The Northern Clemency (13 page)

“I’m fed up of it,” Nick had said. “I’ve done this too often. I’m getting too old for it.”

“No reason why you can’t go on for ever,” Jimmy said. He stretched out in his armchair—a vast leather job, like an intricate wooden puzzle in its manoeuvrability of parts, given to strange hummings and shiftings at Jimmy’s fingertip command. He looked as if he might stretch out his arm for, what?, an august cigar. Or just another whisky to go with the one nestling in his fat groin.

“I don’t like it,” Nick said. “I’ll do it one more time, I promised, but that’s it. I’m too old for it, you’ve got to find someone else to help us out.”

“The older you get,” Miranda said, wandering in—she’d been listening through the serving hatch, “the better you get at it. More believable. No one’s looking at you. When you’re bald and seventy—”

“Thanks, darling,” Jimmy said. “Now go and—” He flicked parodically in the air, readjusting an imaginary blonde hairdo, not taking his eyes off Nick.

“Fuck off,” Miranda said, not aggressively, but she went.

“Silly bitch,” Jimmy said.

“How hilarious,” Nick said.

“Hilarious,” Jimmy said.”Unless you’re married to it.”

“She’s all right, Miranda,” Nick said.

“I know,” Jimmy said, and it was his voice rising now. “I wouldn’t. Have her any. Other way. But what are you saying?”

“Nothing, I suppose,” Nick said.

They sat there for a moment. Jimmy got up and refilled his glass, a heavy crystal pail. It might have been chosen for its effectiveness when thrown in marital rows. He didn’t offer to refill Nick’s. In any case he had half an inch or so of gin and tonic left.

“I tell you what,” Jimmy said, coming back and flinging his legs over the side of the vast leather contraption.

“What?” Nick said.

“We’ve got to sort something out,” Jimmy said. “This might work
out all right.” He was talking about the money problem. Nick had meant him to. He’d evidently been on at Miranda about it; Miranda had been on at him. He recognized the rhythm of the complaint. “I reckon a nice quiet little business, you in charge, everything looks hunky-dory. Somewhere outside London.”

“Come on,” Nick said. “I’ve always lived in London.”

“Not in London,” Jimmy said.

“Forget it,” Nick said.

“Christ, you’re difficult,” said Jimmy, who was not Nick’s brother. They went right back: Nick’s mum had lived in the same street as Jimmy’s family when they were children, Nick an occasional holiday visitor—his parents divorced, it was his father who hung on to him mostly, paying for the good school, though his mother got him half the holidays. Jimmy was a permanent resident of the shabby suburb. They’d hated each other, thrown stones, shouted names, then one day they’d met each other down at the shopping-trolley-stuffed Wandle, had tortured frogs together one wide-eyed afternoon with a bicycle pump, and that had been that. “I’m suggesting something might suit you. A nice little shop somewhere, I don’t know—Leeds, Manchester, Nottingham, Derby, Exeter, Sheffield, Bristol. Sells stationery. Whatever. Looks nice. You do the books every Friday, no one troubles you, all looks nice and proper, even pay the taxes the end of the year. Why not? Posh boy like you, they’d lap you up.”

“Why not London?”

“You don’t want to be in London,” Jimmy said.

“No,” Miranda called through, “you don’t.”

“Why doesn’t he want to be in London?” little Sonia said, coming in in her regulation evening outfit, an inflammable party dress shining like royal icing, red ribbons popping in and out of the hem to match her red patent slingbacks.

“That’s enough,” Miranda said, following her; she might have meant it for Sonia, but she was looking at Nick. He went.

It seemed to him that nothing had been settled, that it was just an idea of Jimmy’s, which had come and would go. Certainly, through all the arrangements for the next trip, he didn’t mention it again, or suggest that this might be Nick’s last. Nick was more nervous than he’d ever been: the guys out there, they knew him well and obviously thought his demeanour odd. It was almost as if, without him wanting it, his body was conspiring to bring this occupation to an end by crippling his boldness with the appearance of guilt. But he got back all
right, and after the last stages had been gone through, the money safely logged and counted, Jimmy had brought the whole thing up again.

It was Miranda’s day off, and Jimmy asked Nick to come with him and Sonia (“Don’t tell Miranda, and you, don’t tell Mummy about him coming with us, darling, and if you’re good I’ll buy you—what do you want most, darling?”) to, of all places, the zoo. It was a dank day, not quite raining but in its London way not quite not raining either; the air was heavy with moisture. Behind bars, the show-stoppers cowered, the lions flat out on their sides, like half-eviscerated carcasses on their way to being rugs. Even the polar bears, presumably used to worse than the gloom of a London November afternoon, had a disgruntled air, casting hungry eyes upwards.

“I like them,” Sonia said.

“They’d eat you up in one gulp,” Nick said humorously. He was not much good with children, who generally knew this.

“Don’t go putting nightmares into her head,” Jimmy said. “They wouldn’t eat you, darling.”

“I know that,” Sonia said. “He’s just being stupid, this man. I can’t listen to things like that, I can’t remember them, neither.”

“All right,” Nick said. “Fair enough.”

“I’d like to have one,” Sonia said. “I know you can’t have one, not in a house, but I’d like one, to have rides on, maybe, and you could put your face in his fur, sometimes I reckon.”

“Yeah, that’d be nice,” Jimmy said. “You ask your mum. Maybe she’ll get you one.”

“Don’t be so silly,” Sonia said. “I want to see the penguins now. They come from the same place as these polo bears.”

“No, they don’t,” Nick said. “They come from the other end of the earth. The polar bears live in the north, penguins live in the south.”

“It’s a bit cold, isn’t it, darling?” Jimmy said to his daughter. “Don’t you want to go and see some inside animals?”

“No,” Sonia said. Today she was in a heavily embroidered Afghan coat over a puffed and ruched red-and-green dress, more ribbons, but now sort of gypsy ribbons. Nick’s nightmare: that Sonia be abducted from his company, and he be obliged to describe her wardrobe to the police. “I think what I want is to see the penguins now, on their slides. I like their slides. I’d like to have a go on one, I reckon. I went inside once and I looked at the inside animals. And I liked the first one, because it was small and furry and you could put it in your sleeve
and then it would look out at you and go—” she gestured at her nose with her little fist in its fur mitten, making a small squeaking noise “—but then in the next case there was another small and furry animal and that wasn’t quite so nice. And the lady I was with”—adult, drawling boredom—“oh, you know that lady I mean”—normal voice—“that lady I meant, she made me go round every case in the inside part of the zoo, and do you know? Every case, it had in it a different small furry animal, apart from the ones where the animal was supposed to be hiding at the back. And I liked the small furry animals at first but after a while I got really a little bit bored of them all. But she made me go round all of them, and I think really they were all the same animal. They were quite sweet, but they weren’t very exciting. I think I want to see the penguins now and the real slide.”

“I know what you mean, sweetheart,” Jimmy said. He didn’t seem to have been listening, but Nick knew what she meant: the world was full of small furry animals with large eyes, and only the first ones you came across would you feel like putting up your sleeve. After that, you’d be wise to their small furry ways, and could step past their cases with a light step. He’d rather go and see the penguins now, too.

“It’s all settled,” Jimmy said, when they were at the penguins’ enclosure, watching their antic waddle.

“Yeah?” Nick said, not following.

“The shop,” Jimmy said. “The shop I was on about.” The penguins hesitated: over their pool was a double slide, a double helix, and at the top of it they crowded, as if with empty bravado. It had once been white, but the paint was peeling, the concrete coming through in patches, the penguins projecting nerves. At the top, they jostled each other, as if trying to pick on one to shove down first. Nick had seen it before, and knew that as soon as one was sent down, the rest would follow.

“Oh, the shop,” Nick said. And then the whole thing was settled.

My God, Nick thought, the first time he saw it. There wasn’t much for him to organize: Jimmy was taking charge, dealing with everyone from the end of a phone. The hardware merchant had gone, leaving an interior prickly with shelves and pigeonholes, all painted the same unrenewed cream. The pigeonholes were still labelled “2½’,” “60 watt,” “mortices,” the letters punched out white on those black plastic strips, now, many of them, peeling off and some littering the floor with a detritus of wood-shavings, nails, the screwed-up balls of newspaper used for packing. They would go: a florist’s would demand
no extraordinary expertise—he’d been on a course, anyway, Jimmy’d thought of that. But the point was that the shop had to be run. It couldn’t be like little Sonia, upstairs with last year’s Christmas present, an eighteen-inch toy greengrocer’s with imperishable plaster-of-paris cauliflowers, pretending to weigh them out and demanding, as Sonia tended to, real money in exchange.

Nick wasn’t sure he was up to it. He’d never done such a thing. He’d been a waiter; he’d worked in bars; he’d tried more ambitious jobs, a bit of responsibility, a job in local government, which—you couldn’t lose that sort of job, his mum had said—ought to have done him. But it turned out you could lose that sort of job, if you were Nick. And then he’d bumped into Jimmy again, and his life had taken that particular nervous but lucrative direction. It seemed a lot to undertake, running a flower shop.

But without him having to do anything very much, the shop took shape. The workmen came and went, and Nick only opened the door and made them cups of tea as they tore down the shelves and sanded the stained and knobbly floor. “Dost a gnaw—” one workman asked the first day, and broke off, laughing, when he saw that Nick did not understand even that. And he did not know. Nick did not know where—as it turned out he was being asked—the nearest hardware supplier was, this one being thoroughly stripped down and a drill bit needed. After that, whenever a decision was needed, it was to Jimmy they appealed; even the first time a dilemma arose, and they had to have been under Jimmy’s instructions in this regard not to appeal to Nick who, they knew, would be the shop’s proprietor. They kept a pile of two-pence pieces by the door, on the shelf, like a church’s cumulative charity; at least once a day, the foreman took the upmost half-dozen to the phone box to clarify things with Jimmy. Nick made more tea; there was, as yet, no working toilet and they had to nip into the pub at lunchtime or, after two thirty, piss in the yard out the back.

For a few days Nick hovered, an ingratiating smile on his face, then got tired of it, and took himself off. He started to appreciate, with unwelcome clarity, the overt diffidence about him that had made him so useful to Jimmy in the past. Though the diffidence would shortly become useful again, he had only really been aware of it when, as now, it made him risibly ineffective in the eyes of workmen. The area seemed appalling to him. The mincingly genteel tea-shop; the 1950s American-modern laundromat and Co-op; further back, the dismal Victorian philanthropy of the black-pillared Greek-style museum,
with its leaking prehistoric beasts, its dismal paintings of local industries or, up the hill, that same Victorian philanthropy, the same Greek pillars in front of a library, and no more alluring. Sometimes, the layers of change were manifest on a single site: a men’s boutique, with a psychedelic shop sign in purple, had kept hanging outside the three balls of the pawnbroker who must have preceded it. The changes of the district: Nick started to be aware of them as time passed, as the weather improved and a surprising yellow spurt of, what was it?, crocuses, could that be it?, emerged from a crack in the pavement outside the shop and, hardly less cheering, a pod of mushrooms bubbled up beneath the carpet they’d laid in the lavatory. Became aware of those slower changes as his business took shape. The scoured-smooth emptiness of the hardware shop began to be filled. The plasterwork was finished off, and the Regency striped wallpaper piled up, ready for application; a display unit, rather like an Olympic podium, but with spaces for five rather than three winners, was installed and painted a nice dark maroon; a reproduction desk was brought in at, apparently, Jimmy’s order—he hadn’t shared this decision with Nick. Like other decisions passed up-country by Jimmy—his insistence that the flowers should bear no prices—it added that crucial sense of class to the enterprise.

All that strange period, Nick behaved and thought much more like a client than the instigator of a business. Jimmy had booked him into a hotel while he found somewhere to live, saying he should take his time about it; but Nick had done nothing in that direction. He returned to the Hallam Towers every night, dined richly—after five weeks his waistband was uncomfortable with the lobster sauces and no exercise—and settled down to an early night after his daily phone conversation with Jimmy. After a few weeks, it looked as if he had set up camp within the room, the walls lined with bagged laundry, a short shelf of borrowed thrillers by the bedside.

The workmen knew all about this impermanent existence, returning to their own wives and children after a day spent not asking for Nick’s instructions about anything. So did the hotel staff, and so did Jimmy. “Have you got yourself a supplier yet?” Jimmy said one night.

“Supplier?” Nick said, rather thrown by Jimmy’s familiar term.

“Flower supplier,” Jimmy said. “You been to the market yet?” There was the sound of Jimmy heavily waiting at the end of the phone.

“I’m planning to go the day after tomorrow,” Nick said.

“You should have gone by now,” Jimmy said. “Important to strike up a relationship. I want it up and running by—what did we agree on?”