Pagan and her parents

by Michael Arditti

  ‘And you, Edward?’

  ‘Saturday, I just said. I think I can speak for us both.’

  ‘But Melissa dear, you weren’t on the tandem.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Edward, I fear you’ve not been honest.’ Your tone mocks everyone: him, Melissa, Julius, even yourself. ‘How can you hope to reach the heart of Orlando if you’re not honest about your own? You’ve spent months trying to worm your way into my knickers. Then you come round last week with Brendan Hislop and practically rape me.’

  ‘This is pathetic,’ Melissa sneers.

  ‘Oh no, apart from the odd puncture, it was the Tour de France.’

  Melissa breaks out of the line in which we stand like a Sunday school crocodile. ‘Is this true?’ she challenges Edward, who squirms, searching desperately for support that is not forthcoming. ‘We went round. Brendan … we were drunk. Fooling around. It was late. Fooling … just fooling.’

  You sigh. ‘And I suppose last week at Newmarket was fooling too?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Candida told me she’d never been to the races.’

  ‘You whore!’ She strides up to you. … A voice from the future rings in my ear: ‘Except the whores. She showed real sympathy with whores.’ … She grabs your wrist; I prepare to assert my best-friend status.

  ‘You’re sick. You can’t bear the idea of two people in love. Like a spoilt child, you want to destroy everything you can’t have.’

  ‘Oh I had it. And I’m not the only one. Ask Clare Lennox, Leonora Jardine, Hilary Parker.’ Melissa responds with a scream that is more Medea than Rosalind. Julius intervenes.

  ‘OK, cut. That was fabulous. Now the important thing is to use these emotions: pain, jealousy, resentment, power. Let them inform your performance. There’s far more to love than sentiment.’

  ‘And there’s far more to life than theatre. You think I mean to share the stage with her … with him.’ It is the first time that I have seen Melissa look vulnerable; Lucinda Dodd understudies Celia and leads her away. Julius appears perplexed.

  ‘You don’t understand. That was a breakthrough. We must build on it now. Act Three Scene Two. Orlando, Corin, Touchstone, Rosalind and Celia.’ But the lovers have left the glade: the actors have left the garden. Edward approaches indignantly.

  ‘Thanks a bunch. You landed me right in the faeces.’

  ‘Don’t worry, you’ll come out on top; you always do.’

  ‘Will she ever forgive you?’ I inject a note of practicality.

  ‘Oh yes. She’ll threaten boiling oil but let me off with bread and water. It’s par for the course.’

  ‘You’re wrong. You’re not just in the shit; you are one.’

  ‘Why else did you want me?’

  Your reply is lost in the breeze from the backs … and the mists of memory. Edward is right about Melissa, who packs her bags for Girton and then tells the taxi to wait. After all, she knows his weaknesses; and it would be punishing him twice over to leave him in your clutches. But she won’t trust you with him or herself with you. She refuses to play Rosalind if you remain as Celia; and Julius, weighing your respective parts – not, I assure you, your talents – substitutes Lucinda. You insist that it is a relief; you have had your fill of Cambridge theatricals. But I worry. Gazing into a dressing-room mirror is the acceptable face of fantasy; when that is removed, there are more dangerous ones to explore.

  Rosalind is reconciled to Orlando and scores a triumph. She refuses to let any private grief cast a shadow over Arden just as she refuses to miss a performance on the night that her mother dies. No doubt her professionalism impresses the London agent in the audience. You sit sportingly in the front row and bravo her solo call. But you stay silent at Edward’s. The loss is too painful. I misjudged his appeal. I thought that it was the subterfuge that attracted you, not the man … unless they were one and the same and his callousness fed your cynicism. And you misjudged his maturity. He needed the reassurance of Melissa’s reactions. Naughtiness is no fun without a nurse.

  The chance for revenge comes at their wedding. Your scarlet dress fills me with foreboding as we drive to Suffolk and enter the church directly behind the bride.

  ‘Which side?’ asks an etiolated usher.

  ‘Oh the groom’s, definitely,’ you say with such a knowing laugh that I give thanks for the soaring chords of the Charpentier Te Deum and the focus of attention on the nave. Two hours later, you are at his side less publicly when Melissa’s nanny – the real thing, no self-revealing diminutive – discovers you indulging a very unbibliographic passion in the library.

  ‘We share a taste for fine bindings,’ you protest as Melissa’s father orders us from the house. ‘It was just a final fling,’ you insist to me in the car.

  ‘It was their wedding day!’

  ‘I know; I bought them a toaster.’

  ‘That hardly gives you droit de seigneur. They made a vow.’

  ‘I see. So it’s God I’ve offended?’

  ‘It has nothing to do with religion; it’s basic decency.’

  ‘I suppose that’s the trouble. I have none.’

  ‘That’s nothing to be proud of.’

  ‘I can’t help it. I’m just a slut. It’s in my blood.’

  ‘Don’t start that. Morality isn’t genetic. We’re talking about the Candida cunt not the Hapsburg chin.’

  You twiddle the radio; I accelerate to distort the sound.

  ‘Melissa was right: I’m no good; I destroy everything I can lay my hands on. So take care. One day I’ll even destroy you.’

  ‘You’re talking nonsense. You made me. Think what I was like when I met you; my bluffer’s guide to life tucked neatly inside my Companion Guide to Venice. My only distinction was my voice. I’d have probably wound up in the Mike Sammes Singers.’

  ‘Oh darling, you’re so sweet.’ You lean over and kiss me. ‘Who needs men when I have you?’

  ‘Thank you.’ … And for a long time I did. I thought that we had something deeper than the ordinary; now I wonder if it were not just more oblique. Seeing all these people with their little bits of you makes me question our intimacy. They turn a portrait into a patchwork. Even Edward casts his doubts. I remember an uneasy lunchtime in the French pub when he described how you liked to play dead in bed. Your fantasy was that he was breaking into your coffin. You were cold and crystalline: the ultimate taboo. Why? Was it the lure of self-destruction? Or was there a more sinister attraction? I will never know.

  What do any two people ever know of each other? I look at Melissa examining the exhibits and Edward standing two paces behind, less like a consort than an irreverent footman, and ponder on their relationship. She no longer conceals her contempt for him. It is as though she cannot understand how, of all the men in the world, he was the one she fell in love with. Now nothing remains of that love but their children – ‘All sons,’ she asserts with a peasant pride. Indeed, half the time she treats Edward as if he were one of them. ‘I’m surrounded by boys,’ she simpers, rewriting Oedipus as Peter Pan. No wonder Edward resists his parental role.

  ‘You’ve been on my conscience for weeks,’ she tells me. ‘But life has been somewhat fraught.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘A succession of family crises.’

  ‘Dougall and drugs.’

  ‘Edward, you promised! It was never proved. Besides, is your nose clean?’

  ‘Well I never stuffed coke up it at fifteen.’

  ‘Too busy sniffing around elsewhere.’

  ‘Not as successfully as your darling second son. I’ve spent the last week trying to placate homicidal Belgians. Sweeney’s thirteen-year-old girlfriend is on the pill.’

  ‘She explained; she has very heavy periods.’

  ‘I suppose that’s why her father’s applying for a posting in Dar es Salaam.’

  ‘It’s no joke. If you’d shown more interest in them when they were younger, none of this might have happened. As it was, I had to be both mother
and father. It never works.’

  ‘Doesn’t it?’ I think of myself.

  ‘Children need two parents: one to remonstrate, one to reassure.’

  ‘If you wanted a neo-Victorian husband, you should have married your father.’

  ‘I’d make do with just a husband.’

  ‘Family life, Leo: it’s no joke. You’re well out of it.’

  ‘I have Pagan.’

  ‘Of course, I forgot. But that’s different.’

  ‘Why? I’m her guardian.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But it’s always different, isn’t it? Other people’s children.’

  ‘Why? Why is it different?’

  ‘Whoa there! All I meant was that the stakes aren’t so high.’

  ‘In this case they couldn’t be higher.’ Am I becoming paranoid? I suspect them of being emissaries from your parents, sent to change my mind. But I cannot recall if they ever met, in Cambridge or after, and my memory resists all attempts at manipulation.

  ‘Actually,’ Melissa intervenes, ‘we wanted to talk to you about Pagan.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘I’m not sure that this is the time, but I suppose it’s as good as any. Laura says you mean to keep her.’

  ‘You talk as though she were a stray puppy! Of course I shall keep her. She’s my life.’

  ‘Have you thought – of course you’ve thought – but have you really thought what you’re doing? Looking after a child isn’t easy.’

  ‘You managed.’

  ‘But there were two of us.’ She flicks ash over her skirt and her inconsistencies. ‘You have a life of your own. You can’t sacrifice it for Pagan. On the contrary, you need someone who’ll do as much for you …’ Not another! What do they all want: to fix me up or file me away?

  ‘Like you and Edward?’

  ‘Well, I don’t suppose it’ll be quite like that. After all, we’ve been together eighteen years. We have something very special. It’s hardly the same for you. Besides,’ she adds quickly, ‘you wouldn’t want to ape heterosexual marriage. We must seem awfully staid.’

  Tm sure that you have your moments.’

  ‘You can’t devote all of your life to children. As a mother, I know. They grow up and you resent them for it, while they resent you for making them feel guilty. I know that you think it’s your duty; but you also have a duty to yourself. Now’s the perfect opportunity. To tell the truth, I never thought it was healthy your living with Candida for so long.’

  ‘Why when people say “to tell the truth” is the truth they tell always unpleasant?’

  ‘Everyone could see that she was using you. You were the perfect partner, providing the comfort of the double mortgage without the pressure of the double bed. But it can’t have been the same for you. Of course, it may have fulfilled some deep-seated masochism.’

  ‘Melissa …’

  ‘No, Edward, we’re Leo’s friends. If we can’t be honest with him, who can?’

  ‘That’s it, Melissa; the secret’s out. Actually, she used to wear thigh-length PVC boots with six-inch stiletto heels, and spurs on Sundays, and I wore a red-satin jockstrap. Then she stood over me with a whip while I scrubbed the house from top to bottom.’

  ‘Really …? Oh God, am I losing my ear for irony?’

  ‘The short answer’s yes.’

  ‘There are people like that.’

  ‘I know, I’ve read your novels … Candida and I were friends. You remember: Plato, E. M. Forster, the Famous Five. We loved each other.’

  ‘You used each other.’

  ‘Have a canapé, precious. Have two.’

  ‘No, Edward. We’ve talked about it often enough. And we aren’t alone.’

  ‘I didn’t know you cared …’ Now I know that they don’t.

  ‘Of course it was an excellent front. I used to think that it was to hide from the tabloids; now I suspect it was to hide from yourself.’

  ‘Put me in a story, Melissa – all names changed to protect the inadequate – and then I’ll be able to see for myself.’

  ‘But you can’t hide behind Pagan the way you hid behind Candida. She’s not even your own child.’

  ‘It’s not so long ago that you were going to adopt a Romanian baby; would you have loved it any less than your own?’

  ‘Of course. I have to be honest. We’d never have shown it. We’d have given him everything: Hampstead, Southwold, us. But I can’t pretend it would have been like a child I’d carried.’ I start to see your objections to your mother. ‘Why did Candida never say who the father was? It was pure amateur dramatics; a mystery in a played-out genre. I suppose she’d got all the mileage she could from her own origins – no one’s interested in your parents when you’re thirty – so she had to muddy things for her daughter instead. She always had to be different; she couldn’t even give birth like the rest of us. She had to be the most miraculous mother since Mary. And, since virginity would have defeated even her, she decided to throw a veil over the father.’

  ‘Maybe she genuinely didn’t know,’ Edward suggests.

  ‘That’s something a woman always knows. It was sheer attention-seeking. Hey Mummy, look at me; my baby has no daddy. Aren’t I the wickedest girl in the world?’

  ‘Maybe Edward knows better than either of us.’

  ‘Why? What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘What I said.’

  ‘There was nothing between them but some stupid student stunts. We were children.’

  ‘That’s alright then.’

  ‘Why does everyone picture Edward as a latter-day Don Juan? I wish!’

  ‘Don’t make such a fuss! I’m married to you, aren’t I? Candida’s dead.’

  I recall how you met in secret for years after he married and calculate as desperately as a teenager late with her period. Could it be Edward? I discounted him years ago. Now I mentally transpose Pagan and Dougall … no; Rory … no; Sweeney … well, there is a likeness about the mouth. This is absurd. What a sentimental view of family resemblance! I don’t look anything like my father and I know … at least I assume … it couldn’t possibly … Is nothing sacred? Or at least sure?

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Melissa asks. ‘You have a wild look in your eyes.’

  ‘It’s nothing. I was just speculating on Pagan’s father.’

  She examines the room as if it were the hall of a country house thriller.

  ‘Pagan’s the one who’ll suffer. Children can be so cruel … to themselves as much as to each other. When her friends stop taunting her, then she’ll start on herself.’

  ‘I’ll be here to prevent it.’

  ‘And what will you do if one day her father does turn up?’

  ‘You’re plotting again.’

  ‘If he claims her, he’d have a powerful case. And children are fickle, always ready to throw up the tried and tested for the thrill of the new. I’m under no illusions about ours; they’d ditch us at the first opportunity. You can’t close your eyes to these things.’

  If she only knew; mine are propped open with matchsticks, bloodshot testaments to sleepless nights. Her words echo in my head as I drive down to the coast. Instead of support from my friends, all I gain is confusion. And I can no longer even be sure of myself. Is she right? I rack my motives. Am I hiding from the implications of my sexuality? Am I so afraid of rejection that I take the easiest option? Why do I rate a bedtime kiss from Pagan above a night of torrid passion? I switch on the windscreen wipers; but the raindrops are tears.

  Self-doubt becomes self-dramatisation, a process heightened by the backdrop of Brighton. I make my way through the web of winding streets, as ramshackle as theatre wings, that leads to the footlit flamboyance of the Front. I aim for the Court with the aid of Max’s map. To ask directions risks recognition. I search for a building that combines the majesty of the law with the raffishness of a town that exists on the edge of it. I sigh with relief, and then disbelief, as I see the signs.

  It is a squat, unimpressive building, lik
e a polytechnic that has lost its funding. The brutality of the architecture fails to inspire hope. I have to remind myself that I am not on trial. Max meets me and tells me again that I did not need to come. I know full well that it is just a preliminary hearing to allow for the filing of affidavits and that ten minutes in court scarcely justify a two-hour drive, but I want the Judge to appreciate how important the case is to me. I even fantasise that he may be a fan. As it is, he addresses all his remarks to Counsel and barely looks at me.

  Your parents are even more determined to ignore me. They abort my every glance. I delight in any discomfort I can cause. I sense a calculated air of grievance about their appearance; although it may just be the faded formality of their clothes. Your mother’s floral print dress and your father’s cavalry twill are designed to define them as the backbone of England. My concern is with the heart.

  I listen to Counsel’s statements. Max has engaged Rebecca Colestone whom he rates as the finest QC in the Family Division; but today she has sent her junior, whose name I fail to catch. He is disconcertingly young, less like a qualified lawyer than a student performing in a Footlights sketch, an impression heightened by the lack of a wig and gown … the decor may be authentic but where are the props? I must stop these theatrical analogies. This is real; it is happening to me. I suspect that it is his youth which makes me uneasy. I just wish that he would show less interest in my career and more in my case.

  The Judge makes an order for myself and any witnesses to file affidavits within twenty-eight days. I immediately resolve to marshal my forces with as impressive a list of signatures as a protest letter to The Times. But Max and the revue artist advise against it and say that the only statements necessary are from Susan, Dr Bradshaw, Miss Lister and, perhaps, my mother. The Judge also rules that the case is to be heard on the first open day after two months. My disgust at the delay doubles when officials tell us that this will not be before the end of June.

  My real resentment is reserved for the Welfare Officer’s report. It is not that I subscribe to some superior notion that welfare officers, like toilets and the dole, are for other people. I was once another person myself; I can still feel the humiliation when they examined my head for lice at school. But, in such an open-and-shut case as this, it seems a shocking waste of resources. And I am worried about the effect on Pagan. I have taken great care that she should have no hint of the threat hanging over us. Now I must bang another nail in the coffin of childhood, alongside the dangers of sweet-offering strangers and drivers proposing lifts.