King of the Badgers

by Philip Hensher

  5.

  ‘Ironic’ was the word that the village, the county, the newspapers and even the television had used about the Brigadier’s death. But in fact the word they wanted to use was ‘funny’. If she had ever thought about the matter while the Brigadier was alive, she would have realized that his eventual death would have had its public aspect. But she had always presumed that the reason for that would have been his public career. He had been a brave man, and for forty years, uncomplaining, the pair of them had gone all over the world, to some terrifying places. He had stood upright as flags were hauled down in half a dozen colonies, or once—it was a favourite story of his—running for his life for the gunboat in Aden as the marauding tribes closed in on them, about to turn and plunge the country into a hell, not a very upright one, of impenetrable internecine slaughter. He had done his very best in Northern Ireland and, with Billa at home in Hanmouth watching and reading every scrap of information she could gather, had led his men into the Falklands and out again with the minimum of fuss and bother. He’d been rewarded for that in a more than routine way: the medals were in the small mahogany chest upstairs, lying on top of his dress uniform. She was proud of him—indeed, the village was proud of him, near-strangers always calling out, ‘Good morning, Brigadier,’ across the street as he set off on his constitutional—and had taken it for granted that, at the end, the pride would be expressed in newsprint. No scandal or impropriety had ever touched his conduct; the army esteemed him, his men always loved him, and he volubly hated any sense of the army’s disgrace. He had taken, in his last days, to turning off the television news when the subject of Iraq had come up; the self-serving decisions of politicians, the incomprehensible and wilful conduct of individual soldiers towards their prisoners, all that was hateful to him. She could not imagine a more upright man; never could.

  She had left him alone for a morning while she went into Barnstaple for some shopping—the village was quite all right for the day-to-day things, but there were some things, like the Little Scarlet jam they had both always liked at breakfast, you had to go into Barnstaple for. She never minded. She had called a cheerful ‘I’m back,’ on opening the door, but there had been no response and, in the hallway at the foot of the stairs, the sprawled, ugly scene she would never be able to get out of her mind. She called an ambulance, though he was obviously dead, and, absurdly, she felt guilty at using the emergency services when there was no emergency any more. Who else were you supposed to call? She put the telephone down. Immediately, there was a knocking at the front door; it was an ambulance crew. They hadn’t found it funny, or even ironic: they’d been concerned, swift, practical and serious. She didn’t question the immediacy of their arrival at the time. It seemed only an aspect of their gravity. It was only much later that she realized, with a flush of ugly shame, that the Brigadier had somehow managed to telephone as he lay, that he hadn’t, in fact, died in a moment. She hadn’t attached any significance to the telephone lying in a tangle on the floor with everything else. She had, it turned out, just missed him.

  Kitty was very good, when they’d returned from the hospital, even holding her hand in the taxi, and not expecting her to say anything at all. But what had been most helpful was what always had been helpful, Billa’s opportunity, once alone, to sit herself down and give herself a good talking-to. She’d always excelled at that, whether it was the night before her wedding when, incredible as it now seemed, she’d almost decided that she was making a ghastly mistake in marrying the Brigadier as he then wasn’t, or returning from the clinic five years later when the doctor had had to tell them that they would never be able to have children. (So, her wrongness before her wedding had been so quickly revealed that five years later it was a matter of ‘them’ in so personal an issue.) She’d given herself a good talking-to on their first night in their Ugandan quarters, with mould halfway up the walls and stinking like a wardrobe in which an animal had died, no food in the house, no servants in sight, and the single thing that might have made her burst into tears, a long-unflushed lavatory. And she gave herself a good talking-to now.

  The public aspect of the Brigadier’s death simply hadn’t occurred to her, though perhaps she might have seen something of it in the quivering, bright-eyed way so many of the village people had conveyed their regrets, as if they were trembling on the verge of quite a different sentiment altogether. It was only when the hateful obituary in the Daily Telegraph came out, only five days ago, which actually mentioned the circumstances of the Brigadier’s death in its first sentence before going on, true, to his military record, that any such possibility had occurred to her. And then it only seemed to her like a single blunder in taste and tact, like a snorting-out of soup at the dinner table, which nobody, naturally, would ever mention again. But late the next day, the local television news had got hold of it, and they did not mention the Brigadier’s life at all, but only the way, which was horrible enough, he had died, and treated it with vast levity. She had not been able to stop watching, once she had seen the outside of their house on the screen, until the report had finished and the man on the sofa had turned lightly to the woman on the sofa and said, with open amusement ‘It’s always the ironing-boards that get you in the end,’ and the woman had actually laughed. Billa, now, wondered what sort of country she was living in.

  The funeral, as she walked into the church in advance of her husband, like a wedding in reverse, Kitty at her side like an ageing bridesmaid, was as crowded as she could ever have wished. But it had arranged itself in a series of rings, the genuine mourners at the centre and becoming steadily more carnival-like the further out it spread until, at its furthest reaches with people who could never have known the Brigadier in life, it started to resemble the last stages of a rather ragged party. Irrelevantly, as she sat down in the front pew, she wondered where exactly she would draw the line in this, at what point she should stop inviting the attenders to come back to the house afterwards to eat Kitty’s shrink-wrapped food. Certainly the inmost mourners—kind Miranda and Kenyon from the reading group with their little daughter, her face lowered, the neighbours, Billa’s elderly cousin and, if he arrived, her brother they hadn’t seen for three years, the Brigadier always rather objecting to his manner and his readiness to mount an argument from a standing start. Dear Sam and Harry had put on suits and white shirts and black ties; they had never been great pals of the Brigadier, who had had to be ticked off enough times for the way he referred to her cheese-flogging bum-bandit chums. They were here for her. There were plenty of people of that sort—not Sam’s sort in the Brigadier’s sense, just friends from the village, old comrades of the Brigadier’s. She turned round and nodded with a subdued smile at General Franklin and his wife; it was very good of them to come all the way from Yorkshire. And, as well, there was what must be, in that very smartly turned-out young officer, a representative from the regiment. It was good of them, too.

  But further away, there were people unlikely to have felt much personal grief for the Brigadier, such as the sluttish landlady of one of the worst pubs in Hanmouth, one they never went into. And next to her, in one of the back pews, a girl who lived in one of the houses at the far end of the high street, said in the greengrocer’s to be an artist, along with much more about her history and goings-on with men. She was wrapped up in dark velvet scarves, blue and purple and swirling in patterns, like a Bashi-Bazouk, and although she wore a black dress, it was exactly the same dress she always wore, in a stretchy T-shirt material. The Brigadier hadn’t known her, wouldn’t have wanted to, and it was only by the purest chance that Billa had hung around in greengrocer’s shops and heard her name: Sylvie. She was looking around her with frank interest, as if she were the sort of artist who might dash home to sketch the scene. But of course—the greengrocer’s gossip had it—she wasn’t at all that sort of artist, rather the sort that stapled a brick to a dead frog and called it art, as the Brigadier used to say. And beyond that circle, containing people like Sylvie—Billa was surprised
that she actually knew her name—there were, outside the church, a couple of representatives of the media, one with a small television camera, with the name of an unfamiliar television channel on the side. There was nothing, surely, to be got out of the funeral for them. There, gawping on the pavement opposite the church, strangers not from the village, who had heard the story, and their children running up and down. It was exactly like the time, four or five months ago, when that girl had gone missing, believed kidnapped, and hundreds of rubberneckers had descended on Hanmouth. They might even be the same rubberneckers. The comparison seemed distasteful in the extreme to Billa. To them it seemed unlikely that anyone had actually died, that anyone could be conceivably mourning a death so very entertaining.

  Well, that was to be expected, and Billa’s irritation stopped, in practice, with people like the woman artist, who had forced her way into the church itself, never having known or spoken to the Brigadier in life. That was pushing impertinent curiosity to its limits. At the end of the service, making her way out of the church, Billa made a point of pausing by the woman’s pew. She looked up, a little puzzled; she might not actually know who Billa was, and she hadn’t even lived in Hanmouth that long. ‘Thank you for coming,’ Billa said, in a forced, kindly tone. ‘I do hope you’ll come back to the house afterwards. Since you made the effort to come and see Tom off.’ Sylvie, if that was her name, had at least the decency to blush, taking the point. As if by inoculation, this comment ensured that none of the outer circle of rubberneckers pushed their intrusion any further. Those coming into the kitchen were exactly those she would have invited to a normal sort of party, plus the honourable addition of the young officer from the Brigadier’s regiment.

  ‘It was very good of you to come,’ she said. ‘I do hope it wasn’t too tiresome a journey for you. My husband always thought of the army as one of the most important things in his life.’

  ‘I’m proud to have been asked,’ the young soldier said. ‘It’s important to keep a sense of continuity.’

  That was so much a sentence from a memo, a much-Roneoed sheet of instructions for junior officers attending funerals, that she shouldn’t have gone on. But she had always been a good hostess, and said, distractedly, ‘I do hope you’ll drop in again if you’re ever in the area.’ That was the wrong thing to say: this was just a uniform, paying the required homage to another uniform. The supplied mourner, like the regiment, felt nothing, and in a moment he excused himself and left. He had parked his car outside the house—a most unexpected little red Fiat—and she watched him, in his uniform, zap the door open, get in, and drive off in an embarrassed, stately way. She tried to remember times when the Brigadier had carried out this exact duty, long ago. He must have done; but it could never have seemed important.

  6.

  ‘“Hanmouth is home to a wide and varied community. Many families and older people have chosen to make their home here, and they appreciate its family atmosphere and the feeling of safety in its streets. With the installation of CCTV cameras without a gap from the end of the Fore street to the end of the Strand, and the Devon Police Authority’s agreement to dedicate a single desk officer, PC Browning, to Hanmouth and its concerns, we can all feel much safer in a sometimes threatening and fast-changing world.

  ‘“However, with the privilege of living in Hanmouth come responsibilities, and Neighbourhood Watch have long emphasized the importance of good, neighbourly behaviour, and the maintenance of a certain standard of acceptable behaviour. It was drawn to the attention of Neighbourhood Watch at its most recent meeting that two men, in the early evening of Saturday, the twelfth of July, were seen in a residential Hanmouth street dressed in an unacceptable manner. Though Neighbourhood Watch was clear that it has no intentions of imposing dress standards, and has no objection to fancy dress, it does believe that the ‘fetish’ costumes worn by these two were only designed to advertise their sexual preferences and should not have been worn in public in a town where many families with children of different ages live.

  ‘“We understand that these men were guests of yours on this particular occasion. We would like to emphasize to you that a certain standard of behaviour is required not only of those visiting Hanmouth, but those who live here, too. We are sorry to have to bring this to your attention, but we feel that you should be aware of how your neighbours feel, as evidenced by a number of representations to Neighbourhood Watch. We are sure that you will want to tell your guests in future that, once in Hanmouth, they should behave and dress in the style which the families who live here have come to expect and enjoy.” Fuck off,’ Sam said, finishing reading.

  ‘Who’s signed it?’ Harry said. They were in the sitting room of their house. Sam had screwed up the letter, before throwing it in the direction of the bin. Stanley, capering with a sort of dim joy about Sam’s feet, had been misled by Sam pacing up and down into thinking that a walk was imminent. So often, before a walk, one thing after another—a woolly hat, gloves, keys, poo-bags, wallet, man-bag—had been misplaced or lost by Sam, and so often he had walked up and down in exactly this pacing way before he had found enough to go out.

  ‘It’s just signed Neighbourhood Watch,’ Sam said. ‘There’s no name. Who’s in Neighbourhood Watch?’

  ‘I don’t think we know anyone, apart from that John Calvin,’ Harry said. ‘Didn’t Helena Grosjean used to be in it?’

  ‘No, you’re thinking of the people who lived there before Mrs Grosjean,’ Sam said. ‘The ones who had that really hideous water feature in their pocket garden. This is really outrageous.’

  ‘Just throw it away,’ Harry said. ‘And stop stomping up and down—I can’t read the paper with that going on. It’s just the usual crap. You know they hate us.’

  ‘No,’ Sam said. ‘I don’t think I did know they hated you and me.’

  ‘Not you and me,’ Harry said. ‘They hate us, the gays. Well, they don’t mind us if they don’t have to think about it too much. But once they think about us, they realize that they do hate us, actually. Was it that night the mechanic came?’

  ‘And that Italian.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. That Italian.’ Harry went off into a short but, clearly, agreeable reverie. ‘Who brought him?’

  ‘I was trying to think. Was it Juan Carlos? Another waiter from Paddington Park, was it?’

  ‘They’ve discovered a ten-year-old, been under the rubble in Haiti for nineteen days—would you have believed that possible?’ Harry waved the paper in Sam’s general direction. ‘He’d have had to have water, some access to water, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Who do you think it was?’ Sam said.

  ‘I don’t know, it doesn’t give—’

  ‘Not your earthquake victim, you fool. Who do you think it was that so upset Neighbourhood Frigging Watch?’

  ‘Could have been anyone. I’ll have a word with the lads. Someone did come in a strap and a kilt with their tits out, I seem to remember. I’ll mention it, next time we have a gathering.’

  Sam stopped pacing; Stanley promptly sat down, his eyes on his master, just as patient and fascinated as if Sam were a washing-machine or a hen-house. Sam looked, amazed, at Harry. ‘No, Harry,’ he said. ‘No. That’s not the point. Neighbourhood Watch have sent us a letter, saying that they don’t like the way our friends dress, and can we have a word with them. Why the hell should we? Who the hell are Neighbourhood Watch to tell us what our friends can wear? If we don’t tell them to fuck off now, they’ll be asking if they can go through our cupboards, see if there’s anything they deem’—Sam got a lot of mileage out of this word— ‘unsuitable next.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Harry said. ‘I love it when you get all principled.’

  ‘Fuck off, Harry,’ Sam said. ‘You don’t like it any more than I do.’

  ‘I don’t really care,’ Harry said. ‘They didn’t have their dicks out, did they, do you think?’

  ‘Of course they didn’t,’ Sam said. ‘It’s not stamped, is it?’ He went to the table and turned the envelo
pe over. ‘Did you see who put it through the letterbox—was it this morning?’

  ‘No idea,’ Harry said. ‘A representative of Neighbourhood Watch. I don’t know them, apart from John Calvin. Anyway, I didn’t see.’

  ‘I’m going round to see John Calvin with this,’ Sam said.

  In his lumbering way, Stanley capered about Sam as he picked up the lead from the coat-rack by the door. Walk time was before breakfast, late afternoon when Sam got back from the shop—Stanley was just too smelly to have hanging around the shop during the day, and he seemed happy enough retiring to his basket for a few hours if Sam popped back at lunchtime—and a quick walk down the street and a poo while gazing at the night sky. Stanley was confused but giddily delighted at this one, with both Sam and Harry at home—it was a Saturday—and a walk being offered at half past eleven. He took the opportunity.

  There was that crisp blue day, with the suggestion of woodsmoke brought on by the colouring of the leaves, which in late September always brought happy thoughts of change and improvement to Sam. He supposed it was the memory of going back to school, which never left you, apparently. No one lit bonfires any more; and yet his childhood, at this time of year, on a September clear day, had been so full of bonfires that the suggestions and associations of autumn constructed an illusion. He could have sworn he could smell, was just about to smell, had just stopped smelling the smoke of a domestic bonfire. It was the best smell he ever smelt, and he strained after it. What did people used to burn in their bonfires? His father had had one every fortnight. Probably what people now were enjoined to recycle—garden waste, news-paper, paper packaging. He couldn’t think that a square green recycling bin, full to the brim with old Guardians, increased the sum of human happiness in the way that a single bonfire could, casting its lapsang-souchong odours over a neat suburb of London, its gardens packaged and fenced and tidy. When he got back, he would phone his father, if he could work out the time difference. One of these days, he, and Harry too, they’d take the long journey to Auckland. Probably quite soon.