The Pagan House Read online

‘We were. There was a swimming-pool, and a restaurant, and a games room for the kids.’

  ‘You’re already sounding American. Kids. Where are you now?’

  He invented a friend of his father who was a reclusive inventor of some kind and was putting them up in a large, curious house where the electricity was always blowing and the communications were usually down. ‘I think that’s why the cellphone isn’t working. Interference from all the power supplies.’

  ‘It sounds very strange to me. Where is it?’

  ‘Uh, I’m not sure. It’s near a highway.’

  ‘What state are you in?’

  ‘I’m quite relaxed, actually. It’s all been very easy-going.’

  ‘Very funny, ha ha. Where are you?’

  ‘Um. Pennsylvania somewhere. There’s these Amish nearby, got beards and horse-buggies and stuff. It’s really interesting. Historical.’

  Edgar added this detail from a TV documentary he had caught the end of with Fay while she was waiting for a John Mills movie to come on for the afternoon matinée.

  ‘I bet you haven’t sent your grandmother a thank-you card?’

  ‘What? Sorry. This line’s not very good.’

  ‘The line’s perfectly good. Have you sent Fay a card?’

  Edgar found it curious that he was able to lie so fluently about some things yet not about others. Considering this anomaly, he decided that while he was perfectly adept at lying to protect others, he hadn’t developed the skill when it was himself at threat.

  ‘Eddie?’

  ‘I’ll do it first thing.’

  ‘I’d better call her.’

  ‘I’ll send it first thing, I promise. I’ve got some postcards with stamps on already. I’ll do it, believe me.’

  ‘There’s such a thing as elementary courtesy, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ he said feelingly.

  ‘So who is this inventor?’

  ‘He’s called Dave. He’s got a swimming-pool in the shape of his monogram, and servants.’

  ‘How does your father know this Dave?’

  ‘It’s a business thing, I think. But they’re friends too. They play chess together.’

  ‘I thought he was a recluse?’

  ‘He likes to play chess. I’ve even played against him. I beat him once.’

  And Edgar wasn’t bragging here, he was seeing it all, the evenings spent in a green velvet library, the atlases and rare books open on lecterns, sporting prints on the walls, and Dave, the millionaire, sitting at the chessboard, his chin in his hands, an expression in his eyes of the infinite weariness that infinite knowledge brings, pushing back his grey hair and nodding. Well played, Edgar.

  ‘Maybe he let me win,’ he admitted.

  ‘I don’t think it’s healthy, how you’re spending your holiday with your father.’

  ‘We eat muesli every morning, with fruit.’

  ‘You should be with people your own age. It’s not right to be cooped up with a recluse called Dave. You’re thirteen not fifty. There used to be a poet in the family. Maybe that’s where you get these funny things from.’

  ‘How do you know about a poet?’ Edgar said, aggrieved that she was presuming knowledge about the history of the house.

  ‘Someone must have told me.’

  ‘Jeffrey, I suppose.’

  ‘It could have been. He’s very interested in transgression.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s all a bit technical and grown-up for you. I’ll tell you when you’re older. But I’ll tell you something about Jeffrey.’

  ‘Please don’t.’

  ‘He’s the only man who ever admired my feet. He says I have pretty feet. It’s true. I do have pretty feet, but no one else has ever said anything nice about them.’

  Edgar, gruesomely fascinated, wondered if Mon just spoke out of her own pathology here, or was in fact representative of her sex.

  He hoped that music could lift him from this mood, but it failed him. The magic was gone, nothing in the guitar, the singer’s voice; the ability to soothe, to cure, had been spent, squandered, when he hadn’t really needed it. The record spun, one of Uncle Frank’s records that he had mistakenly supposed to be his father’s. Edgar occupied himself for the rest of the evening by scratching geometric shapes across the groove.

  13

  Jerome was not a disciplined researcher: every day he uncovered more information that led him into further investigations. He went each morning to Syracuse, returning around dusk. They’d see him at the start and end of his day, his anxious battered car, reckless and slow on the descent and ascent of the rise into Vail.

  ‘What sort of car is that?’ Warren asked him one evening.

  ‘It’s Japanese,’ Jerome confidently said.

  He’d visit Fay briefly at the end of his day, eager to keep the household up to date with his discoveries, impatient to get to bed for an early start the following morning.

  ‘It would take a lifetime to go through it all properly,’ Jerome said. ‘It’s captivating, absolutely fascinating. Every day I turn up new stuff that I didn’t know before. You know that crazy guy, Guiteau? The one who assassinated McKinley? “I am a Stalwart of the Stalwarts! Now Arthur will be president!” That’s what he said when he fired the shots. Well I knew he’d spent a little time in the Association but it turns out he was here for five years, off and on. It’s fascinating, isn’t it?’

  ‘Fascinating,’ Warren said.

  ‘Now in this context, of course, “Stalwart” doesn’t mean what you might expect it to mean, Eddie’—because Jerome, for purposes of his own, perhaps purely rhetorical, laid the burden of his discoveries on Edgar—‘you’ve got to look at it in terms of US reconstruction politics. There were the Stalwarts on one side against—now what was the other side called? Was it Niggers? Half-Breeds? Or am I getting them muddled with something else?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Edgar said.

  ‘And Guiteau switched from one side to the other quite a few times. It was the struggle that interested him, like a holy war—it might be a heresy this, but he had his own messiah complex quite as much as John Prindle. The difference between them, of course, was that people wanted to follow John Prindle.’

  Jerome smiled at Edgar. Pieces of his face moved in unlikely directions.

  ‘Which raises some very interesting questions, I’d say, into the whole nature of religious leadership and divine commission. Is something true if enough people want to believe it to be true? I don’t know the answer. It’s deep waters. And all this is a long-winded way of saying I haven’t uncovered yet all of the rather basic information Warren is looking for. But it will come, it will come. So. How’s our convalescent?’

  ‘I’m not a convalescent. I’m fine, Jerry, really I am.’

  ‘And you look it! You’re looking tremendous,’ Jerome said.

  ‘It’s such a relief to have Warren back.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jerome said doubtfully. ‘I suppose it might be.’ Finally Jerome allowed Warren his attention. ‘That smells very good.’

  ‘Lamb chop and beans on the menu today. You’re more than welcome to stay. Plenty for everybody.’

  ‘No. Thank you. As a matter of fact I’m keen to get to my bed. I’m aiming to get through boxes five to eleven tomorrow.’

  ‘Don’t let us keep you,’ Warren said.

  The researcher hoisted his picnic bag on his shoulder and went back across the road. Fay made her way slowly towards her easel in the garden.

  Watching Edgar clung to shadows as Warren went into Fay’s bedroom.

  He waited and watched as Warren, like a hairdresser gone silently amok, an anti-hairdresser, gently pulled and twisted and tangled Fay’s previously neat white hair. Edgar went back to his room, keeping close to the corridor walls, where the floorboards seldom creaked. After hearing Warren’s footsteps return to his own room, Edgar went back to Fay’s. The door was ajar, his grandmother slept, her hair criminally wild on the pillow. In time to the r
attle of the nightjars outside the window he brushed. Fay stirred. A sleeping hand rose to stroke her own cheek. Grateful shadows slid across the walls of the Pagan House.

  He brushed. He kept brushing until her hair was smooth and straight and he continued to brush until the muscles ached in his forearm and wrist. He returned to his room exhilarated, sleepless, heroic.

  In the morning, Fay’s hair was messy again. There was no sign of Edgar’s handiwork. It was as he was pouring himself a bowl of cereal (Doctor Chox, ‘It’s Chocolaty!’) that Edgar glanced up and saw Warren looking at him. There was an unmistakable challenge in Warren’s expression, an incipient triumph.

  Edgar took all his meals with Fay and Warren. Daytime was cordial, with no references ever made to the battles that went on, with brush and comb, at night. Fay went up to bed at about eight thirty, after watching a John Mills movie. Jerome didn’t come by in the evenings any longer; he was too busy with his researches. Edgar set the alarm for midnight. Usually her hair was undisturbed then, but Edgar would perform a little touching-up. Then again at six in the morning, when her hair would always be mussed, far more maliciously than could be accounted for by Fay’s innocent movements in sleep. He was finding the days wearing, and had taken to after-lunch naps, or siestas, as he thought of them. He was considering eliminating the midnight visit but worried that might be a dereliction of duty. Most people died between three and four in the morning.

  ‘Sometimes I experience air as oppression. I can almost detect the colours of all the layers of stuff that press down on me. It’s a spectrum, from orange to blue,’ Fay said.

  ‘Oh,’ Edgar said. He was in her bedroom, combing her hair that Warren would later disturb and Edgar would later set right.

  ‘I’ve forgotten to do my homework,’ she said. ‘Do you think they’ll mind?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so.’

  Fay was sometimes lucid, sometimes inexplicable.

  ‘Do you like Mary?’ she said. Her voice remained that of an apprehensive schoolchild so Edgar assumed Mary was a controversial girl whose friendship she was hoping for or else a playground bully against whom she was shyly trying to gather support.

  ‘Um,’ Edgar said.

  ‘You can be honest with me.’

  ‘Yes. I think I do like Mary. Very much.’

  His guess was rewarded with a sunlit smile. ‘I’m so glad. I knew you would. She was the best of them. This is her house. No one who’s lived here has been worthy of the privilege. Maybe you could be.’

  She closed her eyes and her stillness alarmed Edgar. He brought her back with talk of the cat. ‘Tom’s dead. Your cat. He’s dead.’

  ‘Oh I know that,’ she said, a little impatiently. ‘Warren killed him.’

  The battle for Fay’s life will be fought with combs and brushes, tortoiseshell, ivory, silver and plastic, stroking through her fine white hair.

  Except, now, she has had enough. She is done; she longs for oblivion, obliteration, extinction—a boat casting off from shore, a balloon let go by a child’s hand, to drift. But a rope keeps pulling her back; a pale hand holds tight.

  14

  Whenever Edgar left the Pagan House something, usually bad, happened there. But Edgar had been picked for the first soccer game of the season and neither Warren nor Fay would hear of him missing his opportunity, as they called it. Before the game began, Coach Spiro called Edgar over to walk with him to his pickup truck where Marilou was sitting, looking skittish and wild-eyed. Edgar took the opportunity to protest the unfairness of Electa’s exclusion from the team.

  ‘Your loyalty does you credit,’ said Spiro.

  ‘I’m not being loyal,’ said Edgar.

  ‘If there’s one thing missing from your game, it’s self-belief.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Edgar conceded, because Coach Spiro’s scrutiny was an uncomfortable form of attention.

  ‘No maybes or ifs or buts about it. The men will realize how good you are and then you will too.’

  For a moment Edgar could almost believe in the coach’s hopelessly mistaken judgement of him.

  ‘You’ll be taking the corners from the left side. And the attacking free kicks from the right.’

  Edgar’s moment of near self-belief collapsed under the weight of inevitable shaming exposure. He was happy to wear team colours. He was happy to run around on the wing, regardless of the weather. But corners, and free kicks.

  ‘Oh. But. I think—’

  ‘And that’s your problem. You think too much. Free the body and it will do what it needs to do. The best golfers can play blindfold.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I know you won’t let me down,’ Coach said. ‘Oh, Eddie?’

  ‘Yes?’ said Edgar, interested in the way Spiro’s fingers dug into the skin of his wife’s arm making little red shadow fingers. ‘You might want to give a message to Warren. Isn’t that right, Marilou?’

  Marilou Weathers licked her lips and smiled and looked terribly sad.

  ‘Marilou isn’t going to make rehearsals tonight. In fact, she finds that she’s unable to take part in the opera at all. Isn’t that right, Marilou?’

  ‘Tell Warren I’m sorry.’

  ‘Yeah. Tell Warren she’s sorry.’

  To dismiss Edgar, Coach Spiro tipped the peak of his cap in a military salute. He was more intimate but equally soldierly in his leavetaking of his wife, who licked her chapped laps after he was finished with them.

  The game began, and Edgar tried Coach Spiro’s advice and shut his eyes. He stumbled into one of his own teammates and took a hefty blow to the nose that brought tears to his eyes and made him reconsider his tactic. For the rest of the half he trotted up and down the wing, relieved that no one passed to him. His team at least knew his insufficiency. He touched the ball twice in the first half. The first, a miscued return pass to Husky Marvin, spun wildly into the opposition penalty area where Ray Newhouse, surprised, failed to run on to it. The second time, the ball bounced off his shins, ricocheting to Husky Marvin who gathered it in his stride and cracked a shot from outside the area that powered into the net before the goalkeeper had even registered the need to save it. (Although, to his credit, the dive he executed after the goal had already been scored, was sumptuously balletic.)

  At half-time the score was 1–1. The players sat on their bench, eating slices of banana and swilling their mouths with water, which their regimen did not allow them to swallow, while Coach Spiro hectored them on their need to get the ball out to the wing, to Edgar, who was, Spiro declared, the one true playmaker on the team.

  The second half was torture to Edgar. The group mind of the team had decided to follow the coach’s instructions in the interest of showing him just how bad Edgar was. He had to chase after unreachable balls that were skilfully overhit by just a fraction. He endured the injury of fast-hit passes that skipped on the turf to sting his thighs. But he drew a crowd. Opposition defenders and midfielders, anticipating where the ball was going, gathered around hapless Edgar to retrieve the inevitably uncontrolled pass. This had the effect of leaving unoccupied space in the middle and when Edgar, with tears stinging his eyes, frustration and rage firing his muscles, saw another humiliating pass coming towards him, he made no attempt to control it, just kicked it as hard as he could; the ball bounced against the hip-bone of the nearest defender and lolloped over his teammates into the space for Husky Marvin to gather, run, and dribble past the goalkeeper for the winning goal. The goalkeeper beat the grass with his fist. Edgar was impressed by the gesture, the shiny dazzle of braces on his teeth.

  In the dressing room, drinking Gatorade, strutting, slapping backs and tousling hair, kicking plastic bottles away, hands on hips, in, as ever, sunglasses and shorts, the vindicated coach permitted himself some lordly self-congratulation. ‘Good play men. Now in future when I issue an instruction I expect it executed in the moment!’

  ‘Well played,’ Electa said, as they left the club room.

  ‘Thanks,’ Edgar said. He assume
d she was being sarcastic. He didn’t mind if she was being sarcastic, he was just glad she was talking to him, that the possibility existed that he might be renewed in her world.

  She permitted him to walk down with her to Creek and he justified himself with a summary of Warren’s tactics. She wasn’t convinced.

  ‘He drove everybody away.’

  ‘Except for you.’

  ‘Except for me. It’s so he could have the coast clear.’

  ‘Clear for what?’

  ‘He does things. At night.’

  ‘What kindsa things? I’m agog.’

  ‘And he killed the cat.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘And something’s going to happen at the Blackberry Festival.’

  ‘Like what? A party? That’s really interesting. You’re outdoing yourself,’ she said.

  ‘There’s something else.’

  Edgar was saved temporarily from Electa’s scorn by the drama of a police siren, a patrol car spinning up dirt from the side of the road as it slowed to take the corner, and Ray Newhouse, looking triumphant and silly, held up his manacled hands high from the back of the car for them to see. He hooked his thumbs together and made the shape of an eagle dropping from the sky until the cop sitting next to him cracked his elbow against his head and Ray Newhouse fell out of sight.

  After a pause, Electa said, ‘Wow.’

  ‘There’s something else.’

  ‘I really have to tear myself away from this and go to work.’

  ‘You’ve got very pretty feet,’ Edgar said.

  Her reaction to this compliment, which was colder and more impressive than fury, was a further reproach that he could hold against his mother.

  15

  Warren was on the porch wiping his hands.

  ‘I’d like to ask you a few questions,’ said Edgar, filling his voice with knowledge and dread.

  ‘First things first, Edgar,’ Warren said, brazenly using his secret name. ‘Come into the living room.’

  Fresh luggage was stacked higgledy-piggledy in the hallway. Edgar slid behind Warren into the living room, where his mother was standing by the sideboard, wearing white-rimmed sunglasses and a headscarf.