The Northern Clemency. Philip Hensher
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She had been finding important things to occupy her around every single one of the windows with a good view ever since the men had started unloading the van. Finally, she had drawn up a chair and a small table by her sitting-room window and made a show of reading the Morning Telegraph over a cup of coffee. ‘They’ll not have driven up from London this morning,’ she said to herself, and started speculating about their arrangements.
In Karen Warner’s house, her husband had gone to work an hour before. Her son, nineteen, a disappointment, lay at full length on the sofa. It was one of her rules: he might have nothing to do and nothing to get up for, but he would get up every morning and not lie in bed. In practice, it meant he got up, dressed, stretched out on the sofa and remained horizontal all morning. The telephone rang.
At the other end, Anthea Arbuthnot announced herself; Mrs Warner agreed that it had been nice at the Glovers’, the other night, and nice to have had a chance to meet in a social manner. Karen wondered, rather, why Anthea Arbuthnot was telephoning at the expensive time of day when she was only a hundred yards away. But in a moment she pointed out that the new family had just arrived, that they were standing outside with their furniture spread across the road, and invited Karen to pop round to take her morning coffee with her at, say, eleven. Putting the telephone down, it seemed to Karen that Anthea might have invented some kind of purpose for her telephone call, some occasion to justify the invitation – the loan of the garlic-crusher she’d been so interested by the other night would have done.
‘Really, she’s no shame,’ Karen said out loud.
‘Pardon?’ her son said, after a minute.
But Karen had been talking to herself – he wasn’t much company, her worry of a son. ‘I hope you’re planning to get something done today,’ she said.
‘Probably,’ he said.
Further up the road, the nursery nurse had phoned in sick. Everything about her seemed to be swelling, not just her soft parts, her belly, her breasts, not even her joints, her ankles, her knees, her elbows blowing up like warty old gourds. Everything seemed to be swelling, even her bones, and her face was purple and tight and aching with the effort involved in lying flat on a bed for eight hours. The nursery was growing politely unbelieving – you could hear it in their voices. She knew they’d put the phone down, and start swapping stories about Chinese peasant women giving birth behind bushes in their lunch breaks. The phone rang and she felt it might be something important – she couldn’t ignore it.
It was only the woman from down the road, the one they’d met the other night. ‘I let it ring,’ Anthea Arbuthnot said, ‘because I know what it’s like. You’re at the other end of the house and by the time you get there it stops ringing just as you pick it up and you spend the whole day wondering who it might have been. How are you, my dear?’ She apologized, she hadn’t noticed the new neighbours moving in; she agreed the other night had been nice; she demurred at the suggestion of coffee later, but there must have been some uncertainty in her voice, because in two more exchanges she had agreed to lug herself down the road. She put the telephone down, and scowled at it.
Taking the key from a willing, smiling Bernie, Alice opened the door to the house. She thought nothing of all these neighbours; she gave no thought to their being surrounded by all those accumulated possessions which in her case were pressed into boxes or arranged haphazardly in the open air. Behind her, the children came in, at first cautiously, craning round corners, and then with increasing confidence of possession, Sandra striding boldly upstairs, already arguing over her shoulder with her brother over bedrooms, something already decided. Outside, Bernie was discussing matters with the men in high good humour: he was good with workmen. Alice thought it would be a relief when the house was straight; she thought, too, that after being left empty for all those weeks, it smelt like a cloakroom, like the smell of dust heating on a long-unused toaster, and, a little, of piss. It looked not empty to her but emptied, robbed, and a little pathetic. She walked through the empty rooms; they seemed small, but she reminded herself that empty rooms did seem small. You put furniture in them, and they started to seem larger; you went on putting furniture in them and at a certain point they started to seem small again.
It was the curtains that gave each room its air of abandonment rather than emptiness. All the curtains had been left behind, and still hung limply at each window. It had made sense to Bernie, and to Alice too, at the time: your old curtains aren’t going to fit the new windows. And the house was going to be empty for weeks, maybe months. There wasn’t much you could do about that, but perhaps if there were curtains up, it might look to anyone passing that it wasn’t abandoned. You heard about squatters, these days.
Bernie came in and, shyly, put his arm round her waist where she stood, at the back window.
‘Look at that,’ she said. ‘Look at the garden.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’ll need some work. Nobody’s touched it for months.’
‘Maybe more than that,’ she said. ‘Oh God,’ she said.
‘What?’ Bernie said. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Just so much to do,’ she said.
‘Not so much,’ he said. ‘I tell you what. I’ll mow the lawn straight away, it won’t look so bad. And then we’ll leave it till spring.’
That wasn’t really what she’d meant, but she said, ‘You’ll need more than a lawnmower. It’s too long for that, the grass. You know, I wish—’
‘What do you wish?’ he said, smiling; it was something they had always come back to, her wishing, his asking to know her wish.
‘Oh, I was thinking about the carpets,’ she said. ‘What’s it going to look like, none of the old carpets fitting properly? I wish we’d persuaded the Watsons – oh, well, never mind. You don’t suppose—’
‘What?’ Bernie said.
‘I’ve just had an awful thought,’ Alice said. She loosened Bernie’s arm, and turned round to look at the light fitting. ‘I can’t believe it.’
‘They haven’t,’ Bernie said. ‘They can’t have done.’
‘Maybe they’ve just taken that lightbulb,’ Alice said, without any hope.
‘Let’s go and look,’ Bernie said.
Room by room, they went through the house, and it turned out to be true. ‘What are you looking at?’ Sandra said, as they came into the room where she and Francis were bickering, and her mother explained. The children stopped their argument, and followed their parents through the house. For whatever reason, perhaps after the negotiations over the curtains and the failed ones over the carpet, the Watsons had apparently, before leaving, gone through the house and carefully removed every single lightbulb. It was incredible. On Francis’s face was a look, a usual one with him, of something like fear; he felt these difficulties as catastrophes, personal catastrophes, Alice always thought.
‘Well,’ Bernie said, when they had finished, and had settled, the four of them, on the sofa in the middle of the sitting room, ‘I’m going to write them a letter. Give them a piece of my mind. How many lightbulbs is it? Fifteen?’
‘Problem?’ the foreman said, coming in with the smaller of the coffee-tables. Alice explained.
‘Happens all the time,’ the foreman said. ‘You’d be surprised. Mostly out of meanness.’
‘My dad works for the Electricity,’ Francis offered.
‘Well, he’ll know all about lightbulbs,’ the foreman said jocosely.
‘No,’ Francis said seriously. ‘It’s mostly other things.’
Katherine had made her phone calls now, lying to everyone except the police. To the building society she said that Malcolm was unwell; he couldn’t come to the phone, he was sleeping after a restless night. She said this in her best, her bored telephone voice, consciously removing the fact that she had, the night before, called the same woman in a state of