Pagan and her parents

by Michael Arditti

  ‘You mean you fancy my tits.’ I am amazed. Is his coarseness contagious? I blow my nose and concentrate on my food. I try to like him; I want to like him … at least I have wanted to meet him ever since you came back from your first Criterion party and told me how he singled you out among the stuffed shirts and canapés and lavished praise on your South African portfolio … Johannesburg matrons with mudpacks on their faces set against Soweto mothers with mud-caked packs on their backs hold an obvious appeal for him. Your photographs, his morality, their system, all neatly black and white.

  ‘He wouldn’t leave me alone. It was outrageous. Eventually, his wife came up.’

  ‘And that rang no alarm bells?’

  ‘No more than it did for him. He insisted on seeing me later. So he sent her home to Reigate while he put the paper – and me – to bed. He took me up to his office. He spent so long jiggling the key in the lock that I thought he was drunk until I realised it was a come-on.’ I am more depressed by your amusement than his technique. ‘Once inside, he was like a mad dog.’

  ‘All slavering chops?’

  ‘He ripped off my dress with his teeth.’

  ‘Your Caroline Charles?’

  ‘He said he’d buy me another … three, four. To him, money is no object.’

  ‘But you presumably are.’

  ‘Am I telling this story or are you?’

  You were then … you are now … but I need to refresh my memory.

  ‘He didn’t even take off his trousers but simply unbuttoned his flies.’ I picture him standing at a urinal. ‘We made love on the boardroom table. I’ve never felt so much power.’

  It seems to me that you have never been so helpless, as you report the brutality with which he scoops up your breasts in his hands and then swats you with leather-bound blotters, before slipping them beneath you to absorb the damp. You take such pleasure in the way that he separates your body from your personality that I think back to Edward and our conversation in the French pub. A flicker of unease runs through me: is feeling disembodied another way of playing dead? At least you are alive to the comedy of his penis, describing it rearing its ugly head, fat and apoplectic, before withdrawing, soft and apologetic, as he rolls off you and almost onto the floor. ‘Thank you,’ he says as you pull him back. ‘Now I know that I can trust you. A great many people would be only too glad to see me fall.’

  He assaults a recalcitrant fibre of meat with a toothpick. ‘Cartier,’ you mouth; I am unimpressed. I appreciate his appeal to Mitchell; his Cockney barrow-boyishness is itself a statement of intent. ‘I’m here to upset the applecart,’ he declares and sets the pinstripes shaking in their brogues. But it is a denial of all that we hold dear. When I mention Covent Garden, he snorts; ‘I haven’t been since the Jubilee Gala. It was my silver wedding; my wife enjoyed it. I don’t believe in suffering for art.’

  ‘Brian regards art as a con-trick devised by liberals to disguise their own futility.’

  ‘A highly successful one, I grant. They create a market for something that no one needs and a mystique that intimidates everyone. But not me. I’m proud to stand with the Philistines. They were a noble nation who’ve had an unfair press.’

  ‘You can change that.’

  ‘In time, Candy.’ I choke on the contraction. ‘When we’ve sorted out the rest of them, then we’ll see to the artists.’

  Is power really such an aphrodisiac? Does it signify so much that he can sit beside – and unseat – prime ministers? Or is it the duplicity that attracts you? ‘He calls me his bit on the side,’ is a strange boast from one who has always insisted on standing stage-centre. It is almost as though you believe that is where you belong. You indulge his taste for low-life; from dog-fights in Essex barns, where the blood that spurts onto your skirt stirs his in a nearby lay-by, to bare-knuckle fights in West End hotels, where men from his past spill their guts to thrill men from his present. Meanwhile, Westminster and Ascot and Charles Mitchell’s yacht are reserved for his wife.

  ‘Sheila must know nothing,’ he tells you. ‘She is the mother of my son. If it ever comes to a choice, there won’t be one.’ You find his loyalty touching. ‘There may have been other women – I’m a busy man – but I go home to her at the end of the day … or at least the weekend. That’s what family values mean.’

  His words disturb me as you report them … they disturb me still more as I sit at table and watch you play a part for which you are twenty years too old. As he rolls an oyster around his throat and you brush your lips with buttered asparagus, food becomes foreplay. I feel less like a guest than a voyeur. Then, when we reach the dessert course and he feeds you bavarois from his spoon, your napkin becomes a bib; I half-expect a wheedling plea of ‘one for Daddy’. The implications make me so queasy that I push away my plate.

  I wish that I could push away the memory; but the aftertaste – the ten-years-after taste – sticks in my throat. I need a drink. Ignoring the secretary’s strained smile, I walk through the No Entry door which I know from – your – experience leads to his private loo. As I cup my hands, the taps prove to be as wayward as before, first spluttering, and then spurting over my thighs. I refuse to panic and pick up a copy of the Nation – a most inappropriate fig-leaf – and exit with it pressed to my crotch. The office door is now open and I sidle in like a character in a farce. Brian greets me expansively. I realise that I am holding the paper in my right hand and have to lower my guard to meet his grip. He sees the stain but makes no comment. He has aged.

  He waves me to a chair, which stands uncomfortably close to his desk; but the distance must be deliberate for the feet are fixed. He leans back, and I find myself craning forward to compensate. A faint fading in the print of his shirt is evident when he crosses his arms behind his head. He no longer makes any attempt to disguise his girth, appearing to regard it as a badge of office, the embodiment of the weight on his mind. I picture him making jokes about his corporation at his club. The hair that he lacks on his head seems to sprout from his ears, and he looks like a bloated pub landlord. I wait to be offered a drink.

  He scratches an armpit and congratulates me on my recent columns. I express surprise that he reads them. He pulls himself up and lunges across the desk. I shut my eyes and feel his breath on my cheeks. I wait for him to lock horns.

  ‘Believe me, Leo, I read every word in all four of our titles. And ninety per cent of our competitors. So to those who say that the Criterion is too big’ – he pats his paunch – ‘I say do you know how long it takes me cover to cover? Forty-two minutes. I did a speed-reading course five years ago. I read Bleak House and Hard Times last Bank Holiday Monday. Sheila said that, if I took a week off, I could go on Mastermind. But I can’t afford the time. I leave that to blokes like you.’

  ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘And your plea for proper English struck a chord.’

  ‘Sarah was worried that it might offend the “it’s what you say not the way you say it” brigade.’

  ‘Balls. It’s what we expect from you. A little overblown perhaps, a little flowery. But if it’s good enough for … how many viewers?’

  ‘On average, around five million.’

  ‘Then it’s good enough for us. And it fits our agenda. More discipline at home, in school and in the workplace. Flout the rules of grammar and, next thing, you’ll be mugging old ladies, fathering illegitimate children and off your head on crack.’

  ‘I don’t think that that was my point at all, Brian.’

  ‘I’m quite sure it wasn’t; but it is ours.’ He smiles and I feel my integrity run dry.

  ‘But you didn’t come here to argue ideology, or did you?’ He leans back and the armpit print is now thick with sweat. I explain about the journalist’s visit. He stands and moves behind me; I summon all my self-control not to turn round. He hovers over me and, while his words are all reassurance, his body is all threat. He dismisses the file as a formality, the basis for a profile or an obituary … I expect that they have access
to my medical records. Do they know something that I do not?

  I refuse to be deflected and repeat my fears about the intrusion, particularly after the Sunday Sentinel story.

  ‘Well of course I read that …’ How many minutes does he allow for the Sentinel? ‘I saw that it was about you and Candy. To speak frankly, I was hurt, Leo, that, if you had a story, you didn’t come to us first.’

  ‘But I didn’t … don’t have a story; that’s just it. I’m asking for it to be spiked.’

  He looks at me with an air of disappointment. ‘Be fair, Leo; you’d be the first to cry foul if I challenged an editor’s independence. And rightly so. Charles Mitchell has always said that he gives his editors complete control, whatever the Trots and their friends in the media might make out; and, as his Chief Executive, I back him all the way.’

  ‘But this isn’t a story of any interest.’

  ‘Then it’s quite simple; it won’t run.’

  ‘I’m trying to bring up a little girl, Candida’s little girl; it isn’t easy. And something like this won’t help.’ For an agonising moment, I wonder if Pagan might be his daughter … dates dissolve as in an exam. Then I remember your views on heredity; Bow Bells ring reassuringly in my ears.

  ‘I must say that the Sentinel story put the parents’ case very powerfully.’

  ‘Grandparents’ case! And it has already been answered in court. Why air it again in the press?’

  ‘With kids divorcing their parents and child-molesters set free, when judges are so out-of-touch, where else can people look for justice?’

  ‘I cannot understand how you can employ someone on one paper and attack him in another.’

  ‘They serve quite different markets; that’s what freedom of choice means.’ He picks up the phone and tells his secretary to place his call to Tokyo; he flicks through a file. I stand, aware that we have resolved nothing. He looks up as if surprised to find me still there. ‘Good to see you, Leo. Drop by any time. We must have lunch, at this rate sometime in 1995.’ His laughter sounds more self-satisfied than self-mocking. ‘I shouldn’t worry. You have no idea how many stories are researched, written, even put on the system, and yet never run.’

  ‘Then why not kill it now? I can’t believe that the channels don’t exist. If there were a story about your private life …’

  He looks up sharply. ‘What story?’

  ‘If, just if.’

  ‘There is no story. I don’t have a private life. I’m stuck here all the hours God sends. Do you know I now have a bed in the office?’ I see him unbuttoning his flies as he spreads you out on the boardroom table … ‘It’s not that I’m old-fashioned; I’ve just been caught too often in the zip.’

  I begin to laugh. I check myself. ‘How’s Sheila?’ I ask; but, instead of easing the tension, I increase it.

  ‘What are you implying?’

  ‘Nothing. I was just wondering. It must be years –’

  ‘Is that meant as a threat?’

  ‘She’s your wife; I thought it polite to inquire.’

  ‘She’s my wife, yes. This summer we celebrated our ruby wedding.’

  ‘I saw the pictures in the Nation.’

  ‘Forty years and never an angry word.’

  ‘They don’t speak,’ I hear you saying. ‘He locks her up in Reigate behind a Beware of the Dog sign with an electric bark.’

  ‘That’s what this country needs,’ he says, ‘stability. Kids today have no sense of responsibility. Have a bonk and do a bunk; that’s their attitude. Bonk and bunk!’ He savours a future headline. ‘The Nation is launching a campaign. Instead of calling next year the Year of the Dwarf or the Disabled or some other hardluck group, they should call it the Year of the Family; then we can all take heart … Yes, Sheila’s fine, thank you. Never better.’

  I long to assert the Family of Man but fear that he would smell a perversion.

  ‘I was sorry that you weren’t able to come to Candida’s exhibition. It would have meant a lot to her.’ Would it? Or is my attitude as sentimental as his? ‘You meant a lot to her, she told me.’ Does he wonder what else you may have told me? Does he care? ‘Publish and be damned’ comes cheap when you control the country’s largest newspaper group.

  ‘I’d have liked to, but it was my sister-in-law’s fiftieth birthday. A family affair.’

  He knows that I know and he knows what I know and he is signalling that it is of no value. I gave her up, he is saying; I am clean. And yet, if his son’s motorbike hadn’t skidded and if you hadn’t fallen ill … there are too many ‘if’s; the past is complex enough without revision. For Brian, it leaves a future without hope. Young Brian was his only son; now he has only daughters. ‘Who will carry on my name?’ he asks, and rejects his daughter’s double-barrelled compromise. He has never done anything by halves.

  Your attempts to console him fail. He becomes impotent from the day of the accident. As grief and guilt mingle in his mind, he blames you for destroying both his son and his manhood, refusing to see or even to speak to you again.

  ‘I’m in despair,’ you say; and you say it so lightly that I know that it must be true.

  And, as I walk out backwards, not from deference but self-defence, I study his face and cringe at its cruelty. ‘He’s so ruthless,’ you once said admiringly; ‘he’d feed you to the sharks if he thought that the water looked better red.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Leo,’ he calls; ‘I’m sure you’ve no need.’

  And I sense something stir beneath the waves.

  2

  I am boycotting Brighton. In March, I was determined to show willing; now I stand aloof. The hearing is a travesty, which I refuse to acknowledge. I try to banish it from my mind; but it sneaks back into my imagination, as my office becomes an anteroom where the secretaries are clerks, the messengers ushers, and Judge Flower glares at me from the wall. I am granted a temporary reprieve over lunch in order to propose a toast to Bridget Newscombe, who is taking early retirement from Music and Arts. I brave-face my way through the aperitifs; but my composure cracks on being seated next to Ginny Lawson, who rails against the BBC’s switch from Reithian ethics to Birtian economics. As she alliterates into our costive, cost-effective corporation, I push aside my plate and console myself with the Chablis.

  ‘You must eat,’ she insists.

  ‘I’m on a diet.’

  ‘Then should you be drinking?’

  ‘It isn’t weight that I’m trying to lose but memories.’ By the end of the meal, I am so on edge that I mangle my speech, losing the thread and pulling the punchline of several jokes.

  I return to work and try to assess Vicky’s colour-coded guest-lists for prospective programmes, but my own prospects are too black. At four thirty, Max rings from Brighton, but, after a short preamble, the line goes dead. He rings again. This time there is no preamble, only pips. I pace around the office which starts to feel sinisterly small, fuelling my resentment of an organisation that undervalues me. The telephone rings again; I fly at it, upsetting the cone of water which is balanced precariously on the inkwell. It is the switchboard asking if I will be personally responsible for a reversed-charge call from Brighton. I hiss my assent. As the colours on Vicky’s sodden chart start to run, Edward Heath seeps into Vera Lynn.

  Max is connected and launches a bitter tirade on the inadequacies of British Telecom and the BBC switchboard. I steer him unceremoniously back into court, and he assures me that the Directions Hearing went without a hitch. As before, the Judge has allowed us three weeks to file affidavits, while making an Interim Order for Pagan to remain with me. Although your parents were in court, they raised no objection. Max was surprised. I am suspicious. I yearn to share the benefit of your experience; is their reticence a sign of weakness or of a willingness to wait?

  At least we know their new evidence. They have sniffed out my sexuality, while yours has been dug from the grave and dragged through the gutter … I keep picturing Oliver Cromwell’s corpse disinterred in disgrace and dis
played at Tyburn. History is not always a help. The resurrectionists are Jenny Knatchpole and Lewis Kelly, an extraordinary combination in themselves, let alone in collaboration with your parents; I fail to see how they made contact, let alone common cause. The retired major, the minister’s wife and the murderer form a trio straight out of Agatha Christie. Their affidavits present such a picture of your unfitness as a mother that I am amazed that Pagan was not wrenched from your arms at birth. She could have been put up for adoption and your parents could have applied; in which case, this whole ordeal would have been avoided. Not that any adoption society would have considered them; they are too old.

  A social worker in Nottingham has caused an outcry by refusing a foster-child to a couple on the grounds that they are too fat. The tabloids have lambasted another example of red talk and red tape: the Nanny State discriminating against parents. They ignore the fact that, with a combined weight of fifty-two stone, they might not have the stamina for a six-year-old and that the six-year-old might be mercilessly mocked at school. No, they are a happily married couple and so have a God-given right to a child.

  Homosexuality tilts the scales the other way. Reading your parents’ affidavit – the actual words, not between the lines – their case is clear; every breath that I take is tainted by my sexual preference. I am no longer a person but a pathology: an abnormality in their eyes and an abomination in God’s. I betrayed myself when I ordered your mother to stop telling Pagan about Jesus’s miracles … as I recall, I made the specific request that she stop confusing her about Lazarus. My revulsion from the Scriptures is as marked as a mystery-play Satan tortured by the name of Christ.

  Their affidavit is a testament to my inadequacy. They show no compunction about vilifying you in order to hit at me. They have discovered the flat in Brewer Street and the club in Meard Street; and, from the tenor of their remarks, I was not just living with you but off you. Let me introduce myself; Leo Young, parasite and pimp. The absurdity of the idea is concealed by the formality of the language. The legal terminology gives it authority, while the numbered paragraphs present established facts. What is worse, they imply that, if they leave her in my hands, Pagan will go the same way. ‘She is encouraged to mix with undesirables.’ Who are they? Actors, writers, television executives? ‘She stays up until all hours and tells us that, at a recent party, the respondent allowed her to come downstairs in her pyjamas and say goodnight to the guests, several of whom she kissed.’ Just what are they trying to suggest?