The Northern Clemency

The husbands of the road left for work at seven thirty, at eight, at shortly after eight, to be at work by nine. Some had noted the removals van, blocking half the road; the later departures had observed the furniture being placed right across the pavement, and worried, some on behalf of the furniture, some on behalf of anyone wanting to walk down the pavement, as was their right, not obstructed by household chattels and trinkets. That was quite good, but when the interest of the road quickened with the arrival of the new family around nine o’clock, the curiosity was limited to the non-working wives. Most of them welcomed this; they preferred not to have to share their mood of observation with a man. It usually meant dissembling, pretending not to be all that interested. But if you were on your own, you could take a healthy interest, and not have to explain anything to anyone.

Anthea Arbuthnot, in her flowered housecoat, was paying close attention. She had been finding important things to occupy her around every single one of the windows with a good view ever since the men had started unloading the van. Finally, she had drawn up a chair and a small table by her sitting-room window and made a show of reading the Morning Telegraph over a cup of coffee. ‘They’ll not have driven up from London this morning,’ she said to herself, and started speculating about their arrangements.

In Karen Warner’s house, her husband had gone to work an hour before. Her son, nineteen, a disappointment, lay at full length on the sofa. It was one of her rules: he might have nothing to do and nothing to get up for, but he would get up every morning and not lie in bed. In practice, it meant he got up, dressed, stretched out on the sofa and remained horizontal all morning. The telephone rang.

At the other end, Anthea Arbuthnot announced herself; Mrs Warner agreed that it had been nice at the Glovers’, the other night, and nice to have had a chance to meet in a social manner. Karen wondered, rather, why Anthea Arbuthnot was telephoning at the expensive time of day when she was only a hundred yards away. But in a moment she pointed out that the new family had just arrived, that they were standing outside with their furniture spread across the road, and invited Karen to pop round to take her morning coffee with her at, say, eleven. Putting the telephone down, it seemed to Karen that Anthea might have invented some kind of purpose for her telephone call, some occasion to justify the invitation – the loan of the garlic-crusher she’d been so interested by the other night would have done.

‘Really, she’s no shame,’ Karen said out loud.

‘Pardon?’ her son said, after a minute.

But Karen had been talking to herself – he wasn’t much company, her worry of a son. ‘I hope you’re planning to get something done today,’ she said.

‘Probably,’ he said.

Further up the road, the nursery nurse had phoned in sick. Everything about her seemed to be swelling, not just her soft parts, her belly, her breasts, not even her joints, her ankles, her knees, her elbows blowing up like warty old gourds. Everything seemed to be swelling, even her bones, and her face was purple and tight and aching with the effort involved in lying flat on a bed for eight hours. The nursery was growing politely unbelieving – you could hear it in their voices. She knew they’d put the phone down, and start swapping stories about Chinese peasant women giving birth behind bushes in their lunch breaks. The phone rang and she felt it might be something important – she couldn’t ignore it.

It was only the woman from down the road, the one they’d met the other night. ‘I let it ring,’ Anthea Arbuthnot said, ‘because I know what it’s like. You’re at the other end of the house and by the time you get there it stops ringing just as you pick it up and you spend the whole day wondering who it might have been. How are you, my dear?’ She apologized, she hadn’t noticed the new neighbours moving in; she agreed the other night had been nice; she demurred at the suggestion of coffee later, but there must have been some uncertainty in her voice, because in two more exchanges she had agreed to lug herself down the road. She put the telephone down, and scowled at it.

Taking the key from a willing, smiling Bernie, Alice opened the door to the house. She thought nothing of all these neighbours; she gave no thought to their being surrounded by all those accumulated possessions which in her case were pressed into boxes or arranged haphazardly in the open air. Behind her, the children came in, at first cautiously, craning round corners, and then with increasing confidence of possession, Sandra striding boldly upstairs, already arguing over her shoulder with her brother over bedrooms, something already decided. Outside, Bernie was discussing matters with the men in high good humour: he was good with workmen. Alice thought it would be a relief when the house was straight; she thought, too, that after being left empty for all those weeks, it smelt like a cloakroom, like the smell of dust heating on a long-unused toaster, and, a little, of piss. It looked not empty to her but emptied, robbed, and a little pathetic. She walked through the empty rooms; they seemed small, but she reminded herself that empty rooms did seem small. You put furniture in them, and they started to seem larger; you went on putting furniture in them and at a certain point they started to seem small again.

It was the curtains that gave each room its air of abandonment rather than emptiness. All the curtains had been left behind, and still hung limply at each window. It had made sense to Bernie, and to Alice too, at the time: your old curtains aren’t going to fit the new windows. And the house was going to be empty for weeks, maybe months. There wasn’t much you could do about that, but perhaps if there were curtains up, it might look to anyone passing that it wasn’t abandoned. You heard about squatters, these days.

Bernie came in and, shyly, put his arm round her waist where she stood, at the back window.

‘Look at that,’ she said. ‘Look at the garden.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’ll need some work. Nobody’s touched it for months.’

‘Maybe more than that,’ she said. ‘Oh God,’ she said.

‘What?’ Bernie said. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Just so much to do,’ she said.

‘Not so much,’ he said. ‘I tell you what. I’ll mow the lawn straight away, it won’t look so bad. And then we’ll leave it till spring.’

That wasn’t really what she’d meant, but she said, ‘You’ll need more than a lawnmower. It’s too long for that, the grass. You know, I wish—’

‘What do you wish?’ he said, smiling; it was something they had always come back to, her wishing, his asking to know her wish.

‘Oh, I was thinking about the carpets,’ she said. ‘What’s it going to look like, none of the old carpets fitting properly? I wish we’d persuaded the Watsons – oh, well, never mind. You don’t suppose—’

‘What?’ Bernie said.

‘I’ve just had an awful thought,’ Alice said. She loosened Bernie’s arm, and turned round to look at the light fitting. ‘I can’t believe it.’

‘They haven’t,’ Bernie said. ‘They can’t have done.’

‘Maybe they’ve just taken that lightbulb,’ Alice said, without any hope.

‘Let’s go and look,’ Bernie said.

Room by room, they went through the house, and it turned out to be true. ‘What are you looking at?’ Sandra said, as they came into the room where she and Francis were bickering, and her mother explained. The children stopped their argument, and followed their parents through the house. For whatever reason, perhaps after the negotiations over the curtains and the failed ones over the carpet, the Watsons had apparently, before leaving, gone through the house and carefully removed every single lightbulb. It was incredible. On Francis’s face was a look, a usual one with him, of something like fear; he felt these difficulties as catastrophes, personal catastrophes, Alice always thought.

‘Well,’ Bernie said, when they had finished, and had settled, the four of them, on the sofa in the middle of the sitting room, ‘I’m going to write them a letter. Give them a piece of my mind. How many lightbulbs is it? Fifteen?’

‘Problem?’ the foreman said, coming in with the smaller of the coffee-tables. Alice explained.

‘Happens all the time,’ the foreman said. ‘You’d be surprised. Mostly out of meanness.’

‘My dad works for the Electricity,’ Francis offered.

‘Well, he’ll know all about lightbulbs,’ the foreman said jocosely.

‘No,’ Francis said seriously. ‘It’s mostly other things.’

Katherine had made her phone calls now, lying to everyone except the police. To the building society she said that Malcolm was unwell; he couldn’t come to the phone, he was sleeping after a restless night. She said this in her best, her bored telephone voice, consciously removing the fact that she had, the night before, called the same woman in a state of panic, telling her about Malcolm’s disappearance. She could hear the puzzlement at the other end of the line, and finally his secretary said, ‘But he seems all right.’

Katherine said sharply, ‘No, he’s not well.’

‘He’s asleep at home?’ his secretary said. ‘Are you sure about that?’

‘Are you suggesting—’ Katherine said.

‘It’s just that he phoned five minutes ago,’ the secretary said. ‘I was sorry to hear about his mother.’

‘His mother?’ Katherine said. ‘Oh – his mother—’

‘Yes, being taken ill like that – what I don’t understand—’ she went on, but Katherine interrupted her with apologies before putting the receiver down. She sat by the telephone, breaking out into a light sweat of sheer panic, her heart thumping, and in two minutes she dialled the same number and apologized – the confusion with Malcolm’s mother, she’d meant to be phoning the children’s, Daniel’s school, it was Daniel, their son, who was ill. ‘I must be going round the bend,’ she said amusedly, ‘ringing the number next to the school’s in the address book and saying Malcolm when I meant Daniel.’

‘That’s all right,’ the secretary said, obviously thinking there were better things for her to be doing. She phoned the florist’s, and this time, to Nick, but with even more of a telephone voice, it was her that was ill. ‘Eaten something,’ she said. ‘Awful bore.’

Nick told her not to worry, he’d hold the fort; there was something almost enthusiastic about the way he said it, and then he apologized again for not making it to her party the other night. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking,’ he said. She had forgotten all about that; almost all about that; but he had reminded her, and that absence, so painful and crucial, returned at once, shamefully battling in her mind against this now more urgent, more dutifully felt absence. To the police, she would have told the exact truth, but now she could only tell them that Malcolm had turned up safe and sound, and in a sense, so he had.

Thank God, with five of them, the washing was constant; thank God that supplied her with something to do. As far as she could see, going through the piles, then, her heart beating, their joint wardrobe, Malcolm had taken no clothes. What that meant, good or bad, she couldn’t articulate even in her mind. She took it all downstairs, at least three loads, and deposited it on the utility-room floor. That was where the washing-machine, the boiler, the freezer, all sat together. It was a good thing with the washing machine; an efficient new one, its cycle went into passages of immense fury you couldn’t make yourself be heard over when it had been in the kitchen. Even in the utility room, it made the walls of the house shake at its juddering climaxes. She put a load of washing in. That would be something to fill the time, that and the ironing. She could have welcomed the children going off to school, or at least engaging in some kind of holiday activity that would have removed them for a while.

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 emphatic ally, 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.