The Northern Clemency. Philip Hensher

game they played. At eleven, Malcolm got up, switched the television off, unplugged it, remarking that it was a relief all those power-cuts had stopped at last. He made the same remark twice a week. They went upstairs. As usual, she went to the bathroom first, stripped off her makeup, creamed her face. Malcolm had left his jacket on the back of a chair, and was just putting it away in the fitted wardrobe. She started to undress, unbuttoning her skirt. He went to the bathroom next; she put on her clean nightdress and, as she always did, took off her bra and knickers underneath it, like a shy bather fumbling with a towel. Through the wall, she could hear the fierce sizzle of his piss in the toilet. She got into bed, taking a book and her reading glasses from the bedside table.

      He came back, and undressed without saying anything. She looked at him covertly over the top of her book. His hair was getting longer; untidy, though, and he’d be having it cut soon. He pulled his shirt, blue with a white collar, over his head. The first time she’d seen him naked, three months before they’d married, she’d been struck by the hair on his body; the little tufty patch between his nipples, almost circular, not quite amounting to a hairy chest. He turned now, and there was the other patch she’d not known anyone could have, a rough growth at the bottom of his spine, a monkey flourish. He wasn’t a hairy man; he’d not have a thick beard if he grew one. She noticed now that the rest of his back, which used to be spotty, was now lightly furred. Odd, the way you went on changing as you got older; that was what ageing meant.

      He had an order to things: after the shirt, he took off his trousers, then his socks – his thin white legs! Then he put on his pyjama top, fastening one or two of the buttons, before taking his underpants off. Beneath the hem of the pyjamas, the little purplish tip of his penis, dangling absurdly; she’d had no idea about the penis, apart from Michelangelo’s David, and it had seemed long and thin, ugly with veins, a little bit sad, always had. It was something she’d read men worried about. Just then the possibility of sex came to her; she’d creamed her face, but she could wipe it off, strip her nightdress from her; her husband could take off his pyjamas again, and then, all that. It hadn’t been very much like that, ever; she didn’t know why she thought of it like that now. We could get flowers for the house, she thought. All the time; even in the bedroom. Nick, in her head, handed a huge bunch of unsold lilies to her, bearded, solemn, pagan. My life is on the point of change, she said.

      And then Malcolm got into bed, and reached for his own book. For fifteen minutes, he read about the English Civil War; for fifteen minutes, before they put the lights out, she read, with less concentration, about an uninvolving girl called Pierrette in a château in Provence.

      Although she had started work, Katherine’s morning routine remained the same. From the first morning, she took out a more careful outfit, though, one she’d decided on the night before: a neat jacket with a floral scarf, a pussy-bow tied at the neck. When the weather worsened, she would wear a poncho over it; she’d found and bought a purple one in Debenhams, the end of the week before. She’d sneaked it into the wardrobe, and if Malcolm noticed, she’d say, ‘Oh – this? I don’t wear it often, I know.’ He often didn’t notice. It was her money, she reminded herself.

      When she arrived, Nick was already in the shop, the flowers in the boxes. It was fifteen minutes before opening time, and when she rapped on the door, smiling, he looked up, first surprised and then, oddly, relieved – had he thought she wouldn’t turn up?

      ‘I realized,’ he said, letting her in, the key fumbling in the thick chamois leather of his glove, ‘I don’t have your telephone number. I forgot to ask.’ He locked the door behind her.

      ‘I’ll write it down for you,’ Katherine said. ‘Now. Where have we got to?’

      ‘Well, let’s see,’ he said. ‘First things first. A cup of coffee. I’m dying for one.’

      He started to pull off his gloves. He was nervous in some way; after all, it was a new business, the flower shop.

      ‘Let me,’ Katherine said. ‘You carry on with what you’re doing. Where are the things?’

      ‘I bought a mug for you,’ he said. ‘And the milk’s in the fridge. I remembered to get it on my way in.’

      ‘I tell you what,’ she said, ‘let’s have a kitty, and I’ll be in charge of the coffee and biscuits. I’ll need to know about your favourites.’

      ‘I can see we’re going to get on,’ Nick said, going back to stripping the stems of the yellow roses. ‘My favourite biscuits. Well, I like those pink ones, wafers. Or Iced Gems.’

      ‘My son likes those,’ Katherine said. ‘My younger son.’

      ‘They’re not a very grown-up sort of biscuit,’ Nick said. ‘I’m sorry for that. But I don’t think I could face the austerity of Rich Tea.’

      ‘My nan liked those,’ Katherine said. ‘My grandmother. She used to dip them in her tea. As I suppose you’re meant to. So now you know about the biscuit preferences of most of my family.’

      ‘I didn’t know you had a family,’ Nick said. ‘Though of course you’ve got a family. And what are your preferences in the biscuit line?’

      ‘Me?’ Katherine said. ‘Oh – anything. I just get what the children like, usually.’

      ‘The other thing I meant to say – I don’t mind if you don’t want to work on Saturdays.’

      ‘Saturdays?’ Katherine said.

      ‘Your family,’ Nick said. ‘I’ll manage.’

      ‘Oh,’ Katherine said. She hadn’t considered that; the arrangements had been vague. She didn’t want to reject what, for Nick, was evidently some thought-out kindness, and things could change later. ‘That’s very good of you. You’ll manage all right?’

      ‘I’ll manage,’ Nick said again. ‘Now. Let’s have that coffee and no biscuits – I remembered the milk, the biscuits didn’t occur to me – and we’ll go through the tasks of the week. It’s the same every week.’

      Twice a week, on Tuesday morning – ‘but I went on Monday this week’ – and on Friday morning, before the Saturday rush, Nick went in the little van to the flower market. He’d be back before opening time, and together they’d strip the flowers’ foliage, plunge them into the buckets. ‘I’ll just get what tempts me,’ Nick said. ‘I suppose in a bit we’ll find out what sells and what doesn’t.’ That was the fresh stock, which he was dealing with. Apart from the flowers, there were leaves and other greenery, used in making up bouquets. There was, too, a range of dried flowers and grasses so the shop, even at the end of a busy day, wouldn’t look denuded. Some of that, too, could go into a fresh bouquet, like the shining coins of honesty, and some more exotic things: there were crabbed and arthritic fingers of willow twigs, and, against the wall, a fan of peacock feathers. ‘People come in sometimes, and they just buy honesty and peacock feathers,’ Nick said. ‘The trouble is they last for ever, so we won’t see them for another year, and we won’t get rich on that.’

      There was, too, a range of vases for sale. ‘You’d be surprised,’ Nick said, ‘– at the number of people – I’ve already discovered this and I’ve only been here a week – who come in and buy a bunch of flowers, they’re the ones who’ve got something to apologize for, to their wives usually, I suppose, and then they remember they haven’t got a vase. You can charge what you like for those.’ Katherine looked at the strange collection: some big square greenish glass ones, a Chinese-looking one with dragons, and half a dozen in brownish pottery, a few Victorian ones with blurred transfers of fruit and vegetables.

      ‘Well,’ Nick said, ‘I had a flurry of custom on Monday, just after you came in – it must have been you, bringing me luck – and a little bit on Tuesday, but then it died down a bit. I had a good day on Friday, though, and actually, Saturday too. We were closer to running out of stock than I’d expected. Curiosity, I expect – we’ll see what it looks like in a month.’

      ‘And the vases?’ Katherine said, picking at a stuck-on rose on a goblin fantasy of fruit and