The Northern Clemency (72 page)

And then, all at once, she was crying, the stripped album open on her lap in front of her, and not knowing how not to. Malcolm squeezed her shoulder, and smiled too, in a way that suggested he, too, might at any moment start crying, and got up, placing the albums carefully on the coffee-table in front of her.

“Do you remember,” he said in the end, “years and years ago—”

Katherine nodded.

“Years and years ago,” he said, “I just took off that once. I just went off for two days and I didn’t say where I was going, I just went and came back.”

Katherine nodded.

“I never said where I’d gone, did I?” Malcolm said. “I don’t think I ever told you why I’d gone, either.” Katherine tried to say no; she couldn’t.

“The thing is,” he said, “it’s not important why I went, or where I went. I just went to a hotel for two days, then I came back. That’s all I did, it was nothing much. You know what the important question is, though?”

“You’re being deep,” Katherine said, or tried to say; she couldn’t.

“Yes, well,” Malcolm said, “the important thing—I think the important thing is why I came back. Anyway. I’m just going to get the rest, love,” he said. “The rest of the photographs,” and he went to the door.

“I don’t deserve you,” Katherine said, hardly managing to get the words out, shaking her head.

“Love you,” Malcolm said, and went upstairs. He was there a while, allowing her to finish, to dry her tears on the handkerchief she kept, as she always had, in the wrist of her blouse, and when he came back, it was with the rest of the albums. “We might as well,” he said judiciously, and his eyes were, surely, a little red around the rims themselves, “finish going through these tonight. I’m enjoying this.”

Beyond and below the crags, heading down into the bottom of the valley that divided Rayfield Avenue, Ranmoor and Lodge Moor on one flank from Hillsborough and the moors on the other, there ran the Rivelin through a thick line of trees. The beechwoods stretched like a thick dark wash along the floor of the valley, like sediment that had washed to the lowest point, flourishing along the meandering line of
the river as far up the flanks as the twin A-roads on either side, heading in the direction of Manchester. It was a place of mysterious lights and shadows, which under rain hissed and drummed; the river formed pools and deep, sibilant cascades. It was always dark down there. Even when the sun shone, the trees met overhead and cast heavy green shades over the paths, carved by custom rather than arrangement. In the winter, the limes and beeches bare, it was a favourite place for rooks to congregate, their sawing calls echoing down the narrow, extended forest. It seemed like a very old place, and was; probably the remains of a much larger forest that had extended right up the sides of the valley, where now were fields of sheep and stripped moorland, and even crawling masses of houses.

It began at the western edge of Sheffield. The lengths of suburb started to contain some things that suggested an older, more rural past: an old forge, preserved now as a museum, which school trips favoured, and, among the suburban houses, a stableyard and field tilted at thirty degrees, now a riding school. There was even a little working farm, with hens and geese and twelve pigs tucked somehow into its yard; there must once have been more land to that, and the farmhouse itself was blackened, rough and eighteenth-century. But the land, if it had existed, had long ago been sold off to build bungalows and semidetached houses on, each with a sunburst motif on its gates and a garage added at some later date. It must have taken some doing to live in the houses directly backing on to the pigsties.

The houses gave way to a last garden centre, or nursery, according to taste, as the Rivelin woods and the Rivelin valley began their sinuous path. After this point, the river ran behind the backs of houses, unfollowably, and was even directed into narrow pipes. At the edge of the houses, it was full of rubbish, old bicycle wheels, plastic supermarket bags, a trolley from Gateway, which must have been pushed uphill a good two miles before being dumped here. But if you followed the river upstream, the detritus in the water, the flotsam and jetsam, soon thinned and then disappeared; you came across a municipal pond, a little reservoir constructed out of the Rivelin’s stream like a lido. Children often came here with their shrimping nets in search of frogspawn and sticklebacks, taking the sticky trove home in funerary jam-jars. And then you could go further upstream, tracing the river that fed this pond, and all sorts of fish under the rippling green shade. Most kids—Daniel was explaining, as he and Helen walked up the side of the
stream together—most kids round here, they came to the pond, and stopped there. But if you went on—

The pond, with its concrete edges and warning notices, was ruled by the gods of municipal holiday. But further upstream, leading up from the runnel that fed the pond itself through a concrete pipe, in most seasons under water, beyond this pond the events of the river became more surprising and suggestive. There weren’t often many people around. Often you came across the remains of a dam constructed out of rocks and mud by boys, once effective but after a few days scattered and ineffective; the naughtiest boys—

“You weren’t one of them, were you, by any chance?”

“I was not,” Daniel said.

—the very naughtiest boys used to beg or steal a sheet of plastic from building sites and underpin their dams with it. It was the only thing that ever successfully stopped the river, constructed a proper pool; rocks and mud never had the same effect. From such a pool, you could after a couple of hours scoop the gulping tench with your bare hands, more or less. But grown-ups, if they ever came across one of these more ruthlessly efficient dams, would usually step in and pull out the plastic sheet with an impressive roar and cascade as the built-up pool gave up its swelling bulk, its gasping and ungrateful fish.

The concrete paths stopped above the municipal pond, and the only paths were worn down by people following the river out of curiosity and the occasional gang of naughty boys. Most kids went to Forge Dam, with its ice-cream vans and its shallow reach. You could only drown in that if you set your mind to it, like those government adverts starring man-high talking squirrels about the murderous potential of six inches of water. Some kids, like Daniel, had gone to the stretch of Rivelin that went between the pond and the old post office two miles into woodland, which only survived on the sale of drinks to cyclists and quarters of sweets to the dam-making boys. He loved the summer here; loved the hover of the dragonflies over the soupy surface of the river’s pools in summer; loved those clouds of gnats like a hot fog about your head, clustering under the stickiest trees; loved the underwater hover, like a mirroring of the dragonfly hover above, of the sticklebacks, and the occasional glimpse of a bigger fish, or the thought of a bigger fish as the surface of the water gulped like a hiccup, and it must have been a carp, perhaps, taking an insect. Nobody came to fish here, apart from the naughty boys with their home-made means, which
most fish easily evaded. You were supposed to have a licence, according to the notice at the western edge of the Rivelin ponds. But Daniel had never seen anyone fishing seriously here. He liked it—he’d always liked it—because not many people came here. It wasn’t really anything special, but it felt very old, and it was always quiet, so—

“You mean you could take girls here,” Helen said.

“I worry about you,” Daniel said. “I worry about what a cynic you’re becoming.”

“Well, it’s not cynical if it’s true,” Helen said. “And I bet you did bring girls here.”

Daniel thought. “I don’t think I did much,” he said. “If it was for a kiss and a cuddle—”

“A
kiss
and a
cuddle?”

“—if it was for a kiss and a cuddle, I used to take girls more to the crags. It wasn’t so much of a walk from home.”

“It’s lovely here, though,” Helen said. “We’ve nothing like this in Tinstone. Just the moor tops—if you took a girl up there, you’d not have much luck asking her to take her jersey off.”

“Look,” Daniel said, “no one else knows about this …”

And he took Helen’s hand and dived off into the woods to their left. There was no path at all. They could have been going anywhere. They thrashed and plunged through undisturbed plant growth; Helen put her hand on a tree-trunk, and it came away reluctantly, smeared with sap. “This had better be worth it,” she said. The noise of the river behind them, the plunge of the fall over rocks and, above their heads, the song of birds as their huge crashing alarmed them; but when they stopped everything seemed quite still. There was a whoosh ahead, perhaps a couple of hundred yards, the unexpected noise of a car. The woodland was dense and untouched, so close to the Manchester road. “It’s wet, Daniel,” Helen said, but he just held out his hand to help her along. The ferns and grass were moist, and her tights were wet round her ankles as if she’d plunged into the river. But they carried on.

Suddenly the woodland came to an end, and they were at a clearing. There was a building in the middle of the wood. She couldn’t understand why you didn’t see it until you were absolutely on top of it, but it was quite hidden. It was an old, two-storey building, its windows made blank with wood panels that were themselves old and shabby. Its door—wide enough to have been a double door once—was covered with another panel, but hanging half off, and its roof bald and patchy, the joists displayed like the bones of a dead animal under its fur. It
didn’t look like a house; there was a kind of shed to one side, or the remains of one, its roof completely off and open to the elements. The walls of the shed were eroded like the ruins of a medieval castle, as if it had been stripped for masonry or dry-stone walls. The main building, however, was still pretty well whole. There were the remains of two external staircases, leading up to door-sized windows on the upper floor, one at each end, like wrecked fire-escapes.

“I don’t think many people know about this,” Daniel said. “I found it. I used to come here. Not with girls, I just used to come here. Come on.”

They went to the building across the grass-strewn clearing. Under the grass, there were some sort of cobblestones, though they’d been grown over for years, perhaps decades. Daniel slipped through the broken door; Helen followed him.

“It’s some sort of old forge, I found out,” he said. “It went on working till before the war, but no one’s done anything with it since.”

“What’s a forge doing out here?”

“It’s perfect for steel-making,” Daniel said. “Or it would have been once. There’s the forest for firewood—if you look round the back, there’s still a pile of timber rotting, it’s been there fifty years. There’s the river—I reckon there used to be a pond came right up from the river, but it’s dried up and overgrown now. I don’t know how that happens. There’s the road, too. They’d have wanted to build something near a road, for the transport.”

“What—you think they built this because of the Manchester road?”

“It’s old, the Manchester road. It’d have been there long before this was built. It’s only a hundred yards in that direction. Didn’t you hear the car go past?”

“That’s amazing,” Helen said. “Someone must own it.”

“I don’t know who,” Daniel said.

“People own everything,” Helen said.

Inside, there was nothing much to be seen. If there had ever been forges or machinery, it had long been stripped out and taken to be melted down or reused. Though, from the outside, it looked as if it had two storeys, and the wrecked staircases showed that it must have done, there were only the broken-down remnants of a ceiling, mostly joists and rafters, hardly any floorboards, and what might have been a staircase had been efficiently removed, leaving not much more than markings on the wall where the horizontal beams had gone. The sun slashed through the grand ruined space; great diagonal girders of light struck
haphazardly, just as they did through the forest. Whether it was from their entrance, or perhaps its normal state, the airborne dust of forest-eaten ruin was as heavy as a thin brown fog.

Helen walked round the circumference of the building, running her fingers over the lovely texture of the worn brick. “There’s mushrooms growing here,” she said.

“I bet you could eat them,” Daniel said.

“I’ll watch you eat them,” Helen said, “and die soon of the adventure.”

“There’s nothing growing inside, though,” Daniel said. “Have you seen that? The ferns, they’re only growing just inside the door.”

“Why’s that, then?”

“There’s a cellar underneath, a big one,” Daniel said. “You get to it through that archway, over there.”

“I’d be careful,” Helen said. “The floor’s going to collapse if you don’t watch out.”

“It won’t collapse,” Daniel said. “It’s stone and brick, this floor, it’s made to last for ever. It’s only the first floor that was wood. Do you want to see the cellar?”

“You must be joking,” Helen said. “It’ll be dark and full of rats, I’ve no doubt.”

From his pocket, Daniel produced a little torch, smiling. “There’s no rats,” he said. “Or, at least, none I’ve ever seen. There might be a frog or two, they like it down there, but they’re not going to hurt you.”

“Were you planning this?” Helen said. “I’m not one of your girls, you know, you can ask to lie down on your mackintosh in a wet cellar in a derelict building.”

“I told you,” Daniel said. “I never brought any girls here.”

The archway, which looked like a cobwebby niche in the wall, no more, showed itself to be the top of a flight of stone steps. He brushed aside the curtain of wet cobwebs, their makers long gone, and with his torch shining a path down the steps, took her arm.

“I’m not going down there,” Helen said, but she let herself go down with Daniel, step by step, until with a kind of damp crunch under her shoes they reached the bottom. He turned her gently, as if she were the blindfolded birthday girl being taken into her own party—for a second she almost felt that as he swung his torch round, there would be all her friends, and her family, waving balloons and calling, “Surprise!” But there was a huge space there, pillared with brick, twelve feet high.
There must be some other opening; the torch lit up a dense gloom rather than complete blackness.