Philip Hensher - The Northern Clemency

‘The man in the shop said,’ Tim said. ‘And, besides, you can tell the difference between male and female by—’

‘That’s enough,’ Katherine said, not letting Tim set out his expertise; it was the way he comforted himself. ‘It doesn’t matter what it is, it’s going back to the man in the shop. My God, it’s not dangerous, is it? You’ve not been as stupid as that?’

‘No,’ Tim said. ‘He wouldn’t hurt anyone, he wouldn’t. I take him out, I talk to him. You can tell he’s not venomous, because the venomous ones, generally—’

‘If I want to know about fucking snakes,’ Katherine said, beyond everything now, ‘I’ll ask for the information and I won’t have to think about who to ask, I’ve heard enough about them now. I could write an essay on the subject with everything we’ve all had to listen to. All I want to know now is where it came from and then you and I are going to take it back there. And I’m going to give the man in the shop –’ and, as she said that, she dropped into an awful, mincing voice of parody, nothing like Tim’s voice, but just the voice of loose cruel mockery ‘– a piece of my mind for selling anything, let alone a snake, to a small boy on his own. My God, what must he have been thinking of?’

Tim’s tears, which had been drying up, burst out with great force, and downstairs Alice, still hovering and listening, decided that she would not be missed, and should probably not hear this. She tried to feel pity: not eleven o’clock and all this deposited on top of the situation. But Katherine had sworn at her child, and had spoken to him not even as a sardonic teacher speaks, but as one child to another, a bully in the playground. No one should be heard speaking like that, and Alice let herself out quietly.

‘I didn’t mean to,’ Tim said.

‘Of course you meant to,’ Daniel said, apparently enjoying the situation. ‘You must have saved up for months.’

‘Years,’ Tim said. ‘I thought you’d like—’

‘Of course I don’t like it,’ Katherine said. ‘How do you open this thing?’

Tim, crying, said nothing, and Katherine got down on her knees and fiddled with the case. With a single quick gesture, she reached in and took the snake with both hands, one hand behind its head, the other about its tail, and stood up. The snake buckled and writhed in mid-air, astonished and frightened, its tongue flickering in and out. ‘Don’t take him back there,’ Tim said, dashing at her and trying to seize her arms. ‘He doesn’t like it there, please don’t—’

‘All right, then,’ Katherine said, nearly smiling, ‘if that’s what you want—’

And she walked out of the room decisively and down the stairs, the snake in her hands, her children following her.

‘That was Caroline,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said, coming back from the telephone. ‘You know, nice young thing, she works as a nursery nurse, very pregnant, I mentioned. She says she’s just setting off now so she’ll be here in five minutes, tops. I’ll go and put the kettle on.’

‘Oh, good,’ Mrs Warner said.

‘No, I won’t, she’s coming out again,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said, sitting down. Over the road, Alice had opened the front door of the Glovers’ house and closed it behind her, very gently. ‘She’s been a time.’

‘Saw herself out, I see,’ Karen Warner said. ‘Too much trouble to take your guests to the door to say goodbye. Manners.’

‘Terrible,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. ‘Would you have said that she enjoyed herself, meeting the Glovers?’

‘Well,’ Mrs Warner said, observing Alice treading, very gently, down the path, as if trying to escape without being noticed, casting a glance upwards at the house. ‘I expect it was very nice for her, really.’

‘Yes,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. ‘Very nice. All the same, I think I might pop over there when they’re a little settled. You don’t want them to be thinking that we’re all like that, do you?’

‘Like what?’ Mrs Warner said, rather sharply; she didn’t altogether approve of being superior about your neighbours, even if they probably deserved it, particularly two days after you’d drunk their wine and ate their food and admired their furniture.

Mrs Arbuthnot, who would have said exactly the same thing, hastened to qualify her point. ‘Not all the same,’ she said. ‘People, they aren’t all the same, are they?, even if they all live in the same road, and it’s nice to meet – well, anyway. It was a nice party she gave.’

‘Very nice,’ Mrs Warner said. ‘Of course,’ she went on, offering Anthea a little concession in return, ‘I’m not sure about letting those children stay up, cluttering up the party. A little out of control.’

‘The boy,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said, enjoying this part of the conversation. ‘The girl, of course, she’s not so bad, but I agree, I wouldn’t have them around, any kind of children, particularly when they’re at that difficult age. I notice you didn’t think of bringing your John along.’

‘No, I certainly didn’t,’ Mrs Warner said. ‘If you ask me, it’s nice to have an evening without your great lump hanging around and embarrassing you, and it’s not as if he needs a babysitter. They are a worry, though.’

‘A worry?’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. She remembered Mrs Warner’s John, hopeless. Mrs Warner explained.

‘Well,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said finally. ‘I’m sure it’ll all come right in the end. Now – goodness – what—’

Opposite, the front door of the Glovers’ had opened again. The removal men at the new people’s house, the new family, the husband, the girl and the elongated boy, as well as their mother, were all standing outside in an awkwardly arranged group, and had an excellent view. Through the door of the Glovers’ came Katherine. In her hands she was holding a – what was it – something limp but flexible, like—

‘That’s never a snake she’s got there,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. ‘It is, it’s a snake. Goodness me.’

‘Where’s that from?’ Mrs Warner said. ‘Not the garden, surely.’

‘I never heard of—’ Mrs Arbuthnot said, but she dried up at what was happening. Behind Katherine and her snake came her younger boy, screaming and crying, tugging at her ineffectually, and the two others standing by. The windows were shut, but the boy was screaming, ‘You fucking, fucking mother,’ as Katherine marched down the path.

‘Disgraceful,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. ‘He can’t be more than –’

‘Eight,’ Mrs Warner supplied. ‘Imagine. Look, here’s Caroline—’

But the nursery nurse, just heaving herself down the road, coming into view, stopped dead at Arbuthnot’s gate, and, like the new family and the removers and, inside, Anthea and Karen, watched Katherine and the children.

‘Don’t you ever—’ Katherine was screaming at her son, who was screaming back. ‘And if you ever do anything like that again – this is what happens when you do something as naughty as—’

She ran out of words. She didn’t seem to see anyone else around her; the snake, held between her two hands, she raised above her head in a bold, a dancer’s gesture, and flung it down on the pavement. ‘Stop it, stop it!’ Tim was screaming, over and over, but she raised her foot and brought the heel of her black shoe down on the snake’s head, crushing it in one. It flailed behind her like a whip. The screaming rose, went beyond words, and the little boy’s face purpled with terror and violence. His limbs flailed away from him in undecided, unformed gestures, as if some invisible force was plucking at them, and he screamed and screamed. Behind him, his sister turned away and, with a gesture too theatrical to be anything but instinctive, covered her eyes. Over the road, the new people, the Sellerses, stood and stared, and you couldn’t blame them.