King of the Badgers

by Philip Hensher

  In the little communal garden where the war memorial stood, there were two hunched figures on the bench, looking outwards. They were not talking for the moment; they gave the impression of not having exchanged a word for some time. It was Catherine and Alec. Then Sam remembered who it had been who had brought the Italian, and that it had been on the same night, two months before, that they had gone first to Catherine and Alec’s party. He considered greeting them; he knew he had said, more than once, how sorry he was. Could you go on saying how sorry you were when there was nothing else, really, to say? Instead, he began to walk past them without a comment; but Stanley’s whuffling and wheezing did the trick, and Catherine turned round. Her face was tired and worn and slow. How did she fill her days when her son had been taken away from her?

  ‘Why, Sam,’ she said, and Sam said hello. Then her husband turned round, looked at Sam, and turned back again, to go on looking at the view. After a moment, Catherine gave a weak, watery smile at Sam, and turned back as well. They had not been seen at Tom’s funeral, which anyone could have understood. Sam walked on with Stanley; he saw that Catherine had taken her husband’s hand in her own, and they went on sitting there.

  John Calvin lived in a house beyond Miranda’s, on the Strand. It was a curious, unsatisfactory house, which had at some period been squeezed into a gap between two more substantial houses. If it had a good location, the house itself was evidently hard to live in. While Harry and Sam had lived in their house, four different people had lived in the Calvins’. But Calvin and his wife had now lived there for some years. They apparently saw nothing wrong with its narrow, wedge-like arrangements, or with its lowering pebbledash front, practical against the salt water from the estuary, which made such havoc with other fronts, but inescapably ugly. No one had ever been inside Calvin’s house. Sam rang the bell on the grey, unwindowed front door with a sense of boldness.

  Calvin’s wife stood there with an enquiring expression; she perhaps didn’t remember or recognize Sam, and they had only met once.

  ‘I was looking for John,’ Sam said. Laura retreated into the gloom of the house without saying anything; her lank hair, parted at the top, the glasses through which she peered made her seem some underwater or underground being, some kobold called up from the depths and now allowed to retreat.

  Calvin shuffled forward; his eyes flickered downwards to the piece of paper Sam held in his hand, and to Stanley, looking upwards in turn at Calvin. He said nothing; just an enquiring movement of the eyebrow.

  ‘Hello, John,’ Sam said, and waited.

  ‘Hello there,’ Calvin said uncertainly.

  ‘I’d like to join Neighbourhood Watch,’ Sam said.

  Calvin stared. He scratched his head, first theatrically, in puzzlement, and then genuinely, as if by scratching he had brought on an itch. His scratching seemed to lift his Brylcreemed coiffure in one, like a trapdoor, and for a moment it stood up on the crest of his skull like a cock’s comb. He raised his other hand to his head, and smoothed his white hair down into its usual cap-like structure. Behind him, his wife Laura could be seen approaching again. Sam felt he had said the one magical sentence that would summon this household like a box of djinns, and make it blink at his command.

  ‘Well,’ Calvin said. ‘That wasn’t what I thought you were going to say.’

  ‘What did you think I was going to say?’

  ‘Not that,’ Laura Calvin said, in her low croak, from their sitting room. The front door of their house opened directly onto the sitting room rather than a hallway. It was a marker of social class on the Strand, whether your door opened onto a hall or a sitting room; a subdivision of a class that had already subdivided itself on geographical grounds. Sam knew, from occasional visits to these houses, that the wind from the estuary whipped under the door and chilled your ankles all year round, if you had no hallway. Calvin’s brown and green sitting room, gloomily lit, seemed to be filled with ill-assorted and oddly shaped furniture, as if at the depot of an unsuccessful antiques dealer, and gathered in the direction of neither a television nor a fireplace, nor with regard to each other. The chairs and tables and lamps, even, sat and pointed, and ignored each other.

  ‘No,’ Calvin said. ‘I didn’t think you were going to say that.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ Sam said, ‘I would like to join Neighbourhood Watch.’

  ‘It would be lovely,’ Calvin said. ‘But I’m not sure we really have room for any more.’

  ‘I’m sure you could squeeze me in,’ Sam said.

  ‘I don’t think we could,’ Calvin said.

  ‘Somebody sent us this letter,’ Sam said, producing it. ‘I wonder who it’s from.’

  Calvin peered, and flattened it out—Sam had been clutching it, and it had grown crumpled. ‘It’s from Neighbourhood Watch,’ he said. ‘It says so, there, at the bottom, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, I read that,’ Sam said. ‘But I wondered who wrote it. I would rather like to speak to the person who wrote it.’

  ‘Well, Neighbourhood Watch wrote it,’ Calvin said, apparently genuinely at a loss.

  ‘That’s right,’ Laura said from behind. ‘Neighbourhood Watch did.’

  ‘Well, I would like to come to talk to Neighbourhood Watch,’ Sam said. ‘When do you meet?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s really appropriate,’ Calvin said.

  ‘Or possible,’ Laura said, now coming up to the doorway. She was holding a mug with, unexpectedly, World’s Greatest Mum written on it. The Calvins had no children, did they? Or were they grown-up and gone away? For the first time, it occurred to Sam that, with his unlined pink face and smooth white hair, Calvin could be almost any age. But then, gathering himself, Calvin shot into one of his performances.

  ‘Oooh! No! Oooh! I tell you what—I tell you what, missus—no, go on, I’m telling you—there’s ever such a lot, I mean-to-say, there’s ever such a lot of them as would LOVE to come to Watch, as we call it. Ooh, we ’ave a laugh, ooh, we do. So you see,’ Calvin said, coming back into his normal, or his most-used tones, ‘we’re always having to say to people who want to join that it’s unfortunate, but due to pressures of space, this is your captain speaking with a health-and-safety announcement, the fire exits are at the rear, middle and front of the plane, we can’t let everyone come who wants to join Neighbourhood Watch. I’m sorry, and it’s unfortunate, but there it is.’

  ‘So who’s in Neighbourhood Watch? I thought Helena Grosjean was, but apparently she isn’t. And I know Miranda Kenyon isn’t, though she’d like to be, I dare say.’

  Calvin looked at him blankly, kindly.

  ‘I just wanted to know,’ Sam said, ‘who is actually in your Neighbourhood Watch group.’

  ‘Well, I am,’ Calvin said, with a laugh. ‘Obviously I’m in it. Look, I don’t think I can stand out here in the cold any more with the door open. The cost of central heating nowadays, it’s summink chronic.’

  ‘I don’t mind coming in to talk it over.’

  ‘That would be charming,’ Calvin said. ‘But Laura—my wife, here—she’s very allergic to dogs. Comes up in hives a quarter of an inch high. Purple. No, we can’t have your dog in the house, I’m sorry to say.’

  ‘Stanley can wait outside—’ Sam was in the middle of saying, but found that he was talking to a shut door, Calvin having said, ‘See you soon,’ and shut it in his face. There was a little rustle at the curtains—Calvin must have been the only person in the Strand still to have net curtains to shield his privacy and his wife’s from the passing trade. Sam wondered if he could be Scottish. On the window, on two of the small panes between the leading, there was the orange logo of Neighbourhood Watch, its shouty capitals, a logo of inspection and observation.

  7.

  The restaurant was too close to a tube station—in this case South Kensington. Another two hundred metres away, perhaps down a stuccoed avenue, and it would have found it easier to claim some kind of elegance, make a stake on a regular, satisfied and sophisticated clientele
. London was full of restaurants of the same sort as Sumac, named after an abstruse foodstuff, set up with an elaborately creative menu and the funding of a dozen of the owner’s friends from banks or the City. The old restaurant, which had managed to stay in business only a year and a half before succumbing to the lack of enthusiasm of Londoners for a Peruvian ranch-style restaurant, was gutted. A new interior in magnolia and grey, with slate surfaces and white lilies everywhere, glass urinals and translucent orange marble doors to the toilets, all this would be installed with the backing of the owner’s friends. But in the end it was too close to a tube station. The people who wandered in were tourists on their way to or back from the museums, and tended to be shocked when they saw the prices, and settle only for one dish and some water. The rich locals in their stucco terraces or their mansion flats, they tried Sumac once, said it was nice, said they’d be back, and then presumably went to a restaurant not so close to a tube station. Six months after opening, the white lilies were appearing only at weekends, and were still hanging about, browning at the edges, a week later. Mauro thought they would be better off trying the techniques of Paolo Crichetti, and just delivering food to the table that the tourists hadn’t ordered, and charging them for it whether they ate it or not. He had no idea why restaurant owners in London didn’t seem to do that.

  Mauro had worked at the restaurant for two months now, or maybe a little bit more. He had just started working there when he had gone away for the weekend with David that had ended so badly. Before this, he had been working in a pizzeria, and was keen to get away from the hot, noisy, oregano-smelling atmosphere. It was a good pizzeria, a gourmet pizzeria, one with well-dressed customers and with newspaper reviews in the window. Still, it was a pizzeria. Mauro thought of working in a crisp white shirt and black trousers, welcoming his favourite customers with a smile and dismissing the walk-ups with a shrug; he dreamt of working in a restaurant with a handsome blond sommelier with a black apron down to his ankles. London must be full of such places.

  A boy Mauro knew called Luis had told him about Sumac. It was being started up by someone he knew, an Englishman called Oswald Bond. ‘You should want to be in on the ground of this one,’ Luis had said, and Mauro had gone to see Oswald Bond. Talking to him, Oswald Bond explained that he wanted something stylish; he wanted something innovative; he wanted something exciting. Mauro signed up.

  Now, at this exact moment, Mauro felt terrible. It was his own fault. At first, Oswald Bond had promised, or seemed to promise, that Mauro could work whenever he wanted to, choosing what service he wanted to work and did not want to work. For the first weeks, Mauro had not worked the Saturday or the Sunday lunchtime services. But then Oswald Bond had said one week that he needed Mauro to work exactly those times. He gave the impression that it would be just for that week; but then, at the end of the following week, Mauro was put down to work the same shifts without any comment. Now he had worked for three out of the four last Saturday lunchtimes.

  He hated it, because the Saturday lunch service drew in, almost exclusively, a disgruntled and complaining crowd of tourists straight out of the museums, unable to find anything else, unwilling to pay Sumac’s prices. He was fed up of serving tables of seven a main course only, with nothing but tap water to drink, and a bare scraping of a tip at the end. Most of all, he hated it because it deprived him of his Friday nights; either a Friday night working, which gave the best tips and the nearest thing to a nice crowd Sumac ever saw, or a Friday night in the bars and clubs of Vauxhall.

  Now, he stood in Sumac, and felt terrible. The night before, not working, he had succumbed to a phone call from Susie. He had met her and her dyke friends at seven in a Vauxhall bar, and had gone on from there. At five, he had found himself shouting into Christian’s ear on a dance floor somewhere underground, somewhere under a railway arch, that he had to be ‘on’ in six hours’ time, as if that were the funniest thing in the world. ‘Darling,’ Christian had yelled back, ‘just have a disco nap, a strong coffee, a cold shower, and leave a line of coke on your dressing-table, baby. That’ll get you out of the door. The Gods of Gay, they’ll do the rest, baby.’ He had followed the advice, not leaving the club until the lights went on. Now he looked at himself in the horizontal mirror that ran at head height around the whole space of Sumac, and saw how terrible he looked.

  He was sweating slightly; his skin was blotchy and somehow both yellow and red; his eyes were bloodshot, and his hair had taken on a mad quality. A party of five Norwegians were giving their order. Two giant parents, a giant, massive-jawed girl and a seven-foot boy and, maybe, Grandma with her Nazi gaze. It was one thirty. Mauro had recited the specials for the ninth time, and guided the party towards the scallop and black pudding cannelloni the kitchen wanted to get rid of. He was alone on the service. Bruno, the English boy, the son of a friend of Oswald Bond who had been ineptly waiting for the last two weeks, had phoned in sick. Mauro doubted he would ever come in again. Oswald Bond, too mean or too constrained by the restaurant’s lack of success to call an agency for help, had said, ‘I’ll step in,’ but, as before, had quickly retreated to the bar, where he sat with what might be sparkling water.

  Mauro went to the kitchen hatch, handed over the miserly order, and felt he had to go to and do something about his appearance. ‘Table seven ready to order,’ Oswald Bond said reprovingly.

  ‘I’ll be there in a moment,’ Mauro said, going into the customer toilet. He had to do something. He splashed his face with cold water—he could smell himself, oozing the corruptions of last night, the pleasures, the old odours preserved and leaking in his flesh. He dried his face with one of the white towels kept in a pile by the sink. The single line of coke he had left to get himself going at ten that morning had worked, up to a point: he hadn’t been late; he had presented himself in a clean white shirt and a clean pair of black trousers. He couldn’t see himself getting through until one o’clock in the morning without a little more help. He felt for his mobile phone. But, as usual, he had left it behind the bar for safekeeping. Glen would come out to South Kensington with his bag of goodies, some time in the early evening, when Mauro would need it most.

  It was then, Mauro standing at the urinal, that the catastrophe happened. Pissing, he felt a fart building up, and he let it out. Instantly he knew his mistake, as a hot wet weight filled his underpants. He was drunk, hung-over, under the loosening effects of the drugs from the night before, and for the first time ever, he had shit himself. With an awkward shuffle, the piss still dribbling across the floor as he rapidly went, he pushed the translucent marble door of the cubicle open, and, almost before it was shut, dropped his trousers and pants to the floor. He had no idea what to do. He kicked his slip-on shoes off, then his trousers, then made a bundle of his underpants. He emptied them of their disgusting load down the toilet, and cleaned himself, standing in his shirt and socks on the cold stone floor. He could not clean the underpants, not in the sink outside with a customer liable to come in at any moment. He flushed the toilet again, and cautiously, retching slightly, he held the soiled underpants under the waterfall out of the rim. It did no good. There was no bin in the toilet; the underpants could not be worn again, could not be flushed away—these toilets were temperamental in their modern design and prone to blocking, and he would be the one who would have to unblock them, in any case. He could not leave the toilet with the soiled underpants in his hand, and the toilet offered no means of disposal. He was a man who had shit himself at his place of work. The bathroom door outside opened with its usual clang.

  ‘What are you doing in there?’ Oswald Bond said. ‘I can’t have this, Mauro.’

  ‘I’m not well,’ Mauro said. ‘I’ll be all right in a minute.’

  ‘I can’t have this,’ Oswald Bond said again. ‘You need to be out here, in a proper state, in exactly thirty seconds. You’re disappointing me, now, Mauro.’

  With a shuddering gesture, Mauro took the underpants and threw them up above the cupboard concealing the c
istern. He pulled his trousers up, flushed and left the cubicle. Oswald Bond was still there, his hands in his pockets, wearing a sarcastic expression.

  ‘Some restaurants measure the time their staff spend in the toilets,’ Oswald Bond said. He had made one of his effortless passes between mate-of-yours to hyper-efficient boss; it was never quite predictable when one of these would happen, but it was usually at some vulnerable moment. ‘I might start to think about that. I don’t know what you were doing in there. I don’t want to know how you spend your time when you go off for ten minutes alone in the toilet, because I think if I did know, I’d feel obliged to send for the police. Do you understand, Mauro?’

  ‘I was ill,’ Mauro said.

  ‘You were ill,’ Oswald Bond said. ‘Like all the other times. Well, consider yourself told. I don’t want to have to tell you again. And we can’t have you absenting yourself from the lunchtime service for ten minutes in the middle of the rush. It just can’t happen again. OK? Lecture over,’ he went on, disconcertingly switching back to his previous, indiscriminately friendly mode. ‘By the way, your phone was going a minute ago. I didn’t answer it.’

  In the end, he didn’t have a chance to look at his phone until the end of the lunch service and the departure of the last complaining Scandinavian. It wasn’t a number he recognized. It was a landline of some sort, but one from outside London. They hadn’t left a message. Mauro resolved to start looking for another job as soon as he had got himself back in Oswald Bond’s good books.

  8.

  The view composed itself slowly into six horizontals: sky, hills, mud, water, mud again, and the shoreline. It was a simple visual construction, and it coagulated out of a complicated blur. Catherine cried so often, these days. She had a full range of ways of crying; a set of categories she had explored from top to bottom. At one end there was the helpless tantrum, like being shaken by an outside force, where your joints and limbs ached and juddered; at the other there was the more or less constant access of moisture to your eyes. She felt, at best, as if she existed at the tender edge of a touching movie. The feeling of a tremulous beat somewhere in the chest, the gingery itch of water at the corner of the eye: she knew all about that. They sat, the two of them, on a bench in a small public garden on the Strand in Hanmouth. Catherine was returning from an intermediate state of weeping; neither the noisy nor the pathetic, but just a steady silent flow of water down her face. It came whether she thought of David or not. She had had no idea that she had loved her son as much as she had.