Philip Hensher - The Northern Clemency

‘Yes,’ Katherine said. ‘Don’t you think it looks lovely?’

‘Lovely?’ Miss Johnson said. ‘Yes, it does. It does look—’ she tried the word out ‘– lovely. It would be nice to have that and an ironmonger’s. You see, I’m not in a forgiving mood. I don’t know where I’ll go for the practical side of things now Townsend’s is gone.’

‘You could go to Marshall’s in Crookes,’ Katherine said, a little impatient at being dragged away from the topic of Nick after so promising a start. ‘There’ll always be ironmongers.’ She’d been thinking, and couldn’t come up with another florist’s in the whole of the west of Sheffield, even in the splendid beech-sheltered ramparts of Ranmoor.

‘Well, some people might think there’s more of a need for ironmongers,’ Miss Johnson said. ‘But you’re right, Marshall’s is perfectly satisfactory.’

Katherine wouldn’t let on she’d be working at Nick’s the next week, and left Miss Johnson to read as best she could the scene she’d witnessed. She was clearly busting to know. She satisfied herself by remarking that the young man seemed nice, and went on. She didn’t mind the prospect of acquiring a reputation for slyness when the news got out in the tea-shop.

Malcolm had to be told, of course, and the evening had to be chosen carefully. He was out two and a half nights a week. Tuesday was his battle re-creation society; Thursday the gardening club; Friday he liked to go out with the staff for a drink in the pub and wasn’t home before eight. ‘Liked to’ in the sense of ‘thought it a good thing to do’: he didn’t have much of a drink, and said they enjoyed it more than he did. Probably enjoyed it more when he’d gone, Katherine always thought. She toyed with the idea of saving it for one of those nights when he’d come in half an hour before bedtime, to limit the discussion. But there probably wouldn’t be much of a discussion anyway. On Wednesday she thought hard and recalled what Malcolm’s favourite dinner was. She shopped and bought it to soften him up. She even thought about getting a bottle of wine, but that seemed too blatant.

‘Steak!’ Malcolm said. ‘And mushrooms!’ He was standing in the kitchen doorway, having changed out of his suit. The room was steamy, loud with the radio and the steak’s sizzle. Most food he said nothing much about. But at either end of the scale, he had two responses: after anything new, he’d set down his fork and say, discouragingly, ‘Makes a change, at least.’ The other thing, the massively keen one, was what he said now, not even after finishing but before. ‘Haven’t had steak for an age.’

‘What’s so funny?’ Daniel said, wandering into the kitchen, looking for something to eat once his dad had gone.

‘Your dad,’ Katherine said, though really it was herself, the neatness of the plan. ‘Don’t start picking, your dinner’s nearly ready.’

‘I’m starving,’ Daniel said.

‘The inexhaustible appetites of the adolescent male,’ Jane said, coming down the stairs.

‘Gi’ o’er,’ Daniel said, lapsing into school talk.

She didn’t change the tablecloth, she didn’t get out anything but their usual weekday plates. For pudding there was, deliberately, the trifle left from the day before – a delicious one with strawberries in it: she’d been softening them up. The whole thing, apart from Tim saying, at one point, ‘I don’t like steak’ (‘Why not?’ ‘It’s got tubes in it’) was a great success. It was almost a pang to remember what she’d done it for; it was quite a glimpse of a perfect family, all sitting up neatly and eating their delicious steak dinner. The kids might as well have said, ‘May I get down?’ at the end.

‘Do you know what?’ Katherine said, when she and Malcolm were alone. ‘I’ve got myself a job.’

Malcolm looked at her in assessment; she looked back, firmly; he dropped his gaze to his empty plate. You could see him recalculating the steak, which had been only enjoyment, a treat.

‘We’re not that short of money,’ he said.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’ve worked before. I like having a job. I haven’t had one since the children were born.’

‘What’s all this, then, all of a sudden? You’ve not said anything.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t looking for one. It’s just landed in my lap, in a manner of speaking.’

‘We’re not short of money,’ he said again.

‘It’s to keep myself busy,’ she said. ‘Don’t you want to know what it is?’

‘All right, then,’ Malcolm said.

She told him about the shop, which he hadn’t noticed although he drove through Broomhill twice a day. That confirmed something she’d instinctively felt. Malcolm, with all his fussing and tweaking at the plants in the garden, the membership of and regular attendance at the garden club, hadn’t had his attention drawn by a new florist’s. Nick’s business and Malcolm’s Thursday-night interest, both apparently concerned with the same thing, were in reality sharply separated. He wouldn’t have connected the shop with his own interest. They were, mysteriously, different things, and she felt the affront she was offering him.

‘Well, I don’t see why not,’ Malcolm said. ‘If you don’t like it, you can always give up. Who’s in charge of the shop?’

‘He’s not in charge,’ Katherine said. ‘It’s his own business.’

‘Oh, I thought it must be a chain,’ Malcolm said. ‘Interflora. Well, it might not work out for him, either.’

And then Katherine told him about Nick.

It had been easy, really. He’d given way limply, and she didn’t know why she’d made such a business about it in her head. She’d had an argument practised and rehearsed in her mind, marshalled her points; and they lay there now like gleaming clockwork devices for someone to come and claim them. She was almost disappointed. All those arguments had been, in their different ways, attacks on him. It was only afterwards, sitting in front of the telly, Daniel out somewhere, Tim and Jane upstairs, heads in books, that she started to feel a little annoyed; the things he’d just accepted, the things he hadn’t asked about. Shouldn’t you ask about the wages, apologetic though they are? She wondered, angrily, about his politeness to her.

At ten, Daniel came in – he’d been at his friend Matthew’s, playing that board game they played. At eleven, Malcolm got up, switched the television off, unplugged it, remarking that it was a relief all those power-cuts had stopped at last. He made the same remark twice a week. They went upstairs. As usual, she went to the bathroom first, stripped off her makeup, creamed her face. Malcolm had left his jacket on the back of a chair, and was just putting it away in the fitted wardrobe. She started to undress, unbuttoning her skirt. He went to the bathroom next; she put on her clean nightdress and, as she always did, took off her bra and knickers underneath it, like a shy bather fumbling with a towel. Through the wall, she could hear the fierce sizzle of his piss in the toilet. She got into bed, taking a book and her reading glasses from the bedside table.

He came back, and undressed without saying anything. She looked at him covertly over the top of her book. His hair was getting longer; untidy, though, and he’d be having it cut soon. He pulled his shirt, blue with a white collar, over his head. The first time she’d seen him naked, three months before they’d married, she’d been struck by the hair on his body; the little tufty patch between his nipples, almost circular, not quite amounting to a hairy chest. He turned now, and there was the other patch she’d not known anyone could have, a rough growth at the bottom of his spine, a monkey flourish. He wasn’t a hairy man; he’d not have a thick beard if he grew one. She noticed now that the rest of his back, which used to be spotty, was now lightly furred. Odd, the way you went on changing as you got older; that was what ageing meant.