The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  “Well, I hadn’t honestly given that aspect of it a lot of thought,” his mother said. “Whatever you’re talking about. Why don’t you tell your father all about it? I’m sure he’d like to hear.”

  “Hear about what?” his father said. “You’re not leaving me alone with Tim’s principles, again, are you, Katherine?”

  His mother was laughing heartily as she left the kitchen—it was always like this since Tim had left home, an atmosphere of teasing that Tim couldn’t remember ever having been there before.

  “Well, I’m sure we’ll all miss your merry banter and Trudy’s sense of fun,” his father said. That was supposed to be a joke. No wonder Trudy said it made her feel physically sick to visit his parents.

  It was incredible to him that the Sellerses, Sandra’s parents though they were, could possibly have so little sense of him that they could think he might come to their stupid party, and the very next opportunity, at the end of the working day, he sat down and wrote a finely argued letter over five pages of the departmental writing paper explaining why, whatever he thought personally of Bernie Sellers, he couldn’t in all conscience go to such a party. A condensed but savage account of the CEGB’s role during 1984 formed the main bulk of the letter, with an astonished and wounded paragraph on the Tory programme of denationalization to wind up. It was seven thirty before he was done. It wasn’t until two weeks after the party that he had any kind of reply, and then it was only three unoffended and inappropriately lighthearted lines, which he read once before throwing away and, unlike his original letter, didn’t bother showing to Trudy.

  It wasn’t just him who felt more at home in the new office. Students, he noticed, were coming to see him of their own initiative. And an odd thing started to happen: they were mostly girls. Women, eighteen-year-old women. At first he could hardly credit it, and for several weeks pushed the suspicion to the back of his mind as an unregenerate thought from some reactionary and uncorrected fragment of his personality. But it seemed to him at last undeniable that, for the first time, the physical irresistibility of his brother Daniel, now lost as he had gained a couple of stones, had passed on to him, and the women, some ten years younger than him, had started to pay him visits. They came to talk, nominally, about their work, but their eyes widened, their mouths fell open like ruminating beasts of the field, they allowed their hands to brush lightly against his as he went over their poor essays, lying on the desk. There were half a dozen favourites; or, rather, he was the favourite of half a dozen. He was inoculated against their charms. He never considered whose the imaged face was that protected him.

  He hardly knew how to talk about this with Trudy, and, as it was not her face he thought of, decided not to; it was too easy to imagine what she would say on the fantasies of men about strong and independent women under their supposed academic control, and then straight off into some page of Foucault or other. The oddest part of the phenomenon was its cyclical nature. It didn’t happen steadily: it came and went. Even the most devoted of his followers, if accosted in a corridor at the wrong point of the cycle, would look at him with slight puzzlement from clear complexions, not quite understanding what it could be he wanted to talk to them about. (He had no doubt: the students here might not be the brightest.) But in a couple of weeks the same students were booking appointments with him, the next day if at all possible, and soon sitting there, in as few feet distance from him as could be decently contrived, a galaxy of acne crossing their features, breathing at him with their mouths open, as if they wanted him to lie back and let them lick him.

  It baffled him. Tim had never been particularly expert with women, or known a lot about them, until Trudy had happened along; she was only the third woman he had ever slept with, and the first two had, to be honest, hardly registered for long. What started to strike him was the peculiar odour that accompanied his visitors, the weight of their breath in the room; it was an odour at once eggy and metallic, a smell that it seemed to him he had always known, or known how to respond to, almost a primeval smell. It wasn’t a body odour or, exactly, bad breath, but it certainly came from them.

  Perhaps he was a little slow. When the explanation came to him, he was walking down the main concrete stairs of the polytechnic building, cased in glass; one of his half-dozen girls had been coming up the same staircase. “Hello, Mandy,” he said cheerfully; only ten days ago she had been in his office, glowing with tears and acne and emotion over nothing more than her essay on farewell gestures in public places.

  “Hello, yourself,” she said, remote and surprised.

  It had happened before, that shift of relationship. It was as if she couldn’t remember quite why she had been so warm towards him, or even that she had. If she had been surrounded by friends, unwilling to be seen to suck up to a lecturer, he could have understood it, but she was on her own. He observed that her skin had much improved since he’d seen her; there was none of that eggy odour but, rather, a clean waft of recently washed flesh. All at once, an amazing explanation came to him: could it be that they came, these girls, midway in their need, at the centre of the menstrual cycle? Could essay-checking be taking the place of mating in their primeval skulls? He checked. It took an entire day with this year’s diary, but it seemed indisputable: his six most regular attenders, his most loyal fans, they had made appointments at intervals of four weeks, regular as clockwork.

  The revelation left Tim entirely aghast. He hated any kind of personal revelation to the point where he shrank from his own insight. Though he could undertake the kind of Goffman-like investigations into the behaviour of strangers, that was different. There was nothing biological about that, but acquired, willed behaviour. And in any case he didn’t know the people who refused to buy copies of the Spartacist in, if they only knew it, one of five distinct ways. To see students at the mercy of their biological imperatives in so elevated a practice as writing and discussing essays with their academic tutor horrified him, and after some thought he wasn’t surprised that he’d pushed away the explanation in his own mind. But, worse than that, there didn’t seem to be anyone he could discuss it with. Trudy was out of the question: he knew her likely response so well, he could have recorded himself talking about the power of women being rooted in their menstrual gift, and the intellectual structures imposed on them by male institutions being (and so on). There was no way he could have raised it with any of the girls themselves. Women. They would have been horrified—he was worldly enough to understand that. And it didn’t seem altogether a matter for the faculty’s welfare officers. He expected they would wonder out loud what, exactly, they could do about it, and if it were really a faculty matter at all. It seemed incredible, but Tim went back and forwards through the Spartacists and his colleagues and the remoter correct regions of his acquaintance, and there seemed only one person that he could raise the subject with without fear of consequences. For the first time in months, he phoned Daniel.

  “Why ever not?” Daniel said, when Tim suggested lunch, a little heartily. “Do you want to come out here?”

  “I’ve only got my bicycle,” Tim said.

  “It’s not far,” Daniel said. “You could cycle that, easily. But all right. What about in town?”

  Daniel took a day off, once a week, leaving either his partner Helen in charge of things or the boy straight out of catering college, who, Daniel said, could manage perfectly well on his own so long as he knew exactly what he was supposed to do. Daniel suggested Tuesday, which was the day when Tim’s teaching finished at twelve anyway. Tim suggested they meet at Ruby Tuesday’s.

  “Are you home tomorrow afternoon?” Trudy said, over the vegetable curry and rice that evening—it had been her turn to cook, and she’d put sultanas in it again. Tim could never decide whether she liked sultanas in her vegetable curry, if it was a memory of those dried Vesta curries, heavy with mincemeat, or whether it was meant to demonstrate that she couldn’t cook and it was an insult to assume that women could cook and that that was where their inter
ests lay. Once she’d put glacé cherries in; that was pretty definitely a protest.

  “No,” Tim said. “Not till three or four.”

  “I wanted to go up the nursery to fetch some potting compost,” Trudy said, “but I can’t manage it on my own.”

  “I’ve got a meeting,” Tim said, which was more or less accurate. If at all possible, he avoided telling Trudy when he was seeing any of his family, or even mentioning them. It wasn’t often, their meetings or phone calls, but he embarked on them stealthily—once, when Trudy had asked about a London number on the phone bill that turned out to be Jane’s, it had led to a whole evening’s disquisition. If he ever had to phone her in particular, he saved it for the office. Trudy had something specific against all of them, and the mention of their names was generally enough to spark off a detailed recapitulation of the specific account. She’d followed his mother’s court case in gleeful detail; and then there was what his father did for a living; what his brother did, and also what his brother had done for a living, somehow in cahoots with his father’s activities; there was what his sister did and who his sister was married to. Worst of all were Daniel’s Helen and her parents, who perhaps ought to have been OK but were somehow included in the sweeping arraignment as class traitors. It wasn’t that Tim didn’t agree—it was all right for Trudy with her unfaultable connections and the brutally cut-off culpable ones, like her rich cousin James sending his kids to public school. But most people had family that couldn’t be looked at as ideal, and most people, like Tim, thought you probably shouldn’t cut them off entirely. Even Daniel, who Tim had more time for now that he was a bit overweight.

  Ruby Tuesday was a café, but a vegetarian one, and quite OK. It had been there for more than twenty years; Tim had started going in for long-spun-out cups of tea when he was in the sixth form at Flint. It was on that radical stretch behind Division Street that started with Bigg and Cleaver, the jazz-playing second-hand bookshop, next to an old bookbinder’s and a radical print shop. Inside, it was painted a dark racing green with its Edwardian cornices picked out in vivid red. The tables were scrubbed old kitchen-tables from junk shops and skips; the plates, glasses and chairs didn’t match, and the salads, quiches, homemade cakes and the till rested on a similarly reclaimed bank counter. It was run by a kind of collective, most of whom were pretty rude to you, and did very well. There were handwritten menus on the tables, but if you sat there you tended to get neglected, and the customers never seemed able to decide whether you waited to get served and paid at the table, or did both at the counter. Neither tactic was reliably effective.

  Daniel was late, and when he came through the door Tim was sitting there with a cloudy apple juice. Tim hadn’t seen him since Christmas, and he’d trimmed his hair right back; it was as short as Trudy’s skull-crop, but somehow more expensive-looking. There was a new goatee beard, as well; whenever Tim had allowed his beard to grow, he’d wondered about the unfairness with which Daniel had been able to grow one densely and quickly. His shirt hung carelessly over the waistband of his black jeans.

  “I knew it would do well,” Daniel said, once they were sitting down. He was talking about his business. “I just knew it. We’re turning people away on a Friday and Saturday night.”

  “Good for you,” Tim said.

  “You ought to come,” Daniel said. “Bring Trudy. We do a vegetarian option. It’s roast Mediterranean vegetables and couscous this week.”

  “Remind me,” Tim said. “What’s your restaurant called?”

  Daniel looked a little abashed. “Get High on Your Own Supply,” he said. “You must know that, though.”

  “Why’s it called that?” Tim said; he did know, perfectly well.

  “I know,” Daniel said. “But we’re stuck with it now. It seemed like a good idea. It was that we were told there was no chance of getting a licence in time for the restaurant opening, and not for at least eight months after that, if then. So we thought we’d make a feature of it, you know, the restaurant where you have to bring your own booze, and you only get charged, what, fifty pence corkage, for us to open it.”

  “You charge fifty pence to open a bottle of wine?”

  “It’s not fifty pence a bottle,” Daniel said. “It’s a flat charge. I think it’s some kind of legal requirement. Anyway, we called it that, and then, as it turned out, the licence got fast-tracked in some way, or we’d been given rubbish advice in the first place, because it came through a week before we opened. But by then we’d put out adverts and everything, had the menus printed with Get High on Your Own Supply on the top. Phil said—Phil’s Helen’s dad—Phil said that people would think it was the sort of place like in Amsterdam where you go and smoke cannabis, but people seem to get the hang of it being called that.”

  “I don’t know when you learnt to cook,” Tim said.

  “I don’t do the cooking,” Daniel said. “I’m just the—I don’t know, the host or something. I wander round and I make sure everyone’s having a good time, that sort of thing. I do all the boring stuff, too, the ordering and the invoicing. Helen does the menu—she’s got a real knack for it. She knows what people like and what’s going to sell. I put a word in from time to time but I don’t get it as right as she does. She said people would go for the calves’ liver, and I thought it wouldn’t work, people wouldn’t go out to have liver, but she was right. It’s one of our best sellers.”

  “I don’t think I could eat any sort of veal,” Tim said.

  “No, I wouldn’t expect you to,” Daniel said. He was in very good humour, and not allowing himself to be snubbed. “As I say, we’ve got a vegetarian option. It’s quite popular.”

  The food arrived.

  “This is terrible,” Daniel said cheerfully, banging the back of his fork against a potato in the salad. “It’s practically raw, it’s like a water chestnut. It’s not hard to cook potatoes and serve them with mayonnaise on top.”

  “I like it here,” Tim said, but Daniel was off again.

  “Helen’s got a new idea,” he said. “We’re going to have a seventies’ night in the restaurant once a month. I’m going to dress up in flares and a loud shirt and she’ll put an Afro wig on.”

  “Where are you going to get flares from?”

  “Oh, there’ll be some in my dad’s wardrobe,” Daniel said. “But we’re going to do seventies food, too—there’ll be prawn cocktail and chicken Maryland and melba toast. Helen thinks we ought to put glasses of fruit juice on the menu as a starter, just as a joke, I wouldn’t expect anyone to order it. People really like that stuff still.”

  “But, Daniel,” Tim said in his most superior way, “there are certainly restaurants in Sheffield which still serve all that. I bet the restaurant at the Hallam Towers still does prawn cocktail.”

  “Not ironically, though,” Daniel said. “It’ll be a blast. Anyway, they don’t, I know they don’t.”

  “You don’t eat at the Hallam Towers, do you?”

  “Not regularly,” Daniel said, “but when we were starting up the restaurant, we thought we’d go and eat in every restaurant in town, and everywhere that was any good in the countryside near here. So we went to the Hallam Towers. We just had dinner, we went on a night we knew’d be quiet, and we’d order things off the menu that you knew people wouldn’t order much. And then you’d start up a conversation with the waiter about what was popular, what went well, what did most people like to eat. They’d always tell you. It’s interesting. But, no, they don’t do all that stuff any more.”

  “I’m amazed,” Tim said sardonically, but he was surprised; “prawn cocktail” along with “dinner-dance” were shorthand pieces of abuse between him and Trudy for the pleasures of the petit bourgeoisie. He wondered what they actually ate nowadays when they wanted to go out for a bit of a splash.

  “And we went there again, it must have been six months ago, and it certainly wasn’t prawn cocktail. It was Bernie, you know, Mr. Sellers, lives across from Mum and Dad, he was retiring and they gave
him a big party there. It was Japanese, the food, sushi, it was really good. I thought it was going to be warm white wine and a master of ceremonies inviting us to tuck into the vol-au-vents, but it was quite smart, they really splashed out. Hang on, they only asked us on Mum and Dad’s invitation—didn’t they ask you as well?”

  “They did,” Tim said. “I don’t think we could have gone.”

  “Well, you missed—” Daniel said. “Hey, I remember.” He gave a big smile, and now it was a deliberately malicious one. “Yeah, you wrote a big letter to Bernie saying he was a fascist, or something, and it was in contravention of your political position, or whatever. Yeah, he showed it to me, we were really concerned about that, Mr. Sellers never knew he’d been in such danger of being put up against the wall when the revolution comes.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Tim said. “Not everyone agrees with your political position, you know.”

  “I don’t have a political position,” Daniel said. “I’ve never voted in my life. They’re all the same.”

  “That’s exactly what all completely right-wing people always say,” Tim said, attacking his quiche.

  “Yeah, I bet,” Daniel said, not ruffled. “I bet you’re really proud of yourself, though, now Mrs. Sellers is in hospital and probably going to die.”

  “She’s what?”

  Tim was flushed still; it wasn’t out of rage, just out of shame that Bernie might have come over the road to show the carefully argued letter he’d written explaining the facts of the case to Daniel. Probably to his mum and dad too—no, probably not. Tim remembered Bernie, his brusque, assessing manner, and it seemed most likely that he’d have waited to show it to Daniel, the one who would find it funny. He hadn’t heard anything was wrong with Sandra’s mum.

  “It was at the weekend,” Daniel said. He was, it seemed, not surprised that nobody would have thought to tell Tim something like this and, in fact, he hadn’t spoken to any of his family for weeks. It wouldn’t have occurred to them to pass this on. “Mum asked me to send over a few ready-made dishes from the kitchen that Bernie could heat up when he came in from the hospital, so I’m involved in the whole thing. Of course, we were pleased to,” he said grandly. “It’s no more work for us.”