The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher Page A

for fifteen minutes longer. Alice even had a piece of cake. Everyone did their best to be cheerful, talking around rather than to Sandra, and by the time they had finished, they could look directly at her. Although she was still a bit red, she no longer seemed about to burst into tears.
    Daniel was home by half past four. He’d been at Hathersage all day, pretty well; it had been a hot day, a perfect one. The pool was built on a hillside just outside the Derbyshire village. Surrounded by schoolmasterly red-brick walls, it was concrete and tile inside; outside were the Derbyshire hills, and the huge sky. If you hurled yourself from the highest diving board, you were horizontal for one moment, poised above the water, framed against the sky and hills. Perfect. He’d got there at ten, in the first bus of the morning, still empty; later buses were full of kids, as he said to himself. Barbara had been supposed to come, and he’d told her to meet him at the bus stop at the bottom of Coldwell Lane at nine, but she hadn’t been there when the bus came. He’d got on anyway; not a bad excuse to dump her, especially since she hadn’t been on the next bus.
    He’d spent an hour thrashing up and down, throwing himself off the diving board in bold, untidy shapes, enjoying more the gesture and the moment of flight than anything else, and grinning when he surfaced after a bellyflop, his stomach red and stinging, joining in with the laughter of the girl lifeguard. By eleven or so another bus had arrived from Sheffield, much more full, and they came in; some he recognized from his school, three girls from his sister’s year, finding Daniel splendid in his exercise, brown limbs jumbled, the disconcerting swirl of his turquoise-patterned trunks, flying above the vivid oblong of water which shone with the Derbyshire blue of the sky. He’d met some friends and made some more; he always did. But in the end he went home on his own, hardly saying goodbye, burying his face in a bag of cheese and onion crisps from the machine.
    The bus home, the three-thirty, was as empty as the morning bus had been—too early for most people—but with all that day’s exercise he ached, sitting at the front of the top deck. Ached, too, slumping up Coldwell Lane when the bus let him off; it was uphill all the way, and just a bit too far; his black sports bag, the one he used for school,banged away in the heat at his bony hips. Half enjoying his exhaustion, groaning as he slouched up the hill, he almost expected Barbara to be sitting on the wall outside their house. Perhaps crying.
    There seemed to be nobody in the house. Daniel was terribly hungry; he hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, apart from the crisps. He went through to the kitchen, dropping his bag in the middle of the hall, and went through the cupboards and the fridge, banging the doors as he went. He poured himself some vividly orange squash; it was always too weak and watery when your mother made it for you, and he liked it about one part to three. In a few minutes, he’d got the stuff for a magic sandwich together, and sat down with a breadknife, contentedly putting it together and eating the constituent parts individually as he went.
    “That looks revolting,” Jane said, opening the kitchen door. She must have been in the garden.
    “You don’t have to eat it,” Daniel said, putting the sandwich spread on awkwardly with the breadknife. “I’m starving.”
    “I bet you had some chips in Hathersage,” Jane said. She put down her notebook and pen on the table. He noticed that her dress was stained with grass.
    “No, I didn’t,” he said. “What’ve you been doing? Writing poetry?”
    “No,” Jane said. “Where’s Tim?”
    “I don’t know,” Daniel said. “I only just came in. You know Jason in my year? Him and his brother Matthew were out on the crags a week ago and he said to me, ‘I saw your sister. And she was sitting on a rock and gazing at the landscape and