King of the Badgers

20.

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—’

‘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.

21.

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.

Hettie had been left behind. In fact, it might be thought that the trip to Japan was a sort of celebration, a kind of honeymoon, to mark the moment that Hettie, at eleven, was able to take her own holidays without her parents. The school had arranged an outward-bound week on Dartmoor. Some kind colleagues of Miranda’s who worked in the library had offered to take Hettie for the second week. They had a daughter the same age, and Mabel was going on the same week on the moor. Hettie did not object any more than she would have to anything else. Kenyon wondered whether they were truly friendly, and previous attempts to bring Hettie and Mabel together had not been much of a success. They had been sent upstairs together, and had come down together, without making any kind of friendship. Still, Kenyon reflected on the failed family holidays from the last ten years, characterized by sulking from one corner or another; Hettie’s refusal, the previous summer, to admit that the Sicilian baroque was as dramatic and entertaining as most authorities believed. Or there was the summer before that, when Miranda had first put a brave face on, then satirically descanted over her agreed fate of spending five days at Disneyland Paris. She’d enjoyed it in the end more than Hettie had. Miranda had managed to keep up the monologue about semiotic and cultural imperialism from one end of Main Street USA to the other. There must have been some pleasure in that. Hettie had only wanted to go because her classmates had gone, and hadn’t really cared for the giant exaggerated animals poking their fat plush fingers in her face. Kenyon thought about these two failed holidays, and it seemed to him that their holidays together had never worked, and that Hettie’s festival independence might be something worth celebrating. He wondered afterwards where it was that he might like to go, though.