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

admitted to his garden developed, stretching in their new freedom. But then the weeds started: the perfect lawn was scattered with constellations of daisies and, quite soon, dandelions. There were butterflies now and when, once, it rained overnight in torrents, the garden was filled with snails, come out to drink and feed. Best of all was a marvellous new plant, embracing and winding itself round anything, a fence, a post, running itself through other plants, with the most beautifulflowers like trumpets, like lilies, like the flowers of heaven. Jane had never had a favourite flower before, and whenever the craze for quizzes had arisen among the girls, she’d always replied, “Roses,” when asked, a choice she knew was limp and conventional, as well as probably untrue. But now she really did have a favourite flower.
    It was a shock to discover, when she asked her father, discreetly, that it was a garden pest called bindweed. Then he explained the complex and violent steps needed to eradicate it. Jane listened, but it seemed a little sad to her to remove a plant so beautiful, to prefer, as her father did, a border of squat green-tongued plants that would never flower or get anywhere much in life. Jane promised herself, when she grew up, a garden with nothing but bindweed, a dense bower of strangling vines and trumpeting innocent flowers.
    Her garden visits were over now. A couple of days ago one of those neighbours had rapped at the window as she had been going in—slipping in, she had thought, unobserved as a mouse in the middle of the day. It had been embarrassing enough to see the neighbour at her mother’s party; that hiding-place was now closed to her, and the garden went its way in peace.
    She smoothed the paper: she started to write again. Something caught her eye. From here, she could not be seen from the house, if she kept low, but she could see anyone standing near the windows. There was a movement in Daniel’s bedroom. Daniel was supposed to have gone swimming in the open-air pool at Hathersage; he couldn’t have got there and back so quickly. The figure moved again, and it wasn’t Daniel. The day was bright, and in the dimness of the house, Jane could see only the outline of a figure, its shape and gestures. It moved again: a hand travelled towards the face, then paused in mid-air, shifted, went downwards, as if it was going through something on Daniel’s “desk.”
    It was Jane’s father. She hadn’t realized how absolutely she knew his shape and movements, the way he had of letting his hands start to do one vague thing before abandoning it nervously for something else. “I’ll tell you something,” she remembered Daniel saying to her once, watching her with an amused horrid gleam, “I bet they don’t do it any more.” “Do what?” Jane had said. “What do you think?” Daniel said. “And I bet Dad’s relieved more than anything.”
    Lying there, undiscoverable, in the middle of the day, Jane might have preferred a burglar. She allowed herself a minute of speculativeromance, but it was no good, it was her father; surprisingly here in the middle of the day, surprisingly in Daniel’s bedroom, but that was all.
    Twenty minutes later, she heard the front door shut. She hadn’t heard it open, she reflected, though it usually made a solid clunk. He’d opened it quietly, she guessed, as if he had sneaked in; he’d thought there was no one in the house so he’d shut it as he normally did. It wasn’t much of an adventure, really. She got up, picked up her notebook and went into the house for a drink, brushing down her print dress as she went. She should have gone with Daniel to Hathersage for a swim. She’d said she probably would, that morning over breakfast, just before her dad went off to work.
    “We said we’d stop at the next service station,” Alice said, noticing a sign.
    “Yeah?” Bernie said, not concentrating on what she was saying. “Sorry—”
    “I said, we told the removers