Philip Hensher - The Northern Clemency

‘Goodnight, love,’ Bernie said, and as he got into bed, swinging his legs up under the cheese-smelling pink candlewick bedspread, rolling into the same central hollow in the mattress she had fallen into, he gripped her hand and kissed her and groaned and laughed all at the same time. She smelt his warmth; and, as ever, even at the end of the day, the warm smell of his body was a sweet one, like toffee. Always had been.

She was reassured for a moment, could have found the hotel and Sheffield funny as Bernie meant her to, but then, through the wall, there came an ugly noise: a human voice, groaning. It was horribly clear.

‘What’s that?’ Alice said.

‘It’s from next door,’ Bernie said, whispering.

‘It’s not the kids, is it?’ Alice said.

‘No, they’re the other side,’ Bernie said. ‘It’s—’ But then the noise resumed, and some kind of wet slapping noise, too; a single voice giving in to a single pleasure, and Alice clenched her jaw and tried not to think of it, tried not to hear it. It went on, the noise, in a way impossible to laugh about. Bernie coughed, sharply, a cough meant to be heard through the partition. But the noise continued, the animal noise of slap and groan, a middle-aged man – it was impossible not to visualise the scene – doing things to himself in the light of a forty-watt bulb, and not much caring whether anyone heard him through the walls or not.

Presently it stopped and, as best she could, Alice unclenched herself. Bernie was tense, pretending to sleep. It was better than trying to find anything to say. The sound of heavy feet padding around the room next door, clearing up – good God, clearing what up? – was concluded with the sharp click of the light switch and, in a startlingly short stretch of time, with the gross rumble of a fat man snoring. Alice lay there against Bernie’s slowly relaxing body, counting up to five hundred, over and over.

In the morning, they dressed and were about to leave the room when she heard the door of their wanking neighbour open and shut.

‘Hang on a second,’ she said to Bernie. ‘I just want to brush my hair before we go down.’

‘You’ve just brushed it,’ he said.

‘I want to brush it again,’ she said. She picked up the brush, and in front of the tiny wonky mirror she brushed her hair again, thirty times, until it was charged with static and flying outwards, until the man, whoever he was, was downstairs and anonymous. But all the same, when the children had been collected and they were all sitting round the table in the ‘breakfast room’, she could not help letting her eye run round the room. Everyone else there was a man on his own, each at his little table, in various positions of respectability, and the four of them talked in near-whispers. It could have been any of them; she rather wanted to know now, to exclude the innocent others.

‘Well,’ Sandra surprisingly said, when they were decanted into the green Simca, the hotel bill grumpily paid, ‘I don’t think we’ll be staying there again.’

‘Well, of course we won’t,’ Bernie said, turning his head. ‘We won’t ever need to.’

‘That’s not really—’ Sandra began.

‘I think the Hallam Towers was a better hotel,’ Francis said. ‘From the point of view of quality.’

‘Yes, of course it’s a better hotel,’ Bernie said. ‘I’m under no illusions there.’

‘If anyone asked you,’ Francis said, ‘Mummy, if anyone asked you to recommend a hotel to stay in in Sheffield—’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ Alice said, her temper now breaking out for the first time, ‘let’s just shut up about it, and never think about the bloody place ever again. I don’t know why we’ve always got to discuss everything.’

‘Your mother’s quite right,’ Bernie said. ‘Give it a rest, Francis.’ He smiled, amused and released from some of the tension of Alice’s bravely kept-up face.

‘You said “bloody”,’ Sandra said, gleeful and mincing.

‘I know,’ Alice said. ‘It was a bloody hotel. It’s the only word for it.’

‘Bloody awful,’ Bernie said. ‘Bloody awful hotel,’ he went on. ‘Arsehole of the world’s hotels.’

‘That hotel,’ Francis began, ‘was really the most—’

‘That’ll do,’ Alice said. ‘We all agree.’

The thing was that Bernie had taught her to swear, and he liked it, sometimes, when she did. She wasn’t much good at it, she knew that. But she’d grown up in a house where you earned a punishment for saying ‘rotten’; anything much stronger she’d never heard, or heard and never understood. Bernie and his family, they swore; swore at Churchill on the radio (‘Pissed old bugger’), at the neighbours (‘Stupid old bastard’), at any inconvenience or none, at each other, at inanimate objects and, strangest of all, affectionately. His mother, his aunts, even; and she’d tried to join in, but she couldn’t really get it, couldn’t do it; she couldn’t get the rhythm right somehow, couldn’t put the words together right, and it obviously became a subject of fond amusement among the whole clan of them when Bernie’s shy fiancée hesitantly described the Northern Line as a bollocks, whatever bollocks might mean.

It was a fine day. As they drove up the long hill towards their new house, a constant steady incline, three miles long, Bernie hummed; she had sworn and made him cheerful again. For some reason, it was nine o’clock by the time they turned into the road. ‘Here we are,’ Bernie said. ‘There’s the van. Christ, look!’ and, to their surprise, by the removal van, outside one of the houses, on the driveway and spilling out on to the pavement, was most of their furniture. It took a moment to recognize that that was what it was. In the sunshine, it looked so different, arranged in random and undomestic ways, like the sad back lot of a junk shop. The sofa against the dining-table, the dining-chairs against Francis’s bedroom bookshelf, one of the pictures, the pretty eighteenth-century princess hugging a cat, with no wall to be hung on, leaning against a unit. Their beds, too, stripped of sheets and mattresses like the beds of the dead, laid open to the public gaze, shamefully. Their possessions; they seemed at once many and sadly inadequate to fill a house. In the old place, they had stood where they stood for so long that you stopped seeing them. But on the lawn, in the driveway, under the sun, laid out as if for purchasers, you saw it all again. Some of it was nice.

‘There’s the men,’ Bernie said. ‘Well, they’ve made a start, at any rate.’

‘They might have waited,’ Alice said.

‘Look, Sandra,’ Francis said. ‘There’s the men.’

‘I know,’ Sandra said, angrily. The car stopped: they got out.

‘Morning,’ the foreman said.

From his bedroom window, Timothy watched the family get out. There were four of them. He had taken Geoffrey out of his case again, to let him watch the excitement. The father got out of the little turquoise car, like a box, and stretched his shoulders back. Timothy imitated him. And there was a mother too, holding her handbag tightly, a sweet nervous expression. The boy was tall, taller than his mother though Timothy thought someone had said that he and the boy were the same age. Timothy hated him already.

But he was really looking at the girl by now. He had no interest in the others. She stood there in a cloud of frizzed hair, and yawned. As she pulled her arms upwards, her wrist in the other hand’s grip, her T-shirt popped loose of her waistband, pulled tightly against her chest. Even yawning she was lovely; even from here her beauty was defined. ‘Venus,’ Timothy said to himself, and found he was stroking along his snake’s back, pointing Geoffrey’s head towards the lovely girl. The removers had seen him when he had stood here. But the girl did not seem to see him, to pay any attention to him. He wondered why not. He promised himself something about this sight; he knew it was important; he promised himself he would never forget it. He had heard of people seeing each other, and knowing immediately that was the person they were to marry. He filed it away.