‘Where’s Mummy?’ she asks as if I am concealing you … as if your illness were just a game and ‘let’s pretend’ has been superceded by hide-and-seek.
I hold her tight and try to explain what has happened. … You said that your parents told you that you were adopted at three. I wonder if it were some clumsiness of expression that made you hate them for ever more. I desperately try to find words that will make sense; words that are clear but not cruel. I will my tongue to treacle. We should build up to death: budgies, ponies, grandparents, not mothers … mothers are a lesson for book four. What can she know of loss? She has never even known a new nanny. In her world, time is measured in trips and treats and presents, and bereavement was her first day at school.
I weigh my words; but they are crushing her. Death is in her face, her hair, her clothes. She looks at me as if pleading for mercy from a stranger. ‘Does it mean I won’t ever see Mummy again?’
‘Not face to face, no. But she’ll always be with us.’
‘Where?’
‘In our thoughts … in our hearts.’
She stands confused. ‘But that’s nowhere.’
‘It’s a different way of looking.’
‘Does it mean I’ll be an orphan?’
I wonder where she has heard the word. ‘I know it’s hard, darling, but we must think of Mummy. She was so unhappy lying in bed all day. She was in such pain. We must be glad it’s been taken away.’
‘But she said I did that by rubbing her feet.’
‘I know.’
‘She said.’
‘I know.’
‘If I rubbed harder. Harder and harder and harder.’
‘Would you like a hug?’
She shakes her head and walks into the playroom. She lifts the flap of the Wendy house and steps inside. I stand outside, as isolated as any next-door neighbour. My exclusion frightens me. I feel that she has become a stranger, no longer the baby with basic needs or the infant as predictable as a nursery rhyme, but a growing girl with her own window on the world. I look through the window of the Wendy house; but the opaque plastic merely reflects my own face. I hear her repeating distinctly ‘I must be brave; I must be brave’.
Her words are my challenge; her life is my charge. What greater gift can anyone give than a child? What do you want for her? To be herself, to be happy … too obvious, too ordinary; or do you want for her what you despised for yourself? To be loved, to be fulfilled, to be famous, to be outrageous? There are so many possibilities. To have so many possibilities; perhaps we should settle for that? If we had only had more time to talk; but it was so hard for you communicating by computer, flicking out words for me to fill out into sentences. And yet your reluctance was more than mechanical. Was it too painful to contemplate giving up Pagan; or did you simply have faith in me?
Why did you choose me? What did you see in me? A good friend, yes; but a good father? If only the two were the same. When you told me you were pregnant, I thought that our life together was ended, convention would take over and you would disappear, if not to Chez Nous, at least to Sans Moi; that the homing or the nesting or the brooding instinct would come into play and I would be left out in the cold. You amazed me by your insistence that nothing should change: that I should be Pagan’s father, not in name, no, that would be cheating, but in everything else.
I was flattered then; just as I am frightened now. And it is you who have sown the doubts. Why, when you spent so long trying to trace your natural parents, did you always refuse to identify Pagan’s father? If your adopted father was a sham, why should her surrogate one be any less so? I fail to understand why you made it such a secret; we had no secrets – no other secrets – especially about men. Who could be that shameful? I wonder, if I search through your papers, will I come up with an Identikit picture? This one’s love letters; that one’s recriminations; another one’s return to his wife. I have to know, if not for myself then for Pagan. How else can she disprove your equation of fatherhood and fate?
Everything would be so much easier if she were my daughter … if we could have made the lie last as long as an erection. I often wonder what would have happened if things had been different that first day; if I had taken my cue from Casanova in his native city. Would we have stayed together all this time? I expected you to make a joke of me … I was still living in a world of schoolboys and bikesheds. But it was the others you made fun of, with their flashy, fleshy self-importance. My gaucheness seemed to touch a nerve in you. It was failure which guaranteed my success.
Next year will be our twentieth anniversary … will be? would be – no comfort is as cold as a pen’s. I planned to take you back, to retrace our steps, to recapture our youth. I see your curled lip: ‘Wouldn’t it be more fun to capture someone else’s?’ But your eyes know the answer. Ours was a gilded generation. The gold may have worn thin, like the gilt on the front of the Ca’ d’Oro, but we can still see its richness in the dazzle of the Venetian sun. We can gaze from the Rialto and smile.
I see you through the mists of memory … I see you through the mists of Venice, as we stand in a dimly lit sacristy, peering at an undistinguished Virgin and Child.
‘It’s not very good, is it?’
I look round, startled by the interruption.
‘It’s attributed to Rubens.’
‘Wishful thinking.’
‘Still, what does it matter?’ I remember that I am on route to university, where school rules will be subsumed by subjectivity. ‘What counts is how you feel.’
‘Oh it matters. If you don’t know where something comes from, you can never hope to understand it.’
I am troubled by your vehemence.
‘So, why are you keen on Rubens? The nudes?’
I am thrilled that a girl can ask me such a question.
‘Not at all. I find them oppressive: all that too, too solid flesh.’ You fail to respond; and the quotation hangs like a fart in the air.
‘The patron saint of the fuller figure.’
‘Oh no. It wasn’t that he found fat women more attractive, simply that the acreage of flesh gave him more scope to experiment with light.’
‘Oh dear, my last illusion shattered.’
‘You’re not fat,’ I say, picturing my mother’s middle-aged waistline.
‘I know.’ You move away to examine some stucco cherubs who appear to be laughing at my unease.
I cannot tell if it marks the end of the conversation. I suddenly need to know you better. ‘Are you an artist?’ I toss out my greatest compliment.
‘God, no.’ You explain that you are on a pre-university course in Venice and Florence and that you will be going up to Cambridge in the autumn. I reply that I am on an Easter tour with the Trelawnyd choir and that I will be going up to Cambridge in the autumn. At which you laugh and say that we might have been there for three years and our paths not have crossed, and yet here we meet in Santa Maria Zobenigo. I am struck by the thought that my life will never be as simple again.
We find a café. You smile as I order chocolate cake; I grimace as I remember that savouries are more sophisticated … and you are by far the most sophisticated girl that I have ever met. I know that if I don’t leave at once, I will be late for the choir; but I want you to see me as an individual and not as part of a group. For the first time I feel an individual … for the first time I am being irresponsible; and I wonder if they are the same. Then, when you ask if I want to go back to your pensione, as casually as you ordered a cappuccino, I say yes.
I never knew that fear could be so exciting; I am usually sick with nerves before I sing. Now here I am, about to attempt my first performance in a new register, and the agony is transmuted into energy. You lead me through overhung streets; Venice seems a city of hidden entrances and dead ends. We emerge at the Grand Canal and wait for a vaporetto. I suggest a gondola; romance makes me feel rich. We step in gingerly and squeeze into the seat. I put my arm behind your shoulders but keep an inch away from the skin. The g
ondolier is a distraction. As I pluck up the courage to kiss you, he signals approval with his pole.
The light of the room – is it brighter in retrospect? – streams across your skin as you strip off your clothes, while I shrug off mine like a snake’s dead skin. As I stare at the crumpled pile, I hear my mother’s voice, ‘Clothes don’t grow on trees’, and I suppress the urge to fold them; I see my mother’s face and I suppress the urge to scream. I am in Venice to sing, to send postcards and to look at churches. It was foreign frauds that she warned me against, not English sirens. You lure me towards the rocks … you plump the pillows. It is half-past three; I am in bed and I am not ill. It is half-past three; I am in bed and I am a man.
‘You’re wearing your knickers,’ you say; and I thrill to the image. Knickers are gymslips, hockey sticks and domestic science, filled with the frisson of the fetish; underpants are coarse, functional, stained with shame. And yet, as I fondle your breasts, I am sexually charged but not attracted. My penis curls like a comma, when it should rise in exclamation. It is the illicitness that excites me, which I try to translate into desire.
Sensing my inexperience, you guide me technically, too technically, and I rue the day that I gave up biology in favour of German. I am caught in a confusion of gender far greater than that between masculine and feminine nouns. What use is knowing der, die, dum when I am struck dumb by the lips of a vulva? Is it any wonder that English words are neuter? Am I a neuter or simply cold?
‘Relax,’ you say; ‘let me help you.’
‘It’s my first time,’ I say, in a blatant appeal for sympathy.
‘What have you been doing all these years?’ … I’m only seventeen, I want to reply, but nibble at your nipple to escape the need. I nuzzle in a fold of your flesh before venturing under pressure from your hands and my own expectations into the no-man’s-land between your legs.
I sniff tentatively and detect a faint aroma of gentleman’s relish. The skin is as soft as a baby’s but feels slightly chapped. I glimpse myself nose down, tongue out, and an image floods my brain of a hog rooting for truffles. I chuckle, which you take as a sign of pleasure; I am relieved. ‘Your first time,’ you coo and cradle my head. I know how easily I could play on your maternal instincts; but I am determined to avoid the trap.
My sex is still inert. My brow is wet; my hair is matted. All my blood is rushing to my head, which I will down to my middle. Has this happened to you before? Is it a copulational hazard? I long to ask about your previous experience and turn the coition into conversation. I want the intimacy without the indignity. I want painless, deathless love.
I connect with you, but inadvertently, as though my umbrella were caught in the loop of your coat. I thrust indiscriminately, desperately trying to feel something besides strain. The only naked women I have seen before were playing tennis in the pages of a naturist magazine; their fresh-faced smiles showed no more evidence of emotion than their airbrushed bodies did of sex. My penis pounds like a piston; the repetition is becoming wearing. I worry that I am sweating on your neck.
I have heard that making love is equivalent to playing two sets of tennis; I can well believe it. I have an ache in every muscle and incipient cramp in my back. How long is this supposed to last? Is it a hundred-yard sprint or a marathon? Is a quick spurt a sign of passion, or is a measured pace a sign of power? Please don’t hold this against me. I want to see you again, but next time in clothes.
I slip out of you and fall back. You lean over me and kiss me. You seem happy enough and I wonder if I have been worrying unduly. You put your hands between your legs.
‘You didn’t come,’ you say. I know what you mean; although I have never before heard the expression.
‘I tried to. It wasn’t you,’ I say lamely.
‘I should think not.’ You hand me some grappa which burns my throat.
‘I’m afraid men can’t fake orgasm.’
‘That’s a small consolation. They fake almost everything else.’
At another time I would find that witty, but now I am just conscious of the future opening up in front of me like a return to the past. I am a boy again, back in my own skin. I am a snake condemned to slide on my belly. I catch sight of my underpants and yearn to sneak them on.
‘I knew it wouldn’t work from the moment in the café when you said that your favourite artist was Michelangelo.’ I am startled; I imagine Michelangelo to be the most uncontroversial choice, a universal genius like Tolstoy or Bach. But I have yet to learn your theories of ‘fag’ art. In years to come, ‘he likes Michelangelo’ will be our coded shorthand, our own ‘friend of Dorothy’; the sculptor’s marble breasts no more convincing than a drag queen’s padded bra. But, for now, The Agony and the Ecstasy is showing in a double-bill with The Wizard of Oz.
‘It has nothing to do with art. It’s just that the chemistry wasn’t right.’
‘It wasn’t the chemistry but the biology.’
I don’t know … I don’t want to know what you mean. I put on my pants for protection. I want to go and sing: to lose myself in a madrigal’s six-part harmony, not this atonal duet.
‘You’re not angry with me?’ you say, shifting the sheet, making no attempt at modesty. ‘I like you so much; I felt at once we could be friends.’
‘I’m not queer,’ I insist.
‘What does it matter?’
‘It matters to me.’ I’m ready to pull off my pants and prove it to you; my anger is making me hard. ‘If you thought that I wasn’t interested, why did you suggest it? It was your idea not mine.’
‘Because I need a friend. And I somehow knew you were the one. We had to get this over with, or else it would have stood in the way. We’d always be wondering “could we? should we?” There’d be too many barriers between us. And I don’t believe in barriers … of any sort.’
‘I’ve had girlfriends.’
‘You said I was the first.’
‘The first in bed. There are other things to do.’
‘And we shall do them all. What’s the problem? Homosex is far superior to boring old heterosex. Look at Plato; look at the Greeks …’ You beguile me with a virile ideal that owes more to Mount Olympus than to Hampstead Heath. ‘Are you saying you’ve never had sex with another man?’
‘Yes,’ I lie, but honestly … it was not a man; it was a mouth.
‘I’ll introduce you to my friend Robin’ … a calling card that will be engraved on my heart. I strive to understand why you take such an interest. I thought that women despised men who failed to respond to them sexually; but with you it is quite the opposite … an admission of attraction is the quickest route to your scorn.
At first I wonder if you are a lesbian.
‘God, no! Women are such cows in every way. Flabby minds and flabby bodies. Udders and underwear. Parturition.’
I wish that I could establish the source of your self-disgust. Mine lies in the white-washed walls of a Methodist chapel; mine lies in the stale stranglehold of a rugby scrum; mine lies in a world of dreary Saturdays and dry Sundays: the petty paternalism of North Wales. But you have the liberty of the South of England. You have poetry and eccentricity and tolerance and travel. I fail to identify the worm in your bud.
Liberty bred liberality. ‘I’m such a slut,’ you used to say, ‘such a slut.’ And I never knew whether it was to punish yourself or men or other women. Edward told me, in a confession I never sought, that your favourite ruse was to play dead: to lie motionless – emotionless – while he assaulted you like a soldier with a bayonet. At first he found the power exciting, but then he found it daunting. He felt that he could have killed you and you would have maintained the same distant smile … But you always said that he was a liar; and it suited me to take your word.
However much your sexuality threatened him, it reassured me. I had the intimacy without the intrusion; I was spared the mechanics. My chaste cheeks were suffused with a post-coital glow. We outwitted the world; we wrote our own scenario. You were my publ
ic private life; I had no need to confront my own disgust or anyone else’s … I think it wise not to speculate as to why you found it equally important, why you desired a love uncompromised by the body, as we lay together on top of the sheets like an effigy on a medieval tomb.
But death is no longer set in such serene statuary. And I walk with Pagan up the path to the crematorium. With her chestnut hair swept back in a tortoise-shell band, her black velvet cape hiding a grey check dress, her socks unruffled, her shoes unscuffed, she might be making her way to a party, if it were not for the bunch of weeping lilies in her hand. She grips my hand, and offends me by skipping … until I realise that she is skirting the cracks in the stone and the unrealised dangers underneath.
The undertakers meet us on the steps and take us into the chapel, as austere as a prison waiting room – I think of Lewis – as though the absence of religion entails an absence of art. It smells of official disapproval, like the teacher at Pagan’s play group: why not give your daughter a Christian name …? Why not give her mother a Christian funeral …? You should be buried in a Temple of Love or a Temple of the Muses, under frescoes of Venus or murals of Mount Parnassus. But the only picture is a Constable landscape, which fails to hide an ancient dust patch; and the sound system stutters with a scratchy recording of Delibes.
Your coffin is on its bier. I look at Pagan. She sits quietly beside me, willing a smell out of the lilies. She refuses to lift her eyes. The seats are filling behind us. I feel the cold breath of condolence on my shoulder; I shake its clammy hand. The doors close and I recognise my cue to move to the lectern. For, in the absence of any cleric, I must guide the proceedings myself. Even the undertakers have disappeared, after showing me where to find the button. I am overwhelmed by the task. I want to disobey orders and declare myself agnostic, to run to another chapel and waylay a vicar. I want to escape the setting and the symbolism. I feel like a medieval cardinal burning a witch.
Pagan and her parents Page 2