The Northern Clemency (12 page)

“An affair?” Anne seemed frightened but impressed.

“It’s happening everywhere, these days,” Jane said, and sighed. “I only hope it won’t lead to divorce. It would break my heart if my parents split up.”

“Who would you live with?” Anne said.

“I don’t know,” Jane said. She hadn’t thought things out this far.

“It’d be your dad,” Anne said. “Your mum’d be off with her fancy
man. It’d be all her fault—you wouldn’t let a woman who’d done that walk off with the children too. It’d not be fair.”

Jane let the full, lovely tragedy wash over her, its forthcoming bliss. She’d practically be an orphan, her and Daniel and Tim, coping bravely after a family tragedy; how they would look at her, when she moved up to Flint next year! “I don’t know,” she said, honesty cutting in. “I don’t know that it’s come to talk of divorce yet.”

“What’s your dad think?”

“I don’t know that he knows,” Jane said.

“Well, how d’you know, come to that?” Anne said. “You’re making it up.” Then Anne got up, apparently bored with the subject. “Look at this,” she said. “I got it down town on Saturday.”

She opened her white-painted louvred wardrobe doors. That was one of the things about Anne, along with her horses and her snappiness, her incredible wardrobe: there were things in there she’d grown out of, she having no small sister or cousin to pass things on to, all pressing against each other stiflingly. You couldn’t help but feel sorry for Anne’s clothes, suffocating each other in that breathless wardrobe. “Look,” Anne said, and from the bottom of the wardrobe, she fished out a scrap of cloth, white and glistening, its price tag still on it even though it had been tossed to the bottom of the wardrobe, and a pair of strappy white shoes. “I got a halter-top and a pair of slingbacks from Chelsea Girl. The shoes were three ninety-nine.”

Jane didn’t know whether that was a lot or not. “Your mum go with you?”

“Course she did,” Anne said. “She paid. I’m going to put them on.”

She shucked off her school shirt. Jane looked, with envy, at her starter bra. Anne’s mother had bought it for her the first time she’d asked. No one else in their class had managed it, and Jane certainly not. But Anne didn’t have an older brother who’d overheard and laughed his head off. She put on the halter-top, twisting and fiddling with the strings behind. She slipped off the heavy brown school shoes, not untying the laces, and pushed on the slingbacks, squashing them on in a hurry, and then, striking a pose, the price tag dangling from her waist over the grey school skirt, she pushed forward her left hip and pouted. She twirled, the strap of her starter bra across her bare back.

“Nice,” Jane said.

“Go on, you try them on,” Anne said, and so they started to play, the lipstick coming out, the hairbrushes, the materials of femininity. Most of their afternoons turned to this.

“I’m not making it up,” Jane said, after a while, their makeup smeared, their outfits half on, half thrown off across the bed.

“Making what up?”

“My mum and her affair. I’m not,” Jane said. “She talks about him all the time. She can’t stop herself. It’s like you and horses.”

“Me and horses? What’re you talking about?” Anne got up and peered into the mirror, admiring her face, this way and that.

“It’s like the way, you know, you love horses, you, you’re mad about them, and all the time, it’s horses this, horses that.”

“I thought you liked horses too,” Anne said, drawing back a bit, offended. “I wouldn’t talk about them if you weren’t just as interested as I am.”

“I am interested,” Jane said, feeling that the conversation was getting away from her. “But you love horses, you.”

“Yes, I do,” Anne said. She sank to her haunches, clasping her knees to her chest like great adult breasts. “I’m not saying I don’t.”

“So you talk about them, don’t you?”

“If you say so,” Anne said, not quite convinced.

“Well, it’s like that with my mum,” Jane said. “Every day it’s ‘Nick says this, Nick did that, Nick likes ketchup with his chips.’”

“Everyone likes ketchup with their chips,” Anne said. “That doesn’t prove anything, if you ask me.”

“Yes,” Jane said, gathering the logic of her case. “Yes, that’s it, though. If everyone likes ketchup on their chips, why’s she bringing up Nick especially? You see what I mean?”

“You’re daft, you,” Anne said, “I think you’re just romancing. Anyway, you don’t want your mum and dad to split up, do you?”

“I don’t know,” Jane said. “It’s nothing to do with me.”

“Who’s this Nick, then?”

“He’s her boss. She got a job, working in a flower shop. In Broomhill, it is.”

Anne sighed. She was eight months older than Jane: sometimes she took advantage of this difference to make an emphatic point. “I would say,” she said heavily, “there’s nothing in it. I’m glad my mum doesn’t have to go out to work.”

“My mum doesn’t have to either,” Jane said. “She just wants to. I know what. I’m going to go down there one day after school, I want to have a look at him. Do you want to come?”

“What’ll that prove one way or the other?”

“Are you going to come?”

“If you insist,” Anne said, and then, from downstairs, her mother called something. She rolled her eyes. The call came again. She got up from her squatting position, and impatiently flung open the door. “What do you want?” she shouted rudely.

“There’s squash, girls,” the polite voice floated up. “And biscuits. I know the sort you like.”

“We’re busy,” Anne yelled. “We’re talking about Jane’s mum. She’s got a lover.”

There was a short silence downstairs. Jane could feel herself blushing. “I wish—” she said.

“Oh, I’m sure she’s not, not really,” Anne’s mum called. “There’s squash and biscuits. Shall I bring them up?”

But the idea of going down Broomhill the next afternoon had been agreed on. The next day they had geography last thing; Anne had volunteered the pair of them to put away the Plasticine contour map of Yorkshire the class was making, and the labelled cut-away of the strata of rock underneath a coal-mine. The task had been occupying them for weeks—it was supposed to be ready for Christmas Parents’ Day and they were all sick of it and Miss Barker’s shrill exhortations: “I don’t care whether it’s done or not, you’re only showing yourselves up.” For weeks, as if it were tainting them with the nightmarish horror of its incompletion, there had been a rush to the door as the bell rang. But this evening Anne lingered, tugging at Jane’s skirt as she, like the rest, got up, slinging her bag over her shoulder. Miss Barker had been about to collar someone at random as usual, but, with a mistaken glitter in her eye, she alighted on Jane and Anne, fingered them as dawdlers for the punishment of putting the stuff away. Anne and Jane, they weren’t good girls—they’d already been done for giggling five minutes into one of her lecture-reminiscences, and would have been done worse if Miss Barker had known that Jane had giggled at Anne saying, “It’s her wants a lover,” meaning Miss Barker. So she couldn’t have known that Anne’s dawdling was in aid of volunteering for the task, or at any rate—you wouldn’t want to show Miss Barker that much willing—allowing herself and Jane to be landed with it. Jane thought she might have been consulted—“There’s good girls,” Miss Barker said when they were done, which was enough to make you puke—but she saw the point when they’d finished folding the plans, scraping the mess of the afternoon’s Plasticine off the tables, put the whole almond-smelling bright geologies back into 4B’s geography cupboard, and gone out, fifteen unhurried minutes after the end of school. It was as
empty as a weekend glimpse; everyone had gone, swept off in the fifty-one bus. She and Anne shouldered their bags and turned in the other direction, of Broomhill, without having to explain to anyone, and that was a good thing.

All the schools were turning out: the big boys and girls from the George V in their standard black blazers, and the snooty ones, the girls in purple from St. Benet’s, where you paid to go, like Sophy next door to Anne, where she claimed you got to learn Russian and, like drippy, bleating Sophy, to produce the horrible sheep-like noise of the oboe, too. They were all heading in the same direction, the opposite one to Jane and Anne. Jane felt like a truant, the two of them in their ordinary clothes.

“Do you think Barker cares?” Anne said.

“Cares about what?” Jane said.

“About Parents’ Day,” Anne said. “She goes on about it enough.”

“I reckon she’ll get the sack if it’s not ready,” Jane said, “if it’s not perfect, that geology thing.”

“I hope she does,” Anne said. “We might get someone who doesn’t—”

“‘When I was in Africa,’” Jane quoted, a favourite conversational opening of Miss Barker’s, liable to lead to any subject, and they laughed immoderately, clutching their stomachs and saying it three or four times.

“She made me eat cabbage once,” Anne said, “when she was sitting in the teacher’s place on our table at dinner. I hate cabbage.”

“She’ll have had to eat worse in Africa,” Jane said. “She’ll not have sympathy for you, being fussy over a plate of cabbage, when you think what she’s had to force down.”

“Missionaries from a pot,” Anne said. “I dare say.”

“Worms and grubs,” Jane said. “Toasted over an open fire.”

“Only like marshmallow,” Anne said.

“Not much like,” Jane said.

“But cabbage, it’s horrible,” Anne said. “She made me eat it, she said it didn’t taste of much. I think it tastes right horrible.” Jane agreed, and they went on.

“‘When I was in Africa,’” Anne quoted again, but she hadn’t thought of how it could go on after that and fell silent. Missionaries, cannibals, and that right funny film in Geography with a black man in a wig like a lawyer’s where they’d laughed and Miss Barker’d turned the lights up to talk in low serious tones about (one of) her disappointments.

There was the Hallam Towers on the left, and on the right, the gloomy ericaceous drive that led up to the blind school—there were dozens of blind children up there: you never saw them. And then the library, and then they were in Broomhill. It was a journey you took with your mum and dad, perhaps; it wasn’t a schoolday journey. So they were a little bit solemn as they turned the corner into Broomhill proper, with its parade of shops, marking not what they passed but what they were heading towards.

Jane suddenly thought how unwise this idea had been, to turn up without warning her mother. What if—her novelist’s imagination creaked into gear and saw, clear as anything, her mother and a young lover, a David Cassidy perhaps, embracing and kissing in a bower of flowers in the shop window. But it could not be helped now. For some unspoken reason, they did not cross the road. Over there, the flower shop’s awning, pink and domed, the only one sheltering the Broomhill street, like a flushed, guilty, cross and bad forehead, and, inside, a figure, two figures, moved, gathering, circling, busy.

They stood opposite, watching. Jane clutched her bag. “Let’s—” she said feebly, but it was too late. They had been seen. The figures had paused as if surprised, then one came to the broad window, resolving its dark outline into her mother, not bearing the surprised, suspicious expression Jane had envisaged, but a flash of uncustomary delight as the other figure came up behind her. Jane raised her arm to wave, but was arrested by an insight as she took in the worried face beside her mother.

It was Anne’s insight, too. “But he’s old,” she said. “I thought—”

“What did you think?” Jane said, snapping a little. She already felt defensive about this man.

“He doesn’t look like anyone’s lover,” Anne said.

“I never said he was,” Jane said irrationally. She didn’t need to come closer: she somehow knew what this man was like, better than her mother could, and she could surely see that what animation he possessed was a matter of sparks thrown off by a chill and flinty interior. She was right: Nick had aspects of fire, could briefly blaze, but they were mere sparks, giving little light and no heat, capable only of a short spectacle, of the casual infliction of harsh smarts on anyone standing by, foolishly admiring.

As for Nick: he ran that shop for another ten years. But whenever he looked out of the shop window and saw someone, two people, on the
opposite side of the road, inspecting his façade, he always felt that same sudden way. He always felt the same as he did that first afternoon. And then, they were only two schoolgirls.

“It’s my daughter,” Katherine said. “And her friend. They never said.”

“Ask them in,” Nick said.

It had been eighteen months or so before when Nick and Jimmy had had the idea. They’d been in Jimmy’s new house in Fulham. Jimmy said Chelsea, though it was really Fulham. Miranda, Jimmy’s wife, certainly said Chelsea. She was as decisive about that as she was about the fact that Nick, and Jimmy’s other not very desirable but probably useful colleagues could be offered drinks at five thirty, but shouldn’t expect to stay for dinner. Colleagues! Ha! After all, the nanny’d be bringing little Sonia in her best dress down for dinner: a nice thing—as Miranda said, voice rising—if she grew up mixing with people like Nick.

“You won’t have any difficulty finding a taxi on the street,” Miranda would say, drifting through and interrupting their conversation. “This is Chelsea, after all. It’s not, it’s not fucking, what, Streatham or somewhere.” Miranda’s hair curled out in a single wave backwards about her features. She’d flick it back, give Nick or whatever-his-name-was a level stare, her mascaraed or false eyelashes held painfully apart, go to the bamboo-fronted bar, and, with leisurely disdain, mix herself a Dubonnet and gin, three fat ice cubes and a straw, before returning to the kitchen to shout at Solange, the put-upon au pair, acquired, like so much else in this house, in one of Jimmy’s fits of sexual ambitiousness, and now hanging around, disappointing him and annoying Miranda.

The house in Fulham was a step up from the two-bedroom flat in Islington. The money had been flooding in so fast that Jimmy had had a job knowing what to do with it, keeping it in fat bundles (he’d once confided) in a painted oak chest under little Sonia’s bed and taking it out periodically to press it into the hands of shop assistants. The results—a pair of gold-tasselled sofas glowering at each other across the drawing room like a pair of retired rival strippers, a whole pack of waist-high china hounds glistening throughout the open-plan living area, vast surfaces of built-in brown smoked mirrors, ankle-high white shagpile and two at least of those horrible leather rhinoceroses you saw in Liberty’s. The results all bore something of the bewilderment
of the moment of their liberation, as Jimmy brought out a wad of crinkled fivers and counted out several dozen of them in a more than respectable shop. He’d have paid cash for the house if he could; as it was, he was reduced to transferring it from bank to bank to bank first. Nick put the money Jimmy handed over irregularly but lavishly into a bank account and worried about that all the time, though it wasn’t an account in his own name.