Philip Hensher - King of the Badgers

‘The police-brutality shows?’

‘I mean the police shows on the telly. I always watch them. But if they asked you in real life, one would probably have to say—’

‘“I haven’t a single solitary clue.” Of course one would.’

‘Or just “I expect I was cooking dinner, or we might have been watching some nonsense on the telly, though I can’t remember what it was one had been watching.” ’

‘There’s Sky Plus nowadays. Record and watch later. One couldn’t rely on that as an alibi. A murder detective would see through it immediately.’

Caroline looked at Kenyon’s red eyes in his jowly and humourless damp face. He was an odd fellow to have thought all that through.

‘But luckily,’ Caroline said, ‘Miranda’s a marvel about all of that. A date and a place booked weeks in advance. And then she writes it all up afterwards in her diary, I’m sure someone told me. Marvellous, the energy to write an entry in your diary every day. I wouldn’t have the energy even to do half of what she does, let alone write about it all afterwards.’

‘I expect she enjoys doing it,’ Kenyon said drily. ‘Here’s the train. Do you want a hand with your bags?’

Miranda, Kenyon’s wife, was marvellous, everyone agreed. Her house, at exactly the right point in the Strand where the picturesque, in the form of old fishermen’s cottages lived in by gay couples, began to give way to the imposing line of mercantile mansions, was a marvel, renewed every year. There might be more valuable houses in Hanmouth, but when she and Kenyon had bought it, five years before, it was the highest price ever paid for a Hanmouth house. Her drawing room had no taint of the rural, still less of the estuarine, but was rather defined by a Wiener Werkstätte desk in steel, an icy Meredith Frampton of a chemist holding a white lily and resting his hand on a bright array of test tubes, and two Mies van der Rohe black leather chaises-longues with liquorice-allsorts headrests, in the crook of which first-time visitors tended to perch like elves on the inside of an elbow. (Returning visitors had learnt their lesson, and made for one of the three less distinguished but more comfortable armchairs.) At the door there was always a collecting box for an African cause; a small shelf in the hallway held some classics of Miranda’s professional interest (Regency women poets), Miranda’s two books on the subject, this year’s and last year’s Booker shortlist. There were also usually a couple of Harry Potters or similar pre-pubescent epics—not to suggest Hettie’s reading, since she clearly didn’t do any, but to indicate that Miranda was not an intimidating intellectual but a girl at heart with, just below the surface, a well-developed sense of fun. Often some of these were signed copies, since Miranda spent a whole week every summer at the Dartington literary festival. Later, the deserving few would be decanted upstairs to the study, the others donated to the lifeboat charity or the air-rescue service, to sell for a pound or two in one of their many shops.

Miranda had a grey-white Louise Brooks bob, and severe black glasses, oblong like a letterbox; her necklines squarely suggested the unspecifically medieval. With what she could alter, she tried to impose corners, lines and geometry on a general appearance otherwise curved and bulging to a fault. She was aware of the dangers to a woman of her size and age of flowing red and purple velvet, of ethnic beads and the worst that Hampstead Bazaar could do. She would not, like most of Hanmouth’s women, be inspired by Dame Judi Dench on an Oscar night, and she dressed, as far as possible, in the black and white lines and corners of the fat wife of a Weimar architect. Kenyon was used to being told what a marvel his wife was; he did quite well, all things considered.

Reading groups, local groups, charities, and a party three times a year. It was obvious what Miranda thought of herself in her lovely and expensive home. Most people agreed she was marvellous, though wondering how she and Kenyon stretched to such a house on the salary of a civil servant and a university lecturer. Kenyon himself had lived for so long in proximity to the marvel that, like a waiter working in a restaurant with a view of the Parthenon, he seemed years ago to have stopped decently appreciating it.

‘What did they see in each other?’ Hanmouth asked, when Miranda wasn’t in the room—running late, usually. Over a long, green-baize-covered table, all of them in possession of a too-elaborate agenda produced by the committee’s word-processing expert, or standing about at a party in a garden in the summer, or craning their necks backwards in the direction of a neighbour and fellow book-grouper in the row behind as they waited for the curtain to go up on the Miranda-produced Hanmouth Players production of The Bacchae or Woyzeck , they would put the same questions. How did they meet in the first place? How did they afford that house—was there money in the family? What were they like when they were young? And what—this above all—did they do or talk about when no one else was there? Hettie didn’t seem enough to sustain their interest or their occupation. Bold speculations about their all-enveloping sex lives, unspoken, filled the air; and then the lights went down, the curtain went up, and Hanmouth concentrated on a production of Marat/Sade in the community hall.

Kenyon was not there during the week; it was just Hettie and, people imagined, Miranda being understanding but firm with her over the dinner table from Monday to Thursday. It was a surprise to Caroline to see Kenyon on Barnstaple station on a Thursday night. He worked in London. ‘For an NGO,’ Miranda would say, not always to the perfect comprehension of those who had asked. ‘He’s been donated for ten years, a solid commitment by the Treasury.’ People envisaged Kenyon, reduced to two dimensions, being pushed through the slot of rather a large collection tin. Kenyon would smile, and explain that ‘seconded’ was really the term for the way the Treasury had concluded it could rub along perfectly well without him for the next decade.

Hardly anyone knew or understood or bothered to enquire what it was Kenyon did for a living. It was something to do with AIDS in Africa. That was an improvement, Miranda would confide, on the Treasury. Of course, she would say, when Kenyon worked at the Treasury, one knew in an abstract and uncomprehending way that he did something very important. It was something to do with the balance of payments or with incomes policy or whether interest rates were going to go up or come down—why, she went on, did interest rates go up but come down? The choice of verb was interesting: it was as if we human beings existed at a sort of base rate—at zero—that we were the nothing that interest rates pretended to improve upon, and what would happen if interest rates ever came down to zero and looked us in the face? Yes, our mortgage repayments might be less murderous, she supposed—but why those comings and goings, one really couldn’t say—and why interest rates when of all the utterly dread and drear and tedious and unforgivably…

That was Miranda’s style of conversation, and very good of its own sort it was, too. Kenyon would smile graciously and in a generally abstracted way, never pointing out that ‘balance of payments’ and ‘incomes policy’ dated Miranda very badly to her era of courting and seduction, when she had last paid serious attention to Kenyon’s explanations of what he did for a living during the day. The Treasury hadn’t touched interest rates for eight years when Kenyon was donated to the NGO. On the other hand, everyone knew what Miranda did: she was always ready to explain about post-colonial theory.