The Northern Clemency (67 page)

Helen’s parents lived at number forty-two, and their front door was a cheerful blue, the front garden neatly kept with a sort of standard border of marigolds and lobelias. It wasn’t the house of a tango champion, and when the woman opened the door, too quickly after Helen’s brisk ring, she didn’t look much like a tango champion either. There was only a suggestion of neatness about her figure and an upright stance to imply any of that.

“You could have phoned,” she said to Helen, with a degree of reproachful but delighted welcome, inspecting not Helen but Daniel. “And who’s this, then?”

It had been one of Philip Cavan’s worse days. They’d grown more frequent since the men from the NUM had decided to leave him alone. When they’d first gone out on strike, announced it without a ballot, Philip had been one of those who’d grumbled. “It won’t get anyone anywhere,” he said. “We’ll be out on strike for four months and then they’ll close down the pits just as they would have done.” There was a lot of talk of “solidarity,” though, and talk like Philip’s wasn’t popular, however many might have agreed with it. “Solidarity with who? That’s what I’d like to know,” he said.

“Solidarity with the lads, Phil,” Thiselton, the new NUM man had said—he was twenty years younger than Cavan, and a firebrand.

Philip had liked John Collins well enough, Thiselton’s predecessor as the union man, but this one talked too much about the working man’s struggle and the fascist Tory government for his liking. Philip would never have admitted it to anyone, not even to Shirley, but the year before, the only reason he’d not voted for Mrs. T was the nonsense in the Falklands. Apart from that, she was doing the country a lot of good, he reckoned. Thiselton was Scargill’s man, and Philip couldn’t stand Arthur. “It’s all very well him calling us all out on strike without the courtesy of a ballot,” he’d observed to Thiselton, “but it’s not him going to lose his job at the end of it, is it, now?”

All these observations were made during a series of visits by the union men to Philip’s house in the early days of the strike. At first they’d tried to get him to come and do his stint at the picket line. “I reckon giving up my wages at Arthur’s command is solidarity enough,” Philip said, and they’d stopped trying to persuade him. They settled, in the end, for a promise that he wouldn’t go back to work against the clear majority wishes of the mine-workers. “What majority wishes?” Philip asked. “Show me the ballot results.” The man from the NUM explained that there was no ballot, because the requirement to hold a
ballot was one imposed on working people by the fascist Tory government in a clear attempt to frustrate the democratically expressed wishes of the working classes. “Oh, aye,” Philip said laconically, then kindly observed that he supposed the lads had mostly come out, and that was a majority, any road.

Having extracted this minimal promise, the NUM left him and Shirley alone to fill their days as best they could. They could practise the tango in the community hall, cluttered up now with banners and collection tins and boxes of donated cans of food, waiting for the boot-faced NUM wives to hand out to supposedly deserving cases. The food got collected in Sheffield town centre, half by the boot-faced contingent and half by a lot of silly students being supported through university by Mummy and Daddy and all the tax Philip Cavan had paid over the years. Shirley’d made it clear, when the NUM wives had come round at the start to gather names, that she wouldn’t demean herself by accepting hand-outs, hadn’t in her life eaten dinner out of tin cans and didn’t propose to start eating tinned food now, donated or not. She’d kept them on the doorstep with their little clipboards, rudely hadn’t asked them in, had made it plain that solidarity wouldn’t now require her to ask women into her house she’d never have asked in before. Philip was proud of her, even if the bit about not eating tinned food wasn’t strictly true, and as they practised the tango, she took care, at least once each session, to kick over a pile of tinned beans with one of her famous, neatly timed turns.

But there was not much to practise for, and even those competitions on the horizon, they wondered whether they could justify the expense of travel and accommodation. Not that they’d say so to each other. The practising only took up a couple of hours a day; in the evenings there were books to read; there was the trip, once a week, to Rotherham to the library to change their books—they both liked biography, Shirley at the moment reading a life of Disraeli, Philip on the third volume of a life of Tchaikovsky. The house had never been so clean, the garden so well weeded. People left them alone. Everyone knew what Phil’s position was. He wasn’t a blackleg, but he wasn’t part of the strike either, and anyone with any sense would have worked out that he wasn’t far off retirement, and wouldn’t much care if the pit closed down. It was all right for him: he’d take the redundancy money and he’d have his pension soon enough.

But they were left alone, and it was clear how much Philip had
enjoyed his audience in the first days of the strike, how much he’d enjoyed explaining to them why he wasn’t going to join in, why they were wasting their time, what he thought of Arthur Scargill, all in all. He hadn’t said to them that he thought Mrs. T was doing a good job for the country, Falklands nonsense notwithstanding, but if they’d persevered, it would have come in time to that. What he missed, now, was an audience. He’d allowed himself to assume that the professional duty of the NUM men, coming round to lecture him, would go on indefinitely, allowing him to ask them awkward questions and lecture them more extensively as long as the strike lasted. Perhaps he’d thought that once Thiselton had run out of things to say, he’d bring in the regional heads of the NUM to talk to Philip, and so on upwards until Philip found himself, with great joy, talking down Scargill himself in his own front room. What he hadn’t imagined was that Thiselton would just give up, go away and leave Philip in peace, with no one to lecture on the iniquities of the strike, the foolishness of the whole enterprise and its inevitable disaster, no one but Shirley. Shirley couldn’t give up. She had to put up with it.

She was dusting in the front room when, through the curtains, she saw Helen coming up the path with a young man she didn’t know. Her first reaction was relief, fast followed by wonderment at what the young man seemed to have on. She dashed to the front door, taking off the housecoat she wore for cleaning and hanging it quickly in the cupboard under the stairs. She wanted to have a better look.

“You could have phoned,” she said, looking him up and down. “And who’s this?”

The young man was wearing the sort of clothes—well, she wouldn’t want to say what first came to mind. But the second thing that came to mind was the sort of pantomime they’d taken the children to at Christmas. His shoes were black and shiny, and witchily pointed—you’d fall over your feet in shoes like that. His trousers were jeans, but black and tight enought to cut off his circulation. The young lads in Tinstone liked to get dressed up, and that was only to be expected. But they wouldn’t wear a shirt like that, though it was brilliantly white and obviously brand new; the sleeves billowed like a girl’s blouse, and the collar was just daft, a butterfly collar of the sort old rich people used to wear with dinner jackets and bow-ties. He wasn’t wearing a bow-tie, though, but had two buttons undone; a dark flurry of hair, trimmed short like pencil strokes, showed at the top of his chest. He was a handsome
young man, with shining white teeth, long eyelashes about his dark blue eyes, and a little flush of pink in his dark face as he smiled, but his clothes couldn’t have been more ridiculous.

“This is Daniel,” Helen said. “I’m sorry about his car, lowering the tone of the neighbourhood, but it couldn’t be helped.”

“We don’t care anything about things like that round here,” Shirley said, ushering them in. She turned and had a look; it was a long yellow car, badly bashed in, but she wasn’t in much of a position to say anything, and this might be the sort of young man, like a student or something, for whom a car like that might be amusing. They used to drive old London taxis, young men like that, years ago, she remembered. “I think your dad’s in the garden.”

Once they were in the front room, the young man produced a cellophane-wrapped cake, a shop cake, from behind his back. “We thought we’d contribute something in case you were going to make us a cup of tea,” he said cheekily.

“That’s nice of you,” she said, but she recognized it as one of the cakes you could get from Rita’s shop in Tinstone. She didn’t think much of shop-bought cakes, and the sort that Rita sold, she wouldn’t ever have offered those to a guest. If they were going to bring a cake, they could have got one in Sheffield or even in Rotherham.

“Daniel wanted to see where I grew up,” Helen said.

“Well, there’s not much to see,” Philip said, coming in from the garden. Helen introduced Daniel to him. “There’s where you went to school, and the playing-fields out the back, but I wouldn’t go anywhere near the mine this afternoon. They’ve been having trouble down there.”

“Is it the police?” Daniel asked.

“No,” Philip said. “It’s a lot of idiotic hot-heads with nothing better to do than sit there day after day. It’s worse elsewhere, I hear—they’re throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at each other down at Orgreave coking plant. But it’s bad enough here.”

“There’s people down there never worked at Tinstone,” Shirley said. “People never been down a mine, come to that, don’t care anything for it, just want to make trouble.”

Daniel blushed for some reason. “Are those your cups?” he said, getting up and looking at the mock-mahogany display cabinet, crowded with trophies, large and small; they were almost an extra source of light in the little room, they shone so sharply. “I’ve heard about your winning prizes for dancing.”

“Ballroom dancing,” Philip corrected mildly. “In the Latin.”

“I’ll put the kettle on,” Shirley said.

“I was telling him on the way over,” Helen said, putting her bag on the floor and sitting down, “about the Latin competitions you’ve won. I was saying—”

But Daniel’s attention had been caught by the way Helen sat down, in a single graceful movement, and by the way her knees, popping out from her above-knee skirt like bashful bald angels, held together and slid with somehow the same grace to the side of the armchair, her lovely unclad calves making an ideal chevron to the floor. It was beautifully done, something only a finishing school or perhaps a dancing school in Rotherham could have taught; or, perhaps, something to be acquired by natural elegance. It could have been Princess Diana sitting there, and he himself sat down with a feeling of comparative lumpiness. You wouldn’t have thought this little parlour, with its ugly highlights of the elaborate cups in a glass-fronted cabinet, could have produced such natural discreet elegance.

“My dad just asked you a question,” Helen said.

“I’m sorry, Philip,” Daniel said. “I was away admiring all your trophies.”

“Oh, aye,” Helen’s dad said, with what might have been amusement; Daniel must have been staring at Helen’s legs clearly enough. “I just wondered where you met our Helen.”

“Oh,” Daniel said. “I think we first met at Casanova’s, in Sheffield, the nightclub. We’ve got friends in common,” he added, in a rush, in case they should think their daughter was the sort of girl who picked up strangers.

“There’s a lot of skill in disco dancing,” Shirley said gnomically, calling through from the kitchen; it wasn’t far to call. “There’s competitions for it.”

“Of course, we’re too old for that,” Philip said. “High kicks and that. I’ve not seen our Helen do it. Is she good at it?”

“It’s not like that, Dad,” Helen said sharply, and Daniel could see the difference between “disco dancing,” as Philip and Shirley had perhaps seen it executed on stage in a Blackpool ballroom, men in all-in-one rhinestone-encrusted Lycra doing their damnedest to kick their own eyebrows, and the sort of “dancing” that happened on the under-lit dance-floor at Casanova’s, which was basically estate agents in suits, like him, shifting from one foot to another, and making odd clay-modelling gestures with their hands.

“Oh, I dare say,” Philip said. “Do you like dancing, Daniel?”

“I’ve never really learnt,” Daniel said, seeing this as the easiest reply. “I enjoy it, and I’m sure I’d enjoy it more if I knew what to do properly.”

“He’s an embarrassment on the dance-floor, this one,” Helen said.

“Try and be a bit more polite, love,” Shirley said, coming through with, obviously, the best china, the milk in a little pink floral jug and the shop-bought cake in neat slices on top of a pile of matching floral plates. “You want him to come again, don’t you?”

“He’ll think you weren’t brought up to know how to behave,” Philip added, with that married-couple thing, not exactly finishing each other’s sentences, but chiming in with matching responses. “Would you like to learn?”

“Learn to dance?” Daniel said.

“I can show you the first rudiments of the tango,” Philip said, and was, incredibly, up on his feet in a second, his arm outstretched. Daniel couldn’t believe he was serious, and was half expecting the two women to burst out laughing—apart from anything else, there was no space to dance in this little room, with its bulging fat tasselled three-piece suite decorated with a brown forestry pattern around the low coffee-table. But Helen and Shirley were looking at Philip with shy indulgence; they knew what a generous thing he was offering to a non-dancer like Daniel.

Daniel’s hesitation was clear, and Helen said, “Go on, he’s just going to show you the first position.” So Daniel did, and with his elbows stiff, allowed himself to be held by Philip, a good eight inches shorter than him.

“That’s no good,” Philip said. “I can see you’ve not learnt to dance. It looks like a stiff dance, but you can’t hold yourself as stiffly as that,” and he took one of Daniel’s arms, then the other, shaking it until it seemed to move in a single wave from wrist to shoulder. “There,” Philip said, “and try not to hold your head like that, and your feet like—no, not quite, more like—” he kicked Daniel’s right foot, then nudged it, then the left “—no, don’t move your right foot, that was just right, and then, soon as I touch your left, you move it, let’s try again.”