I knew at once that it was one of those nights. The drink, such as it had been, was dying out of my brain and leaving a kind of sediment of irritation, vague discomfort and even remorse. It had not been—no, indeed—a bender or booze-up. By the exercise of special pleading I could have persuaded other people that my evening's consumption had been no more than reasonable with regard to the duties of a host: an English author entertaining a professor of English Literature from overseas. I could also have pleaded that it had been my fiftieth birthday and that we had been having, quote, one of those long, continental meals that are at the heart of European civilization, unquote. (Come to think of it I don't know if that's a quote or not. Call it a clitch.) But the indefatigable analyst of my character—myself, that is—would have none of it. There had been those drinks at lunch. They were the fatal first step, implying in themselves a desert period between four and five o'clock when one would feel not justified but urged, shoved, compelled by the process started at midday to bring the six o'clock hour of offering the guest a drink back to five o'clock, which in its turn—and so on. If I could congratulate myself on a degree of sobriety at half-past three in the morning, it was a minuscule triumph that most people would have considered a defeat.
And boring young Professor Rick L. Tucker would be there at breakfast! At the memory of him I started up in bed, then collapsed again with a groan. It was a small blessing to count, that he had no wife with him, or I should probably have made a pass at her or at the very least been suggestive. And we should drink again. No. I should drink again, out of opportunity and boredom, thus making a nonsense of the high moral stand, the teetotalism that had seemed so irrefrangible no longer ago than last Monday.
There was another thing. It was a black hole in my memory of the previous night, where the long summer evening had turned into night. It was not a large black hole—merely a blotch between the after-dinner drinking and—yes, now it was smaller, the black hole I mean, because on its very brink I remembered getting up yet another bottle, opening it, despite their protests and—doing what? I examined my throat, my mouth, my head, my stomach. It was impossible to believe that I had really made any significant inroads into that (fifth?) bottle. Otherwise my head would be … and my stomach would be … and the black hole would be …
It was at that very moment—and if I bothered to leaf through that pile of journals out there that I am going to burn, I could tell you the hour as well as the date—that I conceived a thought. The point where drinking can be defined as alcoholism is precisely where the black hole is recognized as part of it. I remember thinking, in the terrible clarity of early morning, that the symptoms also implied that the disease was incurable. For it was part of the running of the mind, the universal process. I sat up in bed, but slowly. The window was aglimmer. I moved into another emotional gear, another symptom, perhaps, a feeling of dry, hard factuality that probed my situation from every side, an army of unutterable law which in time might produce unthinkable horrors, as in all accounts of drug addiction. It was not impossible to envisage this very dryness and bleakness as a monster itself that was not yet visible—and would not, I thought with a spurt of real desperation, would not ever be visible if I could help it! I would fight the black hole, fight it on the beaches, in pubs and restaurants, clubs, bars, in travel, in the house, in the very damned delectable bottles themselves, hoping at last to find some pleasure without payment or, alternatively, a pleasure taken in calm, sober daylight rather than this stare so dry and hard—I was frightened, I remember, in a deep, hard way, an appalled way. No, no, I protested to the glimmering window, it can't be as bad as that! But the words of the wise man returned upon me. Remember that everything that can happen to a man can happen to you!
I took hold of myself. There is no such thing as universal insurance. Black hole there might be, but the first thing a bitterly sobering man would do would be to probe it, find a light to shine here and there until the hole was seen to be no more than a case of forgetfulness that must increase with the advance, year by year, of middle age. My sanity told me that there was a tool to hand. I had only to go downstairs, examine the four empty bottles and the fifth partly empty one, look round in the spirit of Holmes or of Maigret and reconstruct that period between dinner and bed from the evidence of glasses and bottles, spilt booze it might be, or perhaps mercifully not and I should find the fifth bottle still full with no more than a cork drawn—
At that, I heard Elizabeth turn over in the other bed with a sleeper's sigh. She would know—oh, yes indeed! Doubtless I should hear all in bad time; but why wake her and ask? The way to discover the truth was to creep down in dressing-gown and slippers, yes, and with the pocket torch which I kept at the ready by my bed because our area is notorious for power failures. Nor must I be fobbed off by any drunken efforts on my own part to conceal the evidence. I must interrogate the bottles. If it proved necessary, I must sneak out of the back door—no, the conservatory was quieter—get to the dustbin, ashcan, poubelle, whatever one chose to call it and, not to elaborate, count the empties. For the truth was that already I did not believe in the bottle still full but with the cork drawn. That would be a miracle and miracles, though they might happen, did not seem to apply to me. Yet, so enfeebled was I in mind rather than body that the thought of waking Elizabeth accidentally turned the prospect of getting out of bed into a test of will power like diving into cold water. I have never liked cold water.
It was at this moment that my wavering mind was made up for me. The rubberized lid of the dustbin outside the back door fell off. Somehow that made the whole issue clear. I was no longer a repentant drinker. I was Outraged Householder. Sir, how much longer in the guise of enlightened conservationism are we to endure the depredations of these clumsy creatures and at the same time run the risk of contamination by a disease once thought eradicated? Sir, while we must be mindful, sir—sir, sir, sir—
Bloody badgers. I twisted out of bed, hardly minding whether Elizabeth woke or not. The only gun in my house was an ancient but powerful airgun which I had acquired with a tin of pellets through circumstances too trivial and complex to be worth recording. Author—no, well-known author—no, damn it, Wilfred Barclay shoots badger. Was there a law against it? Something dating from King John or thereabouts? Could you not shoot a badger on your own land? My head was quite extraordinarily uncluttered, my hangover marvellously pushed into the background. I felt pardoned. Perhaps it was the possibility of killing something, the countryman's hereditary privilege. I bundled into my dressng-gown, shoved on my slippers. Stealthily I stole down the stairs, past the room where our guest slept his solitary sleep in the letto matrimoniale of the spare room. I fished the gun out of the cupboard by the dining-room fireplace, cocked and loaded it. I tiptoed into the warm conservatory, opened the door and peered round the corner.
Here was a dilemma. How do you shoot a badger when you can make it out as no more than an enlargement of a dustbin? The creature had its paws on the rim, its head down, as it searched nastily and avidly through our rubbish. It would be licking at scraps of paté and perhaps gnawing old bacon rind or the bone from a gammon. It was wild nature and probably gassable but only by the appropriate authorities. Then again (was there a chill in the air for all the time of the year?) were badgers dangerous—not only by transmitting disease, but actively, toothily, clawily dangerous? Would a wounded badger attack? Would a tickled-up badger or one with young (were there young with it?) go for my throat? The situation was not simple and was further complicated by the absurd. I was wearing an old pair of pyjamas and the cord of my dressing-gown was gripping me a little above where the pyjamas should have been gripping me but were too ancient for their elasticated top to do so. They were performing as they always did, even in contrary conditions. If I was losing weight, they slipped down. If I was gaining weight, they slipped down. I had the loaded gun in one hand, my torch in the other and no third hand for my trousers which now fell suddenly under my dressing-gown so that I only just caught them by clapping my knees together. It was, perhaps, no situation from which to face a charging badger. I recognized uneasily the hand of what I sometimes thought to be my personal nemesis, the spirit of farce.
There came a fresh sound from the dustbin. I began to shuffle forward in a complex manner, the gun in one hand, the other hand partly holding the torch in my pocket and at the same time hooked into my trouser top. A sudden breeze rattled the branches noisily in the orchard. I reached the dustbin at the exact moment when the badger, it may be, alarmed by the sudden sound, froze in its probing act. I faced it across the bin. The badger looked up and uttered the only really "strangled cry" I have ever experienced outside fiction. This cry was the beginning of a high sound expressed in the funnies as glug or gulp. The dawn-lit face of Professor Rick L. Tucker rose before me beyond the further rim. I ought to have been embarrassed for him but I wasn't. He had bored me and intruded, he had shown every sign of prying, of making a professional meal of me. Now I had caught him in the act of the unthinkable. I spoke very loudly. If this woke up the whole world, I implied by my decibels, why should I conceal the fact that I had found a full professor of Eng. Lit. rifling my dustbin?
"You must be very hungry, Tucker. I'm sorry we didn't feed you better."
He made no sound at all. I could see the kitchen door was open behind him. I had no free hand with which to point. I gestured with the airgun and that commanding gesture tightened my finger (unaccustomed enough to guns, these days) round the trigger. The gun went off with a report that in daytime would have seemed no louder than a cork popping but in the dawn sounded like the first shot of D Day. Tucker may have given another strangled cry for all I know, but all I heard was the shot, its echo and the cries of what sounded like all the birds for miles. Tucker turned and moved clumsily as a badger into the kitchen. I hobbled after him, switched on the light, shut the door and stood the gun beside it. I sank on to a stool on one side of the kitchen table and, as if an interview or a continuation of the last one was inevitable, Tucker sank on to a stool across the table from me. My own farcical situation and incompetence changed my irritation into fury.
"For God's sake, Tucker!"
There was a smear of some food or other on his cheek, marmalade and a tealeaf or two on the back of his hand. It was evident how he had rummaged—even opening the plastic bags that were put out to catch the dustmen or, as Tucker might say, the Sanitary Engineers, in what I usually called our village festival. Tucker's right hand held a mass of rumpled paper, papers I had thought disposed of safely only twenty-four hours before. There was a torn scrap of paper hanging on his bedrobe, a scrap with childish scrawls of writing on it.
"God, Tucker, you are the most— Do you suppose I throw away—? Well—"
I remembered with sudden unease. It wasn't that simple.
"What you've got there, Tucker, is what's commonly called fan mail. I don't get much but what I do get is worth less than a good honest toilet roll. You can take one of those with you if you like."
"Please, Wilf—"
"And you've cut yourself. There's broken glass in that dustbin."
He rocked on the stool.
"Shot …"
It was like hearing a strangled cry for the first time. It was like hearing the word "shot" for the first time.
"Christ!"
I leapt to my feet, took a step and grabbed the table to save myself. My pyjama trousers fell round my ankles. I kicked them off as the ghastly seriousness of the situation flashed in on me. It was a peripeteia to end all peripeteias. From being indignantly in the right I was now monstrously in the wrong.
"Here. Let me see."
"No, no. I'll be OK."
"Nonsense, man—here!"
"Guess I'll make out.'
I grabbed the belt of his bedrobe, pulled the knot loose, then dragged the whole thing down from his shoulders. A densely hairy chest came into view, then a narrower shrubbery leading down to an even more densely haired nest of privates.
"Where is it, for God's sake?"
He said nothing but swayed. The bedrobe dragged down his arm from thick upper arm to thick forearm. I nerved myself for the bloody revelation. I got the bedrobe down to his wrist. There was a bruise on it and a scratch. A trickle of blood led down to the back of his hand.
"Tucker, you fool, you're not hurt at all!"
As if on cue the kitchen door opened, stage left. Elizabeth came in, surveyed Tucker's hairy nakedness and my discarded pyjama trousers.
"I don't want to be fussy but it is rather late and extremely difficult to get to sleep or stay there. Could you two men make less noise about it?"
"About what, Liz?"
"About whatever you're doing."
"Can't you see? I shot him. He was at the dustbin, ashcan, trashcan. The badger— Oh God, I can't explain!"
Elizabeth smiled with terrible sweetness. "I've no doubt you will, given a little time, Wilfred."
"I thought he was a badger. I fired the airgun accidentally, you see—"
"Yes, I do see," said Elizabeth charmingly. "Well if you are going to continue, please don't frighten the horses."
"Liz!"
She bent down and picked up a scrap of paper that had fallen from Tucker somewhere. With one hand up to her hair she turned the paper over, read it silently at first, then aloud.
"… longing to be with you. Lucinda."
She turned the paper over again and sniffed it with delicate connoisseurship. "And who is Lucinda?"
Then, as if she had switched channels, she became the perfect hostess. She had to be assured that Tucker's now concealed hairiness had not suffered. She indicated that the whole thing was the sort of joke she was used to and enjoyed. Quite soon she left us still sitting at the table. My hangover was back, increased and only made endurable by the depth of fury I felt.
"I wish to God I had shot you!"
Tucker nodded submissively, willing to be shot in the cause of scholarship, even conceding my right to do it, marvellous me. He was prepared to concede my wonderful right of control over everything in the wide world except the words I had written or received, which were by their nature, no, by my nature—oh, what the hell? Even now I can remember my hatred of Tucker, apprehension over Liz and anger with impossible, daft Lucinda. Stir into that fury with myself and sheer blazing rage at the farcical improbability and implacability of the Fact. Beyond all the contrivances of paper, manipulations of plot, delineation of character, dénouements and resolutions, there, in that real world, real dustbin, the quite implausible actions of individuals had brought into the light of day a set of circumstances I had thought concealed from the relevant person and finally disposed of. Nor, in all this, had I the comfort of any morality, only immorality.
"Tucker."
"You were calling me Rick, Wilf."
"Listen, Tucker. Tomorrow you were leaving. I mean today. You are never coming back. Never, never, never, never, never."
"You make me deeply unhappy, Wilf."
"Go to bed, for God's sake!"
I put my elbows on the table and my forehead in my hands. All at once a black despair descended on me.
"Go to bed, go away, get out. Leave me alone, alone—"
He answered me out of the depths of his reverent absurdity.
"I understand, Wilf. It's the Burden."
At last the kitchen door closed. Sheer self-pity was filling the dark hollows behind my eyelids with water. Lucinda, Elizabeth, Tucker, the book that was going so badly—the water spilled into my palms the way the blood had trickled out of Tucker. In the trees the dawn chorus was in full, joyous swing.
Presently I opened my eyes. Yes, of course I should have known. The evidence had been staring me in the face. It stood by the sink, the bottle I had opened that I couldn't persuade anyone to drink. It was empty. By its side stood another one. That was empty too.
Immediately my hangover became desperate. I hunted about for pills, stole some of Liz's that had been effective before. By the back door the dustbin fell over. Furiously I staggered out. A black-and-white creature with a bristly back was running along by the river bank, making for the mill dam where it could cross into the woods opposite us. The dustbin, ashcan, trashcan, poubelle, the evidence, the incriminator, lay on its side with a trail of household rubbish, refuse, cartons, bottles, bits of meat, eggshells strewn from it all the way along the wake of the badger; and in the mess, scribbled, typed, printed, black-and-white and coloured—paper, paper, paper!
It was too much. The village festival, that weekly collecting of all our yesterdays, must look after itself. I crept, as I thought, softly through the house. I opened the door of "our" bedroom, in blinding daylight. Elizabeth turned over.
"I'm not asleep."
"Look, Liz—"
"'Longing to be with you. Lucinda.'"
I was too miserable to speak. I gathered the eiderdown from my bed and found my way, half-blind, to the hole I sometimes call my study. The dawn chorus had died away and I knew that the sounds of Monday morning would begin long before my head was anywhere near rescued from ruin. It was at that—well, not moment but juncture—that I realized something not so much with a start as with a convulsion. There were torn photographs in the dustbin as well. Why had I gone through those boxes to rid myself of old shames, my past, and dumped them in the dustbin instead of burning them? Why had I told Tucker? Why was he such a dedicated, such a determined, single-minded fool? Somewhere in all that spilt rubbish, crumpled, torn, smeared with jam or fat—now there was no knowing who in the household, our daily, or out there, the dustmen, or milkman—or lying in a badger's stomach or its sett: the point was that Rick L. Tucker and a badger with their dawn antics had put me in danger of losing my wife and my dignity at the same time. The assiduity and humble determination that had seemed comic at first now seemed to threaten me like a disease. It was as if all paper had become sticky by nature so that whether it was lard or marmalade you could never rid yourself of the stuff, once committed to it. It was flypaper and I was the fly. It was the Venus Flytrap, the Sundew. It was those footsteps in the sands of time that I now saw I preferred not to leave behind me.
