The Northern Clemency. Philip Hensher
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with offices in a Georgian house in Peace Square, as in a social category above that of a Yorkshire building society.
The beehive had lasted after their wedding, but not long after, the changes of fashion and of her own status dismissing it. And the job at the solicitors’ went, too, Mr Collins having opinions about married women in the office that even then he acknowledged as old-fashioned. She didn’t mind, never having been brought up to stay where she wasn’t wanted, and got another job, actually, in a private boys’ school, a day school, a decade old but housed, like the solicitors’, in a building meant for more domestic and gracious purposes, a mill-owner’s town-house in Broomhill, blackened with soot. A neat line of iron stumps, like orphaned children’s teeth, marked the line where the railings had been before the war. There was no prohibition on married women here, and, indeed, they were employed in preference to virgins, though not through any valuing of motherliness – it was not that sort of school, or that sort of time. The masters wore gowns and often carried, actually carried canes through the corridors; rather, it was presumed that the experience of coition had removed from women any illusions about the male nature. Katherine helped out, her tasks too vague and multiple in that scandalous school to remember, let alone define. They went from sticking plasters on knees and sweeping up leaves to ‘playing the pianoforte’ in assembly and taking the boys to Forge Dam on a local-history expedition, shivering informatively in the laid-on rain. Everything fell under her title, calculated to distinguish not her but the school in the eyes of prospectives, of Headmaster’s Secretary. She was a sort of alternative to the headmaster’s wife, who was a hooting memsahib with the week’s dinners on a list. She’d quite liked that job too; at the end of her day, she could come home and, as never before or since, make Malcolm laugh about it. She had wondered if he wasn’t a little too serious, even as she was marrying him; now he was relaxing, and laughing. It was a happy time. It never occurred to her that stories about terrible schools are always funny to anyone.
The jobs ended with Daniel, and then there was Jane. Maybe, as Jane was going to school for the first time, maybe then Katherine was starting to say to herself the sorts of things that women, even in Sheffield, were saying to themselves in the mid-to-late 1960s, with a sense of what very mid-to-late 1960s things they were to be thinking at all. She might well have been thinking that she could, after all, go back to work in some way. But then Timothy came along – how had that happened? She couldn’t remember having sex after 1962 – but she couldn’t remember buying Malcolm’s socks either, although she must have done. Maybe it had been a part of her unremarkable domestic routine that had gone on automatically. It was a couple of years after Tim had started school before she dared to think of working, and it was only the florist’s opening that put in into her head.
‘Ah,’ the man said, as she came through the door of Reynolds’ that morning. The door was open, the flowers still in boxes, the ranks of gerberas like rows of medals, the chrysanthemums like mop-headed boys, the tulips shocked and upright as corn. The empty vases and buckets were arranged on the shelving display, which ramped up against one wall; the other was covered with a sheet of mirrored glass. ‘Ah – good morning. Good morning,’ he said again, more cheerfully.
‘Are you open?’ Katherine said.
‘Yes, absolutely,’ he said. ‘Just setting everything out. It’s our first morning.’
‘I know,’ Katherine said. ‘We’ve been looking forward to it. Well, you’re getting there steadily.’
‘And you’re our first customer,’ he said. ‘How hilarious. That calls for something, I feel. I don’t know what, exactly. There’s no kettle, so I can’t offer you a cup of tea, I’m afraid. Perhaps I can give you your choice of flowers gratis, as my first customer. We’ve got plenty of those.’
‘No,’ Katherine said. ‘Start as you mean to go on.’
‘That’s all right, then,’ the man said, with a little gesture of relief. ‘Why don’t you sit down? You’re not in a hurry, are you? Sit down and talk to me. I’m just putting the flowers out and then you can choose properly. I’m Nick, by the way.’
‘I’m Katherine,’ Katherine said. ‘Is it just you working here?’
‘Well, at the moment,’ Nick said, lifting a row of yellow gerberas from their box in a single fine movement. ‘I haven’t had time to find an assistant, though of course I’ll be needing one. I suppose I’ll have to advertise and interview and my brother’ll want to have a say, and it all seems a bit…’
Just then Miss Johnson walked past the front window, her green tartan shopping trolley rattling behind her; she peered into the shop and saw Katherine, sitting on the one chair, apparently at ease with a young man struggling with flowers. Her mouth shut sharply. She walked on. She must have been on the point of greeting the new florist, but now she wouldn’t, and Nick would never know he might have been forgiven.
At home, Katherine did not immediately tell anyone that she’d taken a job at the new florist’s in Broomhill. She put the jazz-modern yellow and brown plates, twenty years old, in front of Malcolm, Daniel, Jane and Tim; with oven gloves she put one down for herself. On the dining-table was a red tablecloth. She went back to the kitchen, took off the oven gloves and returned. Nothing was really hers. The plates had been a gift from Malcolm’s mother – a wedding present. She’d chosen it, Malcolm’s mother, as the sort of thing a young couple would like, near on twenty years ago. Now, it looked exactly that: something nobody in particular had ever liked, just some postulated abstract entity of a young couple. The dining-table, another gift or cast-off; a repro of something Edwardian, again Malcolm’s mother’s – ‘Your father liked it,’ she’d said, in a challenging tone, as if Katherine and Malcolm were proposing to get shot of it and not her. Anyway, they’d taken it when Malcolm’s father died and his mother had announced that she’d be moving to a cottage in Derbyshire. Snowed in every winter now, too. Katherine put down the five plates, with chilli con carne on them, a new way to make mince interesting mid-week. Malcolm looked at his, perhaps at the patina of violent orange grease surrounding the mound of meat, then started to eat. Really, only the red tablecloth and the melamine-handled cutlery in this room had been her choice. The rest of it represented agreements, and all of it was potential lumber in Katherine’s mind. And that summed it up. She felt all she’d brought to this family were innumerable and faintly pathetic minor possessions, effortlessly chosen but easily replaced with something similar, or something quite different. The substantive structures of their existence, like the table they ate around every night, had been foisted on her without anyone ever considering that she might like to choose something herself.
She would start work a week later – no point in hanging about, Nick had said, with evident relief. She’d dropped in once or twice since then to talk over her tasks – it wasn’t necessary, Nick said, but she was in Broomhill anyway, as she often was.
‘Here, let me,’ she’d said, on one of her drop-ins, approaching him with opening arms to take a sheaf of sixty yellow roses from him. His lightly bearded face had a suddenly pagan look, a spark of alarm, like an intelligent animal’s.
‘No, no,’ he said, controlling the emotion, looking now amused, boss-like. ‘I can’t let you work yet, not until I start paying you.’
‘Well, I could start properly today,’ Katherine said. ‘You wouldn’t have to pay me the full day. You obviously need help.’
‘I can’t,’ Nick said. ‘I haven’t had a chance to talk it through with my brother. It’s half his money.’
‘Where is he?’ Katherine said.
‘New York,’ Nick said. ‘I’ll mention it at the weekend.’
‘Is he coming over, then?’ Katherine said, treading cautiously. She was inexperienced in lives and brothers like that, New York brothers; she felt in danger of saying something that showed where she was and where she’d seen. What she was.
‘No,’ Nick said. ‘I’ll speak to him on the phone.’
‘Can you do that?’ and ‘That’s an awful expense,’ came to Katherine,