Philip Hensher - The Northern Clemency

‘Ah,’ the man said, as she came through the door of Reynolds’ that morning. The door was open, the flowers still in boxes, the ranks of gerberas like rows of medals, the chrysanthemums like mop-headed boys, the tulips shocked and upright as corn. The empty vases and buckets were arranged on the shelving display, which ramped up against one wall; the other was covered with a sheet of mirrored glass. ‘Ah – good morning. Good morning,’ he said again, more cheerfully.

‘Are you open?’ Katherine said.

‘Yes, absolutely,’ he said. ‘Just setting everything out. It’s our first morning.’

‘I know,’ Katherine said. ‘We’ve been looking forward to it. Well, you’re getting there steadily.’

‘And you’re our first customer,’ he said. ‘How hilarious. That calls for something, I feel. I don’t know what, exactly. There’s no kettle, so I can’t offer you a cup of tea, I’m afraid. Perhaps I can give you your choice of flowers gratis, as my first customer. We’ve got plenty of those.’

‘No,’ Katherine said. ‘Start as you mean to go on.’

‘That’s all right, then,’ the man said, with a little gesture of relief. ‘Why don’t you sit down? You’re not in a hurry, are you? Sit down and talk to me. I’m just putting the flowers out and then you can choose properly. I’m Nick, by the way.’

‘I’m Katherine,’ Katherine said. ‘Is it just you working here?’

‘Well, at the moment,’ Nick said, lifting a row of yellow gerberas from their box in a single fine movement. ‘I haven’t had time to find an assistant, though of course I’ll be needing one. I suppose I’ll have to advertise and interview and my brother’ll want to have a say, and it all seems a bit…’

Just then Miss Johnson walked past the front window, her green tartan shopping trolley rattling behind her; she peered into the shop and saw Katherine, sitting on the one chair, apparently at ease with a young man struggling with flowers. Her mouth shut sharply. She walked on. She must have been on the point of greeting the new florist, but now she wouldn’t, and Nick would never know he might have been forgiven.

At home, Katherine did not immediately tell anyone that she’d taken a job at the new florist’s in Broomhill. She put the jazz-modern yellow and brown plates, twenty years old, in front of Malcolm, Daniel, Jane and Tim; with oven gloves she put one down for herself. On the dining-table was a red tablecloth. She went back to the kitchen, took off the oven gloves and returned. Nothing was really hers. The plates had been a gift from Malcolm’s mother – a wedding present. She’d chosen it, Malcolm’s mother, as the sort of thing a young couple would like, near on twenty years ago. Now, it looked exactly that: something nobody in particular had ever liked, just some postulated abstract entity of a young couple. The dining-table, another gift or cast-off; a repro of something Edwardian, again Malcolm’s mother’s – ‘Your father liked it,’ she’d said, in a challenging tone, as if Katherine and Malcolm were proposing to get shot of it and not her. Anyway, they’d taken it when Malcolm’s father died and his mother had announced that she’d be moving to a cottage in Derbyshire. Snowed in every winter now, too. Katherine put down the five plates, with chilli con carne on them, a new way to make mince interesting mid-week. Malcolm looked at his, perhaps at the patina of violent orange grease surrounding the mound of meat, then started to eat. Really, only the red tablecloth and the melamine-handled cutlery in this room had been her choice. The rest of it represented agreements, and all of it was potential lumber in Katherine’s mind. And that summed it up. She felt all she’d brought to this family were innumerable and faintly pathetic minor possessions, effortlessly chosen but easily replaced with something similar, or something quite different. The substantive structures of their existence, like the table they ate around every night, had been foisted on her without anyone ever considering that she might like to choose something herself.

She would start work a week later – no point in hanging about, Nick had said, with evident relief. She’d dropped in once or twice since then to talk over her tasks – it wasn’t necessary, Nick said, but she was in Broomhill anyway, as she often was.

‘Here, let me,’ she’d said, on one of her drop-ins, approaching him with opening arms to take a sheaf of sixty yellow roses from him. His lightly bearded face had a suddenly pagan look, a spark of alarm, like an intelligent animal’s.

‘No, no,’ he said, controlling the emotion, looking now amused, boss-like. ‘I can’t let you work yet, not until I start paying you.’

‘Well, I could start properly today,’ Katherine said. ‘You wouldn’t have to pay me the full day. You obviously need help.’

‘I can’t,’ Nick said. ‘I haven’t had a chance to talk it through with my brother. It’s half his money.’

‘Where is he?’ Katherine said.

‘New York,’ Nick said. ‘I’ll mention it at the weekend.’

‘Is he coming over, then?’ Katherine said, treading cautiously. She was inexperienced in lives and brothers like that, New York brothers; she felt in danger of saying something that showed where she was and where she’d seen. What she was.

‘No,’ Nick said. ‘I’ll speak to him on the phone.’

‘Can you do that?’ and ‘That’s an awful expense,’ came to Katherine, but she managed to say, ‘Of course,’ in quite a natural way, and went away quite soon afterwards.

This brother was a new, tantalizing fact, a good one for the tea-shop, but she’d not be in a rush to share it. In repetition, under the unsparing investigation of the Broomhill matrons and virgins, that urbane ‘of course’ would not save her, and she could hardly pass as a woman to whom phone calls to New York brothers were an ordinary matter. Pretence with a Jacqueline Susann flavour made those women’s eyes widen, their lips licked even if it were true, a holiday in Morocco with photographs from Boots; she could not associate herself with this bold life without examining her own, and it started with the furniture.

She could not revolt from the second-hand, passed-down nature of her house’s furnishings – hadn’t she always said she liked old things, family things? – uncomfortably eliding a guilty table her mother-in-law had bought thirty years before with the notion of a ‘family heirloom’. It was rather the sense that her life would pass among superseded objects, things too vast and bulky to throw away without life-changing resolution. She saw herself, elderly, negotiating her own house like a mountaineer with crampons. There was some betrayal of her own existence, too, in the choice of a flower shop. Responsibility; waste; luxury; gardens. That was what it was about. When the time came, she would put on her orange rubber gloves and throw away the stock at the end of the week with a flash of excitement like the anticipation of adultery. Goodness. She would set her face. Nick would fold his arms, study her. She saw the whole scene quite clearly, and she was starting there on Monday. What she had betrayed had, quite suddenly, become not her existence but her husband’s.

That oasis of mutable beauty, bought wholesale, was a startling addition to Broomhill’s black and, where cleaned, yellowish sandstone. Nick’s flowers were the only things sold there both useless and shortlived. Frivolous, unnecessary and lovely.

‘Have you seen the new shop? The flower shop?’ Miss Johnson said, bumping into Katherine a day or two after it had opened. They were outside the post office; this was Miss Johnson’s way of letting Katherine know she had been seen sitting casually with the young man, and had not been seen at all.