Philip Hensher - The Northern Clemency

‘You don’t think it’ll come back into fashion?’ Nick said, still laughing.

‘And in the meantime we’re to have it cluttering up the shop and frightening off the customers?’

‘I see what you mean,’ Nick said. He took off his chamois gloves and, with his slight hands, picked up the vase. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’ll christen the good ship Reynolds.’

She followed him to the back of the shop. He gave a sturdy kick to the door. It flung open. The brick courtyard was shaggy with weeds, and a cat threw itself up a wall. ‘Right,’ Nick said. ‘Do you want to do it or shall I?’

‘Do what?’

‘Christen the shop,’ Nick said. ‘All right. I name this good shop –’ he hurled the vase with one movement against the wall ‘– Reynolds.’

The vase bounced, then rolled along the ground, coming to rest at their feet. They looked at it, soberly.

‘It must be melamine,’ Katherine said. ‘Or some such.’

‘I suppose it must,’ Nick said. ‘How hilarious.’ And then they were laughing and laughing; they did not stop until the bell at the front of the shop announced their first customer of the day.

That night, at supper, Katherine told the story; she tried to make it funny.

‘I don’t understand,’ Malcolm said. ‘Why would he try to smash a vase he’d bought?’

‘It was so ugly,’ Katherine said. ‘I don’t know why he bought it in the first place.’

‘Someone might not have thought so,’ Malcolm said seriously. ‘You can’t assume that everyone’s going to have the same taste as you. He’s not going to make a success of it if he goes on smashing his stock like that. I expect he could put it down to accidental damage, though it wouldn’t be exactly honest. If I were you—’

Daniel groaned.

Malcolm looked at him in astonishment. ‘What’s up with you?’ he said.

‘It’s funny,’ Daniel said. ‘He sounds a right laugh, Mum’s boss.’

‘Yes,’ Malcolm said. ‘That’s what I’d expect someone of your age to think.’

Daniel groaned again.

‘That’s quite enough, Daniel,’ Katherine said. She looked down at her plate: the jazz-modern orange and brown pattern they’d always had. She ought to do something about it. And she agreed with Daniel: Nick was a right laugh.

She soon discovered that Nick needed someone like her. The shop was, of course, just a business. It took in perishable stock, relying as well on imperishable steady sellers – Nick ran an illogical but quite profitable line in minor stationery by the till as well as a carousel of cards, and it was surprising the number of people who popped in for a card, some of whom found themselves leaving with some flowers as well. (The cards were much more artistic – Monet! – on the whole than the dismal and ancient range to be had in the newsagent’s opposite and, being blank inside, were superior to his faintly common specifications of particular birthdays and particular family recipients.) It was, if you thought of it in an abstract, Malcolmish way, like many other retail businesses.

And yet it was not, because there was the question of the flowers that Nick went to fetch twice a week. Nick, you might easily assume, was a person who had little idea: he projected a kind of uselessness, and a casual Malcolmish auditor might conclude that he had no particular attraction to flowers and no particular aptitude that would make the business a success. But when Nick came in twice a week with his van of flowers, she perceived, without his having to say anything, a kind of magic. That twice-weekly unloading made her feel as if she had carried out some act of betrayal against Malcolm and, in particular, his garden. Malcolm’s garden was a matter of mulch and compost, of feeding and pruning, of weeding and trellises, espaliers, reading. Then for two or three weeks the flowers passed the baton of display from one to the next, with perhaps a brief spurt of mass exuberance in late summer; sometimes, despite all the weeding and reading and feeding, it did not happen at all. One January the three camellias had failed to do anything, just stayed there leggily with their glossy dark leaves, like the picture on a jar of face cream; and Malcolm had raised the question at his horticultural society at the church hall in Crosspool. Then, with all the conflicting advice he’d gathered, he’d come back and read some more. ‘Throw them out,’ she always wanted to say; and Malcolm had observed that he’d see what happened next year, infuriatingly.

The unloading of Nick’s van was a direct affront to that. Thirty perfect roses in each colour, red, white, pink, yellow and, once, exotically green; the masses of carnations, routine and nuptial; the lilies casting their high scent throughout the shop as they slowly opened, the stargazers, the tigers; those were the standards of the shop, and any found not to be perfect was discarded, not nurtured. The glassed-in gardens, heated with oil-stoves, that bred these frail fantasies, she longed to see those. They had to come all year round, the lilies for the Christmas table, the red roses for Valentine’s Day, because the dates when people wanted flowers – a wedding, a funeral, what turned out to be the frantic rush of 14 February and the guilty expressions before Mother’s Day – did not coincide with the natural lives of the flowers. And along with them came the exotics, things that had caught Nick’s eye. Some sold; some, like the almost tawdry beauty of the bird-of-paradise flowers at seventy pence a stem, did not. And Katherine knew that a man who had pinned his future on things that would burst out in colour for a few days and die was not someone who might as well be selling cabbages. That was Malcolm’s phrase for anything like that; Malcolm, whose garden, when it flowered, never ventured as far as the numbing scents of the flower shop. It was not precisely disapproving. The bookshop, the art gallery at Hunter’s Bar, the new record shop at the end of the moor where Daniel spent his Saturdays, casting out a deafening racket, painted an intimidating black inside, the scarlet legend VIRGIN on the shop face – Malcolm dismissed in them any higher aspirations, any apparently counter-cultural tendencies, with the observation that they were there to make money, they might as well be selling cabbages. But of Nick’s shop that was not true.

‘I went to university here,’ Nick said. ‘My brother too. Actually, I came here because he did. Studied the same thing he did, too. Law.’ He was watching her put together a bouquet; she had thought she knew how to do it, but he’d taught her how to do it properly. Start with one, make a spiral round it, alternating the flowers and the foliage, holding the bouquet in the left hand, adding with the right, and there it was: clip with the secateurs, a twist of ribbon and into the cellophane. Easy, after the first five.

‘You didn’t want to go into the law?’ Katherine said.

‘Well, I did for a bit,’ Nick said. ‘My brother went into a bank in the City, in London, and he’s done very well. Legal adviser. In New York for five years, but he likes it there. I think he’ll stay. Met an American girl, too.’

‘I used to work for a solicitors’ firm in town,’ Katherine said. ‘Before the children were born.’

‘That’s what I did, for a bit,’ Nick said. ‘I went to law school in Guildford after Sheffield, and then I got a job in London, big firm. Didn’t really suit me, though.’

‘That was a good job,’ Katherine said. She couldn’t help it. Sometimes she talked with Malcolm’s views.

‘Oh, I know,’ Nick said. ‘Ghastly. I did it for five years, and by the end of it, I was a sort of expert on this one tiny corner of the law. I won’t bore you with the details – it was something to do with industrial-property law. It came up all the time, and the answer was always the same, so whenever anyone found themselves in this one sticky situation, they’d be recommended to come to Oldman’s, who had an expert in the subject, meaning me, and I’d give them the same answer I’d given someone else the month before. And they’d pay some enormous fee, and I’d go home to my lovely flat in Little Venice – charming, you know, but quite a stink by the end of a hot summer – and have deep existentialist thoughts about the nature of existence. Well, after five years, I was reading Kierkegaard, not quite in the office, but nearly.’