He scurries out. The music starts. From the intermittent whoops, sporadic shouts and occasional words of encouragement, I know that you are performing and try to fit the action to the applause. But the flimsy cotton curtain falls like an iron screen across my imagination … Now it falls again, across my memory, as, by some involuntary impulse, I prevent myself from delving deeper and leave you locked in an eternal bump and grind.
And yet, as I turn again to my affidavit, I know that I must trust to my instincts. There is nothing arbitrary about memory; I simply have to learn its language. I feel sure that it is trying to tell me something … are you trying to tell me something? If so, should I consult a fortune teller or a medium? I intend to find your mother. I need to establish the connection between Stamford and Soho. If you can play private detective, so can I.
3
‘Knock knock!’
‘Who’s there?’
‘Franz Kafka.’
‘Franz who?’
‘No, that’s all wrong; you should say Franz Kafka who?’
‘I’m sorry … Franz Kafka who?’
But my mind blanks and my vision blurs. I look down at the floor and I find that I am naked. I am only saved from the jeers of the audience by the sound of a telephone. Franz Kafka who? Who’s Franz Kafka? I am torn from a nightmare fantasy to confront the reality: not the pounding on the door at three in the morning but the ringing of the telephone at six.
A measured voice asks if I would like to comment on the story in today’s Nation. I flick the lamp switch; the filament flashes. I fling my head back on the pillow and try not to swear. What comment? What story? It is ten past six by the luminous hands of my Mickey Mouse clock … your gift seems prophetic as I am plunged into a Mickey Mouse world. While sleep makes a last attempt to reclaim me, my informant explains that the Nation has published a piece on my sexuality and suggests that she read it to me. I agree, even though the words run into each other like paint and my throbbing bladder forces my attention onto my groin. When I catch the name David Sunning, I realise that it is serious. What is the gay equivalent of Kiss and Tell? Suck and Spit?
‘No comment,’ I insist … I sound like a politician … ‘No comment.’ I have always wanted to say it, even though I know that my silence leaves more space for them to fill. I drag myself out of bed and to the lavatory, where I barely register that I am peeing blood. I creep downstairs in fear that my early rising will license Pagan’s. The telephone rings and I disconnect it. I throw on some clothes, but any thought of slipping out for the paper disappears when I see three shadowy figures huddled by the gate. I start to cry, vast sobs that heave my chest like push-ups. My entire body strains with grief, which transmutes into laughter. I feel an inexplicable sense of liberation … until I think of Pagan, my mother, your mother and the BBC.
I take a shower. My limbs are so uncoordinated that I wonder if I may be in shock. I return to the bedroom dressed only in a hand-towel. I approach the window and fall to the floor at the thought of photographers with telescopic lenses perched in trees. As I crawl to the wardrobe for my underwear, Pagan enters for her Sunday morning cuddle and the chance to snuggle in the warmth at the bottom of my bed. She is at first confused and then delighted by the opportunity to play horses so early in the day. She bounces from the bed onto my back. ‘Ooh, you’re all wet.’ She squirms and abandons the race in disgust.
The problem of fetching today’s paper without featuring on tomorrow’s front page is solved when Susan asks Consuela to buy one on her way home from mass. ‘Is not a good paper,’ she replies, which hardly squares with her relish for the royal scandals in Spanish magazines. At eleven thirty, I wonder whether, having read the paper, she has decided never to return. Then the bell rings; and it is clear that she has simply forgotten her key. Susan counsels caution and calls out before opening the door. There is no reply. My own request in rudimentary Spanish is greeted by stirrings in the letter box and a reporter from the Standard, asking me first for a quote and then for a break.
I resist the disconcertingly powerful urge to grab an umbrella and poke it in his face. Susan kneels by the door and shouts back that no one will be saying anything, even if they wait from now until the January sales. She looks up, stunned by her vehemence. Pagan starts to cry. The fun of creeping through the house bent double has palled; she cannot understand why we will not open the door. Susan takes her upstairs for a special-treat chocolate-and-banana sandwich. I cut insulating tape into strips and stick it over the letter box, until the threat feels as muted as a muzzled dog.
Consuela returns with the paper and the sinister news that she had to walk as far as Bayswater, because ‘every shop I go to is sold’. It seems that the whole of London wants to witness my disgrace. But, to my relief, I see that the front page is an exclusive about the Prince of Wales and his mistress. Thank God for the Order of Precedence! Then I catch a caption underneath, TV’s Leo’s gay lover speaks out. Turn to Pages Six, Seven and Eight. Three pages! What on earth can they have to say that fills three pages? I fumble to find out. Meanwhile Consuela, who sees only the headlines, promises that ‘after lunch I show you beautiful pictures of Princess Diana with the Queen of Spain’.
I reach the pertinent pages. The headline reads Double Life of Chat Show Host. I suppose that I should be grateful that it is not Secret Shame. There are two small photographs, one of me in black tie and one of David wearing a Queer As Fuck T-shirt, or rather Queer As * * * *, since the word has been blacked out. Above them is an old snapshot, taken by you, of the two of us in Suffolk. I am in shirt-sleeves and he is in shorts. I look so happy that it hurts. I cannot remember feeling so happy; I must not remember feeling so happy. I can still hear you shouting ‘closer, closer’, as if you were pushing us into each other’s arms and not just into the frame. ‘Right now, look at the birdie and say sleaze.’
The article is surprisingly unsleazy. It is the fact, not the content, of it that is painful. He describes how we met on Addendum … although his mention of my helping him to a permanent contract has an unfortunate ring of ‘for services rendered’, when he was, unquestionably, our best researcher. He declares that we fell in love … I envy his certainty. It would be some comfort to know that I was able to experience – and to inspire – passion. For once, it is not my memory that I cannot trust, but my emotions … or, rather, my recollected emotions, so perhaps the distinction is false. How much of what I felt came from me and how much from books? Was I responding to him or to Gabriel Oak and George Emerson? I fear that I have made literature not just a reference but a reality and my feelings as fictional as theirs.
David knows no such doubts. To him the problem is simply my timidity, for which read hypocrisy … I read another line and find it spelt out. He calls my sexuality an open secret and claims that the verbal and physical mannerisms that comedians love to mock and critics to castigate are obvious defence mechanisms. How sad that he should have grown so glib. He complains that, for over a year, I would not let him live with me and that, when I finally relented, I put him in the basement and kept him apart from my friends. You would think that he were Mrs Rochester in her attic … no, no more books! But then that may be appropriate since he felt – or at least Ms Sable makes him feel – ‘less like a person than a fact of life that Leo refused to acknowledge’.
He states that he was compelled to speak by the three articles that I wrote in the Criterion detailing my response to your death and describing how we lived together and loved each other for seventeen years. That is no lie, believe me … well, I know that you do; it is the words that are equivocal, not the feelings. Ours was a love that had neither rules nor models, a love that at once defined our parameters and gave us space, a love more select than the love of families, more reasoned than the love of lovers and more intense than the love of friends. And yet, to David, it was a fantasy. He cannot accept such unselfish love … or rather, he considers it self-interest. He asserts that we simply served each other’s purpose: that I ne
eded you in order to hide – and to hide from – my sexuality and that you used me in order to … I won’t repeat what he says about you.
Might he be right? I am mad even to think of it. And yet, once planted, the thought grows. Was our relationship based, not on a false premise, but on a false perception? I followed your romances as intently as if I were one of the reporters clustered in the Christmas crispness outside the gate … Susan tells me that they now number nine. I noted the all-embracing excitement and then the extended despair. I saw you slip into promiscuity, despite your denial – ‘I’m not promiscuous, just easily bored’ – and trembled at the violence of your contempt for the men you bedded … and sofaed and carpeted and floored. It was almost as though you could not decide whom you despised more: the men for the predictability of their desires or yourself for pandering to them. ‘I’m such a slut,’ you said. ‘How can anyone be such a slut? I’m all bad inside.’
I was determined to show that there was one man who wanted more from you than your body, one who responded to you as a person. With us, there would be no sexual subterfuge, no erotic bargaining. We would defy conventional society and deny conventional wisdom. Our intimacy would be all the closer for bypassing bed; our table talk would say more than any pillow talk … And yet was I rationalising from your neuroses? Was I seduced not by your passion but by your pain? I was turning away from sex not on the grounds of my own experience, but of yours. I am beginning to feel like the man who built his house on stilts.
You made it clear, after all, that I was not enough for you. ‘I want a lover,’ you said, whether as a birthday present, Christmas wish or New Year’s resolution. ‘Although I know that it’s a lost cause. Love must be blind, or why is no one in love with me?’
‘Won’t I do?’
‘Oh darling, you know you will – you do.’ And you rubbed my nose the way that Pagan rubs Trouble’s. ‘But it’s the difference between being ravaged by a tiger and cuddled by a pussy cat. Although, in my case, it would have to be a sabre-toothed tiger. If the man for me ever existed, he’s extinct.’
I put my fingers in my ears, but I cannot muffle my memory. I simply jolt it forward a year or so.
‘Sex destroys things,’ I am saying to David, with all the spurious authority of one who has picked up the pieces. ‘Friendship binds them together.’
‘Is that you talking or Ms Mulliner?’
‘I can think for myself; I’ve a mind of my own.’
‘I don’t doubt. What worries me more is whether you have a cock.’ It stirs, as if to make its presence felt; he feels it. I blush and he grins. ‘Sex can be so many things. Exciting … exotic … loving … funny … expansive … expensive.’ He makes a different part of my body glow with each adjective. ‘Let me prove it to you.’ It is an invitation that I find hard to resist, and yet a lesson that I find impossible to learn. ‘Relax a little. If only you could stop thinking.’
If only I could stop remembering … but each word that I read reverberates. I wish that you had made more of an effort to like him; I am sure that he felt as threatened by you as Lewis did by me. But then perhaps you felt as threatened by him as I did by Lewis; which makes us square. I don’t think that he ever forgave you for the ‘be quiet, little boy’ gibe at Duncan’s party. I was afraid that he would hand me an ultimatum on the way home, but he was scared of the reply. Now he has his revenge, or at any rate his recognition. Ms Sable devotes two paragraphs to his politics. Perhaps that was the pay-off? I hope that they did pay him. And it may be seeing his photograph, but I find it impossible to blame him. My resentment is reserved for Brian Derwent and the Nation. What possible interest can the story serve except the most prurient? The details are too old to pass as news. I am afraid that it must have some connection with Pagan. Conspiracy theories may be the last resort of the disenfranchised, but the coincidence is too neat.
Max rings from the National Film Theatre where he is attending an all-day Anton Walbrook tribute. He insists that I do nothing, unless the reporters intrude; in which case, I call the police.
‘Say nothing, end of story … as, indeed, it will be.’
‘What if they make something up?’
‘Then we sue.’
He seems to be spoiling for a fight – or, as you would say, a fee – a prospect which fills me with foreboding. Our conversation is curtailed as he is called to The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and I to lunch; after which Susan and I prepare to take Pagan to Stephanie’s party. We warn her about the reporters.
‘Why do they want to take photographs?’ she asks.
‘Because we’re important,’ Susan replies.
‘Like the Queen?’
I allow Susan three minutes to warm up the engine and then follow. I yearn for a house with two gates. The front door slams like a starting pistol and the press pack leaps into action. Despite my qualms, I regret not requesting police protection. Pagan is bewildered and clasps my hand. I lead her through the crowd, ignoring all entreaties, gritting my teeth to the microphones and glazing my eyes to the cameras. As we jostle our way to the car, one importunate hack almost traps Pagan’s fingers in the door. Susan steps on the accelerator, and he barely escapes with his life.
After a short stop for breath (me), a cuddle (Pagan) and a cigarette (Susan), we reach Stephanie’s, where Pagan at first shows me off and then disowns me … when I see her next, she has a zebra mask painted on her face and a braid in her hair. Stephanie’s mother, whose name I can never remember, and, after two years of child-connections, find it impossible to ask, presses me to join a grown-up gathering in the ‘den’. To my surprise, I agree. Her husband, whose name – Stephen – I learn on introduction, sees me glance at the pile of newspapers. He picks up the Nation. ‘I read this the way my daughters read Bunty.’ The subtext and the support are clear.
‘It’s the only way that we can see how the other half live,’ claims a sedentary man in a rugby shirt with POLO printed across his paunch. I bridle; does he mean the other half or the other ten per cent?
‘And love?’ I inquire.
‘Oh no. I don’t think the Nation knows much about love.’
I return home, fortified by their kindness and Stephen’s Glenfiddich, to be greeted by a batch of messages that almost reconciles me to the answer-machine. Ismene’s assurance that ‘today’s front page is tomorrow’s fish and chip paper’ is followed by Keith’s insistence that such poisonous pieces explain the EEC ban on using them to wrap food. Imogen declares that she is cancelling her order for the paper; ‘which is a real blow because, at my age, how else can I get my kicks? But it’s one thing when it’s naughty vicars, quite another when it’s naughty friends.’ … Pause for giggles … ‘It’s so awful. I never mean what I say – that is say what I mean – on machines.’ The final and most heartening call comes from Kaye Blake, the new Head of Music and Arts, who wonders whether I may have misinterpreted her remarks on revamping the show’s image. ‘Never mind, Auntie is shaken but not stirred.’
I can no longer put off ringing my mother. The whisky has blurred my responses, so it may be fanciful to identify an edge to her voice. We embark on the usual round of small talk: my father, my job, her health, her guests, Pagan. I despair of communication. I finally broach the subject of the paper.
‘I never read newspapers on a Sunday. It’s the Lord’s day, not one for idling.’
‘Still, someone may bring it to your notice.’
‘Someone already has. And I’ll tell you exactly what I told her: I never believe what they write about anyone else, so why should I believe it of you? What about all the decent people? The men who love God and their wives and children: when does anyone write about them?’
‘Every week in your local paper. I can still see the headline: Well-loved caretaker retires.’
‘I don’t wish to continue with this.’
‘But we must. It’s not the way that I’d have chosen, God knows –’
‘God knows everything, Leonard; He doesn�
�t need you to remind Him.’
‘I’m sorry, Mother. It’s just that I want to explain.’
‘I said “no”. I’ve always prided myself on my fairness. Do you remember when they asked me to judge the Choral Society competition after Mr Elves had his heart-attack on the platform?’
‘I do.’
‘I treated you no different from all the rest. As I watched you sing, I put a box over your head.’
‘I know … universally acknowledged as the best voice in the society and you didn’t place me.’
‘I’m putting a box over your head again now.’
I fail to follow her logic, just as I fail to discuss David. Grandchildren apart, I think that she would have liked me to grow up a castrato. She is only sixty-three … too young to be set in her ways, let alone in her ways of thinking; but then she was set in those at thirty. I concede defeat and take refuge in Christmas. She tells me that there are presents in the post for Susan, whom she has never met, Pagan and me. She thanks me for my cheque, chides my extravagance, and insists that she already has more than she needs.
Pagan’s present, a crystal kaleidoscope, is a great success; mine, an argyle sweater, is not … it is bad enough having red hair without picking it up in the pattern. And why are the clothes that she buys me always two sizes too big? Do I still need room for growth? Nevertheless, it is Pagan’s pleasure which is paramount. She decides that she likes Christmas even more than birthdays because, at Christmas, everyone is given presents so everyone feels happy, not just her. I fear that she has reached an age where magic gives way to materialism. She draws up two lists of presents, one for Father Christmas and one for me … ‘just in case he isn’t real’. And, when I hold up her bulging pillowcase as proof of his existence, she looks at the labels, thinks for a moment and declares that ‘I half-believe in Father Christmas because he gave me half my presents’.
Pagan and her parents Page 19