The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  Pity was what most people felt about the Warners’ house. In any other circumstances, someone would have had a word with the owner, pointed out that the shabbiness of the house might affect the value of the houses to either side, and that the weeds flourishing in the garden, both front and back, were no respecters of fences. Of course, nobody said any of this since Karen Warner had died of a sad, fast liver business, even though it was three years and more before. It wasn’t to be expected that Kenneth Warner would cope—not because he was bereaved but because he was a man; the allowance for incompetence spread happily even into masculine areas of ability, such as house and garden. Offers of help had been made, but were not renewed when, in practice, Kenneth Warner had taken advantage, pointing out to Caroline that he didn’t care for lamb stew twice in one week, and it was eating heavy food like that that had made her put on so much weight, which wasn’t polite or grateful in the slightest degree, and in fact it had been moussaka, not “lamb stew,” and her with a ten-, an eight-and a five-year-old to think about too, probably the cause of her putting on weight in the first place.

  Complaint against Kenneth was, all the same, muted and tentatively voiced; it was a sad situation he’d found himself in. Resentment tended to come out more vivaciously when the subject turned to John Warner, nearly thirty and never left home, never had a job for more than six months, a constant worry to his poor mother even on her deathbed, and showing no signs of doing anything with his life other than lie on the sofa and hang around in pubs and nightclubs.

  “Two men living together,” Anthea Arbuthnot often said. But in fact the house, inside, was neat to the point of bleakness, though worn and frayed about the edges. They neither of them cooked very much—you could get quite good lasagne from Marks & Spencer these days—and it had really only been Karen who had taken an interest in things like ornaments and cushions and vases. The vases went unfilled, and were dusty as the ornaments on their shelves. Kenneth hardly saw them any more: the pretty floral bowl, a stylish 1920s figurine of a dancer, skirts in her hands and her hands raised up, something Karen had always thought might be worth something. They all sat on a shelf and were just “the ornaments.” The pictures were always cocked at a quizzical angle, and each wore a disapproving, elderly single eyebrow of dust. The carriage clock on the mantelpiece was stuck at quarter past three—the battery had run out more than a year ago, and nobody had got round to replacing it. There was always at least one lightbulb gone somewhere in the house—at the moment the one on the landing—and elsewhere areas of peculiar dusty dimness, because both Kenneth and John tended to put up with intermittent darkness for three or four weeks before replacing the bulb, and then usually with the wrong or a randomly selected wattage. There had been cushions in the living room, and when Karen was alive they were always neatly posed in the corners of the settee, one at a rakish angle on each armchair. For a while they had a habit of migrating together, ending up in a squashed pile of four at one end only of the settee, and then one day Kenneth picked one up and saw how stained and smelly it was, its tassels now intermittent and even chewed, as if by a dog. John slept with his head on them in the afternoons, with the television on. So he threw them out and hadn’t replaced them. Cushions were things women liked, really.

  They were coping all right. Kenneth had mastered ironing and washing—it wasn’t hard, after all—and presented a decent face in the office and even at weekends. They were clean, but not much more than that. Kenneth saw now what women brought to a house; he wouldn’t have minded it; he didn’t know how to do it. In a moment towards the end, when Karen had taken to saying the sorts of things she’d never in her life come near to saying, she’d said, “Make sure John sticks to things, makes something out of himself,” and then, horribly, unforgettably, “I think you’d be best off if you got married again afterwards.” He couldn’t say anything to that; he didn’t even want to. It wasn’t to do with cherishing anyone’s memory. It was more to do with a sense of decency.

  When he came in, John was standing in the kitchen holding what looked like a big yogurt pot in one hand and a fork in the other. It was steaming, and John was blowing at it. He was wearing a pair of tight drainpipes, the button undone, his stomach bulging through a gap in his shirt buttons.

  “I don’t know how you can eat that stuff,” Kenneth said, putting his briefcase down.

  “It’s all right,” John said. “It’s convenient, at any rate.”

  “You ought to eat some vegetables,” he said.

  “There’s vegetables in this. It’s mushroom flavour.”

  Kenneth grunted. John got on with puffing at forkfuls of noodles.

  “I went for a walk,” John said, between mouthfuls, “and then I came back and read the paper and a bit of a book, then I watched a film this afternoon.”

  “Pardon?” Kenneth said.

  “You were going to ask me what I’d done today,” John said.

  “Doesn’t seem like very much,” Kenneth said. “And I don’t even believe you went out for a walk. What was the film?”

  “Bringing Up Baby,” John said. “I’ve seen it before, though, more than once.”

  “Yes, I know that,” Kenneth said, kicking off his shoes without untying the shoelaces. Next time he might well buy a pair of slip-ons. They were quite smart, the slip-ons they made these days. He went into the sitting room. On the television screen, there was the cast list of an old movie—Bringing Up Baby, presumably—paused on the video. A thick white blazon cut across the screen, hiccuping up and down.

  “I’ve told you before, don’t do that,” Kenneth said. “How long’s that been there?”

  “What?” John said, through a mouthful, wandering through, his holed socks dragging baggily loose. “I wanted to see who was playing the friend, I couldn’t place her and they go past so fast you can never see.”

  “It’s bad for the tape to leave it like that,” Kenneth said. “It’ll break next time you play it and probably ruin the machine. That’s an expensive machine, you know. And,” he said, remembering what he always forgot, to try to look at things from John’s point of view, however stupid it might seem, “then you won’t be able to watch Bringing Up Baby until the next time the BBC broadcast it, will you?”

  “They show it all the time,” John said. “It’s not my favourite Cary Grant.”

  Kenneth went over, stopped the tape and ejected it, not listening to John wondering out loud about which of Cary Grant’s movies he liked best, and switched the television back to the BBC, to the news. It was all about the miners.

  “The rent arrears,” he said, “it’s terrible, I was talking to someone from Housing in the canteen today. They don’t know what to do, the miners, they can’t pay their rent, but you can’t just …”

  He paused and watched the scenes of violence. A policeman, his helmet knocked half off, had blood streaming down his face.

  “Stupid buggers,” John said.

  “Are you in tonight?” Kenneth said.

  “No, I’m off out,” John said. “Daniel’s coming round about eight, we’re going off down town. Don’t wait up.”

  “I wasn’t planning to.”

  Many things in John’s life were a mystery to Kenneth, but the biggest was probably his nights out with Daniel Glover. They’d never been particular friends till a couple of years back—there was three years between them—but now they regularly went down town together, drinking in pubs before going to a nightclub, even. Kenneth wouldn’t have exactly trusted Daniel Glover, but he had to see that most people would think he was a lot more respectable than his own son. He had a decent job, was polite and friendly enough. He was what used to be called “clean-cut.” Really, what Kenneth didn’t trust about Daniel was only the strangeness of his being friends with John. John shouldn’t have been able to afford to go out on nights like that. “I pay my way,” John had said, when asked directly. Kenneth didn’t believe it, and couldn’t work it out. It wasn’t as if they were queers; that would have made mo
re sense.

  Daniel drove down the road so that he wouldn’t drive past his parents’ house, making them wonder why he hadn’t dropped in on them if he was in the neighbourhood. He stopped outside John Warner’s house and hooted twice, not turning the engine off. He was twenty minutes late; John was never ready on time. Daniel could never face sitting around making a sort of conversation with John’s dad, who hadn’t yet realized that Daniel wasn’t fifteen any more. It was always freezing cold in their house, too. I don’t mind the blue suit, Daniel said, but please, just tonight, when I’ve got other things on my mind to worry about, please not the chocolate-brown tie with the naked lady on it. He himself was in a showy new suit, black but with silver thread shot through it, and a new white shirt with a butterfly collar and no tie. The day after all that business with his mother at the police station, he’d checked his bank balance and, amazed that there was as much as that still there at the end of the month, he’d gone shopping, and had his hair cut too, though it was a fortnight before it would really need it. He hooted again, and this time John came out, calling something to his father. With a kind of delight, Daniel saw that he was wearing not just the blue suit but the chocolate-coloured tie with the naked lady on it. He’d have to say something.

  “What’ve you got on?” he said, leaning over to open the passenger door—the handle outside didn’t work.

  “What d’you mean? It’s my suit, you’ve seen it before,” John said.

  “Not that, your tie,” Daniel said.

  “You’ve seen that before, too,” John said. “And you said you liked it. What’s wrong with it? It’s that whole nineteen-forties thing, like Betty Grable.”

  “Has anyone—I mean, has a girl ever come up to you and said, ‘I really like that whole nineteen-forties Betty Grable thing you’ve got going on with your tie’?”

  “I wouldn’t necessarily expect them to,” John said. “You’ve got a lot to learn about women.”

  Daniel knew how it would go from here: the next time they went out, John would be wearing the same tie, without comment. But after that he would throw it away. John looked up to Daniel, while maintaining the belief that it was up to him to explain the facts of the world. He’d actually said that: “You’ve got a lot to learn about women.” It was a strange friendship they’d started up, more of a convenience. Daniel had been out with a girl in the Frog and Parrot, and had seen John on the other side of the bar, recognized him. The pub was a new one, but got up to look old, sawdusty, picturesque; the floorboards were bare, the pillars about the bar, through which the customers ordered, were painted casually green, with amateurish bleeding edges. It was supposed to look like an old rough pub, and different from the real rough pubs, with dartboards and dank sucking carpets; the barmaids were sexy, not in a big dyed blonde way, not buxom, but sexy as girls were ordinarily sexy, and they scowled at you. John had been on his own, and Daniel had raised his glass in greeting to him, half wondering as he did so whether he really knew the face; but after a moment, John had responded with the same gesture. Like Daniel, he had been drinking bitter, the murky small-scale productions with weird names the Frog and Parrot specialized in; the girl Daniel was with, not having been there before, had allowed herself to be talked into a half before saying, “There’s bits in this,” and going on to gin-and-orange. And later, unexpectedly, John had been at Casanova’s, propping up the bar or circling the banquettes, striking up brief conversations, but never quite making it on to the dance floor. “It’s good here,” he shouted into Daniel’s ear, when they’d crossed each other’s paths for the fourth time. “Is that your girlfriend?”

  Of course, the friendship might have rested there, such as it was. But a day or two later, Daniel had been up at his parents’ for Sunday lunch. He liked to take the opportunity of borrowing his dad’s hosepipe and bucket to wash his car, and John walked past with a letter to post, stopped, chatted, and somehow they’d arranged to meet next Friday in the Frog and Parrot for the same sort of night out. Who had John written a letter to? It was hard to imagine.

  “We’ve only had the police round,” Daniel said, when they were sitting in a corner at the Frog and Parrot.

  “What was that?” John said. Daniel repeated himself.

  “What, at Eadon Lockwood and Riddle?”

  “No, at home,” Daniel said. “It’s my mum, she had to go down the police station the other night.”

  “What’s she supposed to have done?”

  “It’s not her,” Daniel said. “Well, I don’t know exactly, but I think, what it is, she used to work in this flower shop and it turns out the fellow who owned it, he was up to all sorts.”

  “Oh, aye,” John said.

  “My mum’s in a right state,” Daniel said. “And my dad.”

  “Is she going to prison, then?” John said.

  “Don’t be daft,” Daniel said. “She’s done nothing wrong, she just didn’t know.”

  “How could she not know, then?” John said. “What’s he been up to, this flower-shop fellow?”

  “Could be anything,” Daniel said.

  John took a long drink of his bitter, narrowed his eyes. He might have been thinking. “My dad’s out of sorts with me, an’ all,” he said. “He had a right go at me today.”

  “What now?”

  John explained about the freeze-framing of the video, his failure to remember the name of the actor, and most of the plot of Bringing Up Baby. After five minutes of it, Daniel went to get two more pints; he came back, and John carried on, just where he’d left off. “It’s not true, either,” he wound up eventually. “I’ve never heard of a video just snapping because it’s been paused. I don’t know what he’s on about.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so,” Daniel said comfortably. That was the thing about John Warner. Look at it how you liked, Daniel’s life was more eventful and more interesting than his. But you could say anything you liked to John, and he’d ask three questions, then tell you about something that once happened to him; something much more boring, but something either very similar, not very similar, or not really the same thing at all. Daniel didn’t mind. From time to time he went as far as making up something sensational—a woman client’s lewd suggestion to him when he was showing her the bedrooms of a house for sale, for instance. Nothing like that had ever happened to him, but John seemed to think that sort of thing would be completely ordinary, and just started talking again about the last girl he’d gone to bed with, months ago now. Daniel had friends enough, but most of them were going to do what John had just done; if you told them your mother had been arrested, they’d probably go, “What for?” and then in a minute start going on about the argument they’d had with their dad about the video-recorder, or something. He let the subject drop.

  Casanova’s was at the other end of town, down towards where the cheap markets were. Round the Frog and Parrot it was all bookshops and cafés, and those stupid shops selling joss sticks and Indian cushions. Casanova’s was on the other side of the dual carriageway and from the outside just a bleak concrete outcrop of the market complex, its name incongruously written in swirling purple copperplate. “All right, lads?” the bouncer said, not really giving away whether he recognized them or not; they were quite early, and there was no queue. Daniel was embarrassed about these early appearances, and didn’t think they led to success. When girls arrived, they naturally looked about to see what was already there, and you were the sad furniture. John wouldn’t have been that successful in any circumstances, but he didn’t help himself with this obstinate idea of turning up early and watching the girls as they came in.

  The purple nooks and mirrored niches of Casanova’s were all familiar to Daniel now; what must be basically a big square space had been made intricate with partitions and semi-circular seating, little intimate caves of velvet and plush, lowered ceilings at unexpected points, raised platforms and short flights of stairs, so that you could hide yourself, place yourself on display, make entrances and disappearances
; pools of luxurious downcast lighting melted into gloom and fug. In some of those corners you could imagine going a long way with a girl. There were two bars, one with a mirrored surface where the expense-accounts stood with the people they’d come with. The other was a mock-marble island between the two dance floors, where the dancers repaired with the new partners they’d acquired mid-record, or where you might buy a girl a drink.

  Daniel bought John and himself a vodka and tonic each. The ultraviolet light made the drinks shine like radioactive mercury as they went across to a discreet booth where they wouldn’t be clocked by new arrivals; lit up the constellation of scurf across the shoulders of John’s suit.

  “Don’t you possess a clothes brush?” Daniel said, flicking his hand over John’s jacket. “Or haven’t you heard of Head and Shoulders? That’s terrible.”

  “It’s only the lights,” John said. “I’ve not got that bad dandruff, it only looks like it in here.” But he took off the jacket and, holding his collar in his fist, gave it a good shake before inspecting it and putting it on again.

  “You want to have it dry-cleaned once in a while, too,” Daniel said.