King of the Badgers - Philip Hensher

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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.

      Kenyon, Miranda said, had gone on to something where at least you could see where the good was being done. Who knew whether anything was being improved, what end was being served by the vagaries of monetary policy? (‘You don’t mean monetary,’ Kenyon said, though it was impossible to tell whether Miranda meant monetary or not, surely.) At the AIDS non-governmental organization, there were clear villains and clear heroes. There were Roman Catholic cardinals in Africa who told lies to their flocks about rubber prophylactics. And on the other side, there were orphans. The Treasury had been like that once: there had been Thatcher, the witch, and monetarism on the one side, destroying people’s lives and cackling over it, and on the other, the miners. Those moral contrasts seemed to have gone on holiday for the moment. In more recent times, there had been no cardinals or orphans at the Treasury; it all seemed so vast and trackless nowadays.

      At the time Miranda had been voluble about Kenyon’s change of career. She had gone on talking about it ever since. Through a useful mechanism, the Treasury had gone on matching Kenyon’s salary and had agreed to regard him as being seconded to Living With Aids (Africa) for five years in the first instance. In a moment of exuberance, Miranda had led him to a bank, told an unverified white lie or two, and walked out with a mortgage six times their combined salaries, with which they had moved from a fisherman’s cottage to the wide bright house on the Strand. Four years had gone by, and it was as if they had always lived there. Kenyon, in private, would occasionally bemoan their lack of savings, the way things seemed to run out towards the end of the month. It was lucky they had principles about not educating their daughter outside the state system. But the house was an unarguable good. And more to the point, nothing had been said by the Treasury about Kenyon’s imminent return. For some reason—some guilty reason, since Kenyon was so able and likeable—it often occurred to those she spoke to to wonder whether the Treasury might not have been keen to get rid of Kenyon for some reason. But surely not. Miranda said she hoped Kenyon would stay for the ten years they were now anticipating. It did her so much good to think of what Kenyon did for a living.

      The train was crowded and talkative. Kenyon and Caroline squashed into the same seat with their various bags piled up on their laps, facing forward. In a line, spread out along the aisle, seven teenagers called out. They were going to the Bear first—no, the Pincers; but one had told Carrie they would be in the Jolly Porters and they knew she’d lost her mobile, so what about that then, what were they going to do about that?

      ‘These people,’ Caroline said, shifting her bag of shopping further onto her knees. She meant to be heard. ‘I don’t know what they expect to see when they get to Hanmouth.’

      ‘The most extraordinary thing,’ Kenyon said. ‘As we were pulling out of Paddington, a young man got out a gun and started firing into the crowd.’

      ‘Oh, no,’ Caroline said. ‘On the train?’

      ‘No,’ Kenyon said. ‘On the concourse. I just glimpsed it as the train was pulling out of the station. I haven’t seen a newspaper and there weren’t any announcements, so I don’t know how serious it was.’

      ‘How dreadful,’ Caroline said. ‘That sort of thing seems to happen so much more often nowadays. What a lucky escape you had. I can’t imagine what these people are doing

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