The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher Read Free Book Online Page A

on to the patio. The lawn-spray flung lazily in this direction with a hiss on each revolution, never quite reaching the little nest. A trickle of sweat, like a darting insect, slipped in a tickle from her armpit down her side; she could smell her own faint metallic odour. She was narrating in her head; she turned and began to write again.
    “My name is Fanny. I was born an orphan in the year 1863. My mother …”
    It was a hundred years before her own birth. Her eyes filled with the sadness that by now Fanny was certainly dead. But she was Fanny, sweating in a sleeveless dress and no knickers in a patch of a Sheffield garden. Presently, as the cool wave of water in air, a jet of perfumed rain, swept over her head, she was lost in the thrill of authorship.
    The garden was not squarely established but, like the whole estate, carved out of country and annexed in opportunistic ways. It swelled at the far corner to take in the substantial holly tree. (“A hundred years old,” Jane’s mother said reverently. She had always wanted to live in an old house, with character.) Elsewhere it wavered about in odd directions, claiming and abjuring patches of land. If the features of the garden seemed deceptively aged, like the trees, that was because the gardens had fenced-in patches of country. A moorland tussock, three feet square, brought in, surrounded by a lawn and a garden wall, like a rockery. The patchy lawn, the spindles of trees on the streets, rooted in squares of earth like tea-bags: those told the age of the development more clearly.
    You could nest in the roots of the old holly tree where you were invisible from the house. For Jane’s less secret withdrawals, she went to read somewhere she could be discovered. You could sometimes hear ahuman noise beyond the garden and, in a series of corrections, understand that it was not, after all, one of the neighbours on either side at their pleasure, or a walker hugging the shore of the development before heading off into the wild heather of the country but the child’s-dismay-call made by a sheep, sheltering from the wind beyond the dry-stone wall.
    But there was another better gift from the moor, which no one, Jane believed, knew about: three thick gorse bushes, brilliant banana-yellow blossom and always quick to slash at your arms. From the open lawn, it looked as if they went right up to the wall, but if you got down on your belly and wriggled through, a little space of secret untended grass opened up. You could sit there and watch, unnoticed. Her father was always talking about clearing the gorse bushes but he wouldn’t get round to it. Perhaps he was fond of them too. Here she had pressed down a space, clearing it of holly leaves and gorse twigs.
    Another hiding-place had been the garden of the house opposite, empty for four months now. All summer it had been the province of her brother after nightfall; there he prowled and roamed, his girls coming to him eagerly. In the daytime, it had been hers. After four months of neglect, it had developed in unexpected, luxuriant ways. At first it was like a room enclosed, left tidy by the owners to await their return, and Jane ventured into it with a sense of intrusion. But quickly it began to grow and dissolve. An inoffensive small plant, a few shoots above the ground, had exploded, leaping through the trellised fence, a few more inches and a few more shoots every day. One day, all at once, a single slap of colour was there: a poppy had burst open, and then, for weeks, there was a relay of flowers, each lasting a day or two. Of course, her mother worked in a shop full of flowers, so they were not strange to Jane; but to watch them work their own stubborn magic, budding and bursting, fading and moulting on the stem, rather than dying, yellow and sour, in someone’s vase was new to her.
    For weeks, the garden expanded along its permitted limits, and only the plants that Mr. Watson, a gardener as draconian as Jane’s father, had