The Northern Clemency. Philip Hensher
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Soon it was the same as Tim’s dreaming evocation of snakes, his paragraphs of detail and longing, and they divided the long evenings between them like a pair of madmen supervising the silent sane. That might have been harmless, and there was no chance of it going beyond mad talk, Jane thought. It could never develop into a situation beyond easy horrid embarrassment.
But Jane was wrong, because after some months a suggestion surfaced and her mother had, apparently, decided to give a party, something never done before by the adults. There was no doubting the reason for this party. It was as if Tim had decided to hold a party to which the snake of his dreams would be invited. You could not say that, not to Daniel, not to Anne, not to anyone. Tell a teacher, was the advice in Jackie when things got bad for the correspondents of Cathy and Claire. But Jane thought of Miss Barker – and thought that Cathy and Claire didn’t know what they were talking about, and she went on thinking that until the night of the party, and the food was laid out to snare Nick, and her mother in a long blue dress, and the doorbell rang for the first time, and it was only Mrs Arbuthnot from over the road.
Perhaps even then it might have been all right. Tim and her dad were standing in the dining room, looking at but not touching the food. There were vol-au-vents, a dish of bright yellow cold chicken curry, decorative arrangements of cheese on sticks, and a whole Brie, cut open, oozing, but smelling strongly of ammonia. There were loaves of French bread, sliced into rounds and in baskets, and small bowls of pickle and bowls of butter, and on the sideboard, glasses set out in ranks with the bottles of white wine, Malcolm’s task, already open. There were bowls of crisps and nuts and, of course, in the middle of the table, and on the piano, and elsewhere in the house, in vases half theirs and half borrowed for the occasion, arrangements of flowers from Nick’s shop.
‘Are they going to eat all this?’ Tim said. ‘Have they had their dinner?’
‘They’ll eat it,’ Malcolm said. ‘Even if they’ve had their dinner. And I suppose if they don’t, we’ll be living off vol-au-vents and Coronation Chicken all week, you’ll see.’
‘How hilarious,’ Tim said. There was a silence.
‘What did you say?’ Malcolm said.
‘I only said it was hilarious,’ Tim said, faltering.
‘Did you say,’ Malcolm said, ‘“how hilarious”?’
Tim didn’t answer; he didn’t know what he had said or done wrong. But Malcolm left the room, with two bottles, his face set, and prepared to act like a host to whoever might come through his front door, to pretend they were welcome. Because that was what he had to do, just for tonight.
Mr Jolly, John Ball and Keith the boy had their routine worked out for an overnight stay and, under Mr Jolly’s direction, they reckoned to clear a good two hundred pounds a year on top of their wages. They worked together as a team. The routine was that you got money from petty cash for a bed-and-breakfast on overnight jobs, but of course you never used it. You slept in the van and kept the money. If they’d been sent out with just anyone, the routine wouldn’t have been possible. You’d have to explain each time, and word would get out, and they’d put a stop to it. As long as Mr Jolly had been with Orchard’s Removals, which was getting on for twenty years, they’d kept their teams fixed – maybe not for a day job, within London, but for overnights and more.
‘It’s that sort of consideration,’ a management wife had once said to John Ball at a works Christmas party, ‘that sets Orchard’s apart, and that’s why we never have any trouble with—’
‘Strikes?’ John Ball had said, and she’d blushed as at an obscenity from an over-familiar acquaintance. Yes, they liked to send you away with your team so, generally, Mr Jolly, John Ball and Keith could work their routine once or twice a week. Maybe everyone did; you didn’t ask.
Mr Jolly, the chief remover, had a kind of contempt for the management on account of this. Even while robbing it in this small way, he wasn’t grateful for the slackness. He’d have put a stop to it. They didn’t even ask for receipts, it being believed that the sort of establishments the men would use were not necessarily able to produce that sort of documentation. You just took the three quid each and signed for it. Later, on the way home, you divided it up; John Ball had three quid, Keith the boy thirty bob, and Mr Jolly took the rest. The firm’s accountant was called Perks, something which always made Mrs Jolly laugh as she took the cash, made a little roll of the notes and put it into the tea caddy on the shelf in their Streatham kitchen for a rainy day, the fifty pee over going straight into her pocket for a couple of glasses of mild for herself later.
‘Oi!’ Mr Jolly always said.
‘Oi yourself,’ Mrs Jolly always replied. He didn’t really mind. They’d managed to get to Majorca on the tea-caddy money last year.
But sometimes you wondered whether it wouldn’t be better to spend the money in the way it was meant, particularly in the summer. It was still quite warm now, at the beginning of September, even as far north as Sheffield. Mr Jolly had known worse than Keith – they weren’t especially smelly, the three of them. After a hard day’s work, you parked, went maybe to a pub for a pint or two and a bite of supper, then back to the van. The van itself was packed with someone’s furniture, beds, sofas and cushions, everything you could want for a nice restful night. That’s what Keith had said when he’d joined the team, complaining about the real sleeping arrangements. It had never occurred to Mr Jolly or (John Ball said, amazement in his voice) to John Ball. What an idea! It would be like – Mr Jolly said – it would be like a doctor treating, er, breaching – a lawyer suing a judge for – er – a thoroughgoing breach of – well, it wasn’t to be thought of, and, oddly, hadn’t been until Keith said it and then they all started thinking, hard, about those lovely soft beds in the back that they could arrange as they liked…
But they had their standards, so they went back to the van and made space for themselves in the cab and in the little loft arrangement over it with its porthole window, just about big enough for two with a blanket rolled up between you. Keith stretched out on the seats, complaining about Mr Jolly’s snoring and about the gear stick in his back all night. It didn’t seem so bad when you woke up, nice and warm and toasty often. Then you went off in search of a caff for breakfast and, ideally, a stand-up wash at a sink. When you came back and opened the cab door, phew! It was like something had died in there, and you left the doors open while you did the second half of the job.
‘I knew there wouldn’t be anywhere,’ John Ball said.
‘Good job you said so, then,’ Keith said. They were sitting disconsolately on the wall outside the house in Sheffield. It was a quarter to eight in the morning. They’d woken up an hour earlier, and Keith had been sent out on a recce for a caff. They’d looked the night before and seen nothing but, as Mr Jolly said, they’d been tired, they’d not looked everywhere. It was hopeless. The house was in a new development in the middle of one suburb after another, not the sort of place where anyone would think of opening a nice caff. Keith had come back shrugging. ‘No joy,’ he said.
‘I knew there wouldn’t be anywhere,’ John Ball said, ‘as soon as I saw where they were moving from. I knew the sort of place they’d be moving to. No caffs, you see.’
‘All right,’ Mr Jolly said. ‘You underestimate your uncle Bill. Get out the emergency supplies, John. You’ll find a Primus stove stowed under the cabin—’
‘That’s not safe—’
‘I dare say, but there it is, and you’ll find some bacon and eggs and a tin of milk too.’
‘How long’s that been there?’
‘Not long enough for you to worry about. So there you are – bacon and eggs and a cup of tea. Get going.’
Mr Jolly lit a cigarette and watched, with satisfaction, the preparations for his pavement breakfast. In a moment John Ball came back, Primus in hand. Behind him, Keith balanced bacon and eggs, a packet of tea and a tin of condensed milk. ‘Where’s the frying pan, Bill?’ he said.
‘Same place,’