The Northern Clemency (43 page)

A piece by Rossini was listed as coming first, but before that the conductor pointed at the percussion, and a drum-roll. Jane began to struggle to her feet, with a little surprise: she knew that concerts at the City Hall in Sheffield often started with the National Anthem, but she’d always assumed that London wouldn’t bother with it, since they could see the Queen’s house any time they chose. But she’d made a mistake: no one else was getting up, and she sat down again promptly. It wasn’t the National Anthem: it was just the way the first piece began, with a drum-roll. Her face burnt. To her left, a couple nudged each other, smiling. She couldn’t listen to the first piece, and applauded at the end with some relief, as though it had been devised only for her discomfiture.

The second piece was Mozart, a piano concerto, and the reason, really, they’d decided to come. But it seemed so hard to Jane to find the pleasure she’d had at
Amadeus
, and though the programme note said that the piece was famous, she couldn’t work out whether she’d heard it before or not. The music was shiny, clean and insolent, not really asking anything of her. Only when it came to the second movement did anything start to make sense; she looked at the programme note again, wondering why she recognized this, and it explained that it had been used as the music to a famous Swedish film. That didn’t explain the familiarity; Jane was sure she’d never seen the film, which was called
Elvira Madigan
. She must have heard it somewhere, the way music became familiar without you noticing it, and all of a sudden it came to an end. She hadn’t been listening. She’d been thinking about something else entirely.

At the end of the piece, when they’d all applauded the pianist, and he’d come back three times, the last time artificially cranking up the applause when it had threatened to die out prematurely, the audience began to shuffle and rise. Behind her, an emphatic voice spoke.

“Of course, it’s all very well,” the voice was saying, “but I think you’ll find that you get much better performances on a Friday night at the Sheffield City Hall from the Hallé Orchestra. Many’s the time I’ve gone back to Rayfield Avenue in Sheffield, quite bowled over by—”

Jane turned in surprise. Behind her there was a man—no, he looked older than he was, his pale hair thinning on top of a pink scalp like mist on a hilltop. He was wearing a slightly crumpled grey suit with an ink
stain at one trouser pocket and a blue shirt, but no tie. His knees were pulled up halfway to his chest; he was immensely tall, even sitting down. He grinned at her. “I know you,” he said. “You’re Jane, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” she said, wondering. Then she remembered—he was the little boy who used to live over the road in Sheffield. He’d been tall even then. Daniel had been friends with his sister.

“Francis,” he said, reminding her. “Francis Sellers.”

“I didn’t know you were in London,” she said.

“I’d heard you were,” he said. “Your mother’s great friends with my mother.”

“I remember you now,” Jane said. “And your sister, she’s—”

“Sandra? She’s just moved to Australia.”

“Emigrated?” Jane said idiotically. She didn’t know what she had been on the point of saying about his sister; she was probably glad he’d interrupted her.

“Yes,” Francis said, looking amused as the people excused themselves around him. It was odd to see him grown-up, with grown-up responses; he was still gangling, but didn’t have that conspicuously hovering appearance any more. If anything, he was lounging in his seat.

“That’s a coincidence,” Jane said, for something to say. But then she realized how foolish her comment really was.

“What is?”

“Oh, nothing,” Jane said, not really able to say that she shared a flat with an Australian. “Where are you living now?”

“In Balham,” Francis said. “And you?”

“I’m in Clapham,” she said. “I don’t know why we haven’t bumped into each other before.”

“Actually, I think I’ve seen you,” Francis said. “I thought it was you, but I wasn’t sure. On the Northern Line.”

“We ought to meet up,” Jane found herself saying.

“Well, we’ve met up now,” Francis said. “Do you want to get a drink?”

He liked music, he explained as they went to the bar. It had come on him in Sheffield. “A lot of adolescents take to music in a big way, I know,” he said, and it struck Jane as a strange thing to say; it would have been indecent to use the word “adolescent” five years before, and she almost envied Francis for being able to distance himself from his biological experience in so fast and lordly a way. He hadn’t, it seemed,
gone to university—he didn’t say why, and he’d always seemed like a clever boy. “Do you like Bruckner?” he asked, and she said she didn’t know, but pointed out what, of course, he must know, that that was what the orchestra was going to play in the second half. He came often to these things, he said. Jane listened; she didn’t quite know how to talk about the way she took this sort of thing, in London.

London was full of opportunities, of interesting things to see and interesting places to visit. For her own sake, Jane was scrupulous about arranging an outing with a friend during the week, perhaps to a concert at the Wigmore Hall or a film, or now and again to the theatre. She’d seen lots of famous actors in all sorts of things, and kept her programmes, some signed, in a folder. There’d never been any choice in Sheffield, just one thing a month at the Crucible and a concert a week at the City Hall, most of which you wouldn’t want to go to. At Oxford there’d been a choice, but you had to admit, after a term of going to everything, that hardly any of it was worth going to or listening to. It was really a crime not to go to what London had to offer, and she’d really started enjoying it; she was proud of having seen Antony Sher in
Richard III
and shelling out for tickets near the front. The way he’d hurtled straight at them on his crutches, like a black missile dismantling in flight; Jane had gone home knowing what “starry-eyed” meant, her eyes feeling weighty and luminous on the Northern Line. She’d gone straight to her room and done something she hadn’t done for years: written a poem about it. Even Sarah Willis, who wasn’t so keen on keeping up with the culture, had to admit that she was glad Jane had asked her to that, though of course the month after she’d yawned her way through a concert—or did you say recital?—of the Amadeus Quartet playing Schubert at the Wigmore Hall.

The outings in the week were interesting and enjoyable, though they sometimes didn’t leave much time for talking to your friend. If it was a long evening and they had to get up in the morning, quite often they’d shoot off without having a pizza afterwards, which wasn’t really very satisfactory. But there were the weekend outings, too. Jane made a point of visiting a different part of London every weekend. Sometimes she went to a museum or a gallery, either a famous central one—she was doing the National Gallery and the Victoria and Albert and the British Museum conscientiously, two or three rooms at a time—or a local one. She hadn’t realized what an enormous walk it was from the tube stop to Kenwood in Hampstead, but of course it was an interesting walk if you hadn’t been to that bit of London before. There was the
Horniman Museum, the John Soane, the Wallace collection—oh, she’d been all over.

There were other walks to be had. It was interesting to go for long walks through the parks, through the snooty velvet hills of Hampstead Heath and Richmond Park, the kite-flyers in the one, the deer raising their heads and, all at once, running; Kew Gardens, which rather daunted her with the sense that everything was interesting here if only she knew anything about plants. She’d have to bring her dad here, he’d enjoy it. She went for Sunday walks, too, through particular parts of London, discovering Spitalfields with its blank-faced and picturesque decrepitude, its crumbling brick façades like the long, ruined face of a drunkard. Or the City, so strangely empty on a Saturday. She’d thought it like a horror movie about the end of the world, and then, to confirm her feeling, she’d come across a film crew shooting a film about exactly that, thirty extras horrifically made up like the living dead, sitting around having cups of tea quite naturally. It was all very interesting, and there was never any shortage of things to tell her mum and dad when, once a week, she telephoned them to tell them what she’d been up to.

She was terribly lonely, really.

The ugly, empty feeling of Oxford, the sense that everyone there was conducting a riotous social life in which they all knew each other and had resolved, before even arriving at the place, to exclude Jane and her big ridiculous chin from it, was massively extended into Jane’s sense of London. Her friends here were, for the moment, the same friends she’d had in Oxford, obstinately maintained. She felt humbly lucky that she lived near Sarah Willis and her boyfriend Dave, who included her quite often, but somehow she hadn’t managed to forge an independent bond with any of their friends. Most of them were Dave’s friends from the hockey club and their girlfriends. Sometimes, towards the end of an evening, that sort would start mimicking the way she talked, ask her to say “bath” and “path” and even, stupidly, “cart;” Sarah had kept the way she talked, too, but they never asked her to perform like that. If Jane ever saw any of them in Clapham, she’d say hello, and they’d say hello back, but after a surprised, contemptuous interval as they dragged Dave’s girl Sarah’s little friend to mind.

The toy-makers weren’t much help, either; they hadn’t taken on a graduate for some time, and everyone else in the office was married or old. They’d asked her to dance, one after the other, at her first Christmas
party, as their wives looked on benevolently, jigging about at more than arm’s length, smiling bravely at her before handing her on to another colleague. Anyone would have thought she was the poor ugly girl, and not just marked out by being young and on her own.

The sense of loneliness was a new one on her; she’d felt it first at Oxford, combined with a horrible, stupid, snobbish sense of social inadequacy, and then, renewed, it had taken hold in this bigger city, in London. But she hadn’t articulated it to herself until it was forced upon her. This was how loneliness in London ended, she thought, sitting at the Australian’s funeral. She wouldn’t die like that, exactly, but she could shut the door and go to bed and never get up again; how long, as in the Australian’s case, until anyone noticed she was missing? From wondering that, the bigger question of who would miss her at all painfully rose.

There was so much to go and see, so much to visit in London; parks and walks, exhibitions and concerts and films and plays and even, she supposed, operas and ballets. In the couple of days after bumping into Francis, she gave them all detailed thought. She tried to remember everything she could about him, too, but nothing much came to mind except his height, the way he’d always sort of folded himself around himself, his limbs trying to make themselves smaller, his head drooping down between his shoulder-blades. His family hadn’t always lived there—actually, Jane remembered quite well the summer they’d moved in—but she remembered his sister more than him. He’d sometimes been around when they were a bit older, and when they’d had that gang who used to go down to the lower crags and sit there drinking bottles of illicitly acquired cider, he was sometimes around at the edges of the group. She remembered, too, there was a new year’s party once at his parents’ house. It was her upper-sixth year; she’d had the letter three days before Christmas from Oxford, and she’d been glowing for ten days. “Jane’s just been accepted by Oxford,” she remembered her mother saying to everyone at the party, and then, with a shameful grasp of the idiom, “LMH. She goes up in October.”

“I’m sure she’ll get the grades,” Mr. Sellers—Bernie, wasn’t it?—had said and meant it kindly.

“Oh, I don’t think they trouble about all of that,” Jane’s mother had hooted embarrassingly, and Jane had stood there like a lemon, as if she were supposed now to start performing or something.

She’d ended up talking to Francis then, and they’d had quite a good
conversation. A deep conversation, as they used to call it, about life, the universe and everything. “I don’t believe in God,” Francis had said, with an air of bravery.

“Well, I don’t think I do either,” Jane had said, surprised, and before long they were on to the distances between stars and galaxies and how long it would take you if you travelled at the speed of light and how insignificant it made everything seem, and then, seamlessly, on to nuclear war. “You sound like my brother’s friend Stig,” Jane had said.

“I hope not,” Francis had said, with a flash of likeability—Stig was a new friend of Tim’s, always around these days, scowling and making sarcastic comments about everything. When people found out she was clever, they often embarked on a conversation that was meant to be deep, and some of the grown-ups at this party had actually started lengthening their vowels as if in deference to Oxford. But Francis laughed at Stig and probably would have laughed at Tim, too. She’d liked him for that, she remembered: she wondered why she hadn’t bothered more with him afterwards.

“Weren’t you a vegetarian?” Francis said as they were going back for the second half. “That’s what I mainly remember about you, that you were a vegetarian.”

He was as tall and drawn-out in shape as someone else’s shadow, and climbing the steps to the upper half of the stalls, she felt as if the crowd was staring at them; the girl who had stood for the Rossini overture with a man a foot taller than her. What she felt like saying was, what I mostly remember about your family is that once, eight years ago, I was walking past my brother’s room, my elder brother Daniel; and I looked in, and there was your sister, with a smeared attempt at lipstick on her spotty stupid face, and bright green eyeshadow on her closed eyes, and she had her school blouse wide open and her bra undone. This was in my family’s house, Francis, remember; that was what she wanted to say. And she was in Daniel’s bedroom, but it wasn’t Daniel who was face down in her stupid tits and making stupid noises. It was my eleven-year-old brother. That’s what I mostly remember about your family, Francis.