King of the Badgers. Philip Hensher
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pair of vivid splashy Vilebrequin shorts and flip-flops, straight from the pool, their girlfriends in spaghetti-stringed tops and sarongs over wet bikinis. They stared as if at celebrity, and spilled halfway down the street as far as the Co-op and the Case Is Altered, one of the better Hanmouth pubs, and evidently doing very well out of the influx of curious outsiders. One woman had come from as far away as London, it was said, though an excited report of travellers from Germany turned out to refer to some holiday-makers who happened to have stumbled, bemused, on the happy scene.
In the middle of the crowd, blocking the street, there was a police car. Somehow a path was got through to it. Heidi and Micky, guarded by police, got into the back. Micky was openly staring at the strangers staring at him. Each of them held up a camera phone to their faces over the policemen’s shoulders. The woman police officer in charge of the investigation got into the front, and the crowd, disappointed, parted. The car was permitted to set off. The chief constable, accompanied by a couple of officers, made his way as best he could through the crowd to his driver and car in the car park behind the community centre and the fire station. The stars of the show had departed. The audience, leaving the community centre, lost its focus of interest but not its excitement. Hanmouth acquaintances started greeting each other, quite happily. The outsiders, knowing no one, drifted away disappointedly.
‘Well, that was sad,’ Billa Townsend, the Brigadier’s wife, said to her friend Kitty. She spoke briskly.
‘I know,’ Kitty said, as if with wonderment that, of all the emotions in the world, Billa had happened by sheer chance to express the very one that she, too, happened to be feeling. ‘Awfully sad, really. Rather wish I hadn’t gone. Just to look at the poor mother—what she must be feeling, I can’t imagine. Terribly sad.’
‘We’re going to be late for Miranda’s book club,’ Billa said. ‘We’d better make a move.’
The pair of them, each with a string bag containing a book—the same book—and strong, cross, hairy old faces over their quilted blue or green sleeveless gilets, turned away from the community centre and down the Fore street towards the quay. Beyond that was the long line of Dutch houses where Miranda lived. The air of reckless festivity was strong in the street now that the police had gone. Outside the Case Is Altered, a dozen men stood and drank, smoking. None of them was known to Billa or to Kitty. A noisy record from the jukebox enquired, through the open window of the inn, whether someone wished his girlfriend was hot like the singer. Billa didn’t know why it was so necessary to make such a frightful din about everything nowadays, and Kitty, throwing everything into her answer, said that she knew. Three unfamiliar children, perhaps the children of some of the drinkers, did handstands without surveillance or restraint against the white-painted carriage arch, against the landlady’s trellis. It didn’t appear like a community in which a dangerous child-abductor was on the prowl.
‘It all seems so normal,’ Kitty said. ‘And us carrying on as normal, going to the book group just as we arranged before all of this happened, as if nothing had happened at all. Talking about the same book we were going to talk about.’
‘Well, I don’t know what we were supposed to do,’ Billa said. ‘Everyone always complains that they hardly have time to finish a book even with a month’s notice. We could hardly have changed the book to something more suitable, even if’ —the noise of the crowd was muted as they turned down the kink in the Fore street’s progress ‘—people really wanted to talk about a book with more relevance. A kidnapping story, I suppose you mean.’
That wasn’t what Kitty really meant; she couldn’t have said what she meant. Billa’s flat-fronted Georgian house, like a house front on a stage flat, came into view. They inspected it from top to bottom. The Brigadier stood in the window of the kitchen, conducting with one hand the orchestra on Classic FM, which was murmuring on the sill next to the scarlet pelargoniums. With the other, he was evidently ironing; he liked to do the week’s ironing on a Tuesday evening, and nothing much got between him, the ironing and Dvoák Evening on the radio.
He was deeply involved in his double task, and did not observe Kitty or Billa as they passed; neither did they try to attract his attention. He had had a lifetime of putting rifles together, of instructing others how to put rifles together, of walking down lines of men ensuring that rifles had been put together properly, and finally of confidence that the men had been properly trained and inspected before he walked a step or two behind Her Majesty, brimming with pride. In old age and retirement, he ensured that he maintained the orderly requirements of a lifetime, dressed with the neatness of an old soldier, and presumably had managed in the army to carry out small domestic chores when required. But little improvements in domestic items over the years had achieved the difficult task of reducing him to helplessness, and he struggled with steam irons and the programmes of modern washing-machines.
They passed on, and a new crowd outside the yellow-painted pub on the quay soon made itself apparent.
‘Have you read it?’ Kitty said.
‘The Makioka Sisters?’ Billa said. ‘Yes, indeed. We ought to have gone through it when we were supposed to rather than tramping off to Crimewatch UK. Now we’re just going to have to discuss it when we get to Miranda’s. I suppose it’s called keeping your powder dry, but I don’t care for it.’
From the upper reaches of the first house on the Strand emerged the sound of the Bach G major cello suite, soupily expressive on every attained top note. It was John Gordon, straining and sobbing over every unfulfilled promise of tune in the piece. At seven, every evening, before dinner, he always did this. Billa and Kitty knew what the piece was because it was John Gordon’s only piece, brought out at parties and dinners, at every invitation and carefully announced. Some people said it was not only his only piece but his only accomplishment in life. He had learnt it at school, many years ago, and at seven in the evening, every day, he opened the upper window and embarked on it, playing it through twice. But everyone knew the same errors would be in it the next day, unimproved by practice and the imitation of self-analysis.
The curtains at the next house, the drawing-room windows of which were sunk somewhat below the level of the pavement, were drawn tightly. Everyone knew why. The Lovells’ children had departed to the City, PR in Dubai, and that final difficult one to Oxford to read Japanese. Now, while the sun was still above the horizon and their children far away, the Lovells had taken to early-evening sex in the sitting room, kitchen or even hallway. Mr Lovell returned from his GP’s practice in Barnstaple and dropped his clothes in the hall; Mrs Lovell, abundantly fleshy, would come from the garden to meet him, wriggling out of skirt and blouse as she came. Tonight, the little squeaks of joy came with treble clusters of tintinnabulating piano chords, as if in improvised modernist accompaniment to John Gordon’s Bach next door. They were doing it in the dining room, on the keyboard of their untuned Yamaha upright. It happened to some people, that obsession with throwing their clothes off at an age when it would be best to keep them on. The Lovells’ invitations to view their holiday photographs were only accepted once, by the unwary.
Over the road, in the detached gardens belonging to each house, a dog sat before a white-painted hen house. He was entranced. Stanley’s long marmalade ears flapped to the ground, his doleful eyes on one chicken or another. They emerged, retreated, strutted like showgirls around Stanley. Stanley the basset hound belonged to gay Sam who ran the specialist cheese shop and his solicitor boyfriend, the Terrible Waste, Harry Milford—Lord Harry, properly—with the office in Bidecombe. The dog had a mania for forms of life smaller than itself, and could sit happily in front of the Kenyons’ chicken coop for long hours. The Kenyons had no objection; they did not believe what the older and more vulgar inhabitants of Hanmouth told them, that that there dog was scaring they hens into fits. Miranda Kenyon didn’t believe that sort of hen was much of a layer in any case.
At the very end of the Strand, where the road ran out and turned into a narrow stone pathway along a beach of mole-coloured mud for another two hundred yards, the last house,