The Northern Clemency (68 page)

It took half an hour before Daniel was remotely in the correct starting position for a tango; Helen and Shirley had drunk the teapot dry, and when Daniel finally collapsed, amazed and exhausted, into the armchair, Shirley had to go out to boil some more water for the pot. Philip looked at him, his eyes shining with laughter.

“It’s not as easy as it looks, is it?” he said.

“It’s not as easy as it looks,” Daniel said to Helen, later in the car, as they were driving back towards Sheffield.

“It’s easier if you start learning when you’re younger,” Helen said. “You’ve got used to putting your body in all sorts of strange positions, so standing naturally, it doesn’t seem natural at all to you. You could still learn, though.”

“Really?” Daniel said. “It’s not one of those things you have to start when you’re six?”

“Well, if you wanted to be really good, you’d have to start young,” Helen said. “I don’t say you couldn’t learn to do it so that it would look all right.”

“I’d like that,” Daniel said. “Do you think I could learn?”

“I don’t see why not,” Helen said. “I don’t know what your mother was thinking of, not sending you to dancing lessons. Everyone ought to learn how to dance.”

“I’ll find a dancing school in Sheffield,” Daniel said. “Do you know one?”

“You want to ask my mum and dad to teach you,” Helen said. “You won’t find anyone in Sheffield knows as much about the tango as them. It’d be good for him. It wouldn’t always be him holding you, you know. You’d mostly get to dance with my mum.”

“Oh, that makes all the difference,” Daniel said. “Wouldn’t I get to dance with you?”

“You can dance with me at Christmas,” Helen said. “When you’ve reached the required standard. I’ve not the patience of my mum and dad.”

“Would they really teach me?”

“I don’t see why not,” Helen said. “It’d give them something to do. They might even start thinking about taking on other pupils. They’re not going to be competing much longer, and my dad’s going to retire from the mines as soon as he reasonably can. They ought to have something to do other than sit around moaning about Scargill and the NUM. The heavens bless us, what’s that terrible noise?”

That terrible noise, just there on the Golden Mile where everything else was decrepit and broken and closed, was the bang and slap and howl of a broken fan-belt. It was the one thing Daniel hadn’t thought about in his worries for the Cortina’s ability to get them there and back. The car limped to the side of the road.

“What are we going to do now?” Daniel said. “Shall I call the AA?”

“If I were you, Daniel,” Helen said, laughing hilariously, “I’d leave this wreck where it’s landed up, and forget about it. I think it’s a bit beyond the care of the AA.”

“You can get in trouble for just abandoning a car,” Daniel said. “And how are we supposed to get home?”

“Well, let’s see,” Helen said. “There’s a bus stop over there’ll take us into town, and from there you can get the fifty-one all the way home. It’s what normal people do, Daniel. And I tell you what, tomorrow, if you like, you can go out and buy a brand new car. I bet you’ve got enough money. How does that sound?”

“Gi’o’er,” Daniel said. “Are you cross, love?”

He’d never called her love before, but she didn’t seem to mind. “No, I think it’s right funny,” she said. “Are we going to get that bus, then?”

There was nothing else to be done. Daniel emptied the car of anything he wanted to keep, and locked it one last time. It was quite sad, standing at the bus-stop looking at the rusted, reproachful expression of its front grille.

“Do you want to do something later this week?” he said eventually.

“Oh, I’m coming home with you,” Helen said, with astonishment. “What did you think, Daniel?”

It seemed both as if the day would never come, and as if every day it slouched a little closer, lumpily approaching from across the moors as the seasons came and went. Whatever tasks occupied a day, at some point the thought of the court case would elbow its way in, and it was always a painful one; her heart would kick off, the sensation of ants running up and down her arms. Katherine could be in town, or doing the housework, or cooking, or out for the day in the car, or in anyone’s company. If she managed to go on talking—and nobody raised the subject, even Malcolm through kindness or renunciation, an unspoken decision that it had nothing to do with him—then it would keep at bay. She could go on about the weather. She could agree with Anthea or Kenneth Warner or any of the neighbours that the state of the road was shocking for something only thirty years old, that the council certainly neglected this side of town out of envy. She could talk about the coal strike. She could discuss anything trivial and meaningless, expounding on the children’s careers. Daniel had taken to coming for Sunday lunch almost every week, and often these days bringing his friend Helen too. They were good at talking about their lives, what
they’d been up to, and Katherine was grateful that for days afterwards she could keep conversation going with any number of people with the news of what Helen’s father thought of the coal strike, or the interesting and surprising fact that Daniel had started taking informal dancing lessons from him—he’d been a champion ballroom dancer until very recently. All these topics of conversation, carefully cultivated and mentally practised, and brought out with care for each listener—she tried to remember not to bring them up more than once, though of course it happened—successfully kept the ugly hot thought from her head. The thought that before long she was going to have to go to court, and be questioned in public as a witness against Nick. If she made an effort, she could take an interest in whatever they had been up to, as well, and that would have the same sort of effect, too. But if silence fell, as it sometimes did even when she was sitting with Anthea and Caroline in Anthea’s lounge in the morning, she could guarantee that the immediate horrible thought of her approaching day in court would come to mind, draining her features and tensing her wrists. “Are you all right?” Anthea said once. “You look quite pale.”

Nick’s trial had a horrible Christmas-like aspect, the way it trod closer and closer with gleeful and unwarning annunciations. Nobody was opening Advent-calendar windows, or reminding the world in shop windows that there were only twenty-seven days to go until Nick’s trial. But as time went on she was contacted by the authorities; had to be interviewed again by the police; had to be informed of the practical questions of being a witness in a criminal trial. These she kept to herself, only telling an unresponding Malcolm afterwards. They were horrible not in themselves but as reminders of the unexperienced unpleasantness that was still to come. The worst of it was that she could not believe Nick was going through a tenth of this dread. Wherever he was—was he in prison, was he out on some kind of licence?—she knew that his temperament would accept whatever was coming for him with acquiescence, and would, if it came to that, take prison with the same spirit. Sometimes she was encouraged to believe that the fatalist in him would let him plead guilty and make a fair end of it. But that wouldn’t happen. He was one of those who would be surprised, in any circumstances, to learn that anyone could think him guilty, and he certainly didn’t believe himself to be anything but innocent. In any case, she knew she would never see him again.

Cole Brothers had moved in Katherine’s lifetime. Where it had been had once been a favourite meeting-place. When she and Malcolm
had first known each other, they, like most of Sheffield, had been accustomed to meet at that point, and still she thought of that turn at the end of Fargate, now occupied by Chelsea Girl and the Midland Bank, as Cole’s Corner. Now it was in a glassy sixties block opposite the City Hall and the war memorial, facing the new prancing statue that looked a bit like an emaciated Princess Anne on a thin rearing donkey. The women’s clothes were on the first floor, and Katherine quite often bought hers there—she’d given up on Belinda’s in Broomhill and, in fact, on Broomhill altogether since she’d stopped working at Nick’s. Today she was buying a suit. The case was on Thursday.

“What is it for?” the shop assistant said—the first one she’d approached had said it was just about her tea break, and passed her on to an older colleague with a violet rinse in her hair, only needing rhinestone horn-rims to make the resemblance to Mary Whitehouse complete. “Is it a wedding?”

She hadn’t waited for an answer, and Katherine was glad. “Yes, that’s about the size of it,” she said.

“Is it your daughter who’s getting married?” the woman said, sizing up the suit Katherine was trying. “Perhaps she ought to come and advise you, too.”

“No,” Katherine said. “It’s an ex-colleague of mine. We never thought it would happen to him, but it finally has. He’s in his late thirties.”

“Well, I do call that nice,” the assistant said. “There’s no need to be too sombre, though, even so. That’s a nice suit for a professional woman, a very smart work suit, but I think a navy that dark might make you look a bit too sombre in the photographs. You could almost wear that to a funeral, now, couldn’t you?”

“All right,” Katherine said, shrugging off the jacket.

“My ladies always think they can jazz up a dark outfit with a brightly coloured shirt or blouse, but it’s never quite right,” the woman said. “Now, it’s definitely a suit you’re wanting, is it? What about a smart dress with a little bolero jacket on top? We’ve got something—”

“No, I don’t think so,” Katherine said. “I think definitely a suit.”

“You’ve got the figure for a little dress,” the assistant said, “and you could just shrug off the jacket when it comes to the wedding breakfast. No? All right, let’s see, now. There’s this—”

“That’s too bright,” Katherine said. “I couldn’t wear that shade of red, not to this sort of occasion.”

“You should try it on,” the assistant said. “I’m sure there are lots
of lovely bright colours you could get away with that you haven’t considered. For instance, you should consider more warm greens, gold and rust. You shouldn’t be wearing that scarf, it’s salmon pink, that’s more a sort of pink-and-blonde lady’s colour, like teal or periwinkle.”

“I’m not sure what periwinkle is,” Katherine said.

“Well, it doesn’t matter, because you won’t be wearing it. Now, just for the sake of it, let’s put you in this long dress. I know it’s not what you’re looking for.”

“No, it certainly isn’t,” Katherine said, because it was a gold taffeta strapless ballgown, ballooning out. She would never wear such a thing, though the idea of turning up to give evidence in it—again that familiar glitch, like a needle skipping over a scratch on a record—was an impressive one.

“I know,” the assistant said. “It’s just to give you an idea of the way that colours you’ve probably never considered could do the world for you. Just slip it on, and you’ll see straight away.”

Katherine meekly obeyed. She came out of the dressing room with her eyes cast down, feeling ridiculous, but the shop assistant clapped her hands; a pair of shoppers who had been sorting through the ra-ra skirts in the middle distance paused in what might have been impressed amazement.

“You see,” the assistant said, leading her to a mirror. “Just take a look at that, see if it isn’t a fantastic colour for you.”

Katherine didn’t know what to expect, but certainly not the full transformation; in this aisle-wide dress, the cloth rustling, its skeleton creaking, she seemed not the apologetic worm she had expected, but an ageing beauty who hadn’t had time to do her hair properly. In this extraordinary colour, she just glowed.

“Welcome to the 1980s,” the assistant said.

“It’s just the dress, though,” Katherine said. “I couldn’t ever wear something like that, I don’t have the occasions.”

“No, it’s not just the dress, it’s the colour,” the assistant said. “Now, let’s have a look for suits, but something in your colours, warm green, golds and rust.”

“Not too gold,” Katherine said, making a gesture at the luminescent dress, which, splendid though it was, was still a little like the Christmas turkey wrapped in gold foil.

“Perhaps a nice warm green tweed,” the assistant said. “I know what you’re thinking, but it’ll be a nice modern sort of take on tweed, a
tweed suit with—a classic with a twist. I might have just the thing. And you’ll be wanting a hat.”

“I’ll leave the hat for another day,” Katherine said. “I want to think about that a little bit first, see what people are wearing, these days.”

So, surprisingly, as Katherine entered the Sheffield court building with Malcolm three days later, Daniel following behind soberly dressed—they’d both managed to take the day off work with a made-up excuse—she was wearing something she’d never thought of wearing, a tweed suit in a warm green she’d been persuaded into. Her shoulders moved experimentally within the wide board-like expanse of the jacket’s cut. She’d thought of livening it up with a blouse to match her usual American Tan tights, but in the end she’d taken the advice, and wore a white silk shirt with a sort of pussy-bow collar and something she’d not worn for years, a pair of black tights. She’d not announced them as new when she’d come home with them; Malcolm must have understood when she came back with the big Cole Brothers bag why she’d bought a new outfit, but he’d not said anything, and this morning, when she’d come down in all this for the first time, he’d only told her something reassuring about repeating exactly what she’d said to the police, and that would be fine.

It had been explained to Katherine that she wouldn’t be allowed to listen to the evidence of other witnesses, just as they couldn’t meet her or listen to her evidence. But she could, if she liked, listen to Nick defending himself later in the day. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to, or what she would gain from that. She didn’t mention it to Malcolm. So she was separated from Malcolm and Nick, and settled in a kind of private space, with nothing to read or look at apart from a neutral pair of old prints, pictures of Sheffield before the war. A cup of coffee was brought, and another. She waited, emptying her mind as much as she could. She remembered what she had been told, that a good witness listened to the questions, and answered only the question that had been put; a witness did not get angry, or try to explain the whole situation, or the witness would be stopped. It all seemed impossible, and had never been further away.