Pagan and her parents

by Michael Arditti

  His first present for any prospective girlfriend should be a pair of dark glasses … I hear you saying – if only you could speak to me – that I do not understand women. I disagree. I need think back no further than last Tuesday’s show and Magdalena Dorsa’s story of the night that her husband accused her of sleeping with Picasso.

  ‘He slit my throat from ’ere to ’ere.’ She removes her choker to reveal the scar.

  ‘And you didn’t leave him?’

  She looks at me with a blend of contempt and pity. ‘Only a man could ask this question. Why should I leave him? I was enslaved for him. Such passion! Such fury! Such pride!’ The studio audience roars its applause.

  Are your black eyes similar signs of affection … no more than love-bites writ large? You insist that I know nothing about him; but I know what he does to you. Why do you allow yourself to be abused? Why do you encourage it? Does it spring from a childhood sense that you are intrinsically wicked … a naughty little girl who deserves to be smacked by Daddy? Or have you been seduced by the adolescent sophistry that sadism is a more sophisticated form of love; which provides another opportunity to look down on Mr and Mrs Average, with their twin-bedded Teasmade sex? I fail to see how a blow to the face can ever be construed as a blow for freedom. … You smile and tell me that passion spells SOS pain.

  ‘He’s the first man who has ever given me an orgasm.’ I am taken aback; our sex talk has always focused on foreplay. I assume that inducing an orgasm is as mechanical as setting the sprinkler system on a lawn. ‘I’m amazed; I never thought that it mattered so much. I feel so grateful to him … unutterably grateful. Once you’ve experienced that power of physical pleasure, it’s possible to forgive everything else.’ I suddenly feel cold. ‘That’s why I’ve decided to move in with him.’

  I slip into automatic. ‘I suppose I shouldn’t see it so much as losing a sister as gaining a brother-in-law.’

  ‘I wish you’d try to like him.’

  ‘He hates me. He’s the most homophobic actor in captivity. No pun intended.’

  ‘It still applies. Fourteen years in prison leave their mark.’

  ‘He’s not there now! And I’m sorry but I don’t see him as some pathetic inadequate gang-raped by the tobacco barons. Quite the opposite. I bet no one picked up the soap when he was in the showers.’

  ‘Who’s being homophobic now?’

  ‘The truth is that he feels threatened by me. He sees women as good for one thing and one thing only; he cannot understand a man who wants something else. It confuses his compartmentalised mind. What was it he told you? “Every time I meet him, I think you’ve discussed what I was like the night before.”’

  ‘Not any more.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I won’t be disloyal.’

  ‘That’s the curse of divided loyalties.’

  So you leave me and move in with him; and I learn about loneliness. I explore the power of physical pleasure for myself; but, despite the groiny excitement, I am left with morning-after blues more acute than any hangover. There is a remedy for a hangover – some concoction of raw eggs and Worcester sauce – but the only cure for solitude is people … and the men I meet seem to consider one-night stands too long an emotional commitment. I yearn for an intimacy that is not measured in inches. I despair of finding it until, several months later, you leave Lewis and return to me. He has failed an audition and relieved his frustration by punching you in the stomach … your pain is too painful to recall. What he does not know is that you are carrying – were carrying – his child.

  I feel sure that he holds me to blame for your departure and, for the past eight years, has been harbouring hopes of revenge. It was fanciful to propose a conspiracy; he may just have read your parents’ interview in the Sunday Sentinel and resented the fact that I was the one with the daughter, not him. His affidavit makes wretched reading. Didn’t I warn you to keep him away from Soho … I’m sorry; ‘I told you so’ is a particularly futile response to a memory. I understand your motives – or, at least, I trust my interpretation – but, for all that you may have wanted to identify with him and show that you were not the clean-living, middle-class girl that he may have imagined, you left him feeling betrayed.

  I would have thought that you, of all people, would have recognised the importance of illusions. In confessing your past, you allowed him to throw it back – literally – in your face. Now he hopes to do the same to me. But, unlike you, I have no need for dark glasses; unlike you, I can raise my guard. His charges are mere innuendo; your parents are building their case on mud. I am supremely confident. What judge will accept the hearsay evidence of a murderer (I have changed my mind on the matter of previous convictions) … or have the Courts become an extension of the prison hierarchy, where murderers are respected while sex-offenders – and my sexuality is in itself an offence to them – are reviled?

  I sweep the paper off my desk with a show of scorn which is wasted without an audience; although I am grateful that there is no one to see me, five minutes later, stooping to scoop it up off the floor. I turn to Jenny Knatchpole’s affidavit, which is more worrying because less expected. Apart from the odd glimpse of her accompanying Guy to an official function or standing by him when his secretary went public, I have not seen her in – it must be – twelve years … your barbed definition of a housewife as someone who falls in love with a man and ends up married to his house holds doubly true of the House of Commons. Still, I am sure that she consoles herself in the country, rescuing sheepdogs and counting sheep.

  The sheepdogs are not respondent’s licence; they figured prominently in a colour-spread in the Criterion supplement. Guy Knatchpole, rising star of the Tory right, invites you into his lovely home and his lovely wife … oops, sorry, cock-up on the computer. It was part of that glamorous lifestyle series in which they wanted to feature me … at least they did until they came to research. Your health was failing and we were converting the house. In place of envy-inducing elegance, they found grab-rails and stair-lifts and pulleys and consoles; the commode was functional rather than decorative. Two weeks later, I received a letter of regret. They had decided against using any more television personalities … especially those whose accessories set the wrong tone.

  Guy’s and Jenny’s, on the other hand, set the tone impeccably. The furniture was solid and the decor muted. The lilies lilted at the perfect angle. Even the sweet-wrappers matched the bowl. It was a far cry from the flat in Fulham which you once cleaned for him, where bachelor squalor met public-school indolence in week-old takeaways mouldering in the kitchen and matted socks scattered around the bed. I opposed the whole enterprise. You had a Cambridge degree – albeit an aegrotat – and a brilliant – or, at any rate, an incisive – mind; both of which you were wasting. But you saw it differently. If I had nothing else, I agree I would be pitiful … a young drudge with no future but buses, babies, and varicose veins. But, for me, it’s an adventure. And it’s one I get paid for: I have to eat.’

  ‘But there are so many other things you could do.’

  ‘Such as? I have a degree in English. That fits me for nothing but teaching; which I willingly leave to you. My only talent is for being myself, so I need to marry someone rich enough to provide a suitable setting. I have one foot in the door already.’

  ‘Carrying a mop and bucket?’

  ‘It’s a start.’

  It is Robin who introduces Guy … another cousin. With that expert genealogy which appears to compensate for your own unknown genes, you inform me that he belongs to the senior branch of the family, superior in every way to Robin, who is beginning to tax even your patience with his antics. Guy hires you for one day a week – ‘I told him to call me Mrs Thursday’ – and prevails on two of his colleagues to take up Monday and Wednesday afternoons. They suggest someone else, a woman … I think … yes, it may sound extraordinary but I am sure that it is Rebecca, a feminist lawyer who practises in the Family Division. I wonder if she remembers … but ho
w can she when you refused to consider her? ‘I make it my rule only to clean for men. Women are slave-drivers; they know what they could do themselves. Whereas men regard it as their birthright to have someone clear up after them; they’re grateful just to have it taken off their hands.’

  You make as marked an impression on Guy as on his flat. He compliments you on your work. You simper: ‘I aim to give satisfaction to all my gentlemen.’ … Cambridge has furnished the vocabulary if nothing else. He takes you at your word. It is as though having an affair with a cleaner meets a long-repressed need … I must resist the temptation to play Freud. For the first time in his life, he is rebelling; you are long hair, free love, Kathmandu and Glastonbury all rolled into one. But, as he and I both know and you refuse to recognise, it cannot last.

  ‘He’s so boring,’ I say, after another dreary dinner where he has droned on about steam engines.

  ‘You have a basic clash of personalities.’

  ‘Precisely. I have one and he doesn’t.’

  ‘You wouldn’t say that if you were interested in old railways.’

  ‘Come on; that’s like saying someone speaks excellent Esperanto.’ Nevertheless, you agree to accompany him to a convention in Halifax to celebrate the reopening of five miles of disused track. You spend the weekend sitting in the hotel foyer, taking tea with the wives and girlfriends, while the boys go off to play chug-chug … the sexes staying as segregated as in a schoolyard. Even that fails to deter you. ‘After a few hours, the boredom becomes transcendent. It’s very Zen.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘Just think; once we’re married, he can have the nursery laid out as a model railway. He can play with the children.’ I am taken aback. This is the first time that I have heard you express a desire for children. In the past, the fantasy has always ended with ‘Reader, I married him’; I see now that there is a sequel.

  ‘Won’t Guy be child enough?’

  ‘I intend to have a large family. Don’t you find there’s an air of the National Portrait Gallery about him? He needs a wife and children by his side.’

  ‘Do men like Guy marry their cleaners? You’re not exactly the seventies equivalent of a chorus girl. It’s one thing when the Duchess of Loamshire kicked up her legs at Drury Lane; quite another when she’s scrubbing the loo.’

  ‘I don’t clean for him any more … at least not professionally.’

  ‘You mean that’s something else he gets for free?’

  ‘You’re so predictable …’ That may be true; but so, I am afraid, is he.

  He invites you to Madame Butterfly at Covent Garden. Robin sneers at the choice … ‘Puccini’s about his level.’ I suggest that he may be preparing you for when he does a Pinkerton. Robin replies that he is not so intelligent; you that he is not so sly. And yet why else is he so frugal with his friends? He surely cannot expect you to fall for the guff about your finding them stuffy? Nor, despite your repeated requests, has he taken you to Northumberland; and your excuses for his excuses sound increasingly lame. But, when his mother and sister come to town on a shopping trip (‘Although London isn’t the same since they closed Marshall and Snelgrove’), your exclusion from the official programme is harder to explain.

  ‘You don’t have to tell them I’m your cleaner. I went to Cambridge. I’ve stayed at Crierley.’

  I avoid Robin’s glance and my memory.

  ‘It’s not the cleaning that’s a problem, not really. It’s you.’ Your silence forces him to fill it. ‘You’re just not their sort of person. Believe me, the loss is entirely theirs; but they wouldn’t see the joke.’

  I have to restrain my basic instincts, which are reassuringly red-blooded, while you pour coffee with a sangfroid that would put any country-house hostess to shame.

  ‘Take this flat. If I told my mother that you were living in Soho, she’d think you were either a Bohemian or a tart.’

  ‘Why?’ you ask. ‘She’s not a man.’

  Robin laughs. ‘You don’t know Aunt Jessie.’ And, despite renewed pleading, you never do. Her visit lasts a week, at the end of which you and Guy resume your former routine … although you admit that your cleaning is somewhat more perfunctory, sweeping the dust under the carpet rather than into the bin. Then one morning, over breakfast in his flat – he is nothing if not territorial – he announces his engagement. He does not even have the grace to wait until you are out of your pyjamas, or rather his pyjamas, since you wear the top and he the bottom. He tells you – you tell me – that he is to marry Jenny Dacre. I am doubly shocked. She is the girl whom Lady Standish picked out for Robin; she is the one for whom I stepped aside … if ‘One Fine Day’ is to be your theme song, ‘This Nearly Was Mine’ should be mine.

  You are so shaken that you start spreading butter very thinly over his Daily Mail. You press him for details, not because they make any sense, but from fear that, if he stops talking, you will collapse. He describes how they were introduced by Robin six months ago and fell in love. ‘You made love to me last night,’ you counter. He blushes like a public schoolboy caught with one of the maids.

  I reconstruct the scene through the sobs, silences and static of a long-distance line to Shropshire. I picture the knife aimlessly spreading … the deceptive harmony of the shared pyjamas.

  ‘There’s no need for us to stop seeing each other,’ he says. One look at your face convinces him of his error. ‘That is if you still want to clean for me. You don’t have to give up your job. We could return to the old arrangement … at a new rate.’

  ‘And, after all, a good cleaner is hard to find. One who knows all your little ways, who doesn’t mix the socks with the knickers, the cleavers with the carving knives.’

  ‘It’s just a thought. I don’t want you to lose out.’

  ‘Oh believe me, I’m losing nothing.’

  ‘You’re a realist. You must have known that this couldn’t last for ever … Do you know you’re buttering the leader page of the Daily Mail?’

  ‘Of course. Why? Do you think that I’m crazed with grief?’ And you tear it into strips and stuff it in your mouth.

  At which point, I stop picturing and wonder whether some of the details may have been added a day later for my benefit. From a hundred and fifty miles away, it is impossible to judge.

  There are no such problems the following month when I come down to London for the Easter break and you persuade me to gatecrash the official engagement party. The only people I know are the Standishes. Lydia is dressed as if for the Good Ship Lollipop, with ribbons in her hair, frills on her sleeves, and knee-length white socks. The intention may be protective, but the effect is cruel. Her equine Aunt Waverley coos over her. ‘You’ll be the next, my dear,’ she insists, with all the complacency of her class. Lydia grins; Lady Standish grimaces. She stands poker-backed, her bosom and hands encrusted with jewels. ‘All fakes,’ Robin whispers. ‘That’s why she keeps to the shadows. They’re first-rate reproductions of her old pieces; but the secret’s out when they catch the light.’ He moves to greet his mother, who barely acknowledges him. He turns away as she holds out her hand to me.

  ‘This should have been Robin’s.’ I cannot tell whether she is referring to the engagement or to the flat.

  ‘He preferred to play Cupid.’ He seems to have passed her on as casually as he recommended you as a cleaner.

  ‘That is not the role for which I intended him. Disappointment is a disease, Leo; people can die of it.’

  ‘People can die of anything if they so choose.’

  ‘I understand that you are teaching.’

  ‘Yes, music. At St Bride’s, a small prep school in Shropshire.’

  ‘I feel sure that you have found your niche.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Robin writes film reviews for a puerile magazine.’

  ‘It’s very popular.’

  ‘None of my friends read it. They say that it’s obscene.’

  ‘With respect, it’s aimed at a younger generation.’


  ‘But a boy with his talents. There’s nothing he couldn’t do. Duncan Treflis – do you remember? – has offered him a job in the bank. I try to talk to him but he won’t listen. Perhaps he will listen to you?’ Her insensitivity astounds me.

  ‘I rarely see him; he no longer trusts me. He called me a moral coward.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ she says quickly. ‘That was all a long time ago; you were children.’

  ‘It was last year.’

  ‘He treats his family like strangers. He never visits Crierley and, when he does, I feel ashamed. I had to beg him to come here tonight; and he is wearing that shirt to spite me. Never love anyone, Leo; if you do, it will break your heart.’ I glance significantly at Robin. She has the grace to look away.

  If disappointment is a disease, it is contagious. As Lady Standish sighs, I feel a surge of emptiness inside. But, before I can ponder further, I am roused by a roar from the dining room. Jenny is shrieking. I know, without pause for reflection, that you are involved. This is confirmed, as you dart into the room, with Jenny pursuing you. Her hair is unpinned, her cheeks raw, her features so distorted that she might have had a stroke. She is bent double, lunging at you, dragging Guy and her mother in her wake, as they attempt to restrain her.

  ‘I don’t know why she’s reacting like this,’ you announce to the assembled company. ‘You’d think she’d thank me. I simply warned her to be careful in bed on account of my herpes. The number of times we’ve made love, it would be a miracle if he’d escaped.’

  Jenny continues to scream, while a musty dowager booms to her daughter. ‘What did she say she had?’

  ‘Herpes, Mother,’ the daughter drawls.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A venereal disease, which ruins your lips and plays hell with your sex life. There’s no cure.’ The ensuing silence is registered even by Jenny. I cannot be alone in wondering where such a homely, Home Counties girl completed her education.

  Guy moves towards you. ‘I’d like to kill you,’ he says coldly.