The Northern Clemency (78 page)

“I’m not supposed to,” he said, “but I’ve got a good idea.”

Franks was on the stage now, bringing his wrists together in the action of an orchestral conductor, and by stages the noise in the room subsided. He began to speak; Alice was pleased to see that, though he’d obviously thought what to say, he’d not found it necessary to bring notes to refer to. There were some office jokes about Bernie’s manners—“We may feel sorry about Bernie leaving us,” he said, “but Davina’s swear box, which Bernie’s sole efforts have kept so full over the years, is completely bereft. No one else could possibly have kept it so busy.” There was a ripple of laughter, even from the people who didn’t know what Bernie was like at work; and “busy” didn’t seem the right word, anyway. He was a good speaker, though; if all the stories he told about Bernie were familiar to Alice, and to most people there, he told them as well as Bernie did. And Bernie, on this telling, sounded like the man who had kept the whole thing on the road. That couldn’t be true, and Franks’s speech was just threatening to get too serious, too heartfelt, too much a history of the electricity industry and its tribulations over the last thirty years when he cut short the beginnings of his audience’s murmurings and went into the last straight. She was proud of him; there was no reason not to be; and she was almost surprised when suddenly her own name came up. What had she done? She’d supported him—“And we who only worked with him can guess at the patience that must have taken over the years.” That was what was to be said about her life; and Franks, in a last gracious sentence or two,
handed the gilded valve to Bernie and, with a pat on the back that only looked slightly like a push, handed Bernie over to Alice for good.

It was a successful party; everyone admired and commented on the Japanese food, and she said hello to more people in one evening, probably, than she had ever done in her life. She kept glimpsing the most unlikely people in conversation with each other, and seeming to get on. Only once was there any kind of awkwardness: passing one group, towards the end, she heard a woman’s voice saying, “Not that you give a toss.”

She looked: it was Daniel Glover’s girlfriend, Helen. She was talking to Mr. Franks and his wife.

“That’s a bit harsh,” Simon Franks was saying.

“All I know is, my dad and everyone he worked with, they crippled themselves, out on strike for a year, and if anyone, anyone at all, had come out in support of the miners—”

“It was our job, young lady,” Simon said, in his most insufferable way, “to keep the lights on in this country. I’m happy to say that our workers understood that, from beginning to end of the crisis.”

“All I’m saying is—” Helen said, but Alice slipped away. It was horrible, the sight of anyone making a spectacle of themselves.

The gilded valve, without either of them discussing it, went on the wall in the spare bedroom where nobody went, and for the first couple of weeks Bernie kept himself busy. A surprising number of people wrote to say how much they’d enjoyed the party and, once he’d worked out how to use his new computer—that took a few days, it having been Davina’s responsibility at the Electric—Bernie enjoyed writing back to them. Even with his near-total incapacity to type, though, that task was eventually done. And then what?

“Where are you off to?” Bernie said, coming out of the sitting room, the newspaper hanging from his hand. He had heard her opening the cloakroom door and, twisting round in his armchair, had seen her putting on her coat. It was six weeks or so after he had retired.

“Oh, just out,” Alice said. She waited where she was. She rather wanted to make Bernie go through everything, just once, so that she could tell him to stop it.

Bernie ruminated. It was perfectly clear to Alice what was going through his mind; he was telling himself not to ask if he could come too, like a small boy. Bernie could understand that much.

“If you’re going to town—” he said eventually.

“No, Bernie, I’m not going to town,” Alice said. She wasn’t going
anywhere so very special or secret; she wasn’t going to carry on accounting for every one of her movements, and she waited again.

“OK,” Bernie said. He still wanted to come, with his newspaper dangling pathetically from his hand. “When will you be back?”

“Bernie, love,” Alice said, and she took the opportunity. Leading him back into the sitting room, placing him back in his chair and sitting herself down, still in her coat, she explained perfectly kindly that, all in all, the only way you could possibly live from this point onwards was with some degree of independence. “I won’t ask you where you’re going all the time, and you shouldn’t ask me where I’m going,” she said.

“It’s not much to ask,” Bernie said.

“No, it’s not,” Alice said, “but if nothing else, it’s nice to have something to tell each other in the evenings, and if we go everywhere together, do everything together, explain everything in advance, we won’t have that. All right?”

Bernie didn’t see, not really, but she left him there. It seemed harsh, even cruel, but Alice could see that if she didn’t do exactly this, she would very soon find herself responsible for finding things to fill Bernie’s life, as well as her own. She saw herself bringing him jigsaw puzzles to do, like an invalid. Not for the first time, Alice reflected that the conditions women existed under were apt to strike men like the cruel imposition of suffering, and she remembered how very bad Bernie had always been at coping with any kind of illness.

Bernie made an effort, and improved a little. He remembered not to ask her where she was going all the time, and contrived a few activities of his own. He started talking about things he might conceivably do in the future, as if reminding himself that, after all, he did have a future. “One of these days,” he’d begin, and though they were mostly unimaginable—Bernie writing a book, or doing a degree at the Open University—Alice thought that showed willingness. Some of the real activities they did together were his idea: they had a regular afternoon at the cinema, and often drove out to see some historic sight, some country house. Alice quite enjoyed the films, and even the country outings. She let him in, too, on a couple of her own activities, and together they experimented with steadily more stringent ways to keep the neighbourhood cats off their lawn. He cancelled the delivery of the paper, and instead made a point of walking to the newsagent’s every day. At first, he was gone only thirty or forty minutes or so; and then, to Alice’s curiosity, he started being gone two hours, even until
lunchtime. He would come back with a cryptic smile and, they’d made an agreement, she wouldn’t enquire. In time, she discovered, not from Bernie, that he’d taken to dropping in on one of four or five acquaintances, housewives living on the way to the shops, and nattering over a cup of coffee. It took a weight off Alice’s mind.

“Nothing much,” she heard Bernie saying once, on the telephone to Francis. They spoke every week, and it broke her heart to hear Bernie say, with every attempt at cheerfulness, that they’d done nothing much in the last seven days. Bernie was filling his time as best he could, being cheerful about it, and it seemed to be her who was forced by his retirement to wonder what, if anything, her life had ever consisted of. Nothing much. Bernie went uncomplainingly through the motions of what, after all, had been her daily existence, and for him, painfully obviously, the emptiness of it was nearly unendurable. Perhaps it ought to have been so for her. What he took pleasure in—she had never seen this so clearly, and at first she could hardly credit it—was her own constant company, and he hurried to share small things with her, saved stories and cartoons from the newspaper to show her. If he was developing an Arbuthnot-like avidness about the most local and minute events, it was only for her sake. It was exhausting to see how much he lit up when she came through the front door.

For Alice, her worry about Bernie—and she had never worried about Bernie—added itself to her long-standing worry about poor Francis, and even to her worry about whatever might be happening to Sandra, Alexandra, Alex in Australia. Francis, who had seemed such a clever child, had a life that no one could have wanted, and there was something about it she could not understand: he had never had a girlfriend, and though she had tried to train herself into thinking he must be gay, that seemed false too. There simply seemed some kind of blankness there, some kind of puzzled lack where everyone else had, surely, something. She worried steadily about them all, individually, and in time the individual worries coalesced, united, turned on her and made her ask what, in fact, she had done to the three of them. She felt herself growing old, exhausted, and she could not help what occupied her mind.

It was something, at least, when Francis told her he’d got himself a cat, and when, a few months later, he announced he was going on holiday to Rome, it was an encouragement to her. She remembered, long ago, when the two of them were children, when they’d first moved up from London, how much she had worried about whether either of
them would settle in, make friends, and how much comfort she had drawn from even very small signs, even the mention of a name by one of them. Of course, she had been worrying then about nothing. Children settled in and made friends easily enough. On the other hand, in feeling relieved over Francis at thirty getting himself a cat, or taking a holiday, she was admitting there was something to worry about. She wished she knew what it was.

It was, however, mostly selfishness that made her offer to come down to pick up the cat. Alice hadn’t been to London in years. She hadn’t any way of making the offer, however, other than in terms of being helpful, and Francis refused it as soon as she came out with it. It might have been nice. If only Francis had said he’d think about it for a day before deciding that he’d come up, she’d have had a day of thinking where she might go, what she might do; as it was, not only the trip but the smaller pleasure of anticipation was taken away from her. He certainly meant well, though.

In the same spirit of sparing them any trouble, he turned up on a Friday morning without announcing himself, catching a taxi from the station. Alice had heard the guttural metallic rattle of a taxi in the road, and gone to the kitchen window to see. “Francis is here,” she called. She watched him untangle himself from the back seat, setting down an overnight bag, a plastic bag from a supermarket and a black cat-box on the pavement, patting his pockets and finally paying the driver. He’d always had difficulty finding clothes his size, and he was wearing all grey and beige. If his habit of carrying his stuff round in old plastic bags was the habit of a schoolboy, his clothes were the clothes of someone thirty years older. His padded beige anorak on its own could make you weep. She went to let him in.

“You could have phoned,” she said, as he bent down to kiss her.

“There was no need,” he said. “I can perfectly well get a taxi. You all right, Dad?”

He shook Bernie’s hand; there was some kind of agreement between them that they wouldn’t kiss, and they had settled on this when they met and when they said goodbye.

“I don’t know when you’re going to learn to drive,” Bernie said.

“There’s not a lot of point keeping a car in London,” Francis said. “And it’s no trouble, getting a train up here. It must be a lot faster than driving, and you can read on the way, too.”

“There’s something in that,” Bernie said. “Well, come in. Is this him, then?”

They shut the door, and Francis bent down to open the cage. There was a glint inside as the cat looked at them, withdrawn into the far corner of the box.

“He’ll come out in his own time,” Francis said. “Here’s his litter tray and some fresh litter for it.” He handed over the plastic bag. “There’s some food there as well. You can put it in the kitchen, he’s quite clean. Have you got any butter?”

“Any butter? What for?”

“It’s an old trick,” Francis said. “To make him feel at home. A friend of mine, she knows all about cats, she said you’ve got to do this straight away. You smear some butter on their front paws as soon as they get to a new place, a place they’ll be staying, and once they’ve licked the butter off, they feel much more at home.”

“Do we want him to feel at home?” Alice said. “I’ve never had a cat to look after before.”

“They’ve got to feel at home, apparently,” Francis said. “If they don’t, they get confused, they start wandering off, trying to find somewhere they know and then they never come back.”

“I don’t think he’s in the mood to wander anywhere,” Bernie said, peering in. “I don’t think he has any intention of coming out.”

“It’s got to be butter, has it?” Alice said, going into the kitchen. “We mostly eat spread nowadays.”

“I don’t think it makes any difference,” Francis said. “How can you eat that stuff?”

“You get used to it,” Bernie said. “I didn’t much like it at first. The doctor told your mother to get her blood pressure down, so we’ve switched to all sorts of things. Oily fish, twice a week.”

“Nothing serious?” Francis said.

“Oh, no,” Alice said. “It just comes with old age. Everyone we know’s had to give up butter and cream, they talk about nothing else.”

“You’re not old,” Francis said, taking the box of yellow spread and the teaspoon from his mother. Perhaps he meant to banter, but in that case it came out wrong; he looked and sounded quite anxiously concerned. He had always been the sort of small boy you couldn’t tease or banter with; he’d always taken everything with a fearful literalness. And Alice remembered that when you knew and lived with someone for years, they went on looking exactly the same to you, never seeming to change. Bernie was just as he had ever been; and she probably seemed just the same to him and to Francis. “I hope this works.”

Choosing his own moment, the cat came to the brink of the cage, its nose and whiskers venturing outside. It took one step, another, not appearing to look about it or register Francis’s presumably familiar presence. “What a pretty boy,” Alice said encouragingly, but in fact there was something slightly skewed about the animal’s handsomeness, its face coming to a point and not quite symmetrical, one eye a little higher than the other. Its ears, too, pricked up and rotating now like radar receivers, were absurdly large for its angular little head, as if, like an adolescent boy, some spurt of growth had inflated only one of its features, and was waiting for the rest to catch up. “What a lovely glossy coat he’s got,” she said, more honestly.