Pagan and her parents

by Michael Arditti

  One present which comes very clearly labelled is a Barbie doll, complete with wedding outfit, from your parents. The only cloud of the day looms when I insist that she ring and thank them. I hear your mother assuring her that she will have a proper ‘family’ Christmas next weekend and Pagan asking how it can be proper if it is late. Afterwards, she tells me that she wants to give the doll to the poor children.

  ‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea.’

  ‘You always say that if I don’t play with my toys, you’re going to give them away. And those are toys I like.’

  ‘You may like this when you’re older.’

  ‘I won’t. I’ll never like it. It’s soppy. Yuck!’ She illustrates her distaste by holding Barbie by the feet and hitting her head against the wall.

  Susan has gone to Hampshire to spend the holiday with her parents and Geoffrey, so Pagan and I are left with Consuela, who divides her time between telephoning her family in Santiago, visiting her friends in Shepherd’s Bush, and declaring that I am ‘the most gracious patron’; because of me, her children can stay at school.

  ‘Doesn’t Consuela want to see Licia and Roberto?’ Pagan asks.

  ‘Of course she does. But, when their daddy died, she had to come here to find work.’

  ‘You should give her some pounds.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Lots and lots.’

  ‘I did. But she’d rather save everything for them. She’ll see them in the summer.’

  ‘Does Licia miss her mummy?’

  ‘She has lots of other people who love her … her granny and her brother and her uncles.’

  ‘I miss my mummy.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Do you think that there’s Christmas in Heaven …? Why are you crying?’

  ‘I’m not … it’s just my contact lens.’

  ‘Yuck! Do you remember when we put sparkle over Mummy’s screen and holly on her bed and middle-toes over the top, so everyone had to kiss her?’

  ‘Yes. I do.’ The ghost of Christmas Past returns to haunt me. It leads me from ‘Santa’s Soho Grotto’ to the foot of Pagan’s cot. I wipe my eyes. This second year without you is so much harder. Twelve months ago, we were feeling our way around your absence; I was being brave for Pagan’s sake and she was being grown-up for mine. The evidence of you was everywhere … even on the cards which I retrieved from Consuela’s safe-keeping. They consoled me far more than all the letters of condolence; they seemed to confirm your presence … not to put back the clock but to stand outside time. Now, you are addressed only in error. Last year’s ralliers-round have become this year’s mustn’t-intruders … Would Christmas in Heaven be a permanent season or a contradiction in terms?

  We spend the evening with Edward and Melissa, who invite us for mulled wine and mince pies.

  ‘It’s only family,’ Melissa insists to overcome my reluctance, ‘so it’s quite informal.’

  ‘It’s only family,’ Edward echoes, as he takes our coats, ‘so thank God you’ve come.’

  Resentments smoulder, as the boys cast aching glances at the television and Melissa murderous ones at Edward.

  She breaks her own no-presents rule with a pre-publication copy of The Madwoman of Muswell Hill … ‘because you need cheering up’.

  ‘Has she told you about her next?’ Edward asks. ‘A scorching saga of necrophilia, entitled Under the Sod.’

  ‘You must be confusing it with the story of our marriage.’

  ‘If you two mean to fight, I’m going to bed,’ Rory warns them.

  ‘This isn’t fighting,’ his father counters; ‘it’s weighing in.’

  The evening simmers on. I feel as though we have arrived not so much in the second act of a play as in the third part of a trilogy; the setting may be English drawing room, but the emotions are Greek. I wait for the climax. It comes sooner than I expect, when Dougall, who is handing round the mulled wine, whispers that I should watch his grandmother since he has slipped a tab of Ecstasy into her mug. I am appalled and fail to see why he has confided in me. I plot an accident … but it is too late. After half an hour in which I studiously avoid Dougall’s gaze, Mrs Frobisher bursts into a fit of giggles. Edward, who views her less as a person than as a premonition, rants that she has ruined his joke; Melissa accuses him of intolerance; Dougall winks at me. His grandmother is unconcerned, laughing wildly, and running her fingers through her hair.

  ‘Switch the lights down a little, will you, dear?’ she asks Sweeney.

  Melissa jibs at criticism: ‘Mummy, anything less and we’ll be plunged into darkness.’

  ‘Everything’s so bright; it’s hurting my eyes.’

  ‘Perhaps she’s seeing God?’ Dougall suggests, as his grandmother scratches her head.

  ‘Do you think she’s had some sort of stroke?’ Melissa asks Edward.

  ‘More likely pissed.’

  ‘On two mugs of mulled wine?’

  ‘Remember your cousin Cynthia’s wedding.’

  ‘Come here, dear,’ Mrs Frobisher calls to Pagan, who recoils. ‘Will you run your fingers through my hair? It gives the most delicious tingle.’ Pagan looks to me for rescue; I mouth ‘go on’ and mime scratching. She reluctantly responds.

  ‘I can feel it all the way down my spine. Harder, dear, harder.’ Dougall sways with suppressed laughter.

  ‘Do you think we should ring the doctor?’ Melissa asks Edward.

  ‘It’s Christmas Day, for Christ’s sake! Would you want to be called out to some drunken old trout?’

  I agree with Edward and glare at Dougall. ‘I’m sure sleep’s the answer.’

  ‘Harder, dear, harder.’ Pagan takes her at her word, as Mrs Frobisher squeals with delight. ‘This is ecstasy.’ Dougall bangs his face with a cushion.

  ‘I think that’s enough now,’ I say, as Pagan scratches so hard that Mrs Frobisher’s wig slides over her forehead.

  Pagan and Melissa both scream. Dougall runs from the room, clasping a darkening patch on his groin, while his brothers look blank. Mrs Frobisher, seemingly oblivious to her exposed scalp, scratches for herself. ‘Sheer Heaven! I’m all a-tingle.’

  I pick up Pagan for a reassuring hug.

  ‘Her hair came off,’ she sobs.

  ‘It’s just a wig. Like in the pantomime.’

  ‘She’s got no hair – like a man. Why?’

  ‘I’ll explain later.’

  ‘Only men have no hair, not ladies …’ As Melissa and Edward argue over the relative faults of their relations, we gather our gifts and leave.

  Susan returns on New Year’s Eve, as Geoffrey has to rejoin his submarine or ‘go back to the zoo’ as he puts it, which, given the lack of showers and ventilation, seems to be no idle phrase. I am invited to spend the evening with the Savages and find myself alone among seven couples. Tristan whispers that there were originally meant to be six, until Deborah, who is going through a ‘spiritual’ phase, all soya beans and birth signs, realised that that would make thirteen at table. Catastrophe looms when the Chubbs’ au pair runs off with Priscilla’s nephew and they ring to cancel. Deborah at once declares that, on account of her bruised coccyx, she intends to stand.

  She hovers over the meal, casting a shadow which I attempt to dispel with a succession of stories. I fear that I am turning into the Court Jester of David’s accusation. ‘Relax,’ I tell myself, ‘you’re among friends.’ And yet, in a world of seven couples and me, I never feel justified by friendship alone. I cannot shrug off the sense of being tolerated, ‘the pet poof’, in David’s phrase … no, that is going too far. Nevertheless, I am convinced that they like me not on account of what I am, but in spite of it, and find my sexuality acceptable only because it remains academic (where David might describe a holiday in Ibiza or a night at a disco, I discuss a poem by Rimbaud or an essay by Freud); furthermore, in the unlikely event of its becoming practical, I can always be relied on to excise any emotion and fashion an amusing anecdote. … The thing that we love best about you,
Leo, is the way you can laugh at yourself.

  As dinner drags on, I feel increasingly lonely. I may refrain from ramming my sexuality down their throats (cue laughter), but no one shows the same consideration for me. After a stream of in-jokes about in-laws, Penny launches her familiar attack on the size of Fergus’s penis and Jessica tipsily asks to judge for herself; at which he unzips. Matty seeks advice on maternity bras and breast pumps, adding that ‘this must be very boring for you, Leo’. ‘Not at all,’ I reply, as my left leg goes to sleep. Edward and Tristan debate whether watching Matty give birth will turn Tim off sex, while Joan and Melissa lambast the insensitivity of men. By the time that we reach the nanny course, I am ready to scream.

  Suddenly, it is midnight and harmony is restored … apart from a raucous rendition of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, during which Edward kisses Lucinda so tenderly that I foresee the plot of Melissa’s next book.

  The new year begins in earnest for me on the fourth of January, when Max returns to his office and faxes me a copy of Lewis’s second affidavit. My assertion of heterosexuality, which was lamed by the Nation article, is now completely crippled. I even used our discovery in bed at St Bride’s to illustrate our intimacy. How was I to know that you had written to Lewis in prison with the full story? You were always such a reluctant correspondent. Pace my mother and God, I am sure that you considered mankind’s greatest invention to be the telephone. Why did you have to fall for the one man who was unable to receive calls?

  Why did he have to keep your letters? It is so unlike you, so unlike him, so unjust.

  I pick up your letter of November 3rd 1982, which is attached to his affidavit … ‘I only wish I could spring you from the Scrubs as easily as I sprung Leo from his prep school’ … It is not an occasion that I choose to remember. I know that I should never have invited you to St Bride’s; but I thought that, if you saw my production of Curlew River, you would at least acknowledge the creative side of my work. I may not be singing Don Ottavio at the ENO, but neither am I merely teaching scales and playing hymns. And yet you remain unconvinced. You are angry that I have failed to justify your faith in me. You accuse me of selling myself short.

  ‘You might as well change your name back to Lenny.’

  ‘It’s too late; it’s on their books.’

  ‘When we first met, all you wanted to do was sing. You had your life mapped out. The only question was whether it would be in opera or oratorio, Covent Garden or St Paul’s.’

  ‘People change.’

  ‘No, things happen to divert them.’

  ‘Well then, let me introduce you to the diversions: you … Robin … Duncan Treflis.’

  ‘Duncan Treflis?’

  ‘I really loved my time at John’s … the services and the records and the feasts and the tours. I don’t think I’ve ever told you how, after the Tallis programme at the Sainte Chapelle, I met a man who introduced himself as belonging to one of the oldest Protestant families in France. He offered to take me round the private apartments in Versailles, to which he had some historic right of access. As we went, I addressed him formally as Monsieur le Comte. He stopped and said quietly “You do not call me Monsieur le Comte; that is what my butler calls me. You call me simply Comte; you are my equal.”’

  ‘And then he buggered you in the boudoir?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Candida!’

  ‘Why else are you telling me?’

  ‘Because I felt so elated. This was the aristocracy of art … the democracy of talent. Liberté, égalité, fraternité … even in the heart of Versailles. I’d entertained him; now he wanted to do as much for me. But it was an exception. I discovered the rule back in London, when Duncan Treflis invited me to his box at Covent Garden.’

  ‘Not the private apartments at Hampton Court?’

  ‘They might as well have been. He introduced me to his friend Leslie Meacham. “Ah, the Methodist,” he lisped, as if it were a title, like The Huguenots, and rubbed my hand. Not that he has any love of music. His interest is focused on the foyers … the louche young men lounging in the Crush Bar or fingering their genitals in the gents. He wanders the corridors as if he were kerb-crawling. Robin says that’s why they have such long intervals. Then they can consummate during the second act.’

  ‘Typical Robin!’

  ‘I was there. I saw … It was La Traviata, appropriately enough. After pushing Meacham’s hand off my thigh for the umpteenth time during ‘Un di felice’, I finally lost patience and yanked back his fingers. He gave such a yelp that even the singers looked up. In the interval, he left us in the bar and returned with a barely articulate youth, with powdered cheeks and breath that smelt like syrup of figs, who, when the conversation turned to the modern art exhibition at the Hayward, announced that he didn’t like modern paintings; “I prefer originals.” And those two evil men, who’d mocked me for confusing Bauhaus and Balthus, laughed as if he were Oscar Wilde. Then, during the second act, Meacham fellated him at the back of the box.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘While Violetta was giving up the life of a tart, Meacham’s new friend was pursuing it. He and Treflis had swapped seats. And Robin didn’t bat an eyelid; he says that it happens all the time … and, on ballet nights, it’s worse.’

  ‘So forget the boxes, play to the gallery.’

  ‘Then I’d be playing to their ghosts. Treflis claimed that, until recently, the amphitheatre was a brothel for Guardsmen. There was a rail at the back and you placed yourself in front or behind, depending on whether you wanted to service them or wanted them to service you.’

  ‘So that’s why they wear those cloaks …’

  ‘I expect you think I’m being prissy. Robin reproached me for putting on airs. But I could never be part of it, either on stage or off. Now I know the double meaning of “musical”, and it repels me.’

  ‘So what about plan b, and a place on the Deputies List for St Paul’s?’

  ‘How can I put my heart – my soul – into sacred music when I don’t believe in God? Is my whole life to be a pretence? I could audition for the Gothic Voices or the BBC Singers, but what would be the point? I’m far happier teaching the boys the joy … the power … the discipline of singing; although I would never encourage any of them to make it his life.’

  ‘I won’t let you settle for such mediocrity. You forget that I grew up in a school like this … my father has been a bursar for nearly twenty years. I saw the disappointment that grew like moss on the masters’ faces: men who exude failure like the stale smell of boiled cabbage. I picture you, twenty years from now, in some musty common room, your only intellectual challenge the Criterion crossword, your only intimacy supervising the fifth-form showers. I see you shrivel into a collection of mannerisms, desperately trying to keep the boys amused.’

  I hear you across almost twenty years, and I look at myself. What am I but a collection of mannerisms desperately trying to keep the viewers amused? Only now I exude the clotted-cream smell of success. Pagan used to call the television the turn-on; I prefer a different preposition. Switch me on, switch me off, play me back, wind me forward; I am the Petroushka of the remote control. Or should that be the Pinocchio? I have always read the lying puppet with the nose that grows as a metaphor for masturbation. In which case, it would be doubly appropriate … At least, at St Bride’s, I was someone whom I could respect.

  ‘It’s time to say goodbye to Goodbye Mr Chips.’

  ‘I’m happy here. I enjoy the routines and the rituals … knowing whose chair not to sit on, which newspaper not to open, that, every Tuesday, it’s roly-poly pudding and, every second Saturday, we show a film.’

  ‘It’s called becoming institutionalised. You’ll be booking into hospital for unnecessary operations next.’

  ‘Whereas your life is so thrilling, thrusting your tits in the faces of tired businessmen?’

  ‘If I didn’t, then they’d be thrusting their cocks somewhere else.’

  ‘No, I won’t buy that.
You said that they were all middle-aged tax inspectors and businessmen from Birmingham, celebrating their first night without their wives in fifteen years … hardly prime sex-fiend material.’

  ‘You’ve no idea. You talk of Duncan Treflis or Leslie Meacham and their squalid liaisons, but that’s nothing compared to the foulness of so-called respectable men, with their need to dominate and degrade and abuse.’

  ‘A place like The Pigalle is bound to distort your perspective.’

  ‘Which came first: the place or the perspective? I’ve seen what those men are like, and that’s why I have to be there, at the hub of it, in control of it, thrusting not just my tits but my fanny in their faces … and more, oh yes, much more. “Is there anyone who’d care for a private encounter?” But it makes me strong. Once I’ve experienced every humiliation, nothing will ever be able to hurt me again.’

  ‘I know that Guy hurt you –’

  ‘You can’t think that it’s because of Guy?’

  ‘But there are other men.’

  ‘Yes, there’s you.’

  ‘Not just gay men; that’s too easy for both of us.’

  ‘You’re the only man I can trust – the one person I can talk to. That’s why I can’t bear you to be so far away.’

  ‘I’ll be back in London in July … well, August. Geoffrey Lindley has invited me to spend the first two weeks of the holiday on a walking tour of northern Greece.’

  ‘A walking tour?’

  ‘He teaches Latin, so he should know his way around.’

  ‘You said Greece.’

  ‘He’d teach Greek too in a smarter school.’

  ‘It’s perverse.’

  Looking back, I realise that anyone who could take revenge on one lover by inserting a notice of his engagement to his secretary in The Times and an announcement of his death in the Telegraph on the same day, and punish another by scribbling ‘Small Penis’ under Distinguishing Marks in his passport, would have no difficulty in extricating me from both my teaching and holiday commitments. But, at the time, the hypothetical herpes had been my only experience of your schemes. So, when the Headmaster and his wife invited me to dinner after the final performance of Curlew River, it was in all innocence that I asked if I might bring you.