King of the Badgers

by Philip Hensher

  ‘This is a small present, a housewarming present,’ John Calvin said. ‘It’ll come in ever so ’andy abaht the ’ahse. I bet you’ll say, “Ooh, I’ve never thought of that, I’ve never imagined I could have lived ever without one of them, and now it’s there, I dunno how I ever managed without it.” ’

  ‘John,’ his wife said, perhaps restraining Calvin’s shrill joke falsetto. Her voice was low and gracious, her eyes flickering backwards and forwards.

  ‘Anywhere, there it is,’ John Calvin said. ‘It’s just to welcome you to our little town.’

  ‘Well, that’s very nice of you,’ Catherine said. ‘But it’s a little bit late to have a housewarming party—we’ve been here months. But, anyway, I suppose if we’d had it earlier, we wouldn’t have known people to invite to it. You know everyone, do you? This is our son, David—he works in…’

  It was awkward to help John and Laura Calvin to drinks, introduce them to whoever they didn’t know and to open the ill-wrapped present all at once. With some enjoyment, Sam observed that the housewarming present was from his own shop, but not something he had sold for at least two years. It had been a hideous mistake, the scale of which had slowly revealed itself in the years it had sat on the shelf. In the long months it had waited for the right person to come along and buy it, Sam and Harry had started referring to it as the Home Beautifier. Eventually someone had bought it, though certainly not Calvin—who had it been? To a small-town shopkeeper like Sam, the means of production and distribution were all too clear, particularly around Christmas time. The Home Beautifier, a sort of papier-mâché bowl with hollows for different-shaped cheeses and an Indian elephant ineptly rising in the middle, had originally been made by a cheesemaker’s teenage daughter, and Sam hadn’t had the heart to refuse to try and sell it. It had been given as a present from the forgotten buyer to a mystery recipient, and had afterwards been passed on, perhaps the very same season, to someone the mystery recipient hadn’t liked much. It might even have been John and Laura Calvin, who were very much the sort of people to turn up at Christmas time bearing presents when no exchange of presents had been envisaged. They liked imposing an obligation.

  ‘How nice!’ Catherine could be heard saying. ‘Alec, look, it’s…’

  Sam found himself in conversation with a middle-aged couple.

  ‘Did you find it hard to park?’ the man said.

  ‘Well, no, I only live over the road, so, well, I left the car where it was, and—’

  ‘It took us for ever to find a place to park,’ the woman said. She was in a camel-coloured blouse with purple jewellery round the neck; her hair was tight and cropped around her skull, her close bud of a mouth like a flower about to open.

  ‘It’s legendary, Hanmouth, for being difficult to park in,’ the man said.

  ‘We thought it might be easier on a Saturday night,’ the woman said. ‘But in the end we went round and round, and we had to park right up at the doctors’ surgery, at the pay and display.’

  ‘Did you have to pay and display at this time of night?’ Sam said.

  The couple looked at each other doubtfully.

  ‘I just assumed,’ the man said to his wife.

  ‘Your trouble is, you always sodding assume,’ the woman said. ‘I suppose it’s up to me to go back up and put some money in the machine.’

  ‘No, I’m sure you don’t have to,’ Sam said. In fact, he had no idea at all. As far as he knew, the traffic wardens patrolled the quiet streets of Hanmouth twenty-four hours a day, slapping yellow clamps on the wheels of pay-and-display delinquents. ‘How do you know Catherine and—and Alec?’

  The pair had simmered down a little. ‘Well, my wife, Barbara, the genius who’s probably just landed us with a sixty-pound fine here, she used to work with Alec in St Albans, and then we retired down here, and they sort of followed us.’

  ‘Do you live in Hanmouth?’

  ‘No, over the estuary, over there, in Cockering. It’s a hell of a journey from Cockering to here, whichever way you look at it. Tell me, Sam, how would you set about driving from Cockering to here?’

  ‘Bedlingtons, you see, they’re what I like to call a very intelligent breed,’ Isobel Wallace, or possibly Marian, was saying to Miranda and, for the second time, to David. Without shifting his eyes from her for a second, he leaned backwards and took two canapés from the sideboard, eating first one, then the other without chewing, just a large swill of wine. ‘And intelligent dogs have their downside as well as their upside, let me tell you…’

  Kitty had arrived all in a fluster, clutching a last-minute Co-op bottle of Chardonnay-Semillon in raggedy flying paper. She was, she said, expecting to see Billa. ‘I thought you were going to call for her,’ she said to Miranda, pulling her away from explanations about Bedlingtons. ‘Or did you think I was supposed to call for her?’

  ‘I honestly didn’t wonder how she was getting here,’ Miranda said, eyeing Kitty’s well-known party dress in gloomy swirling shades of pot-pourri. ‘Was it my responsibility? Someone might have told me. I’m sure the Brigadier’s perfectly capable of bringing her himself.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Kitty said seriously. ‘Tom wouldn’t come out to something like this. When was the last time you saw him at a party? He never comes out, if he can help it, at all. Happy for people to come to him.’ She dropped her voice an octave and her chin into her bosom, in supposed imitation of Billa’s husband’s parade-ground voice. ‘Perfectly happy. Delighted. But never go to other people’s parties to sit in other people’s chairs and drink other people’s ideas of wine. Very picky, Tom, about that sort of thing. Quite unreasonable. No, I think really the best thing is if I go back and collect her.’

  ‘Or Kenyon could pick her up on his way,’ Miranda said. ‘Is she still tottery on her pins?’

  ‘Oh, dreadfully,’ Kitty said. ‘I can’t imagine how people could be so awful as to knock her over like that and not stop to make sure she was all right. Her legs were a mass of purple from knee to hip. It really turned the stomach to look at them. But here she is—Billa, what are you doing?’

  ‘What on earth do you mean, what am I doing?’ Billa said. ‘Hello, hello, hello—how nice of you to ask me, Catherine, and Alec, too. So nice to get to know new neighbours, at our time of life, you know, so difficult, one never meets anyone new. Charming. What a wonderful view you have. Champagne! I say. No, I’m quite all right standing for the moment—I’ll yell out if I need to plop myself down. Well, I just came along, came out of the house, turned right, walked down to the quay and a bit further—I don’t know what Kitty means, it hardly seems so very extraordinary.’

  ‘Well, I thought Miranda was going to call for you, and she thought I was supposed to call for you, and we’d just decided that it was probably going to be best if Kenyon called for you.’

  ‘Well, here he is,’ Billa said. ‘Kenyon, I do hope you haven’t been fruitlessly calling on me, or for me, or whatever everyone seems to think I need.’

  ‘No,’ Mauro was saying. ‘I come from Rome. I know David, he is my friend from London, though he does not live in London.’

  ‘Oh, David’s their son, isn’t he?’ John Calvin said.

  ‘John,’ Mrs Calvin said, in her low, restrained voice. They all looked at her. ‘Don’t,’ she said, quite as if they were entirely alone.

  Calvin did not say whatever he had been preparing to say, and whether it was an impersonation of a London homosexual or a routine in stage-Italian, nobody could not be glad of it.

  ‘We’ve known David since he was a very little boy,’ the old friend from Cockering, over the estuary, was saying. ‘I used to work with David’s father Alec, and I remember him coming into the office. He was very shy—he used to try to hide behind things, the hatstand, the filing cabinets, under the desks—he’d never speak to you unless you put on a specially kind voice.’

  ‘I always thought he was a bit of a mummy’s boy,’ her husband put in.

  ‘Well, you can see he was,’ the woman
said. ‘Obviously he was. You don’t need to make the point, Ted. Some things go without saying, I would say.’

  ‘We went to Italy on a driving holiday, not five years ago,’ Ted began, addressing himself to Mauro. ‘We thought about putting the car on the train, the Eurostar—Eurotunnel, do I mean?—but then we thought, we’ve got all the time in the world. So we drove to Poole, to get the ferry to Cherbourg, and I know what you’re going to say, we could have gone Plymouth—Roscoff, or even Weymouth to St Malo, that would have saved us quite a drive at the other end, or we could honestly have gone from Portsmouth, and even now, with the competition from the Channel Tunnel, there’s a lot more choice from Portsmouth, as far as destinations go. But we talked over all those alternatives, and we decided in the end to go to Cherbourg from Poole.’

  ‘It was nice, the ferry,’ the woman said.

  ‘So on the other side, we had quite a choice of routes,’ Ted said confidentially to Mauro. ‘Remember, we had designated a good week to get down to Tuscany—we’d decided that the journey was really going to be part of our holiday. So if you were us, what route do you think you would have taken, Cherbourg to Chiantishire, as we call it in England?’

  ‘That’s what people call Tuscany in England, because there’s so many English people there, apparently,’ the wife put in.

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ Ted continued. ‘Oh—he’s gone. Gone to refresh his drink. Very sensible of him. It was a nice holiday that one, wasn’t it?’

  The room was filling up nicely, and unlikely people were starting to talk to each other; people who did not know each other well, or at all.

  ‘Yes, she’s ours,’ Marian Wallace was saying to Kenyon. ‘She’s called Poppet. She’s a Bedlington terrier—they’re awfully intelligent. No, she is naughty, she knows not to bark inside, and most of them, the breed, they don’t bark a great deal. Just Poppet, but I expect we’ve got used to it now. No, she can’t have a sausage—no, you can’t—no, no, no, and … in it goes. I do find her irresistible, when she holds out her paw like that and cocks her head.’

  A short burst of music now filled the room; a crackling piece of noisy jazz. It was not obviously party music, but it could not be taken off without confessing a mistake, and now music had come to the party, it would seem strange to take it off and rely on silence and the noise of talk. Alec straightened up—the hi-fi was kept on a low table in the corner of the room, the CD collection in a wall-mounted rack—and smiled generally. He went into the kitchen. Mauro had just preceded him in there. The man they had met on the street this afternoon—it was Sam, Alec believed—was leaning against the sink holding a glass. Neither of them paid any attention to him. He took a bottle of champagne from the fridge, and went out again to do the rounds of the party.

  ‘So,’ Sam said, watching Alec’s apologetic back retreat.

  ‘So,’ Mauro said, and shrugged, and grinned, and like a pair of dancers coming together at the beginning of a routine, they moved towards each other. Out of the window, the sun flashed on some remote and unobserved castle window at the crest of the far and wooded hillside.

  26.

  Harry had stayed at home to do a last lot of phoning round, to encourage stragglers, to remind them that there was going to be food—there wasn’t always—and to make sure of numbers. There’d been a lot of phoning round already, but he believed you could never have too much, to egg people on. He was really quite excited about tonight, and was going to pass on his excitement. He liked to call landlines for this. You never knew when a Bear was going to be in the car with his mum, doing the weekend shopping. Fewer and fewer people used their landline at all. Once, recently, when he had called a London friend, there had been a puzzled ‘Hello?’ and then, when he’d identified himself, a drawled ‘How deliciously retro’, meaning, to call a landline from a landline.

  Sam had gone off to his party, Harry saying he’d join them later, and he was installed in the window of the sitting room when an unfamiliar car drew up, a woman at the wheel. Harry wasn’t much interested in cars, but he could see this was a glamorous or an impressive one in some way. It was perhaps vintage, perhaps American, but there was something restored and exotic about its appearance, the powder blue, the upsweep of the fins at the back, like diamanté spectacles. There was something redolent of the hobby about it, and he could believe that it was the possession not of the plump woman at the wheel, but of the tousled blond unshaven bloke, good-looking and trim in his worn and frayed weekend clothes, who was now getting out of the passenger seat, a bottle of wine in his thick fist. The man must be bringing the bottle to a party; but as he got out, he raised the bottle to his lips, glugging the wine himself. The woman hooted and drove off, manoeuvring the car with some difficulty down the awkward, narrow and twisting lane; the man watched her go, obviously concerned for the safety of his car’s sides, and so did half a dozen observers, owners of parked cars, from the curtained windows of their white-painted cottages, concerned for the safety of theirs, too, at the expense of those back fins. Unexpectedly, the man came straight to Harry’s front door and rang the bell, placing the now empty bottle in their window.

  ‘I’m Spencer,’ the man said. ‘Steve’s mate. Steve said I could come, yeah?’

  Harry remembered the mention of a mechanic, Steve’s employee, just moved down from London, whom Steve had had twice in the back room of his garage, over the desk.

  ‘Nice car,’ Harry said. ‘I’m Harry. You can bring that bottle in—better throw it away than leave it there.’

  ‘Yeah, thanks,’ Spencer said, coming into the hall. He handed the bottle over, shutting the door behind him. ‘Restored it myself. It’s a 1961 DeSoto. Pillarless hardtop. Had to respray it, but the colour’s authentic. Hear the growl it makes?’

  ‘Was that your wife?’ Harry said, dropping the bottle into the recycling box by the front door. ‘At the wheel?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Spencer said briefly. That wasn’t unprecedented: there were Bears who couldn’t drive, or who were banned from driving, who had got lifts from family members, sisters, mothers, fathers. ‘She don’t care. I don’t ask her where she’s going, she don’t ask me what I’ve been up to. So, we’re going to have a good time, yeah?’

  He was a good-looking man, but the way he jammed his hand, hard, against Harry’s crotch and rubbed himself up against him was more aggressive than inviting. ‘It’s been a while,’ he said, and then he made a growl himself, possibly in imitation of a 1961 DeSoto pillarless hardtop.

  ‘It’s going to be a while yet,’ Harry said, smiling but disentangling himself. ‘I don’t think anyone else is coming for an hour or two—two hours, actually. Never mind. You’re welcome. Come in.’

  ‘Steve told me half six,’ Spencer said. ‘I think he did. No one else here yet? Never mind. We’ll sit down and make ourselves comfortable, yeah?’

  He flung himself down on the white sofa, kicking off his trainers onto the Persian carpet, and lay back with his eyes closed and his legs spread, running his thumbs across his chest. ‘Yeah,’ he murmured. ‘Eighteen thirty he said, yeah?’

  ‘I think he must have said eight thirty,’ Harry said. ‘Were you in the military?’

  ‘Yeah, I was,’ Spencer said, carrying on with what he was doing. ‘Was it the eighteen thirty that made you think that? Like a squaddie, do you?’

  ‘I’ll get you a beer,’ Harry said, amused.

  ‘Yeah, that’d be great,’ Spencer said, sitting up. ‘Nice place. A beer’d be good, but, Harry—Harry, yeah?—you know what’d be good with a beer? You know what’d be good with a beer, I reckon. You got anything else?’

  ‘Whisky, gin, wine…’

  ‘No, I mean—Steve says—I mean, you know what I love, I love coke, me. I don’t know where you get coke, down here in the country. But I heard, you know, mate…’

  ‘All in good time,’ Harry said. He feared he had sounded too much like an old-school nanny, a little bit discouraging, a little bit priggish; Spencer might be, from all
appearances, a madman, but they’d invited him and they’d want to have some fun with him later on. ‘If you want some now, that’s fine.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Spencer said, adopting a new, open, available posture halfway between the sofa and the floor. ‘I reckon I want some. Is that your dog? Can you get him to go somewhere? He’s putting me off my stroke, mate.’

  When Harry and Sam hosted a party like this, it was agreed between them that the drink should be on display, and freely available; the other stuff should be somewhere more discreet, and probably in two or three separate places, in case a greedy guest discovered one stash and polished it off. Harry went to the fridge for the beer, and then went to the back window, lifting up the base of a lamp and took out a Ziploc sachet. ‘Stanley,’ he said, going back into the sitting room. ‘Fuck off. Upstairs. Upstairs, now.’ He had thought that Spencer might take the opportunity of his temporary absence to take all his clothes off, but in fact, he had only taken his T-shirt and jeans off, which now lay in a pile to one side. He lay on the rug in white socks and Aussie Bum tight whites. Stanley had seen more surprising things, but now he gave a shake of his head as if coming out from water, averted his eyes and bounded heavily upstairs. Perhaps his short doggy memory erased anything genuinely traumatic, until the next time.

  ‘Good boy,’ Harry said. ‘Up you go. Nice tan. Have you been away?’

  ‘No, mate,’ Spencer said. ‘Just been on the sunbed this week. D’you think it looks all right?’

  ‘Very nice,’ Harry said honestly. He put down the beer and the sachet on the table and, kneeling, gave an encouraging rub, up and down Spencer’s hairy, solid, almost bony torso, pausing to twist once, twice, his nipples, then down again, weighing the heavy contents of Spencer’s pants like a bag of fruit.