The Northern Clemency (87 page)

Sometimes there were other people there,
amis de maison
, as Mark put it to Jerry in another of his irritating French phrases. One of the least popular with Jerry and Mark and the other staff was in tonight. He was supposed to be a great friend of Mr. Daniel’s, though nobody had ever seen any concrete sign of it. He sat in the corner, nursing a drink that he clearly thought he shouldn’t have been asked to pay for, his eyes following Daniel about the room as he mingled and greeted and laughed. Daniel carried on as usual; they could see, however, that he was quite aware of being watched and followed, and would deal with it in due course. He was wearing a sort of imitation of what Daniel was wearing, but his black shirt had been worn a good deal, and its colour had in the first place not been very good quality; it was greying round the cuffs and collar, its points curling inwards slightly. He must be getting on for forty. They’d seen him before: he came down, when he came down, for the party-like atmosphere between seven thirty and eight thirty, but he didn’t stay for dinner.

“What’s John Warner doing here?” Helen said to Daniel, as soon as she could, her tight little bob shaking crossly.

“He’s allowed to come,” Daniel said. “I didn’t invite him. If he wants to come and have dinner, he’s as welcome as anyone else. Has he come for dinner?”

Helen barely glanced at the reservations book. “No,” she said.

“Well, he’s welcome to come for a drink before dinner, then,” Daniel said.

“Am I indeed?” Phil said, coming up. “That’s nice to hear.”

“We weren’t talking about you, Phil,” Daniel said. “It’s already on the tray. Good afternoon?”

“Fair,” Phil said, taking a handful of nuts and throwing them back in his throat before picking up his usual dry sherry. “That lad David’s coming on. He’s got a gift for it.”

This David was the twelve-year-old son of one of the water-workers in one of the cottages at the reservoir, who had come in shyly one day with his saved-up pocket money and asked to learn to dance the Latin. His mum and his sisters had come from the start to cheer him on, and in a few weeks they’d all been learning, and their friends. But David, according to Phil, was the one with the gift.

“I’ll be thinking of putting him in for competitions before the year’s out,” Phil said. “We’ve not got a girl of the same standard, though. Who were you talking about, anyway?”

“That chap over there,” Helen said. “In the black shirt with the fringe falling in his eyes.”

“Oh, that chap,” Phil said. “I’ve seen him before. He’s an old friend of yours, though, isn’t he, Daniel?”

“His dad lives on my mum and dad’s road,” Daniel said. “Him and me, we used to go down town on a Friday night together.”

“Knocking them dead,” Helen said.

“That was before I met you, though,” Daniel said. “Can’t stand here nattering—”

And he was off in aid of the party-like atmosphere. “Party Like Atmosphere” was one of the names they’d considered for the restaurant, ruling it out because, as Helen said, what happened if it didn’t have one?

Daniel more or less avoided John Warner until the bar started to empty, people moving through to the restaurant, a drink in one hand, a brown-paper handwritten menu in the other and the ladies with their handbags swinging from the crook of their arms. At that point in the evening, Daniel always liked to withdraw a little bit. They’d seen enough of him for the moment, and it was his firm belief that the one thing that got on people’s nerves was intrusion at the dinner-table. No waiter of his would ever ask whether the food was all right; a waiter of his would be perfectly confident that it was. At this point Daniel disappeared; he’d go back into the restaurant to circulate when they’d moved on to coffee and maybe even liqueurs. Jerry and Mark and the others were good at their jobs, and everyone in Get High on Your
Own Supply ended up eating a pudding, and having a cup of coffee. He just stayed in the bar, and let them go through.

Before the bar was quite empty, he did go over to John Warner. “Sorry, mate,” he said. “It’s been mad.”

“You’re doing well,” John said, now taking his vodka-tonic, in which all the ice had long since melted, and finishing it in a long swig, like a pint of beer. “I came down to see how well it was going.”

“Yeah, it’s been mad,” Daniel said again. “The secret is, I reckon, don’t try to do what you don’t know how to do. There’s always someone else you can hire for that. We’ve got someone who can cook, and the front-of-house know what they’re doing.”

“Fascinating,” John Warner said.

Daniel wasn’t having that from someone like John Warner who’d never achieved anything in his life. “You need someone experienced in a new place,” he said. “I wouldn’t do it again, I think it’s a fluke. If I started again, I’d work in a professional restaurant, an established one, for two years first. But everyone else knows what they’re doing, they’ve all done it before. The other day, right, the suppliers turn up with sirloins, Andy doesn’t like the look of them, refuses to sign the docket, sends the whole lot back, crosses it off the menu, calm as anything. I’d have let myself be talked into taking them—well, not now, but I bet they’d have talked me into it a year ago. You need experience.”

“Helen’s enjoying herself?” John Warner said, twirling his glass pointedly.

“I reckon so,” Daniel said. “How’s your dad?”

“He’s all right,” John said. “Always the same.”

“And you,” Daniel said. “Are you still going down Casanova’s like we used to? I haven’t been for, I don’t know, five years. We used to go every week, you remember?”

“Course,” John said. “Yeah, I go down there. You ought to come—you don’t want to get too middle-aged too soon. It’s changed a bit, though. There’s not those lads in suits hanging round the edge of the dance-floor any more, and there’s not the girls dancing round their handbags in circles.”

“You all right, John?” Helen said, coming up with his vodka-and-tonic in her hand. She handed it over in a somehow satirical way. “Seen any good new films recently, or, I should say, any good old films? I always enjoy hearing about Barbara Stanwyck’s best films, you know.”

“We were just talking about Casanova’s,” Daniel said. “John says it’s changed,” and John repeated what he’d just said.

“Well, I don’t know how you fit in,” Helen said to John, “since you were always one of the ones in suits hanging round the edges.”

“As it happens, I dance,” John said. “You ought to come down some time.”

“I wouldn’t have thought that’s likely to happen again,” Helen said. “I don’t mind letting Daniel off the leash, though. You two should go for old times’ sake. Just so long as you don’t get off with a nurse—I mean you, Daniel.”

“Yeah, why not?” John said. “I was going down there tonight—you want to come?”

“Some other night,” Daniel said, but to his surprise, Helen joined in with the ridiculous request and, within ten minutes, he’d strangely agreed to go to Casanova’s with John Warner that evening.

“Go on,” Helen said, when they’d excused themselves and were in the office. “Go and have some fun. You’ve been working too hard, and on top of everything, taking meals up to, you know, Bernie three times a week.”

Daniel hadn’t known she knew about that.

“It’s a nice gesture, Daniel, but it can’t go on, and it’s made everything just a little bit more hectic. Go on, have a night off. We’ll manage.”

It wasn’t until she said that that he thought that, actually, he hadn’t spent an evening apart from Helen for months and months. Driving from the restaurant to Walkley to change before going out, John Warner in the passenger seat—and how had he got down to Get High on Your Own Supply in the first place, had his dad brought him?—he tried out a more brutal way of putting it. “I haven’t had a night off from Helen in six months,” he said.

John Warner laughed unkindly, as he was supposed to. “How are the mighty fallen,” he said. “Not let you out of her sight, does she?”

“Something like that,” Daniel said. In fact, it wasn’t until he had a night off from Helen, as he had coarsely put it for Warner’s benefit, that it seemed clear to him that he didn’t really want one. He wouldn’t mind going down to Casanova’s, but he’d much rather go with Helen than with John Warner, who was probably going to spend half his time telling Daniel what was wrong with him and the other half trying to get drinks out of him. Now that it was Daniel’s money, he’d earned it, he resented glad-handing people with drinks much more. He hadn’t cared so much about it when it was just his salary at the end of the month.

John Warner spent most of the journey talking jeeringly about the girl he’d picked up the week before, the things she’d said, the enthusiasm she’d expressed for seeing him again. Daniel listened, thinking that “the week before” probably meant six months ago, if not a year, and wondering why someone who seemed to dislike women as much as John Warner did devoted so much time to hunting them down. Perhaps that was the right phrase: hunting them down.

“Mind you,” John said, “it’s changed a bit, down at Casanova’s. It’s a riot. They all come, the ravers and that, and they dance till they chuck them out, and then they dance outside till the police come. They’ll dance to the noise of police sirens if there’s nothing else. Mind, they’re on drugs, most of them. They all take that Ecstasy.”

“At Casanova’s?” Daniel said; it was only a couple of years since he’d been there in a suit and a tie, grooving round the dance floor to George Michael. Five years, tops.

“Oh, yeah, they all do it. The management, they don’t like it, but it’s full every night, now, and it stays open till four, five in the morning. They don’t drink, though, that’s the only thing, they just drink water. Casanova’s, they put up the price of a bottle of water—it’s two pounds now, a right small bottle, too.”

“I wish I could get away with that,” Daniel said, wondering if he was making a mistake in coming out with Warner.

“It’s good for our sort of trade, too,” John Warner said. “You know what I mean? Is this where you live?” as they drew up in the Walkley street outside Daniel’s house. “It’s quite nice, I wouldn’t have thought of living in Walkley myself, but it’s all right.”

“Thanks,” Daniel said, as John Warner followed him in.

“The thing is,” John Warner said, hardly casting an eye round the hallway as he took off his jacket and hung it on a hook, “it’s all good for our ancestral trade, if you know what I mean. The girls, the little ravers, they come down, they take their drugs, and then they get—do you know what they say? They call it getting ‘loved up.’ They love everyone. I tell you, I wouldn’t normally stand a chance with some of those girls, but they’re quite happy to ask you to come home with them, or even, you know, if they can’t wait, they’ll say, ‘Come on, let’s do it now, in the toilets,’ and that.”

“OK,” Daniel said. “What happens, though, the next morning, when they wake up and they’re in bed with someone old enough to be their dad?”

“I’m not as old as that,” John Warner said. “I don’t mind. It’s not like they didn’t want to do it.”

“Sounds like fun,” Daniel said, his heart sinking. “Get yourself a drink. I’ll go and change.”

“Thanks,” John Warner said, going over to the walnut table where the bottles stood, and starting to go through them as if conducting an inventory. “Don’t dress up, just put an old T-shirt on and some jeans or something. There’s no point in wearing anything flash—they probably wouldn’t let you in.”

Daniel, halfway up the stairs, stopped and turned, came down again slowly. He watched John pour himself a good half a glass of Irish whiskey, and flop down on the long low black leather sofa. “Do you do all that, then?” Daniel said.

“What?” John Warner said. “I told you I did, didn’t I?”

“I meant the drugs, you know,” Daniel said. “Ecstasy and all that.”

“I’ve done it sometimes,” John Warner said. “It’s all right, it makes you dance.”

“I’m not going to,” Daniel said. “I’m too old to be starting on something like that, I reckon.”

“I wasn’t going to offer you any,” John Warner said, affronted, but Daniel thought it was probably more likely that he was going to end up paying for whatever pleasures Warner had developed.

“That’s all right then,” Daniel said, going back upstairs. “I won’t be a minute.”

The street in Walkley where they lived was steep and tree-lined; the houses, solid and Edwardian, attached to each other on one side but set solidly apart on the other. The road didn’t lead anywhere in particular, and it was quiet all day long, and in the night there was absolute silence outside. That was one of the reasons they’d liked it so much. Helen was woken by the noise of a taxi drawing up outside, the door slamming, and then the creaking of the front gate as the taxi drove off. She looked at the bedside clock; it was half past three. She’d only been asleep an hour and a half. She listened, her body tensing back into consciousness, to Daniel scrabbling with his key in the lock, then a jangle outside, and him trying another key. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said to herself. She had no idea why Daniel kept all his keys, for the restaurant as well as home, on the same key-ring: it always took him about
five minutes to find the right one. The door opened and shut again; she could hear him breathing heavily in the hallway in the dark, then toppling upstairs. He opened the bedroom door with exaggerated care and came in; she lay there, not saying anything, quite enjoying the performance. With a thud and then another, he got his shoes off; and when she thought he’d managed to get his trousers off, she reached over and turned on the bedside light with a click.

“Christ, look at you,” she said, and meant it: Daniel’s hair was all over the place, mad and flaring, and the black T-shirt he was wearing was stained with a white tidemark of salt where he’d sweated. “Jesus, you stink.”

“I know,” Daniel said, placing his words carefully, judiciously, like swirls of cream on top of a tart. “I got into the taxi and said where I was going, and then the driver just opened all the windows. I can’t smell it myself.”

“He’s such a twat, that friend of yours,” Helen said.

“You don’t know the half of it,” Daniel said. “You know something?”