Philip Hensher - The Northern Clemency

‘These two’ve been in all day,’ Daniel said. ‘He didn’t call, did he?’

‘No,’ Tim said. ‘No one’s called.’

‘I don’t understand it,’ Katherine said.

For some reason, Jane felt she couldn’t say she’d seen him at lunchtime. He hadn’t wanted to be seen; she didn’t feel she should let on.

But Daniel said, ‘He came home at lunchtime. And then he went out again.’

Katherine looked at him. ‘What did he do that for?’

‘How should I know? I didn’t see him. I was at the pool all day. Jane saw him.’

‘Jane,’ Katherine said, ‘did he say anything? I don’t know where he’s got to. If he’d gone to the pub he’d have phoned, surely.’

‘He never goes to the pub,’ Daniel said, ‘except on Fridays.’

‘But did he say anything about being late?’

‘I only saw him,’ Jane said. ‘I didn’t speak to him. I was in the garden. He didn’t see me, I don’t think.’

Katherine looked at her. It sounded strange, your family avoiding each other, hiding and not speaking. But it made sense to all of them. ‘I expect he’s been held up,’ she said. ‘Let’s not worry just yet.’

‘He’s never held up,’ Tim said, his voice emphatic. ‘He’s always home by now.’

‘He’s got a good reason, I’m sure,’ Katherine said. ‘Let’s not worry. Have you had your dinner?’

The children looked at each other, surprised. The idea of making their own dinner was a new one. No one had ever suggested it.

‘All right,’ Katherine said. ‘Just let me get changed. There’s the food from last night to finish up. That OK?’

‘Aren’t we going to wait for Dad?’ Daniel said.

‘He’ll be home soon,’ Katherine said.

They’d forgotten about the party food, which was sitting in the fridge on two big plates under foil, not separated out now, but the remains of half a dozen dishes jammed together. The vol-au-vents were flaking, soft and clothy, the Coronation Chicken a little brown and crusty round the edges; the rice salad, flecked with red peppers, hadn’t really been touched the night before, and it didn’t look nicer now. Everything seemed sad and unfestive, like tinsel in the full light of day. Jane and Daniel took it out, and she set the table with five places. There was some lettuce and tomatoes too; she made a salad, put out the salad cream.

‘I don’t like rice,’ Tim said, following her from the kitchen to the dining room. ‘I don’t like that yellow stuff either. I want beans on toast.’

‘You be quiet,’ Jane said. ‘You’re too fussy about your food.’

‘I can’t help it.’

Katherine came down, her face washed and recomposed. ‘Good girl!’ she said brightly, when she saw Jane had set the dinner out. They ate; there was nothing to wait for with the food. Daniel ate quickly; he was always hungry, and nothing got in the way of that. Katherine filled a plate for Tim, ignoring his protests; he poked at it, eating a little here and there. Neither he nor Daniel was thinking about their father. Jane put food on her plate – a strange assortment, like the hopeful random selection you make at a party, not necessarily meaning to eat everything but taking a bit of each. She watched her mother nervously; she was looking around her, on edge, not eating. After a few minutes, Tim said, ‘I don’t like rice,’ again. ‘I don’t like those red things, those peppers, in it.’

‘Then don’t eat it,’ Katherine said abruptly. ‘Go hungry.’ She got up sharply – almost as if she were going to strike him – and went into the hall. They could hear her rifling through the address book by the telephone. Jane and Daniel exchanged a short, scared look. Their parents had suddenly altered. From the hall, the noise of dialling.

‘Hello?’ Katherine said. ‘Hello, Margaret? This is Katherine Glover, Malcolm’s wife…Yes, that’s right, at the Dennises…Yes, I remember. I know this sounds a little strange, but did Malcolm have anything – Oh, I see…Really? That sounds unusual…No, I didn’t. Well, I’m sure there’s some perfectly innocent explanation – he’ll be home soon, I expect. Thank you so much – I hope I’m not disturbing you…’

And she put the phone down, then came back into the dining room. She didn’t sit down and go on with her dinner. She just stood there. ‘That was your father’s secretary,’ she said, ‘Margaret. She said he left the office at lunchtime and didn’t come back.’

‘He was here at lunchtime,’ Jane said, ‘and then he went out again. I thought he’d gone back to work.’

‘Yes,’ Katherine said. ‘You said.’

She went to the window, peered out through the net curtains. She seemed lost in thought. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘the new people are moving in. There’s a removal van.’

‘It came this afternoon,’ Daniel said, still eating. ‘They’ve left it, they’ve not started unpacking the furniture.’

‘Did you see them?’ Katherine said absently.

‘No,’ Daniel said. ‘They’ll be moving in tomorrow, I suppose.’

‘I wonder,’ Tim said, ‘where my dad’s gone.’

‘You don’t think there’s anything wrong, do you?’ Jane said. She remembered the stories she’d constructed in the garden as she saw the figure in the window. It seemed odd already that she’d imagined burglars.

‘No,’ Katherine said firmly. ‘There’s nothing wrong.’

But then she went out again and started making phone calls, to the hospitals first and, finally, the police. One by one the children took their plates to the kitchen; Jane washed up, listening to the repeated query in her mother’s politest, most telephone voice. It seemed to her that there was something of blame and guilt in it. She could not understand it.

For years Katherine had been in the habit, in the mornings, of getting into the car with the children and Malcolm. First, Malcolm dropped off Daniel at Flint, the senior school – he insisted on being dropped a good three hundred yards from the gates, and she knew for a fact that most of his friends had exactly the same arrangement with their parents – then Tim, at his primary school, and Jane at the new middle school, less self-consciously getting out at the gate. Finally Malcolm dropped her in Broomhill with its parade of shops and went off to work.

That had been her routine since Tim started school. She did it almost every day, saying, as if it needed justifying, that it was nice to have a regular routine each day, and hers was to buy the groceries before ten each morning, then head back to do the housework. In reality, she hadn’t minded the housework when Tim was too small to go to school, just as she didn’t really mind it when the children were on their school holidays. It was the days when the four of them set off, leaving her on her own, with no one to talk to and nothing but dull tasks to do, that wore her down. The noise of Radio 2, so mild a burbling complement to breakfast, had to be turned off, or had to be listened to as if it were company; so, by the time Tim was seven, she had taken to getting into the car, going to Broomhill and filling the morning with the day’s small shopping – the fishmonger or the pork butcher, the little supermarket, the greengrocer – maybe the bank, and definitely the little tea-shop for a cup of coffee and a piece of cake.

Crosspool was closer to shop in, of course, but it was a 1920s development, a shabby parade with holes in the Tarmac and a hardware shop with Chinese-made plastic flowers in the window, and no tea-shop. Broomhill was stone-built Victorian villas – it was a part of the city that hadn’t been bombed in the war. It had a dress shop, a bookshop, and the greengrocer sold courgettes. It was a nicer place, so Katherine put up with the tinny flavour of the brown-coloured filling in the cakes at the tea-shop, the burnt crusty nubbings of Mrs Milner’s rock cakes a guarantee of Broomhill’s middle-class, non-shop-bought authenticity. They couldn’t have afforded a house there, though.