King of the Badgers

by Philip Hensher

  ‘Well, I don’t know what we were supposed to do,’ Billa said. ‘Everyone always complains that they hardly have time to finish a book even with a month’s notice. We could hardly have changed the book to something more suitable, even if’ —the noise of the crowd was muted as they turned down the kink in the Fore street’s progress ‘—people really wanted to talk about a book with more relevance. A kidnapping story, I suppose you mean.’

  That wasn’t what Kitty really meant; she couldn’t have said what she meant. Billa’s flat-fronted Georgian house, like a house front on a stage flat, came into view. They inspected it from top to bottom. The Brigadier stood in the window of the kitchen, conducting with one hand the orchestra on Classic FM, which was murmuring on the sill next to the scarlet pelargoniums. With the other, he was evidently ironing; he liked to do the week’s ironing on a Tuesday evening, and nothing much got between him, the ironing and Dvoák Evening on the radio.

  He was deeply involved in his double task, and did not observe Kitty or Billa as they passed; neither did they try to attract his attention. He had had a lifetime of putting rifles together, of instructing others how to put rifles together, of walking down lines of men ensuring that rifles had been put together properly, and finally of confidence that the men had been properly trained and inspected before he walked a step or two behind Her Majesty, brimming with pride. In old age and retirement, he ensured that he maintained the orderly requirements of a lifetime, dressed with the neatness of an old soldier, and presumably had managed in the army to carry out small domestic chores when required. But little improvements in domestic items over the years had achieved the difficult task of reducing him to helplessness, and he struggled with steam irons and the programmes of modern washing-machines.

  They passed on, and a new crowd outside the yellow-painted pub on the quay soon made itself apparent.

  ‘Have you read it?’ Kitty said.

  ‘The Makioka Sisters?’ Billa said. ‘Yes, indeed. We ought to have gone through it when we were supposed to rather than tramping off to Crimewatch UK. Now we’re just going to have to discuss it when we get to Miranda’s. I suppose it’s called keeping your powder dry, but I don’t care for it.’

  From the upper reaches of the first house on the Strand emerged the sound of the Bach G major cello suite, soupily expressive on every attained top note. It was John Gordon, straining and sobbing over every unfulfilled promise of tune in the piece. At seven, every evening, before dinner, he always did this. Billa and Kitty knew what the piece was because it was John Gordon’s only piece, brought out at parties and dinners, at every invitation and carefully announced. Some people said it was not only his only piece but his only accomplishment in life. He had learnt it at school, many years ago, and at seven in the evening, every day, he opened the upper window and embarked on it, playing it through twice. But everyone knew the same errors would be in it the next day, unimproved by practice and the imitation of self-analysis.

  The curtains at the next house, the drawing-room windows of which were sunk somewhat below the level of the pavement, were drawn tightly. Everyone knew why. The Lovells’ children had departed to the City, PR in Dubai, and that final difficult one to Oxford to read Japanese. Now, while the sun was still above the horizon and their children far away, the Lovells had taken to early-evening sex in the sitting room, kitchen or even hallway. Mr Lovell returned from his GP’s practice in Barnstaple and dropped his clothes in the hall; Mrs Lovell, abundantly fleshy, would come from the garden to meet him, wriggling out of skirt and blouse as she came. Tonight, the little squeaks of joy came with treble clusters of tintinnabulating piano chords, as if in improvised modernist accompaniment to John Gordon’s Bach next door. They were doing it in the dining room, on the keyboard of their untuned Yamaha upright. It happened to some people, that obsession with throwing their clothes off at an age when it would be best to keep them on. The Lovells’ invitations to view their holiday photographs were only accepted once, by the unwary.

  Over the road, in the detached gardens belonging to each house, a dog sat before a white-painted hen house. He was entranced. Stanley’s long marmalade ears flapped to the ground, his doleful eyes on one chicken or another. They emerged, retreated, strutted like showgirls around Stanley. Stanley the basset hound belonged to gay Sam who ran the specialist cheese shop and his solicitor boyfriend, the Terrible Waste, Harry Milford—Lord Harry, properly—with the office in Bidecombe. The dog had a mania for forms of life smaller than itself, and could sit happily in front of the Kenyons’ chicken coop for long hours. The Kenyons had no objection; they did not believe what the older and more vulgar inhabitants of Hanmouth told them, that that there dog was scaring they hens into fits. Miranda Kenyon didn’t believe that sort of hen was much of a layer in any case.

  At the very end of the Strand, where the road ran out and turned into a narrow stone pathway along a beach of mole-coloured mud for another two hundred yards, the last house, Mrs Grosjean, kept a white-slatted beehive. It looked like a miniature tongue-and-groove New England lunatic asylum. Stanley loved that even better. It must have been something to do with the rasping hum the slatted box made, or so it was supposed. Mrs Grosjean suspected him, however, of wanting to thieve the honey within, and would chase him off with a flapping tea-towel and shrieks of alarm if she saw him sitting before it. As far as anyone knew, neither Mrs Grosjean’s bees nor Miranda Kenyon’s chickens had the slightest objection to Stanley sitting there, manoeuvring about him with their habitual chicken or bee noises, and he certainly seemed satisfied to sit and meditate in their presence. If it were rainy, however, he might settle for the more cryptic simulacrum of colony life presented by the washing-machine in Sam and Lord What-a-Waste’s kitchen once it arrived at the spin cycle. The only command he ever mastered, because everyone in Hanmouth said it to him, all the time, was ‘Go home, Stanley.’

  13.

  ‘I wish they’d go home,’ Miranda said, peering out of the window, although the rubbernecking crowds had only come this far in dribs and drabs, and there was no one to be seen. ‘How’s Lord What-a-Waste?’

  ‘Oh, he’s fine,’ Sam said. He joined Miranda at the window. Once, Miranda had gone into the greengrocer just as Sam was leaving it. The two awful old crones who ran it had been rearranging some rather wrinkly Coxes and discussing Sam. Yes, he was that lord’s—the one who worked as a lawyer in town—he was his boyfriend. They lived up behind the Strand in one of those old fishermen’s cottages—two, rather, knocked into one. Big house, now, all wood and glass inside. What a waste, one harridan assured the other. It was as if she had believed that a nice rich lord with a solicitor’s practice and a big house—two knocked into one—would otherwise have done very well for her, or her ghastly friend, or for one of their slack-jawed daughters. They hadn’t said the same about Sam, who only ran a cheese shop, and who, therefore, wasn’t so much of a catch. Or perhaps it was that, though Lord What-a-Waste was somewhat inclining to plumpness these days, Sam could only be described as fat. With his shaved head and full jowls, he had a certain charm but, as he said himself, no one would call him love’s young dream any more. In the greengrocer’s, Miranda had listened to this unbelievable conversation before buying a random bag of woolly Spanish tomatoes and going round to Sam’s shop. She had told him the whole story without any delay. It couldn’t have been funnier, and since then Harry had been Lord What-a-Waste, though naturally not to his face. ‘He couldn’t be more cheerful, actually. He’s got some lovely new bit of hypochondria on the go. Full of the joys of something that might turn out to be a goitre, he believes.’

  ‘What is a goitre?’ Miranda said.

  ‘Heaven alone knows,’ Sam said. ‘I only said it for the comic potential.’

  ‘Sciatica.’

  ‘Boils. Piles.’

  ‘Giant wen,’ Miranda said fondly, as if bringing out a pet name.

  ‘Gout,’ Sam said. The nice thing about Miranda was that you never had to explain a joke: she
was quicker than any woman Sam had ever known to catch on to an elaborating absurdity. She could catch a principle. ‘And shingles.’

  ‘Shingles really isn’t amusing if you have it,’ Miranda said. ‘An old aunt of mine had it, and it was awful. Most of these things, it’s the old names that are so amusing, like the Shaking Palsy, which is Parkinson’s, isn’t it? I don’t know why they don’t think up a non-funny, anti-funny name for shingles that would mean you took it more seriously. As if psychiatrists had to say that their patients were loony, bonkers, round the twist and nut-jobs. Shingles sounds about as serious as freckles, and it’s no fun at all.’

  ‘Miranda, freckles can be terrifying,’ Sam said. ‘Much worse than Harry’s goitre, if it does turn out to be a goitre, which I seriously doubt. I don’t suppose any of them are actually enjoyable to get. Some of them sound funny, and some of them don’t. Goitre. Funny. Leukaemia. Not funny. Children used to get mumps, didn’t they? That’s a funny-sounding disease. Did Hettie get mumps ever?’

  Miranda busied herself with some flowers on the walnut card table, and Sam saw that he had trodden on one of those occasional and unpredictable patches in Miranda’s life where she was not prepared to be clever or amusing. ‘I don’t know why you should know any better than I do. Is that Stanley out there again?’

  ‘Staring at the chickens,’ Miranda said. ‘They seem quite inured to him. If I were a chicken and there were an immobile great hound staring at my every doing from a foot away, I’d peck him on the nose. I haven’t noticed that he even stops them laying, though they won’t do it in front of him, which is what I guess he’s waiting to see.’

  ‘Like not being able to go to the loo with someone watching, I expect. I admire your hens’ composure immensely.’

  ‘Does Stanley sit and watch you on the lav in the morning, then?’ Miranda said. ‘Go on, you’re blushing, he does. I knew he did. Doesn’t it put you off laying?’

  ‘Please.’

  Sam leant forward and tapped on the window. He meant to attract the attention of Stanley, in the fenced-off garden on the other side of the road. Stanley inclined to deafness, as basset hounds do. He made no response, his attention fully on the chicken coop. Or perhaps he did hear: the sound of knuckles rapping on windows followed him around, every day of his life. Just then, a woman was passing. ‘Woman. Came into the shop this afternoon. I’ve seen her around and about before,’ Sam said. ‘Bought half a pound of Wiltshire Gjetost and an olivewood cheeseboard for her new kitchen.’

  ‘Not a ghoulish tripper, then,’ Miranda said. Just then Billa and Kitty came to the door with their copies of The Makioka Sisters, each recognizable in a string bag, for the evening’s discussion. She went into the hallway and opened the door. For an odd moment Sam could hear her welcoming cries in two dimensions, from the outside and from the inside, like a two-woman chorus. Inexplicably, the woman who had waved at Sam came up behind Billa and Kitty. Sam went into the hallway, almost knocking over a Japanese lacquer table in his haste.

  ‘You don’t know me,’ the woman was saying to Miranda over Billa’s imperturbable green-quilted shoulder. ‘But I know you’re Miranda Kenyon. It’s nice to meet you. I live in the flats over there, on the top floor. With my husband. My name’s Catherine Butterworth.’

  They were awkwardly placed. Sam relished these moments of embarrassing social disposition, and this one was almost unprecedented. Billa and Kitty were at the door, and could not be invited in without actively dismissing the woman. They stood there, half turned between Miranda and Miranda’s new friend, their smiles fixed and formal, not quite greeting anyone. Miranda’s smile in turn was general and remote. Probably, Sam reflected, never in her life had Billa been greeted with the words ‘You don’t know me, but…’

  ‘Hello there, Sam,’ Catherine Butterworth said, giving him a flap of a wave. He’d evidently told her his name, though he couldn’t remember doing so.

  ‘Hello, Catherine,’ he said. ‘Did you enjoy the Gjetost? Unusual cheese, that.’

  ‘Toffeeish,’ Catherine said. ‘Very unusual. We’re saving it for an after-dinner treat. I’ll let you get on. We’re having a little drink next week—next Saturday at six or so. Our son’s coming down to see our new place—he’s bringing his new partner, so we thought he’d like to meet some neighbours, too. Any of you. That would be delightful. Over there, in the block of flats—Woodlands. Silly name. On the top floor, number six—it’s the only flat on the top floor. Do come.’

  ‘On the top floor of the flats that spoil our view,’ Miranda said, once she had waved Catherine on her way and ushered Billa and Kitty towards the drinks table. A schooner of fino for Kitty, like wee in a test tube, and a gut-destroying but no doubt Colonel’s Mess-ish Campari and soda for Billa. Sam knew the clearing-out effects Campari had on Billa’s insides. He looked forward to the later stages of their Makioka discussions being accompanied by Billa’s thunderous tummy-rumbles. ‘I’ve never met anyone who lives there before. Couldn’t even identify them by sight. I can’t imagine what anyone was thinking of, throwing up a monstrosity like that between the Strand and the estuary. I think people must have been quite mad in the 1960s. It’s so out of keeping.’

  ‘We’ve been to the meeting,’ Kitty burst out.

  ‘Oh, God, how I envy you,’ Sam said. ‘What’s the latest?’

  ‘Yes, we must get through it before Kenyon gets home,’ Miranda said.

  ‘Is he coming home tonight, Miranda?’ Billa said. ‘I thought—’

  ‘Totally placed a tabu on any further mention of it,’ Miranda said precisely. ‘I don’t imagine we talked about anything else for seventy-two hours last weekend—people popping round to chew over it. Then phoning up. Then Hettie’ —voice lowered at this point— ‘actually coming out of her room and not telling us she hates us for once but wanting to know all the details. So’ —back to normal volume— ‘after three days of Heidi and Micky and Tragic China and the others—’

  ‘Hannah and Archie and, and, and,’ Sam said, counting them out on his fingers.

  ‘—Kenyon couldn’t stand it any longer and said he didn’t want to hear another word, not even if Tragic China were found camping underneath the blackcurrant bush in the back garden.’

  ‘Harvey,’ Sam said with satisfaction. ‘That’s the fourth one. Very ugly child. Unbelievable, really. You can understand why they didn’t have him abducted. Never knew a child could be both porcine and bovine at the same time. Wouldn’t have thought its face would tug at the heartstrings of readers of the Sun when they saw it. I thought the little girl was plain but, really, when you see the others, they were making the best of rather a bad job. It is fascinating, though, do admit.’

  ‘Simply gripping,’ Billa said. ‘I can’t imagine why Kenyon doesn’t want to talk about it all the time from the moment he wakes up. It’s quite put a pep in Tom’s stride in the morning, knowing that he’s going to bump into someone on the Fore street with some delicious new titbit or ingenious theory. Yesterday it was that the children were in charge of concealing China. No one would suspect them of conspiracy.’

  ‘And they were the last to see her,’ Kitty said. ‘Very good. She’s probably in the old Anderson shelter in the back garden, or something, getting smuggled chips through the garden fence. What I don’t understand is why the husband, or the lover, or the live-in, or whatever he’s supposed to be, chose the library of all places for his alibi. I mean, anywhere would have done. It simply looks so very peculiar for someone like that suddenly to develop an interest in books.’

  ‘Kitty, libraries aren’t for reading books any more,’ Sam said. ‘They’ve given all that away. It’s nothing but DVDs and computer terminals nowadays.’

  ‘And of course it’s the one place where, if he took something out, the computer records would show that it was him and that he’d been there at a specific time.’

  ‘Oh, Billa,’ Miranda said. ‘If he’d walked down Barnstaple high street the CCTV would show where he’d been. I w
onder what he took out. Not The Makioka Sisters, I suppose.’

  They speculated luridly about his reading or viewing material for a while.

  ‘I would have thought the unemployment office would have been a better bet,’ Sam said.

  ‘In what way?’ Kitty said. She was not always the quickest to catch on.

  ‘If I were someone like that,’ Sam said. ‘I would do roughly what he’s done. I would go somewhere recognizably official to prove my alibi. Not the library, that’s absurd. I would get it somewhere I could be expected to go to. The unemployment office, enquiring about my benefits, or something.’

  ‘And the mother, how’s she?’ Miranda said.

  ‘Simply terrifying,’ Billa said. ‘Chills the heart simply to look at her. Sits there playing with her hair, staring into space, unutterably blank. Like looking at a cloud drift across the sky. She has lovely hair, doesn’t she? Bored and boring, I should say.’

  ‘And new clothes from top to toe,’ Kitty said. ‘Out of the Save China fund, I should guess.’

  ‘Do you want another drink, Kitty?’ Miranda said.

  ‘Well, I don’t mind if I do,’ Kitty said. ‘It was awfully crowded—the world and his wife were there and then some extra, just for fun. Billa and I had to stand at the back and we counted ourselves lucky. People getting so overheated, too, calling for everyone’s heads to roll. Terribly silly and embarrassing, and John Calvin running everything so.’

  ‘There was a fight in the Case Is Altered last night, I heard,’ Billa said. ‘Tom bumped into the landlord on his morning constitutional this morning. He said they’d never seen or heard of such a thing in twenty-five years’ running the pub. Townees, he said.’

  ‘Grockles, they were calling them in the queue at the post office this afternoon.’

  ‘Sam,’ Miranda said. ‘What an awful, frightful, yokel-like word. Never let me hear you say anything so prejudiced again.’