The Northern Clemency (57 page)

All the same—and this was a thought that she rather kept from her mind than hugged to it—he had, in the end, made love to her. Screwed her—done sex to her—fucked her. If she thought of that one occasion at all, she would uglify it as much as she could. He hadn’t needed to do that. He must have wanted it.

It seemed incredible to her now that she hadn’t wondered where the money had come from to buy the charming Ranmoor cottage with its London furniture. She had never thought that it had come from the flower shop. If she had considered the matter at all, she would have thought that Nick had a deep reservoir of his own money. Quite natural that such a person could run a shop, making no money, for years, and not take the matter remotely seriously. The question for Katherine now was not what she had believed at the time, but what the police could reasonably presume she had believed, as the time went on, the questions dully circling, setting out what Katherine could now see was the substantial truth of the situation. She wondered where Nick was at this moment; perhaps in this police station, locked up. She almost felt like asking.

There was nowhere to wait in the police station; nowhere but where everyone waited, out in front of the public desk. The walls were shiny with washable yellow-white paint, and hung with firmly advising posters about drink and drive, about drugs, about guns, about all manner of things. There was a leisurely traffic through the reception area, some drunk and noisy, more drunk and rebuked, their heads down. One defiant prostitute, her frizzy, hennaed, half-greying hair plastered down with sweat, her white leggings obscenely hoisted into the cleft of her cunt, greeted the desk sergeant by name and was greeted, sardonically, by name in return; she looked round, grinning, and found Daniel to stare at. Malcolm had never seen such people; Daniel said, when appealed to, that it was more like you had seen them, glimpsed them out of the corner of your eye when walking through town. You wouldn’t want to look directly at people like that. They sat on the orange plastic chairs, bolted in rows against the walls in case someone decided to throw them at the policemen, and read the posters, over and over, passing desultory and general observations, like a conversation struck up between strangers on a bus. At one point, around half past nine, on the other side of the desk, the station filled with hundreds of policemen, appearing from nowhere, dishevelled and dusty, their
tunics open and their helmets in their hands, shouting with the hoarse voices of men occupied all day in the open air. They didn’t have Yorkshire accents; they had been called in from elsewhere, and had been policing a miners’ picket line all day. “Where can we get something to eat round here?” one called out.

“In the canteen,” the desk sergeant said, in his normal voice, breaking off from a discussion with a worried old man.

“They’re in no hurry,” Malcolm said, attempting cheerfulness, but Daniel wouldn’t answer that. If they started wondering about how long they were going to keep her, they would start thinking about what his mother might have done, and it obviously wasn’t a parking ticket.

“I should phone Tim,” Malcolm said a little later.

“I’ll phone him if you like,” Daniel said. “Have you got any two-ps?”

“There’s not a lot of point,” Malcolm said. “And he won’t be worrying. Do you think we should phone Jane?”

“When we know if there’s anything to tell her,” Daniel said. “It’s probably nothing.”

“Yes,” Malcolm said desolately.

But the time went on, and they went on reading the posters; so many useful telephone numbers.

It was late when the Austin Allegro drew into the driveway. Across the way, a light in the front room of a house snapped off sharply, so as not to reveal the woman standing up and peering out. Katherine—you could see how the story would run—had been carried off in a Black Maria, and they wanted to see if she was coming back tonight. There had been no question about one thing. Daniel had come home with them, riding in the back as if he were a child again. No one had mentioned dropping him off in Crookes and he hadn’t thought of it until they were halfway up the Manchester Road. Anyway, the car was still in Rayfield Avenue.

Certainly, it had always been his job to jump out smartly to open the garage door, one of his household tasks, like gravy-making. But tonight it was his mother who made a point of getting out. She had thought, evidently, during the long, silent exchanges of their drive home, of the neighbours’ watchfulness. She fumbled with the key at the lock, lit by the headlight beam, and with a wrench lifted it up over her head. She stood aside to let Malcolm drive in, and Daniel caught
an unguarded glimpse of her face, as a stranger might see it. The faces of his parents were surely just as they had always been, ever since he had been able to identify them, they had grown no older, but now he saw Katherine’s face as the worn generic face of a middle-aged woman, its lines full of some unknowable care, and only the eyes were definitely those of his mother. She had found time to change not only her shoes but all her clothes. She was wearing the little jacket and, underneath it, exactly that sort of piecrust pussy-bow-collared blouse Mrs. Thatcher so liked to wear on the television, exactly the same shade of baby shit as the Austin Allegro, now a bit wilting at the end of this long guilt-strewn evening.

His father leant over to lock the passenger door before getting out and locking his own. Katherine was standing there, her arms upraised on the garage door, her back to the street. She seemed tall; but she had her high-heeled shoes on. Malcolm looked at her, a volunteering expression in his eyes.

“I think,” Katherine said, swallowing as she spoke, “I might go for a walk before bedtime. I feel—” she lowered her voice as if she could be overheard “—all wound up, if you know—”

Daniel looked at his watch. He had no idea what time it was, and it was well after eleven. But as if he’d made a rational objection with the gesture, Malcolm seized Daniel’s forearm and held it. She pulled the garage door down, and swiftly walked away. Above, the snake-hiss of a curtain opening, a slash of light in the upper floor. Tim was watching her go. Katherine clicked away down the street; her increasing speed made it seem as if the clicking was growing louder the further away from them she got.

In a moment, the two of them went inside. Unseen by anyone, Tim drew his curtain again, and in ten minutes the light in his bedroom went out.

Katherine started walking at an ordinary pace, hardly knowing where she should go—she walked so seldom, unless it was to the post-box at the corner of the road. But she reached the corner and did not turn right, following the greasy line of yellow lights, but left, off the road, on to the crags. Here, at the very edge of the city, was the big old house behind its double gateposts. An old woman lived there, a posh old woman whose family had owned it for years, perhaps for ever, perhaps had built it. Katherine had invited her to a party once; she’d accepted, then written a kind, regretful note of apology, as if she’d remembered she’d ignored the estate growing up round her big square
sandstone house on the edge of the moor, and couldn’t start acknowledging it now. Katherine went past, on to the stony irregular path, walking more quickly as she went, and to her surprise the windows on the moor side of the house were lit up, curtainless, empty of people observed or observing, like a lighthouse to a broad dark sea.

She went on, almost trotting, into the darkness of the path, her ankles bending impossibly from step to step. The light cast by the big house faded after a couple of hundred yards. On the right, a steep rise of hillside grazing where sheep sometimes wandered, their flanks striped with a slash of blue or green. To the right, a sharp fall of rocks, almost a fifteen-foot cliff. She could see neither, only down below the glowing sequence of street-lights masking the road. It was the Manchester road, just losing its name and turning into the pass over the Pennines. Katherine went fast, her breath catching. She never walked down here, hadn’t since the children were old enough not to want her company when they explored or escaped. She hadn’t missed those maternal outings, and she knew they’d all come here on their own. Daniel with girls, Jane to dream, Tim to bury himself in a crevice and hide, she guessed. She couldn’t be sure of the path—her feet wouldn’t carry her unthinkingly over the rubble-strewn way, but she hurried on. It hardly mattered, what would become of her, and her thoughts ran, not on Nick or even on her husband and children, still less on that specific chain of circumstance, but on all that, transformed and melting into a black cloud of dread. It was bigger and more horrible than the mere idea of public prosecution, even prison; bigger even than the notion of being found out and having to account, as she had tried so haplessly to do in that thin-windowed interview room, for a broad stretch of her own behaviour. It was just a weight, a blanket of dread spreading out to the dark horizon and covering half the starless sky, like the embroidered ownerless moors, with great strata sleeping deep beneath it.

Her right foot went through something, a gap between two rocks. She pulled, but her heel was caught fast. She tugged again, letting out a little cry, and all at once she felt the narrow heel snap. Even here, the immediate thought was of cost. They were new shoes; that was why she’d put them on. She bent down, gasping, and felt. It had snapped off cleanly, leaving her only the sole to walk on, and though she rummaged around in the loose detached fragments of the wild earth, she could not find the heel. For a moment Katherine paused, scrabbling for breath—she had been almost running—and without stopping to
debate her immediate thought, walked directly to the right, where the precipice must be. That was the best thing to do.

But she fell, not a bone-breaking ten yards, but directly forward, on to grass and heather. All at once the exact image of the lower crags in daylight came to her. Sideways in her vision, in the garden of the big house, a new light appeared. It was like a torchlight in the garden, moving about with pendulum regularity, a little hand-held light, a fleck like a glow-worm. It could have moved, pointed in her direction and shown her fallen, not tragically, but absurdly flat on her face in a damp, cold field. There was only a drop at the very beginning of the path. After that, the fields rose up to meet it. She lay, awkwardly twisted, bruised but no more than uncomfortable, and looked at her ridiculous position. After all, it seemed as if she hadn’t wanted to fling herself off a cliff at all. She hadn’t wanted to die, but rather, for once in her life, to fall over like a risible idiot, unwatched. Had she ever, since she was a girl, fallen in such a way? With this fall, her shoe broken, lying helpless like an overturned beetle, Katherine felt that the worst had now happened to her, happened in a fall, a second. Nick, the police, authority could peer at her, and do their worst. But she didn’t know what grey position in this new configuration of inspectors was occupied by Malcolm. She lay there until the damp and prickle of the undergrowth took the place of all other thoughts and sensations.

The shoes were unbearable, and she carried them one in each hand, all the way home. By the time she let herself quietly in, her tights were worn through at the heel and under the balls of her feet. Her feet felt as if she had been a day walking over cheese graters. She paused at the kitchen and switched its light on. In the dark house, the strip-lighting had the same metallic sour quality of a glass of water drunk on waking at four in the morning. Noiselessly, she dropped the new shoes, one broken, one whole, into the kitchen bin on top of a heap of potato peelings. It seemed so long since her last domestic task, and Tim had left the washing up from dinner time just where it had been left, in the sink.

A voice from upstairs, frail and sleepy, calling in the dark: “Is that you, Katherine?”

“Yes,” she said, not raising her voice. “I just felt like some air.”

The door to their bedroom opened, rustling against the thick pile of the fitted carpet. Presently, a thin figure, slightly hunched, pulling the skirts of his dressing-gown to him, coagulated at the top of the stairs looking down like a dark spook on the landing.

“You’ve been a time,” Malcolm said, in his normal, quiet voice.

“I wanted some air,” Katherine said. “Can I bring you anything up?” She hitched up her skirt, and in a broad gesture, hooked her thumbs under the waist of her tights, pulling them off with their ruined heels. They crackled over her legs; she’d shaved them last a week ago. She screwed them up into a ball and threw them at the kitchen bin.

“What happened to your shoes?” Malcolm said, but mildly, as if reminding her of something she might for very good reason have forgotten or mislaid. “And what—”

But that was evidently to hold her too much to account, and he stopped, leaving Katherine to survey her torn skirt, with a thick gash of mud and crushed grass down her left hip, where she’d fallen and slid.

“I don’t know,” Katherine said, but it sounded stupid. “I thought I’d walk down the path—you know, what the kids call the lower crags—”

“In the pitch dark?” Malcolm said.

“Well, I broke the heel of my shoe,” Katherine said reasonably. “In the dark. And I fell over, as you see. So you’re right, it wasn’t a good idea.”

By now they were in their bedroom. Katherine handed over the unrequested second glass of water she’d brought up, as she did every night, one on each side of the bed, on his bedside table, on hers. Malcolm in his old pyjamas with the drawstring waist and his woollen tartan dressing-gown; it was the same evidently comforting one, much washed and faded in its now soft fog of colours, running into each other, that she’d bought for him a Christmas soon after they’d married. He looked so like an aggrieved big-eyed child, one ill with some harsh wasting disease rendering him old before his time. He spoke, too, with the sort of grievance a child might have.

“Now, Katherine, what’s all this about—”

Or more accurately, a child trying his best to be terribly adult. It infuriated her, instantly.

“Is that how you speak to customers at the building society? The bad ones?”