The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  “Francis,” the voice said. “Thank God.”

  It sounded quite unlike his father—a broken and absent voice—and in a second it went on. Francis could not understand what it was saying. He had been so clear in his mind that it would be one of the lodgers’ idiot friends, calling repeatedly from some pub on Balham High Street that he couldn’t for half a minute quite understand what it was that his father was saying, or understand that it was his father talking.

  Still, he must have understood something, since he found that he had, after all, said, “I’ll come up as soon as I can.” It was his own voice, sounding still in the quiet and dim-lit hallway of the house that seemed to break the spell, and, as if in reverse, he heard what his father had been saying.

  “Your mother’s had a brain haemorrhage—she’s in a coma—she’s in the hospital, in the Northern General. The doctors say it’s too early to—”

  And some terrible gulping breaths. He had been phoning all evening—with a sort of grisly relic of paternal concern Bernie had started asking whether Francis had had a reasonable trip back, thinking perhaps it had taken him until now to get home, and worrying about the state of public transport in London rather than his more immediate concerns. Perhaps he had gone on ringing without any expectation that the telephone would be answered, and had not been prepared to have to tell anyone yet what he would soon have to tell to so many people—Francis thought of the masses of people at his retirement party, six months before. In any case, he had started, and in a few moments had found himself gulping.

  “I’ve looked at the trains,” he said, pulling himself together. You could hear the noise in the background, some sort of lazy yowling call between nurses ending their shifts. “The last train to Sheffield tonight’s gone, the first one in the morning’s at quarter to six. You don’t need to get that, you can come later in the morning. You will come?” he added in a rush, remembering perhaps that Francis had been going to Rome, remembering perhaps what Francis, with a shudder, thought, that he’d not left the address or phone number of his hotel there with them, that he might not have known any of this for a week, and what might happen in a week.

  “Yes,” Francis said. “I’ll come.”

  He went upstairs and sat in his room. A stretch of time elapsed; Francis found that he could not sit, but kept having to rise and walk from one room to another, pacing. Outside, in the street, it grew quiet. Francis picked up a book, set it down. All at once he thought of Sandra; he worked out the time difference, and saw that it was lunchtime there—whether Friday lunchtime or Saturday lunchtime, he couldn’t work out. His brain would just not go in that particular direction. He switched on his Amstrad computer; it hummed, and in a moment he pushed the programming disk in. At this point, he usually went to make a cup of coffee, coming back to find the computer ready to go, but now he just sat there and listened to it run through its cacophonic recitation. He could almost sing along with it. The list of options came up, sour green on black—if you worked too long on the computer, you could look away and see your work printed, purple against a white wall. He replaced the disk with another, and opened up the file with all his addresses on it. He printed out the document, noisily—he had never quite worked out how to print anything but a whole document—took the sheet with Sandra’s address and telephone number on it, and went downstairs. He couldn’t remember ever having phoned her in Australia of his own accord.

  The quality of the air down the line changed noticeably when he was finished dialling, and then an unfamiliar ringing tone. It rang six times, and then there was Sandra’s voice. It was unmistakably hers, but with a distinct Australian swing to it. He started to say, “Hello? Hello, Sandra?” but it was only a machine.

  “Alex,” it began. He started to put the phone down, but stopped; he left a short message, saying what had happened, and that he was going up to Sheffield. He put the phone down, a cream plastic comma, slotting neatly into its place, and went upstairs again.

  At two the housemates came in, shushing but thumping about noisily.

  At three, they came out of the kitchen and went to bed, murmuring their goodnights to each other.

  At half past three, Francis realized that anything would be better than walking up and down in this confined space. He wrote a short but clear note to his housemates, explaining what had happened, and taped it to his door. He thought again, and wrote exactly the same note, and left it on the telephone table as he left the house with his already packed bag. He imagined them waking for a moment, puzzled, wondering why the bloke upstairs was going out at such a strange time, and then turning over and going back to sleep; he imagined them waking late the next morning, saying, “What a night,” and then seeing the note on the table. He imagined them regretting their sarcasm towards him, their lack of sympathy. As he hailed a rare and lucky taxi, it struck him that for the first time he could remember, he was in the middle of a serious drama. He wanted it to be taken away from him.

  It was always incredible to Francis that the whole of his journey afterwards disappeared, as if that itself was the trauma, from his mind. He knew that he must somehow have spent at least an hour and a half at an empty and shuttered King’s Cross station waiting for the trains to begin again; he must have travelled in a slow train to Doncaster, and changed there for Sheffield; he knew that from Sheffield station he must have taken a taxi to the Northern General hospital, travelling up quite unfamiliar hills to a campus of sickness, at some remote and unknown quarter of the city. All that specifically remained in his memory of that horrible journey, going through the end of a dark night into a grey and wet dawn, was the general sense of not knowing what was at the end of it; and, from time to time, turning his face to the rain-washed windows because, he found, he was crying as if in anticipation, as if in practice. There was nothing else afterwards, except the memory of coming into the hall of the Northern General, the sense of nurses falling away to right and left, and finally coming into a room with his mother and, bending over her, his father. There looked to be nothing much worse with his mother than, perhaps, a touch of flu; she was flushed around the eyes and mouth, and her hair was damp; nothing, that is, other than what was suggested by the array of tubes and the battery of bleeping machinery. Thank God bleeping. It was his father in whom something seemed to have broken; it was something that had been keeping him upright for years.

  “The doctor thinks she’s stable,” his father said. “The doctors are going to come round in a while.” There seemed nothing more for him to say, and, on either side of the white hospital bed, in a room on their own, they pulled up a chair each, and took, each of them, one of Alice’s hands.

  When it became apparent that Tim was going to get one of the refurbished offices on the fourth floor, Hester Carver obviously made a decision that she might as well dress it up as her personal favour. Anyone could see that, in fact, there was nothing she could have done about it, even though she was the faculty secretary and, for all purposes, the person with the power around here. Her personal campaign against Tim, based on nothing more than personal antipathy and carried on without a break for the three years since he’d finished his PhD and been taken on as a junior lecturer, had taken quite a few forms. He’d been refused almost every item of furniture he could think of to request. The office computer he’d been assigned had been an old one, overladen with five years of files that his predecessor had built up before taking a fatal overdose and leaving a vacancy. Everyone, it seemed, had been given an updated model before him, and then the budget had run out. There was talk of the faculty going on to the Internet, but not in Tim’s direction. He lived in a windowless breeze-block hell-hole in the basement with his name handwritten on a slip on the door.

  The basement, however, was being handed over to Film Studies, which seemed quite happy to be subterranean. It was probably something to do with them all having had a misspent youth watching old movies with the curtains drawn in the afternoons, and Hollywood blockbusters made intellectually resp
ectable by being viewed at suburban Gaumont matinées rather than in the evening, with popcorn. In whatever other ways Hester wanted to neglect Tim, she was in the end defeated in this. He was to be moved, he was informed, to one of the refurbished offices on the fourth floor, with quite a decent view of the station and Hyde Park Flats behind. She chose to take advantage of this by putting it to Tim not as a defeat but as the result of a certain amount of strings-pulling for which he ought to be grateful.

  “I wish I had an office as nice as that one,” she said, in her own cosy space, accreted with a bonsai tree, photographs of the grandchildren, a lingam-sized vacuum flask with a tartan transfer and a rolling screen-saver of kittens in a bowl of pasta. One of her many cardigans, this one in apricot, was over the back of the chair. “I’m sorry you’ve had to wait for it, but I’m sure you’ll appreciate it all the more now you’re settled in it. There were quite a few people after that office, you know.”

  “I’m very grateful,” Tim said, not believing her and giving her something not to believe in return.

  “Have you been up to have a look at it?” she said. “It’s not quite finished yet—the men’ll be wanting to paint it next. You can choose your colour, you know. Any colour you like.”

  “Isn’t it all going to be white?”

  “Oh, no,” Hester said. “In any case, if you mean like this, this is actually magnolia, not white. White with a hint of cream. Whatever colour you like.” And she hoicked out a paint chart from her top drawer. Some of the samples were already annotated with what looked like room numbers.

  “Can I have anything at all?”

  “Anything you like,” Hester said, turning back to her typing. It was a letter from the professor to a first-year student who’d missed four Cultural Criticism seminars in a row without explanation. Not that they’d fail the ignorant little sod, she allowed herself to think.

  “I think I’d like this nice dark brown,” Tim said.

  Hester looked over the top of her glasses—a habit, she hadn’t her bifocals on. “I don’t know about that,” she said. “They dry darker, you know, Tim. That’d be quite dark and depressing to work in.”

  “Are you sure?” Tim said. “I thought paint dried lighter.”

  “No,” Hester said. “It dries darker.”

  There was an embarrassed pause between them, which Hester quite enjoyed.

  “What about this one?”

  “What’s that? Prawn Sunrise, is it called?” Hester said.

  “That can’t be right,” Tim said. “No, it’s—well, you’re right, it is called Prawn Sunrise.”

  “That’d give you a headache, that shade of yellow,” Hester said. “It might be all right for a kitchen. You want something fairly neutral, really. No, I wouldn’t have that green either. People are driven mad by green, you know.”

  “I thought it was restful,” Tim said, looking as if he were starting to resent this utter waste of time. “Or meant to be, anyway. Backstage at theatres, the green rooms, where the actors rest, aren’t they green? Well, they’re not green, but they used to be. Aren’t they green because it’s supposed to be a restful colour?”

  “That’s quite a vivid green,” Hester said, enjoying this thoroughly. Actually, if she’d predicted, she’d have thought a grumpy idiot like Dr. Tim Glover, presented with his run of a paint chart, would unerringly go for having his office painted black, like a seventeen-year-old boy who liked heavy-metal music. And in the end she got her own way, as she usually did. Tim’s office was to be painted a very suitable pale brown, quite a lot like Demerara sugar or maybe wet sand, but called Peanut Butter. It was quite nice if you didn’t think about the name they’d given it.

  “You see,” Trudy said, when he told her the whole saga, “everything’s been bought up and sold off. Even colours.” They found a lot to chew over in Hester’s campaign against Tim and her whole Tory demeanour, unbelievable in someone who worked in what was supposed to be a radical department teaching the social sciences.

  “How do you mean?”

  “It’s all part of the system,” Trudy said. Her face under the energy-saving forty-watt bulb in the kitchen—you could only tell when onions were browning or just burning by the smell—was full of the shadowed troughs and valleys of a much older person. Her frizzed-out hair was full of grey already. She was only thirty-four. He was becoming embarrassed by these grand claims of hers, but he said nothing, knowing she enjoyed insisting on what embarrassed him. “Everything’s owned, even colours. You can’t just call a colour what it’s called. The name of a colour’s owned by some paint company. Brown, the colour brown or its name, it’s probably owned by Dulux.”

  “That can’t be right.”

  “So they’ve got to think up ludicrous names for colours. All the ordinary ones were sold off and bought up years ago. Things can’t be just blue or green any more, because blue and green are owned by, whoever, Rupert Murdoch. They’ve got to be Italian Ladder or Blush or Clouded Rose or something stupid. The ordinary person, he has to ask permission from a company before he can call his own door blue. Mind you, it’s all about the illusion of choice. The multiplication of options …”

  It took Trudy a good fifteen minutes to explain why it was stupid to have your room painted a colour called Peanut Butter and why in any case you didn’t have any real choice in the matter. It wasn’t that Tim disagreed with her. But when he moved in, he found the room quite restful, even if it was the colour of a capitalist plot. Finally, he’d got something that looked like proper furniture, and not things that might have been rescued from the departmental rubbish heap. “I wish I had an office chair as nice as that one,” Hester said, rotating in the comfy old swiveller she wouldn’t give up if you paid her. The view was surprisingly pleasant—you could see that old flat of Trudy’s from here. He’d never wanted to hang around the office in the basement, only arriving when absolutely necessary and leaving when his tasks were done. But this office started to seem—well, not nicer than home, it would be an insult or an admission of failure to say that, but definitely an alternative place to sit and think. For the first time, he organized his books in alphabetical order, rather than in random piles, acquired and started using a filing cabinet, started sticking up pictures of Bose on the walls, that poster of Thatcher and Reagan in a Gone With the Wind embrace. The new orderly airiness up here had an effect on his work. Where before his intellectual explorations had been limited to what was required, like his office hours, now he wondered about all sorts of things. It was as if he needed tasks to undertake to justify hanging about, often, until seven or seven thirty in the evening.

  Some of these were ideas for articles, true—some spilling over with unrestrained vitality from the mainstream of Tim’s work. He had gone to university in the first place two years late, and from the beginning had been more purposeful, better read and more focused than any other undergraduate. Cleverer, too; the choice to come here was only down to the fact that it was local, and he wanted, by then, to be near Trudy, who wasn’t moving. He’d always been brighter than the mass of the intake, he had no illusions about that, and they’d been delighted to take him on as a PhD student and, when the time came, to appoint him to a job. It was proof of the excellence of the institution that it could appoint from its own ranks of postgraduate students; le patron mange ici. But he’d been dopily devoted to the narrow line of his own research, down there in the basement, like a duckling head-down pursuing a laid-out line of corn, a duckling narrowly denouncing far-off Erving Goffman and following wherever the despised master chose to go. Up here, with a view of Park Hill Flats and the railway station, he found his mind expanding, and in the first three months he wrote an article on something quite off his usual track. Gestures of refusal enacted between the public bourgeoisie and the vendors of radical media in an English urban setting. (He and Trudy, they still sold the Spartacist outside Sheffield public library on a Saturday, and in his fifteen-page analysis, tabulated according to gender and perceived social
class, my God, he got his own back on the deradicalized lumpen bourgeoisie.) More than one of his colleagues, bombarded with offprints, called it “witty,” and he started to think of more, fresher work to undertake.

  Up there, too, he started to think of other things he’d like to write and, all at once, found himself writing cogent and furious letters to the Guardian, The Times Higher Education Supplement, New Left Review on all manner of subjects. Most of them were no more left than the Daily Telegraph, he had no illusion about that, but the letters page (he found himself explaining) was the point at which radical voices sometimes made themselves heard, almost despite the media’s best intentions. “The voice of the people,” Trudy said piously, and Tim agreed. It wasn’t an expression he could have used himself in good conscience, these days, and doubted that Trudy, in the sixth year of her own PhD, was allowed to get away with it in an academic context any more. But he let it go for old times’ sake. Some of his letters were published, though—of course—they were cut down and their point and cogency removed. Even so, colleagues noticed; he was developing a reputation for controversy.

  There were other letters, too. On a rare visit to his parents, he saw, shamelessly pinned to the kitchen noticeboard, an invitation from a public utility. He looked, amazed, and saw his own name written in by hand, along with Daniel’s, Jane’s and his parents’. “What the hell’s this?” he said to his mother.

  “It’s just an invitation,” she said. “You can see for yourself. It’s for Bernie’s retirement. It’s nice of them to think of you at all. I’m sure Trudy could come as well if she wanted to—I’m not sure that they’ve ever—”

  “Trudy wouldn’t want to go to something like that,” Tim said. It was incredible to him how dense his mother could be. “Do you seriously think I could possibly want to go to a party hosted by a company like that? Don’t you think Sellers is totally implicated by that job he’s done?”