King of the Badgers

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King of the Badgers Page 8

by Philip Hensher


  Sam understood that by ‘prejudiced’ Miranda meant, as she usually did, ‘common’, and carried on. ‘A nice policeman came into the shop,’ he said, undeterred, ‘and he was saying that they were hoping, very much hoping, to make an arrest before much longer. He was pretending to question me about my whereabouts and had I recalled anything I might have forgotten earlier, but I know he just wanted a good old gossip really. And I said, “Have you got a suspect then?” and he said, “Even two,” and he didn’t wink exactly, but he made a sort of very winking kind of face without actually winking, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘I’m sure the little girl’s off safely in Butlin’s or somewhere,’ Billa said. ‘Dyed her hair and sent her off for a couple of weeks to enjoy herself.’

  ‘The thing I truly object to,’ Kitty said, ‘and I know this sounds trivial and I don’t care if it sounds a bit snobbish, but I don’t care about these awful people and I do care about this. It’s that the whole world now thinks of Hanmouth as being this sort of awful council estate and nothing else, and Hanmouth people like this awful Heidi and Micky people. Absolutely everything you read in the papers is about how they live in Hanmouth and, frankly, they don’t. They live on the Ruskin estate where I’ve never been and I hope never to go anywhere near.’

  ‘I saw a newspaper photographer in a boat in the middle of the estuary, taking photographs,’ Sam said eagerly. ‘Out there in Brian Miller’s ferryboat. Taking a photograph of the church and the Strand and the quay. That’ll turn up in the Sun as a photograph of Heidi’s home town, I promise you.’

  ‘As if that family could live somewhere like this.’

  ‘Or, really, more to the point, as if they would ever contrive a story like this if they did live on the Strand,’ Miranda said. ‘One may be cynical, but one does think that moral attitudes and truthfulness and not having your children kidnapped for the sake of the exposure don’t go with deprivation. It’s material deprivation that starts all this off.’

  ‘They’ve got dishwashers, Miranda,’ Billa said. ‘They’re not examples of material deprivation. But you’re right. You don’t hear about children disappearing from Hanmouth proper, do you? It’s just bad education, ignorance, idleness and avarice.’

  ‘And drugs,’ Sam put in. ‘Don’t forget the drugs. The policeman shouldn’t have been saying this, but he hinted very heavily that not only had the women been smoking drugs when they were supposed to be looking after the children, but the woman’s partner’s got some kind of criminal record for selling the stuff.’

  ‘What an awful story,’ Miranda said. ‘I can’t wait for all those drunks and mischief-makers and rubberneckers and fisticuff-merchants and journalists to call it a day and go somewhere else.’

  ‘I could wring that bally woman’s neck,’ Billa said.

  Because belief in and sympathy for Heidi, Micky and their four children, one missing, believed abducted, ran very low among the membership of the reading groups of Hanmouth.

  14.

  Catherine had had such a nice half-hour in the shops of Hanmouth that afternoon. She had started with the Oriental emporium. There was hardly anything that could be described as a window display. It looked more like the random circulation of stock in the half-lit front. The door was hung with a bright purple and red throw, tied back. Out of the dark interior a jangle of temple bells and a whiff of what Catherine thought of as joss-sticks came—David had had quite a craze for the things at one stage, had been unable to embark upon his physics homework in the back bedroom in St Albans without them.

  And then, saving it up rather, she’d gone into Sam’s cheese shop. She’d seen Sam around, walking his dog down the Wolf Walk, reading the papers on a Sunday lunchtime outside the pub on the quay with what must be his partner. She had identified him after a month or two as the owner of the attractive little shop, white-tiled inside with built-in display cabinets. He was often to be seen swapping lengthy stories with other Hanmouthites in the street, the newsagent and the butcher. He seemed to know everyone, and Catherine didn’t consider she would be a proper Hanmouthite until she’d made his acquaintance. He’d been delightful this afternoon: he had foisted the Wiltshire Gjetost on her and a Gorgonzola from a farm just up the road outside Iddesleigh, and something very unusual, a chocolate-flavoured log of goats’ cheese. ‘Made by lesbians in Wales,’ Sam had explained superfluously. And then, not being very busy, he’d asked about the bag she was holding, from the Oriental emporium, and then, very cosily, what she was doing in Hanmouth, did she live here? He’d even clapped his hands when she said she was refurbishing the spare bedroom. It was really quite without any character at the moment, just the previous-owner-who-had-died’s magnolia on the walls. It might even have been the builder’s magnolia, Catherine speculated; there would be no reason to alter that in the first owner’s mind. ‘Well,’ Sam had said reasonably enough, ‘I don’t want to pour cold water, but paint does yellow. It might even have been the builder’s white, forty years ago.’

  ‘I suppose it might have been,’ Catherine said, enjoying this banter. She wanted to liven it up, furnish the room, give it something resembling character before her son came to visit for the first time. He was bringing his new partner, too, about whom Catherine knew nothing.

  ‘And did they persuade you into buying their Buddha?’ Sam asked, referring to the sisters with the Oriental antiques. ‘A four-foot gold Buddha. Did you see it? They’ve had it for ten years. I don’t suppose anyone will ever buy it now—it’s almost a joke. Promise me you didn’t buy it.’ Catherine reassured him. ‘We shopkeepers, we do have these disasters, and then we’re stuck with them. So easy to get carried away, and now, I dare say, it’s quite an old friend. I don’t know what Lesley and Julia would do without their Buddha.’

  Of course they had laughed together. She had been tempted to bring up David’s new boyfriend, but she thought that might be presumptuously making connections between them. She didn’t know the name of David’s boyfriend, and there was no reason to suppose Sam knew that she knew he had a boyfriend, so the conversation would run quickly into embarrassment. (Catherine was good, she considered, at anticipating conversational awkwardnesses like that one.) After an hour, she came home with some experimental cheese, an olivewood board, a ceramic butter dish ornamented with octopuses, squid, fish and smiling underwater anemones, as well as a charming glass from next door in a padded red cloth frame, decorated with gold embroidery and pieces of mirror. ‘Filling up the house with tat,’ Alec said, looking round from beyond the blinkers of his green leather wing-chair as she came in, but not unkindly. That was his customary response whenever she brought anything home.

  So when she heard a rapping at a window and turned to see Sam, gesturing in her direction, she naturally waved back. It was only when he rapped again, and a dog—Sam’s dog—bounded past her that Catherine realized he hadn’t been trying to attract her attention at all. Of course Catherine knew Sam’s dog. She’d known Stanley’s name since before she’d known Sam’s. She had heard him calling impatiently after Stanley almost every morning as the basset hound lumbered off down the Strand. Finding out Sam’s name had been more of a challenge. She still hadn’t discovered his fairly handsome partner’s name. Eavesdropping on a Sunday lunchtime had produced nothing but an exchange of ‘darling’, rather edgy in tone.

  She knew Miranda Kenyon’s name, however. When Miranda opened her door to the two ladies, Catherine found herself propelled into the doorway of the house. She could explain her mistake, be friendly, and at the same time offer an invitation to the little drinks she and Alec were having when David and his partner were there next weekend. They were planning to invite all the people they had made friends with since they arrived in Hanmouth. It didn’t seem to go quite as well as she had hoped. It was extraordinary that four sentences could congeal in the air and fall to the floor between strangers. But the gesture had been made. The awkwardness, in the future, might lessen. Catherine stumped up the little rise at the quay end
of the Fore street, past estate agent, white-tablecloth French bistro and charity shop. She forced herself to think that Sam had been very kind to her, and friendly, too, that afternoon. They were not at all the same thing, kindness and friendliness, but he had shown both. There was no reason to suppose that she and Alec wouldn’t make good friends in this place.

  Still, there had been rebuffs, which couldn’t be shared with Alec, him being a man and not very interested in the smaller details of social life. After a month or six weeks, she’d grown confident when faces presented themselves as familiar. She had started to say hello to them, and been greeted back. She’d even got to know a few names. Every face met before nine and perhaps ten must be a resident, she believed, rather than a tripper, and worth a greeting. The return of greeting had sometimes been enthusiastic, as with a lady with a small West Highland White Terrier on her morning rounds, out and about rather earlier than anyone else. Sometimes the return was more doubtful, provisional, and sometimes rudely withheld. There was an elderly man she saw almost every morning, tall and long-faced and sinewy, with a knowing, watery, foolish expression. He had a regular route: he picked up the paper and got some fresh air, as she did. Their rounds crossed at some point almost every morning. After a month or so of meeting practically every day, she ventured a greeting, a neutral sort of comment about the weather. It was her favourite sort of day. Blue-skied and blustery, the clouds galloping at a racehorse’s pace inland, the spring whiff of salt carried in the buoyant breeze from the ten-miles-remote Bristol Channel. The seagulls widely embraced the wind, wedged diagonally on the air, falling backwards and inland on the salt-swept air, and, walking over the salt-encrusted lawn of the little churchyard that was her shortcut, Catherine smiled and said, ‘Lovely day,’ to a familiar long-faced man. He looked at her directly, as if she were a tree or an animal of some sort, and said nothing. She had read in nineteenth-century novels about people being cut directly. Before she and Alec had moved to Hanmouth, she had been ignored or overlooked, but never cut in so blunt a way.

  He was a horrible old man, as it turned out. Afterwards, she heard him laying down the law in the street, his false teeth loose, his loud, humourless Devon accent spitting over whoever he thought worth talking to. She knew people like that were proved unpleasant and not worth knowing by their parade of superiority and withholding of so simple a thing as friendliness. All the same, it hurt. You couldn’t explain any of that to Alec. He would always ask why on earth you cared. He had a point.

  15.

  ‘That was a lovely town,’ Catherine had said, as they drove away from Hanmouth five years before. They had come from St Albans to visit Alec’s old secretary from the paper suppliers. She had retired down here with her husband. Alec and Barbara had always got on well in the office, but he and Catherine had been surprised by the invitation to come and spend a long weekend down in Devon with them. They’d had a lovely time. Barbara and Ted, her husband, lived in a whitewashed settlement around a harbour. You couldn’t call it a village. The harbour was a picturesque muddy lagoon, filled with leaning skiffs and old fishing boats. In their front garden, a rowing boat was planted with lobelias and geraniums. When they returned to St Albans, agreeing that they had had a lovely time, it did occur to Catherine that Barbara and Ted might be somewhat lonely in their prettily brackish nook. They hadn’t been greeted in anything but a professionally cheerful way when they went into the pub in the harbour. You might have expected more. It was the only pub in the village, and the village only had twenty or so houses in it.

  Still, they had had a lovely time. Barbara had suggested they might like to drive over to the other side of the estuary to a small town called Hanmouth, directly opposite Cockering. ‘Very historical,’ Barbara said remotely. It gave off an air, even at a water-divided distance, of picturesque activity. It had a front of white-painted houses, a square-towered mock-Norman church flying a flag on a promontory facing Cockering over some steak-red cliffs, thirty feet high. It appeared martial and festive. On Thursday nights, if the conditions were clear, the clamour of bellringers going through their changes drifted over the estuary. They had arrived on a Thursday afternoon; at seven, Barbara had hushed them over a pre-dinner drink, and they had heard the distant hum and clanging, the mathematical variations blurring into a halo of sky and sea and seabirds. At night from Cockering, the town looked like Monte Carlo, its lights clustering like bright grapes, reflecting in the high water.

  They went, and were surprised how quickly a Saturday morning passed. They had dawdled from coffee to market to bookshop. In the village hall, or community centre, there was a Saturday-morning market. The Women’s Institute sold cakes and pickles on one stall, the biggest and most prominent. Other stalls sold hopeful bric-à-brac, forced pot plants, low-skill craft product such as home-made psychedelic candles, macramé hanging holders or batik throws. When you got down to the jetty and the mooring places, there were boats both large and small, neat, shiny as refrigerators, elegant Edwardian craft with shining brass fittings holding them together like corsets, and squat, businesslike, bumptious tugs. Between them swans, geese, ducks, spoon-billed wading birds and alert-headed coots swam and dived, swimming out to possess the middle stream of the estuary. The boats tranquilly waited for their owners to return. From here, Cockering was impossible to identify or pick out.

  There was a square brick warehouse from the turn of the century on the quayside where a bus into Barnstaple waited, the driver sitting on the step with the door open, reading a thriller with some absorption. Three geese, like old womanly friends with no urgent occupation, stood in the middle of the concrete apron, sizing him up as a likely source of bread. The building must once have been a storehouse for the fish industry but now it turned out to be filled with antiques of every description. There were pretty old pubs whose names had to have some story behind them—the Case Is Altered! On the high street, blue, white and red bunting hung from side to side in high airy zigzags. It must have been for the Hanmouth Festival with a procession led by the Hanmouth Festival Queen 2008. Catherine and Alec read about it in a series of shop windows. Alec remarked that the procession would be a short one. The high street—the Fore street, as many Devon main streets were called—was a bare five hundred yards long.

  There were two Italian restaurants. One had pretensions, the other gingham tablecloths and a pizza menu. There was a French bistro where everything, white tablecloths, white walls, glassware, cutlery, seemed to polish and reflect Catherine’s smile back at her through the windows. There was no Chinese takeaway or kebab shop, as far as she could see. There was a cheese shop, with a plump man in a blue and white striped apron, proffering wafery samples with good cheer to his customers. Best of all, there was a butcher. It was unexpected how butchers had become a means to register the life and independence of any English town. Until recently they had been an ordinary and unnoticed presence in a community of any size. Now they had become a thermometer measuring a body’s health, and the last butcher in St Albans had given up the unequal struggle with Tesco’s meat counter three years before. For no very good reason, they joined the queue in the Hanmouth butcher’s and bought two pounds of their homemade sausages. ‘We’re almost down to the last of the free-rangers till Tuesday,’ the butcher told the shopper before her. Catherine inwardly shivered for shame that the town in which she had made her home had not, it seemed, needed a butcher. The town was busy and jolly. On their way back to Barbara’s for a lunch of soup, bread-and-Wensleydale and a salad, Catherine and Alec agreed that if they ever moved from St Albans, this was the sort of place that they would like to live in.

  Neither of them could pin down exactly when it was that they had firmly decided to move. Their growing seriousness about the idea had been marked by their growing engagement with the Hanmouth estate agents. At first they only looked in the windows of estate agents. Frustratingly, they did not display the prices of the houses at the upper and most intriguing end. Often, the grandest houses had their own glos
sy brochures. They soon graduated, in a series of interviews, to pretending to be interested in buying a house. Nosily, they went round half a dozen they could never have afforded, tutting and shaking their heads sorrowfully over the lack of a utility room, a library, a music room.

  It was embarrassing to have to go back to the same estate agents, a month later, after a serious conversation or two, with different aims. They had to concoct a story that they had decided, after consideration, not to move down there permanently. (‘A permanent residence,’ Alec had said, overdoing it.) They now wanted a holiday home. Their invented objections gave way to real ones: plausible fishermen’s cottages, almshouses, inter-war semis dropped away. Too small, too expensive, facing east, facing west, too large, the worst house in a good area (embarrassment), the best house in a bad area (ostentation). A garden to keep up; a garage, which would only fill with junk. There seemed no objection that a property in Hanmouth would not meet in the most specific terms.

  16.

  Added to these objections were the comments of David, their son. They had told him about their intentions only at that point. He had been dubious. He had gone on living in St Albans, though he worked in London and commuted every day. Perhaps he was not the right person to consult about any adventurous enterprise. They knew people in St Albans, apart from him. They were familiar with things and services thereabouts. What if something went wrong, what if someone fell ill? At home in St Albans, they would be surrounded by willing volunteers from their circle. In this town in Devon they’d taken a liking to, no one would even know either of them was ill. No one would think of helping out. They were getting on. These things had to be thought about.

  These gloomy objections were evidently weighing in Alec’s mind when, for the seventh time that year, they found themselves in a Hanmouth estate agent’s. One of three. It was an unpromising day for viewing anything: rain at St Albans had turned steadily colder as they headed westwards, and by now the sleet was so thick outside that you could barely see the other side of the Fore street. Maria, the untidy woman in charge, hair flying and papers everywhere on the desk, like the White Queen in steady employment, had said over the telephone that there was a nice house which had just come on the market. Should she send them the particulars? Maria had giggled as she said this, and as she said most things, though none of them were at all amusing. They had driven down the same morning. Maria had been taken aback to see them, though Alec had definitely said, ‘We’ll pop over this afternoon,’ on the telephone. She hadn’t been able to find the keys at first: she knew she hadn’t popped them on the key rack, she’d just dropped them for a moment—scream of laughter—as she’d come in to take her coat off and run herself up a little cup of coffee, because she’d picked them up on her way in; Apthorpe Avenue was really the way she took from home into work—a small giggle. A Mozart piano concerto on Classic FM formed a backdrop to Maria’s comments; as she turned half her desk upside down searching for the keys, she was starting in on a description of the house, very nice, pre-war, a striking sculpture in the front garden, had been lived in by the same owner for nearly forty years, but he’d taken good care of it.

 

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