The Northern Clemency Read online

  The book was about snakes. Timothy gazed at the photographs as if at a family album, committing the names he already knew to a further refreshment of memory.

  He had been there for three hours, wedged between the sofa and the large picture window. If the party went outside, they would see him, and probably laugh. From time to time the back of the sofa, the porridgy tweed panels between the wood frames, bulged as someone sat down, swelling towards him, like some inchoate mass searching for him. There was a queer smell of dust down here, and the nasty smell of spilt alcohol. It was his favourite place when there was anyone in the house.

  “I don’t know where he’s got to,” Katherine Glover said to a departing guest; it was too warm for anyone to have brought coats, but she made a helpful gesture. “He’s a little bit shy.”

  The guest smiled; her husband made a honking noise, understanding that the woman was talking about her son, not knowing that there was any son apart from the great lout who had been lolling on the sofa, gawping at the ladies.

  On the mat was an envelope, which, surely, had not been there earlier; it was addressed to Katherine, and she picked it up. In front of her, the remains of her party; the poor pregnant woman, harassed and tired, waiting for her husband to want to go. But the husband was drunk, his hair rumpled, making a hash of a joke to a group of husbands. Where was Malcolm? Sitting down, his host’s bottle in his hand, all refills at an end; and the Mozart had come to an end, too, leaving the patient silence to dismiss the guests.

  “You looked so nice,” Jane said to her mother, coming up to her in the hall, munching a cheese straw, “in your posh frock and your hair like that.”

  Katherine felt so terribly tired. “I don’t know why I bothered,” she said crossly. “They didn’t appreciate it at all.”

  Jane looked at her mother in astonishment. “It was a lovely party,” she said. “You should always wear your hair like that.”

  “What, to work?” Katherine said. “Don’t be daft.”

  “Thank you so much,” the drunk man was saying, “for a lovely time, my dear. We’ve had a lovely, lovely time.”

  He leant towards her, as if to kiss her, but did not; Katherine had him by the shoulders, a gesture that might have been affectionate, holding him at arm’s-length inspection.

  “We’ve had a very good time,” the pregnant woman said. But it didn’t look it.

  “When is your baby due?” Jane said abruptly.

  “In November,” the woman said, not smiling. She took her husband by the arm, and they went.

  “Where’s your dad?” Katherine said, but then Daniel was in the hall, up from the sofa for the first time all evening.

  “Just going out for a second,” he muttered.

  “One second—” Katherine said, but he was gone. “Oh, well.”

  And then Daniel, who had answered all polite inquiries with a brief grunt and a shrug, who had not moved from his perch on the arm of the sofa, like a vast and lurid ornament, proved himself to have been all along the ringmaster of the festivities. Because with his departure the party was decisively over, and the few remaining guests moved towards the front door where Mrs. Glover, her daughter at her side, was standing. In kindness, they bent and said a word to Malcolm, who said something in return, and then, with a chorus of thanks, they were out.

  “I do love your unit,” Mrs. Warner said over her shoulder, a final kindly thought disappearing into the lush August night. “As I was saying, I do love your …”

  Goodbye, goodbye … and Katherine opened the envelope in her hand. It was an unfamiliar hand, elegant and swooping, in real ink, and the general gist of apology was clear before the signature was deciphered. She read it again, and smiled, her first genuine smile all evening.

  “Have they all gone?” she heard Timothy saying, as he got up from behind the sofa, book in hand.

  “I think so,” his father said, his voice muffled, regretful in the other room. “Where’s your brother?”

  Daniel was in the street. It was half past nine. The road and the estate, in this summer twilight, had a lush warm glow; in the houses, up and down the avenue, single lights were coming on automatically, guiding the couples home from the party; husbands and wives, arm in arm and in the summer gloaming turned into lovers. The thin trees, planted ten years before, had lost their daylit lack of conviction and formed a delicate orchard, marking the edges of the quiet street. The night was perfumed, and Daniel, perfumed too, sniffed it all up.

  Barbara was there, waiting for him. He had told her to wait on the wall outside number eighty-four. It was less suspicious to be casual like that rather than, as she was doing, cowering under the porch at the side of the house. Everyone knew it was empty; anyone could see her from the street. It was asking for trouble. Worse, it showed Barbara didn’t trust him, didn’t automatically think he was right. He decided to dump her after tonight, or maybe after the weekend.

  “I thought you weren’t coming,” she said, in a burst.

  “Well, I’ve come now,” he said, and dived for her mouth. She gave a small squeal, the beginning of a protest; but he knew to let his mouth just stay at the edge of a kiss, not forcing it, and in a second her hard teeth seemed to make way. They stayed like that for a minute; once or twice she made a pretty little noise, almost animal, and each time, not quite knowing whether he was mocking or encouraging her, he made something of the same noise back, but deeper, the sound vibrating through their twinned lips, making them buzz and ache, fulfilling the desire and stirring up more. Finally he pulled away. He looked at her critically; the little squeal, the blonde hair frizzing up in one, the pink roundness of her pinked-up face, lips and tits. Perhaps the boys had it right when they called her Crystal Tipps and laughed at him. Or maybe they were jealous. “I came as soon as I could,” he said. “They were having a party.”

  “You said they were,” Barbara said. “I don’t know why I couldn’t be allowed to come. I’d have behaved.”

  “It was boring,” he said. “There was nothing but neighbours. They didn’t know each other, my mum didn’t know them. I don’t know why she asked them.”

  “We know all our neighbours,” Barbara said with astonishment, “their birthdays, star signs, the lot. The telly programmes they watch, even.”

  “That’s because you live in a terraced house,” Daniel said. “You could hear everything through the walls. When they fuck.”

  “Do you mind?” Barbara said, objecting to the word rather than Daniel’s snobbery. But she drew close again, pulling him with her out of the light from the street towards the empty, overgrown garden.

  “They were all saying,” Daniel murmured, his mouth against hers, running his tongue against her lips as they walked backwards into the lyric night, “they were all saying, who’s that gorgeous girl, goes into the neighbours’ gardens with Daniel Glover—”

  “They were not,” Barbara said, her eyes bright, her hand running down Daniel’s side.

  “They were,” Daniel said, his hand, his rippling fingers rising, weighing, cupping, down and under, beneath and within. “And I said—”

  “Oh, give over,” Barbara said. But Daniel carried on, his hushed, exuberant voice now muted, and as they fell back against the lawn, which had grown into a thick meadow, she gave in to what he knew she felt. There was some indulgent amusement deep within him, and he never completely surrendered to the sensation, was never reduced to begging animal favours or further steps in the exploration of what she would grant him. His gratification, always, lay in seeing her so helpless; his pleasure in the expert and improving knack of bestowing pleasure. The noises she made were on some level comic, “Nnngg,” she went, and an observation post in him kept alert over the expanding border territory between her propriety and her desire. They began when he chose to begin; they ended when he said he had to go, and when he knew that she would say disappointedly, “Do you have to?”

  Barbara was in his maths set; he’d heard some of the things she’d been letting
out about him. Flattering, really. He didn’t talk about her. Another couple of times, and that would be it; he’d seen the way Michael Cox’s sister looked at him, though she was eighteen next month. That would be something to talk about.

  . . .

  It was not clear to any of the Glovers what the purpose of the party had been. Not even to Katherine, whose idea it had been. He hadn’t come, after all. When the last of the guests had gone, the other two children went upstairs, Timothy holding a book. Malcolm sat down and, with his heels, dragged the armchair into a position facing the television. He did not get up to turn it.

  Katherine put the letter on the shelf over the radiator, and began to go round the room, picking up glasses and plates. Malcolm had put the empty bottles in the kitchen as he had got through them. There were two open bottles left, one red and one white. The food had mostly been eaten, the tablecloth around the large oval dish of Coronation Chicken stained yellow where spoonfuls had been carelessly dropped. She began to talk as she collected the remains. She was wiping the thought that Nick, after all that effort, hadn’t come. He’d said he would.

  “They seemed to have a good time,” she said. “I thought the food went well. I was worried they wouldn’t be able to eat it standing up, but people manage, don’t they?”

  Malcolm said nothing. She sighed.

  “It’s a shame the new people over the road haven’t moved in yet,” she said. “It would have been a good opportunity for them to meet the neighbours. Most people came, I think. There was a nice little letter from the lady in the big house, saying she was sorry she couldn’t come. She doesn’t like to go home after dark. Silly, really—it’s only a hundred yards, I don’t know what she thinks would happen to her, and it’s not really dark, even now. They get set in their ways, old people.”

  Malcolm gave no sign of listening.

  She couldn’t be sure what the reason for the party had been. But for her it had been defined by the people who hadn’t come rather than those who had. Not just one person; two of them. All evening she’d felt impatient with her guests who, by stooping to attend, had shown themselves to be not quite worth knowing. She projected her idea of the sort of friends she ought to have on to the new people—the Sellerses—and Mrs. Topsfield, with the exquisite handwriting and supercilious reason for not attending. The Sellerses were going to be smart London people. That was absolutely clear.

  “Did you miss your battle re-creation society tonight?” she said to Malcolm, to be kind.

  “Yes,” he said. “It doesn’t matter, once in a while.”

  “You could have invited some of them to come tonight,” she said, although she’d rather not have to meet grown men who dressed up in Civil War uniforms and disported themselves over the moors, pretending to kill each other. It was bad enough being married to one.

  “I thought it was just for the neighbours,” Malcolm said. “You said you weren’t going to invite anyone else.”

  Upstairs, Jane shut her door. It was too early to go to bed, but it was accepted that she spent time in her room; homework, her mother said hopefully, but, really, Jane sat in her room reading. There were forty books on the two low shelves, and a blank notebook. She had read them all, apart from The Mayor of Casterbridge, a Christmas present from a disliked aunt; she had been told that Jane liked reading old books and that, with a life of Shelley, now lost, unread, had been the result. Jane’s books were of orphans, of love between equals, of illegitimate babies, treading round the mystery of sex and sometimes ending just before it began.

  Her room was plain. Three years before she had been given the chance to choose its décor. Her mother had made the offer as the promise of special treaty enacted between women, something to be conveyed only afterwards to the men. Jane had appreciated the tone of her mother’s confiding voice, but was baffled by the possibilities. It was that she had no real idea what role her bedroom’s décor was supposed to play in her mother’s half-angry plans for social improvement, and she was under no illusions that if she actually did choose wallpaper, curtains, paint, bedspread, carpet, even, that her choice would be measured against her mother’s unshared ideas and probably found disappointing. Would it be best to ask for an old-fashioned style, “with character,” as her mother said, a pink teenage girl’s bedroom? Or to opt for her own taste, whatever that might be?

  In the end she delayed and delayed, and now her bedroom was a blank series of whites and neutrals. She had failed in whatever romance her mother had planned for her; and, with its big picture window, the room showed no sign of turning into a garret. It looked out on to a suburban street. Daniel’s room, at the back of the house, had the view of the moor, which meant nothing to him. Over her bed, one concession: a poster, bought in a sale, of a Crucible Theatre production of Romeo and Juliet. Daniel had seen it, not her—he’d done the play for O level. Someone had given him the poster, but it was over her bed that two blue-lit figures embraced, one already dead.

  She wondered what the new people over the road would be like, and let her thoughts go on their romantic course.

  . . .

  It was the next day, in London. The house had been packed into a van. It was driving northwards, towards Sheffield. On every box was written, in large felt-tip letters, the name SELLERS.

  “Nice day for it,” the driver said.

  “Yeah, you don’t want to be moving in the rain,” the other man put in.

  The driver was on Sandra’s right, his mate, the chief remover, on her left. On the far side the boy, ten or fifteen years younger than the others, who had said nothing.

  “Why do you say that?” Sandra said. She was pressed up against the man on her left, and the driver’s operations meant that his left hand banged continually against her thigh. The lorry’s cabin was meant only for the comfort of three. There was a dull, dusty smell in the cabin, of unwashed sweaters and ancient cigarette stubs. The floor was littered with brown-paper sandwich wrappers.

  “Well, stands to reason,” the chief remover said. “If it’s raining, that’s no fun.”

  “And there are always customers who insist on tarpaulins,” the driver said.

  “Tarpaulins?” Sandra said. “Whatever for?”

  “It’s their right,” the chief remover said. “Say you’re moving a lot of pictures, or books, or soft furnishings—”

  “The customer, they don’t like it if you carry them out into the rain, and sometimes you have to leave them outside for a minute or two, and if it’s raining—”

  “Hence the tarpaulin,” the driver said. Behind them, the full tinny bulk of the removals van thundered like weather. There was a distant rattle, perhaps furniture banging against the walls or a loose exhaust pipe. Below, the roofs of cars hurtled past.

  “Because,” the chief remover said, “if something gets wet, even for a couple of minutes, if the whole load gets rained on, you get to the other end, see, and it’s offloaded and put in place, and a day or two later, there’s a call to the office, a letter, maybe, complaining that the whole lot stinks of damp.”

  “Hence the tarpaulin,” the driver said again.

  “Course,” the chief remover said, “nine times out of ten, it’s not the furniture, it’s the house, the new house, because a house left empty for a week, it does tend to smell of damp, but they don’t take that into consideration. But the tarpaulins, it doubles the work for us, it does.”

  They were nearing the motorway now, having crossed London. The traffic that had held them steady on the North Circular for an hour was thinning, and the removals van was moving in bigger bursts. The car with Sandra’s parents in it, her brother in the back, had long been lost in the shuffle of road lanes, one moving, one holding; a music-hall song her grandmother used to sing was in her head: “My old man said follow the van … you can’t trust the specials like an old-time copper …” No, indeed you couldn’t, whatever it meant.

  She went back to being interested and vivacious before she had a chance to regret her request to t
ravel up to Sheffield in the van, rather than in the car. “You must see everything in this job,” she said vividly.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” the boy surprisingly said, snuffling with laughter.

  “Don’t mind him,” the driver said. “He can’t help himself.”

  “It’s a shame, really,” the chief remover said.

  “A bit like being a window-cleaner, I expect,” Sandra said, before the boy could say he’d seen nothing to match her and her jumping into the van like that. She was fourteen; he was probably five years older, but she was determined to despise him. “I mean, you get to see everything, everything about people.”

  “You’d be surprised,” the chief remover said.

  “That’s the worst of it over,” the driver said. The road was widening, splitting into lanes, its sides rising up in high concrete barriers, and the London cars were flying, as if for sheer uncaged delight, and the four of them, in their rumbling box, were flying too. “Crossing London, that’s always the worst.”

  “You see some queer stuff,” the chief remover said. “People are different, though. There’s some people who, you turn up, there’s nothing done. They expect you to put the whole house into boxes, wrap up everything, tidy up, do the job from scratch.”

  “Old people, I suppose,” Sandra said.

  “Not always,” the driver said. “You’d be surprised. It’s the old people, the ones it’d be a task for, that aren’t usually a problem.”

  “It’s the younger ones, the hippies, you might call them, expect you to do everything,” the chief remove said. “My aunt, you come across some stuff with that lot, things you’d think they’d be ashamed to have in the house, let alone have a stranger come across.”

  “That’s right,” the boy said. He seemed almost blissful, perhaps remembering the boxing-up of some incredible iniquity.

  “Of course,” Sandra said, “you’re not to know what’s in a lot of boxes, are you? There might be anything.”

  The three of them were silent: it had not occurred to them to worry about what they had agreed to transport.