The Northern Clemency. Philip Hensher
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Malcolm’s views.
‘Oh, I know,’ Nick said. ‘Ghastly. I did it for five years, and by the end of it, I was a sort of expert on this one tiny corner of the law. I won’t bore you with the details – it was something to do with industrial-property law. It came up all the time, and the answer was always the same, so whenever anyone found themselves in this one sticky situation, they’d be recommended to come to Oldman’s, who had an expert in the subject, meaning me, and I’d give them the same answer I’d given someone else the month before. And they’d pay some enormous fee, and I’d go home to my lovely flat in Little Venice – charming, you know, but quite a stink by the end of a hot summer – and have deep existentialist thoughts about the nature of existence. Well, after five years, I was reading Kierkegaard, not quite in the office, but nearly.’
A lot of this was obscure to Katherine. ‘I know what you mean,’ she said.
‘But in the end it was my dear old aunty Joan who came to the rescue. She died and left me a chunk of her money. I suppose she was still thinking of me as a nice little boy with perfect manners and curly blond hair and a velvet suit at tea on Sundays.’
‘Did you have curly blond hair?’ Katherine said. ‘How sweet.’ She looked, unable to help herself, at Nick’s hair now: tousled but, yes, curly, blond.
‘Perhaps not the velvet suit,’ Nick said. ‘My father, of course, was furious – he’s a lawyer too, great big house in Barnes, wanted us to follow in his footsteps, but I thought, One money-making lawyer’s enough. I’m going to sell the flat in Little Venice, take Aunty Joan’s money and go –’ he pulled a face and threw his hands up in mock horror ‘– into trade. Bugger.’
‘I could have told you that would happen if you didn’t put the coffee down first,’ Katherine said tranquilly.
‘It’s gone everywhere. Where’s that cloth?’
‘By the sink, where it should be. And your brother?’
‘Oh, Jimmy? Well, he was tickled by the idea, and I dare say he wanted to annoy the old man, too, so he put some money in. He just wants a finger in the pie. He was always like that, even when we were little boys, wanted to establish the rules of the game himself before we started playing.’
‘And your mother?’ Katherine said.
‘She died,’ Nick said. ‘Years ago.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Katherine said.
‘It was years ago,’ Nick said.
He was not one to accept sympathy, she found out. There were a couple of other incidents when, over the flowers and a cup of coffee in the morning, she tried to offer sympathy, and was rebuffed, first with surprise and then with faint amusement, as if his predicament were more of a shared joke than anything else. She had the impression, for instance, that his relationship with his father was difficult and oppressive, a Marxist nightmare of exploitation and liberation; Katherine had little idea of what Little Venice and Barnes might mean. ‘He’s not as bad as all that,’ Nick said. ‘He’s quite looking forward to coming up some weekend, actually, to see the shop. My brother said he said, “Well, at least someone in the family’s going to be making some money in an honest way,” as if I was going into the manufacture of – I don’t know – steel things, whatever they make in Sheffield.’
‘How hilarious,’ Katherine said. It was something Nick said. And the discovery of Nick’s response to sympathy there, or over his dead mother or, another instance, over a faintly outlined tale of unsuccessful love, was only one of several things she learnt about him. She was mastering the subject of Nick in pieces, from his favourite biscuit to the envisaged beauty of his future life, and she rehearsed it to herself on the daily bus ride home, on the fifty-one, as if it were her forthcoming specialist subject on Mastermind. Rehearsed it, too, in front of her family over dinner each night.
Jane could see that her mother was making a mistake with this. The rhythms of their day had been firmly established: she and Timothy would get on the same bus, the fifty-one, her with her friends and he with his friend, Antony, who lived just down the road. Two stops after, Daniel would get on, his school tie pulled down, a huge fat knot on his chest and just an inch or two of tie poking out, his black sports bag slung round his shoulders – she’d be getting on there next year, when she went to Flint. They ignored each other, Daniel with his noisy friends talking smut or football noisily, evicting the kids who didn’t know better than to bag the back seat on the top deck. It was only when they were walking down the muddy track after they’d got off the bus at the top of the road that they coagulated, usually after Daniel had cast a few showy insults their way. But then they’d be home, and there would be Mother, too, having started cooking dinner, the house bright and tidy. They all had keys, even Tim, but they hadn’t often used them.
That had changed, and now, when they got home, they opened up the house themselves, and it was grey and preserved from the morning, the breakfast things still in the sink, like an abandoned catastrophe. At first they were bewildered, at a loss, then afternoon television, children’s television, rose up like an appalling colour possibility; the telephone, too, which they fought over like rats. And there was, too, the possibility of bickering, always there but never quite bursting out in this way. Bickering: it was mostly tormenting poor Timothy, who nevertheless hardly seemed to suffer, just to accept leadenly the complex feints of Jane and Daniel’s mockery. Too often, even Jane thought, after a few weeks of her mother’s new job, as Katherine returned, towards six, she must have been greeted with three lined-up children, two faces sweetly composed, hands behind their backs, a third’s red and recently washed with a thoroughness surely slightly suspicious.
But if Katherine was suspicious, she did not show it, and her ‘I wish you two would leave Timothy alone’ survived – survived for years, in fact – only in their private exchanges, like a parrot-learnt and comic phrase from a school language that survives fossilized into adulthood when all possibility of expansion into grammatical expression has disappeared. Something decisive had changed when, a few weeks in, their mother came through the door, a little tousled but with a careless glow to her beyond what the weather could bestow, to be greeted with exactly this butter/mouth tableau, and said only, ‘How hilarious.’ A phrase Jane knew to be a possible expression but had never heard from her mother before and, reading its origins correctly, found there were more things to blush over than shame at having given your younger brother a Chinese burn while the elder sat on his chest.
But life was quickly full of such embarrassments. She wondered her father was not touched by it. Jane had learnt a lesson in behaviour from Daniel. That year, there had been a new girl at school. There were Indians in Sheffield, you saw them often in town, but they were poor and lost-looking and Ajanta was not like that.
‘My father,’ she said, on her first morning, ‘is a professor at the university.’ She said that, just going up to them in the playground at the first break, not waiting to be invited or anything. They’d been about to play a round of Witches and Fairies, but the plan evaporated. Anyway, they all felt a bit too old for that.
‘Where are you from?’ Anne, always the quickest to nose, said.
‘Bombay, originally,’ Ajanta said, ‘but we’ve been in America the last three years.’
‘Bombay,’ Anne said. ‘Where’s that when it’s at home?’
‘It’s a city,’ Ajanta had said, not put off, ‘in the south of India. Have you heard of India?’
‘Have you got brothers and sisters?’ Jane found herself asking.
‘Yes,’ Ajanta said. ‘I’ve got a sister. She’s going to Flint – is that what it’s called? And there’s my parents and Meena.’
‘Who’s Meena?’ Anne said deridingly, trying still to recoup some credit.
‘She’s my nurse,’ Ajanta said.
‘Your nurse? Are you ill or summat?’
‘No,’ Ajanta said. ‘You must know the use of the word