Pagan and her parents

by Michael Arditti

  I take hold of myself and the lectern. I stare into the room and catch sight of friends and colleagues, all trying to register their presence without intruding on my grief. I start to speak but my eyes are transfixed by the button. I lose my thread; I find my notes; I lose my voice. I can only think of the rollers sticking, the curtains catching, the fire going out. I escape into the trivia of public appearances; I declare this supermarket open … this life at an end.

  Your coffin slides forward with perfect equipoise and slips behind the curtains. We strain to imagine the other side like condemned schoolboys outside the Headmaster’s study. I drag my feet down the steps and return to my seat where Pagan is turning the pages of a book. I am torn between relief and revulsion at her detachment.

  ‘Can we go home now?’ she asks.

  ‘Let’s just sit here for a minute and think about Mummy.’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘Anything you want.’

  ‘Her mummy died when she was younger than me.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Mummy. That’s why she was adopted. Will I be adopted?’

  ‘You have me.’

  The service is over; the seats are hard; but no one stirs, as if this minor discomfort were itself a little death. I judge that it is time to lead the way out. We stand in the porch soaking up sympathy. I ask Susan to take Pagan home. I want to spare her the burden of adult inarticulacy; but she insists on staying and grips my hand, the trickle of sweat the only obstacle between us. As Melissa Franklin tells me in ponderous French that I was wrong to let her come, she takes refuge behind my legs.

  The last cheek brushed, the last hand shaken, I walk to the office and wait for them to produce your ashes. I am startled by the residue of heat in the box. It is the ultimate indignity: this mockery of warmth. We return to the car; Pagan and Susan sit in the back with you in front beside me … the death seat I used to call it as a child. I try not to wonder whether the ashes are all yours; and yet if hospitals can make mistakes with newborn babies … So what do I suggest: some parody of a paternity test? I slam on the breaks at the lights.

  We reach home. Consuela is preparing lunch. Laura has declared open house in Hampstead. I can hear your response ‘Just like her to push herself forward’; but I was grateful that she took the pressure off me. I have promised to go up there after seeing to Pagan.

  ‘You won’t leave me?’ she asks, as she toys with Consuela’s tortilla … I think that she is growing suspicious at being served so much of her favourite food.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You won’t go away and leave me like Mummy?’

  ‘Mummy didn’t leave you, my darling,’ I struggle to explain. ‘Mummy would never leave you. She had no choice; she was very ill.’

  ‘Why?’ she asks. ‘Why? Why?’

  And I try to bury her fears in my chest.

  ‘I want Mummy,’ she cries, all semblance of bravery lost.

  ‘You mustn’t cry,’ I say, ‘or you’ll make me cry too. Then where will we be?’ But it is too late and my eyes start to water. She looks at me, aghast, as the voice of authority cracks and its face crumbles.

  ‘Stop it!’ she says, smacking my arm as if I were her wetting doll. ‘Grown-ups don’t cry.’

  ‘It’s just that I miss Mummy too.’

  ‘Naughty Leo,’ she says and goes on smacking, reassuring me by the force of her hands. ‘You mustn’t.’

  ‘Silly Leo; I know. I’m here to look after you.’

  ‘And I’m looking after you too. Mummy told me.’

  ‘Really?’ I wonder whether you did; and, if so, how her rudimentary reading picked up the phrase on the screen.

  ‘So we’ll both have to look after each other,’ she says, sharing my hankie; ‘and we’ll take it in turns to cry.’

  2

  ‘Look at the pineapples,’ Pagan giggles, as we approach the gates which once seemed monumentally disdainful and are now dilapidated and obscure.

  ‘They’re hundreds of years old.’

  ‘Older than you?’

  ‘Much older.’

  ‘Older than Miss Jennings?’

  ‘Older than Miss Jennings.’

  ‘Older even than the Queen?’

  ‘Older than anyone who’s alive today. They were built about the same time as St Paul’s Cathedral. Sir Christopher Wren wanted to put a pineapple on top of that too.’

  ‘Why?’

  Why? the thinking child’s constant question: the first crack in the parental façade. The reason why is because …

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You should.’

  ‘I know. When we go home, I’ll ask someone.’ Was it a recent discovery: the seventeenth-century equivalent of the kiwi fruit? I tease my mind with trivia to keep it on track.

  It veers alarmingly at the sight of the gatehouse. This was a dream cottage … your dream cottage where, you declare with a mixture of humour and desperation, ‘I’ll live when you and Robin move into the hall, like a dog curled up at the foot of a bed. We’ll stick up a sign Beware of the Spinster.’ But the danger now speaks for itself. Stalks shooting up around the walls seem to have sucked the plaster from the brickwork. Rooms are gutted and gutters hang loose. Slabs and slates lie scattered in the garden. The undergrowth has turned into overgrowth. The setting is as abandoned as the dream.

  The car jolts and I look guiltily at the dashboard. I fear that my mission will be pre-empted and you will be scattered all over the floor.

  ‘The ground’s grumbling.’ Pagan exclaims as we trundle over a cattle grid.

  ‘It’s to stop cows going out into the road.’

  ‘What about children?’

  ‘They know better.’

  ‘No, what if they fall through it?’

  ‘They couldn’t.’

  ‘Or twist their ankles and break their legs and lie there until a car runs them over or a lorry delivering food and squashes them until they’re completely flat and dead.’

  ‘Pagan, darling, this is a private road, a quiet place. There’s no danger.’

  ‘People should take care when there are children. They’re small. They can’t see.’ Her vehemence is more fitting to a mother than a child. I watch with unease as she squirms in her seatbelt and kicks her heels against the dashboard … she has not made the connection. Once again I question my judgement. In Tibet they place a three-year-old child in front of a decomposing corpse; in England they stamp crosses on buns and eat the crucified Christ. I want your death to be part of the cycle of life and the magic of nature. I want to scatter your ashes around her like fairy dust.

  ‘I’m bored.’

  ‘We’re almost there,’ I say to reassure her … and disturb myself by my proximity to the past.

  ‘What are you doing at Easter?’ Robin asks, as he nibbles the hairs at the nape of my neck and I spurn his charms for those of George Eliot. ‘Do you fancy a week at Crierley?’

  ‘What are you doing at Easter?’ you ask two hours later, as you sense the confusions in the scattered cushions and the Penguin Middlemarch supine on the floor.

  ‘I’m spending a week at Crierley.’ … And, for a moment, I think that you hate me. To me, it is an ordeal by etiquette. I fear for wrong forks and bad form and flat diphthongs. But, to you, it is the acme of your adolescent dreams.

  I persuade Robin to invite you … I can admit it now that all invitations are repaid. He demurs; he has the true lover’s tunnel vision. But I stand firm; and we approach the house in a vintage Daimler driven by a veteran chauffeur, whose silvery stateliness matches the car.

  ‘Pineapples,’ you say … I feel a frisson.

  ‘Pevsner calls it one of the finest gateways in Herefordshire.’ Robin crinkles his nose as he always does when he fears he is being boastful.

  You lean back in your seat. ‘I never realised the county was so camp.’

  We approach the house. It is heavier and flatter than in my memory; the stone that once looked wea
thered now looks worn. When we came before, all that struck me was the size … the colonnade like the British Museum, the Hampton Court chimneys and St Pancras towers. I was blind to the disharmony of the Jacobean manor with its Palladian portico and gothic wings. To you, the mishmash of styles was its attraction: a compendium of history where each generation improved on the one before. But, to me, it seems the most slavish following of fashion … less a palimpsest of England than an architectural Vicar of Bray.

  We skirt the warren of walls around annexes and outhouses. True to form, Lady Standish has directed me to the back. I undo Pagan’s belt and lift her out of the seat. My hands break out in an adolescent sweat. I am nineteen again. I am walking into a stately home with no need of a ticket. Instead, I have a bag packed with a hired dinner suit and my mother’s disapproval … I have flouted her golden rule: Stick to your own.

  ‘This is Leo,’ Robin says; as cramp leaves me tottering at the feet of a formidable woman with her hair pinned in a pepper-and-salt bun and a pearl pendant dangling from each ear.

  ‘You used to have a stuffed lion called Leo as a boy, Robin, do you remember?’ She smiles; the lipstick smear on her teeth looks like blood.

  ‘Of course.’ His eyes glisten. ‘Uncle Ronnie sent him to me from Kenya. Whatever became of him? I haven’t seen him for years.’

  ‘It went mouldy … bug-ridden. I had to throw it out.’

  ‘Mother, how could you? I loved Leo. He was my favourite toy.’

  ‘Nonsense; after two days it bored you. It was a mangy old thing, cheap and nasty. I can’t think what possessed your uncle to send it to you.’ She smiles again; the blood on her teeth has smudged.

  ‘And this is Candida.’ Robin presents you with more confidence. ‘You met her at school.’

  ‘Of course, the bursar’s daughter.’ She invests the words with such scorn that I determine to declare my father dead. ‘How is your poor father? My heart went out to him, having to spend his life cooped in that stuffy office, coping with blocked drains and pregnant maids.’

  ‘Oh there is a more positive side,’ you say with equanimity, ‘arranging for favoured boys to complete their education when their parents renege on the fees.’

  She smiles again and the blood has vanished. She leads us into the house. ‘We’ll go in the back way – I hope you don’t mind – it’s so much cosier.’ As Robin giggles, I want to die.

  She smiles now and is wearing no lipstick. Her neck is puckered and her distended earlobes emphasise their lack of ornament. Her face is paler and her eyes water; but her bearing is as erect as ever and her bun as perfectly formed … it even appears all of a piece now that her hair is completely grey.

  ‘You’ve changed,’ she says, and I am suddenly forced into her perspective.

  ‘It’s sixteen years.’ I calculated on the speedometer in the car.

  ‘It takes death to bring us together … death and Christmas; though to me they’re one and the same.’ I search for some obscure Catholic theology; she registers my confusion. ‘My husband drowned on Christmas Day. Too much festive spirits. He capsized in the lake. We burnt the boat.’

  Pagan says nothing but grips my hand tightly. Lady Standish bends to acknowledge her. ‘I was sorry to hear about your mother. It’s cruel when people we love are wrested from us.’ I wonder if she is thinking of Robin. ‘I can’t say that I liked her and I know she detested me.’ Pagan’s brow furrows; this is the first time that anyone has discussed you with detachment. I am both offended and relieved.

  ‘She admired you a great deal.’

  ‘She wanted to be me; that’s different. She thought she could have done it better; she probably could. You needn’t look so surprised. When you reach my advanced age, there’s little you don’t know.’

  ‘Are you very old?’ Pagan asks.

  ‘Me, my dear? I’m older than God.’

  Pagan stands pensively. ‘Does that mean you’re his mother?’

  She laughs throatily; ‘I don’t know. You’ll have to ask your … what does she call you?’

  ‘Leo,’ I say firmly.

  ‘Not Daddy?’

  ‘Leo.’

  ‘Well, Leo, would you say I was God’s mother?’ Her cheeks are suffused with sixteen years of suppressed malice. I think of Robin, his hair burnished in the sunlight, his face burning in my memory. I see him again, for the first time, beneath the dimly lit dome of San Marco, a young god stepped down from the glittering mosaics on the wall. You bring him round at the end of the concert. He congratulates me on the singing, particularly the Weelkes and the Tomkins. I am surprised to find him so well informed. ‘Robin’s musical,’ you laugh; and I discover yet another double meaning. A moment later, he moves to an altar and lights a candle. ‘It’s for you,’ he declares on his return.

  ‘You say nothing,’ Lady Standish rebukes me. ‘Can it be that you don’t remember?’

  ‘On the contrary. I was thinking back to our first meeting. In the nave of St Mark’s in Venice. He knelt and lit a candle.’

  ‘To Our Lady?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘He was always devout.’ She mistakes my shrug for a shiver. ‘You must be cold. Shall we go inside.’

  ‘Will everything be safe in the car? Perhaps I should lock …?’

  ‘Oh don’t worry; no one ever comes up here. Besides I don’t suppose you have any valuables.’ I cannot decide whether she means to be insulting, so I leave you in the glove compartment and make to go into the house.

  ‘Oh no, not that way,’ she says with the throaty relish of one determined to make my discomfort equal her humiliation. ‘Did you think we still lived in the manor?’ And she leads the way to a cream and brown caravan stationed behind a crumbling stone wall. I try to compose my features as we step inside.

  ‘Are you a gypsy?’ Pagan asks.

  ‘Oh no, my dear, nothing so romantic. Gypsies have friends and fairs and fortunes. Gypsies have bands and kings and queens. I just have my daughter Lydia … Careful of your head,’ she shouts as I crack it, ‘the ceilings aren’t as high as in Holland Park.’

  My confusion is complete as I see the interior. Every inch is crammed with family treasures. Silver frames, jade bowls and ivory boxes sit on toothmug shelves; and Persian rugs cover the floor. Free-standing fans and forlorn feathers droop in corners. A velvet canopy hangs over two box-like beds draped with quilts cut from moth-eaten minks. A large old TV and a Bakelite wireless stand on a Sheraton sideboard, which divides the room from the kitchen. Only a set of Regency miniatures seems to scale. Pagan sits on the shell of a giant turtle; I inadvertently stamp on an elephant’s foot.

  ‘We’ll wait for Lydia before we eat. You’re not hungry, are you, my dear?’ she asks Pagan, who remembers her manners. ‘And I hope you’re not cramped.’

  ‘I have a Wendy house.’

  ‘How nice.’

  ‘Leo bought it for my last but one birthday.’

  ‘I’m sure he’s very generous.’

  I recover my voice, if not my equilibrium. ‘Has the house been sold?’

  ‘Oh no, the house can never be sold; it belongs to Robin.’ I nod knowingly, although I come from a world of protected tenancies not entailed estates. She corrects me. ‘It’s nothing legal. I could sell tomorrow if I chose; but I can’t betray my son. This house is his inheritance; it’s as much a part of him as the smile on his face … You remember the smile on his face?’ I nod.

  ‘So what happened?’ The Standishes’ wealth seemed as secure as England.

  ‘His father happened. His father and his life without loyalty, without morality, without family. His father and his gambling, his father and his drinking, his father and his cars and his boats and his villas.’ I wonder whether it is to spare herself or Pagan that she fails to add ‘and his women’. ‘His father who went through every penny we had, and no one told me until it was too late, until he was dragged from the mud of a drained lake, as foetid in body as in spirit. We were left to sift through the debri
s; we sold our ancestors to pay his debts … portraits for people with Porsches. We tried to make ourselves a commercial proposition – you must know about that – suitable for conferences or courses or a leisure centre. But there was no hope; we’re too remote and the costs of reconstruction were too great. So, when parts of the gallery collapsed, Lydia and I simply retreated to the ground floor. Then, when the boilers burst and we couldn’t afford to replace them, we moved out here. It’s the obvious solution. What more do we need: a prematurely aged woman and a middle-aged girl? We use the old laundry and the buttery and there’s no one to turn us off our own land. And when Robin comes back – as one day I know he will – from wherever and whoever has been keeping him from me, he’ll rejoice to find that all this has been preserved for him’ – I try not to picture the collapsed stairs and rotting timbers – ‘and that every penny we could save from the rents has been put in his name. Now if you’ll excuse me, Lydia or no Lydia, I must see to lunch. Restricted space requires perfect coordination. Thank Heaven I can cook on my precious Baby Belling.’

  ‘She’s cooking her baby?’ Pagan’s pupils dilate in horror.

  ‘No, darling. It’s the make of the oven, like Hoover or Frigidaire.’

  ‘Is ours a baby?’

  ‘Ours is big.’

  Pagan’s whispers bring no response from the kitchen. She picks up a Victorian music box which plaintively plays ‘There’s No Place Like Home’. I put it down promptly. I fear that we will be accused of pocketing the family heirlooms … guilt comes back so easily, or perhaps it never goes. I catch sight of a picture of Robin at school in his First Eleven flannels. The toss of his head, the tousle of his hair and the sparkle of his smile are heartrending. I see him again in the clarity of your account and the glow of my imagination, as he limbers up to bowl, rubbing the ball against his groin, leaving fine red marks like the pressure of fingertips on a smooth white back … the thud of fantasy on willow.

  No wonder you fell for him as you sat demurely in the pavilion alongside the other staff wives and daughters, the object of bawdy speculation and defensive derision, your presence feeding the frustrations of three hundred hungry adolescents. He alone remained aloof. At first I thought that you must have been attracted by the challenge; now I see that it made him worthy of your respect. He responded to your femininity, not your sexuality; he was the only one uncompromised by desire. You made his romantic ventures into a heroic rebellion, more anarchic than aphrodisiac, a blow for liberty not libido. You were his adolescent alibi … Candida and Robin, an unlikely but undeniable couple; it was a role that you longed to play for life. But was it him you wanted, or his world?