The Northern Clemency. Philip Hensher

She said he left the office at lunchtime and didn’t come back.’

      ‘He was here at lunchtime,’ Jane said, ‘and then he went out again. I thought he’d gone back to work.’

      ‘Yes,’ Katherine said. ‘You said.’

      She went to the window, peered out through the net curtains. She seemed lost in thought. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘the new people are moving in. There’s a removal van.’

      ‘It came this afternoon,’ Daniel said, still eating. ‘They’ve left it, they’ve not started unpacking the furniture.’

      ‘Did you see them?’ Katherine said absently.

      ‘No,’ Daniel said. ‘They’ll be moving in tomorrow, I suppose.’

      ‘I wonder,’ Tim said, ‘where my dad’s gone.’

      ‘You don’t think there’s anything wrong, do you?’ Jane said. She remembered the stories she’d constructed in the garden as she saw the figure in the window. It seemed odd already that she’d imagined burglars.

      ‘No,’ Katherine said firmly. ‘There’s nothing wrong.’

      But then she went out again and started making phone calls, to the hospitals first and, finally, the police. One by one the children took their plates to the kitchen; Jane washed up, listening to the repeated query in her mother’s politest, most telephone voice. It seemed to her that there was something of blame and guilt in it. She could not understand it.

      For years Katherine had been in the habit, in the mornings, of getting into the car with the children and Malcolm. First, Malcolm dropped off Daniel at Flint, the senior school – he insisted on being dropped a good three hundred yards from the gates, and she knew for a fact that most of his friends had exactly the same arrangement with their parents – then Tim, at his primary school, and Jane at the new middle school, less self-consciously getting out at the gate. Finally Malcolm dropped her in Broomhill with its parade of shops and went off to work.

      That had been her routine since Tim started school. She did it almost every day, saying, as if it needed justifying, that it was nice to have a regular routine each day, and hers was to buy the groceries before ten each morning, then head back to do the housework. In reality, she hadn’t minded the housework when Tim was too small to go to school, just as she didn’t really mind it when the children were on their school holidays. It was the days when the four of them set off, leaving her on her own, with no one to talk to and nothing but dull tasks to do, that wore her down. The noise of Radio 2, so mild a burbling complement to breakfast, had to be turned off, or had to be listened to as if it were company; so, by the time Tim was seven, she had taken to getting into the car, going to Broomhill and filling the morning with the day’s small shopping – the fishmonger or the pork butcher, the little supermarket, the greengrocer – maybe the bank, and definitely the little tea-shop for a cup of coffee and a piece of cake.

      Crosspool was closer to shop in, of course, but it was a 1920s development, a shabby parade with holes in the Tarmac and a hardware shop with Chinese-made plastic flowers in the window, and no tea-shop. Broomhill was stone-built Victorian villas – it was a part of the city that hadn’t been bombed in the war. It had a dress shop, a bookshop, and the greengrocer sold courgettes. It was a nicer place, so Katherine put up with the tinny flavour of the brown-coloured filling in the cakes at the tea-shop, the burnt crusty nubbings of Mrs Milner’s rock cakes a guarantee of Broomhill’s middle-class, non-shop-bought authenticity. They couldn’t have afforded a house there, though.

      Malcolm, not really thinking, often said it would be more sensible to go to the supermarket once a week, and was talking about buying a chest freezer to put in the utility room, but she discouraged him. At the words ‘chest freezer’ she saw her life retreating: lifting deep-frozen carcasses from their bed of ice, spending days watching joints defrost, drip by pink drip. In any case, he didn’t know that when she said she’d done the shopping by ten, she was dissembling: it was rare that she was home before two – she had so many ways of passing the time. A different woman, she often thought, would have dropped in at the pub for a gin and tonic; the Admiral Codrington was eminently respectable, apparently.

      Two years before, Mrs Milner had said to her, ‘There’s a florist’s opening where Townsend’s the ironmonger’s used to be.’ She was sitting at Katherine’s table: she liked to take the weight off her feet when they weren’t too busy and, in any case, the eight or nine women who came in regularly, sometimes inviting each other to share a table, more often calling across if the conversation became more than usually interesting, hardly counted as customers to make a fuss of.

      ‘That’s a shame,’ Miss Johnson, the retired bank clerk, said. ‘It was useful, Townsend’s, for anything small about the house. I’d been hoping there’d be something useful opening up in its place.’

      ‘You can always buy a box of screws in Woolworth’s, I dare say, Mary,’ Mrs Milner said.

      ‘It’s not the same,’ Miss Johnson said. ‘It was a useful shop to have round the corner, and I don’t believe I’ve bought a bunch of flowers since Mother died, so a florist’s no use to me.’

      ‘I like a sprig of rosemary with lamb,’ Mrs Goldsmith said, intruding into another conversation. ‘I think it brings out the flavour.’

      ‘I don’t suppose Townsend’s found it easy to keep going, you buying a picture hook once every two years,’ Mrs Milner said to Miss Johnson. ‘Those old family firms with everything in little drawers and the assistant taking fifteen minutes to find anything, they’re on the way out, you mark my words. I think it’ll be lovely to have a florist nearby. I might even invite them,’ she went on grandly, ‘to supply the tea-shop with regular bouquets.’

      ‘That’ll be an improvement,’ Miss Johnson said, somewhat nettled, and poking at the limp anemone in a thumb-sized vase on her table. ‘Goodness, what a day – you’d never think it was June.’

      ‘I’ve never known June such a wash-out,’ Mrs Milner said, ignoring Miss Johnson’s rudeness. ‘As for the florist’s, they’ll all be buying flowers from it once it’s there, I think you’ll find.’

      ‘It’s a nice idea,’ Katherine said. ‘You never know – it’s on the way home from my husband’s work. He might take to stopping off there.’ None of the other ladies knew Malcolm, but politely suppressed ribaldry ensued.

      ‘It’s terrible, the parking in Broomhill,’ Janet Goldsmith said. ‘I’d remember that, Katherine, before you get your hopes up. Have you seen the new knee-length skirts in Belinda’s? Well worth a look.’

      ‘Buy yourself flowers and save the heartbreak,’ Mrs Milner said, but just then a man, a stranger, came in, bringing a burst of rain with a flapping umbrella, and she got up to fetch him the list of cakes.

      Katherine hadn’t noticed the shop-fitting work going on at Townsend’s old premises, but over the next few weeks she took some interest in its progress. As the work came towards a conclusion, it became obvious that it was going to be a high-class florist’s, a cut above the two or three purveyors of scrubby chrysanthemums, tired-out roses and oversized daisies in unnatural colours to be found in the town centre. As soon as the plastering was finished, the decorators put up wallpaper in thin Regency stripes, red and white. Katherine had thought about Regency stripes for her own hall – and she watched with approval when the shop sign, in good solid brass Roman lettering on a dark-blue painted background, went up: REYNOLDS, just that. It wasn’t long before the shop opened, and Katherine went in on the first morning. She had plans.

      Katherine had had jobs in the past. Before she knew Malcolm, she had worked in a solicitors’ office, a family firm in Sheffield that had taken her on when her father put her in the way of one of his old golfing cronies. She’d like that job. Nice, it had been, hurrying out of the office in Peace Square, down the steps of the Georgian building, sandstone and worn hammocky, at five thirty to meet her young man waiting there with, often, a protective umbrella held high – Katherine had a beehive, high and shiny as