King of the Badgers

by Philip Hensher

  Miranda, smiling, made her way through the crowd. There were a few current students she recognized at the front, pink with self-importance and confidence. It was usually the plainer, less socially successful students who volunteered for this sort of thing. ‘Well,’ she said to one of them. ‘Shall we make a start?’ The student pushed open the door, and Miranda led the way in. The student volunteers, then the parents with their prospectives followed, finding their places; then at the back, Karen Chu, one of the newest of the faculty. She had come to see how it was done, no doubt. Miranda had known there would be someone here, someone to report back. She was pleased it was Karen Chu, who would not exaggerate or invent material or misunderstand. Karen Chu was a bright girl: she had published two books before she was given employment at Barnstaple; she could be relied upon to play her part.

  Karen Chu stood up, a glamorous, tousled figure with a parrot’s quiff, a semi-Mohican, a polo-neck in electric blue and black leather trousers. ‘Welcome,’ she began, and introduced Miranda in generous terms.

  ‘Well, that’s very kind of you, Karen,’ Miranda said. ‘And at least I hope you can see that we are a friendly faculty—we like to see the best in each other. Thanks very much—are you staying? Oh, good. I’m going to talk for about twenty minutes, no more than that, maybe a little bit less. I want to leave lots of time for questions. You must be bursting with questions. I know how daunting it all seems! Or if you don’t want to ask a question in front of everyone, for whatever reason, then we’ll be around afterwards for tea or coffee and Danish pastries, along with lots of other folk from the faculty, and do come and ask us whatever you had in mind then. Now then—where was I? Let me tell you a little bit about the faculty here. We’re quite well established—we were part of the original Barnstaple Training College, a sort of extramural part, before we became first Barnstaple and North Devon Polytechnic, and then the University of the English Occident, as we are now, though of course everyone calls us Barnstaple Uni—it’s easier to pronounce, we find.

  ‘If you believe these things called government statistics, which I’m not sure I do, however flattering they might be, we at Barnstaple University are somewhere between the seventy-fourth and eighty-seventh best university in the country. Now that might not immediately sound very impressive, I know…’ a pause here for polite laughter ‘…but I’d like you to remember two or three things. First, the English faculty here is rated a little bit higher than the university as a whole, somewhere between the forty-seventh and the fifty-fifth best in the country. No one else in the university does as well as we do. So your son or daughter would have the confidence of studying at a faculty which is better than any of the other faculties. The second point I would like to make is that the university, a mere five years ago, was only the hundred and fourth or hundred and fifth best university in the country, so we have improved a good deal. And third, I should point out that in this country, there are one hundred and seventeen universities, and ninety-seven English faculties. What that means is that there are—excuse me, my maths is really a little rusty, though I find I use it more and more these days—there are up to forty-three universities in this country which are worse than this one. And as many as fifty English faculties which are not as good. Hardly any of our graduates leave us with anything but a first or a two: one—we only awarded one two:two last year, out of a cohort of sixty-four. These are impressive statistics, ladies and gentlemen.’

  (Those in the audience more eager to make a mark on this open day, who were showing off by taking notes, now wrote down ‘impressive statistics’ in their new notebooks.)

  ‘And believe me,’ Miranda continued, ‘with the employment statistics as they are, we are providing a vital service. We are offering young people who, even thirty years ago, would not have had the chance of higher education, and would have had to become plumbers, builders, cooks or carpenters, we are offering them the chance to come to university. We are a vocationally focused faculty, and many of our graduates find employment within a year of leaving the university. But more than that, we find ways to enrich our students’ lives. Many of our students are imbued with a love of literature, which lasts almost until the day they graduate.’

  (Karen Chu gave Miranda a sideways look from under her Mohican, or was it a Mohawk, or was it neither? The audience, though, seemed to hear nothing so very odd, and it was clearly a new experience for many of them, to listen to a woman being allowed to speak without interruption. Some of them were writing down the words ‘love of literature’.)

  ‘We’re a very young faculty—I sometimes don’t know whether I’m talking to a student, straight from school, or a brilliant new colleague who’s just finished work on some manuscripts of Geoffrey Hill, or Milton, or whatever they happen to be working on. We’re very friendly and approachable, as you just saw—we pride ourselves on our approachability, in fact. Approachable not just by your sons and daughters, but by you, too. If you have any concerns about your sons or daughters, then please don’t hesitate to get in touch. And we in turn will get in touch with you if anything seems to be going wrong with your children’s studies, if it seems appropriate to do so.

  ‘And you will be wondering, either now, or when you come to see us, whether we are going to take care of your children. Do we exercise our duty of care? Do we make sure that they’re not going to get into trouble? Well, I can assure you that we keep a close eye on them—we tick them off on registers at every class as if they were six-year-olds, for instance. We insist that they come to see us with their work twice a term, so that we can make sure they’re doing everything they should be doing. That’s because, ladies and gentlemen, we don’t really trust them. But you might approve of that. So you will be asking, what about that duty of care—what happens when my son or daughter needs help?

  ‘Well, I can tell you straight away. The university will wash its hands of them. The university doesn’t give a toss if the police service comes into a lecture hall to arrest one of our students, your children. The university doesn’t even ask the police if they have an arrest warrant. The forces of law and order can trample all over your children, and the university won’t do a single bally thing. So I’m saying this to you. If you want your children to get as reasonable an education as their limited achievements entitle them to, then send them here. Why not? If you want them just to be in a place not too far from home, where there might be a few hundred books, then this is as good as anywhere, I suppose. But if you want to be sure that they’re going to be looked after properly, then I’ve got this to say to you. Send them somewhere else. Send them to one of the—what was it?—forty-three universities in this country which are worse than this one, one of the fifty English faculties where, bloody hell—fifty English faculties worse than this one, some of them, they wouldn’t be able to read a bloody book—yes, send them there. I don’t suppose it matters a great deal in the long run. And now I want to say a few words about research income.’

  At some point in the previous five minutes, Karen Chu had got up from the chair she had been occupying, facing the audience. Now the door to the lecture hall opened, and, with red face, in came Little Benjy. He had come so fast that he hadn’t had time to put his shoes on, and he appeared in his black socks. ‘I’m sure there’ll be time to answer all your questions very shortly,’ he said, laughing lightly in the face of twenty raised and cross arms. Some of the parents were even beginning to call out their observations, remarks, questions without waiting to be invited. ‘Now I’m going to hand you over to Dr Karen Chu, who will be talking to you about what it’s like to live and work at the University of Barnstaple. Dr Kenyon will be leaving you now, but I’m sure we can answer any of the questions raised by her talk later in the afternoon.’

  Miranda gathered up her yellow folder, and followed Little Benjy out of the lecture room.

  24.

  ‘The thing is,’ Kenyon said rather later, at home, ‘they went down the list, one after the other, and there was nobody. Nobody at all.
’

  ‘This is the Treasury, is it?’ Miranda said. They were both quite calm; Hettie was upstairs; from somewhere a bottle of gin and a bottle of tonic had been procured, and even a couple of slices of lemon. They were jolly well having their Friday-night drink. ‘Where you used to work?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Kenyon said. ‘It was the Treasury I was talking about.’

  ‘I see,’ Miranda said. ‘And what was this for—I’m sorry, I’m being awfully stupid, I know.’

  ‘It’s the head of their new Deficit Unit,’ Kenyon said. ‘I don’t know whether you know, but the country’s really in a bit of a sticky situation. It honestly is. We gave such a lot of money to those awful bankers.’

  ‘Awful, awful bankers, I quite agree,’ Miranda said, thinking of the occasion at the end of last month when the cashpoint had rudely refused to give her any money. She had had to borrow three hundred pounds off her own husband, like a student. So rude.

  ‘And now we don’t seem to have any at all ourselves. Less than none, really,’ Kenyon said.

  ‘Well, that is bad luck,’ Miranda said. ‘You mean the nation when you say “we”, I presume.’

  ‘Yes, indeed, I meant us the nation. And so the Chancellor—you know, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the big cheese with the eyebrows—he’s decided that he needs a Deficit Unit to run around thinking of good ideas about how to raise money.’

  ‘Well, you could just ask those awful bankers for all that money back, couldn’t you?’ Miranda said. ‘Golly, how I loathe capitalists. I could toss a brick through their windows sometimes.’

  ‘I suppose we could,’ Kenyon said, his voice going into falsetto. ‘Ask them for the money back. I don’t suppose they’d take much notice if we asked them. In any case, they had a chap lined up to be the head of this new Deficit Unit, though I don’t suppose even he was doing it very willingly. His name was Barraclough. I don’t know if you remember him from a Christmas party, or something like that.’

  ‘No,’ Miranda said. ‘I can’t say that I do, I’m afraid, darling.’

  ‘Well, he had just agreed to do it, when—do you remember that extraordinary day, when I came back from Paddington, and there had been that shooting on the concourse? About six months ago? Do you remember?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Miranda said. ‘Awful. Frightful.’

  Kenyon eyed her: he was not sure that he had ever managed to tell her about the event in a way that she would remember. ‘Well, it turned out that one of the people that chap shot was my former colleague Barraclough, who was just on his way home to Oxford, poor fellow. Shot through the head. Dead as a doornail. So ever since then, the Treasury, they’ve been running down the list of people who might, just might, be prepared to head up this new Deficit Unit.’

  ‘And they still haven’t found anyone?’ Miranda said. ‘That seems rather a long time.’

  ‘Oh, you know the Treasury,’ Kenyon said. ‘Like God in the hymn, a thousand ages in their sight are like a moment gone. And, anyway, everyone they offered it to said they wanted to think it over for a week and then said no.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Why do you think? Awful job, can’t achieve anything, public obloquy and shame. But all the time their desperation was rising and so were the sums they were offering the candidates, interestingly enough—I heard they had to go back to the Cabinet Office three times, strictly between you and me. And a couple of weeks ago, they remembered that they’d donated me to the AIDS in Africa people.’

  ‘Not donated, darling, seconded,’ Miranda said.

  ‘Quite right, seconded,’ Kenyon said. ‘They’d rather forgotten about me, I dare say. But two weeks ago, I had a telephone call about this, and the long and the short of it is that—well, you’re looking at the new head of the new Deficit Unit. I suppose if I’d said no, they would have had to offer the job to Robert Peston off the News.’

  Miranda’s eyes were gleaming with love, or moisture, or contemplation of the mere future in which she and Kenyon and Hettie could go on living in their million-pound house, currently bankrupting them by the day.

  ‘How much?’ she said, her voice low and thrilling.

  ‘Well, that’s the rather good thing,’ Kenyon said. ‘It’s going to be about twice what I earn now, or a little bit more. The negotiations had reached such a pitch before they even got to me, you have no idea! And the other nice thing is that they’ve agreed to regard me as a candidate recruited from the outside world, not from within the public service at all.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So I get a lovely big sum of lovely money for just coming back to the bosom of the Treasury. They thought I would say no unless they gave me—’

  ‘But I thought we had no money, I mean, not us, I mean the country, didn’t you just say?’

  ‘Well, yes, but this is sort of different money. They can justify that.’

  ‘How much?’ Miranda said again.

  ‘Oh, somewhere around three hundred thousand,’ Kenyon said. ‘Something like that.’

  Miranda drank her gin-and-tonic in one; her manner quite changed. ‘Well, that is a nice lot of different money to welcome you home with,’ she said. ‘I am pleased for you. Of course, it’s not really about the money, is it? I am glad they’re recognizing you, at last—I rather thought they had forgotten all about you, tucked away in Islington like that. And I’ve got some news too, rather along the same lines. Really very much along the same lines.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me the university’s going to give you three hundred thousand, too?’ Kenyon said, laughing.

  ‘Well, I don’t know how much it will be in the end,’ Miranda said. ‘But there was a bit of a hoo-hah today, and after a little bit of a conversation with Little Benjy and his Big Boss—golly, it sounds like a play by Brecht, doesn’t it, darling?—after that little bit of a conversation, I reckon that they see the future of the faculty as being a little bit Miranda-less. Boo-hoo. But they did say that they would be sure to give me a lump sum if they had to ask me to go, a nice big lump sum. So we’ve both had some very good news. I think, between the two of us, we could probably pay off the mortgage in one go, when the money comes through, and then we won’t have any difficulty living on your salary, I suppose. Probably have a hundred thousand or two left over, as well. For a rainy day.’

  ‘As much as that?’ Kenyon said, whose thoughts were all on Ahmed, on how he could juggle a five-day-week job with his lover; and he was thinking about a flat in London, and a job in London for Ahmed. ‘As much as that? Miranda—what is it that you’ve done?’

  ‘Oh,’ Miranda said. ‘Well, the awful thing is that Benjy’s big boss made me promise, as a condition of all of this—I mean, we’re only just beginning on discussions, but this was his absolutely first insistence—that I would never, ever repeat to anyone the ghastly things I said today. So I don’t think I will. I know it sounds awful. Maybe one day I’ll tell you what it was. But anyway. That all sounds like very good news, I must say. Gracious heavens, what’s that noise?’

  At the window there was a distorted and inhuman face; it was Stanley, Sam and Harry’s basset hound, emerging from the winter darkness, and for some reason best known to himself, gazing into Miranda and Kenyon’s sitting room at the two handsome figures. He gave the paintwork an appraising lick, making the window frame rattle again.

  ‘He shouldn’t be out this late,’ Miranda said. ‘He knows he shouldn’t. Stanley. Go home, Stanley, go home.’

  ‘No, Stanley, we’re not letting you in,’ Kenyon said. ‘God knows what you’ve been rolling in. Go home.’ Stanley went on gazing, occasionally shaking his rump loose, as if he had never seen anything so fascinating as two people sitting opposite each other, their faces lit by table lamps, one with a tie loose about his neck, the other sitting upright in a black geometric dress, a black geometric haircut, slightly grown out, looking at him with concern and, perhaps, something like love. And, in a moment, Miranda picked up the telephone sitti
ng on the side table, and called Sam to come and fetch him.

  25.

  Whenever Hettie left the house, she liked to count the steps between one landmark and the next. Between the front door and the fish shop: 247. In the other direction, to the very end of their street and the beginning of the Wolf Walk: 485. From one end of the Wolf Walk to the other and Tracy Wood; 170. (Hettie could cry when she thought of Tracy Wood, and the strange thought that she, Hettie, was now older than Tracy Wood would ever be. Somewhere, they were friends, she and Tracy Wood.) From the station to the Crapping Juvenile: 463. From the town hall to the swings at the Rec: 733.

  She had always done that, and did it now when she was alone. If she was with Michael, her thoughts ran in different directions. She had sometimes thought of telling him that she counted her steps when she walked in Hanmouth, but not yet. He might think she was mental, so she did not. Perhaps before he went back to America, she would tell him. Whenever she left the house, she took a deep breath, as if about to place her head under water, and said a giant ONE in her head, whichever way she was going. She could count Hanmouth from one end to another. As she walked, it would unroll under her stamp and pace and jog.

  In the last days and weeks, she had had a new task to add to the counting. She had had Billa Townsend, the old General’s wife, to look out for. She had thought a lot about the way the General died, and every way she looked at it, she was to blame. Hettie saw the old General, going to one cupboard after another, looking for the ironing-board. All his life, his wife had done the ironing, but she couldn’t now, because she’d fallen over and hurt herself somehow. So he would have to do it. His wife, Billa, she was out and she couldn’t tell him where the ironing-board was kept, even. And then he went upstairs, and found the ironing-board in an upstairs cupboard. He didn’t know how to do it, so instead of getting it downstairs while it was still folded, he thought it would save time to unfold it on the top landing and carry it down like that. But unfolding an ironing-board is a complicated thing. Hettie knew that. And somehow, there, standing on the top step of twenty, trying to get the ironing-board out, he caught his foot in it, and then it all came down like a pack of cards, whoosh, bang, thud.