The Northern Clemency (30 page)

“Listen to this, though,” the short girl said, handing over his bag.

“I’m not interested,” the boy said, but he stayed, drawn into the little group. The boys already there drew back a bit, grew still as if in respect for this story, whatever it was—and it had to have become a story about her body, couldn’t possibly have remained only a faithful account of how a new girl with no friends as yet hadn’t worn the right-coloured shirt for games and had had to use a communal towel to dry herself. The word “towel” came over again, now pronounced in a mincingly serious way. Oh, God, Sandra thought. The story was now setting off on a journey among the sixth-formers and upwards till the whole city of half a million knew about her as the heroine of a narrative that certainly hadn’t happened.

But with this handsome boy as a new and initially thrilling audience, the story seemed to be dying a death. It was as if, standing over them, he had not just a general superiority to them, from age and good looks, but a specific authority over them, as if they were his personal imps. As he looked at it the glee had gone from the story; and there were three very silly little girls, faltering their way through to an under-prepared conclusion. It was suddenly unsatisfactory and not really that funny, even if it was true. The boys were looking not at the formerly excited tellers, or at Sandra, but at the newcomer, holding his retrieved bag. “Don’t be so stupid,” he said eventually. “That never happened. You’re talking a right load of rubbish.” He went, not glancing at Sandra, and perhaps he had no idea that the story was about her.

Deflated, the little group sidled to their seats. The short girl, the supposedly fun one who’d stolen a sixth-former’s bag and told the story to its unconvincing end, occupied herself, her pink face down like a shy diner’s interrogation of a plate, busily rearranging the pens and sharpeners and Snoopy-decorated protractors in her grubby Snoopy pencil case. Sandra eyed her with open, satisfied malice.

“They were saying,” her deskmate said, now displaying a wavering and inconsistent support for Sandra in her woes, after ignoring her for three weeks, “they were saying that yesterday in the changing room, you know, after games, they were saying that you’d had your period started in the middle of the floor and you hadn’t got your towel, you know, a sanitary towel. But I said that was rubbish, that wasn’t how it was, it wasn’t that sort of towel at all, I put them right. I’ve started using tampons,” she concluded confidentially, “I find them more discreet.”

“Thank you for that,” Sandra murmured. The girl seemed to expect
more effusive gratitude than that, or perhaps some irrelevant menstrual confidence, but Sandra had seen just how it had been. She’d silently christened this girl Daphne after the four-eyed brainbox in the cartoon. She wasn’t the sort of friend Sandra had ever anticipated. She foresaw long Saturday afternoons in the girl’s bedroom, talking over David Cassidy’s favourite colour (blue), experimenting with diagonal highlighting with blushers, and being jealously allowed after a while to hold pony competition rosettes, awarded for third place.

“That girl who was saying it all,” Daphne went on, “you don’t want to be seen with her. She’s got a reputation. She says she’s a virgin but she’s not. She let that Michael Williams, I know it for a fact, put
it
in her mouth behind the rec on Coldwell Lane. It was before the summer holidays. She’s not a virgin properly speaking.”

“Do you think that’s entirely true?” Sandra said. She couldn’t help herself.

“I know it for a fact,” Daphne said, drawing back, dismayed at this wrong response. But of course Sandra, if all things were equal, was more like the sort of girl who put
it
in her mouth than a Daphne with a starter bra who singly deplored that sort of carry-on in others. Anyway, objectively speaking, they would all come in time to be the sort of girl who put
it
, whatever
it
was, in her mouth, sooner or later. Even Daphne. That was a cheering thought. It was history that morning, periods 1 and 2.

“Do let me help you with one of those,” a woman said, just behind Alice, a treacly, warm voice.

“Thank you!” Alice said, turning. It was one of the neighbours; a bosomy woman, her front sloping solidly at forty-five floral degrees, less encumbered than she was, but red-faced and pattering up. The woman’s name—“One of those disorganized days, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, we all have those.”

“Normally I do the whole lot at the weekend in the car with Bernie but—”

“Oh, I know,” the woman said, taking a bag, just one of five, from Alice and beaming, weighing it in her hand. “Anthea Arbuthnot. You’ve probably not remembered, it was just the once we met.”

“Yes, of course,” Alice said. “Thank you so much—it’s quite a hill.”

“It’s quite a nice supermarket, that little one,” Anthea said, holding up the bag and scrutinizing the logo. “Crosspool, isn’t it?”

“You must tell me the best places to go,” Alice said, correctly divining the meaning of this. “To buy groceries. We’re all at sixes and sevens still.”

“So hard,” Anthea said, “to find the shops that suit you in a new place. Of course, when Sainsbury’s opens—”

“Oh?” Alice said. “Well, that’ll be a familiar name. The thing I find strangest is really—”

“But settling in all right in general, are you?” Anthea said.

“Yes, I think so,” Alice said. “The butcher’s,” she’d been about to say; the way they cut the meat in different directions, dividing beasts in unexpected ways, calling their divisions names all their own, gazing at her as she tried to fit it all back together again, the jigsaw body, and recognize what she knew. She’d felt like a new bride all over again, with that ignorance in the ruddy-faced expertise of the butcher’s shop; and meat-knowledge was something she thought she’d acquired.

“I’m sure you’ll wonder that you ever thought any of it strange,” Anthea said. “I wouldn’t live anywhere else now.”

“Oh, I’m sure …” Alice began, not wanting to offend.

“Apart from anything else,” Anthea said, “it’s so easy to get out into the country. Just the end of the road, and there you are.”

“Yes, I see,” Alice said, who had been told this before.

“Let’s have a nice cup of coffee,” Anthea said, turning in at her drive and, after all, since she was holding one of Alice’s shopping bags, Alice couldn’t very well refuse. “I’ll just pop your perishables in the fridge, then you won’t be fretting while we chat. Do go on through.

“Of course,” Anthea said, when they were settled, the percolator popping and groaning like colic through the serving hatch, plates of pink iced biscuits, pink wafers, sliced pink and yellow Battenberg before them as her voice grew grander, “one does love London. One always used to.”

“Oh—so have you—”

“Well, naturally,” Anthea said. “Naturally I’ve been to London. Many times.”

“But you haven’t lived there,” Alice said—of course people had been to London. “I thought you meant that you’d lived in London for some reason.”

“No,” Anthea said. “My husband, now, he did live there, for a year and a half, when he was young, a job he briefly had. He often used to talk about it. Hither Green, he lived at. Do you know it?”

“Not so well,” Alice said.

“Very sad,” Anthea said. “Sometimes when he used to talk about it I wondered whether it was the only really happy time he ever had. But after all, he did come back to Sheffield, and—well, there’s no point in wondering about what might have been.”

“I’m so sorry,” Alice said. “Is it long since he—”

“Oh, he’s not dead,” Anthea said. “Ran off with someone, awful house on the top of a hill outside Chesterfield with the wind whistling round, two, I believe, small children, well shot of him all things considered.”

“I see,” Alice said.

“No, I’ve never lived in London,” Anthea said, “but I do make the effort to go down from time to time, for the great occasions of state. They come round sufficiently often, I find. It’s quite a regular journey.”

Alice laughed politely; she supposed Anthea meant the January sales.

“It was last year, wasn’t it, Princess Anne’s wedding?” Anthea said, quite serious. “So that was the last time I went down. Well, it’s got to be quite a habit now because, of course, the first trip we made along those lines, it was for the old King’s funeral in 1952. My mother, she had really desperately wanted to go to Princess Elizabeth’s wedding in 1947, but my father thought it was a ridiculous idea, and put his foot down and she didn’t go. Do you know, I honestly don’t think she ever forgave my father for that, because she didn’t ask for a great number of things, but just that once, I remember her so clearly coming out with it. ‘Samuel,’ she said—it was a Friday night because I remember she always liked to have fish, even though we weren’t particularly religious, I suppose it was just a sort of custom, and we were eating fish at the time—‘I’d like to take a trip to London to see the wedding of Princess Elizabeth,’ she said. But he wouldn’t have it. And I know she wanted to go again to London in 1951—now what in heaven’s name would that have been for?”

“The Festival of Britain,” Alice said. “I went to that. It was wonderful.”

“Exactly that,” Anthea said, beaming. “But my father stopped us again, only it wasn’t that he said anything, it was that he was dying that summer. We couldn’t have gone, naturally. But he died that September and the beginning of the next year, when the old King died all of a sudden, she quite perked up and said, ‘Anthea, I’ve decided, we’ll dye your old barathea black, and we’ll go to the King’s funeral. It’s what your father would have wanted, to show respect.’ Which was to be doubted, in my view, but we did it, we went down and it was thoroughly interesting,
I would say. We had really quite a good view—I’d held out hopes for Princess Margaret, but we did have a good view of the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester at one point as they passed, I’ll always remember. Not that royalty doesn’t come to Sheffield from time to time.”

“I remember the King’s funeral,” Alice said. But that was it: she remembered the fact of it, no more. She hadn’t gone near it.

“And the next year—this is really how the habit started—my mother said, and there’s a lot of truth in this, she said, ‘Well, we’ve paid respects to the old King, it’s only right that we go down to see his daughter crowned Queen.’ Which is quite right, if you think about it, and so we went down again. The rain! But you didn’t really think of that at the time, you were quite swept away by the whole occasion, didn’t you find?”

“I remember the people next door, they bought a television because of it,” Alice said. “That was quite a common thing to do, I’ve heard. And they asked us in to watch it, not just us but it turned out they’d asked about forty neighbours and relations, all squashed in together.”

“But you were in London!” Anthea said.

“Yes,” Alice said, “but—”

“Well, that I can’t understand,” Anthea said. “Living in London and not going to look at it in the flesh. But I dare say there was some sort of reason. Well, after that there was a bit of a gap, until Princess Margaret married, we went down again for that and that was nice, there was a little less of a crowd, you could see a lot more. And then when Churchill died, it was just the same time of year the old King died, and that must have reminded my mother of something, and I remember her saying, again, ‘We must go and pay our respects, your father would have wanted it, he was always such an admirer of Churchill.’ Which I don’t suppose he was especially, but my mother had it fixed in her head.”

Alice had reached out for a biscuit, but her hand hesitated, as if choosing between a slice of Battenberg and a fondant fancy. It stayed there and, in nervousness, she began to finger, then tear, the paper doily. Anthea Arbuthnot’s lounge was soft and beige, the carpet thick and rich, the ankles of the little tables sinking deep into the pile; and now Alice saw that, at the far end of the room, by the side of a polished reproduction glass-fronted bookcase with its load of
Readers’ Digest
mock-leather-backed summaries, pink and gold and regal in the face, there was a framed and glazed portrait in pastels of the Queen. Extraordinary. In the picture she was the colour of a mixed bag of Edinburgh
Rock misshapes. Alice went on tearing the doily, fixing her look more consciously on Anthea’s face. Suddenly it seemed to grow rather close to her own, the little pointed wet teeth bared, a smudge of the vivid red lipstick on the left canine, the flanks of the face warm and powdery and lightly furred.

“Churchill’s funeral, I’ll always remember that, queuing in the freezing cold for what seemed like hours. Well, it was hours we were waiting. Mother was insisting, but though we’d got there good and early, we’d still to queue, and we’d drunk the Thermos dry long before we got into the hall where he was lying in state. I went with Mother again, though by now I was married. I’d married the summer before, but my husband, he’d put his foot down, he’d said it was a waste of time and money and we’d not see anything much. Mother said, ‘Anthea, it’s history repeating itself, I don’t like the look of this one bit,’ and though I wouldn’t have it, she lived to see herself proved right. I should have seen how the land was lying from the start. But it was worth it, going to Churchill’s funeral and queuing all that time in the bitter cold, I’d say, because we had a great piece of luck: when we got into the hall, there were the four royal princes standing guard at each corner of the coffin. I’ll never forget that sight as long as I live. They looked terribly young and slender, all in their uniforms. They’d not announced it in advance, they just wanted to show their respects quietly.”

“I never heard that,” Alice said. “I’m sorry, I don’t really know—which royal princes?”

“Well,” Anthea said, “I’m not sure, but we can certainly work it out. It must have been Prince Charles, or would he have been too young? Well, certainly the Duke of Gloucester—the Duke of Edinburgh—no, let me see …”

Anthea paused, and thought hard. The direction of her gaze, which had been wandering remotely, seemed to come back within the room. “Do you know,” she said. “I don’t think the royal princes were there at all. I’m mixing it up with King George V’s funeral. That was when they stood guard over the coffin and, of course, I’ve only read about that, I was only just born. Isn’t that a curiosity? It’s quite as if I remembered it. But let me show you—”