The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  “I’ll sithee, love,” Barbara said. “And give my best to, Helen, was it? Poor cow, whoever she is. Bet she’s working her fingers to the bone. And tell him from me, that sounds like a stupid business he’s got himself. Bet he’s happy spending other people’s money, though. Sithee.” She got out quite gracefully, and walked away. As she walked ahead of them, she made one exaggerated movement of her hips, an old-fashioned, insulting bump-and-grind gesture.

  “You know the extraordinary thing about getting older?” Robert said. “Police officers, they all start to look like really raddled old strippers.”

  “Don’t they just,” Jane said.

  “Could I ask you?” Robert said. “Hairy bucket? Where on earth did that come from?”

  “Honestly,” Jane said. “Do you know, I almost want to go and watch her act. Did she say what pub it was?”

  “No, thank God,” Robert said. “I want my lunch now. I hope she’s not performing in the Eagle.”

  “Not very likely,” Jane said. “I can’t wait to tell Daniel. Do you think she had a python concealed about her person?”

  “I like the idea of a stripper-policewoman,” Robert said. “Not much worse than a dancer-restaurateur, though, if you think about it.”

  “Honestly, it’s doing well, Daniel’s business,” Jane said. “I wouldn’t have thought it, but there you go.”

  “But that woman,” Robert said. “Of course, it’s disappointing she wasn’t really a policewoman. Imagine. I was stripping in a northerly direction, when I observed—”

  By the time they got to the Eagle, they were laughing raucously about the whole story. The pub had recently been reduced to floorboards and exposed brick; an elaborate kitchen was behind the bar, and on blackboards was listed the sort of food that pubs didn’t sell. Jane had scallops wrapped in prosciutto; Robert had a porcini risotto; she had Pellegrino; he in a nod to their being in a pub had a pint of bitter from an Ipswich brewery, not finishing it. The subject kept them going all through lunch, and by the end they could start talking seriously about the holiday-camp project. Jane heard herself talking sense, incisively; she was good, really, at what she did, which was handling a lot of nonsense.

  Rosalie was loitering a bit as she came up to the entrance to the building. She was sure she’d seen Muriel getting off the same tube train; there had been something characteristically complaining in the set of her shoulders. She knew what that meant for her: ten minutes of Muriel making herself feel better by commiserating about Harold, Rosalie’s son. Muriel always knew what Harold had been up to, or what somebody had told Muriel Harold had been seen getting up to. Rosalie didn’t need it, so she hung back.

  If she was arriving after Muriel, she was late. Without thinking about it, she pushed back the cuff of her coat, forgetting that her watch had gone the way of the carriage clock on the mantelpiece, her mother’s set of four silver candlesticks, and, three times, most of the contents of her purse, left around thoughtlessly. It was the candlesticks she’d minded, though she’d not noticed their disappearance for weeks, probably. The watch wouldn’t have fetched much, surely. Well, she hoped he’d got some enjoyment out of it in the end. Brendan, the supervisor, would be sure to point it out if she was late. But Brendan always made a point of finding fault with something; it might as well be lateness tonight as anything else.

  Sanjay was on tonight; she liked him best of the security guards. He was actually a student, working one night a week for a little cash. Some of the other women were saucy to him, but Rosalie approved of someone bettering themselves and calling her Mrs. Simpkins.

  “You like your book, Sanjay,” Rosalie said.

  “Mr. Macinnes isn’t in yet,” Sanjay said, making as if to conceal it, though it was nothing but a school book, nothing to hide or be ashamed of. Mr. Macinnes was Brendan. He never quite looked you in the eye; his unexpectedly pale ones just fixed themselves on your neck.

  “It my lucky day, Sanjay,” Rosalie said. “I’m thinking I’m late and Brendan kill me.”

  “It’s not seven yet,” Sanjay said. “I keep telling you, Mrs. Simpkins, you got to buy a watch.”

  “When Brendan start paying me a hundred pounds an hour,” Rosalie said, passing through the security barrier and calling behind her as she went, “then I buy me a watch. Or it matters so much to him, he buys me a watch himself, with diamonds on it, OK, Sanjay?”

  There were worse places to clean than offices, Rosalie thought. The worst was a hotel; the mess some people made, you wouldn’t believe, and they were so particular about folding the toilet paper in an arrow, having it hanging flat against the wall, dozens of little thing like that, you were always in some kind of trouble with the housekeeper. She wouldn’t do that again, but she still worked for people in their houses, too, like most of the girls. A lot of the girls said they preferred that to office work. Rosalie didn’t know. They could be nice, and you got to know them—you got to know a lot about them, more than you wanted, sometimes. But there was the looking-grateful when they gave you something extra at Christmas, and when you were a coloured lady they were always thinking that surely there’d been a ten-pound note on the bedside table before Rosalie came or where had my husband’s best cufflinks disappeared to, that type of kerfuffle. Offices were really best; if it was untidy you left it alone, you hoovered and you wiped down the surfaces and emptied the bins, and you cleaned the toilets and the kitchenette. But people in offices generally left those in the sort of state they wouldn’t mind their bosses seeing. It wasn’t too bad.

  She went up to get the cleaning stuff out of the general cupboard, and down again to the fourth floor. She couldn’t understand the fourth floor. It wasn’t like an office at all. There were just little podiums here and there, and sofas. There was even a snooker table and a darts board hanging on the wall; there was a room enclosed with glass for no other purpose than smoking in and, of all things, a cupboard hanging on the wall full of alcoholic drinks. Rosalie was fifty-three, and in all those fifty-three years she had never in her life stepped inside a public house; but it was with confidence that she thought and frequently remarked that the fourth floor more resembled the inside of a drinkers’ den than a respectable place of business. It wasn’t Rosalie’s place to wonder what sort of business was conducted by Barney Spacek Boughton, the name written like careless two-foot-high handwriting in moulded plastic on the wall where you got out of the lift. She read it as “Spack;” she couldn’t really imagine. There were no desks anywhere. Sometimes there were piles of papers left by the side of the sofa, as if they’d tried to hide them; Rosalie did her best, but she always thought of that one time years ago when Saul had still been alive and they’d had company, the minister and his wife. Harold, he’d have been no more than three, he’d disappeared out of shyness, and they’d thought nothing of it, until there’d been this terrible smell; the minister’s wife had been raising a best teacup to her mouth and she’d stopped and lowered it without saying anything. And it had been Harold, hiding behind the sofa, he’d dropped his trousers and pants and done his business on the carpet, the Lord knew why. It had been a terrible thrashing Saul had given Harold when the minister and wife had gone. That was what those shameful little piles of papers always made Rosalie think of, secreted behind the sofas.

  There was a sharp spatter, a shrill military drum-trill, as if against a virgin’s bedroom window a lover had thrown a fistful of gravel. It was starting to rain in the spangled City dark beyond those ten-foot walls of glass, to rain with abrupt, flung severity. There’d been no sign of it when Rosalie had set off from home in Tottenham this morning, or she’d have taken her brolly, or when she’d left her last job of the day, Mrs. Franklin’s house in Clapham—Mrs. Franklin was all right, she wouldn’t mind if she’d borrowed an umbrella from the cloakroom in the circumstances. For an awful moment Rosalie suddenly wondered whether she still had an umbrella. But that was ridiculous: you couldn’t sell an old umbrella for anything, you couldn’t buy any amount of heroin wi
th the money someone would give you in exchange for your own mother’s old umbrella, surely you couldn’t. You couldn’t: Harold couldn’t; nobody could. It must be somewhere.

  Rosalie did everything in order. She washed up the mugs in the kitchen, and the glasses with their ugly smell of smoke and earth, the smell of whisky. (Whisky smelt of burn and destruction, beer smelt of not washing, wine smelt of sick, vodka smelt of money, of sour old coins, gin smelt of room freshener, and the rest, they smelt mostly the way desserts smelt when you’d already had too much to eat and you’d dread another helping being forced on you; all that specific knowledge Rosalie had and would never find a use for or take any pleasure in.) In the men’s toilets, she cleaned the sinks, she cleaned the two toilets, she mopped the floor; she did the same in the women’s, which could be worse. She emptied the full ashtrays in the smoking room, the full wastepaper bins; she wiped the surfaces everywhere. When she’d done everything else, she ran the vacuum-cleaner round; a fat circular red thing on wheels with a face on and something like an old-style hat, like one that old Charlie Chaplin used to wear. Some clever person had thought all that a good idea once, rather than, for instance, quite a stupid one. They paid her two pounds seventy an hour here.

  Even so, Rosalie felt quite lighthearted, she didn’t know why. She hadn’t had to talk to anyone. She hadn’t been got at by Muriel or shouted at by Brendan. If it was raining as hard as this in Tottenham, then Harold would have stayed at home; he wouldn’t be out causing trouble. She ran the vacuum-cleaner round briskly and, without really paying attention, she ran it hard into a pile of papers she hadn’t noticed, just by the side of one of the sofas. They went everywhere. Rosalie switched the grinning red round thing off, and went to pick the papers up. She couldn’t help looking at them, what someone had written on them. It was written by a woman, a child could see that—men, when they wrote, they didn’t do those little fat loops and all—but Rosalie read the single sentence at the top of the page and didn’t think very much of it. No decent person would have written such a thing; she almost felt like putting it out with the rubbish from the bins. Not that she knew in every detail what “buttock-featured TLA-mongering vadge-brain” could mean. She put it back in its pile; she squared them; she continued in her job, and in a moment the doors to the office opened and Brendan came in. She could have said something sarcastic about him turning up at last, but she didn’t. And, of course, he went without saying hello into the office kitchen, and came out again. “I hope that’s next on your list,” he said, “because you’ve obviously not done it properly.” She gave him a thumbs-up and a sort of smile. There was no point in anything else.

  Jane went home with the good feeling of having got somewhere, and knowing exactly what to do tomorrow morning, and it would be easy enough. Nothing much lay in wait for her. Scott wasn’t back yet. She let herself into the hallway of the new house in Clapham. It still gave her pleasure, a month after moving in. There were still movers’ boxes in the outer hallway, emptied but not disposed of—they used to use old tea-chests, but nowadays, apparently, movers had their own name and details printed on the side of special cardboard boxes. There were more boxes, not unpacked yet, in the conservatory, but the house was getting pretty straight now. Her mother had said, “Live in it for three months without changing anything, then you’ll see what needs to be done.” But Jane thought she could see by now what needed to be done, with the curtains too short and the kitchen, which had seemed all right but now seemed really quite awful.

  There were messages blinking red on the answer-phone, three of them—she ran through them. Scott saying he’d be home by eight, Sarah Willis confirming, for the second time, that they were going out for a drink next Wednesday, and someone sighing and putting the phone down. Poor old Sarah Willis, as she’d become again since her divorce; clinging a bit too much, talking a bit too much about the good old days in Sheffield—no, Oxford, Jane corrected herself, she’d met Sarah in Oxford. Just went to show. It was odd how things changed between people: these days, it was her inviting Sarah round out of kindness, though, God knows, Scott complained enough about asking people for dinner on his night off without, on top of that, being asked to be especially nice to Sarah because she was having a rough time; a rough time that was made obvious to everyone since she arrived drunk and carried on drinking steadily, asking everyone round the table to tell her their names three separate times. Well, never again.

  According to her mother, Daniel had got himself a mobile phone. “It really is amazing,” she’d said. “He can justify it against tax, or something. Daniel was showing it to us—you know they used to be about the size of a brick? Well, they’ve really shrunk them down, they’re not even as big as the remote control for the television. Your dad said, ‘You’ll be spending all your time hunting for that,’ but Daniel said, no, he just keeps it in his pocket all the time. It’s as small as that, you can keep it in your pocket.” She’d had his number written down somewhere, but it must have disappeared for the moment. Jane knew perfectly well what mobile phones looked like, these days, but she let her mother run on. Sooner or later, she’d have to get one, she supposed, and as Russell kept saying; and then there’d be a complete end to escaping for three hours where no one could reach you. Daniel had always liked gadgets; she remembered, years ago, his digital watch—it wasn’t the flickering electronic winking, which came in later, but just a dial with numbers on it that rotated slowly behind a window, just an ordinary watch, really, but Daniel used to go round showing it to complete strangers. He must be terrible with his mobile phone. But in any case she didn’t have his number.

  She left a message at their house—“You’ll never guess,” she said, “who I saw today. You’ve got to phone me, you just won’t believe it.” They lived in Walkley; Daniel said it was up and coming, and they’d bought a bigger house than they could afford anywhere else. He also said, laughing, that once you got a bank manager who believed you, you might as well take advantage of it, and of course he still knew all the dodges when it came to buying houses, hadn’t forgotten how property thought into the future. Jane herself, she’d never have wanted a friend who lived in Walkley when she was at school. She found it difficult to imagine.

  But then, afterwards, she started to consider who else there was she could tell, if there was anyone at all. She almost started to phone Sarah Willis before remembering that, of course, she’d got to know Sarah Willis at Oxford, and she’d never have heard of Barbara. Weird how the past sank into a single conflated pile. Tim wasn’t likely to remember Barbara, and in any case there was no point in telling him anything of that sort; he’d always been keen on Sandra Sellers, who’d come afterwards, always gazed and admired and gawped at her in a way that made you think she must be the first girl he’d noticed in any solid way. But thinking of Sandra Sellers, she suddenly remembered her brother—Francis, wasn’t it?—and that he lived in London. She hadn’t seen him for a while; they’d met at a concert by chance, and had gone for a walk afterwards.

  These days, they only had one address book between the pair of them. Scott’s old one with all his Australian addresses was somewhere in the bottom of a tea-chest, and, in any case, it was completely full on every page. It made Jane feel quite inadequate, until she saw that it wasn’t that Scott had so many more friends, just a habit of noting down the addresses of acquaintances, and then their new addresses, and then their temporary addresses, and their Australian addresses for an emergency in case any of them wanked themselves to death and it turned out once more to be Scott and Jane’s responsibility to inform their parents, not that either of them put it like that. They all moved so often between shared houses and bedsits, Scott’s Australian acquaintances from his own house-sharing Europe-touring days, that he was forever crossing out and writing in. But he was older now, and hadn’t seen most of those people for years, or only briefly, at their wedding. He just made sure that Jane had his parents’ address and his sister’s in Amsterdam where she’d been learning t
o play the flute for seven years now, had them written down in her address book, and then that did for the pair of them. They didn’t go out much in any case, and the green padded address book, its spine fraying and its gold-lettered function worn thin, sat undisturbed underneath the Yellow Pages and the phone book and, for some reason, an old copy of the Guardian—oh, it was the one with a review of Scott’s restaurant in it. They mostly knew the numbers of people they called.

  London had divided, and the small part on which Jane had had her haphazard landing had claimed, unnoticed, her allegiance. It seemed unlikely that Jane, and Scott too, could ever have lived anywhere but Clapham, that something in them denoted South London. She loved the common and its featurelessness, even the little duck pond and the curious, hunched pub on their side, like an old rural pub that had once been a London outing and was now just a London pub. She loved the good butcher and the terrible one, the Edwardian adverts for long-useless businesses—piano rolls, stabling for horses and hire—painted indelibly on the sides of houses. She loved the occasional noble square, and the weird passages where council housing had been thrown up in the gaps left by wartime bombing. She liked it all.

  She found the address book, and there, amid a thicket of crossings-out, was an address and phone number for Francis Sellers. They’d gone for a walk a couple of years ago—no, Christ, it had definitely been just after the Australian killed himself, so just before she and Scott had started going out. That was ten years ago. Christ. He’d have definitely moved by now, but she dialled the number anyway.

  “What?” the voice at the end of the phone said. It was the voice of a heavy mouth-breather. Jane was prepared to apologize and hang up, but then it said, “Oh, yeah. I’ll just go and have a look.”

  At the other end, the phone was clunked on to some surface, or dropped on to the floor. There was a heavy thudding upstairs, and then, after a minute or two, the same noise in reverse.