King of the Badgers

by Philip Hensher

  Spencer moaned. ‘Oh, yeah,’ he said. ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  ‘The thing is,’ Harry said, seeing a way out of the apparently inevitable sequence of the next few minutes. He withdrew his hands. ‘You’re really a couple of hours early. I don’t know why we’ve got things in a muddle, but we have. And I said, I promised, really, that I’d go to a party over the road, just for ten minutes, half an hour, something like that.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Spencer said. ‘I can stay here, no trouble. Anyone else comes, I’ll let them in, we’ll make a start.’

  ‘I’ve got a better idea,’ Harry said, thinking of the Fuseli and the best—the fourth from the left—of the Hagi bowls. ‘Let’s have a beer and a quick line here. Then, I tell you what, you put your clothes on and come over the road. We won’t stay, we’ll just go in and pick up Sam, my husband, and come straight back.’

  ‘Are they blokes, too?’ Spencer said. ‘Christ, you know how to live in Hanmouth, I’ll say.’

  Harry took a moment to see the direction of Spencer’s thought. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing like that. It’s just our neighbours, having a little drinks party. Nothing exciting. We’ll just go in, pick up Sam, come back. You can behave yourself for five minutes, can’t you?’ Then Harry somehow doubted this, and said, more honestly, ‘You could wait outside if you didn’t want to come in.’

  ‘Well, I could fucking well wait here, couldn’t I? I’m not going to nick anything, mate, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

  ‘I’m sure you wouldn’t,’ Harry said. Maybe the best thing was to phone Sam with apologies, ask him to come back, abandon his project of luring that cute Italian over to the Bears’ night. ‘Here. Let’s have a line.’

  27.

  The party was filling up nicely: probably nobody there had expected to come into a crowded room, perhaps nobody had come from any motivation other than mild pity, not wanting their new neighbours to announce a party to which nobody came. That would not show a good side to Hanmouth. ‘So you haven’t lived here that long, either,’ Catherine was saying brightly to Miranda.

  ‘Not ten years, I think,’ Miranda said.

  ‘We’ve been here a little longer than that,’ Billa was saying. ‘Fifteen, I think, in September. Of course, we had the house before that, some years, just as an investment at first, then with the idea of moving into it when Tom retired from the army. But we’ve only lived here properly for a decade and a half now.’

  ‘Me too,’ Kitty said. ‘I moved here just before you did, a year or so, I think. I well remember the excitement of your moving in, Billa.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense,’ Billa said.

  ‘Really,’ Kitty said. ‘Of course, it’s your house, it’s so prominent, everyone walks by it, and if it’s empty, everyone would wonder about it, you know. And Sam’s not been here for much longer than that, have you—Sam? Sam—oh, he’s gone.’

  ‘I think he’s in the kitchen,’ Catherine said. ‘Do you know, that’s surprising. I thought everyone was born and bred in Hanmouth, or at any rate, in Devon. I thought this was one of those places where no one accepted you until you’d lived here for fifty years and then probably only your children, you know. Is nobody a proper Devon native?’

  ‘Not me,’ said the man who rowed the ferry across the estuary. Alec had had a long and informative chat with him one morning and invited him along. He seemed, Alec said, to have what might be a slightly lonely life, and there was no harm in him. ‘We moved from Sheffield, eight years ago. Retired from a steel firm. My wife, she died five years back.’

  ‘There are people born in Hanmouth,’ Kenyon was saying. ‘After all, there was that girl, woman I should say, the one behind that awful case last month. Her family had never lived anywhere else.’

  There was a small pause: the conversation of Hanmouth had moved on from Heidi and China. Nothing more had happened since Heidi had been charged, and people of good taste had moved away from the subject. Perhaps it was that Kenyon had been so much in London during the hunt and the panic that he hadn’t had his chance to discuss it at the time, and was making up for it now.

  ‘There must be someone we know who’s a native,’ Miranda said. ‘I can’t believe everyone’s a newcomer, comparatively speaking.’

  ‘But you all seem so very settled, so much a part of the place,’ Catherine said. ‘That is encouraging.’

  ‘We moved here, too,’ John Calvin’s wife, Laura, said, but so quietly nobody took any notice of her.

  ‘I know,’ Miranda said. ‘I’ve thought of someone. Harry. Sam’s Harry, Lord What-a-Waste. Here he comes, as if on cue. Harry, hello, we were just talking about you.’

  Behind Harry was a man none of them knew; he was barely dressed for a party, if the party had been held by anyone over the age of sixteen. He was unshaven, his hair scrunched up and uncombed; his gaze was a little wild, not directed at anyone in particular. His broad grin was not reassuring; it roamed about the room, not engaging with anyone, like the sweep of a lighthouse.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ Harry said smoothly to Catherine. ‘A guest of ours for dinner tonight, his business in Barnstaple this afternoon finished early and he came straight over. An old friend of ours—I thought you wouldn’t mind if I brought him, rather than leave him alone in the house with Stanley.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, with Stanley,’ the man said, and burst out laughing.

  ‘Stanley, the dog,’ Harry said mildly. ‘You forgot the name of our dog.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Catherine said brightly. ‘Have a drink, both of you.’

  ‘What’s your friend’s name, Harry?’ Miranda said. Harry stared at her, quite blankly. Miranda exchanged a look with the man, who looked frankly back at her, engaging with an expression for the first time since he had entered, and then, once more, he broke into open laughter, joined by Miranda.

  ‘I’m Spencer,’ he said, without hostility. ‘Who the fuck are you?’

  ‘I’m Miranda,’ Miranda said. ‘Fucking nice to meet you.’

  David saw, with some surprise, his parents’ party filling up rapidly with handsome gay men. Where had they come from? There was one Hanmouth gay in the kitchen, talking to Mauro; another Hanmouth gay had just arrived with a man whom David could not believe his parents knew. It seemed to David that, in natural justice, he ought to be the fulcrum of this particular aspect of the party, but he had hardly made any impact on it. He was stuck in a corner with one of the two sisters, who had been taking shifts at the David-face for three-quarters of an hour now. Every time one of them drew a breath, or ran out of things to tell him about their Bedlington terrier, Poppet, the other one came over and relieved her. The dog herself was still running around through a thicket of legs and making whining noises. It seemed unlikely to inspire such a sequence of amusing or poignant stories. In the meantime, Mauro was grinning as if he had never had such fun at a party, and one of the Hanmouth gays had his arm on his shoulder; the pair of them were drawing near the other pair, the other Hanmouth gay and the sexy gatecrasher, and David could see that he would be stuck in this Bedlington-virgin corner for ever, excluded from the quadrangle where he wanted, needed, to be.

  He had never been good at parties, even as a child, when parties were run along strict rules with their phases and their games and their gifts and their consequences, when parties were much easier. Once, when he was coming up to eleven, he remembered what parties were like, and told his mother that he didn’t want to have a birthday party that year. For some reason he had it in his mind that birthday parties were childish things that he should make himself grow out of. What did they do instead? He had no recollection; only that, bad as parties were, always ending with him crying and running out to find his mummy, to general amusement and contempt, it was worse not to hold a party at all. That year, hardly anyone in his class invited him to their parties; in retrospect, it seemed that he had only ever been invited in recompense for an earlier invitation. And he had been completely wrong: parties were things
you were never allowed to grow out of, with their jeweller’s clusters of brilliant amusement and, round the edges, the dreary extras making laborious and egocentric conversation with each other for the sake of it. ‘Excuse me,’ he said to the two sisters, one to his right, one to his left, shining with the joy of having been allowed to talk about themselves for forty-five minutes. He remembered a conventional phrase. ‘I mustn’t monopolize you,’ he said. But they looked at him in surprise and bewilderment; and perhaps in a room containing only seventeen people, that was a strange thing to say.

  ‘Yeah, there’s never been a club like Trade,’ the handsome gatecrasher was saying. He took a moment and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. ‘Ten, fifteen years ago, there was nothing like it.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Spencer,’ the posher of the two gays—Harry, was it?—was saying. ‘Fifteen years ago, how old were you?’

  ‘Seventeen,’ Spencer said. ‘I was seventeen. I never saw anything like it. The things I saw in Trade, my days.’

  ‘It’s not the same now,’ Mauro said. ‘I hear it was fabulous in the old days.’

  ‘Back in the day,’ Harry said, and laughed. ‘What’s good now?’

  Mauro, in his good-natured way, introduced David again to Sam, Harry and Spencer; they all greeted him, friendly, but quickly. Mauro ran through Soho, Vauxhall and Shoreditch. ‘And there’s Bitch—it’s OK,’ he finished up. ‘That’s at the Rooms in Vauxhall.’

  ‘That’s where we met,’ David said, to get some kind of purchase on the conversation. ‘You and me. Remember?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Mauro said. ‘Is that right? I can’t remember.’

  ‘Must have been a good night,’ David said, and laughed on his own.

  ‘Hey,’ Spencer said to Mauro, running his hand down his back and resting casually on his bum, ‘are you going to come over later?’

  ‘Coming over where?’ David said.

  The look that now filled the air between Sam and Harry was one of those looks between couples that could mean anything to an outside observer, that to the couple could hardly have any more decisive meaning: it was a consultation in an expressive look. ‘We were having some friends over,’ Harry said.

  ‘A bit later,’ Sam said.

  ‘You’re welcome to come, if Catherine and Alec can spare you,’ Harry said, and then he, too, made the same gesture of a backhanded wipe under the nose. With astonishment, David realized that they had all snorted something before they came out; he was amazed that Mauro hadn’t discovered this, and wheedled something to take off to his parents’ spare bedroom.

  ‘A party?’ Mauro said.

  ‘They’re famous, these two’s parties,’ Spencer said. ‘You’re in luck, coming down on the right weekend. You don’t want to miss out on this.’

  David knew that if he said, ‘Well, I don’t know,’ or made some kind of acknowledgement that they had come down to see his parents, that he could see no way of explaining to them that he and his boyfriend were going to go off and spend the evening with two people they’d only just met, if he said any of that, then the invitation would be extended to the one they actually wanted to come, and Mauro would certainly accept. He had no particular reason to be the perfect guest. As for David, he did not believe that the invitation had been extended to him, if it had, indeed, been extended to him, for any reason other than politeness. They wanted Mauro to come, and Mauro would go. To look at it another way, Mauro was David’s ticket to an orgy of sex and drugs.

  ‘Yeah, why not?’ David said. ‘We’ll just slip off. What time?’

  ‘What sort of party?’ Mauro said.

  ‘Just a few mates coming round,’ Sam said.

  ‘Are they like you?’ Mauro said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Harry said.

  ‘Are they Bears?’ Mauro said. ‘Is that what you say? Are they Bears?’

  Sam and Harry exchanged another look, but this time they looked, expressively and with agonizing amusement, at David. It was as if they had all known each other for ever, in some sympathetic world of the overweight and lecherous, and in a moment, the three of them burst out laughing.

  ‘Come on,’ Sam said, lowering his voice. ‘It’ll be fun.’

  With a swift, open, undisguised movement, Harry now took a small paper wrap from the inner top pocket of his jeans and handed it to Mauro. ‘There you go,’ he said smoothly. ‘That’ll start you off on the right foot.’ There was no hesitation or surprise in the exchange; it was as if Mauro had been expecting exactly this small gift ever since he had arrived in Devon, and here it was, astoundingly in David’s parents’ sitting room, just as everything ought to be. The wrap went into Mauro’s inner top pocket in return, quite naturally. In the room there were incompatible multitudes: there were two grumpy sisters—spinsters was the only word—talking about their terrier, which was pestering their ankles; there was his mother whom he loved, flushed and pleasant, feeling that her party was a success, feeling justified; there was a posh old woman, saying, ‘Well, I mean to say,’ to a thin man, his arms wrapped tight about himself, hand to elbow, other hand against his face; there was his father doggedly filling glasses, and Ted and Barbara discussing A-roads with each other; there was the lovely vista from the picture windows; and there was the man, the thief, impersonating his boyfriend, taking a wrap of drugs from a stranger in front of all the rest. When worlds collide, David thought in his best Chinese-blurb manner, the result can only be shame in the heart.

  ‘It’s beautiful, the view from here,’ Mauro said. ‘Really beautiful. Do you have so nice a view from where you live?’

  ‘No, not really,’ Sam said. ‘We like it, though.’

  ‘The nice thing about Hanmouth is that you can always walk down to the estuary,’ Harry said obstinately. Spencer was pawing at him and muttering into his ear. ‘Well, you can have some when he comes back, you can’t go with him, it’s too much, you’ll get us into trouble. I can’t imagine living anywhere else.’

  ‘Hey,’ Sam said, as Spencer’s gestures grew more importunate. ‘You see that guy over there. The tall thin guy. He’s Neighbourhood Watch round here. If he sees you, he’ll call the Bill. Wait your turn and keep it discreet.’

  ‘I do love these long summer evenings with the sun setting behind the castle,’ Harry said. ‘Always have. My idea of heaven. When I die and go to heaven, it’s going to look exactly like that.’

  ‘They were saying,’ David said, ‘I think I heard them saying, that you’re about the only person here who didn’t move here. Everyone else is a bit of a newcomer, apparently.’

  ‘I suppose that’s true,’ Harry said, as Mauro appeared to judge that enough innocent conversation had followed the exchange to insulate it, and sauntered off to the bathroom.

  ‘It’s been a lovely party,’ John Calvin could be heard saying in farewell to Catherine, whose attention was on this unexpected, half-invited group of men. She hadn’t meant her party to be filled like this, you could tell. ‘Thank you ever so for asking us but—heigh ho, heigh ho, we’ve got to go back home—’ and he had actually broken into song.

  ‘Goodbye,’ the wife said to Catherine. ‘It was nice to meet you.’

  ‘What are you lot gossiping about?’ Miranda’s husband said, coming over to Sam, Harry, David and Spencer, still pawing Harry. Everyone called him Kenyon; David had no idea what his first name was. ‘I know a good old chinwag when I see one.’

  ‘Oh, you wouldn’t understand,’ Sam said. ‘Straight men, they’re hopeless for gossip.’

  ‘Who are you calling straight?’ Kenyon said equably. ‘We can all start calling each other names.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Harry said. ‘What about those shoes? I can tell you—there’s not a gay man in the world would even know where you could buy shoes like that.’

  The shoes were palest brown, and padded somehow; their tops were stitched like eiderdowns, their sides spreading. They were comfortable shoes, catalogue shoes, shoes bought by Mummy or wife. They inspected, in turn, H
arry’s shoes—Australian Chelsea boots, polished to a conkery shine; Sam’s shoes—an elaborate set of silver buckles and fastenings, breaking out into a showy ankle-collar, left louchely undone; and then they turned away, as if in shame, from the shoes with which David was letting down his sexual tribe.

  ‘Anyway,’ Spencer said, in a quick, flickering drawl, ‘what the hell do they do when they go down to Neighbourhood Watch? That guy—the one who’s left—the Neighbourhood Watch guy. What the FUCK. Do they DO. FUCK knows.’

  ‘I really don’t know,’ Kenyon said. ‘I really don’t. I think they meet on Tuesdays, but I honestly don’t know who takes an interest. I know John Calvin does. But I don’t know anyone else who goes. I know they’re awfully powerful and influential, though. What time is it? Don’t you have people coming for dinner, Harry?’

  ‘Yeah, for dinner,’ Spencer said, bursting out laughing. ‘Lovely, lovely dinner. Is he coming over?’ nodding at Mauro coming back from the bathroom with a sudden shine on his features.

  ‘Look at Mauro’s shoes,’ Kenyon said brightly. ‘They’re not so different from mine, surely.’

  ‘Well. They’re brown,’ Sam said, because even Kenyon ought to be able to see the difference between a pair of Onitsuka Tigers in brown with this season’s orange trim and the squashed Cornish pasties Kenyon was wearing.

  ‘Are they as bad as all that?’ Kenyon said, and Spencer raised his voice a little, bored with this nattering about shoes. The seventeen people in the room, who had broken up into half a dozen or so conversations, fell subordinate to his urgent and alien noise.

  ‘Hey, gorgeous,’ Spencer called. ‘You’re coming over later, yeah? We’ll look forward to that, I reckon.’ Mauro, returning, smiled, and Spencer slid his arm round his waist, assessing his firm sides, his silky skin. Without making any concession to the place or the people around, he boldly pushed his hand down the back of Mauro’s jeans, and for a moment his hand writhed under the denim like a suffocating vole. Mauro went on smiling, not doing anything to discourage this frank and coked-up move; and David could see that he might quite like it. ‘Yeah,’ Spencer said. ‘When you come over, I want…’ but then his voice sank into intimacy, and he muttered into Mauro’s ear the deeds he would do to him, the deeds Mauro would be commanded to do to him ‘…cos I bet you love that,’ it finished, Spencer withdrawing his hand and returning to the land of the audible. He might have been talking in a strange language to Mauro, who went on smiling, and not responding, and wishing him well with his benevolent face. Sam and Harry were masks; Miranda’s face was interested; Kenyon was giving him that calm, deciding judgement with his pale blue eyes, the look of a schoolmaster waiting for someone to stop fooling about and give an attempt at the right answer. Behind them, Alec, with a sad bottle in his hand, offering top-ups, confused and unhappy. It was as if he were wondering who it was that his son had brought into the house; as if he blamed David for bringing in this remote and shameful member of his tribe, this Spencer, and despoiling their party, which might have been quite nice. Then Alec caught David’s eye, and there was the opposite of an exchange of complicity; there was an exchange of disavowal. It occurred to David that his father might not be objecting to Spencer, who was the sort of party accident that might happen to anyone, the sort of party disaster who could be brought once by people you hardly knew anyway. It might not be Spencer; it might be Mauro his father was registering such distaste for, who was standing with an aura of unnatural brightness, a hired glassful of champagne from the in-laws in one hand, and letting a stranger shove his finger down his bum-crack. Yes, it might be Mauro.