The Northern Clemency. Philip Hensher
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humour, fetched three chipped old mugs from the cab of the lorry, walked up the driveway of the house opposite. The kid in the window upstairs with the snake – it was definitely a snake, there was no doubting that – he drew back into the bedroom with a look of alarm on his face. Maybe the snake wasn’t supposed to come out of its cage; maybe he wasn’t allowed to play with the thing before school. He rang the doorbell.
There was a confused noise inside. People talking, their voices raised and muted at the same time. It was a couple of minutes before anyone came to the door. It was a woman; she was dressed – that hadn’t been the delay, then – but her hair was unkempt. She held the door half open, looking at Mr Jolly with her mouth tense. She might have been expecting him, someone like him; she looked as if she was expecting something bad to happen to her, the next time she opened the front door. She said nothing.
‘I’m sorry to trouble you, madam,’ Mr Jolly. ‘This is a bit cheeky, like, but…’ He explained their predicament. She listened to the end; he grew less and less hopeful of success as he went on, she looked so unencouraging.
But then she surprised him by saying, ‘Yes, of course,’ and then ‘It’s awful to have to start work without a hot drink in the morning,’ and ‘No, I don’t know where you’d find somewhere to serve you breakfast, not without going right down into, I don’t know, Crosspool,’ a name that meant nothing to him.
‘Thanks very much,’ he said, handing over the mugs but not inviting himself in.
‘Who’s that, then?’ A girl’s voice came from the back of the house. ‘It’s not—’
‘No, it’s not,’ the woman said. ‘It’s nobody.’
Mr Jolly overlooked this rudeness, put it down to some kind of distraction as she carried the mugs away, almost at arm’s length. She left the front door open and Mr Jolly standing there.
‘It’s all with milk and two sugars,’ he said, calling into the kitchen where she’d gone, having forgotten to ask him any of this.
‘Sorry, what did you say?’ she said, coming out again, the mugs still in her hand.
‘Milk and two sugars,’ he said. ‘If it’s no trouble.’
‘It’s only instant,’ she said.
‘That’ll be perfect,’ he said, not having expected any other kind.
The conversation was not closed, but he felt foolish standing there. The other two sat on the other side of the road, talking with amusement to each other, watching his suspended embarrassment. Mr Jolly settled for a performance of head-scratching, whistling, inspecting his watch and looking up and down the road in an exaggerated way. He bent down and ran his second and third finger underneath a flower, a fat yellow familiar one, without picking it.
‘Don’t do that,’ a boy said, standing at the open door. It was the boy who’d been watching them from the upstairs window, a snake round his neck. The snake had been disposed of. Made you shiver to think of it. ‘That’s my dad’s flowers.’
‘I was just looking,’ Mr Jolly said. He was no good with children, having none; his sister neither, never wanted them, not that they couldn’t have had them, him and his wife. ‘I wasn’t going to pick.’
‘Just because he’s not here,’ the boy said.
‘Gone to work, has he?’ Mr Jolly said heartily. ‘Me too. We’re moving your new neighbours in, over the road, there. That’ll be nice for you, won’t it? Having new…’ He trailed away. The boy was looking at him, a horrified gaze.
‘That’s right,’ he said, raising his voice. ‘He’s gone to work, definitely.’
‘Good,’ Mr Jolly said. ‘Make a nice early start. I saw you, just then with – you know, your friend—’
‘What friend?’
‘Your special friend, the yellow one,’ Mr Jolly said. ‘At least he looked yellow from where I was standing. You know –’ he made a face ‘– sssssss.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ the boy said. ‘I wouldn’t tell anyone else what you thought you saw only they might think you were mental or something. You wouldn’t want that, so don’t mention it to anyone, what you saw.’
‘Here you are,’ the woman said, bringing out the three mugs, now filled with coffee, on a shamingly clean tray. Amazingly, she’d only gone and put some biscuits on a plate as well. ‘I do hope my son isn’t bothering you.’
‘Thank you very much,’ Mr Jolly said, now rather baffled, and with the door closing firmly, he walked steadily back, balancing the tray carefully.
‘That’s the ticket,’ John Ball said comfortably. ‘Use your charm, did you?’
‘They’re all bonkers round here,’ Mr Jolly said, relieving his feelings a little. ‘Fit for the hatch, they are.’
‘Biscuits, too,’ Keith said. ‘You should have tried for bacon and eggs.’
‘That’s enough,’ Mr Jolly said. ‘And take your hands off those. This fucking job—’
‘That girl, rode with us—’ John Ball said.
‘Mental,’ Mr Jolly said.
‘Glad to get shot of her,’ Keith said.
‘Mental,’ John Ball agreed.
It had been a long night for the Sellerses. They had stayed not in the funded luxury of the Hallam Towers Hotel but in a small family hotel; since the week in the summer, looking for a house, the Electric had ordered a cut-back. Alice had found the Sandown, and apologized for it as soon as they had rolled up there, the night before. She ought to have known. The advertisement, found in a hotel guide, had used an illustration, not a photograph, and a highly fanciful one; you couldn’t have assumed that the hotel in reality would have had a horse-drawn carriage with a jolly coachman drawn up outside, but the false impression of window-boxes and carriage lamps at the door surely went further than excusable exaggeration. But there were few hotels in Sheffield, and it was only for one night; the front door already locked at eight, opened up to them by a fat man in cardigan and slippers, masticating sourly on slowly revolving bread and cheese, the slight marshy suck of the orange-and-black carpet underfoot, and the forty-watt lightbulbs casting their yellowish light over a long-term resident peeling the pages of an ancient Punch in the lobby.
There was naturally no food to be had, and only a shrug when, their bags deposited, Alice asked after nearby restaurants. Still, they found one and, thank Heavens, it had what to the children evidently seemed some quality of fun; an American-style restaurant with flags on the wall and drinks called Fudpucker; they were alone in the restaurant, but it would do to perk up the spirits. Alice wouldn’t say anything about what they had left, she wouldn’t.
It was a restless night. The hotel had once been three Edwardian semis, now joined together, the gap between the second and third filled with dismal grey prefabricated corridors, and the original rooms split with partitions. There seemed to be few people staying, but, perhaps to save the legs of the chambermaids, all of them were apparently squeezed into the same corner of the hotel. Bernie undressed and, without seeming to pause to think about it, pulled out his red pyjamas from the overnight bag, put them on. It was an agreed signal, undisguised, what he did with them at this point; it was kind of him to know how tired she would be, to remember that there could be better reassurances between them on this hard night than sex.
‘Goodnight, love,’ Bernie said, and as he got into bed, swinging his legs up under the cheese-smelling pink candlewick bedspread, rolling into the same central hollow in the mattress she had fallen into, he gripped her hand and kissed her and groaned and laughed all at the same time. She smelt his warmth; and, as ever, even at the end of the day, the warm smell of his body was a sweet one, like toffee. Always had been.
She was reassured for a moment, could have found the hotel