The Northern Clemency (4 page)

“New home,” the chief remover said sweetly. “Sheffield. And The North, it said.”

“Have you ever noticed,” the driver said, “that wherever you go, anywhere, you see motorway signs that say ‘The North’? Or ‘The South’ when you’re in the north? Or ‘The West’? But wherever you go, and we go everywhere, you never see a sign which says ‘The East’?”

“No, you never do,” the boy agreed.

Sandra felt her story hadn’t made much of an impression. It was difficult, squashed in like this, to push back her shoulders, but she tried.

“This girl,” she went on, “you always wondered whether it was good for her to move so often. I mean, seven times, seven new schools. She never stayed long, so I don’t suppose she ever made proper friends with anyone. I tried to be friends with her, because I thought she’d be lonely, but she didn’t make much of an effort back. She’d only been in our school for three, four weeks when we found out the sort of girl she was.”

“What sort was she?” the boy said.

“At our school, see,” Sandra said, “you didn’t hang about after school had finished. Because next door there was the boys’ school. And maybe some girls knew boys from the boys’ school—if they had brothers or something—but this girl, I said to her one day, ‘Let’s walk home together.’ And she said to me, ‘No, let’s hang around here and see if we can bump into boys because they’re out in ten minutes.’ We didn’t get let out together, the boys’ school and girls’ school. And she jumps on to the wall, sits there, grins, waiting for me to jump up too. Because she just wanted to meet boys. That’s the sort of girl she was.”

“Dear oh dear,” the driver said. She had hoped for a little more concern: the older men might have had daughters of their own. The levity of the sarcastic apprentice had spread to them.

“So you didn’t stay friends with her, then?” The chief remover pushed back his cap and scratched his bald head.

“No,” Sandra said. Sod them, she thought. “Five months later, she had to leave the school because she’d met a boy and gone further. In a way I don’t need to specify”—the adult phrase rang well in her ears—“and she had to leave the school because she was having a baby. Can you imagine?”

“No,” the driver said. He almost sang it, humouring her, and now it was over, the whole invented rigmarole seemed unlikely even to Sandra. “Probably best for you to leave a school where things like that go on.”

“That’s right,” the chief remover said, very soberly, looking directly ahead.

“That’s right,” the boy said. He plucked at his chin as if in thought. But he was trembling with laughter; the big blue van at their backs rumbled and trembled with suppressed laughter.

The blue pantechnicon, ahead of Bernie, Alice and Francis, formed a hurtling, unrooted landmark.

“I don’t know which way he’s heading,” Bernie said. “Expect he knows a route.”

Alice opened her handbag, brown leather against the brighter shine of the Simca’s plastic seats. She popped out an extra-strong mint for Bernie and put it to his mouth, like a trainer with a sugar-lump for a horse—he took it—then one for herself. They were on Park Lane. The van was a hundred yards ahead—no, that was a different blue van. Theirs was ahead of it.

“We don’t need to follow them all the way,” Bernie said, crunching his mint cheerfully. “We could be quicker going down side-streets. They’ll be sticking to the A-roads through London.”

“I’d be happier, really,” Alice said. That was all. Everything she had, everything she had acquired and kept in her life, had gone into that van—the nest of tables they’d saved up for, their first furniture after they had married, the settee and matching chairs that had replaced the green chair and springy tartan two-seater Bernie’s aunts had lent them …

“That’s all right, love,” Bernie said. “If you want to keep them in view, we’ll keep them in view.”

… the mock-mahogany dining table and chairs, green-velvet seated, from Waring & Gillow, brass-footed with lions’ claws, the double divan bed only a year old—their third since she had first come home with Bernie, him carrying her over the threshold and not stopping there but carrying her upstairs, puffing and panting until he was through the door of their bedroom and dropping her on to his surprise, a new-bought bed, and her not knowing she was pregnant already—and the carpets …

“I know it’s silly,” Alice said, “but I won’t feel easy about it unless we follow them.”

“Well, we’ve lost them now,” Bernie said. “We’ll catch up.”

It was true. London had spawned vans ahead of them, blue and black and green, rumbling and bouncing to the street horizon; the Orchard’s van was there somewhere, but lost. They ground to a halt in the dense traffic.

“It can’t be helped,” Alice said bravely. The carpets, all chosen doubtfully, all fitting their space. (She had no faith in the Sheffield estate agent’s measurements. The woman bred Labradors, which she’d mentioned more than once when she ought to have been paying attention.) The unit for the sitting room, a new bold speculation, white Formica with smoked brown glass doors, the
Reader’s Digest
books, the china ladies, the perpetual flowers under glass; the mahogany-veneer sideboard, a wedding present, once grand and solitary in the sitting room before furniture started to be possible for them; curtains, yellow for the kitchen, purple Paisley in the sitting room, red in their bedroom, the rainbow pattern Sandra had chosen …

“Look on the bright side,” Bernie said. “If they do get lost, or if they steal it and run away to South America, Orchard’s can buy us a whole new houseful of furniture. Insurance.”

“They aren’t going to lose it, are they?” A voice came from the back seat. It was Francis; even at nine, his knees were pressing hard into his mother. Goodness knew how tall he’d grow.

“No, love,” Alice said. Her own worry disappeared in her love for her son. He worried about these things, as she did. Once, on an aeroplane, she had found her own nervousness about flying vanished as she did her duty and comforted him. “They won’t lose it, and if they did steal it, they wouldn’t get far on the proceeds. Do you think they’d get much for Sandra? She’s up there with them, keeping an eye on things.”

“I wouldn’t give you two hundred quid for Sandra,” Bernie said, concentrating on the road. “Maybe if she’d had a wash first. What do you reckon, son?”

“I don’t know where you go to buy and sell people,” Francis said. “There aren’t people shops, are there?”

She hadn’t told Francis they were going to move to Sheffield until it was certain. She wasn’t sure, herself, how it had happened. Bernie had worked for the Electricity Board for years, the only member of his fast-talking family not to make money in irregular, unpredictable ways. They were at the outer edges of respectability, in most cases only having their churchgoing to take the edge off their quickness. Alice had first met Bernie at church, him and his family in their Sunday best. If it had been a deft illusion, it hadn’t been a long-lasting one; you couldn’t be surprised with Bernie—he was as open to view as an Ordnance Survey map. His family were proud of him and his proper job, his steadily rising salary, at head office, and Bernie paid back their pride by not renouncing his own quick ways, his broad mother’s broad manners.

But in the last couple of years, the job, London, had worn away at him. The series of strikes—every power-cut had driven him to a personal sense of grievance. “Don’t say that,” Alice had said, the first time the house had gone dark, the television fading slowest, giving out a couple more seconds of ghostly blue light before the four of them were in pitch darkness, Bernie swearing.

“Don’t say what?” Bernie said, almost shouting.

“You know what you said,” Alice said.

“I can’t think of a better word for them,” Bernie said, getting up and groping for the fucking candles.

Though the power-cuts, random and savage, affected and infuriated every adult in the country—not the children, who across the nation took to it with delight, like camping, and in later years were to ask their parents when the power-cuts would start again, as if it were a traditional,
seasonal thing—they affected Bernie worst. In part, it was the way neighbours, like the Griffithses, or the regular commuters on Bernie’s train would inquire pointedly when Bernie and his colleagues were going to get a grip on the situation. Everyone had a story of the power coming on and sparking up an abandoned iron, still plugged in, in the middle of the night, waking up Mrs. Griffiths, as it happened, with a stench of burning, which proved to be her husband’s best shirt for the morning. “And a miracle the house didn’t burn down,” Mr. Griffiths said, suggesting that someone more honourable than Bernie might offer to pay for a new best shirt for the morning out of his own wallet. It drove Bernie mad.

On top of that the winter of 1973 was a hard one, and three or four times the train from the City to Kingston had failed. The first time, Bernie phoned Alice, who went to Morden Underground station to pick him up in their ancient black Austin, the same car they’d had when they first married, a cast-off from Bernie’s brother Tony. It had refused to start again in the car park at Morden, and Alice had had to phone Mrs. Griffiths, begging her to give the children something to eat while the garage came out; they didn’t get home until after midnight. So the second time it happened, even though by that time Bernie had bought a new car, the Simca, he only called to say he’d be a bit late, got the Tube to Morden and walked from there. The third and fourth time, too; it seemed to be going on all winter, like the winter.

But by then he’d heard of a new job, a promotion, out of London. That would never have seemed like a recommendation before. “Bernard,” his widowed mother had said, when they’d gone to tell her in St. Helier, the ranks of crocuses lining up firmly along the path outside. “Bernard. You’ve never lived anywhere but London. You couldn’t stand it for a week.” She ignored Alice, apart from a savage glance or two; the whole thing, she could see, was the boy’s wife’s idea. In a corner, Bernard’s shy uncle Henry sipped tea from a next-to-best floral cup, not getting involved; he would have to stay and hear the worst of it afterwards. But if it was unfair of anyone to think it couldn’t have been Bernie’s idea, you could see why they believed that. His whole manner—the way he blew his nose, the way he ate with his elbows out, as if always demolishing a pie in a crowded pub, his soft London complexion, even—made it impossible to think of him outside London. But it was only Bernie who wanted to move. Alice had been born near the Scottish borders, and had moved to London at the age Francis was moving to Sheffield, nine, at the war’s end when no one was moving
into capital cities. It was Alice, though, who loved London; she dreaded the North’s forgiveness, the way it would look at her when she returned.

But there was no arguing with Bernie and, it was true, the job was a good one. Bernie had been offered the deputy managership of a power plant. It was the best way forward, to take a hands-on, strategic role, Bernie said. He’d left it quite late; but the industry was expanding.

He was like that: he could sell you anything with his enthusiasm. It was for her, however, to sell the move to the children, and she had nothing but her love to draw on there.

Outside the car, the landscape was changing. London had gone on for ever, its red-brick houses and businesses clinging to the edge of the motorway, like small rodents to a balloon suddenly in flight. The soft green of the southern counties, too, had gone, with the cows and sheep, and now harder, more purposeful facts were looming across the landscape. A herd of vast-waisted cooling towers, steaming massively; a terrain untended, brown and barren; one town after another with no name, just a mass of black and brown smoke and soot. It was getting worse; Francis could see that.

He had never thought that his mother would, one night, come into his bedroom and, sitting on the edge of his bed, explain that they might be moving to Sheffield. It was not that he had thought they would go on for ever where they were; it was simply that, at nine, no concept of change had ever entered his head. She had sat there, her face worried, when she’d finished, and he’d wanted to comfort her.

“It won’t be so bad,” he said in the end. “We’ll all be there.” He’d wanted to say that they couldn’t make her move anywhere—not quite knowing who “they” might be. But he tried to comfort her and, misunderstanding, her face cleared.

“That’s right,” she said. “I knew you’d be brave about it. And it’ll be exciting—a new school, new friends—” She hugged him. It was odd; they’d been trying to console each other. Still, he knew that, in her worry for him, she had expressed some of her own; he’d been right, after all, to think of consoling her.

They’d travelled up to Sheffield two or three weeks later. They’d gone by train, an experience so unusual to Francis, who had only ever gone into London by train, a journey of twenty minutes, that he paid no attention to the view outside. He’d taken fascinated pleasure in the
toilets, mysteriously labelled WC, the wooden slatted windows with their frank graffiti, the extraordinary act of sitting around a table, the four of them, and a cloth being laid and lunch being served. You could eat soup on a train, which had bewildered him when he had read of it, in
Emil and the Detectives
. It was all so unlike the rattling compartment train from Kingston to Waterloo when the Lord Mayor’s Show was on. Now, in the Simca with its lack of event, he could start to look, with some apprehension, at his surroundings.

The week in Sheffield they’d spent at a hotel. The Electricity had paid for it—“It’s all a treat,” Bernie had said, once they were settled in the beige rooms, the walls lined with nubbled tweed fabric. “Have whatever you like.”

“That’s nice of them,” Sandra said.

“They’re grateful,” Bernie said.

“Can I have a glass of wine?” Sandra said.

“I don’t see why not,” Alice said. It was to be their holiday that summer; they weren’t going to have another.

Each day, they took the car the Electricity had provided, and drove out somewhere. Mostly into the countryside. It was different from the countryside in Surrey. There were no hedges, no trees, and the villages were harsh, square and unadorned. Outside, the great expanses of the moors were frightening and ugly; even in bright sun, the black hills with the blaze of purple on their flanks were crude, unfinished. They parked the car and, with a picnic, clambered down into a valley where some terrible catastrophe seemed to have occurred, and about a stream, plummeting and plunging, black rocks were littered, huge and cuboid, just lying there like a set of abandoned giant toys, polystyrene and poised to fall again, without warning. Once they came across a dead sheep, lying there, half in the stream, its mouth open, its fleece filthy and stinking with flies. In Surrey it would have been tidied away. “Don’t drink from a stream, ever,” Alice said. It would never have occurred to Francis even to consider such a thing.