The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  She must have been much younger than Trudy was now. But just as the trees outside the window, though now presumably much bigger, seemed exactly the same as they had been ten years before, so Trudy seemed exactly as Sandra had been. There was nothing to connect them; Trudy possessed only a fragment of that beauty which Sandra had so fully inhabited. He had looked at Sandra for ten years, every day until she had got on a plane and left for Australia, and with every look there was a precious fragment of that wash of desire he had felt in his uncomprehending childish way the very first time. He never saw her now. But this memory, brought back all at once, was something that often occurred to him. He had looked at her carefully; had made as solid a set of memories of her speech and words as if he had stolen keepsakes of her and locked them in a box. He had stolen a letter of hers to Daniel, before he had seen it. But that was all the physical avatar of hers he had, safe between the pages of a long history of the Cuban revolution. Now, mere thoughts of her were solid and regular in his mind. He thought they always would be.

  She had gone from his life. Perhaps all he could do was to try to find those women, like Trudy, in whom his desire could mine a fragment of that pure quality now embodied on the other side of the world, in one woman he hadn’t seen for years.

  “You took your time,” Trudy said, as he got into the car.

  “Are we all right, then?” Tim said to Stig.

  “You’ll get away with that,” Stig said, meaning the T-shirt. “You know something? Trudy was just saying. Your house, it looks completely mad.”

  “My dad’s idea.”

  Whenever it was the right season, and, as everyone always said, the climbers about the house shot all at once into bloom like a moment, prolonged into weeks, of applause, and the house itself, no more interesting or remarkable or special than any other house in this road, turned for a long moment into what might have been a house of blossom and nothing else.

  As Stig started the car, Mr. Sellers opposite was coming out in his suit, keys in hand. Something in the way he shut the door made it clear that his wife, Sandra’s mother, was still asleep. Of course, there was nobody else in the house to wake up: Sandra was in Australia (a sudden shot of her in bikini, laughing as she ran out of the surf) and that Francis had left home, was in London, wasn’t he?

  “He’s up early,” Stig said, setting off.

  “Works for the Electricity Board,” Tim said. “My mum’s friends with his wife. She says he’s always having to leave the house before seven.”

  “I don’t wonder,” Trudy said. “They ought to be supporting the action, and they’ll be working against it. We should go and let down his tyres.”

  “What’s it got to do with him?”

  “Who do you think’s buying the blackleg coal, if we don’t stop it leaving the pits?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Tim said. He was vague about the destination of the coal: he always thought of it as going into people’s fireplaces, but of course nobody did that any more.

  They quickly left the western suburbs, the blackened stately villas of Broomhill with their remains of railings like cut-off blackened teeth. Nobody was about; the morning was high and blue and slightly steaming, the dew smoking above the municipal gardens. It was going to be hot. They drove through town, round the Hole in the Road, hardly being stopped by lights at all, and only now was traffic beginning to build up. Tim saw a single, boarded-up shop, and turned to make sure. There’d been shops like this on the outskirts, in the poor places, as Tim could never stop himself thinking of them. He’d seen shops in frazzled arcades which had discovered they served no need, and where no one else could see a need either, and had been boarded up. But that happened in the poor places. It hadn’t happened in Broomhill, where Nick’s flower shop had already been turned into a bookshop, with forty copies of Frost in May fanned out in the window round a left-over vase of Nick’s with a sprig of blossom in it. It hadn’t happened, before, in the middle of town. That had been a trendy clothes shop, selling jeans mostly; he’d bought a pair of cords there once himself. He hadn’t noticed it was closed, and now it was boarded up. Perhaps Sheffield itself counted as a poor place now.

  There was an increasingly sour smell in the car. You might have thought Trudy would have taken the opportunity to have a bath before she set off in a small car on a warm morning. “We’re not picking you up,” he said in surprise, turning round to her; they were driving past Hyde Park Flats in its immense sour concrete ribbon on the hillside above the station. It hadn’t occurred to him that it was odd, Trudy being in the car from Lodge Moor, nor had he really understood what had been meant when she’d said that Fat Marge had made them both breakfast. He hadn’t been paying attention.

  “I stayed at Stig’s last night,” Trudy said. “We thought it would be easier.” She had a sort of triumph in her voice; he hadn’t known she saw him as some kind of rival for Stig’s attention, though Tim knew he thought of her in that way.

  “It’s quicker,” Stig said. “Trudy wanted to borrow a book, so she came up last night and stayed.”

  “You don’t have to explain,” Trudy said, her voice rising. “Not to little Timmy. Oh, and by the way, Timmy. We didn’t screw or anything.”

  “I never thought you had,” Tim said. “I don’t make those sorts of assumptions. Where are we meeting the others?”

  “At the service station car park, just on the M18,” Stig said. “Throw them off the track a bit.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Orgreave,” Trudy said. “No harm in telling you now.”

  And now the roads were widening out, leaving Sheffield behind. The carriageway ran like a mournful mountain pass behind high peaks of slag, lowering and black. Down in the valleys, the palaces of the steel-makers, vast and cubic and full of fire; up here, the unworking coal-sorters, huge and yet frail, their sides dustily clamped with metal stairs, like drawings executed in dust. Tim wondered what they looked like, in their car with bricks in the boot. To the other drivers, they could be normal. Just then, like a physical thrill, a police van drove past; not just a police car, but a whole van, its windows lined with chain-link and filled with shadowy dark figures. As it overtook them—Stig was driving at an ostentatiously moderate speed—Tim felt sure that they would wave them over. But in the back window, two heads, leaning forward, helmetless, in intimate conference. The three of them in the Marina must look like what they were not, students off to Manchester for the day.

  “Pigs,” Trudy said, with obstinate routine.

  “They must be stupid,” Stig said. “If they knew their job, they’d be putting roadblocks up for miles around.”

  “You can’t stop democratic protest,” Trudy said. “It’s not just us supporting the miners, it’s the ordinary people of Sheffield. You’ll see.”

  And this seemed to be the case because, in ten minutes’ time, they slowed at the signs for the service station turn-off, the three fat white stripes on blue, two, one—signs that had always fascinated Tim when he was young. They turned off, and drove into the car park. There seemed to be nobody there, or just families getting in and out of cars, but Stig seemed to know where to go. He parked at the far end of the car park, overlooking the motorway, and almost at once the doors of cars near them opened, disgorging half a dozen people like them.

  Stig and Trudy knew them, and there was quite a lot of pumped-fist hand-shaking going on. “I’m Tim,” Tim said loudly, because you didn’t wait for people to say who you were, and the others introduced themselves, too—Johnny, Vikram, Billy, Kate, and half a dozen others. He’d come across two or three before, met them while selling the Spartacist, and knew the faces of most of the others.

  There wasn’t much time, and Vikram, who seemed to be the leader, explained quickly. “We can’t stand around here,” he said. “They’ll spot us and take us in if they see us grouping. We’re all here now, I reckon. We’re going to drive off at five-minute intervals—you first, then us, then you, OK—and this is what you do. You stop
outside Orgreave— there’s a little car park by the community centre, you’ll see the pay-and-display sign on the toilet wall. Drop people off there and make a move pretty sharpish. Don’t wait for us. It’s about fifteen minutes’ walk from there, it should be OK. The men make their way to the site of the action as discreetly as you can. The women and me, we’ll take up viewing positions wherever we can. If you’re just sitting on a wall, not doing anything, they can’t tell you to move on.”

  Everyone laughed at the policeman-like turn of phrase. Tim thought, on the whole, they could move you on, but out of curiosity just said, “Why are you staying with the women and not coming with us?”

  “Come on, Timmy,” Trudy said.

  “Do you think I look like a miner?” Vikram said. “Have you ever seen a black miner in South Yorkshire? They’d spot me as soon as look at me.”

  “When do we meet up again?” one of the boys—Johnny, perhaps—said.

  “This is an engagement,” Vikram said impressively. “It doesn’t run to a timetable. We’ll see how it goes. You might have to get out on your own.”

  That was it. Perhaps the others had discussed more specific and military tactics, or perhaps they were expected to use their own initiative. Trudy took over the wheel, and they set off again, accelerating away down the ramp. It was a beautiful morning—you couldn’t help thinking that. The landscape was torn away in slag heaps and pylons and this fat grey slash of a motorway, but there were trees, too, and green hills as if it were the English countryside. Torn and scarred, it still swelled and dipped like Gloucestershire. Once, people might have come here to admire the scenery; the earth had been beautiful before it had proved useful. If they had their way, Tim thought with deliberation, it would only be beautiful all over again, and useless, and filled with the ragged foraging unemployed. But you couldn’t help responding to the lovely morning. There had been some early mist on the ground, and the sun was lifting it off by the minute, like a transparent child’s blanket. You could see the layers of air; still misty down in the dips, and thinning into a blue lucid heat, solid and tangible like crystal fifty metres up. The air seemed like a reflection, as in a still lake, of the dense layers of geology below, the mist like a white negative of the seams of coal beneath the thin surface of turf, under what might even have been lawn. It was a beautiful day for it. He could have got out and danced on the roof of the moving car.

  “I’m going to drop you and make off straight away,” Trudy said. “I’ll find somewhere to leave it inconspicuously. I’ll make my way back somehow, but I’ll be watching from a distance, like Vikram said.”

  “It’s not my car,” Stig said. “Leave it in the car park, it makes no odds.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Trudy said.

  “It might be quite funny if the police turn up and ask Fat Marge what exactly she was doing in Orgreave yesterday. She’d have a fit,” Stig said.

  “What does she think you’re doing with it?”

  “God knows,” Stig said. “I just took the car. I didn’t ask her.”

  “And, Trudy,” Tim said, drawing out her name cruelly—Troooody, “you’re just going to sit on a hillock overlooking the event with some egg sandwiches and some salt in a wrap of foil, are you? Doesn’t seem very brave to me.”

  “You heard what Vikram said,” Trudy said. “There’s not going to be many women out there on the line. I’d stick out like a sore thumb. Don’t worry, Timmy, I’ll be doing useful things. I’ll be seeing Orgreave women. I know plenty of women activists here. Don’t worry about me.”

  Tim thought of the women who stood in Fargate, shaking tin cans and shrinking from what was now very pungent in the car, Trudy’s animal odour, when she embraced them. Most were probably a bit too houseproud to be real friends with Trudy; she flourished her friendship with working-class women as something extra to ideology, something she would have done anyway. He didn’t have the knack of that. He saw their houses, with yellow leather sofas and fat yellow leather armchairs; he saw the dado-effect stripes of wallpaper running at waist height round the sitting room; he saw their doorbells ringing, and them rushing with their (practical, he made himself think) floral housecoats on to answer the door. He saw their back kitchens, with nothing in them but donated tins from Fargate and a little caddy of tea. They would answer the door, and there would be Trudy, foul-smelling with her self-cut hair and granny glasses, in her collarless striped shirt, her arms wide to embrace them. He could well imagine how welcome she’d be.

  “Sounds like you’re actually a bit frightened,” Tim said. “Not to want to come.”

  “Trudy’s not frightened,” Stig said as Trudy, simultaneously, in a querulous whine, said, “How do you mean, frightened?”

  “You know, frightened,” Tim said. “Frightened. Frit. You know, couldn’t take it, couldn’t stand it—I don’t blame you, it’s going to be pretty tough.”

  “It’s going to be pretty tough, is it, Timmy?” Trudy said. “Oooh, I never realized.”

  “Gi’o’er, you two,” Stig said.

  “I think Timmy’s been giving himself nightmares about it,” Trudy said, but in the jeer, there might have been some kind of admiration, too. “Here we are. We turn off here.”

  When the news came, Alice was in Katherine’s kitchen with her bag on her arm, sipping a cup of coffee. She wasn’t supposed to be stopping long. Alice knew about the whole business. Katherine had to tell somebody outside her immediate family about the court case, about Nick being in trouble. Everyone inside her immediate family was scornfully disapproving and enjoying it (Tim); bewildered and hurt and withdrawn (Malcolm); just not understanding and constantly asking for tactless details. That was Daniel. Or they were in London and not to be bothered. That was Jane. Somebody else had to be told so that she could look at it and see it for what it was. It was like when you bought a picture in a sale, or a dress on a whim. Your family had too much history of responses to your whims to be of much use. You had to call in a friend, an outsider, to look at the fact of it and then, without them even saying anything, you had a view of the fact of it through their eyes, from the way they stood and looked at you, or at it, even.

  Perversely, it was Alice she had told rather than anyone else. She was the obvious choice, because Alice was the only one who knew the whole story about Nick. She knew more than Malcolm, who would now never listen to it, or believe it. Perhaps she knew more even than Katherine, who had only steeled herself to tell the story that once quite plainly and honestly. On every other occasion, reflecting on it, she found herself providing embellishments, romantic touches, exaggerations of humiliations and inventions regarding disgusted rejections. When she had told Alice the full plain account of the affair, such as it was, and then, more recently, when she decided that of course Alice was the person to tell about being in trouble with the police, the whole evening down the station, which Rayfield Avenue must be absolutely dying to find out about, given the appearance of the police car outside their house and her being taken away, as it were, virtually in handcuffs, Alice had behaved well. She had only said, “But did he say …” and “I’m sure what he really meant” each time quite plausibly. She had been a good listener. She had enquired, carefully, and with the appearance of objectivity, and had in the end cleared Katherine of culpable wrongdoing with a consideration that might almost have been professional. It would have been nice to be sure that the court, when it came to it, was going to do the same thing.

  The cherry tree was in blossom in the front garden; she gazed out at it through the yellow and white kitchen blinds, and thought of nothing but her problems.

  But it was perverse, her choice of Alice as someone to tell the whole story to, and exactly because of what might have recommended her in the first place, that she would never tell anyone. Katherine knew that perfectly well. She would never tell even Bernie. And what was needed now was someone who would tell the story completely and authoritatively. Since the appearance of the panda car outside Katherine’s house,
Anthea Arbuthnot had never “popped round,” had never so much “just happened,” had never existed half so much “on the off-chance” in her entire life. Her being had never had so much excited casualness about it as it did these days. She was forever appearing for no very good reason, with a gift of half a dozen scones too many she’d just happened to make, or a recipe she’d cut out from the Morning Telegraph on the off-chance Katherine might find it useful, or bearing a pot of home-made jam. Tim had answered the door: “Thanks, I’ll donate it to the miners’ collections,” he said, taking it firmly off her, but it hadn’t put her off.

  Anthea was round here because she’d seen the police car, and couldn’t produce an explanation for it even she could believe. Her own inventions were, almost certainly, not remotely credible even to herself. It wasn’t her fault if Katherine couldn’t produce an explanation for it either, but that didn’t seem to cross her mind. It would have been much easier all round if Katherine had taken Anthea into her confidence as well as or instead of Alice and just told her what was going on. It would have saved a lot of trouble. Sooner or later, she’d have to start telling people—she had no illusions that the case would come to court, and it would certainly be made public then. If they already knew, through Anthea, it would save a lot of trouble. Katherine envisaged Anthea, hastening up Rayfield Avenue in a muck sweat, brushing the streetside blossom from her glistening face where it fell, popping up one red Tarmac drive after another, ringing the bell and, as the door opened, producing a small token gift from behind her back, an excuse to come in and gossip. It would be very much like that. It probably had been very much like that, since by now they probably all knew her constructed and invented version. Already the haggard and worn figure of poor Caroline had made a habit of crossing the road to offer inept expressions of sympathy over the knee-high grey brick wall when she’d seen Katherine in the front garden. They’d been inept expressions of sympathy about greenfly on the roses, as it happened, but Katherine identified the general intention and where it had come from.