Philip Hensher - The Northern Clemency

Bernie looked startled. ‘There’ll not be room. A bit of an adventure, is it?’

‘Something like that.’

‘I’ll see what I can do. Don’t ask your mother. She’ll have a fit.’

So there she was, wedged into the van, clear of London, for the sake of the boy she had glimpsed – a movement of the arms, a flash of blue from the deep-set shadow under the surprising blond eyebrows. But he was saying nothing, and she was settling for enchanting the driver and the chief remover.

‘People do this all the time,’ she said.

‘Move house?’ the chief remover said. ‘Enough to keep us busy.’

‘No, I meant –’ But what she had meant was that people leave London by car, drive on to the motorway, set off northwards all the time, perhaps every day. She never had, and her mother, her brother and she had only ever left London when they went on holiday. She had never had any business outside London. ‘People either move a lot or not at all, don’t they?’ she said. ‘I mean,’ sensing puzzlement, ‘there’s the sort of people who never leave the house they were born in and die there. Dukes. And there’s the sort of people who move house every year, every two years. I don’t know what would be normal.’

‘The average number of times a person moves house in his lifetime,’ the boy said, ‘is seven, isn’t it?’ He had a harsh, grating voice, a South London voice not yet settled into its adult state.

‘Take no notice of him,’ the driver said. ‘He’s making it up. He doesn’t know.’

‘But the figure is increasing all the time,’ he continued.

‘He makes up statistics,’ the chief remover said. ‘That’s what he does. Once we were dealing with a musician, moving house for him – a sad story, he was divorcing his wife, and we had to go in and pick out the things that were going and the things that were staying. And we were moving his stuff and he said he’d be taking his cellos, because he had two, with him in a taxi, and wouldn’t let us touch them, though we handle your fragile things all the time. And all of a sudden this one says, “There are a hundred and twenty-three parts in a cello,” as if to say, yes, it’s best you handle it yourself. He’d only gone and made it up, the hundred and twenty-three parts. There’s probably about thirty.’

‘It sounds about right, moving seven times,’ Sandra said. ‘There’s a girl in my class who’s moved house seven times already. She’s only fourteen.’ Sandra thought she might have told them she was sixteen: she sometimes did that. Even seventeen. ‘This was two years ago,’ she added. ‘So she’d used up all her moves already, if you look at it like that.’

‘Fancy,’ the boy said.

‘Do you see that sign, young lady?’ the driver said. ‘A hundred and twenty miles to Sheffield.’

They were clear of London now; the banked-up sides of the motorway no longer suggested the outskirts of towns, but now, behind stunted trees, there were open fields, expansive with scattered sheep. In the distance, on top of a hill like a figurine on a cake, there was a romantic, solitary house. She wondered what it must be like to look out every morning from your inherited grand house and see, like a river, the distant flowing motorway. It was never empty, this road.

‘New home,’ the chief remover said sweetly. ‘Sheffield. And The North, it said.’

‘Have you ever noticed,’ the driver said, ‘that wherever you go, anywhere, you see motorway signs that say “The North”? Or “The South” when you’re in the north? Or “The West”? But wherever you go, and we go everywhere, you never see a sign which says “The East”?’

‘No, you never do,’ the boy agreed.

Sandra felt her story hadn’t made much of an impression. It was difficult, squashed in like this, to push back her shoulders, but she tried.

‘This girl,’ she went on, ‘you always wondered whether it was good for her to move so often. I mean, seven times, seven new schools. She never stayed long, so I don’t suppose she ever made proper friends with anyone. I tried to be friends with her, because I thought she’d be lonely, but she didn’t make much of an effort back. She’d only been in our school for three, four weeks when we found out the sort of girl she was.’

‘What sort was she?’ the boy said.

‘At our school, see,’ Sandra said, ‘you didn’t hang about after school had finished. Because next door there was the boys’ school. And maybe some girls knew boys from the boys’ school – if they had brothers or something – but this girl, I said to her one day, “Let’s walk home together.” And she said to me, “No, let’s hang around here and see if we can bump into boys because they’re out in ten minutes.” We didn’t get let out together, the boys’ school and girls’ school. And she jumps on to the wall, sits there, grins, waiting for me to jump up too. Because she just wanted to meet boys. That’s the sort of girl she was.’

‘Dear oh dear,’ the driver said. She had hoped for a little more concern: the older men might have had daughters of their own. The levity of the sarcastic apprentice had spread to them.

‘So you didn’t stay friends with her, then?’ The chief remover pushed back his cap and scratched his bald head.

‘No,’ Sandra said. Sod them, she thought. ‘Five months later, she had to leave the school because she’d met a boy and gone further. In a way I don’t need to specify—’ the adult phrase rang well in her ears ‘—and she had to leave the school because she was having a baby. Can you imagine?’

‘No,’ the driver said. He almost sang it, humouring her, and now it was over, the whole invented rigmarole seemed unlikely even to Sandra. ‘Probably best for you to leave a school where things like that go on.’

‘That’s right,’ the chief remover said, very soberly, looking directly ahead.

‘That’s right,’ the boy said. He plucked at his chin as if in thought. But he was trembling with laughter; the big blue van at their backs rumbled and trembled with suppressed laughter.

The blue pantechnicon, ahead of Bernie, Alice and Francis, formed a hurtling, unrooted landmark.

‘I don’t know which way he’s heading,’ Bernie said. ‘Expect he knows a route.’

Alice opened her handbag, brown leather against the brighter shine of the Simca’s plastic seats. She popped out an extra-strong mint for Bernie and put it to his mouth, like a trainer with a sugar-lump for a horse – he took it – then one for herself. They were on Park Lane. The van was a hundred yards ahead – no, that was a different blue van. Theirs was ahead of it.

‘We don’t need to follow them all the way,’ Bernie said, crunching his mint cheerfully. ‘We could be quicker going down side-streets. They’ll be sticking to the A-roads through London.’

‘I’d be happier, really,’ Alice said. That was all. Everything she had, everything she had acquired and kept in her life, had gone into that van – the nest of tables they’d saved up for, their first furniture after they had married, the settee and matching chairs that had replaced the green chair and springy tartan two-seater Bernie’s aunts had lent them…

‘That’s all right, love,’ Bernie said. ‘If you want to keep them in view, we’ll keep them in view.’

…the mock-mahogany dining table and chairs, green-velvet seated, from Waring & Gillow, brass-footed with lions’ claws, the double divan bed only a year old – their third since she had first come home with Bernie, him carrying her over the threshold and not stopping there but carrying her upstairs, puffing and panting until he was through the door of their bedroom and dropping her on to his surprise, a new-bought bed, and her not knowing she was pregnant already – and the carpets…