King of the Badgers. Philip Hensher
to do than hang around here. “I like your bag,” ’ he quoted.
‘You never know what people are going to say,’ the policewoman said reproachfully. ‘In these situations.’
‘You know what people aren’t going to say,’ the driver said. ‘Or shouldn’t. Lovely bag. What a thing to say. I think she thought he might give it to her if she said she liked it.’
‘Tragic Heidi,’ the policewoman said. ‘It was a nice bag, though.’
‘Glad I’ve got something else to do now,’ the driver said. ‘I don’t think I could have stood much more of those two. And what’s his name—why are we driving him about?’
‘John Calvin,’ the policewoman said. ‘You don’t have to like any of them.’
‘Just as well,’ the driver said, slowing down for the Ruskin roundabout. ‘If I were Micky—’
‘I know what you’re going to say.’
‘If I were Micky,’ the driver continued regardless, ‘I wouldn’t go on about how the police ought to open up the sex-offenders register quite so much.’
‘Do you think she knows?’
‘About Micky? I wouldn’t have thought so. Micky doesn’t seem very clear about it himself.’
‘What was it again?’
‘Indecent exposure. Two twelve-year-old girls. Not very nice at all. Not for the first time, either. Four years ago.’
‘Well, we don’t have to like them,’ the policewoman said.
‘Just as well,’ the driver said, turning into the station car park.
Kenyon came in and excused himself quickly, saying that he would come and say hello properly once he was more presentable; Billa and Kitty helped out by saying how exhausting and overcrowded that London train always was. ‘The most extraordinary thing…’ Kenyon began, then seemed to change his mind, and went upstairs rapidly. He might come down or he might not, they knew. On the rare occasions when a book club meeting took place and Kenyon was there, he generally said hello, then went upstairs for the rest of the evening, exactly like that. In his wake followed Caroline, who had walked down from the station, she said, with Kenyon, only popping in at her house to drop off some shopping from Barnstaple; she’d had quite a day of it, and what about all those awful people in the Fore street?
The next to arrive at Miranda’s was Sukie, Miranda’s American colleague. The university operated an exchange programme every year. A small liberal-arts college in Kansas had once funded a literature professor to examine the letters of Bryher, now in the basement of the Old Library at Barnstaple University. No one had ever looked at the leavings of the lesbian poet before. The Kansas professor proposed to do so, not because of any great interest in Bryher but because it seemed to be an untouched archive a hell of a long way from Kansas, with someone aching to fund it.
In practice, the archive proved too inextensive to justify a programme on the scale envisaged by the Kansas institute, and the professor grew bored. The small Barnstaple faculty took to inviting him out to lunch and dinner and, after a dropped suggestion or two, including him on the teaching programme. (This was in 1973, when things could be done in this informal way.) After a few months, he and the department’s Chaucer expert—but it could have been almost anyone—started to have an affair. One thing led to another, and the visiting professor went back to Kansas with the sad information that the Bryher archives were more substantial and potentially much more important than anyone knew. He conveyed an image of grey stacks, receding into the middle distance of a dusty basement interior, lit by flickering fluorescents. It was a great stroke of luck for a small and unnoticed college like Quincunx, Kansas. They congratulated themselves on forging links with so ancient and distinguished a foundation as Barnstaple University. The Quincunctians, who on the whole were well-read and inquisitive people, piqued themselves on the connection. For them, having a link with a place not far from the place that the man came from who interrupted Coleridge while he was composing Kubla Khan was as good a connection as any. Bryher, whoever she was, was an added bonus.
Small and unnoticed Quincunx might be, but it was very well funded. In two years, a proper exchange programme was up and running. The English found it a useful way to pack off the younger and more Yank-struck members of the faculty for a year. The Americans liked to come, to soak up, they said, the theatre and the Sights. They didn’t mean the Hanmouth Players or the abject university theatre, struggling through Hay Fever or Oedipus Tyrannus. Nor did they mean, evidently, the statue of the Crapping Juvenile in Hanmouth or the Romanesque parish church with twelve neo-classical marble placards of alto-rilievo nymphs weeping among bulrushes and the like, all memorials to Regency slave-owners. They meant the Shaftesbury Avenue and a girl out of Friends starring in John Gabriel Borkman and the usual doomy Holocaust-installation stuff out of Tate Modern, which they could have found in Kansas anyway.
There had never been an American exchange professor who hadn’t gone through his entire year behaving as if Devon were a suburb of London. You had to travel three solid hours from Quincunx College to the next theatrical offering or one of those scraps of Corot that so pepper the North American continent, and three hours by plane to glimpse a soprano singing a single note in the German language on an operatic stage. A mere two hours on the train to see Simon Russell Beale in The Cherry Orchard seemed like a short hop into real quality.
The thrilling founding adultery had long since run its course, though the Chaucer expert was now not a waif-like youth with a tied-back swatch of black hair falling over deliciously lickable olive skin, but a grizzled boyfriendless ancient with bags under his eyes and a badly advised combination of balding top and pepper-and-salt ponytail, given to looking at himself in the mirror and mouthing the never-to-be-forgotten words ‘Deliciously lickable’ to the reflection. The book on the Parliament of Fowls and the long-awaited reunion with the big-cocked Kansas aesthete would both have to wait until he retired, the year after the year after next. Since then, the visiting Quincunctians had by tradition set up shop in Hanmouth. The letting agency kept a three-bedroomed red-brick Edwardian villa for each arriving American family, and they usually liked it. Since her own arrival Miranda, too, had kept a place in her book club for an American. This one had written twenty-three articles and a book about Sylvia Plath, and was a recovering alcoholic. She had turned down the offer of a drink at her very first social outing in Hanmouth, and in the same breath asked if anyone had the number of the Barnstaple AA. It was important to keep in touch, she had said, sipping brightly at her sparkling water.
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ Sukie, said, coming through the door. She was talking about the figure with her, her elder son.
‘Of course not,’ Miranda said. She did think that the boy—Michael, was it?—could probably be left on his own. He was fifteen, six foot three, ripely and malodorously pubescent. What was wrong with him? Was he a pyromaniac, not to be trusted with an empty house that contained a box of matches in a drawer and a desk full of notes on… Rossetti, was it? ‘Does he want to sit with us—no, of course you don’t, Michael. I’ll get my daughter Hettie down.’
There was something in Michael’s demeanour as he was led into the hallway that suggested that he knew Hettie already. His posture, as he walked forward, was curved and bent, as if actually backing away. Sukie went into the sitting room confidently, greeting the others. ‘And this is Michael—Michael, come on in.’
From upstairs the noises of insistence and complaint could be heard joining in response. They all looked upwards for a moment at where the floorboards creaked. Before the sounds could turn into specific and probably embarrassing words, they all started talking at once.
‘How are you finding—’
‘Are you at the same school—’