The Pagan House Read online

  ‘The private-eye genre,’ said Jeffrey, ‘what is it about?’

  They were sitting in the living room. Soon the minicab would be arriving to take mother and son to Heathrow. Edgar’s earphones were on his head and he drummed along to the music on the coffee-table even though both adults had asked him not to. Surreptitiously he lowered the volume. Here, in this temporary victory, he did not want to lose any advantage by relaxing his vigilance. He continued to drum as if he were still listening to his music but instead he listened to Jeffrey rehearse tomorrow night’s lecture. Mon, once his student, wanted to please her teacher. She offered suggestions. ‘It’s about truth,’ she said, ‘it’s about justice, the American Way; the private eye is a bruised Galahad in disguise, Christian myth transubstantiated, the good man in a godless world.’

  Jeffrey looked bored throughout. He examined his hands and picked away dirt from beneath his thumbnails. The only time Jeffrey was interested sufficiently to look at his audience was when she said bruised.

  ‘Bruised? More than that,’ said Jeffrey. ‘Damaged. Impotence is what it’s about. Who’s the precursor of the private eye? Of course the cowboy heroes of the western, but mixed in with some Hemingway. Fiesta, the narrator who’s been damaged in the war, who can’t get it up, who will never be able to consummate anything.’

  ‘Jeffrey!’ warned Mon, who could get oddly prudish sometimes in the company of her son.

  ‘Please,’ said Jeffrey with pained expression.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Mon.

  She pushed back her hair, which was red. She was wearing a leather jacket that creaked and which Edgar had suggested would be uncomfortable and hot to wear on the airplane, a black T-shirt and a long black skirt. Edgar was wearing what, after some very long time, and for which he had even consulted Jeffrey, he had settled on as his appropriate American outfit of long shorts, stripy short-sleeved shirt, sneakers and baseball cap worn backwards. He winced at his mother’s determination to please Jeffrey and Jeffrey caught the expression so Edgar turned it into the music-lover’s appreciation and drummed harder.

  ‘Hemingway,’ prompted Mon. ‘The narrator who’s been damaged in the war.’

  Jeffrey glanced at his notes and consented to continue. ‘He can’t get it up. He’ll never be able to consummate anything. That’s where the private eye comes from. The mood of melancholy, yearning, frustration. He can’t please a woman, can’t satisfy any of them, not the blowsy blonde overripe tramps, not the rich men’s daughters who are driven by his disregard into lesbianism. So he’s got to walk in shadows. He’s got to drink to quieten some of the self-pity inside of him. Being beaten on the head by the buttside of a revolver brings him some kind of temporary release. But he’s lost, finding a dark path to get revenge on some of the whole men in his pathetic universe. If he can restore some of the order in the universe, maybe he can repair some of the disorder inside himself. But of course not, it’s a doomed quest. Some men have died, some women have suffered. The law is temporarily satisfied, but not our damaged hero. He’s alone, because he has to be, drinking himself stupid in his melancholy office.’

  … But not Edgar. Edgar was the very antithesis of the generic private eye. He was neither hard-bitten nor hardboiled. He hadn’t seen too much—he’d hardly seen anything at all—and he was bursting, overflowing, with inaccessible juvenile potency.

  Some conventional techniques of the traditional private eye were denied to him: he could not, for example, sit at a bar drinking whiskey. But he did have certain advantages all his own. He could blend into any crowd, particularly one of schoolchildren. No one would suspect him of a dangerous agenda. But he could not drive a car. And he still needed permission to stay out past supper-time.

  2

  Edgar liked airports. He liked airports and flying and pretty much everything connected with flight except birds, which brought out his squeamish side in some primitive way. He liked airplanes and he even liked the word ‘airplane’, with its airplaney shape, the a of the cockpit, the p and l of transverse wings. Mon didn’t mind airports in themselves, just what they represented. They contained shops and Mon liked shops, but these ones were signs of imminent flight and Mon did not like airplanes or flight. She was, as she told the weirdly cosmeticized woman at the check-in desk, a nervous flyer.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mrs …’ at which point the cosmeticized woman sneaked a look at the passports.

  ‘Ms,’ corrected Mon.

  ‘Excuse me. You’re in very capable hands. Would the young man like a window seat?’

  The young man in question was blushing because he could see down the shirt-front of the check-in woman, her cleavage, the rise of her breasts, freckled and tanned, and his immediate response—or, even, quicker than immediate; as if the response might have preceded the stimulus, might, in some magical way, have induced it—was a stiffening of his penis followed by a necessary cupping of hands over his groin to hide the tell-tale bulge. Pressing himself against the desk was no good, because, in these difficult times, he had discovered that any contact, even for purposes of concealment, and with a material as uninflected with erotic value as veneered chipboard, would only exacerbate his aroused state.

  ‘The young man takes what he gets,’ said Mon, severely but playfully, as if she was enjoying the possibility of being a different kind of mother. ‘We’d like to sit next to an exit door.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can find,’ said the check-in woman, whose search could only fail because she had already, Edgar noticed, printed out their boarding passes. Her search ended, predictably, in briskly acted disappointment and Edgar, who did indeed want a window seat, was allocated one.

  Waiting to board, they played their favourite game.

  ‘You know, I’ve been thinking about the hall,’ Edgar said, quietly drumming with pen and pencil on holiday puzzle book.

  Mon shook her head. There was probably a Valium inside her to take the edge off her fear, slow it down to a sluggish thing, but still enormous and impossible to evade.

  ‘You know, the fireplace?’ Edgar asked.

  She tapped her chin lightly with a lipstick case, smiled bravely, and was ready to join in.

  ‘What colour are Dutch tiles? Blue, or blue and white?’

  ‘Blue and white,’ she said. ‘But we don’t have to have them.’

  She had failed to interest him in tiles before, which was why he had brought them up now.

  ‘No it’s fine,’ he grandly said.

  The departure lounge was full. There were families here and couples, and babies that screamed, and a boy with a computer game whom Mon had tried to get Edgar to introduce himself to.

  ‘Inlaid into the floor and around the fireplace itself. They’re very expensive, though, so we might have to leave that kind of thing to last. I’d like to get the library in order first. What’s the matter?’

  She had caught him frowning. Edgar was not sure about the library. He had alternative plans, a snooker room, where he and his father, in matching black waistcoats, should solemnly apply chalk to the tips of their cues and with all the emphatic restraint of beloved comrades congratulate each other on their shots.

  ‘I thought we might have a snooker room.’

  ‘We’ve got a games room already.’

  ‘Yes but it needs to be separate. You can’t have pinball machines and noise and things in a snooker room. It’s not, you know …’

  ‘Appropriate?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Even if she was laughing at him he didn’t care. He had lifted her mind away from their flight and he enjoyed this sort of conversation hardly less than she did, their When-We-Move-To-A-Big-House game.

  ‘I’ve decided to wood-panel my bedroom,’ she said. ‘You can have your bedroom panelled if you like.’

  ‘No thank you.’

  ‘Too proud?’

  It has never been discussed where his father might sleep—start him off discreetly perhaps in one of the guest rooms, let things develop from there. Edgar�
�s father could watch his sports through the night on the Sensurround TV set. He was, no doubt, not above playing computer games. He could make his telephone calls, to Nice and Los Angeles and New York and Las Vegas and Accra and Nairobi and Casablanca. Swim by moonlight in the pool. Edgar had wanted to telephone his father before they left the flat but the understanding was that he waited for his father to call. If Edgar ever did try to telephone his father, it was to numbers that no longer existed, or else a woman answered, who would call Edgar by the wrong name and tell him that his father was on the road.

  ‘The pool.’

  ‘What about the pool?’

  ‘Can it be P-shaped?’

  She smiled with indulgence and permitted it to be so. He wanted to be able to see it from the sky, the initial of his surname, a blue suburban monogram.

  ‘I need a proper garden,’ she said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘A walled garden, with places to sit, stone benches, maybe a fountain, and a vegetable garden and a herb garden, and you’ll need somewhere to play football.’

  This was one of Mon’s fantasies that sometimes he benevolently allowed her, that Edgar was a typical boy who enjoyed the usual pleasures. He pictured the garden, its straggly long grass that would be his responsibility to cut, where he would go and lounge with his friends, if he had any. Edgar wondered when he would take up smoking. Soon, perhaps. That was the sort of activity that takes place in long grass. He sometimes saw Jeffrey smoking, standing on a chair, blowing smoke out of the top frame of Mon’s bedroom window.

  He had to learn how to hide his thoughts better. He must have been wearing a Jeffrey face, because Mon was inspecting him and saying, ‘You’re going to have to let Jeffrey in.’

  ‘In? Where? I thought he had a key.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘You know how much he likes you.’

  She often said this, as if it were both true and argument enough. He did not believe it to be true. Even if Jeffrey was on record as saying this (which Edgar doubted) it would only have been to curry favour with Mon.

  ‘He always says such nice things about you, he really likes you, he does, it’s like a brotherly thing, but while we’re on the subject it might be just as well if.’

  She looked away, squinted nervously at a suavely tanned, gold-braided pilot pulling his hand-luggage through the departure hall on shiny wheels. Edgar was fascinated. There was no coyness or played intrigue in Mon’s manner. She was actually finding it difficult to finish her sentence and Edgar was curious to know where it would resolve.

  ‘Might be just as well if what?’

  ‘If. If you don’t talk about Jeffrey, there. When you’re in America. At your grandma’s. Or with your father.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It just wouldn’t be appropriate.’

  ‘Appropriate?’

  ‘Please Eddie. Just indulge me. Trust me on this. It would be better if, people, over there, didn’t know about Jeffrey. That’s all.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘I really would appreciate it if you’d stop repeating everything I say.’

  ‘Everything I say.’

  ‘Eddie!’

  There were times when Edgar knew not to push his mother, even in fun. He relented. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘And about this Jeffrey thing.’

  ‘You want me to lie for you.’

  ‘It’s not lying. No one’s going to ask you if there’s someone I know called Jeffrey. I’m just asking you not to bring the subject up, that’s all.’

  ‘O-kay,’ Edgar said, more warily than he felt. He was happy to put Jeffrey behind them. He liked the idea of being on a continent where Jeffrey did not exist, where the fact of Jeffrey was strictly to be denied, where the very condition of Jeffreyness, of being Jeffrey, of knowing a Jeffrey, were causes for secrecy and shame. He admired America all the better for it.

  ‘And I promise you a P-shaped pool, and there’ll be lots of trees,’ she said, reaching for him in an old familiar way, cradling him so his head rested on her shoulder. ‘You used to love to climb trees when you were little.’

  ‘Did I?’ Edgar had no memory of tree-climbing and was sceptical.

  ‘An apple orchard. I’ll make you apple sauce every week and I won’t forget the cinnamon.’

  ‘You always forget the cinnamon.’

  ‘I won’t forget the cinnamon. What’s the matter?’

  ‘It’s fine. I’m fine, Mummy,’ he said, reverting at this moment when he felt at his most adult to an honorific long abandoned. The woman from the check-in desk, who was, frankly, hideous, had just gone by and the merry wave she gave him had lifted his penis hard. He closed his eyes, primly averted his head from his mother’s shoulder as he tried to find an unerotic image to hide her behind, and cupped his hands over his groin.

  ‘I know something’s going to go wrong with the arrangements. You can never depend on him,’ Mon said.

  ‘I’m going to listen to some music now,’ Edgar said. He put on his earphones and, with his Walkman protecting his lap, pretended to slumber.

  ‘What,’ Edgar asked his mother, ‘did you think you were going to be?’

  The airplane was taxiing across the runway, delighting Edgar with the prospect of its speed. His mother gripped the armrest and asked him to keep still. Perhaps brutally, he had passed on the first of his two most interesting airplane facts: that for the first thirty-two seconds after take-off the pilot had no control over the plane and if anything should go wrong …—and here, Edgar maybe oversold the idea by crossing his eyes and cutting his index finger across his throat. But now he felt contrite and had decided to spare her the other of his interesting airplane facts and was trying to take his mother’s mind off things in a way that would be satisfactory to them both.

  ‘Or maybe what you wanted to be. When you were young, a child I mean.’

  Mon made an attempt at a smile that showed the newish lines at the corners of her eyes that Edgar thought of as her Jeffrey lines. She had kicked off her shoes. Her toes wriggled in discomfort. Their cracked nail polish was a lighter shade of red than her hair.

  ‘I don’t know, Ed. A fashion model, a doctor, the usual kinds of things. I don’t know.’

  She closed her eyes, the better to remember or invent herself as young, or just to hide, from Edgar’s questioning, from the impending fact of flight.

  ‘You know that if anything’s wrong you can call me at Hen’s.’

  Edgar was flicking through the channels. He felt himself to be too old for the children’s TV and the children’s films. He didn’t care for action movies.

  ‘Nothing to go wrong,’ said Edgar, who believed this.

  ‘I’ll be with her a couple of days. They’re bringing the lunch trays around.’

  Edgar turned his head to look at the stewardesses. Edgar liked the stewardesses. In fact, he liked everything about this flight. He liked the metal clasp of the seat-belt, the flaps that opened and closed on the wing, the heavy thrum of the engines, the blue tartan of the carpet, the overhead lockers, especially the one across the aisle that had been poorly secured and had emptied itself after take-off on to the head of a burly man in a business suit. And he liked the food they brought. He inspected it upon arrival partly in appreciation and partly because he knew that otherwise he would stare too much at the shape the stewardess made when she retrieved the meal trays from the lower shelves of her trolley, her legs together, her spine perfectly straight. And the touch on his arm from the back of her skirt when she bent to ask the burly man whether he would prefer chicken or beef ranked as number four in the most erotic moments of Edgar’s life.

  ‘Imagine,’ he said to his mother, after he had finished his lunch and eaten some of hers and was waiting for the film cycle to begin again, ‘if the plane caught fire, or the engines fell off. How long do you think it would take until we hit the sea?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mon said, look
ing away into the perfect blueness of sky.

  ‘You could guess. It wouldn’t happen straight away would it? Do you think it would be A, two minutes, B, four minutes, C, eight minutes, or D, none of the above?’

  ‘I really don’t know Eddie.’

  ‘Then your answer must be D, none of the above.’

  She didn’t answer. She was looking queasy. It would be good for her to be away from Jeffrey, if only for a few days. The horrific idea that she might already be missing him was too grotesque to consider.

  ‘Which is in fact the right answer by definition because we’re over the ocean, not the sea. It was a trick question,’ he added apologetically. ‘But I think the real answer’s eight minutes, actually. Do you think they would know?’

  His mother was performing her foot and ankle exercises. She extended her toes and revolved each ankle in turn and ignored him. Edgar leaned his chair back more abruptly than he should have, because it cracked against something, the knees he thought, of the divinity student sitting behind him, who yelled out a curse, and Edgar quickly said, ‘Sorry’, and pulled his seat forward and climbed over his mother and into the aisle.

  He would have liked to go into a toilet to further test the void inside him, but the toilets were all full and he didn’t want to queue just to prove, again, his incapacity, and anyway the plane had started to bounce and dip, which he enjoyed, standing by the emergency-exit door, a surfer on the waves of turbulence, until a woman’s voice came over the intercom asking all passengers to return to their seats. He walked backwards along the aisle up to his row, past passengers who had blue blankets pulled up to cover their faces, as if when they slept all air passengers aspired to be female Muslims.

  ‘Old people get into a routine,’ his mother said to him on his return as if he had never been away and they had been having this conversation throughout, and Edgar wondered if maybe they had, if, thoughtfully or deceitfully, he had learned to leave part of himself, his boyish unsexual part, in this seat while the rest, the future part of him, had gone into the world to explore.