Philip Hensher - King of the Badgers

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.

There was a square brick warehouse from the turn of the century on the quayside where a bus into Barnstaple waited, the driver sitting on the step with the door open, reading a thriller with some absorption. Three geese, like old womanly friends with no urgent occupation, stood in the middle of the concrete apron, sizing him up as a likely source of bread. The building must once have been a storehouse for the fish industry but now it turned out to be filled with antiques of every description. There were pretty old pubs whose names had to have some story behind them—the Case Is Altered! On the high street, blue, white and red bunting hung from side to side in high airy zigzags. It must have been for the Hanmouth Festival with a procession led by the Hanmouth Festival Queen 2008. Catherine and Alec read about it in a series of shop windows. Alec remarked that the procession would be a short one. The high street—the Fore street, as many Devon main streets were called—was a bare five hundred yards long.

There were two Italian restaurants. One had pretensions, the other gingham tablecloths and a pizza menu. There was a French bistro where everything, white tablecloths, white walls, glassware, cutlery, seemed to polish and reflect Catherine’s smile back at her through the windows. There was no Chinese takeaway or kebab shop, as far as she could see. There was a cheese shop, with a plump man in a blue and white striped apron, proffering wafery samples with good cheer to his customers. Best of all, there was a butcher. It was unexpected how butchers had become a means to register the life and independence of any English town. Until recently they had been an ordinary and unnoticed presence in a community of any size. Now they had become a thermometer measuring a body’s health, and the last butcher in St Albans had given up the unequal struggle with Tesco’s meat counter three years before. For no very good reason, they joined the queue in the Hanmouth butcher’s and bought two pounds of their homemade sausages. ‘We’re almost down to the last of the free-rangers till Tuesday,’ the butcher told the shopper before her. Catherine inwardly shivered for shame that the town in which she had made her home had not, it seemed, needed a butcher. The town was busy and jolly. On their way back to Barbara’s for a lunch of soup, bread-and-Wensleydale and a salad, Catherine and Alec agreed that if they ever moved from St Albans, this was the sort of place that they would like to live in.

Neither of them could pin down exactly when it was that they had firmly decided to move. Their growing seriousness about the idea had been marked by their growing engagement with the Hanmouth estate agents. At first they only looked in the windows of estate agents. Frustratingly, they did not display the prices of the houses at the upper and most intriguing end. Often, the grandest houses had their own glossy brochures. They soon graduated, in a series of interviews, to pretending to be interested in buying a house. Nosily, they went round half a dozen they could never have afforded, tutting and shaking their heads sorrowfully over the lack of a utility room, a library, a music room.

It was embarrassing to have to go back to the same estate agents, a month later, after a serious conversation or two, with different aims. They had to concoct a story that they had decided, after consideration, not to move down there permanently. (‘A permanent residence,’ Alec had said, overdoing it.) They now wanted a holiday home. Their invented objections gave way to real ones: plausible fishermen’s cottages, almshouses, inter-war semis dropped away. Too small, too expensive, facing east, facing west, too large, the worst house in a good area (embarrassment), the best house in a bad area (ostentation). A garden to keep up; a garage, which would only fill with junk. There seemed no objection that a property in Hanmouth would not meet in the most specific terms.

Added to these objections were the comments of David, their son. They had told him about their intentions only at that point. He had been dubious. He had gone on living in St Albans, though he worked in London and commuted every day. Perhaps he was not the right person to consult about any adventurous enterprise. They knew people in St Albans, apart from him. They were familiar with things and services thereabouts. What if something went wrong, what if someone fell ill? At home in St Albans, they would be surrounded by willing volunteers from their circle. In this town in Devon they’d taken a liking to, no one would even know either of them was ill. No one would think of helping out. They were getting on. These things had to be thought about.

These gloomy objections were evidently weighing in Alec’s mind when, for the seventh time that year, they found themselves in a Hanmouth estate agent’s. One of three. It was an unpromising day for viewing anything: rain at St Albans had turned steadily colder as they headed westwards, and by now the sleet was so thick outside that you could barely see the other side of the Fore street. Maria, the untidy woman in charge, hair flying and papers everywhere on the desk, like the White Queen in steady employment, had said over the telephone that there was a nice house which had just come on the market. Should she send them the particulars? Maria had giggled as she said this, and as she said most things, though none of them were at all amusing. They had driven down the same morning. Maria had been taken aback to see them, though Alec had definitely said, ‘We’ll pop over this afternoon,’ on the telephone. She hadn’t been able to find the keys at first: she knew she hadn’t popped them on the key rack, she’d just dropped them for a moment—scream of laughter—as she’d come in to take her coat off and run herself up a little cup of coffee, because she’d picked them up on her way in; Apthorpe Avenue was really the way she took from home into work—a small giggle. A Mozart piano concerto on Classic FM formed a backdrop to Maria’s comments; as she turned half her desk upside down searching for the keys, she was starting in on a description of the house, very nice, pre-war, a striking sculpture in the front garden, had been lived in by the same owner for nearly forty years, but he’d taken good care of it.

Catherine started to suspect and, as Maria continued, grew sure of it, that the house she was talking about was, in fact, a house she had shown them eight months earlier; it had come off the market without finding a buyer (faced west, seller immovable on price). It had, evidently, now come back on. Maria had forgotten or never knew that she had shown Catherine and Alec the house. As inspiration started to fail her, Alec began to interject with unhelpfully general observations: perhaps David had a point. Did they want to be moving to a town where they’d be making new friends from scratch? What if one of them had a turn of some sort? And then there was the question of security, wasn’t there? They’d hardly considered that. This was a rich town, but not everywhere near here was rich. What did they know about the burglary situation? Was it even safe to walk the streets at night? There were a lot of pubs, weren’t there? You heard about such things in country towns—it was as bad on a Saturday night as in St Albans, or so Alec had heard.