by James Lasdun
His first big coup came when the British ambassador to Uruguay was kidnapped by the Tupamaros guerrillas. Marco’s parents had a weekend cottage near the ambassador’s family farm in Sussex, and Marco was able to get an early interview with family members, blinking in shock outside their oast houses a few hours after news of the kidnapping reached England. On the back of this he got a commission to make a programme about the guerillas themselves. Footage of Héctor Pérez distributing stolen food in the slums of Montevideo, along with a lingering close-up of the ‘People’s Prison’ where the ambassador himself was possibly being held at the very moment of filming, provoked spasms of scandalised indignation in the right-wing press, ensuring Marco’s success with the left, and providing the formula for future triumphs.
From the Tupamaros he went on to embed himself for periods with insurrectionists and paramilitaries across half the world. He was in Northern Ireland in 1975, filming a programme that upset even some of his admirers, when the actions he was accused of decades later were alleged to have taken place.
The footage in question, of a young Catholic woman being tarred and feathered, had no direct connection with the private scene that occurred, or didn’t occur, in Marco’s hotel room a few hours after he filmed it, but a certain affinity exists between the two (or does in my mind); and I found myself thinking of both as I listened to the tweed-clad woman at the lectern speaking about rape and memory, imitation and repetition, while Marco sat nodding, frowning, jabbing at ragged chicken bones on his plate, tilting his face this way and that in his usual unguarded fashion; every word seemingly triggering some reflex of warm approval or restless annoyance.
2
His ‘ordeal’ (as he’d taken to calling it) began with, of all things, a private message on Twitter. He’d never used Twitter for private communication. For that matter he’d never tweeted. The only reason he had a Twitter account at all was to search for tweets about himself (he told me this with an only mildly embarrassed grin).
‘@Marcorosedale,’ the message read, ‘desperately need to get hold of you. Can you contact me asap?’
The sender, a Mel Sauer, included his email address, the server for which was a British national newspaper. I’ll call it the Messenger.
It depressed Marco a little to think he’d dropped so far off the map that a major newspaper couldn’t track down his phone number. But the message itself seemed to him to bode well. He wondered if it might have something to do with his current project, a pilot for a series combining travelogue and crime reportage, provisionally titled A Crime and a Place. The idea – by his own admission more gimmicky than anything he’d tried before – was to attend trials at county courthouses across the US, and look at the crimes through the lens of local cultural issues. ‘I’m thinking Artisanal murder for the tagline,’ he’d joked; ‘or else Marco Rosedale sells out for one last gig …’ Somewhat to his surprise, early reaction to a rough cut of a domestic violence trial in Maine had been positive, and he was already in talks with cable companies and independent financiers. Was it possible, he wondered, that the Messenger had got wind of the project and wanted to run a puff piece of some kind? Marco didn’t like to think he cared about such things any longer, but he admitted feeling a minor stir of excitement. It was years since he’d had any serious attention from the press.
He made himself wait a couple of days, and then sent a laconic note with his number in Brooklyn.
The phone rang almost immediately.
‘Marco? Mel Sauer here. So good of you to get back to me. We’re running an excerpt from a memoir by one of your old girlfriends, and I wanted to have a quick word with you about the contents. Take your temperature, as it were.’
So much for the puff piece. The man’s tone – glib, presumptuous, a little nervous – put Marco on his guard.
‘Which girlfriend?’
‘Julia Gault.’
The name surprised him – their affair had been brief, and he’d never actually thought of her as his ‘girlfriend’.
‘Julia’s publishing a memoir?’
‘She’s written one. I don’t know that she has a publisher, necessarily, at this point, but we’re keen to run the excerpt regardless. You’re in it, which is why I want to talk to you.’
‘What does she say?’
‘Well, it’s very candid, and somewhat … intimate.’
Marco, who’d already been rifling his long past for an incident in his personal life that could possibly interest an English newspaper, and drawn a complete blank, blurted out the only thing he could think of.
‘You’re going to inform me I have a secret illegitimate child – is that it? All grown up presumably, given how long ago our little fling was …’
Sauer chuckled.
‘No, nothing like that. Why don’t I email you the relevant passage, Marco, then you can read it and we can talk again?’
‘Okay.’
‘You may dispute one or two details, in which case we’d certainly consider running something in tandem by yourself. We’d be very open to that, in fact.’
‘Send it over,’ Marco told him.
An email arrived a few minutes later: ‘Here you go. Like I say, just taking your temperature at this point! Let me know your thoughts. Yours ever, Mel.’
The passage from Julia Gault’s memoir was attached.
I should mention that the name Julia Gault was familiar to me, and had been for almost as long as I could remember, though it was years since I’d heard it spoken. There was a time when I thought I might write a long novel, even a series of novels, about that distant English world of ours, in which Julia’s recurrent appearance at the periphery of my life as she transited through the many phases of her own, would form a significant motif. I can’t say I knew her in any way that properly qualified me to write about her. I was a shy teenager in the period when she was a regular presence in our house, and I don’t think I ever had a private conversation with her. But she made a strong impression on me, and as an adult, qualified or not, I spent many hours over many years making notes and sketches for what, in the grandiose ambition consuming me, was intended to be a portrait of her in the monumental manner of Proust’s Odette or Anthony Powell’s Pamela Flitton.
I hadn’t realised she and Marco had had a fling, though it didn’t surprise me to hear it. She’d been something of a media star herself for a short time, a current affairs presenter on a popular but serious TV show (the combination existed once), though from what I knew her own decline had been steeper and harder than Marco’s. The last news I’d heard of her involved money troubles stemming from a messy divorce and a house-sitting stint in the home of friends that had ended badly when she refused to leave.
The passage from her memoir that Sauer had sent began as a reminiscence of the sexual mores of the 1970s in general and the behaviour of men at that time in particular. Marco read it aloud from his phone to me and my wife when he visited us that spring to talk about his situation. The gist of it was that men were more overtly sexist then; more unabashedly condescending, imperious, entitled, aggressive and preeningly lustful, than they were now, and that young women like herself had been duped into thinking that a reluctance to play along was evidence of a prudish spirit. Marco was offered up as a characteristic specimen of the period, strutting about the globe in his leather jacket and jeans, with a fixed grin of libidinous intent on his handsome face and various phallic items of photographic equipment slung over his shoulder.
Despite the note of ridicule, it was, on the face of it, an affectionate portrait, and I believed Marco when he told me that on first reading it, he’d thought it pretty harmless. He wasn’t sure why the Messenger considered it worth publishing, but his feeling was that if Julia could make some money out of it, then good luck to her. He knew vaguely about her straitened circumstances, and was sympathetically disposed. The leather-jacketed stud stuff didn’t bother him; in fact, he told me, it had made him briefly nostalgic for his younger, cockier self.
He’d been about to email Sauer that he had no objections to the article, when a dim misgiving made him reread it. Only on this second reading did he take in the potentially damaging part. It was packed into a relatively small space; just a few sentences two thirds of the way through, easy to overlook, or at least mis-gauge. In them, Julia described an incident that occurred while she was working as the research assistant on his Belfast film. They’d been drinking at the bar of their hotel after a difficult shoot. At one point he’d kissed her, and after a while they’d gone upstairs to his room. She was in a serious relationship with someone else at the time – a university boyfriend whom she was planning to marry. Upstairs with Marco, she’d had an attack of fidelity and told Marco very apologetically that she didn’t want go to bed with him after all.
‘Did he take any notice?’ her piece continued in its oddly jaunty way. ‘Not a bit of it! Next thing I knew, my buttons and buckles and fasteners were being undone by what felt like about a hundred pairs of exceedingly powerful if also exceedingly nimble and well-practised hands, and I was lying naked underneath him on the bed. If memory serves, it was all over very quickly.’ From there the piece swerved back into affectionately lampooning mode, teasingly describing the long row of sharp-toed leather ankle boots lined up in the corner of Marco’s hotel room, along with its grimy corner washbasin and fly-specked ceiling light, but also praising his TV programmes, and declaring that ‘in spite of everything’ she was proud to have started her media career working with someone so talented and dynamic.
The accusation he’d missed the first time around hit him square-on this time. She was saying he had assaulted her. Regardless of the cheery tone, regardless of the decades that had passed since the night in question, it was a statement that could cause him serious harm. It was the kind of thing that, once said about you in public, rendered you permanently suspect – at best.
He emailed Sauer, telling him he considered the piece malicious and defamatory, and that he was astonished the Messenger would even consider publishing it. Sauer wrote back, suavely placating, assuring him that nothing was set in stone yet, repeating that for now he was just interested in, as he put it, ‘taking your temperature’, while also asking if Marco could be more specific about what he found ‘defamatory’. Reluctantly (unversed as he was in these matters, Marco sensed that to repeat an allegation, even if just to defend oneself against it, was a sure way to increase its weight and substance), he directed Sauer’s attention to the scene in the hotel bedroom.
Sauer replied: ‘Are you suggesting you didn’t sleep with her that night?’
‘No,’ Marco corrected him. ‘I probably did sleep with her that night. I’m not disputing that we had a fling. But it certainly didn’t happen the way she describes it.’
That ‘probably’ of his was a mistake; at any rate it gave Sauer a little crack to slither through. ‘Do please correct me if I’m wrong,’ he emailed back, ‘but it sounds as though there’s some uncertainty in your memory about the events of that night. Is that in fact the case?’
To which Marco retorted impatiently: ‘Of course there’s some uncertainty about that night! It was forty years ago! But I’m damn sure whatever happened was fully consensual.’ Already he was beginning to feel pestered; angry at being drawn in even this far.
‘I understand of course,’ Sauer wrote soothingly. ‘Memories can be slippery, can’t they? As I said, we’d be very open to something by you presenting your side of the story. We’re always terribly concerned to be balanced. Do please let me know if you’d like to write a riposte of some sort. Perhaps you might want to remind people that all kinds of behaviours we condemn now were considered perfectly acceptable in those days. I think that’s a point of view many of our readers would sympathise with.’
Enraged, Marco typed: ‘Go fuck yourself, you slimy sewer rat. All I have to say is that if you print this I’ll sue you and your shitty excuse for a newspaper for every penny you’re worth.’
He deleted the words, however. He wasn’t the son of a barrister for nothing; he understood the dangers of emailing abuse and threats to a newspaper features editor who already appeared to be out for his blood. Instead he wrote: ‘Thanks, but my point is that I never indulged in those “behaviours”: never wanted to, never needed to, never felt they were “acceptable” even in “those days”. As I said in my first email, the article is defamatory. Really, I have nothing further to add.’
There was no immediate reply, and after a while Marco began to feel cautiously hopeful that his point had been taken. Libel laws being stricter in England than the States, he knew the Messenger would have to be careful. It seemed possible this man Sauer had genuinely thought he might not mind the article, and that Marco had scared him off just by showing that he did. Sauer’s response, when it finally came, didn’t entirely dispel this optimism: ‘Thank you for this, Marco, enormously appreciated. As I say, just wanted to take your temperature. Will discuss with my senior editor tomorrow. Have a good night!’
Marco slept reasonably well (he remembered this because it was the last good night’s sleep he got for several weeks), but in the morning he found an email from Sauer in his inbox. ‘Hello Marco, we do feel Julia has a right to tell her side of this important story and are inclined to press ahead on the basis of that, but we equally feel you should have an opportunity to defend yourself. I’m attaching a suggested snapshot about you, listing your considerable accomplishments in I trust acceptable terms, though do please feel free to revise as you see fit, and we are more than happy to offer you equal space with Julia to comment however you choose, within reason. Greatly looking forward to your thoughts about this.’
The ‘snapshot’ described Marco in ingratiating terms, making him sound far more successful than he really was. He was flattered for a moment, but soon realised that in the context of the proposed article itself, the flattery would merely make readers dislike him even more than they were going to anyway. What really unsettled him, however, was the opening: ‘Marco Rosedale, son of eminent barrister Sir Alec Rosedale QC …’
Having lived half his life in the US, Marco sometimes forgot what a considerable personage his father still was in British cultural and political circles. Even now, in his nineties, the old man was something of a public figure, lending his name to progressive causes and occasionally appearing as a guest on TV shows, where he cut a figure of simple dignity: white-haired, mild-eyed, his mind as alert as it had ever been, his sympathies for the downtrodden undimmed. Marco revered him, but preferred not to define himself in terms of his distinguished paternity, and it was always a bit of a shock to him when other people did. On this occasion, along with the shock, came a sudden suspicion of why the Messenger was so interested in publishing Julia’s tale. Dirt on a well-known, well-respected name. Just the kind of sleazy exercise English newspapers liked to indulge in on behalf of their readers; the more respected their target, the better.
I’m not sure I agreed this was their sole motive. Julia had had her own celebrity moment (albeit briefly and long ago), and Marco himself was not a totally unknown commodity, so there was some scandal mileage in each of them in their own right. But no doubt the connection to Sir Alec helped. Either way, the thought of his father getting dragged into this was upsetting to Marco for all sorts of reasons. He’d always had a sense of himself as somehow questionable, dubious even, compared to his father: generationally inferior you could say; condemned, by historical forces if not personal inclination, to be looser and loucher. So the accusations touched a nerve. Then too, he was just plain mortified; ashamed at the prospect of his father seeing him engulfed in this miasma that seemed to be moving towards him, wafting like a bad smell out of Sauer’s emails.
He steeled himself for battle, resolving not to trouble his old man’s peace, even though he could have used his advice.
3
The first I heard of all this was in May of 2016, when Marco called me upstate and invited himself for the weekend: ‘I need to ta
lk to you about something …’
He was wearing one of his usual casually dapper outfits when I picked him up at the train station – dark jacket over a mustard polo neck, English cords tapering to grained leather boots. But he looked pretty ragged all the same: eyes bloodshot, grey-brown stubble blurring the normally clean lines of his chin and cheekbones.
‘I haven’t slept for a month,’ he said, catching the look on my face.
‘How come?’
‘Tell me something. Have you been following these sexual harassment dramas in the news?’
‘You mean like … Bill Cosby?’
‘Cosby, Assange, DSK, Jian Ghomeshi … Do you follow them?’
I felt a shade apprehensive.
‘Some, a little. Why?’
‘What interests you about them?’
‘I mean, they’re all very different from each other, aren’t they?’