The Northern Clemency (34 page)

“It wasn’t Tim,” she said, coming down. “It was Daniel. I don’t know why I said that. You’d think you’d remember.” But then she was ashamed, and her voice lowered and shaking, because there was no lover’s talking about her body, about what any of her was without a reminder of why she shouldn’t and couldn’t be here. She had said that
it had been Tim who was cut out of her because, in every other way, he had been so difficult, with his wishes and refusals and tears and tantrums and strange obsessions and the worry about what he would become whenever you looked at him. It was not like the removal of an appendix. There was nothing in her flesh that was not written over with the fact of her obligations and her inescapable histories.

She was an hour and a half later home than usual, Nick dropping her at the top of the road in his little purple van with the gold lettering where it was easiest to reverse. She could feel herself shining as she came through her front door, with all the force of the word: “brazen.” “Hello?” she called, and from the different parts of the house her children and husband came, not quite approaching her; only the littlest had said, “I didn’t know where you’d
gone,”
and burst, almost, into tears, and that was only really about his dinner. No one else could reasonably have complained that she might have phoned. Certainly not Malcolm, who was chewing his lip as she explained that from time to time she’d be staying late to sort out some things. He looked at her, not angrily but in the sort of unexplained fear that often seemed to come over him now. She finished her explanation; she might almost have said, “Anyone got any questions?” But without removing her coat, she took Tim off, as sluts do, and drove in her husband’s car to the fish-and-chip shop, where she bought supper for all five of them, and hang whatever was in the fridge. She wasn’t going to cook it tonight.

The new arrangement, though more irregular than it had been announced, changed the rhythms of the whole household. Daniel took the new irregularity of his mother’s hours as some kind of licence, and started appearing from school at odd, late hours. It was only after a few such late appearances—at six, half six, sometimes nearly seven, when the dinner was always on the table—that Katherine brought it up with Malcolm and discovered that, in his opinion, a girl was delaying Daniel. Not that Barbara; she seemed to have disappeared or been dropped. Malcolm seemed relieved about that; Katherine had no view on the subject. No one seemed able to talk to each other in this house any more: they all had their reasons for concealing matters from or snubbing each other.

Across the road, the new family were settling in. Through the Watsons’ curtains could be glimpsed a temporary arrangement of furniture; at first, that large front room was filled with armchairs and,
crowding over them, the unit filled with objects and a line or two of books. Upstairs, there were more books, a surprising number; it was the boy’s bedroom, the boy too tall for his age.

But then, after a week or two, things changed rapidly. Over a weekend, the whole family could be seen pushing the armchairs out of that front room, a dining-table and chairs in. It was a removers’ mistake, and then they had their dining room at the front, like most of the rest of the street. (Only Anthea Arbuthnot, who liked to watch, kept it as a sort of second sitting room, one she had had painted yellow, and grandly called “the morning room.”) And then, a month or six weeks later, a Cole’s van had arrived with sets of ready-made curtains. For the back as well as the front, it was said by the knowledgeable. They’d had them all done at once.

Katherine met the nursery nurse on the street, pushing her tiny darling new baby, Rose, with a face aptly like a tight-gripped rosebud against the light. “Isn’t she good?” Katherine said to the only slightly deflated mother, and, with an air of relief, the nursery nurse agreed.

“For the moment,” she said. And then they commented on the expense of having all the curtains done at once but, of course, he worked for the electricity, a responsible job. The baby, Rose, stirred and murmured, and with a sudden red crumpling-open of the face, began to howl. “Oh dear,” the nursery nurse said, “time for her feed,” and was off.

Katherine hadn’t seen the woman opposite since she’d moved in, and wasn’t keen to. What was it they said about first impressions—you made your mind up about someone in the first five minutes of meeting them? She thought of how she had been that day, and decided to go on avoiding her. She averted her eyes. In the way of things, she had no exact memory of what she had said to her. The exact memory she had was of what the woman had said in return, her awful sympathy, punctuating Katherine’s tale. From that she could understand that she had said what should never be said.

When Katherine was a child, she had longed for a dog. That had been all she ever asked for, for Christmas and birthdays, twice a year. No one could understand where it came from. Neither her mother nor her father had ever had a dog. They were not sociable people, and none of the few people they knew had dogs either. She had argued and argued for a dog, and in the end, her parents had agreed. “But,”
they said, “it’s got to be your responsibility; and we’re going to borrow a dog for a week, just to see if you can really look after one.”

The dog arrived—where had it come from? She couldn’t imagine. It was a white West Highland terrier called Rosie. That was a disappointment; she’d wanted to name it herself, but her mother explained that the dog knew its own name, and wouldn’t learn a new one in a week. The first afternoon, she’d played with it inside, calling “Rosie!” over and over, delighting in the way that the dear little dog ran to her every time she said it, never growing bored or suspecting that there was nothing much to run to.

Towards the end of the afternoon, Rosie started to whine, to run to the door, and, after a while, gave a sharp, angry bark. “What’s wrong, Rosie?” Katherine had asked, but her mother came out of the kitchen, laughing, and explained that the dog needed a walk. She handed Katherine the lead.

Katherine had imagined a little dog, trotting happily by her side, but Rosie did not do that. She pulled and whined, and stopped dead and had to be pulled forward hard. And, all the time, she stopped to piss. Katherine had never been so embarrassed. It got worse when Rosie stopped dead in the middle of the pavement, squatted and produced an enormous poo. Katherine had felt like crying.

The next morning, she was woken by her mother shouting, and she had to take Rosie out immediately. In the night, the dog had done another poo in the middle of the kitchen. “Rub her face in it,” Katherine’s father advised, but no one really wanted to do that. The morning walk was even more of a nightmare, and when it was time to turn round and go home, Rosie dug her heels in and had to be pulled whining all the way, her claws skittering on the pavement. At the end of the week, Rosie was handed back—who on earth was her owner?—and there was no more talk about dogs.

But Katherine had told everyone, all her friends, that she was getting a dog. They’d come over that week and made a fuss of Rosie. They all did exactly what Katherine had done, and entertained themselves by calling her from one end of the room to another.

But she’d somehow given them the impression that Rosie was her own dog, her permanent one, and after she was returned, she had to go on answering questions about her, about her tricks, about what she liked to eat, about whether she was going to have puppies. It made Katherine feel sick, pretending that she still had and still enjoyed what
she’d once wanted. She had to pretend that no one could come round. It went on for months, and in the end, in a panic, not knowing what on earth else to do, she came to school one day, red-eyed, and told everyone that Rosie had run out in front of a car. “I’ll never have another dog,” she said, to her impressed audience, some of whom were actually crying on their own behalf. “I just couldn’t.” It made her a heroine for a number of weeks. Then someone came round, and her mother, unbriefed, told them the whole awful story.

Everything was going wrong in the house. Jane felt that it was exactly the sort of thing she ought to be interested in for the sake of her novel. She’d told everyone she was writing one, and they’d cooed and murmured appreciatively—the grown-ups, that is. The people in her class had chucked spit balls. She ought to be investigating her father, interviewing her mother, observing her brother’s behaviour.

Her novel had stuck where it was, in the middle of the nineteenth century. She’d written the first chapter, and by the end of it, Fanny’s mother, father, infant brother, her fat nurse proffering sage advice with dropped aitches and (she couldn’t help herself as her pen ran dreamily on) even the cruel stepmother with her eye on Fanny’s come-by fortune had died in satisfyingly horrible or heartrending ways. Fanny had lost her fortune and two houses (her father’s and her stepmother’s); and the chapter had concluded with a powerful description of the orphanage on the bleak Lancashire moors burning down. Mrs. Crewkle, the hateful orphanage keeper, had been trapped in the larder, calling bootlessly for Fanny’s help. Mrs. Crewkle’s too-late repentance and her death surrounded by the larder’s hoarded riches, the same ones she’d vindictively denied the starving orphans; Jane was particularly proud of that.

It had stuck there, though. She might be writing about the way they each escaped to their rooms. Her father went to the spare room to tinker with battle plans, or to the garden to thin and weed the plot within an inch of its life, her mother taking charge of the television, or settling in the kitchen—there had never been so many cakes baked in this house, hanging about, forgotten in tins—or in the hall, on the telephone. The three of them were upstairs in their rooms, their different tasks fraudulently described—in Jane’s case, and she was pretty sure in Daniel’s and Tim’s too—as “homework.” Or Daniel went out. Nobody stopped him. Everything had gone silent and ugly since that knot of
events last year. But no one was talking. They did their talking in other directions and at other people, and how could you write that down? She hadn’t managed to get on with it for weeks, perhaps months, but Jane really thought that Fanny, her stepmother, her orphanage and her long-suspended plight on top of a moor where the ruins had now been eerily smouldering for three months might be the thing she could most easily write. It was true, however, that when she sat down, she couldn’t see how to get on with it.

It was a surprise, then, when one Saturday morning her mother crisply picked up her car keys from the orangey little wooden table where the telephone and gold-embossed address book sat and said, “I’m going to the supermarket. Coming?” and, without waiting for much of an answer, led Jane out. Over the road, the father of the new family was washing his little turquoise car—an odd thing to do, Jane thought, a Sunday activity rather than a Saturday one. The mother was there too, standing by the bucket. For a moment Jane thought she was helping, ordered out by her husband whose small face, its features squashed together in a rubbery way, gave the impression of a short fuse, though Jane had never seen him lose his temper. But then his wife laughed, and said something; he said something back and she went on laughing, a low and disconcertingly dirty, genuine laugh. “Do it yourself,” she said over her shoulder, heading back into the house, but without heat, with affection. She had come outside without a request and without wanting to help. That looked like unfamiliar behaviour to Jane. She was simply talking to her husband; it had an unusual appearance.

Mrs. Sellers turned again, as if she’d forgotten something, saw Jane and her mother before the house, and unhesitatingly raised a hand in greeting. Jane’s mother gave a tired little smile and raised her hand, too, but just an upward flick of the wrist. Mr. Sellers followed, an almost satirically enthusiastic wave of his right arm from the shoulder, like a castaway hailing a passing cutter. This Jane’s mother ignored. They got into the car and set off.

“They seem a nice family,” Katherine said.

“Yes,” Jane said. Who, she could imagine Mrs. Sellers saying, did that woman think she was, after that dismissive flick of the wrist. But, of course, Mrs. Sellers was far too nice to say such a thing: it was Jane who was wondering who her mother thought she was. Jane
knew
that something had passed between her mother and Mrs. Sellers, something irretrievable and unforgivable.

“We must invite them over some time,” her mother went on, in her light social voice. “It was a shame they weren’t here for the party last year. That was what I call a
good
party.”

“I don’t know that my dad’s all that good at having people over,” Jane said. “At the moment.”

“Rubbish, of course he likes it,” Katherine cried. “Oh, watch out, you idiot!” this at a red Mini with a learner driver, edging out six feet into the road, then giving up and staying where he was.

“Isn’t this where Nick lives?” Jane said. It was: she knew it was. But her mother overdid it.

“Who?” she said. “Oh, Nick, flower-shop Nick. Yes, I think it must be somewhere around here. I don’t really remember. Clever of you to know.”

Then Jane was certain, because her mother had said that she’d been to his house, that he’d asked her in, that she’d seen his furniture, that she’d admired his taste but that there were some things that needed to be done, for instance in the bedroom—

No, she hadn’t said that. That was Jane filling in. But all that conversation—talking to herself, really—about Nick had passed its long obsessive stage, the casual and constant ostinato to any conversation after which it was not only the overheard name, belonging to someone else in the street or at school that could embarrass Jane, but the coincidence of the mere monosyllable in another word, so that a teacher diverting to the health risks of nicotine, or describing an answer of Jane’s to a question about trade in Africa as “slightly cynical” could make her blush. That phase, both of her mother’s adoring references and Jane’s pained silent registering, went away after the party. Though the references continued, there was for some time an impatience about them and even a dismissive tone. But by the time they stopped, coinciding for no explicable reason with Nick’s moving into his new house, they had resumed their fond, almost obsessive tone. The last time Katherine had mentioned Nick to the family, she had been describing the handsome and uncottage-like style in which he had arranged his house. And a matter of months later she was affecting not to know, never to have known, where Nick lived and certainly never to have gone there alone. It was exactly like the way Jane had discussed with Anne the possibility of her mother having an affair, when it had seemed unlikely; when it had seemed altogether possible that she really was having an affair, hadn’t she herself stopped talking about it, resisting
all enticements to say anything more about what she did or didn’t think? “How’s your mother’s affair going?” Anne’s mother had lightly asked once, and while Jane struggled not just for the right answer but for any answer, she’d said, “You’re such a romancer, young lady,” since she was one of those whom the news of Jane’s novel had amused more than impressed. It was just like that, really, her mother’s silence.