‘Not me,’ you say wilfully. ‘At school we were asked to name mankind’s greatest invention. The official answer was the wheel. I said God.’
My mother chokes; I slap her back and imagine that it is yours … My mother coughs; I pass her a tumbler of water.
‘I’m sure half the things she said were for effect. Like the time she told me she was named after a venereal disease.’
I start. The coincidence is as unnerving as the confusion.
‘I don’t think she ever said that, Mother.’
‘You must remember. It was when I came to visit you in Cambridge. The house with the poster.’
‘Life’s a bitch and so’s my –?’
‘That’s just what I mean. Things like that upset people.’
‘Although if you’d met her mother …’
‘It was the same when she came here with her boyfriend.’
‘He wasn’t her boyfriend.’
‘You were in tears.’
‘Best to forget it.’
‘That’s easier said than done.’
‘I know …’ I know. I can try not to remember, but all the goodwill in the world cannot make me forget.
A cloud crosses the sky and hangs over my memory. It is the Easter vacation. After four wet days, the rain has stopped, but the air retains the dampness like a sponge. My mother is expecting two new guests: a Miss Rubens and a Mr Dorothy. The names sound comic but authentic; in Colwyn Bay, no pseudonym would be so overt. But then you are the mistress of the double bluff. ‘Surprise, surprise!’ The taxi disgorges you and Robin … When the Marquis de Sade threw a party, he called it a surprise.
‘Why do you have to humiliate me?’ I confront you in the lobby.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, darling; we couldn’t bear to be parted from you a moment longer.’
‘You must go back first thing tomorrow. No, this evening. There’s a train around six.’
‘But we’ve paid a deposit.’ You wave the receipt.
‘Don’t you realise; we’re short-staffed. I have to help out in the dining room.’
‘Better and better,’ Robin says. ‘I’ve always had a thing about waiters.’
I storm out, shame and frustration mingled with fury. I am appalled that you should identify me with the coy conventionality of my mother’s guesthouse, where Mr and Mrs Elwes have stayed every Easter for nine years with their two, now four, children, still call me lad and remember when I had spots. In an effort to contain the damage, I tamper with the TV, so that, at least, you will be spared the room with its Rocky Mountains mural; but the repairman soon discovers the twisted wires. And nothing I do can hide the sauce served in plastic tomatoes, the Fred Basset draught excluder and the flamenco dolls. My home life, which was a treasury of mundane eccentricities, is exposed as a seaside joke.
You are surprised by the vehemence of my reaction. To you, it is quite natural to want to see someone in his own home; it is the only way to understand him … but then you treat character as a mixture of genealogy and interior decoration. It is so reductive. I insist that we can make ourselves. I am the perfect example as I elocute my way out of the lower-middle class. ‘Oh yes,’ you agree; ‘but you will always be in reaction against it; you can take a man out of his background but never the background out of the man.’
‘I beg to differ.’ We begin to dispute. ‘I believe we are what we are because of what we believe.’
‘And I believe we believe what we believe because of what we are.’
‘If all you say were true, there’d be no human progress. We’d still be living in caves.’
‘We are. They just have better plumbing.’
You would have an easy convert in my mother: a woman who considers ‘know your place’ to be a more important lesson than ‘know yourself’. She refuses to cancel your booking and insists that I continue to help out. I determine on dignity and strive for an outer expression of inner calm. My resolve is sorely shaken at dinner when Robin addresses the entire room on the etymology of Welsh rarebit, the pleasures of home cooking and the virtues of friendly staff. I smile steelily and imagine myself an exiled archduke, the tables turned, waiting on tables in Paris. My White Russian blood boils when he pinches my bottom; and I inadvertently ladle trifle into his lap … which he scrapes off with a seraphic grin.
Honour is satisfied the next day, when I serve your early morning tea heavily salted and polish his brown brogues an indelible black. We agree to call a truce. But my humiliation is complete when you meet my father. For a moment, I wonder if I can pass him off as an odd-job man, some ex-inmate whom we employ for bed, board and beer money. But that would be to reckon without my mother: ‘First they beat his brains out; now you cut out his heart.’ How can I disown him when she stands by him … she still lies beside him, her only feather-bedding a plastic sheet? I am spared the full horror; she nurses it, dresses it and wipes it clean.
At times, I am drawn closer. He has a turn in the bath; and she calls me to help. His blubbery body slips through my fingers, as he shakes and splashes and froths. It is the first time that I have seen him naked; it feels like a post-mortem. I strive to get a grip on my revulsion and his chest; both slip out of control. ‘He’s your father,’ my mother says. Does she think that I don’t know? You used to say how hard it was not knowing your natural mother, not just the absence of pictures from the past but of any kind of blueprint for the future … this will be me in ten, twenty, thirty years’ time. But, believe me, ignorance is a blessing. As I catch sight of his flaccid penis floundering in the murky water, I grab the basin and vomit.
‘He’s your father,’ my mother says. I know; but even before the accident … ‘Never call it an accident,’ she says, ‘it was a vicious, brutal assault.’ I know; but even before the vicious, brutal assault we barely communicated. We shared the same blood; but that was all. He never hid his disappointment in me, and I responded with a show of disdain. He saw my intelligence as a threat. ‘What good are brains?’ he would ask. ‘Brains never made anyone happy.’ He might find an answer now that his own have been bludgeoned away. He refused to come to Cambridge. To him, choral scholar was a contradiction in terms. The finest singers in the world were the ones he grew up with, the male voice choirs from the mines and the quarries, men who worked with their hands and sang with their hearts.
‘He’s your father,’ my mother says. Yes, I admit, at the moment of production; although even that I find hard to credit. It is not just the lack of passion, but the logistics: the who did what to whom of a schoolboy limerick … sex with her must rank as a form of lese-majeste. Do you remember a therapy exercise when I had to picture my parents naked? What I never told you was that all I could see was an empty bed … Is there a temperance equivalent of a drunken fumble? Whatever else was going through his mind, there was no thought of me. And there have been precious few since. Fatherhood does not lie in blood and still less in a piece of gristle: a momentary spurt of enthusiasm and nearly four decades of indifference. The so-called paternity test should be banned; it is a virility test, nothing more. Paternity lies in life-long love. I am a far better father than him.
‘He’s your father,’ my mother says. Yes, words are important. There is no clumsier transition in the English language than that from daddy to father: the one too infantile, the other too funereally formal … with dad popping up like a poor relation in-between. Nothing better illustrates the uneasy relationship at the heart of our family lives. The only words that cause equal embarrassment are those for genitals … the connection is made again.
‘This is my father,’ I say, opting for the conventional definition; I am eighteen years old. He is picking snails from a line of lettuces. ‘Little buggers,’ he says, ‘we’d be alright in France.’
‘That’s right, Dad; foreigners and their funny food. You’re better off in a North Wales guesthouse, where the sauce is left on the table and you can see what you eat … even when you can’t taste it.’
Irony is lost on him; but then so
is conversation. I attempt to introduce you, but he is back in his weevilly world. As he bends to crush a beetle, his metal plate gleams in the austere April sun to strangely beatific effect. We escape down the promenade towards St Trillo’s, where you question me about his injury. I respond with a reverie of revenge.
‘Ever since he left school, he worked as a park-keeper. Out all winds and weathers, but he didn’t mind. He enjoyed the company: the children in the playground, the old men on the bowling green, the women with dogs. There was one old lady who used to sit for hours painting flowers. You’ll find some of her efforts in Gleneagles. When she died, she left him £2000. My mother wanted him to buy me a gramophone, but he put it all towards a shelter for the park. There was a plaque; the council has promised to replace it …’ My voice falters as I see a side of him that I prefer to ignore. ‘It’s also the favourite haunt of local homosexuals.’
‘Wherever two or three bushes are gathered together …’
‘That’s blasphemy, Candida.’ Robin is offended and intrigued. ‘Did you frequent it?’
‘Frequently,’ I lie, determined on a change of image. ‘On my way back from choir practice in Rhyl, I used to stop off in his precious park and trample over the shrubs. The darkness added danger to the desire. One night I spent ten minutes making unrequited advances to a birch tree; George III was certified for less. How I loved it when he came home in the evenings and complained of the debris he had to clear – the tissues and handkerchiefs and torn pages of magazines – and I’d imagine that some of that was me: the tissue he spiked into his basket was caked in me. It was my seed; it was his.’
‘How primitive.’
‘How perverse.’
‘Then, one night two years ago, I was busy in the bushes with two builders from Abergele; we had our trousers by our knees and our faces in similar positions. A torch was suddenly turned on us. “Caught you, you filthy buggers”; it was my father fighting his one-man campaign to eradicate vice. I covered my face; but, for a moment, I’m sure he saw it. Then one of the men picked up a fallen branch and thwacked him about the head so hard that I thought he’d kill him, while the other kicked him violently in the balls. “Run,” they shouted to me, as they shinned over the fence to their motorbikes; but I was in shock. I stared at my father with the blood oozing over his hair into the darkness and, as the beam of the torch skimmed the surface, I saw worms – that is, ants – caught in the flow. It was only when I tried to move that I realised my trousers were down; I tripped and skewered my groin on a rosebush.’ I improvise on a birthmark. ‘You’ve both seen the scar.’
‘What about your father: did you help him?’
‘I couldn’t think straight; I was terrified. I pictured my mother, my friends, Oscar Wilde, Ronnie Kray. I had to run. I planned to disguise my voice and ring the police with descriptions; but it wasn’t their faces I remembered. In the end, no one was charged. The only fingerprints on the torch were mine.’
‘They never suspected …?’
‘No. The surgeons said that, if they’d operated on him straight away, they might have saved some of his mind … today is a good day. I have no one but myself to blame; for years, I longed for his death and this is my punishment … And the subject of my next essay will be Tragedy is Dead.’
As we walk down the cliff wall to the beach, you are silent. I sense that my stature has grown in your eyes. I am not just a coastal bumpkin; I have a trauma to equal yours, a classic mix of sex, violence and family passions … Oedipus at Old Colwyn. I stifle a laugh for fear that I will shock you, as I skip the last three steps.
Our feet drag in the sea-heavy sand. You scratch weird hieroglyphics with an umbrella-frame, salvaged from driftwood, that resembles a prop from a symbolist play. Robin takes my arm with a sympathetic squeeze. ‘Fathers are bloody,’ he says. The pun threatens hysteria; but I furrow my fingernails into my palms and regain control. Is pain with our parents the link that binds us? You and I can rely on the minutiae of friendship; but it may explain Robin’s passion for me if, instead of falling for an average mind and an imperfect body, he has recognised another damaged soul.
Without you, I would never have met him. ‘From Cupid to gooseberry in four short steps,’ you said later, when we were at the all-embracing stage. I retained a residue of unease; I knew what you felt for him. But I also knew that it was a lost cause. To my certain knowledge, Robin slept with only one woman, regaling us with his horror the following day.
‘I had to pretend I was with a man.’
‘No doubt,’ you snorted, ‘so did she.’
And yet his reluctance did not deter you. You rejected anyone whose idea of Heaven lay between your thighs; in your personal cosmography, it was more the Devil’s gateway. Abraham’s bosom was not yours. You laughed at our friends’ white weddings, while longing for a mariage blanc. But then you despised your sexuality almost as much as you despaired of your sex.
Instead, you made for the middle ground. With gay men, you could maintain your innocence … or, rather, your illusions. Homosexuality was heroic, like a bout of wrestling on a Greek vase; it was more a trial of strength than a sentimental tussle. The world called it deviance, you defiance. You lambasted David and his friends’ insistence that it was natural; its glory lay in its perversity. It was man-made and man-centred and stood at the heart of man’s greatest achievement: the sublime perversity of art.
I tried to recognise myself in that picture, but it was so hard. Robin was the closest I came, not just to the Greek ideal but to any ideal at all. And the reality was much more Mykonos than Troy. I never went into details – you were strangely prudish about details – but he made love more to himself than to me. At the time, I failed to realise – I was deducing from Hollywood heterosexuality… my feelings at two removes – but he would never let me touch his penis. He would touch mine and more, much more. He would linger and lick and kiss and suck – if ecstasy frustrates memory, frustration turns it pornographic – he would do everything for my pleasure; but, when it came to his own, he would lie on his belly and rub himself up and down on the sheet. I tried to intercept, but he would push me away. Then, just as he came, he would grab hold of my arm, as if to sustain him in his agony rather than share in his bliss.
He wanted me to fuck him. He would place himself on top of me until I felt violated by the strength of his desire. He would engineer me into him until my will melted like wax in the heat of his bowels. He would sit astride me and plead. And I was forced to reject him when, in fact, I was rejecting the violence coursing through my body and bursting to a head. I could never engage in an act of such self-assertion nor of such wilful self-annihilation. I longed for him – he was the love of my life – and I let him go.
I search for him now in the haze of sea from the parlour window. Where is he? Is he still alive? Why have none of us heard from him for so many years? I yearn to see him again and talk about you. He is the only one who will understand, who will corroborate, who will correct.
‘A penny for them,’ my mother says.
‘I was thinking about inflation.’
Switching my glance to my car, I see a bird attack the mirror. I sense the impact and watch it fly off, winged and wounded. It circles three times before swooping back in revenge on its reflection. It scratches its own eyes and pecks at its own heart, its battered beak oozing blood. Feathers fly in a phantom fight, the deception as disturbing as the violence. It falls on the bonnet, rights itself and hovers unsteadily. I anticipate a further bout and run out with a paper bag to cover the glass. The bird falters into flight, its left wing hanging like a torn sleeve. Then, just as I turn up the steps, it hurls itself at the other mirror. It lies inert on the ground. I decapitate it with my father’s spade.
Pagan cries. ‘It’s God’s will,’ my mother says approvingly. ‘It’s Robin,’ I think and wonder why. Is it some sort of bird association, even though it is clearly a starling; or is it the self-destruction that has shadowed his life? I see him now at a C
ambridge party, staring at a wall of mirrors and raising his glass in a toast. I join him, and he asks me, in all seriousness, if I know the name of the stunningly beautiful man opposite. I laugh and presume that he is joking; but he is drunk. ‘Why won’t you introduce me?’ he asks. ‘Are you afraid of a rival?’ If so, it is the only one who can hurt me. When I tell him that the rival is his own reflection, he totters towards it, spits in its face and cries.
Why wouldn’t he let me touch him? I feel the lack like the throb of an ancient wound. My thoughts coalesce into patterns: Robin rocks himself and you play dead, while Edward and I look on, perplexed and excluded. Did you both feel a secret shame for your bodies? Was that another spiritual bond? Your sexuality always appeared so grown-up, while mine was still in nappies. As I was experimenting with ‘da-da’, you were dispensing bon mots. ‘Virginity,’ you declared, ‘is the one virtue which, when lost, can never be recovered.’ And I laughed, as expected. But was your levity a mask for anguish? Did my admiration blind me to the pain?
However hard you tried, you never escaped your mother’s values. When Pagan was born in a membrane of green mucus, you claimed that it was the embodiment of your own vice. No matter that she was three weeks overdue; no matter that the muck soon washed off. ‘Sins don’t wash off,’ you insisted. I watched, riven with pain and embarrassment, as you refused to hold her in case you did her harm or even to look at her in case you cast the evil eye. You covered your breasts for fear that she should imbibe your wickedness … the deadliest infections came from mother’s milk.
‘She’s suffering from post-natal depression,’ the consultant diagnosed. But I knew that that was only half of it. Like post-coital tristesse, what mattered was what went before.
You put the pain behind you in the mother and baby unit. ‘They always say that loving your baby is the most natural thing in the world; it isn’t, but it is the best.’ And yet, when I asked if you were planning to have a second, you were adamant both that you would not want a family with more than one father and that you would never see Pagan’s again. I confirmed my surrogate status with my daily visits; one nurse even called me Mr Mulliner. Sister said that I was perfect therapy for several of the women, who showed no interest in their babies and made their first efforts for me. You laughed and said that it was like a royal visit. What next? The King’s Evil cured by a chat show smile?
Pagan and her parents Page 11