Philip Hensher - The Northern Clemency

Malcolm, not really thinking, often said it would be more sensible to go to the supermarket once a week, and was talking about buying a chest freezer to put in the utility room, but she discouraged him. At the words ‘chest freezer’ she saw her life retreating: lifting deep-frozen carcasses from their bed of ice, spending days watching joints defrost, drip by pink drip. In any case, he didn’t know that when she said she’d done the shopping by ten, she was dissembling: it was rare that she was home before two – she had so many ways of passing the time. A different woman, she often thought, would have dropped in at the pub for a gin and tonic; the Admiral Codrington was eminently respectable, apparently.

Two years before, Mrs Milner had said to her, ‘There’s a florist’s opening where Townsend’s the ironmonger’s used to be.’ She was sitting at Katherine’s table: she liked to take the weight off her feet when they weren’t too busy and, in any case, the eight or nine women who came in regularly, sometimes inviting each other to share a table, more often calling across if the conversation became more than usually interesting, hardly counted as customers to make a fuss of.

‘That’s a shame,’ Miss Johnson, the retired bank clerk, said. ‘It was useful, Townsend’s, for anything small about the house. I’d been hoping there’d be something useful opening up in its place.’

‘You can always buy a box of screws in Woolworth’s, I dare say, Mary,’ Mrs Milner said.

‘It’s not the same,’ Miss Johnson said. ‘It was a useful shop to have round the corner, and I don’t believe I’ve bought a bunch of flowers since Mother died, so a florist’s no use to me.’

‘I like a sprig of rosemary with lamb,’ Mrs Goldsmith said, intruding into another conversation. ‘I think it brings out the flavour.’

‘I don’t suppose Townsend’s found it easy to keep going, you buying a picture hook once every two years,’ Mrs Milner said to Miss Johnson. ‘Those old family firms with everything in little drawers and the assistant taking fifteen minutes to find anything, they’re on the way out, you mark my words. I think it’ll be lovely to have a florist nearby. I might even invite them,’ she went on grandly, ‘to supply the tea-shop with regular bouquets.’

‘That’ll be an improvement,’ Miss Johnson said, somewhat nettled, and poking at the limp anemone in a thumb-sized vase on her table. ‘Goodness, what a day – you’d never think it was June.’

‘I’ve never known June such a wash-out,’ Mrs Milner said, ignoring Miss Johnson’s rudeness. ‘As for the florist’s, they’ll all be buying flowers from it once it’s there, I think you’ll find.’

‘It’s a nice idea,’ Katherine said. ‘You never know – it’s on the way home from my husband’s work. He might take to stopping off there.’ None of the other ladies knew Malcolm, but politely suppressed ribaldry ensued.

‘It’s terrible, the parking in Broomhill,’ Janet Goldsmith said. ‘I’d remember that, Katherine, before you get your hopes up. Have you seen the new knee-length skirts in Belinda’s? Well worth a look.’

‘Buy yourself flowers and save the heartbreak,’ Mrs Milner said, but just then a man, a stranger, came in, bringing a burst of rain with a flapping umbrella, and she got up to fetch him the list of cakes.

Katherine hadn’t noticed the shop-fitting work going on at Townsend’s old premises, but over the next few weeks she took some interest in its progress. As the work came towards a conclusion, it became obvious that it was going to be a high-class florist’s, a cut above the two or three purveyors of scrubby chrysanthemums, tired-out roses and oversized daisies in unnatural colours to be found in the town centre. As soon as the plastering was finished, the decorators put up wallpaper in thin Regency stripes, red and white. Katherine had thought about Regency stripes for her own hall – and she watched with approval when the shop sign, in good solid brass Roman lettering on a dark-blue painted background, went up: REYNOLDS, just that. It wasn’t long before the shop opened, and Katherine went in on the first morning. She had plans.

Katherine had had jobs in the past. Before she knew Malcolm, she had worked in a solicitors’ office, a family firm in Sheffield that had taken her on when her father put her in the way of one of his old golfing cronies. She’d like that job. Nice, it had been, hurrying out of the office in Peace Square, down the steps of the Georgian building, sandstone and worn hammocky, at five thirty to meet her young man waiting there with, often, a protective umbrella held high – Katherine had a beehive, high and shiny as precariously roped-on furniture. It was a shock to remember that the young man must have been Malcolm. There hadn’t been any other young men. He’d been too shy to come in and wait with the senior partner’s secretary even when it was raining, apparently seeing a solicitors’ firm, with offices in a Georgian house in Peace Square, as in a social category above that of a Yorkshire building society.

The beehive had lasted after their wedding, but not long after, the changes of fashion and of her own status dismissing it. And the job at the solicitors’ went, too, Mr Collins having opinions about married women in the office that even then he acknowledged as old-fashioned. She didn’t mind, never having been brought up to stay where she wasn’t wanted, and got another job, actually, in a private boys’ school, a day school, a decade old but housed, like the solicitors’, in a building meant for more domestic and gracious purposes, a mill-owner’s town-house in Broomhill, blackened with soot. A neat line of iron stumps, like orphaned children’s teeth, marked the line where the railings had been before the war. There was no prohibition on married women here, and, indeed, they were employed in preference to virgins, though not through any valuing of motherliness – it was not that sort of school, or that sort of time. The masters wore gowns and often carried, actually carried canes through the corridors; rather, it was presumed that the experience of coition had removed from women any illusions about the male nature. Katherine helped out, her tasks too vague and multiple in that scandalous school to remember, let alone define. They went from sticking plasters on knees and sweeping up leaves to ‘playing the pianoforte’ in assembly and taking the boys to Forge Dam on a local-history expedition, shivering informatively in the laid-on rain. Everything fell under her title, calculated to distinguish not her but the school in the eyes of prospectives, of Headmaster’s Secretary. She was a sort of alternative to the headmaster’s wife, who was a hooting memsahib with the week’s dinners on a list. She’d quite liked that job too; at the end of her day, she could come home and, as never before or since, make Malcolm laugh about it. She had wondered if he wasn’t a little too serious, even as she was marrying him; now he was relaxing, and laughing. It was a happy time. It never occurred to her that stories about terrible schools are always funny to anyone.

The jobs ended with Daniel, and then there was Jane. Maybe, as Jane was going to school for the first time, maybe then Katherine was starting to say to herself the sorts of things that women, even in Sheffield, were saying to themselves in the mid-to-late 1960s, with a sense of what very mid-to-late 1960s things they were to be thinking at all. She might well have been thinking that she could, after all, go back to work in some way. But then Timothy came along – how had that happened? She couldn’t remember having sex after 1962 – but she couldn’t remember buying Malcolm’s socks either, although she must have done. Maybe it had been a part of her unremarkable domestic routine that had gone on automatically. It was a couple of years after Tim had started school before she dared to think of working, and it was only the florist’s opening that put in into her head.