The Northern Clemency (63 page)

“I’m going to drop you and make off straight away,” Trudy said. “I’ll find somewhere to leave it inconspicuously. I’ll make my way back somehow, but I’ll be watching from a distance, like Vikram said.”

“It’s not my car,” Stig said. “Leave it in the car park, it makes no odds.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Trudy said.

“It might be quite funny if the police turn up and ask Fat Marge what exactly she was doing in Orgreave yesterday. She’d have a fit,” Stig said.

“What does she think you’re doing with it?”

“God knows,” Stig said. “I just took the car. I didn’t ask her.”

“And, Trudy,” Tim said, drawing out her name cruelly—Troooody, “you’re just going to sit on a hillock overlooking the event with some egg sandwiches and some salt in a wrap of foil, are you? Doesn’t seem very brave to me.”

“You heard what Vikram said,” Trudy said. “There’s not going to be many women out there on the line. I’d stick out like a sore thumb. Don’t worry, Timmy, I’ll be doing useful things. I’ll be seeing Orgreave women. I know plenty of women activists here. Don’t worry about me.”

Tim thought of the women who stood in Fargate, shaking tin cans and shrinking from what was now very pungent in the car, Trudy’s animal odour, when she embraced them. Most were probably a bit too houseproud to be real friends with Trudy; she flourished her friendship with working-class women as something extra to ideology, something she would have done anyway. He didn’t have the knack of that. He saw their houses, with yellow leather sofas and fat yellow leather armchairs; he saw the dado-effect stripes of wallpaper running at waist height round the sitting room; he saw their doorbells ringing, and them rushing with their (practical, he made himself think) floral housecoats on to answer the door. He saw their back kitchens, with nothing in them but donated tins from Fargate and a little caddy of tea. They would answer the door, and there would be Trudy, foul-smelling with her self-cut hair and granny glasses, in her collarless striped shirt, her arms wide to embrace them. He could well imagine how welcome she’d be.

“Sounds like you’re actually a bit frightened,” Tim said. “Not to want to come.”

“Trudy’s not frightened,” Stig said as Trudy, simultaneously, in a querulous whine, said, “How do you mean, frightened?”

“You know, frightened,” Tim said. “Frightened. Frit. You know,
couldn’t take it, couldn’t stand it—I don’t blame you, it’s going to be pretty tough.”

“It’s going to be
pretty tough
, is it, Timmy?” Trudy said. “Oooh, I never realized.”

“Gi’o’er, you two,” Stig said.

“I think Timmy’s been giving himself nightmares about it,” Trudy said, but in the jeer, there might have been some kind of admiration, too. “Here we are. We turn off here.”

When the news came, Alice was in Katherine’s kitchen with her bag on her arm, sipping a cup of coffee. She wasn’t supposed to be stopping long. Alice knew about the whole business. Katherine had to tell somebody outside her immediate family about the court case, about Nick being in trouble. Everyone inside her immediate family was scornfully disapproving and enjoying it (Tim); bewildered and hurt and withdrawn (Malcolm); just not understanding and constantly asking for tactless details. That was Daniel. Or they were in London and not to be bothered. That was Jane. Somebody else had to be told so that she could look at it and see it for what it was. It was like when you bought a picture in a sale, or a dress on a whim. Your family had too much history of responses to your whims to be of much use. You had to call in a friend, an outsider, to look at the fact of it and then, without them even saying anything, you had a view of the fact of it through their eyes, from the way they stood and looked at you, or at it, even.

Perversely, it was Alice she had told rather than anyone else. She was the obvious choice, because Alice was the only one who knew the whole story about Nick. She knew more than Malcolm, who would now never listen to it, or believe it. Perhaps she knew more even than Katherine, who had only steeled herself to tell the story that once quite plainly and honestly. On every other occasion, reflecting on it, she found herself providing embellishments, romantic touches, exaggerations of humiliations and inventions regarding disgusted rejections. When she had told Alice the full plain account of the affair, such as it was, and then, more recently, when she decided that of course Alice was the person to tell about being in trouble with the police, the whole evening down the station, which Rayfield Avenue must be absolutely dying to find out about, given the appearance of the police car outside their house and her being taken away, as it were, virtually in handcuffs, Alice had behaved well. She had only said, “But did he say …” and
“I’m sure what he really meant” each time quite plausibly. She had been a good listener. She had enquired, carefully, and with the appearance of objectivity, and had in the end cleared Katherine of culpable wrongdoing with a consideration that might almost have been professional. It would have been nice to be sure that the court, when it came to it, was going to do the same thing.

The cherry tree was in blossom in the front garden; she gazed out at it through the yellow and white kitchen blinds, and thought of nothing but her problems.

But it was perverse, her choice of Alice as someone to tell the whole story to, and exactly because of what might have recommended her in the first place, that she would never tell anyone. Katherine knew that perfectly well. She would never tell even Bernie. And what was needed now was someone who would tell the story completely and authoritatively. Since the appearance of the panda car outside Katherine’s house, Anthea Arbuthnot had never “popped round,” had never so much “just happened,” had never existed half so much “on the off-chance” in her entire life. Her being had never had so much excited casualness about it as it did these days. She was forever appearing for no very good reason, with a gift of half a dozen scones too many she’d just happened to make, or a recipe she’d cut out from the
Morning Telegraph
on the off-chance Katherine might find it useful, or bearing a pot of home-made jam. Tim had answered the door: “Thanks, I’ll donate it to the miners’ collections,” he said, taking it firmly off her, but it hadn’t put her off.

Anthea was round here because she’d seen the police car, and couldn’t produce an explanation for it even she could believe. Her own inventions were, almost certainly, not remotely credible even to herself. It wasn’t her fault if Katherine couldn’t produce an explanation for it either, but that didn’t seem to cross her mind. It would have been much easier all round if Katherine had taken Anthea into her confidence as well as or instead of Alice and just told her what was going on. It would have saved a lot of trouble. Sooner or later, she’d have to start telling people—she had no illusions that the case would come to court, and it would certainly be made public then. If they already knew, through Anthea, it would save a lot of trouble. Katherine envisaged Anthea, hastening up Rayfield Avenue in a muck sweat, brushing the streetside blossom from her glistening face where it fell, popping up one red Tarmac drive after another, ringing the bell and, as the door opened, producing a small token gift from behind her back, an excuse to come in and gossip. It would be very much like that. It probably had
been very much like that, since by now they probably all knew her constructed and invented version. Already the haggard and worn figure of poor Caroline had made a habit of crossing the road to offer inept expressions of sympathy over the knee-high grey brick wall when she’d seen Katherine in the front garden. They’d been inept expressions of sympathy about greenfly on the roses, as it happened, but Katherine identified the general intention and where it had come from.

She’d only told Alice, whose practical expression of sympathy was to induce her to join her keep-fit class. It was run by a lady in Crosspool, a nice girl called Tracy Bowness, who said she’d been at school with Francis and—a polite little afterthought, turning from Alice’s glowing face to her own—with Tim, too, she thought. She rented the church hall by the term—she had some connection with the church—and got them all going for 50p a lesson, or “session,” as they said. She was very good, with an array of legwarmers and a large range of different-coloured all-in-one leotards as the weeks went on. She hadn’t left home, and kept house for her dad, who was a mine-manager—you weren’t supposed to know that, but they all did. Her mother had gone off with a teacher from Flint, years before, run off to Exeter with him. You weren’t supposed to know any of that, but they did, and it added a degree of sympathy to the enjoyment of the class. Poor Tracy, with nothing but her legwarmers to keep her warm, with her Kept-Fit figure and spoony unkissable features. They all knew she had nothing but a grumpy old mine-manager of a dad in a little house in Crosspool to go home to.

Alice was in Katherine’s kitchen, the cherry blossom thick in clouds just at the window, when the news came. She was drinking a cup of coffee. Tim had gone out somewhere very early. They’d been woken by the front door slamming, before seven o’clock. “Heaven knows where,” Katherine said, though Malcolm—who was for some reason still in at ten o’clock on a weekday—said he could guess. That was mysterious to Alice, as Malcolm greeted her amicably enough and went off upstairs. The telephone rang, above their heads and in the hallway. They’d installed a Trimphone extension in Malcolm’s study, directly above the kitchen, and they heard the sound of his voice saying their number rather than the actual words, “double one double six?” in a tune with a rising inflection. There was another comment, a silence, then another rumbling, unintelligible and short sentence, before he called, “Katherine—it’s important,” and came out of the little study.

She went to the phone in the hall and picked it up, listening, whitefaced.
Malcolm hung up the phone upstairs, and came down. Alice, following Katherine, made a quick tactful gesture of leaving in Malcolm’s direction, but Katherine saw this. She reached out to grip her wrists. Malcolm, more weakly, shook his hands and pointed at the ground, to say, “No, stay here.” Whether Malcolm knew that Alice had been told the facts of the case or not, he wanted her here.

There was nothing to be gathered from Katherine’s short, neutral sentences, hunched over the phone with the wings of her hair hiding the secret of the Trimphone handset. Malcolm led Alice into the kitchen.

“It’s the solicitor,” he said calmly. “She’s phoning to give us an update on the case.”

Alice noted that “us.” “Good news, I hope,” she said, words that even she knew would probably sound even more fatuous. And then they started talking, in the agreed social manner of those days, about the miners’ strike and the weather. Started talking about them in connection, too, as if they had anything to do with each other, as if the miners, on top of everything else, had managed to arrange lovely weather for their strike. Alice and Malcolm did it on this occasion with graceful, pointed practice, as if the whole of their social intercourse over the last few decades had prepared them to carry out exactly this difficult conversation, even with a more difficult one happening in the hallway on the Trimphone. But, all the same, they broke off as soon as she put the phone down and straightened up.

Katherine came into the kitchen with elaborate casualness. She was sometimes so much like a small girl, Alice considered. Not like her own daughter Jane, whose body had always had that gawky frankness that never mounted much of a defence or dissimulation of her own thoughts. When fed-up, Jane drooped; when happy, she perked up; when bored (Alice had noted last Christmas when they went over there for drinks), she still sighed and moaned and rolled her eyes. Katherine was more like Alice’s daughter Sandra, who had made a point of complicated poses at odds with her situation or feeling, being upright and staring when she was frightened, looking angry when she was in love and, like Katherine now, draping herself around in casual unconsid-ered shapes when there was something clearly important to be conveyed. Of course, Alice didn’t know whether Sandra still did this; she hadn’t seen her in eighteen months.

“That was the solicitor,” Katherine said. “Tricia. She was phoning about the case. She was just giving us an update.”

“Is there any news?” Malcolm said, after a pause.

“I thought you’d spoken to her,” Katherine said, going to look out of the kitchen window. She turned the kitchen taps on, and started to wash her hands. “Well,” she said, raising her voice, “they’ve decided not to bring charges.”

“They’re not going to—” Alice said, as Malcolm, simultaneously, said, “Against Nick, you mean?”

“I don’t know about Nick,” Katherine said. “She didn’t say anything. Of course, she’s not his solicitor. No, she, they, they’re not going to press charges against me. They know I didn’t do anything wrong.”

At that point, Alice realized that that was how it was always going to be from now on. The moment of frank openness—a short moment, no more, in their lives—like an eye opening and shutting again in sleep, had gone away. Because the news had come when there was an audience, in front of whom pretence had to be kept up: from now on it had never been the case that Katherine had done anything wrong, that she had ever been in danger of being prosecuted and taken to court. Alice could feel the buttress-like projections of the last few weeks dissolving like pissed-on bubble-bath. That was how it was to be.

“Are they going to prosecute Nick?” Malcolm said, with a visible effort.

“Well, yes, they are,” Katherine said. She was going now into that style which was almost the first thing Alice had found in her, when they first met; the tiny recoil when an unwelcome and inconvenient question was asked, the tiny beginnings of a party-like smile as if at a personal comment in bad taste from the friend of a guest, brought and welcomed under sufferance. “They must be. Tricia said that they’ll want me as a witness when it comes to court.”

All this behaviour was mounted for the benefit of an audience. It wasn’t clear, though, who the confidant was, and who the audience before whom appearances had to be kept up. Katherine ought to be pretending that things were as she had expected in front of the neighbour, in front of Alice. In fact, it felt much more as if she was protecting Malcolm from the full knowledge of the scenario. There was now no hope that she would ever be honest with either of them, or anyone, about what she had once so clearly feared. She had been let off; and from now on, Alice knew, should she ever again mention the fact of Katherine’s affair with, her feelings for Nick, she would be greeted with that faint party-like smile and twitch of surprise, and a change of subject. None of it had ever happened.