The Northern Clemency. Philip Hensher
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like she’s not all there,’ Bernie said.
‘No,’ Alice said. ‘She’d had a shock.’
‘I don’t blame him,’ Bernie said.
‘Who? Oh, her husband,’ Alice said. ‘That’s an awful thing to say, love.’
‘Well, I don’t,’ Bernie said. ‘I’m worried at the idea of living opposite someone like that.’
‘She must be mental,’ Sandra said.
‘Imagine what it’d be like being married to her,’ Bernie went on. ‘You wouldn’t be blamed by anyone, really, for leaving her. Mentally unbalanced.’
‘We don’t know,’ Alice said. ‘It might be the shock, your husband ups and goes. That’s a terrible thing to happen.’
‘No, love,’ Bernie said. ‘Anyone normal, they just get on with things. They don’t—’
‘She took the snake,’ Francis said meditatively, telling the story bit by bit, almost more for himself than for anyone else, ‘and she threw it down and she jumped on its head until it was dead, and it was the boy’s snake, and he was there watching.’
‘That’s about the sum of it,’ Bernie said. ‘It’s not normal, whatever’s happened to you. It’s not still lying there, is it? Christ.’
‘No,’ Francis said. ‘The girl, his sister, she came out a while ago with a plastic bag and a broom, cleared it up and threw it away, and she washed the pavement down, too.’
‘Thank God for that,’ Bernie said. ‘Someone in the family’s got a bit of sense, apart from him, the dad, had the sense to walk out.’
‘Poor woman,’ Alice said. ‘I wish—’ She dried up and took a forkful of Russian salad from her plate of cold food. It was like the supper of a Christmas night, the dinner she’d arranged for them the first night in a new house, and the events of the day similarly cast a sensation of exhausted manic festivity over their plates.
‘What do you wish, love?’ Bernie said.
‘I don’t know,’ Alice said. You couldn’t say to your husband and children that you wished you’d kept the information of this woman’s situation to yourself. You owed her nothing, you wouldn’t keep anything from these three. But she still thought she might not have repeated any of that. ‘I bet he’ll be back,’ she said, surprising herself.
‘Why do you say that?’ Bernie said.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I just think he will be. He doesn’t sound like the sort of man who wouldn’t come back. He works in a building society.’
‘She sounds mental,’ Sandra said. ‘Killing the little boy’s pet like that in front of him. I wouldn’t mind a snake as a pet. If she couldn’t have it in the house, she could have found a home for it. Oh, well, who cares?’
‘You’re not to be getting ideas,’ Bernie said to Sandra, ‘about snakes.’
‘No, I don’t really want one,’ she said. ‘But killing it, that was horrible.’
‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘It was horrible.’ But she felt—
She felt what Katherine, across the road, felt.
Katherine was sitting on her own in the dining room. The table was empty and not set; there was no food and Katherine had not prepared any. The children had been into the kitchen and had picked up what they could from the fridge, from the cupboards; children’s meals, the sort of thing they arranged for themselves between meals, coming home from school. At least Jane and Daniel had; Tim was still upstairs, gulping and muttering to himself in his room. The last time she’d looked, his face was in his pillow and he refused to take it out at any expressions of regret or apology. Inconsolable. It was just too bad for him; and he liked his food. She didn’t worry, not for the moment. What she felt was that the primary drama of the day, the awful thing that had happened to her, was Malcolm’s disappearance. But that, now, was inside and had only happened to her. What had taken its place, and remained in its place, was what she had done in the street: stamped on her son’s snake at the utmost pitch of despair and rage. Malcolm would come back, there was no doubt about that. That would finish the story in everyone’s memory; his disappearance, for whatever reason, would end up being trivial and anecdotal. What would remain was not what had been done to her but what she had done. In the dining room, only the small lamp on the piano was switched on, and the room was dim and gloomy, a pool of light in the blue evening. She sat, her hands on the table, like a suspect in a cell; she breathed in and out steadily, knowing what she had now made of herself. And in time night came, still with no word from Malcolm, whom everyone had now apparently forgotten.
Eventually she got up, switched the lights off, one after another, and went to bed. Over the road, the lights were still on. She looked at her watch and it was only a quarter past ten.
Malcolm came back two days later. She had stopped caring. That morning, she had taken the rubbish out, and over the road, the new people, they’d been coming out at the same time. She had been prepared to pretend that they hadn’t seen each other – she just didn’t want to think about the things she’d said to Alice. And she’d thought they would probably want to do the same, ignore her politely. Maybe, in a few months, they could pretend to be meeting for the first time, and everything could be, if not forgotten, then at least not mentioned, and they could both pretend they had forgotten. But Alice obviously didn’t know the rules of the game. They were getting into their ridiculous little car, some kind of small square boxy green thing, and Alice saw Katherine with her boxes of rubbish, the remains of the party, the empty bottles, the smashed glasses, the chicken carcasses, which had been attracting flies outside the back door waiting for the binmen’s day. She hesitated, evidently not knowing what she was supposed to do, and raised a hand. It was a gesture that might have been a greeting, or might have been the beginning of her scratching her head.
Perhaps it might have been possible. Perhaps if Malcolm had never left, she’d now be wandering over, asking how they were settling in, when the children would be starting school, offering advice about plumbers and local carpet-fitters, meeting the children and the husband, inviting them over for a drink with Malcolm and her children some time in the next day or two. But it was hard to see how she could manage that on her own. Alice didn’t seem to understand the rules of the situation. All the other neighbours did: the day before, Katherine had been walking slowly down the road, and the door to Mrs Arbuthnot’s had opened, issuing Mrs Arbuthnot, a scarf on her head and a shopping trolley, setting off for the supermarket. Mrs Arbuthnot had seen her approaching, and rather than continue and be forced to meet or ignore her, she’d performed a small pantomime of forgetting, slapping her forehead almost and shaking her head, going back inside until Katherine was safely past. Katherine blushed. Of course, she couldn’t know anything about Malcolm yet, could only have wondered about him not coming home, the car no longer in the driveway, or maybe she’d seen the business with the snake, heard Tim’s wailing. That sort of ignoring would not go on for ever, but only until these things were not the most recent and conspicuous subjects to talk about in a chance encounter. But Alice didn’t seem to know that, and raised her hand uncertainly. Her husband, opening the car, saw the gesture, and looked over the road to where Katherine stood. He waited, watching in the interested way of someone who hadn’t met her yet. Katherine smiled, but she could not wave because of the bags in her hands. She put them down, turned, and went back into the house.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t come to your party,’ Nick said, when she had got to work. ‘I was terribly looking forward to it. I don’t know what happened. It was all a bit chaotic. I went home and called my brother, you know, in New York, and then I sat down with the paper, just for five minutes, before getting dressed and coming up to your party, and all of a sudden I woke up and it was four hours later. I don’t know what happened – it must have been getting up so early for the market. And then, of course, it was far too late to come. I felt such a fool. I was so looking forward to it.’
‘That’s