The Northern Clemency (86 page)

“I’ll call for a taxi,” Francis said.

He liked to be in bed by the time Bernie was home. It was best not to face each other. He knew that for his father, the night, the end of the day’s visiting when all possibility of being practical had gone and there was nothing to do but sleep as best he could, was the worst time, and he had trained himself not to listen to the noises that came from his parents’ bedroom. If he listened, Francis could not sleep, and the noises of his father’s terror and grief went on into the small hours.

The next day he resumed his narrative, and he went back, talking and thinking about every holiday they had ever taken; going back to when they had first come to Sheffield. There was a half-hour on Grandma Sellers, and another on Uncle Henry, everything he could think of and remember about them. He returned again to the recent past, and, interspersing memories now with frank statements of love, he went over the same ground. His mother shifted; her surfaces still flushed and tense, as if under some unknowable pain. From time to time the nurses came in, sometimes to take readings from the machine, sometimes to usher Francis out so that they could perform some rite of ablution. He returned, and, not knowing what else to start talking about, started telling her what he had never told her, about how he felt and what he was. He knew that he should have told her this long before, knew that she wanted to know what puzzled her, and now he explained that he was quite all right, that he was a failure in the eyes of
the world but he didn’t mind, that it wasn’t important. Told her what he had long ago come to understand, that for whatever reason something in him was missing, that he had never felt any sexual desire for anyone, that some part, which to the world was indispensable, was not there. He told her how, always, he had led up to the fringe of desire, of expressed desire, whether he was on his own and in his own thoughts, or even when he was with another person and the possibility seemed, as best he could tell, to be in the air. He had been led away from it, and if he had desires of any sort, he did not know what form they would ultimately take. He explained what it was like to look at someone and know them beautiful, yet not respond; whether to a man or a woman; he explained about the sense of exclusion that knowledge had imposed from any society he had ever lived in. He explained all this, quite clearly, and as if to reassure her told her that he had never been so happy as when he had been hers, a child, not knowing and not missing what would never be his.

The knowledge that he was, at any rate, something—not someone who wanted his own sex, nor someone who wanted to change his own, a something that was nothing, a neutral—would console her, and he expanded, telling her over and over again that she was not to blame, that nobody was. In his own mind, knowing what Sandra had been, he felt that there was some fount of desire to be shared between his parents’ children, which she had prematurely drained, leaving nothing for him; at her worst, she had surely said as much, taunting him, and he had had no reply. But now he had talked enough about himself; he went off, tired, and ate an awful sandwich in the hospital canteen, and came back, ready to talk.

He told her more things he had never told her, never told anyone else who hadn’t laughed at the information; told her about the three novels he had written, exuberantly detailed epics on distant planets, whole imagined many-branching biologies and evolutions among three-and five-legged purple camel-like beings, the detailed invented languages and geologies, trade systems and entire millennia-long imaginary wars between planetary empires he had worked out and worked over for the purpose, in the end, of writing a trite love story that nobody could believe and nobody—he had tried each of his three novels on four different people—could read. They all said it was interesting, and evidently hadn’t got more than fifty pages into any of them. Francis told her everything about the Gurganian Empire, ruled by the three-and five-legged camel-like beings with their purple fur, and its
three typewritten narratives; no one had ever stayed so long and listened to its intricacies. It went on all afternoon, until Bernie returned.

“I don’t know what you find to talk about,” he admitted. “I go over old things. I’ve brought in—” he shamefacedly brought out a photograph album, an old family album “—I’ve brought in something to remind me of stuff I could talk to her about, things that might mean something even if she isn’t—”

The euphemism eluded Bernie.

“Isn’t clear in her head,” Francis supplied, but Bernie shook his head irritably.

When Francis came back the next day, he had thought about these things, and brought with him a book. Five years before, as a Christmas present, he had given his parents a complete set of Sherlock Holmes, in nine handsome volumes, the complete lot. He didn’t know whether they had read them; he himself had loved them crazily at sixteen or seventeen, read them over and over until the one-volume Penguin paperback had broken and shattered under its enormous weight. He brought one in—it was pocket-sized—and when Bernie had handed over, Francis shyly brought the volume out from his pocket, and explained to his mother, her eyes shut, what he was going to do. He started to read.

He had always loved to be read to. Though he had himself learnt to read so young that he couldn’t remember any bedtime story, it was an accepted thing that if he was ill and tired as a child, his mother would come and read to him, anything he wanted her to. It was as part of an illness as tomato soup and Marmite on toast. There had been flu, a proper three-week flu when he was fourteen or so, and all the lights in the house had gone a sour yellow with his temperature. His eyes had been too tired and sore to rest on a page—“Fancy you not wanting to read,” his mother had said teasingly. But he had asked her to read to him, and she had gone on from where he had got to with
Vanity Fair
. He rested, his eyes closed, feeling dizzy with illness, but he could follow the story. It was not a book she had ever read, she said, and he could hear the slight puzzlement in her voice as Becky Sharp went through the ballroom on the night before Waterloo. He knew what it was; she could tell, somehow, that all of this had nothing to do with him. He knew all about passion in literature; he knew the words and the tune it went along to. They had read five whole chapters, and George Osborne was lying dead on the battlefield by the time he was well enough to take it up again. “I’ve enjoyed it,” she said. “I’ll read it
when you’re finished with it.” But he didn’t think she had, and when he opened
The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes
, the boards were still as stiff as those of a volume in a bookshop.

He started to read, not putting any expression into his voice, but reading all the characters as if they were him. He felt that he did not know what her wounded brain would make of a gamut of pretended voices, and thought of
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold
. As he read on, he grew absorbed in the story, and had to resist the temptation to fall silent, and read on rapidly in his own enchantment, his eye flying more swiftly over the page than his tongue could. Some were better than others, but he loved the rhythm of it; he loved the way the world, so baffling and meaningless at the beginning of each story, fell into place before Sherlock Holmes, so wonderful a reader of facts that everything made sense to him, everything under the most disparate and unnar-rated surfaces.

The nurses came in, and the doctors from time to time, examining Alice’s own surface. There seemed to be an obvious connection between the tasks of Sherlock Holmes and these medical investigations. It seemed to him that, like geologists wandering over a lawn buckled by seams of coal, the doctors were trying to work out the reality and the substance of profound events by means of the most external and conspicuous signs. What Alice’s face and body now offered—what those machines, even, offered that were hooked up to her and reading, measuring her—were only the most exiguous clues, in the Conan Doyle sense; facts, curiosities that, though interesting perhaps in themselves or peculiar, made no connected sense to the Watson-like observer. These items of information formed to a Watson only a remote pattern of sense, reduced in the clipboard at the end of her bed to lines between points that nobody could really interpret. Only the Holmeses who came and went could look at these facts, and sagely nod, as the great Sherlock could look at a footprint in a Brixton garden and deduce the age and weight and race of the man who, days before, had placed it there.

The case before him, and Bernie, too, as the light failed and Francis’s father took his place at the nightly vigil, seemed one that the great detective had never got round to, and Francis read the exchanges of Holmes’s unreported, speculative cases with care and something like sorrow, as if their full details would supply him with the reason he was waiting for, as if the reason he waited for was tantamount to what he really wanted: a cure and an awakening. Most of all, he waited for and
dwelt on the names of those cases Watson had never got round to telling, as if in these last ones might lie the secret causes that lay below Alice’s hot surface.

have therefore recommended Mr. Ferguson to call upon you and lay the matter before you. We have not forgotten your successful action in the case of Matilda Briggs
.

We are, sir
,
Faithfully yours
,
Morrison, Morrison, and Dodd
.
per E. J. C
.

“Matilda Briggs was not the name of a young woman, Watson,” said Holmes in a reminiscent voice. “It was a ship which is associated with the giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared. But what do we know about vampires? Does it come within

“Have you been reading all afternoon?” Bernie said, coming in, although it was really his voice that sounded so tired and broken.

“Most of it,” Francis said.

“What is it? Sherlock Holmes? You used to like that a lot,” Bernie said. “I remember you were always pestering us to know what we thought of it, the way kids do. There wasn’t any point, I’d only seen it on the telly, I don’t know anything about the books. It’s yours, is it, the book?”

“Yes, I think so,” Francis said, lying.

“I ought to read it some time,” Bernie said. “Did she enjoy it?”

Francis smiled. “Oh, I think so,” he said, welcoming this sign of his father, as much as anything, getting better. “Her blood pressure’s down, too.”

“She looks cooler, don’t you think?” Bernie said. “Long way to go, though.”

“I’ll call a taxi,” Francis said.

It was one of Daniel’s ideas, and one of the things that made Get High on Your Own Supply so popular, that it should have some kind of home-like aspect. One of these aspects was that, from seven thirty to eight thirty every night, the bar should be made as much like a drinks
party as it possibly could. It was a success; people often booked a table for eight thirty or even nine, but turned up at seven thirty on the dot to swan about the bar. Two of the waiters, Jerry and Mark, were deputed to walk about with silver platters on their shoulders laden with canapés. Scott, Jane’s husband, had offered advice, but as Daniel said to Helen—neither of them quite knowing what degree of mockery or irony was involved in the statement—folk in Sheffield didn’t want that kind of rubbish; they wouldn’t stand for it even if it were free. So what went out on the silver platters was exactly the sort of thing Daniel remembered from parties ten or twenty years ago: mushroom and Coronation-chicken vol-au-vents, mini quiches, sausages on sticks, even. It had started at Daniel’s quite successful monthly seventies nights in the restaurant; then Helen had pointed out how much quicker the ironic canapés went on seventies nights than the seriously meant stuff on every other night of the month. Folk in Sheffield—at any rate the folk in Sheffield who came to Get High on Your Own Supply—laughed when this sort of thing started turning up straight-facedly on every other night of the month, but they ate it and enjoyed it.

Tonight, Daniel was wandering through the crowd, meeting and greeting. He liked to keep up the appearance of a favoured guest at the party, perhaps some kind of famous client, rather than the
patron
, as Mark put it to Jerry, in a bogus French accent. He did it very well, laughing and joining in, giving the impression of getting just a little bit drunk on the company rather than the unattended Campari in his hand, never less than two-thirds down, never refilled. Jerry and Mark walked through the crowd gracefully, like synchronized swimmers carving arcs and swerves towards each other; it was a matter of walking constantly in a series of S-shapes. Helen wasn’t such a good party person, and liked to stand behind the frosted-glass bar with the reservations book, lending a hand with the drinks when it got a bit hectic. On the other hand, her mum and dad, Phil and Shirley, they loved it. They worked hard all day, Jerry’s sister Emma, who doubled as a receptionist for the dance school, said, but always by seven thirty they were down here, pink and shining and delighted, with a drink in his right hand and a drink in her left hand, quite symmetrical, smiling at the newcomers but not approaching anyone, just standing there and taking the occasional canapé as if perfectly amazed and astonished that anyone could offer them any such thing for free, simply full of pleasure. “I can tell you something, Jerry,” Phil had said one night after a third sherry, amazement high in his brown eyes. “I never expected it—but I’m getting
to be a rich man. I can’t believe it.” Because of course it was mostly his money that had gone into Get High on Your Own Supply. He didn’t look like the sort who had ever had much money to throw around, though now he’d settled into a uniform of smart brown shoes and quite dapper, brightly coloured woollen jackets, which didn’t make him look too much like a Butlins funmonger. Jerry had wondered, and had wormed out of him, that the money had been his retirement or redundancy fund; he’d been a miner. He smiled as he said this, shyly embarrassed, looking at the floor, though it was impossible to imagine why. “Don’t tell m’wife I said anything,” Phil said, artificially maintaining the normal level of his voice. Jerry liked him a lot. “This is what I’ve always dreamed of doing, to tell you the truth, young man,” Phil said, and refused, regretfully, the last vol-au-vent left on the tray.