The Northern Clemency. Philip Hensher
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the same Greek pillars in front of a library, and no more alluring. Sometimes, the layers of change were manifest on a single site: a men’s boutique, with a psychedelic shop sign in purple, had kept hanging outside the three balls of the pawn-broker who must have preceded it. The changes of the district: Nick started to be aware of them as time passed, as the weather improved and a surprising yellow spurt of, what was it?, crocuses, could that be it?, emerged from a crack in the pavement outside the shop and, hardly less cheering, a pod of mushrooms bubbled up beneath the carpet they’d laid in the lavatory. Became aware of those slower changes as his business took shape. The scoured-smooth emptiness of the hardware shop began to be filled. The plasterwork was finished off, and the Regency striped wallpaper piled up, ready for application; a display unit, rather like an Olympic podium, but with spaces for five rather than three winners, was installed and painted a nice dark maroon; a reproduction desk was brought in at, apparently, Jimmy’s order – he hadn’t shared this decision with Nick. Like other decisions passed up-country by Jimmy – his insistence that the flowers should bear no prices – it added that crucial sense of class to the enterprise.
All that strange period, Nick behaved and thought much more like a client than the instigator of a business. Jimmy had booked him into a hotel while he found somewhere to live, saying he should take his time about it; but Nick had done nothing in that direction. He returned to the Hallam Towers every night, dined richly – after five weeks his waistband was uncomfortable with the lobster sauces and no exercise – and settled down to an early night after his daily phone conversation with Jimmy. After a few weeks, it looked as if he had set up camp within the room, the walls lined with bagged laundry, a short shelf of borrowed thrillers by the bedside.
The workmen knew all about this impermanent existence, returning to their own wives and children after a day spent not asking for Nick’s instructions about anything. So did the hotel staff, and so did Jimmy. ‘Have you got yourself a supplier yet?’ Jimmy said one night.
‘Supplier?’ Nick said, rather thrown by Jimmy’s familiar term.
‘Flower supplier,’ Jimmy said. ‘You been to the market yet?’ There was the sound of Jimmy heavily waiting at the end of the phone.
‘I’m planning to go the day after tomorrow,’ Nick said.
‘You should have gone by now,’ Jimmy said. ‘Important to strike up a relationship. I want it up and running by – what did we agree on?’
‘Two weeks yesterday,’ Nick said.
‘Two weeks yesterday,’ Jimmy said. ‘You think they’ll be done by then?’
‘I would say so,’ Nick said. ‘It looks almost ready now.’
‘Well,’ Jimmy said, ‘this is what you want to do.’
The question of the market hadn’t gone from Nick’s mind, but he’d put it aside as if someone were to deal with it on his behalf. After this conversation with Jimmy, he told the workmen in the shop he wouldn’t be around the next day, and asked the receptionist at the hotel for a four thirty a.m. wake-up call. ‘Hilarious, I know,’ he said dismally.
The flower market was fifty miles away, in a more urbane, less industrial city that could stretch out its lines of supply in all directions into very different places, some more austere even than Sheffield. Nick had had the whole thing arranged for him, and instructions had been passed down. At a layby on the A1, shortly before six, his hands in fingerless red woollen tradesman’s gloves clutched a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich, the hand-drawn map pinned to the bonnet of his little van with an elbow. He knew he would get lost.
But it seemed to work in an all but professional manner, and in only half an hour he was parking outside a grimy Victorian market hall, open to the elements, pillared with flaking green paint over rusting green metal, and everywhere ornamented with idealized brick bouquets, now blackened and snotlike. His laisser-passer was accepted, and he went in.
His breath condensed before him. It seemed early, but he could see that the market had, even now, passed the peak of its exchanging, and men and women were pushing wheeled pallets full of ranked blooms towards him on their way out. The market ways were still banked with flowers but great holes had appeared in them as the marauding buyers had carried off the best. Well, he was not here to buy, not today; and that was a useful commercial lesson to have learnt, he told himself. The buyers, the marauders, were men and women, some genteel-looking, the women in capes and ponchos, the men in Harris tweed coats, like Nick, but others rough boys, carrying off the helpless innocent blooms to smaller, more diverse markets, to sell chrysanths beside meat stalls, greengrocers, fishmongers, cheap clothing stalls, provision merchants.
He walked on until he came to what seemed one of the biggest stalls in the market, its depleted fields of carnations and tulips stretching out like blankets. He stood there, irresolute. The man in charge registered him, shook his head in a knowing way and, as his subordinates smirked at this demonstration of who he was, leant forward to spit richly, the abundant phlegm of a smoker’s early-morning mouth splattering like puke on the floor.
‘Help you?’ the man said.
‘Yes,’ Nick said firmly. ‘I hope so.’ He explained his situation, or some of it: a new flower shop, a need for a regular relationship with a supplier, and – it did no harm – a frank though not exactly explicit acknowledgement that it was all new to him, he hadn’t a clue about what stock to take. Mr William, he said his name was – Nick was pleased with this: it suggested to him an old-established family in the trade, where the long-retired dad in the nursing-home might be the name on the board referred to as Mr Gracechurch, the hard-nosed chief remaining Mr William until his father’s death. Nick addressed him as Mr William in what he hoped was a respectful way at least three times during the conversation. Mr William was serious, helpful – ‘You’re not thinking of buying today, I take it, sir,’ he said. In twenty minutes advice had been given about stock – ‘Though, of course, you’ll come to know your customers PDQ’ – and an agreement made about the days Nick would turn up – a little earlier, Mr William suggested, than he had today. It all seemed quite easy. Nick just hoped he hadn’t made a mistake in choosing his supplier; in fact, he’d hardly chosen him at all. He took what comfort he could from the greetings Mr William threw behind his back at passing florists; a popular and – yes? – respected man around here.
‘One last thing, though,’ Mr William said, as they shook hands. ‘If we’re to do business on a regular like basis, let’s not be getting each other’s names wrong. My name’s Williams, Roy Williams. It’s got an s on the end.’
‘How hilarious,’ Nick said, aghast. ‘Not hilarious, sorry, I didn’t mean – just – sorry,’ he said, stumbling backwards and, for some reason, bowing. The man wasn’t a Gracechurch at all, and though Nick had never heard of the Gracechurch family before half an hour ago, the revelation of Mr William as the acquirer of the guise of Gracechurch made the original owners seem unattainably grand, the present owner tainted for ever with the suspicion of dishonesty, as if Nick had made a mistake not starting twenty years before, and dealing with those imagined excellencies of the fabled Gracechurches. The embarrassing exchange made him, finally, feel the entire fraudulent nature of the enterprise.
He drove off, face burning, and when, after breakfast, a charity shop presented itself with, in the window, a rigid array of donated vases, there was only one thing he could do. He went in and bought the lot. At least I can, he thought, driving away with the hideous clanking load in the back, at least I can – but reassurance wouldn’t come. It would not come, either, when he arrived back in Broomhill and and, in front of all the builders, he had to unload seven unbelievably ugly vases. They had done a good job, the builders, in producing an elegant interior for his shop; they had to see how ugly these vases were. But they said nothing.
It was to this state of concentrated hopelessness that Katherine presented herself. Until then he hadn’t thought of taking on an assistant but, of course, shops had them. It was easy for him to understand why he’d taken her on: she had come through the door and, immediately, reassuringly, he had seen someone who was projecting an idea of herself with even less competence than Nick did. She