King of the Badgers

by Philip Hensher

  She held Alec’s hand. It lay there, morosely. In some time her tears came to a sort of end; the landscape composed itself. She fished in her old brown handbag by her side, creased and folded like a boxer’s glove, and tidied herself with a Kleenex. There were plenty more in there.

  ‘I’ll phone him again later,’ she said. ‘It was probably foolish phoning him at lunchtime. He’d be busy. It’s a small restaurant—they couldn’t afford to give him time off.’

  ‘He’ll have seen the number,’ Alec said. ‘He can call us back.’

  ‘I’d like to phone again,’ Catherine said.

  ‘I don’t like to see you getting into so much of a state,’ Alec said. ‘Best let sleeping dogs lie. He can get in touch with us. Maybe he just doesn’t want to—you know.’

  ‘People deal with these things in different ways,’ Catherine said, for the hundredth time; she had applied this maxim to the difference between her grieving and Alec’s, about the ways in which people greeted or avoided them—David’s death had brought an end to anything resembling a social life in Hanmouth. She knew about the Brigadier’s death, like a satisfied, hurtful carnival. Her grief was the object of communal shame, ignored, a kind of low-level and unsuccessful attempt to imitate what Hanmouth did best, apparently. Nobody wanted to do anything but cross the road or closely examine the house prices in estate agents’ windows when they saw Catherine and Alec approaching, two people who had been bereaved whom they did not know well. Bereaved in a rubbish way. Now Catherine applied her maxim to the unknown ways in which Mauro, someone they had met only once, for twenty-four hours, might be dealing between shifts with the death of his partner. They really had no idea; they only knew that his way was different from theirs.

  After that unexpected arrival of the police officers at their door, they had gone immediately to the hospital. How had they got there? She couldn’t remember. ‘His friend is there, too,’ the policeman had said gently. They had nodded. She and Alec had sat in the back of the car, not quite understanding. She remembered them riding slowly along the Fore street in Hanmouth, a stranger bowing his head to look inside at them. It was the foolish-looking old man who had once snubbed her, the one who knew everything that happened in Hanmouth, everybody that mattered here, and who had made it clear that they did not count. He lowered his head as men used to when a hearse drove past; but then he must have seen the two of them, white-faced, as if they were arrested criminals. A brief raising, self-satisfied, of the head, and he was gone again, perhaps to spread the word. When they got to the roundabout outside Hanmouth and the enormous roadhouse pub neither of them had ever been to, the car speeded up. She did not know whether she wanted it to drive fast or slowly; in stately grief, or to rush to her boy. And then they had got to that unfamiliar town and its unfamiliar hospital, a name on a map only, and had been taken straight past Reception, with its load of waiting patients, into a treatment room, and there was David. She had never thought to see him like this. ‘Where is he?’ she had said after a time. They had not understood at first. It was made clear to her that Mauro had gone. He had left the hospital. In the days to come, she constructed his journey: he must have phoned for a taxi, gone to the station, got the train back to London. She could not understand it. They had gone through David’s telephone, had called every name on it, and they had mostly come down to the funeral. They had not known where to hold it, and in the end had held it in Bideford. It was nearest to them, and to the hospital where David’s body had been held, and his friends—Richard, Dymphna, some others—had come down to it. It made a small crowd, a sad afternoon. She had spoken to Mauro, and he had said he didn’t know. Grief took people in different ways. In the end he had not come. What to do with the mobile phone afterwards? They let the battery run down, not wanting to switch it off for ever, and kept it in a cupboard, with all the other stuff.

  ‘Do you remember,’ she said eventually, ‘do you remember when we went to the Proms that time.’

  ‘Why are you thinking of that?’ Alec said.

  ‘It just came to mind,’ Catherine said. It was before they were married—the summer before. They weren’t even engaged. They had agreed to get married in the autumn, one Sunday afternoon in the park, and had married in April, on the second of April. ‘Can’t get married on April Fools’ Day,’ Alec had said. People seemed to take longer, these days. But before all of that, there was the Proms. Their 1960s were not the 1960s of pop festivals and free love and everything else, all that you saw on documentaries. It was a 1960s of living with their parents still, seven streets away from each other, of a good job and suits from Burton’s, of library books returned on time and her resentful sister acting as a chaperone; of an outing, in the summer, to the Proms. They liked it; Alec had been keen on jazz, but just as keen on classical music. People were then. It was an August night, one of the hottest she could remember or imagine, and they had driven up to London in his little Morris Minor, black and shiny. He had curtains in the back window, neatly tied back, a favourite joke of the time among the sort of people they knew, and she was wearing—she was amazed she could remember this—a red-on-white polka-dot dress, not quite miniskirt—an inch or two above the knee with a white plastic belt. White tights, too—she’d regretted those tights later, what with the heat. What would Alec have been wearing? A charcoal suit, probably, and—yes—a thin tie. She could remember taking it between her hands, later in the evening. In the hall it was as if steam were rising from the auditorium, from the students standing, pressing forward, marking their spaces. They had got seats. ‘I couldn’t stand,’ she said. ‘Not through all of that. I would faint.’ But she was saying that as they were taking their seats. Alec would never ask her to stand. He was always considerate like that.

  They loved Tchaikovsky, they had agreed on that, and there was his violin concerto, played by Ida Haendel. They’d heard her before; they loved her grand, enormous, serious face, and the huge noise she threw into the auditorium. And after the interval there was something they didn’t know, a symphony by Mahler. They’d loved that above almost anything. It was like storytelling; it was like the fairytale wanderings of a German shepherdess, going through travails and suffering, and coming out all right at the end. A week later, Alec had presented her with an LP of this very symphony; fifteen years later, he had come home with a huge object under his arm, all of Mahler’s symphonies, and for weeks they had listened to them, one after the other, vainly attempting to find again the magic of that hot August night in 1968, and Alec coming out with her, his face red and hot, his shirt even sticking to his body, and saying, ‘Wonderful,’ and she saying, ‘Truly wonderful,’ back. By the time he had bought that enormous box set, he had needed to apologize for spending his money on such a thing. They had loved music. And afterwards, on the way back to the car—how easy it had been to park in central London then, forty years ago!—the tune in her head, surging on after the lovely song finale, the ovations, the exiting, had made her seize him and, not caring, she had pulled him onto the bonnet of a perfect stranger’s car, and they had kissed for so long. The memory was sweet; it was combined with the thought that, of course, they’d had no car alarms then to set off. Now she thought of it, she did not think the tie had been narrow at all. He must have been wearing a kipper tie, one of the first. It had been fat in her hand as she pulled him towards her. She was sure of it.

  ‘What on earth made you think of that?’ Alec said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Catherine said. ‘It came to mind. All of it, all at once.’

  9.

  ‘The important thing,’ Kitty was saying, much later, ‘is to keep busy. Find yourself an occupation.’

  Everyone had gone, an hour or two before. Kitty had stayed on, at first bustling around tidying things up. But it hadn’t taken all that long, and finally she’d sat down and started talking. Of course, it wouldn’t do just to leave Billa on her own with the whole evening in front of her. They’d done the congregation and the guests, and in a while Kitty had
got on to the subject of Billa’s future.

  ‘What I found,’ she went on, ‘was that all of a sudden, I had enormous amounts of time on my hands. I honestly hadn’t realized how much time was taken up by just having a husband. Extraordinary. Really, when things are settled down, you must think about finding yourself an occupation of some sort.’

  ‘A job, do you mean?’ Billa said, trying to envisage herself behind a counter in a shop. ‘No one would give me a job.’

  ‘Oh, you’d be surprised,’ Kitty said expansively. ‘Not necessarily a job, though. All I meant was something to keep your hand in, a new skill, something to keep the grey cells ticking over. Learn a language. Take up painting.’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that,’ Billa said, aghast. The village was full of amateur painters, foisting their views of the estuary on each other, filling up their own walls in a manner Billa had always found depressing. Filling up each other’s walls with paintings best understood as threats, or hostages: still more depressing.

  ‘I’m sure you could, perfectly well,’ Kitty said, not having understood. ‘I was thinking,’ she went on, finishing what was in her glass. ‘More than anything, I would love to go to Italy some time. I was thinking perhaps of going, hmm, in the early spring?’

  ‘Good idea,’ Billa said. ‘Won’t be too hot.’

  ‘Awful to go on your own, though,’ Kitty said.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll cope,’ Billa said. She heard herself—and, after all, Kitty only meant to be kind, had only heard somewhere that you ought to give the bereaved something to look forward to. ‘Sorry. I just don’t see it happening. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be quite all right.’

  ‘Any more of this?’ Kitty said, waving her empty glass.

  Kitty’s interest was one thing, but Billa’s situation seemed to have turned her into a sort of public property, the concern of a considerable swathe of acquaintanceship.

  ‘You really ought to take something up,’ Kitty said one morning. ‘I can’t imagine what you do, all day long.’ They were in the little high street; Kitty had persuaded her to come out for a few small things.

  ‘Oh, I’m quite busy,’ Billa said. ‘Sam!’

  ‘Hello, Billa, love,’ Sam said, just coming out of the greengrocer. ‘I can’t stop. We’ve got friends coming round tonight and I haven’t done a thing. Are you two coming to the book club tomorrow?’

  ‘Gosh, I hadn’t thought,’ Billa said. ‘I haven’t got on at all with the book, I’m afraid. Off you go, then—you see, Kitty, I am busy. If I’d only remembered to read the book for the club, of course.’

  ‘I don’t mean that sort of busy,’ Kitty said. ‘Always good to take something new up. I just want to pop in here.’

  ‘Here’ was the little greengrocer that Sam had just popped out of. Kitty used it, saying as she so often did that one had to support local businesses if the supermarkets weren’t going to take over the world. Billa rarely bothered; she thought supermarkets were perfectly convenient.

  ‘Good morning,’ Kitty said, to the sour old pair who ran the shop, who said nothing in return. ‘Just a few things…’

  Billa stood there, making no attempt to look like someone who wasn’t waiting.

  ‘You might take a class in something interesting,’ Kitty said. ‘Learn to type. Or paint. Or there’s the amateur dramatics. Garlic.’

  ‘You might be right,’ Billa said. Kitty, as she spoke, was waving her arms around as if she had suddenly been struck with this inspiration. She had quite forgotten that she had said exactly the same things to Billa immediately after the funeral. An unfamiliar young woman with a small boy, ginger-haired and frail-looking, came into the shop behind them.

  ‘We’ll just have some apples,’ the woman said. ‘Golden Delicious all right?’

  ‘I only like Granny Smith’s,’ the boy said. They both had a flatly querulous London accent; holidaymakers.

  ‘Well, they’ve only got Golden Delicious,’ the woman said. ‘They’re quite nice.’

  ‘I can’t remember,’ Kitty said, as if she expected Billa to help her out, ‘whether I’ve got any eggs.’

  Billa made a noncommittal noise. The London pair paid for their apples.

  ‘On holiday?’ the greengrocer’s wife said, as she took their money.

  ‘That’s right,’ the woman said. ‘It’s nice down here.’

  ‘We like it,’ the greengrocer interjected.

  They watched the pair go; they were hardly out of the door when the greengrocer said, ‘Grockles. Nothing ever good enough for them.’ His wife laughed coarsely.

  Kitty didn’t seem to hear at all, but Billa flushed, as so often when someone let themselves down in her hearing. She’d only started hearing the word recently, and it had seemed the most repulsively provincial insult, a description of a Londoner only a real yokel could ever use.

  She had always bought food more or less indifferently in local shops, or in supermarkets you had to drive to. Kitty maintained that you ought to keep the local shops going, that the huge supermarkets springing up everywhere were destroying small towns and the tomatoes had no taste whatsoever. Billa went along with this, weak-mindedly, in general. ‘Do you know what?’ Kitty said now. ‘I’ve come out without any money at all. I’m just going to pop to the cashpoint.’

  ‘I’ll lend you the money,’ Billa said, and it was only a bag or two of stuff, but Kitty was out of the door, leaving her basket at the till.

  ‘That’s the second time that’s happened today,’ the greengrocer’s wife said.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Billa said, but then, clearly, she was not being spoken to. She might as well not be there at all.

  ‘What’s that, then?’ the greengrocer said.

  ‘Someone walking out, saying they’ll be back. Who was it earlier?’

  ‘That fat chap,’ the greengrocer said. ‘Lives with his friend, the lawyer. He’s a lord, too, they say. Like that, they are.’

  ‘They’re friends, are they?’ the greengrocer’s wife said. ‘And the boyfriend a lord and a lawyer, too. What a waste, I’d say.’

  Billa, standing there gazing at the bins of potatoes, felt all the invisibility that solitude, apparently, had conferred on her. She had heard Sam repeat exactly this story; the way that people referred to him and to Harry when there was no one around. It was as if the greengrocer were repeating a well-loved performance for the sake of an audience. But that was misleading, because there was no audience, not even her. This was the way that people always talked when there was nobody who mattered around them.

  10.

  She was almost outside her own house when she was accosted from the other side of the street. ‘Mrs Townsend,’ a voice said. Billa turned, and it was, unexpectedly, the woman artist who had come to the funeral. She’d thought she had seen her off. The woman was draped in blacks and purples; somewhere underneath there was a shape-fitting dress, but the surface was all shawls and drapes. She came across the road in an uneven, seesawing way, as if in something of a hurry; Billa waited, conscious of the need to be civil, briefly, avoiding the word ‘waddling’, even in her head.

  ‘How are you?’ the woman said.

  ‘I’m very well, considering,’ Billa said, in her unvarying formula. ‘Of course, it’s all been a very great strain, but I think I see my way clear now, thank you so much.’

  ‘That’s good to hear,’ the woman said. ‘I just wanted to say—I do hope you didn’t think I was intruding. Coming to the funeral like that.’

  This was so impossible a comment that Billa made no answer, other than moving her head to one side. Over the road, Kitty waved, returning from the cashpoint machine—Billa had quite forgotten about her, and had left Kitty’s basket unattended in the greengrocer.

  ‘I’m Sylvie,’ the woman said. ‘I thought you might not remember my name from before.’

  ‘No,’ Billa said. ‘That’s right, I’m afraid. I don’t remember meeting you.’

  Sylvie blew out her cheeks, emptied them, inhale
d noisily and fanned herself with the flippers of her hands, although it was not at all hot. ‘Well, no wonder,’ she began. ‘Of course, you wouldn’t remember. It must have been a great shock. It was me, when those yobbos bowled you over in the street a couple of months back—I picked you up and got you into the little cheese shop your friend runs—Sam, is it?’

  ‘Oh,’ Billa said. Of all things, she hated snubbing the most; the act of pretending you were too good to say hello to someone, to be ungrateful for that small deed of reaching across to another human being. Always had. In the humiliations and sore moments of the funeral, she had been led, against all her principles, to snub someone she’d thought she did not know. To dismiss someone’s kindness in such a way, that was not like Billa, she liked to think. She considered for a moment whether she could pass off her greeting at the funeral as an ordinary moment of gratitude; she did not remember her exact words, but knew from the way it hung in the air that she could not. ‘Oh, my dear, what must you think of me? I am so sorry. It was so kind of you to come to Tom’s funeral. And I never said thank you for what you did. I don’t know what I should have done—probably still be lying in the road.’