King of the Badgers

by Philip Hensher

  For a moment, David thought something incredible, that what he had considered was going to take place; that the cosy but quickly static relationship really was a long wooing, whose degrees were too finely distinguished for him to perceive. Tonight, the reason that Richard’s belief that their relationship had a sexual aspect to it didn’t matter was that the sexual aspect was going to be offered tonight. Richard thought they went to bed together; tonight they would go to bed together; so Mauro didn’t care. All the same, David was glad that Richard’s error had only been brought out before Mauro, and not in front of any of Mauro’s friends.

  When, the next afternoon, David woke in his own bed in St Albans, hung-over and sweating, not having gone to bed with Mauro after all, he wondered why Mauro was so indifferent to being regarded as his boyfriend. For the first time, the thought of the £2,400 he had lent Mauro for the deposit on the flat, the subject of fervent promises every week ever since, started to display a different aspect.

  12.

  The view from Cockering was no more lovely than the view from Hanmouth. Catherine liked it, however, because from here you could see the long ribbon of Hanmouth. The town stretched along the estuary shore like bunting: from the inland side, the park and the newish school, then the shining roof and windows of the doctor’s clinic, the church, high on its headland in its green graveyard. Then the complicated knot of streets and houses and shops, rising and falling behind the berthed yachts about the stone jetty, and onwards to the Strand and its Dutch houses; the gables hocketing and curving in a musical phrase, interrupted at the exact centre by the square pretty block Catherine and Alec lived in. From the Cockering circular harbour, now emptied of water, the sailing boats and tugs lying on their sides in the thick black mud, you could see what an agreeable, festive town Hanmouth was. They often came over here to visit Barbara and Ted, and in fact the pair of them had become much better friends with them since they had moved down here. Or, at any rate, had seen a good deal more of them than when they had lived in St Albans. One of their very infrequent arguments had erupted when Alec suggested that they’d seen Barbara and Ted only six days before, and they shouldn’t ‘drop in’ on them by chance. ‘I don’t think they’re always all that pleased to see us,’ he’d said. ‘We’d all enjoy it more if it was more occasional.’ Catherine hadn’t noticed any unwillingness; Barbara, at least, always seemed pleased to see the pair of them. And Alec was a typical man, always happy to go for days or weeks without any company but his own and Catherine’s, cheerful with the telly in the evening, a book or the newspaper, and conversation that didn’t have to be kept up, that could be a series of sporadic observations. Catherine thought that was a sure way to make you grow old before your time; her counter-image constructed itself, all those sprightly gossips of both sexes, darting between book clubs and drinks parties and Neighbourhood Watch from the far end of Ferry Road to the far end of the Strand, keeping themselves young with an interest in life and each other.

  As it turned out, Barbara was thrilled to see them.

  ‘Gosh, there’s been some excitement over in Hanmouth,’ she said, coming out into the front garden and wiping her hands on her apron. Behind her, in the door, Ted stood, holding the Daily Telegraph. ‘It’s all over the news and on the television. They interviewed the landlord of the pub and the headmaster of the school, and I think I saw the lady who works in the bookshop in the back of a shot while Justin Webb was talking. You thought it wasn’t her, didn’t you, Ted? But I think it was.’

  ‘It was someone else entirely,’ Ted said. ‘And the camera moved on so you couldn’t see who it was with any certainty.’

  ‘What an awful thing,’ Barbara said. ‘We saw the police frogmen at work in the estuary. You hate to think of that, don’t you? But even that would be better than…’

  She led them into the house. Over the floor of the sitting room, the leaves of the paper lay scattered, the remains of Ted’s elevenses in crumbs on the plate, the prize whole-page crossword just begun and a road atlas open on the coffee-table.

  ‘Are you going somewhere?’ Alec said, referring to the map.

  ‘They think, don’t they, that she might have been abducted?’ Barbara said. ‘They thought she might have wandered off and fallen into the estuary, or into a ditch, or—but now they’re saying somebody might have taken her. Isn’t that awful?’

  ‘We’re planning our summer holiday,’ Ted said morosely. ‘Barb likes to have it all clear in her mind before we set off. Three months before we set off. We’ve booked all the hotels, everything.’

  ‘That’s a French road atlas, is it?’

  ‘All of Europe. It’s a nice little production, look.’

  ‘I don’t see how a child could be just abducted, though,’ Barbara said, ‘in the middle of the day, with dozens of people around, and they look round and she’s gone, and nobody’s seen anything.’

  ‘Frightening, isn’t it?’ Alec said. ‘I’m glad we’re not bringing a child up, these days.’

  ‘I know,’ Barbara said, with feeling. ‘Everything’s so much more frightening, these days. And in a place like Hanmouth!’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ted said. ‘You can mollycoddle your kids, keep them inside, never let them out without supervision, and then the first bit of trouble they come across when they’re grown up and left the nest, they can’t cope, they’ve never had to deal with the like. If we were having kids now, I’d let them out just the same as ever, send them off into the woods for the afternoon, tell them, “See you at teatime, back at the ranch.” ’

  The usual observations were made on the question of liberty versus restraint and supervision for the under-tens, dividing on sex lines. Barbara observed that letting your children loose in the woods was all very well when everyone did it, but if yours were the only ones with such freedom and there was only one child-abductor paedophile in the neighbourhood, then yours would be the ones they would go for. Alec told a story about how he’d got lost in a storm drain when he was nine on one of those afternoons in the woods, way back in the 1950s it must have been, and it was his brother who found him in the end just as it was turning dark.

  ‘And were your parents worried that you were a bit late? I bet they hardly even noticed,’ Ted said.

  ‘Well, no,’ Alec said. ‘They were worried sick. They were on the verge of phoning the police.’

  The observation, running counter to the shared conclusions of the conversation, introduced a silence; they sipped their coffee in unison.

  ‘I didn’t mention,’ Catherine said. ‘David’s coming down to visit next week—he’s not been here before. You must come over.’

  ‘I remember David,’ Barbara said. ‘He was such a little boy, though. I remember him, always off in the corner with a book, always happy with his own company.’

  Once, Catherine had attempted to explain what David did for a living to Barbara; she had nodded and smiled and said she saw quite a lot, but there was no doubt it was hard to convey any vital quality in his employment. Something must have got through to Barbara, however, and she had conflated it with whatever memories she had of David as a little boy, sitting quietly, a good little boy, in the corner while the grown-ups talked. He hadn’t been particularly attached to books at all, though it had become his job.

  ‘Well,’ Catherine said, ‘he’s quite a bit more sociable these days. He’s got a new friend, actually—they’re coming down together. I don’t think we’ve ever met a friend of David’s before.’

  ‘Yes, we have,’ Alec said. ‘You know we have. That girl Teresa in the sixth form—she was always over, they were thick as thieves at one stage.’

  ‘Oh, you know what I mean,’ Catherine said. ‘Not friends, friends.’

  ‘These days people say “partners”,’ Barbara said. ‘I suppose he’s getting a bit old to say boyfriend. It’s not too bad when you’re twenty, but it’s a bit silly saying, “This is my boyfriend,” and then someone bald and fifty-five comes through the door.’

/>   ‘Has the window-cleaner been round recently?’ Ted said, leaping up and looking through the glass at the back garden. ‘It’s absolutely filthy. Does he ever get back here?’

  ‘What’s David’s friend called?’ Barbara said. She was a good sort, really; after years of marriage to Ted, she could ignore his embarrassment on any remotely private subject. If Ted had his way, they would always be talking about window-cleaners but Barbara, after years of practice, just paid no attention and went on with a more interesting subject.

  ‘I don’t know, I’m afraid,’ Catherine said. ‘He just said there was someone he’d like to bring down, that he’d like us to meet. Did he happen to mention his friend’s name to you, Alec?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Alec said. ‘He wouldn’t say a thing like that to me.’

  13.

  Gay Sam’s cheese shop had been at the corner of the curve of the Fore street for five years or so. It was sandwiched between an Oriental antiques shop and the Conservative Party headquarters. The Conservative Party could have done with a lick of white paint and a new set of curtains. There was no doubt that this was at a useless curve of the Fore street; no one really needed the Conservative Party, or the imported goods, or the sort of cheese that Fred & Gordon sold. (The name of the shop, in gold Roman lettering on a dark navy background, was often mistaken for the owners’ names, and Sam had grown used to being hailed as Fred in the street by someone who thought they knew him. It stocked cheese from nowhere beyond a hundred miles’ radius, though its name referred to the child-mangled names of two cheeses they didn’t stock, Gordon Zola and Fred Leicester: that sort of tortuous joke, which had to be explained, was rather in vogue among the new shopkeepers of the new millennium.) Sam had run his business from a stall on a Saturday morning for years. When the terrible old ironmonger had insulted his last customer and closed up, Sam had looked longingly at the interior, unable to resist the romantic look of the space, its unswept floor scattered with the last unopened forlorn letters from the authorities. They had talked it over, and Lord What-a-Waste had thought they could manage it.

  Sam took his place respectfully, self-deprecatingly, among the small-scale revivers of small trades, the inventors of new ones, the lady merchants undertaking miniature shopkeeping endeavours. Hanmouth was full of these, operating out of their houses, running stalls, rising to the dignity of a shop in the high street before sinking under economic constraints back to the temporary place they had risen from. In Hanmouth there were lacemakers, batik-printers, humble potters, potters who referred to themselves as ceramicists, the perpetrators of macramé, paper makers, conceptual artists, jewellers and sellers of jewellery, watercolourists, bookbinders, hand-printers; there were the outlets of nearby near-champagne manufacturers; there was a retired hedge-fund trader who had taken, at thirty-four with twenty-five million pounds in the bank, to running a shop, twelve metres deep, which displayed and sold nothing but twenty of his abstracts. (When, once a year, one was sold to the passing trade, another was produced from a back room to take its place; it was a process like the slicing off of Hydra heads.) Some trades were old and historic and uninterrupted; others were revived by force of will, and some were entirely novel and basically implausible. One lady, called Eunice Jorna, had founded a business that would take a cast of your infant’s foot, and cast it in bronze as a keepsake. She did quite well, although five years ago an adult couple had come in and asked for their feet to be cast, a left and a right; oddly enough, they did not have unusually attractive feet or anything, and the man’s bunioned pair, the hair on the toes and the hammer toes, were no more appealing rendered in bronze. Since then, she had determined to turn any custom but infants away; but the question had not arisen again.

  Sam did not make anything: he just sold cheese and locally handmade pickles, cheeseboards made of olivewood and cherrywood, the bowls and dishes and plates of ceramicists from around, and even fondue sets, knives like little axes and other accoutrements. He had journeyed the country, and established relationships with farmers and cheesemakers, tiny backyard concerns and gleaming semi-industrial workers. He sold dozens of curious English imitations of more famous foreign cheeses: lesbian bleu d’Auvergne, Welsh vignotte, Essex boursin, Wiltshire Gjetost. The daughters of the town sometimes came to work for a few afternoons a week, the occasional Saturday, or Sam managed on his own. He didn’t much care if a small queue sometimes built up on a busy afternoon. People liked the little shop, he believed. The cheeses were not available in many other places. Sometimes they were available in none at all, and in one case, the cheese should not have been sold even by Sam, but rather extinguished on health-and-safety grounds by the EU. Sam had often told his customers this; they laughed and then bought half a pound. They liked him. He was always ready with a sliver, a tongue of cheese. He felt creative, rather than a foodmonger, and the shop was just about breaking even, most years. He mixed in a sunny way with the foot-casters and lacemakers and a woman, four foot nine and named Eleanor Redwood, who was richly learned in raku and had a taste for black men. All of these were the ones who earned something from their craft; behind them, like a shadowy army of talentless Platonic forms, were those who did very much the same for no money at all, just for their own pleasure and for the sake of Christmas presents. And then there were the humble jam-makers and cake-makers and practitioners of fancy icing, who had their own hierarchies and snobberies, penetrable only to those who surrendered their identity and went, humbly, to live among them as an anthropologist might go among the Kikuyu. Ten years ago, the hedge-fund trader’s abstract-painting shop had been a fishmonger.

  14.

  When Lord What-a-Waste—really Harry—had the morning off that partners were allowed from the solicitor’s, which was at the moment on a Wednesday, he liked to come down to Sam’s shop and sit in the back room. He was a sleeping partner, Sam told everyone, in the shop, and he liked to go over the accounts of a Wednesday. He went over them, it was true, but in all honesty Sam usually enjoyed telling Harry over dinner what he had sold that day, and how much money he’d made out of it, and there were only two or three things ever to tell, so even if Harry forgot, it wouldn’t have taken him the whole morning to remind himself of the salient facts. Really, Harry enjoyed coming down and sitting in the back room, turning papers over, coming out sometimes if one of Sam’s friends came in to hug them and complain about trade slowing or, in the past, about being rushed off their feet. He enjoyed playing at shops, as, indeed, did Sam.

  ‘What’s this?’ Harry said, coming out of the back room with a receipt.

  ‘No idea, hon,’ Sam said. ‘What’s it look like?’

  ‘It’s just a receipt,’ Harry said. ‘It doesn’t say where it’s from or what it’s for or when it was or anything, just this figure, twenty-two pounds. Could be anything.’

  ‘Does it look recent?’ Sam said. He held up, sniffed at, then bit cautiously into the croissant he’d got to go with their mid-morning coffee. The cake shop had been known to forget which were the plain croissants and which the ones stuffed with Nutella or almond paste—to which Sam believed himself slightly allergic. But it was OK and he carried on.

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ Harry said, going back into the little office and calling through the open door, ‘Anyway, it was with other recent stuff. It looked as if you’d taken it all out of your wallet and just dumped it there.’

  ‘Let me see,’ Sam said. ‘Twenty-two pounds. Not the butcher? No. I got some stuff from the cash and carry but it was more than that, and it would say on the receipt. I know—I got some thrillers from Frank Cohen Books. I went in to see if they had that Japanese novel we’re doing and they didn’t, but I thought I’d stock up. Twenty-two pounds—was it really?’

  ‘You are brilliant,’ Harry called. ‘Though I notice you’ve hidden them from me.’

  ‘Nonsense. I put them on the bedside table in a pile. That reminds me—’

  When Sam said ‘that reminds me’ it did not necessarily indicate a logical connect
ion, but a train of thought that had started at that particular point.

  ‘—the lads phoned to see if we wanted to go round there Saturday night.’

  ‘The lads.’

  ‘It was Peter.’

  ‘Well, no, then.’

  ‘Come on, it’ll be fun. We haven’t been to a gathering for three months. They’ll think we’re not interested any more, they’ll stop phoning us. We are interested, aren’t we?’

  Harry came out of the back room. He had been wearing his glasses to look through the papers and to nose around in Sam’s doings, as he liked to do. Now he took them off—a dashing, innocent, vulnerable gesture—and stood there blinking with his pale blue eyes in his plump, dark, hairy face. ‘Well,’ Harry said. ‘I’m interested if you’re interested.’

  ‘We’ve had this conversation before, I feel.’

  ‘Yes, quite a lot. I don’t mind going to those gatherings but, you know, I’ve had sex with every single one of them, several times, every single time, and so have you, and I don’t mind going on just as we are.’

  ‘No, that’s right,’ Sam said.

  ‘But on the other hand, the last three times, it’s true that we’ve found something else to do, so maybe we’re getting out of the habit.’

  ‘Are you saying that I’m enough for you, that you only ever want to have sex with me for the rest of your life?’ Sam said, raising his eyebrows.

  ‘No, of course not,’ Harry said affectionately. ‘I’d never say that to you, darling. You know that.’

  ‘Love you,’ Sam said, beaming. They understood each other. When they had first met, they had been eight months together, chafing at the romantic bit; it wasn’t that they didn’t enjoy each other, hadn’t feasted on each other’s even then abundant flesh with nightly pleasure. But both of them had passed themselves around generously earlier in their lives, or as generously as the possibilities of Devon, Cornwall and a twice-yearly weekend in London allowed. (It was amazing they hadn’t met before they had, when they were twenty-eight and thirty-one respectively.) At first, they had had those eight months of a shamefaced monogamy. Both had assured the other that they liked it, that they felt that, with the other, their life had taken a change in the right direction. They did not go as far as to say that they never wanted to sleep with another man, that Sam (or Harry) had permanently filled the wants of Harry (or Sam). But they did say that they couldn’t imagine going back to their old ways of generosity and indiscrimination.