Philip Hensher - The Northern Clemency

‘I didn’t expect to be invited,’ the nursery nurse was saying, to someone she didn’t know, ‘but I’m glad I came.’ It had been ten days before; she had been resting in the afternoon, her feet, horribly swollen in this weather even at six months, up on a stool. Through the window she had seen a woman in a sleeveless summer dress stomping up the drive; a familiar figure, some sort of neighbour, with an air of imminent complaint about her walk. What now? she’d thought wearily. But the woman hadn’t rung: there was the clatter of something through the letterbox that proved, when her husband got home and picked it up, to be an invitation. ‘But who are they?’ he’d said. ‘I think we might as well go,’ she’d said, not answering his question.

But the Glovers had three children, surely: the youngest a boy, wasn’t he? Maybe he was in bed.

The youngest was behind the sofa: he had been there most of the evening, slipping behind it quite early on. Timothy had with him his favourite book in the whole world. He had been reading it steadily all evening, letting his eye run over the familiar entries. He had taken it out from the public library eleven months before; he had renewed it once, then stopped bothering. It was now ten months overdue, which caused him great terror whenever he thought of it. In happy moments, he decided that he could conceal the book where no one would find it, and his parents would never uncover the gigantic fine now building up. The fear of punishment was huge in him.

But the terror did not touch the book. It was as good now as ever. The pleasure he found in letting his eye ride over it, touching on category after category, overrode anything else. Whenever he could, he returned to its calm instructions. Even when it was not quite right of him to do so, he sensed, he found a way to be alone with it, as now burrowing behind the sofa at his parents’ party. It was so important to him that often in the last months he had found himself telling others – his best friends Simon and Ian, his sister Jane, his mother but for some reason not his brother Daniel, not his father – some facts about his subject. More oddly, he found himself asking them questions about it, as if they could instruct him, feigning ignorance, wanting to find out if they knew what he already did.

The book was about snakes. Timothy gazed at the photographs as if at a family album, committing the names he already knew to a further refreshment of memory.

He had been there for three hours, wedged between the sofa and the large picture window. If the party went outside, they would see him, and probably laugh. From time to time the back of the sofa, the porridgy tweed panels between the wood frames, bulged as someone sat down, swelling towards him, like some inchoate mass searching for him. There was a queer smell of dust down here, and the nasty smell of spilt alcohol. It was his favourite place when there was anyone in the house.

‘I don’t know where he’s got to,’ Katherine Glover said to a departing guest; it was too warm for anyone to have brought coats, but she made a helpful gesture. ‘He’s a little bit shy.’

The guest smiled; her husband made a honking noise, understanding that the woman was talking about her son, not knowing that there was any son apart from the great lout who had been lolling on the sofa, gawping at the ladies.

On the mat was an envelope, which, surely, had not been there earlier; it was addressed to Katherine, and she picked it up. In front of her, the remains of her party; the poor pregnant woman, harassed and tired, waiting for her husband to want to go. But the husband was drunk, his hair rumpled, making a hash of a joke to a group of husbands. Where was Malcolm? Sitting down, his host’s bottle in his hand, all refills at an end; and the Mozart had come to an end, too, leaving the patient silence to dismiss the guests.

‘You looked so nice,’ Jane said to her mother, coming up to her in the hall, munching a cheese straw, ‘in your posh frock and your hair like that.’

Katherine felt so terribly tired. ‘I don’t know why I bothered,’ she said crossly. ‘They didn’t appreciate it at all.’

Jane looked at her mother in astonishment. ‘It was a lovely party,’ she said. ‘You should always wear your hair like that.’

‘What, to work?’ Katherine said. ‘Don’t be daft.’

‘Thank you so much,’ the drunk man was saying, ‘for a lovely time, my dear. We’ve had a lovely, lovely time.’

He leant towards her, as if to kiss her, but did not; Katherine had him by the shoulders, a gesture that might have been affectionate, holding him at arm’s-length inspection.

‘We’ve had a very good time,’ the pregnant woman said. But it didn’t look it.

‘When is your baby due?’ Jane said abruptly.

‘In November,’ the woman said, not smiling. She took her husband by the arm, and they went.

‘Where’s your dad?’ Katherine said, but then Daniel was in the hall, up from the sofa for the first time all evening.

‘Just going out for a second,’ he muttered.

‘One second—’ Katherine said, but he was gone. ‘Oh, well.’

And then Daniel, who had answered all polite inquiries with a brief grunt and a shrug, who had not moved from his perch on the arm of the sofa, like a vast and lurid ornament, proved himself to have been all along the ringmaster of the festivities. Because with his departure the party was decisively over, and the few remaining guests moved towards the front door where Mrs Glover, her daughter at her side, was standing. In kindness, they bent and said a word to Malcolm, who said something in return, and then, with a chorus of thanks, they were out.

‘I do love your unit,’ Mrs Warner said over her shoulder, a final kindly thought disappearing into the lush August night. ‘As I was saying, I do love your…’

Goodbye, goodbye…and Katherine opened the envelope in her hand. It was an unfamiliar hand, elegant and swooping, in real ink, and the general gist of apology was clear before the signature was deciphered. She read it again, and smiled, her first genuine smile all evening.

‘Have they all gone?’ she heard Timothy saying, as he got up from behind the sofa, book in hand.

‘I think so,’ his father said, his voice muffled, regretful in the other room. ‘Where’s your brother?’

Daniel was in the street. It was half past nine. The road and the estate, in this summer twilight, had a lush warm glow; in the houses, up and down the avenue, single lights were coming on automatically, guiding the couples home from the party; husbands and wives, arm in arm and in the summer gloaming turned into lovers. The thin trees, planted ten years before, had lost their daylit lack of conviction and formed a delicate orchard, marking the edges of the quiet street. The night was perfumed, and Daniel, perfumed too, sniffed it all up.

Barbara was there, waiting for him. He had told her to wait on the wall outside number eighty-four. It was less suspicious to be casual like that rather than, as she was doing, cowering under the porch at the side of the house. Everyone knew it was empty; anyone could see her from the street. It was asking for trouble. Worse, it showed Barbara didn’t trust him, didn’t automatically think he was right. He decided to dump her after tonight, or maybe after the weekend.

‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ she said, in a burst.

‘Well, I’ve come now,’ he said, and dived for her mouth. She gave a small squeal, the beginning of a protest; but he knew to let his mouth just stay at the edge of a kiss, not forcing it, and in a second her hard teeth seemed to make way. They stayed like that for a minute; once or twice she made a pretty little noise, almost animal, and each time, not quite knowing whether he was mocking or encouraging her, he made something of the same noise back, but deeper, the sound vibrating through their twinned lips, making them buzz and ache, fulfilling the desire and stirring up more. Finally he pulled away. He looked at her critically; the little squeal, the blonde hair frizzing up in one, the pink roundness of her pinked-up face, lips and tits. Perhaps the boys had it right when they called her Crystal Tipps and laughed at him. Or maybe they were jealous. ‘I came as soon as I could,’ he said. ‘They were having a party.’