Philip Hensher - King of the Badgers

‘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.

‘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.