The Northern Clemency (58 page)

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The ones who’ve fallen behind with their payments?”

“Katherine, there’s really not a lot of point—”

“Do you think there’s a single woman in the world would put up with being spoken to like that?
Malcolm?”

“I don’t mean to put your back up,” Malcolm said, blinking in
his most owl-like way. “I know you’ve had a shock, an unpleasant experience—”

Katherine almost delighted in that, though her face remained perfectly solemn. He hadn’t expected her to throw up so solid a wall to block the customary allusions and retreats of their customary way of speaking to each other, the ways in which he always tried to head off her capacity for the blunt statement of a situation by the shy exhibition of a patch of tender skin. Nothing was to be gained by not speaking plainly, she felt, about their situation if not her particular one, and she saw her way forward quite clearly.

“I’m worrying about you,” Malcolm said in the end. “And about how you—I don’t know—about how this has all come about. It must be—” he said, hanging on in case she should ask where, exactly, he thought the blame lay “—it must be some stupid mistake, a silly misunderstanding.”

“That would be the
easiest
thing,” Katherine said. She remained standing, taking off her clasp earrings. It was a surprise that they were both still there. The familiar physical release, at the end of a long day, was like an exhalation.

“Katherine,” Malcolm said. “I don’t understand why you’re talking to me like this. Anyone would think it was my fault you seem to be in trouble with the police.”

“That’s really not fair,” Katherine said, lowering her voice. “And not accurate. I’m not ‘in trouble with the police.’ I’ve done nothing wrong.”

“It’s Nick, I know,” Malcolm said. “But what did he get you involved in, that’s what I’d like to know.”

“I see,” Katherine said. “So you and Daniel, you’ve been puzzling it all out between you—”

“No,” Malcolm said quizzically. “It’s more, really, that you came out and said, ‘It’s Nick.’”

Had she?

“I didn’t know what I was saying.”

“Do you now?”

Katherine sat down—not next to Malcolm, on his side of the bed, but in the armchair they’d always had in the bedroom, Lord knew why. Perhaps no one had ever sat in it before, with its hard red chintz and its narrow hipless seat. But Katherine sat in it now. She was quite calm, not hysterical, as Malcolm seemed to think—he was treating her gently, as a woman who couldn’t remember what he’d said, one who had
no grasp of the situation. Clarity was best and, actually, clarity was what she had to spare. She had walked out into the unlit country to clear her head, and her head was now quite clear.

“What’s that noise?” she said.

Malcolm cocked his head; in a moment the same rasping sound came again. Of course, she knew it; she didn’t know why it had seemed so unfamiliar. “It’s Daniel snoring,” he said. “He must have left his bedroom door open.”

“I’d got used to not hearing it at night,” she said. “I’d practically forgotten what a noise he makes. Why did he come home with us?”

“He left his car,” Malcolm said. “I suppose he thought he might as well stay overnight, drive in tomorrow.”

“He’ll have to be up early in the morning,” Katherine said. “Is there still an alarm clock in there anywhere?”

“Oh, I’ll wake him up,” Malcolm said. “I’ll even give him a lift to work, don’t worry.”

“I thought you said he’d got his car.”

“Yes,” Malcolm said. “That’s right, he’s got his car. I don’t know what I was saying. Of course he’s got his car.”

“The best thing,” Katherine said. “The best thing all round is if we get divorced.”

The curtains were drawn, the room small and full of stuff; on the floor, a pile of books had been kicked over and tangled with his abandoned shoes. There was a chaos in the room that never used to be there; they’d always been good, the pair of them, about putting things away, dirty clothes in the bedroom laundry basket or folding them neatly on the back of the armchair. Somehow, the room wasn’t like that now; it was full of detritus. There’d been an effort recently: she’d put a little vase of chrysanthemums on the bedside table, on his side, a week ago. They were starting to brown and wilt; a few curled-up petals, like monkey fingers, lay on top of his book. Malcolm got up and, with his bare foot, poked aside his shirt from where he’d dropped and left it, a gesture of disgust. He went to the window, pulled the curtain aside a little, looked out. There was nothing out there; he looked at the silence.

“You’re not straight in your mind,” he said after a while.

“Stop saying that,” she said, gripping the arms of the chair. “I’m perfectly straight in my mind. The best thing all round is if we decide to get divorced.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” Malcolm said, coming
back. He raised his hands; he might have been about to hold her face in them.

“I’m saying,” Katherine said, “it’s best all round if we get divorced. I’ll move out in the morning. I won’t need much stuff, it’ll go in a suitcase, and I’ll find a hotel first, and then a bedsit, maybe like the one Daniel lives in, and—and—”

Her plans ran out. She shook her head, as if to shake some notions loose into speech.

“Just go to sleep,” he said, sitting down on the bed and pulling the cover over his knees. “It’ll all seem different in the morning.” But he didn’t get into bed; he stayed there in a halfway position, waiting for the rest of the conversation.

“No, it won’t,” she said savagely. “Whatever it seems like, it’ll all be the same in the morning. Don’t speak about it, don’t look at it, don’t think about it—it’s always there, whatever you do. I don’t know how you can—”

Her speech was failing her now, perhaps in exhaustion, like a garaged car on a frosty morning.

“You want to speak about it?” he said levelly. “Katherine, I’m telling you, you’ve had a shock. Don’t say anything you won’t want said in the morning, because you don’t really mean it. Whatever it is.”

“But you’ve said it now,” Katherine said, and then, parodically, “whatever it is. You’ve said yourself there’s something I won’t want said in the morning. You might as well come out with it now.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t want to know.”

“Yes, you do.”

Outside, remotely in the night, perhaps as far down as the Manchester Road but carrying across the outdoor open silence of the suburban night, there was a piercing remote noise, the yowl of a siren. Katherine, convulsively, got up out of the chair and went to the window, a bone cracking in her bare ankles as she went. She pulled the curtains tighter shut, held them with her fists.

“They wouldn’t put the sirens on for you,” Malcolm said. “Anyway, they’re done with you tonight, they said.”

“I don’t know how you can—” Katherine said. “You’ve no idea, what it was like in there.”

“I can imagine,” Malcolm said. “And you’re right, I know. I just don’t want to know.”

“You don’t know anything,” Katherine said. It was the worst thing
she could have said to her husband, worse than any confession, a frank statement of unretractable contempt.

“I didn’t think I did,” Malcolm said, holding the bedclothes tight to him. “Till a couple of weeks ago.”

“A couple of weeks ago?” Katherine said.

“Yes,” Malcolm said. “He told me then.”

“He?”

“Listen,” Malcolm said, getting up with a convulsive gesture, “just let me tell you, and then, you know, everything’s been said, like you want. I was out in the garden, I was pruning the abutilons, I remember because it said in the
Telegraph
gardening column that it was this weekend you ought to be pruning shrubs back, and I thought, That’s funny, shows I’m on top of things because that was one of the things I’d definitely decided to do that weekend, trim back the abutilons—”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Malcolm,” Katherine said. “Shut up about the shrubbery. I can’t bear it. It’s nothing to do with the abutilons.”

“Katherine,” Malcolm said, not raising his voice. “Just sit down and let me tell the story in my own way. And if abutilons come into it, then they come into it. There’s not everything in my head that’s all about you. Some of it’s abutilons, and some of it’s stuff which I go out into the garden and do to get you out of my head, and the kids, and everything that sometimes makes me want to think about something else entirely for an hour or two. Right? It was still quite cold out there—I had my gloves on—so it was strange when Tim came out. He watched me for a while. I ignored him. Actually, I probably went out so I didn’t have to talk to him, I just couldn’t face it. And then he said, ‘I don’t know how you keep it up,’ or something he’d been thinking about saying, something horrible. I pretended I thought he was being interested, so I started saying that with a garden you had to keep it up, just a little attention now and again, going round doing a bit of weeding, a bit of pruning, a bit of planting, and the plants’d look after themselves, or it seemed like it. You had to keep it up.

“I probably gave him a bit of a speech about gardens, and he just listened for a while, and then he smiled and said, ‘I wasn’t talking about shrubbery,’ exactly that, exactly the thing you’ve just said. I don’t know where you get ‘shrubbery’ from but I know where he got it from, it’s just what you say when I’m out in the garden. Teaching your children contempt for their father, that’s a nice thing for you to do. Wait a second, I’m not done. ‘That’s a shame,’ I say to Tim. ‘It might do you
good to take a bit of interest in something.’ And I thought he was going to start on the urban proletariat again, that, you know, there were more important things than hobbies, as he calls them, there’s the revolution, blah blah. It doesn’t take a lot to set him off, you know as well as I do. But he didn’t, he just said, ‘I wasn’t talking about gardening. I was talking about your wife.’ ‘Your mother,’ I said. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘how you can take an interest in something and pretend nothing wrong when your wife’s behaving like she behaves.’”

“Oh, my God,” Katherine said. “What on earth—”

“No, there’s more,” Malcolm said. His voice was steady, and now he was almost in Katherine’s face. “I just looked at him, and I sort of knew what he was going to say, and I think I said to him what I just said to you, that there’s things that are best if no one says them even if everyone knows them, that if you don’t say them—no, I didn’t say this, but this is what I think—that if you don’t say something it can’t become important, but if you say it everyone’s ever after got to walk round it like a pile of rocks in the living room, and it might just go away. I thought it had gone away. I thought it really had. I thought I’d ignored it and you’d stopped it, whatever it was, and we were getting on all right again. We’ve been fine, the last three or four years, better than ever, there’s no reason—”

“It’s Nick, isn’t it?” Katherine said.

“There’s no harm in saying it,” Malcolm said. She hadn’t surprised him. He’d known one of them, soon, was going to say exactly that, and he swept on. “Or no more harm now, I suppose. That’s what he said. He said it wasn’t recent information, it was something he’d seen years ago. He said he’d been going down through Broomhill, what, six, seven years ago, he’d only be a little boy, and he looked in through the window of the flower shop to see if you were there. And, I suppose, to get a lift home—I don’t know what he was doing in Broomhill, coming back from town in the school holidays or something. But he looked in through the window and, he said, ‘You know what I saw? I saw your wife with her arms round that man she used to work for, and they were kissing.’”

“That’s not true,” Katherine said.

“Oh, come off it,” Malcolm said.

“No, I’m completely serious, it’s not true, it can’t be true,” she said. She was incredulous that something like the truth should be represented by something so false. Tim had never seen anything of the sort, and it was ridiculous to pretend that he had. Never in her life had she
embraced and certainly she had never kissed Nick in the flower shop, in the window of the shop where anyone passing, anyone in Broomhill, could have seen them. He had just made it up. “I’ve never kissed Nick in the flower shop, I’ve never put my arms round him. He can’t have seen that because it didn’t happen there.”

Malcolm looked at her gravely. “I wish you hadn’t said that,” he said. “There’s been a point, I think you know the point, where we could just ignore it and the whole thing would come to an end, though I wouldn’t know when it came to an end, and then you’d stop thinking about it and so would I. And it would fade away in time without anyone ever talking about it. But you just said, ‘It didn’t happen there.’”

She had heard herself saying, “It didn’t happen there,” but the time was too late to hold back confessions. Malcolm, too, was going to do it all for her. It was unfair of him to say that it was her fault it was coming out now.

“I thought it was all over,” Malcolm said.

“It is, it was, a long time back, it was hardly ever anything, it never started, it was a mistake, it’s—”

“I don’t know why you want a divorce,” Malcolm said. “If it’s all so very much over and finished. I don’t know why you wouldn’t first want to forget all about it, or if that’s not possible because your husband’s found out, why you wouldn’t first ask him if he can forgive you, because that seems like the sensible thing to do in the circumstances.”

That dropped like a stone. It was true: she didn’t want a divorce now. It seemed extraordinary that she had wanted a divorce only so that she wouldn’t have to talk, as a married woman, about the short affair she had had with Nick. The one occasion. It seemed a high price to pay so that she wouldn’t have to listen to anything he said in response, but she had said it, and had said it with a conviction that things were clear in her head. Now that, it seemed, they were about to have that conversation, her wishes had changed; her wishes, which had always been for convenience above all.

“You see, the thing is,” Malcolm said—and it was exactly the voice in which, surely, he started raising objections to someone applying for credit when holes in their application had become apparent, “I thought we’d been through all that. I thought it was all over and nothing had come of it, and, really, I still think I was right. When you said first, ‘I want to go and get a job,’ I thought, Well, we don’t need the extra money, though extra money is always nice, but I’m not going to
be selfish, I’m going to think about you. And maybe that was right. I know it can’t have been much of a life for you, being at home all day, looking after the kids, shopping, cleaning, tidying, cooking dinner, it would wear anyone down. And I know you used to like going to work—you used to go on about it, but I know you enjoyed working in the school, having a position of responsibility. You’re an educated woman, you’re not stupid. It’s not like Alice over the road who’s never worked and never missed it.