The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  But it was hard to think of Bernie’s interests in the usual sense, and impossible to think how they might be boiled down into a present that Bernie would find either beautiful or useful. It was difficult enough at Christmas and birthdays, but various conventions had evolved there, and Bernie accepted his tie, this year’s book, his whatever-it-was-the-house-needed with good grace. A retirement present was more difficult. Alice herself suggested a clock, a canteen of cutlery, garden furniture. In the end, Davina thought up something really quite original, a gold-plated vent, or valve, or tap, or something—something industrial and very ordinary, something Bernie would have seen every day of his working life, turned into a useless gewgaw and put in a glass case. “He’ll love it,” she announced briskly. “Some people suggested a scale model of a generating plant, but I put the kibosh on that. I couldn’t imagine anything more hideous, plonked in the middle of your sitting room or, if you’ve got any sense, straight into the attic. But this is rather unusual, a conversation piece—” she finished off, barking with mirth “—as one used to say.” It made Alice wonder how Bernie, so hard to buy a gift for, was going to fill his days.

  The day came. Bernie retired on his fifty-sixth birthday, and there was a big party. She’d been to parties like this before at the Electric, and they’d often been dismal affairs; sometimes there’d been only one or two other wives attending apart from her, almost everyone else coming out of duty. But Bernie was popular, he’d always been popular, as well as being quite a high-up; they hired a venue and paid for everything. Everyone’s wives came, and they asked a few of their own friends too. The Glovers came, and Daniel and his girlfriend, Helen, and Helen’s parents, too, Philip and Shirley; and people from the reading group, even, with their husbands, and other friends; people they’d met because they’d had children at school together, Jillian Kirkpatrick, who had tried to teach Francis the piano, and people they’d only met at parties, friends of friends who had become proper firm friends themselves. It was astonishing how embedded they were in this place.

  “You know Walter Marshall was supposed to come,” Davina said, plonking herself down with worrying heaviness on one of the hotel’s thin-legged gilded chairs. “No, honestly, David, go away, we’ve got girl things to talk about. Go and pick up a bird or something.”

  “Lord Marshall,” Alice said—she wondered how the topic of Lord Marshall qualified as a “girl thing.” She watched poor old David, a bear-like figure, plod off with a glass of wine in each hand. Big bones ran in their family, evidently.

  “Oh, we all call him Walter,” Davina said. “He’s awfully nice.”

  “I know, I’ve met him,” Alice said. “I don’t suppose he would really have come.”

  “Don’t you believe it,” Davina said, finishing off the wine in her lipstick-rimmed glass. “He’s got the highest regard for Bernie. Terribly fond.”

  “I’ll be glad to have him on my own for a while,” Alice said. “Bernie, not Lord Marshall, I mean.” She looked sideways at Davina: a big woman in a little black dress, she had held her knees together but, as if that was effort enough, her legs sprawled off in quite different directions and her elbows kept wandering away in search of something to rest on. The dado rail, as her right elbow kept discovering with a jerk and a slip, wouldn’t do.

  A waiter approached the two of them with a salver of food.

  “I love these little things,” Davina said, taking a sushi roll, then a second and, with the waiter’s smiling forbearance, a third. “It was a brilliant suggestion of yours. It’s perfect for a party.”

  “I thought it would be a little bit unusual,” Alice said. “When I saw the Hallam Towers had started doing Japanese food, I thought it would make a bit of a change.”

  “Brilliant stuff,” Davina said. “Hasn’t he got good-looking, your son?”

  It was kind of Davina, but Alice looked with surprise. “Oh, no,” she said. “That’s Daniel, he’s our neighbour’s son.” She raised her glass to Daniel. “Excuse me,” Alice said, getting up.

  “I’ve come to save you,” Daniel said, smiling. “Is she drunk?”

  “What have you done with Helen?” Alice said. She felt terribly tired; it was a mistake to wear new shoes to a party, a mistake she’d known she was making even when she was buying them.

  “She’s off somewhere lecturing some bigwig about privatization,” Daniel said. “I left her to it. They didn’t seem to be minding too much.”

  “She’s a nice girl,” Alice said.

  “Sandra couldn’t make it, then,” Daniel said.

  “We never expected her to,” Alice said. “It’s a long way to come just for a party. She said she’s hoping to come over some time next year, but she’s very settled now. Do you ever hear from her?”

  “I had a Christmas card from someone calling herself Alex the year before last,” Daniel said. “I couldn’t think who it was.”

  “Oh, yes, she’s changed again,” Alice said. “I never got used to Alexandra, either. It never occurred to me that Sandra was short for Alexandra—anyway, she’s Sandra on her birth certificate.”

  “You ought to go out there, now that Bernie’s retired,” Daniel said. “She’s not married, is she?”

  “No, nothing like that,” Alice said. Then she saw she hadn’t answered the question. “It’d be nice to go out there. It’s just such a long flight, and Bernie—”

  She left that where it stood.

  “He’s like me,” Daniel said kindly. “He likes his home comforts.”

  “I hear the dance school’s going well,” Alice said. “Helen’s dad was telling me he’s never enjoyed himself so much in his life. And the restaurant, too—Anthea was saying—”

  “What was I saying?” Anthea said, turning as she heard her name. Alice hadn’t seen her there, talking to Bernie’s brother Tony and his new wife, though she was conspicuous enough in her black-and-white vertically striped dress, for the slimming effect. Tony and his new wife saw their chance and slipped off. “I heard you, just now, saying, ‘Anthea was saying.’ I’m sure it was something very reprehensible.”

  “I was telling Daniel what a nice time you had at his new restaurant, down in the Rivelin valley.”

  Anthea Arbuthnot looked Daniel up and down, never having quite lost her ambition to play a round of strip poker with him. He looked her up and down in return, observing with fascination that on the huge bosom of her horrible dress she was wearing a brooch that, amazingly, contained a kind of pastel portrait of the Queen’s profile. It looked as though a second-class stamp had fallen there, and stuck.

  “We had a lovely time,” she said. “It’s the most gorgeous setting and, though it’s a converted factory, if you think of it that way, they’ve converted it very nicely, I must say. We had a girls’ night out. I went with Caroline and my cousin Ruth, who normally lives in Wales, she retired with her husband to Tenby, and Katherine too, and we had a high old time. It was Katherine’s suggestion—she wanted to support Daniel’s restaurant, but we needn’t have bothered, it was nearly full. I had the fish pie, and Ruth and Caroline splashed out and had a steak, both of them, and Katherine—what did your mother have, can you remember, Daniel?”

  Daniel burst out laughing. “You know, Anthea,” he said, obviously having decided that he was now old enough not to have to call her “Mrs. Arbuthnot” any more, “it’s a strange thing, but I find it quite difficult to remember what every one of my customers ordered from weeks and weeks ago. Even if they are my mother.”

  “That’s no way to talk to valued customers,” Anthea said, laughing herself. “But in any case, I remember now, she had the fish and chips. Some people might think it was a little bit odd, having fish and chips on the menu, but everyone likes it, and it was lovely and fresh, I must say. It was a Thursday we went, or I’d never have advised the fish—never, ever eat fish in a restaurant on a Monday, that’s my advice, even Daniel’s restaurant. He’s got a hard head, this one—there was no discount for the owner’s mother,
even. And we had two bottles of wine and it came to forty pounds with a starter each but no pudding, which I call good value, these days. You ought to go, Alice. We’re going to go back and we’re going to be taking dancing lessons too. You had a lovely write-up in the Morning Telegraph, Daniel, did you see?”

  “We’ve got it framed,” Daniel said. “I think they’re going to make a speech, Alice.”

  She excused herself and went over to stand by Bernie. He’d always liked parties—as she came up, he was surrounded by a circle of people, all laughing at something he’d just said—and he took her hand with a quick smile and a raise of the eyebrows, to make sure she, too, was having a good time. In fact, she was looking at Francis. It wasn’t hard to spot him, though he was in the middle of the crowd. His head was six inches at least above anyone else’s, and she couldn’t see how Davina had mistaken anyone else for him. Had he been talking to anyone? She couldn’t see. Whenever she’d spotted him, he had been wearing the same slightly baffled expression, moving through the room as if looking for someone in particular. He always looked like that. It was nice of him to come up for his father’s party, even on his own, not having anyone else for them to invite. Alice turned back to Bernie. “Do you know what it is they’re giving you?” she whispered.

  “I’m not supposed to,” he said, “but I’ve got a good idea.”

  Franks was on the stage now, bringing his wrists together in the action of an orchestral conductor, and by stages the noise in the room subsided. He began to speak; Alice was pleased to see that, though he’d obviously thought what to say, he’d not found it necessary to bring notes to refer to. There were some office jokes about Bernie’s manners—“We may feel sorry about Bernie leaving us,” he said, “but Davina’s swear box, which Bernie’s sole efforts have kept so full over the years, is completely bereft. No one else could possibly have kept it so busy.” There was a ripple of laughter, even from the people who didn’t know what Bernie was like at work; and “busy” didn’t seem the right word, anyway. He was a good speaker, though; if all the stories he told about Bernie were familiar to Alice, and to most people there, he told them as well as Bernie did. And Bernie, on this telling, sounded like the man who had kept the whole thing on the road. That couldn’t be true, and Franks’s speech was just threatening to get too serious, too heartfelt, too much a history of the electricity industry and its tribulations over the last thirty years when he cut short the beginnings of his audience’s murmurings and went into the last straight. She was proud of him; there was no reason not to be; and she was almost surprised when suddenly her own name came up. What had she done? She’d supported him—“And we who only worked with him can guess at the patience that must have taken over the years.” That was what was to be said about her life; and Franks, in a last gracious sentence or two, handed the gilded valve to Bernie and, with a pat on the back that only looked slightly like a push, handed Bernie over to Alice for good.

  It was a successful party; everyone admired and commented on the Japanese food, and she said hello to more people in one evening, probably, than she had ever done in her life. She kept glimpsing the most unlikely people in conversation with each other, and seeming to get on. Only once was there any kind of awkwardness: passing one group, towards the end, she heard a woman’s voice saying, “Not that you give a toss.”

  She looked: it was Daniel Glover’s girlfriend, Helen. She was talking to Mr. Franks and his wife.

  “That’s a bit harsh,” Simon Franks was saying.

  “All I know is, my dad and everyone he worked with, they crippled themselves, out on strike for a year, and if anyone, anyone at all, had come out in support of the miners—”

  “It was our job, young lady,” Simon said, in his most insufferable way, “to keep the lights on in this country. I’m happy to say that our workers understood that, from beginning to end of the crisis.”

  “All I’m saying is—” Helen said, but Alice slipped away. It was horrible, the sight of anyone making a spectacle of themselves.

  The gilded valve, without either of them discussing it, went on the wall in the spare bedroom where nobody went, and for the first couple of weeks Bernie kept himself busy. A surprising number of people wrote to say how much they’d enjoyed the party and, once he’d worked out how to use his new computer—that took a few days, it having been Davina’s responsibility at the Electric—Bernie enjoyed writing back to them. Even with his near-total incapacity to type, though, that task was eventually done. And then what?

  “Where are you off to?” Bernie said, coming out of the sitting room, the newspaper hanging from his hand. He had heard her opening the cloakroom door and, twisting round in his armchair, had seen her putting on her coat. It was six weeks or so after he had retired.

  “Oh, just out,” Alice said. She waited where she was. She rather wanted to make Bernie go through everything, just once, so that she could tell him to stop it.

  Bernie ruminated. It was perfectly clear to Alice what was going through his mind; he was telling himself not to ask if he could come too, like a small boy. Bernie could understand that much.

  “If you’re going to town—” he said eventually.

  “No, Bernie, I’m not going to town,” Alice said. She wasn’t going anywhere so very special or secret; she wasn’t going to carry on accounting for every one of her movements, and she waited again.

  “OK,” Bernie said. He still wanted to come, with his newspaper dangling pathetically from his hand. “When will you be back?”

  “Bernie, love,” Alice said, and she took the opportunity. Leading him back into the sitting room, placing him back in his chair and sitting herself down, still in her coat, she explained perfectly kindly that, all in all, the only way you could possibly live from this point onwards was with some degree of independence. “I won’t ask you where you’re going all the time, and you shouldn’t ask me where I’m going,” she said.

  “It’s not much to ask,” Bernie said.

  “No, it’s not,” Alice said, “but if nothing else, it’s nice to have something to tell each other in the evenings, and if we go everywhere together, do everything together, explain everything in advance, we won’t have that. All right?”

  Bernie didn’t see, not really, but she left him there. It seemed harsh, even cruel, but Alice could see that if she didn’t do exactly this, she would very soon find herself responsible for finding things to fill Bernie’s life, as well as her own. She saw herself bringing him jigsaw puzzles to do, like an invalid. Not for the first time, Alice reflected that the conditions women existed under were apt to strike men like the cruel imposition of suffering, and she remembered how very bad Bernie had always been at coping with any kind of illness.

  Bernie made an effort, and improved a little. He remembered not to ask her where she was going all the time, and contrived a few activities of his own. He started talking about things he might conceivably do in the future, as if reminding himself that, after all, he did have a future. “One of these days,” he’d begin, and though they were mostly unimaginable—Bernie writing a book, or doing a degree at the Open University—Alice thought that showed willingness. Some of the real activities they did together were his idea: they had a regular afternoon at the cinema, and often drove out to see some historic sight, some country house. Alice quite enjoyed the films, and even the country outings. She let him in, too, on a couple of her own activities, and together they experimented with steadily more stringent ways to keep the neighbourhood cats off their lawn. He cancelled the delivery of the paper, and instead made a point of walking to the newsagent’s every day. At first, he was gone only thirty or forty minutes or so; and then, to Alice’s curiosity, he started being gone two hours, even until lunchtime. He would come back with a cryptic smile and, they’d made an agreement, she wouldn’t enquire. In time, she discovered, not from Bernie, that he’d taken to dropping in on one of four or five acquaintances, housewives living on the way to the shops, and nattering over a cup
of coffee. It took a weight off Alice’s mind.

  “Nothing much,” she heard Bernie saying once, on the telephone to Francis. They spoke every week, and it broke her heart to hear Bernie say, with every attempt at cheerfulness, that they’d done nothing much in the last seven days. Bernie was filling his time as best he could, being cheerful about it, and it seemed to be her who was forced by his retirement to wonder what, if anything, her life had ever consisted of. Nothing much. Bernie went uncomplainingly through the motions of what, after all, had been her daily existence, and for him, painfully obviously, the emptiness of it was nearly unendurable. Perhaps it ought to have been so for her. What he took pleasure in—she had never seen this so clearly, and at first she could hardly credit it—was her own constant company, and he hurried to share small things with her, saved stories and cartoons from the newspaper to show her. If he was developing an Arbuthnot-like avidness about the most local and minute events, it was only for her sake. It was exhausting to see how much he lit up when she came through the front door.