The Northern Clemency (36 page)

“Your dad does that?” Sandra said, because the only time she’d glimpsed Daniel’s father was when he’d said hello, in a small, shy voice, as if he thought she might laugh or make fun of his tiny head, and then disappeared as soon as he could. He seemed more like a guest in that house than the man who owned it.

Sandra paid a lot of attention to the way the people opposite, the Glovers, actually looked. Some of them looked normal and others were strange-looking. Daniel was the most normal-looking. People said he was a good-looking boy, and even sexy—she’d become more popular at school, some people in the class suddenly knowing her name without rudely asking a bystander first, once it had got out that she walked home with him most nights. He was that good-looking boy Daniel Glover a year above her, and she was his friend. But actually Daniel, among his family, wasn’t particularly good-looking, only normal. His head was the right size, his nose and mouth were the right size for his head, his skin was OK—better than Sandra’s, though the Clearasil her mother had bought her without any fuss after a rehearsed request was making some difference. He wasn’t thin or fat; he walked as if he was quite happy with the body he was in. His mother was normal-looking, too, though her hands and feet were scrubbed red and huge, like flippers.

Sandra didn’t often meet them when she went round to Daniel’s. She hardly ever saw his mother close up, since, he said, she came home
later from work than his father, the three days a week she worked, and once a week quite a lot later. She worked at a florist’s in Broomhill. Their house was always full of lovely flowers, not just the once-in-a-blue-moon vase of mixed tulips her mother treated herself to, buying them, she knew, from somewhere other than Daniel’s mother’s shop. The rest of the family either didn’t notice or, like Sandra, didn’t comment. But Sandra knew her mother loved that sight unconditionally, of bright clashing flowers in a vase, unarranged, lovely. Loved it more than Daniel’s mother did, she knew that. Daniel’s family weren’t often there together, and she liked to inspect them covertly from the kitchen window when they set off in the morning. His droopy sister, her hair lank and blonde, and never quite washed, hanging down in solid ribbons, her big ears poking through the gaps, peering through ugly glasses she couldn’t have chosen herself. She might have been one of those Jameson girls, the sisters of Francis’s little friend, one of whom was in Sandra’s class, never seeming to notice anything. The sister—Jane—she was a year below Sandra. She was weird-looking or, rather, she could have been all right if she didn’t always walk in a way that looked like someone nervously trying out a new and dangerous machine. But when the five of them walked out in the morning, always in dribs and drabs, the mother shouting for the last dawdler, which was usually Daniel, it was the weirdness of the father and the little boy that took your attention. They really did look objectively weird. She knew it wasn’t very mature to think of people in that way, but you couldn’t help it. When you saw the little boy, you thought that you’d never seen a kid with so tiny and round a head. It was like a bowling ball sitting on his shoulders. For some reason he’d had his hair cut in a short back and sides, probably nits, and his head, with its big nose and the same sticky-out ears as his sister, was really ridiculous. The three children looked strange when they stood together, their hair colour all so different, Daniel’s a dark flop over his forehead and falling into his eyes, Jane’s a dirty blonde, but the little boy a real ginger, which must have come from nowhere. You thought his ball-headedness took the prize, but his father had exactly the same tiny head. There was a word for the rest of him, and the word was “weedy.” Daniel’s mother wasn’t much taller than his dad, maybe only by a fringe and a nose, but with her big hands and generally bigger scale, the way she held herself and never scurried, ratlike, as her husband did, she looked much larger, much more normal. Sandra watched them, fascinated. She tried not to think, though,
of her own family’s element of freakishness, the way anyone would when they saw them comment on the weird tallness of her own brother. Maybe all families were a bit weird from the outside, until you knew them. But with Daniel’s father, you forgot the pinheadedness close up. There was something much weirder: his fingernails. They were scrupulously clean, white as bone, but he had let them grow until they looked like fragile white claws. Not like women’s fingernails—they were square at the end and blunt—but they made your skin crawl. She had to stop herself shuddering whenever Daniel’s father moved his hands at the thought they might come anywhere near her.

When they were at the top of the road, Daniel was still talking about being vegetarian. She liked these deep conversations with him. She guessed that he’d never known another girl he could talk to like this.

“The thing is,” he was saying, “that vegetarians think they’re saving the lives of animals, but they’re not.”

“They’re not eating them, though,” Sandra said.

“But the ones who are alive, they’ll still be killed,” Daniel said, “and I’ll eat them and you’ll eat them.”

“That’s true,” Sandra said.

“You see, if they’re not needed for food, they won’t exist at all,” Daniel said. “No one would call those hens into existence if everyone was vegetarian. Either way they’d be dead or never be born, so they don’t win whatever we do. As humans,” he finished grandly.

“But do you think we should be allowed,” Sandra said, “to destroy the life of a chicken once we’ve created it?”

“I see what you mean,” said Daniel. Sandra, too, had no particular feeling about whether this was a good or a sensible point to make. It might have been total rubbish. She didn’t care about the life of chickens, and really she thought it totally stupid of Daniel’s sister to alter her own life for the sake of something so totally trivial as the lives of however many thousand chickens.

They stopped for a moment by a house where that woman lived who’d just had a baby; she was outside, staring up at the guttering, or perhaps at the sky. She still looked pregnant, but by her was a pram. The baby couldn’t be seen, but it must be getting the sun. The way they’d stopped, it was as if there were now three of them, or four, in a group.

“What’s your purpose?” Daniel said, looking at the big blue pram in which a baby lay, absorbed by the sight of the blue sky.

“To be eaten,” Sandra said lightly, and the woman heard this, and
turned. She looked dazed; she hadn’t understood what Sandra said, but her lack of understanding had started long before Sandra said anything.

“Come on,” Daniel said, and they started to walk again.

They were nearly home. It was a clear day of fat clouds in the translucent blue, hanging there in a still way. Toys for baby, unreachable. The moon must be up there, and in an hour it would probably pop out of the blue, startling in daylight. She always liked that spectacle. In London, there had always been straight lines drawn in the sky. Every couple of minutes another plane making its way out into the world or back again. Here, there was never anything. The sky was what it must have been before Sandra was born.

“What are you thinking?” Daniel said.

“Nothing,” Sandra said. “What are you thinking? Deep thoughts?”

“No,” Daniel said. “I was just remembering that my mum asked me if you’d like to come over for tea on Friday.”

“Your mum did?” Sandra said.

“I mean, only if you want to. You could watch my sister eating vegetables.”

“With gravy. I might go vegetarian myself, keep her company.”

Daniel laughed at this idea. She hadn’t thought it funny, but to Daniel there seemed no way she could suddenly become a vegetarian. She didn’t go into Daniel’s house today: she said untruthfully that she’d got a lot of homework to do. It was something to do with leaving space around Friday, to make her appearance then welcome, and not routine. They said goodbye; she shut her own front door behind her and went thoughtfully upstairs. In the pink bathroom, into which someone had thought it a good idea to put an avocado suite, she washed her hands, stained with today’s black ink and then her face. She dried her face on the pale blue towel and then, experimentally, she smiled, then bared her teeth in the mirror. Daniel was right, she saw. They were unmistakably the teeth of a meat-eater. She folded the towel, still smiling, but now for herself rather than for the mirror. It was odd. She hadn’t expected what had been there for some weeks, and she hadn’t really noticed it. It was more like a removal of heavy difficulties than anything positive. She wasn’t remotely in love with Daniel, she couldn’t be, but in the last few weeks she’d become happy. Her skin was better, too.

“That was Katherine Glover,” her mother said, enunciating the name, coming back from the telephone. “I thought she had decided to ignore us.”

“What—the woman over the road?” Bernie said. “What’s she want, phoning in the middle of dinner? Husband run off again?”

“Well, she wasn’t to know when we eat our dinner,” Alice said. “She’s got a little boy, they probably eat earlier than we do.”

“He’s in my class at school,” Francis said.

“Is he really?” Alice said. “He looks very young. She was asking for you, Sandra—she wanted to know whether you could go over for tea on Friday night. Is she a friend of yours, her daughter?”

“No,” Sandra said. “It’s Daniel I’m more friends with.”

“Ah,” Bernie said, in a knowing voice, and they all got on with their lasagne.

The phone call had come out of the blue, but after that, relations were restored to what they might have become sooner. The next morning, the exits of the two families coincided exactly, and rather than wave from the other side of the road, Katherine crossed, all smiles, and had a word with them. She was so pleased Sandra could come to tea—hoped there was nothing she didn’t like to eat—promised not to send her home too late. Bernie pointed out it wasn’t a school night so it didn’t matter within reason, and she turned her gaze on him—she’d hardly met him, they both seemed to realize at once—and agreed to use the phrase, within reason. “We’ve been so busy,” she said, apparently in relation to nothing in the conversation. It was some sort of acknowledgement, apology even, that eight months before she’d sat with Alice and told her everything, and until now there had been nothing between them, perhaps an awkward and half-returned wave.

Katherine, until recently, when they’d seen that Sandra had become such friends with her son, had acquired a name at number eighty-four, and the name was “the mad lady.” They got into the car. In the mirror, Bernie watched her make her way back across the road to where her family stood, as if stuck still about their car in the drive. She seemed quite unembarrassable. He thought of launching a sardonic comment, but turned the key and started the car.

When Malcolm heard from Katherine that they were expecting a guest to dinner on Friday night, he misunderstood. For most of their lives together, it had seemed to him that he was admitted only to the public downstairs rooms of Katherine’s mind. The more intimate spaces and speculations, the whole upstairs and attics of her thinking were kept
from him. So when she told him two days before about this guest, he said wretchedly, “Oh, good,” taking the statement at face value. A guest—by which he thought she meant an adult guest—was coming. She made these statements in the tone of one to whom guests for dinner were commonplace and even a bore. She always had. It seemed obvious to him that the only person it could be was Katherine’s boss Nick. In a few minutes it became clear that it wasn’t a guest in the normal sense but a girlfriend of Daniel’s. Why Katherine had implied someone who would need impressing he couldn’t understand. He found it hard to forgive her, even for so small a misunderstanding.

On Tuesday night he went to the battle re-creation society. He drove into Hillsborough, down in the valley. The houses here were packed more tightly together, a little shabbier. There was a crowd about, all wearing blue and white scarves, all trudging gnome-like in the same direction, towards the football ground. It was a steady crowd, with none of the urgency and those flurries of violence that would burst out later, after the match. He drove carefully, though, since even before the match there was foolishness in the air, and someone might choose to run out into the road. He made a note to drive back from the society the long way round, to avoid any trouble.

The society met in a school hall over the brow of the next-but-one hill. The school let them meet in it for almost nothing, persuaded by John Ashworth. He taught chemistry there. It was convenient for him, at any rate. There were already twelve cars in the car park when Malcolm drove in, though he was early. That meant twenty already, a good turnout.

Some weeks the society met to plan their biannual re-creation of a battle, which wasn’t going to happen until next summer, a good long way off. For those re-creations the core membership of about forty expanded dramatically. Wives and children, colleagues of Richard Thwaite’s from the council, John Ashworth’s chemistry pupils, all and sundry were pressed into versions of Civil War uniform and given antique-looking guns, or gun-like objects. The quality of the outfits and the power of the delusion varied. Some members of the society were magnificent in hand-crafted uniforms, kept carefully in boxes, and put on appropriate-looking wigs, the illusion only broken, perhaps, by a pair of solicitor-like spectacles peeping out through a cavalier’s poodle wig. Others, roped in at the last moment, made do with a cardboard breastplate painted grey, an old trilby spray-painted silver (surprisingly all right from a distance) and a sawn-off broom-handle.
These less plausible warriors were encouraged not to stand together, or at the front, but to melt into the general illusion, their props (of doubtful admissibility) borrowing authenticity from some more scrupulous adjacence. They had as good a day as anyone, and there were some in the society who argued that what they ought to be interested in was battlefield tactics, not the minutiae of breeches and flintlocks, and tactics could as interestingly be re-enacted by three hundred women in flowery skirts if it came to that. Others, more hardline, said that it wouldn’t feel right unless everyone was in the right dress for the period, and got into what in the end were surprisingly personal arguments about cuirasses. That was George Burke, who worked for the education authority and who refused to recruit any temporary participants for the re-creations, saying they would get in the way and mess things up. But he always lost the argument when it was pointed out that if you limited participation to people in the pedantically correct uniforms, you’d end up trying to re-create major clashes of civilization with twelve immaculately dressed obsessives. The other point, which no one raised but everyone bore in mind, was that it would also mean everyone submitting their uniform to the approval of George, who was not a generous fellow, in which case you might end up re-creating battles with only one person.