King of the Badgers

‘Gout,’ Sam said. The nice thing about Miranda was that you never had to explain a joke: she was quicker than any woman Sam had ever known to catch on to an elaborating absurdity. She could catch a principle. ‘And shingles.’

‘Shingles really isn’t amusing if you have it,’ Miranda said. ‘An old aunt of mine had it, and it was awful. Most of these things, it’s the old names that are so amusing, like the Shaking Palsy, which is Parkinson’s, isn’t it? I don’t know why they don’t think up a non-funny, anti-funny name for shingles that would mean you took it more seriously. As if psychiatrists had to say that their patients were loony, bonkers, round the twist and nut-jobs. Shingles sounds about as serious as freckles, and it’s no fun at all.’

‘Miranda, freckles can be terrifying,’ Sam said. ‘Much worse than Harry’s goitre, if it does turn out to be a goitre, which I seriously doubt. I don’t suppose any of them are actually enjoyable to get. Some of them sound funny, and some of them don’t. Goitre. Funny. Leukaemia. Not funny. Children used to get mumps, didn’t they? That’s a funny-sounding disease. Did Hettie get mumps ever?’

Miranda busied herself with some flowers on the walnut card table, and Sam saw that he had trodden on one of those occasional and unpredictable patches in Miranda’s life where she was not prepared to be clever or amusing. ‘I don’t know why you should know any better than I do. Is that Stanley out there again?’

‘Staring at the chickens,’ Miranda said. ‘They seem quite inured to him. If I were a chicken and there were an immobile great hound staring at my every doing from a foot away, I’d peck him on the nose. I haven’t noticed that he even stops them laying, though they won’t do it in front of him, which is what I guess he’s waiting to see.’

‘Like not being able to go to the loo with someone watching, I expect. I admire your hens’ composure immensely.’

‘Does Stanley sit and watch you on the lav in the morning, then?’ Miranda said. ‘Go on, you’re blushing, he does. I knew he did. Doesn’t it put you off laying?’

‘Please.’

Sam leant forward and tapped on the window. He meant to attract the attention of Stanley, in the fenced-off garden on the other side of the road. Stanley inclined to deafness, as basset hounds do. He made no response, his attention fully on the chicken coop. Or perhaps he did hear: the sound of knuckles rapping on windows followed him around, every day of his life. Just then, a woman was passing. ‘Woman. Came into the shop this afternoon. I’ve seen her around and about before,’ Sam said. ‘Bought half a pound of Wiltshire Gjetost and an olivewood cheeseboard for her new kitchen.’

‘Not a ghoulish tripper, then,’ Miranda said. Just then Billa and Kitty came to the door with their copies of The Makioka Sisters, each recognizable in a string bag, for the evening’s discussion. She went into the hallway and opened the door. For an odd moment Sam could hear her welcoming cries in two dimensions, from the outside and from the inside, like a two-woman chorus. Inexplicably, the woman who had waved at Sam came up behind Billa and Kitty. Sam went into the hallway, almost knocking over a Japanese lacquer table in his haste.

‘You don’t know me,’ the woman was saying to Miranda over Billa’s imperturbable green-quilted shoulder. ‘But I know you’re Miranda Kenyon. It’s nice to meet you. I live in the flats over there, on the top floor. With my husband. My name’s Catherine Butterworth.’

They were awkwardly placed. Sam relished these moments of embarrassing social disposition, and this one was almost unprecedented. Billa and Kitty were at the door, and could not be invited in without actively dismissing the woman. They stood there, half turned between Miranda and Miranda’s new friend, their smiles fixed and formal, not quite greeting anyone. Miranda’s smile in turn was general and remote. Probably, Sam reflected, never in her life had Billa been greeted with the words ‘You don’t know me, but…’

‘Hello there, Sam,’ Catherine Butterworth said, giving him a flap of a wave. He’d evidently told her his name, though he couldn’t remember doing so.

‘Hello, Catherine,’ he said. ‘Did you enjoy the Gjetost? Unusual cheese, that.’

‘Toffeeish,’ Catherine said. ‘Very unusual. We’re saving it for an after-dinner treat. I’ll let you get on. We’re having a little drink next week—next Saturday at six or so. Our son’s coming down to see our new place—he’s bringing his new partner, so we thought he’d like to meet some neighbours, too. Any of you. That would be delightful. Over there, in the block of flats—Woodlands. Silly name. On the top floor, number six—it’s the only flat on the top floor. Do come.’

‘On the top floor of the flats that spoil our view,’ Miranda said, once she had waved Catherine on her way and ushered Billa and Kitty towards the drinks table. A schooner of fino for Kitty, like wee in a test tube, and a gut-destroying but no doubt Colonel’s Mess-ish Campari and soda for Billa. Sam knew the clearing-out effects Campari had on Billa’s insides. He looked forward to the later stages of their Makioka discussions being accompanied by Billa’s thunderous tummy-rumbles. ‘I’ve never met anyone who lives there before. Couldn’t even identify them by sight. I can’t imagine what anyone was thinking of, throwing up a monstrosity like that between the Strand and the estuary. I think people must have been quite mad in the 1960s. It’s so out of keeping.’

‘We’ve been to the meeting,’ Kitty burst out.

‘Oh, God, how I envy you,’ Sam said. ‘What’s the latest?’

‘Yes, we must get through it before Kenyon gets home,’ Miranda said.

‘Is he coming home tonight, Miranda?’ Billa said. ‘I thought—’

‘Totally placed a tabu on any further mention of it,’ Miranda said precisely. ‘I don’t imagine we talked about anything else for seventy-two hours last weekend—people popping round to chew over it. Then phoning up. Then Hettie’ —voice lowered at this point— ‘actually coming out of her room and not telling us she hates us for once but wanting to know all the details. So’ —back to normal volume— ‘after three days of Heidi and Micky and Tragic China and the others—’

‘Hannah and Archie and, and, and,’ Sam said, counting them out on his fingers.

‘—Kenyon couldn’t stand it any longer and said he didn’t want to hear another word, not even if Tragic China were found camping underneath the blackcurrant bush in the back garden.’

‘Harvey,’ Sam said with satisfaction. ‘That’s the fourth one. Very ugly child. Unbelievable, really. You can understand why they didn’t have him abducted. Never knew a child could be both porcine and bovine at the same time. Wouldn’t have thought its face would tug at the heartstrings of readers of the Sun when they saw it. I thought the little girl was plain but, really, when you see the others, they were making the best of rather a bad job. It is fascinating, though, do admit.’

‘Simply gripping,’ Billa said. ‘I can’t imagine why Kenyon doesn’t want to talk about it all the time from the moment he wakes up. It’s quite put a pep in Tom’s stride in the morning, knowing that he’s going to bump into someone on the Fore street with some delicious new titbit or ingenious theory. Yesterday it was that the children were in charge of concealing China. No one would suspect them of conspiracy.’

‘And they were the last to see her,’ Kitty said. ‘Very good. She’s probably in the old Anderson shelter in the back garden, or something, getting smuggled chips through the garden fence. What I don’t understand is why the husband, or the lover, or the live-in, or whatever he’s supposed to be, chose the library of all places for his alibi. I mean, anywhere would have done. It simply looks so very peculiar for someone like that suddenly to develop an interest in books.’

‘Kitty, libraries aren’t for reading books any more,’ Sam said. ‘They’ve given all that away. It’s nothing but DVDs and computer terminals nowadays.’

‘And of course it’s the one place where, if he took something out, the computer records would show that it was him and that he’d been there at a specific time.’

‘Oh, Billa,’ Miranda said. ‘If he’d walked down Barnstaple high street the CCTV would show where he’d been. I wonder what he took out. Not The Makioka Sisters, I suppose.’

They speculated luridly about his reading or viewing material for a while.

‘I would have thought the unemployment office would have been a better bet,’ Sam said.

‘In what way?’ Kitty said. She was not always the quickest to catch on.

‘If I were someone like that,’ Sam said. ‘I would do roughly what he’s done. I would go somewhere recognizably official to prove my alibi. Not the library, that’s absurd. I would get it somewhere I could be expected to go to. The unemployment office, enquiring about my benefits, or something.’

‘And the mother, how’s she?’ Miranda said.

‘Simply terrifying,’ Billa said. ‘Chills the heart simply to look at her. Sits there playing with her hair, staring into space, unutterably blank. Like looking at a cloud drift across the sky. She has lovely hair, doesn’t she? Bored and boring, I should say.’

‘And new clothes from top to toe,’ Kitty said. ‘Out of the Save China fund, I should guess.’

‘Do you want another drink, Kitty?’ Miranda said.

‘Well, I don’t mind if I do,’ Kitty said. ‘It was awfully crowded—the world and his wife were there and then some extra, just for fun. Billa and I had to stand at the back and we counted ourselves lucky. People getting so overheated, too, calling for everyone’s heads to roll. Terribly silly and embarrassing, and John Calvin running everything so.’

‘There was a fight in the Case Is Altered last night, I heard,’ Billa said. ‘Tom bumped into the landlord on his morning constitutional this morning. He said they’d never seen or heard of such a thing in twenty-five years’ running the pub. Townees, he said.’

‘Grockles, they were calling them in the queue at the post office this afternoon.’

‘Sam,’ Miranda said. ‘What an awful, frightful, yokel-like word. Never let me hear you say anything so prejudiced again.’

Sam understood that by ‘prejudiced’ Miranda meant, as she usually did, ‘common’, and carried on. ‘A nice policeman came into the shop,’ he said, undeterred, ‘and he was saying that they were hoping, very much hoping, to make an arrest before much longer. He was pretending to question me about my whereabouts and had I recalled anything I might have forgotten earlier, but I know he just wanted a good old gossip really. And I said, “Have you got a suspect then?” and he said, “Even two,” and he didn’t wink exactly, but he made a sort of very winking kind of face without actually winking, if you know what I mean.’

‘I’m sure the little girl’s off safely in Butlin’s or somewhere,’ Billa said. ‘Dyed her hair and sent her off for a couple of weeks to enjoy herself.’

‘The thing I truly object to,’ Kitty said, ‘and I know this sounds trivial and I don’t care if it sounds a bit snobbish, but I don’t care about these awful people and I do care about this. It’s that the whole world now thinks of Hanmouth as being this sort of awful council estate and nothing else, and Hanmouth people like this awful Heidi and Micky people. Absolutely everything you read in the papers is about how they live in Hanmouth and, frankly, they don’t. They live on the Ruskin estate where I’ve never been and I hope never to go anywhere near.’

‘I saw a newspaper photographer in a boat in the middle of the estuary, taking photographs,’ Sam said eagerly. ‘Out there in Brian Miller’s ferryboat. Taking a photograph of the church and the Strand and the quay. That’ll turn up in the Sun as a photograph of Heidi’s home town, I promise you.’

‘As if that family could live somewhere like this.’

‘Or, really, more to the point, as if they would ever contrive a story like this if they did live on the Strand,’ Miranda said. ‘One may be cynical, but one does think that moral attitudes and truthfulness and not having your children kidnapped for the sake of the exposure don’t go with deprivation. It’s material deprivation that starts all this off.’

‘They’ve got dishwashers, Miranda,’ Billa said. ‘They’re not examples of material deprivation. But you’re right. You don’t hear about children disappearing from Hanmouth proper, do you? It’s just bad education, ignorance, idleness and avarice.’

‘And drugs,’ Sam put in. ‘Don’t forget the drugs. The policeman shouldn’t have been saying this, but he hinted very heavily that not only had the women been smoking drugs when they were supposed to be looking after the children, but the woman’s partner’s got some kind of criminal record for selling the stuff.’

‘What an awful story,’ Miranda said. ‘I can’t wait for all those drunks and mischief-makers and rubberneckers and fisticuff-merchants and journalists to call it a day and go somewhere else.’

‘I could wring that bally woman’s neck,’ Billa said.

Because belief in and sympathy for Heidi, Micky and their four children, one missing, believed abducted, ran very low among the membership of the reading groups of Hanmouth.

14.

Catherine had had such a nice half-hour in the shops of Hanmouth that afternoon. She had started with the Oriental emporium. There was hardly anything that could be described as a window display. It looked more like the random circulation of stock in the half-lit front. The door was hung with a bright purple and red throw, tied back. Out of the dark interior a jangle of temple bells and a whiff of what Catherine thought of as joss-sticks came—David had had quite a craze for the things at one stage, had been unable to embark upon his physics homework in the back bedroom in St Albans without them.

And then, saving it up rather, she’d gone into Sam’s cheese shop. She’d seen Sam around, walking his dog down the Wolf Walk, reading the papers on a Sunday lunchtime outside the pub on the quay with what must be his partner. She had identified him after a month or two as the owner of the attractive little shop, white-tiled inside with built-in display cabinets. He was often to be seen swapping lengthy stories with other Hanmouthites in the street, the newsagent and the butcher. He seemed to know everyone, and Catherine didn’t consider she would be a proper Hanmouthite until she’d made his acquaintance. He’d been delightful this afternoon: he had foisted the Wiltshire Gjetost on her and a Gorgonzola from a farm just up the road outside Iddesleigh, and something very unusual, a chocolate-flavoured log of goats’ cheese. ‘Made by lesbians in Wales,’ Sam had explained superfluously. And then, not being very busy, he’d asked about the bag she was holding, from the Oriental emporium, and then, very cosily, what she was doing in Hanmouth, did she live here? He’d even clapped his hands when she said she was refurbishing the spare bedroom. It was really quite without any character at the moment, just the previous-owner-who-had-died’s magnolia on the walls. It might even have been the builder’s magnolia, Catherine speculated; there would be no reason to alter that in the first owner’s mind. ‘Well,’ Sam had said reasonably enough, ‘I don’t want to pour cold water, but paint does yellow. It might even have been the builder’s white, forty years ago.’

‘I suppose it might have been,’ Catherine said, enjoying this banter. She wanted to liven it up, furnish the room, give it something resembling character before her son came to visit for the first time. He was bringing his new partner, too, about whom Catherine knew nothing.

‘And did they persuade you into buying their Buddha?’ Sam asked, referring to the sisters with the Oriental antiques. ‘A four-foot gold Buddha. Did you see it? They’ve had it for ten years. I don’t suppose anyone will ever buy it now—it’s almost a joke. Promise me you didn’t buy it.’ Catherine reassured him. ‘We shopkeepers, we do have these disasters, and then we’re stuck with them. So easy to get carried away, and now, I dare say, it’s quite an old friend. I don’t know what Lesley and Julia would do without their Buddha.’

Of course they had laughed together. She had been tempted to bring up David’s new boyfriend, but she thought that might be presumptuously making connections between them. She didn’t know the name of David’s boyfriend, and there was no reason to suppose Sam knew that she knew he had a boyfriend, so the conversation would run quickly into embarrassment. (Catherine was good, she considered, at anticipating conversational awkwardnesses like that one.) After an hour, she came home with some experimental cheese, an olivewood board, a ceramic butter dish ornamented with octopuses, squid, fish and smiling underwater anemones, as well as a charming glass from next door in a padded red cloth frame, decorated with gold embroidery and pieces of mirror. ‘Filling up the house with tat,’ Alec said, looking round from beyond the blinkers of his green leather wing-chair as she came in, but not unkindly. That was his customary response whenever she brought anything home.

So when she heard a rapping at a window and turned to see Sam, gesturing in her direction, she naturally waved back. It was only when he rapped again, and a dog—Sam’s dog—bounded past her that Catherine realized he hadn’t been trying to attract her attention at all. Of course Catherine knew Sam’s dog. She’d known Stanley’s name since before she’d known Sam’s. She had heard him calling impatiently after Stanley almost every morning as the basset hound lumbered off down the Strand. Finding out Sam’s name had been more of a challenge. She still hadn’t discovered his fairly handsome partner’s name. Eavesdropping on a Sunday lunchtime had produced nothing but an exchange of ‘darling’, rather edgy in tone.

She knew Miranda Kenyon’s name, however. When Miranda opened her door to the two ladies, Catherine found herself propelled into the doorway of the house. She could explain her mistake, be friendly, and at the same time offer an invitation to the little drinks she and Alec were having when David and his partner were there next weekend. They were planning to invite all the people they had made friends with since they arrived in Hanmouth. It didn’t seem to go quite as well as she had hoped. It was extraordinary that four sentences could congeal in the air and fall to the floor between strangers. But the gesture had been made. The awkwardness, in the future, might lessen. Catherine stumped up the little rise at the quay end of the Fore street, past estate agent, white-tablecloth French bistro and charity shop. She forced herself to think that Sam had been very kind to her, and friendly, too, that afternoon. They were not at all the same thing, kindness and friendliness, but he had shown both. There was no reason to suppose that she and Alec wouldn’t make good friends in this place.

Still, there had been rebuffs, which couldn’t be shared with Alec, him being a man and not very interested in the smaller details of social life. After a month or six weeks, she’d grown confident when faces presented themselves as familiar. She had started to say hello to them, and been greeted back. She’d even got to know a few names. Every face met before nine and perhaps ten must be a resident, she believed, rather than a tripper, and worth a greeting. The return of greeting had sometimes been enthusiastic, as with a lady with a small West Highland White Terrier on her morning rounds, out and about rather earlier than anyone else. Sometimes the return was more doubtful, provisional, and sometimes rudely withheld. There was an elderly man she saw almost every morning, tall and long-faced and sinewy, with a knowing, watery, foolish expression. He had a regular route: he picked up the paper and got some fresh air, as she did. Their rounds crossed at some point almost every morning. After a month or so of meeting practically every day, she ventured a greeting, a neutral sort of comment about the weather. It was her favourite sort of day. Blue-skied and blustery, the clouds galloping at a racehorse’s pace inland, the spring whiff of salt carried in the buoyant breeze from the ten-miles-remote Bristol Channel. The seagulls widely embraced the wind, wedged diagonally on the air, falling backwards and inland on the salt-swept air, and, walking over the salt-encrusted lawn of the little churchyard that was her shortcut, Catherine smiled and said, ‘Lovely day,’ to a familiar long-faced man. He looked at her directly, as if she were a tree or an animal of some sort, and said nothing. She had read in nineteenth-century novels about people being cut directly. Before she and Alec had moved to Hanmouth, she had been ignored or overlooked, but never cut in so blunt a way.

He was a horrible old man, as it turned out. Afterwards, she heard him laying down the law in the street, his false teeth loose, his loud, humourless Devon accent spitting over whoever he thought worth talking to. She knew people like that were proved unpleasant and not worth knowing by their parade of superiority and withholding of so simple a thing as friendliness. All the same, it hurt. You couldn’t explain any of that to Alec. He would always ask why on earth you cared. He had a point.

15.

‘That was a lovely town,’ Catherine had said, as they drove away from Hanmouth five years before. They had come from St Albans to visit Alec’s old secretary from the paper suppliers. She had retired down here with her husband. Alec and Barbara had always got on well in the office, but he and Catherine had been surprised by the invitation to come and spend a long weekend down in Devon with them. They’d had a lovely time. Barbara and Ted, her husband, lived in a whitewashed settlement around a harbour. You couldn’t call it a village. The harbour was a picturesque muddy lagoon, filled with leaning skiffs and old fishing boats. In their front garden, a rowing boat was planted with lobelias and geraniums. When they returned to St Albans, agreeing that they had had a lovely time, it did occur to Catherine that Barbara and Ted might be somewhat lonely in their prettily brackish nook. They hadn’t been greeted in anything but a professionally cheerful way when they went into the pub in the harbour. You might have expected more. It was the only pub in the village, and the village only had twenty or so houses in it.

Still, they had had a lovely time. Barbara had suggested they might like to drive over to the other side of the estuary to a small town called Hanmouth, directly opposite Cockering. ‘Very historical,’ Barbara said remotely. It gave off an air, even at a water-divided distance, of picturesque activity. It had a front of white-painted houses, a square-towered mock-Norman church flying a flag on a promontory facing Cockering over some steak-red cliffs, thirty feet high. It appeared martial and festive. On Thursday nights, if the conditions were clear, the clamour of bellringers going through their changes drifted over the estuary. They had arrived on a Thursday afternoon; at seven, Barbara had hushed them over a pre-dinner drink, and they had heard the distant hum and clanging, the mathematical variations blurring into a halo of sky and sea and seabirds. At night from Cockering, the town looked like Monte Carlo, its lights clustering like bright grapes, reflecting in the high water.

They went, and were surprised how quickly a Saturday morning passed. They had dawdled from coffee to market to bookshop. In the village hall, or community centre, there was a Saturday-morning market. The Women’s Institute sold cakes and pickles on one stall, the biggest and most prominent. Other stalls sold hopeful bric-à-brac, forced pot plants, low-skill craft product such as home-made psychedelic candles, macramé hanging holders or batik throws. When you got down to the jetty and the mooring places, there were boats both large and small, neat, shiny as refrigerators, elegant Edwardian craft with shining brass fittings holding them together like corsets, and squat, businesslike, bumptious tugs. Between them swans, geese, ducks, spoon-billed wading birds and alert-headed coots swam and dived, swimming out to possess the middle stream of the estuary. The boats tranquilly waited for their owners to return. From here, Cockering was impossible to identify or pick out.