Margot's Secrets

by Don Boyd

  Tape recorder – his request. Transcript. Paolo’s words verbatim:

  “I pushed myself towards this. Being one of his special boys. Not only was I allowed to rub out Las Novas but I would also find myself favoured with goodies – with Guy’s special jar of garlic salt at table in the dining room. I would be the first to be invited to come his room to listen to his favourite singers, faded pop stars from the fifties in Spain and France – Concha Velasco, Rosalia, Edith Piaf, Charles Trenet, and to smoke dope. My hero had a seductive, shadowy study – he loved all that smoky sentimentality of wartime European culture, particularly the iconography of Spain during the Spanish Civil War. All this was so much for me, as I was then. Impressionable. A bit frightened. Like a child. I won the prizes he doled out for perfect marks in his Spanish lessons. Quarter pound boxes of Black Magic chocolates. I won a bottle of Kia Ora orange squash for the best-kept cricket-scoring book in the summer. (A way to keep us watching the school match more seriously then – Scottish prep school cricket is crap) and, of course, I was always the quickest to conjugate Spanish verbs. I was brilliant at it.

  “In the early stages of I sort of hero-worshiped Guy… I had absolutely no idea of what he had in store for me. I loved it. Innocent, well-deserved attention. I laughed, as all of us did, at the sexual jokes – none of us knew what they meant. We even joked about our suave hero’s love affair with one of the pretty female teachers. We were, after all, beginning to know a bit about sex. Some of us were masturbating. Sex was rearing its seductive head. We were shown ‘naughty’ mags in his study: Playboy, Private Voyeur and Titbits. This made our visits there so exciting – for all of us, not just me. He was so popular. We all loved him. I loved him unconditionally.

  “And I couldn’t help beginning to notice that I was his favourite. And all at the expense of another boy who was a couple of years older than me. I liked this boy very much and I had always preferred being with boys older than me. Being a bit ahead of my age group in my studies made that easier. Callum was his name. He had become my friend and this made it a bit difficult. At first I thought that Guy’s favours were because I had an unusual advantage over Callum. Mum is Spanish and I spoke fluent Spanish in a way that even the smart boys like Callum couldn’t. But other factors crept in. For instance, when it came to punishment, I wasn’t beaten properly in the way that other boys were. On one occasion, Guy pretended to cane me, yet I knew that the other boys had been caned brutally. Callum showed me the stripes on his bum in the tub room – this was the last year of legal beatings, and for some nasty reason this had increased the number of punishments. The dreaded pain, this was… superseded… by an overwhelming sensation of sexual excitement when he hugged me instead of caning me. I was standing in his study in thin white games shorts and a flimsy rugby jersey. My Spanish teacher was holding me tight, close to his body. I could feel his penis. It was hard. Gradually I began to get a message, which made me realise that there was more to the ‘special’ relationship than just a brilliant teacher/pupil rap. A new dynamic crept into our relationship. Repeated, subtle references to his bedroom began to crop up – it was all very hush-hush, secret – other boys who had heard through the bush telegraph that a visit to his bedroom was the ultimate accolade for ‘special friends’. Callum seemed to be in on this. True acceptance as a ‘special friend’ was a visit to Guy’s room. These rumours were made stronger by the occasional, almost casual, hint from my superhero that I might like to visit him ‘upstairs’ one evening, for a ‘session’.

  “ ‘What is a session?’ I asked.”

  “ ‘Very secret’, Guy replied, smiling with a naughty, naughty smile as he raised his long finger to the ruby lips of his handsome, rather louche face. I had to find out more. I asked around and got blanks. Extra tuition it wasn’t! A beating – no. Sex education possibly? Titters of ignorance. I finally made a decision. One evening in his study I told him that I would be interested in the prospect of a session. I had been told that I was to become Head Boy the following term. I was old enough. He explained that I had now become a ‘special friend’. He emphasised secrecy. Discreet was one of his favourite words. He embellished the invitation with a hint of the dangers of being caught. He played on a sense of trust. He relied on the knowledge that to become part of this special club was as dangerous for a newbie as for himself. And so he fixed a time for my induction. No text messages, emails – too risky. I knew that this was going to be my first proper sexual experience. I was twelve years old. I had fallen into Guy’s deliberately orchestrated trap. I was about to visit his lair. And what is horrifying to think about now is that I wanted this more than anything in the world. I had been primed! I was a willing victim… Of this man’s determined campaign to seduce me into his world of illicit homosexual sex.

  “I can hardly remember my first visit to his bedroom, although I can remember many aspects of these sessions over the four years. The ‘sausage between your buttocks’ sense of buggery. The putrid smell of sticky male cum. The whiff of gelatine cream (KY, I think), which he used to make entry easier. Fumbling. And his low seductive voice, yes, gentle encouragement as I was introduced to each new facet of sex between a man and a young boy. His room was very neat, with combs and brushes laid out neatly on a small, makeshift dressing table.

  “I will never forget seeing his erect penis for the first time and gasping… I was petrified. It was huge. He asked me to fondle it and put my mouth over it. I never quite understood, and still don’t to this day, why he was so excited by me. I wore glasses and was hardly a Greek God to look at. My own penis is not huge, sort of average. But I clearly got it on for him. I found doing it itself fairly revolting, although I enjoyed coming in the way that you might imagine a young boy who is doing it for the first time might enjoy coming. I hated the taste of his semen. I loathed the pain. I could smell the slightly effeminate, perfumed aroma of what I assumed was his after-shave. I hated that, too. And yet, I became a member of his highly secret club. Regular. My initiation into this club – sophisticated… exotic… this secret world, seemed to make it more important for me to be one of Guy’s ‘special friends’. I was at last receiving some proper attention from a man I really admired. It was exciting. I felt privileged. And so one session became two, and two became…

  “And then something truly hellish happened which increased my own need to be loved and cared for. My friend Callum had decided to leave school early before taking his ‘A’ levels. Nobody really knew why – he was very clever and would have definitely gone onto Oxford or Cambridge. He was a strange, rather emotional boy but I liked him. Loved him. Like me, he had enjoyed a special relationship with another master at the junior school when he was very much younger, many years before I had arrived. A brilliant teacher, older than Guy, but with the same gift of the gab. Callum had worshipped him. And quite suddenly, this man had left rather abruptly, under a cloud. Forced to resign. Some hushed up scandal. No proof. This had profoundly upset Callum. He told me that he had been to blame. I never really found out why, as Callum refused to talk about it. The only thing he did tell me was that it had all happened after he had been off sick in the ‘san’ and been examined by the school doctor. Callum’s secret! My secret! But he did tell me how he had felt, and that he had nursed these feelings for months and had been very depressed – guilty, lonely, traitorous, isolated. I was his only friend. He told me that he used to cry in his bed at night and had been bullied by the other boys in the dorm. That Summer term he didn’t show up. He lived in the Highlands where his Dad owned a small deer-stalking estate. I think he was an only child. I assumed that he had persuaded his Dad to let him go to a local day school to sit his exams. They are pretty good in Scotland. How wrong! How stupid! I was flicking through The Scotsman one Sunday and came across his familiar face, splashed across two pages. One night during the summer holidays, Callum had hidden himself in the gunroom of his ghillies’ home and shot himself in the head with a twelve bore, double-barrelled shotgun… I felt so bad. As if
it had been partly my fault…”

  Paolo went very quiet. I asked him if he wanted me to turn off the tape. He was silent. He shook his head. Callum’s secret?

  “Guy was especially comforting to me about Callum. When I moved in the winter term from the prep school to the senior school at Strathalmond, I thought that our ‘sessions’, as he called them, would have to stop. Apart from the shock of Callum’s suicide, I had enjoyed my term as Head Boy and my Common Entrance results had been good enough to put me into the ‘A’ stream class, which meant taking my first GCSEs while I was still only twelve, with boys who were nearly two years older than I was. This required fitting into a new, more competitive environment at Strathalmond’s upper school, meaning that all this exciting stuff, sex, would have to stop. And yet, of course, there was a culture of public school homosexuality at Strathalmond. Even in a mixed school. The girls were taken for granted and kept largely to themselves, while the boys had rampant sex with each other. I began to obsessively nurse the secret of my relationship with Guy and get on with normal life at this horrible place. Beatings from prefects – secret and illegal but they were happening. And mild flirtations with pretty boys being every public schoolboys’ substitute for teenage sexual experiment. Strathalmond had this system called the ‘Top Ten’. The top ten most desirable boys at school were favoured creatures who all provided fantasies for the rest of the mostly heterosexual guys. Their photos were posted on our special Internet site, which had a secret password. I fell in love with a peaches and cream boy then like everybody else. I even had the occasional masturbatory homoerotic experience with fellow dorm boys. But out of school I began a long career of rampantly heterosexual experiences. I thought that Guy was firmly in my past, a very, very secret rite of passage. But I was soon to discover that ‘special friendships’ do not necessarily cease, and that what had begun as a powerfully organised campaign of seduction disguised as good, clean, harmless fun, was going to go on into my teens and dominate the rest of my life.

  “Guy rounded on me after chapel one Sunday at the beginning of my second week in senior school. He invited me for a session on the following Thursday after prep. The ease with which he explained how I could wangle this without being caught, suggested that he had obviously organised similar visits from other ‘special friends’. Clearly this was not a club for one member. All week I would be excited at the prospect of seeing him again. From the seconds after our short, sly exchange outside that very beautiful chapel, while the rest of the kilted pupils filed meekly out of our two Sunday church services, and that millisecond of my cry of sado-masochistic pain as his large circumcised penis entered my tender, teenage, well-lubricated buttocks, I would nurse a sexy, exciting, all-enveloping sensation which would not go away until after I had clandestinely crept out of his small bedroom, close to the tub room on the top floor of his boarding house, and taken the short, ten-minute walk back to the main upper school gates. This was Strathalmond School, one of Scotland’s most prestigious ‘public’ boarding schools.

  “I had sung the treble solo at the carol service in front of the stained glass window of that church. Within months of singing an innocent adeste fideles, I was committing the sin which should have earned me perpetual damnation, six brutal strokes of the cane and the summary expulsion which almost certainly would have been my fate had I been caught. And yet the fear of this kind of disastrous punishment didn’t put me off. I slipped off secretly to continue a relationship which I now know was one which allowed a man to commit a crime which he should probably have been locked up for.”

  Margot stared at her handwritten notes:

  This man is a criminal in the eyes of the law and he is an evil manifestation of a peculiar British phenomenon, which for so long has characterised the institutional elite. These more disguised predators are just as culpable as Guy, just as culpable as the Welsh priests serving jail for their child abuse offences, just as guilty as the men serving sentences for abusing children in the ‘care’ homes of our social welfare system. Or the Catholic priests in Boston. Has the public school system mysteriously protected itself from a terrible history of child abuse for too long and if so, why has it got away with it all for so long? These are just a few of the issues which crop up in analysing Paolo’s case. On a personal level, the idea that anyone I know – cousins, godchildren, friends’ children, anyone – should fall prey to such a monster is too hideous. Where is this all leading to, I wonder?

  I must ask Archie about his experiences in Scotland. It’s a small country and the school community there must be rife with gossip and secrets.

  Margot stopped the tape, and made another note to ask Archie about Strathalmond. And then she turned on the tape again:

  “I was manoeuvred by Guy into out of school activities, making it easy for him to continue to sexually abuse me. He was so wily. My brother and I went on holiday in Austria with him my last summer at school – my parents’ marriage had become alcoholic and violent and they were heading for a divorce, as Mum had fallen for Eusebio by now. Dad thought that we would be better off away from home on that holiday! We stayed in St Gilgen on the Wolfgangsee and in Salzburg during the music festival. Fabulous operas. And who was our chaperone on this perfect idyll amidst the Salzgammergut? None other than Guy. Between bouts of Mozart and the Marionetten Theater, between rubbers of bridge and visits across the lake, Guy forced me into two or three sessions for old times’ sake. I went along with these very reluctantly – I had developed a major crush on a very pretty chambermaid who flirted with me every morning after breakfast. I looked at girls on the bus. I was beginning to realise that I was heterosexual and that Guy was something completely different. And yet our friendship thrived. He seemed to like my company. Was this the early stages of some sort of careful monitoring process? Had he gone too far with me? Was he anxious? When I finally began my foray into the glam world of London life, Guy arranged an apartment for me. But I had made it totally clear that there would never be any more sex with him. I was adamant. He seemed less interested and was happy to take me along to the races at Goodwood – horseracing was his other grand passion. I had graduated from pupil to ‘friend’. It seemed that at school he needed to have these two identities. But in the real world, I was no longer el mono; he was no longer Guy the entertainer.

  “My only contact with him after this was at a chance meeting in the Café L’Accademia, you know, that one near the Liceu Metro in that square with the beautiful little church? I thought that I would never see him again when I learnt that he had been sacked from school. That was until I had heard once more this unmistakeable, prolonged, rather phoney laugh, his laugh. I was sitting at the counter where you can have a cheap lunch. I was with Tilly. We love that place. Dark and sexy, it serves the best Catalan lunch. They throw in a glass of wine with your food – an old tradition dating back to the industrial unrest of the late nineteenth century. At first I thought that I may have made a mistake, so I peered around the wooden columns which separate the counter stools from the normal tables. And there he was. I shuddered and went white with shame and fear and pretended to Tilly, who was anxious, that I had heard a laugh which reminded me of someone I once knew. For some peculiar reason I just had to go over to his table and say hello. For all I know he may have seen me. He looked sheepish – he was with two rather beautiful older women who were clearly hanging on all his witticisms and charm. He insisted on schmoozing over to meet Tilly but her reaction to him must have told him that she knew something about our secret. Tilly was the only person I had ever said anything to about him. And then he took me aside and, holding my arm tightly, told me in a whisper how good it was to see one of his ‘special friends’ again and that we should be in touch soon! I so stupidly gave him my mobile number and scribbled out an address. Tilly threw him a look, which must have got to him because he all but ran back to his table.”

  Paolo burst into tears. I (very gently) tried to find out why. He refused to talk. Session ran out of time. Next cli
ent had arrived.

  Margot’s notes ended here. She shivered. Paolo had clammed up. He wouldn’t tell her any more, and she would never see Paolo again. To ask him all the questions she now desperately wanted to ask him. She knew that he had more to tell her. Margot was ashamed. She felt guilty. She knew that he was not ‘cured’, as he put it. She had missed this golden opportunity to help Paolo. She hadn’t probed enough. If she had, she might have helped to save his life. Tilly’s life.

  Chapter Eleven

  Detective Police Inspector Carlos Mendoza loved gadgets as much as his wife, Elvira, hated them. At home he was denied the opportunity to show off his considerable knowledge of digital technologies. It drove his wife crazy, not simply because she was a technophobe, but because all his waking thoughts were directed towards the obsession which had taken over their domestic life. She forbade him to use his mobile telephone and banished his elaborate computer equipment to a tiny room, which looked like the storeroom of a second-hand hi-fi emporium, at the back of their apartment. None of Elvira’s hysteria perturbed Carlos. He ignored her remonstrations while scouring the Internet for bargains to supplement his extraordinary collection of state-of-the-art gadgetry.