The Northern Clemency (76 page)

She found the address book, and there, amid a thicket of crossings-out, was an address and phone number for Francis Sellers. They’d gone for a walk a couple of years ago—no, Christ, it had definitely been just after the Australian killed himself, so just before she and Scott had started going out. That was ten years ago. Christ. He’d have definitely moved by now, but she dialled the number anyway.

“What?” the voice at the end of the phone said. It was the voice of a heavy mouth-breather. Jane was prepared to apologize and hang up, but then it said, “Oh, yeah. I’ll just go and have a look.”

At the other end, the phone was clunked on to some surface, or dropped on to the floor. There was a heavy thudding upstairs, and then, after a minute or two, the same noise in reverse.

“There’s a note on his door,” the voice said. “It says he’s gone away for a while, says he’s gone home, says his mother’s seriously ill or something. Hang on, I thought he was supposed to be going to Rome, though. Says if anyone calls to tell them but I don’t think no one’s called. Except you.”

“When did he go away?” Jane said.

“How should I know?” the voice said.

“OK,” Jane said. “Do you live there?”

“Course I do.”

“Well, when did you last see him?”

“I don’t know,” the voice said. “All right?”

Jane was about to leave it, but the other person, whether man or woman, had already hung up. In any case, she didn’t think, on reflection, Francis Sellers had ever known Barbara or even Daniel that well.

There was the nice rattling sound of Scott’s key in the lock. She
looked at her watch—it was later than she’d thought. She got up from where she’d been squatting—with all this unpacking still to do, it was a bit like the office round here—and went to kiss him.

“Hey, stop running everywhere,” Scott said.

“I’m not running,” Jane said. “I just got up to give my husband a kiss.”

“Well, don’t do it,” Scott said. “I bet you haven’t had a rest at all.”

“I feel fine,” Jane said. “Think of all those Chinese women who go on working in the fields until the last moment.”

“Yeah, well, I’d like to see their miscarriage rate,” Scott said. “You’ll never guess what happened.”

“Don’t do that,” Jane said, as Scott ran his hand over her stomach, still flat.

“Don’t do what? I’m not allowed to touch you all of a sudden?”

“No, it’s just—” Jane said, not quite able to say that it was sort of hers now in a way it hadn’t been before and, more than that, she knew how, when you were visibly pregnant, people you hardly recognized had a way of laying their hands on your belly for luck. She might even have done it herself. “So what happened, then?”

“Your friend Sarah Willis called me,” Scott said. “They hauled me out of the kitchen.”

“Christ, what was it?” Jane said, going over and laying herself down carefully on the sofa. He’d always impressed on her that you didn’t call him at work.

“Well, it seemed she’d been calling you and leaving messages,” Scott said, “and you were unavailable at work and you weren’t answering the messages she’d left here.”

“She’s left one message,” Jane said. “Yesterday. No, the day before.”

“And she thought there might be something terribly wrong. Which there isn’t. So she called me to see if you’re still having a drink next week. Tell her she’s not to do that.”

“I’ll give her hell,” Jane said.

“Good,” Scott said. “I hope you’re not having a drink with her, though, I mean, a drink.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Jane said. “I’ll stick to tomato juice. I think we can probably tell people now, anyway.”

“She’ll only want to be the godmother,” Scott said. “Silly bitch.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Jane said, laughing. “I suppose we ought to think about it, though.”

The kitchen was a naff flash one, with metal work surfaces and glass-fronted
cupboards; when the previous owners had heard that Scott was a chef, as they were going over the house for the first time, they’d visibly relaxed, as though the sale was now in the bag. But the kitchen didn’t get a great deal of use. These nights, now Scott came home from cooking and then cooked dinner for them, they ate the same few simple things. It might have been easier to reheat something ready-made from the supermarket, but they were full of additives, Scott said. So it was plain things, full of iron; he’d fry a plain steak with mushrooms, and steam a big pan full of spinach, a huge pot of greenery reducing quickly to a kind of slimy undergrowth. It didn’t taste too bad at all. And for dessert, a succession of mineral supplements and vitamins. Scott was taking it all very seriously. But she liked the way he faced her across the table, and watched her eat every mouthful, making sure all that goodness went in, making sure, as parents did, she chewed every mouthful thirty-six times before swallowing.

There were four whole weeks’ holiday in the working year. Twenty days—it meant four weeks. And there were bank holidays, too, nine of them—New Year, May Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday, Spring, August, and about three days off at Christmas. Francis knew them all, particularly that horrible long stretch at Easter, when it seemed as if one Sunday was succeeding another. The four weeks’ holiday you had to take for the sake of the other staff in the office, who actually wanted it. Oddly enough, you had to call in sick at least once or twice a year, too, because everyone thought that was normal and pretty well your right, so you had to do it whether you were sick or not.

Usually Francis took his holiday in as large chunks as he could bear, whenever it was convenient to everyone else—always in school term-time, which couldn’t affect him. He never did anything much. Often, he went up to see his parents in Sheffield. One of these days, he thought, he was going to go to Australia to see Sandra. He hadn’t seen her for five years. There was no reason why not: his salary piled up in his bank account, depleted only by his CD habit. But it didn’t happen. He was quite happy as he was.

For some reason, he’d suddenly thought that, after all, there might be something to be said for going abroad. He was getting too set in his ways. He thought, and decided that he really would quite like to go to Rome. He booked his holiday from work, bought a ticket, three months in advance, and reserved a hotel by letter. He went to the post
office, filled in the forms, and in some weeks his passport arrived; he’d never needed one before. And then he remembered the cat.

Francis had lived in the same house since he’d moved to London. It was quite pleasant, but it wasn’t his. He’d moved into one bedroom in a shared house, and in time the original people had moved out. At first he’d had the smallest room; when the others moved out, he moved into their rooms, until he was living in the best room in the house and paying a little more for it. There were five bedrooms in the house, and at first five lodgers. In time, he asked the landlord whether he could have an extra room, and the landlord agreed. He’d lived there now for ten years, and now he had three rooms. There were two lodgers downstairs; he had a whole floor. He didn’t really know them—anyway, they were so much younger than him they didn’t have much in common. They’d move out soon, he expected.

Francis was so settled in his three rooms on the top floor that it seemed a natural step to acquire a cat. He’d got the idea from one of his friends in the queue for a Proms concert in the summer. The Proms were his social season. He’d been going for years, and knew almost all the old hands, the regulars. They all had their favourite places on the rail at the front of the arena, and they looked out for each other. If anyone tried to let someone in at the front of the queue, or muscle into a reserved space, the dedicated Prommers had their ways of making sure they didn’t succeed, and didn’t ever come back. “I’m surprised you don’t get a cat,” Stephanie said. She was twenty stone, her long, half-washed grey hair in a wet-looking cascade down her back, which, even now, she sometimes liked to flick in girlish ways, and loved oratorio best. “It’s so nice when you come back to your flat and there’s Dame Kiri there, so excited, she can’t wait to jump up into your lap.”

“I didn’t see you at the Rattle, Francis,” someone else said, perhaps surprised at a mental picture.

“I thought I’d prom in the gallery,” Francis said. “I think you get the best sound in Mahler Two up there.”

Stephanie worked for the Civil Service, too, in the Department of Health, where she had her own little things, her own coffee-machine and pictures and special chair for her back problems, they all knew all about it. Francis could see the pathos of a woman like Stephanie coming home and being greeted by a cat; she kept the animal’s birthday, and bought it Christmas presents too. But, of course, a cat needn’t be like that. A cat of Francis’s wouldn’t be like that at all. It might be quite
nice to have an animal dozing away in the corner of a room. You couldn’t have a dog in London, but a cat was perfectly possible, and a degree of company more than the lodgers downstairs. And, of course, the cat wouldn’t be called Dame Kiri.

It was called Samson.

“I wouldn’t have thought of you as a cat person, Francis,” Mr. Knowles, his line manager, said in the lift. He was hearty and fat and, though dad-like, actually the same age as Francis; his stomach bulged against his striped shirts, turning straight lines into arabesques. He looked up cheerfully at Francis. “I’d have thought—”

“Do I seem more like a dog person?” Francis said, surprised.

“Oh, no,” Mr. Knowles said. “Definitely not.”

“Definitely not,” a woman in the lift agreed. Francis wasn’t sure he even knew her.

“I would have thought …” Mr. Knowles said. “More—a fish, maybe.”

Francis didn’t know what to say to that. The woman started sniggering. But luckily it seemed to Mr. Knowles as if he’d said something rude, which Francis might complain about.

“So what are you going to call your cat?” Mr. Knowles said.

“He’s called Samson,” Francis said.

“That’s a curious name for a cat,” Mr. Knowles said. “Big fellow, is he?”

“Well, it’s more that—” Francis began, but then the lift arrived at the fifteenth floor, and Mr. Knowles led the way out as if the conversation was over.

Francis had brought the cat home in its cage-fronted box; had set out its basket, its litter box, and then had opened the front. The cat, still unnamed, had peered at them with its black face from the dark like a panther in a plastic cave. After a moment, it ventured out, padding heavily. It went all round the room, under chairs and into crevices between furniture. For some reason, watching it walk with its soundless, weighty tread, Francis remembered something horrible he had once heard: that if you died alone in a house with a cat in it, it would sooner or later start eating your body. The cat came to the CDs, piled up high in towers; he seemed to see something interesting in the gap between two balancing piles. He turned away and, with his rump, knocked against one of the towers. It teetered, wavered, and fell with a crash, sending the cat rocketing to the other side of the room and up the sofa. “It’s all right, you silly animal,” Francis said. “You don’t know
your own strength.” So, of course, the cat was Samson. He’d have explained to Mr. Knowles if he hadn’t been in so much of a hurry.

“I couldn’t take the responsibility,” one of the lodgers said, when Francis asked her about looking after Samson for a week.

“I’m not going to be here,” the other one said, barefaced, staring at Francis as if challenging him. “Where are you going?”

“I thought I might go to Rome,” Francis said apologetically, as if he hadn’t quite decided yet. He thought about everyone he knew, which of them could look after Samson for a week. It wouldn’t be much of a burden; he didn’t do anything much for Samson himself, beyond feeding him and emptying his litter tray, and Samson never went outside. All the same, it seemed a lot to ask people. In the end, before he found himself tracking down Stephanie in the Department of Health, he phoned his mother.

“Yes, of course,” his mother said. “I don’t mind. It won’t be any trouble for a week.”

She sounded tired, accepting.

“What shall I do?” Francis said. “Shall I bring him up on—what—the Friday?”

“Why don’t I come down for a change?” his mother said. “I could make a trip of it—come to London, stay overnight with you, take the cat back the next day.”

“There’s not really the set-up here,” Francis said. “I don’t see why you should be put out. I’ll come up.”

“It wouldn’t put me out,” his mother said. “It’s not like you, popping off to Rome. What’s got into you?”

“I don’t know,” Francis said. “I suddenly thought I wanted to go somewhere for a change.”

“Say hello to the Pope for me,” she said.

After Bernie had retired, the days seemed to lengthen for Alice. The question of his retirement had come up earlier than she had expected, when he was still in his early fifties, and she’d known what it meant: it meant being held accountable, in the friendliest way possible, for how she spent her days. There wasn’t much to it. The house didn’t take much keeping, now the children were gone. She liked to have ten minutes on the exercise bike in the mornings—she’d always kept herself trim. There were a few small hobbies she’d taken up, too; not elaborate pastimes like Malcolm Glover devoted himself to, but taking a particular
care and interest in stuff that most people did carelessly and inattentively. She’d always been a reliable cook, and even the plain stuff she’d cooked night after night for the children had been interesting to her; now she became an inquisitive one. Although she took care not to become overelaborate or showy, and, anyway, as everyone said, you shouldn’t eat food that was too rich any more, she discovered and mastered new dishes, repeating and refining them over a few months until they were really delicious, then moving on to something else.

The little brick-bordered patch outside the back door she cleared of the few dismal perennials, and turned into a little herb garden—lemon balm, mint, rosemary, thyme. She picked them over, trimming them neatly, weeding the bed, finding a use for each. After rain in summer, the waft of perfume was a delight to her. She experimented with remedies to exclude the neighbourhood cats from the garden, pouring five jars of chilli powder round the boundary in a cordon. It didn’t work, and she moved on, with a sense of keeping herself busy, to the next idea. She made a hobby of her face, trying out moisturizers, toners, eyebrow-pluckers, cleansers, foundations, shifting the tones of her makeup in small ways that no one but she was ever likely to observe. Occasionally she even had a face-pack; she liked the fun of the peel-off ones. She read; not buying books particularly, but going weekly to the library. She’d always liked reading, but now her reading became serious: if she liked a novel by an author, she carried on reading all his novels and perhaps even his biography. She saw a notice in the library for a reading group, one afternoon a week, took the plunge and went along. She enjoyed that; she started drinking up something that had always horrified and frightened her, direct argument. She found out about things; there was so much to discover. They kept her going, all these small, ordinary hobbies.