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The Pagan House
David Flusfeder
The much-anticipated new novel from the acclaimed author of ‘The Gift ‘ – a blend of detective novel, historical fiction and the painful coming-of-age of a confused young boy.‘Edgar was neither hard-bitten nor hard-boiled. He hadn’t seen too much – he’d hardly seen anything at all – and he was bursting, overflowing, with inaccessible juvenile potency. 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 suppertime.’Edgar Pagan, nearly thirteen, detests his English mother’s new boyfriend, so when she takes her son away from him across the Atlantic to spend time with his American father, it is a relief and a new adventure for him. He is an unlikely detective, Edgar, but that is what he becomes at the Pagan house, home to his grandmother Fay, and again some years later when he sets down on paper the Pagan past, in particular the peculiar circumstances of his father’s ancestors in the nineteenth century, ‘the story of how I came to be me.’‘The Pagan House’, David Flusfeder’s extraordinary new novel, is the story of how a family came to be established, of the extreme nineteenth-century Christian sect, the Perfectionists, utopians with a belief in free love, who built that family home. It is about the life and tragic death of Mary Pagan, the shaping force in this unusual family, and the impending death 150 years later of her descendent, Edgar’s grandmother, and the consequent destiny of that house. With its blend of detective novel, historical fiction and the painful coming-of-age of a confused young boy in Edgar, Flusfeder brilliantly weaves these strands together with style and verve. ‘Wise and generous: a complete story and a very good one,’ said Jonathan Franzen of Flusfeder’s last book, ‘the best book you’ll give yourself all year,’ said Will Self. With this new novel he has surpassed himself.

DAVID FLUSFEDER

The Pagan House



FOURTH ESTATE · London
It was really quite disturbing. Was his personality changing? Was he losing his edge, his point, his identity? Was he losing thevices that were so much part of his ruthless, cruel, fundamentallytough 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 (#u52624f26-827d-5862-8ba6-40d64ec568a0)Dedication (#ud6d03ade-94c5-5a8f-a802-7c01c23c5b72)One: Edgar In Creek And Vail, 1995 (#u2b09cbee-29cb-57cc-8c89-89a31b121e23)Chapter One (#u839923c2-c40d-5345-8287-0171b5a8a643)Chapter Two (#u33496bc3-5858-5945-a210-366f837a2d53)Chapter Three (#u91502a39-a693-5325-933e-72b84dcfb427)Chapter Four (#ubd9091fd-991a-5635-960f-57675b830afb)Chapter Five (#ud3c22fca-81ca-52ff-8b9c-891a4e9b59d8)Chapter Six (#u74a907bc-30fb-5eba-bdcf-12cac7f4280a)Chapter Seven (#u8a7c61c1-68e1-5f6a-bd30-de87ba75a704)Chapter Eight (#u7617886d-fd6f-5de5-94c8-5ce5dbc9e2ae)Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)Two: The Inheritors (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Four (#litres_trial_promo)Three: Edgar In Creek And Vail, 2005 (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)Also by David Flusfeder (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

ONE (#u30c399cb-4ec6-584b-b5bc-3fde46a149b0)

Edgar in Creek and Vail, 1995


1 (#u30c399cb-4ec6-584b-b5bc-3fde46a149b0)
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 compromised 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 expansive 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: flyto 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.
‘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 (#u30c399cb-4ec6-584b-b5bc-3fde46a149b0)
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, looking 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.
‘Older people I should say, because your grandmother, I don’t know, has always seemed so very much alive. She does a lot of volunteer work and charity and things like that. She always had very enlightened political views, which is rare in that part of America. Your father was a big disappointment to her.’
Edgar frowned. He did not like to hear either of his parents being criticized by the other, especially not his father by his mother because she found it so easy to do and because she was so obviously right. It seemed to Edgar that the easier and more obvious it was to do something, the better it was not to succumb to the pleasure of doing it.
‘But what I mean to say—you are listening to me aren’t you? What I mean to say is that you’re going to have to be thoughtful, considerate. Staying in someone else’s house requires adjustments. And the younger you are the more considerate you have to be. We have responsibilities as guests.’
Edgar supposed his mother was right, but he resented it all the same. She took for granted all the adjustments that he was required to make, and did make, without announcing the whole fuss of it. He would not allude to any of that now, because he didn’t wish to compromise his own nobility of nature, but the gruesome sights of Jeffrey stretching on the sofa and the hair on Jeffrey’s feet and his silver toe ring were all in his head now and he didn’t know how to get rid of them.
‘Stop shaking your head like that. I’m right. And close your mouth. It makes you look stupid.’
Tears of outrage were not far away now. Thankfully, his mother responded to the heightening of his mood with a softening of hers.
‘Oh Eddie, I’m sorry. Let’s not be bad friends. I’m a nervous flyer at the best of times and going there, you know, when I used to, your father.’
She opened her arms for him to wriggle through and even though he was bigger now than when they used to perform this kind of manoeuvre, and both of them were wearing seat-belts, they managed it, and the smell of her reminded him of Sunday mornings before Jeffrey.
‘I wish I still smoked,’ she said, and before Edgar could point out that even if she did she still wouldn’t be able to do so on board the plane, she had yawned, promised him a snooker room, stretched, and announced her intention to sleep.
Edgar, whee! He was loving it, in this plane, sipping a Virgin Mary, chewing peanuts, looking out of the porthole to see his own reflection bounced back with clouds. The noise that had been surrounding them throughout abruptly cut out—and the effect of the silence on Mon was to wake her up, startled: she gripped the armrest and Edgar watched with what he would call an investigator’s dispassion the tightening of her fingers, the whitening of her knuckles, the wrinkling of her skin.
‘It’s okay,’ she said, hoping to reassure him and therefore herself.
‘I know,’ he said.
He knew too that she wanted him to hold on to her hand, to give her the power to protect him, and usually he would allow her this, but not this time, even if it caused him a pang of pity and self-reproach: he was not above punishing her for her transgressions.
The cabin lights flickered off and weakly on and off and on again, and each movement from light to dark to light was accompanied by a collective cabin-gasp of all the passengers, ahhh! and O!, and Mon gripped the armrest tighter and merciful Edgar relented: he held on to her hand and settled into the contact as she pulled his fingers tight. Her eyes were closed and her head was back and a vein pulsed in her eyelid and blue lines stood out in her throat, and the plane dipped and lurched and Edgar was enjoying himself. People all around them made rearrangements with blankets and headrests, and the stewardess reminded them again that the captain had requested that all seats should be in the upright position and infants strapped to a parent or caregiver, and now there was rising the sound of babies crying, nothing too startling, just the discontent of children baffled at being woken from sleep and fussed over, and the burly man from across the way loudly shouted, ‘Miss? Miss?! What IS goingon?!’ and it took a while for Edgar to realize that the high keening note in the theological student’s voice behind him signified anguish, and that the ache in his ears meant that the plane was no longer bouncing but had been losing height, perhaps drastically, and that was why everything was tilted, and glasses and miniature bottles of wine were rolling down the slope towards business class; the mood in the cabin was changed and something very bad seemed to be happening.
‘Miss! Miss!!!! MISS!!!’
The stewardess was sitting below them braced in her chair, talking into a mouthpiece, her hands stroking each other.
‘Would everyone please return to their seats.’
Edgar straining heard her pleasant voice. Mon hadn’t moved or opened her eyes. Her hand gripped his more tightly. He tried to pull his hand away because it was hurting, but she had it and was not letting go. He tugged harder and all he achieved was a tiny choking moan from his mother. The ache in his ears was hardening into pain. The lights were lost again, and in the dark Edgar heard incompetently stowed tables clatter open, the thuds of surprised flesh, petulance now in the sobbing group-noise around him.
The lights came on just as an overhead locker opened, spewing out ribbons of clothes, bottles of duty-free liquor in corrugated-cardboard jackets that clattered off seat-backs and rolled clumsily down the aisle. The divinity student started to pray but lost the thread of his words until all he was saying was, ‘Oh oh oh oh, oh God, oh God, God, oh God, oh ohoh, oh God, oh God, oh …’
Edgar viciously pushed his chair back against the student’s knees but the litany continued unaffected. ‘Oh God oh Godoh God oh God, oh oh …’
‘Oh my God,’ Mon said. ‘The plane’s going down.’
It was as if she had just realized it, and maybe she had. Edgar had been imagining the moment of impact: would the airplane bisect the water?—cutting through to the depths, past startled schools of fish, coral reefs, sunken galleons, mermaids’ treasure, dead men’s bones, down into darkness, bumping blind to a final stop on the ocean bed, the portholes bend with the enormous pressure and then burst, an insane hydraulic gush, the divinity student’s dull features washed away with the power of the water that somehow, miraculously, a benevolent corkscrew, picks up Edgar and twirls him up, pops him out into the air, the climax of a fountain —or would the plane somehow glide to the surface, bob along there on the waves—why else would they have been talking about life-jackets and life-boats and whistles and take your shoes off before you get on the slide? Was there an allowable moment of escape before the 747’s weight took it slurping beneath the water, the frightened pilot saluting behind the glass because, nobly, he has stayed at his controls till the last …?
Mon’s eyes were open. She stared at the awfulness of her end and his, their end, he supposed; he had heard her say it often enough, that a mother mayn’t think of herself any more as a free agent separate from her son, and the fat-legged stewardess was fixed to her seat and to her smile, despite the pleading of an Arab woman who was inexplicably showing the stewardess the naked chest of her infant; and several generations of orthodox Jews had taken a place up high at the rear of the cabin where the seat-backs held them in position, angled swaying with eyes closed, chanting through their beards, and Edgar wondered whether they were pleading with God to intercede here or just smoothing their own paths to Paradise; and the burly man across the way was busy removing his clothes—his business suit was off now and his shirt and his underpants, and he sat there in his tie as if he needed to meet his end almost as naked as when he had experienced his beginning; and others were making their own accommodations and most of these involved screaming or tears, but Edgar, entirely calm, knew exactly what he had to do and what he now might be able to do but he couldn’t do it with his mother beside him.
‘I need to go to the toilet,’ he said.
Mon nodded, plaintively hopeful eyes—this will save us, yes? This toilet, this going-to-the-toilet of yours? But she clearly didn’t understand what the words meant: she was waiting for his or anyone’s magic trick of slipping the future back into their lives.
‘I have to go to the toilet,’ he said.
He clambered over his mother, clasped her shoulder as he went past, and climbed up the slope to the toilet.
Oxygen masks swung in the air. Supper trays slid past, slapping chicken and beef curry against the sides of seats. The burly man was reading the in-flight magazine, resting it on the hairy rise of his belly. The couple who had kept banging into Edgar at the duty-free shop, pushing bulky hand luggage into his shins, swinging plastic baskets against his ribs, were kissing, breathing heavily, her legs folded beneath her; Edgar could trace the blue lines of veins below her khaki shorts, the red blood-holes left behind by shaving. The ginger-haired man who had kept going to the galley for more cans of beer was sobbing. An elderly couple demurely held hands. The game-playing boy from the departures lounge was watching a horror film on his screen. Edgar briefly watched beside him—wolfman transformations, cracks of lightning, high-breasted girls running up and down stairs—until the boy, annoyed at his privacy being invaded or maybe his technology being shared, curtly leaned in front of the screen, blocking Edgar’s view.
These were the last moments and it was surprising to Edgar that so many chose to spend them weeping. It surprised him too, as he continued to labour up towards the toilet—if anything, the angle had got steeper, each step harder to make—that he was so bent on privacy. He did not want to intrude on anyone else’s end, but neither should an unnecessary, outmoded now, sense of propriety keep him from what he needed to do. The rise of panic all around him transferred somehow to a feeling of well-being close to exhilaration and the minutes left to him were few and he did not want to spend the rest of his life climbing.
Edgar ducked into a bank of seats that was tenanted only by a woman sleeping, untouched by the clamour, her knees drawn up under a blanket, her mouth lightly open, her eyes hidden beneath a sleeping mask.
‘Purr-fect,’ Edgar said, in his best whispery movie-villain voice, just as a trolley broke free of its moorings and lurched rattling past down the aisle. He heard a thud, a cry, and that would have been him, but he’d made it, he unzipped his trousers and settled down to his task.
There was no reason for modesty. Privacy was finished here. In the last moments there can be no rules. Edgar, masturbating, felt finally free.
He shut his eyes. High-breasted girls rush up and down stairs. The check-in woman lasciviously unbuttons her shirt, but that image was replaced by an imperishable one from his first trip to this country: a woman at a motel door, who sleepily pushes hair away from her face. She’s wearing a man’s shirt, his father’s, unbuttoned. Quickly he pulled in an image from a magazine of Jeffrey’s: two Japanese women naked below the waist, one in a white T-shirt, the other in black, sit on a hospital floor, boxes of medical supplies behind them.
Edgar became reconciled to death—oblivion, obliteration, extinction—with each back-flick of his knuckles, each pull of his fist. In death there is life and, he supposed, vice versa. The plane was going down and his pleasure was rising and something was new. It announced itself with a roar, wild, mannish, beyond images real or imagined; the void was filled and he was ferocious, bursting, overflowing; the sound grew from deep in his throat and rolled out into the lamenting world of this doomed airplane; he squeezed tighter, and, despite all the tears and furies and beseechings of God and wretched inconsolation, it was the sound that he was making that stirred the sleeping woman beside him. She shifted in her seat. She lifted her sleeping mask. His eyes met hers, which were blue, and blank at first, sleepily unfocused, then surprise registered in them, climaxing in horror at his state.
‘It really doesn’t matter,’ he said, to reassure her. ‘We’re all going to die.’
He kept rubbing, long, quickening strokes leading to something inexorable, but he managed to smile sociably at her at the same time. He tightened his fist against the hardness inside, and yelp, something new, something novel, something glorious was happening, and it was happening right now.
His eyes were open but they couldn’t quite focus, because what was taking place was too grand for vision: his penis was the centre of it and it was almost too sensitive to touch but he couldn’t not touch it, couldn’t stop touching it, grabbing it, brutally rushing his hand up and down it, and he didn’t know if he could bear this any more but if he was going to disintegrate then so be it, and up and out it came, jerking, pulsing out of him, milking jerky fluid, spattering the seat in front of him, and this was a better feeling than anything. In his last act he has truly accomplished something. He has proved himself. He has discovered his capacity.
When the plane pulled out of its dive Edgar was still smiling, sitting legs apart, his trousers and underpants around his ankles, his elbows on the armrests. In front of him globs of jism slid down the TV screen, and the passenger beside him was holding her throat, which must have been hoarse by now as she continued to scream for cabin staff.
At the baggage carousel at Kennedy Airport he aimed to keep his mother between him and the screaming lady, who had been treated with the remaining sedatives and subsequently firmly and politely ignored.
‘What did you do to her Eddie?’ Mon asked, and Edgar looked innocent and said a shocked ‘Nothin’!’ and smiled, hoping to imply something of the infinite weirdness of the world, the bottomless peculiarity of other people. He tried to find a view out of the baggage hall but the only windows were mirrored, and he knew that there would be further to go before they were allowed into the arrivals hall, and he knew too that his father was unlikely to be there, arrangements and handovers were seldom straightforward where his father was involved, but that didn’t matter so much, the world has been changed—and when the screaming lady realized that or when the wreckage of her throat finally gave out, he might be able to hear his name being announced on an airport Tannoy or, maybe, through the next door or the next, he would see his name on a white card being held up by a benevolent chauffeur in uniform.
‘Eddie?’
‘Nuthin’!’
He felt a suspicion lingering in his mother’s mind and perhaps others’ that the fat-legged stewardess might have been a little too quick to push accusations away; but when the engines had come back into life and the plane lifted into cruising height again, there had been so much pressing upon her, reluctant doctors to gather to make repairs to bruises and breaks, tears to soothe, complimentary champagne to distribute along with a printed list of airline-approved stress counsellors through the crush of insistent lawyers intoning, ‘Compensation.’
Anyway, a compact had been silently made. Passengers who had been bandaged and patched leaned on trolleys, chewed gum noisily, laughed to show that they were ready for re-entry into their changed world. Something extraordinary had been shared and it was over and certain things were private and didn’t need to be talked about, and he was respectful of that and his mother ought to honour it too. The burly man was wearing his clothes again.
The conveyor-belt stuttered into motion, and Edgar, jaunty in his freedom, in his maleness, hiccuped the unpleasant sip of champagne back into his mouth and lifted one foot to rest on the metal lip of the carousel until a blue-uniformed airport woman shook her head and said, ‘Sir! Could you step back?’ And Edgar was so pleased to be called ‘sir’ that he did as he was told.
3 (#u30c399cb-4ec6-584b-b5bc-3fde46a149b0)
By the time that Edgar, the aficionado of flight, announced that the small, jittery plane that they had taken from New York to Syracuse was coming in to land, Mon’s skin had turned yellowish white with the exertions of the day, with the effort of keeping airplanes in the sky with the power of her will.
‘It would be nice if someone was there to meet us,’ Edgar said.
‘Fay won’t be up to that kind of thing. And your father always leaves everything to the last minute. We’ll have to make our own way.’
But they were met, by a self-possessed man in pressed white jeans and blue T-shirt, who was scanning the faces of the arriving passengers. To Edgar’s great pleasure and silent promise of friendship he held up their names, correctly spelled in neat capital letters on a white card.
‘I’m Warren,’ he said. Warren had short dark hair and a lightly tanned skin and the manner of someone who did things well. He shook their hands and steered their airport trolley out towards the car-park, while others from their flight stood hapless in the arrivals hall, opening and closing their fists; and Edgar, enjoying how important he and perhaps his mother must be seeming, endeavoured to look sternly businesslike.
Warren drove them out of Syracuse in a wood-panelled station-wagon. He was friendly and polite and informative, speaking in a not-quite-American accent. He neither ignored nor talked down to Edgar, who was allowed the privilege of the front passenger seat while Mon half dozed in the back. It was all very easy and adult and civilized, and Edgar turned to look at his mother from time to time just in case she had not noticed the disparity between this man and Jeffrey.
Edgar, more tired than he would choose to be—but after all, he had experienced much and accomplished something truly grand this day—drifted in and out of Warren’s commentary. The heat made wavery lines out of everything, the financial towers and bridges and billboards and roads, the fields of corn, the toll-booths, distant blue hills, and it all looked bigger than he was used to, which was what he had expected, but he hadn’t expected to feel smaller too.
Warren smelled of pine and lemon and cream. He looked straight ahead while he drove, both hands on the steering-wheel, the air-conditioning vent blowing the dark hairs on his arm to stand soldierly straight. Edgar cleared his throat. Warren glanced his way. Edgar had said nothing so far on this journey, just nodded every so often to show he was listening. He had to say something now, no matter how banal; he had to speak, push his voice into America.
‘We thought we were going to die,’ Edgar said.
Warren’s eyebrows rose. ‘Oh?’
‘The plane went into a dive and kept going and it looked like we were going to crash and everyone thought we were going to die. The big plane. Jumbo jet. The one we came from London on.’
‘Wow. A near-death experience. That’s the sort of thing that changes a person,’ said Warren.
‘Yes. I think so too,’ said Edgar.
Warren had kind eyes. He was very well shaved and his skin was smooth. He drove carefully, without show. ‘We’re coming off the thruway now,’ he said. ‘That was the interstate. We’re on three sixty-five now. Not far to go.’
‘What’s that?’
Edgar pointed to what looked like an artwork from one of Jeffrey’s magazines. By the side of the road, surrounding a dark wooden shack, four large men in shorts and T-shirts sat impassively on garden chairs with guns on their laps.
‘That’s the bingo hall. It’s run by the Onyatakas, the local Indian tribe. It’s pretty small-potatoes stuff, cleaners going there to gamble their money, welfare checks. It’s a sad state of affairs. They want to build a casino but no one thinks the Governor will let them.’
‘Does my dad know about that?’
‘I don’t know, Eddie. I couldn’t say.’
‘Is he at the house?’
‘Uh, not yet, I think he might have been delayed a couple of days, but I’m sure you’ll enjoy your time with us.’
Monica stirred and yawned and stretched. Her leather jacket that she had been using as a pillow creaked. ‘God, I needed that sleep. Where are we?’
‘We’ve just come off the interstate.’
‘There’s a bingo hall. It’s run by Indians. They carry guns,’ Edgar said.
‘You’re not meant to call them Indians. Isn’t it First Nation or Native Americans or something?’ said his mother.
‘This tribe calls itself Indians so it’s okay,’ Warren said, and winked to Edgar. ‘We’re on the road to Onyataka.’
They drove through small towns, past fire stations and sports fields and boxy suburbs where everything was green and white and red, as if people here lived in a perpetual Christmas.
‘Where are you from, Warren?’ asked Mon.
‘I’m from Ireland, more or less Dublin but not quite. But people out here, I might as well be from South Africa or Australia or the moon.’
‘We weren’t actually expecting to be met by anyone.’ In her habitual arrogance she had awarded herself the right to speak for Edgar. How could someone so supposedly close to him not see the change in him? ‘Are you a neighbour of Fay’s?’
‘No actually, I live there. With her. In the house.’
‘Oh?’ said Mon in her suspicious tone, her voice going thin and accusing. Edgar hoped Warren hadn’t noticed the rudeness.
‘Has she not said? I’ve been there some time. Help out a bit you know. Muck in. She’s a lovely lady.’
‘Yes. She is.’
‘And I know how fond she is of you. Of both of you,’ he added.
Mon did not like to be flattered. Edgar knew this, Warren clearly did not. They drove on in silence, into the town of Onyataka (Onyataka welcomes careful drivers!), and Edgar started to pay attention. This was a bigger place than he had been expecting, there were theaters here and a cinema, the expected fire station, the unexpected sex shop; a drunk stumbled into a boarded-up store window but kept his beer can steady throughout in its brown-paper bag, and a pet shop, a video store, and—Onyataka hopes you come back soon!—they were out of town again.
‘I thought …’ Edgar said.
‘What’s that, Eddie?’
‘That we were, that my grandmother, lived in Onyataka.’
‘It’s the nearest town, for postal purposes that’s where we are, but actually we live a few miles along, in Vail. The towns of Creek and Vail. You’ll see in a few minutes.’
Creek, which announced itself to be the smallest city in New York State, welcomed careful drivers no less than Onyataka. It was met by Edgar through half-closed eyes. This was not how he had intended to arrive, sleepily unalert; he forced himself to notice things—a restaurant, a factory, a pizza parlour, a gas station, an office-supplies store, white wooden houses whose front gardens, or yards, he supposed, were open to the pavement where bicycles lay down—
‘There’s a farmer’s market out back there on Thursdays,’ said Warren.
‘That’s good,’ said Mon.
—a video store was neighbour to a doctor’s office and a bookshop, none of which looked open; an impeccably healthy gang of teenagers in jeans and grey sweatshirts lounged in a corner of a baseball field.
‘You’ll like it here, Eddie. There’s lots of life. Kids and trees and parks and so forth. Do you play soccer?’
‘Not really.’
‘Of course he does,’ Mon said. ‘God, it’s so long since I’ve been here and the place hasn’t changed a bit. Time just stands still, doesn’t it? Isn’t that the Company headquarters? That’s where your grandfather worked.’
They passed an ornate, low-slung stone building topped by turrets, which looked as if the architect hadn’t been able to decide whether to build a castle or a bungalow so had invented some unworkable compromise between the two.
‘Did my dad work there as well?’
Mon didn’t say anything. She scoffed silently, as she usually did when her ex-husband was mentioned in the same sentence as money or work.
‘I don’t know, Eddie. He might have had a holiday job there when he was young. Most everybody here has worked for the company at some time. It’s a company town.’
‘Company town,’ Mon repeated, in a sort of wistful voice, and Edgar could tell she had been smitten with the same sour nostalgia or sentimentality that connected to those moments in London when she stayed up late looking at old photographs, playing records and drinking bourbon.
‘It’s got a very interesting history, the company. Creek was where the workers lived, the managers lived in Vail. It all grew out of the Onyataka Association. Nineteenth century. But you must know all about it, Monica, through Mike, Perfectionism, free love, Utopia.’
‘Mike didn’t go in for history tours. And I don’t think Perfectionism would ever have been one of his interests.’
Warren laughed politely to indicate that he had noticed a joke had been made.
‘And here we are. Here’s the house now.’
‘I’ve always liked it. Look, Edward.’
Edgar looked. He too liked the house, very much. It could be drawn very simply, as two intersecting triangles with a horizontal line at the top for the roof. Blue-painted wood with white shutters and weird little carved heads whenever a pipe went into or popped out of the wall, weathervane and TV aerial and a chimney behind each of the gables, it accorded to his idea of what a house should look like. It was the house he had tried to draw when he was a young child. It was the house he furnished when they played their game.
Warren opened the screen door for them. The front door had been left hospitably ajar. They walked along the hallway, past a curving staircase, black and white photographs on green-papered walls, to the kitchen, where an old lady was in the unsteady process of rising from a chair.
‘Fay!’
His grandmother, whom Mon confused with a kiss on both her cheeks, was grandmotherly small and white-haired, in a blue print dress.
‘If I remember you, Monica, you’d like a cup of tea after your trip.’
Her voice was clear and youthful, her face a rivery marvel of lines, which shifted and twisted and showed new tributaries when Mon said how well Fay was looking. Her eyes were blue, like Edgar’s.
Edgar made up for the confusion his mother had wrought with a candid smile and an English gentleman’s firm handshake.
‘And Edward. You look so much like your father, you know. Would you like a chocolate milk, or are you too grown-up for that sort of thing?’
Delighted at being identified as looking like his father, Edgar replied that, yes, he would love a chocolate milk and, no, a straw would not be unwelcome, and after Warren had brought in their bags, he made the tea and poured Edgar a glass of chocolate milk, which Warren suggested and Edgar agreed was the perfect thing after long plane and car rides in the height of summer.
Fay took them on a tour of the house, which passed slowly, because she needed to sit and rest at least once in every room, and Edgar, unconsciously, until Mon pointed out what he was doing and made him too embarrassed to continue, would position himself behind his grandmother’s shoulder, like a servant or a guard.
Edgar had been given the sleeping porch whose ceiling and outer walls were made of glass. It jutted from the house at the back, looking over the rose garden.
‘We thought it might be fun for you to sleep here,’ Warren said.
‘Warren has moved out into Frank’s room.’
‘We’re so sorry to have put you to all this trouble.’
‘It wasn’t much of a move,’ Warren said.
‘He cleans up after himself. He’s very tidy,’ Fay said, and Mon looked meaningfully at Edgar to remind him of his house-guest responsibilities.
In the corridor, Fay sat on a chair after failing to make it quite to the picture window.
‘On a clear day you can see all the way to Onyataka Depot.’
‘Oh,’ said Mon.
‘Good,’ said Edgar.
‘You can see the Company building from the corner of the window. The Administration building, not the factory. That’s in Creek, of course. And across the way is the Mansion House. They have regular tours. I’m sure you’d find it interesting.’
‘I’m sure I would,’ said Edgar, politely unconvinced.
‘But tell me, what would you fancy doing in your time with us?’
The wording of the question intrigued Edgar in its imputation that he might operate in a world of fancy rather than necessity. It supposed an alternative Edgar, foppish, with a butterfly mind, who went where things took him, who carried a battered brown-leather suitcase covered with faded stickers of faraway countries and who might even own a unicycle that he had disciplined himself to ride. The real Edgar was driven by imperatives. Imperative number one was to further investigate his capacity the first chance he got. This was not a subject to share, except he was looking forward to a moment of companionship with his father when he might somehow imply his new state, maybe eating burgers at a lunch counter, men of the world together, two guys.
‘I’m not sure,’ said Edgar.
‘You only have to say. Supper will be in the kitchen. Warren has put out towels in your rooms. I’m so glad you’re here.’
Edgar, in the bathroom, splashing water on his hair and pulling it casually into spikes, listened to his mother and grandmother in the corridor.
‘Who is Warren?’ his mother asked. ‘How long has he been here?’
‘I don’t know where I’d be without him,’ said Fay.
When Edgar went downstairs—after lying on his bed and flirting with his capacity, which he abandoned and zipped away when he heard footsteps going past into Fay’s room next door; and after gazing out of the window and wondering what Onyataka Depot might be and whether he would be here long enough to make the acquaintance of the blonde girls strolling past, who looked so unapproachably healthy and complete; and after sneaking into his father’s old room to run a finger along the spines of the science-fiction paperbacks in the bookcase; and after looking into the Music Room to examine some of the record albums, the glowering 1970s faces—Mon and Fay and Warren were already in the kitchen. His mother was wearing a black T-shirt with red Asian script printed on it that Edgar hadn’t seen before. Her hair was hidden beneath the turban of a bath towel. A large ginger cat snored in a basket by the stove.
‘What do you think of the house?’ Warren asked.
‘It’s really nice,’ Edgar said, somewhat gruffly, because he preferred his voice to err towards brusque manliness rather than the shrill castrato it sometimes became.
‘You must be exhausted,’ said Warren. To which Mon was about to protest but stopped when she realized that he was talking to Fay, who performed her astonishing smile again.
4 (#u30c399cb-4ec6-584b-b5bc-3fde46a149b0)
Edgar awoke in light. Foreign dusty smells, his penis gripped hard in his hand, the taste of night and linen in his mouth. He encouraged this moment of utter unfamiliarity to stretch, with him growing inside it—and that first, good, moment was succeeded by one even better, when he remembered where he was, a new-found place.
At home, he would hear traffic in the main road, the groaning of water-pipes, the drone of his mother’s radio on those days that Jeffrey wasn’t staying over, all the rumble of a London morning. Here, in Vail, there was birdsong outside and frogs croaking, and a rustle of leaves, all of which were delightful at first and then unnerving. The dawn light pouring through the glass walls and ceiling of the sleeping porch made the room seem shipboard, the sky turned to sea. He stayed in bed, stretching, yawning, waiting for the voices and clatters of a usual day or the reassuring sound of his mother, until hunger drove him out in search of food.
Edgar, starving for carbohydrates and fruit juice, in his new chinos and T-shirt, stepped out on to the landing. He had expected the business of the morning to be transacted all around him but he seemed to be the only one up. There had been voices; now he heard only the creak of the corridor floor under his feet, the squeak of the stairs. On the ground floor he could walk more freely and soon was joined by an imaginary companion, a mincing European, maybe Italian or French, could even be Spanish, who wore flamboyantly long white sleeves with lace ruffs and carried a clipboard and assiduously noted down all of Edgar’s instructions.
‘I think we’ll need to move the kitchen from here to here,’ Edgar said commandingly. ‘And the bathroom, of course.’ He felt a slight pang for both rooms, which had done him no harm, but he must be ruthless, make his stamp of ownership plain. ‘And I think we’ll lower that ceiling and raise that one, and maybe that floor ought to become that wall, and do you think two indoor swimming-pools are too much …?’
He paused, tilted his head, cocked his ear, allowed space for his flouncy architect-designer to offer his highly cultivated, overpaid, artistically considered response, which lordly Edgar merely brushed aside—
‘… or not enough at all?! I want four swimming-pools thank you very much. Ha! And I want a snooker room they-ah, and a games room they-ah, and my father will be in his study, there …’ and here Edgar lowered his voice, squeezed his chin flat to his chest and waddled as if he were the fattest man in the world into his grandmother’s living room, narrowly avoiding the early-morning boy-trap of a wire magazine rack, ‘… and here, and here-ah, what are we going to do? Hmn? What are we going to do with you? What in the world are we going to do with you? What in the whole—’ Edgar shot a nervous look around before continuing ‘—fucking world are we going to do with you? What do you think, Alfonso? What’s your considered opinion now, my friend? Answer me Alfonso. Answer me, right now! Oh God, I’m so bored with your ideas, is that what they teach you at the Sorbonne? You’re fired. That’s right. Fired. I shall draw up the plans myself. Goodbye.’
The rejected architect-cum--designer threw himself on his ex-employer’s mercy. He was losing all dignity: he cajoled, threatened, pleaded, he wept. He poured down curses on Edgar, then repented, blessed him, his family, his mother, who reminded him of his own, after which ensued a long impossible-to-follow story set in a hillside village, involving a donkey, two gypsies and the winter wind, and Edgar had had quite enough. This display, quite frankly, sickened him.
‘Enough! Alfonso! Please. Remember you are a man.’
Edgar made his heart hard and turned his face away and went back to the kitchen, and the broken Alfonso crawled after him, still weeping, his suede jeans smeared with dirt from the floor, his black curls tumbling, his white bullfighter’s shirt ripped.
Edgar poured himself a glass of chocolate milk from the refrigerator and downed it in one thirsty morning gulp and poured himself a second, which he measured against his fingers and sipped slowly from, contemplating his day.
‘Edward.’
‘Good morning, Mother.’
Mon looked at him sharply; she mistrusted Edgar at his most formal. She opened the refrigerator, withdrew from it an apple and a bowl of pineapple chunks, which she assembled on top of two slices of white bread in an approximation of the breakfast she ate at home. After a couple of mouthfuls, and an expression of dismay at how much sugar had been added to the pineapple, she was ready for conversation.
‘Who were you speaking to?’
‘Nobody,’ Edgar said, quickly and surprised, before guiltily remembering the corpse of Alfonso that lay in the hallway, his clothes grubby and bloodied, his unbeating heart clutched forlorn in his hand, an unwanted offering that he had held out as his last dying hope.
‘Why are you looking so shifty then?’
‘I’m not looking shifty.’
‘You’re looking shifty. Do you know what time it is?’
This was a familiar technique of his mother’s, to follow one question quickly with another, unrelated, one. It kept people on the back foot.
‘No. What time is it?’
‘It’s a quarter to six.’
‘Oh really? It’s a nice day isn’t it? Did you sleep well?’ Edgar asked, nimbly using his mother’s devices against her.
‘Jetlag,’ his mother grimly said.
They breakfasted to the rumble of Tom the cat snoring in his basket. Edgar ate toasted English muffins with butter and ham. He drank orange juice. His mother drank tea. They briefly speculated as to why English muffins were thought to be English, and Mon said English usually meant something sneaky in this country, and she broadened the topic to include the very unFrench phenomenon of so-called French toast and then they returned to silence. The day could turn out to be a long one but he didn’t care; this was the leisurely part of his American trip, here in this fine house, submerged by the agreeable fog of jetlag, waiting for his father to come.
At lunchtime Mon had been after him to show some enthusiasm as a visitor when the telephone rang. ‘I think we’ll take a walk around the neighbourhood after lunch. Explore things. I’ll show Ed the Mansion House.’
‘You wouldn’t mind getting that, would you?’ Warren was at the sink, his hands full with a colander of cooked spaghetti that he was splashing with olive oil. He was looking at Edgar when he said that, who stared blankly back, because Edgar didn’t like to use the telephone, and Mon took the call before Fay could finish making her preparations to leave her chair.
‘Yes,’ Mon said to the telephone, and as the conversation went on Edgar watched her expression change from patient to pleased.
Warren brought over the food. ‘Would you like a Kool-Aid?’
‘Yes please,’ said Edgar, wondering what it was he had said yes to. He hoped it wasn’t a piece of sports equipment. But Edgar felt expansive; he would take whatever the world offered him.
‘I might be going to New York a little early,’ Mon said.
‘Oh?’
‘That was Hen. It’s all very boring but it would be more convenient if I went there a little earlier than planned.’
His mother looked both stoical and frenzied. She pushed the salt cellar between her hands and stared at it in surprise when it fell over.
‘I can’t do it. Your father’s not even here yet. And your birthday …’
‘He’ll be all right with us, won’t you, Ed?’ said Warren.
For something to do, Edgar brushed at sleeping Tom’s fur until he became aware that ginger clumps of the stuff were coming away in his hands.
‘Ed?’
‘Yes. Of course I will.’
Nonetheless Edgar was alerted. Being here motherless was not unattractive, but Mon’s mood was both wilder and more discomfiting than he was used to. Perhaps it was torture for her to stay in this house, everything here a reminder of her failures as a woman and a wife, but that was a betrayal of him, who would never have been born without this place.
Edgar tried to pat the cat fur back into place. Tom’s only signs of life were the shallow rises of his chest to accompany each noisy breath, and the little rivulets of effluvia that leaked out of his face.
‘That’s so sweet of you to try to groom him,’ Fay said. ‘A lot of people would see him as a lost cause and they’d be missing the point completely.’
‘I’ve put her numbers on the pinboard. That’s her work number and that’s her home, and I’ll call you after I get there.’
‘When are you going?’
‘Well. If you’re sure. I could go in the morning. It’s a real bore,’ Mon said.
She sighed, hoping to indicate some of the boredom she purported to feel, but Edgar knew better. A small overspill of the curious excitement that was going through her seeped over to him.
Warren delivered a glass of some watery red liquid, which Edgar sipped at and found delicious.
‘Your father will be here tomorrow,’ Mon said—which was, Edgar observed, the first time she had given this up as an undisputed fact.
‘Yes, he will,’ Edgar said, pursuing his advantage.
‘You can call me if anything goes wrong.’
She moved over to hug him and rub his hair. He accepted the hug, stiffly, and pulled his hair back into its proper spiky shape, adding a few stray hairs of Tom’s to his own.
‘Oh Eddie.’
She might have been about to weep. Fay reached a hand to her. ‘You mustn’t worry about a thing,’ Fay said.
‘I’ll run you to the airport in the morning,’ Warren said.
‘That’s so nice of you. I don’t want to be any trouble.’
‘It’s no trouble.’
The rhythms of the Pagan House were based around mealtimes, and Edgar was required at supper that night.
‘I think it’ll be amusing for both of you. Some of the local personalities will be here,’ Fay said.
‘Company Bob and so forth,’ Warren said.
‘I’m sure,’ Mon said.
Edgar followed his mother up to her room and watched her pack. He tried to get out of supper but Mon was at her most ruthless: ‘This is my last night here. It’ll be horrible if you’re not around.’
‘I’ll be around. I’ll be upstairs.’
‘You absolutely won’t be upstairs. You’ll be at the dinner table. It’s far too rude otherwise.’
‘What would be just rude enough?’
She clicked her tongue and jerked her chin, she gave him her exasperated ‘Oh, Eddie!’ look and checked again that her passport was in the side-pocket of her handbag. ‘Please get ready. Change your trousers. Wear your good ones.’
Edgar lies on the bed and Edgar scratches. From the wall by his bed he lifts away the damp flap of wallpaper—navy blue, golden stars—and finds another layer of wallpaper beneath. It might once have been cream or white but now is aged urinous yellow, with washed-green cartoon stencils of amiable little rocketmen in large transparent helmets hardly smaller than the dinky little spaceships they ride in. This might have been his father’s childhood wallpaper, glimpses of a happy boundless future, where cheerful little astronauts enjoyed the freedom of infinite flight. This patch of wall is Edgar’s own time-machine. Now he sits here, in 1995, damp blue walls, faded golden stars; now he pulls himself into the early 1960s, and there’s paper beneath that one, and beneath that one; brave Edgar in wartime touches trompe l’oeil pillars; Edgar in the Great Depression wonderingly touches something sickly yellow. And beneath that one is paint, dull brown, which Edgar scratches at with his well-practised right hand, rubbing himself into a further past, white paint, go further, bare pine wood, the original wall, on which a man, the builder, or the architect, or Old Uncle Pagan himself, had pencilled in measurements in a high, confident, sloping hand.
5 (#u30c399cb-4ec6-584b-b5bc-3fde46a149b0)
Christ charged his disciples not to publish all the truths he hadcommitted to them, in the injunction, ‘Cast not your pearls beforeswine’, and on the other hand he forbore to tell them many thingswhich were in his heart, because they were ‘not able to bear them’. In his conversation with Nicodemus, he signified that there wasa class of interior truths, which he called ‘heavenly things’, moreincredible and unintelligible to the sensual understanding by farthan the doctrine of regeneration that Nicodemus made so greata mystery of; that he classed among earthly things.
Paul refers to heavenly things when he says, ‘We speak wisdomamong them that are perfect.’ The Corinthians to whom he waswriting, ‘were yet carnal’; he could not speak unto them as untospiritual; but he stirred up their ambition to become spiritual, that they might know the deep things of God. When he was caughtup into paradise, he heard ‘unspeakable words’ that it was ‘notlawful for a man to utter’. (I Cor. 2:6. II Cor. 12:4. John 16:12, 13. Rev. 11: 15–19)
Bible Communism, John Prindle Stone, 1844
The stones are hard against the plough. Abram Carter has warned him of the damage that stones can do to the blade of the plough. George Pagan has to keep stopping the horse so he can pick the stones away from their path, digging them out half buried from the soil, his futile harvest, breaking his skin, his fingernails, his heart. Blind Jess at least is docile. She stands, tail swishing, the only part of her that shows any vitality.
Jess waits for George to nudge her back into movement. The sunlight is fading, sun going down over the blue hills towards Turkey Street. Here, in this pre-Edenic grove, where wild roses grow and cardinals and goldfinches chirp and cheep, mocking his pretensions as a farmhand, George Pagan pushes the frame of the plough and Jess walks on. George steers, trying to make straight furrows; he has to fight to keep the blade at the correct angle. He had not thought this would be so hard: he had imagined himself into a picture of farming, the light fading on the ploughman’s noble calling, the soil made ready for the vegetables that would sustain two families and whoever joined them for sustenance of spirit and flesh, man and nature united in creation. It is not the picture he had imagined when he had tired of indoor work, city work and therefore fallen work, no matter how virtuous in intent and execution, the composing and printing and distributing of Moral Reform tracts. He had longed to be in a place like this and had never conceived how brutal it would be to submit to the turning of the earth, the passage of the seasons, God’s heartbeat. Here there is no joy, the plough blade turns, scrapes against this dismal earth, the shallow misbegotten furrows; he stops, wipes his forehead with his hand, merely redistributing the sweat and cutting in the sharp grains of earth that have somehow gathered to his skin. In the parlour of the old stone house, the lantern shines more brightly, lighting the scene within. Mary Pagan, George’s wife, sits at the table, her black hair falling in front of her face as Abram Carter instructs her in the ways of Perfectionism. George hopes her path is less rocky than his.
He has been told to plough until called upon to stop and he will. Even though he mistrusts Captain Carter’s manner—delivery obtrudes its substance: he lacks humility, takes too much pride in the sound of the words in his mouth, the orator’s performance, the actor’s pleasures—Mary has confidence in the teaching of Abram Carter, and Mary has an instinct for purity, and truth, that George trusts far better than his own. A hand, his wife’s, reaches out to the window, and George’s heart lifts—here it comes now, the call to finish his labour of the day; he will tether the horse, return the plough to its shed, move back inside to the care and, he hopes, the caresses of his wife. His wife’s arm, illuminated, falls across the window like a clock hand; it is a moment of translucence and hope that, he is forced to admit, would not cut into him nor uplift him quite so directly, so purely, had he not exerted himself so greatly through this ordeal of a day. But the arm does not beckon, the window does not open, he does not hear his wife’s musical voice calling him in from his toil. Instead, the curtain is drawn, pulled between him and the light and the inhabitants of the parlour.
George Pagan trudges on. Blind Jess trudges on. They have no light to steer by. The plough cuts blindly into the soil; and George Pagan devises an analogy. He is not good at devising analogies—he does not possess an associative or synthetic mind: to him things are as they are, form is form, even if dimly he apprehends the possibility of its transformation —but this is as good an analogy as he has ever framed, this the path of the believer in the fallen world finding his way to sinlessness: the way is dark, the day is endless, the horse is blind, the path is stony; his faith sustains him. George Pagan reaches the end of one furrow. Cumbersomely, he turns to begin another.
George, proud in the aftermath of his labour, and a little vain of his analogy, reports it to his companions after he has walked Jess back to her field and scrubbed some of the earth away from his skin. He sips at the hot, sweet tea that Mary has prepared for him.
Abram Carter, the appointed under-teacher of John Prindle Stone’s Perfectionism, slides a finger across the short beard on his chin in the manner he has copied from his master. He nods. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘this is the teaching that must be lived before it can be learned. The way is hard. But we too are making progress.’
Mary frowns. Something foreign passes across her face. ‘Oh, George,’ she says. ‘You must be tired.’
He is. He hasn’t realized just how tired. If it weren’t for Mary removing his boots he would have fallen into bed dressed for the plough.
And so pass their days, Mrs Pagan and Captain Carter in reading and doctrinal discussion, closeted indoors, Mr Pagan at work in the field.
Sometimes George imagines a house where he is ploughing. It is a mild and acceptable form of heresy, he supposes. Instead of the field of corn to sustain them, he invents a house, a family home, built in the modern manner, where he, and Mary, and little Georgie, and the future ones, the Pagan tribe, as yet unborn, will grow and thrive in undirected sinlessness.
Tentatively he attempts to report his fantasy to Mary. It is night and he is wretched with the cold, with the dirt of the land, with the dull accumulated efforts of his blind-horse days. They are in bed; outside, the land is dark with night, fruitful for the imagining of his house, their house, their future lives free of the doctrinal diligence of Abram Carter. He imagines his wife reading to their children in the parlour, an infinity of playful little Pagan children gathered around her skirts, heeding the soft musical truths of her voice. He imagines the house, its gables, the fires that burn in its grates, the rooms that meet each other across polished wooden corridors; he imagines a love-seat on the porch, a rope-swing suspended from the branches of the sycamore tree. What he fails to imagine, what he is unable to see, is himself in any of these pictures—his family flourishes in the house that he has generously built for them, but he absolutely fails to see himself. Vengefully, he invents a field, a blind, skittish horse, a rusty plough to which he sternly tethers Abram Carter. Returning to the invented house he still fails to find himself inside it.
‘Mary?’ he says. ‘I’ve been imagining a house.’
At first he supposes his wife to be asleep. Her breathing is light and rapid. She lies perfectly still as does he, even though his limbs ache with the discomfort of the posture he has chosen or fallen into for sleep. It costs him more to shift than to stay as he is.
‘Mary?’
He whispers more loudly: something troubles him, her stillness, the quick shallowness of her breathing. She turns away from him. Her voice is muffled by her pillow.
‘Oh, George.’
She is weeping. He would like to comfort her but he has never been skilled at that, and anyway his body, tortured by the day, mortified by the plough, refuses him any movement.
‘Mary?’
‘George,’ she finally manages to say, ‘I am so happy.’
6 (#u30c399cb-4ec6-584b-b5bc-3fde46a149b0)
Edgar liked rebel rock ’n’ roll and punk rock and primitive heavy metal, loud noises made before he was born by scowling teenagers in leather jackets with snotty attitudes. Edgar liked songs that rocked and then faded out, as if there was no possible ending to them: shut the door, walk away, and the band still plays on: the drummer keeps clattering, despite the awful weight of his arms; the vocalist sings, his futile eyes examining the sealed room for any possibility of escape; the guitarist picks eternally at his guitar, sitting down now, saving his energy, no more wild darts to the microphone stand; the bass guitarist thuds away, fingers bleeding, and the song goes on for ever. All of Edgar’s favourite songs faded out. He was suspicious of music that knew how to stop.
Seed-spattering Edgar, singing along to his Walkman, wiped down his grandmother’s bathroom surfaces.
Number two. He wondered how old he would be when he could no longer count the number of times he had done this. That would be the end of innocence, he supposed. Edgar worked with flannel and Ajax fluid, cleaning the bathtub with an assiduousness that would have surprised and gratified his mother.
Cheerfully, he gave a second polish to the handrails on the sides of the tub, and enjoyed a pleasant interlude on his hands and knees inspecting the black and white dominoes of the tiled floor, before he banged his head on the brass toilet-roll holder. He returned the flannel to where he had found it, around the stem of the dripping hot tap. He wondered how his stuff might taste. Sickly sweet like breast milk, maybe, which he had sampled at Herman Opoku’s house one afternoon after school before their falling-out. Herman had opened the refrigerator door to show the bottles of milk expressed for his baby sister by his mother, whom Edgar had never met and who worked as a hospital nurse when she wasn’t expressing breast milk. Like connoisseurs, Herman and Edgar had taken small, considering sips from a bottle, which they topped up with water, scrupulously boiled in the Opoku kettle. Herman Opoku told him that semen tasted salty, like caviar, and Edgar had changed the subject. He did not want to find out how or why Herman Opoku had tasted semen and neither did he want to show how impressed he was that Herman Opoku had tasted caviar. Edgar, or The Edster as he’d been then (pre-Edgar, a previous life), wasn’t even supposed to eat the lumpfish that his mother served on blinis with dollops of cream at her vodka parties. ‘It’s a sophisticated taste,’ she said. ‘You won’t like it. Hands off.’
Caviar and stuff were linking now in his mind. He chose to go with it, imagining a crucial part of the caviar-production process as the smearing of fish eggs with male stuff, an intricate, costly procedure, which was the secret reason why the resulting delicacy was so prized. Perhaps there were men, perhaps there were boys, trained, or bred, a family tradition, or kidnapped for that very purpose, condemned to a life of senseless erotic drudgery, milked like cows by Ukrainian women in dairy aprons and hats, or connected, in long, dehumanized rows, to machines by rubber hoses and electricity leads wired into the most sensitive places of penis and brain. Ruuugghghg. He shivered. He had never liked milk trucks and now he knew why.
A final inspection of the room revealed only one dollop that he’d missed, on the mirror over the sink. Urbanely flicking it away, he rinsed it under the tap and watched it swirl down the plughole. He sniffed his finger, which smelled both salty and sickly, a scent that reminded him of autumn. His mother was calling him, loud enough to be heard over the Walkman.
‘Edward!’
‘Coming.’
He was happy here and sorry to leave. The bathroom contained but was not cluttered by old person’s things, and Edgar found the place delightful. The walls were papered in purple and gold. The ceiling was white. Along the ledge by the side of the bath were medicines and dried sponges and bottles of bubble bath. The window between the bathtub and toilet looked over the garden, where roses climbed over the far trellis as if they were trying to get away, a wooden shed, some plant beds of what looked like salad leaves. Threads of a long-ago rope-swing hung from a venerable sort of tree. In the alcove by the toilet there was an anthology of cat cartoons, a history of the Onyataka Association, and a guide to the flora and fauna of Central New York State. Edgar was unimpressed by the cartoon book, uninterested in natural history; he opened the Onyataka Association book at the place that had been marked. The pages had been much underlined, with pencilled comments in the margins, and a small black-and-white photograph on the page of an unsmiling woman wearing a plain dress over trousers, but Edgar was more, if briefly, interested in the photograph that had been used as a bookmark. It was a snapshot of Warren, with close-cropped hair, standing out of focus on a front lawn with his arm around a white-haired lady who wore a red shawl over her shoulders and, unlike Warren, was smiling. She was, Edgar decided, Warren’s widowed grandmother. He saw her as a retired actress, and liked Warren all the better for her.
The sink was deep white. Like the bathtub, it perched on little bronze scaled feet. Edgar switched off his music and looked sternly into the mirror, pressing his chin down against his chest, crinkling his forehead to squash his eyebrows together, and said, most disapprovingly, ‘Edgar. Ed-gah! Ed-GAH! I’m surprised at you.’ Then he rolled his eyes and held his breath until he had to let it go.
‘Edward!’
‘Yes. Yes yes yes.’
Preparing for his return into the social world, the gentleman at his toilet washed his hands, failed to arch a solitary eyebrow, muttered in his fruitiest tone of warm approbation, ‘Ed-gaah’, and vacated the bathroom with his hands demurely in front of his groin, which was when he realized he’d neglected to zip himself back up, and hurriedly did so.
‘Did you get lost in there?’ Mon said.
‘No, I didn’t,’ said Edgar, with one hand in a trouser pocket discreetly wiping down a damp patch on his thigh.
‘Go to the dining room. The guests will be here soon.’
Waiting for their guests, they sat on high-backed chairs. Mon checked the contents of her handbag once and then again while she told Warren that after what had happened on the 747 she didn’t know how she would ever be able to fly again, which Edgar thought was a disrespectful way of thinking about the experience. Fay tried to explain to Edgar about how the state governor was doing such a poor job—The unemployment rate in this region is scandalous!—and then she and Warren talked about the faucet in the bathroom and time dripped slowly away. Edgar wondered if this was what the prelude to a funeral felt like. He had not been allowed his Walkman. He sat, as slouchily as he could get away with, then got up to read the mottoes and legends in the faded silk tapestries on the walls (‘Braidings, they’re called braidings,’ Mon corrected him when dutifully he admired them to his grandmother)—Followed her far and lone/The ways that we have gone braided in gold below a purple tree, beneath which some kind of Oriental lady seemed to be pursued by a sheep and a lamb, and a town scene, of church streets and high-necked pedestrians following an alarming little black terrier, See the gay people/Flaunting like flags/Belle in the steeple/Sky all in rags. When he had tired of that, he invented horrific injuries to the faces in the photographs on the mantelpiece: the square-faced bearded men acquired scything scars, and arrows through their eyes; the still women with their centre partings died horrific deaths with their heads split open by a vengeful woodsman’s axe. And time dripped, and Mon told him to come back to the table and Edgar found himself sitting straighter than he would have chosen, and he was far too enervated even to drum.
Fay had said it might be an amusing evening. Edgar doubted this, but the first guests to arrive did seem built for amusement. Company Bob was a vice-president of the Company or a vice-vice-president, rubicund like a clown, loud and aggressively amiable in a checked shirt that clashed madly with his ferocious skin. His wife was a plump woman with red hair who had tented herself inside a white dress. She stood impatiently at the sideboard that held the glasses and wine bottles until Warren poured her a drink, whereupon she sat at the table guarding herself with a quietly angry dignity that seemed there just to be lost.
‘We’re cousins,’ Company Bob told Edgar. ‘Through the Pagan side. And I think through the Stone side also. So’s Janice.’
‘Who’s Janice?’ Edgar asked.
‘I’m Janice,’ Mrs Company Bob said.
Guthrie, who was the next to arrive, was nicer. She was a spry white-haired woman with brilliant blue eyes that she enjoyed shining on people with an intimately enthusiastic attention. She kissed Fay and told the company that this was my very best friend! Guthrie questioned Edgar on the length of his stay and held his wrists to emphasize the shame of him not staying longer, and Edgar responded to her touch with a stiffening that indeed shamed him, but which was nothing compared to his response to Marilou Weathers. Marilou Weathers had wide eyes and a prettily thin chapped mouth and pale freckled skin that was redder around her eyes and mouth, and brown hair pulled back into a pony-tail. She entered the room, giggling timidly behind her husband, whom everyone called Coach. Edgar arranged his napkin over his lap and dared to look at her again. Marilou Weathers was tall and wore a big green jumper with the face of a dog embroidered on the front; its eyes protruded by her breasts, its red mouth hanging appealingly open. Edgar had to look away and inadvertently caught the attention of Coach Weathers, who had a tanned skin and sharp features and carried himself like an off-duty soldier, vigilant and coiled. He wore sunglasses and a peaked cap and baggy shorts and a faded college sweatshirt and spoke the fewest words required of him, as if life were a constant test behind enemy lines. His first name was Spiro. Edgar immediately admired and feared him.
‘I got to tell you Warren,’ Company Bob said, ‘we’re all totally behind this musical of yours.’ The way he said this made Edgar suspect that one of the secrets of adult life was that everyone said the reverse of what they really thought.
‘It’s an opera,’ Marilou said.
‘That’s what I mean. And you’ve got permission to put it on in the Mansion House?’
‘That’s the plan.’
‘I love history, don’t you?’ Guthrie said to Mon.
‘Just adore it,’ Mon said, making Edgar wince, but the sarcasm seemed to pass everyone else by.
‘Bob sometimes says that this place has got too much history,’ Janice said.
‘You can never have too much history,’ Mon said.
‘That’s exactly what I say,’ said Guthrie.
‘Bob doesn’t agree,’ Janice said.
‘It’s not that I disagree,’ the vice-president said, ‘just that you have to separate the business and the personal. All that nineteenth-century lovey-dovey business doesn’t sit well with the issues of corporate life.’
‘What’s the lovey-dovey business?’ Edgar asked, getting interested, his imagination providing an orgy of unlikely images that involved office desks on which were mounted bizarre contraptions that screwed into the barrels of telephone receivers.
‘What are the issues of corporate life?’ Mon annoyingly asked.
‘Leadership, responsibility, profitability,’ Bob said promptly. He then went through the flatware and silverware on the table, lifting up each knife, fork, spoon, plate and bowl and reporting its provenance. ‘Oh, and this is a very nice piece,’ he said, weighing a sauce-boat in his hand, which was soon splashed with Warren’s béarnaise sauce. ‘This is the Commonwealth line, isn’t it? Nineteen fifty or ’fifty-one or thereabouts.’
‘That’s really, really impressive,’ Marilou said, licking and then touching her chapped lips, as if she was reminding herself of a secret.
‘Oh I don’t know,’ Bob said modestly.
‘That to me is history also,’ Janice said.
‘It’s the history of the Company, not its pre-history. Whenever we have a new employee I send them down to the display room. I say, look at our product lines, memorize them. We make what we sell and we sell what we make. That’s how business works. The shareholders are very happy. And that’s what I try to explain to Malcolm.’
‘The new CEO’s an outsider,’ Janice said to Edgar, who was wondering if pretending to faint was a viable way out of this occasion.
‘That’s history for you,’ Mon was saying.
‘That’s what I say,’ Company Bob said. ‘Took someone like Mac to bring the whole shooting-match into the twentieth century.’ He turned to Edgar. ‘Your granddad was certainly a character. The stories I could tell you about him!’
‘I’ve had quite enough of Mac stories,’ Fay said.
‘I know exactly what you mean,’ Guthrie said, patting her best friend’s hand. ‘But it’s true that Mac was such a larger than life character. Mike is just like him in some ways. Do you remember that time on Marble Hill—’
‘This meat’s very good, Warren. It’s extremely tender,’ Fay said.
‘The soup was good also,’ Marilou said.
‘I’ll give you the recipe,’ Warren said.
‘I think she knows how to cook succotash,’ said Janice.
Everyone else had finished the main course. Edgar attempted a larger mouthful of meat in an effort to clear his unfinishable plate. But it was far too ambitious a portion and took an eternity to chew through and he was sure his cheeks were bulging like a cartoon squirrel’s. Warren and then Fay, kindly, to include him, asked him questions and all he could do was mumble and retch.
‘Don’t ever lose that accent. It’s terrific!’ Bob said.
Plates departed and bowls arrived, all identified by Bob with their brand name and year of manufacture. Bob drank more beer. Guthrie drank more wine and became flushed and talkative. Janice drank more wine and grew sober and quiet. Fay was engaged in a political debate with Company Bob. They were arguing about the Mansion House. Bob had suggested that the Mansion House should be sold off and little pinpricks of deep red appeared on Fay’s cheeks. Edgar had not seen his grandmother angry before. Her voice became stern. ‘If it wasn’t for the Mansion House then this could be anywhere else.’
‘Market forces. Place got to pay its way. Here’s a building where all the guest rooms are empty, a few old fellows living upstairs on peppercorn rent, and no one visits the museum. If we ran the Company like that we’d soon all be in the street. Got to remember who pays the piper. It’s the Company that keeps everything else afloat.’
‘Not market forces. Absolutely not. Where did the Company come from?’
‘Ancient history, Fay.’
‘That’s not the point. People around here used to live differently. They chose to live differently. It may not have lasted for ever and it didn’t bring heaven on earth but it was a very decent time, people looked after one other, worked with one other. It doesn’t matter so much what they believed but what they did, and what they did is find a new way of living.’
The conversation went on and others joined in and Edgar stopped being able to follow what they were talking about but he was sure that what Fay was saying was decent and right, as Bob’s skin became even redder than before and he kept saying, ‘That’s all very well but who’s going to pay for it?’ and ‘That sounds a lot like Communism to me and we know what happened to that!’ The debate collapsed under the force of Bob’s repetitions and the table returned to its separate groups. Mon flirted with Coach Weathers, who uncoiled a little under her attentions. Every time he looked to check what his wife was doing, Marilou Weathers held a spoon (1920s, Presidential line) defensively in front of her face.
‘So has he got you into this musical of his?’ Bob said to Fay, reaching for a conciliatory conversation. ‘He seems to’ve corralled half the women in town.’
Fay shook her head and slowly focused on Bob’s redness. ‘I don’t really have the voice for it.’
‘That’s not true,’ Warren said.
‘You’ve got a much better voice than I do!’ Guthrie said.
‘You’re not one of his victims too, are you?’ Bob asked, grinning at Warren as if he might be making a joke.
‘Harriet Stone at your service.’
‘I’m surprised at that,’ Bob said. ‘I’d’ve thought your hands would be full with the Blackberry Festival and whatnot. Which seems to be a much better use of your time. That to me is good history.’
‘Bob likes to divide things into good and bad,’ Janice said.
When a knock came on the front door, Warren sighed. ‘We know who that’ll be, don’t we?’ he said.
‘You’re too hard on Jerry. You shouldn’t be,’ Fay said.
‘Jerry?’ said Bob. ‘Jerome Prindle? Is he ambulatory?’
‘In a manner of speaking,’ Warren said. ‘He’s wooing Fay.’
‘Warren!’ Fay said, and the blush on her cheek could have signified shyness or embarrassment or pleasure, or just the spreading of the rash that Edgar guiltily associated with the disinfectant-doused flannel he had used to clean the bathroom.
‘I’m sorry,’ the wreckage of the man in the doorway said. ‘I didn’t know you had company. I brought a seed-cake. I’ll go.’
‘You will not. You’ll sit down and join us,’ Fay said.
The latest guest was an old man, who seemed to have outlived his body and his clothes. His skin was mottled red and white, his trousers and shirt were brown and stained. His face was decorated with patches of stubble. His mouth hung open, showing his tongue, which was the same pale colour as his lips. He watched Fay through blue eyes that were glazed and swimming, while his hands clawed slowly at the tablecloth. He sat between Mon and Coach Spiro, who both angled their chairs away from him.
‘Tom’s looking well,’ Jerome said.
‘He’s on a new diet,’ Fay said. ‘Dry food only. It seems to have cleared up some of his catarrh. But he sleeps all of the time. Sometimes I think it would be a mercy—’
Warren interrupted: ‘Maybe Ed should be trying out for your soccer team.’
‘Are you a player?’ Coach asked, to which Edgar could only shake his head for an answer.
‘He’s very good at it,’ Mon brazenly lied, in misjudged loyalty.
‘I’m really not,’ Edgar managed to say.
‘Better to underestimate yourself than the other. Marilou for example thinks she can sing,’ Coach said accusingly at Warren.
‘I’m sure she’s going to make an adorable Mary Pagan,’ Guthrie said.
‘Do we need that stuff, is what I’m asking,’ Bob said. ‘It’s all kind of weird to my way of thinking.’
‘She was a fascinating character,’ Warren said.
‘A little too fascinating, if you know what I mean. I think those dowagers from the forties had the right idea.’
‘What they did was awful,’ Fay said. ‘Pete was so furious.’
‘Yeah. Well. Pete,’ Bob said, winking at Coach.
‘He was a good man,’ Jerome said.
‘He was a very good man,’ Fay said.
‘I guess. But I wouldn’t have had Spanky Pete be my judge of right and wrong. You know what I’m saying? Those ladies were protecting the families and the Company. That’s not so awful in my book. But tell me, who’s playing my wife’s most illustrious ancestor?’
‘He still can’t find a John Prindle Stone,’ Fay said. ‘Who would have thought it so difficult to find a good baritone?’
‘We’re running out of time,’ Warren said.
‘I hope I’ll still be around to see it,’ Fay said, with a surprising cheerfulness.
‘Is it only me or does this cream taste sour?’ said Janice.
‘It’s crème fraîche,’ Warren said.
‘That’s what I’m asking and I don’t think it is.’
‘What I’d absolutely love to know,’ Marilou said fascinatingly, leaning towards Warren, the rough shoulder of her sweater scratching Edgar’s arm, ‘is Mary’s motivation. Do you think much of it is religious or does it all come down to love?’
‘What on earth has happened to the azalea?’ Jerome demanded to know.
Warren was being besieged on all sides. Janice was waving her spoon (Community plate, 1933) of suspicious cream. Marilou had rested her chin on her fist and was nodding encouragingly to pull Warren’s required response out of him. Edgar decided to help. ‘We saw some Indians yesterday,’ he said.
After watching the drip of cream from Janice’s spoon on to the table, Warren, in reciprocation, said, helpfully, ‘The bingo hall.’
‘It’s ironic, isn’t it?’ Fay said. ‘They’re making these little amounts of money from gambling when they’re such an unlucky people. Warren’s thinking of donating the profits from the opera to help them.’
‘That’s a lovely idea. I think the Indians are tragic,’ Marilou said. ‘In the true sense of the word.’
‘Talk of profits is somewhat optimistic,’ Warren said, ‘but we’re going to try to make some kind of donation to their education fund.’
‘Yeah right. Wigwam College,’ Bob said.
‘I don’t think that gives entirely the right impression to our visitors,’ Guthrie said.
‘With all due respect, I don’t think our visitors will ever understand this place until they’ve been here as long as I have. But the Onyatakas have got to face up to things. The trouble with history, it’s like everything else, there’s winners and losers and the Indians are the losers. It’s unfortunate, but if it wasn’t for rain you wouldn’t have rainbows, you know what I’m saying?’
‘Now they’re talking about building a casino,’ Guthrie said.
‘Pie in the sky,’ Bob said.
‘Bob says it’s never going to happen,’ Janice said.
‘It never is going to happen,’ Bob said. ‘The Onyatakas think it’s going to be a licence to print money, but they’ll never get it together. They never do. I remember something really choice that Mac said to me once. There was this Onyataka who worked as a gardener at the Mansion House—do you remember him, Fay? Kind of scruffy fellow, wore a straw hat. Liked his booze.’
‘His name was Ronald,’ Jerome said.
‘That’s right, I think it was. He used to drive this beat-up tractor really super slow around the grounds. And I remember Mac saying to me, “There’s progress for you, look at Ronald, a hundred years ago his ancestors were eating each other and here he is now, master of the internal combustion engine.” You got to laugh.’
Company Bob and Coach were the only ones laughing. Janice and Mon and Marilou watched them with dissimilar looks of distaste. Warren was carrying things through to the kitchen, stopping to offer Guthrie something for her cough, which she haughtily declined. Fay had closed her eyes and might have been sleeping. Jerome already was.
7 (#u30c399cb-4ec6-584b-b5bc-3fde46a149b0)
Mon took flight with regretful hugs and repeated sighs of ‘Oh Eddie!’ She tousled his hair and he had to pull it straight again. She kissed him for the thousandth time and climbed, as if reluctantly, into the station-wagon.
‘Okay Eddie, you’ll be in charge,’ Warren said, patting out a double toot on the horn as the car pulled away.
Edgar stood with Fay on the porch to wave the car off. Maybe because she’d noticed the bereft feeling he was manfully trying to suppress, she gave him a handful of notes and coins. ‘Your father asked me to give you these. It’s for spending money until he gets here.’
Edgar didn’t trust his voice, so he nodded his appreciation.
Fay rubbed the red patch on her throat. ‘I need to pick up my John Mills movie from the video store,’ she said, as if this was a matter of great delicacy that she might nonetheless trust him with. ‘You might want to come with me, if that’s not too boring a project.’
On the way down to the store, Edgar adjusting his walk to the slowness of Fay’s, sometimes holding out a steadying hand when she seemed about to stumble or stall, Fay told him about someone called Mary, of whom she spoke with such fondness that he assumed she was her dearest friend, now sadly moved away. The way she spoke about Mary made Edgar like her too.
‘Her impetuosity sometimes gets her into trouble, but if you don’t get into trouble then how can you say you’ve lived? Don’t you agree?’
‘Yes, I think I do,’ Edgar said.
‘Oh look, we’re here already. The boys are very nice to me here.’
The boys at the video store wore tight black polo-neck jumpers and old-fashioned glasses and had short hair that was badly dyed yellow. One of them was an Onyataka and the others from long-time families of Creek. Edgar knew this because Fay had told him so but they were indistinguishable to him. The video-store boys liked Fay. They liked the obscure rigour of her choices. As a special favour, they let her take the picture boxes of the movies she rented home with her, instead of the pink and blue store boxes that the customers were usually given.
‘We got you your Rocking Horse Winner,’ one of them said.
‘That’s terrific,’ Fay said. ‘I’m very grateful.’
Fay hardly talked on the way home. She was concentrating on the efforts of her walk. When they had reached the Pagan House she exhaled loudly and smiled, in comradeship. ‘What would you like to do now? You could watch my movie with me or maybe you’d like to see something more of the neighbourhood? The Mansion House runs some very interesting tours. I know Jerry would love to show you around.’
She raised an arm towards the Mansion House across the rise and the movement ruined her balance; her foot grasped for the porch step but it was crooked there and the foot slipped and she fell, in slow motion, looking surprised and cross. Edgar, frozen in guilty consternation, watched her go down, crumpling against the screen door.
Fay made little movements of her fingers and looked up at him, baffled, until the sun hurt her eyes so she covered them with her arm. Her legs were splayed wide, and her dress had ridden up over her knees. Edgar’s first act was to tug down the dress to restore his grandmother’s modesty. He squatted beside her and laid a comforting hand on her elbow.
‘I’m so sorry. That was ridiculous,’ she said.
‘I should have caught you.’
‘I’m such a fool. If you could just help me to sit up? Warren’s going to be very angry with me.’
Edgar managed to manoeuvre Fay to the kitchen. She was much lighter than he expected and he should have been able to catch her, even one-handed, with his free arm held nonchalantly behind his back.
‘I’m going to be black and blue tomorrow. Whenever will I learn not to do that kind of thing?’
He fetched a stool for her to rest her feet on. ‘Should I call a doctor?’
‘I make it a rule never to trouble the doctor three days in a row. I think I’ll just regather and then watch my movie. I’m so sorry for causing such a fuss. What do you think you’d like to do?’
‘I thought I might just take a walk around. If that’s all right?’
‘Of course it is, my dear.’
‘But I think I’ll wait until Warren gets back. Just in case.’
‘There’s really no need.’
‘I know, but I want to,’ Edgar said firmly. ‘If you don’t mind?’
‘Of course I don’t mind. You’re a very sweet boy. You know, it’s very nice to have you here.’
‘It’s very nice to be here,’ Edgar said promptly.
All the same, there was an awful silence in the house, as if it was complicit in Fay’s fall and was now planning its next assault upon her. Edgar wondered if he should feel afraid of this house, but that was contrary to the instant congeniality he had felt for its spirit and a way of making excuses for himself, and then he realized that the silence was due to the absence of the cat’s snores that had supplied a rumbling rhythm to the soundworld of the Pagan House. The cat basket was empty, apart from a faded purple cushion, a moss of lost ginger hair.
‘Where’s the cat?’ he asked, and Fay didn’t quite answer.
‘Cats often go somewhere private to do their, when they’re ready to, you know.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Edgar, who didn’t.
When Warren returned, Fay whispered to Edgar, ‘You should go now. I don’t want you to take the blame. I know what you’re like.’
She knew him better than his mother did, better then than he knew himself.
‘I think I’ll take a walk around,’ he said loudly, attempting a wink.
Edgar left behind the sounds of Warren chiding and Fay’s birdlike voice making its apologies. Edgar had been left in charge of Fay and had failed.
The boredom of this town, through which Edgar strolled with a look of quiet dignity on his face. He had never felt so lonely. Trees, timbered houses, sports fields, parks, the video store, the bookshop that never opened, all these things felt entirely indifferent to him. He asserted himself by imagining how a cat might get lost in any of them—stuck snoring in a storage cupboard in the Company administration building or too fat to escape from the hole it had found into the Company Community Center, dreaming of plump mice or the kitten it had used to be, but he had never seen the cat awake so adventurousness was an unlikely quality for it to possess. That suggested malice, then, a human agency at work, the sinister hand of the cat-napper. Why should anyone steal a cat? Perhaps it was the secret historical ingredient that went into the glaze coating of the china produced at the Company factory in Creek. The Indians had been cannibals once, or so Company Bob had said. Maybe they had taken the cat for dark ceremony, old practices that required warm flesh, pulsing blood—but the only Indians he had seen were the stolid men outside the bingo hall, and one of the young men in glasses who worked in the video store, but he didn’t know which one, and none of them had looked like a blood drinker to Edgar.
Still, he should not rule anyone out. The cat was missing, everywhere in peril, and everyone was a suspect.
Edgar walked across the bridge down to Creek. He looked for signs of the cat—tell-tale ginger hair, a lonesome mew—outside the supermarket and the gas station, the Silver City Diner, the Campanile Family Restaurant and Pizzeria, a dance studio, nail parlour (Luscious Nails), tanning salon (Tan Your Can!) and another pizza parlour, Dino’s. He would not have thought a town the size of Creek could support two pizza parlours. He had walked lingeringly past Dino’s twice already, attracted by the pinball machine, deterred by the youths who hung out there, who looked just like the two he had seen outside the supermarket, wild-looking, in cut-off jeans and check shirts, who had squeezed themselves into shopping carts, their legs dangling off the front, and were slowly racing each other down the incline of the car-park. Twice he had resolved to go in and his nerve had failed him each time.
But now he would be strong: a cat investigator required recreation, and he would be protected by the jangle of his father’s quarters, the secret music of his Walkman. He would just pretend they weren’t there, the two shaven-headed hulking boys with little sprouts of beard below their lower lips, lighting matches and flicking them at a third, smaller boy, who wore the same uniform of cut-off shorts and baggy check shirt, but whose face was narrower, more weaselly, acne-pitted and fingernail-picked. Another, the largest one, who was crouched hammering at the rusted corpse of a motorcycle, wore blond hair and a Dino’s paper hat and a grey T-shirt with cut-off sleeves that had the home-made slogan Indian Fighters! scrawled across the back.
Edgar walked past them as if undeterred, and went to the pinball machine. He put in one of his father’s quarters, frowned, slapped the machine with the heel of his hand to let it know who was in charge, pressed the start button, nodded at the display of lights, turned down his music, acknowledged the chorus of beeps and whistles and bells, checked the action of the flippers, pulled the plunger and let it go, and away he played.
Under the glass was a list of instructions, but Edgar liked to learn how these machines worked by playing them, by their responses to him, and his to them. His first ball was a good one, staying under control, keeping in the lanes, until it hit the left bank at an awkward angle, spun back on to his flippers; he tried to catch it, but the flipper was too clumsy, or he was: the ball hopped and fell between the ends of the two flippers and down the middle and was lost. It’s okay, Edgar nodded, this was a decent machine, a worthy opponent. You treat me with respect and I’ll treat you with respect. It was hard to find these machines any more. Everything was computer and video.
The lounging youths were walking slowly through, and now he could feel the attention of their unfriendly scrutiny. One of them jostled against his shoulder as they passed into a back room, where they drowned the friendly noises of the machine with loud lurching music, guitars and drums, clattering, angry, incompetent sounds that made the back of his neck vulnerable with their bad intent.
The second ball built up his score, and he was unlucky to lose it, just before he was about to hit the drop-down targets again to claim a free ball, but the pressure was on him, the music had stopped as abruptly and pointlessly as it had begun, and the hoodlums were back jostling behind him, so before he plunged the third ball into play he put another quarter on the glass top to reserve his next turn. The third ball was a disaster, swooping through the gate, down the alley, it took an awkward carom off his left flipper, bounced against the grinning monster face in the middle, which he had learned must be avoided, and fell through the impotent rise of his flippers.
Edgar felt sick. He had confirmed whatever low opinion of him these dangerous thugs might have. He had performed badly under pressure, like a boy, and the largest one, the Indian Fighter with the blond hair and the paper cap, reached for Edgar’s next quarter and said, ‘Unlucky, kid,’ and slotted it into the machine and pushed him aside.
‘Let’s see the master at work.’
‘But that’s—’ said Edgar.
‘I need some room here.’
A hard elbow cracked into Edgar’s ribs.
‘Tough luck, kid,’ said the weasel, unsympathetically. ‘You gonna order something?’
‘No,’ said Edgar.
‘We’ll see you later, kid.’
Edgar stood disconsolate. They were gathered by the machine with their backs to him. The player used his whole body, flicking the flippers double-fast, hips pushing the path of the ball into the desired lane, his hands slapping the sides of the machine. ‘Sky is so good,’ he said, supplying his own commentary. ‘He’s got all the moves.’
Stubborn Edgar, alarmed at his own impulses, pushed towards the machine. ‘I want my quarter back,’ he said.
Ignoring him, Sky flipped and shoved and jerked his head to tell the ball where to go, and miraculously it did, and miraculously his paper hat stayed on his head.
‘You’re gonna lose it,’ said the weasel.
‘It’s outta control,’ and ‘You is fucked,’ said the other two, simultaneously, then glared at each other so violently that they had to be brothers.
‘In your face. Watch me and weep, you suckers.’
‘I want my quarter back,’ Edgar said.
Someone else had come into the pizza parlour, another enormous boy—they grow them big here—closer in age to the hoodlums than to Edgar. He carried himself awkwardly, as if he was making a perpetual apology for his size, the fluff of his incipient beard, the cleanness of his jeans and the T-shirt he wore over his sweatshirt, the pimples across his broad Scandinavian forehead.
‘Now look what you done made me do! Lost the fuckin’ ball!’
Edgar wished the gang’s inattention back. The sight of them all staring at him was not a comfortable one. He had met their type before, in London, brutalists, torturers of boys and beasts; they immediately went to the top of his list of suspects. He hoped the bulky stranger would intervene. Maybe their attention would turn to him.
‘I want my quarter back. You took my quarter. I want it back.’
He had established his position. There was no turning back. So this was how he was destined to die, friendless and forsaken in a pizza parlour in Creek. He supposed even his mother wouldn’t be able to recognize his battered remains after they had been dredged out of the river. No, no. That’s not him. That’s not my son. It can’t be!
I’m afraid there’s no mistake, ma’am. Dental records and DNA and suchlike prove it. That’s your boy, or what they left of him. Just for God’s sake get that, that thing into the ground quick, the sight of it is making decent men weep.
‘What did he say?’
‘I didn’t hear him. You hear him?’
‘I don’t think he spoke. Did he speak?’
‘You must have heard. He’s got a really funny voice.’
‘Did you speak, kid?’
‘My name’s Edgar.’
It was the first time his secret name had been spoken in public, and how he hoped it had the magic it promised.
‘What? What he say?’
‘He says his name’s Edgar.’
‘He’s got balls.’
‘Where you from, Edgar?’
‘Are you British, Edgar?’
‘Have you got balls, Edgar?’
‘He’s got balls. Edgar’s got balls.’
‘I thought the British were famous for having no balls.’
‘You got balls, Edgar?’
‘He’s not talking now.’
‘I don’t think he talked before.’
‘If you’ve got balls, Edgar, I think you’re gonna have to prove you got balls.’
‘You going to show us your balls, Edgar?’
‘He might be leaving.’
‘I think Edgar’s leaving. Are you leaving, Edgar? You didn’t say anything and now you’re leaving and we’re not going to see you again? Give Edgar some room. I think he’s leaving.’
‘I want my quarter back.’
Edgar had gone beyond being astounded by his own behaviour. He was reconciled to it now and fixed to his path and would take it to its inevitable violent end.
‘Did Edgar say something?’
‘I think he’s definitely got balls.’
‘Almost definitely.’
‘I think Edgar talks too much.’
‘I like how he talks, though. I warnt my quharrrrtarr. It’s funny.’
‘Edgar’s talking is going to get him into trouble one day.’
‘He’s in trouble now.’
‘Let’s see his balls,’ said the weasel, trying to incite his more powerful friends.
‘You took my quarter. I want it back.’
They were about sixteen or seventeen years old and they had muscles that were streaked with motorcycle and pizza grease and they wore tufts of hair on the chins of their hard, unforgiving faces, and he was almost thirteen and lightweight and maybe they’d go easier on him because of that. He wasn’t reassured by the affectionate way they were sneering at him. He had seen enough playground massacres to know that the bully loves his victim.
‘Give him a quarter, Ray.’
‘Wha’? Why me?’ whined the weasel. ‘I don’t have a quarter.’
Sky cuffed Ray on the side of the head and kept hitting him until he pulled out a quarter.
‘Shit,’ said Ray, enviously. He flipped the quarter to Edgar, who predictably dropped it. He didn’t suffer the kicks to the head he was expecting as he retrieved it from the grease-spattered red lino floor.
His new name had proved itself, and this was a good transaction, his father’s coin exchanged for the currency of the community.
‘Okay,’ he said.
The pinball machine sparked back into life.
‘Goodbye,’ he said.
He was ignored. They clustered around the machine again. Sky pulled back the plunger to propel the ball, but was interrupted by the stranger saying, ‘Hi,’ and Edgar—shocked at his own malice and ignobility of nature—hoped to see the bad intentions going his way.
‘Hey Marvin.’
‘Husky! What’s up.’
‘Guys.’
Sky released the plunger and headed for the back room, with the others following, the ball jittering and pinging, it and the machine and Edgar ignored. He braved himself to leap in to play the rest of the game, as the band clattered back into action with the same mistimed vigour of delivery, but they had a vocalist now, Marvin, he guessed, who sang in a beautiful and reckless low voice that Edgar hated him for possessing.
When Edgar returned to the house, hoping to get to his bedroom, to collapse into solitary consolation, Warren called him into the kitchen, where he was emptying the dishwasher. Warren peeled off the black rubber gloves he wore for the performance of domestic tasks. His hands were, Edgar inconsequentially noticed, slightly paler than his arms.
‘You missed your dad.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Your dad called.’
On his way back to the house Edgar had slowed his heart, calmed the wild pumping of adrenaline by throwing sticks at a pine cone and then pine cones at a stick. He had triumphed in a staring contest with a glum red bird. He had paused on the bridge and tossed pine cones into the brown-stoned stream until a passing car slowed down and a bald man had snapped at him to stop what he was doing. He had killed time until it became a point of honour to kill more of it, to sicken himself back into boredom. And meanwhile his dad had phoned and he’d missed the call. Edgar scratched at the inside of his arm until he was alerted to the fact he was doing so by Warren’s curious, slightly concerned expression.
‘Does he want me to call him back?’
‘I don’t think so. I’m not sure where he is, actually. He says sorry and everything but he’s been delayed. Business to take care of. He’ll be arriving a bit later than he thought.’
‘Tomorrow evening?’
That was Edgar’s furthest projection: the morning was unachievable, the evening made sense, his father driving through the day, birthday gifts carelessly scattered in the back seat of his open-top car, to stay overnight in his mother’s house, his house—they were always saying how much time had passed since his last visit. Edgar and his father wouldn’t want to begin their own drive until the morning, after breakfast: it was a long journey they would be making together.
‘Not quite, Eddie.’
Warren was very good at breaking bad news. He should have had a job as one of those army men who stand at front doors and aren’t allowed to touch or hug the broken women who’ve just been told that their boys have died.
‘He’s been delayed. He won’t be able to make it tomorrow.’
‘The day after?’
‘Probably not till the end of the week. But I’m sure we can keep you entertained up till then. He says, sorry. So. I hope you’re hungry. Fay will be down just after she’s done her exercises.’
At supper, after Warren had checked that Fay had taken her evening medication, he asked Edgar about his walk.
‘It was fine,’ Edgar said, and Fay, seeing something sad in Edgar’s eyes, had the delicacy to prevent Warren enquiring further.
‘These mushrooms are delicious,’ Fay said. ‘Is there garlic in them?’
‘I just stir them around from time to time while they’re cooking, with a fork that has a clove of garlic on its, you know, prongs.’
‘Tines,’ said Fay.
‘Excuse me?’ said Warren.
‘The prongs of a fork. They’re called tines.’
‘Oh yes, that’s right, of course they are.’
Warren seemed to like being corrected by Fay, the passage of wisdom down the generations. Paintings hung on the white walls of the kitchen, most of them Fay’s own watercolours of riverside scenes executed when her sight was still largely intact.
‘Have you found the cat yet?’ Edgar asked.
‘How’s your ankle?’ Warren asked.
‘It’s a lot better. Edward was terrific looking after me. I didn’t miss you at all.’
She dazzled Edgar with her smile.
‘That’s good to hear,’ Warren said. ‘How’s the rash?’
‘I think it’s getting better,’ Fay said, covering her throat and chin with a hand.
‘We should get Newhouse to take a look at it.’
‘No more medication. If you shook me I’d rattle. Don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll make it through till the Festival.’
‘May I leave the table?’ Edgar said.
‘Of course you can, my dear. I love your manners.’
Edgar escaped to the Music Room, where he compiled a list of cat-napping suspects, which did not exclude his mother—was it accidental only that she had left on the day that Tom disappeared? And then he counted his money, which amounted to seven dollars and forty-nine cents, and went through the record albums, sorting them into separate piles according to likely interest. The interesting pile he further subdivided into those he thought belonged to his father and those to his uncle Frank. He imagined Frank to have a taste for flowery illustration and fanciful covers. His father he allowed all those simply designed albums with the group’s photograph glowering on the front. On the window-ledge, he arranged the ones with girls he wanted to look at on the covers, blocking out the shallow lights of the Mansion House opposite.
8 (#u30c399cb-4ec6-584b-b5bc-3fde46a149b0)
We believe that Kingdom now coming is the same that was established in heaven at the Second Coming of Christ [70 AD]. Then God commenced a kingdom in human nature independent of the laws of this world. We look for its reestablishment here, and this extension of an existing government into this world is that we mean by the Kingdom of God. I will put the question. Is not now the time for us to commence the testimony that the Kingdom of God has come?
The Spiritual Moralist, John Prindle Stone, 1845
Mary is gone, in zealous spirit, to accompany Captain Carter on a missionary visit to an infant Perfectionist congregation in Greencastle. Little Georgie is with Mary’s sister in Rochester. George spends his hermitry in work upon the land and studies of the Bible. He has never felt quite so lonely. His spirits and vitality are sinking. He can hardly rouse himself to go to the general store on Turkey Street. Even blind Jess grows peevish with lack of use. In compensation he feeds her too many turnips.
He had not realized how dependent his energies are upon Mary’s. In the absence of his wife, he is without initiative, petulant and doltish. His beard grows. His clothes are dirty. Each day he resolves anew to abandon this place, to follow the missionaries to Greencastle, to join his child in Rochester, to visit John Prindle Stone in Vermont, or else return to New York City, where he might taunt his sluggish spirits with the sin he has left behind. Each night he falls sleepless into bed, the day ahead of him stretching out as empty and useless as the previous one. He sets himself small tasks that seem, in their midnight contemplation, manageable. Each morning he fails to accomplish or even begin any one of them. He has become accustomed to rising late, to sit out the lethargic death of the morning at the table in the parlour, still in his night-clothes and sleeping cap.
He can play the violin, that at least he is capable of: the sounds he coaxes from it, the action of the strings beneath his fingers, bring the image of his wife closer.
They had met for the first time on the Bowery. George was walking back to his lodgings from the newspaper office to wash and change before setting out for the weekly meeting of the Moral Reform League at Mr Green’s townhouse on Fifty-Third Street. An Irish urchin running pellmell through the crowd collided with George Pagan, who held him, looking for the purse in his pale hand, the pursuing robbed gentleman. The boy’s hands were empty and the only pursuer was a young lady, who smiled at George as she took hold of the urchin. The child twisted and struggled and wept and surrendered. George asked if he should fetch an officer. Her amused eyes reached straight into George to a place that he had no prior acquaintance with or even knowledge of. She told him she was the child’s teacher, bringing her charge home.
‘This happens at the end of every day. He tries to run back to school. It is my task to persuade him home.’ She stroked the child’s hair and brow. His shoulders relaxed. She wiped the tear tracks off his face. She whispered to him, comforting words to the melody of a Congregationalist hymn, and George was startled by a stab of jealousy for this child, who could so unthinkingly provoke such actions of heart and hand.
‘This is surely a novelty,’ George said. ‘I would have thought it a unique case, a schoolboy that cannot bear to be absent from school.’
‘We fail the ones who love us best. Education affords a glimpse of somewhere else, a preferable place, without always offering a way there.’
And then, with that quality of quickness that would always so enchant George Pagan, she interrupted his considerations of a reply with a curtsy, as if the drab crowded street were a débutante ball. ‘Mary Johnson,’ she said.
‘George Pagan. At your service.’
‘Good afternoon, George Pagan,’ she said, and, businesslike, she led the spent, unresisting child to his unwelcome door.
Mary lived, as Mr Stone would later remark, in the perpetual now. Everything moved fast with her as if without precedence or consequence: her decisions, her wit, her curiosity. Where George’s understanding crabbed from ignorance to knowledge, dimly inching through objections and inconsistencies like a blind man tapping along a nighttime street, the speed of her attention annihilated the distance between darkness and light.
Her pastoral task achieved, she seemed unsurprised to be walking in step up Second Avenue with George Pagan, and her consent to accompany him to the meeting at Mr Green’s was only slightly more miraculous than his boldness in issuing the invitation.
At Mr Green’s townhouse on Fifty-Third Street, the congregants drank tea and lemonade from Mrs Green’s pale blue china. Marriage rights were discussed, and the liquor question, and universal suffrage was allowed, and slavery abolished, and faith-healing argued for and against, while Mrs Green poured tea, and the philanthropist Mr Green blinked merrily at the enthusiasm in his parlour, but for Mary this was never going to be quite enough. Speed of progress, if only in talk, had to keep up with the quickness of her heart.
No photograph could picture her. In photographs—taken at the end of the Prince Street school year, three short lines of pupils and staff, or at the penultimate meeting of the Reform League at Mr Green’s, or at their wedding, with her preacher father already standing aloof from his unmanageable daughter—her slim face looked pinched and narrow, her chin and brow too mannishly strong, her eyes wide and impatient. George looked at his best in photographs. His strongly carved features became sculptural, implying all the power he knew he lacked in life. Mary’s vivacity charmed and beautified everything around her. Later, he would encounter the ferocity of her temper, which—until events gave her greater opportunity for remorse—was the ashamed subject of her largest self-reproach, flaring with a sudden heat, but then, as abruptly, it would dampen, abate, the flames clearing, her true nature revealed again, unscorched, her good fellowship and ardour and sympathy reestablishing themselves as the ruling agents of her passions.

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