by James Lasdun
Marco chuckled. ‘Why do you think that was?’
‘I assume because the whole subject has just become so fraught. They’re terrified of saying something that another student might find offensive or, you know, “triggering”. There are serious consequences for doing that now – actual legal consequences. So they prefer not to say anything at all. Somehow we’ve recreated the taboos of the Victorian era. Different reasons maybe, but the same anxious squeamishness around the whole topic.’
Marco was shaking his head.
‘I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s it at all.’
‘What is it then?’
‘It’s you, pal.’
‘Me?’
‘It’s because you’re old! Not as old as me, maybe, but old. They don’t want to listen to some balding geezer with the flesh beginning to sag under his chin – no offence – talking about desire and virginity and the life-enhancing power of awakened sexuality. Of course they find it embarrassing!’
I considered this, trying to ignore my wounded vanity. It hadn’t actually crossed my mind as a possible explanation for these awkward silences, but I had to admit it made a depressing sense.
‘This is as per your theory of why older men are vulnerable to accusations of harassment?’ I asked.
He nodded.
‘Same deal. Similar, anyway. Older men are going the way of older women. Maybe even overtaking them in terms of perceived repugnance. Power and status aren’t enough to blind people to the liver-spots and age-warts and wrinkles any more. Plus there’s a punitive element: societal revenge. We’ve finally been unmasked as the real villains of history.’
We got off the subway and ambled through Clinton Hill past the old pre-gentrification bodegas with their faded carnival bunting, and the glass-fronted newer establishments, gleaming complacently in the sunshine. Marco appeared to be in an expansive frame of mind. He moved at a leisurely pace, hands in his jeans pockets, his open coat of russet suede hanging in folds either side of him, doubling the width he took up on the narrow sidewalk so that every time we came to one of the thick old blotchy plane trees with gnarled roots breaking through the paving slabs, someone had to stand aside and wait for us to pass.
‘Speaking for myself,’ he said, ‘I’m reconciled to growing old. I embrace it. I’m actually happier, on balance, than I’ve ever been. I felt that way before this crap with Julia started, and I’m starting to feel it again. It does have something to do with sex, I think, in a negative way. I’ve discovered I like not being at the mercy of physical desire the whole time. I don’t lust in the abstract any more; only when occasion demands it, i.e. in bed with Hanan. It’s very nice. I don’t feel I have to make a conquest of every attractive woman I encounter. I don’t have that ridiculous idea that their attractiveness is somehow specifically directed at me, which leaves me much freer to enjoy all the secondary effects of desire – the pleasure of a good conversation, a good meal, a nice painting. I’ve come to appreciate all that, as well as all the little ordinary chores and rituals of life, things I barely noticed before or else regarded as drudgery. Going out in the morning to pick up an espresso and smelling all the neighbourhood smells of cooking, or spring blossoms, or diesel fumes; bumbling off to the gym or a board meeting at the Cinema Collective; watching people going about their lives … I never imagined such humdrum things could be enough to make life worth living, but they’re more than enough. If I were religious, those are the things I’d want to give thanks for. As a matter of fact, I’d say it’s almost worth becoming religious so as to be able to give thanks for them. They fill me with gratitude, and an urge to express that gratitude …’
I thought of pointing out to him that this ‘humdrum’ life of his was what most people would consider the height of leisure and luxury, but I refrained: I disliked falling into the role of purveyor of cold water in his company. Anyway, it wasn’t as if he didn’t already know it.
We reached his house and climbed the steep steps to his front door. There was a commotion going on inside. Alicia and her partner, Erin, were in the first of the adjoining reception rooms with Hanan, all of them laughing loudly. Alicia had a shiny black device strapped on over her eyes attached by cable to a monitor with a stereoscopic image of what looked like the inside of a fairground House of Horror. She was leaping with shock, staggering back as if the floor had just collapsed beneath her, flailing her arms as if to fend someone off (a man with six-inch fingernails and a face like Freddy Krueger had appeared on the monitor), all the while shrieking with terror and dissolving into giggles. Erin stood behind her, catching her as she fell and keeping her from banging the wall as she jerked sideways from her imaginary attackers. Hanan explained what was going on: the mask was a virtual-reality headset. We stood with her for a bit, laughing along, and then Marco noticed a light flashing on the answering machine by the sofa in the next room. He went in through the open archway.
‘Could you guys be quiet a moment?’ he called out. ‘Please?’
Alicia took off the headset, and we lowered our voices. The voice that came spilling out as he hit the playback button silenced us completely. It was high-pitched, unsteady, and filled with a bitter rage so intense it was as if some tormented spirit from the underworld were manifesting itself in the cosy shabbiness of that parlour room.
‘Yes, this is a message for Marco Rosedale. Marco, I want you to know you haven’t succeeded in silencing me. It’s Julia here, by the way, Julia Gault. I’ve found a publisher for my memoir. I’m sure your papa knows her, if you don’t. Renata Shenker. She’s going to publish the whole thing. As a book. Whitethorne Press. The Whitethorne Press. Anyway, I’m making some revisions. I’m going to say you raped me, Marco. Yes. This time I’m going to say it. Because you did. You raped me.’
Marco hung motionless for a moment, bent over the end table as if trying to convince himself the message was just the result of some freakish malfunction of the answering machine. Straightening up, he turned back to the archway and looked at the four of us with a stunned, almost dreamy expression. His daughter had flushed pink. Erin was staring off to the side with an odd smile. Hanan faced him, her eyes glittering as if a mass of thoughts were already firing in rapid succession behind them.
‘Who was that?’ she asked.
Marco seemed unable to answer. He gazed blankly at her, the hawkish set of his features lending a helpless, irrelevant dignity to the shock imprinted on them. I felt his discomfort so acutely that I found myself trying to think up some innocuous explanation for the message. Wrong number … Different Marco Rosedale … Crank call from an old friend with a twisted sense of humour … Before anything plausible came to mind, however, he spoke. His voice was surprisingly calm.
‘I’ll tell you,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you the whole story. I was hoping not to have to burden you with it, but I see that’s no longer an option.’ He turned to his daughter. ‘You too, sweetheart.’
He beckoned them into the living room. Erin retreated tactfully down the passageway to the basement stairs and I went up to the spare room. I remember feeling surprised and impressed by the stoic courage he appeared to have found in that excruciating moment. But I feared for him all the same. The voice on the machine, so familiar to me and yet so changed, had disturbed me profoundly. It seemed to me Marco was up against a more formidable antagonist than he, or I, had quite realised.
Part Two
1
Later that fall my mother had a serious stroke. I flew to England to be with her and my siblings. She’d left instructions not to be kept on life support, and after nine days she died in the hospital.
As far as I can tell, the emotions prompted in me by these unexpected events had no impact on my reactions to Marco’s story as it continued unfolding, so at the risk of appearing callous I will keep them to myself. In a more practical sense, however, the events themselves did have some effect. For one thing, they brought me to London.
In the mass of things needing to be done in the
immediate aftermath of my mother’s death, the task of contacting her friends about the funeral fell to me. Her address book was an enormous grey spring-binder, creased and dilapidated, but still bearing the faded insignia of my father’s old firm, where it had originally been prepared. It contained a thick sheaf of old printer paper – the kind you had to pull apart along the perforations after each printing job – interspersed with newer sheets of miscellaneous size, added as need arose. In the years since my father’s death my mother had done her diligent best to keep it up to date, scribbling or whiting out obsolete addresses, writing down the new ones in her increasingly unsteady hand, adding email addresses and mobile phone numbers as those things came into existence, crossing out the names of deceased friends with an eloquent single line of ink (apparently she couldn’t bring herself to consign them to total oblivion with the white-out brush), and inserting an occasional more recent acquaintance, sometimes on a thin snippet of fresh paper pasted onto the overcrowded original sheet.
Going through it was an unsettling experience. The names of my parents’ friends, living and dead, already had a certain talismanic significance for me. Together they brought back a powerful aura of that vanished world which had come to seem about as remote, in my eyes, as that of the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, and almost as heroic. That much I could have predicted. What I hadn’t reckoned on was finding myself back in the force field of Marco Rosedale’s saga. It hadn’t exactly been at the forefront of my mind since my mother’s stroke, so it was a surprise to be confronted by the names of so many of its principal players as I turned the pages.
Marco’s parents, Alec and Gabriella Rosedale, were there, their unchanged information testifying to a rare marital and geographic stability. Renata Shenker, proprietor of the Whitethorne Press, was there, along with her neatly crossed-out late husband Otto. And Julia was there too. She and my mother had of course been close once, but that was at a time before even this ancient tome had been compiled; before personal computers and perforated printing paper had been invented. She’d faded from our lives, and I was under the impression that she and my mother had lost touch.
But there she was, with a whole inserted page to herself, full of scribbled-out addresses and phone numbers and email addresses, many with question marks or the words ‘not sure’ written beside them. The most recent address was of the house in Maida Vale from which Julia had been evicted after refusing to leave (the owners she’d been house-sitting for were friends of my parents). That was a little over a decade ago, and it appeared my mother’s efforts to keep track of her former protégée had exhausted themselves after this.
We weren’t planning a big funeral, just family and close friends. Julia, who at one time would probably have been considered both, no longer fell into either category. And yet I found myself trying all the phone numbers on her page. I was aware of an element of idle curiosity in this. The thought of seeing her in person, or at least of talking to her, after all that had been going on with Marco, intrigued me. But I felt a little furtive as I dialled the numbers. I don’t like to think of myself as a busybody, though that in itself doesn’t seem enough to account for this dim sense of wrongdoing. Perhaps I was aware of the dangers of becoming implicated; of shifting from neutral observer of this drama into something more, shall we say, participatory. At any rate I was as much relieved as disappointed, when none of the phone numbers or email addresses worked. No doubt I could have got hold of Julia if I’d really wanted to, but I decided to take these failures as a sign that I should let the matter drop. I hadn’t forgotten her voice on Marco’s answering machine, and I could certainly see the benefits of not confronting its owner.
As for the other players in Marco’s drama, his parents had heard the news of my mother’s death through Marco and had sent a message asking to be informed about the funeral arrangements. Unlike Julia, they’d never been more than dinner party acquaintances of my parents, but nor had they ever entirely disappeared from my parents’ lives, and after some hesitation I decided I wouldn’t be stretching a point, or even indulging inappropriately in personal curiosity, by inviting them to the service and the reception afterwards. Renata Shenker presented no such difficulties: she was an old and much-loved family friend, and was one of the first people I called.
She arrived early at the crematorium on the damp, pale morning of the funeral, and we talked for a while in the cloister outside the chapel. In my early twenties I’d interviewed for a job with her. She ran a small publishing company that specialised in social science, European fiction and Holocaust memoirs (her husband had been a camp survivor). On my way to the interview I’d prepared clever things to say about Herbert Marcuse and Primo Levi, but she was more interested in my typing speed. She didn’t offer me a job, but she sent me to an editor at another firm who eventually hired me, so I’d always felt indebted to her. I hadn’t seen her since my father’s funeral, almost twenty years earlier.
‘You’ve lost your hair,’ she said. ‘Still, at least you haven’t swollen up like me. I can hardly walk these days.’ Having always been rather thin and wiry, she’d grown stout and short-breathed, and leaned with both hands on a metal stick.
‘But you’re still publishing books,’ I said. ‘That’s the important thing!’
‘Is it? Yes, I suppose it is.’ She frowned, and then added darkly: ‘When people let me.’
I had a pretty good idea what she was referring to, but I felt I should make a show of ignorance.
‘What does that mean?’
She gave me a searching look. She’d always had a reputation for shrewdness, and for having her ear to the ground. Still, it seemed unlikely she could have known I knew anything about Julia Gault’s memoir, much less that I’d become Marco Rosedale’s confidant.
‘Oh, nothing,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘There’s always nonsense of one sort or another going on in the book world, as I’m sure you know. How are you? I’m sorry about your mother. I shall miss her. She had her ways, but I was fond of her, on the whole. I certainly didn’t expect to outlive her. She always seemed so youthful. And of course she was considered a great beauty. Well, we all have to go.’
I knew her – knew her generation’s spiky honesty – well enough to know she was being affectionate, in her own way.
An usher opened the chapel and I went in with my siblings to check everything was in order, directing Renata to a waiting room. She shuffled off, but reappeared in the chapel a minute later, looking upset.
‘I think I’ll wait in here, on second thoughts,’ she said, squeezing into a pew at the back. I assumed the waiting room must have been crowded, though I hadn’t noticed many people arriving yet. It wasn’t until after the service, when she made a conspicuously hasty exit and told me she’d changed her mind about coming to the reception, that it dawned on me the Rosedales must have been in the waiting room, and that it was the sight of Alec Rosedale – Sir Alec Rosedale, QC – that had upset her.
It occurred to me at that point that I had in fact already made the shift from observer to participant in Marco’s drama, and that my role, minor as it was, had already implicated me in the distress of at least one person: an elderly woman who had once helped me, and whom I admired greatly.
2
It was at my urging that Marco had finally told his father what was going on. I’d suggested it early on, and I pressed him again soon after that sobering phone message of Julia’s announcing (among other things) that Renata was going to publish her memoir.
‘You’re going to need legal help,’ I’d said. ‘Why not get the best?’
As before, Marco was reluctant.
‘He’s not a libel lawyer, my dad. The reverse if anything. Free speech was always his thing; anti-censorship … He defended a publisher in an obscenity trial once.’
‘All the more reason to get his advice. He’ll know the subject from both sides.’
‘I don’t want to drag him into this, though. At his age he deserves some peace. Also it’
s just so humiliating, getting my dad to bail me out. And it’s embarrassing too. Can you imagine telling your father you’ve been accused of rape?’
‘He’s going to find out anyway, if you don’t stop the book. Then you’ll end up with the worst of both worlds.’
He hung his head. ‘I know. But I can’t tell him. I just can’t do it.’
But eventually he swallowed his pride and called his father.
Far from being unwilling to get involved, the old lawyer had rallied at once to his son’s defence. Elderly as he was – ancient, really – he retained a keen interest in political and social affairs, and grasped instantly the danger facing Marco.
‘This will destroy you,’ were the words Marco dourly reported him saying, ‘unless we fight back and fight back hard. If we lose, you’ll never make another film. You won’t be able to publish articles in reputable places either. And don’t expect your friends to stay loyal. This sort of thing is absolutely radioactive. But we shan’t lose. I’m going to put a team together. Send me your correspondence with that man at the Messenger.’
From what I gathered, he shared his son’s view that he himself was at least a part of the reason why the Messenger had wanted to run the original excerpt from Julia’s memoir. Years earlier they’d published an article attacking him after his defence manoeuvres in a terrorist case at the Old Bailey almost caused a mistrial. Later, when his clients were exonerated and freed from jail, the editors were forced to run a grovelling retraction, prompting (so he believed) their everlasting enmity. I still had my doubts about this supposed vendetta; the scenario smacked of grandiosity to me, but in any case Sir Alec apparently took a particular pleasure in his son’s victory over Mel Sauer.