The Northern Clemency

‘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.

‘That’s all right,’ Alice said. ‘It’s better that you tell someone.’

‘Yes,’ Katherine said. ‘That’s right. It’s better I tell someone like you all this rather than the children. Or a neighbour.’

‘Yes,’ Alice said, startled. ‘Of course, I am a neighbour now.’

‘Yes,’ Katherine said. ‘Yes, I suppose you are.’

‘Listen,’ Alice said. ‘Do you mind if I ask you something directly, because—’

‘Depends what it is,’ Katherine said, smiling, wiping her face with a tea towel – the Beauties of Chatsworth, Alice registered irrelevantly. There was something cheeky in her recovering voice; it wasn’t true, Alice thought, that you saw what people were really like only in a crisis.

‘You don’t have to tell me anything at all,’ she said. ‘You really don’t. But is that really the whole story?’

‘The whole story?’

‘I meant about Nick,’ Alice said. ‘Nick? That’s his name?’

‘Yes,’ Katherine said. ‘About Nick?’

‘You and Nick, I mean,’ Alice said.

‘Me and Nick,’ Katherine said. A formality came into her voice again as she saw what Alice had meant. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not having an affair, if that’s what you’re suggesting.’

‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘That was what I was suggesting.’

‘Well,’ Katherine said, attempting a light laugh, ‘I suppose you did ask permission to ask a direct question, and I don’t know a more direct question than that. No, as it happens, Nick and I are not having some sort of mad passionate affair. I suppose there isn’t an enormous amount of point in my saying that. I wouldn’t be very likely to say anything different to you if we…’ she paused for a second ‘…we were in fact having an illicit affair. But one doesn’t happen to be.’

‘No,’ Alice said. ‘No, I believe you.’ It was true. She did believe it. Oddly, it was the way the note of deception had crept into the woman’s voice that convinced her. The woman, whatever else she was, had no gift for lying, and in most of what Alice had heard from her, the note of helpless truth had been audible. It was only at that point, asked directly if she were, in fact, having an affair, that the voice had started to listen to itself as if to monitor its scrupulous lies. And yet the voice was telling the truth; Alice had no doubt of that. The woman was not having an affair, as she said. But Alice had touched something secret and cherished; she had touched, surely, some characteristic and elaborate pretence. Katherine had lapsed into what, surely, was her usual allusive and interior style where Nick was concerned; she had treasured him up and made a precious mystery out of him before the only audience she had, her husband and children. There was nothing there; Alice could see that. But she’d played it out, and he’d believed what she’d wanted him to believe. The woman sat there in her kitchen, looking firmly ahead, away from Alice. She was smiling tautly, her expression now as she wanted it to be, and that must be bad to live with. An affair would be better; that was something to forgive, to walk away from. To have done nothing wrong, to make a secret of nothing, to coach yourself in the gestures of mystery and deflection, to turn your head away to suppress a manufactured expression of recalled rapture, all that, daily; from that there was no walking away.

‘Where’s he gone?’ Alice said.

‘Malcolm?’ Katherine said. ‘I don’t know. He’s just gone.’

‘He didn’t say anything?’ Alice said.

‘Nothing,’ Katherine said. ‘Not even a letter.’

Alice looked at her, seriously wondering. ‘He’s just disappeared?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ Katherine said. ‘Just like that.’

‘But—’ Alice said. ‘Sorry, but – I mean – are you sure that he’s not – well, it could be anything, it could be—’

‘No,’ Katherine said. ‘He’s all right. I know that. He phoned his office this morning. I don’t know where from. He’d do that – he’d phone the office so as not to let them down. Me—’ She left it at that. ‘No, he’s not hurt or in an accident. If that’s what you mean. He’s obviously left me. He told the office that his mother’s been taken ill and he had to go over there all of a sudden.’

‘And she hasn’t been taken ill?’ Alice said.

‘Not urgently,’ Katherine said, and started laughing, an ugly sound.

‘Not—’

‘She’s dead, she’s been dead for five years. I’m surprised the building society didn’t remember that when he said so. It’s a stupid thing for him to say to anyone. Honestly, I don’t have any doubt what’s happened.’

‘I see,’ Alice said. She didn’t see at all. There must be other solutions to this situation; she just couldn’t see what they were.

‘It’s just the waiting,’ Katherine said.

‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘I can see that. Not knowing.’

‘When there’s some news,’ Katherine said, ‘that won’t be so bad. Then I’ll know where he is, what’s happening, even, God forbid, if he’s done something stupid, but then we’ll know, there’ll be things to do. It’s the not knowing.’

‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘Have you talked to the children?’

‘No,’ Katherine said. ‘Yes. Well, sort of. Not all this. There’ll be time enough.’

‘If I were you,’ Alice said, ‘I’d just go and sit with them. You know, be all jolly and cheerful, as if nothing much has happened. They’ll be worried, too. I don’t know, go and help your little boy, show an interest in the snake, that sort of thing—’

‘The snake?’ Katherine said. ‘How on earth did you know about Tim and snakes?’

‘Well, I saw him,’ Alice said. ‘In the window.’

‘But how do you know—’

‘He was holding it up,’ Alice said.

‘A snake?’ Katherine said. ‘He hasn’t got a snake. He never shuts up about them, it’s snakes from the moment he wakes up, but I promise you—’

Alice looked back at her, and, incredibly, felt herself starting to blush. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to tell you anything you didn’t know. But he’s definitely got a snake up there. When we were walking up your drive, I looked up and there he ws in the window with a snake round his neck. I’d better be going.’

Outside on the stairs, Jane had been listening to quite a lot of this. The kitchen door had been taken off, long ago, or perhaps there had never been one, she couldn’t remember. There was a sort of open-plan idea going on, and whenever anything was fried in the kitchen, the smell carried right upstairs, the light patina of grease settling on almost everything throughout the house. You could hear anyone talking in there, too. She’d heard everything her mother had to say, but this would bring her out of the kitchen, and Jane got up briskly and walked back to her bedroom. In a second her mother was following her; up the stairs at quite a trot, you could hear. ‘Timothy,’ she said, raising her voice, ‘Timothy!’ and into his bedroom. Jane came out on to the landing; so did Daniel. Downstairs, the new neighbour was standing in the hallway; she looked a nice woman, and tried a smile, a confused one, on the pair of them. The moment for her farewell was on the far side of some terrible family scene. She just stood there. Jane would have done the same.

‘Is this true?’ Katherine said, in the doorway of Tim’s room.

‘What’s this now?’ Daniel said.

‘Tim’s got a snake,’ Jane said to Daniel.

‘Is it true?’ Katherine said.

‘Is it true what?’ Tim said. He had got up from his bed, had backed nervously away to the window. ‘I haven’t done anything.’

‘You heard what your sister said,’ Katherine said. ‘Have you got yourself a snake?’

Tim said nothing for a moment; his fingers, behind him, running fretfully along his little shelf. ‘I’d love a snake,’ he said forlornly, but his regular request, so long overlooked or greeted with the same brief riposte had lost conviction. ‘I really would.’

‘Do I have to hear from the neighbours that you’re hiding a snake in the house?’ Katherine said. ‘Where is it?’

‘It smells in here,’ Daniel said, coming to the door of Tim’s room. ‘It really does.’

‘I haven’t got any kind of snake,’ Tim said.

‘Are you lying to me?’ Katherine said. ‘What’s under your bed?’

‘Nothing,’ Tim said, breaking out into a wail, but Katherine was already on her knees, dragging out the glass case with one, then two hands. She pulled it into the middle of the room, and knelt there, staring at the thing. It was like an aquarium of air; littered with small rocks, little toys and, ignoring all of these, curled up, was a snake; thirty inches long, yellow, skinny and ugly. With a gesture of disgust, Katherine got up, pushing the case to one side, and stared at Tim. He started to cry, turning his face away.

‘What is that?’ Katherine said.

‘Let’s have a look,’ Daniel said, coming in and peering at the thing.

‘It’s – please don’t – I didn’t mean—’

‘That,’ Katherine said, ‘is a snake. And where did it come from?’

‘I – I—’ Tim said, but it was all too much, and his tears overcame him.

‘You can’t keep it,’ Katherine said. ‘There’s no argument about that. It’s going straight back to wherever you got it from.’

‘What’s he called?’ Jane said.

‘Geoffrey,’ Tim said, through his tears. ‘I only wanted a snake called Geoffrey.’

‘How do you know it’s male?’ Daniel said, looking closely. ‘Look, he’s seen me, he likes me—’

‘The man in the shop said,’ Tim said. ‘And, besides, you can tell the difference between male and female by—’

‘That’s enough,’ Katherine said, not letting Tim set out his expertise; it was the way he comforted himself. ‘It doesn’t matter what it is, it’s going back to the man in the shop. My God, it’s not dangerous, is it? You’ve not been as stupid as that?’

‘No,’ Tim said. ‘He wouldn’t hurt anyone, he wouldn’t. I take him out, I talk to him. You can tell he’s not venomous, because the venomous ones, generally—’

‘If I want to know about fucking snakes,’ Katherine said, beyond everything now, ‘I’ll ask for the information and I won’t have to think about who to ask, I’ve heard enough about them now. I could write an essay on the subject with everything we’ve all had to listen to. All I want to know now is where it came from and then you and I are going to take it back there. And I’m going to give the man in the shop –’ and, as she said that, she dropped into an awful, mincing voice of parody, nothing like Tim’s voice, but just the voice of loose cruel mockery ‘– a piece of my mind for selling anything, let alone a snake, to a small boy on his own. My God, what must he have been thinking of?’

Tim’s tears, which had been drying up, burst out with great force, and downstairs Alice, still hovering and listening, decided that she would not be missed, and should probably not hear this. She tried to feel pity: not eleven o’clock and all this deposited on top of the situation. But Katherine had sworn at her child, and had spoken to him not even as a sardonic teacher speaks, but as one child to another, a bully in the playground. No one should be heard speaking like that, and Alice let herself out quietly.

‘I didn’t mean to,’ Tim said.

‘Of course you meant to,’ Daniel said, apparently enjoying the situation. ‘You must have saved up for months.’

‘Years,’ Tim said. ‘I thought you’d like—’

‘Of course I don’t like it,’ Katherine said. ‘How do you open this thing?’

Tim, crying, said nothing, and Katherine got down on her knees and fiddled with the case. With a single quick gesture, she reached in and took the snake with both hands, one hand behind its head, the other about its tail, and stood up. The snake buckled and writhed in mid-air, astonished and frightened, its tongue flickering in and out. ‘Don’t take him back there,’ Tim said, dashing at her and trying to seize her arms. ‘He doesn’t like it there, please don’t—’

‘All right, then,’ Katherine said, nearly smiling, ‘if that’s what you want—’

And she walked out of the room decisively and down the stairs, the snake in her hands, her children following her.

‘That was Caroline,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said, coming back from the telephone. ‘You know, nice young thing, she works as a nursery nurse, very pregnant, I mentioned. She says she’s just setting off now so she’ll be here in five minutes, tops. I’ll go and put the kettle on.’

‘Oh, good,’ Mrs Warner said.

‘No, I won’t, she’s coming out again,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said, sitting down. Over the road, Alice had opened the front door of the Glovers’ house and closed it behind her, very gently. ‘She’s been a time.’

‘Saw herself out, I see,’ Karen Warner said. ‘Too much trouble to take your guests to the door to say goodbye. Manners.’

‘Terrible,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. ‘Would you have said that she enjoyed herself, meeting the Glovers?’

‘Well,’ Mrs Warner said, observing Alice treading, very gently, down the path, as if trying to escape without being noticed, casting a glance upwards at the house. ‘I expect it was very nice for her, really.’

‘Yes,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. ‘Very nice. All the same, I think I might pop over there when they’re a little settled. You don’t want them to be thinking that we’re all like that, do you?’

‘Like what?’ Mrs Warner said, rather sharply; she didn’t altogether approve of being superior about your neighbours, even if they probably deserved it, particularly two days after you’d drunk their wine and ate their food and admired their furniture.

Mrs Arbuthnot, who would have said exactly the same thing, hastened to qualify her point. ‘Not all the same,’ she said. ‘People, they aren’t all the same, are they?, even if they all live in the same road, and it’s nice to meet – well, anyway. It was a nice party she gave.’

‘Very nice,’ Mrs Warner said. ‘Of course,’ she went on, offering Anthea a little concession in return, ‘I’m not sure about letting those children stay up, cluttering up the party. A little out of control.’

‘The boy,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said, enjoying this part of the conversation. ‘The girl, of course, she’s not so bad, but I agree, I wouldn’t have them around, any kind of children, particularly when they’re at that difficult age. I notice you didn’t think of bringing your John along.’

‘No, I certainly didn’t,’ Mrs Warner said. ‘If you ask me, it’s nice to have an evening without your great lump hanging around and embarrassing you, and it’s not as if he needs a babysitter. They are a worry, though.’

‘A worry?’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. She remembered Mrs Warner’s John, hopeless. Mrs Warner explained.

‘Well,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said finally. ‘I’m sure it’ll all come right in the end. Now – goodness – what—’

Opposite, the front door of the Glovers’ had opened again. The removal men at the new people’s house, the new family, the husband, the girl and the elongated boy, as well as their mother, were all standing outside in an awkwardly arranged group, and had an excellent view. Through the door of the Glovers’ came Katherine. In her hands she was holding a – what was it – something limp but flexible, like—

‘That’s never a snake she’s got there,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. ‘It is, it’s a snake. Goodness me.’

‘Where’s that from?’ Mrs Warner said. ‘Not the garden, surely.’

‘I never heard of—’ Mrs Arbuthnot said, but she dried up at what was happening. Behind Katherine and her snake came her younger boy, screaming and crying, tugging at her ineffectually, and the two others standing by. The windows were shut, but the boy was screaming, ‘You fucking, fucking mother,’ as Katherine marched down the path.

‘Disgraceful,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. ‘He can’t be more than –’

‘Eight,’ Mrs Warner supplied. ‘Imagine. Look, here’s Caroline—’

But the nursery nurse, just heaving herself down the road, coming into view, stopped dead at Arbuthnot’s gate, and, like the new family and the removers and, inside, Anthea and Karen, watched Katherine and the children.

‘Don’t you ever—’ Katherine was screaming at her son, who was screaming back. ‘And if you ever do anything like that again – this is what happens when you do something as naughty as—’

She ran out of words. She didn’t seem to see anyone else around her; the snake, held between her two hands, she raised above her head in a bold, a dancer’s gesture, and flung it down on the pavement. ‘Stop it, stop it!’ Tim was screaming, over and over, but she raised her foot and brought the heel of her black shoe down on the snake’s head, crushing it in one. It flailed behind her like a whip. The screaming rose, went beyond words, and the little boy’s face purpled with terror and violence. His limbs flailed away from him in undecided, unformed gestures, as if some invisible force was plucking at them, and he screamed and screamed. Behind him, his sister turned away and, with a gesture too theatrical to be anything but instinctive, covered her eyes. Over the road, the new people, the Sellerses, stood and stared, and you couldn’t blame them.

‘My God,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said in her house, and Mrs Warner’s mouth moved, and it formed the words without being able to say them. Only Katherine, across the road, seemed composed: she had done what she had meant to do, and now it was all done, all over, and she stood up straight, paying no attention to her screaming son. But had it been enough? There was, surely, a little uncertainty in the way she scanned the houses, at whoever might be watching what she had so publicly done. The doorbell rang.

‘My God,’ Anthea said, hurrying to let Caroline in. ‘Did you see—’ she said, opening the door.

But the nursery nurse, enlisting the doorjamb to support her bulk, was muddily pale, grey to the point of greenness in the face; she had seen it. And it had been all too much for her, the sight of a woman, a mother, flinging down a snake almost in her path and then stamping on it, the snake’s head making a vile porridge on the pavement, and then the screaming – Caroline leant forward, as if in a swoon, and Anthea came forward with her arms open to catch her. But she leant forward in a single shy apologetic motion and, for the first time in several months now, vomited over Anthea, vomited copiously over the small glass coffee-table, the hallway rug, the art-deco figurine of a Greek dancer Anthea had always meant to have valued, everywhere.

‘My God!’ Anthea said – it was all too much and, with a little scream, she ran upstairs, plucking at her puked-over bosom as Caroline, still bubbling over, tried to raise herself up and start apologizing.

‘It could have been worse,’ Mrs Warner said, coming out gingerly, and trying not to look, guiding the poor girl into the downstairs clockroom, trying to help her without actually touching her. Because if there was one thing she hated—

The van was quite unloaded, and the removers gone, and Bernie had fetched thirty lightbulbs, half bayonets, half screw-ins, a mix of sixty and hundred-watt bulbs, and Alice, Sandra and Francis were sitting in their new sitting room, the furniture somehow arranged. They were surrounded by sealed boxes in the evening light, eating a kind of scratch supper off their knees, just for tonight.