The Pagan House

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.’