Philip Hensher - King of the Badgers

‘How are you finding—’

‘Are you at the same school—’

‘I’m sure Miranda would want you to have—’

‘Goodness, isn’t this nice—’

Michael himself stood in the doorway, not allowing himself to come further into the house. The doorframe grazed his temples. His mouth hung slightly open to show his perfect American teeth. ‘I don’t see why…’ the voice from above cried, the last word turning into a wail. There was a brief Miranda-ish rat-a-tat. Her words were unclear but the commanding tone put an end to the argument.

‘And here’s Hettie!’ Miranda said, from the top of the stairs. Behind her Hettie made some kind of yodelling groan. Hettie was thirteen, and a well-built girl. Her face seemed organized around a newly huge nose. Her knotted hair fell about her features. She came to the bottom of the stairs holding her right elbow in her left hand, pressing her broad bosom into one mass. With her other hand, she pulled at her hair. Some experiment had been taking place this afternoon with green eyeshadow and rouge, placed centrally on her cheeks.

‘Hello, Hettie,’ Sam said. Hettie spent enough time in the shop demanding free samples and slivers for him to greet her. The others followed suit raggedly or heartily. She muttered something in response.

‘Have you met Michael?’ Sam said.

‘Well, why don’t you go upstairs?’ Miranda said. ‘Show him your things. You can watch telly in the bedroom, if you like.’

There was a moment when it was not clear whether Michael or Hettie would go along with this suggestion. They all held their breath. It was as if a military officer had issued a command to a band of unruly and potentially violent natives out of nothing but bluster. But this time the natives seemed to obey. Hettie turned, hardly looking at Michael, who followed her. ‘—know why they made—come downstairs,’ she muttered.

‘Thank God for that,’ Miranda said, almost before the door upstairs was closed with a perhaps excessive firmness. ‘I did think that we’d have one more year of peace before all that started. I do blame puberty.’

‘It starts so very much earlier than in our day,’ Kitty said.

‘I didn’t begin on all that until I was fifteen,’ Billa said. ‘I’m sure you were the same. One didn’t think it quite the thing to be much earlier. But now…’

‘You hear about girls of nine or ten beginning,’ Kitty said.

‘I can’t imagine,’ Billa said. ‘I want to ask what their parents must be thinking of, but I don’t suppose there’s anything you can do about it.’

‘Well, I do think it’s nice to see a girl maturing into a young woman like that,’ Sukie said, aghast, accepting a glass of lime and soda water. ‘Those little growing pains—goodness, I’m sure we all had them and were able to laugh about them afterwards. I know my mother—’

‘Well, it sounds awful, but I do wish we could send them away on their thirteenth birthday and get them back at twenty to hear all the funny stories,’ Miranda said. ‘I know that’s not awfully motherly of me.’

‘I know my mother—’ Sukie continued.

‘There are things called boarding schools,’ Sam said.

‘I could never do that,’ Miranda said. ‘We just couldn’t send Hettie away like that.’

‘Well,’ Sam said, getting up and pouring himself another drink, ‘we could all chip in, I suppose. Want a top-up, Billa?’

That wasn’t what Miranda had meant. ‘Has Michael eaten, or should I take some sandwiches up?’ she said.

‘He has eaten, and some sandwiches will be very welcome all the same, I’m sure. When I was his age—of course, that was when I was drinking, I remember my mother—’ Sukie said.

‘Good, I’ll do that,’ Miranda said. She got up and went into the kitchen, leaving Sukie to tell the story of her juvenile nights with the vodka bottle.

The house had been extended in most directions by the previous owner. Behind the frontage, three rooms had been knocked into one sitting room; a dining room went off to the right of the hallway, not often used. The kitchen at the back was a large addition, steel and glass in a steel-and-glass shell, and lit up like seaside illuminations at night. Miranda, Kenyon and certainly Hettie were not great ones for sitting in gardens, and the loss of half the garden to this marvellous kitchen didn’t seem to concern them. Twice or three times in the summer, Miranda would don a floppy hat kept specifically for the purpose. She would go and sit on one of their four deckchairs with a gin-and-tonic and a copy of a novel by Virginia Woolf. There she would stay until the doorbell rang, and she could be discovered in that position. As far as the outside went, she preferred to walk the streets of Hanmouth and look upon the estuary and its birds. You could not meet up by chance with friends and acquaintances if you sat on your own in your garden. Upstairs there were three bedrooms and a study with a futon; above that, the previous owners had converted the loft into an indeterminate space. If you were any more than Kenyon’s height, you could not stand upright in the converted uppermost room other than along its central spine, under the eaves.

When Miranda had taken the sandwiches and a large bottle of some radioactive fizzy drink upstairs— ‘I know… I’ve just given up trying to give them anything healthier, and they wouldn’t drink squash out of a jug, anyway’ —she refilled the glasses, brought out other oval plates of Marmite pinwheels, bruschetta, vegetables, dips and bought-in miniature fishcakes and Scotch eggs. Reluctantly, they left the topic of Tragic China—they had returned to it, almost without wanting to.

‘Well,’ Billa said. ‘The Makioka Sisters .’

She stressed it in an unusual way, and when Miranda began the discussion, she took care to stress the o .

Half an hour later, Kenyon, washed, brushed and hungry, came downstairs to fetch something for his solitary supper at the kitchen table. He paused at the half-open door, wondering whether to go in, to tell them about the murder he believed he had seen at Paddington station, perhaps even to ask whether he might put the television on to see if there was anything on the news. He heard his wife say, ‘Well, when Kenyon and I were in Japan two years ago…’ She was speaking with confidence. She had got into her stride. He thought of the radio in the kitchen, and the news at nine o’clock.

When Kenyon and Miranda were in Japan, two years ago, they travelled first of all to Kyoto. There were reasons for that. Miranda had proposed that they see the historic parts of Japan before they saw anything more contemporary— ‘To do it in order,’ she said. She had researched not in guidebooks but in historical studies of the period, in works of art history, architectural analysis and garden history, many of which she had lugged home from the university library as soon as the airline tickets had been bought. She also researched online, asking travellers who had been to Kyoto where they recommended staying, what out-of-the-way places they should visit, where they might like to eat, all the time making allowances for the national origins and evident literacy of the recommender. In the end, Miranda set one of her graduate students to compile the information she had gathered in this complicated way into two separate folders, one green for Kenyon, one red for Miranda, and handed Kenyon’s to him in the departure lounge at Heathrow airport, once they had left the car in the long-term car park. Guidebooks were beneath Miranda; if she ever took one, she would be careful to consult it only in her hotel room, and decant any relevant information into the back of a small diary bound in soft leather like a ballerina’s practice shoes. She would be physically incapable of walking the streets of a historic city with a guidebook in her hand.