The Northern Clemency (51 page)

It was odd how all that changed, quite suddenly. Somewhere in the previous three years, everyone who had agreed on one thing without ever bringing it up suddenly seemed to agree on another, also without bringing it up. It might have been allotted a date in a memo—say, 15 June 1982. The building society was all at once awash with money, awash with other people’s debt, and a memo might have gone round, instructing that on 15 June 1982 the staff would look at their immediate surroundings and agree that a general overhaul was long overdue. An architect was called in—it was astonishing that there was such a creature in Sheffield. But here was a real one, talking to everyone and telling them to call him Harry.

By the end of the summer, the warren of rooms was gone. Most of it had been temporary partitions, anyway. There was nothing—Malcolm found this weirdly, ironically inappropriate—load-bearing. The offices were opened up, and the top brass, the only ones to have their own secluded space, sat in plate-glass boxes. Everything was planned to match, from top to bottom; the desks all pale ash, black leather chairs, and a range of splashy abstracts. “I like them,” Margaret said defiantly. “I think they’re up-to-date.” But actually everyone else liked them, too, and Margaret’s up-to-dateness went unnoticed. The old windows
in practical white plastic, installed only twelve years before, were ripped out and replaced with hand-made sash windows, quite in the style of the original building. They were solid, though, with a steel core and reinforced glass. There were blinds instead of curtains. On the floor, throughout the building a single pale beige carpet ran. “It’ll look terrible in two years,” someone said, but the designer assured them that it was practical, stain-resistant, and it looked, you had to admit, amazingly expensive. And, for the first time, smoking in the building was forbidden. Downstairs, the girls sat behind gleaming steel windows, secure in their new Huddersfield and Harrogate smart blazers, with smart yellow-and-blue scarves round their necks and little name badges. There were ties in the same colour for the men at the counter too, though naturally they were allowed to wear suits of their own choosing, so long as they were dark blue. There was some discussion, even, about the senior management, the third-and fourth-floor people wearing the new yellow-and-blue tie, to identify them. But word got up to the fifth floor, where Mr. Regan OBE liked to wear his regimental tie, and no more was heard of that. All in all, it was a great success.

Not everyone had his own office any more. Malcolm, though, had been promoted only months before to the level, it proved, of a glass box. He’d have been open-plan without that promotion, any event. His office was open to view on all sides, with a glass door set into the glass wall, which tended to confuse new visitors trying to find their way out. On the way in, Margaret tended to lead the way. She still sat outside his office, connected to him by a new telephone system, one with twenty lines on it. He and Margaret were only six feet apart, though divided by a wall of sheer plate glass, and had to pick up the phone to speak to each other. It would have been unimaginable to summon her by waving. Though they’d always been chums, and whenever he’d wanted to suggest a cup of tea, or she to him, they’d fallen into making a capital T with their forefingers, these days he came out of his office before doing it. He just couldn’t communicate with her through the glass wall. Even when they spoke on the telephone, they automatically swivelled their chairs to face away from each other, as if to preserve the other’s privacy, the telephone right to pull faces unobserved.

This afternoon, she was typing with demure concentration, eyes down; she’d recently been inspired to have a hair-rethink, as she put it, and it was now looser and a little bigger than it had been, as well as a new rich colour, artificially streaked with red and deep brown and
flashes of gold. The shape of a chrysanthemum, it was still a slight novelty to him. Malcolm brought his attention back inside the room.

“Yes,” he said to the couple, not having paid complete attention. “Go on.”

If the interiors of the building society had been taken up a few notches, been polished, the shabby and serviceable replaced by the impractical and expensive, the customers, Malcolm sometimes thought, had gone in the opposite direction. The couple sitting opposite him now might, in the past, have come in, but they would never have ventured beyond the ground floor. For them, the building society would have meant a little green book, with handwritten entries of deposits, perhaps for a son, perhaps five pounds a month or even less. They would never have come upstairs. That was for the bold, the swaggering, people who looked at Malcolm and told him what they expected him to do. These people were different. They had put on their best clothes; a Burton’s suit, which the man’s occupation would not require, and a tie. The man fiddled at the fat knot, checking something. His wife had a black shining handbag like the Queen’s, chubby and square and capacious; it had been gone over with boot polish, leaving its mark on the tight gold clasp, gripped like a mouth.

They were a Sheffield pair, fat-faced and middle-aged, though both—Malcolm looked down at their forms—barely forty. They had the local build, neither with much in the way of a neck; their square heads sat firmly on their shoulders, and their complexions were pale and moist. They had dressed up for an interview with Malcolm, as they must have done once, years before, for a vicar, and he came to the end of the catechism he would always associate with these years with the same sense of an almost spiritual gravity. It was a matter of such importance, and his voice was full of seriousness. He kept from it the excitement, the love almost, which rose in him on these occasions. Such people had always been the bread and butter of the society’s business, but now they were becoming more than that. They were realizing their power, and they were coming upstairs for half an hour with Malcolm, in increasing radiant numbers. Behind his serious face, the desk with the neat arrangement of the necessary papers, his heart, in its peculiar way, shone.

“You think we can afford this?” the wife said, after a long pause.

“Certainly,” Malcolm said. “Of course, it’s my duty to stress that you must keep up repayments or risk the repossession of your house—”

“We’ve never missed a rent payment,” the husband said abruptly. “Never. Or been late, even.”

“I’m sure of that,” Malcolm said. “That was just the requirement of what I have to say to you, as it were. But it’s certainly in your interests to move from renting your property from the council to being its owners.”

“They couldn’t take it back, could they?” the wife said. “Take it away from us again?”

“Don’t be daft,” her husband said. “They couldn’t.”

“No,” Malcolm said, allowing her a kind smile. “They couldn’t in any circumstance take it back.
They
couldn’t. And you would find that your monthly payments would be an investment, rather than a monthly sum of money you’d never see again. Though your property could conceivably decline in value, it is much more likely to appreciate.”

“Appreciate?” the wife said.

“Go up, he means,” the husband said, and he wasn’t impatient, it was a look of unlikely love he gave her, real love between the two of them. All at once, Malcolm saw them, twenty years younger, perhaps at a youth-club dance, taking each other in their arms for the first time, starting to talk to each other and finding out everything they had in common, and that same look they would both come to know so well passing between them.

“It’s just our house,” the wife said. “We’ve lived there for so long, we feel it’s ours. We’d never want to sell it. But when we heard that they’d passed this law, that you could buy your own house, Geoff said—”

“I said, let’s go for it,” the husband said. “Maybe that sounds daft.”

“No,” Malcolm said. “No, it doesn’t sound daft at all.”

They had confessed something private, and as Malcolm went through the remaining details, now smiling freely, they visibly relaxed. It was so small a sum of money in the end, and for it they would have something of their own, a little plot, a house they loved. It didn’t take long, and in ten minutes Malcolm was getting up to show them out. They fussed with their belongings—the wife held her handbag proudly but incompetently, something she wasn’t used to—and the three of them performed a small, embarrassed ballet of after-you at the glass door.

“Goodbye, Mr. Glover,” the husband said, shaking his hand, “and thank you.” He let go and, turning, took his wife’s beloved hand, and
together they walked down the stairs. Malcolm watched them go with pleasure.

“New customers?” Margaret said.

“Buying their own house,” Malcolm said. “Council-house sale. Those are the ones I like best, almost.”

“I’d like to know where people are supposed to live when they’ve sold off all the council houses,” Margaret said. “Poor people, who couldn’t get a mortgage, I mean. Selfish, I call it. The waiting lists, they’re going up and up, since they passed that law.”

“Yes, I suppose it is selfish,” Malcolm said weakly, not quite knowing how to say what he thought, that if you couldn’t be selfish about your own house, you couldn’t be selfish in any respect. It made him happy to help people like that even fill out one of those impossible forms. In the end, he said all he could say, which was “It’s good business for us, though.”

“I suppose so,” Margaret said. “It’ll all end in tears, mark my words.”

She returned to her typing, and Malcolm, after a moment’s thought, went back into his office.

It wasn’t a busy day, and he left on the dot of five thirty. Something was going on in the Roman Catholic cathedral, and through the open doors a dark, glowing interior could be glimpsed, and what you sometimes smelt, a whiff of perfumed smoke. He’d never been in. Outside, there was a small group of women, shaking their tin cans. Not a charity, but what you expected more and more in Sheffield in the last few weeks, a collection labelled “Dig Deep for the Miners.” At the feet of the women, a pile of tinned food—a sad collection of donations, like an urban harvest festival, tins of beans and sardines and ugly soups, and at the front a solitary tin of chick-peas. That amused Malcolm; he could well envisage the Broomhill intellectual who had donated something as dreary as that. Probably a vegetarian, too. Malcolm didn’t know many miners, about as many as he knew vegetarians, but he could imagine how that would go down as a donation when it finally arrived. They were supposed to be miners’ wives, drifting in from the mining villages around Sheffield, and some probably were.

Less connected to the industry, Malcolm guessed, was a group awkwardly aligned to the headscarved wives; they were young men and one girl, shabbily but decisively dressed, not quite mixing with the miners’ wives but next to them, like competing stalls at a village fête. Malcolm recognized the one at the front. It was Tim’s friend Stig,
wasn’t it, with an awkward armful of their nutty newspaper? The
Spartacist
, produced by half a dozen people, half of it written by Tim. Malcolm heard all of it every day, but driven by an obscure impulse, he jingled in his pocket for a fifty-pence piece, went straight up to Stig.

“Hello, Stig,” he said.

The man looked appalled at being addressed by anyone in a suit and tie, carrying a briefcase; or perhaps he didn’t recognize Malcolm. His name, Malcolm believed, was really Simon. His dad was the vicar up Lodge Moor.

“It’s Tim’s dad,” Malcolm said. “I’ll have one of those, please.”

Stig said nothing, but handed over the newspaper with a sneer, and took Malcolm’s fifty pence. “No change,” he said.

“That’s all right,” Malcolm said, folding and tucking the newspaper under his arm as if it were
The Times
. “Give it to a worthy cause.”

“Oh, we will,” Stig said contemptuously, and as Malcolm walked away, he broke into a chant, soon followed by his three or four grubby followers. They’d been alternating two chants all day. In his office, Malcolm couldn’t hear the words, but you could tell what each one was just from its rhythm. “Maggie Maggie Maggie!” Stig shouted after Malcolm as he cheerfully went off. “Out out out!” his followers joined in. Malcolm wasn’t sure that he didn’t prefer that one, on a purely musical basis. The other, which they could keep up for hours, was “Coal not dole! Coal not dole!” That really got on your nerves, as Margaret was always saying. “I say ‘Mine not whine,’” she regularly remarked, oddly not objecting so much to the youths chanting, apparently, for her removal just outside the office. Malcolm wondered when they knocked off for the night. They tended to show up about ten thirty in the morning.

“Who the fuck was that?” Trudy said, sidling up to Stig. “Maggie Maggie Maggie.”

“Out out out,” Stig shouted. “Tory scum with a briefcase. Don’t ask me.”

“Seemed to know you,” Trudy said. She had a scowl, a pair of Doc Martens, black 501s, and granny glasses. “Maggie!”

“Out!”

“Maggie!”

“Out!” Stig said. “He’s Tim’s dad. You know T.”

“Little T,” Trudy said, curdlingly. “That’s his daddy, then, is it? And he lives at home, diddums, getting his clothes washed by mummy.”

“That’s not fair,” Stig said. “Might as well take advantage while he
can. The alternative being pouring money into some fat landlord’s pocket.”

“There are other ways,” Trudy said mysteriously. “There are squats, or there’s the people’s housing. Maggie Maggie Maggie!”

“Out out out,” Stig said dubiously. He, too, still lived at home, with his dad the vicar. Trudy, as she kept reminding them, lived in the people’s housing, or Park Hill Flats on the fourth floor, a nice view, plastered inside with posters of nuclear explosions and unlikely geopolitical figures kissing each other, a flat she also referred to as a Women’s Space, not admitting any men on Mondays to Thursdays inclusive. “I don’t know,” Stig went on, “but there’s enough pressure on ordinary working-class families as it is. There’s not enough of the people’s housing to go round without them as don’t need it claiming it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Trudy said.