The Northern Clemency (3 page)

Malcolm gave no sign of listening.

She couldn’t be sure what the reason for the party had been. But for her it had been defined by the people who hadn’t come rather than those who had. Not just one person; two of them. All evening she’d felt impatient with her guests who, by stooping to attend, had shown themselves to be not quite worth knowing. She projected her idea of the sort of friends she ought to have on to the new people—the Sellerses—and Mrs. Topsfield, with the exquisite handwriting and supercilious reason for not attending. The Sellerses were going to be smart London people. That was absolutely clear.

“Did you miss your battle re-creation society tonight?” she said to Malcolm, to be kind.

“Yes,” he said. “It doesn’t matter, once in a while.”

“You could have invited some of them to come tonight,” she said,
although she’d rather not have to meet grown men who dressed up in Civil War uniforms and disported themselves over the moors, pretending to kill each other. It was bad enough being married to one.

“I thought it was just for the neighbours,” Malcolm said. “You said you weren’t going to invite anyone else.”

Upstairs, Jane shut her door. It was too early to go to bed, but it was accepted that she spent time in her room; homework, her mother said hopefully, but, really, Jane sat in her room reading. There were forty books on the two low shelves, and a blank notebook. She had read them all, apart from
The Mayor of Casterbridge
, a Christmas present from a disliked aunt; she had been told that Jane liked reading old books and that, with a life of Shelley, now lost, unread, had been the result. Jane’s books were of orphans, of love between equals, of illegitimate babies, treading round the mystery of sex and sometimes ending just before it began.

Her room was plain. Three years before she had been given the chance to choose its décor. Her mother had made the offer as the promise of special treaty enacted between women, something to be conveyed only afterwards to the men. Jane had appreciated the tone of her mother’s confiding voice, but was baffled by the possibilities. It was that she had no real idea what role her bedroom’s décor was supposed to play in her mother’s half-angry plans for social improvement, and she was under no illusions that if she actually did choose wallpaper, curtains, paint, bedspread, carpet, even, that her choice would be measured against her mother’s unshared ideas and probably found disappointing. Would it be best to ask for an old-fashioned style, “with character,” as her mother said, a pink teenage girl’s bedroom? Or to opt for her own taste, whatever that might be?

In the end she delayed and delayed, and now her bedroom was a blank series of whites and neutrals. She had failed in whatever romance her mother had planned for her; and, with its big picture window, the room showed no sign of turning into a garret. It looked out on to a suburban street. Daniel’s room, at the back of the house, had the view of the moor, which meant nothing to him. Over her bed, one concession: a poster, bought in a sale, of a Crucible Theatre production of
Romeo and Juliet
. Daniel had seen it, not her—he’d done the play for O level. Someone had given him the poster, but it was over her bed that two blue-lit figures embraced, one already dead.

She wondered what the new people over the road would be like, and let her thoughts go on their romantic course.

.   .   .

It was the next day, in London. The house had been packed into a van. It was driving northwards, towards Sheffield. On every box was written, in large felt-tip letters, the name
SELLERS.

“Nice day for it,” the driver said.

“Yeah, you don’t want to be moving in the rain,” the other man put in.

The driver was on Sandra’s right, his mate, the chief remover, on her left. On the far side the boy, ten or fifteen years younger than the others, who had said nothing.

“Why do you say that?” Sandra said. She was pressed up against the man on her left, and the driver’s operations meant that his left hand banged continually against her thigh. The lorry’s cabin was meant only for the comfort of three. There was a dull, dusty smell in the cabin, of unwashed sweaters and ancient cigarette stubs. The floor was littered with brown-paper sandwich wrappers.

“Well, stands to reason,” the chief remover said. “If it’s raining, that’s no fun.”

“And there are always customers who insist on tarpaulins,” the driver said.

“Tarpaulins?” Sandra said. “Whatever for?”

“It’s their right,” the chief remover said. “Say you’re moving a lot of pictures, or books, or soft furnishings—”

“The customer, they don’t like it if you carry them out into the rain, and sometimes you have to leave them outside for a minute or two, and if it’s raining—”

“Hence the tarpaulin,” the driver said. Behind them, the full tinny bulk of the removals van thundered like weather. There was a distant rattle, perhaps furniture banging against the walls or a loose exhaust pipe. Below, the roofs of cars hurtled past.

“Because,” the chief remover said, “if something gets wet, even for a couple of minutes, if the whole load gets rained on, you get to the other end, see, and it’s offloaded and put in place, and a day or two later, there’s a call to the office, a letter, maybe, complaining that the whole lot stinks of damp.”

“Hence the tarpaulin,” the driver said again.

“Course,” the chief remover said, “nine times out of ten, it’s not the furniture, it’s the house, the new house, because a house left empty for a week, it does tend to smell of damp, but they don’t take that
into consideration. But the tarpaulins, it doubles the work for us, it does.”

They were nearing the motorway now, having crossed London. The traffic that had held them steady on the North Circular for an hour was thinning, and the removals van was moving in bigger bursts. The car with Sandra’s parents in it, her brother in the back, had long been lost in the shuffle of road lanes, one moving, one holding; a music-hall song her grandmother used to sing was in her head: “My old man said follow the van … you can’t trust the specials like an old-time copper …” No, indeed you couldn’t, whatever it meant.

She went back to being interested and vivacious before she had a chance to regret her request to travel up to Sheffield in the van, rather than in the car. “You must see everything in this job,” she said vividly.

“Yeah, that’s right,” the boy surprisingly said, snuffling with laughter.

“Don’t mind him,” the driver said. “He can’t help himself.”

“It’s a shame, really,” the chief remover said.

“A bit like being a window-cleaner, I expect,” Sandra said, before the boy could say he’d seen nothing to match her and her jumping into the van like that. She was fourteen; he was probably five years older, but she was determined to despise him. “I mean, you get to see everything, everything about people.”

“You’d be surprised,” the chief remover said.

“That’s the worst of it over,” the driver said. The road was widening, splitting into lanes, its sides rising up in high concrete barriers, and the London cars were flying, as if for sheer uncaged delight, and the four of them, in their rumbling box, were flying too. “Crossing London, that’s always the worst.”

“You see some queer stuff,” the chief remover said. “People are different, though. There’s some people who, you turn up, there’s nothing done. They expect you to put the whole house into boxes, wrap up everything, tidy up, do the job from scratch.”

“Old people, I suppose,” Sandra said.

“Not always,” the driver said. “You’d be surprised. It’s the old people, the ones it’d be a task for, that aren’t usually a problem.”

“It’s the younger ones, the hippies, you might call them, expect you to do everything,” the chief remove said. “My aunt, you come across some stuff with that lot, things you’d think they’d be ashamed to have in the house, let alone have a stranger come across.”

“That’s right,” the boy said. He seemed almost blissful, perhaps remembering the boxing-up of some incredible iniquity.

“Of course,” Sandra said, “you’re not to know what’s in a lot of boxes, are you? There might be anything.”

The three of them were silent: it had not occurred to them to worry about what they had agreed to transport.

“What was the place we said we’d stop?” the chief remover said.

“Leicester Forest East, wasn’t it?” the driver said.

Sandra had watched the packing from an upstairs window, and only at the end had she thought of asking if she could travel with the men. She was fourteen; she had noticed recently that you could stand in front of a mirror with a small light behind you, approach it with your eyes cast down, then lift them slowly, and raise your arm across your chest, as if you were shy. You could: you could look shy. Whatever you were wearing, a coat, a loose dress, a T-shirt, or most often the new bra you’d had to ask your mum to buy to replace the one that had replaced the starter bra of only a year before, the shy look and the protective arm had an effect.

The old house had been stripped, and everything the upper floor had held was boxed and piled downstairs; the house had drained downwards, like a bucket with a hole. Sandra had been born in that house. She had never seen these upstairs rooms empty, and they now looked so small. Her clean room’s walls were marked and dirty. Only the window looked bigger, stripped of the curtains she had been allowed to choose and hadn’t liked for years—the pink, the peacocks, the girly rainbows and clouds. The net curtains were gone too—and if she had anything to do with it, they’d not be going up in her new room.

Her father was downstairs in the hall, telling the foreman a funny story—the confidential anecdotal mutter deciphered by bursts of laughter. Her mother, probably exhausted, was perhaps looking for Francis, who was lazy and clumsy, and had a knack of disappearing when anything needed to be done. She looked out of the window to where the van, its back open, was being steadily loaded with the house’s contents, exotic and unfamiliar when scattered across the drive. There were two men, one middle-aged, the top of his bald head white and glistening like lard, the other a boy. She waited in the window patiently, and soon her mother came out with cups of tea. The boy turned to her mother. He was polite, he said, “Thank you, Mrs. Sellers,” and when her mother went back inside, he was still facing in the right direction. She did that thing she knew how to do, and it worked; he looked upwards. Her gaze was shy, lowered. It met his modestly, and she gently drew her hand across her chest. Brilliant. She might
have slapped him, the way he turned away, but he was the one who blushed. She realized that the driver and Mr. Griffiths from next door, nosing about in his front garden, had also seen her. Mr. Griffiths, who’d always been fond of her, and Mrs. Griffiths too; from the look on his face now, they’d have something to think about if they ever thought of her ever again.

“Have you seen your brother?” her father said, as he thudded up the stairs.

“No,” Sandra said. “He’s probably down the end of the garden. Can we—” she began. She was about to ask if they could have a tree-house at their new house, but she’d had a better idea. She was fourteen. “Can I go up to Sheffield with the movers in their van?”

Bernie looked startled. “There’ll not be room. A bit of an adventure, is it?”

“Something like that.”

“I’ll see what I can do. Don’t ask your mother. She’ll have a fit.”

So there she was, wedged into the van, clear of London, for the sake of the boy she had glimpsed—a movement of the arms, a flash of blue from the deep-set shadow under the surprising blond eyebrows. But he was saying nothing, and she was settling for enchanting the driver and the chief remover.

“People do this all the time,” she said.

“Move house?” the chief remover said. “Enough to keep us busy.”

“No, I meant—” But what she had meant was that people leave London by car, drive on to the motorway, set off northwards all the time, perhaps every day. She never had, and her mother, her brother and she had only ever left London when they went on holiday. She had never had any business outside London. “People either move a lot or not at all, don’t they?” she said. “I mean,” sensing puzzlement, “there’s the sort of people who never leave the house they were born in and die there. Dukes. And there’s the sort of people who move house every year, every two years. I don’t know what would be normal.”

“The average number of times a person moves house in his lifetime,” the boy said, “is seven, isn’t it?” He had a harsh, grating voice, a South London voice not yet settled into its adult state.

“Take no notice of him,” the driver said. “He’s making it up. He doesn’t know.”

“But the figure is increasing all the time,” he continued.

“He makes up statistics,” the chief remover said. “That’s what he does. Once we were dealing with a musician, moving house for him—
a sad story, he was divorcing his wife, and we had to go in and pick out the things that were going and the things that were staying. And we were moving his stuff and he said he’d be taking his cellos, because he had two, with him in a taxi, and wouldn’t let us touch them, though we handle your fragile things all the time. And all of a sudden this one says, ‘There are a hundred and twenty-three parts in a cello,’ as if to say, yes, it’s best you handle it yourself. He’d only gone and made it up, the hundred and twenty-three parts. There’s probably about thirty.”

“It sounds about right, moving seven times,” Sandra said. “There’s a girl in my class who’s moved house seven times already. She’s only fourteen.” Sandra thought she might have told them she was sixteen: she sometimes did that. Even seventeen. “This was two years ago,” she added. “So she’d used up all her moves already, if you look at it like that.”

“Fancy,” the boy said.

“Do you see that sign, young lady?” the driver said. “A hundred and twenty miles to Sheffield.”

They were clear of London now; the banked-up sides of the motorway no longer suggested the outskirts of towns, but now, behind stunted trees, there were open fields, expansive with scattered sheep. In the distance, on top of a hill like a figurine on a cake, there was a romantic, solitary house. She wondered what it must be like to look out every morning from your inherited grand house and see, like a river, the distant flowing motorway. It was never empty, this road.