The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  Daniel wasn’t having that from someone like John Warner who’d never achieved anything in his life. “You need someone experienced in a new place,” he said. “I wouldn’t do it again, I think it’s a fluke. If I started again, I’d work in a professional restaurant, an established one, for two years first. But everyone else knows what they’re doing, they’ve all done it before. The other day, right, the suppliers turn up with sirloins, Andy doesn’t like the look of them, refuses to sign the docket, sends the whole lot back, crosses it off the menu, calm as anything. I’d have let myself be talked into taking them—well, not now, but I bet they’d have talked me into it a year ago. You need experience.”

  “Helen’s enjoying herself?” John Warner said, twirling his glass pointedly.

  “I reckon so,” Daniel said. “How’s your dad?”

  “He’s all right,” John said. “Always the same.”

  “And you,” Daniel said. “Are you still going down Casanova’s like we used to? I haven’t been for, I don’t know, five years. We used to go every week, you remember?”

  “Course,” John said. “Yeah, I go down there. You ought to come—you don’t want to get too middle-aged too soon. It’s changed a bit, though. There’s not those lads in suits hanging round the edge of the dance-floor any more, and there’s not the girls dancing round their handbags in circles.”

  “You all right, John?” Helen said, coming up with his vodka-and-tonic in her hand. She handed it over in a somehow satirical way. “Seen any good new films recently, or, I should say, any good old films? I always enjoy hearing about Barbara Stanwyck’s best films, you know.”

  “We were just talking about Casanova’s,” Daniel said. “John says it’s changed,” and John repeated what he’d just said.

  “Well, I don’t know how you fit in,” Helen said to John, “since you were always one of the ones in suits hanging round the edges.”

  “As it happens, I dance,” John said. “You ought to come down some time.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought that’s likely to happen again,” Helen said. “I don’t mind letting Daniel off the leash, though. You two should go for old times’ sake. Just so long as you don’t get off with a nurse—I mean you, Daniel.”

  “Yeah, why not?” John said. “I was going down there tonight—you want to come?”

  “Some other night,” Daniel said, but to his surprise, Helen joined in with the ridiculous request and, within ten minutes, he’d strangely agreed to go to Casanova’s with John Warner that evening.

  “Go on,” Helen said, when they’d excused themselves and were in the office. “Go and have some fun. You’ve been working too hard, and on top of everything, taking meals up to, you know, Bernie three times a week.”

  Daniel hadn’t known she knew about that.

  “It’s a nice gesture, Daniel, but it can’t go on, and it’s made everything just a little bit more hectic. Go on, have a night off. We’ll manage.”

  It wasn’t until she said that that he thought that, actually, he hadn’t spent an evening apart from Helen for months and months. Driving from the restaurant to Walkley to change before going out, John Warner in the passenger seat—and how had he got down to Get High on Your Own Supply in the first place, had his dad brought him?—he tried out a more brutal way of putting it. “I haven’t had a night off from Helen in six months,” he said.

  John Warner laughed unkindly, as he was supposed to. “How are the mighty fallen,” he said. “Not let you out of her sight, does she?”

  “Something like that,” Daniel said. In fact, it wasn’t until he had a night off from Helen, as he had coarsely put it for Warner’s benefit, that it seemed clear to him that he didn’t really want one. He wouldn’t mind going down to Casanova’s, but he’d much rather go with Helen than with John Warner, who was probably going to spend half his time telling Daniel what was wrong with him and the other half trying to get drinks out of him. Now that it was Daniel’s money, he’d earned it, he resented glad-handing people with drinks much more. He hadn’t cared so much about it when it was just his salary at the end of the month.

  John Warner spent most of the journey talking jeeringly about the girl he’d picked up the week before, the things she’d said, the enthusiasm she’d expressed for seeing him again. Daniel listened, thinking that “the week before” probably meant six months ago, if not a year, and wondering why someone who seemed to dislike women as much as John Warner did devoted so much time to hunting them down. Perhaps that was the right phrase: hunting them down.

  “Mind you,” John said, “it’s changed a bit, down at Casanova’s. It’s a riot. They all come, the ravers and that, and they dance till they chuck them out, and then they dance outside till the police come. They’ll dance to the noise of police sirens if there’s nothing else. Mind, they’re on drugs, most of them. They all take that Ecstasy.”

  “At Casanova’s?” Daniel said; it was only a couple of years since he’d been there in a suit and a tie, grooving round the dance floor to George Michael. Five years, tops.

  “Oh, yeah, they all do it. The management, they don’t like it, but it’s full every night, now, and it stays open till four, five in the morning. They don’t drink, though, that’s the only thing, they just drink water. Casanova’s, they put up the price of a bottle of water—it’s two pounds now, a right small bottle, too.”

  “I wish I could get away with that,” Daniel said, wondering if he was making a mistake in coming out with Warner.

  “It’s good for our sort of trade, too,” John Warner said. “You know what I mean? Is this where you live?” as they drew up in the Walkley street outside Daniel’s house. “It’s quite nice, I wouldn’t have thought of living in Walkley myself, but it’s all right.”

  “Thanks,” Daniel said, as John Warner followed him in.

  “The thing is,” John Warner said, hardly casting an eye round the hallway as he took off his jacket and hung it on a hook, “it’s all good for our ancestral trade, if you know what I mean. The girls, the little ravers, they come down, they take their drugs, and then they get—do you know what they say? They call it getting ‘loved up.’ They love everyone. I tell you, I wouldn’t normally stand a chance with some of those girls, but they’re quite happy to ask you to come home with them, or even, you know, if they can’t wait, they’ll say, ‘Come on, let’s do it now, in the toilets,’ and that.”

  “OK,” Daniel said. “What happens, though, the next morning, when they wake up and they’re in bed with someone old enough to be their dad?”

  “I’m not as old as that,” John Warner said. “I don’t mind. It’s not like they didn’t want to do it.”

  “Sounds like fun,” Daniel said, his heart sinking. “Get yourself a drink. I’ll go and change.”

  “Thanks,” John Warner said, going over to the walnut table where the bottles stood, and starting to go through them as if conducting an inventory. “Don’t dress up, just put an old T-shirt on and some jeans or something. There’s no point in wearing anything flash—they probably wouldn’t let you in.”

  Daniel, halfway up the stairs, stopped and turned, came down again slowly. He watched John pour himself a good half a glass of Irish whiskey, and flop down on the long low black leather sofa. “Do you do all that, then?” Daniel said.

  “What?” John Warner said. “I told you I did, didn’t I?”

  “I meant the drugs, you know,” Daniel said. “Ecstasy and all that.”

  “I’ve done it sometimes,” John Warner said. “It’s all right, it makes you dance.”

  “I’m not going to,” Daniel said. “I’m too old to be starting on something like that, I reckon.”

  “I wasn’t going to offer you any,” John Warner said, affronted, but Daniel thought it was probably more likely that he was going to end up paying for whatever pleasures Warner had developed.

  “That’s all right then,” Daniel said, going back upstairs. “I won’t be a minute.”

  The street i
n Walkley where they lived was steep and tree-lined; the houses, solid and Edwardian, attached to each other on one side but set solidly apart on the other. The road didn’t lead anywhere in particular, and it was quiet all day long, and in the night there was absolute silence outside. That was one of the reasons they’d liked it so much. Helen was woken by the noise of a taxi drawing up outside, the door slamming, and then the creaking of the front gate as the taxi drove off. She looked at the bedside clock; it was half past three. She’d only been asleep an hour and a half. She listened, her body tensing back into consciousness, to Daniel scrabbling with his key in the lock, then a jangle outside, and him trying another key. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said to herself. She had no idea why Daniel kept all his keys, for the restaurant as well as home, on the same key-ring: it always took him about five minutes to find the right one. The door opened and shut again; she could hear him breathing heavily in the hallway in the dark, then toppling upstairs. He opened the bedroom door with exaggerated care and came in; she lay there, not saying anything, quite enjoying the performance. With a thud and then another, he got his shoes off; and when she thought he’d managed to get his trousers off, she reached over and turned on the bedside light with a click.

  “Christ, look at you,” she said, and meant it: Daniel’s hair was all over the place, mad and flaring, and the black T-shirt he was wearing was stained with a white tidemark of salt where he’d sweated. “Jesus, you stink.”

  “I know,” Daniel said, placing his words carefully, judiciously, like swirls of cream on top of a tart. “I got into the taxi and said where I was going, and then the driver just opened all the windows. I can’t smell it myself.”

  “He’s such a twat, that friend of yours,” Helen said.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Daniel said. “You know something?”

  “What’s that, Daniel?”

  “I think I’m probably too old for that malarkey,” he said.

  “Didn’t you have a good time, then?”

  “It was all right,” Daniel said. “I’ve never seen it so full. And everyone having a much better time than I was.”

  “That’s the saddest thing I ever heard,” Helen said.

  “Fuck off,” Daniel said. “Do you want to know something funny, though?”

  “Go on,” Helen said.

  “Well,” Daniel said, drawing a breath, and trying to get the buttons on his shirt undone. “You know. I’ve got this old friend called John Warner, I used to go down Casanova’s with him. Only I stopped going, because I met this great woman, but he kept on going. And he’s tried to keep up, and I haven’t. And all his friends down there, they’re about fifteen, twenty years younger than him, and they all like this music. You want to hear this music, love, it’s like a washing-machine going round. No. It’s like being inside, going round inside a washing-machine. Only there’s one thing, one really quite sad thing, you might say, about being John Warner’s age or, you know, being my age, and being in a club like that with about a thousand kids jumping up and down. You know what the really sad thing is?”

  “No, Daniel, tell me.”

  “There was this girl, right,” Daniel said, “and she’s a right pretty girl, she’s blonde, and it’s not her fault she’s got a green fur bikini top on and not much else. I wouldn’t have said no, only …” He sat down on the bed, and started amateurishly to fumble away in the general area of Helen’s chest, under the continental quilt.

  “Oh, get off, Daniel, you stink,” Helen said. “So this girl, you’re trying to get off with her, and—”

  “No,” Daniel said. “No. No. It wasn’t like that, Helen, it wasn’t. She was trying to get off with me and I was saying, ‘No, I don’t, I really don’t think so.’ Apart from anything else, she was definitely on drugs.”

  “She’d have to be,” Helen said. “The drugs haven’t been invented that would persuade me to let you near me in your state right now. Seriously, get off me.”

  “She was, she was on drugs,” Daniel said. “And do you know what she said to me?”

  Daniel looked at Helen. It seemed, in whatever was left of Daniel’s mind, to be a genuine question, and after a moment, she said, “No, love, I don’t know what she said to you.”

  “She said to me,” Daniel said, “she said, ‘You’re a friend of Granddad’s.’ That’s what they call John Warner down there, Granddad.”

  “That’s funny.”

  “That’s not the worst of it,” Daniel said. “She goes, ‘You can do it to me if you like, I don’t mind.’ And I say, ‘What do you mean, you don’t mind?’ And she says, ‘I don’t mind, you know what I mean.’”

  “Poor old Daniel,” Helen said.

  “‘I don’t mind,’” Daniel quoted again.

  “Now get off the bed,” Helen said. “And go and have a shower before you get in. It’s not the end of the world. I’ll still put up with you.”

  “I know you do,” Daniel said. “The point is—”

  But then he seemed to lose whatever point it was, and shortly got up, a puzzled and pained expression on his face, and went off to the bathroom in his damp and sagging underpants. Helen watched him go, and in a moment, she turned the light off again. She lay back and, as she often did before sleep, started totting up what they had made in the last few days. She found it soothing, and safe, and in only a few moments had sunk back into the confused thoughts of unconsciousness. She had no sense of Daniel coming into bed.

  The library was exactly as it had always been, behind the grey block of its front. Inside, the smell was reassuringly unchanged; the yellowish varnish of the bookcases, and the black plastic labels at the end of each with the Dewey numbers and the categories. Now there were computers on tables containing the library’s catalogue, too; there were people at each terminal, and readers waiting for one to come free. The tall-legged chests of drawers containing the card catalogue were still there, but no one was consulting them, and they had the air of obsolescence. That was rather sad; there was, surely, a pleasure in rifling through the ragged-edged cards with their neatly typed details, a sensuous pleasure, and also the pleasure of coming across the most unlikely-sounding book, a place or two before the book you were looking for. In a gesture of cussedness, Francis went to the card catalogue and opened a drawer, more or less at random, just to remember what it felt like, before it was too late.

  It was a Saturday morning. Bernie had gone to the hospital, taking Katherine Glover with him in the car, and, rather than sit around the house, Francis had decided to go and do something positive. He’d taken compassionate leave, and felt he ought to be doing more to justify it. He’d asked his father if he could borrow his library card—“Well, I know I’ve got one,” his father said doubtfully, though it was in his wallet—and had gone to town on the bus. For twenty minutes, he’d just walked around; he couldn’t think of anything he wanted to do, or buy, or look at, so he’d done what he’d said he’d do and gone into the library.

  For old times’ sake, he gathered together five books, just as he used to; they were books he’d always meant to read and, actually, if he looked at the date stamps, some of them, ten years back, had probably been on his ticket. There was no doubt; he’d been a great one for taking books out hopefully, then returning them, three weeks later, still unstarted. He had them stamped—it seemed quite possible to him that the woman who stamped them out, blonde and snub-nosed, was the same person as an Alice-band girl he quite clearly remembered, give or take about forty pounds in weight. He put the books into his rucksack, and left. Nothing much had changed, apart from the computers; even the people selling their revolutionary newspapers at the bottom of the steps outside.

  “I heard about your mum,” one said, as he was about to walk past. Francis stopped and looked; it was, unmistakably, Timothy Glover.

  “Oh,” Francis said. “Thanks. I didn’t recognize you, I’m sorry. Thanks. She’s stable now.”

  “I know,” Tim said. “My mother told me. I pho
ned her yesterday to find out how she was doing.”

  “Thanks, it’s kind of you to be concerned,” Francis said.

  “We’re all concerned,” Tim said, and Francis looked at him in surprise. “I expect your sister’s coming over, isn’t she? She lives in Australia, I heard.”

  “I don’t know,” Francis said. “I don’t think she can, not just at the moment.”

  The woman with Tim, selling their newspaper, now gave him a resolute and contemptuous look, and walked five paces away. He hardly gave her a glance.

  “That’s not on,” Tim said. “Surely she can come over?”

  “Well, I don’t think she can,” Francis said. “And my mum’s stable now. I’m sure she’ll come over when she can.”

  “I’m sure she won’t,” Tim said, with real venom. “Somebody ought to make her come. I can’t believe she just can’t be bothered.”

  Francis said nothing. What he remembered now was, long ago, in the playground of the junior school, and the history of that playground game, for so long now obscure in its rules and details. It came back to him, how Timothy, then, had forced his way in, had imposed, uninvited, his own convictions of right and of punishment. He had joined in, not for pleasure, but because he had seen possibilities of damage and destruction. It had been a good game, and Timothy had broken into the circle, and destroyed it for the pleasure of destruction. When Francis thought of the game and its history, he could not remember the details of how it was played, only, in general terms, its energy and allure. But he remembered how it had ended, with Andrew, who had really been one of the only friends he had ever had, his leg broken, and him being taken away to the hospital. He’d never rid himself of the conviction that Timothy Glover, in the end, had got his way, imposing his notions of punishment and right. Perhaps it was just the fact of the hospital that made Francis think of that terrible time again now; but he knew with certainty that they were talking, at bottom, about his mother, someone about whom a Timothy Glover certainly didn’t care in the slightest.

  “You know something?” Francis said, and his voice was trembling. “I don’t think I really believe in ‘Someone ought to do something.’”