The Northern Clemency (19 page)

“Where do you work?” Alice said.

“In Broomhill—oh, you won’t know—a florist’s shop, a new one,” she went on. “It’s only opened a year or two. Nick, the owner, he’s from London—he studied up here, and then he stayed, and he’s opened this little florist’s, and it’s doing very well. He was supposed to come to a party here a night or two back, but something came up and he couldn’t come. Actually, we were thinking, your house, we thought you’d probably be moved in by then and it would have been a good chance for you to meet everyone in the neighbourhood. That’s when we were planning it, and we set the date, thinking, they must be in and settled by then, the Watsons, they’d been gone so long, and then the date was fixed and the invitations sent out and we discovered, my husband and I, we’d missed you by two days. What a shame! You could have met him then.”

“Your husband?” Alice said. “I’m sure—”

“No,” Katherine said, “Nick, you could have met Nick, except that he couldn’t come. And you hadn’t moved in. I meant Nick. I don’t know why he didn’t come. Go away,” she said, raising her voice, as Daniel wandered into the kitchen.

“Your son?” Alice said, nervously taking a cup of coffee.

“Yes,” Katherine said. “I’m sorry, I should have introduced you. How old are your children?”

“Well, Sandra’s fourteen, and Francis, he’s eleven,” Alice said.

“So they’ll be going to—”

“Going to?”

“I meant their schools.”

“Oh—I think Sandra’s, it’s called—”

“The thing is,” Katherine said, setting her cup down on the work
surface and staring out of the window, “you’ve really found us at sixes and sevens this morning.”

“I’m sorry,” Alice said, thinking that the woman needn’t have asked her over if it was as inconvenient as all that.

“The fact is that my husband’s left me,” Katherine said.

All at once there seemed to be an echo in the kitchen, and both Katherine and Alice listened to the noise it made. Katherine had spoken definitely, but she listened, now, to the decisive effect of a statement she had not quite known to be true; she listened to it with something of the same surprise as Jane, sitting on the stairs listening to her mother going on. Alice listened, too; she knew that some sentences needed to be treated, once spoken, with respect, left with a small sad compliment of silence.

“I’m so sorry,” Alice said. “Was it very recently?”

“It was last night,” Katherine said, almost angrily.

“I’m so sorry,” Alice said. “Listen, I’m sure you really don’t want a stranger just at the moment—it was kind of you, but I’d better leave—”

“Of course, you’ve got so much to do,” Katherine said.

“No, it’s not that,” Alice said. “There must be someone who can come and—”

“No,” Katherine said. “There isn’t anyone, really.” It was true. Her party rose up before her again; she found it difficult to call any of them a friend, and impossible to imagine, say, sitting with that pregnant girl and telling her anything. “I don’t have any friends.”

“I’m sure it just feels like that,” Alice said.

“No,” Katherine said. “It’s true. I’ve never had any friends, not really. You have friends at school, people you think are friends, but you lose touch with them afterwards. They get married, they go off and live on the other side of the city. And really all you had in common with them was that you were sitting in the same room with them most days, and when that stops, you don’t have anything much to talk about any more. And the people you work with, when you work, you leave, you say, ‘Oh, we’ll stay in touch,’ and you mean it, and they mean it, but you don’t. Maybe you see them once in a while, just bump into them, and they tell you what they’re doing, their children, and you tell them what your children are doing, and then you go on and nothing ever comes of it.

“My God, you’re wondering, what have I walked into?”

“No,” Alice said. “Don’t worry about that, I’m fine. You can talk to me, I’m here.”

“There isn’t anyone else,” Katherine said simply. “I thought about Nick. Nick, he’s my boss, he runs the florist’s. I thought he was, you know, my friend, but he isn’t, not really. I’m just counting them up. There are the neighbours—they’re just neighbours, really. There are other people—I used to meet these women for coffee in the morning, but … Can you imagine? They say, what—‘We’re thinking of redecorating our lounge,’ and you say, ‘That’s interesting, my husband’s left me.’ They wouldn’t be able to say anything back. And Nick—I’ll tell you something. It’s all about Nick, really. I’m sure it is.”

“What do you mean?” Alice said. She felt that this woman had really forgotten the situation; she had forgotten that Alice wasn’t just a passing acquaintance she’d never see again, but someone who from now on would live opposite her. She, after all, was now exactly one of those neighbours and Katherine didn’t seem to understand that.

“I’ve been silly about him,” Katherine said, “I suppose. I like him, a lot. Well, he’s honestly not anything like most people in Sheffield. His brother lives in New York.”

“I see,” Alice said.

“I don’t have a brother in New York, I don’t know anyone who does,” Katherine said. “He’s funny, he’s really funny, when he talks—that’s the only way I can put it. And, you know, I’ve been kidding myself about him, I see that now. Because he’s a bit hopeless, really, and I’ve helped him out, I’ve kept him going, or so I thought, and he must have been quite grateful for it, or so I thought. But I had a party, it’s the first party I’ve had for I don’t know how long. Malcolm, he just doesn’t like the idea.

“It would be a nice idea, you know? I said so to Malcolm. I said, I said wouldn’t it be nice if we had a little party for when the new neighbours move in, not just for that but for all the road to meet each other because these days, people, they don’t know each other, not because—but—well—I don’t know. I don’t know why people don’t know each other these days. My husband, Malcolm, he works in a building society, but he’s got lots of interests, outside interests, and he does know people. You wouldn’t think it to meet him, but he’s got all these friends through his societies—he’s keen on gardening, he’s in a society, and of course there’s the battle re-creation society, too—”

Katherine, so measured in her speech, had begun to loosen and quicken, her voice now free and bold, her vowels quick and emphatic with the speech of her Sheffield childhood. It was as if for years now
she had been answering the telephone under observation. The voice was liberated from constraint and full, of all things, of new love.

“Battle re-creation?” the new neighbour was saying, puzzled.

“Yes,” Katherine said. “It’s an odd thing. They re-create old battles—they dress up, once a year or so, they act out old battles, just as they were, on the moors. Of course it’s usually the Civil War, that’s usually it—they can’t stretch to different uniforms every time, but once they joined forces with a society from Wales and they did the battle of Waterloo, that must be ten years ago. It takes a lot of work, it’s only once a year. Malcolm loves it. He’s got friends through that, you see.

“But most people, these days, they don’t have the time, and they don’t really make friends with their neighbours particularly. I didn’t expect Malcolm to agree to the party, but he did. The kids, they weren’t around—I can’t remember why not—oh, it was—well, we were on our own, and it was a nice moment, not that I’d engineered it or planned it to get a favour out of him. But I asked and he said straight away, ‘Yes, let’s have a party.’ He said it straight out, and he gave me a big smile, and it was something I’d asked, and it was something he could say that would please me. You see, he wanted to please me.”

“He sounds a nice man, your husband,” Alice said.

“I think he is,” Katherine said, almost surprised, it seemed, at the insight she’d been led to.

“And you know him best,” Alice said.

“Do you think so?” Katherine said.

“Well,” Alice said. “You know, I honestly don’t know—I mean, I don’t know you, I certainly don’t know your husband but—”

She stopped. Katherine withdrew her hand; without her noticing it, she had reached out and rested it on Alice’s. “I’m sorry,” Katherine said, after a time. Something of her formal voice had returned; she might have been regretting the lack of stargazer lilies, late on a Friday afternoon. “I didn’t mean to.”

“That’s all right,” Alice said. “But you do know him best.”

“I wonder,” Katherine said.

“You must do,” Alice said. “Married to him.”

“Maybe,” Katherine said. “It was just that moment. When he said, ‘Yes, let’s have a party.’ He hadn’t wanted to please me like that, not for years. He used to want to, it used to be all the time and you never noticed. You know when it’s been dry, all summer, and then one day it
rains; and then everywhere there’s this smell of grass and earth and flowers, everywhere.”

“Yes,” Alice said. “Yes, I know that.”

“But you never noticed it had gone, that smell,” Katherine said. “And after a while, if it goes on raining, you can’t smell it any more. It’s just the air, it’s just ordinary, you take it for granted.”

“It was like that.”

“Yes, it was like that,” Katherine said. “But I’m so stupid. I always ruin everything, always. He said that, and immediately I said the thing I was thinking really. I said, ‘Let’s have a party,’ and he said yes. And then I said we could ask all sorts of people, not just the neighbours, and he said, yes, we could, why not? I don’t know who he was thinking of, or who he thought I could be thinking of. But then I said what I couldn’t help saying, I said, ‘For instance, we could ask someone like Nick.’ And he didn’t say anything. But I went on, I said, ‘After all, he’s never been here, he’s never come to the house, it would be nice to have him over.’ It was an awful thing to say, it really was. I said it anyway. I don’t know what he said back. Maybe he said, ‘Yes, why not?’ but it was awful for him. I don’t know what I’ve been doing to him. I couldn’t help it.”

By now they were sitting. Alice looked away from the beginnings of Katherine’s tears. The kitchen was brilliant with elective cheerfulness, constructed with wallpaper and blinds and spotlights; its morning yellow sunlit and shining with well-kept order and cleanliness. But there was a woman weeping in it, somehow. Alice had walked lightly across the road, and found herself in a place without landmarks. She looked out of the window tactfully; incredibly, her family were there, getting on with the unloading.

“You’ll be wanting to get back,” Katherine said dully.

Alice turned back to her. Probably better, she told herself firmly, that the woman tell her all this. She was going to have to tell someone, and better her than one of the woman’s children. There were things your children should never hear. She’d forgotten the woman’s name. That was awful, and now surely irreparable.

“That’s all right,” Alice said. “It’s better that you tell someone.”

“Yes,” Katherine said. “That’s right. It’s better I tell someone like you all this rather than the children. Or a neighbour.”

“Yes,” Alice said, startled. “Of course, I am a neighbour now.”

“Yes,” Katherine said. “Yes, I suppose you are.”

“Listen,” Alice said. “Do you mind if I ask you something directly, because—”

“Depends what it is,” Katherine said, smiling, wiping her face with a tea towel—the Beauties of Chatsworth, Alice registered irrelevantly. There was something cheeky in her recovering voice; it wasn’t true, Alice thought, that you saw what people were really like only in a crisis.

“You don’t have to tell me anything at all,” she said. “You really don’t. But is that really the whole story?”

“The whole story?”

“I meant about Nick,” Alice said. “Nick? That’s his name?”

“Yes,” Katherine said. “About Nick?”

“You and Nick, I mean,” Alice said.

“Me and Nick,” Katherine said. A formality came into her voice again as she saw what Alice had meant. “No,” she said. “I’m not having an affair, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

“Yes,” Alice said. “That was what I was suggesting.”

“Well,” Katherine said, attempting a light laugh, “I suppose you did ask permission to ask a direct question, and I don’t know a more direct question than that. No, as it happens, Nick and I are not having some sort of mad passionate affair. I suppose there isn’t an enormous amount of point in my saying that. I wouldn’t be very likely to say anything different to you if we …” She paused for a second. “… we were in fact having an illicit affair. But one doesn’t happen to be.”

“No,” Alice said. “No, I believe you.” It was true. She did believe it. Oddly, it was the way the note of deception had crept into the woman’s voice that convinced her. The woman, whatever else she was, had no gift for lying, and in most of what Alice had heard from her, the note of helpless truth had been audible. It was only at that point, asked directly if she were, in fact, having an affair, that the voice had started to listen to itself as if to monitor its scrupulous lies. And yet the voice was telling the truth; Alice had no doubt of that. The woman was not having an affair, as she said. But Alice had touched something secret and cherished; she had touched, surely, some characteristic and elaborate pretence. Katherine had lapsed into what, surely, was her usual allusive and interior style where Nick was concerned; she had treasured him up and made a precious mystery out of him before the only audience she had, her husband and children. There was nothing there; Alice could see that. But she’d played it out, and he’d believed what she’d wanted him to believe. The woman sat there in her kitchen, looking firmly
ahead, away from Alice. She was smiling tautly, her expression now as she wanted it to be, and that must be bad to live with. An affair would be better; that was something to forgive, to walk away from. To have done nothing wrong, to make a secret of nothing, to coach yourself in the gestures of mystery and deflection, to turn your head away to suppress a manufactured expression of recalled rapture, all that, daily; from that there was no walking away.

“Where’s he gone?” Alice said.

“Malcolm?” Katherine said. “I don’t know. He’s just gone.”

“He didn’t say anything?” Alice said.