The Northern Clemency Read online

  As for her, back in the dining room, she looked out of the window at the activity outside. Then, quite abruptly, she decided to go and offer the new neighbours a cup of coffee. Get to know them. It wouldn’t do to give the removal men coffee, and then be remote and stand-offish with the people you were going to live opposite. She stared, hard, at the unit, identical to her own, facing her house for anyone to see. Drawn out by that, she slipped on a pair of shoes and walked out of the house, leaving the front door open. “Won’t be a moment,” she called.

  “There’s Katherine Glover,” Anthea Arbuthnot observed to Mrs. Warner, both comfortably settled at the window with the best view. “I thought she wouldn’t be long.”

  “Why’s that, then?” Mrs. Warner said, enjoying this.

  “I wouldn’t suppose she’d put up with all that cheap tat lying about in the road,” Anthea said. “She’s very hot on that sort of thing. Only the other night, she was saying to me that something or other, I forget what, was bringing down the tone of the neighbourhood. One of nature’s complainers, I’d say.”

  “She works, she was telling me,” Mrs. Warner said, not believing a word of Anthea’s version, quite rightly.

  “That’s right,” Anthea said. “But it’s a very superior job, I believe.”

  “Those children, they’re not very superior,” Mrs. Warner said.

  “Not at all,” Anthea said. “Do you know, I think she’s just going over there to take a better look. Some people really are appallingly nosy,” she went on, but that was a joke, and both she and Karen tittered at themselves and their shameless vigil. “I don’t think much of that suite,” she went on. “I wouldn’t have it in the house myself.”

  “Hello?” Katherine called, hovering in the front door, calling into the empty house. She didn’t like to ring the doorbell when the door stood open.

  “Hello,” the youngest of the removal men said satirically, coming through with a single chair. “Mind your back.”

  “Hello?” she called again, and a woman her age, hair untidy, an expression of nervousness, came out into the hallway. At the same time, a pair of children, a boy, a child’s face, but too tall, and a girl with an unusual forward stance, dark and unformed, came halfway down the stairs, stood and looked.

  “Not there,” an impatient man’s London voice said from somewhere else, and then “Who’s that?” as he, too, came through, his shirt sleeves rolled. The four stood there and looked at Katherine, almost as if puzzled. She gathered herself.

  “That’s very kind of you,” Alice said, once Katherine had explained, had welcomed them to the neighbourhood, had suggested refreshments. Introductions had been made; Bernie had smiled quickly and returned to the sitting room. The children stayed where they were. “We’d like that—” but the children shook their heads, and Bernie had things to do. “Well, I would, anyway.” Katherine would have liked to have a look round the house—she’d never really known the Watsons, and the layout of all the houses was slightly different—but in a moment she and Alice were going back together over the road, and Alice was asking what the previous owners were like.

  “It’s extraordinary,” Alice said, “I hope they weren’t great friends of yours, but …” and she explained about the lightbulbs.

  Katherine laughed a little and, no, she hadn’t known them well. “Come in,” she said, with a big gesture. Alice had stopped halfway down the front garden path and was looking up at the front of their house. “It’s wistaria,” Katherine said, laughing. “You’re shocked to see it doing so well up here, I can see, but it’s had a good year, ours,” and, seizing Alice’s arm in a frank way, brought her into the house. “They surely didn’t take all the lightbulbs,” she said, and then she was explaining about the Yorkshire character. “You’re from London,” she said, not asking a question, and then was off on a great paragraph of generalisation. She could hear herself, how faintly mad she sounded, setting out what the people of Sheffield were like, and the people of the whole county too, all three ridings, “though we aren’t to say ridings any more, that’s all gone,” their tightness with money, the way they wouldn’t waste a word, their honesty and openness.

  “I see,” Alice said, evidently wondering a little as they came into Katherine’s house. But Katherine went on, unable to help herself, and Alice helped her out with a banality she’d heard or read or seen, that there was a friendliness and openness in the north, which just wasn’t there in the south.

  “You won’t find people keeping themselves to themselves in the same way here,” Katherine went on, forgetting that she had said exactly that of the departed miserly Watsons, who were nothing if not Yorkshire, had, indeed, according to Katherine, embodied the manners of the whole county.

  “I can see that already, the friendliness,” Alice said, smiling awkwardly at this generous neighbour.

  “That’s kind of you,” Katherine said. “But you’ll find that we’re all like that around here.” She thought of saying that there were few people in the area who didn’t keep their door on the snib, but fell silent: this new neighbour would quickly discover that it wasn’t true, for one thing, and in any case it would have made the road sound a little common. She put the kettle on; she heard herself and her brave party voice, not able to be kind without making a comment on that kindness.

  “Normally,” she went on, “I’d be at work by now.”

  “Really?” Alice said. “Where do you work?”

  “Well, it’s quite a new thing,” Katherine said. “I used to work, before the children were born. I mean, when I met my husband I was working at a solicitor’s, and then, after we married, I carried on working, though of course there was no real need, not at the solicitor’s, I didn’t carry on there. I worked at a school, not as a teacher, a sort of administrative job. Do you know Sheffield? No? Well, you must go and have a look at Peace Square. Most of Sheffield was bombed in the war, but that, it’s eighteenth century, untouched, really charming. That was where I worked, in the solicitor’s. Of course, when the children came along I gave up work, though you know, then, I don’t know if it was different in London, but it was quite unusual for a woman to go on working after she was married. You gave up, didn’t you, when you married, not when the children came along? It was the done thing.”

  “Yes,” Alice said.

  “And, of course, the children—well, there were three of them, there are three of them, I should say, so it’s only quite recently that I suddenly thought, I’m bored with sitting at home all day, doing nothing, I’m going to go out there and get a job to keep me occupied. And I did, and it’s the best thing,” she said emphatically, as if insisting on her point, “I ever did.”

  “Where do you work?” Alice said.

  “In Broomhill—oh, you won’t know—a florist’s shop, a new one,” she went on. “It’s only opened a year or two. Nick, the owner, he’s from London—he studied up here, and then he stayed, and he’s opened this little florist’s, and it’s doing very well. He was supposed to come to a party here a night or two back, but something came up and he couldn’t come. Actually, we were thinking, your house, we thought you’d probably be moved in by then and it would have been a good chance for you to meet everyone in the neighbourhood. That’s when we were planning it, and we set the date, thinking, they must be in and settled by then, the Watsons, they’d been gone so long, and then the date was fixed and the invitations sent out and we discovered, my husband and I, we’d missed you by two days. What a shame! You could have met him then.”

  “Your husband?” Alice said. “I’m sure—”

  “No,” Katherine said, “Nick, you could have met Nick, except that he couldn’t come. And you hadn’t moved in. I meant Nick. I don’t know why he didn’t come. Go away,” she said, raising her voice, as Daniel wandered into the kitchen.

  “Your son?” Alice said, nervously taking a cup of coffee.

  “Yes,” Katherine said. “I’m sorry, I should have introduced you. How old are your children?” />
  “Well, Sandra’s fourteen, and Francis, he’s eleven,” Alice said.

  “So they’ll be going to—”

  “Going to?”

  “I meant their schools.”

  “Oh—I think Sandra’s, it’s called—”

  “The thing is,” Katherine said, setting her cup down on the work surface and staring out of the window, “you’ve really found us at sixes and sevens this morning.”

  “I’m sorry,” Alice said, thinking that the woman needn’t have asked her over if it was as inconvenient as all that.

  “The fact is that my husband’s left me,” Katherine said.

  All at once there seemed to be an echo in the kitchen, and both Katherine and Alice listened to the noise it made. Katherine had spoken definitely, but she listened, now, to the decisive effect of a statement she had not quite known to be true; she listened to it with something of the same surprise as Jane, sitting on the stairs listening to her mother going on. Alice listened, too; she knew that some sentences needed to be treated, once spoken, with respect, left with a small sad compliment of silence.

  “I’m so sorry,” Alice said. “Was it very recently?”

  “It was last night,” Katherine said, almost angrily.

  “I’m so sorry,” Alice said. “Listen, I’m sure you really don’t want a stranger just at the moment—it was kind of you, but I’d better leave—”

  “Of course, you’ve got so much to do,” Katherine said.

  “No, it’s not that,” Alice said. “There must be someone who can come and—”

  “No,” Katherine said. “There isn’t anyone, really.” It was true. Her party rose up before her again; she found it difficult to call any of them a friend, and impossible to imagine, say, sitting with that pregnant girl and telling her anything. “I don’t have any friends.”

  “I’m sure it just feels like that,” Alice said.

  “No,” Katherine said. “It’s true. I’ve never had any friends, not really. You have friends at school, people you think are friends, but you lose touch with them afterwards. They get married, they go off and live on the other side of the city. And really all you had in common with them was that you were sitting in the same room with them most days, and when that stops, you don’t have anything much to talk about any more. And the people you work with, when you work, you leave, you say, ‘Oh, we’ll stay in touch,’ and you mean it, and they mean it, but you don’t. Maybe you see them once in a while, just bump into them, and they tell you what they’re doing, their children, and you tell them what your children are doing, and then you go on and nothing ever comes of it.

  “My God, you’re wondering, what have I walked into?”

  “No,” Alice said. “Don’t worry about that, I’m fine. You can talk to me, I’m here.”

  “There isn’t anyone else,” Katherine said simply. “I thought about Nick. Nick, he’s my boss, he runs the florist’s. I thought he was, you know, my friend, but he isn’t, not really. I’m just counting them up. There are the neighbours—they’re just neighbours, really. There are other people—I used to meet these women for coffee in the morning, but … Can you imagine? They say, what—‘We’re thinking of redecorating our lounge,’ and you say, ‘That’s interesting, my husband’s left me.’ They wouldn’t be able to say anything back. And Nick—I’ll tell you something. It’s all about Nick, really. I’m sure it is.”

  “What do you mean?” Alice said. She felt that this woman had really forgotten the situation; she had forgotten that Alice wasn’t just a passing acquaintance she’d never see again, but someone who from now on would live opposite her. She, after all, was now exactly one of those neighbours and Katherine didn’t seem to understand that.

  “I’ve been silly about him,” Katherine said, “I suppose. I like him, a lot. Well, he’s honestly not anything like most people in Sheffield. His brother lives in New York.”

  “I see,” Alice said.

  “I don’t have a brother in New York, I don’t know anyone who does,” Katherine said. “He’s funny, he’s really funny, when he talks—that’s the only way I can put it. And, you know, I’ve been kidding myself about him, I see that now. Because he’s a bit hopeless, really, and I’ve helped him out, I’ve kept him going, or so I thought, and he must have been quite grateful for it, or so I thought. But I had a party, it’s the first party I’ve had for I don’t know how long. Malcolm, he just doesn’t like the idea.

  “It would be a nice idea, you know? I said so to Malcolm. I said, I said wouldn’t it be nice if we had a little party for when the new neighbours move in, not just for that but for all the road to meet each other because these days, people, they don’t know each other, not because—but—well—I don’t know. I don’t know why people don’t know each other these days. My husband, Malcolm, he works in a building society, but he’s got lots of interests, outside interests, and he does know people. You wouldn’t think it to meet him, but he’s got all these friends through his societies—he’s keen on gardening, he’s in a society, and of course there’s the battle re-creation society, too—”

  Katherine, so measured in her speech, had begun to loosen and quicken, her voice now free and bold, her vowels quick and emphatic with the speech of her Sheffield childhood. It was as if for years now she had been answering the telephone under observation. The voice was liberated from constraint and full, of all things, of new love.

  “Battle re-creation?” the new neighbour was saying, puzzled.

  “Yes,” Katherine said. “It’s an odd thing. They re-create old battles—they dress up, once a year or so, they act out old battles, just as they were, on the moors. Of course it’s usually the Civil War, that’s usually it—they can’t stretch to different uniforms every time, but once they joined forces with a society from Wales and they did the battle of Waterloo, that must be ten years ago. It takes a lot of work, it’s only once a year. Malcolm loves it. He’s got friends through that, you see.

  “But most people, these days, they don’t have the time, and they don’t really make friends with their neighbours particularly. I didn’t expect Malcolm to agree to the party, but he did. The kids, they weren’t around—I can’t remember why not—oh, it was—well, we were on our own, and it was a nice moment, not that I’d engineered it or planned it to get a favour out of him. But I asked and he said straight away, ‘Yes, let’s have a party.’ He said it straight out, and he gave me a big smile, and it was something I’d asked, and it was something he could say that would please me. You see, he wanted to please me.”

  “He sounds a nice man, your husband,” Alice said.

  “I think he is,” Katherine said, almost surprised, it seemed, at the insight she’d been led to.

  “And you know him best,” Alice said.

  “Do you think so?” Katherine said.

  “Well,” Alice said. “You know, I honestly don’t know—I mean, I don’t know you, I certainly don’t know your husband but—”

  She stopped. Katherine withdrew her hand; without her noticing it, she had reached out and rested it on Alice’s. “I’m sorry,” Katherine said, after a time. Something of her formal voice had returned; she might have been regretting the lack of stargazer lilies, late on a Friday afternoon. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “That’s all right,” Alice said. “But you do know him best.”

  “I wonder,” Katherine said.

  “You must do,” Alice said. “Married to him.”

  “Maybe,” Katherine said. “It was just that moment. When he said, ‘Yes, let’s have a party.’ He hadn’t wanted to please me like that, not for years. He used to want to, it used to be all the time and you never noticed. You know when it’s been dry, all summer, and then one day it rains; and then everywhere there’s this smell of grass and earth and flowers, everywhere.”

  “Yes,” Alice said. “Yes, I know that.”

  “But you never noticed it had gone, that smell,” Katherine said. “And after a while, if it goes on
raining, you can’t smell it any more. It’s just the air, it’s just ordinary, you take it for granted.”

  “It was like that.”

  “Yes, it was like that,” Katherine said. “But I’m so stupid. I always ruin everything, always. He said that, and immediately I said the thing I was thinking really. I said, ‘Let’s have a party,’ and he said yes. And then I said we could ask all sorts of people, not just the neighbours, and he said, yes, we could, why not? I don’t know who he was thinking of, or who he thought I could be thinking of. But then I said what I couldn’t help saying, I said, ‘For instance, we could ask someone like Nick.’ And he didn’t say anything. But I went on, I said, ‘After all, he’s never been here, he’s never come to the house, it would be nice to have him over.’ It was an awful thing to say, it really was. I said it anyway. I don’t know what he said back. Maybe he said, ‘Yes, why not?’ but it was awful for him. I don’t know what I’ve been doing to him. I couldn’t help it.”

  By now they were sitting. Alice looked away from the beginnings of Katherine’s tears. The kitchen was brilliant with elective cheerfulness, constructed with wallpaper and blinds and spotlights; its morning yellow sunlit and shining with well-kept order and cleanliness. But there was a woman weeping in it, somehow. Alice had walked lightly across the road, and found herself in a place without landmarks. She looked out of the window tactfully; incredibly, her family were there, getting on with the unloading.

  “You’ll be wanting to get back,” Katherine said dully.

  Alice turned back to her. Probably better, she told herself firmly, that the woman tell her all this. She was going to have to tell someone, and better her than one of the woman’s children. There were things your children should never hear. She’d forgotten the woman’s name. That was awful, and now surely irreparable.