The Northern Clemency. Philip Hensher
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whinnyingly upwards, crested the brow of the hill, and there before them, expected in advance and announced on its appearance, was the Surprise View, a valley opening up idyllically; the only surprise, ever, was if the weather had cleared or condensed on that side of the hill, and they came out of or into low-lying cloud, the view revealing itself or a dense white obscurity descending on the car. The weather today was clear; piles of clouds, seeming less vast than the purple expanse of the moors.
‘I thought we’d go to Chatsworth,’ her dad said, a recognized outing. That was all he said, hardly waiting or seeming to expect any response or excited agreement. But all the way her mother kept up a running commentary, and the texture of it was by now familiar, unvarying. She offered one posh superlative to the landscape after another, comments not exactly hers. And she could not keep off the subject of Nick. They might have been driving through the native country of someone dear to them, a figure of historical renown, and she, speculatively, saying what this meant or might be supposed to mean to Nick; Nick; Nick.
Jane sat there, trying not to listen. No one interrupted. And her father? Well, perhaps he was letting her off the leash in giving her excited voice its indulgence, as if to let her hear herself and shame her out of what, for weeks now, she had been unable to stop saying.
In half an hour, they were through a further gated border, and inside the huge estates of the duke. Just outside was a village, a peculiarly picturesque river running through it and, conspicuously, a pub of some pretensions. Nick had been there; he said the food was exceptional, to match anything one might find in London. Jane thought it was a servile, ugly village, ugly with flowerbeds. Once through the gates the quality of the country changed, not to lawn, exactly, but to well-tended grazing land, prettily organized copses and views. The sheep were whiter, the grazing cows like an illustration on a can of evaporated milk, the river, of a glassy clarity, wending its elegantly serpentine way between trimmed banks. Nick thought it one of the most beautifully landscaped estates in the country, if not the world; he had been knocked out by the beauty of Chatsworth, and liked often to come over here. Perhaps even today.
It was not that she disagreed with it, though the estate had a colossal smooth elegance that was not, Jane thought, exactly right here in the north; it was calculated as precisely as that estate village in orange brick. She thought the whole thing beautiful too, and was pained by how Nick’s views, filtered through her mother’s mesmerized infatuation, spurred her on to indignant silent disagreement. She wanted, rather, a kind of beauty that required no one to say, ‘How beautiful,’ and that, she was convinced, was what Chatsworth had: it spoke to the sort of mind that regarded the epithets of beauty and loveliness with shy scorn. And, most of all, there was the great house, rushing now into view: the encrusted palace, the dense magic of its gardens and beyond, a landing-strip of water with a single fierce jet, forty feet high. Seen from the far side of the house, it flung a firm trunk of water upwards, and at the top the mild wind seemed to carry it away like a willow’s foliage.
If Derbyshire had failed, Chatsworth did the trick. Katherine’s conversation dribbled to a halt, her gesturing hands froze in mid-air, then fell to her lap. Her head, which had been turning from her husband to her children in the back, now turned to the great house. Malcolm’s head and shoulders seemed to relax, his eyes no longer flickering tensely in and out of the rear mirror. They drove into the car park, gravel splashing under the tyres, chickens, exuberant as a flowering bush, scattering. He bought a parking ticket through the window. They all got out; locked the doors.
‘You know,’ her dad said, in his mildest voice, ‘that village in the park? Edensor, it’s called, spelt E-D-E-N, there’s an interesting story about that. One of the dukes, a hundred years ago, he wanted to build a model village on the estate for his high-class workers, as you’d call them, the important people, like the chief housekeeper, maybe, the gamekeeper or the head gardener, so he asked an architect to come up with plans for the houses, and the architect, he was nervous and produced a range of ideas, different houses, so that the duke could choose the style he wanted and then they could go with that one. But whether the duke didn’t understand –’ they were walking now into the main hall of the palace, stout ladies sitting under a fat, gaudy allegory on the ceiling ‘– or whether he liked them all about the same, he just said, “I’ll have those, all of them,” and so every house in the village, it’s in a different style. Two adults and three children, please. Of course, I’m not myself all that interested in the house, it’s the garden I like best, but you children, it’ll be interesting for you to see the house, you’ll enjoy it.’
They’d been into the house on school trips and on a family outing – years ago, when Nana Glover was still alive. But they drove through the park regularly, on their twice-yearly trips through Derbyshire, and every time Malcolm pointed out the village, and explained the facts of it. Jane found it comforting, like that longer story about the village of Eyam, the only place, apart from London, where the plague had broken out. She didn’t mind being told things more than once: it was a signal that everything was all right in the world. But a moment after they had begun to climb the stairs to the main rooms, her mother started again, her bright eyes glossing over the spectacle of the house and examining the other visitors, waiting for Nick to appear at any moment and, in the meantime, giving her family the sort of comments he might be expected to produce or perhaps already had. She had dropped his name, but there was nothing of her in what she was saying, and she kept it up through those many golden rooms, explaining them, their views, their historical associations, their – now painful word – beauty to her silent family. At last it was done, sculpture gallery, Mary Queen of Scots rooms and all.
‘Shall we go and have a look at the gardens?’ Katherine said, flushed with pleasure.
Outside on the gravel path, the others said nothing. To the right there were the elaborate gardens, their games and winding path, and the vast single jet; to the left, the car park and the toilets.
‘It’s getting a bit late,’ Malcolm said. ‘It’ll be dark before long. Maybe we’ll save the gardens for another day. We’ve had a nice time, though, haven’t we?’
It came out more plaintive than you’d have expected, and though Daniel said, ‘Lovely,’ and Tim said, ‘Yes,’ his voice rising into a question, Jane put herself into it, for her father’s sake, and said, ‘I’ve really enjoyed it. I wish we did it all the time.’
‘I thought you were looking forward most to the garden,’ her mother said.
‘Well, I was,’ Malcolm said. ‘But we’d better get off. I just want to go to the toilet.’
‘Can’t it wait until we’re home?’ Katherine said – and whether she now thought it was common to piss on the porcelain of Chatsworth, a thing Nick would never presume to do, or whether she imagined the dukes and their sons, the little lords, drove to Edensor for that purpose, or whether she just didn’t want to think about anything so low, nobody could tell.
‘I want to go to the toilet,’ Malcolm said, voice rising in something like anger, and two passing ladies, posh in pearls and dung-coloured sweaters, burst heartlessly into laughter. ‘Well, I do,’ Malcolm said childishly, kicking the gravel.
‘Go on, then,’ Katherine said, and with one last look at the posh ladies, retreating up the gravel path towards the formal gardens, he did so, plucking at his anorak.
‘You know something,’ Daniel said, when they were half-way home, ‘I need to go to the toilet. I wish I’d gone.’ And Jane’s dad – she enjoyed these witty streaks in his character – slowed to the edge of the speed limit, and maintained thirty miles an hour, ignoring Daniel’s complaints and the line of drivers behind them.
After that there was no more talk of anyone having a lover. Jane wondered how her mother could be so blind, so deaf: deaf to what she sounded like, blind to the protective shapes her father started to form whenever her conversation took a familiar turn. Anne might have mentioned it once, after that outing to Broomhill, but it was clear to Jane that she hadn’t got the force of the situation across, and Anne made her references to the lover in so amused a tone that the discussion couldn’t go anywhere; it could only become a joke, like Miss Barker’s impact on the continent of Africa. Nor