The Northern Clemency (48 page)

“No idea,” Nick said.

“No, I don’t know either,” Jimmy said. “But it couldn’t be done. Couldn’t stretch to it.”

Nick looked around him. They lived in a dozen rooms, the wife had said, which didn’t seem a lot until you totted up the rooms in your own house—five, not counting kitchens or bathrooms, and that seemed plenty to Nick. There were more rooms out there for Jimmy and Laura to colonize as time went on, too—billiard rooms, morning rooms, smoking rooms, menageries, the long-gone paraphernalia of wealthy lives. How had even this been stretched to? Nick knew to a penny how much of Jimmy’s finances went through the Broomhill flower shop; it was a good deal, but it wouldn’t have begun to fund this on its own. He had always assumed that, despite the close bond between him and Jimmy, there were others in exactly his position, channelling Jimmy’s heroin money through launderettes, newsagents, sweet shops, stationers, all serving an apparently decent purpose in provincial cities. He had no idea who those other people were or might be. But there had to be a lot of them.

Over the few years the decency and usefulness of his own flower shop had been creeping up on him. Next door to Reynold’s, there was a madam shop, run by a handsome haughty Jewess, selling “robes” to the middle-aged ladies of the area. The mannequins were old-fashioned, based on the sort of Parisian models that the New Look had hung off in the 1940s, and on them Mrs. Grunbaum hung well-made suits and dresses, expensive and heavy with buckles to show where the money was spent, and a few years out of fashion. Nothing too alarming.

For a time Nick had assumed that Belinda’s, as Mrs. Grunbaum’s shop was called, was the sort of madam shop gifted by an elderly businessman to his mistress. Mrs. Grunbaum’s title was certainly a courtesy one; she had laughed hoarsely when it came out that Nick thought there had ever been a Mr. Grunbaum. But Belinda’s was, in fact, all Mrs. Grunbaum’s work—there had been no wealthy lover to give Mrs. Grunbaum the money and indulgently help her choose the pink-and-white toile-de-Jouy style of the showroom, patiently listen to her agonizing over stocks, or assist her in a commanding, humorous way when
she burst into tears over the books. That was the way it would have been in London; there were Jewish madam shops all over London exactly like Belinda’s, and every one run by someone’s mistress as a surprisingly successful hobby. In Sheffield, Mrs. Grunbaum had taken the money her mother had been saving up for years—“God knows for what, Nicholas”—had sold the house in Ranmoor and bought a shop with a flat over it in Broomhill. “I’d always longed to be in the fashion industry, Nicholas, but my people, they’d always looked down on people of our sort doing that sort of business.” She did well, Mrs. Grunbaum; she knew what sold, and what wouldn’t.

Nick, it seemed, had always longed to be in the floristry business. It was just that, unlike Mrs. Grunbaum, it hadn’t been a long-nursed and exact desire. He hadn’t known he’d wanted it until he had it. His assumption about the funding of Mrs. Grunbaum’s shop had been, as well as an inference from previous experience of similar shops, a projection of his own situation. It seemed quite normal, the idea that Mrs. Grunbaum would be set up in business by an admirer for reasons of convenience since that, more or less, had happened to him. He hadn’t, he supposed, thought of the fishmonger, the newsagent, the little greengrocer’s in this light, or as anything other than old family businesses, but it came as a shock, the idea that he might be the only shop in the parade funded by a large donation of capital by a backer who expected no particular financial return, who thought of his business, inevitably, as a sort of light-hearted hobby.

This sense of the shop had been sustained by Katherine, whose employment was not, in any sense, a serious one. She was, at first, just company and they shut the shop if they felt like it, and were able to deal with customers in an unctuous or a dismissive way for no other reason than their own amusement. But after that ugly mistake, the after-hours encounter in his own house, the single occasion that they circled round without comment for months, their light-hearted relationship altered somewhat and so, he eventually realized, did his attitude towards the shop. They carried on working there together, and he concentrated as never before on the shop’s success. Before, he had simply bought more or less what he felt like buying, never troubling about discounts or analysing what sold and what didn’t. It hardly mattered if you ended your Saturdays throwing away twenty pounds’ worth of browning tiger lilies. But he could see where the new awkwardness between him and Katherine would end, and he began taking an interest in the shop itself, having nothing much else to think about. The
wastage of stock fell right off; the shop became more heavily frequented, as if the people of Sheffield had been given their first opportunity to buy flowers and had discovered a need they had never known they had. Perhaps for Katherine the enterprise became less fun, more like work. She couldn’t say that, though, without admitting what the whole enterprise had been about for her in the first place.

“Those narcissi went well,” she remarked out of the blue one May evening. “They were pretty. You could get some more next week.”

“They were nice,” Nick said. “I thought people would go for them—they’re cheap, but they’re quite unusual. People who don’t like to buy daffodils because they’re a bit—”

“A bit newsagent,” Katherine said.

“Exactly,” Nick said, and indeed Price’s opposite had three bright orange buckets of custardy daffodils and tragic dyed carnations plonked down on the pavement next to the ruffle-like display of papers outside. He held up a last narcissus; looked at its curious, inquisitive face, pulled a face of his own.

“I thought that’d be no good for us when he first did it,” Katherine said. “I mean, he never thought of selling flowers until you opened. But I suppose people look at his”—she gestured over the road at the orange buckets, each with its star-shaped lurid green tag in cardboard, with its felt-tip price—“and think, Ooh, flowers—I know, I’ll buy some nice ones, and cross the road.”

“Maybe,” Nick said. “I might try jonquils next.” That was the sort of conversation they tended to have, about the business. The narcissi were lovely, it was true: there was a bridal virginity about their blanched virtue, costing almost nothing, which, properly presented, could lure customers in. But it wasn’t disguising anything to talk about them in terms of turnover. He couldn’t deny it: one of the things he liked best about this new line was that it had sold incredibly well. “How’s your son getting on?” he said, returning from the backyard with the empty mock-lead container the narcissi had been in. “He moved out, didn’t he?”

“Daniel?” Katherine said. “He’s fine, I think. He’s got a room, a big bedsit, really, at the top of a house in Crookes. I haven’t been there since he moved in, but I think he’s coping all right. He was always a tidy boy. Still comes home with his washing.”

“Oh, I was like that,” Nick said, but for some reason Katherine blushed.

“I don’t know about this new job, though,” she said. “I’d have preferred
him to go to university, and his A levels were good enough, but he said he didn’t know what he wanted to study so there didn’t seem much point.”

“He’s in an estate agent’s, isn’t he?”

“Eadon Lockwood and Riddle,” Katherine said promptly. “He likes it. He sold his first house all on his own last week. It suits him much better than the last job. I knew it wouldn’t suit him, working in a building society like his dad. He likes to be out and about a bit, and with this, he gets a company car soon, of course, which you certainly don’t with the Midland Bank. No sign of any steady girlfriend, too busy breaking hearts. I dread the mother of some poor girl turning up on my doorstep. He keeps telling us about houses he’s seen, as if we were ever likely to move.”

“No, you’re all right where you are,” Nick said. They carried on for a time in silence, Katherine stripping away the leaves on some long-stemmed red roses—one of those things that never sold at 40p a stem, but you had to have them, like a gesture of high class. Nick, behind the desk, watched her. A customer came in, not a regular but passing trade, discussed her requirements at some length, went away with a big load of stargazers and two blocks of oasis. A lengthy debate could lead to that or a fistful of carnations.

“I’ve been thinking,” Katherine said eventually, having turned off her smile. She seemed to be concentrating on her task. “How long have I been working here?”

“As long as we’ve been open,” Nick said. “Five years, is it? Six? I remember you came in on my first day. We didn’t know anything, then, did we?”

He knew what she was going to say, and in a way didn’t mind the prospect of it. But for the moment he’d try to fend it off with a cosy reminiscence.

“You hadn’t a clue,” Katherine said. “Do you remember trying to smash that vase in the backyard?”

It was still there, on the shelf: no one would ever buy it, and it was a sort of mascot for the whole enterprise.

“The thing is,” Katherine said. “I’ve been thinking about what I really want to do.”

He listened, kindly, as she explained that she’d enjoyed it, but she might as well stop; she might, she thought, even do an Open University degree now that the kids were grown-up. “Of course,” she said, “I’d stay until you found someone to replace me.”

But that hadn’t taken long, and in only three or four weeks he and Katherine were sitting in a pub, the mysteriously
soignée
school-leaver left in charge on a Thursday lunchtime, having a farewell drink. It was busy, for a Thursday lunchtime, and embarrassingly they had to settle for a fragile little table in a nook, hidden from the rest of the half-lit mahogany interior, just like adulterers. The time, unexpectedly, flew by—Katherine was thinking of taking a little holiday, a City Break perhaps to Munich, which she’d heard was nice, just her and Malcolm, leaving fifteen-year-old Tim to fend for himself, and they looked over her brochures together. It was surprising when the landlord rang the bell for time at half past two. They’d managed to have a conversation for once without awkward corners, and would still see each other, of course … Privately, Nick doubted it.

That had been two years ago, and his relationship with Amanda, the school-leaver, had gone in a quite different direction. He’d even found himself ticking her off when, very occasionally, she turned up late. There was no question of her being anything but an employee, with her boyfriends and her silly concerns, and with her being—how had that happened?—young enough to be Nick’s daughter. The shop, too, seemed to change with Katherine’s departure, less like a game or a toy, with its Regency stripes and its absurd, comic vases that nobody would ever buy. Some vases people did start buying came into the stock: massive, greenish glass vases from Czechoslovakia, oblongs, hourglasses, rosebowls, simple and modern, and for the first time when Nick did the books he paid attention to what the real figures would have been, and realized that beneath the shop’s apparently spectacular profits lay a small but true one; enough, certainly, to live on. It seemed to be growing, too, and for two years he’d been summoning up the energy to do what he was doing now: spending a weekend with Jimmy in the country and telling him at the end that he was very grateful for everything, and would like to pay him back his original investment, and run the shop as a straightforward business from now on. That was what he was here to do. He saw no reason why Jimmy would be difficult about it. It seemed perfectly reasonable to him that, having run a shop for Jimmy’s benefit for ten years, and having gone on who knows how many dodgy and frightening journeys to Morocco, and Iran before that, Jimmy would be happy to hand over the shop as a kind of retirement reward. Jimmy was doing well: perhaps he’d even give it to him without asking Nick to pay back the capital. No, he wouldn’t do that—Nick couldn’t
see him standing in the hot, creaking hallway, handing over the deeds with tears in his eyes—and in a moment a more plausible scenario arrived, in which Jimmy and the thuggish “butler,” by the side of the lake, a good hearing distance from the house, kicked Nick to the ground and beat him into gratitude.

Well, it still had to be done, but probably as late in the weekend as possible.

Jimmy yawned, theatrically, in the library. “Tea” was over, in the form of four fat whiskies for Jimmy, and, eventually, to coincide with the last, one for Nick—“There’s no ice, though I could get some, I suppose.” A smiling maid had come in at half past five to clear Jimmy’s glass and the tray; she had looked broad-faced and foolish, like a milkmaid with a touch of mongolism. The air in the library was stale and heavy as tweed. The yawn might have been connected to some bell-pulley system; in a moment or two Laura came in noiselessly, suddenly appearing by the side of Nick’s chair.

“Nick’ll be wanting to see the grounds,” Jimmy said. “You’re not deep in anything, are you, darling?”

“Nothing I’d like better,” Laura said. “You’d like to see the grounds, would you?”

“I’d be fascinated,” Nick said.

“Where’s Sonia?” Jimmy said. “She’s here, is she? Thought she was looking forward to meeting her old friend again.”

“I’m amazed she remembers me,” Nick said weakly. “I can only have met her—”

“She’s up in her room on the phone,” Laura said, ignoring Nick.

“Never off it,” Jimmy said. “Well, off you go. We’ll have dinner at eight.”

“Do you dress for dinner?” Nick said ironically, and in any case he had nothing to dress in, probably not even a jacket.

“What—for the pub?” Jimmy said. “No, fuck off. Tell Sonia if you see her that she can come out with us too this evening.”

They went. Laura ruffled Jimmy’s hair as she crossed the room, getting a grunt in return. She pushed one of the tall windowed doors, shards of paint falling as the door opened, and stepped out on to the terrace. Nick followed her. “We’re getting there, I believe,” she said. In the puff sleeve of her dress was a handkerchief and a pair of sunglasses; there was nowhere else to keep anything, and she pulled out the sunglasses and put them on. “At least, there always seems to be
some little man or other tinkering away at something or other. I expect it’s a bit like the Forth Bridge—once we get to some kind of presentable state the little men’ll just start doing it all over again.”