed.”

  He got into bed and turned his face to the wall, away from her side. All her life, Katherine had had a bedtime routine, and now she did it, muddy and torn, bruised and untended as she was. She took off her mud-encrusted skirt, her shredded slip, her torn and earth-painted blouse. In her bra and knickers, she sat down at the dressing-table. She took a puff of cotton wool from a transparent plastic tube, and opened a pot of cold cream. It seemed appalling to her that these familiar things had lain there, unused, since her life had changed so much, and it was only twelve, eighteen hours. There was no makeup to remove: her routine of creamy foundation, blusher, blue eyeshadow, lipstick, everything had gone, as if wiped clean by the moors and the crags. Only her mascara remained, though smeared and spread across her face. She must have cried at some point, and the smutty coal of its deposits had run; tearproof it was called, but its manufacturers had not thought of the sort of weeping that had, it seemed, come across Katherine at some point in the evening, whether in the police station, on the moors, in her own bedroom. Across her face, a splat of earth; in the last few months, Katherine had stopped using the scarlet blusher she’d always used, had followed a piece of unwilling extracted advice from Alice, the genuine blush spreading underneath Alice’s applied one, and changed to bronze. It was the same colour; but this was the same earth that had got everywhere. She cleaned herself with the cold cream, the same calm, circular movements she’d always used, and even found herself, as she always did, faintly humming. Malcolm lay with his face to the wall, his knees drawn up underneath him and a pillow hugged to his stomach, not pretending to sleep but in the position of unconsciousness. Her nightie was on the back of the dressing-table mirror, and she dropped it over her head, unhooking her bra underneath it, dropping it to the floor, but she kept her knickers on. She switched off the light, and got into bed, her back to Malcolm’s, in the same spooned position. “Goodnight,” she said, but he didn’t reply. “I said, goodnight,” she said, more tetchily, and he grunted. She had no idea why she had thought, at the end of all that, they might have sex. They lay there together, facing different walls, and listened to the faint, throaty roaring of Daniel’s sleep. It was like the whole house breathing, in and out.

  The next morning, she lay in bed, unmoving, until Malcolm got up, dressed and left. She listened to him and Daniel moving about downstairs, chatting, the metal twang of the toaster popping up twice, the tiny rumble and click of the kettle coming to its climax. They seemed to be talking quite naturally—you couldn’t hear the words, but the noise of their voices was unconstrained. At one point Daniel laughed. They left together, and from outside Katherine heard, first, Daniel’s crappy car, then the Austin Allegro starting up and driving off. She hadn’t said anything to either of them, and Malcolm hadn’t said anything to her, taking her stillness for sleep. And, God knows, she was tired.

  Eventually she washed, dressed and came downstairs. Tim was in the kitchen with a plastic Gateway bag and a pile of books, making himself a sandwich in a ham-fisted way, poking at it disgustedly. He was dressed, but barefoot, and didn’t turn round when Katherine came in.

  “I hope we didn’t wake you up when we came in,” she said politely.

  He said nothing for a moment, but put down his knife, staring out of the window. “I heard you,” he said eventually.

  “I’m sorry,” Katherine said. “It was a bit of a—”

  “I heard what you and my dad were saying,” he said. He turned round; his face was congealed with rage.

  “It’s not—” Katherine began to say, but all at once he hit her; swinging ineptly with his right arm stiff, his hand open. She flinched, but he caught her, not hard, on
the cheekbone, making her give out a small cry, more like a breath.

  “I know what I think,” he said, his voice choking with what could only be emotion, and turned back to stuffing his things into his plastic bag. She went into the sitting room, slamming the door. She had never smacked the children; she’d thought it would teach them habits of violence. And when he left in a few minutes, she went to examine herself in the cloakroom mirror. If he had hurt her, she could not distinguish that bruise from the other bruises and scratches of the night before, or tell that one sting apart from all the others.

  . . .

  There was a house in Rayfield Avenue that excited comment. Most people who drove or walked through the estate either lived there, or were visiting someone there, or were perhaps thinking of moving there and were having a look at the houses on a Sunday afternoon. It wasn’t a short-cut to anywhere, so anyone who drove or walked up the road tended to look carefully at the houses. It was a well-kept estate; the gardens were at worst bleakly tidy, and at best, like the Glovers’, elaborate witnesses to a keen hobby. Quite a few had had their pristine irregularity added to with extensions and conversions, extra bedrooms and side conservatories making the asymmetrical houses still more saleable. The fronts were painted every three to five years, the window frames and front doors in bright white and the garage doors, to demonstrate individuality, in a variety of vivid shades; Mrs. Arbuthnot had just had hers done again in imperial purple after a few years of lime green, but something had gone wrong, and the paint was bubbling all over like bubonic plague. “I could kill that painter and decorator,” she kept saying, “and he says it’ll all be all right in a month or so, having pocketed my money in the meantime.”

  It was a tidy, respectable place, but one house excited comment. It was the Warners’. There, in the front, the lawn grew unchecked over the pathway, and the asphalt in the driveway had cracked as weeds forced their way through. The doors and windows hadn’t been attended to in years, and the paint peeled off in long strips, showing the already rotting wood underneath. In the porch, addressed and unaddressed mail formed chaotic drifts; outside, half a dozen unwashed milk bottles, half full of rain and antique mould had been sitting for weeks—the milkman wouldn’t collect them, and neither Warner nor his son was likely to take them back inside to wash them. It was generally thought that sooner or later someone—“Probably me,” at least half a dozen civic-minded people, busybodies really, from different addresses tended to think—would take pity, go up the drive, pick up the milk bottles and wash them themselves. It couldn’t be hygienic, leaving them mouldering and festering away like that, week on week.