The Northern Clemency. Philip Hensher
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talks about him all the time. She can’t stop herself. It’s like you and horses.’
‘Me and horses? What’re you talking about?’ Anne got up and peered into the mirror, admiring her face, this way and that.
‘It’s like the way, you know, you love horses, you, you’re mad about them, and all the time, it’s horses this, horses that.’
‘I thought you liked horses too,’ Anne said, drawing back a bit, offended. ‘I wouldn’t talk about them if you weren’t just as interested as I am.’
‘I am interested,’ Jane said, feeling that the conversation was getting away from her. ‘But you love horses, you.’
‘Yes, I do,’ Anne said. She sank to her haunches, clasping her knees to her chest like great adult breasts. ‘I’m not saying I don’t.’
‘So you talk about them, don’t you?’
‘If you say so,’ Anne said, not quite convinced.
‘Well, it’s like that with my mum,’ Jane said. ‘Every day it’s “Nick says this, Nick did that, Nick likes ketchup with his chips.”’
‘Everyone likes ketchup with their chips,’ Anne said. ‘That doesn’t prove anything, if you ask me.’
‘Yes,’ Jane said, gathering the logic of her case. ‘Yes, that’s it, though. If everyone likes ketchup on their chips, why’s she bringing up Nick especially? You see what I mean?’
‘You’re daft, you,’ Anne said, ‘I think you’re just romancing. Anyway, you don’t want your mum and dad to split up, do you?’
‘I don’t know,’ Jane said. ‘It’s nothing to do with me.’
‘Who’s this Nick, then?’
‘He’s her boss. She got a job, working in a flower shop. In Broomhill, it is.’
Anne sighed. She was eight months older than Jane: sometimes she took advantage of this difference to make an emphatic point. ‘I would say,’ she said heavily, ‘there’s nothing in it. I’m glad my mum doesn’t have to go out to work.’
‘My mum doesn’t have to either,’ Jane said. ‘She just wants to. I know what. I’m going to go down there one day after school, I want to have a look at him. Do you want to come?’
‘What’ll that prove one way or the other?’
‘Are you going to come?’
‘If you insist,’ Anne said, and then, from downstairs, her mother called something. She rolled her eyes. The call came again. She got up from her squatting position, and impatiently flung open the door. ‘What do you want?’ she shouted rudely.
‘There’s squash, girls,’ the polite voice floated up. ‘And biscuits. I know the sort you like.’
‘We’re busy,’ Anne yelled. ‘We’re talking about Jane’s mum. She’s got a lover.’
There was a short silence downstairs. Jane could feel herself blushing. ‘I wish—’ she said.
‘Oh, I’m sure she’s not, not really,’ Anne’s mum called. ‘There’s squash and biscuits. Shall I bring them up?’
But the idea of going down Broomhill the next afternoon had been agreed on. The next day they had geography last thing; Anne had volunteered the pair of them to put away the Plasticine contour map of Yorkshire the class was making, and the labelled cut-away of the strata of rock underneath a coal-mine. The task had been occupying them for weeks – it was supposed to be ready for Christmas Parents’ Day and they were all sick of it and Miss Barker’s shrill exhortations: ‘I don’t care whether it’s done or not, you’re only showing yourselves up.’ For weeks, as if it were tainting them with the nightmarish horror of its incompletion, there had been a rush to the door as the bell rang. But this evening Anne lingered, tugging at Jane’s skirt as she, like the rest, got up, slinging her bag over her shoulder. Miss Barker had been about to collar someone at random as usual, but, with a mistaken glitter in her eye, she alighted on Jane and Anne, fingered them as dawdlers for the punishment of putting the stuff away. Anne and Jane, they weren’t good girls – they’d already been done for giggling five minutes into one of her lecture-reminiscences, and would have been done worse if Miss Barker had known that Jane had giggled at Anne saying, ‘It’s her wants a lover,’ meaning Miss Barker. So she couldn’t have known that Anne’s dawdling was in aid of volunteering for the task, or at any rate – you wouldn’t want to show Miss Barker that much willing – allowing herself and Jane to be landed with it. Jane thought she might have been consulted – ‘There’s good girls,’ Miss Barker said when they were done, which was enough to make you puke – but she saw the point when they’d finished folding the plans, scraping the mess of the afternoon’s Plasticine off the tables, put the whole almond-smelling bright geologies back into 4B’s geography cupboard, and gone out, fifteen unhurried minutes after the end of school. It was as empty as a weekend glimpse; everyone had gone, swept off in the fifty-one bus. She and Anne shouldered their bags and turned in the other direction, of Broomhill, without having to explain to anyone, and that was a good thing.
All the schools were turning out: the big boys and girls from the George V in their standard black blazers, and the snooty ones, the girls in purple from St Benet’s, where you paid to go, like Sophy next door to Anne, where she claimed you got to learn Russian and, like drippy, bleating Sophy, to produce the horrible sheep-like noise of the oboe too. They were all heading in the same direction, the opposite one to Jane and Anne. Jane felt like a truant, the two of them in their ordinary clothes.
‘Do you think Barker cares?’ Anne said.
‘Cares about what?’ Jane said.
‘About Parents’ Day,’ Anne said. ‘She goes on about it enough.’
‘I reckon she’ll get the sack if it’s not ready,’ Jane said, ‘if it’s not perfect, that geology thing.’
‘I hope she does,’ Anne said. ‘We might get someone who doesn’t—’
‘“When I was in Africa,”’ Jane quoted, a favourite conversational opening of Miss Barker’s, liable to lead to any subject, and they laughed immoderately, clutching their stomachs and saying it three or four times.
‘She made me eat cabbage once,’ Anne said, ‘when she was sitting in the teacher’s place on our table at dinner. I hate cabbage.’
‘She’ll have had to eat worse in Africa,’ Jane said. ‘She’ll not have sympathy for you, being fussy over a plate of cabbage, when you think what she’s had to force down.’
‘Missionaries from a pot,’ Anne said. ‘I dare say.’
‘Worms and grubs,’ Jane said. ‘Toasted over an open fire.’
‘Only like marshmallow,’ Anne said.
‘Not much like,’ Jane said.
‘But cabbage, it’s horrible,’ Anne said. ‘She made me eat it, she said it didn’t taste of much. I think it tastes right horrible.’ Jane agreed, and they went on.
‘“When I was in Africa,”’ Anne quoted again, but she hadn’t thought of how it could go on after that and fell silent. Missionaries, cannibals, and that right funny film in Geography with a black man in a wig like a lawyer’s where they’d laughed and Miss Barker’d turned the lights up to talk in low serious tones about (one of) her disappointments.
There was the Hallam Towers on the left, and on the right, the gloomy ericaceous drive that led up to the blind school – there were dozens of blind children up there: you never saw them. And then the library, and then they were in Broomhill. It was a journey you took with your mum and dad, perhaps; it wasn’t a schoolday journey. So they were a little bit solemn as they turned the corner into Broomhill proper, with its parade of shops, marking not what they passed but what they