The Northern Clemency (52 page)

“Maggie!” Stig said. “I just meant him, he’s got housing as it is, no point adding to the obligations of a local authority trying to establish socialist principles in a fascist larger environment. They’ve not the resources to offer to freeloaders. It’s right he’s taking the larger view.”

“It’s not everyone as can take the larger view, which anyway is supporting fascism, if you think about it,” Trudy said. “If you bring down the local authority, which in any case is implicated in the larger fascist system, then the whole thing will follow, you shouldn’t make things easy for any of them. Blunkett.”

“Fascist,” Stig said. “Anyway, that’s his dad, works for a building society.”

“Fascist,” Trudy said. “Should have spat in his face.”

“We’re off home now,” one of the mining wives said, a woman with carefully prepared hair and a thin, raw face. They’d been dividing up the food donations, which weren’t that many, into solid woven-plastic bags. “We’ll not be back while Thursday. Mary and that lot from Pontefract’ll be down tomorrow.”

“We feel your pain,” Trudy said exuberantly, and, as she always did, tried to embrace the chief mining wife. They sort of submitted to it, but you could see what they thought about Trudy, who, with her views on the systems that made deodorant, both vaginal and armpit, and shampoo seem necessary, wasn’t all that nice to be embraced by or even come very near to.

.   .   .

Malcolm had parked the car in Cole’s car park as usual, and he whistled a little tune as he turned into Fargate. It was a tricky tune he was attempting—what was it?—an old one, a hit from
Oklahoma!
was it, with its little notes so close together, quite close but not quite the same. With a new black leather briefcase in one hand, a copy of the
Spartacist
neatly folded under the other, and whistling “People Will Say We’re In Love,” Malcolm found that the previous few years had developed his sense of irony about his own existence to an unexpected degree. There was hardly anything in the briefcase—for years, he’d suffered a kind of briefcase envy at all the young executives who, at the mid-point of the 1960s, had abruptly materialized with almost the sharp suits of the five-years-before Mods, a sharp oblong black briefcase in their firm grip. What did they carry in them? Malcolm hardly ever had anything to take from or to work unless he felt like taking sandwiches, and for some time he’d loaded up his case with unnecessary work, which would stay in the locked case until morning, when he’d take it back again. But then he concluded that many of those sharp-suited men had, like him, nothing in their briefcases from the way they swung them. They were just a signifier of a sort of existence, and Malcolm went on bearing his existence to work, empty, and back again. They would have been scandalized, the girls at the Huddersfield and Harrogate, if a man of his station had gone through the doors in the morning with no bag in his hand. Anyway, today there was a library book in it, a life of Wavell.

At the head of Fargate was another small group of ratty, raw-faced women, in the bright Crimplene fashions of ten years before, their floral skirts at or above their knees, like the women outside his office touting for donations to the miners, their husbands. Competition. He wondered whether there were arguments over the best sites to collect, whether they joined forces, whether what they collected went into a general pool at the end of the day, the neediest getting the tinned meat pie, the less needy a tin of chick-peas or nothing. Or whether each donation was kept by whoever received it. Probably sold it at knockdown prices. Odd how your interests changed over time. Ten years ago, he wouldn’t have bothered with any of the viceroys, or India at all. These days, the whole thing struck him as extraordinarily fascinating. He looked forward to a good hour or two after dinner, undisturbed, with the life of Wavell. Dig deep for the miners. Stupid, when you came to think of it, and not serious either, going on a coal strike in
May. They’d starve to death long before demand rose sharply in November. Stupid. They didn’t deserve anyone’s chick-peas.

All the way home, his thoughts ran on pleasantly. He followed his usual route, hardly paying it any attention. As he approached the university swimming-pool, a police van turned out, full of policemen, then a second and a third. Curious. Then he realized it was probably their afternoon off. Extras, called in from neighbouring authorities to deal with all those flying pickets, terrorizing the students with their dive-bombing and Australian crawl—was that still what it was called these days? It was a shame, when you came to think of it, that Tim didn’t go there or that they didn’t go to the cockroach-looking old Glossop Road Baths where, three times a week, Tim did. He must be getting to be quite a good swimmer.

In fact, Tim was coming up the road now, his black hair plastered down and a plastic bag in his hand, with a heavy rolled towel at the bottom of it. It was one of his swimming days. If you didn’t know him, you’d think he was quite respectable. There was nothing he wore that owed anything to any kind of fashion, as far as Malcolm could see, unless those horrible old granddad shirts without a collar and those sleeveless Fair Isle knitted jerseys had come back into fashion. Tim found them in junk shops, second-hand clothes shops, like the suits he liked to wear. You saw other kids dressed like that. But you couldn’t, it seemed, get the shoes quite right from a junk shop—anyway, Tim’s shoes were always a bit strange. Today they were the sort of platform shoes they’d been wearing ten years before. Perhaps the other kids gave up, and bought their shoes new to go with their junk-shop clothes.

Over the road, Katherine and Alice were standing in Alice’s kitchen, watching Malcolm get out of their new red car, a hatchback.

“That’s a nice big car you’ve got there,” Alice said.

“I know,” Katherine said. “I don’t know what Malcolm was thinking of. I suppose once you’ve had three children hanging round the house and all wanting lifts at the same time, you go on thinking in those terms even when two of them are gone.”

“Useful if you ever wanted anything moving,” Alice said, and they giggled a little.

“Ah, well,” Katherine said, and they took a regretful sip from their glasses of white wine. “I suppose I’d better be getting back.”

“No hurry,” Alice said, reaching for the bottle.

“No, they can wait,” Katherine said. “I know what we’ll be getting
all evening, anyway, from Chairman Mao over there. No point in hurrying the inevitable.”

Since Katherine had given up her job, she’d taken to dropping in at Alice’s around four thirty or five. It was at Alice’s suggestion, and they both enjoyed the regularity of it. Of course, at first they’d had a cup of tea and a cake, but one day Alice had said, when Katherine was getting up to go, “Do you fancy a glass of wine?” And Katherine, of course, had said, “Oh, I didn’t know it was as late as that,” and Alice had assured her that it was a real offer, not one to get rid of her. Since then, they’d dropped the tea, taking turns to bring a little bottle of wine. It was nothing too awful, a bottle lasted them two days, and they’d carried on with the cake, but there was no nonsense about cups of tea. “Oh, Mother,” Alice’s boy Francis would say, before he’d left home, if he happened to come in, but not seriously, and it was generally only when Bernie came back that Katherine put her glass down and, regretfully, went.

“I saw that Nick the other day,” Alice said. “In the post office in Ranmoor. He was struggling with the mysteries of recorded delivery.”

“Did you say hello?”

“Oh, he wouldn’t know me from Adam,” Alice said. “Do you not miss working there?”

Katherine considered, taking a ladylike sip. She could have been remembering anything.

“I don’t think so,” she said. Then, eventually—it was not a logical answer, Alice had not asked it but she was answering the question that was hanging in the air—she said, “It was only that once. And that was ages ago. It seems ridiculous for it to have become something to make all this fuss over.”

Between the two of them, they had gradually, over the years, slipped back to the point they had started from, attained by degrees their initial level of intimacy. It had come about by degrees, by little allusions on Katherine’s part when she felt ready, and by an ordinary decent pretence on Alice’s part that she didn’t know any of it. These were necessary steps, and by this mutual process of respect and pretence they’d got to the point of being able to talk frankly and openly about the situation when no one else was about. It was almost the most interesting thing that had ever happened to Katherine—the most interesting thing she’d ever done. In return, Alice had been able to tell her all of the most interesting things that had ever happened to her. They were not, by comparison, all that interesting or tellable, but she talked
expansively to Katherine as best anyone could who had, after all, met her husband when she was eighteen, who had married him at twenty-two, who had never been to bed or been tempted to go to bed with anyone else. Alice’s story was less forceful than Katherine’s, which tended to circle round one episode, one event, one afternoon, even, but it had aspects that she couldn’t tell to anyone else.

“It wasn’t exactly just that one time, though,” Alice said reprovingly.

“Oh, but it was—”

“I mean, that’s not what’s worrying you,” Alice said. “You might only have done it, taken that step, once, done what you’re not supposed ever to have done, but in your head it went on a lot before that and a lot after.”

“I suppose there’s something in that,” Katherine said.

“It was the thinking about it in advance, and the extracting yourself from it afterwards, that’s what did the damage.”

“I suppose so,” Katherine said humbly. “Though the afterwards part, that was when the whole situation became a lot easier. It was doing it when I didn’t want to any more.”

“They’ll be wondering where you are,” Alice said, nodding at over the road. “Have a bit more.”

“I will,” Katherine said.

“But afterwards …”

“Well, afterwards,” Katherine said practically, “naturally, I couldn’t feel the same about him, I didn’t even like him that much. I couldn’t see what it was all about, and then I noticed that in the six months before I’d actually called in sick three times. Of course, I’d not been sick, I’d just found I had other things to do those days. Before—you know, I couldn’t have imagined being sick on a day when I might see Nick, spend a day with him putting stupid flowers in vases. I’d have dragged myself in even if I’d had bubonic plague. And then all at once I was looking at him one day, and I thought how completely stupid and—you know, somehow
unmanly
he looked, stripping the foliage off lilies. I never compared him to Malcolm, I never let myself go down that route, but then I thought, you know, what Malcolm does, it’s just a bit better, a bit more dignified. And then Malcolm got this promotion, and he gets bonuses now, and he said at the time—in a way this was funny—he said, ‘You don’t seem all that keen about going to work any more. You used to look forward to it and talk about it more.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I suppose that’s true.’ I thought about it for a minute. I’d rather not be doing anything.”

“Even though there’s less to do around the house, I suppose,” Alice said.

“That’s true,” Katherine said. “Though Daniel, even with his little flat in Crookes, he still comes home with his washing, to save time. Jane’s always been a bit more self-reliant, I imagine she’s coping quite well in London—at least she never says anything that makes you think otherwise. We were going to go down next month, Jane’s got a sort of sofabed in the sitting room she says we can sleep on, a kind of Japanese thing called a futon, though Malcolm says he doesn’t much fancy that and what about a hotel—”

“London prices,” Alice said. “Stick to your Japanese affair, save yourself a hundred pounds.”

“That’s what I said,” Katherine said comfortably.

“What did Nick say in the end?” Alice said.

“I think he was secretly a bit relieved,” Katherine said. “That sounds terrible, but I think he was. Anyway, he’s got a school-leaver. It all seems to have worked out very well. Here’s Bernie, I’ll have to be off.”

“All right, Katherine?” Bernie said, coming into the kitchen. “Don’t dash off on my account, it’s nice to have company.”

“No, I saw my boys coming in twenty minutes ago,” Katherine said. “I’ll have to go and make the peace.”

“Make the peace?” Bernie said. “Hello love,” he said, kissing Alice.

“They’ll be hammer and tongs by now,” Katherine said. “You don’t know how lucky you are.”

“Oh, we all have our little crosses to bear,” Bernie said, smiling because, after all, they didn’t really. “Is that a letter from Sandra I saw?”

“Alexandra,” Alice said. “Yes, I left it until you got home. The post didn’t come till ten.”

“Shocking,” Bernie said, and together they said goodbye to Katherine, before together going into the sitting room, opening the envelope with the Australian stamps, and Bernie, as they’d got used to, reading it out loud to Alice.

Tim had got to the city library, as was his habit, within half an hour of its opening. Sometimes when the porter opened the yellowish varnished double doors at nine thirty he was already waiting on the chalky white steps with his two old plastic supermarket bags, one filled with pads and paper, foil-wrapped sandwiches, biros and books, the other
with a towel and swimming trunks, soap and shampoo for later. The porter had a pitted beetroot for a face, and, neckless, chomped on his ill-fitting dentures as he let in Tim and the other two or three impatients. He never acknowledged these early regulars as his jaw rose horribly into the middle of his face like a horrible motor. Tim did not acknowledge him, either: his blue uniform with its insistent badges, shiny as if it had been through a rainstorm, put him on the far side of some line of demarcation.

There were three doors leading out of the echoing marble lobby; in front, the general library, for anyone who thought reading was for entertainment, cheap sops to keep them quiet, and to the right, the business library, full of telephone directories. Tim despised them both. Two at a time, he went up the august marble stairs to the first floor, where the reference library was. If you carried on up, or took the strangely two-doored lift, which made the exact same clank at the exact same spot in its ascent, you got to the art gallery with its op-art café, furnished with tables and chairs all red and plastic and circular. Tim despised that, too, with its sense of money and fatuous donation. But he liked the reference library, liked the sudden squeak of the floor under your shoes as you came through the double doors, liked the newspaper smell of it, and the light through the high, many-paned windows. He didn’t go into the main library. That was where his dad went.