King of the Badgers

by Philip Hensher

  ‘And that we urge them not to let their family difficulties affect their daughter’s work. That’s where we start to get concerned, surely. Isn’t that rather a worry? Benjamin?’

  ‘Ben,’ Ben said.

  ‘I’m sorry, Benjamin?’

  ‘I prefer to be called Ben,’ Ben said. He had been trying, and failing, to think of an unwelcome abbreviation of Miranda’s name. Randy? Anda? Mira? She wouldn’t even have recognized that he was addressing her.

  ‘In any case,’ Miranda said, ‘the students are always saying that they want more contact hours, more supervision, more interest in all of their affairs. I thought I would be helpful and aid Miss Warren with some more direct contact. Isn’t that what we are always being enjoined to undertake?’

  ‘So you wrote this letter.’

  ‘Not this letter,’ Miranda said, handing back the letter to Ben. ‘This letter seems to be from Miss Warren’s father. I believe he still has the letter I sent. Benjamin.’ She had read it, and now he read it again. They seemed to have reached a complete impasse.

  Ten minutes later Sukie, standing in front of the German department’s noticeboard, examining a disconsolate claim that learning German could be fun, was startled by Miranda pushing open a pair of double doors and breaking into ‘Dontcha Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me’.

  ‘You’re in a good mood,’ Sukie said.

  ‘I’ve just had half an hour with poor little Benny,’ Miranda said.

  ‘Poor old Benny,’ Sukie said.

  ‘Oh, he just needs speaking to, now and again,’ she said. ‘He’s perfectly harmless, really.’

  3.

  At the far end of Hanmouth, if you turned left at the far end of the Wolf Walk, you found yourself in a land of mud and water, of meadows and standing pools. Birds landed and settled here; migratory birds, wading birds, a small dull bird with a ringed collar that was never seen anywhere in Britain but here, in the Hanmouth estuary on the north coast of Devon. The ring-necked pipit was so choosy, it would not even cross the Bristol Channel and breed in Wales. For some reason, this ornithological star had been officially adopted as a symbol of the estuary, and a dreary Pipit Lines boat grunted up and down between Hanmouth and the sea, and the train that stopped at Hanmouth was officially called the Pipit Express as it chugged and hooted its slow way northwards, between road and water.

  The bird came to the notice of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, who declared that not enough was being done on behalf of the ring-necked pipit. At the millennium, seven years before, a platform had been erected above the ring-necked pipits’ breeding ground, the stretch of meadow, bush, water and mud where Hanmouth gave out. On the platform was a hide of plain, unstained pine with a letter-box slit running around at roughly eye level, where the birdwatchers of Hanmouth and around could gather and watch that unremarkable bird, the ring-necked pipit, without scaring it off. It had cost £150,000 of Lottery money matched by public funds, and had been opened in 2000 with pipit-terrifying pizzazz by the newsreader who spent his weekends here.

  Hettie and Michael came here to be on their own. They had never been disturbed, never seen anyone else here, and they thought of it as their private place. When they came back, the cigarette stubs on the floor were the ones Michael had smoked the last time they had been here. Hettie didn’t smoke: she thought it was disgusting, it smelt, but she didn’t mind Michael doing it because it was Michael, and she liked it when she saw the cigarette butts lying on the floor, exactly as he had left them the time before. No one came here; no one cleared it up; and Hettie was glad of it. Today they had come separately; they sometimes ran down the Fore street together, went for a walk before they ended up here, but Hettie had phoned Michael yesterday, saying, ‘I’ve got to see you. At the hide. Tomorrow after school. I’ll see you there.’

  In a corner of the hide, Michael squatted. It was not cold. On this September day, the summer was holding on with some determination. But he was pretending to be cold: the sleeves of his shirt had been drawn down to cover his hands, and the cigarette poked out from the wrist hole like a strange beast, fire-snouted, from its lair. Sometimes it was hot in the world and sometimes it was cold. That was an ordinary thought which anyone might have. But also you could say that when it was cold it was impossible to imagine what it was like when it was hot, and when it was hot you could never think it would ever again be cold. These thoughts had never occurred to Michael before he and his family had come to Britain. Britain was good for having the sorts of strange, interesting thoughts he now had all the time. He was putting his hands inside the sleeves of his shirt and then pretending he was cold and shivering—he shivered, he held his forearms to his chest, he gripped himself—as an experiment in whether you could make yourself remember what cold was like by doing all the gestures of a response to cold. He had found out that you could make yourself sleepy by opening your mouth wide until you yawned. It didn’t seem as if you could stop yourself feeling hungry by making chomping noises—Michael was often hungry, his mother always commenting on how much he was eating directly out of the fridge. Now he was seeing if you could re-create the memory of cold by making yourself shiver. Sometimes Michael surprised himself with how totally mental his thoughts went. ‘Totally mental,’ he said in the empty hide, being as British as he knew how to be. Perhaps it was all over Europe that you could think in this interesting way. He clutched his forearms to his chest and, in the warm, dusty atmosphere, half lit from the slits in the upper half of the hide, a winter’s day momentarily rose up, the dust on the floor becoming hoar frost. He blinked; the warm day was back; there was a racket and thunder as Hettie came tearing up the pine steps of the hide.

  ‘I had to see you,’ Hettie said, plumping herself down on the floor. She looked haggard, distraught, big-eyed. ‘I had to see you, Michael. I don’t know that there’s anyone else who would understand. No one else knows what we did, that day, what happened. It was wrong, Michael, I’m not saying it was anything but wrong, I’m not saying it was right—that would be crazy, stupid, bonkers! I’m not saying that. But I never meant this to happen, I never did, I promise, I swear. You know I never meant this to happen.’

  ‘Hey, Hettie,’ Michael said. ‘I know you’re not a mean person. I don’t know what you’re talking about. What happened?’

  ‘That’s always the way,’ Hettie said. ‘You’re thinking what you’re thinking, all to yourself, and it goes round and round and round, whee, whee, whee, inside your head until you meet someone. Then, BANG, it comes out just as it is, how you’ve been thinking of it, and they don’t know what you’ve been thinking, how can they, you’re bonkers for thinking they know what you’re thinking, they’re off on a train of thought of their own. The Brigadier.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Michael said.

  ‘The Brigadier!’ Hettie said.

  ‘The—’

  ‘The Brigadier, that’s what I’m talking about. You could have knocked me down with a feather when I heard. I came down to breakfast, and my mum was sitting there, looking very solemn, you know my mum Miranda, and she said she’d heard the night before but she hadn’t told me. The Brigadier. Tinkle, tinkle, the phone went, when dear little Hettie was tucked up in bed and I was looking at things on YouTube so I only heard the phone ring downstairs. I didn’t hear the conversation which Miranda, my mum you know, had with Kitty, that old woman. It came out of the blue, like a rumble of thunder, no one thought that would happen, he’ll be seriously missed. The Brigadier.’

  ‘I don’t know who the Brigadier is,’ Michael said.

  ‘Oh,’ Hettie said. Her eyes rolled about in their sockets; her hands fluttered about in search of something to do. Her fingertips found the raw pine board, tapped, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, along it; then became a great pianist’s hands, and she played a C major scale on the floorboard. When Hettie was in this trying-out state, everything about her agitated and experimental, Michael wondered if she were, in fact, seriously insane.
‘Oh, but you do. You do, Michael. Do you remember once we were running down the Fore street and we ran into an old woman and she fell over, bang? That was the day I told you I loved you, remember? I must have been out of my tree, I must! What was I thinking? But we knocked her over and we ran away and no one else ever found out who we were, the hooligans who had knocked dear old Billa over.’

  ‘But who’s the Brigadier?’

  ‘I’m coming to that. Billa, she’s married, she WAS married, to the Brigadier. We knocked her over and now her husband, he’s dead, he’s tragically dead, it’s AWFUL.’

  ‘That’s awful,’ Michael said. He got up and looked through the slits in the hide. The ring-necked pipit might be the bird flapping around in gangs of a dozen; or that could be some other bird entirely. It was an odd thing to be fascinated by, a particular bird. ‘That’s awful. But it’s not anything to do with knocking her over—how can it be?’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Hettie said. ‘He died because of us knocking her over. He was trying to do something in the house, I don’t know what, he was trying to do something which, normally, it’d have been her job, it was woman’s work. But she wasn’t doing it, Billa wasn’t doing it, because she couldn’t, because we’d knocked her over, she was bruised from head to toe, a solid mass of bruises, Kitty said she was. The Brigadier couldn’t do it, naturally he couldn’t do it. He’d never had to do it. And he got in a tangle and a muddle, he was all wrangled up and he fell over and he got himself killed. That’s the story. If WE hadn’t knocked her over SHE would have been able to do it and HE wouldn’t have tried to do it and been a big failure because HE didn’t know how to do it and HE wouldn’t have died. It’s ALL OUR FAULT.’

  Michael looked at the case from one end and from the other end. A small paw rose up, streaked with mud, and with its back stroked his cheek.

  ‘I do love you, Michael,’ the owner of the small paw said. ‘I really do. I’d go all the way with you, Michael, I would, if you only asked me.’

  Michael said nothing to this, not even what he had said before, which was that he wanted to be sure, and he thought it was wrong to go all the way before you were married or possibly engaged to be married. He considered the case. It did seem to him that he and Hettie had done something that had led to the death of the Brigadier.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ he said.

  ‘We can’t put things right,’ Hettie said. ‘We can’t pick her up off the pavement, we can’t go back in time and remember to swerve round her, or not to run at all, walk, maybe, like good little boys and girls. Because if we’d done that, if we could go and do that, she would be alive today, I mean he would be alive today. I wish that with all my heart, Michael. I am profoundly moved and he will, I believe, be much missed, I think that with all my heart, Michael.’

  ‘When you’ve done something wrong,’ Michael said. ‘You can apologize. You can go and explain.’ Then he told her about his mother’s twelve-step programme, and about the eleventh step, the apologizing to everyone. Hettie listened, her eyes tranquil, following only the movement of his lips, and nodding from time to time, and saying, ‘I see,’ now and then.

  4.

  After the Brigadier’s death, Billa felt herself, in the eyes of the village, flitting between incompatible states. She never knew when she was going to be invisible, as widows and women over a certain age were said to be, and find herself standing by while a conversation of terrible intimacy unwound between strangers; and then, without any warning, she would have the sense that she was being pointed out, observed, described. It seemed to Billa that her place in the village had been altered at one stroke by the Brigadier’s dying, and the style of his death. She had always felt a little anonymous, in the shadow of his local celebrity, and the invisibility, enhanced by widowhood, was only to be expected. The celebrity and notoriety, in which she knew some strangers must find a comic aspect, was quite new. The Brigadier’s local fame now fell on her, and was compromised and magnified by the absurd and horrible story. She felt herself pointed out, discreetly, but also, by others, not seen at all.

  Billa had said thank you effusively at first, when Kitty had come over with the first plastic-covered dish. After that, she had retreated to the Brigadier’s study, upstairs, to sit in the Brigadier’s red leather thinking chair. She left the kitchen door open, and now watched Kitty bustling backwards and forwards, carrying one plate after another, each glistening in the March sunlight with its transparent polythene sheathing. ‘I don’t want you to do a thing,’ Kitty had said, and she wasn’t going to. ‘It’s no trouble,’ she had gone on, when the response she’d expected wasn’t quite forthcoming. Even an old friend like Kitty had difficulty in not ending her sentences, these days, on an unfinished cadence, a sort of dash, —, hanging in the air. Like many people in Hanmouth, she seemed to think any comment, if voiced quizzically, might well call out Billa’s innermost thoughts on the whole affair.

  Billa’s big square house, and Kitty’s smaller L-shaped white cottage; were attached, and curved round a paved semi-courtyard lined with lobelia pots. The fourth, open, side gave onto the churchyard, where the salt-encrusted grass grew leaning in the direction of the wind off the estuary. Day-trippers, who had an extraordinary mania for reading the ancient tombstones, would sometimes walk quite confidently into their courtyard, even peer into Billa’s or Kitty’s kitchen windows as if they expected to see an aproned Mrs Tiggywinkle taking scones out of the oven. Billa’s house proprietorially fronted onto the comfortably sinuous high street, with its navy-blue front door and brass knocker. Kitty’s crowded cottage, unmistakably the house of a widow who had lived in a larger, more urban house, faced directly onto the estuary, overlooking the mudflats where the avocets picked and strode in their fastidious way. That side, thanks to the salt winds, had to be painted every two years at, Kitty said, appalling expense.

  Kitty’s opulent caravan of funeral dishes—the sum of her party dishes, acquired and tested over a lifetime of party-giving—was at last drying up, and she was trotting over now with what must be the last offerings. She had brought them through her green kitchen door and across the courtyard in eating order, the objects skewered on cocktail sticks first, the substantial cold ham and coronation chicken next, and finally a bowl of fruit, of cheese and, surprisingly, a cake. At the sight of the cake, Billa rose and went steadily downstairs, gripping the banister. She hadn’t expected a cake, and wondered if it was quite the thing. She couldn’t remember having seen, or been offered, one at a funeral ever before. With a nod to the parties of her childhood, she contemplated the funeral-goers accepting a slice, taking it home wrapped in black-edged paper napkins to eat later. For Kitty, who had won prizes at the Women’s Institute, any occasion was a good excuse to make a cake. This time, it was a good dark sombre fruit cake, and she’d restrained herself enough, as Billa saw coming into the kitchen, by not indulging herself with icing. It stood there on the shelf of the Welsh dresser, monumental and sadly bulging with cherries, in austere solemnity. In any case, had she iced it, what could Kitty have found to pipe on the top?

  ‘You shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble,’ Billa said.

  ‘No trouble at all,’ Kitty said, and then surprisingly added, ‘I was awfully fond of the Brigadier—of Tom.’

  ‘I hope it all gets eaten up,’ Billa said. ‘One never knows.’

  ‘Well, if not, it won’t go to waste,’ Kitty said. ‘Do you have any idea about the numbers?’

  ‘I can’t remember how many we wrote to,’ Billa said.

  ‘I think it was a hundred and eighty in the end.’

  ‘I’ve certainly had a lot of letters back. And there were quite a lot from people we hadn’t thought to write to, who had just read about it.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Kitty said. One of those hanging sentences, waiting for Billa, at the end of this long and difficult week, to come out at last with what she actually felt about the Brigadier dying in such a fashion. To most people, now, he’d bec
ome Tom; Billa thought still of him as ‘the Brigadier’, inexplicably a more intimate address. But her eyes dropped, the moment passed. ‘You probably ought to start thinking about changing,’ Kitty went on practically. ‘They’ll be here in, what, three-quarters of an hour?’

  Kitty was already in her funeral garb, or what passed for such: it was black, certainly, but the bodice was gleaming with jet. It looked like a frock for an outing, like the matinée garments of the aunts who, years ago, would take the young Billa to the theatre. Of course, people didn’t have devoted funeral outfits, these days.

  ‘I know,’ Billa said. ‘It just seemed awfully sad to get up and put on one’s black straight away, eat one’s breakfast alone in it.’

  ‘I quite see.’

  ‘Of course,’ Billa said, ‘I dare say in another week or two I’ll be shamelessly eating my breakfast in my dressing-gown. But not quite yet.’

  She said this because she knew quite well that Kitty did that exact thing, had often seen her watering the plants, or opening the kitchen door to the postman quite late in the morning in a purple quilted dressing-gown. She wasn’t quite convinced, either, that it was a habit Kitty had fallen into since her widowhood; from what she had heard of Dennis, it might always have been her way. The Brigadier had often commented on it; daily, it might have been. But now Kitty gave an enigmatic chuckle, and reversed out of the kitchen. She paused at the door.

  ‘It just seems…’ she said.

  Billa raised her eyes. ‘Ironic?’ she said, at last supplying the word for the whole situation, which not just Kitty but most of the village had evidently been waiting for.

  ‘Not that, exactly,’ Kitty said gratefully. ‘But terribly sad. I’ll be back in half an hour, walk over with you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Billa said. ‘Thank you so much.’

  Kitty looked at her with curiosity; and perhaps she had struck the wrong tone with so old a friend and neighbour.