The Northern Clemency (38 page)

Most of the wives, like Margaret, treated it as a jolly, a day out in knickerbockers that might as well end in throwing a half-eaten Bakewell pudding slap in the side of Cromwell’s face as he was making his victory speech. Cromwell hadn’t asked for his wife, Margaret, Earl of Arlington, to throw puddings at him, however merrily.

Malcolm didn’t fancy either the open ridicule or the enthusiastic joining in, which seemed to be the two main alternatives. He would settle for amused disdain. But he hadn’t noticed that amused disdain was, in fact, what he’d got until the car, in those days a brown Morris, had stopped in the car park by Burbage rocks and Malcolm could place Katherine next to the others. He hadn’t asked her to show an interest in his interests, and any curiosity had only shown itself in airy, smiling allusions. She dusted his books, but never opened one; never commented, either, like Ed’s wife, on the stupidity of the
cost
of all of this, and for that he was more or less grateful. What he mostly wanted was to be allowed to get on with his interests undisturbed, and he ran through the various alternatives—an informed interest, a lively uninformed one, down to open opposition—before coming to the conclusion that Katherine’s attitude wasn’t the worst one, though she seemed capable, if comments afterwards could be read correctly, of mildly insulting one or two of the more serious members of the society. “As long as I live,” she said, laughing hilariously, “I’ll never forget the look on that Richard Thwaite’s face when he realized that his own wife had thrown the pudding at him. Talk about outraged dignity.” What, if anything, he was grateful for was that she wouldn’t be embarrassed by any of this. It took a lot to embarrass Katherine and, unlike most people, if she found herself doing something, then by definition it was clearly not an embarrassing thing to be doing.

All the same, it wasn’t until the battle of Naseby that it became quite clear to Malcolm what his marriage was, and what it looked like. It had taken thirteen years and a Civil War battle to show that.

“Katherine enjoy it, did she?” Ed asked at the next meeting, flushed with success.

“Yes, I think so,” Malcolm said, taking off his duffel coat and adding it to the pile at the edge of the stage.

“We’ll have to persuade her to take a part next time,” Ed said, but this was so evidently unlikely that he faltered while he was saying it. Perhaps he envisaged Katherine in her pale blue summer frock with a pattern of daisies, a white cotton-knit cardigan with mother-of-pearl buttons over her shoulders, her skirt spread over a groundsheet and, by her side, an insulated picnic box in pink plastic to keep everything cold.

“I don’t think she’d enjoy taking part half so much,” Malcolm said. “She enjoyed it as a spectacle mostly, I would think.”

He felt he could live with this; it seemed to him like a stable situation, a sustainable one, and perhaps only in the more concentrated exposure of their two-weeks’ holiday each year did it seem as if the long repayments on the initial commitment, as it were, might not reach the agreed term. One fortnight on a barge on the Norfolk Broads, the usual amused allusions, the rather tarter comments made directly to the children on the reading matter their father had seen fit to bring along, turned into something worse. It had rained every day, and the cramped ingenious space, smelling of mould and other people’s old dinners, found itself brownly listening to something unfamiliar to Malcolm and Katherine: raised voices and the endless games of Monopoly definitively abandoned long before the end of the evening. It wasn’t much of a success, they privately and ruefully agreed later, but the failure had been Norfolk’s, the weather, blamed on the idea of managing a barge through the narrow canals. That last one had been Katherine’s conclusion. Malcolm felt that he and Daniel had done quite well between them. But he hadn’t contradicted her, in the circumstances.

It was only after she’d taken the job in that flower shop that he’d really started to wonder. That was what he said, once, to Margaret and to Richard too, who’d turned up at the office Friday-night drink at the Dog and Duck, the redecorated pub at the end of Division Street, in the nook by the horse-brass-festooned fireplace. “I really start to wonder,” he’d said at the tucked-away table, only space for three of them.

“How do you mean, Malcolm?” Richard had said. Katherine had never made much of an effort to get to know them, and he guessed Richard and Margaret only had a broad impression of her.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, almost scared by what he’d said. “I suppose we all have these patches.”

“Some of us have nothing but patches,” Margaret said cosily, “and very
cross
patches too,” punching Richard, but looking oddly at Malcolm, who always seemed to go on so evenly. He couldn’t imagine a marriage that worked by making a spectacle of its difficulties, and of small punches in public. After that, he didn’t confide in anyone.

After Katherine’s party there had been those stupid two days. He always thought of them like that. Even at the time they had been stupid. What the hell are you doing? he said to himself, over and over in that strange clean room, asking questions of the unfamiliar pictures, the unfamiliar wallpaper. All he’d done was move into a hotel for two days, and tell no one about it. It was stupid because it couldn’t last longer than a very few days—he couldn’t in all conscience stretch beyond that if he was ever to return; a week and it would be easier never to come back and answer the questions about what he’d spent that sum of money on. The day after the party, he’d been left with a feeling of appalling exhaustion, like that after intense physical effort. He’d been tight-pulled for weeks, ever since she’d announced it, or before. He’d had no doubt who this party was meant for, and he waited with his jaw firmly gripped for this man Nick, hardly knowing what he looked like, and it made no difference that he hadn’t, in the end, come. Maybe there was an agreement between the two of them.

So Malcolm changed his route home. There was an obvious way to drive from work to home. You went up Division Street, right and past the university, through Broomhill, right up the Manchester Road past Crosspool and left up Coldwell Lane, just before the city came to an end, and then you were almost home. Now he changed his route. After the university, he turned right, before Broomhill, which he wouldn’t drive through. He went an extra half-mile through Crookes, every night, humming a little tune that was no tune at all but just one note leading to the next, very calmly. He didn’t even express it to himself. It was just a different route home, one he sort of preferred, these days—but he didn’t end up driving through Broomhill. He wouldn’t have to see the flower shop, open or closed. He wouldn’t have to catch any kind of glimpse of Nick. He wouldn’t have to drive past the shop, in particular, on those nights when, Katherine said, “Nick” (so Malcolm called him, inverted commas poisonous in his mind) needed her to stay late, just an hour, stay late in the shop to go through the books. He wouldn’t have to drive past the darkened closed shop on such a night,
Katherine’s explanation that morning as clear in his ears as if on a cassette repeating itself in the car’s tape-player, to reach home telling himself that there must have been a change of arrangements, the children watching television and waiting for both him and Katherine. He’d made that mistake once. He wouldn’t make it again.

The supper that had so alarmed Malcolm, before he’d discovered who it was really for, occupied Katherine more, perhaps, than it should.

“What does Sandra like to eat?” she asked Daniel in the end.

“You never asked that when Antony came to tea,” Tim said immediately. They were walking down the Moor, going to Marks & Spencer. Tim needed a new shirt, having come home from school with the sleeve of a new blue one half ripped off in some act of playground violence. Once, she might have mended it—it had torn neatly at the seam—but now she was damned if she could be bothered to muck about with a needle and thread.

“No,” Katherine said heartlessly. “That’s quite right. I didn’t bother.”

“It’s not fair,” Tim said. “Just because it’s Daniel’s girlfriend coming you want to butter her up—”

“And pop her in the oven at regulo three,” Katherine said, making a witchy face.

“What does that mean?” Tim said.

“You said butter her up,” Daniel said. “She’s not my girlfriend—”
girl, friend
, almost singing it. “She’s just—”

“I thought she was,” Katherine said. “I thought you’d got rid of Barbara and taken up with Sandra.”

“Everyone in this family’s so immature,” Daniel said, evidently unable to specify the particular acts that, committed, had made Barbara his girlfriend and, left alone, had put Sandra into a different category. “I don’t see why people can’t have friends who are girls.”

“No,” Katherine said. “I don’t see that either. But generally people, as you call them, don’t. So, you’re still going out with Barbara?”

Tim made retching noises, attracting the attention of a startled old traffic warden, her cap and badge perched on top of a superannuated beehive hairdo. Tim’s being-sick noises were deep and grunty.

“She seemed a nice girl,” Katherine said cheerfully. “I don’t suppose it was entirely her fault, having ankles as fat as that.”

“It wasn’t her
ankles,”
Daniel said.

“When she came to supper—‘Thank you, Mrs. Glover, ooh, thanks ever so much for passing me the salt, Mr. Glover,’” Tim said, in curdlingly sweet parody “—you wanted to know what she liked too. It’s not fair.”

“I expect I just assumed that a friend of yours would like everything, and he did,” Katherine said. “But it was more likely I just forgot to ask, or that there was no reason you’d know what he especially liked. I’ll remember to ask next time you want to ask a little friend to tea. Who do you want to ask to tea?”

“Antony could come again,” Tim said.

“You’ve only got one friend,” Daniel said jeeringly. “Slightly Smelly. Just put a nosebag round his neck and let him get on with it. It was horrible to watch.”

“That’s not true,” Tim said, but then they went on to discuss what Sandra might like to eat, going into Marks & Spencer.

“You’re both useless,” Katherine cried after five minutes, throwing down a pile of shirts, blue, white and military green. “You’re both suggesting the sort of thing you’d like to have. I’m going to make a fish pie.”

It was an important thing, making a fish pie. Katherine’s cooking had retreated to fifteen or so dinners. They didn’t rotate with absolute regularity but there was a limit to them. There were the Sunday roasts she’d been taught to do by Malcolm’s mother—it was, by immemorial tradition, Daniel’s job to make the gravy; he’d been doing it since he was five. There were the dinner-party dishes, such as the beef olives she’d got out of
Good Housekeeping
a year or two back. There were the daily dishes—the shepherd’s pie, the lasagnes, the chillis with rice. Katherine was more adventurous a cook than most people with children, and she rather relished the story of Jane coming home crying, a few years before, because she’d reported having trout for dinner and her friend had come back with what was normal, sausage and chips. She hoped, in fact, that had got back to the mother.

Fish pie was one of the things that was halfway between a daily dish and a fiddly special production. She would do it on a weekday, but only if she had the time, and it always landed on the table with a sort of flourish, a sense of a special treat, usually with peas. (Frozen—the children preferred them.) With its layers and the four or five separate things to prepare, it was one of the meals Daniel liked to help with. She wanted Sandra to go back and say, “We had fish pie.”

“Bought, I expect,” the sardonic father would say, and she’d have to
say, “No, Mrs. Glover made it herself—it was great.” Those people who said that food was only there to keep you going, that it didn’t matter what you ate so long as you didn’t actually fall over from malnutrition, hadn’t understood anything.

She had only said that to Daniel, “I think I’ll make a fish pie,” but he understood. On Friday morning, she popped out of Nick’s shop and up to the old-fashioned family fishmonger, its bouquets of fanned-out fish with their eyes, shiny as polythene, sprats and perch, a whole half salmon, like the aftermath of some unsuccessful fishy magical trick, its lower body already sliced into tiled fat steaks and laid out on the pallid marble, buried in parsley, half real and wilting, half plastic and spikily vivid, greenly erect, and everything dripping with ice like a forest enchantment. Mr. Gribbins, whose family had run the shop for years—she remembered his father selling her mother herring to fry in oatmeal, when she and this Mr. Gribbins, she supposed, were both children—smiled a ruddy, professional smile as she came in. He was always ready with odd recommendations, the rubbish from the bottom of the net, like pollock, or some Edwardian extravagance like turbot.

“It’s only for a fish pie,” she said, and ordered some fat translucent cod, some smoked haddock.

“And some prawns, I expect,” Mr. Gribbins said. “Me wife always says that fish pie, it’s not same wi’out prawns. They’re only frozen, what we’ve got.”

“And some prawns, frozen will be fine,” Katherine said, then asked him to pop the bag in the fridge and she’d pick it up at five. Mr. Gribbins was a good, popular fishmonger; she expected his fish was better than anything you’d get even in Sainsbury’s, which was opening, the city-centre billboard said, that autumn. There’d always be a need for those family businesses.

She left Nick’s early, with the groceries she’d picked up in the minimarket over the road and the fish in a heavy, sloshing bag, and caught the bus home. She started work straight away. Four eggs boiled for ten minutes. Onion and carrot fried slowly until they were soft—she hung lovingly over the hissing pan—and some single cream over the top. The potatoes peeled—

“You’ve done everything,” Daniel said, coming into the kitchen. Behind him, Sandra. She was quite a pretty girl, though it was a shame about her skin; she even looked quite nice in that frizzy way of doing their hair that all the girls her age had taken to. Or perhaps it was that
you got used to fashions—it didn’t look as ugly now as it had only a year ago. She wasn’t wearing, either, those terrible clumpy shoes you sometimes saw her in, but quite simple black ones—but, of course, the whole thing, the flattering white shirt and the elegant, demure grey skirt wasn’t a meeting-his-mother outfit but simply her school uniform with the tie removed. She hadn’t been home. Just as Daniel could, with a plain white shirt and black trousers, Sandra made a dull uniform look like a personal decision. Katherine recognized the bond between them; recognized, too, that the bond was somehow of affinity, and not in any way erotic. They moved towards each other in some other way, neither stiffly self-conscious nor in sinuous enjoyment. He wasn’t going out with this girl.