The Northern Clemency. Philip Hensher
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her hard teeth seemed to make way. They stayed like that for a minute; once or twice she made a pretty little noise, almost animal, and each time, not quite knowing whether he was mocking or encouraging her, he made something of the same noise back, but deeper, the sound vibrating through their twinned lips, making them buzz and ache, fulfilling the desire and stirring up more. Finally he pulled away. He looked at her critically; the little squeal, the blonde hair frizzing up in one, the pink roundness of her pinked-up face, lips and tits. Perhaps the boys had it right when they called her Crystal Tipps and laughed at him. Or maybe they were jealous. ‘I came as soon as I could,’ he said. ‘They were having a party.’
‘You said they were,’ Barbara said. ‘I don’t know why I couldn’t be allowed to come. I’d have behaved.’
‘It was boring,’ he said. ‘There was nothing but neighbours. They didn’t know each other, my mum didn’t know them. I don’t know why she asked them.’
‘We know all our neighbours,’ Barbara said with astonishment, ‘their birthdays, star signs, the lot. The telly programmes they watch, even.’
‘That’s because you live in a terraced house,’ Daniel said. ‘You could hear everything through the walls. When they fuck.’
‘Do you mind?’ Barbara said, objecting to the word rather than Daniel’s snobbery. But she drew close again, pulling him with her out of the light from the street towards the empty, overgrown garden.
‘They were all saying,’ Daniel murmured, his mouth against hers, running his tongue against her lips as they walked backwards into the lyric night, ‘they were all saying, who’s that gorgeous girl, goes into the neighbours’ gardens with Daniel Glover—’
‘They were not,’ Barbara said, her eyes bright, her hand running down Daniel’s side.
‘They were,’ Daniel said, his hand, his rippling fingers rising, weighing, cupping, down and under, beneath and within. ‘And I said—’
‘Oh, give over,’ Barbara said. But Daniel carried on, his hushed, exuberant voice now muted, and as they fell back against the lawn, which had grown into a thick meadow, she gave in to what he knew she felt. There was some indulgent amusement deep within him, and he never completely surrendered to the sensation, was never reduced to begging animal favours or further steps in the exploration of what she would grant him. His gratification, always, lay in seeing her so helpless; his pleasure in the expert and improving knack of bestowing pleasure. The noises she made were on some level comic, ‘Nnngg,’ she went, and an observation post in him kept alert over the expanding border territory between her propriety and her desire. They began when he chose to begin; they ended when he said he had to go, and when he knew that she would say disappointedly, ‘Do you have to?’
Barbara was in his maths set; he’d heard some of the things she’d been letting out about him. Flattering, really. He didn’t talk about her. Another couple of times, and that would be it; he’d seen the way Michael Cox’s sister looked at him, though she was eighteen next month. That would be something to talk about.
It was not clear to any of the Glovers what the purpose of the party had been. Not even to Katherine, whose idea it had been. He hadn’t come, after all. When the last of the guests had gone, the other two children went upstairs, Timothy holding a book. Malcolm sat down and, with his heels, dragged the armchair into a position facing the television. He did not get up to turn it.
Katherine put the letter on the shelf over the radiator, and began to go round the room, picking up glasses and plates. Malcolm had put the empty bottles in the kitchen as he had got through them. There were two open bottles left, one red and one white. The food had mostly been eaten, the tablecloth around the large oval dish of Coronation Chicken stained yellow where spoonfuls had been carelessly dropped. She began to talk as she collected the remains. She was wiping the thought that Nick, after all that effort, hadn’t come. He’d said he would.
‘They seemed to have a good time,’ she said. ‘I thought the food went well. I was worried they wouldn’t be able to eat it standing up, but people manage, don’t they?’
Malcolm said nothing. She sighed.
‘It’s a shame the new people over the road haven’t moved in yet,’ she said. ‘It would have been a good opportunity for them to meet the neighbours. Most people came, I think. There was a nice little letter from the lady in the big house, saying she was sorry she couldn’t come. She doesn’t like to go home after dark. Silly, really – it’s only a hundred yards, I don’t know what she thinks would happen to her, and it’s not really dark, even now. They get set in their ways, old people.’
Malcolm gave no sign of listening.
She couldn’t be sure what the reason for the party had been. But for her it had been defined by the people who hadn’t come rather than those who had. Not just one person; two of them. All evening she’d felt impatient with her guests who, by stooping to attend, had shown themselves to be not quite worth knowing. She projected her idea of the sort of friends she ought to have on to the new people – the Sellerses – and Mrs Topsfield, with the exquisite handwriting and supercilious reason for not attending. The Sellerses were going to be smart London people. That was absolutely clear.
‘Did you miss your battle re-creation society tonight?’ she said to Malcolm, to be kind.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter, once in a while.’
‘You could have invited some of them to come tonight,’ she said, although she’d rather not have to meet grown men who dressed up in Civil War uniforms and disported themselves over the moors, pretending to kill each other. It was bad enough being married to one.
‘I thought it was just for the neighbours,’ Malcolm said. ‘You said you weren’t going to invite anyone else.’
Upstairs, Jane shut her door. It was too early to go to bed, but it was accepted that she spent time in her room; homework, her mother said hopefully, but, really, Jane sat in her room reading. There were forty books on the two low shelves, and a blank notebook. She had read them all, apart from The Mayor of Casterbridge, a Christmas present from a disliked aunt; she had been told that Jane liked reading old books and that, with a life of Shelley, now lost, unread, had been the result. Jane’s books were of orphans, of love between equals, of illegitimate babies, treading round the mystery of sex and sometimes ending just before it began.
Her room was plain. Three years before she had been given the chance to choose its décor. Her mother had made the offer as the promise of a special treaty enacted between women, something to be conveyed only afterwards to the men. Jane had appreciated the tone of her mother’s confiding voice, but was baffled by the possibilities. It was that she had no real idea what role her bedroom’s décor was supposed to play in her mother’s half-angry plans for social improvement, and she was under no illusions that if she actually did choose wallpaper, curtains, paint, bedspread, carpet, even, that her choice would be measured against her mother’s unshared ideas and probably found disappointing. Would it be best to ask for an old-fashioned style, ‘with character’, as her mother said, a pink teenage girl’s bedroom? Or to opt for her own taste, whatever that might be?
In the end she delayed and delayed, and now her bedroom was a blank series of whites and neutrals. She had failed in whatever romance her mother had planned for her; and, with its big picture window, the room showed no sign of turning into a garret. It looked out on to a suburban street. Daniel’s room, at the back of the house, had the view of the moor, which meant nothing to him. Over her bed, one concession: a poster, bought in a sale, of a Crucible Theatre production of Romeo and Juliet. Daniel had seen it, not her – he’d done the play for O level. Someone had given him the poster, but it was over her bed that two blue-lit figures embraced, one already dead.
She wondered what the new people over the road would be like, and let her thoughts go on their romantic course.
It was the next day, in London. The house had been packed into a van. It was driving northwards, towards Sheffield. On every box was written, in large felt-tip