King of the Badgers

by Philip Hensher

  ‘You’ve never been anywhere else, though.’

  ‘Is it near, where we’re going?’

  ‘Near Brighton? No—not really in the same direction, even. Did you hear about the town my parents live in? It’s called Hanmouth—Han-mouth. It was in the news.’

  ‘Can we put a CD on? I brought some CDs. They’re in my bag.’

  ‘It was a strange story,’ David said, realizing at that exact moment that he had gone towards Vauxhall Bridge when he should have gone towards Chelsea Bridge, or further westwards. He silently calibrated his route again. ‘This girl went missing—a girl in the village where my parents moved to. It was all over the papers. The girl’s mother and father went on television, crying their hearts out. There were policemen all over the place, searching for this girl—first they thought she’d fallen into the river, or got lost, and then they started saying, “Whoever’s got her, whoever’s taken her, please just bring her back.” ’

  ‘Yeah, I saw that. The girl—she was in Portugal, wasn’t she, a little girl, two, three years old? They never found her.’

  ‘No,’ David said. ‘That was a different case. This was in Hanmouth, where my parents moved to. It happened a couple of months after they moved there. They said you couldn’t move for journalists and people just wanting to stand and stare. It’s in Devon.’

  ‘No, I don’t think I heard about that, then,’ Mauro said. ‘That’s terrible. And your parents, they knew the girl?’

  ‘No, they’d never seen her,’ David said. ‘So the police were making all these announcements, and then they said, you know, we’re not so sure about this. And the next thing you know, they’ve arrested the girl’s mother. They reckoned that she’d faked her daughter’s disappearance, hidden her somewhere, gone on television crying about it.’

  ‘But why does she do that? That’s crazy.’

  ‘Well, she goes on television, says, “We can’t sleep, we need money to campaign for her return,” and people send in donations. Money. Lots of money.’

  ‘How much money, you think, they get sent? A million, you think?’

  ‘I don’t know, I didn’t hear. But they arrested the mother.’

  ‘Well, but the mother, she gets to keep the money, she gets her million pounds, whatever she gets?’

  ‘No,’ David said, slightly shocked at the turn of Mauro’s thoughts. ‘I don’t think she would get to keep any money. There’s something called not profiting from the proceeds of crime, isn’t there? If you rob a bank, you can’t keep what you get.’

  ‘Yes, but you need to hide it, hide it away where the police they can’t find it. Do you think she did this, this woman?’

  ‘The thing is, it gets worse. The police arrested the woman and she confesses to what she’s done, tells them where the little girl is. She’s hiding in the house of a friend of hers, something like that, and they go there, but there’s no sign of the girl or the friend. They’ve disappeared. The mother doesn’t know anything about it, where they’ve gone. Then the friend turns up dead in a field—he was murdered. No sign of the little girl. She’s really disappeared.’

  ‘Yes, but the mother, she knows really where her daughter is. She’s just not saying.’

  ‘I don’t think she does,’ David said.

  ‘And I bet the mother, she’s hidden the million pounds where her daughter is, they’re safe together, she’s going to be let out of prison and go off with her daughter and the money, paff, paff, paff,’ Mauro said, making his fingers into a gun shape and firing, left to right across the windscreen; perhaps imagining the shootout as the mother and her daughter, in some fast sports car, shot behind them at the pursuing police. For a moment David thought of asking Mauro how old he imagined the daughter in the sad tale to be; his idea, that enthusiastic paff, paff, paff, from a Hollywood fantasy of women running away together. But then he wondered why he cared in the slightest.

  ‘Yeah, I bet that’s right,’ David said, after a moment. ‘We’ll be all right when we hit the A4.’

  ‘Hey, I’ve got Armand van Helden,’ Mauro said. ‘Can I put it on?’

  19.

  The day before, David had written his last Chinese blurb:

  Why fake being ill? Why should you pretend that that warm delirium has come over you, that you have to go to bed and draw the covers over you? The sheet and your blood turn the world a blank of pink, and you are pulsing away inside your cocoon. Some day soon your lie will catch up with you, and you will see that no one ever believed that you were ill for one second. They only allowed you to think they thought that, to let you off school, to stay home from work, to lie and be brought little sweets and bowls of soup to keep you warm and make you better. Mother-love will do this, even when you are no longer perfectly young. Mother-love knows you best, and understands that sometimes the world is most beautiful when it is rejected and hugged to yourself, beneath the pink or blue covers of your bed, waiting for things to get better. All the same, the golden day sometimes comes when your mother puts a gentle smile on her face, and she says to you, ‘I know you are not really ill, but only wanted a rest. But today you can be better, you can go out and look at the world, which is still beautiful and full of bright sunshine, and forget your sickness, the sickness that was never really a sickness at all. Get up, stretch, yawn, smile and see the beautiful world. Recover.’ And love, too, is like this. It is always better to stop faking it.

  20.

  On Tuesday mornings at eleven a.m., Miranda held a seminar at the university. It was for her second-year undergraduates, and on the subject of post-colonial literature. She had been assigned fifteen students for this class, and for the first week fourteen had turned up, clutching their copies of Oroonoko and forty pages of photocopied articles, looking nervous (Miranda, with her severe bob and her way of tapping the table with her pen when a student, asked a direct question, sat in silence, was feared by people she had never taught.) Miranda checked her list. There was a fifteenth name, Sophie Warren. It meant nothing to her. She began to conduct her class, in the grey, windowless room under the morose striplights. She was a good teacher, respecting her good students. In this class, for instance, she never appealed directly to Faisal Khalil on any matter relating directly to colonial theory, as if he might have special knowledge or interest. As far as she knew, he was born in Sutton, and his father, she believed, lived in Barnstaple, working for the sixth-form college. She needed a student like that on her side; and she treated him, at least, with respect whenever he felt like speaking. She was a good teacher.

  The next week and the week after, there was no Sophie Warren present—those weeks also saw a couple of the first-week students fail to turn up as well, which was normal. Miranda carried out with contempt the faculty’s instruction to sit there with a register, reading out students’ names and ticking them off; though she was not a junior-school mistress, and she did not propose to work in a university with a truancy department, she registered the names, and did nothing more about it. She assumed that Sophie Warren, whose name appeared on her class lists, had found herself there by mistake, and after four weeks must have found a home somewhere else.

  On the fifth week, Miranda found a new face among the rows of girls and two boys in her post-colonial class. It was meek, downward-looking, with the familiar curtains of blonde hair falling to either side; a book lay open underneath the gaze. There was something protective about the two girls on either side of her—what was it? They had taken on the shape of her hair, her downward gaze, her hands folded in her lap. Reflecting each other, they looked like Rossetti’s Sweet Symphonies, and one of them might have been called Gertrude. Miranda thought of telling them this in her best sardonic class manner, but settled for asking the newcomer who she was.

  ‘I’m Sophie Warren,’ the girl said, as Miranda expected she would.

  ‘This is the fifth week of term. Where have you been before now?’

  ‘I’ve been in family difficulties,’ the girl said. ‘I’ve caught up with all th
e work, though.’

  ‘What family difficulties?’ Miranda said. ‘Or did you say learning difficulties?’

  ‘I’d rather not say,’ Sophie Warren said. ‘Family difficulties.’

  ‘Well, I’m not very happy about this,’ Miranda said. ‘You’ve missed half the classes of the term. You’ve got the burden of them from a friend who might have been listening, or who might not have been listening. The result of that kind of Chinese-whispers learning, in my experience, is that a student misses a crucial point. He or she drops five marks on an assessed paper. They sadly drop a class on the module. The result is that they narrowly miss a two:one and get a two:two. They leave university with what is nowadays a worthless degree. They have wasted three years of their life and have to get a job at Dolcis, where they remain for the rest of their lives. Nor do they marry, because nobody wishes to marry an assistant in Dolcis. It’s a sad story. But the moral is this. Don’t miss classes. It’s too late for Sophie, of course. But it may not be too late for the rest of you.’

  By the time Miranda had got to Dolcis, some of the class, at least, were laughing merrily—the sophisticated part. She was pleased to see that Faisal Khalil, who was quiet but reasonable, was one of the laughing ones—she would hate to think that the one non-white student in the whole of the first year wasn’t on her side. The rest of them were looking mutinous, furious, or amazed at being spoken to like that. It was impossible to know what Sophie Warren or her two acolytes—the ones who claimed to have passed on the seminar information—thought. They were head down over their books.

  At the coffee break, mid-seminar, Miranda held Sophie Warren back and asked her what was the matter. ‘After all,’ Miranda said, chortling inwardly, ‘if the faculty knows that you are facing some difficult problems, we can deal with them, too.’

  ‘I’d rather not say,’ Sophie Warren said. ‘They’re just family problems, all right?’

  ‘Well, in that case, we can’t help you,’ Miranda said. ‘If people are just going to say, “I’ve got family problems,” every time they don’t feel like turning up or doing an essay, it doesn’t seem fair on the others, does it?’

  At this point Sophie Warren started making loud weeping noises, though clearly not actually crying. Miranda sat and waited.

  ‘God,’ Sophie Warren said, with real hatred. ‘It’s absolutely unbelievable. I’ve never—never—been spoken to in my life by anyone—anyone at all—in such a way. I’m really thinking of telling my father about this.’

  ‘Yes, that would be a good idea,’ Miranda said. ‘If family problems are preventing you from studying, we would like to discuss them with your father, and your mother, too, if she is around.’

  Sophie Warren now made another burst of weeping noises. When she surfaced, she said briskly, ‘Look. It’s not a new thing. It’s been going on for years between my father and my mother. They’ve never got on, and now that I’ve left home to come to this fucking place, they think they might be getting a divorce. I’m so unhappy about it. I felt I had to be with my mother this last four weeks.’

  ‘Well, I do see that,’ Miranda said, doing everything she could to put sympathy in her voice. ‘In these situations, the faculty of course likes to write a letter to the parents, expressing their concern, and of course saying that they do hope your parents will do everything they can to keep the distress of a family divorce from affecting your work, which is, of course, the most important thing from our point of view.’

  ‘What?’ Sophie Warren said. ‘No, I don’t want you to do that, you mustn’t do that, I’m telling you, all right?’

  ‘But of course we must,’ Miranda said. She had used this to great effect to entertain herself when lackadaisical students cited dead grandmothers, divorcing parents, and once, a brother being kept in jail in Thailand for drug-smuggling—alas, that last one had turned out to be true, and her family, the student had said, would be very appreciative of the faculty’s concern. ‘Of course, if I see that your situation is not affecting your work in future—in other words, if you start turning up to classes and doing all the work—then perhaps your family would prefer not to have to deal with expressions of sympathy from people they don’t know. I don’t know. What do you think?’

  ‘I think you’re an awful fucking bitch,’ Sophie Warren said, timing this just to coincide with the first students coming back into the room holding cups of coffee, crisps and bananas.

  21.

  When Kenyon got back from London, on Thursday night or Friday afternoon, he liked to recover from the rigours of his journey and of his week by cooking. He would usually drop Miranda a note with a list of what he needed, and she would absorb it into her weekly shop. Kenyon was a good cook, and neither Miranda nor Hettie was a particularly fussy eater. So he often managed to be adventurous. He kept two copies of the favourite cookbook of the moment, whatever it might be, in his office in London and in the kitchen in Hanmouth. During the week he ate in London restaurants near the flat; Miranda and Hettie ate whatever was consistent with Miranda’s long-held conviction not to be a slave to the kitchen, as her mother had been, which meant the healthier sort of ready meal and a lot of stuffed pasta with salad and a tomato sauce. Kenyon’s returns on a Thursday or a Friday night were highlights of the family week, as he donned the blue striped apron and started to chop onions and pulverize garlic, with the sharp side or the flat blade of the knife.

  On a sunny day like today, he thought something summery and yet roasted; he found an idea for chicken roasted in saffron, hazelnuts and lemon. There might be a herb salad with it—perhaps just tarragon, parsley and dill, nothing else. He emailed the details of the food to Miranda, buying some sumac, whatever sumac might be, in Harvey Nichols. When he got home, it was all there.

  Miranda spent little time using the kitchen for its purpose. But when Kenyon was cooking in there, she followed him in with a glass of white wine, and chatted to him as he played about with his complicated cooking. Boys’ stuff, she referred to it as. When cookery passed out of the realm of women, it had gone only partially into the habits of men, who naturally took it up in too complicated and fussy a way. She had said this to Kenyon in the past. ‘You can’t help it,’ she said. ‘You’re a man. You have to do everything as a man does it. You love a little hobby, the more complicated the better. It’s all to do with taking control, and directing the gaze back to you.’ That had been after a notably irrational boeuf bourguignon, when Kenyon had laboured with a split pig’s trotter, discarded before serving, and some home-made dumplings. He had accepted the criticism; Miranda had eaten the French beef stew; and they and Hettie had done the washing-up together.

  Miranda was sitting at the kitchen table with a bowl of nuts and a glass of white wine. It was Thursday night; her teaching was over, and so was Kenyon’s week. She was talking to Kenyon, ignoring, for the moment, Hettie, who had had plenty of attention since Sunday night.

  ‘And Susie was here. I had lunch with her after she’d done her bit,’ she said. ‘We went out to that brasserie by the cathedral.’

  ‘Who’s Susie?’

  ‘Susie Aboagye,’ Miranda said. ‘You know her. You met her when we hosted that conference in 2000. She was over from the University of Florida then. She’s in England now, she’s the professor at Manchester. She came down to give a paper and stayed overnight.’

  ‘You should have asked her to stay here,’ Kenyon said.

  ‘Oh, we can’t do that,’ Miranda said. ‘You should know. If we don’t spend our entertainment and hospitality budget, it gets cut next year when we might need it. And there was a palaver with a student. She broke the record by not turning up until the fifth week of term. She said she’d been “catching up” with what she’d missed.’

  ‘Gracious heavens,’ Kenyon said politely, measuring out sumac with a spoon. The cookbook was not quite clear about its application. Parts of the recipe seemed to suggest the reddish, sour powder—Kenyon had licked his finger and cautiously tasted it—should go on before
the roasting, others that it should wait until serving. He decided to do both. ‘The trouble is, they want to get everything online nowadays. They don’t believe in experiencing anything face to face.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So what was her excuse?’

  Miranda explained about the family troubles of Sophie Warren, and about her own threat to write to the girl’s family expressing her regret for their divorce. Kenyon turned round from the oven in amazement.

  ‘One day, you’ll go too far,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Oh, I already have,’ Miranda said. ‘I did write to them. Very sorry I was to hear about their family troubles. Understood, on behalf of the university, that divorce was an upsetting thing in anyone’s life. However, thought that they might not be aware how far their family situation was affecting their daughter’s studying, not turning up for weeks on end, bursting into tears in seminars, could they please, et cetera, et cetera. She told me all her problems. I wrote them down in a letter and sent them to her parents, who, she said, were the cause of all of them.’

  ‘I don’t think you should have done that,’ Kenyon said. ‘I really don’t.’

  ‘Well, I’ve done it now,’ Miranda said. ‘Let them explain to her what she’s done. I don’t suppose they’re really getting divorced at all.’

  ‘Miranda, that’s a terrible thing to do,’ Kenyon said. ‘If it’s not true, they’ll be so upset with her.’

  ‘Well, whatever, as students say,’ Miranda said. ‘I don’t suppose there’ll be any repercussions. The point is, really, that it isn’t fair on the rest of them. They work perfectly hard—they turn up to lectures, they take notes, they contribute to discussions. Why should they do all that if you can get exactly the same degree by just borrowing a few notes off someone else and trying to make some sense out of it? It isn’t fair.’