The Northern Clemency (77 page)

When Bernie was still working, her unassuming activities could be compressed into ten or twenty seconds of explanation at the end of the day: “Oh, I read a book, I had coffee with Anthea Arbuthnot, I did a bit of weeding in the herb bed,” and that seemed good enough. It would be different, however, when he was always there to observe her pottering. She loved him, and she would never conceal anything from him. But she couldn’t help thinking it would be odd when he was there every day to watch her putting on a face-pack in the middle of the day, for no particular reason. She supposed she was asking herself, in reality, how it was that Bernie was going to fill his days.

Bernie decided that the sensible thing to do was to stay on until after
privatization, then leave gracefully. It was a good idea, greeted with relief all round. Bernie had proved himself during the difficult stretch in the summer and autumn of 1984, when the electricity had kept running. Probably, Walter Marshall had said, in the handwritten letter he’d sent at the time—not just to Bernie, but he had sent one to Bernie—not one of the general public had noticed that the electricity in his house was still there, or had worried about its disruption for one moment, “and that, if I may say so, as the Prime Minister has said in person to me, can only be a tribute to …” Bernie would get one last promotion, it was agreed—a promotion in post, a kindness more for the sake of the pension than anything else—and walk his privatized successors through the process. The Electricity was going to come to an end, guided by Bernie, then he would hand over and go. He was splitting in two, it seemed: there were going to be two generating companies where there had been one. Politicians’ decisions. There was some talk, even, of asking Walter Marshall himself to Bernie’s leaving party; he was, indeed, asked, and a charming letter of regret came back, that he was, unfortunately, long scheduled to be in America on that day. But he would have come.

The day approached, and a difficulty arose. The difficulty was over Bernie’s retirement present. Davina, Bernie’s secretary, was “o.i.c. Bernie’s present,” as she, incomprehensibly, described herself on the telephone; she was a foghorn of a woman, much imitated by Bernie and rather feared by Alice. She was Yorkshire gentry, five-ten and Harrogate, well-shod and well-brought-up, as she was the first to tell you, the twice-married daughter of a Harrogate solicitor called (of course) David, married the second time to a second cousin of her own called (of course) David. For fifteen years, Alice had never telephoned Bernie at his office if it could be helped. To do so always involved talking to Davina first. “We’re racking our brains down here,” Davina said, over the telephone, “and we would really like to mark Bernie’s departure with something special, something he’d use, or something he’d very much enjoy in his retirement. You know how fond we are of Bernie.” It was astonishing how, even before his departure, everyone had become “fond” of Bernie. It made him sound like a dribbling nonagenarian in his wing-chair already.

His family had been interested in all sorts of things. Alice had never quite got over the conviction that his mother, with her perm the colour of pewter and the up-and-down assessing gaze, had been the black-market queen of St. Helier during the war, keeping the grassed-over
Anderson shelter at the bottom of their garden stuffed with nylons. In the years before she died, in the late seventies, she’d taken to continental tours in what she went on calling charabancs, to the Italian lakes, to the châteaux of the Loire, to the Austrian Alps, to Switzerland in summer. She’d return with sixty slides, a china figurine labelled Innsbruck or a hand-turned wooden spoon at the top of her luggage and, concealed elsewhere, something to get past Customs. She couldn’t read about an allowance without flouting it, setting off with a hundred pounds in cash over the legal limit stuffed in her knickers, returning with four hundred cigarettes more than you were allowed. Lily, no doubt about it, was interested in all sorts of things. And there were those uncles and cousins; some a bit shady, like Lily, or Bernie’s brother Tony, who had been lucky to escape prison that once. Even Bernie’s shy uncle Henry, who seemed much more out of place in that family than Bernie did, he’d got his interests: until he was fifty, he’d gone cycling somewhere in England with the same man, every year for twenty-five years, a man who, like Uncle Henry, had never married and who Uncle Henry every now and again talked about setting up a house with to save money. Bernie had been incredulous, then hilarious when Alice had pointed out what to her was perfectly obvious, that Henry’s friend Eric was his boyfriend. “But they only spend the two weeks together in the summer,” he’d said. “It’d kill Mum if she ever thought—” Even Uncle Henry had fiddled with bits of radio in the garden shed, and he took endless photographs of Eric in front of anonymous backdrops. “Here’s Eric again,” he’d mutter, handing another one over, “in front of Boots in Hereford. We cycled forty miles that day.”

But it was hard to think of Bernie’s interests in the usual sense, and impossible to think how they might be boiled down into a present that Bernie would find either beautiful or useful. It was difficult enough at Christmas and birthdays, but various conventions had evolved there, and Bernie accepted his tie, this year’s book, his whatever-it-was-the-house-needed with good grace. A retirement present was more difficult. Alice herself suggested a clock, a canteen of cutlery, garden furniture. In the end, Davina thought up something really quite original, a gold-plated vent, or valve, or tap, or something—something industrial and very ordinary, something Bernie would have seen every day of his working life, turned into a useless gewgaw and put in a glass case. “He’ll love it,” she announced briskly. “Some people suggested a scale model of a generating plant, but I put the kibosh on that. I
couldn’t imagine anything more hideous, plonked in the middle of your sitting room or, if you’ve got any sense, straight into the attic. But this is rather unusual, a conversation piece—” she finished off, barking with mirth “—as one used to say.” It made Alice wonder how Bernie, so hard to buy a gift for, was going to fill his days.

The day came. Bernie retired on his fifty-sixth birthday, and there was a big party. She’d been to parties like this before at the Electric, and they’d often been dismal affairs; sometimes there’d been only one or two other wives attending apart from her, almost everyone else coming out of duty. But Bernie was popular, he’d always been popular, as well as being quite a high-up; they hired a venue and paid for everything. Everyone’s wives came, and they asked a few of their own friends too. The Glovers came, and Daniel and his girlfriend, Helen, and Helen’s parents, too, Philip and Shirley; and people from the reading group, even, with their husbands, and other friends; people they’d met because they’d had children at school together, Jillian Kirkpatrick, who had tried to teach Francis the piano, and people they’d only met at parties, friends of friends who had become proper firm friends themselves. It was astonishing how embedded they were in this place.

“You know Walter Marshall was supposed to come,” Davina said, plonking herself down with worrying heaviness on one of the hotel’s thin-legged gilded chairs. “No, honestly, David, go away, we’ve got girl things to talk about. Go and pick up a bird or something.”

“Lord Marshall,” Alice said—she wondered how the topic of Lord Marshall qualified as a “girl thing.” She watched poor old David, a bear-like figure, plod off with a glass of wine in each hand. Big bones ran in their family, evidently.

“Oh, we all call him Walter,” Davina said. “He’s awfully nice.”

“I know, I’ve met him,” Alice said. “I don’t suppose he would really have come.”

“Don’t you believe it,” Davina said, finishing off the wine in her lipstick-rimmed glass. “He’s got the highest regard for Bernie. Terribly fond.”

“I’ll be glad to have him on my own for a while,” Alice said. “Bernie, not Lord Marshall, I mean.” She looked sideways at Davina: a big woman in a little black dress, she had held her knees together but, as if that was effort enough, her legs sprawled off in quite different directions and her elbows kept wandering away in search of something to rest on. The dado rail, as her right elbow kept discovering with a jerk and a slip, wouldn’t do.

A waiter approached the two of them with a salver of food.

“I love these little things,” Davina said, taking a sushi roll, then a second and, with the waiter’s smiling forbearance, a third. “It was a brilliant suggestion of yours. It’s perfect for a party.”

“I thought it would be a little bit unusual,” Alice said. “When I saw the Hallam Towers had started doing Japanese food, I thought it would make a bit of a change.”

“Brilliant stuff,” Davina said. “Hasn’t he got good-looking, your son?”

It was kind of Davina, but Alice looked with surprise. “Oh, no,” she said. “That’s Daniel, he’s our neighbour’s son.” She raised her glass to Daniel. “Excuse me,” Alice said, getting up.

“I’ve come to save you,” Daniel said, smiling. “Is she drunk?”

“What have you done with Helen?” Alice said. She felt terribly tired; it was a mistake to wear new shoes to a party, a mistake she’d known she was making even when she was buying them.

“She’s off somewhere lecturing some bigwig about privatization,” Daniel said. “I left her to it. They didn’t seem to be minding too much.”

“She’s a nice girl,” Alice said.

“Sandra couldn’t make it, then,” Daniel said.

“We never expected her to,” Alice said. “It’s a long way to come just for a party. She said she’s hoping to come over some time next year, but she’s very settled now. Do you ever hear from her?”

“I had a Christmas card from someone calling herself Alex the year before last,” Daniel said. “I couldn’t think who it was.”

“Oh, yes, she’s changed again,” Alice said. “I never got used to Alexandra, either. It never occurred to me that Sandra was short for Alexandra—anyway, she’s Sandra on her birth certificate.”

“You ought to go out there, now that Bernie’s retired,” Daniel said. “She’s not married, is she?”

“No, nothing like that,” Alice said. Then she saw she hadn’t answered the question. “It’d be nice to go out there. It’s just such a long flight, and Bernie—”

She left that where it stood.

“He’s like me,” Daniel said kindly. “He likes his home comforts.”

“I hear the dance school’s going well,” Alice said. “Helen’s dad was telling me he’s never enjoyed himself so much in his life. And the restaurant, too—Anthea was saying—”

“What was I saying?” Anthea said, turning as she heard her name.
Alice hadn’t seen her there, talking to Bernie’s brother Tony and his new wife, though she was conspicuous enough in her black-and-white vertically striped dress, for the slimming effect. Tony and his new wife saw their chance and slipped off. “I heard you, just now, saying, ‘Anthea was saying.’ I’m sure it was something very reprehensible.”

“I was telling Daniel what a nice time you had at his new restaurant, down in the Rivelin valley.”

Anthea Arbuthnot looked Daniel up and down, never having quite lost her ambition to play a round of strip poker with him. He looked her up and down in return, observing with fascination that on the huge bosom of her horrible dress she was wearing a brooch that, amazingly, contained a kind of pastel portrait of the Queen’s profile. It looked as though a second-class stamp had fallen there, and stuck.

“We had a lovely time,” she said. “It’s the most gorgeous setting and, though it’s a converted factory, if you think of it that way, they’ve converted it very nicely, I must say. We had a girls’ night out. I went with Caroline and my cousin Ruth, who normally lives in Wales, she retired with her husband to Tenby, and Katherine too, and we had a high old time. It was Katherine’s suggestion—she wanted to support Daniel’s restaurant, but we needn’t have bothered, it was nearly full. I had the fish pie, and Ruth and Caroline splashed out and had a steak, both of them, and Katherine—what did your mother have, can you remember, Daniel?”

Daniel burst out laughing. “You know, Anthea,” he said, obviously having decided that he was now old enough not to have to call her “Mrs. Arbuthnot” any more, “it’s a strange thing, but I find it quite difficult to remember what every one of my customers ordered from weeks and weeks ago. Even if they are my mother.”

“That’s no way to talk to valued customers,” Anthea said, laughing herself. “But in any case, I remember now, she had the fish and chips. Some people might think it was a little bit odd, having fish and chips on the menu, but everyone likes it, and it was lovely and fresh, I must say. It was a Thursday we went, or I’d never have advised the fish—never, ever eat fish in a restaurant on a Monday, that’s my advice, even Daniel’s restaurant. He’s got a hard head, this one—there was no discount for the owner’s mother, even. And we had two bottles of wine and it came to forty pounds with a starter each but no pudding, which I call good value, these days. You ought to go, Alice. We’re going to go back and we’re going to be taking dancing lessons too. You had a lovely write-up in the
Morning Telegraph
, Daniel, did you see?”

“We’ve got it framed,” Daniel said. “I think they’re going to make a speech, Alice.”

She excused herself and went over to stand by Bernie. He’d always liked parties—as she came up, he was surrounded by a circle of people, all laughing at something he’d just said—and he took her hand with a quick smile and a raise of the eyebrows, to make sure she, too, was having a good time. In fact, she was looking at Francis. It wasn’t hard to spot him, though he was in the middle of the crowd. His head was six inches at least above anyone else’s, and she couldn’t see how Davina had mistaken anyone else for him. Had he been talking to anyone? She couldn’t see. Whenever she’d spotted him, he had been wearing the same slightly baffled expression, moving through the room as if looking for someone in particular. He always looked like that. It was nice of him to come up for his father’s party, even on his own, not having anyone else for them to invite. Alice turned back to Bernie. “Do you know what it is they’re giving you?” she whispered.