Pagan and her parents

by Michael Arditti

‘Don’t worry, you already have.’

  You turn to go. I follow, worried that I am suggesting not just complicity but a common infection. Robin breaks from the elderly colonel with whom he has been flirting and moves towards us, only to be intercepted by his mother’s imperious ‘remember you are family, Robin’; at which he wavers, shrugs and stays. We run the gauntlet of affronted aunts and reach the front door, where the butler hands us our coats. While I grab mine, you coolly turn your back and wait for him to help you into the sleeves. Then, with a bazaar-opening wave, you leave. We take the lift into the cold. You stay silent until we are halfway across Cadogan Square, where you look back and shout ‘revenge is sweet’.

  I wonder if Jenny is saying the same, albeit less publicly, as she strides across the Chilterns, exercising the dogs. What else is her affidavit but retaliation for a sixteen-year-long hurt? She claims, with all the authority of one who has bred thirty puppies, that you were incapable of bringing up a child; as indeed has been shown by your leaving Pagan to me. Her specific charges are that you harassed Guy – which I shall have no difficulty rebutting – and did irreparable damage to Robin, which exercises me more, especially since she cites his disappearance as proof. I long to find him and persuade him to testify … I long to find him, full stop. Should I place an advertisement in the Criterion: Would R.P.St-J.S. please contact L.P.Y., from whom he will learn something to his advantage? I doubt that he would recognise the initials, let alone reply.

  Where is he? How has he vanished so completely from all our lives? Has he been spirited away by the Special Branch and fitted with a new identity? Or is he lost in the aftermath of an accident, searching for his name? I sift the evidence of our last encounter. He is walking down Wardour Street in the company of two Junoesque transsexuals, like a schoolboy in the care of a pair of raffish aunts. They are going to see a film. I insist on my greater need to see him. He consents with a reluctance that robs me of my past. His friends depart in a flurry of costume-kisses, and he leads me off to a nearby bar. It is low-lit, low-life and loathsome, and, to my dismay, he seems to feel at home.

  There are no clues in our conversation … indeed, there is precious little conversation. My questions – then and now – lead nowhere, as we sit in a strangers’ silence, his wandering eyes fixing on me only when I charge him with wasting his life.

  ‘You really are your mother’s son.’ If nothing else, he still knows how to hurt me.

  ‘And you’re not, I suppose? “Hey Mummy, look at me, hanging out with my friends, the transvestites.”’

  ‘They’re transsexuals.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘A hell of a lot, especially to them.’

  ‘I mean to you, Robin … to us.’

  ‘There is no “us”, thanks to you.’

  ‘To people like us.’

  ‘They’re people like me. You’ve no idea. I’ve found myself here. They’re more like me than any of you ever were.’

  ‘No. You’re wrong. You may choose to read your life as a tabloid headline. “Shock! Horror! Peer’s son in Soho vice den.” But it isn’t a real shock or horror; it’s simply a shame. Just as it was for Candida. Thank God, she broke out.’

  ‘I can’t take photographs.’

  ‘You can do so much more. It may amuse you to picture generations of your ancestors turning in their graves … or rather on their tombs, but it’s just the rebellion of someone who believes that decadence is having green nails. To quote Candida, however hard you try, you’ll always be an upper-class man.’

  ‘That’s where you’re quite wrong.’ He stands. ‘Goodbye, Leo. Be happy. We won’t meet again.’

  I dismiss his threat as the thud of a first act curtain. But the interval has lasted ten years. I put down Jenny’s affidavit and turn to drafting my own. I wish that I had more on my side than right. I have to convince the Court that the herpes was a ploy and that you were as innocent a victim of Guy’s libido as Jenny … more so, for Cadogan Square leads me as directly to Brewer Street as if they intersected; and I am fairly certain that it was after Guy’s engagement that you plunged headlong into Soho life. And yet ‘fairly’ is not enough; I need to be sure. As of now, we have a pox-ridden prostitute who has left her child to a cross-dressing homosexual, pitched against a retired war-hero-turned-bursar and his angel-of-mercy wife. The Army, the Public Schools, the Ambulance Service, Parliament … I can fight them all; I will fight them all, as long as I can substantiate my facts.

  I remember when the past was a book: a history book. Life in Elizabethan England … The Struggle for the Constitution … even The Whig Interpretation of History … were all based on solid facts. Now the genre has shifted. The past has been rewritten as a thriller: The Mystery of the Unknown Father… The Mystery of the Disappearing Friend. The textbooks have been pulped and recycled as popular fiction. I have to restock my library; I have to take stock of your life.

  The one person who may be able to help is your mother – no, your real mother … natural mother … biological mother; that’s better (any other adjective reflects on Pagan’s relationship to me). It must have been at about the time of Guy’s engagement that you found her. Let me see; we leave Cambridge in 1975 and, a year later, they alter the law to allow adopted children access to their birth records. You amaze me by ignoring it. I thought that you would be the first in line, queuing all night outside the Registrar General’s Office. Here is the end of your quest … the answer to all your questions. At last, you can escape from the uncertainty that confounds you and claim not just your birth records but your birthright.

  Am I wrong to encourage you? Would it be safer to maintain the fantasy? In my more self-scourging moments, I accuse myself of morbid curiosity, and yet how can I remain indifferent when I feel sure that not knowing is ruining your life? Your theories are so absurdly romantic. How often have I heard you claim, with complete conviction, to be the product of a doomed romance between an impetuous younger son and his mother’s maid or a chatelaine and her under-gardener? I fail to understand how you can make a plot that you would reject in the slushiest novel into the cornerstone of your life.

  Of course, if you dislodge it, the entire edifice may crumble. You foresee the danger far more clearly than I. You agonise over application, sending for a form, only to destroy it, and then sending for another with the excuse that the first was lost in the post. You ask my advice and, when I urge you to fill it in without delay, accuse me of never allowing you to think for yourself. I resolve to say nothing more, whereupon you accuse me of indifference. Then, one morning, I find a bottle of champagne in the fridge. I ask if it is somebody’s birthday. ‘In a way,’ you say, ‘it’s mine’, and add that we will be celebrating later. Without a word to me, you have sent back the form to Merseyside. Last week, you received a reply stating that your birth records have been despatched to Westminster Social Services. You have an appointment to see a social worker this afternoon.

  I take your hands, which are like ice. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Scared. No, Californian.’ You laugh. ‘What was that phrase Imogen came back with? “Today is the first day of the rest of my life.”’

  When you return, your mood is electric. You are so full of loathing for the Social Worker that, at first, I fear that the information has been withheld.

  ‘She reminded me of Muriel. She had the same margarine voice … you know, vowels that spread straight from the fridge. She began by explaining that she disapproved of the new law. She’d been an adoption officer in the fifties and remembered promising the mothers complete anonymity. She claimed that a young woman today – I felt as though I were on Panorama – could have no idea of the slur that illegitimacy used to carry. She insisted that I consider my mother’s feelings. I said that I’d considered little else for twenty years. It’s the most important relationship of my life; does she think I mean to screw it up like all the rest?’

  ‘There may be some children who are less well prepared.’ />
  ‘I’m not a child!’

  ‘In the adopted sense.’

  ‘She hid behind this huge file, smugly holding my past – no, my future – in her hands. I had to sit on my hands to stop myself lashing out. I kept reminding myself that I was required by law to see her. She was determined to drag it out … again like Muriel, who used to read my school report so slowly that she made me feel bad even when it was good. Bitches! She asked if I appreciated that my mother might have died; a surprising number of the women had. “I see,” I said, “then the wages of sin really is death.” And, for a moment, I thought that she might reject me. But my patience paid off, and she handed me these.’ You hold up two slips of paper.

  ‘What are they?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s all she gave me. The bitch took great delight in telling me how little information she’d been sent. But it’s enough. This gives me the details on my birth certificate, and this authorises me to apply to Peterborough Crown Court for the name of the adoption agency.’

  ‘Peterborough?’

  ‘That’s where I was born. Look.’

  ‘But this is for a Joan Davies.’

  ‘Voilà. That’s the name on my birth certificate. Tomorrow, I shall go to St Catherine’s House for my own copy. Then I intend to frame it. You remember how your mother wanted to frame your degree certificate?’

  ‘And you remember what I said?’

  ‘But now I understand. It may only be a piece of paper, but it authenticates my life.’

  Joan Davies … Joan … I try to see you as Joan, but it jars. Names come attached to so much baggage; who expects a Sid to compose a symphony or a Constance to conduct a bus? You rechristened me, but I find the reverse so much harder. Candida is whimsical and witty; Joan is sensible and severe. You are the quintessential Candida. I know that your parents picked the name for its purity – thereby reprieving you from a lifetime of Prudence – and yet, whether in reaction or defiance, you have made it your own. But Joan Davies … Joan … the exuberance of your personality is mocked by the monosyllable … Still, we can always pretend that they named you after the Pope.

  ‘Joan Davies,’ you say slowly. ‘Mother’s name: Linda. Father’s a blank. My father a blank. That says it all.’

  ‘They may have had something to hide.’

  ‘Yes, if he were the Earl of Peterborough and she were one of his tenants.’

  ‘Why not put “Father’s name: Jasper” and have done with it? Candida, darling, it may just be that he was married or else that she may not have known.’

  ‘A woman always knows the father of her child.’ … I feel a pang for Pagan … ‘Besides, Joan Davies is far too nondescript to be genuine; it’s the hotel register John Smith.’

  I move a few steps away from the font. ‘Then how can you hope to find her?’

  ‘There’s an address.’

  ‘From twenty-two years ago.’

  ‘So? Not everyone’s a nomad. Some people live in communities; they die in the houses where they were born. Did you know there are still people living in South London who have never been north of the river? What if her family was like that? And, if not, there may be neighbours. I’ll knock on every door in the street … in the town, if need be. I’ll hire a balloon and scatter leaflets. I’ll plaster posters on billboards.’ The Candida is eclipsing the Joan again. ‘I’m sure someone will remember: a single woman with a child. Small-town people – small-minded people. I’ll find a way.’

  I wish that I could offer more than moral support, but I am off again to St Bride’s. We keep in regular contact and I chart your progress like a boy with victory flags. At times, I sense that you are close to despair, as you spend days in St Catherine’s House, poring over the Marriage records, buckling under the weight of coupledom. But persistence pays when you discover that, in 1960, your mother married a bank-clerk called Saxon … Sancton … Sacristan … I have an image of something archaic. A search through Births adds two daughters and a 1965 address in Huntingdon; which a trip to the District Council offices, and a trawl through the Electoral Registers, updates to 1971. Then the trail goes blank.

  I forget how you proceed – perhaps I never knew – but I think that an estate agent comes into it, along with a neighbour who has kept in Christmas card contact since they moved to Stamford, where Sexton – of course – has been made assistant manager of Barclays Bank. Then, one evening, I am summoned from choir practice to receive an urgent phone call from my sister. I may not have a sister, but you, at last, have the address. The line crackles with excitement as you announce your plan to spring a surprise visit. You charge me with treachery when I side with the Social Worker’s ‘write first, meet later’ approach.

  You are as reluctant to brook any delay as your mother is to agree to a meeting; and yet, in time, her resistance wears thin. I am as nervous as you. On the appointed day, I neglect my work and watch the clock like the idlest schoolboy. Unable to bear the suspense, I stand in the staff phone booth with a sweaty store of 10ps. I can tell at once, in spite of your chirpy, chin-up voice, that the encounter was a disaster. I am loath to add to the pain, but I have to know what happened. You provide a brief report in exchange for a promise never to mention it again. My suspicions are confirmed. Far from clasping you to her bosom, your mother never so much as took your hand. She resented the revived memories and refused to discuss either her past or present life. She did, however, tell you the one thing that you most needed – and dreaded – to hear. She is a sales assistant at Boots; in Peterborough, she worked as a telephonist, while your father packed meat.

  ‘You mean in an abattoir?’

  ‘No, there’s not even any blood in it. He worked in a deep freeze.’ Your laughter chills me. ‘She hasn’t seen or heard from him in over twenty years. He did a runner as soon as he found she was pregnant. She was living, with her father …’ Your voice falters. ‘So there was never any question of her keeping me. But she claims to have made sure that I went to a good home. “How?” I asked. “By giving you to the Church of England Children’s Society instead of the council,” she said. She stipulated that they be churchgoers. “Big deal!” I said. “Have you never heard of the Pharisees?” She took me to mean some series with Susan Hampshire on TV.’

  ‘What? Oh, she must have been thinking of The Pallisers.’

  ‘Who cares? It’s all so trivial … She hasn’t told her husband or her new daughters anything about me. I feel like a cheap hotel room full of soiled sheets and stale air. She was terrified that I’d cause trouble; and I suddenly felt so powerful. Our positions were reversed; she’d given me up and now I could give her away. But why? I felt nothing for her. I wanted nothing from her. And the thing I cared about least was that I couldn’t call her Mother. The word caught like a bone in my throat.’

  My concern on the phone is magnified when I return at half-term and find you standing on a tatty, tinselly stage, gyrating in a g-string. You wear a curly blonde wig, fuchsia false nails and glossy red lipstick which smears on my cheeks. Soho, from being an eccentric address for someone who could not afford Chelsea and refused to compromise with Camden, has become a way of life. Snatched conversations with the girls, in the alleyways where they work and in the shops where you buy cigarettes, have solicited you more successfully than any of their men.

  ‘I don’t understand what’s come over you.’

  ‘Joan Davies.’

  ‘She died, at five days old, when you became Candida Mulliner.’

  ‘And I’ve been carrying her around ever since. She’s not some role that I can discard at the cast party. She’s me. There again, she’s no one: the product of a telephone call to a frozen-food factory. I hope that you’re all enjoying a good laugh.’

  ‘I’m not laughing.’

  ‘Why not? I deserve it. I thought I was special, that I’d find my parents and come into my kingdom. I built castles in the air when it should have been semi-detacheds … I warn you, if you give me one of your homilies about everyone being s
pecial, I’ll scream.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to …’ I bite my tongue.

  ‘But I’m so bloody ordinary. That’s the worst fate of all. I could live with poverty or tragedy or terminal illness, but ordinariness … I’d rather die.’

  ‘I find it comforting.’

  ‘I was so naive. I didn’t imagine that God was just – I’m not that naive – but I did think that he was sporting. I couldn’t believe that anyone would be given the intensity of my desire without the chance to fulfil it. I knew that I didn’t have any particular talent or creativity, so I invested all my hopes in my story. I’d fulfil myself not by being myself – that’s far too easy – but by becoming myself; and, for that, I had to be someone worth becoming. Now I’m paying for my presumption. Who am I? Joan Davies: a nonperson; Candida Mulliner: a nonentity; so why not Sylvie Labelle, thrusting her pelvis into her customers’ cocktails? At least I made her up myself.’

  I may be obtuse, but I fail to see how your trip to Stamford leads quite so directly to the dressing room of The Pigalle. I feel that the equation of disillusion and self-abasement requires an extra ‘x’ factor that you have yet to reveal. But, before I can ask, you are summoned on stage by Dom, the Maltese ‘stage manager’ … or so he is termed for tax purposes and court appearances. You throw off your wrap and stand in a crimson and black satin corset that puts me in mind less of the Folies Bergère than a Feydeau farce. I sit and pour myself a large glass of your whisky, while Patti and Velma, the speciality double act, slip through the curtain, their bitterness tempered by the knowledge that they have paraded their passion in front of an unsuspecting, all-male audience.

  Patti shakes; Velma comforts her. Dom rushes in and pulls them apart. ‘We have none of that here. This club is clean, clean clean,’ he repeats, while they spit out a very different adjective. My presence is ignored; after two days, I am already part of the furniture … as scuffed and soiled as the rest. Even Dom regards me with indifference, calling me Professor with all the irony of one who has graduated summa cum laude from the University of Life.