The Pagan House Read online

  DAVID FLUSFEDER

  The Pagan House

  It was really quite disturbing. Was his personality changing? Was he losing his edge, his point, his identity? Was he losing the vices that were so much part of his ruthless, cruel, fundamentally tough character? Who was he in the process of becoming?

  Ian Fleming, Thunderball

  I met ‘Edgar’ at a creative-writing workshop I run each summer at a working-men’s college in London. It’s a week-long course, which attracts the usual, predominantly female, mix of hobbyists, memoirists and needy, bored neurotics. The few men who attend usually have a high-concept idea for a thriller that they are convinced can be developed into a multi-million-dollar money-spinner, but which they won’t talk about at first because they are anxious that their idea might be stolen—and then, of course, when their reserve has melted away, they’ll talk about it in stultifyingly intricate detail. There’s probably one student each year who shows some genuine talent. Last year, it was a Bengali community worker from the East End, who was very beautiful and poised. In a private tutorial she wanted to discuss whether the Kama Sutra strand in her novel should be eliminated, kept in or expanded, a discussion that maybe blinded me a little to the overall strengths and weaknesses of her project. She was the youngest member of the class. It’s invariably the youngest and the oldest students who are the most interesting, and this year the youngest was ‘Edgar’.

  Edgar was an unlikely-looking writer of historical fiction. He was very pale with a strong jaw, short, reddish hair and startling blue eyes. He wore modish skin piercings and studs, heavy boots and an antique black suit with a long frock-coat. He was initially resistant to me, even quietly aggressive. He always spoke quietly, which made the people around him listen harder. Something I said in a workshop, I can’t remember exactly what it was, it might have been about the difficulty or impossibility of writing about the past—we are not they, their world is different from ours so how can we presume to know what was in their minds and hearts?—won him over to my side and, on the third day, he found me in the pub around the corner from the college where it was my habit to look through the students’ work that would be discussed in the following day’s seminar.

  He sat with me and didn’t interrupt my reading and when I was done we drank beer and exchanged a few pleasantly rude remarks about some of the other members of the class. And then, predictably, he asked me what I thought of his stuff.

  – You don’t like it do you? he said.

  – That’s not true, I said. It’s a bit mannered and there are a few things I don’t quite get, but actually I do quite like it. All the same, I’d have expected Marjorie or Gwyneth to be writing historical fiction, not you.

  – But it’s not.

  – Not what?

  – It isn’t historical fiction, he said, very earnestly and unironically. It’s the story of how I came to be me. And then he gave a little self-mocking laugh and went to the bar to buy us each another Guinness. He came quickly back to the table to ask if I could spare some money as he didn’t have enough. I gave the few pounds to him willingly because the manner he had when asking for money made it seem like a kind of favour he was bestowing on the giver.

  We drank more beer and he asked me some slightly flattering questions, which I answered more honestly than I usually do, and in return, but not because I was being polite, I asked him about himself. He talked for a long time, the pub went through several generations of drinkers around us, until he said he should be getting home, his friend would be worried about him. I was surprised by his use of the word friend—it was spoken in the way people use when they’re being discreet about the sex of their boy-or girlfriend, and he had been entirely, sometimes unsettlingly, candid with me up till then.

  He asked me if I would read more of his stuff, as he called it; he had some with him. This is something I’m often asked when I’m teaching and which I always turn down, claiming lack of time, the need to be fair to other students, but which in Edgar’s case I was interested to accept. My heart sank only a little when I felt the weight of the brown padded envelope he pulled out of his bicycle bag.

  Most of what we had talked about related to a particular period of his early adolescence, which he had spent in a place he had revisited the previous year, and I wondered if what he had just given me was more overtly about himself than I had read in his work before, and that made him laugh in his careful way that seemed to identify humour with truth, and say,

  – No, that’ll be your job.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  One: Edgar In Creek And Vail, 1995

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Two: The Inheritors

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Three: Edgar In Creek And Vail, 2005

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Author’s Note

  Also by David Flusfeder

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ONE

  Edgar in Creek and Vail, 1995

  1

  Edgar, taking precautions, left his bedroom. He walked light-footed to the kitchenette, squeezed past the suitcases in the hall, shut his eyes, pushed open the door, strengthened himself with a whisper of his new name to himself, and stepped in. Instead of the hoped-for bachelorish solitude, the leisurely pleasures of a weekend breakfast, his fastidious senses were greeted, confronted—affronted—by the sight, sound and faintly sour smell of Jeffrey.

  ‘Geezer,’ said Jeffrey.

  ‘Jeffrey,’ said Edgar.

  Jeffrey often used the word ‘geezer’. He used it in a matey way. It was one of his newer affectations, picked up from an approved-of hipster student, Edgar suspected.

  ‘I’m going to make some toast,’ Edgar said, speaking slowly, concentrating on keeping the pitch of his voice level and squeak-free.

  ‘Go for it,’ Jeffrey said.

  It had been meant as an invitation. Edgar liked to be courteous, especially to people he disliked. He made some toast for himself and some for his mother, who had yet to emerge from her bedroom. If Jeffrey were not here, Edgar would take Mon’s toast in to her. But Jeffrey was here, and that made his mother’s bedroom foreign territory. Edgar compromise
d by preparing the toast as Mon liked it, unbuttered, with freshly cut peach slices laid neatly across, and left it on a plate by the kettle. He ate his own toast, which he had thickly spread with butter and marmalade both, and contemplated the shape of his day, which, unlike most, was filled with possibility.

  He tried not to look at Jeffrey. Sometimes it was impossible: his attention would be drawn to the loathsome fascination that was his mother’s boyfriend. Jeffrey was wearing a baseball cap. He wore it ironically.

  Jeffrey was in baggy blue jeans and black polo-neck jumper, heavy black-rimmed glasses that he often pushed to the top of his insubstantial nose; his head was shaved, but when he removed his cap the pattern of his baldness was still evident, like a join-the-dots puzzle of something horrible. His feet were bare and hairy and there was a dull metallic ring around the little toe of his left foot. Edgar had a particular distaste for the hair on Jeffrey’s body. One day, thought Edgar, mouthing the shape of the word ‘Edgar’ to the shiny creased top of Jeffrey’s bare head, this man and my mother will have an argument and I will never have to see him again. Edgar examined his heart for the possibility of any future good feeling or sentimental regret towards Jeffrey and failed to find any. He wondered what the terminal argument might be, perhaps a lapse of taste on Mon’s part that Jeffrey would find unforgivable; perhaps—and this was the least likely—she would, with the help of Edgar’s insights, finally see Jeffrey as he really was. Edgar concentrated on making the picture of Mon’s face in the aftermath of discovery, but the face kept melting away because the sounds that were coming from the CD player were particularly annoying, even for one of Jeffrey’s choices.

  Jeffrey smiled his ironic smile at Edgar, who nodded, curtly, and Jeffrey stretched and his jumper rode up, so Edgar was shown the line of hair that poked up out of the waistband of his trousers.

  Today Edgar was going to America, and that event was a big one, and not just because Jeffrey wouldn’t be there, and Edgar wished there was more to do to prepare for it—vaccinations, or some kind of training programme, or at least a stab at the learning of a foreign language. He had argued that a new suitcase was needed, but Mon had demonstrated to him that it wasn’t. And anyway, he now realized that Jeffrey would probably have muscled in on the expedition, because Jeffrey had very strong opinions about most things, including, no doubt, luggage.

  Jeffrey had perfect taste. He knew the right music to listen to, the right book to be carrying, the right bobble hat to wear, the right toilet paper to put in the bathroom (Edgar had once heard Jeffrey in instruction of Mon: ‘But never put the roll of paper on a holder’). Jeffrey was always adamant, and ruthlessly correct, about his opinions and tastes, especially so as he changed them often. He loved them so much he wanted to keep them new.

  Edgar went to the fridge and daringly drank some orange juice out of the carton and inadvertently caught Jeffrey’s eye.

  ‘Geeeezaah!’ said Jeffrey.

  Edgar nodded. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, and went to the bathroom, which had a door with a lock on it, and which he had come to think of as a kind of adjunct to his own bedroom, a sort of windowless conservatory. In the bathroom he may relax.

  Edgar didn’t like to be taken advantage of. Nor did he like to be surprised by things. Recently he had been alarmed by the reddening of the skin beneath his arms. He lifted an arm to inspect beneath and fancied he spied the pinprick crowns of the first crop of underarm hair. He would hate to be polluted like Jeffrey, the naked swirls of hair that surrounded pink nipples, the womanish rise of his breast. Edgar squeezed his chin to his shoulder the better to investigate the site and caught his reflection in the mirror. He twisted his face to make it look even more deformed and stuck out his tongue and gurgled.

  ‘Eddie? What are you doing in there? I need to use the loo.’

  ‘Nearly finished,’ he said to his mother, after a dignified silence.

  He lowered his shoulders, flashed an urbane smile into the mirror and sprinkled some water on to his hair, which he finger-combed into spiky tufts. His face often disappointed him: it was too revealing, too boyish. Its onset of freckles had appalled him. He wanted the kind of face that hides mysteries.

  ‘Eddie!’

  ‘Coming, Mother.’

  Now Monica was annoyed and so was Edgar. Jeffrey had the knack of making everyone annoyed around him. Edgar had often argued that when the loathsome urge to spend time with Jeffrey overcame her she should do whatever she had to do at Jeffrey’s flat rather than theirs. For one thing, Jeffrey’s flat was larger. Edgar’s mother had said that would mean leaving Edgar by himself, as if this was something bad, a curse rather than a blessing. What did Mon see in Jeffrey? Or was the answer to that to be found in one of those areas which it would be wise not to look into too deeply? Or did Jeffrey have some secret hold over her, a hypnotist’s snaky lure, mind control?—and Edgar, just through an excess of distaste for some of the acts that adults were compelled to perform with one another, had been doing nothing at all to protect his poor mother.

  Edgar sat on the closed toilet seat. He instructed his face to be friendly. If there were dark secrets to uncover it was Edgar’s task, no, stronger than that: it was Edgar’s duty to do the digging. He was, as he was sometimes reminded, the man of the house. His father would tell him so, a routine pleasantry on one of their occasional telephone conversations. His mother would tell him so too, but never without some degree of wonder and humour. Edgar narrowed his eyes to shrink his field of vision to a movie frame. Then he quickly returned his face to a smile again.

  What information did he require? The secrets of dark Jeffrey’s heart. The dark secrets of dark Jeffrey’s heart. The dark secrets of dark Jeffrey’s dark heart—the wailing madwoman beating on the locked attic door; the money swindled from the academy that had been intended for the needy purses of African students hungry for Jeffrey’s lectures on the secret signs of westerns, the critical theory of motorway service stations; the art treasures he had smuggled out of Russia; the heartbreaking sex-slave victims he had traded out of eastern Europe on one of his supposed ‘conferences’; or maybe it was the corrupt circle of friends he should find, Jeffrey’s intimates, the pin-striped politician, the loathsome friar, the toothless woman who flounces her skirts, whom Edgar had shipped over from an adjacent part of his imagination and whose image now caused the beginnings of a process that he couldn’t allow to continue towards its inevitably disappointing consummation because his mother was shouting his discarded name and beating on the bathroom door. Edgar buckled his shorts over his rebellious groin. He had been subject to much rising and lowering recently, an embarrassed boy popping up half bridges. It wouldn’t be so bad, but there was nothing that this led to. He was aware, at least in a textbook sort of way, of the stages of the process, and he knew that the climax should coincide with a release of fluid. But he released no fluid. And experienced no climax. Just a blind gasping at the head of his (roughened, rawed) penis of what he had not been able to decide should be designated an eye or a mouth.

  ‘ED-DIE!’

  ‘Just finishing up.’

  Perhaps there was a void within him, an emptiness that corresponded to where others contained sluicing reservoirs of stuff, of fluid, life-force. While he, the pipe within him tapped down merely to some absence, not even an empty chamber, this was a void that was empty even of itself.

  ‘And about time too,’ his mother said, when he opened the door.

  Carrying his fixed smile, he returned to the kitchen, where he aimed it at the wall, at Jeffrey, at the two narrow windows, at the deflated football that was a legacy of a failed Jeffrey attempt to bond, at a standard lamp, and quickly to his toast. He did not want to alert Jeffrey to his vigilance. The trick, he was sure, was to convince his enemies to underestimate him.

  ‘What’s up, geezer?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he quickly said but then realized he had spoken defensive-aggressively, his customary tone, Shut-Out-Jeffrey, and anyway he could afford to be expan
sive today, because today he was flying to America, and his mother would be with him and his father was waiting for him and Jeffrey would be left three thousand miles away.

  Edgar looked at the itinerary, which his mother had remembered to print out on her office computer. Friday: fly to New York. Change planes. Syracuse airport. Saturday & Sunday: time with grandmother Fay. Monday: Mon to New York; Edgar and father on the road. Tuesday—

  ‘Oh,’ said his mother. ‘Toast.’

  ‘I made it, actually,’ said Edgar, who wrote himself a mental note not to speak always so precipitously, better to allow loathsome Jeffrey to take the credit for his mother’s breakfast and then watch it rebound or be snatched away afterwards. Silence and cunning would be his watchwords.

  ‘Thank you, darling,’ said Mon, who was sitting at the counter in her ironic pink 1950s housecoat that she never bothered to wear unless Jeffrey was staying over. She chewed complacently on a triangle of toast and reached over to the refrigerator to pour herself a glass of orange juice and unwary Edgar failed to avoid the complicit wink that Jeffrey sent his way. Mon ate her toast and flicked through a magazine, one that Jeffrey had brought into the flat and which Edgar, when he was sure he was alone, did not find it beneath him to inspect.

  ‘Here’s a piece about that Japanese photographer you like so much.’

  Jeffrey sniffed. He did not like that Japanese photographer any more. Mention of that Japanese photographer would elicit only scorn from Jeffrey. This had happened before, it would happen again; Jeffrey was slippery and quick to change in all his enthusiasms. When Mon naively said, ‘Oh there’s a piece here about that Japanese photographer/ Australian performance masochist/Canadian poet/ American lesbian you like so much,’ Jeffrey would already have, contemptuously and self-congratulatingly, moved on.

  Edgar smiled to outface the world. Defiantly he mouthed the shape of his new name. Edgar was twelve, soon to be thirteen, and his name was not in fact Edgar, but Edward. Edgar was a preferment he had recently awarded himself, so far secretly. Edward and all its variants and diminutives (Ed, Eddie, Steady Eddie, The Edster) had long been unsatisfactory or loathed by him. Edgar he took as a graceful-sounding name, gently archaic, hinting at past glories, shadowy marble buildings behind vines. The creator of Tarzan was called Edgar; so was the writer of The Tell-Tale Heart.