The Northern Clemency

‘Sounds like she’s not all there,’ Bernie said.

‘No,’ Alice said. ‘She’d had a shock.’

‘I don’t blame him,’ Bernie said.

‘Who? Oh, her husband,’ Alice said. ‘That’s an awful thing to say, love.’

‘Well, I don’t,’ Bernie said. ‘I’m worried at the idea of living opposite someone like that.’

‘She must be mental,’ Sandra said.

‘Imagine what it’d be like being married to her,’ Bernie went on. ‘You wouldn’t be blamed by anyone, really, for leaving her. Mentally unbalanced.’

‘We don’t know,’ Alice said. ‘It might be the shock, your husband ups and goes. That’s a terrible thing to happen.’

‘No, love,’ Bernie said. ‘Anyone normal, they just get on with things. They don’t—’

‘She took the snake,’ Francis said meditatively, telling the story bit by bit, almost more for himself than for anyone else, ‘and she threw it down and she jumped on its head until it was dead, and it was the boy’s snake, and he was there watching.’

‘That’s about the sum of it,’ Bernie said. ‘It’s not normal, whatever’s happened to you. It’s not still lying there, is it? Christ.’

‘No,’ Francis said. ‘The girl, his sister, she came out a while ago with a plastic bag and a broom, cleared it up and threw it away, and she washed the pavement down, too.’

‘Thank God for that,’ Bernie said. ‘Someone in the family’s got a bit of sense, apart from him, the dad, had the sense to walk out.’

‘Poor woman,’ Alice said. ‘I wish—’ She dried up and took a forkful of Russian salad from her plate of cold food. It was like the supper of a Christmas night, the dinner she’d arranged for them the first night in a new house, and the events of the day similarly cast a sensation of exhausted manic festivity over their plates.

‘What do you wish, love?’ Bernie said.

‘I don’t know,’ Alice said. You couldn’t say to your husband and children that you wished you’d kept the information of this woman’s situation to yourself. You owed her nothing, you wouldn’t keep anything from these three. But she still thought she might not have repeated any of that. ‘I bet he’ll be back,’ she said, surprising herself.

‘Why do you say that?’ Bernie said.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I just think he will be. He doesn’t sound like the sort of man who wouldn’t come back. He works in a building society.’

‘She sounds mental,’ Sandra said. ‘Killing the little boy’s pet like that in front of him. I wouldn’t mind a snake as a pet. If she couldn’t have it in the house, she could have found a home for it. Oh, well, who cares?’

‘You’re not to be getting ideas,’ Bernie said to Sandra, ‘about snakes.’

‘No, I don’t really want one,’ she said. ‘But killing it, that was horrible.’

‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘It was horrible.’ But she felt—

She felt what Katherine, across the road, felt.

Katherine was sitting on her own in the dining room. The table was empty and not set; there was no food and Katherine had not prepared any. The children had been into the kitchen and had picked up what they could from the fridge, from the cupboards; children’s meals, the sort of thing they arranged for themselves between meals, coming home from school. At least Jane and Daniel had; Tim was still upstairs, gulping and muttering to himself in his room. The last time she’d looked, his face was in his pillow and he refused to take it out at any expressions of regret or apology. Inconsolable. It was just too bad for him; and he liked his food. She didn’t worry, not for the moment. What she felt was that the primary drama of the day, the awful thing that had happened to her, was Malcolm’s disappearance. But that, now, was inside and had only happened to her. What had taken its place, and remained in its place, was what she had done in the street: stamped on her son’s snake at the utmost pitch of despair and rage. Malcolm would come back, there was no doubt about that. That would finish the story in everyone’s memory; his disappearance, for whatever reason, would end up being trivial and anecdotal. What would remain was not what had been done to her but what she had done. In the dining room, only the small lamp on the piano was switched on, and the room was dim and gloomy, a pool of light in the blue evening. She sat, her hands on the table, like a suspect in a cell; she breathed in and out steadily, knowing what she had now made of herself. And in time night came, still with no word from Malcolm, whom everyone had now apparently forgotten.

Eventually she got up, switched the lights off, one after another, and went to bed. Over the road, the lights were still on. She looked at her watch and it was only a quarter past ten.

Malcolm came back two days later. She had stopped caring. That morning, she had taken the rubbish out, and over the road, the new people, they’d been coming out at the same time. She had been prepared to pretend that they hadn’t seen each other – she just didn’t want to think about the things she’d said to Alice. And she’d thought they would probably want to do the same, ignore her politely. Maybe, in a few months, they could pretend to be meeting for the first time, and everything could be, if not forgotten, then at least not mentioned, and they could both pretend they had forgotten. But Alice obviously didn’t know the rules of the game. They were getting into their ridiculous little car, some kind of small square boxy green thing, and Alice saw Katherine with her boxes of rubbish, the remains of the party, the empty bottles, the smashed glasses, the chicken carcasses, which had been attracting flies outside the back door waiting for the binmen’s day. She hesitated, evidently not knowing what she was supposed to do, and raised a hand. It was a gesture that might have been a greeting, or might have been the beginning of her scratching her head.

Perhaps it might have been possible. Perhaps if Malcolm had never left, she’d now be wandering over, asking how they were settling in, when the children would be starting school, offering advice about plumbers and local carpet-fitters, meeting the children and the husband, inviting them over for a drink with Malcolm and her children some time in the next day or two. But it was hard to see how she could manage that on her own. Alice didn’t seem to understand the rules of the situation. All the other neighbours did: the day before, Katherine had been walking slowly down the road, and the door to Mrs Arbuthnot’s had opened, issuing Mrs Arbuthnot, a scarf on her head and a shopping trolley, setting off for the supermarket. Mrs Arbuthnot had seen her approaching, and rather than continue and be forced to meet or ignore her, she’d performed a small pantomime of forgetting, slapping her forehead almost and shaking her head, going back inside until Katherine was safely past. Katherine blushed. Of course, she couldn’t know anything about Malcolm yet, could only have wondered about him not coming home, the car no longer in the driveway, or maybe she’d seen the business with the snake, heard Tim’s wailing. That sort of ignoring would not go on for ever, but only until these things were not the most recent and conspicuous subjects to talk about in a chance encounter. But Alice didn’t seem to know that, and raised her hand uncertainly. Her husband, opening the car, saw the gesture, and looked over the road to where Katherine stood. He waited, watching in the interested way of someone who hadn’t met her yet. Katherine smiled, but she could not wave because of the bags in her hands. She put them down, turned, and went back into the house.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t come to your party,’ Nick said, when she had got to work. ‘I was terribly looking forward to it. I don’t know what happened. It was all a bit chaotic. I went home and called my brother, you know, in New York, and then I sat down with the paper, just for five minutes, before getting dressed and coming up to your party, and all of a sudden I woke up and it was four hours later. I don’t know what happened – it must have been getting up so early for the market. And then, of course, it was far too late to come. I felt such a fool. I was so looking forward to it.’

‘That’s all right,’ Katherine said, stripping the leaves off a box of roses, her sleeves rolled up over her reddened forearms, Marigolds protecting her hands. They were white roses, just flushed with pink at the ends of the petals; lovely, unlasting. She had her back to him, her face down, concentrating on her task, and she let very little into her voice.

‘Was it a good party, though?’ Nick said.

‘Oh, it was just the neighbours mostly,’ Katherine said. ‘You’d have been bored.’

‘Don’t say that,’ Nick said. ‘I’m sure I would have loved it. Nobody ever asks me to parties. Well, there’s nobody I know who would invite me to a party, apart from you. I feel such a fool.’

‘Don’t be hard on yourself,’ Katherine said, but there must have been something wrong with the way she said it, because Nick came up behind her and put a hand on her arm, as if he was about to turn her round to face him. The touch of him: she actually flinched. She could not endure the sensation.

‘Don’t be cross with me,’ he said, taking his hand away. ‘I can’t bear it if you – if anyone, I mean, if anyone’s ever cross with me. It’s just something I hate. It’s so silly, too, to fall out over something like that.’

‘Oh, no one’s going to be cross with you,’ Katherine said. She meant it to come across contemptuously, but it came out wrongly, as a confession of loneliness. Nick’s statement, which ought perhaps to have been that admission of loneliness, had instead been amused, self-reliant, adding to his confidence rather than anything else. Katherine had assured him that nobody could possibly be cross with him, and the words had their face value, a confession of admiration. All at once she was in tears, and gulping, trying to wipe her face with her arm and scratching herself with the rose in her yellow-gloved hand.

‘Katherine, don’t,’ Nick said. Without turning she could not tell whether concern or embarrassment would be in his face, but in a moment he took the rose from her, laid it on the pile, the right-hand one, of prepared roses, and he turned her round, her face lowered, not ready to meet his eyes and what might be in them. He so rarely used her name. No one did.

There was still quite some laundry to get through; that had been neglected in the days before the party and now it was keeping her busy. At home, she set the dinner to cook, and went through into the utility room to get on with it in the meantime. The children were in the sitting room, watching the noisy television they all seemed to get something out of. A year or two before they had extended the house. A garage had been built on the strip of land to the side, and what had been the garage, separated from the house, was turned into the dining room and, behind it, an intermediate sort of room, leading from the dining room into the garage.

After dinner, that evening, Katherine went back to the utility room. She had to do something to fill her mind with blankness. You could not hear the telephone from there, but the children would get it, and fetch her. Anyway, there was nobody to ring her, and if it rang, it would only be one of the children’s friends. The washing-machine had done one load – shirts and blouses – and was now starting on another, underwear. Normally, she would have transferred the shirts to the tumble-dryer, a newish acquisition, but today she wanted the chores to keep her busy, and she was ironing her way through a damp pile.

The door opened, the one from the dining room. It was Malcolm. She stopped and looked at him. He was wearing the suit he had been wearing that day, but a shirt she had never seen before, and no tie. He’s been buying new shirts while he’s been away, she thought, with a flush of anger. There were no children behind him; they’d probably taken themselves upstairs, whether to bed or just to be on their own. They’d been avoiding her, but now she didn’t care. After all, he’d come to see her first.

‘Are you back?’ she said harshly.

‘Yes,’ Malcolm said. ‘Yes, of course I’m back.’

‘I was worried,’ she said.

‘Yes, I’m sorry,’ Malcolm said. ‘But you know why I went like that.’

She stared at him, and thumped down the iron. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, frankly, I don’t know why you went like that. I haven’t the faintest idea.’ She had to raise her voice; the washing-machine with its noisy rhythms was going into the racket of its spin cycle.

‘You want me to tell you?’ Malcolm said. ‘All right,’ and he started to speak. He was telling some sort of story, and in his hands, his face, you could see the weight of the conviction behind the story; telling what had led up to this, and what he had been doing the last few days outside the house, where he had been. His face went from pleasure, enjoyment as he thought of something, and rage, pain, irritation and puzzlement. He came into the utility room, and started walking up and down. But she could hardly hear any of it. His voice, always rather soft and low, stood no chance against the furious racket of the washing-machine. She watched, fascinated, and in all honesty not all that interested. It would probably be better, in the long run, not to know. She knew, afterwards, exactly how long Malcolm’s explanation had taken, because it was the exact length of the spin cycle. It took four minutes and twelve seconds. The spin cycle came to an end, juddering across the amplifying concrete floor, and made one or two final groans before going into a quieter reverse. It was Daniel and Tim’s socks in there, mostly black.

‘So that’s it, really,’ Malcolm said finally.

‘Yes, I see,’ Katherine said.

‘I don’t think there’s much point in going over and over it,’ Malcolm said.

‘No,’ Katherine said. ‘I’ll not be bringing it up, asking for details. We’ll just get on with it.’

‘Exactly,’ Malcolm said. ‘That’s the best thing, just get on with things, don’t go on about them.’

‘Yes,’ Katherine said. ‘The new people moved in over the road.’

‘Oh, yes?’ Malcolm said. ‘Nice, are they?’

‘They seem nice,’ Katherine said. ‘Why don’t you go and say goodnight to the children?’

‘Yes,’ Malcolm said. ‘I’ll do that. I suppose I could just tell them—’

‘No,’ Katherine said. ‘Just tell them you’re back. That’ll do.’

‘Probably best,’ Malcolm said. ‘All right, then.’

There seemed to be something more he wanted to say; perhaps he could see in her face that in the last few days something had changed for her as well. But what would he know? For Malcolm, nothing in the situation as he knew it had changed; Tim had not had a snake under his bed, and still did not have a snake under his bed; his wife’s concealments remained his wife’s concealments; and he was back where he had always been. In a few days’ time he would wander across the road, drop in on the Sellerses, ask them over for a drink, and they would come over, none of them mentioning at any point any of the things he had caused or missed, and everything would be quite all right. ‘Is there any supper left?’ Malcolm called from the stairs.

‘There’s a bit,’ Katherine called back, but her answer was lost as the doors upstairs started to open, and something like conversation began again, and even the children pretended that there was nothing so very extraordinary, as there indeed was not, in their father coming home in the evening, the only cause for comment a shirt not seen before, the only remarkable detail a man in a suit, and no tie, and no sign of a tie anywhere.

BOOK TWO

Afterwards he could never accurately reconstruct the rules of the game. The game and its rules had come from nowhere, like myth or tune. It disappeared afterwards, leaving no trace in memory, not even its name, perhaps still being played by generations of children who discovered it, just as Francis had in the autumn of 1974, in a playground and lost it again within the year. But preserved only in that way. What he had in his memory was the sense of a chase, a circle of tremulously linked limbs, some raucous and pungent chant, and, more, the ecstatic terror of wriggling as the quarry turned and buckled under the hand of the pursuer, the ecstasy whichever way the roles had fallen that day; above all, a thick, vivid rise in the chest at the promise or the enactment of violence which, years later, he identified with some shock as an adult sensation, the sensation of erotic desire on the brink of fulfilment. It had been some form of chase, that was all; surely it was the subsequent recognition of its banality that removed its exact excitements from the memory. But a game of chase alone could not have accounted for that speechless thrill, ending with the crack of bone against concrete, a stifled and jubilant cry. There must have been something else.

The school building was new. The school had been recently transferred from an old and blackened building further up the hill to something modern. The old school was a decorated stone edifice, conspicuous with Victorian aspiration and benevolence; with its two entrances, still inscribed BOYS and GIRLS, it looked very much like a school. The new one, oddly, did not. Built in yellow brick, a single storey, the whole shape of the building was difficult to construe as Francis and his mother had crossed the empty playground, that first morning. The building bulged out at either side of a wide external staircase, burst into angry and fanciful geometries of brick and glass, sagging unexpectedly on to rounded banks of grass and, already, well-trodden flowers. He held his mother’s hand tightly. An odd pair, given his height; but he held his mother’s hand tightly.

Inside the building, they made their way somehow to the headmaster’s office. He contributed nothing to this, allowing his mother to make the enquiries, follow the signs, and only when they were sitting on two out of the line of five chairs, the kind lady remaining behind her desk, did he realize that he could not rely on his mother to lead him round his new school from now on. But waiting there, his main concern was for her: in her clothes, the tight smile which was in her mouth but not her eyes, there was something he ought to be able to console. He wanted to tell her that it would be all right, not altogether knowing that himself. But now the headmaster himself was coming down the corridor, buoyant from his assembly; down there, a daunting flood of children, all of whom he would shortly have to come to terms with, all of whom knew exactly where they were going.

The headmaster was affable; the secretary on the way out smiled kindly; a kiss had come from nowhere; and suddenly he was walking by the side of a teacher who, apparently, he had been introduced to, who, apparently, was now his teacher. His mother was gone. It had been her kiss. Once, when he was much smaller, he had in a moment of confusion in a classroom said, ‘Mummy…’ before realizing that he was addressing his teacher. He went clammy, as if he had already done it again, as his first act in a new school.

‘Quiet, now,’ the teacher said, coming into a room. It was full of children; they fell silent and looked at him. It was a terrible moment. The teacher had an extraordinary voice. She talked, too, in that strange way, as she went on to explain who he was, where he came from – London, it produced giggles across the classroom – and assigned a boy to show him round; she talked in that way where ‘castle’ sounded like ‘cattle’, a blunt and, to Francis, not very friendly-sounding manner of speech. He was surprised and ashamed on her behalf: he had not thought that a teacher, a person in charge, would speak in the ordinary way everywhere.

The boy he was supposed to sit next to shoved up roughly, and turned his face deliberately away from Francis, placing his hand against it so that Francis could not see anything of him. He was a naughty boy, you could see that straight away; he started hissing and sniggering to two other boys, naughty boys too, across the aisle, who leant forward and examined Francis from a safe, contemptuous distance, their lips curling like crimped pastry. He thought about his friends; they might be sitting at this exact moment, hundreds of miles away, in that sensible classroom, not just-built but old and solid, and there might be – his heart leapt to think of it – an empty chair there now, and perhaps a new person, someone a little like him, being guided to it.

The lesson started, but no one had taken out any books: they were just sitting there. Francis had been dreading that; he thought that he might be the only one without the books, and though everyone would notice no one would help. He had imagined he would go through his whole life in this school without books and, which he had anticipated and accepted, without friends. But there were no books. He placed his pens and pencil, the ruler and rubber on the table; he had brought them with him. He could not understand what sort of lesson this was. The teacher was just talking, and in a moment he listened. It was a while before her words started to make sense. She was talking about the government. He did not know what sort of lesson that could be part of. From time to time she asked a question, and nobody put their hands up so she answered it herself. Some of those questions Francis knew the answers to, but he didn’t put his hand up. It was like a party you weren’t sure you were meant to be at and he kept quiet, though it was painful for him not to be able to put his hand up to answer a question he could answer. The boy next to him went on talking to the boys over the aisle, and there was a sort of malice in the hiss, which was directed at Francis.

‘Michael,’ the teacher said abruptly. That was the boy’s name, which Francis hadn’t taken in, and the boy straightened up, lowered his hand from his face, and gave Francis a poisonous look, as if he had betrayed him. There was a smell as if of boiled peas from the boy; it was shocking, he was sitting next to a bad boy who wasn’t even clean. ‘Do you want to tell the class the name of the prime minister?’

‘Don’t know,’ Michael said eventually, full of scorn at being asked something so stupid.

‘Perhaps our new boy knows,’ the teacher said, quite gently.

‘It’s Mr Wilson,’ Francis said. He hardly knew how to pretend not to know.

‘Very good,’ the teacher said, enunciating with surprise in her voice, as if talking to an idiot. Francis felt himself getting a little cross. ‘And how long has he been prime minister?’

‘He was prime minister before,’ Francis said. ‘But there was a general election this year and he became it again. He’s Labour. I thought the Conservatives were going to come first, but they didn’t.’

‘Very good,’ the teacher said, now really surprised. ‘Quite a lot of people thought, like – like our new friend from London here’ – a wave, a giggle, but why? – ‘that the Conservatives were going to win. Now, who can explain to me what a general election is?’

The lesson went on, but Francis felt he shouldn’t have said anything, should have said, ‘Don’t know, Miss,’ and swapped what he possessed for something he might have, popularity and the quality of being ordinary. Once the attention of the teacher went elsewhere, the naughty boys on the other side of the aisle said, ‘Kick him,’ quite loudly, and Michael, the boy he was sitting next to, gave him a hard angry shove. Francis did not know how to respond, and blushingly rearranged his pens and pencils, his ruler and rubber. In time, the lesson came to an end; it was interrupted – and it had only really been a speech by the teacher, diversifying into reminiscence of a life led partly, it seemed, in Africa – by a bell that, so unexpectedly, was exactly the same as the bells in the school in London. The class got up, their chairs screeching on the floor, and the teacher, too, screeching for them to sit down until they were given permission to go. But half the class were already through the door, and she only wanted to say one more sentence before they were dismissed.

It was playtime. The boy he had been assigned to had disappeared and, anyway, Francis would not follow that boy: he knew well what would happen if he tried to make friends, having said in clear London tones who the prime minister now was. He didn’t know what to do or where to go, but he followed them anyway, and was soon in the playground. It was already full, and excited with noise.