The Northern Clemency. Philip Hensher
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paid for it – ‘It’s all a treat,’ Bernie had said, once they were settled in the beige rooms, the walls lined with nubbled tweed fabric. ‘Have whatever you like.’
‘That’s nice of them,’ Sandra said.
‘They’re grateful,’ Bernie said.
‘Can I have a glass of wine?’ Sandra said.
‘I don’t see why not,’ Alice said. It was to be their holiday that summer; they weren’t going to have another.
Each day, they took the car the Electricity had provided, and drove out somewhere. Mostly into the countryside. It was different from the countryside in Surrey. There were no hedges, no trees, and the villages were harsh, square and unadorned. Outside, the great expanses of the moors were frightening and ugly; even in bright sun, the black hills with the blaze of purple on their flanks were crude, unfinished. They parked the car and, with a picnic, clambered down into a valley where some terrible catastrophe seemed to have occurred, and about a stream, plummeting and plunging, black rocks were littered, huge and cuboid, just lying there like a set of abandoned giant toys, polystyrene and poised to fall again, without warning. Once they came across a dead sheep, lying there, half in the stream, its mouth open, its fleece filthy and stinking with flies. In Surrey it would have been tidied away. ‘Don’t drink from a stream, ever,’ Alice said. It would never have occurred to Francis even to consider such a thing.
On these outings Sandra, in the back of the Simca with him, was quiet and sullen. She didn’t complain: she followed whatever they were supposed to be doing, from time to time inspecting the sensible shoes she’d been made to bring with open distaste. Francis, as often these days, observed her with covert interest. She was five years older than him. In the room they shared at the hotel, she spent her time writing postcards to her friends, which, when she left them for him to read, proved cryptic or insulting about him in specific terms. Her weariness, never openly stated, only dissipated when they arrived at a market town, and the prospect of shops, on however unambitious a scale, revived her. She bought more postcards; she looked, she said, for presents for her friends, though nothing seemed to fit the bill.
Once they went into the centre of Sheffield, but even for Sandra, Francis could see, this was not a success. It was strange, confusing, and not planned, as London was, to excite. Francis was gripped with the prospect of getting lost; he had no sense of direction or memory for landmarks. They followed Sandra indulgently into one shop after another, and after a couple of hours stopped in municipal gardens by the town hall, an alarming construction like an egg-box.
‘We’ll have to come back here,’ Alice said to Bernie. ‘This is where the education department is. To see about schools.’
Francis’s dad bought him and Sandra a Coke each, and they sat on a bench in the dry city heat. ‘This will have been cleared by bombs,’ Bernie said, ‘these gardens, in the war. See where the old buildings stop and the new ones start? They’ll have been bombed during the war because of the steel, see?’ Francis looked around and it was right: a ripped-out space had been created, a kind of shapeless acreage, and into it, dropped in as exactly as false teeth, were new and extravagant buildings, the egg-box, a building with brass globes protruding from its top floor, others whose smoked mirrors for windows made no allowances towards the church-like blackened solemnity of the old town hall, a figure poised heroically above the entrance like Eros.
Two boys his own age had sat on a bench directly opposite theirs. It was term-time, Francis knew that, but they had not been taken out of school for a week because their families were moving – a licensed absence that had nevertheless caused him unspoken worry in the course of the week, even while clambering over Burbage Rocks, in case an inspector should materialize from behind a dry-stone wall. These were real truants, their hands dirty, and Francis looked at them in the way he would have studied photographs of Victorian murderers, possessors of a remote experience that would never be his. He sucked at his Coke, and lazily, one of the boys pulled out a packet of cigarettes, offering the other boy one. He felt childish with his fizzy drink and already the object of contempt. Their conversation drifted over with its incomprehensible freight of words – ‘Waggy nit,’ one said, and ‘Scoile,’ the other said; a long story began, about Castle Market – the Cattle Market, did they mean? Why didn’t they say ‘the’? ‘Mardy’, ‘gennel’; one punched the other, hard, and the other said, ‘Geeyour.’ Francis tried not to look at them. He feared their retribution, or their mockery; he feared the idea that his father would take it upon himself to say something to them, something inflammatory and adult, and Sheffield would turn upon them.
His parents had planned to spend the next day going round and finding a new house to buy. Although Francis had inspected the pile of agent’s particulars in his parents’ hotel bedroom with fervour and wonderment at the sums – £16,000 – involved, he and Sandra were to entertain themselves for most of the day. His ideas of entertainment were few, and he knew they were not allowed to stay in their room, the cleaners demanding access every morning after breakfast. But his mother had done a little research, and had discovered that a public library was to be found in a Victorian villa at Broomhill, only three hundred yards away. They were to spend the morning there, and find their own way back to the hotel, where they could order lunch themselves as a special treat. Of course, they could not take anything out of the library, not having an address, but if Francis wanted a book to read – there was no suggestion that Sandra was likely to share in this desire – there was a bookshop, only fifty yards further on, where he could buy something. Alice gave him two pound notes, an unheard-of advance on pocket money, and, it seemed, not even an advance: she did it when Sandra and his father could not see, a little squeeze of the hand pressing the money into his fist.
The library filled the morning, but it was short. He sat under the wooden bookshelves that, even in the children’s section, bore the intimidating municipal heading ‘Novels’. It took him a moment to recognize some familiar and favourite books there, and it was a surprise to discover that he had been reading ‘novels’ when he thought he had been reading Enid Blyton, or a book about Uncle, the millionaire elephant in a city of skyscrapers, Beaver Hateman at his heels. Chairs were supplied and, greedily taking five books with him, head down and not acknowledging the look of the librarian, whether approving or sour, he went to sit. At first he could hear his sister: she was talking to someone downstairs, in her ‘mature’ voice, as he called it; maturity, much evoked, had become her favourite virtue, and whenever she thought of it her voice dragged and drawled to the point of a groan. ‘No, we’re moving up here in a few months’ time. Yes, from London. We thought it best to sample the local amenities. I do hope you don’t mind us coming in – my brother’s the real reader in the family…’
And then the voice somehow faded away. The old library, in Kingston, he’d been going to since he was four, and had read every book in their children’s section, except the I-books, which he didn’t like, when people told you a story and said I. Here, there were so many new and different books, and what his sister’s voice had faded into was a book, a little childish but funny, about a bushranger called Midnite, and ‘bushranger’ was the Australian word for ‘highwayman’, with a cat called Khat, and, look, Queen Victoria, and—
It was quite short, and he had almost finished it by the time his sister, hot and bored, came to fetch him. She had left the library to explore the little parade of shops. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Time for lunch.’ He followed her, the last five pages abandoned; perhaps he could come back later. And perhaps he could keep the two pounds – you could spend it on books in London, too.
‘We’ve found a house,’ Bernie said, coming into the hotel dining room while they were still eating their lunch. He was glowing with relief and satisfaction. The dining room, hung with velvet wallpaper and dark curtains, had been daytime dingy, and the children had been talking in whispers, not daring to bicker, but there was Francis’s dad, as if he hadn’t noticed anything. ‘You’ll like it, kids.’
‘I’ve found a book,’ Francis wanted to say to complete everyone’s happiness. ‘I’ve found lots of books.’
‘It’s nice,’ Alice said, sitting down in a flop and looking first, with concern, at Francis. She had something