The Northern Clemency (82 page)

“I don’t think I could eat any sort of veal,” Tim said.

“No, I wouldn’t expect you to,” Daniel said. He was in very good humour, and not allowing himself to be snubbed. “As I say, we’ve got a vegetarian option. It’s quite popular.”

The food arrived.

“This is terrible,” Daniel said cheerfully, banging the back of his fork against a potato in the salad. “It’s practically raw, it’s like a water chestnut. It’s not hard to cook potatoes and serve them with mayonnaise on top.”

“I like it here,” Tim said, but Daniel was off again.

“Helen’s got a new idea,” he said. “We’re going to have a seventies’ night in the restaurant once a month. I’m going to dress up in flares and a loud shirt and she’ll put an Afro wig on.”

“Where are you going to get flares from?”

“Oh, there’ll be some in my dad’s wardrobe,” Daniel said. “But we’re going to do seventies food, too—there’ll be prawn cocktail and chicken Maryland and melba toast. Helen thinks we ought to put glasses of fruit juice on the menu as a starter, just as a joke, I wouldn’t expect anyone to order it. People really like that stuff still.”

“But, Daniel,” Tim said in his most superior way, “there are certainly restaurants in Sheffield which still serve all that. I bet the restaurant at the Hallam Towers still does prawn cocktail.”

“Not ironically, though,” Daniel said. “It’ll be a blast. Anyway, they don’t, I know they don’t.”

“You don’t eat at the Hallam Towers, do you?”

“Not regularly,” Daniel said, “but when we were starting up the restaurant, we thought we’d go and eat in every restaurant in town, and everywhere that was any good in the countryside near here. So we went to the Hallam Towers. We just had dinner, we went on a night we knew’d be quiet, and we’d order things off the menu that you knew people wouldn’t order much. And then you’d start up a conversation with the waiter about what was popular, what went well, what did most people like to eat. They’d always tell you. It’s interesting. But, no, they don’t do all that stuff any more.”

“I’m amazed,” Tim said sardonically, but he was surprised; “prawn cocktail” along with “dinner-dance” were shorthand pieces of abuse between him and Trudy for the pleasures of the
petit bourgeoisie
. He wondered what they actually ate nowadays when they wanted to go out for a bit of a splash.

“And we went there again, it must have been six months ago, and it certainly wasn’t prawn cocktail. It was Bernie, you know, Mr. Sellers, lives across from Mum and Dad, he was retiring and they gave him a big party there. It was Japanese, the food, sushi, it was really good. I thought it was going to be warm white wine and a master of ceremonies inviting us to tuck into the vol-au-vents, but it was quite smart, they really splashed out. Hang on, they only asked us on Mum and Dad’s invitation—didn’t they ask you as well?”

“They did,” Tim said. “I don’t think we could have gone.”

“Well, you missed—” Daniel said. “Hey, I remember.” He gave a big smile, and now it was a deliberately malicious one. “Yeah, you wrote a big letter to Bernie saying he was a fascist, or something, and it was in contravention of your political position, or whatever. Yeah, he showed it to me, we were really concerned about that, Mr. Sellers
never knew he’d been in such danger of being put up against the wall when the revolution comes.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Tim said. “Not everyone agrees with your political position, you know.”

“I don’t have a political position,” Daniel said. “I’ve never voted in my life. They’re all the same.”

“That’s exactly what all completely right-wing people always say,” Tim said, attacking his quiche.

“Yeah, I bet,” Daniel said, not ruffled. “I bet you’re really proud of yourself, though, now Mrs. Sellers is in hospital and probably going to die.”

“She’s what?”

Tim was flushed still; it wasn’t out of rage, just out of shame that Bernie might have come over the road to show the carefully argued letter he’d written explaining the facts of the case to Daniel. Probably to his mum and dad too—no, probably not. Tim remembered Bernie, his brusque, assessing manner, and it seemed most likely that he’d have waited to show it to Daniel, the one who would find it funny. He hadn’t heard anything was wrong with Sandra’s mum.

“It was at the weekend,” Daniel said. He was, it seemed, not surprised that nobody would have thought to tell Tim something like this and, in fact, he hadn’t spoken to any of his family for weeks. It wouldn’t have occurred to them to pass this on. “Mum asked me to send over a few ready-made dishes from the kitchen that Bernie could heat up when he came in from the hospital, so I’m involved in the whole thing. Of course, we were pleased to,” he said grandly. “It’s no more work for us.”

“That’s generous of you,” Tim said.

“She’s had a brain haemorrhage,” Daniel said. “It was lucky Bernie was in—he’d just got back from taking their son off to the station. What’s his name?”

“Francis,” Tim said.

“Francis, he was up from London, he was just going back. If it had happened when he was out, she’d have died, they reckon. She’s probably still going to die. She’s in a coma. They’re over there at the Northern General day and night. Mum’s been going every other day. I went with her, the day before yesterday, and Helen’s been once, too.”

“Helen’s been?” Tim hardly knew Helen.

“She’s quite upset about it. She felt she was just getting to know Alice. She liked her. I mean, she still likes her, she’s not dead.”

“What caused it?”

“I don’t think anything much, not in particular,” Daniel said. “Helen was there when the doctor came round. She went out, of course, she let him talk to Mr. Sellers and—Francis. Are you sure it’s Francis? But they told her afterwards—it could have happened at any point in her life, there’s some kind of weakness there anyway, and it just burst now. They showed us the scans. They’re horrific.”

Tim controlled himself. It seemed to him that this was the moment he’d been waiting for over the course of years. Every patient stroke of his conduct, every irregular and unconventional turn in his professional and personal path had, it seemed, been directed with keen rationality towards this exact end, and directed, despite himself, by his own mind, full of planning. He had read a book called
Love in the Time of Cholera
and had thrilled to the idea that you might wait fifty, sixty years and your love would return to you. It had happened to him at twenty-nine. Everything from the previous years—his taking up with Trudy, which had always appeared a decision and not a gut feeling, the chain of progress along the same line in the same building, which represented his career, even the house in Nether Edge, which, ugly as it was, offered a spare room on the narrow top floor, which, of course, of course, was there to be hers—everything seemed now in retrospect to have been arranged for this exact moment. He had been led through high-hedged path after high-hedged path, unable to see over the top, not to be told whether this was a maze or a road to a destination, and now he had been rewarded. It all made sense, as if he had been handed a map when he no longer had any need of it. All that—everything since, twenty years before, she had taken his head and pressed it in a need that was hers alone, since he had not known the need until it was being fulfilled—had led him to this point. That long-remembered face was taking on flesh again, moving. He was in Sheffield when she would return; he was there to offer her everything she now needed. He had had dreams in which she returned from Australia in a wheelchair, blind, and he was on the Tarmac to push her. A dead mother was nearly the next best thing.

“Has Sandra come back?” Tim said casually.

Daniel shifted in his chair, uncomfortably. “I wondered that,” he said. “She hasn’t. I don’t think she’s planning to.”

“She’s not coming back?” Tim said.

“I don’t think so,” Daniel said. “I know. I’m surprised. I mentioned her to Bernie—he’s in a terrible state, Bernie. At the moment he’s got
other things to worry about, of course he has. I’ve never seen anyone cry so much. I don’t think Francis is much use to him, either. Sooner or later, though, he’s going to start thinking about Sandra. I’m really surprised at her. Bernie said he’d phoned her and she said that she would come over, but she couldn’t at the moment. He wouldn’t say but I think she said it was too expensive to get a ticket at that short notice.”

“She wouldn’t have said that.”

“Maybe she didn’t. It was just that when he was telling me, he said, ‘I know everyone thinks she’s making a lot of money over there.’ But then he stopped himself. She must have said something of that sort.”

“She must have been in Australia for ten years.”

“More than that,” Daniel said. “She was only out of university a year when she went. She’s only been back once, and they’ve never gone at all. I know they keep in touch, though.”

“What an old gossip you are,” Tim said.

“Of course,” Daniel said, stung. “It’s nice of you to wonder immediately what you can do to help when someone’s in trouble. I know you’re so concerned about social problems.”

Tim didn’t think that a single rich woman in hospital was “social problems,” but he also thought that if he said that, Daniel would immediately say that the Sellerses weren’t rich in any obvious sense. A few moments ago, however, a bold and extraordinary idea had been unfolding in Tim’s mind. If he had been disappointed to discover that, after all, the initial scenario of his helping, supporting Sandra at a time of need, would unfold another scenario, a more dramatic one, had immediately presented itself. He didn’t know how he was going to achieve it; it seemed, however, exactly the thing he ought to be doing, even if he had to walk out on Trudy to do it, even if he had to cancel all his classes, supplying Hester Carver with the flimsiest of excuses for the purpose. He saw exactly what he was going to do. There was no reason not to.

“Where does she live?” Tim said.

“In Sydney,” Daniel said, puzzled, because surely Tim would know this. “She calls herself Alex, these days. She lives in a place called Manly—I remember noticing, because I thought it was funny. She sends me a Christmas card most years … You know I was friends with her.” Daniel, not always the brightest person, looked assessingly now at Tim. “Listen to me—you’re not thinking of writing to her, are you?”

“Of course not,” Tim said. “I don’t know her. I’m not going to write to her. The older I get,” he said, settling back—he’d finished his lunch,
though the waitress took his empty plate and Daniel’s near-full one away quite indifferently, “the older I get, the less I think I understand women. Take my students …”

And he had prepared this bit, explaining his menstruating fan club in non-carrying tones quite coherently. In fact, it was so coherent—he’d made so much sense out of it—that he couldn’t quite recall why he’d wanted to ask Daniel’s opinion. As he carried on, it seemed to Tim that he was talking in exactly the exuberant and amusing way that he’d heard other men talk at parties and at the ends of public bars about women, about the curious things their co-workers did, and were greeted with laughter; but Daniel’s face was hardening with distaste, pulling back into a sort of disgusted sneer, as if it were trying to escape from Tim as fast as it possibly could.

“You’re completely sick,” Daniel said eventually. “You really want to see a psychiatrist.”

None of that seemed to matter any more; he’d been handed a task, a big, shiny, beautiful task, and all he had to do was to carry it to the other side of the world. In fairy tales, that was the hardest thing of all, to go to the ends of the earth. These days, Tim thought, as he trudged into Bigg and Cleaver (there was an old Pelican he was looking for) to the welcoming fanfare of a drunk saxophonist falling out of a third-storey window and landing on a skip full of drums, that was a doddle. Anyone could go to the ends of the earth; after this, he was going to go to Thomas Cook and buy a ticket. Only then would he go home and tell Trudy where he was going, on his own.

Twelve years before, in 1982, a white Mercedes taxi was driving in thin, drizzly rain along an Australian highway. The driver was dark and hairy; Lebanese, he’d told his passenger, and gone on to guess, without asking her, that she was English. “Pale, you see,” he’d said. He kept on talking, and was talking still; but Sandra’s—Alexandra’s—attention was fixed on the outside. It was extraordinary to get off and find rain here, too. It might have been the same rain that had been falling at Heathrow, twenty-four hours before, and it was certainly almost the same temperature. It seemed bizarre to have made so much effort; to have paid hundreds of pounds for the ticket; to have lugged two enormous suitcases across the country (a hundred and twenty pounds in excess baggage), to have sat, cramped, nearly at the back row of a plane for a whole cycle of a day, though the sun was swerving crazily around
the plane’s progress, making a sort of figure-of-eight; to have done all that to find exactly what she had left, a faint drizzle and only the accent on the car radio at all different. They had paused at Singapore, and she had gone out on to the airport terrace, and that had seemed worth travelling for: a huge slap of hot, wet air. Now it seemed as if they might as well have turned round and gone straight back to England.

But of course they had not done so. Alexandra was desperately tired; her watch said six, but she couldn’t work out whether this grey drizzle was that of dawn or dusk. She focused on the world outside, and then, of course, it was different, gorgeously so, the gorgeousness residing only in the strange billboards, the boasting about what things cost in weird and unworkable currency, and behind them, some suggestion that this was a new country, an unfamiliar country; the trees were quite different. Could they be eucalyptus? She had no idea. She reminded herself that the stars, even, were different from the ones in England.

“Out here on holiday?” the taxi driver said, having run through his monologue.

“No,” Alexandra said. “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it. I don’t know how long I’m staying.”

She didn’t know, it was true. The story was that she was here after a man; she’d told everyone that. There’d been an Australian in a bar in Zakynthos the August before last. He’d been travelling round Europe, and had ended up there. She’d ditched Michelle, her friend she’d gone on holiday with, and after one night, then a day on a boat trip to the nearest island with him, a second night, she’d gone back to her hotel in the morning and had moved her stuff into the flat Chris was renting. She’d left a note for Michelle with an apology; Michelle saw her and she saw Michelle, on her own, on the beach two days later, and she’d raised her book and ignored them both. They hadn’t been such friends after that, and Michelle made a point of telling her, when they were back in England, that she’d had a really boring time on her own. It had been fun. Part of it was that she’d made up a whole load of stuff about herself. People often thought she was posher than she was, what with the drawl and the Alice band and the Alexandra, and she generally played up a bit to it, saying she’d been born in London but brought up in Yorkshire. That was what you needed to do, these days; people liked posh, and though Alexandra herself had never fooled anyone genuinely posher than herself, she managed all right with the sort of people who had gone to Warwick, and with most people since then. She’d never gone the whole hog so much, though, as she’d gone with Australian
Chris, and she suspected that part of her appeal for him was that he thought she was a dirty posh English girl, or however he put it to himself and, when they were alone, to his two pathetic “mates.”