Pagan and her parents

by Michael Arditti

  You go back, having resolved nothing, determined to tell him the truth. In the event, he pre-empts you by returning from an audition where he was not even asked to read. ‘You have to be queer to get anywhere these days. Bend over and you’ll be a star.’ He punches the wall; you giggle. He punches you; you run into the street and hail a taxi, which drives you straight to Holland Park. Safe behind the newly installed door-chain, you examine your bruised stomach and insist that he has damaged the child. The next day you make an appointment at the clinic and announce with dark-eyed desperation that ‘babies are much over-rated; I fail to see the attraction. They eat; they shit; they spew. I’m surprised they don’t all grow up to be men.’

  ‘Is anything wrong?’ Max notices my discomfort.

  ‘Just a fluttering in my head.’ I must pin down my butterfly mind.

  So Lewis knew nothing of the baby … not even in recrimination. However hard Rebecca tries, she cannot dispel the impression he creates when your parents’ Counsel asks about my fitness as a father. ‘What do you think I think? He forced the woman I loved to have an abortion. He took away my chance of having a child. And now he throws it in my face as if it were history.’ He breaks down in tears; are they as stagy as the blood? ‘He was terrified of ending up alone. He cast some sort of spell on her … I know; I’ve played Svengali. He took my child away from me. He has no right to hers!’

  After a brief re-examination, Counsel declares that he has no further questions and the Judge adjourns proceedings for the day. Rebecca will present my case on Monday. ‘Let’s just hope that the English cricket team puts His Honour in a good humour over the weekend.’ She has no time to confer, as she is rushing back to town to prepare for her grandson’s circumcision.

  ‘Chin up,’ she says, ‘there’s light at the end of the tunnel.’

  ‘Then it’s the glare of an oncoming train.’

  Pagan and I spend Saturday morning on the pier. She has her fortune told by ‘the amazing computer palm scanner’, which, among much else, reveals how she will fare as a child, as a wife and as a husband, and that her lucky number is two. ‘Famous Twos are Bart Lancaster, Sophy Loren and May Quant.’ We have our photograph taken in a mock-up of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, which I trust will not prove to be an omen. We enter a stall selling personalised Brighton rock, but, among all the Kevins, Kirstys, Laurens and Melanies, there is a predictable lack of Pagans. So I settle for one marked ‘daughter’, and she picks me one marked ‘Dad’.

  ‘Grown-ups don’t eat rock,’ I say.

  ‘Dads do.’ She rests her case. We walk down the promenade, where three young women ask if I would mind taking a photograph. I pause wearily, pulling up my tie and smoothing my hair. Then I realise that what they want is for me to take a picture of them. They have either failed to recognise me or else they are uninterested, and, as they fall into a candy-floss huddle, I laugh for the first time in days. ‘Look at the birdie and say …’

  After lunch, I leave Pagan and Susan to visit the Sea Life Centre and drive to London to record the show. Vicky is waiting for me at the camera rehearsal. She is remarkably cheerful about yesterday’s wasted journey and promises that she is doing all that she can to rearrange her schedule for next week. Her chief concern is that I look strained. I assure her that it is nothing that a tub of Max Factor and a tube of Eye Light cannot fix. And yet, as we sit while the crew set the unusually complex video cues and indulge the pop group E=mc2’s U2 fantasies, the strain starts to tell. I escape before I snap.

  The buzz as I walk on stage should be bottled. It is a relief to be back on the right side of the questions. The familiar line-up of guests offsets any lack of preparation … although it turns out to be far too familiar for one loudmouth in the audience, who yells ‘Not him again!’ on Ian Botham’s entry. As Vicky hisses in my ear and Botham carries on regardless, I reassess the benefits of broadcasting live.

  Question: what sort of man allows his guests to be insulted?

  Answer: the sort who allows his child to be taken away.

  My after-show hospitality is limited to a single round of drinks as, with Arundel Castle on the morning’s programme, I am anxious for an early night. I race back to Brighton and jump bathless and bookless into bed. Sleep eludes me; my thoughts prove to be harder to dim than the lights. I try music, masturbation and Mogadon in turn and in vain. The pillow chafes my cheek. I sweat as though it were a siesta. In despair, I reach for a glass of water, which spills all over the sheets.

  I awake in a tangle of sodden bedding. I wash, dress and join Pagan and Susan for breakfast in a half-empty dining room. Pagan orders a basket of fresh fruit.

  ‘What are these?’

  ‘Lychees.’

  ‘They don’t look like cheese.’

  As Susan pours me some coffee, an elderly man, with relief map veins and a zip that has lost the battle with his stomach, approaches the table. ‘If I had my way, you’d be shot,’ he declares. ‘There were men like you in the jungle; we regarded them as lower than the Japanese.’ He walks back to his wife who butters him a croissant. I am bewildered. I suppose that he may have taken exception to the remarks I made to Botham on the state of English cricket or to several of E=mc2’s lyrics; but, surely, neither constitutes a shooting offence? The mystery deepens, when we are intercepted at the door by the assistant manager who advises us to avoid the lobby and, instead, to use the service stairs.

  ‘Has there been another bomb?’ I ask, as he leads us through the kitchens. ‘Why has no one been evacuated?’

  ‘Not so much a bomb as a bombshell, sir.’ He laughs limply. ‘I thought that you might wish to see this.’ He holds up the front page of the Nation. I read my own obituary. My Double Life has become my Rent Boy Shame.

  Pagan complains that the stairs are making her tired. I take her in my arms; the warmth outweighs the weight. The assistant manager warns us to be on our guard. ‘There are several journalists in the lobby. One has already tried to bribe a chambermaid, who quite properly reported it to me. But I’m afraid that some of the staff are only casual. And had it been anywhere else but the Grand …’

  ‘I’m very grateful for all your trouble. I’m sorry to have brought scandal into your hotel.’

  ‘Think nothing of it, sir; we have politicians here.’

  Susan leads a protesting Pagan to her room. ‘You promised we’d go to a castle.’

  ‘I need to have a quick look at the paper. It’s work.’

  ‘You promised!’

  I lock the door and turn the pages. My head swims at the thought of four million copies rolling off the presses. The facts of the story are sordid rather than sensational; I am at the nuts and bolts end of vice, not the whips and chains. The one perversity of which they can accuse me is a taste for foul language. And that was because it was the boys’ language; it seemed to make them more themselves. It is reported, in bold type, that I kept my socks on during sex as though it were the height of decadence … but the room was so filthy that I would have kept on all my clothes if I could. In terms more suited to an assault, I am charged with having ‘performed fellatio on the boy’.

  ‘What’s fellatio …?’ I eavesdrop on breakfast tables throughout the land.

  ‘It’s a cream cheese to which chat show hosts are extremely partial.’

  ‘I had to explain to my wife what it meant.’

  Will he have to explain rent boys too when they make their inevitable appearance in court tomorrow? I can recall a time when they had to be explained to me … when I supposed that the boys lingering on Soho corners were playing the waiting game of adolescents, not the mating game of adults. Then, one night, a soft-spoken, middle-aged man, with bone-white flesh, accosts me as I stroll home.

  ‘Are you rent?’ I thrill to the blatancy of the question. The term is unfamiliar but I presume that it must be a synonym for queer.

  ‘Yes,’ I say equally boldly, although he is far too old to attract me during the day.

  ‘Shall we g
o to your place?’ I take him to Brewer Street. ‘I like you,’ he says, ‘you’re a cut above the rest. There’s no quibbling, no haggling.’ And I fail to understand, even when he makes demands which are unacceptable on a first date and noises which I am afraid will rouse you. The next morning I awake to find him gone, having left three ten-pound notes on my pillow. My immediate thought is that he must have stolen something and then had a pang of conscience; but a quick check reveals that the only thing lost is my self-respect. Do I look like a tart to you?

  I look around the Amalfi. Which are the researchers and which the strippers? I find it impossible to say.

  I never tell you about the man, nor, a few years later, about the boys. The first comes on my thirtieth birthday; a present from me to me. With David moved out and you abroad on an assignment, I feel miserably alone. But I have an advert in my wallet and I realise that I am rich enough to buy ‘relief’. What a euphemism! What a lie! … along with so many others, like ‘discretion guaranteed’. I fling the paper to the floor and curse their bad faith. But then, if they put a price on their bodies, what price anything else? It is not that I am naive enough to believe that such visits dispel my loneliness, but they at least give it an identifiable form … and an identikit face. The payment is for my own protection. The boys manipulate but never touch me; though naked, I am clothed in cash.

  When my television face becomes too familiar for such ad hoc arrangements, I use agencies, on the assumption that exposure threatens them more than me. In the meantime, I destroy any chance of love. I sell my ideals more cheaply than the boys sell their bodies; I am so certain of disappointment that I pre-empt hope. The young Andy Warhol bleached his hair so that he would never have to watch it grow grey; I drain my life of passion so that I will never have to watch it go wrong. Now, I even dream in monochrome.

  It was not always thus. I was once a confirmed romantic … for which I still bear the scars of your scorn. I climbed up Juliet’s balcony; I sailed to Tristan’s island; I languished in Abelard’s cell. Now, I see only the death of love: the poisoning, the stabbing, the castration. We live in a culture that subordinates every other myth to the myth of romantic love and hence to the inevitability of loss. We idealise self-sacrifice as reverently as a priest raising the communion cup. And, when I allowed Lady Standish to seduce me into giving up Robin, I drained the cup to the dregs.

  Robin accused me of moral cowardice; David accused me of self-oppression; I accuse myself of romantic illusion. I visualise this room as a courtroom … even an anonymous hotel bedroom has a dignity that the Brighton Court lacks. I press the trouser press into service as a dock. I want to subpoena Lady Standish as a witness for the defence; but she stands firm in the Maid’s Causeway kitchen. Will you allow her to give her testimony from there?

  She examines Exhibit A: the ‘life’s a bitch and so’s my mother’ poster that has already caused such offence. She tells me of her love for Robin, of her fears for Lydia and of her troubles with her husband. She asserts an alliance. ‘I felt that we understood each other from the moment we met. We are linked by our feelings for Robin’ … she links arms as if in illustration. ‘He’s a very special person but weak – wouldn’t you agree? – he can be so weak. He doesn’t know his own mind, not least when it comes to Jennifer. You and I who are strong have a duty to guide him. He looks on you as a brother; you must give him the benefit of your advice.’

  I have always longed for a brother, someone who would be close but not claustrophobic. I am coaxed into submission. And, even if I ignore her remarks about the influence of school and the inadequacy of his father, I feel sure that he will be happier with Crierley and Jenny than with Earls Court and me. I have as strong a sense of the sanctity of his family as you, albeit one linked less to its history and more to an ideal of married life. Lady Standish never confronts the reality of our relationship but rather presents her restraint as a sign of intimacy. By the time that Robin returns from having shown Jenny around Cambridge – she takes the Amnesty protest on King’s Parade to be a quaint medieval custom – his mother has wrung a promise from me to speak to him of his obligations, social and sexual. Do you still wonder that I cry at every showing of Camille!

  Now my tears burn my cheeks like acid. I have disappointed everyone: you, Pagan, my mother. I twice pick up the phone to call Gleneagles; but my courage fails. I remember your contempt for the punters at The Pigalle. What would you have thought if you had known that your best friend was among them? Whatever else, I doubt that you would have named me as Pagan’s guardian. It is a far cry from consorting with heroes on the slopes of Mount Olympus to cavorting with rent boys on a floor in Notting Hill.

  I remain in my room, safe from journalistic intrusion, although every creaking floorboard chills me like a haunted house. I ask Susan to take Pagan to the toy museum in the hope that the change of venue will make up for the change of guide. But the visit is cut short. They are joined by a woman whose wheedling questions rouse Susan’s suspicions and whose language, when she refuses to answer, confirms her fears. Her accusations fall flat, as Susan replies that she has never known a more devoted parent than me … an assertion which she repeats at the hotel. But, while I find her pledge of loyalty touching, I worry that it may be overruled. What will happen when her parents agitate and Geoffrey surfaces? She is twenty-three years old; her life has moved from nursery to school to nursery. I am the stranger lying in wait at the gate.

  After lunch, I swear a fresh affidavit before a local solicitor, which will allow Rebecca to question me on the Nation’s story in court. She and Max insist that, in spite of the risk of hostile cross-examination, it is wiser to address the allegations than to shy away. The most galling fact is that, if we had not lost the whole of Friday morning, the case would have been resolved within the allotted day. I even wonder if the injunction application might have been engineered by Brian Derwent. He was determined not to be beaten by the reporting restrictions. Prevented from printing one story, he has simply produced another. Moral: no one can muzzle a rabid press.

  The next morning I order a wide range of papers, to my immediate regret. Rather than risk a return to the law of the jungle, we breakfast in Pagan’s room, where I sit beneath an inauspicious print of ‘The Arraignment of Princess Caroline’. At nine thirty, Max arrives to fetch me and to lend Susan his mobile phone. ‘How are you feeling this morning?’ ‘The condemned man ate a hearty breakfast.’ ‘That’s not true! You ate kippers and toast.’ I press Pagan to my chest. As we kiss goodbye, her whole life seems to flash before me; I gulp for air. We go down to the lobby, which, to my relief, shows no sign of reporters. They have decamped to the court steps, which Max propels me up so fast that I feel both giddy and guilty. I am surprised that he does not throw a blanket over my head … Young, write out a thousand times: ‘I am not on trial; I am not on trial; I am not on trial.’ After three lines, I run out of ink.

  The Court is tense with anticipation, even the Usher seems to think that developments are of sufficient interest for him to leave off his book. I walk up to Rebecca’s junior, whose face betrays the distaste of a man who exhausts all his excess energy playing squash. Rebecca herself burns with indignation. I smile gratefully at the long, handsome head, with the nut-brown eyes and perfectly poised bun that inspire such confidence. She considers that the Nation’s story may well constitute contempt; but, in a statement at the start of the session, the Judge makes it clear that he sees it as less grave.

  ‘The article in question has been brought to my attention by my clerk’ … who sits, inscrutably, typing out Orders on his laptop computer. ‘I wish to make it quite clear that I shall be trying the case on the evidence before me and not on scurrilous gossip. You may rest assured that I shall not allow it to colour my judgment in any way.’ Nevertheless, the morning’s hearing becomes less of an examination of my relationship with Pagan than a tribunal on my sexuality. Rebecca starts by asking leave to present new evidence and files my third affidavit. I enter the
witness box and take the oath. ‘I swear by Almighty God that the evidence I give shall be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’ As I add ‘So help me God!’, I realise that it comes from Hollywood, not the card, and cough. Rebecca leads me first through my own statements and then through the prosecution’s … the applicants’ accusations. I explain that, whether for better or worse for myself, I have kept my sexuality separate … but it has certainly been better for Pagan. As she has no awareness of sexuality, it is an irrelevance; what counts is my love.

  I add that you knew everything about my sexuality (So help me God!) and that, even though several of our married friends offered Pagan a home, you entrusted her to me. I state my case to my own satisfaction but not, it would seem, to the Judge’s, who gruffly asks Rebecca to move on to other matters. For the first time, she challenges him.

  ‘Should Your Honour decide against my client, he might feel that his case has not been pursued.’ … Gloves off – and wigs on – with the threat of an appeal.

  ‘Your client may not be as conversant with the ways of this court as you are, Ms Colestone. You may proceed.’

  Her acknowledgement of his antipathy is manifest in the speed with which she takes me through my remaining evidence. As she refers me to specific paragraphs, I fumble with the papers and lose my place. Eventually, the Judge hands his copy to the Usher and asks him to show me the relevant passage. He dismisses my thanks with a grunt.

  I fear that I am creating a bad impression … which is one that your parents’ Counsel is determined to underline. Dispensing with preliminaries, he asks about the discrepancy between my first and second affidavits … I am a twelve-year-old boy at the door of the Headmaster’s study. ‘I see. So, this was a deliberate invention on your part. You lied in the affidavit and thereby lied to the Court. What was your purpose in lying?’ I want to reply that it was to protect myself from the prejudices of men like him, but, instead, I say that I was afraid that the Court might be reluctant to let Pagan remain with a homosexual.