Philip Hensher - The Northern Clemency

‘My God,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said in her house, and Mrs Warner’s mouth moved, and it formed the words without being able to say them. Only Katherine, across the road, seemed composed: she had done what she had meant to do, and now it was all done, all over, and she stood up straight, paying no attention to her screaming son. But had it been enough? There was, surely, a little uncertainty in the way she scanned the houses, at whoever might be watching what she had so publicly done. The doorbell rang.

‘My God,’ Anthea said, hurrying to let Caroline in. ‘Did you see—’ she said, opening the door.

But the nursery nurse, enlisting the doorjamb to support her bulk, was muddily pale, grey to the point of greenness in the face; she had seen it. And it had been all too much for her, the sight of a woman, a mother, flinging down a snake almost in her path and then stamping on it, the snake’s head making a vile porridge on the pavement, and then the screaming – Caroline leant forward, as if in a swoon, and Anthea came forward with her arms open to catch her. But she leant forward in a single shy apologetic motion and, for the first time in several months now, vomited over Anthea, vomited copiously over the small glass coffee-table, the hallway rug, the art-deco figurine of a Greek dancer Anthea had always meant to have valued, everywhere.

‘My God!’ Anthea said – it was all too much and, with a little scream, she ran upstairs, plucking at her puked-over bosom as Caroline, still bubbling over, tried to raise herself up and start apologizing.

‘It could have been worse,’ Mrs Warner said, coming out gingerly, and trying not to look, guiding the poor girl into the downstairs clockroom, trying to help her without actually touching her. Because if there was one thing she hated—

The van was quite unloaded, and the removers gone, and Bernie had fetched thirty lightbulbs, half bayonets, half screw-ins, a mix of sixty and hundred-watt bulbs, and Alice, Sandra and Francis were sitting in their new sitting room, the furniture somehow arranged. They were surrounded by sealed boxes in the evening light, eating a kind of scratch supper off their knees, just for tonight.

‘Sounds like she’s not all there,’ Bernie said.

‘No,’ Alice said. ‘She’d had a shock.’

‘I don’t blame him,’ Bernie said.

‘Who? Oh, her husband,’ Alice said. ‘That’s an awful thing to say, love.’

‘Well, I don’t,’ Bernie said. ‘I’m worried at the idea of living opposite someone like that.’

‘She must be mental,’ Sandra said.

‘Imagine what it’d be like being married to her,’ Bernie went on. ‘You wouldn’t be blamed by anyone, really, for leaving her. Mentally unbalanced.’

‘We don’t know,’ Alice said. ‘It might be the shock, your husband ups and goes. That’s a terrible thing to happen.’

‘No, love,’ Bernie said. ‘Anyone normal, they just get on with things. They don’t—’

‘She took the snake,’ Francis said meditatively, telling the story bit by bit, almost more for himself than for anyone else, ‘and she threw it down and she jumped on its head until it was dead, and it was the boy’s snake, and he was there watching.’

‘That’s about the sum of it,’ Bernie said. ‘It’s not normal, whatever’s happened to you. It’s not still lying there, is it? Christ.’

‘No,’ Francis said. ‘The girl, his sister, she came out a while ago with a plastic bag and a broom, cleared it up and threw it away, and she washed the pavement down, too.’

‘Thank God for that,’ Bernie said. ‘Someone in the family’s got a bit of sense, apart from him, the dad, had the sense to walk out.’

‘Poor woman,’ Alice said. ‘I wish—’ She dried up and took a forkful of Russian salad from her plate of cold food. It was like the supper of a Christmas night, the dinner she’d arranged for them the first night in a new house, and the events of the day similarly cast a sensation of exhausted manic festivity over their plates.

‘What do you wish, love?’ Bernie said.

‘I don’t know,’ Alice said. You couldn’t say to your husband and children that you wished you’d kept the information of this woman’s situation to yourself. You owed her nothing, you wouldn’t keep anything from these three. But she still thought she might not have repeated any of that. ‘I bet he’ll be back,’ she said, surprising herself.

‘Why do you say that?’ Bernie said.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I just think he will be. He doesn’t sound like the sort of man who wouldn’t come back. He works in a building society.’

‘She sounds mental,’ Sandra said. ‘Killing the little boy’s pet like that in front of him. I wouldn’t mind a snake as a pet. If she couldn’t have it in the house, she could have found a home for it. Oh, well, who cares?’

‘You’re not to be getting ideas,’ Bernie said to Sandra, ‘about snakes.’

‘No, I don’t really want one,’ she said. ‘But killing it, that was horrible.’

‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘It was horrible.’ But she felt—

She felt what Katherine, across the road, felt.

Katherine was sitting on her own in the dining room. The table was empty and not set; there was no food and Katherine had not prepared any. The children had been into the kitchen and had picked up what they could from the fridge, from the cupboards; children’s meals, the sort of thing they arranged for themselves between meals, coming home from school. At least Jane and Daniel had; Tim was still upstairs, gulping and muttering to himself in his room. The last time she’d looked, his face was in his pillow and he refused to take it out at any expressions of regret or apology. Inconsolable. It was just too bad for him; and he liked his food. She didn’t worry, not for the moment. What she felt was that the primary drama of the day, the awful thing that had happened to her, was Malcolm’s disappearance. But that, now, was inside and had only happened to her. What had taken its place, and remained in its place, was what she had done in the street: stamped on her son’s snake at the utmost pitch of despair and rage. Malcolm would come back, there was no doubt about that. That would finish the story in everyone’s memory; his disappearance, for whatever reason, would end up being trivial and anecdotal. What would remain was not what had been done to her but what she had done. In the dining room, only the small lamp on the piano was switched on, and the room was dim and gloomy, a pool of light in the blue evening. She sat, her hands on the table, like a suspect in a cell; she breathed in and out steadily, knowing what she had now made of herself. And in time night came, still with no word from Malcolm, whom everyone had now apparently forgotten.

Eventually she got up, switched the lights off, one after another, and went to bed. Over the road, the lights were still on. She looked at her watch and it was only a quarter past ten.

Malcolm came back two days later. She had stopped caring. That morning, she had taken the rubbish out, and over the road, the new people, they’d been coming out at the same time. She had been prepared to pretend that they hadn’t seen each other – she just didn’t want to think about the things she’d said to Alice. And she’d thought they would probably want to do the same, ignore her politely. Maybe, in a few months, they could pretend to be meeting for the first time, and everything could be, if not forgotten, then at least not mentioned, and they could both pretend they had forgotten. But Alice obviously didn’t know the rules of the game. They were getting into their ridiculous little car, some kind of small square boxy green thing, and Alice saw Katherine with her boxes of rubbish, the remains of the party, the empty bottles, the smashed glasses, the chicken carcasses, which had been attracting flies outside the back door waiting for the binmen’s day. She hesitated, evidently not knowing what she was supposed to do, and raised a hand. It was a gesture that might have been a greeting, or might have been the beginning of her scratching her head.