Pagan and her parents

by Michael Arditti

  ‘Always?’ I feel the poles of my past melting.

  ‘Not you, Leo, and I say that to be truthful not kind. You were the only one I felt not just close to but part of. With you, it might have been different … no, what’s the good of a might-have-been with a man who never was? But, if I remember – and I do … and I have – we were neither of us all that comfortable with the sex.’

  ‘I never knew where I was with you. On the one hand, you were always urging me to sleep with you, and, on the other, you kept so aloof. You never let me touch you, at least not your penis. You wouldn’t even touch it yourself. You just rubbed yourself up and down on the sheet like a fish flapping its fins on the shore.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he … she laughs. ‘I’m sorry if I confused you: I confused myself. While I found the idea of intimacy appealing, the mechanics filled me with disgust. Sex became a compromise … as though I were wearing my skin back to front.’

  ‘I struggled so hard to understand. I thought that there must be something wrong with me. I used to discuss it with Candida. She began by saying that you were hung up about your body and blamed it on Treflis. Later, she took a broader view and attributed it to religion, claiming that Catholic guilt was about sex just as Protestant guilt was about money.’

  ‘Candida managed to find explanations for everything. And some of them were true. And some of them simply sounded as if they were. At first, I believed that she would prove to be the answer to all my problems. If I live to be a hundred, nothing will ever give me as much status as being the boyfriend of the only girl in the school. I use the word “boyfriend” loosely; I always did. But she didn’t object. On the contrary, she was more than happy to provide the screen behind which I could pursue my genuine – what I supposed were my genuine – interests. That was when I came to realise that the idea of me was far more attractive to her than the fact.’

  ‘She wanted to marry you more than anything in the world.’

  ‘Yes. She told me not long after we met that it was her destiny. I laughed … out of embarrassment, not mockery. No one our age used words like that. A couple of the religious boys talked about vocations, and there was someone in my house who wanted to be a vet. But we were at school; we’d barely started life. What terrified her most was the prospect of losing me. I’m convinced that she only applied to Cambridge because she knew it was a family – my family – tradition. She even went on the course in Venice to be with me. Somehow she managed to persuade her father to pay; which was amazing because it was way beyond his means (your old friend Duncan Treflis subsidised me). She implied that she had some sort of hold over him … I think she may have discovered him with a mistress.’

  ‘Really?’ I picture an old man locked in a lonely cell, with nothing to mark the days but misery and masturbation.

  ‘It was then that she started making herself indispensable to me in other ways. It was as if, since we couldn’t make love ourselves, the next best thing was to find me the men who would.’

  ‘I remember her introducing us in San Marco.’

  ‘Oh, I’d seen you before that. I was the one who noticed you looking round the church. I can still hear myself saying “I want some of that” and her saying “nothing easier”, and so it proved.’

  ‘You mean that her picking me up was all a sham?’

  ‘What difference does it make now? It was more than twenty years ago.’

  ‘It makes a difference to me! My mother was right; I wish I’d never gone to Venice.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned it.’

  ‘No, I’m glad. How you must both have laughed at me: hooked like an old boot from a lake.’

  ‘Don’t rewrite the past, Leo. Memory’s confusing enough without the complication of hindsight. We both loved you … far more than we did each other. Candida was determined that you and I should stay together, so much so that she contrived to do the very thing that pushed us apart.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She told my mother that we were spending the night in the Temple of Love.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’d told her of the plans afoot for me and Jenny, and she was scared. She had no objections to sharing me with a man – quite the reverse – but she knew that it wouldn’t be the same with a woman. She felt that she could head off the challenge by showing my mother how, given my true nature, I would be better off with someone who understood it, who’d give me children but make no other demands, who’d be the perfect daughter-in-law if only a token wife. I think she genuinely believed that my mother would fall on her neck and thank her. She had a very strange view of family life.’

  I try to assimilate his revelation. Is this the betrayal that you so often intimated? Is this what Lady Standish meant when she said that you were no friend of mine? The naked nineteen-year-old abandoned in the wood condemns you, but his thirty-nine-year-old counterpart is more circumspect.

  ‘The irony is that, a year or so later, my mother would have welcomed you with open arms. I became the despair of my family. Duncan offered me the job at the bank, which I refused as easily as I did the wife who went with it (I couldn’t believe how old Jenny looked yesterday). My Uncle Lennox said that, if I were determined to do something artistic, he’d buy me into a Duke Street gallery. They even tried the traditional last resort of a black-sheep farm in Australia. Can you imagine? What they wouldn’t understand was that they had no hold on me. I was a free agent.’

  ‘I also worried. Whenever we met, I felt that you’d lost direction.’

  ‘On the contrary, I’d found my true destination. And, although she never realised it, it was Candida who set me off on the road. I used to visit her when she was working in Soho. I began to hang out with some of the other women, in particular the transsexuals. I owe them more than I can say. They took charge of me. They encouraged me to put on a dress, and – don’t laugh – but it changed my life. Before that, I’d had to make it a game … dressing up at Crierley or play-acting at school, but this was like stepping into a second skin. It was as if all my other clothes had been pinching and cramping and chafing, and, at last, I’d discovered the perfect fit.’

  ‘Is that when you had the operation … you have had the operation?’

  ‘Oh yes. What you see is the genuine article … or at least a serviceable copy.’ Her face suddenly looks strained. ‘Though, for years, my identity was the product of the make-up bag and the wardrobe; I didn’t have the op till much later. Not that I didn’t have the chance. Whatever the horror stories of waiting for it on the NHS, for two thousand quid, anyone could go to a private clinic. You didn’t have to have so much as a half an hour’s counselling. You paid your money and you were admitted the next day. It fills me with rage when I remember all the kids who did it without thinking … because it was a new experience or “it seemed like a good idea at the time” or they were making good money as male whores so they’d be bound to make more as the real thing.’ Her eyes water. ‘It was appallingly easy. It doesn’t take long to make two thousand quid in Soho if you’re young and compliant.’

  ‘Surely all that’s changed with AIDS?’

  ‘The only thing that’s changed is the risk … I saw the aftereffects of those operations. The haemorrhages. The colostomies. The infections. The vaginas that slipped out as easily as handkerchiefs that they’d stuffed up their knickers. And worse, I saw what it did to their heads. Not just the drugs that they took for the pain … the drugs that became their only pleasure, but the sense of mutilation … for which they had no one to blame but themselves. Their motives led me to suspect my own; their experiences made me afraid.’

  ‘Did you know no ordinary …’ I cannot finish the sentence; the phrase sounds like a contradiction in terms.

  ‘Ordinary transsexuals? No. I’m sure there are some. I expect they’re all playing bridge and sipping tea with Jan Morris. The problem – at least for so many of us – is that we go through so much to assert our real selves … to enter the space in which w
e are ordinary, only to find that we’re forced to live as freaks.’

  ‘You could be anything. When I saw you in the church, I thought: a banker? a writer? a diplomat’s wife?’

  ‘I’m flattered, but you’re way off the mark … why are you looking at my feet? Is there something on my shoes?’

  ‘Oh it’s nothing,’ I blush. ‘I was remembering a remark of Candida’s.’ I fix my gaze across the table. ‘You were saying?’

  ‘Just that I decided to take a course of female hormones. None of the threatened side effects occurred, which I was sure must be an omen. I felt so happy. My whole being – not only my body – seemed to be glowing. Are you happy, Leo?’

  ‘How can I answer … most of my adult life has been spent evolving strategies to avoid the question; until last year when they all broke down.’

  ‘And since then?’

  ‘I’m working on it. I’ve come to see that the key to happiness is not to accept anyone’s definition but your own.’

  ‘That sounds like a fair start … As for me, I was just, as you might say, becoming who I am, when I met Candida for the first time in years. The joke is that it was she who recognised me. She presumed I was dressed in drag. I didn’t intend to disabuse her; I was determined that mine shouldn’t be a before-and-after story, but a begin-again-halfway-through. Then she invited me here for a meal (we sat in this room … if I remember rightly, you were abroad filming). We drank a couple of bottles of wine, smoked some dope, and I told her that I’d begun to take the pills. I think she was quite moved … and not a little frightened. I let her feel the bumps on my chest, which were barely perceptible, except to me. And, before we knew it, we were in bed.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She went into this big routine about it being my last chance to sleep with a woman … little did either of us know. And it may have been because I was high, but, although the thought seemed absurd, it was funny ha-ha rather than funny yuck-yuck. I found the whole process extremely pleasant and surprisingly passionate … I suppose because I felt free to make love to her as a person and not as a man. The next morning we went our separate ways. I gave her my new number, more for old time’s sake than anything else; then, six weeks later, she rang it and told me that she was pregnant.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘At first I thought that it was another of her stupid jokes.’

  ‘How long ago would this have been?’

  ‘About eight and a half years.’ Connections explode in my brain. ‘I told her she’d have to do better than that. How could it be me? She’d felt my breasts.’

  ‘You’re Pagan’s father?’

  ‘I can’t be anyone’s father, I said, and, least of all, a child of yours. The list of candidates must be extensive. But she insisted – preposterously – that I was the only man she’d slept with in over a year.’

  ‘No, that was true. She had an abortion, followed by a miscarriage, which turned her totally off sex.’

  ‘She was prepared to take any test, but the only one I wanted was my doctor’s. Then, when I explained to him that I’d come – more than once – although I couldn’t believe it’d had any potency, he told me that fertile sperm could be stored in the testicles for up to a month.’

  ‘You’re Pagan’s father?’

  ‘As soon as I saw Candida, I knew that she’d told me the truth. “I know what it is to be no one,” she said; “the last thing I would ever lie about is my child’s father.” I told her that she’d have to get rid of it; I can still see the way that she moved to shield herself, as though I were trying to tear the child from her womb. What choice did I have? How could I be a father? I wanted to be a father even less than a man. But she made it clear that she’d make no demands on me; she never even wanted to see me again. I’d played my part; you were to do the rest.’

  ‘You mean that she’d planned it?’

  ‘That’s what she said. She described it as having the best of both worlds.’

  ‘You’re Pagan’s father!’ The shock suddenly shifts to apprehension. ‘If you’ve come to take her away, I warn you, I’ll fight. I’ll spend the rest of my life in the courts.’

  ‘Leo please, relax! I haven’t the least intention … or the least interest. When I had the operation, they cut away more than my genitals. As my body became softer, my heart became hard. I couldn’t see anyone from the past, for fear of being hurt; I wouldn’t allow my new self to be undermined by images of the old. Do you think it’s been easy knowing that I could never contact my mother or my sister? I didn’t even dare to speak to Lydia yesterday. So I’ve done away with the desire. I’m strong and self-contained.’ She speaks gruffly, as though to herself. ‘I run a guesthouse.’ I think of Gleneagles. ‘Like your mother. Although we cater to a rather different clientele. In Copenhagen.’

  ‘What on earth are you doing there?’

  ‘Running a guesthouse.’ She smiles.

  ‘No, but …’

  ‘No, I know. It’s a long story … several chapters of accidents and a happy ending. My partner, Brita’s, Danish.’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me something?’

  ‘Yes. Ironic, isn’t it, that I should go through all that to find myself with a woman? No.’ Her expression hardens. ‘That’s not true. I didn’t do it to make my sexuality respectable but to make it natural. And my nature changed along with my body. This is what’s natural to me now; this is who I am.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Your turn now: do you have anyone?’ Her interest is purely formal.

  ‘I have memories.’ She smiles. ‘Otherwise, no. I thought that I’d found someone this summer. Benedict Menzies: a man as beautiful as his name. We were right for each other in so many ways, but not quite enough. In spite of all my assurances, he felt that he’d always come a poor second to Pagan. But, at least, he proved that the potential still exists.’

  ‘Did you doubt it?’

  ‘Every day of my life.’

  We sit in silence. I burst out laughing. ‘Please don’t be offended; I’m not laughing at you. I’ve remembered something truly ironic. Candida’s parents tried to have Pagan taken away from me … that’s a whole other story. The Judge declared that all our problems would be solved if only he knew the identity of her father. The God-given, my-father’s-bigger-than-your-father, wait-until-your-father-gets-home order would be re-established. They’ve spent so much time trying to prove that fatherhood is located between the legs, when her actual father, her natural father, is a woman … and not just a woman but a lesbian.’

  ‘You’re right. They find it hard enough to stomach a lesbian mother; but a father … they’d probably shoot me on sight for crimes against my sex. Which is another reason why no one must ever be told.’

  She gives me a gentle wink but a genuine warning. And, for a moment, the craziest logic fills my head. I loved him then; I could love her now. Man and woman could be father and mother. We would be the perfect family for Pagan. But I dismiss this parody of parenthood; I am determined to be a father on my own terms.

  The meal … the ordeal is over. The clock strikes three, and I tell Robin (the ‘y’ will take practice) that, in a quarter of an hour, I must set out to fetch Pagan. I ask if she would like to come with me or wait for us here.

  ‘I don’t think I could bear either. Not the emotions,’ she adds quickly, ‘but the complications.’ She then picks up one of the photographs that she has studiously ignored since her arrival.

  ‘Is this recent?’

  ‘This summer.’

  ‘You see; I feel nothing.’ Her knuckles are white. ‘She looks a lot like Candida.’

  ‘I think she looks like you. Would you like to keep it?’

  ‘No. It’s kind of you, but no. My flat’s full … my life’s full. I’d have nowhere to put it. Now I should go.’

  ‘Will I see you again?’

  ‘I fly first thing tomorrow morning. This evening, I have to attend to some legal matters apropos of Crierley.’

>   ‘You’ve been in touch with your solicitor?’

  ‘He’s always had my address. How else do you think I knew of my mother’s death? It turns out that, for the past six months, he’s been trying to persuade her to rent the house to an American yoghurt company that wants to use it for its English base. I’ve instructed him to offer it to them for sale.’

  ‘You used to say that Crierley was in your blood.’

  ‘Too much has been spilt since then. I’ll never go back, nor will Lydia. Do you want it for Pagan?’

  ‘She didn’t have much joy on her last visit.’

  ‘Then we’ll get rid of it. New blood … or, at any rate, yoghurt.’ She laughs and moves into the hall. ‘Goodbye, Leo. This may sound presumptuous, but I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have caring for my child.’

  ‘I can’t think of anyone’s child I’d rather care for. It’s mad; I’ve spent so long speculating on the identity of Pagan’s father. I’ve virtually combed the London phone book. Yours is the one name I’ve never considered.’

  ‘I suppose I’m what you might call ex-directory.’

  ‘I finally see why Candida never told me. Knowing my feelings for you, she must have thought that, one day, I’d be bound to tell Pagan. She remembered the trauma of finding her own father and was desperate to prevent there being more of the same. Nevertheless, I wish that she could have trusted me.’

  ‘But she did. You were the one man she ever did trust, with herself and her daughter. I was a father for a few stoned minutes; you’ve been a father for life.’ She moves to the door. ‘You’re going to be late.’

  ‘You will keep in touch?’

  ‘Believe me, Leo, it would be a mistake. We have nothing in common but memories. And, if we talked for much longer, I’m afraid we’d find that we didn’t even have those.’

  She opens the door. I clasp her shoulders and try to hold him in my arms again. But the hug is hollow; the intimacy is tenuous; I feel nothing but her shape.