The Northern Clemency Read Online Free PDF

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 …
    “I know it’s silly,” Alice said, “but I won’t feel easy about it unless we follow them.”
    “Well, we’ve lost them now,” Bernie said. “We’ll catch up.”
    It was true. London had spawned vans ahead of them, blue and black and green, rumbling and bouncing to the street horizon; the Orchard’s van was there somewhere, but lost. They ground to a halt in the dense traffic.
    “It can’t be helped,” Alice said bravely. The carpets, all chosen doubtfully, all fitting their