The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  “Well,” she said, at a loss, and Tim was in no hurry to take a hint. “Why don’t you sit down for the moment, anyway?” He was a very unlikely emissary. She could hardly remember him.

  The last thing Trudy had said to him as he left the house was a hateful thing. “Well, have a good time,” she had said. “Whatever you’re supposed to be doing. I’m sure you’ve got some good reason.”

  “It’s good to do our own thing from time to time,” he had said, his suitcase at his feet. It didn’t even sound convincing to himself.

  “That’s right,” she said. “You know, I’ll get in touch with Stig while you’re away. I haven’t seen him for years. We’ll go down the Leadmill or something. Bye, then.”

  She had turned and gone upstairs, her crumpled grey espadrilles trodden down at the back and slapping against her yellowing heels. At the sixth step, she paused. He didn’t know why he had thought that she might turn round and say something more sympathetic, something regretful and imbued with the love which ought to lie beneath their life together.

  Trudy had known her duty, however. She had said the offensive, the really hurtful thing. Neither of them had seen Stig for years. When he and Trudy had first started seeing each other, Stig had taken the opportunity to insult them, one after the other, and then drop them. The insults had been on the grounds of ideology, but the intention beneath it was clear. And when they’d got married at the registry office, the invitation to the piss-up at the Frog and Parrot had come back, broadly scrawled upon with a passion which was quite unreadable. Tim couldn’t understand it, but he understood the way that, on those occasional meetings in the street, Tim looked straight in his face with a thousand-yard stare before walking past in a chilly way. He wondered what would happen if Trudy really did phone him.

  He’d forgotten about it by the time he reached Heathrow. The coach to London had been cheaper than the train, but the front door was wedged open by some hydraulic failure, its piercing alarm ringing for the whole six hours. He hadn’t known how to get to Heathrow, and the underground was a nightmare of stairs and corridors with his heavy oblong suitcase. He seemed to be the only person in the world who, nowadays, didn’t have a set of little wheels on his suitcase. And then Heathrow, the security, the awful piles of businessmen setting off with their little briefcases, the awful piles of holidaymakers drinking in the bars. He looked about for somewhere to sit; the gate of his flight had not been announced yet. But there was no-where; there was only shopping.

  It was only the thought of Sandra, bobbing up insistently and joyously now at regular intervals, as often as a Bedouin thinking of water, that drew him on; that, and the irreversibility of the security screening. It was a long way to go, and this was a lot to subject yourself to.

  Tim would not shop; he would only buy a sandwich. And if he had thought about it in advance, he would have made himself a sandwich. He went to the shiny sandwich shop, and bought one bacon sandwich. He ate it. Then, thinking about the journey, he went and bought another, and placed it in its cellophane wrapping in his old canvas shoulder bag. Airlines did not feed you enough, and it might be a good idea to buy some more food, to fill the gaps between one meal and another.

  But between London and Singapore; at Singapore, where the emaciated chill of the air in the terminal indicated the thick hot wet blanket of air in the outside; and in the long sleep which overtook him between Singapore and Sydney, so that he woke only when over the vast red continent with only three hours to go; all that time he was not hungry. When they landed and were out of the plane, they were asked, all the passengers, to place their bags on the floor. A sniffer dog was let loose, and ran with unerring insistence up to Tim’s bag. The three hundred passengers craned and stared. Tim blushed, and, as the security staff insisted, opened his bag. It was only a bacon sandwich; he’d quite forgotten. He thought that would be the end of the matter, but it was not. Did he not realize that it was a serious offence to bring food into Australia? What had he thought he was doing?

  There was a relief, however, in the bacon sandwich as they took it away. There was no sniffer dog who could detect the thing which Tim was bringing into the country; the thing which he was bringing to Sandra. He didn’t know what it was. But he could feel it inside him.

  The patient was moved, in an ambulance with flashing lights driving at ten miles an hour, avoiding every road with speed bumps in it, and, though Bernie went with Alice, holding her hand and gritting his teeth in terror throughout that long hour, she was in the end moved from the ground-floor room at the Northern General to the fifteenth floor of the Hallamshire Hospital. She seemed perfectly calm throughout the transfer, as if there was nothing much to it, and her lack of concern insulated her from the close observation of everyone else involved. In the end she was installed in another private room, with large windows giving out over the great sweep of the valley, and the constant and steady alteration in her state continued in its unpredictable way.

  Bernie did not admit any change in his own response; he went on visiting at exactly the same times, and in exactly the same way. His routine, and Francis’s when he came up on a Thursday night, remained exactly as it had been for the previous weeks. It was Alice who was following a narrative of her own, an old-fashioned melodrama full of twists and turns, of unsuspected developments in the plot, of dangers threatened and averted, in which actions undertaken long ago came back to the surface and had unpredicted effects. They were the dullest members of an audience at, perhaps, an underattended Saturday matinée; the brilliant actress giving her all and taking them through the immense convolutions of a frankly implausible plot was in the bed at the Hallamshire.

  Alice had started to try to speak again, though her mouth, for the moment, would not make the right noises. The noises she made sounded like her; they had her sweetness of tone and gentle enunciation, and even the rhythms of proper sentences, observations, questions, which to Alice were obviously perfectly sensible, and probably were. Her visitors could not understand what she was saying, and after a few attempts, Alice would assume a look of enraged irritation and sink back into her pillow, before starting again on another subject. She had always had lovely manners, and the need to entertain her guests with some conversation had survived, whatever else was lost from her personality. It was just that they couldn’t understand what she was saying. That would improve, and there was talk of speech therapists in due course.

  Bernie was more concerned with something he could not talk to the doctors about. Alice’s conversational sallies were not directed at him; they were directed at everyone other than him. She had a new expression of great, child-like sweetness; she had never had a knowing look, exactly, but had acquired adult guarded expressions just as anyone might in the course of fifty-eight years. All that veiled social range of measured pleasure, measured interest, controlled boredom had gone. Alice now had the immediate expressions of a child, and when someone entered whom she was pleased to see, her face lit up with delight; it sometimes took her a moment to get there, but she greeted Katherine, Francis, even Anthea, even Daniel, even Helen with a beautiful smile and a look in her eyes of glowing enjoyment, which was that of a girl. Her boredom, too, could be open, though perhaps it was only tiredness, and they had to be careful not to talk across her, or—everyone noticed—to talk too fast or simultaneously. That called up an expression of pained distress, Alice’s eyes flickering backwards and forwards and finally collapsing in exhaustion. The simplicity of her response was not indiscriminate: no nurse or doctor entering could create any delighted welcome in her eyes and mouth, and she tended to look at them in rather a snooty way, as if they were servants. That response was obvious to everyone, and the nurses and doctors tended to divert from their general cosy Christian-name assumed intimacy and call her “Mrs. Sellers” without hesitation, as if she were someone accustomed to a high degree of respect. Bernie wondered, sometimes, if he gave the impression, with his old London voice and unmistakably ordinary background, of being the de
voted chauffeur of their patient, looking down her nose in a blunt and undisguisedly haughty way, like a child, or the Red Queen.

  Because, in fact, though Alice greeted all her other visitors with unalloyed frank pleasure, her eyes grew cold and snubbing when Bernie came into the little room. If anyone else was visiting at the same time, she would try to talk to them, would listen to what they had to say with her eyes fixed in open pleasure on their face as long as her energy lasted. She would turn her eyes away from Bernie, and if she looked at him, there was always cold anger in her expression. Mostly, if he was there on his own, he would talk away, telling her about his day, about anything that crossed his mind, maintaining cheerfulness and telling her how well she was doing. “Keeping her spirits up,” he called it to himself. He didn’t want to admit that her spirits seemed high when anyone but him was around.

  The nurses and doctors started to try to divine her state with Alice’s own help, and took to asking her searching questions to find out what had happened to her, or perhaps what knowledge now remained to her. Bernie liked this twice-daily oral exam, and particularly the one question: “Alice, could you tell us who the prime minister is?”

  He thought that was funny; and Alice answered promptly. It was difficult to understand the long sentence she brought out. Perhaps it was “There was an election last year,” or “Still the same one as it was this morning,” or something similarly dismissive, but she made an effort and you could hear, through the muffled noises her tongue could make, the rhythm, at least, of “John Major.” The nurse made a satisfied tick, and went away.

  “We’ve just reinstated that one in the last couple of years,” a nurse explained, when Bernie asked. “We found that however badly damaged a patient’s mind was—even patients with quite advanced Alzheimer’s—they always seemed to know that it was Mrs. Thatcher. And until quite recently you couldn’t base much on them not remembering immediately that it was John Major. People with nothing wrong with them went on saying Mrs. Thatcher before remembering and correcting themselves, for a year, eighteen months. There was a doctor even who said once, ‘I’m going to write to the prime minister—she’ll do something,’ without thinking about it.”

  “I know what you mean,” Bernie said. Alice, who was listening to this, lay with her eyes angrily up to the ceiling, seemingly determined not to make any contribution, even by listening. If she could have stuck her fingers in her ears, she would.

  In the course of a couple of weeks, Alice’s speech cleared a good deal, like thick dark stormclouds after rain, and you could understand what she was saying. It turned out that her response to the prime-minister question was “It’s still the same one, unless there’s been an election since this morning.” The curt and manorial style towards the nursing staff turned out not to be a wrong impression, and Alice’s instructions to them, her comments on the food had a highly irascible quality. The staff, one confided in Bernie, thought Alice a perfect hoot and a love, and the more grande dame she grew, the more it seemed to amuse them and make them fond of her. Bernie didn’t feel the same way. It broke his heart to see her turn away from him so pointedly, to reject him with every gesture and look at her disposal. He had always thought that a pretentious and meaningless thing to say, “to break your heart.” Hearts did not break; no one died of a broken heart. People died of falling off ladders, of inadequately insulated plugs, of hairdryers, but they did not die of a broken heart, and when they suffered, it was from some other cause.

  But, all the same, Bernie’s heart was breaking. When, at the end of a long day of looks and tight-drawn lips, he got into the car to drive home, alone, he felt as if something had broken inside his chest and would never be mended. Something seemed to have shattered and splintered within his ribcage, and splinters had caught at the base of his throat. Sometimes, when nobody was by, he found himself bending over in pain and crying, useless meaningless self-pitying phrases coming to his lips and emerging, unheard by anyone. He would not do it in the hospital, or in front of anyone else, but sometimes, when he was alone at home at night, or once or twice actually in the car—he’d had to draw over to the side of the road and wait until the storm of weeping had passed over him—it took hold of him. There was no such thing as a broken heart, he told himself, not perhaps knowing what a doctor could have told him, that there was such a thing as a stress-induced cardiomyopathy when, through weeping, a patient’s ventricles could rebel against their casing, could imitate anything up to a myocardial infarction; he did not know that, in fact, there was such a thing as a broken heart, though his heart was doing its best to tell him so.

  Nothing like this had ever happened between him and Alice, all the years of their marriage, and this was the longest period they had ever spent apart. Apart, to Bernie, meant “apart at night.” Night terrified him, now that the depth and breadth of his love and dependence was revealed to him, and he thought, over and over, of the first months of their lives together. He recalled in exact detail their first outings, to the pictures, for a coffee in an espresso bar, to the youth-club dance. He remembered how lovely she had looked in her boned dress, full-skirted with a fitted bodice, swirling out when they danced, the feel of the heavy ruched white cotton under his hand, white cotton with a print of electric blue Himalayan poppies all over it. He remembered that dress much better than her wedding dress; the wedding itself had been a blur, and now was reduced to nothing more than what the photographs had recorded. He remembered the different stages of their relationship, going from single outings to courting, and then her coming home to meet his mother and Uncle Henry, her sitting down willingly and helping unpack the boxes of stockings, was it?, that his mother had acquired somehow and was going to make a profit out of through Mrs. Harris’s market stall. How she’d done that cheerfully, only afterwards telling him she couldn’t believe his mother made her way like that, but she’d liked his uncle Henry. And then the engagement; they hadn’t had a party, as people tended to these days, and they’d known each other for what now seemed an incredibly short time, only six months before they’d got engaged, and in another six months they were married. That was thirty-five years ago. Ever since then he’d half taken her for granted, half existed in a state of astonished gratitude that had become utterly familiar, and only now was it being taken away from him. He’d thought he would lose it through the Insult, as the doctors called it, and now, quite unexpectedly, Alice was turning away from him, and he did not know why. In all those years she had never turned away from him. Most of all what broke his heart was, resurrected in the purest clarity, the false memory of her in a red kilt with a big safety-pin and a grey jersey under a duffel coat, her breasts held separately and apart as the bras of the period did, coming through the door of his friend’s party with two friends of her own and already laughing, and him looking at her and saying—and that must be a false memory—to himself, “I’m going to marry that girl.” The first time he ever saw her.

  The canteen at the Hallamshire was quite different in style from the one at the Northern General, and less brutally functional. There were trellises between tables, wound through with fake plastic ivy, and real potted plants on waist-high brass stands. Bernie had gone down there one Friday morning, and was sitting with a mug of coffee and a cheese scone. He had left Francis upstairs with Alice; she liked to have him to herself, Bernie thought, when he arrived after a few days, and he liked to see what progress she’d made in the few days since he’d seen her. It felt to Bernie that, in the weeks since the Insult, he and Francis had grown closer together than they had ever been before, but it was an intimacy of a peculiar kind. They had gone from not speaking openly to each other through reserve and restraint, the usual conditions of an English life, to a state in which nothing needed to be said because they both understood what the other was thinking, and what the other was dealing with. Bernie had said nothing to anyone, even Francis, about the way Alice was turning away from him. It seemed to him that it was paining Francis as much as it was him.


  He had been in the canteen for an hour and a half, drawing out his cheese scone with a second mug of coffee—he had had breakfast, and in general he wasn’t hungry these days—when Francis came in, looking around to find him. “I’m just going to get a coffee,” he said. “Do you want anything?” Bernie waited, and in a moment Francis came back and sat down. He said immediately, “It’s Mum. She’s been thinking something, she hasn’t told anyone. She just told me, though.”

  He had come in with Bernie that morning, and the difference in the way Alice greeted each of them had been marked. Bernie had disconsolately kissed her, Alice turning her cheek away as much as she could, and then said bravely that he’d leave the two of them to chat for a while and would be up in an hour or so. He’d left, and Francis, he said, just had to ask his mother what was wrong; the behaviour was so strange, and anything that suggested what the doctors had warned of, a change of personality, ought to be addressed rather than tactfully left alone. At first she had denied anything was on her mind; she conveyed to Francis that it seemed to her to be quite reasonable to be taking this attitude. She gave the impression that a “situation” had caused a rupture between her and Bernie, and nothing in this was her own fault.

  Francis looked into his coffee, and then, haltingly, and with embarrassment, it came out. “It’s some kind of delusion,” he said. In the moment of the Insult, a fantasy had been planted in Alice’s brain, and, with some kind of evil ingenuity, it had manufactured a grotesque explanation for the sequence of events that had ended with her lying in hospital.

  “She doesn’t believe, or she doesn’t think she had a brain haemorrhage,” Francis said. “I don’t know whether she hasn’t taken it in, or that she doesn’t believe it.”