The Northern Clemency (39 page)

“I’ve only just started,” Katherine said. “Hello, Sandra. Nice to see you.”

“Hello, Mrs. Glover,” Sandra said demurely. “Can we help?”

“No, you run off,” Katherine said. “It won’t be long.”

“We’d like to help,” Daniel said. Though that might be true of him, Katherine was surprised when Sandra competently took an apron and rolled up her sleeves. If the fish pie was Katherine’s gesture, it looked as if Sandra had come with some gestures of her own prepared. Daniel went to the kitchen door, swung it shut; on the hook on the back was hanging a red laminated shopping bag and, underneath it, a blue-and-white striped butcher’s apron, which he put on.

“Well—I suppose you could carry on peeling those potatoes,” Katherine said. “I have to admit that’s the one thing I hate doing, so you can say no and do something more interesting, if you like. I don’t want to foist stuff on you.”

“No,” Sandra said, getting to work with the potatoes under a running tap, just as Katherine did them. “I like peeling potatoes, actually.”

If the look that passed between Daniel and his mother had had a name, it might have been called what-a-treasure. And then they got to work. Katherine put a few handfuls of spinach on to boil. Daniel competently chopped the fish fillets into domino-sized pieces, and buttered a dish—he always buttered dishes, there was no talking him out of it—and then artistically tessellated the white fish and the yellow across the bottom.

“There’s no need to be as fussy as that,” Katherine said, watching what he was doing. Sandra came to have a look, and they laughed a little at him. Daniel played up to their mockery, holding the last piece high, parodically examining the space left before putting it down
exquisitely and stepping back, like a great artist, to admire the final effect.

“A masterpiece, it is a masterpiece,” Sandra said, in a French accent. Daniel scattered the last pieces of fish over the top, then started on the prawns.

“Oh, get a move on,” Katherine said, slicing the eggs into quarters and distributing them among the fish. “Mind out,” she said to Sandra, taking the boiled spinach in two hands, wringing it out like a cloth over the sink and scattering it over the fish.

“Shall I?” Sandra said, taking the pan with the onion-and-cream mixture and carefully spooning it over everything.

“And that’s it,” Katherine said. “I just need to mash the potatoes when they’re done—I’ll do that.” She smiled at Sandra, and Sandra gave a big smile back. Somehow, in five minutes assembling a pie for dinner, any awkwardness between them had melted.

“I love fish pie,” Daniel said, as they went out, not to his bedroom but into the living room. Sandra turned her head and gave another grateful, almost forgiving smile to Katherine, who returned it.

“What does your dad do, Sandra?” Malcolm said, when they were seated round the table and waiting for Katherine to bring in the dinner. He poured her a glass of water. There was a red and yellow oilcloth cover on the table. It was padded beneath, yielding slightly when pressed.

“He works for the Electric,” Sandra said, unthinkingly using Bernie’s own abbreviation, or perhaps that, originally, of Bernie’s mother.

“The electric what?” Malcolm said, smiling. Though he’d kept his tie and shirt on, he had otherwise changed out of his building-society suit into his weekend clothes, a grey V-necked pullover and flapping grey tweedy trousers, his blue slippers. He didn’t always: often he sat all evening in the trousers of his suit, wearing them out fast, as Katherine pointed out. But today he’d made an effort. “Do you mean the Electricity Board?”

“He manages a generating plant, I mean,” Sandra said. She picked up the white floral cruet from the boat it sat in, turned over the salt and pepper pots, put them back, seeming to approve as they watched her. “In London he used to work at head office, but he got fed up of living in London, I mean we all did, so he decided to come and work up here instead. I don’t really know what he does, exactly.”

“How do you make electricity?” Tim said. “I thought it was all like big batteries somewhere.”

“They make it in different ways,” Katherine said, coming in with the fish pie in her hands, holding it in scarved blue-and-white oven gloves, depositing it with a flourish on the hunting-scene mat in the centre of the table. “And whenever you switch something on it’s there.”

“That looks nice,” Malcolm said, his eyes fixed like a child on what they all remembered now was, in fact, one of his favourite dinners.

“But sometimes they run out,” Tim said, going on although his mother had left the room again. “I remember when I was little, sometimes all the lights and everything, they’d go out, even the television maybe, because we’d run out.”

“Well, I expect Sandra’s dad’s making sure we don’t run out again,” Malcolm said. “I don’t know that that’s going to happen again. It was because of a strike. It’s an important job, your dad’s.”

“I suppose so,” Sandra said. “He doesn’t talk much about it.”

“He could be a spy,” Tim said seriously, his eyes on Sandra. “They don’t talk about what they do. They’re not allowed to. They’d be arrested or shot perhaps.”

“Why don’t we always have fish pie?” Daniel said, ignoring Tim, as Katherine came back with the peas and, a concession, a bottle of tomato ketchup. “I like fish pie. Is it too much bother to do when there’s not a guest?”

“Honestly, Daniel,” Katherine said; Sandra burst into laughter. “You’re always showing me up.”

But he probably had a point. The big fish pie in the somehow comfortingly chipped and oblong earthenware dish, browned and toffeelike at the edges of the crust where the sauce had bubbled up through the mashed potato, the shared bowl of shiny green peas and everyone eating it all up—it was like a picture of a family in a magazine. Not even the labelled bottle of tomato ketchup on the table could detract from the pastoral sweetness of the scene—that was something Katherine generally disapproved of, but they were allowed it with fish pie and, for some reason, shepherd’s pie as well. (Maybe because she liked it, that was a good enough reason.)

The early-summer-evening light came through the window like music. Anyone walking up the street, glancing in, would see a happy family, six of them round a table, their numbers reflecting their abundant easy happiness. And with a guest from over the road, they seemed to be getting on better than usual. They were actually speaking to each other for the first time in months. It was as if family life needed a simple
audience, not even to become happy in performance but to take any kind of recognizable shape at all. Without observation, they’d been eating for months now, as it were, from their own little dishes, disparate like strangers in a crowded restaurant asked to share a table and sulking about it. For the sake of a visitor they’d put on a performance of cohesion, but there was nothing false about the cohesion. They all seemed to mean it. And Sandra was a nice girl. Katherine had forgotten Alice’s evident niceness, the quality which had invited that instant and embarrassing confidence; all that had disappeared in the shame afterwards. Sandra had some of it, behind her sharp gaze. She was an improvement on Barbara.

“That looks nice, too,” Sandra said to Jane, gesturing at her plate, entirely in earnest. It was a cheese omelette with tomato slices placed lumpenly on top—they’d been supposed to go into the omelette, Katherine had forgotten, and she’d put the tomato on one side specially—and the same peas everyone was having. Jane was making it last, but there was no pretending it was as nice as the fish pie, and her new practice looked more stupid than ever.

“Yes, it is nice,” Jane said shortly. She guessed what was behind the comment. She guessed that Daniel had told Sandra while they were walking home that, for satirical effect, she ought to turn to Jane with a straight face and say that what she was eating looked nice. Jane was right about this, and about the satiric intent, but she still had to answer the observation and say, “Yes, it is.”

“So, why are you a vegetarian?” Sandra said.

“Everyone always asks that,” Jane said, not exactly rudely.

“Well, it’s interesting,” Sandra said. “I want to know—I might become vegetarian myself.”

“I can’t take the responsibility for sending you back home a vegetarian,” Katherine said.

“I don’t think there’s any real risk of that,” Jane said, bending over the remains of her omelette. She was parcelling it out as slowly as she could.

“That’s not very polite, Jane,” Malcolm said.

“No, seriously,” Sandra said. “I was interested. I mean what is it about, the cruelty, or what?”

“Well,” Jane said, “I suppose it’s mostly about finding it revolting, you know, eating dead bodies.”

“Do you mind?” Katherine said. “We are eating.”

“That’s right,” Malcolm said, chortling. “We’re eating dead bodies.”

“You’re as bad as Daniel,” Katherine said, but suddenly they were smiling at each other, remembering something between the two of them.

“What?” Daniel said abruptly. “What is it?”

“You don’t miss much,” Malcolm said, raising a fork with a single prawn on the end of it to near his face, gazing at it, and smiling in a way not all that familiar, smiling over it at Katherine. “I was just thinking—actually, I was just remembering something—”

“I knew it was about prawns,” Katherine said, and their eyes met. They giggled. But no one could extract anything further from either of them: they were away, sitting on the promenade front at Scarborough in June 1958, the wind brisk off the North Sea scattering Katherine’s young hair about her glowing face, and Malcolm with a wooden prong forking cold pink prawns into her mouth from a newspaper wrap and mostly missing and—no, they wouldn’t be sharing that.

“Would you say that a prawn was a dead body exactly?” Daniel said. “I wouldn’t bother even about a human body if it was as titchy as that. I don’t say I’d eat one, mind.”

“It’s not the cruelty, then,” Sandra said. “You’re not bothered about people being cruel to animals for the sake of food.”

“I don’t know why you say that,” Jane said, blushing. She knew she was going to lose this one, and she could only say, in the end, what she thought and felt. “I think the cruelty’s the worst part of it.”

“That’s what I think, too,” Sandra said soberly. “I don’t like eating eggs because they’re from chickens kept in cages. They can’t go anywhere. And milk—think how cruel milk is, the cow has a sweet little baby cow, and it’s snatched away to make veal, lovely veal, and the poor mother cow just wanting to be left alone with her grief, and she’s yanked up to a machine and milked over and over. I call that cruel. No wonder we say ‘poor cow.’”

Tim was yelping and applauding, unable to stop staring at Sandra.

“You can choose not to,” Jane said bravely. “You can choose only to drink milk from cows who haven’t had calves at all.”

Everyone laughed, edging Tim’s hysteria up a further notch. Jane just said, “Why? What? What did I say?”

“That’s worse than being a cod, isn’t it? I mean, you’ve got the whole sea to swim about in, and then you get caught one day and that’s it. Your life was quite all right until then.”

“Prawns are farmed,” Jane said forlornly, but she was losing the argument.

“So, according to you,” Tim said, calming down a little, “prawns grow in a sort of farm, with prawn tractors, and in a field, prawns growing in trees?”

“Not like that, but—”

“You have to admit,” Malcolm said, “Sandra’s got a point. If you were against cruelty, you’d still eat wild things. There are lots crueller things.”

“You’re all wrong,” Jane said, but Sandra, glowing with amusement, hardly even glancing at Daniel, who was her audience, had already started on another topic. They were all enjoying this, Jane thought, all of them; they were keeping up with this spotty girl, and she was enjoying it too.

“I didn’t like it up here at first,” Sandra was saying. “I didn’t want to move. I didn’t understand what anyone was saying.”

“It’s a bit of a shock,” Malcolm said.

“Do you know what this means?” Tim shouted; he was getting excited. But it turned out he just wanted to explain what Tin Tin Tin could mean—it isn’t in the tin—and, since he’d explained it once already, they all knew that one.

“I wouldn’t want to live in London,” Malcolm said. “I don’t know how anyone stands it. All that commuting—you stand in a big train overground, packed in like sardines, and then in a little train underground, travelling maybe for an hour each way.”

“How could you stand it?” Tim said to Sandra. “Did you do that every day?”

“No, I got a bus to school, just like I do here,” Sandra said. “It was my dad did that.”

“But there’s lots more to see,” Katherine said. “There’s much more happening in London.” She didn’t want anyone to think they were stupid lumps, going on about the wonders of Sheffield, like Anthea Arbuthnot or someone.

“I don’t know that we ever saw any of it,” Sandra said. “We’ve been to more places since we moved up here. My mum and dad, they like to go out on a Sunday, go to the countryside or to a stately home or something. I’d rather stay at home, but they like it.”

There was a dangerous memory here, and Malcolm’s thoughts must have gone to Nick, and his similar London liking for weekend visits to Chatsworth: he said, “Does your mother work, Sandra?”

“No,” she said. “She didn’t in London, either. I think she might like to. At any rate she says she gets bored sometimes. But I don’t know
what she could do. I think she worked as a librarian for a while before I was born. Maybe she could do that again.”

“Oh dear,” Katherine said lightly. “Tell her to pop over and invite herself in for a cup of coffee if she’s ever bored during the day.”

“But you’re at work during the day,” Tim said, who had not taken his eyes off Sandra since she’d arrived, gazing at her with hunger and amazement, spooning gloopy chunks of fish pie, jewelled with bright peas. “You work every day except Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

“That’s true,” Katherine said, taken aback. For one moment, she’d completely forgotten that part of her life with Nick and the shop and his pretty bower of a cottage in Ranmoor. She’d only been a housewife fulfilled with her family around her at the dining-table. “That’s absolutely true, Timothy. Thank you for reminding me. But I’m sure Mrs. Sellers can drop in on a Tuesday or a Thursday.”