The Northern Clemency (96 page)

One weekend Francis looked out of the window of his parents’ house and thought the grass needed cutting. Bernie had never been much of a gardener, and many of the shrubs, which had now grown shapelessly leggy, or squat and shapeless, were actually the plants that had been left so many years before by the Watsons. They were the ones who had taken all the lightbulbs, a story told every high season and holiday by Bernie, with additions; for some years, in the retelling, he had been hurling himself to his knees as the last and youngest Watson exited the house, begging tearfully for at least one lightbulb in the downstairs toilet to shit by. It hadn’t happened quite like that, and the Watsons’d left, at any rate, a few shrubs in the garden. There’d been an occasional addition, a camellia and some sticks, which you always forgot about until they put leaves out and flowered. But Bernie’s gardening was on a different sort of scale to, say, Malcolm Glover’s: he was forever ripping out trees and installing six-inch saplings that would only look like anything in thirty years’ time. Bernie, on the other hand, had bought the camellia (for instance) already in bloom. He didn’t get a great deal done beyond mowing the lawn.

When Francis noticed that the lawn was growing thick and shaggy, like a mane, he couldn’t leave it for a moment longer. His situation, his and his father’s, was in danger of turning into that horrible warning up
the road: the house where the mother had died. It hadn’t been painted for decades; there were weeds and unkempt growths in the front garden; the rubbish piled up in the front porch and was thrown into the long grass. It looked, actually, quite a lot like the house Francis lived in in London. It had happened here, in this neat street, because the mother had died and the father and son hadn’t known how to keep it up. With the childish habit of naming things that had never left him, Francis called it the Sad House in his mind, just as Anthea Arbuthnot, whose name he knew perfectly well, had always been Nosy Woman.

Living as he did in a bedsit or three, Francis was conscious of the neatness of his parents’ house. An ornament, once chipped, would never be allowed to stay on the shelf on the grounds that most of it was whole; a mug with a crack like a hair in it was promptly thrown out. Things here were looked after, and replaced. Unlike the Sad House, up the road, it wasn’t his mother’s sole attention that kept things like this: Bernie, too, was neat in his ways, couldn’t bear disorder. “If you’d been in the army …” he used to say reproachfully, whenever he’d come across anything Francis or Sandra had dropped on the floor, a plate left dirty and unattended on a table. Perhaps it had been his two years’ national service, decades ago, that had made him neat. Though he’d kept the house shipshape, the garden had passed him by, and the lawn had grown.

The fly-mower was kept in the garage, and Francis fetched it out one afternoon. When he took the cover off, the blades had been carefully wiped after its last outing. He set it on the long grass, and went inside to the utility room to plug the machine in. He must have knocked the on/off switch when taking it out; as he put the plug in, the machine started up outside, with a buzz and then a kind of stubby, choking series of grunts. The window upstairs opened.

“I don’t think that’s going to work,” Bernie said. “I was looking the other day, I think the grass has got too long. Something more radical’s called for.”

“I could give it a go,” Francis said. “Improve the look of it a bit anyway, if I gave it a once-over.”

“It’ll make things worse,” Bernie said. “When the grass is as long as that, the fly-mower just tears it out by the root and it ruins the blades. I’m going to have to get a man in with a scythe.”

Francis unplugged the mower, wiped the blades, wound up the coil, replaced the cover and put the mower back where it had come from.
But then he crossed the road to Mr. Glover, who, after all, knew about gardening.

“Hello, Francis,” Mrs. Glover said, opening the door with a Saturday magazine in her hand and her reading-glasses on. “Have you been down to see your mum today? She seemed very cheerful yesterday.”

“She’ll be home in a week or two,” Francis said.

“That seems quick,” Mr. Glover said, coming to the door too. He had got, quite suddenly, a good deal older, his slightness and thinness developing deep ridges, and, when he smiled, the weatherbeaten quality of a retired jockey. He had never looked much like a jockey before; but now he looked like a retired one. He and Katherine, unexpectedly, had grown to look like each other: they could have been brother and sister. It was since she had had her hair cut short; it was practical, but quite flattering to her thin white hair. “They never let you hang around in hospitals, these days, do they?”

“They wouldn’t be talking of sending her home unless they were completely sure,” Mrs. Glover said. “They must be happy about the way the operation went.”

Francis explained his errand.

“A scythe?” Mr. Glover said. “I’m not sure. I don’t think you mean a scythe, that’s an enormous two-handed job—one of those could take your legs off if you weren’t careful. You want what we used to call a bagging hook—it’s, what, a sort of sickle. The sort of thing you see medieval peasants walking around with in the films, you know, over their shoulders.”

Francis thought it was the sort of thing Death always had, as well, but only said, “I don’t suppose you’ve got one of those, then?”

“A bagging hook?” Mr. Glover said. “I used to have one, I know.”

“One more piece of supposedly historic rubbish cluttering up the garage,” Mrs. Glover said, much less surprised at this than might have been expected, “I’ll be bound.”

“Some of that stuff’s very valuable,” Mr. Glover said warmly.

“If you ever wonder why it is we have to keep the car outside in all weathers,” Mrs. Glover said, gesturing to their new car with the rolled-up magazine, a surprisingly saucy four-door sports car in bright red, “that’ll be because of all the very valuable stuff in the garage.” She spoke casually; it was obviously a favourite topic of dissension around here.

“But the sickle,” Mr. Glover said. “It’s not something you use all that
often. There’s a difference between a sickle and a bagging hook, but I don’t know what it is exactly. Let me have a rummage—I don’t think
I
threw it away, at all events.”

“Don’t look at me,” Katherine said, turning round and going back inside the house. “I don’t throw anything away, my life wouldn’t be worth living.”

“I daresay that’s true,” Malcolm said. “Let’s have a bit of a rummage.”

When the garage door was raised, it wasn’t quite the Oriental bazaar Katherine had suggested, but there wasn’t any chance that a car could have fitted in there. There was a bench with metal-working tools and a half-finished breastplate in a clamp, and above it, three dozen neatly labelled plastic drawers, like a well-stocked ironmonger’s; there was a potting bench, with green egg-trays in stacks and two large, comfortable pillows, potting compost in plastic sacks, as well as the small tools of the potter’s trade. On the other side of the garage, the hardier tools of the garden, the rake, spade, electric mower, trowels in different sizes, and some odder things that could only have been there, as Mrs. Glover had said, for the historical importance, including—

“I knew I had one,” Mr. Glover said. “It’s been there so long, and I’ve never used it, so you sort of stop seeing it. Do you know how to use it?”

They went back together over the road, and, for half an hour, gingerly, they tried the thing out. It was very tricky: Francis, a foot taller than Malcolm, had to stoop to get near the grass at all. They found that you only got into the rhythm with quite small swings; if you were too ambitious, took too wide a sweep, you were apt to lose your balance and fall over. Bernie came out with a cup of tea, and watched, making unhelpful suggestions, but in half an hour, Francis had somehow developed the right kind of action, and was making three or four swings in succession, stepping sideways at the right moment. He’d manage it for a little while, and then he’d somehow become aware of what he was doing—it must look odd, this antique task in a back garden on a Saturday morning in Sheffield—and lose it again, have to stop, take a practice swing, begin again. Malcolm was much more the height for it, but somehow couldn’t do it, and after a while he and Bernie sat down and watched Francis get on with it. The regularity of it, the difficulty, hypnotized Francis; he was almost finished before he realized how tired he was, his shirt dripping with sweat. He felt as if
he’d done a good job, but the lawn seemed to have had the haircut of a blind madman, patches of near-baldness and spikes of untouched grass alternating.

“I’d leave round the pond,” Bernie called. “You’ll break the blade on the bricks.”

Francis saw the sense of this, and sat down for a rest on the low brick wall around the pond at the end of the garden. There’d once been fish in this pond, he remembered; something else the Watsons had left. They must have been pretty strange people.

“Didn’t there used to be—” he called, but at that exact moment, a fat red fish, exactly what he remembered, surfaced lazily as if, one more time, taking a look at a surprised Francis.

“What’s that?” Bernie said, ambling up the garden.

“There are fish in this pond,” Francis said, astonished. “I mean, there still are.”

“Of course there are,” Bernie said comfortably. “Fancy you not knowing that.”

“How old are they?” Francis said. “They must be—”

“No idea,” Bernie said. “Decades, probably.”

“How have they survived all this time, with no one looking after them?” Francis said in amazement.

“They don’t take much looking after,” Bernie said, slightly reproachfully. It hadn’t occurred to Francis that anyone might look after the fish. It seemed to him that, had they been his responsibility, he’d have neglected them, left them to die. The easy assumption of responsibility, of achievement on the part of others was always the cause of self-reproach in Francis. He found it so difficult to do what anyone else did as a matter of routine, and he had never had that knack of application. He looked about him now at the garden; he had enjoyed the task when he was in the middle of it, had taken pleasure in the swinging of the blade through the long grass, but now that it was done, he could see that he’d made a careless, untidy job without much concentration. He could never be much good at anything. He’d made the garden look a much worse mess than it had looked to start with; he’d not managed, these last weeks, to be much in the way of help or support to his parents, even. His mother was coming home in a week or two; he knew that his dad, once he’d gone back to London, would do what he’d been planning to do in any case, get in a professional gardener to sort out the lawn.

When he said goodbye to his mother the next day, in hospital, she said what she’d taken to saying on his farewells: “You’re a good boy.” It
was, roughly, what a nurse had said once; he wondered whether she and her nurses had discussed it, and come to this point together, or whether he carried it in front of him like a consolation prize. He gave her a kiss, and said goodbye to his father, then took a taxi to the station. He’d got to know the Sunday-afternoon trains, and there was only ten minutes to wait. Usually he bought a magazine of some sort; today he thought he wouldn’t.

The trains on Sunday were unpredictable. It must have been about an hour after it left Sheffield that Francis raised himself from his thoughts and noticed that the train had come to a stop, and hadn’t moved for a good stretch of time. Outside, a patch of unremarkable countryside; a green hill, crested with a copse, a slope scattered with sheep, a pool of standing water. The train was silent; there were only two or three other people in the carriage, and no announcement—Francis was fairly sure of it—had been made. Nobody went and nobody came. Brought back from his thoughts, he opened his fat briefcase, and took out the manuscript of his half-finished novel and, rattling round the bottom, one of a long series of green Pentel pens. He looked at the scale of the book; nobody would ever read it; and then, yielding to something he couldn’t have explained, he turned the first page of the manuscript over and began to write, very quickly.

He didn’t notice when the train started again, and it must have been an hour or more later when he looked up. Outside the train, the yellow lights of the outskirts of London; and, to his surprise, inside the train at the table facing him was someone who must have joined the train at where, Bedford, Leicester? He hadn’t noticed the train stopping, or anyone getting on, or anyone sitting down at the table. The man was inspecting him with sparkling pleasure, and when Francis caught his eye, he broke out into an enormous and brilliantly white smile. He was a handsome man, Indian or at any rate Asian, his eyes and teeth and hair all shining in their different ways, and giving off a sense of life and enjoyment; and Francis, for once, didn’t look away in shyness, but smiled back. It felt as if every smile he had ever smiled in his life until then had been an attempt at a smile, and not a very good one; Francis had often seen himself trying to smile in photographs, and had had to accept that his smiles looked as unconvincing and unpractised from the outside as they always felt from within. But now he smiled, and it was a smile you could have put on the cover of a magazine.

“You were completely lost in your writing,” the man said. “I was going to ask you if you wanted a cup of tea, but I couldn’t disturb you.”

“I’m sorry if I ignored you,” Francis said.

“That’s quite all right,” the man said. “But hello, anyway.”

“Hello,” Francis said, and for the second time that afternoon, he seemed to feel something long neglected, something he had not even known was there inside him, begin to stir and move. Everything in this afternoon seemed quite unlike him; nothing now seemed like an effort; and he set down his pen, stretched his long arms, and started to talk to his new friend.

There was no doubt about it. Daniel was driving everybody mad. Bethany, the new chef, was the only one to do anything about it. He had wandered into the kitchen at eleven o’clock, and had inspected the deliveries, one after the other, lifting the cloth and peering at the contents. It was all fine: Bethany had signed for everything. He clearly wasn’t really looking at it, in any case. He went out of the kitchen, into the dining room, and walked around in his stately plump way, moving pepper pots an inch or two on the tables, running a finger along the top of the four or five paintings around the walls. He went behind the bar, and tapped a finger against the line of optics. Gareth, the sous-chef, was watching all this. Then he came back into the kitchen and, all over again, lifted up the covers on the boxes of vegetables. Bethany put down her knife, and went to the kitchen telephone, speaking briefly and sharply, and in a minute Helen came down from the office. “For heaven’s sake,” she said, coming in, “find something to do and stop bothering Bethany and Gareth.”