Philip Hensher - The Northern Clemency

It was Anne’s insight, too. ‘But he’s old,’ she said. ‘I thought—’

‘What did you think?’ Jane said, snapping a little. She already felt defensive about this man.

‘He doesn’t look like anyone’s lover,’ Anne said.

‘I never said he was,’ Jane said irrationally. She didn’t need to come closer: she somehow knew what this man was like, better than her mother could, and she could surely see that what animation he possessed was a matter of sparks thrown off by a chill and flinty interior. She was right: Nick had aspects of fire, could briefly blaze, but they were mere sparks, giving little light and no heat, capable only of a short spectacle, of the casual infliction of harsh smarts on anyone standing by, foolishly admiring.

As for Nick: he ran that shop for another ten years. But whenever he looked out of the shop window and saw someone, two people, on the opposite side of the road, inspecting his façade, he always felt that same sudden way. He always felt the same as he did that first afternoon. And then, they were only two schoolgirls.

‘It’s my daughter,’ Katherine said. ‘And her friend. They never said.’

‘Ask them in,’ Nick said.

It had been eighteen months or so before when Nick and Jimmy had had the idea. They’d been in Jimmy’s new house in Fulham. Jimmy said Chelsea, though it was really Fulham. Miranda, Jimmy’s wife, certainly said Chelsea. She was as decisive about that as she was about the fact that Nick, and Jimmy’s other not very desirable but probably useful colleagues could be offered drinks at five thirty, but shouldn’t expect to stay for dinner. Colleagues! Ha! After all, the nanny’d be bringing little Sonia in her best dress down for dinner: a nice thing – as Miranda said, voice rising – if she grew up mixing with people like Nick.

‘You won’t have any difficulty finding a taxi on the street,’ Miranda would say, drifting through and interrupting their conversation. ‘This is Chelsea, after all. It’s not, it’s not fucking, what, Streatham or somewhere.’ Miranda’s hair curled out in a single wave backwards about her features. She’d flick it back, give Nick or whatever-his-name-was a level stare, her mascaraed or false eyelashes held painfully apart, go to the bamboo-fronted bar, and, with leisurely disdain, mix herself a Dubonnet and gin, three fat ice cubes and a straw, before returning to the kitchen to shout at Solange, the put-upon au pair, acquired, like so much else in this house, in one of Jimmy’s fits of sexual ambitiousness, and now hanging around, disappointing him and annoying Miranda.

The house in Fulham was a step up from the two-bedroom flat in Islington. The money had been flooding in so fast that Jimmy had had a job knowing what to do with it, keeping it in fat bundles (he’d once confided) in a painted oak chest under little Sonia’s bed and taking it out periodically to press it into the hands of shop assistants. The results – a pair of gold-tasselled sofas glowering at each other across the drawing room like a pair of retired rival strippers, a whole pack of waist-high china hounds glistening throughout the open-plan living area, vast surfaces of built-in brown smoked mirrors, ankle-high white shagpile and two at least of those horrible leather rhinoceroses you saw in Liberty’s. The results all bore something of the bewilderment of the moment of their liberation, as Jimmy brought out a wad of crinkled fivers and counted out several dozen of them in a more than respectable shop. He’d have paid cash for the house if he could; as it was, he was reduced to transferring it from bank to bank to bank first. Nick put the money Jimmy handed over irregularly but lavishly into a bank account and worried about that all the time, though it wasn’t an account in his own name.

‘I’m fed up of it,’ Nick had said. ‘I’ve done this too often. I’m getting too old for it.’

‘No reason why you can’t go on for ever,’ Jimmy said. He stretched out in his armchair – a vast leather job, like an intricate wooden puzzle in its manoeuvrability of parts, given to strange hummings and shiftings at Jimmy’s fingertip command. He looked as if he might stretch out his arm for, what?, an august cigar. Or just another whisky to go with the one nestling in his fat groin.

‘I don’t like it,’ Nick said. ‘I’ll do it one more time, I promised, but that’s it. I’m too old for it, you’ve got to find someone else to help us out.’

‘The older you get,’ Miranda said, wandering in – she’d been listening through the serving hatch, ‘the better you get at it. More believable. No one’s looking at you. When you’re bald and seventy—’

‘Thanks, darling,’ Jimmy said. ‘Now go and—’ He flicked parodically in the air, readjusting an imaginary blonde hairdo, not taking his eyes off Nick.

‘Fuck off,’ Miranda said, not aggressively, but she went.

‘Silly bitch,’ Jimmy said.

‘How hilarious,’ Nick said.

‘Hilarious,’ Jimmy said. ‘Unless you’re married to it.’

‘She’s all right, Miranda,’ Nick said.

‘I know,’ Jimmy said, and it was his voice rising now. ‘I wouldn’t. Have her any. Other way. But what are you saying?’

‘Nothing, I suppose,’ Nick said.

They sat there for a moment. Jimmy got up and refilled his glass, a heavy crystal pail. It might have been chosen for its effectiveness when thrown in marital rows. He didn’t offer to refill Nick’s. In any case he had half an inch or so of gin and tonic left.

‘I tell you what,’ Jimmy said, coming back and flinging his legs over the side of the vast leather contraption.

‘What?’ Nick said.

‘We’ve got to sort something out,’ Jimmy said. ‘This might work out all right.’ He was talking about the money problem. Nick had meant him to. He’d evidently been on at Miranda about it; Miranda had been on at him. He recognized the rhythm of the complaint. ‘I reckon a nice quiet little business, you in charge, everything looks hunky-dory. Somewhere outside London.’

‘Come on,’ Nick said. ‘I’ve always lived in London.’

‘Not in London,’ Jimmy said.

‘Forget it,’ Nick said.

‘Christ, you’re difficult,’ said Jimmy, who was not Nick’s brother. They went right back: Nick’s mum had lived in the same street as Jimmy’s family when they were children, Nick an occasional holiday visitor – his parents divorced, it was his father who hung on to him mostly, paying for the good school, though his mother got him half the holidays. Jimmy was a permanent resident of the shabby suburb. They’d hated each other, thrown stones, shouted names, then one day they’d met each other down at the shopping-trolley-stuffed Wandle, had tortured frogs together one wide-eyed afternoon with a bicycle pump, and that had been that. ‘I’m suggesting something might suit you. A nice little shop somewhere, I don’t know – Leeds, Manchester, Nottingham, Derby, Exeter, Sheffield, Bristol. Sells stationery. Whatever. Looks nice. You do the books every Friday, no one troubles you, all looks nice and proper, even pay the taxes the end of the year. Why not? Posh boy like you, they’d lap you up.’

‘Why not London?’

‘You don’t want to be in London,’ Jimmy said.

‘No,’ Miranda called through, ‘you don’t.’

‘Why doesn’t he want to be in London?’ little Sonia said, coming in in her regulation evening outfit, an inflammable party dress shining like royal icing, red ribbons popping in and out of the hem to match her red patent slingbacks.

‘That’s enough,’ Miranda said, following her; she might have meant it for Sonia, but she was looking at Nick. He went.

It seemed to him that nothing had been settled, that it was just an idea of Jimmy’s, which had come and would go. Certainly, through all the arrangements for the next trip, he didn’t mention it again, or suggest that this might be Nick’s last. Nick was more nervous than he’d ever been: the guys out there, they knew him well and obviously thought his demeanour odd. It was almost as if, without him wanting it, his body was conspiring to bring this occupation to an end by crippling his boldness with the appearance of guilt. But he got back all right, and after the last stages had been gone through, the money safely logged and counted, Jimmy had brought the whole thing up again.