The Enemy of the Good

by Michael Arditti

  Although his recent split had left him so wary of physical contact that he had even shunned the circle dance, he accepted at once, arranging to meet Mike after dinner in the Aduki Room, and spent the rest of the day in a frenzy of anticipation that was hard to reconcile with the knowledge that Mike had trained in shiatsu expressly to help out on the retreats. To his combined relief and regret, the massage was legitimate. He disgraced himself only once when, with Mike manipulating the base of his spine, he confirmed the claim that it was the seat of suppressed emotion by bursting into tears. He was glad of the chance to turn over, at least until a gentle pressure on his nipples threatened to provoke a more humiliating release. By a supreme effort of will, he was able to contain the stirring under his towel so that it expressed a healthy vigour rather than a blatant need.

  That need was satisfied the following night when Mike invited him to leave Lentil for a tent in the glen. Clement had not slept under canvas since he and Mark camped out in Wells on their eleventh birthday, zipping together their sleeping bags in all innocence. With Mike he discovered a new kind of innocence, one that was knowing but not calculated, where passion wiped out the past and rekindled lost pleasures. He had never felt so free from the confines of his body. His consciousness grew so vast and his senses so heightened that he speculated on the nature of the mushrooms in the evening’s soup. But the only magic ingredient was Mike. Their lovemaking was imbued with such meaning that he began to contemplate a future beyond art. Which made his disillusion all the more acute when, after waking him the next morning with a kiss and a bowl of muesli, Mike went rowing on the loch with friends. He told himself that it showed strength – even nobility – of character for Mike to honour his existing commitments, a view he revised when he was abandoned again after dinner. For all Mike’s friendliness over the rest of the week, he was unable to banish the suspicion of having been the dreaded ‘mercy fuck’.

  Back home he responded by turning the retreat into a dinner-party anecdote, accentuating the absurdity of the rooms which now became Baked, Broad and Butter, of the heterosexual woman so desperate to identify with the victims that she had had affairs with two haemophiliacs, and of the mountainous lesbian cook who had sworn never again to be a sex object for men. The tactic worked until he received a phone call from Mike who, as facilitator, had access not only to his address, date of birth and next of kin, but also to his hopes for the week. He presumed that a stray glance at ‘to restore my faith in my fellow man after a bitter break-up’ must have pricked his conscience, since he invited him to dinner in Brixton on any Thursday before Christmas. The memory of their night under the stars was potent enough to dispel his doubts. Displaying a dignified reserve, he accepted for a date three weeks later. When the time came, he was so anxious to remain in control that he masturbated an hour before he left the house.

  His pre-emptive strike failed, however, when they rounded off the surprisingly tasty shepherdess’s pie and brown rice pudding by going up to Mike’s room for some green tea. After slumping on a beanbag, he agreed that he would be more comfortable on the bed. He sat on edge, on the edge, as determined to keep his feet on the floor as a thirties film star, but no sooner had Mike placed his hand on his thigh than he advanced the action by several decades. As tongues darted, fingers stroked and bodies deliquesced, he realised that their rapport in the tent had been no accident. Finally, their passion sated with a frequency he had hitherto ascribed to barroom myth, he laid his head on Mike’s slick chest and challenged him to defend his capriciousness on the retreat. Mike demurred, insisting that he was a free agent and that Clement must take responsibility for his own emotions. Although stung by his defiance, Clement was soothed by his tone, detecting a conflict between words and feelings. Over time, he found that Mike was content to put his feelings first.

  He, in turn, was completely besotted. He loved Mike’s looks: the rugged, open face and square jaw; the sea-green eyes and brilliant smile; the pepper-and-salt hair – cayenne pepper in line with his Celtic roots. He loved his powerful frame, solid without an ounce of fat, that put all the pumped-up musclemen to shame, and the riot of freckles on his arms, chest and back which, with uncharacteristic coyness, he refused to let Clement paint. He loved his passion for teaching, which he sustained in the face of interfering politicians and a politicking headmaster, of obstructive parents and destructive pupils, even the one who, high on his grandmother’s anti-Alzheimer’s pills, had plunged a knife into his thigh, leaving a jagged scar. He loved his social commitment and his willingness to make fun of it, as when he hung a Meat is Murder poster alongside one urging Eat the Rich.

  ‘Does that include me?’ Clement asked.

  ‘You’re the dish of the day,’ Mike said, before taking a bite out of what, in deference to Clement’s father, he described as the parson’s son’s nose.

  For three years they commuted between Regent’s Park and Brixton. Clement longed for Mike to move in, but he was loath to force the issue since he knew that what was for him the clearing of a few shelves and the emptying of the odd cupboard was for Mike a seismic shift. Events conspired in his favour when the Brixton household plunged into schism and Mike was voted out. Clement repeated his offer, presenting it as a practical solution to the problem. Mike was not fooled, but he agreed to a six-month trial, which had so far been extended by eight years. Clement had never been happier and yet, faced with the reality of his infection, he wondered if happiness was just another word for self-delusion.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It’s madness even to think of it. Me, a father! But for a moment it seemed to be something I could do: for Carla; for my parents; for Mark.’

  ‘Haven’t you done enough for him already?’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I don’t need to spell it out.’

  ‘Please do. I can be very slow.’

  ‘You shouldn’t spend the rest of your life feeling guilty. Mark died. It was a tragedy. You lived. That’s the way things are.’

  The flaw in Mike’s argument, which Clement was quick to point out, was that he had felt the need to prove himself – to justify his existence – even when Mark was alive. He admitted, however, that the need had grown more urgent since his death. He had been determined to convince everyone, starting with himself, that it was not the better twin who had died. Mark had been so decent and frank, so healthy in every respect, engaging fully with the world rather than keeping it behind a shield of canvas. For all his parents’ even-handedness, they must have realised that, had Mark been the one to survive, they would have had grandchildren. All he could give them were pictures which, however much they brightened their walls, would never touch their hearts.

  3

  The journey to Oxford was as ever tinged with melancholy. The carriage was cramped and airless but, for Clement, the real discomfort lay not in his seat but in his head. Whichever route he took, he couldn’t hope to recapture the idyllic childhood he had shared with Mark and their younger sister Susannah in the charge of the most benign of parents. On paper it was hard to imagine a more mismatched pair than his father, an Anglican bishop of county stock, and his mother, a Polish Jewish anthropologist, whose The Eden People, a seminal study of a Stone Age tribe, had been credited with inspiring many of the protest movements of the sixties and seventies. But, for all their differences of background and belief, he regarded them as the perfect couple, at times too perfect for one eager to demonstrate the strength of his own partnership. He remained in awe of the love that had been at once the bedrock of their careers and an inspiration to their family and friends.

  They were the lodestone of his life, the fixed point from which he determined his identity, and yet of late he had had a disturbing sense that the balance of dependency was shifting. This was his first trip home for two months and his guilt at his absence was compounded by a more corrosive guilt at its underlying cause. He couldn’t bear to picture his parents changing. He could accept their growing old – not even
the most dewy-eyed sentimentalist would expect them to hold back the clock – but not their losing what was, in every sense, their distinction. He remembered his unease about a boy at school who was younger than his nephew and feared the far greater anomaly of a father who grew younger than his son.

  He was met at the station by Mr Shepherd, the gardener and handyman who, with his wife, had lived at Beckley since his grandparents’ time. The one short and wiry, the other tall and stout, they might have walked straight off an old-fashioned seaside postcard, but the physical incongruity belied what, at their recent golden wedding, Mr Shepherd had shyly described as ‘fifty years of congenital bliss’. Both now in their seventies they showed no sign of retiring, although their duties had been so reduced that their wages doubled as pensions. Mrs Shepherd had Susan and Jilly from the village to help her in the house and Mr Shepherd had young Charlie Heapstone in the garden, whose fondness for working shirtless in all weathers was one of the strongest incentives on Mike to visit. Mr Shepherd rarely drove any more, but he insisted on making an exception for Clement, who soon began to wish that his sense of loyalty were less acute. As they hurtled down narrow lanes, the sharp bends fraught with peril in the gathering dusk, he was forced to feign exhaustion to keep his driver’s mind on the road.

  ‘Safely home, Mr Clement,’ Mr Shepherd said, as they shuddered over the cattle grid and swerved down the drive, whose length bore witness to his forebears’ desire for seclusion. He felt his customary rush of admiration for the park which their founding father had landscaped with complete confidence in the family’s future, dotting it with classical statuary in a bid to obscure the novelty of his wealth. Clumps of crocuses and snowdrops were early heralds of spring, while the yellow trumpets of winter jasmine cascaded over the kitchen-garden wall. The Queen Anne house loomed benignly before them, its façade unmarred by accretions, its perfect proportions attesting to the builder’s faith in his own rectitude. Looking back from an age in which impermanence was the common condition of life and doubt the orthodox viewpoint, he longed to trade places with people who believed in order, both human and divine, and who even expressed their dissent in exquisitely measured prose.

  Entering the hall, he tried to recapture the emotion it had inspired in him on boyhood visits to his grandparents, but he was crushed by the weight of expectation. Not even Bonnard could have used a palette as bright as his memory. The house itself had scarcely changed, but the child’s enchantment had given way to the adult’s reserve. He was greeted first by Ajax, his parent’s collie, who jumped up to nuzzle his chest, and then by Mrs Shepherd, who met his kiss with her usual diffidence.

  ‘The Bishop gave us the magazine article about your Harvest Festival picture in New York. They did you proud.’

  ‘Did you like it? Collages never photograph well.’

  ‘It was grand. Quite what a Harvest Festival should be. I remember when it was all about offering the fruits of the earth to the Lord. Now it’s “no perishables, just tins that can be sent to Comic Relief.”’ She snorted and smoothed her apron. ‘I stuck it next to the Two Marys in the album.’

  Feeling a pang at this latest sign of her devotion, he promised to call on her for a proper chat in the morning. Then he hurried into the drawing room where he found his mother, father and sister nursing drinks in anticipation of his arrival. His mother rushed towards him, exuding such vitality that he was ready to discount all his fears. As he prolonged their hug, she gazed at him with a quizzical air.

  ‘How’s Mike?’ she asked.

  ‘Well,’ he replied. ‘Busy. He sends his love.’

  He moved to his father, who was sitting by the fireside in the wingback chair that had served as a fortress for Mark and himself at a time when anything over four foot high was an adventure. He leant down and kissed his cheek, grateful that no misplaced reticence had forced them to resort to handshakes. He turned to Susannah, whose butt-filled ashtray betrayed her own unease at returning to the bosom of the family. In appearance, she resembled their father. They had the same blue-grey eyes, long nose and dimpled chin (his father claimed that they had the same russet hair, although it had been years since he could produce any evidence), whereas, in both colouring and features, he and Mark took after their mother. Susannah looked drained and he suspected that, for all her success, she remained unfulfilled. He longed to draw her out but knew that the competitive, at times even combative, air which from early childhood she had adopted towards both her brothers would prevent her admitting to any disappointment.

  ‘Hiya sis,’ he said, ‘how’s life among the A-list?’

  ‘I’ve just won the contract for the new Weston tea campaign,’ she replied tersely, as he pressed his cheek to her lips.

  ‘That’s brilliant,’ he said, mortified that his attempt to show interest in an alien world had sounded like a snub.

  ‘She’s a very clever girl,’ his mother said.

  ‘Thanks, Ma,’ she said dryly, as if refusing to credit her mother’s praise for any intelligence that was not academic. Clement felt a surge of sympathy towards her. The indulgence she might have expected as the youngest child had been forfeited by having twins for her older brothers. She had always felt undervalued and, despite having built up a thriving PR business, claimed that no one in the family took her seriously. In private, Clement acknowledged the charge. Despising the relatively tame publicity campaigns he was forced to undertake for his own work, he found it hard to summon enthusiasm for her promotion of an airbrushed film star or pop group, and his parents were even more confused.

  ‘Why do they call themselves Hiroshige?’ his father had asked of one of her New Rave bands.

  ‘It’s just a name, Pa,’ Susannah replied.

  ‘Are they Japanese?’

  ‘It’s just a name.’

  Clement poured himself a glass of whisky and sat down, listening while his parents and sister resumed their discussion of Leon Marks, the RAF officer who had brought his mother to England after the war and whose funeral in Banbury the next morning was the reason for the family gathering.

  Karen Mullins’ arrival offered a distraction. ‘Da dum,’ she trumpeted, standing in the doorway and slowly pulling off her scarf to reveal the acid green tips to her dark brown hair.

  ‘What on earth…?’ Susannah said.

  ‘It’s very colourful,’ his mother said.

  ‘You’re twenty-three years old!’ Susannah said.

  ‘Don’t worry. We’ll soon get used to it,’ his father said.

  ‘You look like an after-dinner mint,’ Susannah said.

  Karen’s lower lip quivered and, while Clement might have wished that his sister had chosen her words with more care, he knew that they sprang from genuine concern for the girl to whom she had become a second mother after she moved in with the loathsome Chris.

  For years Susannah had bullied their parents into inviting Chris, now officially designated as ‘the biggest mistake of my life’, and his children, Karen and Bill, to Beckley, claiming quite unjustly that their doubts about his character sprang from prejudice against his class. By the time that those doubts were confirmed – and more conclusively than they could ever have supposed – she had long since walked out. Even so, she had felt responsible for the children, whose mother had committed suicide when Bill was born and who had looked set to be taken into care. So she had appealed to her parents who became their legal guardians, sending them to Linden Hall, a progressive boarding school run by a family friend. Leaving with no formal qualifications, Bill joined the army, straining his guardians’ liberalism to its limit, and Karen moved into an estate cottage, where she dabbled with a series of ill-fated schemes, from making goat’s milk soap to writing romantic fiction, and dallied with a string of unsuitable men. Nevertheless Susannah was eager for her to stay, leading Clement to wonder if she shared his guilt at having failed as a source of grandchildren and saw Karen as the next best thing.

  Karen’s self-serving chatter over dinner soon exhausted his g
oodwill. ‘I’ve become a pagan. You don’t mind, do you?’ she asked his father. ‘It’s not all that different from being a Christian except we worship the Goddess instead of God.’

  ‘Of course, I don’t, my dear. You know that the Church took over many pagan practices, including the Eucharist.’

  ‘Who are these pagans?’ Susannah asked dubiously. ‘More deadbeats?’

  ‘Susannah darling, that’s not kind,’ his mother interjected.

  ‘It’s not her fault, Aunt Marta,’ Karen said in a buttery voice. ‘People have too many preconceptions about pagans. They think it’s just about drinking chicken’s blood and sacrificing virgins. They’re frightened of us because we worship the earth, dance naked and don’t hate our bodies.’

  ‘Do you do that here?’ Clement asked anxiously.

  ‘Of course. Beckley’s a very ancient and sacred place. Frank and I are starting a coven.’

  ‘Frank?’

  ‘My boyfriend.’

  ‘That’s all we need,’ Susannah said. ‘The Sun will have a field day. I can picture the headline already: Batty Bishop In Wicca Worship.’

  ‘You shouldn’t always think in headlines, darling,’ his mother said, ‘even if it is your job. But take care, Karen, or you’ll find yourself calling up forces beyond your control. I’ve seen it in Africa.’

  ‘Frank and I are going to Sicily in the summer,’ she said defiantly. ‘On a pilgrimage to Aleister Crowley’s Abbey.’