The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  At the end, when they came through the door, the others melted away somehow. She had the sense, when she was sitting at the right end of the sofa as if washed up by the tide, her hand resting like a claw on the shell-embedded box that had always sat there on the green-leather-topped table, that the others had tactfully disappeared in some way. But that wasn’t true: only Daniel and Helen had made a mumbled excuse and headed off. Tim had taken one look at them, coming in, and levered himself off the sofa in the living room, taken himself off to the armchair in front of the small television in the dining room. The television and the armchair had replaced, a couple of years ago, the old upright piano in shades of marmalade and Double Gloucester, an old square marmalade cat showing its silent teeth, that had been Malcolm’s mother’s. Nobody had ever played on it once the children’s lessons came, at their own wailed request, to an end. The replacement television was used pretty constantly by Tim, if no one else; he didn’t like anyone to think he watched television in any kind of frivolous spirit, and having to peer at the fifteen-inch screen gave him some kind of puritanical licence to watch even quiz shows. She did think, however, he might have asked how it had gone first. She thought, too, Malcolm might have done something different from lowering his head and going upstairs, following Tim. He was probably going to spend the evening in the study, leaving her to her own devices. It occurred to her that she had no idea what they were going to eat for supper. It hadn’t come to mind in the morning, as if she were accused and might not be returning to her house that evening.

  But she, at any rate, had not been on trial, and whatever it was that the jury would return with in their hands in the days to follow, it would not constitute any kind of judgement on her life. What she had had to do was now finished, and it could never have had any public consequences. But Nick had said what he had said, and it was not just everyone but Malcolm who had heard it, and knew that everyone else had heard and believed it. Underneath the new jacket, the warm green tweed, her new blouse was soaked and limp; her hair, which had been teased into a difficult and precarious height that morning, was collapsing about her head in slides like the shale of a Derbyshire mountain. She took her jacket off, slinging it carelessly over one arm of the sofa. She didn’t feel that, at the end of this, she could turn the television on and sink into the unfeeling events of any normal day. There was Malcolm in the doorway. He was carrying a pile of fat-leaved leatherbound books, chin-high; she recognized the photograph albums that lined up along the bottom of the bookcase in the study.

  “I was thinking,” Malcolm said gently, “we’ve got too many photo albums. We stuck everything, almost, in them. I thought we ought to have some quality control.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I thought we might go through them, separate out the best ones, put all the best ones in the same album. People like to see photos when they come round, but no one’s going to go through fifteen albums.”

  “Are there as many as that?”

  “I counted,” Malcolm said. “There’s five don’t match—I couldn’t get the same ones we used to buy.”

  “That’s a nice idea,” Katherine said. She wasn’t in the mood to refuse anything Malcolm suggested tonight. Perhaps this was the moment to renew her offer to leave him, to move out, but she hoped he wouldn’t bring it up, now that he had so concrete a reason for doing so.

  Malcolm placed himself down beside her, quite solidly, and opened a volume. “No,” he said. “That’s not the first,” and indeed it wasn’t, since there were three children on the first page, all quite young and all with that funny page-boy haircut children used to get in the early 1970s. Once, Daniel in a shoe shop had been offered girls’ slingbacks; he was so pretty and his hair so long and shiny. Jane had never let him forget it. In the background, a white railing and a blue sea; it must have been Scarborough, or perhaps Whitby. But Malcolm set it aside and, humming, opened another volume and then another. “They’ve got out of order,” he said. But that one was the first, and they settled down to it.

  First, there was an overlit quartet, the two of them and Malcolm’s friend Eric and his girlfriend—what was her name?—her hair gone greenish in the odd colour printing of the time. There was a solid white frame about them all. They were outside a pub, standing by Eric’s Hillman Imp. Who had taken the photograph? It was before they’d married, and probably in the depths of winter, judging by the girlfriend’s whited-out face and the white fur collar on Katherine’s winter coat. She remembered that coat; Malcolm had promised to buy her a new whole-fur coat when they were married. It was an elegant thing, cream and A-line. What had happened to it? And then there were more of Malcolm and Katherine, some on the same sorts of outings into the country. It surprised her how, in so many of the photographs, whoever was with them, Malcolm was caught looking directly at her, as if impressed and surprised by something she had said. The look of love, she supposed.

  And at some point in this album, they’d married, but all the photographs from the wedding were in a different album, a white and silver-embossed one. Malcolm hadn’t brought it down, and in any case that was the album that had had most wear over the years. Jane had had a positive mania for poring over it at one stage, it must have been at her ballerina-phase. She’d needed to be reassured about who everyone was in the bigger crowd photographs, and Katherine had got thoroughly reacquainted with it. So here they passed imperceptibly from what must be pre-wedding outings for nothing in particular to the ones after the honeymoon. The best of the honeymoon photographs—there weren’t many, it had rained with a warm Atlantic persistence for two weeks in the Scilly Isles, so much for the Gulf Stream and the palm trees—were in loose bundles in the other album. She couldn’t quite tell at what point she and Malcolm went from anticipation to settled couple, the Kodak happiness was so uninterrupted. She selected (“That’s in your cousin’s garden, isn’t it?”) and Malcolm pulled out a photograph from under the clinging transparent skin.

  There was their old house; there she was, in the beehive, which, to be honest, had always looked a little silly. It was as hard to coax her thin hair into one of those high piles as it was now to persuade it into the big waves people seemed to like. Her hair had always been thin, even before she’d had the children. But she had to admit, in this photograph, in an overall spattered with cheerful blue paint, her hair coming loose from its loaf, flushed and smiling, it didn’t look as stupid as all that. The gaze of the camera was almost tangible, its pleasure. He must have taken that photograph at the end of a long day. She was kneeling, and you couldn’t tell but they must have been doing up the second bedroom in their first little house because Daniel was on the way. There was probably a reason scientists would tell you about nowadays that would stop you painting a spare bedroom if you were pregnant. For the sake of the photograph, she was glad no one had thought that at the time. She slid it out and passed it to Malcolm; without thinking, following it with the photograph on the next page, of Malcolm, similarly smiling and tired-looking in the finished room, in front of the little cream crib stencilled with cartoon woodland animals. It had served them well, that crib, through all three children. She could remember the shock of coming in, one day, and peering over the by then very shabby and well-known bars and seeing, instead of what she had expected, the calm expectation or funny screwed-up understandable rage that Daniel and Jane had displayed, the unnerving face of Tim as a baby, like no baby she had ever seen, lying there on his back observing and calculating with what looked unmistakably like adult resentment.

  The album came to an end just as reels of film did, with some miscellaneous and unidentifiable shots of bluebells in a wood, moorland, a stretch of marsh and estuary she had no recollection of. They all looked oddly period, just as if bluebells and moorland and estuaries everywhere had changed markedly since the early 1960s; of course it was the colour in the photographs that dated them. They moved on to the next volume, and all at once it was Daniel; he was a funny Chinese-looking baby with his dark colo
uring and screwed-up eyes, and on the verge of screaming in photographs. He couldn’t possibly have been so green in the face as these pictures made him look, though.

  As in the image she craned her neck to peer, amazed, into Daniel’s face, and Malcolm in those heavy horn-rims peered over with the goofy smile he seemed, from these albums, to have developed around then; it was hilarious to see how incredibly cross and grumpy and uncooperative the baby looked, and went on looking in subsequent photographs, as they held him up, one at a time, for each other to view. Daniel had been an easy baby, really, never rejecting even unfamiliar food and sleeping easily, taking to the potty early, never being shy with strangers and hardly a tantrum to be seen; he’d been an easy teenager, too, come to think of it, and the troubles Katherine had foreseen hadn’t, after all, come to pass. He was a good lad. There were only two or three photographs with all three of them, Katherine, Malcolm and the baby Daniel; mostly the photographs were taken by one or the other of them. (It worried her, Katherine, who had taken the ones of the three of them; she wished Malcolm had noted that rather than what had seemed the obvious thing to write on the back, that it was of her, him and Daniel; they could see that for themselves.) Malcolm had known how to set the shutter speed and all that, and they’d all come out well, whoever had been taking the pictures.

  She carried on, Malcolm turning the pages with her, and craning over at them as he had in the photographs with Daniel as a baby. She carefully extracted photographs, she passed them to him; he placed them on the arm of the sofa beside him.

  And then it seemed as if it had been sensible for Malcolm to note who it had been on the back of the photograph, because there was another baby, Jane. Katherine and Malcolm looked exactly the same, but there was a little brother, too, in a grey pullover with a red train appliquéd on the front—his grandmother’s offering—and here in a white shirt and a turquoise bow-tie, the sort of thing little boys were forced into for parties then, and didn’t his scowl show it … There was a different house now in the background. With a shock, Katherine saw that they were sitting, her and Daniel and baby Jane, just where they were sitting now, at that exact place. A different sofa, a different pattern on the walls behind them—they could only just have moved in, it was the builder’s idea of decoration still—but the same house and the same place. The outings began again; aunts appeared, a cousin of Malcolm’s, and his friend from the battle society with their children. Here they were on the moors with a picnic—she must have taken this one, with Malcolm in a Civil War uniform holding the baby in a soft pink woollen blanket, silk-margined, and Daniel gazing up at his father in excited surprise. He looked—of all things—dashing in his get-up, Malcolm did. She had to admit it; she’d complained, but she had sometimes secretly quite enjoyed those afternoons. Last year she’d even told Malcolm that she’d started enjoying them, though it was the battle of Naseby again, and she’d seen that one, frankly, a few times before.

  She started recognizing, to her surprise, outfits of her own, things still hanging in the wardrobe upstairs. That white cardigan—she hadn’t worn it for years but it was certainly still up there. It was Jane’s fifth birthday party, and an artistic shot, her eyes pitched between the candles, and made to glow. Behind her, there was Katherine, big with what must have been Tim. You didn’t know what Jane was thinking; she’d been made to look like an angelic Victorian tot, open with wonder at the four candles and the pink ballerina in royal icing on top. Katherine extracted and passed a photograph; they started on the next album. “Look at Tim,” Malcolm said, gurgling with amusement, and, absorbed, she had to laugh too: it must have been the least prepossessing photograph of a newborn child ever taken, his eyes already big and open and calculating. He’d been terribly thin, and his aged ugly face, like a gnome’s or a changeling’s, was one not even a mother, as it proved, could love. (How they’d recoiled, all those initial visitors!) She’d had difficulty with Tim, and difficulty telling Jane and Daniel that they had to love their new little brother. He hadn’t slept, hadn’t liked food, had pushed her away almost constantly. She’d wanted, sometimes, to push him away, to be honest. There weren’t so many photographs of Tim, at least not in so much of a starring role: he tended to creep in at the edges of family gatherings, at Christmas and the children’s birthdays and on holiday, and only two or three of him in particular. There was one of him being christened. She hadn’t quite got round to it with the elder two, but with Tim, for some reason, she’d got it into her head, as Malcolm had expressed it, that he ought to be “done.” Perhaps she thought that someone ought to love him, and it might as well be God.

  Daniel with a football; Jane in a ballerina’s dress—poor Jane, second-row fairy at Miss Brackenbury’s dance-school summer show, before she decisively lost interest, or lost sight of her once great goal, to stand on a stage in pink on pointes. Katherine felt for her: she could remember wanting exactly the same thing. And then suddenly a flush, a whole run of photographs of Paris. They’d never been, and it had seemed like an adventure; taking children had proved, indeed, an adventure, and suddenly, where the albums had been patchy and isolated, glimpses only of the stream of their lives, here was the whole thing, photographs taken in succession, fifteen a day, all of them minus the photographer (Malcolm wouldn’t have trusted a passer-by in a foreign country, just as he wouldn’t trust a running dog abroad), underneath the Eiffel Tower, on a famous bridge of some sort, the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame. She passed the photographs; the album was ended.

  “There’s plenty more,” Malcolm said, and he was smiling. “Do you want to carry on?”

  “We’re not doing very well,” Katherine said, indicating the substantial pile of photographs she’d taken out of the albums, quite two-thirds of them all. She hadn’t realized how much of their recorded lives was, in fact, worth saving. “There’s too many there for one album already. We might as well put them all back.”

  And then, all at once, she was crying, the stripped album open on her lap in front of her, and not knowing how not to. Malcolm squeezed her shoulder, and smiled too, in a way that suggested he, too, might at any moment start crying, and got up, placing the albums carefully on the coffee-table in front of her.

  “Do you remember,” he said in the end, “years and years ago—”

  Katherine nodded.

  “Years and years ago,” he said, “I just took off that once. I just went off for two days and I didn’t say where I was going, I just went and came back.”

  Katherine nodded.

  “I never said where I’d gone, did I?” Malcolm said. “I don’t think I ever told you why I’d gone, either.” Katherine tried to say no; she couldn’t.

  “The thing is,” he said, “it’s not important why I went, or where I went. I just went to a hotel for two days, then I came back. That’s all I did, it was nothing much. You know what the important question is, though?”

  “You’re being deep,” Katherine said, or tried to say; she couldn’t.

  “Yes, well,” Malcolm said, “the important thing—I think the important thing is why I came back. Anyway. I’m just going to get the rest, love,” he said. “The rest of the photographs,” and he went to the door.

  “I don’t deserve you,” Katherine said, hardly managing to get the words out, shaking her head.

  “Love you,” Malcolm said, and went upstairs. He was there a while, allowing her to finish, to dry her tears on the handkerchief she kept, as she always had, in the wrist of her blouse, and when he came back, it was with the rest of the albums. “We might as well,” he said judiciously, and his eyes were, surely, a little red around the rims themselves, “finish going through these tonight. I’m enjoying this.”

  Beyond and below the crags, heading down into the bottom of the valley that divided Rayfield Avenue, Ranmoor and Lodge Moor on one flank from Hillsborough and the moors on the other, there ran the Rivelin through a thick line of trees. The beechwoods stretched like a thick dark wash along the floor of the valley, like sedime
nt that had washed to the lowest point, flourishing along the meandering line of the river as far up the flanks as the twin A-roads on either side, heading in the direction of Manchester. It was a place of mysterious lights and shadows, which under rain hissed and drummed; the river formed pools and deep, sibilant cascades. It was always dark down there. Even when the sun shone, the trees met overhead and cast heavy green shades over the paths, carved by custom rather than arrangement. In the winter, the limes and beeches bare, it was a favourite place for rooks to congregate, their sawing calls echoing down the narrow, extended forest. It seemed like a very old place, and was; probably the remains of a much larger forest that had extended right up the sides of the valley, where now were fields of sheep and stripped moorland, and even crawling masses of houses.

  It began at the western edge of Sheffield. The lengths of suburb started to contain some things that suggested an older, more rural past: an old forge, preserved now as a museum, which school trips favoured, and, among the suburban houses, a stableyard and field tilted at thirty degrees, now a riding school. There was even a little working farm, with hens and geese and twelve pigs tucked somehow into its yard; there must once have been more land to that, and the farmhouse itself was blackened, rough and eighteenth-century. But the land, if it had existed, had long ago been sold off to build bungalows and semidetached houses on, each with a sunburst motif on its gates and a garage added at some later date. It must have taken some doing to live in the houses directly backing on to the pigsties.