King of the Badgers

by Philip Hensher

  ‘Yes, you did,’ Harry said. ‘Look—remind me, I’ve forgotten…’

  They were walking down their road towards the junction with the Strand, and walking along the road, not having seen them just yet, was the neat and birdlike woman Sam seemed to know—she was newish in town, she was having a party some time, she was perfectly nice, a chatterbox, she’d bought some Gjetost, and her name, her name was— ‘It’s Catherine,’ Sam said. ‘I knew I knew it.’ With her was her husband, a beige-padded anorak type, resembling a retired policeman, and behind, a fat man in his thirties, balding, a morose and withdrawn expression in, surprisingly, scarlet corduroy trousers and a blue sweater. He had a startlingly red face, full of blood and breathlessness; he looked, frankly, ill. But with him was a dark, small, beautiful, neat man, his mobile features and thoughtful, expressive dark eyes alive with pleasure and sex. He radiated availability from twenty yards, and Sam and Harry passed a look between them, not needing to say anything to indicate whom they were talking about.

  ‘I do hope you’re going to come to our party tonight,’ Catherine said, when they had greeted each other, the fat son, as it turned out to be, introduced, and the sex object described as ‘David’s special friend’ by David’s mother.

  ‘Lucky David,’ Sam said drily, shaking David’s hand; he blushed and said nothing.

  ‘It’s tonight, is it?’ Harry said. ‘Well, we do have friends coming round, but later—perhaps we could drop in at some point. What time is it?’

  Sam was almost certain that the last time the question had been raised, there had been no possibility of their finding time in their busy evening of stress and bother. He did not blame Catherine, however, for asking again, now that she could dangle the gorgeous prize of this Italian in front of them in person, if that was what she was doing.

  ‘I’m sure we can get over for half an hour,’ Harry said. ‘It’s only over the road, and we’re only cooking shepherd’s pie—that’s not going to spoil, I suppose.’

  ‘Who’s the cook in this relationship, then?’ Sam said, to make everything absolutely clear to the hot Italian, and he flirtatiously punched Harry on the shoulder. ‘Honestly,’ Sam said confidentially, and as camply as he could manage. ‘Some people—and I include Harry in this—they have no idea, no idea at all, what cooking dinner for guests entails. He really is terrible. He thinks it’s just shoving something in the oven and then shoving it on the table afterwards. He has absolutely no idea what I’m going to have to do for the next few hours.’

  ‘So you can’t come, then?’ Catherine’s husband—Alec—said. He seemed a bit slow.

  ‘No, no,’ Sam said. ‘We’d love to come. Just for half an hour, though, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Looking forward to it,’ Harry said brilliantly, shaking the hand of the Italian one last time and looking him warmly in the eye; the Italian, it was clear, needed no encouragement whatsoever.

  ‘Lucky old David,’ Sam said, when they had gone in different directions.

  ‘Let’s get an extra carrot,’ Harry said. ‘You never know who might drop in after dinner, after all.’

  Sam paused at the cashpoint machine—all that shopping, all that drugs-buying, the whole lot, had cleared him out—and struggled, as ever, to remember his security number. ‘Let’s get another carrot?’ he asked, as the machine tongued two hundred pounds into his hands. ‘Let’s get another carrot?’

  ‘They’re really a very nice pair,’ Alec was saying to Mauro confidentially, as they peered together at the collection of post humous donations in the window of the Devon Sea Rescue charity shop—a china house saying ‘A Present From Exmouth’, a Cabbage Patch doll, a lace doily the size of a goatskin, and seven novels by Barbara Taylor Bradford. ‘We don’t know them well, but they’re always very friendly. He runs a shop here, on the high street, a cheesemonger’s. I don’t know what he does, the other one.’

  ‘They seem very nice,’ Mauro said warmly, smiling at Alec, and everyone—Alec, Catherine and David—thought how very well Alec was getting on with his son’s boyfriend, how easy it was all proving to be.

  24.

  There was little more to do before the party. David had looked, and there were four oval plates of finger-food, dominoes of dark bread with pink, green and black toppings, small potatoes roasted and Xed open for a dollop of cream cheese, pastry barques ready to be filled with finely chopped tomato, garlic and parsley mix in a bowl to the side. The plates were covered with clingfilm. David had peeled one, then the other, and quickly, while nobody was watching, eaten half a dozen from round the edges. He wasn’t hungry—the late lunch in a quayside pub had finished only an hour before—but he thought he might as well since, in his experience, you never got enough to eat at parties under the gaze of the other guests, counting how much you were eating and how much they were eating. He carefully unrolled the clingfilm, and put it back in place.

  In the sitting room, his father was sitting with the paper, his mother perched on the windowsill, which looked down towards the town. ‘Mauro’s just gone out,’ his mother said, carefully and politely pronouncing his boyfriend’s name. ‘He said he needed to make a phone call, and he couldn’t get reception here.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with the reception here, is there?’ David said.

  ‘No, he just wants a bit of privacy, I expect,’ Catherine said. ‘You can’t blame him. He seems a very nice young man, David.’

  The objects about the sitting room were all familiar from David’s childhood. Not all the possessions from twenty years back had made it into this smaller collection—Jubilee plates, the tasteless china presents David had thought to give his mother for Christmas and birthdays, things too markedly 1970s, like the bouquet of flowers preserved under a glass dome, in a vacuum: these had all been removed and given away to charity shops. The inherited adornments of both sets of grandparents, too, had been reduced, as far as David could see, to a Bavarian wood-carved cherub on his father’s side, and a geometric vase on his mother’s. They could be seen as cropping up on Antiques Roadshow and, though hideous, might have some value, so—David reckoned—they had stayed. But not everything his parents had possessed was ugly, and not everything had needed throwing out. All through his childhood, David had loved a sideboard ornament, a small enamel bird, a pheasant, beautifully made and swarming with brilliant colour, with garnets for its eyes, and which, if you took its upper body and lifted, turned out to be a box with a warm blue coat of enamel inside, a swimming, liquid colour. David had always thought, in an unelaborated childish way, that the Chinese pheasant was not just a jewel-box, but was itself in some way made out of jewels; the colours were of that order of brilliance. Even when he understood that it was made out of enamel—had connected, with a shock, the process that had produced this lovely object with a process they had spent three weeks in Metalwork on—it had still retained its magic aura. David didn’t suppose it was, in fact, particularly valuable, but the freshness of the colour, the shine and cleverness of it made it precious to him.

  For some reason, it wasn’t on the console table where it should have been. ‘Mum,’ David said.

  ‘David,’ his mother said, but then David thought better of it. Why did he think it should have been on the new console table? It had always been on the sideboard at home in St Albans, as long as he could remember—the thing, in fact, that the console table had replaced. He realized that he had, in fact, seen it on the console table that morning, when they had arrived; he had particularly noticed it, had been pleased that his mother and father had kept something they knew he had always liked a great deal. He wondered whether his mother had removed it for the sake of the party, but that was unlikely. There were more fragile and probably more valuable objects still out on tables, and it didn’t seem likely that his parents knew people who would snaffle or swipe anything, not even those two fat queens his mother had, bafflingly, greeted as friends. ‘What is it, David?’ his mother said.

  ‘I just wondered when people are goi
ng to be coming,’ David said.

  ‘In an hour or two, I suppose,’ his father said. ‘We’ll have a cup of tea in a minute.’

  David got up and went into the spare room—their room, his mother had called it. His dark blue weekend suitcase was on one side of the bed, upright; Mauro’s bag had been thrown down carelessly on the bedroom armchair. David went to the window, but it was facing the other direction, towards the hills on the other side of the estuary: he could not see Mauro, if he was, in fact, making a phone call on the street. Probably making a date for Monday night. Even Sunday night; Mauro’s schedules were tightly tessellated, David believed, with a spare hour quickly filled with a man or two.

  David hovered, undecided, then swiftly ran his hands over the crumpled leather surface of Mauro’s bag. It was no more than ordinarily lumpy and, hardly believing he was doing this for anything but lecherous reasons, David unzipped the bag and plunged his hands into Mauro’s underwear, socks, crumpled shirt and trousers. The dizzying sensation that followed, as he saw himself as if from outside rifling through Mauro’s intimate and private possessions, sweating and panting, was a complex one of sex and passionate, transferred guilt. He did not know what he would say if Mauro came in now; he could not be expected to absorb this behaviour in his assessment and acceptance of David’s public relationship with him, and he would—David thought—be justified in taking his bag, walking to the station, and going straight back to London.

  But then, underneath, swaddled in a pair of impossibly tiny Y-fronts, there was something hard and unyielding: well, David reflected, that was what he had wanted, after all. He unwrapped it without bringing it out, his two arms plunged into Mauro’s bag, and in a moment the cloth texture revealed something hard, sharp and smooth. It was David’s mother’s enamel pheasant, as he had known it would be. David quickly placed the thing in his pocket, and zipped up Mauro’s bag, not really caring that Mauro would know he had been inside from the mess he had made of its contents. He would find out soon enough that someone had reclaimed his stolen object.

  ‘What’s that on the floor?’ he said casually, once back in the sitting room, having performed a small and secretive pantomime.

  ‘Pardon?’ his mother said. ‘How did that get there? I must have knocked it off when I was dusting. It’s that little jewel-box. We’ve had it for years—I always liked it. There’s Mauro, now. That was a long phone call.’

  25.

  The buzzer from the front door went at five minutes past six exactly. The four of them had been sitting in an artificial way—Catherine had pushed all the chairs back against the walls, so that people could sit if they wanted to, but most of the party would roam in the central space in the room. The television, normally the intense focus of interest, the chairs turned to its face, had been pushed back squarely against the wall as if it were an occasional, temporary distraction. When people started arriving, it would look more nearly normal; but before the guests arrived, it seemed foolish to stand up, so the four of them sat against different walls awkwardly, as if waiting for the dentist.

  Catherine had been getting up and sitting down again for twenty minutes, checking and rechecking. Alec had never been to Rome, but he and Catherine had been, two years running, to Lake Como, the second time not so much of a success, and of course Catherine had been to Venice, with David, a couple of years ago. Catherine had always had a wanting to go to Venice, and they’d enjoyed it, he believed, but it had been difficult to get away from the tourist traps, in the event. Mauro had never been to Venice, although he knew people who came from there, and he knew there were good pasta dishes, including one with the black ink of a squid. ‘I’ll make it for you some day,’ Mauro said, in a burst of enthusiasm, though it was not clear when this would happen. David and Mauro were leaving after lunch the next day, and to David and, presumably, to Mauro, too, in his different way, it must seem unlikely that they would meet again. Unlikely, too, that Mauro would take or be given the opportunity to go out and buy cuttlefish ink, which was what David thought he meant by squid, even if such a thing could be had in Hanmouth between Saturday evening and Sunday lunchtime. The conversation went its way, absurdly; David could hardly listen to it. Any forgiveness in his heart for his boyfriend’s chatter, his father’s attempts to keep the conversational show on the road was gone; any allowance for the nervous half an hour between near strangers before a party they bore some kind of joint responsibility for was gone. David levered himself to a standing position before his father could dredge anything else up about Italy from his experience or knowledge. Before he could go in search of his mother, the buzzer at the front door went.

  ‘They’re prompt,’ his father said, with a glance at his watch. ‘I’ll let your mother get that. She knows who she’s invited.’

  There was a bustle in the hallway, as his mother said, ‘Hello?’ in an unpractised way into the speakerphone and buzzed them in. Quickly, she wiped her hands on her blue and white apron, and took it off, going into the kitchen to hang it up. She came back quite partified, her green shift dress like one a much younger woman would wear. For the first time in years the thought came to David, like a pang, that his mother was as pretty as anyone; he did think the shade of green exactly the right one for her, and exactly paired with an uncomplicated amber necklace and an amber and silver brooch.

  ‘Hello, my dear,’ the woman was saying, as she came through the door. ‘It’s so nice to get to know new neighbours.’

  She had a distinctive appearance: square-bobbed and squarely spectacled. She sailed into the flat like a landlady on an impromptu inspection. ‘How nice of you to come,’ Catherine said. ‘Nice and early, too—it’s always a terror, that, in case someone not very…’

  She floundered a little here, having made a suggestion that she might have invited some not-very people to her party.

  ‘No, don’t shut the door,’ the woman said, as Alec came into the hallway to greet her heartily enough. ‘Hello—I’m Miranda Kenyon, I don’t think we’ve met. Have we? How awfully rude of me. Yes, of course we have. Catherine, don’t shut the door—I came in with Sam, you know. I saw him passing in his party finery and I dashed out to have an escort to arrive with.’

  ‘Is he there?’ Catherine said, popping out to peer down the marble and brass stairwell. ‘Yes, here he comes.’

  ‘Toiling upwards,’ Miranda said. ‘I took the lift. Kenyon’s coming along very shortly.’

  ‘And my husband too,’ Sam said, smiling and wiping his brow. His party finery turned out to be a pair of faded pale blue jeans and a lumberjack shirt. ‘I have to climb stairs whenever I can—it’s the only exercise I get. How lovely!’

  His panoramic and sweeping gaze made a general compliment out of his words, but Catherine merely said, ‘Yes, I do think we’ve got it looking nice now,’ and went to pour everyone a drink. The others went into the sitting room.

  ‘Charming,’ Miranda said, with warmth. ‘Kenyon would have come with me, but—well, I don’t know why he didn’t. I was going to say he had to wait in for the babysitter, but my great lump hardly needs a babysitter beyond The X Factor, so I don’t know. I’m sure he’s on his way.’

  ‘Have you come far?’ David said, in a general sort of way.

  ‘No, just over the road,’ Miranda said. ‘What a beautiful view you have from up here—we don’t have anything like such a nice one. Our house is, as it were, sunk down into the earth rather than raised up as you are. How beautiful!’

  ‘I expect you had a nicer view before they built this block,’ Alec said. ‘It must stand completely in your way, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Well,’ Miranda said. She paused. ‘Of course, we haven’t lived here much longer than you have, not ten years, so this was the view when we bought and we can’t complain. We don’t complain, I should say. Champagne! How lovely! How generous of you!’

  There was a knock on the front door. ‘I left the entrance ajar,’ Sam said, taking a glass of wine and popping a fistful of peanuts into his m
outh. ‘I hope I did right. Save you from getting up and down again all night. Hello, we sort of met earlier.’

  ‘Hello,’ Mauro said meaningfully, but then the attention was taken by the new arrivals, who, in fact, were the retired sisters who lived two floors down, and their Bedlington terrier.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ Isobel, or possibly Marian, said—both were big-haired, big-jawed, big-voiced women with broad bottoms and hairy chins. ‘We brought Poppet up. She gets bored.’

  ‘Bedlingtons, very intelligent dogs,’ Marian, or possibly Isobel, chipped in. ‘Intelligent dogs, they need distraction, problems to solve, games to play.’

  ‘Walks to go on,’ the other one said.

  ‘Drinks!’ they said in unison. ‘Well, just a small one,’ said one. ‘I’m Isobel Wallace, how do you do? And if Poppet could have perhaps a small bowl of water, that would be lovely. Very intelligent, Bedlingtons,’ Isobel Wallace said, closing down the range of her remarks from the whole room to David. ‘You see, the thing is…’

  ‘You should have brought Stanley,’ Catherine said, daringly, to Sam. ‘He’d have been quite welcome.’

  ‘Oh, you know Stanley, do you?’ Sam said. ‘He’s a card, dashing here and there, making pals behind our backs. No, he’s perfectly all right where he is, and besides—he pongs rather a lot. He and—what? Poppet, is it?—they’re old friends, he never gives up a chance to bite her savagely.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ Catherine said. ‘We hear Poppet sometimes in the evening. She’s a little over-excitable.’ Together they looked at the small, sheep-like object, like an incompetent drawing of an indeterminate four-legged creature, fresh from having her hair cut, dashing about yapping and begging for canapés. ‘And here’s Mr and Mrs Calvin…’

  John Calvin’s arrival was a surprise, particularly to Catherine, after he had snubbed her. He was clutching something in tissue paper, an awkward shape. By his side stood a tall, thin, nervous woman; her face and her hair were long and unkempt. She seemed to have made little or no effort in coming out. The Wallace sisters and Sam eyed her with interest. They didn’t remember ever having seen her before.