The Northern Clemency (9 page)

The jobs ended with Daniel, and then there was Jane. Maybe, as Jane was going to school for the first time, maybe then Katherine was starting to say to herself the sorts of things that women, even in Sheffield, were saying to themselves in the mid-to-late 1960s, with a sense of what very mid-to-late 1960s things they were to be thinking at all. She might well have been thinking that she could, after all, go back to work in some way. But then Timothy came along—how had that
happened? She couldn’t remember having sex after 1962—but she couldn’t remember buying Malcolm’s socks either, although she must have done. Maybe it had been a part of her unremarkable domestic routine that had gone on automatically. It was a couple of years after Tim had started school before she dared to think of working, and it was only the florist’s opening that put it into her head.

“Ah,” the man said, as she came through the door of Reynolds’ that morning. The door was open, the flowers still in boxes, the ranks of gerberas like rows of medals, the chrysanthemums like mop-headed boys, the tulips shocked and upright as corn. The empty vases and buckets were arranged on the shelving display, which ramped up against one wall; the other was covered with a sheet of mirrored glass. “Ah—good morning. Good morning,” he said again, more cheerfully.

“Are you open?” Katherine said.

“Yes, absolutely,” he said. “Just setting everything out. It’s our first morning.”

“I know,” Katherine said. “We’ve been looking forward to it. Well, you’re getting there steadily.”

“And you’re our first customer,” he said. “How hilarious. That calls for something, I feel. I don’t know what, exactly. There’s no kettle, so I can’t offer you a cup of tea, I’m afraid. Perhaps I can give you your choice of flowers gratis, as my first customer. We’ve got plenty of those.”

“No,” Katherine said. “Start as you mean to go on.”

“That’s all right, then,” the man said, with a little gesture of relief. “Why don’t you sit down? You’re not in a hurry, are you? Sit down and talk to me. I’m just putting the flowers out and then you can choose properly. I’m Nick, by the way.”

“I’m Katherine,” Katherine said. “Is it just you working here?”

“Well, at the moment,” Nick said, lifting a row of yellow gerberas from their box in a single fine movement. “I haven’t had time to find an assistant, though of course I’ll be needing one. I suppose I’ll have to advertise and interview and my brother’ll want to have a say, and it all seems a bit …”

Just then Miss Johnson walked past the front window, her green tartan shopping trolley rattling behind her; she peered into the shop and saw Katherine, sitting on the one chair, apparently at ease with a young man struggling with flowers. Her mouth shut sharply. She walked on. She must have been on the point of greeting the new florist, but now she wouldn’t, and Nick would never know he might have been forgiven.

At home, Katherine did not immediately tell anyone that she’d taken a job at the new florist’s in Broomhill. She put the jazz-modern yellow and brown plates, twenty years old, in front of Malcolm, Daniel, Jane and Tim; with oven gloves she put one down for herself. On the dining-table was a red tablecloth. She went back to the kitchen, took off the oven gloves and returned. Nothing was really hers. The plates had been a gift from Malcolm’s mother—a wedding present. She’d chosen it, Malcolm’s mother, as the sort of thing a young couple would like, near on twenty years ago. Now, it looked exactly that: something nobody in particular had ever liked, just some postulated abstract entity of a young couple. The dining-table, another gift or cast-off; a repro of something Edwardian, again Malcolm’s mother’s—“Your father liked it,” she’d said, in a challenging tone, as if Katherine and Malcolm were proposing to get shot of it and not her. Anyway, they’d taken it when Malcolm’s father died and his mother had announced that she’d be moving to a cottage in Derbyshire. Snowed in every winter now, too. Katherine put down the five plates, with chilli con carne on them, a new way to make mince interesting mid-week. Malcolm looked at his, perhaps at the patina of violent orange grease surrounding the mound of meat, then started to eat. Really, only the red tablecloth and the melamine-handled cutlery in this room had been her choice. The rest of it represented agreements, and all of it was potential lumber in Katherine’s mind. And that summed it up. She felt all she’d brought to this family were innumerable and faintly pathetic minor possessions, effortlessly chosen but easily replaced with something similar, or something quite different. The substantive structures of their existence, like the table they ate around every night, had been foisted on her without anyone ever considering that she might like to choose something herself.

She would start work a week later—no point in hanging about, Nick had said, with evident relief. She’d dropped in once or twice since then to talk over her tasks—it wasn’t necessary, Nick said, but she was in Broomhill anyway, as she often was.

“Here, let me,” she’d said, on one of her drop-ins, approaching him with opening arms to take a sheaf of sixty yellow roses from him. His lightly bearded face had a suddenly pagan look, a spark of alarm, like an intelligent animal’s.

“No, no,” he said, controlling the emotion, looking now amused, boss-like. “I can’t let you work yet, not until I start paying you.”

“Well, I could start properly today,” Katherine said. “You wouldn’t have to pay me the full day. You obviously need help.”

“I can’t,” Nick said. “I haven’t had a chance to talk it through with my brother. It’s half his money.”

“Where is he?” Katherine said.

“New York,” Nick said. “I’ll mention it at the weekend.”

“Is he coming over, then?” Katherine said, treading cautiously. She was inexperienced in lives and brothers like that, New York brothers; she felt in danger of saying something that showed where she was and where she’d seen. What she was.

“No,” Nick said. “I’ll speak to him on the phone.”

“Can you do that?” and “That’s an awful expense,” came to Katherine, but she managed to say, “Of course,” in quite a natural way, and went away quite soon afterwards.

This brother was a new, tantalizing fact, a good one for the tea-shop, but she’d not be in a rush to share it. In repetition, under the unsparing investigation of the Broomhill matrons and virgins, that urbane “of course” would not save her, and she could hardly pass as a woman to whom phone calls to New York brothers were an ordinary matter. Pretence with a Jacqueline Susann flavour made those women’s eyes widen, their lips licked even if it were true, a holiday in Morocco with photographs from Boots; she could not associate herself with this bold life without examining her own, and it started with the furniture.

She could not revolt from the second-hand, passed-down nature of her house’s furnishings—hadn’t she always said she liked old things, family things?—uncomfortably eliding a guilty table her mother-in-law had bought thirty years before with the notion of a “family heirloom.” It was rather the sense that her life would pass among superseded objects, things too vast and bulky to throw away without life-changing resolution. She saw herself, elderly, negotiating her own house like a mountaineer with crampons. There was some betrayal of her own existence, too, in the choice of a flower shop. Responsibility; waste; luxury; gardens. That was what it was about. When the time came, she would put on her orange rubber gloves and throw away the stock at the end of the week with a flash of excitement like the anticipation of adultery. Goodness. She would set her face. Nick would fold his arms, study her. She saw the whole scene quite clearly, and she was starting there on Monday. What she had betrayed had, quite suddenly, become not her existence but her husband’s.

That oasis of mutable beauty, bought wholesale, was a startling addition to Broomhill’s black and, where cleaned, yellowish sandstone. Nick’s flowers were the only things sold there both useless and shortlived. Frivolous, unnecessary and lovely.

“Have you seen the new shop? The flower shop?” Miss Johnson said, bumping into Katherine a day or two after it had opened. They were outside the post office; this was Miss Johnson’s way of letting Katherine know she had been seen sitting casually with the young man, and had not been seen at all.

“Yes,” Katherine said. “Don’t you think it looks lovely?”

“Lovely?” Miss Johnson said. “Yes, it does. It does look—” she tried the word out “—lovely. It would be nice to have that
and
an ironmonger’s. You see, I’m not in a forgiving mood. I don’t know where I’ll go for the practical side of things now Townsend’s is gone.”

“You could go to Marshall’s in Crookes,” Katherine said, a little impatient at being dragged away from the topic of Nick after so promising a start. “There’ll always be ironmongers.” She’d been thinking, and couldn’t come up with another florist’s in the whole of the west of Sheffield, even in the splendid beech-sheltered ramparts of Ranmoor.

“Well, some people might think there’s more of a need for ironmongers,” Miss Johnson said. “But you’re right, Marshall’s is perfectly satisfactory.”

Katherine wouldn’t let on she’d be working at Nick’s the next week, and left Miss Johnson to read as best she could the scene she’d witnessed. She was clearly busting to know. She satisfied herself by remarking that the young man seemed nice, and went on. She didn’t mind the prospect of acquiring a reputation for slyness when the news got out in the tea-shop.

Malcolm had to be told, of course, and the evening had to be chosen carefully. He was out two and a half nights a week. Tuesday was his battle re-creation society; Thursday the gardening club; Friday he liked to go out with the staff for a drink in the pub and wasn’t home before eight. “Liked to” in the sense of “thought it a good thing to do”: he didn’t have much of a drink, and said they enjoyed it more than he did. Probably enjoyed it more when he’d gone, Katherine always thought. She toyed with the idea of saving it for one of those nights when he’d come in half an hour before bedtime, to limit the discussion. But there probably wouldn’t be much of a discussion anyway. On Wednesday she thought hard and recalled what Malcolm’s favourite dinner was.
She shopped and bought it to soften him up. She even thought about getting a bottle of wine, but that seemed too blatant.

“Steak!” Malcolm said. “And mushrooms!” He was standing in the kitchen doorway, having changed out of his suit. The room was steamy, loud with the radio and the steak’s sizzle. Most food he said nothing much about. But at either end of the scale, he had two responses: after anything new, he’d set down his fork and say, discour-agingly, “Makes a change, at least.” The other thing, the massively keen one, was what he said now, not even after finishing but before. “Haven’t had steak for an age.”

“What’s so funny?” Daniel said, wandering into the kitchen, looking for something to eat once his dad had gone.

“Your dad,” Katherine said, though really it was herself, the neatness of the plan. “Don’t start picking, your dinner’s nearly ready.”

“I’m starving,” Daniel said.

“The inexhaustible appetites of the adolescent male,” Jane said, coming down the stairs.

“Gi’o’er,” Daniel said, lapsing into school talk.

She didn’t change the tablecloth, she didn’t get out anything but their usual weekday plates. For pudding there was, deliberately, the trifle left from the day before—a delicious one with strawberries in it: she’d been softening them up. The whole thing, apart from Tim saying, at one point, “I don’t like steak” (“Why not?” “It’s got tubes in it”) was a great success. It was almost a pang to remember what she’d done it for; it was quite a glimpse of a perfect family, all sitting up neatly and eating their delicious steak dinner. The kids might as well have said, “May I get down?” at the end.

“Do you know what?” Katherine said, when she and Malcolm were alone. “I’ve got myself a job.”

Malcolm looked at her in assessment; she looked back, firmly; he dropped his gaze to his empty plate. You could see him recalculating the steak, which had been only enjoyment, a treat.

“We’re not that short of money,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “I’ve worked before. I like having a job. I haven’t had one since the children were born.”

“What’s all this, then, all of a sudden? You’ve not said anything.”

“I know,” she said. “I wasn’t looking for one. It’s just landed in my lap, in a manner of speaking.”

“We’re not short of money,” he said again.

“It’s to keep myself busy,” she said. “Don’t you want to know what it is?”

“All right, then,” Malcolm said.

She told him about the shop, which he hadn’t noticed although he drove through Broomhill twice a day. That confirmed something she’d instinctively felt. Malcolm, with all his fussing and tweaking at the plants in the garden, the membership of and regular attendance at the garden club, hadn’t had his attention drawn by a new florist’s. Nick’s business and Malcolm’s Thursday-night interest, both apparently concerned with the same thing, were in reality sharply separated. He wouldn’t have connected the shop with his own interest. They were, mysteriously, different things, and she felt the affront she was offering him.

“Well, I don’t see why not,” Malcolm said. “If you don’t like it, you can always give up. Who’s in charge of the shop?”

“He’s not in charge,” Katherine said. “It’s his own business.”

“Oh, I thought it must be a chain,” Malcolm said. “Interflora. Well, it might not work out for him, either.”

And then Katherine told him about Nick.

It had been easy, really. He’d given way limply, and she didn’t know why she’d made such a business about it in her head. She’d had an argument practised and rehearsed in her mind, marshalled her points; and they lay there now like gleaming clockwork devices for someone to come and claim them. She was almost disappointed. All those arguments had been, in their different ways, attacks on him. It was only afterwards, sitting in front of the telly, Daniel out somewhere, Tim and Jane upstairs, heads in books, that she started to feel a little annoyed; the things he’d just accepted, the things he hadn’t asked about. Shouldn’t you ask about the wages, apologetic though they are? She wondered, angrily, about his politeness to her.