The Pagan House Read online

  ‘Well, if you say he’s okay I guess he might be. You wouldn’t help me out here now? There’s weeding to be done at the monument.’

  Edgar, hypnotized by the suspense of Jerome lowering himself to his knees, slowly joined him, hunched down, pulling away at the tight clumps of dandelions that had sprouted from the base of the stone obelisk, which was the one extravagance in an otherwise austere cemetery. All the other graves were marked by identical small headstones, names and dates of birth and death. As Edgar pulled away the weeds the back of his head felt painfully vulnerable to an old man’s attack. He had no weapons to protect himself with, except his mission as a cat investigator.

  ‘Guthrie doesn’t like him. She won’t let him in her house. But Fay seems very fond of him, he’s certainly won her over and maybe, I couldn’t deny it, there’s a spot of jealousy in my outlook. I have lemonade in my flask. Would you like some?’

  ‘No. Thank you.’

  Perhaps the thing to do would be just to relax, give in to the inevitability of it, the anticipation of horror is always worse than the horror itself—or is it? That might be the sort of lie that victims tell, to console their families, to protect themselves, to make it possible to live in the monstrous, damaged aftermath.

  ‘Do you like cats?’ Edgar asked.

  ‘Mary Pagan, who’s buried here, is our mutual ancestor. I used to be the CEO of the Company, I don’t know if you know that. Which to my mind is the same thing as the Association. Until recently, that is. It’s an awful shame it’s moved out of family hands. Fay’s right and Bob’s wrong, that’s what you’ve got to remember.’

  ‘Some people kill cats,’ Edgar said, ‘if they consider them a nuisance.’

  ‘She’s a very fine woman, your grandmother.’

  Jerome sighed. So did Edgar. And here it came, what he was dreading, or its presage. Jerome’s hand clawed towards him. It touched his shoulder, a grisly intimation of what would follow, and then it withdrew, like a greedy animal deferring its feed to derive maximum pleasure, and cruelty.

  ‘I know I’m a nuisance to her but you know, I used to propose marriage to her, twice a year, regular as clockwork, on our birthdays. I don’t do that any more, it’s no longer charming, she doesn’t even enjoy the sentimentality of it, so I’ve stopped myself.’

  ‘Oh,’ Edgar said.

  ‘That’s right. That’s right.’ Jerome shook his head a number of times and his jowls shook and the bones in his neck cracked with the effort. ‘All I can do is offer my advice, that’s all I can do, isn’t it? Offer my advice and hope she takes it, and if she doesn’t I’ll offer it anyway, because how else am I going to get to see her, Eddie? How else?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Jerome looked at Edgar as if he had said something very profound. ‘No. That’s right. I don’t know either. And believe me I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it.’

  Down in the scrubs of bushes between the golf course and the graveyard, three of the Indian Fighters picked through the earth. Jerome waved to them and they didn’t wave back.

  ‘What are they looking for?’ Edgar asked.

  ‘Balls.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Golf balls. They sell them back to the club house. It’s interesting, those boys, the Ashton boys are descendants of workers in the factory, the original residents of Creek. While Newhouse of course is descended from one of the owners of the factory and therefore of course from the Association. He’s a cousin of yours. We’re cousins too, you know.’

  While Edgar knew of the existence of the category of his American cousins, he hadn’t thought it would include Company Bob and Janice, and now Ray Newhouse and Jerome.

  ‘It’s a while till the Blackberry Festival. Things can change. Except, when you get to my age, seasons go by in less time than it takes to change a colostomy bag. I think I’ll go in now. I’m so grateful for your help, and your discretion. You’re a bright kid, and a sympathetic one. Are you sure you don’t want a lemonade?’

  ‘Yes. I’m sure,’ Edgar said.

  Edgar had an empty house to explore and assert himself inside. Calling ‘Tom!’ in a high-pitched maternal voice, he followed a trail of cat hairs through the rooms, where he stamped his ownership in discreet but certain ways—timid graffiti signatures, the carving of his initials with a kitchen knife beneath the window-ledge in his father’s old room, where a flap of paper had pulled away from the damp wall. It was good to be a cat investigator. It gave purpose to things.

  Bending forward from the waist, Edgar’s trail brought him to Warren’s room and Warren’s things, his T-shirts and sweaters and jeans, his papers—which Edgar thought of half interestedly as his private papers—everything neatly piled and folded along the window-ledge. There were no cat hairs in Warren’s room. There was nothing extraneous in Warren’s room. It showed hardly a trace of being lived in.

  There was a photograph on the window-ledge of an old lady, again in a front garden—Warren’s photographic eye seemed to have a fetish for gardens—and again her face was out of focus, so Edgar couldn’t be sure but he suspected that this was a different old lady from the photograph he had seen before. That was it. Edgar leafed through the private papers and found nothing implicating or even interesting among the bank statements and legal documents. He heard the sound of a car slowing outside and Edgar squared all the papers as neatly as he could and fought to conquer the burn of anxiety and fear. The car passed. Edgar tiptoed out.

  In Fay’s room, he sat on the foot of the bed and looked at his reflection, bounced and endlessly multiplied in the triptych mirror on his grandmother’s dressing-table. He lifted a silver hair away from the bristles of a silver brush, which was part of a matching set, with comb and hand mirror. It was the unguents that interested him most. From the lotions and creams he selected a cocktail of Nivea and something lilac-green from a slender unmarked jar to soothe his penis, which was reddening and rawing from his frequent attentions, which he now renewed. And stopped, his penis high and bobbing, his soccer shorts around his shins, when he saw a handwritten page that was headed Emergency Numbers, and third on the list, between Dr Newhouse and Onyataka Druggists, was written ‘Dr X’, followed by a telephone number and address.

  ‘Gold dust,’ said Edgar. He looked for pen and paper. He was too much of a professional to take the original document because that would alert his powerful enemies—whose identities were as yet unknown, a further testimony to their power and threat—to the progress he was making. He copied the number on the back of a piece of paper taken from Fay’s wastepaper bin, and triumphantly renewed his attentions upon his capacity, when the telephone rang.

  He answered it, expecting to hear the sound of his enemy’s voice or, failing that, his father’s. It was neither. The voice was his mother’s, quick and excited. She was still in New York. Edgar cursed her witchlike talents for embarrassing him from afar. He protected his modesty with a corner of Fay’s bedcover.

  ‘I thought you’d be back in London by now,’ Edgar said.

  ‘Oh. Well. Hen, and. It’s very nice here. You’d like it. But let me have a word with your father, and then we’ll speak again after. Eddie?’

  Edgar was silent.

  ‘Eddie?’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Could I speak to your father please?’

  ‘How’s the weather in New York? It’s very nice here. Warren says that it’s unseasonably warm. Usually the summers are mild while the winters can be very severe.’

  ‘Can you put your father on, please?’

  ‘The cat’s missing. I’ve been looking for the cat. He’s called Tom.’

  ‘He is there isn’t he?’

  ‘I haven’t found the cat but—’ Mon is not the girl assistant Edgar the detective would have chosen but he had to tell someone about Dr X. ‘But, there’s this—’

  Typically she barrelled past what he was trying to tell her. ‘Edward. Your father. Please.’

  ‘He stepped out,’ Edgar
announced decisively, as he lifted the cover to inspect his penis wilted on his thigh. ‘He went to visit a cousin of his.’

  ‘A cousin. Which one? It’s not Gus is it?’

  ‘I’m not sure, I think so. Maybe.’

  His mother snorted. Or else it was the crackle of interference on the line. ‘Gus!’ she said.

  ‘It might not be Gus.’

  ‘Well whoever—’

  ‘Whomever.’

  ‘Yes. Thank you Edward. Whatever. When he gets in tell him I rang and need to speak to him. You can do that, can’t you?’

  ‘What’s New York like?’

  He was seized by self-pity: Edgar in Creek and Vail, his father nowhere, his mother in New York; for some reason his imagination demanded, he saw her wearing a painter’s smock and a very silly hat with a feather attached, sitting on a revolving bar stool, opening lipsticky smiles for men who drink martinis and talk in guttural European accents, gold jewellery around thick necks and wrists, dark coarse hair sprouting from tailored suits, shining gold credit cards and gold-capped smiles, while Mon twirled on her bar stool, acting like a swan. And he was here alone, thinly protected by Fay and Warren from the antagonism of high-spirited youths and the neglect of his parents and the world.

  ‘New York’s wonderful. You’d love it here, and next time I promise I’ll bring you, I promise. I’d come and get you now but if your father’s there that’s okay. But look, I’d better go. I’m ringing on Hen’s phone and it’s costing a fortune. I’ll speak to you tomorrow. I love you. Edward?’

  ‘Yes, you too,’ Edgar said, hoping to imply nothing beyond empty formality.

  Returning to the dressing-table mirror, he felt jaded. He pulled up his shorts and secured Dr X’s address between stomach and waistband. He sat on the cushioned stool, wondering if this was the item of furniture called a pouffe, and sighed. Enjoying the sensation he performed it again, and then stopped, pinched his nose silent when he heard footsteps and a woman’s chirruping voice.

  ‘I always love the windows here. Old windows are the best, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Warren.

  ‘And where is the lady of the house today?’

  ‘She’s with Doctor Newhouse. I’ll be picking her up shortly. So if we could just move on with this?’

  ‘She’s a very lively lady, isn’t she?’ said the woman.

  ‘Yes,’ said Warren dully. ‘Very lively.’

  ‘Probably see us all off.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Warren.

  Their footsteps advanced. Edgar slipped off the pouffe, rolled on the carpet, lay with his arms outstretched between the bed and the window as if he was holding a revolver. The door opened and he could see their shoes from under the bed.

  ‘Sorry to put you through all this again,’ Warren said.

  ‘Not at all. Out there is what I call a very volatile market.’

  Edgar couldn’t resist peeking above the bed. Warren was standing impatiently in the doorway. The woman with him was small, crinkly-old, with yellow skin and alarming crimson hair. She wore a blue nautical blazer with a gold anchor embroidered on the breast pocket. She carried a clipboard and wore a sea captain’s hat.

  ‘Yes,’ said Warren.

  The woman moistened a finger and ran it along the inside frame of the doorway. She glanced meaningfully at Warren both when she was performing and after she had finished executing this peculiar, perhaps technical, manoeuvre.

  ‘We’ll get your valuation in the usual way I expect,’ said Warren.

  ‘Oh yes,’ the woman said, lifting a hand to her face to tap her cheek. Warren was performing the same action on his own, paler cheek and Edgar wondered which of them had initiated it and which was, consciously or unconsciously, mimicking the other.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ said Warren.

  Warren departed. The woman approached the window. She saw Edgar outstretched on the carpet. ‘Hello handsome. How are you today?’ she said, brightly and unsurprised.

  ‘I’m looking for a cat,’ Edgar said, and ran downstairs and fled.

  The afternoon was clear and sunny, he had survived an adventure and discovered much and enjoyed the state it had aroused in him, and he had enough money in his shorts to buy pizza at either of the establishments in Creek. He strolled over the bridge and past the silverware factory, which was a rectangular building of dirtied brick, and to Dino’s. At the counter Sky was at the controls of a tape machine, which was bellowing out noise, crooked train-track rhythms, the pure unmistakable voice of Husky Marvin riding effortlessly on top.

  Edgar didn’t have the appetite for a further ordeal. Yes, the Indian Fighters were near the top of his list of cat-napping suspects; yes, he would have to interrogate them—he had had experience of boys their type in London, animal torturers, whose greatest pleasure was strapping a firework to a cat on a rooftop. But first he needed to fortify himself. He would treat himself to the executive pleasure of a restaurant. He retraced his steps along Main Street, past the dance studio and Luscious Nails and Tan Your Can!, and into the Campanile Family Restaurant, where he was led by a bruised-looking matron to a corner table, red-and-white tablecloth, unlit candle in yellow frosted glass, landscapes of Italian holiday destinations on the walls. He gazed at the menu for a long time: there were many pages of it, vellum-style paper, with brown spots dotting the grain, and when the waiter removed the yellow napkin from his water glass, and deposited it on his lap—an over-familiar gesture, Edgar primly thought—Edgar ordered pizza, the largest size, on a thin crust, topped with pepperoni and mushrooms. The waiter asked him when he was expecting the rest of his party and Edgar squirmed in his chair. ‘No. Just bring it please.’

  He had thought the menu boast that the large pizza was sufficient to feed a ‘mob’ was just empty bragging, but the thing that arrived, overspilling from its steel tray, was enormous. He started to eat, trying to find a rhythm to work to, keeping his eyes down on his task, away from any pitying glances. The cheese burned the roof of his mouth, then promptly went cold. The mushrooms were hollow and ancient. This was probably how the night tasted in his grandmother’s mouth. This was probably how death tasted, thin cold mushrooms greased with metallic tomatoey goo. Pushing through subsequent slices—cold chewy slabs of cheese and base, which was cardboard in some places, swampland in others, from where the gloop of it all had soaked through—Edgar imagined himself as his grandmother. He imagined what it must be like to have a body that was failing, what it was like to be in constant pain. He lifted his water glass with a crotchety unsteady hand and sipped from it with pursed lips, and Edgar became angry.

  He was angry at his father for not being there; angry at his mother for enjoying herself in New York; angry at his grandmother for being dependent on Warren; angry at Warren for dominating his grandmother’s world; angry at himself for not having any power; angry at his mother for doing whatever it was that she did with Jeffrey; angry at the Forza girl for adoring Husky Marvin; angry at Husky Marvin for being so apologetically competent; angry at the cat who could only snore and moult and flee, which was maybe the sanest response to life in the Pagan House; angry at the Campanile Family Restaurant for allowing him to order this ludicrous surplus of pizza that reminded him of an old woman’s death. With a curt shake of his head at a watching waiter, to indicate that, no, he was not finished, no representative of the house may remove this pizza yet, he would come back to it, but meanwhile he had business to attend to, Edgar smoothed out the page he had purloined from Fay’s room.

  Dr X lived in Onyataka Depot. Edgar’s imagination jumped into a dozen pictures of sinister doings in laboratories, hospital sanatoriums, dangerous experiments, unwilling victims, out of human tissue are born grisly perversions of humanity. On the other side of the paper, which Edgar turned to, just so he could grant himself the pleasure of turning the page over again, was a bank statement. Greedy for the sight again of Dr X, Edgar deferred it. He chewed on a slab of cold pepperoni.

  ‘Chec
king your portfolio?’

  ‘No. What? I’m just—Oh, hi.’

  It was the girl with the blue Italian shirt who played soccer with more gusto than most.

  ‘I’m Electa.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Electa. Yeah, I know it’s weird. It’s like a family name.’

  There was an ensuing silence that Edgar broke by saying, ‘Oh. Right,’ and then, seizing the moment, ‘And I’m Ed—Edgar.’

  ‘Hey Edgar. Where are your friends?’

  ‘Uh?’ he said, maybe less suavely than he’d intended.

  She nodded at the pizza carnage on the table.

  ‘Oh. That. I just felt, like a, you know, blow-out. Do you want a piece?’

  ‘Uh, no. I get kind of tired of pizza. You can have a soda if you like. On the house.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll have a Kool-Aid.’

  ‘Seven-Up Sprite Coke Diet Coke root beer.’

  Edgar asked for a root beer and Electa went behind the counter. He was impressed by the way she treated the restaurant as a receiving room of her house. He was impressed too, how the soda came, with no ice, and with a straw professionally stripped of the wrapper except for the short paper cylinder surrounding the top. She had brought one for herself and sat across from him with her lips pursed around the straw.

  ‘Don’t you like ice?’

  Electa blew a couple of small bubbles in her glass. ‘Sometimes I like ice. Sometimes I just fill a glass with ice and eat the whole thing.’

  ‘Oh. Do you?’

  It was a fatuous remark but he was required to make some response and couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  ‘But if I want soda, I want soda. Why weren’t you at soccer?’

  ‘Is it finished?’

  ‘Sure it’s finished. Why weren’t you there?’

  She didn’t sound interested and nor did she act it. She slouched in her chair, leaning away from Edgar who was leaning towards her, keeping his soccer shorts well hidden beneath the tabletop.