The Northern Clemency Read Free

the Glovers had three children, surely: the youngest a boy, wasn’t he? Maybe he was in bed.
    The youngest was behind the sofa: he had been there most of the evening, slipping behind it quite early on. Timothy had with him his favourite book in the whole world. He had been reading it steadily all evening, letting his eye run over the familiar entries. He had taken it out from the public library eleven months before; he had renewed it once, then stopped bothering. It was now ten months overdue,which caused him great terror whenever he thought of it. In happy moments, he decided that he could conceal the book where no one would find it, and his parents would never uncover the gigantic fine now building up. The fear of punishment was huge in him.
    But the terror did not touch the book. It was as good now as ever. The pleasure he found in letting his eye ride over it, touching on category after category, overrode anything else. Whenever he could, he returned to its calm instructions. Even when it was not quite right of him to do so, he sensed, he found a way to be alone with it, as now burrowing behind the sofa at his parents’ party. It was so important to him that often in the last months he had found himself telling others—his best friends Simon and Ian, his sister Jane, his mother but for some reason not his brother Daniel, not his father—some facts about his subject. More oddly, he found himself asking them questions about it, as if they could instruct him, feigning ignorance, wanting to find out if they knew what he already did.
    The book was about snakes. Timothy gazed at the photographs as if at a family album, committing the names he already knew to a further refreshment of memory.
    He had been there for three hours, wedged between the sofa and the large picture window. If the party went outside, they would see him, and probably laugh. From time to time the back of the sofa, the porridgy tweed panels between the wood frames, bulged as someone sat down, swelling towards him, like some inchoate mass searching for him. There was a queer smell of dust down here, and the nasty smell of spilt alcohol. It was his favourite place when there was anyone in the house.
    “I don’t know where he’s got to,” Katherine Glover said to a departing guest; it was too warm for anyone to have brought coats, but she made a helpful gesture. “He’s a little bit shy.”
    The guest smiled; her husband made a honking noise, understanding that the woman was talking about her son, not knowing that there was any son apart from the great lout who had been lolling on the sofa, gawping at the ladies.
    On the mat was an envelope, which, surely, had not been there earlier; it was addressed to Katherine, and she picked it up. In front of her, the remains of her party; the poor pregnant woman, harassed and tired, waiting for her husband to want to go. But the husband was drunk, his hair rumpled, making a hash of a joke to a group of husbands. Where was Malcolm? Sitting down, his host’s bottle in hishand, all refills at an end; and the Mozart had come to an end, too, leaving the patient silence to dismiss the guests.
    “You looked so nice,” Jane said to her mother, coming up to her in the hall, munching a cheese straw, “in your posh frock and your hair like that.”
    Katherine felt so terribly tired. “I don’t know why I bothered,” she said crossly. “They didn’t appreciate it at all.”
    Jane looked at her mother in astonishment. “It was a lovely party,” she said. “You should always wear your hair like that.”
    “What, to work?” Katherine said. “Don’t be daft.”
    “Thank you so much,” the drunk man was saying, “for a lovely time, my dear. We’ve had a lovely, lovely time.”
    He leant towards her, as if to kiss her, but did not; Katherine had him by the shoulders, a gesture that might have been affectionate, holding him at arm’s-length inspection.
    “We’ve had a very good time,” the pregnant woman