The Northern Clemency (79 page)

“Let’s give it a go,” Francis said, kneeling with the tub, and taking a teaspoonful of spread. He took the cat’s front right paw, and, with a finger, smeared it over the pink pads. The cat pulled the paw back, and tried to lick it; but Francis took the other, and, after a short tussle in which both of them were trying to do quite incompatible things, Samson gave up and let the same thing happen to his left front paw.

“He’s not going to walk butter into the carpets, is he?” Bernie said. “Hell of a mess to get out.”

“No, look, he’s licking himself clean,” Francis said. “And after that, he’s supposed to settle down.”

It appeared to be working. Samson finished with his paws, and then gave himself a thorough wash from top to bottom. The three watched; Samson ignored them.

“We ought to leave him in peace,” Alice said. “It doesn’t seem very polite to watch.”

“He’s all right,” Francis said. “He doesn’t care. Look, he can reach everything with his tongue apart from bits of his face.”

“That’s a useful talent,” Bernie said.

“I suppose so,” Francis said, and there was that lack again; it was a little like talking to someone who couldn’t understand jokes. The three of them seemed mesmerized by the cat, and when he’d finished his bath, and set off to find out about the house, they followed him into first the kitchen, then the sitting room, watching him prowl the margins. They only let him go off on his own when he went out again to map the rest of the house.

“He can’t get out, can he?” Francis said.

“I don’t think so,” Alice said. “I don’t want to be rude, love, but how long are you here for? I’m only thinking about meals.”

“I’ve got to go back this afternoon,” Francis said. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh,” Alice said; she’d got a leg of lamb in for the evening meal. She couldn’t understand the overnight bag.

“I got a really cheap flight to Rome,” Francis said, “but it leaves at four thirty in the morning, tonight. It would have been twice the price otherwise. I’ve got to get back and get packed.”

“That’s a shame,” Bernie said heartily. “We haven’t seen you since Christmas.”

“Can you stay a bit longer when you get back?” Alice said. “I mean, when you come to pick up Samson?”

“That’d be nice,” Francis said. “I don’t see why not.”

“Never mind the cat,” Bernie said. “I reckon it’s you we want to put butter—we want to put butter on your paws, make you feel at home again. It’s always your home.”

But his voice dropped as if he had been trapped into saying something serious. Disconcertingly, Francis put out his long pink tongue and pretended to start licking the palm of his hand. “I know,” he said sadly, and Alice couldn’t help looking about her at the house: the new Turkish rug, the old wood and glass coffee-table, the glass-domed preserved flowers on the shelf and the other knick-knacks, the new pair of sofas, which had replaced the three-piece suite, and Bernie’s ancient comfortable high chair he swore he couldn’t do without, and the ten-year-old television that couldn’t help being at the focal point of the room, the Liberty brown-and-purple curtains that had been there ever since they’d moved in. Like Francis, she knew; it seemed to be her home, too.

He stayed, at least, for lunch—she wished she’d known, it was a bit of a scant affair of shop-bought stuffed pasta and shop-bought sauce with a salad thrown together on the side. She’d got used, too, to cooking for herself and Bernie, and had somehow forgotten that Francis was six foot eight, and ate about twice as much as anyone else you could think of. Bernie insisted on driving Francis to the station, and she’d only just started doing the washing-up when he returned.

“That cat’s watching you,” Bernie said, coming through the front door.

“I haven’t seen it since it arrived,” Alice said. “Where is it?”

“Here on the stairs,” Bernie said. “He’s watching you do the washing-up.”

It was true: it was watching her from a distance and through the kitchen door, but very intently. It was on a step, too, which was not much below her own eye level.

“Daft thing,” Bernie said. “Do you know something? Francis didn’t say goodbye to the cat.”

“There’s not a lot of point in saying goodbye to a cat,” Alice said.

“You’d have thought, though,” Bernie said. “I’m going to let it out into the garden. It seems settled enough.”

He went through the dining room, making little kissing noises as he went, and into the utility room. Alice stopped her washing-up, and turned to see what the cat was doing. As soon as she looked directly at it, it looked away, as if embarrassed, and started washing itself energetically. From the utility room, Bernie’s encouraging smacking and bussing could be heard and, after a cursory wash, for display purposes, the cat lowered itself with unnecessary care from one step to another, slinking into the dining room. Alice followed at a few feet; it walked into the utility room, dropping itself after a short hesitation off the single deep step, and inspected Bernie, standing by the open door to the back garden. The cat looked Bernie up and down, and thoughtfully sauntered to the door. It paused; something seemed to stiffen in its frame; it gave a tiny sneeze and, quickly, another, then turned and ran back into the house.

“Ah,” Bernie said. “I forgot. The garden’s about half an inch thick in chilli powder.”

That hadn’t occurred to Alice, either. “At least we’ve found—” she said. She was about to say that finally they’d discovered one cat the deterrent worked on, but it was as if something, at just that moment, had hit her from behind on the head. She staggered.

“What is it?” Bernie said.

“Ah—” Alice said. A brilliant horrible light was exploding in her eyes, and behind them, some shock of pain. “Bernie—”

He was turning to her, and, starting, almost to run—and Bernie never ran—and she was holding out her arms in order not to be anything but caught when she—

It was a long journey back. Francis hadn’t thought to check the train times to London—he’d vaguely thought they ran every hour, and they did, apart from the occasional longer gap. As it happened, his dad dropped him off at the station—“Don’t wait,” he said. “I’ll be fine, I’ll see you in a week”—just after a train had gone, and another not due until a quarter to six. He filled the time as best he could with a copy of
Gramophone
magazine, which, he realized after a few dimly familiar pages, he’d read already, and a cup of coffee in the station café.

It was a busy train, and he had to share a table with three noisy women who were heading down to London to take in a show, whose festivities were beginning here; they had two bottles of wine with them, which they invited Francis to share, laughing at him quite unkindly when he refused, and when, after Leicester, that ran out, they raucously asked him to pop along to the buffet to get them some more. “Don’t fret,” one said, pretending to be outraged, “it’s not like we won’t give you the money.” He was appalled at the thought that anyone around them might think he was with them, and appalled at their broad and wrong ideas of the pleasures of London. It was
Phantom
they were going to see; Francis had never seen a London musical in his life.

The tube train fell into that lull between the rush-hour and chucking-out time; most people who were going out would already have gone out, and it was quiet. Opposite were two Middle Eastern students, talking in their gurgling labial language, smelling of cloves in a way that made Francis feel slightly sick. He remembered he had no food in the house; he’d been using things up before his Rome trip, and had come to the end of everything a day early. He’d have to stop at the corner shop to buy something, or—that would be easier—pick up a chicken kebab from Mo’s takeaway at the end of the road. The best the corner shop could do was ready-stuffed pasta, and he’d had that for lunch.

The house was dark—the housemates downstairs were always out on a Friday night. As Francis was fumbling with his keys, he could hear the phone ringing. He didn’t bother hurrying, it would certainly be for one of the housemates, and as he let himself in, the greasy bundle warm in his hands, it stopped before he could turn the light on. He went upstairs, put the kebab on a plate, poured himself a glass of water, and put the little television in the corner on, quite indifferent to whatever the programme or the channel was. He’d wait to pack his bags until after he’d finished eating—he couldn’t really say “after dinner.” It wouldn’t take long. He could have read his guidebook about Rome, but he had a feeling that over the next week, he’d be filling in a few hours alone in his hotel room by reading it in detail, and there was no reason to start on that early. The phone started ringing again; Francis ignored it.

He finished his plate of food, and went to wash it and his hands. Then he started to pack. He suddenly thought that he didn’t know what the weather was like in Rome at the moment. He had thrown out all the newspapers when he’d got home from work the day before—they carried
information about the weather in foreign cities. In the end, he packed a series of short-sleeved shirts and lightweight trousers—all his trousers were grey or beige, and drip-dry, so they would do for relative heat. He put in a pair of thin sweaters—even if it was still warm over there, he’d heard it could be cold in the evening. Then, spending more time thinking about this than about any other, he went over to his bookshelves and pulled out one, then a second fat Russian novel. Most of the books on the shelves were old ones, favourites from his childhood,
Uncle
and
Professor Branestawm
and
Midnite
. But others were fat books he’d read, had always meant to read, had been saying to himself so long he had read them that he believed they had actually been read. He packed
The Idiot;
he packed
Dead Souls
. Finally, with a quick look round the room, he went to the bottom drawer of his desk, on top of which an Amstrad computer sat stolidly, its start-up disk hanging from the slot like a tongue. Francis took out the half-finished bulk of his own book, eight inches thick, an A4 notebook with black binding and three green Pentel pens. He’d always used those Pentel pens; he liked the flow of the ink-soaked ball under pressure.

The book was the third novel Francis had written. He had sent the first out; he had sent the second out; he rather thought he would finish this one and put it back into his drawer.

The telephone started ringing again. Francis looked at his watch; it was past eleven o’clock. If he was going to get even two hours’ sleep, he would have to go to bed soon. They’d been phoning every half an hour since he got in. It was completely unreasonable. They’d probably go on phoning and preventing him sleeping, too; or, if they stopped phoning, he would probably be lying awake wondering whether it had been someone phoning for him with an important message. By the time he had thought half of this, he was down the stairs, sure he was going to reach it just as they rang off.

“Hello?” Francis said. There was some ambient noise at the other end of the phone, and the clunk of a payphone. “Hello?”

“Francis,” the voice said. “Thank God.”

It sounded quite unlike his father—a broken and absent voice—and in a second it went on. Francis could not understand what it was saying. He had been so clear in his mind that it would be one of the lodgers’ idiot friends, calling repeatedly from some pub on Balham High Street that he couldn’t for half a minute quite understand what it was that his father was saying, or understand that it was his father talking.

Still, he must have understood something, since he found that he had, after all, said, “I’ll come up as soon as I can.” It was his own voice, sounding still in the quiet and dim-lit hallway of the house that seemed to break the spell, and, as if in reverse, he heard what his father had been saying.

“Your mother’s had a brain haemorrhage—she’s in a coma—she’s in the hospital, in the Northern General. The doctors say it’s too early to—”

And some terrible gulping breaths. He had been phoning all evening—with a sort of grisly relic of paternal concern Bernie had started asking whether Francis had had a reasonable trip back, thinking perhaps it had taken him until now to get home, and worrying about the state of public transport in London rather than his more immediate concerns. Perhaps he had gone on ringing without any expectation that the telephone would be answered, and had not been prepared to have to tell anyone yet what he would soon have to tell to so many people—Francis thought of the masses of people at his retirement party, six months before. In any case, he had started, and in a few moments had found himself gulping.

“I’ve looked at the trains,” he said, pulling himself together. You could hear the noise in the background, some sort of lazy yowling call between nurses ending their shifts. “The last train to Sheffield tonight’s gone, the first one in the morning’s at quarter to six. You don’t need to get that, you can come later in the morning. You will come?” he added in a rush, remembering perhaps that Francis had been going to Rome, remembering perhaps what Francis, with a shudder, thought, that he’d not left the address or phone number of his hotel there with them, that he might not have known any of this for a week, and what might happen in a week.

“Yes,” Francis said. “I’ll come.”

He went upstairs and sat in his room. A stretch of time elapsed; Francis found that he could not sit, but kept having to rise and walk from one room to another, pacing. Outside, in the street, it grew quiet. Francis picked up a book, set it down. All at once he thought of Sandra; he worked out the time difference, and saw that it was lunchtime there—whether Friday lunchtime or Saturday lunchtime, he couldn’t work out. His brain would just not go in that particular direction. He switched on his Amstrad computer; it hummed, and in a moment he pushed the programming disk in. At this point, he usually went to make a cup of coffee, coming back to find the computer ready to go,
but now he just sat there and listened to it run through its cacophonic recitation. He could almost sing along with it. The list of options came up, sour green on black—if you worked too long on the computer, you could look away and see your work printed, purple against a white wall. He replaced the disk with another, and opened up the file with all his addresses on it. He printed out the document, noisily—he had never quite worked out how to print anything but a whole document—took the sheet with Sandra’s address and telephone number on it, and went downstairs. He couldn’t remember ever having phoned her in Australia of his own accord.