by Jane Gardam
Oh Nancy and Clancy—the trouble to come!
Soon there was a serpent calling for rosy-posy Nancy in a car. He would roar up and sit in the road with the radio blasting down the street as he lit up a joint. He didn’t trouble to get out of the car, a roofless sports car, bright yellow. Nancy would come running down the path in her mini-frill, black boob-tube and heavy leggings, with her hair done up in barley-sugar bundles and her voice gone silly. And Clancy in his black shell-suit next door, looking polished like a black beetle, lean as a ferret, was all the time on the phone in his front room organising the local cycling club, the Gleaming Wheelers, of which he was founder, member, treasurer, secretary and president. The rounder and lovelier and noisier Nancy became, the skinnier, twitchier and less articulate grew Clancy.
Clancy’s house began to fill up with trophies from the cycling. First they covered the spaces on the walls of his small bedroom where his bike posters and a few wheels hung. Next they spread over the walls of the front room. Then they lined both sides of the passage and began to climb the stairs. Photographs of Clancy appeared in Cycling News and the local papers; and after the night of Nancy’s engagement party to the snake in the MG, Clancy won a remarkable hundred in Northants that brought him to the notice of the national press. He couldn’t go to Nancy’s celebration because of the hundred, the hundred being on a Sunday and Nancy’s betrothal the Saturday night before, when Clancy had to have his sleep. Whether he got it or not in his narrow bed next door, with the noise of the pre-nuptial heavy-metal thudding through walls and piercing almost to shattering the closed windows, we shall never know. It was silent enough when Clancy left for his race at 5:00 A.M., picked up by some other ferret-like beings in a minibus with bike racks. Exhaustion oozed from the interior of Nancy’s house in that dawn. There were a dozen cars parked all anywhere in the road, some with their doors open, and vomit in the tulips. A cold brisk spring day for Clancy and colder still in Northamptonshire. Up and down the flat, windswept roads, around the great curves of the silver River Nene, went Clancy, in and out of the icy spires of all the famous churches.
Not that Clancy saw any of it. Head down, bottom up, hands steady, legs like pistons up near his ears—all sinew, eyes narrowed—away he went, never looking for an instant at the gauge upon his wrist that checked the heart rate, never deigning to suck from the vitaminised bottle on the tight and glittering oxbow handlebars. He broke a national record that morning (3.31.52) and there was champagne and shouting and it was Clancy-talk at the Northants clubhouse the best part of the night. Some old spindle-shanked veteran, seventy if a day and still doing a good 4.31.00—a man made of ropework and leather with the fanatical gleaming eye of one who has given his life to the road—this old vet. said he saw the Arc de Triomphe in the tea leaves.
Clancy spoke little, as always. The habit had given him status. Some thought Clancy rather a comic little turn. So silent. No friends. Girls didn’t exist. Hardly drank a drop. By trade he was a computer guy, and you can be that without speaking much, but he was a puzzle to his work mates, with whom he never conversed at all. They saw him arriving every day on a different bike, working-out in the Gents and jogging in the lunch break, and after the hundred one or two of them saw his face in the tabloids and were impressed. ‘He’s nuts,’ they said. ‘Cycling mad. Nothing else to him. But he’s a consistent guy.’
Then something happened. Clancy’s mum packed up and went to live with the manager of the Bowlerama. (His dad had packed up long ago.) She said she was sick of nothing but bikes all over the place and no conversation. ‘Clancy’s gone funny,’ she said. ‘See how he gets on without me.’ Clancy’s mum said she didn’t know where Clancy came from and if she hadn’t seen for herself the minute he was born she’d have said there’d been a mix-up. That Nancy next door now, there’s a smashing girl with a bit of fun about her and her parents nothing but stuffed pudding.
So Clancy’s house grew very dirty. From the outside you’d say it was taken over by squatters. Inside it looked like a bike shop, overrun at weekends by little streamlined people, crowds of them, with an eye for nothing but a bike.
Then Nancy’s engagement was broken off, though she kept the ring, having paid for it herself, and she slammed the doors a lot and laughed over-loudly and wore don’t-care clothes and went off with her parents to the Costa del Sol to get over it, Clancy saying he’d see to the cat and the rubbish and the pipes, it being wintertime. He took custody of the keys from Nancy’s father, who slapped him on what passed for his shoulder as he left and said, ‘Good lad, Clancy. Why can’t she marry you?’
Not that he really meant it, Clancy now being dead eccentric with glittering eyes and twitching hands and an inward-turning heart. But he was much improved in appearance, fit and healthy and weather-beaten and self-confident in his way, people coming to his door for autographs and articles appearing about him in the Sundays entitled Tour de France 2000? and Pride of the Midlands: Cert. and Wellingborough Wheels Olympic Hope. All true—but you wouldn’t want him in the family. Like a foreigner, he was. Inhuman. Dehumanised.
So Clancy took the keys of Nancy’s house that fortnight; and every evening, be it ever so late, he’d let himself in and lock the door behind him, and when he’d fed the cat and picked up the junk mail and put it in the box marked Junk Mail he went up to Nancy’s bedroom and touched her bed and opened her wardrobe and her chest of drawers and rubbed his little wedge of face into her knickers and bras and her all-over-lace shortie nighties. Once or twice he took off his shoes, turned back the bed cover and got into her brown satin sheets and lay still. He looked at the posters on her walls. Elvis types, rubber-necks, prize-fighters. There was nobody who looked the least like him.
Yet he knew she loved him.
Even when she came back from Spain with a great hairy thing with a paunch at twenty-five and all tattoos and boots, even when she paraded this dream-boy up and down the path next door, even when she introduced him, ‘This is Darien, Clancy; we’re engaged,’ he knew she loved him. Him. Clancy. She flounced about when he just said, ‘Hi, Darien,’ and went on mending a back sprocket, garage doors behind him open to reveal a laboratory of cyclomatory science. ‘Good luck,’ he said. The Adonis smirked.
Nancy came round that night, a bit later, on her own. It was the first time she had come round and flopped down on the old sofa since they were kids.
‘Can I come in? Heck—you want a few windows open in here. Is this the kitchen? I can’t see space for a knife and fork.’
He cleared a stool of cycling magazines and moved the long drape of socks and sweat shirts on the string between the sink and the back door. He went to the sink and started cleaning oil off his hands. ‘D’you want a Coke, Nancy?’
They were easygoing as two pensioners, yet they’d not talked for years.
‘OK, if you can find one. It’s for real this time, Clance. I’m going to do it this time.’
‘Why?’
‘He’s strong. He’s nice. He loves me.’
‘If that’s it, you could have me.’
‘Don’t be daft.’ She looked terrified. She looked appalled. ‘Be like marrying your brother.’
‘You never had one. I never had a sister. It’d be good.’
‘I’m not in your world, Clancy.’
‘I don’t care about my world, Nance.’
When he said this, standing amid all the paraphernalia—the holy icons on the wall, his lifeblood, his empire—she felt the power of him and ran off back home.
Her mother asked her what was wrong and was she crying and she said no, she’d been over to Clancy and he was pathetic. Just pathetic. And she wasn’t having him to the wedding.
‘She won’t have you to the wedding, Clancy,’ said her mother one day when he was disappearing off in his fast car with the bikes in a trailer, sleek like for racehorses. ‘I’m ever so sorry, Clancy.’
‘I couldn’t co
me anyway,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the Nantwich Spa to Scroxton Fifty that day.’
He won it of course. It was his biggest win yet. They wanted to give him a ball. But he came home. Drove himself all the way home that night, got in at three in the morning. Not a sign of a wedding about Nancy’s house. It had all been done down the Rotary with red carpets and a toastmaster and white ribbons and everything, a big confetti do. Clancy never looked towards the place as he let himself into his garage, thin, metallic little ferret Clancy, the hero of the world.
And the world never saw him again. Nobody ever saw him again.
Nancy’s mother came looking for him in a day or two. She’d heard his telephones ringing and ringing. The place was empty. The cycling people came next. Then the gas man and the electricity and the Council. Then little clutches of people together. Then the press. Then the police. All the world came knocking, but Nancy’s mother had seen no sign of him. Had she the keys? No, she had not.
It seemed, though, that Nancy had a key. She’d had one for some time. He’d given it to her when they were both eight and he had been provided with one of his own. Sometimes, between lovers, when Clancy was well away and after his mother’s departure, Nancy would let herself into Clancy’s house round the back and wander about in it and clear up a bit where once they used to sit hugging mugs of cocoa or bubbling down their straws into pop, or blowing sprays of biscuit crumbs in each other’s face, laughing. She would clean round the bath and basin upstairs and even make his bed and look at all the posters on the wall, all the makes of bike. Examine all the trophies.
She would relive the one occasion when he had come in unexpectedly and found her there, a day when he’d not done very well in a Huntingdon–Lincoln Seventy-five and he was dejected. And sweaty. He had stood numb and she had taken him in her arms and they had lain together on the bed wrapped and lapped, soft and kind, warm and true, as if for ever. They never knew which one of them it was who had pulled away.
Clancy’s mother came back after Clancy disappeared. She had been off with a pop group half her age and was into holistic medicine and E-tabs and seemed uncertain who Clancy had been. The police were stumped, the Sally Army too, and there was a lot of publicity and talk of murder by jealous competitors, though this is scarcely the way of the cycling world.
The house was sold, Clancy’s mother needing money, and in the garage into which Clancy had last stepped was found, standing among his other bicycles, one of the most exquisite crafting: under twenty-five ounces, light enough to lift by a finger, equipped with every known and unknown development of bicycle wizardry.
Nancy, when she saw it, knew that it was Clancy. ‘Can I have it?’ she asked.
‘What do you want with a bike?’ asked his mother. ‘I’m the one that should have it. It’s all I’ll have to remember him by. I’ll take a thousand pounds.’
‘Done,’ said Nancy, and wheeled it away.
It lived at home with her, at first in the en-suite garage of the detached house in Park Drive, and after that, in its Jamaican-style extension; then, in the built-on cedar-wood conservatory. But this she found too cold for it in winter, even with rugs and blankets, so it came into the kitchen and stood by the Aga and every time she passed it she stroked it. When she took it up into their bedroom, however, her husband threatened to leave her. Once, when, during the menopause, she took it into her bed, he did leave her.
He came back, though. He had seen doctors about her and had counsellors come round to talk to her. These people spoke of mania and she threw a chair at them and climbed passionately on top of Clancy and rode away.
Away and away she rode on the long firm saddle, up and down, up and down the hills. The hills flew from her as she rode. She rode like Juliet fleeing towards her tomb, and ‘Clancy, Clancy, Clancy’ yearned her heart.
MISSING THE MIDNIGHT
One Christmas Eve long ago, when I was twenty, I was sitting in the London train at York station, waiting for it to start. I was in a first-class carriage. I had been pushed into it. The rest of the train was packed. This compartment must have been unlocked at the last minute, like they sometimes do. Maybe it was because I had so much luggage. I was very glad to be alone. The compartment was sumptuous, with grey and pink velour seats and armrests and white cloths to rest your head against. I’d never travelled first class.
Just as the last doors were slamming, three people came into the compartment who looked as if they were there by right. They sat down two and one, the young man and the young woman side by side across from me, near the corridor, the old man on my side with the spare seat between us. I kept my face turned away from them but I could see them reflected in the window against the cold, black night. I had my hand up against my face.
I had my hand up against my face because I was weeping. The tears welled and welled. There had been no sign of tears when I was saying my bright goodbyes to the friend who was seeing me on to the train. I had waited to be alone. Now they rolled down my face and the front of my dismal mackintosh, and they would not stop.
I was leaving college a year early, having failed my exams and because the man I loved had told me the week before that he had found someone else. I was going home to my family, whom I despised and who had never liked me and were about to like me less. I had told them everything. Got it over in a letter. I hadn’t yet told my mother, though, something which would cause her deeper distress—she was always in shallow distress—that I had also lately lost my faith. Anthropology had been my subject. I had just come to terms with the fact that it had destroyed my Christianity totally.
My Christianity had always been on a fragile footing on account of my mother’s obsession with it. All she had seemed to be thinking about the previous night when I rang her was that if I was catching this late train I would miss the Midnight.
‘But that means you’ll be missing the Midnight,’ she said. ‘I’d have thought that the least you could do is come with me to the Midnight.’ Then she said something nauseous and unforgivable to a daughter lost: ‘All the mothers will be there with their college daughters.’ Oh my God.
All my mother ever thought about was what the neighbours might say, just as all my father ever thought about was how my achievements might improve his image at the bank, where he had been a desk clerk for most of his life. My father drank. He drank in the greenhouse at the end of our long, narrow garden in Watford. The greenhouse was packed with splendid tomato plants in summer and with heavy-headed old-English-sheepdog chrysanthemums in winter. Under its benches, all the year round, stood several pairs of wellingtons, and in every wellington stood a bottle. The bottles were never mentioned. They changed from full to empty to full again, invisibly. When my father came out of the greenhouse he would go upstairs to bed and cry. Then my mother would rest her head against the sitting room mantelpiece and cry too. Then, as she also did after she and I had quarrelled, she would fling on her coat and dash to the church for comfort.
And she always came back much better. I would hear her feet tap-tapping briskly home along the pavement as I sat in my bedroom doing my homework. I used always to be doing my homework because I so wanted to get to college.
After the church visits my mother would sing to herself in the kitchen and start preparing a huge meal for my brother. She always felt forgiven after her prayers but she never came up to see me. Her life was my brother. He was my father’s life too. He was supposed to be delicate and he had been long-awaited. When I was born, eight years before him, there had been a telegram from my father’s family saying, ‘Pity it isn’t a boy.’ My brother was in fact far from delicate. He was surly and uncommunicative and had the muscles of a carthorse. He detested me.
The only time I had been happy since my brother was born was the summer before, when I was in love. It was amazing how much happier my family had been then, too. Much more cheerful, and nicer to me. My mother had gone round saying, ‘Esther’s engaged to a
graduate.’ I put my hand to my face and the tears rolled.
I could not ignore my fellow passengers. The smell of them was so arresting—the smell of beautiful tweed clothes, shoe leather, pipe-smokers’ best tobacco and some wonderful scent. There was a glow now in the compartment. Even in the glass there was a blur like a rosy sunset.
It was the young woman. She had stood up—we were on the move now—to go down the corridor. She drew back the glass door and slid it shut again outside, turning back and looking down through it at the young man. I felt for a handkerchief and took a quick glance.
She was the most lovely looking girl, in a glorious red coat. Her expensive hair was dark and silky, with shadows in it. Long pearls swung. Big pearl earrings. Huge, soft Italian bag. The hand that rested on the door latch outside wore a huge square diamond. Shiny red lipstick. She smiled down. He smiled up. They were enchanted with each other and enchanted because they felt their families were enchanted too.
I was astonished. There she stood. My mother always said that you should not be seen either entering or leaving a lavatory, yet here was this goddess, unhurried, waving her fingers at a man when she was on the way there.
The fiancé leaned comfortably back and smiled across at the man opposite, who could not be anybody but his father. He had the same lanky ease, though he was thinner and greyer and was wearing a dog-collar. This old priest now looked across at me, and smiled.
The trio seemed to me to be the most enviable human beings I had ever seen. It seemed impossible that anything could harm them: easy, worldly, confident, rich, blooming with health; failure, rejection, guilt, all unknown to them. And how they loved each other at this wonderful point in their lives! When the girl came back they all smiled at one another all over again.
I could see that the girl did not belong quite to the same world as the priest. I knew she thought him just rather an old duck and that she had no notion of his job. I don’t know how I knew this, but I did. And I saw that the son had moved some way into the girl’s world, and would go farther into it. He’d got clear of all the church stuff. But nobody was worrying.
