The Northern Clemency (88 page)

“What’s that, Daniel?”

“I think I’m probably too old for that malarkey,” he said.

“Didn’t you have a good time, then?”

“It was all right,” Daniel said. “I’ve never seen it so full. And everyone having a much better time than I was.”

“That’s the saddest thing I ever heard,” Helen said.

“Fuck off,” Daniel said. “Do you want to know something funny, though?”

“Go on,” Helen said.

“Well,” Daniel said, drawing a breath, and trying to get the buttons on his shirt undone. “You know. I’ve got this old friend called John Warner, I used to go down Casanova’s with him. Only I stopped going, because I met this great woman, but he kept on going. And he’s tried to keep up, and I haven’t. And all his friends down there, they’re about fifteen, twenty years younger than him, and they all like this music. You want to hear this music, love, it’s like a washing-machine going round. No. It’s like being inside, going round inside a washing-machine. Only there’s one thing, one really quite sad thing, you might say, about being John Warner’s age or, you know, being my age, and being in a club like that with about a thousand kids jumping up and down. You know what the really sad thing is?”

“No, Daniel, tell me.”

“There was this girl, right,” Daniel said, “and she’s a right pretty
girl, she’s blonde, and it’s not her fault she’s got a green fur bikini top on and not much else. I wouldn’t have said no, only …” He sat down on the bed, and started amateurishly to fumble away in the general area of Helen’s chest, under the continental quilt.

“Oh, get off, Daniel, you stink,” Helen said. “So this girl, you’re trying to get off with her, and—”

“No,” Daniel said. “No. No. It wasn’t like that, Helen, it wasn’t. She was trying to get off with me and I was saying, ‘No, I don’t, I really don’t think so.’ Apart from anything else, she was definitely on drugs.”

“She’d have to be,” Helen said. “The drugs haven’t been invented that would persuade me to let you near me in your state right now. Seriously, get off me.”

“She was, she was on drugs,” Daniel said. “And do you know what she said to me?”

Daniel looked at Helen. It seemed, in whatever was left of Daniel’s mind, to be a genuine question, and after a moment, she said, “No, love, I don’t know what she said to you.”

“She said to me,” Daniel said, “she said, ‘You’re a friend of Granddad’s.’ That’s what they call John Warner down there, Granddad.”

“That’s funny.”

“That’s not the worst of it,” Daniel said. “She goes, ‘You can do it to me if you like, I don’t mind.’ And I say, ‘What do you mean, you don’t mind?’ And she says, ‘I don’t mind, you know what I mean.’”

“Poor old Daniel,” Helen said.

“‘I don’t mind,’” Daniel quoted again.

“Now get off the bed,” Helen said. “And go and have a shower before you get in. It’s not the end of the world. I’ll still put up with you.”

“I know you do,” Daniel said. “The point is—”

But then he seemed to lose whatever point it was, and shortly got up, a puzzled and pained expression on his face, and went off to the bathroom in his damp and sagging underpants. Helen watched him go, and in a moment, she turned the light off again. She lay back and, as she often did before sleep, started totting up what they had made in the last few days. She found it soothing, and safe, and in only a few moments had sunk back into the confused thoughts of unconsciousness. She had no sense of Daniel coming into bed.

The library was exactly as it had always been, behind the grey block of its front. Inside, the smell was reassuringly unchanged; the yellowish
varnish of the bookcases, and the black plastic labels at the end of each with the Dewey numbers and the categories. Now there were computers on tables containing the library’s catalogue, too; there were people at each terminal, and readers waiting for one to come free. The tall-legged chests of drawers containing the card catalogue were still there, but no one was consulting them, and they had the air of obsolescence. That was rather sad; there was, surely, a pleasure in rifling through the ragged-edged cards with their neatly typed details, a sensuous pleasure, and also the pleasure of coming across the most unlikely-sounding book, a place or two before the book you were looking for. In a gesture of cussedness, Francis went to the card catalogue and opened a drawer, more or less at random, just to remember what it felt like, before it was too late.

It was a Saturday morning. Bernie had gone to the hospital, taking Katherine Glover with him in the car, and, rather than sit around the house, Francis had decided to go and do something positive. He’d taken compassionate leave, and felt he ought to be doing more to justify it. He’d asked his father if he could borrow his library card—“Well, I know I’ve got one,” his father said doubtfully, though it was in his wallet—and had gone to town on the bus. For twenty minutes, he’d just walked around; he couldn’t think of anything he wanted to do, or buy, or look at, so he’d done what he’d said he’d do and gone into the library.

For old times’ sake, he gathered together five books, just as he used to; they were books he’d always meant to read and, actually, if he looked at the date stamps, some of them, ten years back, had probably been on his ticket. There was no doubt; he’d been a great one for taking books out hopefully, then returning them, three weeks later, still unstarted. He had them stamped—it seemed quite possible to him that the woman who stamped them out, blonde and snub-nosed, was the same person as an Alice-band girl he quite clearly remembered, give or take about forty pounds in weight. He put the books into his rucksack, and left. Nothing much had changed, apart from the computers; even the people selling their revolutionary newspapers at the bottom of the steps outside.

“I heard about your mum,” one said, as he was about to walk past. Francis stopped and looked; it was, unmistakably, Timothy Glover.

“Oh,” Francis said. “Thanks. I didn’t recognize you, I’m sorry. Thanks. She’s stable now.”

“I know,” Tim said. “My mother told me. I phoned her yesterday to find out how she was doing.”

“Thanks, it’s kind of you to be concerned,” Francis said.

“We’re all concerned,” Tim said, and Francis looked at him in surprise. “I expect your sister’s coming over, isn’t she? She lives in Australia, I heard.”

“I don’t know,” Francis said. “I don’t think she can, not just at the moment.”

The woman with Tim, selling their newspaper, now gave him a resolute and contemptuous look, and walked five paces away. He hardly gave her a glance.

“That’s not on,” Tim said. “Surely she can come over?”

“Well, I don’t think she can,” Francis said. “And my mum’s stable now. I’m sure she’ll come over when she can.”

“I’m sure she won’t,” Tim said, with real venom. “Somebody ought to make her come. I can’t believe she just can’t be bothered.”

Francis said nothing. What he remembered now was, long ago, in the playground of the junior school, and the history of that playground game, for so long now obscure in its rules and details. It came back to him, how Timothy, then, had forced his way in, had imposed, uninvited, his own convictions of right and of punishment. He had joined in, not for pleasure, but because he had seen possibilities of damage and destruction. It had been a good game, and Timothy had broken into the circle, and destroyed it for the pleasure of destruction. When Francis thought of the game and its history, he could not remember the details of how it was played, only, in general terms, its energy and allure. But he remembered how it had ended, with Andrew, who had really been one of the only friends he had ever had, his leg broken, and him being taken away to the hospital. He’d never rid himself of the conviction that Timothy Glover, in the end, had got his way, imposing his notions of punishment and right. Perhaps it was just the fact of the hospital that made Francis think of that terrible time again now; but he knew with certainty that they were talking, at bottom, about his mother, someone about whom a Timothy Glover certainly didn’t care in the slightest.

“You know something?” Francis said, and his voice was trembling. “I don’t think I really believe in ‘Someone ought to do something.’”

“Pardon me?” Timothy said, shaking his head and laughing in an affected way.

“When people say, ‘Someone ought to do something,’” Francis said. “I don’t really believe in it. Particularly if it means ‘you ought to do something.’ It just seems quite an easy sort of thing to say, to tell other people what their duty is when it’s none of your business.”

“I’m sorry about your mother,” Timothy said mildly, turning away. “I didn’t express myself well. I didn’t mean to start telling you what you ought to be doing.”

Francis turned his back and was off. He’d never liked Timothy Glover; he would have preferred not to have had that conversation. That was the trouble with being so tall: people tended to recognize you, even when you wouldn’t recognize them. It was time to go to the hospital.

As the weeks went on, Alice started becoming stable. That was the expression that was used, odd though it was; to start to become anything was surely to be in a condition of change and not stability. But she started to become stable. Her colour improved, and she lost the terrible rasping edge to her breath, through which she had appeared to be trying to swallow a lump of air as if it were a choking cube of meat. She had looked as if she were in the throes of a traumatic sleep and struggling against nightmares, her brow furrowed in pain. But now her brow had smoothed, and she looked not peacefully asleep—that was what was customarily said about the dead—but even as if she were awake and resting her eyes. There was a tranquillity about her now, which everyone commented on; she had lost that deep-sleep frown of suffering, and as Francis read to her, he occasionally had the illusion that she was listening to him and following the story, that at some point she might open her eyes at the end of a Sherlock Holmes and say how much she’d enjoyed that.

“I know it sounds strange,” Katherine Glover said, “but your mother, she looks much better than she did two weeks ago.”

“I think it’s just the drugs,” Francis said. “They’ve lowered her temperature and her blood pressure. I think that makes things easier for her.”

The drugs had been changed slightly, and she no longer suffered under those storms of itching, the clouds of rash across her neck dissolving into her familiar milky skin tones. If she looked better, the machines by her bed confirmed the impression: the figures registering her blood pressure were lower, her temperature normal, her body
starting to repair the damage that had taken place. The doctors came round less frequently, and had less to say to Francis and Bernie. They interpreted these abstruse clues in their best Sherlock Holmes style and, unlike Holmes, started to give not the veiled past but the uncertain future a cautious shape.

“If there are no setbacks,” one said to Bernie and Francis, in the same small Relatives’ Room, “we might start to think about moving Alice to the Hallamshire Hospital. They can look after her more thoroughly there, they have a dedicated neurology unit.”

There was, too, a surgical procedure that needed to be carried out on Alice to secure her brain against further insults—it was a beautiful word Francis had learnt for the first time in the last weeks, and it seemed extraordinarily apt to him. Insult: it really was the right word for what had happened to his mother and to all of them, only wrong in the inadequacy of its scale. It struck him that, even though Alice was in a coma and presumably not listening, any more than, in reality, she was listening to or following the Sherlock Holmes recitations, the doctors showed a delicacy of feeling in not discussing her case in front of her, but in asking them to come to the Relatives’ Room. Such delicacy of feeling was naturally at the opposite pole of behaviour to the insult Alice had suffered, and would naturally deplore it and work to undo that insult’s worst effects.

“Oh, that’s a good idea,” Helen said, when appealed to; she had come one afternoon with Katherine, for company, when Malcolm was at work. “They’ll want to move her to the Hallamshire if they can. There’s a dedicated neurology unit there.”

It had surprised Francis, and also, evidently, Bernie, with what dedication unexpected people had visited Alice, not once but repeatedly. She had liked Helen, on the few times they had met, but Helen’s devotion, and her and Daniel’s practical help, couldn’t have been predicted. Their restaurant, about which Francis heard a good deal, and was grateful for the supply of a topic of conversation, was left largely to run itself. Over the weeks it seemed to Francis that his mother, without knowing it, had made a pair of new friends, and they had become intimate with Alice as she slept. He wondered what she would feel about that if she knew about it.

“Of course,” Katherine said. “Helen used to work at the Hallamshire. She used to be a nurse, you ought to take her advice.”

“I don’t think there’s any decisions to be made,” Bernie said, and
then, as if fearing he might have been rude, he added, “I mean, of course Alice will go wherever the doctors think is best.” He took Alice’s hand in both of his, and stroked the back of it.

Alice changed, and became stable, the two things in this unfamiliar world not contradicting each other, and around her things changed too. Francis and Bernie were less conscious of the other patients in the ward than they had been, now that Alice was in a room on her own. The freely offered cups of tea came to an end, marking the nurses’ assessment of a less dangerous situation, and Francis went out more often to the hot-drinks machine in the octagonal foyer between the four sub-wards. There, struggling to find the right change, he came across other sets of visitors, and they became first familiar faces and then people he could talk to, and finally, after a few polite but anonymous conversations, names and a family member in a ward. “Is she a fighter, your mam?” one said to him one day, when he was outside on the steps, and Francis agreed that she was, hardly knowing whether his mother was or not. “She’ll make it through,” the other patient’s relative said, and Francis nodded, pretending to be consoled, though he thought of asking her what the hell she knew about it. It would be a very easy thing to say, whatever the circumstances.