The Northern Clemency (14 page)

“Two weeks yesterday,” Nick said.

“Two weeks yesterday,” Jimmy said. “You think they’ll be done by then?”

“I would say so,” Nick said. “It looks almost ready now.”

“Well,” Jimmy said, “this is what you want to do.”

The question of the market hadn’t gone from Nick’s mind, but he’d put it aside as if someone were to deal with it on his behalf. After this conversation with Jimmy, he told the workmen in the shop he wouldn’t be around the next day, and asked the receptionist at the hotel for a four thirty a.m. wake-up call. “Hilarious, I know,” he said dismally.

The flower market was fifty miles away, in a more urbane, less industrial city that could stretch out its lines of supply in all directions into very different places, some more austere even than Sheffield. Nick had had the whole thing arranged for him, and instructions had been passed down. At a layby on the A1, shortly before six, his hands in fingerless red woollen tradesman’s gloves clutched a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich, the hand-drawn map pinned to the bonnet of his little van with an elbow. He knew he would get lost.

But it seemed to work in an all but professional manner, and in only half an hour he was parking outside a grimy Victorian market hall, open to the elements, pillared with flaking green paint over rusting green metal, and everywhere ornamented with idealized brick bouquets, now blackened and snotlike. His
laisser-passer
was accepted, and he went in.

His breath condensed before him. It seemed early, but he could see that the market had, even now, passed the peak of its exchanging, and men and women were pushing wheeled pallets full of ranked blooms towards him on their way out. The market ways were still banked with flowers but great holes had appeared in them as the marauding buyers had carried off the best. Well, he was not here to buy, not today; and that was a useful commercial lesson to have learnt, he told himself. The buyers, the marauders, were men and women, some genteel-looking, the women in capes and ponchos, the men in Harris tweed coats, like Nick, but others rough boys, carrying off the helpless innocent blooms to smaller, more diverse markets, to sell chrysanths beside meat stalls, greengrocers, fishmongers, cheap clothing stalls, provision merchants.

He walked on until he came to what seemed one of the biggest stalls in the market, its depleted fields of carnations and tulips stretching out like blankets. He stood there, irresolute. The man in charge registered
him, shook his head in a knowing way and, as his subordinates smirked at this demonstration of who he was, leant forward to spit richly, the abundant phlegm of a smoker’s early-morning mouth splattering like puke on the floor.

“Help you?” the man said.

“Yes,” Nick said firmly. “I hope so.” He explained his situation, or some of it: a new flower shop, a need for a regular relationship with a supplier, and—it did no harm—a frank though not exactly explicit acknowledgement that it was all new to him, he hadn’t a clue about what stock to take. Mr. William, he said his name was—Nick was pleased with this: it suggested to him an old-established family in the trade, where the long-retired dad in the nursing-home might be the name on the board referred to as Mr. Gracechurch, the hard-nosed chief remaining Mr. William until his father’s death. Nick addressed him as Mr. William in what he hoped was a respectful way at least three times during the conversation. Mr. William was serious, helpful—“You’re not thinking of buying today, I take it, sir,” he said. In twenty minutes advice had been given about stock—“Though, of course, you’ll come to know your customers PDQ”—and an agreement made about the days Nick would turn up—a little earlier, Mr. William suggested, than he had today. It all seemed quite easy. Nick just hoped he hadn’t made a mistake in choosing his supplier; in fact, he’d hardly chosen him at all. He took what comfort he could from the greetings Mr. William threw behind his back at passing florists; a popular and—yes?—respected man around here.

“One last thing, though,” Mr. William said, as they shook hands. “If we’re to do business on a regular like basis, let’s not be getting each other’s names wrong. My name’s Williams, Roy Williams. It’s got an
s
on the end.”

“How hilarious,” Nick said, aghast. “Not hilarious, sorry, I didn’t mean—just—sorry,” he said, stumbling backwards and, for some reason, bowing. The man wasn’t a Gracechurch at all, and though Nick had never heard of the Gracechurch family before half an hour ago, the revelation of Mr. William as the acquirer of the guise of Gracechurch made the original owners seem unattainably grand, the present owner tainted for ever with the suspicion of dishonesty, as if Nick had made a mistake not starting twenty years before, and dealing with those imagined excellencies of the fabled Gracechurches. The embarrassing exchange made him, finally, feel the entire fraudulent nature of the enterprise.

He drove off, face burning, and when, after breakfast, a charity shop presented itself with, in the window, a rigid array of donated vases, there was only one thing he could do. He went in and bought the lot. At least I can, he thought, driving away with the hideous clanking load in the back, at least I can—but reassurance wouldn’t come. It would not come, either, when he arrived back in Broomhill and and, in front of all the builders, he had to unload seven unbelievably ugly vases. They had done a good job, the builders, in producing an elegant interior for his shop; they had to see how ugly these vases were. But they said nothing.

It was to this state of concentrated hopelessness that Katherine presented herself. Until then he hadn’t thought of taking on an assistant but, of course, shops had them. It was easy for him to understand why he’d taken her on: she had come through the door and, immediately, reassuringly, he had seen someone who was projecting an idea of herself with even less competence than Nick did. She seemed to take him at his word, swallowing brothers in New York. He felt himself growing bigger in her eyes. He didn’t despise her for it—in fact, he rather liked the way her presence made him feel about himself. He liked, even, the way she said “Nick” to him, saving herself up, then using his name, enjoying it.

It seemed a good idea. It was a very good idea and, surprisingly, Jimmy agreed. “Why not?” he said. “Don’t let her near the books, that’s all.”

From then on, things improved. Three weeks after the shop’s opening, when he looked out of the window and saw two figures opposite, observing his front of a business, he felt only a small shudder of alarm, which subsided immediately as he saw they were two young girls.

Katherine said, “It’s my daughter. And her friend.”

“Ask them in,” Nick said. It was going to be all right.

It was a Sunday morning, a month or two after Katherine had started her new job, when Jane’s father put down the
Sunday Express
and said, “We ought to go out somewhere.”

Jane had been looking forward to the
Sunday Express
. There was the Foreign News page, a page she always enjoyed, with the story about the man coming back early and disturbing his wife with her lover in an unusual hiding-place—the names and the nation changed from week to week but the story was the same. She’d been looking forward to a boring Sunday, maybe a bike ride down the crags.

“Go out where?” her mother said.

“It’s a nice day,” Malcolm said. “We could go out somewhere after lunch.”

“We never go out somewhere after lunch,” Daniel said. He was sitting on the piano stool, one sock off, picking at his feet, absorbed as a grooming monkey. “On a Sunday. Mrs. Kilwhinney, right, she said to us, ‘Do you ever go out into Derbyshire with your family, on a Sunday?’ and only this one kid, this right spastic, said he did. But no one else.”

“I don’t quite understand the point you’re trying to make,” Malcolm said, with the heavy irony he sometimes used in Daniel’s direction. “But this afternoon, this family is going to get in the car and go for a drive in Derbyshire. Is that understood? And have a nice time. All right?”

Malcolm got up from the breakfast table and, without exactly storming, walked emphatically out of the room and upstairs; he often retreated to the study and his military books at moments of stress.

“What was that?” Daniel said.

“It’s you that’s supposed to have tantrums and slam doors,” Jane said, neatly swiping the
Sunday Express
. “The problems of adolescence in the young male.”

“You read too much,” Katherine said mildly. “It’s nothing unusual. Your father wants to go for a drive in Derbyshire. I don’t know why that’s so strange. Lots of people do it.”

“It’s strange for us,” Jane said. “We only do it when Nana comes.”

“Well, perhaps it would be a good thing if we started doing it,” Katherine said. “There’s some of the most beautiful country in England out there, and we look at it once in a blue moon. I don’t see that it’s ‘spastic,’ Daniel, and I’ve asked you once—”

“Okay, okay,” Daniel said, and put his sock back on.

“It’s disgusting,” Katherine said. “But the other day, Nick, at work, he mentioned he’d been to Haddon Hall at the weekend, this would have been last weekend, and he was saying to me how beautiful it was. Well, I was really quite embarrassed to have to admit that even though I’ve lived forty years in Sheffield, not fifteen miles from Haddon Hall, I’ve never been there. Of course, Nick, he’s interested in beautiful things, he’s sensitive to them—a florist, it’s to be expected. But don’t you think it’s terrible that we live here and we never bother to go and enjoy all the beautiful things on our doorstep, and someone who’s only lived here for three months, he’s making so much more of an effort?”

“We went to Haddon Hall.” Tim sounded aggrieved. “Martin Jones was sick in the coach into a bag and Miss Taylor threw it out of the door of the coach without it stopping. I told you we went. You never listen.”

“Well, it was only an example,” Katherine said. “Of course I remember you going.”

“It was boring. I don’t think I like beautiful things.” Then Tim thought hard for a moment, and said, “Haddon Hall, more glass than wall.”

“That’s Hardwick Hall,” Jane said. “You’re mixing up beautiful things.”

“No, it was Haddon Hall,” Tim said, in a kindly, regretful tone. “Hardwick Hall we didn’t go to. I did a project about it, though. I got seven out of ten and I drew pictures. Oh.”

“It was Hardwick Hall, wasn’t it?” Jane said. “That’s got more glass than wall?”

“I don’t care which one it was,” Tim said. “It might be both of them probably.”

“The point is,” Katherine said, her voice lowered and slow, she might have been passing on a moral lesson, “don’t you think it would be nice if someone, Nick for instance, Mr. Reynolds, said to me on a Monday morning, ‘What did you get up to at the weekend?’ And I could say—or it could be your teacher, it could be anyone—instead of ‘Not much,’ or ‘Mucked about,’ or ‘Washed some socks,’ I could say, ‘We had a lovely day out in Derbyshire. We went to see, I don’t know what, and it was really beautiful’? Don’t you think that might be nice? I’d really like, once in a while, to say something like that to Nick.”

Jane concentrated on the newspaper, as if she weren’t listening. She thought of her father’s outing, a suggestion out of nowhere; she listened to her mother, lovingly speculating on how she could describe a Sunday afternoon to Nick, the sort of person she could become for his sake. She had never gone on so much about beauty; you could hear the rhythm of her voice changing, as if some contagion had taken hold of it. She doesn’t understand anything, she said to herself.

“Well,” Daniel said, “you could always say it. It wouldn’t have to be true. And then we could have the best of both worlds. We could muck about and you could still say that you’d been somewhere posh and it was beautiful. But you wouldn’t actually have to go there.”

“That,” Katherine said, “is exactly the sort of thing I would expect someone of your age to say.”

“How hilarious,” Jane said, looking up from the paper and its breathless foreign adulteries, its lovers safely absurd, in faraway cupboards. How hilarious: she meant it to wound. But the outing happened.

After lunch, Malcolm said, “Can you be ready in ten minutes? I want to be off soon.”

“Just let me do the washing-up,” Katherine said.

“Leave it,” Malcolm said. “I want to be off, or it’ll be getting dark.”

“It’ll only take ten minutes,” Katherine said. “I’m not leaving the washing-up to fester.” And in fifteen minutes they were in the car.

Sheffield fell away from you so quickly, and the gardens joined, broke up, grew and became moorland. There was a garden centre right at the edge, the very last thing of the city, or the first, and Jane had always found something funny about that: it wasn’t the sort of thing you could ever say to anyone, or even properly explain, but it was something to do with all that green, rooted life out there, going on without anyone doing anything, and then it got into the garden centre and people sort of then thought it was all right, one of those green things, to pay money for it and put it in their gardens, even though—Jane wished she could explain this thought properly. She just knew there was something funny about the garden centre being at the border of the city, like Passport Control for plants. Ah well. She loved the country, even those walking-distance views and landmarks she had to concentrate to see.

But Jane’s pleasure was being ruined by the noises and silences in the car. Her father’s concentration on the road had a different quality of silence to it, compared to Tim’s dense, bewildered concentration, or the quiet amusement Daniel was extracting from the situation. She wondered what her own pained silence sounded like from outside—perhaps very much like sulking. She looked out for the real boundary, a circular grinding stone turned upright and labelled “Peak District National Park,” although no wildness began there. She looked forward to the moment that the car laboured whinnyingly upwards, crested the brow of the hill, and there before them, expected in advance and announced on its appearance, was the Surprise View, a valley opening up idyllically; the only surprise, ever, was if the weather had cleared or condensed on that side of the hill, and they came out of or into low-lying cloud, the view revealing itself or a dense white obscurity descending on the car. The weather today was clear; piles of clouds, seeming less vast than the purple expanse of the moors.