‘That didn’t hurt now, did it?’ Dudley claims in the face of the evidence. Pagan does not reply; I picture the eloquent accusation in her eyes. ‘All over. You’ve been a very brave girl. Put your kit back on and we’ll see what we can find for you in my drawer.’ What he finds is a lollipop, with which he bribes her into the waiting room. He then returns to his desk and takes out a silver art-deco cigarette case, which he presents to me. ‘Do you partake of the weed? No? It may shock you, coming from a doctor, but I can’t help regretting the fact that so few people do nowadays. It was such a serviceable convention: an instant ice-breaker. Courtesy … comradeship.’
‘Cancer?’
‘Yes, well, to the matter in hand … I’m afraid that there’s nothing conclusive. Her vagina is a little red, which is consistent with mild incontinence. And there’s slight scarring to the hymen.’
‘What’s that consistent with?’
‘Children play with themselves; little girls as much as little boys. Inserting a finger –’
‘Or a penis?’
‘As I said, there are slight scars on the hymen and mild anal dilation.’
‘Is she fingering that too?’
‘An open bot is generally trying to tell us something, but I wouldn’t be prepared to make a diagnosis based on anal dilation. We don’t want another Cleveland.’
‘This is one girl, not the whole of Hove!’
‘Now anal fissures would be a good sign … that is, from a clinical point of view. In a baby, they might be due to a bowel problem; but not in a six-year-old.’
‘So what action should we take?’
‘The trouble with anal dilation is that it tends to clear up fairly fast. We’d need a photograph; and, to be frank, I’m not too keen on taking pictures of six-year-old bots, especially when the consultation has been somewhat irregular.’
‘So we leave her exposed to further abuse?’
‘You mentioned that you suspected your father?’
‘He’s not my father; he’s Pagan’s grandfather.’
‘Make it clear that you have your eye on him. Abusers are cowards. More than likely, he’ll run scared.’
‘They’re far more than suspicions. She described what he did to her in gross detail.’
‘Let me give you a word of advice. In thirty-five years in this field, I’ve seen case after case collapse in court. Any half-competent barrister would wipe the floor with her story. The Judge has to direct the jury that it’s dangerous to convict without corroboration. Do you want to put her though all that to no purpose?’
‘All I want is to protect her.’
‘There’s something else. You said yourself that the grandfather was a disciplinarian. She may have thought to herself: I don’t like this man; I’m going to make trouble for him.’
‘Her grandmother is equally strict and yet she hasn’t accused her.’
‘Children are devious.’
‘His very words. I’m beginning to smell a conspiracy.’
‘Come now, Mr Young; that’s unworthy of you.’
‘You heard what she said about bottoms.’
‘There may well be confusion; she may mean smacks … So he believes in a good slap on the bot; that doesn’t make him an ogre. He’s in keeping with one out of every two normal families …’ I, of course, am not a normal family; I am a pervert who believes that children learn at their parents’ knees, not by being spread across them.
‘And the “Come, come, come” and the spilt school pudding?’
‘Playground talk.’
‘In a primary school?’
‘I’m afraid so. Either she or one of her friends will have watched a pornographic video. Word gets around.’
‘So I’m to do nothing?’
‘My advice is to stay vigilant but silent. You’d be stirring up a hornet’s nest and the little girl would be the first to be stung.’ He walks me to the door. ‘I feel that we’re altogether too precious about children these days; it’s like all the fashionable, faddy diets … we mustn’t eat this; we mustn’t eat that. We need a little grit in our food to protect us; just like we need a little grit in life.’ He exhales smoke in my face. ‘And, even if there has been a degree of what we might term “sexual inappropriateness”, it doesn’t automatically mean that she should never visit her grandparents. Pros and cons, my friend; ride the seesaw. Pros and cons.’
We discover Pagan turning a clockwork TV with a permanent showing of nursery rhymes. I remind her of our date with the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum. She says a guarded goodbye to Dudley, who asks if she enjoyed her lollipop.
‘Grandpa gave Patience a lollipop when he tickled her too.’ Dudley looks startled. I hear the thump of a slumped seesaw.
‘Pros and cons, my friend? Pros and cons?’
2
I sit in the lounge of Brown’s hotel, like a lonely hearts lover mocked by the freshness of his rose. I am waiting for your mother. Making contact proved to be easier than I had feared. A direct approach to the bank in Stamford established that her husband had been promoted and transferred to Peterborough; an indirect one, via the BT archives, left me with photocopies of the last eight years’ entries of Sextons. I embarked on a process of elimination.
‘Hello … Mr Sexton? You may not remember me; but I think that we worked together at Barclays in Huntingdon, thirty years ago.’
‘You’ve got the wrong man, I’m afraid. I don’t think I’ve even been to Huntingdon; I’m an optician. Besides, I bank at Lloyds.’
‘Hello … Miss Sexton? I’m sorry to bother you. But I think that I may have worked with your father at Barclays in Huntingdon nearly thirty years ago.’
‘Not mine. Not unless you’re psychic. Pop died in Plymouth in 1960. Look, what is this? Are you from Cilla Black?’
‘Hello … Mrs Sexton? I don’t expect you’ll know me, but I used to work with your husband nearly thirty years ago in the bank in Huntingdon.’
‘Well I never. Thirty years. He’s out at his committee now, but he’ll be ever so disappointed. Mr…? I didn’t quite catch your name.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m afraid I’ve got the wrong number.’
A trip to Peterborough and a tour through the avenues and cul-de-sacs of suburbia confirm that I have the right number, both of the phone and the house. These are the streets that witnessed wife-swapping in the seventies, Trivial Pursuit in the eighties, and negative equity in the nineties. ‘Lilac Time’, with its loft-conversion, satellite-dish and white wrought-iron gates, looks the perfect setting for a bank manager. Rejecting the impulse to knock on the door, I return home, where I write her a letter, recounting our friendship and requesting a meeting to fill in some of the gaps left by your death. I guarantee my complete discretion … until I recollect the men who did as much for me.
Three days later, she telephones me. She introduces herself without mentioning you; and, for a moment, I fail to put a history to the name. She explains that this is the first time that she has been alone in the house and free to talk … I feel like a conspirator. It seems that she had no idea that you were dead and has been unable to stop crying since receiving my letter; fortunately, her husband attributes it to the change of life. ‘I thought that all my tears were dried,’ she says … or is it ‘cried’? I am distracted by the accent. ‘When I was younger, they’d come on without warning. Floods of tears: I couldn’t control them. They don’t tell you about that when they make you give up your baby. I only saw her for a few hours and yet I wept for her for years. “It’s just Mum in one of her states,” my family would say. I have two girls.’
I overcome her resistance to a meeting. Even so, she rejects my offer to drive to Peterborough, in favour of tea in London, which she can combine with a morning’s shopping.
‘How will we recognise each other?’
‘Oh, I’ll recognise you. I never miss a programme. My favourite this year was Zsa Zsa Gabor.’
I wait in the plushness of Brown’s, my privacy pr
eserved by the host of American tourists, when I am greeted by something overwhelmingly floral. ‘You look redder than you do on the BBC,’ she says, smoothing her skirt and sitting down; ‘your hair, that is. Though it may be our set; it doesn’t do you justice.’
‘How was your journey?’
‘Very A to B … that’s what my daughter says. And the toilets weren’t fit for a football fan. I couldn’t live in the capital.’ She points the word as though it were the concept that scared her.
‘You don’t seem to have had much success shopping.’
‘Oh, I never meant to buy anything. Just to shop.’
I order our teas. She toys with the sandwiches and reserves her serious attention for the cakes. ‘I shall pay for this tomorrow,’ she says with a mouth full of meringue. ‘A minute on the lips, a lifetime on the hips. Still, everything in moderation.’ She reaches for a millefeuille.
I examine her features for signs of yours; but I see no resemblance. Your face is all animation; hers is set in its folds, its expression framed in excess flesh. She squeezes the pastry into her mouth and a dollop of cream squirts out. She meets my gaze with a guilty blush; and I sense the intimacy of her relationship with food. I avert my eyes as she dabs her dewlap. Between bites, she introduces me to her family. Both daughters are married. One lives in Leeds with a cricketer … I politely pretend to have heard of him; the other has stayed in Stamford and works part-time in her husband’s office. ‘Two of the kids are under five, so I help out three days a week. My husband thinks it’s too much for me. But she’s my daughter.’ She gulps.
‘Yes.’
‘Besides, I gave up my job when we moved back to Peterborough; so what else do I have to do?’
‘Candida told me that you were a cashier in Boots.’
‘I was a supervisor!’
‘Of course. I’m sorry. My memory.’
‘She came out of the blue. There was no letter … you sent a letter. I didn’t have time to collect my thoughts.’
‘She was always impetuous. It was her nature.’
‘I don’t know where she got it from.’ She is silent.
‘It was her middle name.’
‘It’s not right, you know: that law letting kids track down their parents. Opening a can of worms on their eighteenth birthday, when it should be a bottle of champagne.’
‘People need to know where they come from.’
‘What about the parents? You can have no idea what it’s like to give up a child.’ I decide not to disabuse her. ‘I was seventeen years old. I couldn’t tell the difference between her growing in my body and my own body growing. It didn’t feel anything special … just another change; until she came out: that perfect, squashed bit of me … Look at me. You’ve made me cry again.’ I apologise and hold out the cake-plate. ‘Why not?’ she smiles, ‘what have I got to lose?’ … I refrain from remarking ‘weight’. ‘It’s strange but I remember her birth so much better than my daughters’ … my other daughters. Then there were cards and flowers and my husband and his mother. But, with her, I was completely alone.’
‘Didn’t your own mother visit?’
‘No … It was a hard labour. Sometimes I feel it’s been forty years’ hard labour, which is no less than I deserved. I used to think she was giving me something to remember her by, if only rips and stitches. They let me hold her, but they wouldn’t let me feed her, even though I had all this milk … for months, I had milk that I had to get rid of. I remember there was some famine; I think … I expect it was Africa. People were starving, and there was I wasting all this milk. I used to dream of mouths … The woman from the society came to collect her the next day and I howled. I howled and howled until the nurse gave me an injection; I was disturbing the other mothers on the ward … the real mothers. I was kept there for five days, watching the comings and goings: the husbands and the children and the chocolates. I could see all the visitors looking at me and asking the story of the girl without so much as a bottle of Lucozade on her locker.’
‘What happened when you were discharged?’
‘I went home. To Mum and Dad and six years of silence. Oh, I had some good times … laughs with the girls, fun with the lads. But inside there was pain; in my heart … in my head … in my breasts, there was pain. There was love and guilt spilling into each other. There was pain. I couldn’t tell anyone. Everyone knew; but they were doing me a favour by saying nothing. I had to be grateful, even though it was eating me up. And the worst day of all was her birthday. For weeks before – long before I remembered – I’d get this ache in my stomach and this rash on my skin: bright blood-red lumps … Mother’s Day was almost as bad. Every year, in the shop, we had more and more gifts: bath salts; so many sorts of bath salts … what does anyone want with bath salts? And my daughters would write me cards. And my husband would say “it’s Mum’s day today, so she’s not going to lift a finger” … though I always did. And all I could think of was those few hours in the hospital with that little baby on the pillow.’ She breaks down in dry tears. ‘There’s a Grandparents’ Day now, you know,’ she recovers herself. ‘My grandson – he’s eight – sent us a card for the first time last year. He put “To the best Gran and Grandad in the whole world”. And that didn’t hurt at all … Look at me, chattering away nineteen to the dozen. I can see you’re a professional; you know how to make people talk.’
‘Were you never curious to find her yourself?’
‘No, I gave her – I tried to give her – to a good home. I insisted on church-goers, though I wasn’t one myself … perhaps that was why. And, six years later, I married. If Andrew could see me now … I don’t mean talking about this, but talking to you. He’s a great fan. He wrote a letter to the paper after they published … well, you know. They didn’t print it. He said they had no call to do that to someone who brought pleasure to millions. He’s very broad-minded.’
‘And yet you haven’t felt able to tell him about Candida?’
‘That’s the past. It’s dead and buried. Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean …’
‘Don’t worry.’
‘Ever since I heard the news, I keep thinking: was it psychopathic?’
‘What?’
‘Like cancer. She seemed so unhappy. I don’t know what she expected from me. We were strangers … strangers who happened to share the same blood.’
‘She had an almost mystical belief in the power of parenthood. All the emotions that others attach to their lovers or art or God, she attached to you. There was no way that you could live up to her expectations … her fantasies. The biggest shock was to learn about her father.’
‘She told you?’
‘Of course. But there was far more to it than snobbery. She seemed to be living out a fairy tale, with herself as a princess in disguise. Then she found that the king was a genuine peasant … I don’t suppose you know if he’s still alive.’
‘Who?’
‘Her father.’
‘I go to visit him once a week.’
‘Really? I’m sure she told me he’d run off. I must be confused. She was so disillusioned by the story. She threw herself into … a life that wasn’t good for her. I’ve always believed that one of the reasons she never named Pagan’s father was to spare her a similar pain.’
‘You don’t know who he is?’
‘No. And, at the risk of sounding like Candida, I’d give anything to find out. I’m desperate for an ally. He’s the only one people will listen to. Even the Judge admitted that, if he’d known his identity, he’d have come to a different decision. I’m no relation so I’m nothing … I wouldn’t even be allowed in the ward if she had an accident. But a father has rights. He could apply to the Courts; he could have Pagan removed from her grandfather.’
‘Her grandfather?’
‘I don’t want to distress you, but I suspect … in fact, I’m convinced that she’s being abused.’ The word sounds shrill amid the understated elegance of the lounge.
‘Pagan?’
‘I have proof.’ The blood drains from her face.
‘It can’t happen again. It can’t.’
‘Is everything satisfactory, sir, madam?’ The waiter’s intervention is insufferable. I ask him curtly to leave.
‘I must go. I knew that I shouldn’t have come. Why did you insist?’ She takes out a mirror, more to occupy her hands than to look at her face.
‘The last thing I want is to hurt you. I thought you’d understand.’
‘Of course I understand. Who better? She told you about her father.’
‘The meat-packing?’
‘What? I mean that her father was my father; her father was her grandfather. I was her mother and her sister.’ She looks aghast. ‘You said that you knew.’
‘No, I knew something different … thought I knew.’ I try to assimilate this new pattern. Is this blood enough for you? I am drowning in blood.
‘I’d never told anyone except my mum. It killed her. Oh not with shock, nothing sudden. But, from then on, she went through life like she was always laying the table and never eating. She stopped talking; the house felt as cold as a convent … God forgive him for what he did. He’d been after me for years. He was always switching off lights; she used to tell him he must have Scotch blood and he’d laugh to make her feel safe. But it was so as he could come at me in the dark … with his breath and his hands. To be honest, I never thought much about it, not until the hands got rougher … The last thing I meant was to tell Candida – such a pretty name, don’t you think? I could never have picked such a pretty name – but she was so pushy. She reminded me of him. I don’t like to say it but she did. She wouldn’t let go of me. When I asked her to leave, she began to accuse me … it was my fault that I hadn’t kept her, my fault that her dad had run off.’
I suddenly see a resemblance, not in your features but in your self-disgust. You are sitting opposite me on so many mornings-after, insisting that you are nothing but a slut and blaming it on your bad blood.
Pagan and her parents Page 31
