The Northern Clemency (5 page)

On these outings Sandra, in the back of the Simca with him, was quiet and sullen. She didn’t complain: she followed whatever they were supposed to be doing, from time to time inspecting the sensible shoes she’d been made to bring with open distaste. Francis, as often these days, observed her with covert interest. She was five years older than him. In the room they shared at the hotel, she spent her time writing postcards to her friends, which, when she left them for him to read, proved cryptic or insulting about him in specific terms. Her weariness,
never openly stated, only dissipated when they arrived at a market town, and the prospect of shops, on however unambitious a scale, revived her. She bought more postcards; she looked, she said, for presents for her friends, though nothing seemed to fit the bill.

Once they went into the centre of Sheffield, but even for Sandra, Francis could see, this was not a success. It was strange, confusing, and not planned, as London was, to excite. Francis was gripped with the prospect of getting lost; he had no sense of direction or memory for landmarks. They followed Sandra indulgently into one shop after another, and after a couple of hours stopped in municipal gardens by the town hall, an alarming construction like an egg-box.

“We’ll have to come back here,” Alice said to Bernie. “This is where the education department is. To see about schools.”

Francis’s dad bought him and Sandra a Coke each, and they sat on a bench in the dry city heat. “This will have been cleared by bombs,” Bernie said, “these gardens, in the war. See where the old buildings stop and the new ones start? They’ll have been bombed during the war because of the steel, see?” Francis looked around and it was right: a ripped-out space had been created, a kind of shapeless acreage, and into it, dropped in as exactly as false teeth, were new and extravagant buildings, the egg-box, a building with brass globes protruding from its top floor, others whose smoked mirrors for windows made no allowances towards the church-like blackened solemnity of the old town hall, a figure poised heroically above the entrance like Eros.

Two boys his own age had sat on a bench directly opposite theirs. It was term-time, Francis knew that, but they had not been taken out of school for a week because their families were moving—a licensed absence that had nevertheless caused him unspoken worry in the course of the week, even while clambering over Burbage Rocks, in case an inspector should materialize from behind a dry-stone wall. These were real truants, their hands dirty, and Francis looked at them in the way he would have studied photographs of Victorian murderers, possessors of a remote experience that would never be his. He sucked at his Coke, and lazily, one of the boys pulled out a packet of cigarettes, offering the other boy one. He felt childish with his fizzy drink and already the object of contempt. Their conversation drifted over with its incomprehensible freight of words—“Waggy nit,” one said, and “Scoile,” the other said; a long story began, about Castle Market—the Cattle Market, did they mean? Why didn’t they say “the”? “Mardy,” “gennel;” one punched the other, hard, and the other said, “Geeyour.”
Francis tried not to look at them. He feared their retribution, or their mockery; he feared the idea that his father would take it upon himself to say something to them, something inflammatory and adult, and Sheffield would turn upon them.

His parents had planned to spend the next day going round and finding a new house to buy. Although Francis had inspected the pile of agent’s particulars in his parents’ hotel bedroom with fervour and wonderment at the sums—£16,000—involved, he and Sandra were to entertain themselves for most of the day. His ideas of entertainment were few, and he knew they were not allowed to stay in their room, the cleaners demanding access every morning after breakfast. But his mother had done a little research, and had discovered that a public library was to be found in a Victorian villa at Broomhill, only three hundred yards away. They were to spend the morning there, and find their own way back to the hotel, where they could order lunch themselves as a special treat. Of course, they could not take anything out of the library, not having an address, but if Francis wanted a book to read—there was no suggestion that Sandra was likely to share in this desire—there was a bookshop, only fifty yards further on, where he could buy something. Alice gave him two pound notes, an unheard-of advance on pocket money, and, it seemed, not even an advance: she did it when Sandra and his father could not see, a little squeeze of the hand pressing the money into his fist.

The library filled the morning, but it was short. He sat under the wooden bookshelves that, even in the children’s section, bore the intimidating municipal heading “Novels.” It took him a moment to recognize some familiar and favourite books there, and it was a surprise to discover that he had been reading “novels” when he thought he had been reading Enid Blyton, or a book about Uncle, the millionaire elephant in a city of skyscrapers, Beaver Hateman at his heels. Chairs were supplied and, greedily taking five books with him, head down and not acknowledging the look of the librarian, whether approving or sour, he went to sit. At first he could hear his sister: she was talking to someone downstairs, in her “mature” voice, as he called it; maturity, much evoked, had become her favourite virtue, and whenever she thought of it her voice dragged and drawled to the point of a groan. “No, we’re moving up here in a few months’ time. Yes, from London. We thought it best to sample the local amenities. I do hope you don’t mind us coming in—my brother’s the real reader in the family …”

And then the voice somehow faded away. The old library, in Kingston, he’d been going to since he was four, and had read every book in their children’s section, except the I-books, which he didn’t like, when people told you a story and said I. Here, there were so many new and different books, and what his sister’s voice had faded into was a book, a little childish but funny, about a bushranger called Midnite, and “bushranger” was the Australian word for “highwayman,” with a cat called Khat, and, look, Queen Victoria, and—

It was quite short, and he had almost finished it by the time his sister, hot and bored, came to fetch him. She had left the library to explore the little parade of shops. “Come on,” she said. “Time for lunch.” He followed her, the last five pages abandoned; perhaps he could come back later. And perhaps he could keep the two pounds—you could spend it on books in London, too.

“We’ve found a house,” Bernie said, coming into the hotel dining room while they were still eating their lunch. He was glowing with relief and satisfaction. The dining room, hung with velvet wallpaper and dark curtains, had been daytime dingy, and the children had been talking in whispers, not daring to bicker, but there was Francis’s dad, as if he hadn’t noticed anything. “You’ll like it, kids.”

“I’ve found a book,” Francis wanted to say to complete everyone’s happiness. “I’ve found lots of books.”

“It’s nice,” Alice said, sitting down in a flop and looking first, with concern, at Francis. She had something to console him with. “You’ll like it.”

“My name is—”

She began to write. But the paper was resting on the lawn. Her pen tore through the paper on the
y
of “my,” and then she was writing on grass through torn paper. Jane was lying on her stomach in a secret part of the garden. She cocked her head and listened. She kicked her heels up, bouncing them against her bum. There was nobody about.

She took the paper and, rolling over, sat up to write properly. At the end of August, the grass was dry and brown, crackling like a fire. Under her legs, it was itchy with gorse droppings, and she could feel a holly leaf or two. The holly tree in the far corner was constantly shedding leaves. Nowhere in the garden was ever completely free of them. She folded the paper, and wrote: “My name is Fanny.”

Jane paused. For as long as she could remember, her name had
really been Fanny. Her paper-name, the name of the heroine of her book when it should be written. Now she was fourteen, it was time to write it.

It was a great shame, really, that it was the end of August. She’d let so much of the summer holiday go by without writing anything. Now that she had written four words, she regretted it had taken so long. Until now, it had been a running, contiguous commentary in her head, a third voice putting her smallest actions into a sort of prose—Jane left the house, shutting the door behind her. In the garden there were birds singing. Her mood was black—but now she was writing something.

She had switched on the lawn-sprinkler. The wet earth started to smell dense and delicious in the dry heat. The holly tree dripped with a tropical rhythm, irregular, on to the patio. The lawn-spray flung lazily in this direction with a hiss on each revolution, never quite reaching the little nest. A trickle of sweat, like a darting insect, slipped in a tickle from her armpit down her side; she could smell her own faint metallic odour. She was narrating in her head; she turned and began to write again.

“My name is Fanny. I was born an orphan in the year 1863. My mother …”

It was a hundred years before her own birth. Her eyes filled with the sadness that by now Fanny was certainly dead. But she was Fanny, sweating in a sleeveless dress and no knickers in a patch of a Sheffield garden. Presently, as the cool wave of water in air, a jet of perfumed rain, swept over her head, she was lost in the thrill of authorship.

The garden was not squarely established but, like the whole estate, carved out of country and annexed in opportunistic ways. It swelled at the far corner to take in the substantial holly tree. (“A hundred years old,” Jane’s mother said reverently. She had always wanted to live in an old house, with character.) Elsewhere it wavered about in odd directions, claiming and abjuring patches of land. If the features of the garden seemed deceptively aged, like the trees, that was because the gardens had fenced-in patches of country. A moorland tussock, three feet square, brought in, surrounded by a lawn and a garden wall, like a rockery. The patchy lawn, the spindles of trees on the streets, rooted in squares of earth like tea-bags: those told the age of the development more clearly.

You could nest in the roots of the old holly tree where you were invisible from the house. For Jane’s less secret withdrawals, she went to read somewhere she could be discovered. You could sometimes hear a
human noise beyond the garden and, in a series of corrections, understand that it was not, after all, one of the neighbours on either side at their pleasure, or a walker hugging the shore of the development before heading off into the wild heather of the country but the child’s-dismay-call made by a sheep, sheltering from the wind beyond the dry-stone wall.

But there was another better gift from the moor, which no one, Jane believed, knew about: three thick gorse bushes, brilliant banana-yellow blossom and always quick to slash at your arms. From the open lawn, it looked as if they went right up to the wall, but if you got down on your belly and wriggled through, a little space of secret untended grass opened up. You could sit there and watch, unnoticed. Her father was always talking about clearing the gorse bushes but he wouldn’t get round to it. Perhaps he was fond of them too. Here she had pressed down a space, clearing it of holly leaves and gorse twigs.

Another hiding-place had been the garden of the house opposite, empty for four months now. All summer it had been the province of her brother after nightfall; there he prowled and roamed, his girls coming to him eagerly. In the daytime, it had been hers. After four months of neglect, it had developed in unexpected, luxuriant ways. At first it was like a room enclosed, left tidy by the owners to await their return, and Jane ventured into it with a sense of intrusion. But quickly it began to grow and dissolve. An inoffensive small plant, a few shoots above the ground, had exploded, leaping through the trellised fence, a few more inches and a few more shoots every day. One day, all at once, a single slap of colour was there: a poppy had burst open, and then, for weeks, there was a relay of flowers, each lasting a day or two. Of course, her mother worked in a shop full of flowers, so they were not strange to Jane; but to watch them work their own stubborn magic, budding and bursting, fading and moulting on the stem, rather than dying, yellow and sour, in someone’s vase was new to her.

For weeks, the garden expanded along its permitted limits, and only the plants that Mr. Watson, a gardener as draconian as Jane’s father, had admitted to his garden developed, stretching in their new freedom. But then the weeds started: the perfect lawn was scattered with constellations of daisies and, quite soon, dandelions. There were butterflies now and when, once, it rained overnight in torrents, the garden was filled with snails, come out to drink and feed. Best of all was a marvellous new plant, embracing and winding itself round anything, a fence, a post, running itself through other plants, with the most beautiful
flowers like trumpets, like lilies, like the flowers of heaven. Jane had never had a favourite flower before, and whenever the craze for quizzes had arisen among the girls, she’d always replied, “Roses,” when asked, a choice she knew was limp and conventional, as well as probably untrue. But now she really did have a favourite flower.

It was a shock to discover, when she asked her father, discreetly, that it was a garden pest called bindweed. Then he explained the complex and violent steps needed to eradicate it. Jane listened, but it seemed a little sad to her to remove a plant so beautiful, to prefer, as her father did, a border of squat green-tongued plants that would never flower or get anywhere much in life. Jane promised herself, when she grew up, a garden with nothing but bindweed, a dense bower of strangling vines and trumpeting innocent flowers.

Her garden visits were over now. A couple of days ago one of those neighbours had rapped at the window as she had been going in—slipping in, she had thought, unobserved as a mouse in the middle of the day. It had been embarrassing enough to see the neighbour at her mother’s party; that hiding-place was now closed to her, and the garden went its way in peace.