The Northern Clemency (33 page)

“Yes,” Sandra said, though she was thinking of ridicule and hostility rather than sexual triumph, “I know what you mean.”

“And then apparently we’re going out together, though I don’t remember that part of the agreement, and going out together means that you spend every break and every dinnertime together, mostly snogging, and you walk home with her, but she only lives in Crosspool
so it’s not much of a walk, and then you get home and the phone rings and it’s her again, probably been ringing you for the last half an hour just in case you’d managed to fly home in a helicopter or something, and you’re on the phone with nothing to say, and most of that saying goodbye to each other.”

“Oh, I know,” Sandra said.

“And then, before you know it, she’s hanging about outside your house, because she’s just passing, and then it’s the tears and the tantrums and she’s offering to hand over the thing you’ve been asking for. Only now you don’t much want it.”

Sandra burst out laughing. She poked Daniel, hard, just underneath where his stubby tie ended, on his bony chest. “And so you turn her down flat,” she said.

“You sounded quite Sheffield when you said that,” Daniel said admiringly.

“I know I dost,” Sandra said.

“Not then,” Daniel said.

They sat there for a while. You could see for ever from up here, in any direction you wanted. Only when you looked behind you, and there it was just Sheffield. But even in that direction you could still see the moors, the hills, the valleys the houses had been built over.

For a while now Katherine had been staying late at the florist’s, one day a week. “Don’t bother telephoning,” she’d said, when this arrangement was first mentioned. “Nick doesn’t answer the phone after the shop’s closed. We’ve got too much to do.”

After the two days of Malcolm’s disappearance, everything had altered. Nick had moved out of his rented house into a little old cottage on the other side of the ridge, in Ranmoor. He seemed indifferent to the statement of this. His house, a stone-built cottage with four big windows square on, a sloping tile roof, and a door with a red lintel and flowers around it, sat squarely behind a little garden divided by a path, a dry stone wall in front and a blue wooden gate. It was like the houses Katherine’s children had so liked to draw; it almost had a round smiling yellow sun above it.

Nick had hardly seemed to cherish or value its prettiness, or what seemed most distinctive about it: that it had been there before Sheffield had spread and surrounded it. Around it, there were quiet leafy roads, and Nick’s neighbours lived in what had once been the vast
mansions of steel magnates, set back hugely from their big-bellied front walls. A professor lived just there; an old man, a Mappin, one of the last of the family that had given an art gallery to the city, lived over the road and collected books. Nick’s house was not grand, but his surroundings were. The place had risen up and surrounded, a hundred years before, what had once been a lonely little house on the raw unclaimed moors. Nick had slipped into this august corner of Ranmoor casually, and hardly seemed to notice.

He had apologized to her, fervently, for not coming to her party, and then, just once, as if he had not been able to prevent himself, had turned her round, had wiped her face, had kissed her. When he took possession of his little house in Rowan Grove, he had offered her a lift home if she wanted to come and look at it. They’d got out of his little van, he’d opened the creaking blue gate, the
SOLD
notice still over the wall, like a flag stiff in the wind. “This is all going to be wistaria,” Nick said, gesturing at the dead-looking vines covering most of the front of the house.

“Going to be?” Katherine said.

“I mean, it is now, only it looks a bit dead,” Nick said. “It’s not quite right, inside I mean,” he went on, opening the door with an unpractised shake and thrust of the Yale key.

“Well, I wouldn’t expect it to be that,” Katherine said lightly. She’d never seen his furniture—she hadn’t been to the rented house, and he had been keeping his furniture in storage, he said—but it made a curious impression in this new house.

It was all bold and new, Nick’s collection of possessions. The furniture was expensive, black and metal and bleak, and all with some design behind it. Nothing seemed to harmonize: there was no matching of armchairs and sofas, just a blank standing around of angles and polish. On the table, just above ankle height but long and expensive as a seven-foot glass grave slab, stood a vase. It was rough in texture but as thin as paper; the flowers were placed elsewhere, and this one stood empty and impassive. “It’s a Lucie Rie,” Nick said, seeing her looking at it, and then he was off, ascribing all his furniture to one name or another, all of it important and all of the names unknown to her.

She was impressed, but all she said was “I don’t suppose you bought any of it with a house like this in mind,” thinking that the vase was so unlike anything Nick had bought for the shop’s use, and wondering about the seriousness that lay behind the shop. He seemed to mount everything for his own amusement in Broomhill, and it was with the
same lightness of voice that he would say “Astonishingly, we’ve made forty pounds clear profit this week” or “How tragic—we’re going to have to throw those lilies away,” with a giggle and an allusion to the spectre of the workhouse. Everything there was funny; and if he’d never turned her round from the bank of yellow roses, said, “Don’t,” in that stricken, serious voice and kissed her, she’d never have been prepared for the tone in which he’d said, “It’s a Lucie Rie.” Nick’s ironic detachment, though very extensive, was not all-encompassing, and in his new house, he quickly showed himself when explaining a possession he liked.

“No,” he said. “I didn’t buy any of it for one house in particular. You don’t think it looks right?”

“Well,” Katherine said, “it’s unusual at the moment.”

“You’re so right,” Nick said, seeming relieved by this. “It’s the wallpaper, that’s all.” And, indeed, the wallpaper, as Nick tore at it ineffectually, comically, with his stubby-nailed hands, had been installed by its previous owner with appropriateness in mind. Trellises of spring and summer flowers, in as unnatural and unseasonal profusions as in the florist’s shop, ran through the hall and—Nick’s word—drawing room against an underimagined yellow ground. It was as if the entangled twiggy growths covering the front of the house had withdrawn, hibernated, and flowered lavishly inside in more extravagant forms. “We don’t want any of this,” Nick said.

“Leave it,” Katherine said, laughing. “Plenty of time to do it properly.”

It was all going to be white, plain white, Nick said, though the carpet—he gestured at the plain tufted pale brown, not so different from the through carpeting Katherine had—would do perfectly well. Then the furniture wouldn’t look so strange. She could see that but, still, it seemed to her that Nick had acquired an unusually picturesque house that, even if stripped of the rather too bucolic wallpaper, would retain the windows, diamond-leaded like a witch’s, the same cosy low-ceilinged proportions and, unless something very radical happened, the same adorable fireplace. It was never going to look very London, Katherine reflected. A thought struck her. “Don’t you have any pictures?” she said.

“No,” Nick said. “I don’t know why. Or books, in case that was your next question.”

“Actually,” Katherine said, “I was going to suggest we could look at the kitchen.”

Nick laughed heartily. “Now that,” he said, “I don’t think I can face. It’s really the worst of it, and I know you’re going to say that you really like it. It looks like the sort of kitchen someone would put in a house like this.”

It seemed the right moment for a retreat, an apology. “I keep meaning to say,” she said, “the other day, when—” she struggled for a point of reference “—when I was so upset—”

“There’s really no need,” Nick said. “Let’s forget about it.”

“Yes,” Katherine said. “That’s best.” She turned and smiled, a real smile of relief, sagging with pleasure and, in exact unison, he did exactly the same. They hadn’t looked directly at each other for days, had been communicating with each other through glimpses, catching sight of each other through the corner of their eyes, turning away in politeness whenever the other showed signs of looking back, like some game of return and defence. It was immense, their mutual relief, and it made no sense and all the sense in the world when Nick, in pleasure and relief, took a step forward and, quite naturally, hugged her, and, after a relieved and relaxed minute or two, lowered his face to hers and kissed her. She kissed back. It made no sense; it made all the sense in the world.

All at once it was as if the room had changed, not her and not Nick; changed, with the sudden incursion into it of the acts of adultery, and Nick’s possessions, into something like a hotel room, planned for this exact purpose, its outer borders now torn and shabby, as if in disgrace. They were turning as they kissed, his mouth and hers the only point of contact between them, their arms flailing about as if seeking an embrace in the dark. She had never noticed until then that she was taller than he was, her neck craning downwards, and as they moved about each other, she sank a little on her knees. He sank too, misunderstanding, and in a second her ankles in their heeled shoes gave, and she collapsed on to the white sheepskin rug. She brought him with her, and then, wildly, he reached round her and pulled the loose cushions from the sofa, throwing them to the floor as he had torn at the wallpaper. “Yes,” she said, detaching herself and reaching for the loose seat of the armchair. He threw a glance at the window at the front of the house, small and leaded and half covered with thick unflowering wistaria branches, bare of leaves—“It’s all right,” Katherine said, breathless, meaning the window, but he could have understood almost anything. She half rose and, fumbling, shakily undid the hook at the top of her zip fastener, tugged at it, her shoulders twisting, pushed
down the straps of her dress, undid and pulled off her bra in a disorderly and indecisive sequence, then thrust the dress down to her waist.

She had never presented herself in such a way, and though she did not move, she felt as if she were falling backwards in space. It was only when Nick veiled his spontaneous expression and leant, deliberately, forwards towards her, unbuttoning his own shirt with unshaking deliberate hands, that she started to feel on something like familiar ground. The dizzily unforeseen acts now beginning between the two of them were not familiar, and yet at once she discovered in them a long-trusted pattern, one she knew she could rely on. There, with her dress about her waist, her bra hanging from her elbow, offering herself to a man not her husband, she was discovering what she had, clothed and standing in a hundred different situations, always relied upon: that, in the end, you could force people to be polite to you, and through their politeness, make them act as you chose. No, more than that; dare them not to be polite to you.

And there it was: as the two of them put aside their clothes, undressing and awkwardly tumbling over each other, their limbs meshing into each other’s angles, banging against the floor, bone against bone or flesh or the sharp corner of a chair at the height of an eye, even when they were naked and Nick was all at once butting at her in raucous, joyless haste, it was all Katherine, daring Nick not to, and in the middle of it, there rested the dictates of Nick’s politeness. For a few minutes, violently as she clutched at him, fiercely as she pressed against him, she was only matching his fierceness. She saw her own body as if from above, saw it as, in every respect, it was. It seemed inconceivable that she could want this, that she could ever have wanted this.

But then, all at once, the doubt returned, and with it her body tensed. For some minutes she had been lost, transfixed in the thunderous unthinking rhythms of the body, had been taken to a place where there was no thought, there was nothing to say. Only when it all returned did she realize that she had managed to lose it all, that it was, after all, possible. “What is it?” Nick said, pausing at the far end of his stroke, a single line of sweat running down the side of his face, there in front of her own.

“Don’t stop,” Katherine said, and from then it all disappeared, all thought, all questions, dissolving into a gathering sensation, the air itself seeming to thicken, her body pulling towards some kind of centre, discharging itself in some kind of long thunder, some kind of vast joint-racking yawn, a sneeze, a fit.

He felt all his purpose for her drawn to one point, felt her drawing her body together and hurling it in his direction, and then, as he quickly finished the act for him, going on almost unnoticed through her sighing collapse, fell back and watched her, as it were, pull herself together; the prickled flush across the top of her chest and throat, her pale tight-drawn skin over her bones reddened and raw in spots, her breasts, flat and snub-nosed like deer, rising and falling. He was glad he had not seen until afterwards how much her body bore the marks of her three children, of experience he would never be given access to, and he ran his finger lightly, through her thin layer of cold sweat, down the channel between her wide-separated breasts, and over to mark the diagonal slash, purple and silvery like the trail of a snail against her white skin, faded with freckles, of a long-ago appendectomy. And down, there, horizontal just where the bush of dry, frizzy hair began, untrimmed and lavish, though a little greying, the tight horizontal scar, like a broad smile, of a Caesarean. A child, perhaps more, had been lifted through there—

“It was Tim,” she said, understanding that the finger was moving in exploration of the history written on her body, not in playfulness. “He was a breech baby.”

But the others had been born normally, and her parts were worn and experienced, he had felt that, shrinking at the time from the observation.

“It’s all right,” he said, putting his arms awkwardly about her. But the time was past, and she had retreated into what she would allow him or anyone to know. With her hands she made vague, unformed gestures, rather like someone drawing together a
peignoir
, though none was to be had. He understood; he did not linger at this point. He got up, helped her to her feet, and she walked, with wide, almost bowed legs, awkwardly upstairs to the bathroom, gathering up her clothes as she went. He dressed, listening to the shudder and groan of the old hot-water system, the hiss of the shower audible. It was not a large house. Upstairs, the door to the bathroom closed with a click. Nick sat on the sofa, and waited for her to come down, prepared his awkward and kindly farewells.