Pagan and Her Parents

‘Arditti has skilfully crafted a compelling novel, ably interweaving seemingly insignificant events and asides into the final denouement, and has created in Leo a charming likeable hero. The scenes with Leo and Pagan are both funny and touching’

Time Out

‘A tale of our times … brilliantly illuminated by Arditti, who uses his pen like the brush of a pointillist for his effects, the children being especially real’

Attitude

‘Pagan and her Parents is one of those rare things: a page-turner of a novel with a strong political heart’

The Pink Paper

‘Arditti is unusually deft in his manipulation of the way a narrative unfolds’

Independent

‘Arditti is a literary Hogarth, savaging modern England on many levels. Like Hogarth, Arditti is a moralist. He never accepts the conventional values of the patriarchs but looks to a new extended family. An astonishingly intelligent, funny and touching book’

Scotsman

‘Caustically funny … a wonderful and completely unsentimental evocation of a small girl. Arditti twists and wrests language like a craftsman. Altogether this novel is extraordinarily moving, involving, intelligent and humane – I feel the better for having read it’

Yorkshire Post

‘Arditti writes exceedingly well and with resonance and he traces the ever-evolving relationship between Leo and Pagan with skill and genuine feeling’

Publisher’s Weekly (US)

‘Pagan and Her Parents is an unexpectedly tender book. Gripping and beautifully written’

Catholic Herald

‘Sardonic wit and keen observation. Emotionally convincing … rich in detail’

Times Literary Supplement

‘Timely, relevant and opportune … gripping and vivid … provocative and stimulating. A novel of tension and intrigue’

Morning Star

‘A compulsive, well-written story that poses questions about who is best qualified to bring up a child’

Good Housekeeping [Book of the Month]

‘Pagan and her Parents will split opinion. It tackles taboos that society hardly wants to consider. It is brave, witty and stimulating’

Jewish Chronicle

‘Finely crafted, thought-provoking and topical. Arditti argues the case against prejudice and for civil liberties in an eloquent and entertaining way, and he offers hope for a future based on real humanity’

Gay News

‘A fabulously spell-binding effort. He handles his explosive subject with great tact and humour … A rare, first-rate marriage of crisp, vivid storytelling and political manifesto’

The Advocate Literary Supplement

‘A real page-turner’

San Francisco Chronicle

Pagan and Her Parents

MICHAEL ARDITTI

For my mother

Table of Contents

Praise
Title Page
Dedication

ONE
1
2
3
4

TWO
1
2
3
4
5

THREE
1
2
3
4
5

FOUR
1
2
Copyright

ONE

First Affidavit of Leonard Peter Young
on behalf of the Respondent
Sworn the 25th day of March 1992

In the Brighton County Court

Case  No. 7296

In the matter of Pagan Mulliner

And in the matter of the Children’s Act 1989 

Between

Muriel Ellen Mulliner &

Edgar Atkins Mulliner

APPLICANTS

and

Leonard Peter Young

RESPONDENT

I, LEONARD PETER YOUNG, Writer and Broadcaster, of 64 Addison Avenue, London VV11, MAKE OATH and say as follows:-

1. I am the respondent in this matter and I have read what purports to be a true copy of the Affidavit sworn by the Applicants on the 12th day of February 1992 and filed herein. I am 37 years old and am the guardian of Pagan Mulliner (herinafter referred to as Pagan).

2. I accept that paragraph 2 of the Applicants’ Affidavit is true. I began living with Candida Mulliner in Cambridge in the autumn of 1974 and continued to do so up until her death in November of last year.

3. I accept that paragraph 3 of the Applicants’ Affidavit is true.

4. I deny the allegations of inadequacy contained in paragraph 4 of the Applicants’ Affidavit and assert that I am fully able to care for Pagan.

5. As to the Applicants’ own relationship with Candida, I would say that their account of the matter in paragraph 5 of their Affidavit is distorted and I would give my own account of it as follows:-

a. Candida informed me of her antipathy to the Applicants, her adopted parents, at our first encounter in Italy in the summer of 1973. It is my belief that her obsessive search for her natural parents sprang entirely from this.

b. It is utterly untrue that I alienated Candida from the Applicants. On the contrary, for years I urged a reconciliation and, on several occasions before her death, suggested that she write to them.

c. My own relationship with my parents is an excellent one; I am in regular contact with my mother, who regards Pagan as a granddaughter.

d. The poster in the Maid’s Causeway kitchen was Candida’s and not mine.

e. I was unaware of the incident said to have occurred on July 30th 1986; but, in view of the Applicants’ response to Candida’s pregnancy, it is no surprise to learn that she gave orders for her mother to be refused entry to the maternity ward.

6. As to the assertions in paragraph 6 of the Applicants’ Affidavit, I would like to comment as follows:-

a. Although my relationship with Candida Mulliner was not a conventional one, it was a perfectly natural one. We enjoyed a loving friendship for over eighteen years, which was the focus of both our lives. It was never exclusive and allowed for the existence of other friendships and other loves.

b. Candida saw sexuality as a means of communication not confinement. She was faithful but not monogamous. She had several lovers at the time of Pagan’s conception and resolutely refused to name the father; I sometimes doubt whether she knew.

c. I have never claimed that Pagan was my daughter by birth. To me the issue is immaterial. Fatherhood is in the love, not the blood.

7. As to the assertion in paragraph 7 of the Applicants’ Affidavit that they are best equipped to care for Pagan, I would like:–

a. to repeat my paragraph 6c.

b. to refer to Candida Mulliner’s express wish in both her sworn statement of 11th September 1988, exhibited to this Affidavit and marked LPY 1, and in her last will and testament, exhibited to this Affidavit and marked LPY 2, in which she asserts that, in the event of her death, the Applicants should have no access to her daughter.

8. I dispute the assertion in paragraph 8 of the Applicants’ Affidavit that, as a man, I am unfit to bring up a girl, and ask whether they would have made such a claim in the case of a biological father. I would add that:–

a. I employ a full-time nanny, Susan Redding, who has lived with us since August 1989. Her relationship with both Pagan and myself is excellent. She has declared her intention to continue in the position for the foreseeable future.

b. Pagan is a lively, intelligent girl with many interests. Since last autumn she has been attending school in Cottesmore Gardens, where her form teacher describes her as ‘imaginative, eager to learn, happy in herself and with others’. She is developing a wide social circle, both among her schoolmates and the children of our friends. She goes to riding and ballet classes in the neighbourhood and takes leading rein lessons on Saturday mornings in Hyde Park; these would be seriously disrupted were she to move to Hove.

c. She will not lack for female influence. We have many close women friends who have pledged their help and support.

d. She is devoted to her cat, Trouble, to which the Applicant expressed a marked aversion during her visit on January 22nd of this year. Her exact words were ‘I don’t know why children need pets; dolls are so much cleaner’.

e. If the mother’s influence is paramount, how does the Applicant explain the breakdown of her relationship with her own daughter?

9a. As to paragraph 9a of the Applicants’ Affidavit, I refute the suggestion that Pagan is in any way miserable. I do however believe that some disturbance in her behaviour is only to be expected after the recent death of her mother. The particular problems on January 22nd were entirely due to her reluctance to see the Applicants.

b. As to Paragraph 9b of the Applicants’ Affidavit, I repeat my paragraph 9a and would add that the tension between Pagan and myself noted on January 22nd reflected her fury at my insistence that she meet the Applicants, towards whom she has inherited her mother’s hostility.

c. As to Paragraph 9c of the Applicants’ Affidavit, I can only suppose that this is a wilful misinterpretation. Pagan was referring to my cooking on a spit, not in spit.

10. I deny the Applicants’ assertion that it is not in Pagan’s best interests to remain with me. On the contrary, I have been the one constant factor in her life. From the start, I took charge of her when her mother was on photographic assignments abroad; indeed, it was a standing joke among our friends that ‘I was left holding the baby’. I have since played a major role in her upbringing and education. I have taken her on several foreign holidays. I have been her father in all but name.

a. During the extended and highly distressing period of her mother’s final illness, it was I who cared for her on a daily basis. I ensured that her world stayed secure in the face of her mother’s slow decay. I respected Candida’s wish to remain at home, both for her own sake and to minimise the disturbance to Pagan. I made sense of her fading senses. I interpreted the basic sentences that she printed out on her screen. More recently, I interpreted her death.

11. I believe that to remove Pagan from my care would cause her incalculable distress and confusion. It would increase her sense of loss after the death of her mother. Besides which, I consider that I am better placed than the Applicants to attend to her emotional, educational and material needs. Despite its pressures, my contract with the BBC allows me considerable latitude; my hours are flexible and my summers free. I would urge therefore that she remain with me. If, however, the Court is to grant residence to the Applicants, I would ask to have regular contact so that I can continue to play a part in her life

Sworn by the above-named
Leonard Peter Young,

At 12 Field Court,
Grays Inn, London WC1R 5EN.

This 25th day of March 1992
Before me,

Arthur Ernest Duff.
Solicitor/Commissioner for Oaths

1

I know now why coffins seem small; it is because people are so much larger than their bodies. When we walk into a room, we don’t just inhabit a space, we change it all around us. And you changed more than a space; you changed my life.

First you changed my name. ‘Leonard,’ you said dubiously. … ‘Yes, but my friends call me Lenny.’ And you no longer bothered to hide your distaste. ‘Leo,’ you said triumphantly; ‘we’ll call you Leo.’ And I was as supine as a baby at a christening. Leo: it fitted me; Leo: it flattered me … a cross between a pop star and a pope.

They pack you away like a ventriloquist’s dummy … the same top-heavy torso, the same token legs. I watch the undertaker leaning over you like a children’s magician: his black coat a treasure-trove of tricks and props. I wait for him to slide out a saw, to slit open the wood and for you to spring up, head and feet at either end: a confusion, an optical illusion, but alive.

He wills me forward; the lid looms ominously; I know that I am supposed to take my leave. I rage at their earth-bound souls … their grave-bound assumptions. I can never take my leave of you; these words are the proof. I gaze inside and search in vain for an identifiable expression – the puckered lip of paradox, the furrowed brow of perversity – your face was only real in the turbulence of emotion; it is not one that I recognise in repose.

They lift the lid and I am seized with panic.

‘Not yet!’ I bend to adjust a perfectly set hair. I need to rescue your face from a photographic memory, the frozen images of the future; I refuse to become dependent on other men’s eyes.

They leave; the house is silent. I yearn for God and the consolations of childhood; but I am lost in an adult black hole. My thoughts are torn between grief and grievance. Ours was a lifelong commitment. I want to grow old with you gratefully, disgracefully, checking each other for signs of senility as we once did for secrets of love. I want us to exit together in a nursing-home blaze, from the flames of the hundred candles on our joint birthday cake. You have no right to die and leave me alone.

But I am not alone, I have Pagan … not the consolations of childhood but of one precious child. I have to ease her around your death as I tried to do around your illness … a mother who could not hold her close, a mother who could not change her clothes, a mother at the mercy of her mutineering muscles, who could move nothing unaided but her bowels. You were at least spared the foulest indignity and we the cruellest irony of seeing your daughter being trained on the potty while you were forced to wear pads.

She never knew you otherwise. She never saw you armed for an assignment, bags of equipment stretched across your back, so heavy that we supposed that the initial pains in your legs were a direct result of photographer’s shoulder, as much of an occupational hazard as housemaid’s knee. But then came the numb thumb and the dropped vase and the jerking and the months of misdiagnosis when trapped nerves were superceded by degeneration of the spine and even the false hope of multiple sclerosis; as your chin was collared and your head strapped, which gave you the prospect – and the prospects – of a prisoner in an electric chair.

I scoured the BBC library, borrowed books and burrowed into reports. I re-ran old programmes and lobbied for new. I spoke to experts and ordered equipment until your bedroom resembled a control-room, with every computerised aid that could be operated first with a nod of the head and then with the flick of an eye. I surrounded you with gadgets the way that lovers had showered you with gifts.

And communication became reduced to a few hundred practical phrases that flashed across your screen; the parameters of your life defined by a software firm in Ohio. And with the same caring cruelty that offers black mastectomy patients white prostheses, they gave you a voice like an overemphatic Swede.

For me that was the hardest loss: that voice, with its assumed huskiness that had become second nature – if I do have bedroom eyes, then you had a bedroom voice – fighting for intelligibility, with vowels white with pain. If I live to be a hundred and I blow out all the candles, alone and afraid, I shall never forget your wail of despair when you first dropped Pagan … the world fallen through your fingers and staring up in shock on the floor. And I stood, locked in horror, unable to reassure you or to rescue her.

She was two years old when the sounds began to muffle and you swallowed your words when you could no longer swallow anything else. How she laughed as you were reduced to a diet of baby foods just as she began to eat everything … except for pizza, which makes her think of blood.

How much does she understand …? For that matter, how much do I? I see her playing quietly at the foot of your bed, until the telephone rings, and she grabs it and lifts it to your ear and I feel your frustration as she holds it upside down or too far away. I see her wipe away the spittle which pours onto your chin, as though every breath were an epileptic stutter; and I see you torn between rage at your illness and joy in your nurse. I see her bewilderment as your muscles decay and dwindle to the flutter of an eyelid. Then I see her fear, as your emotions veer out of control even more cruelly than your body and you howl with laughter as she comes to you holding a cut finger, until she runs from the room screaming in incomprehension. And that is when I know that you want to die.

Now she stands before me, back from three days staying with Stephanie. I ask if she enjoyed herself.

‘I’m not going again. Stephanie has to go to bed when she’s not sleepy and her mummy won’t even let us talk. Do you think that’s when bad dreams come – when you go to bed before you’re sleepy?’

‘No. They’re not that clever.’

‘I do. And she kept telling us not to make a noise because it wasn’t the right time to play and she wouldn’t say why. I think people should say why they say something, don’t you?’

My first and only line of defence is breached and a lifetime of euphemism flounders on the floor.

‘And she kept looking at me like I was ill or it was the last day of the holidays. I don’t want to go back.’

She leaps into the house. Consuela stands in the hall with her best Ash Wednesday face and gathers her into the apron that she says smells of onions and heat. She wriggles free and runs into your bedroom and stares at the whiteness of it all: the sheets and blankets and flowers all removed and the mattress ominously airing on the bed.

‘Where’s Mummy?’ she asks as if I am concealing you … as if your illness were just a game and ‘let’s pretend’ has been superceded by hide-and-seek.

I hold her tight and try to explain what has happened. … You said that your parents told you that you were adopted at three. I wonder if it were some clumsiness of expression that made you hate them for ever more. I desperately try to find words that will make sense; words that are clear but not cruel. I will my tongue to treacle. We should build up to death: budgies, ponies, grandparents, not mothers … mothers are a lesson for book four. What can she know of loss? She has never even known a new nanny. In her world, time is measured in trips and treats and presents, and bereavement was her first day at school.

I weigh my words; but they are crushing her. Death is in her face, her hair, her clothes. She looks at me as if pleading for mercy from a stranger. ‘Does it mean I won’t ever see Mummy again?’

‘Not face to face, no. But she’ll always be with us.’

‘Where?’

‘In our thoughts … in our hearts.’

She stands confused. ‘But that’s nowhere.’

‘It’s a different way of looking.’

‘Does it mean I’ll be an orphan?’

I wonder where she has heard the word. ‘I know it’s hard, darling, but we must think of Mummy. She was so unhappy lying in bed all day. She was in such pain. We must be glad it’s been taken away.’

‘But she said I did that by rubbing her feet.’

‘I know.’

‘She said.’

‘I know.’

‘If I rubbed harder. Harder and harder and harder.’

‘Would you like a hug?’

She shakes her head and walks into the playroom. She lifts the flap of the Wendy house and steps inside. I stand outside, as isolated as any next-door neighbour. My exclusion frightens me. I feel that she has become a stranger, no longer the baby with basic needs or the infant as predictable as a nursery rhyme, but a growing girl with her own window on the world. I look through the window of the Wendy house; but the opaque plastic merely reflects my own face. I hear her repeating distinctly ‘I must be brave; I must be brave’.

Her words are my challenge; her life is my charge. What greater gift can anyone give than a child? What do you want for her? To be herself, to be happy … too obvious, too ordinary; or do you want for her what you despised for yourself? To be loved, to be fulfilled, to be famous, to be outrageous? There are so many possibilities. To have so many possibilities; perhaps we should settle for that? If we had only had more time to talk; but it was so hard for you communicating by computer, flicking out words for me to fill out into sentences. And yet your reluctance was more than mechanical. Was it too painful to contemplate giving up Pagan; or did you simply have faith in me?

Why did you choose me? What did you see in me? A good friend, yes; but a good father? If only the two were the same. When you told me you were pregnant, I thought that our life together was ended, convention would take over and you would disappear, if not to Chez Nous, at least to Sans Moi; that the homing or the nesting or the brooding instinct would come into play and I would be left out in the cold. You amazed me by your insistence that nothing should change: that I should be Pagan’s father, not in name, no, that would be cheating, but in everything else.

I was flattered then; just as I am frightened now. And it is you who have sown the doubts. Why, when you spent so long trying to trace your natural parents, did you always refuse to identify Pagan’s father? If your adopted father was a sham, why should her surrogate one be any less so? I fail to understand why you made it such a secret; we had no secrets – no other secrets – especially about men. Who could be that shameful? I wonder, if I search through your papers, will I come up with an Identikit picture? This one’s love letters; that one’s recriminations; another one’s return to his wife. I have to know, if not for myself then for Pagan. How else can she disprove your equation of fatherhood and fate?

Everything would be so much easier if she were my daughter … if we could have made the lie last as long as an erection. I often wonder what would have happened if things had been different that first day; if I had taken my cue from Casanova in his native city. Would we have stayed together all this time? I expected you to make a joke of me … I was still living in a world of schoolboys and bikesheds. But it was the others you made fun of, with their flashy, fleshy self-importance. My gaucheness seemed to touch a nerve in you. It was failure which guaranteed my success.

Next year will be our twentieth anniversary … will be? would be – no comfort is as cold as a pen’s. I planned to take you back, to retrace our steps, to recapture our youth. I see your curled lip: ‘Wouldn’t it be more fun to capture someone else’s?’ But your eyes know the answer. Ours was a gilded generation. The gold may have worn thin, like the gilt on the front of the Ca’ d’Oro, but we can still see its richness in the dazzle of the Venetian sun. We can gaze from the Rialto and smile.

I see you through the mists of memory … I see you through the mists of Venice, as we stand in a dimly lit sacristy, peering at an undistinguished Virgin and Child.

‘It’s not very good, is it?’

I look round, startled by the interruption.

‘It’s attributed to Rubens.’

‘Wishful thinking.’

‘Still, what does it matter?’ I remember that I am on route to university, where school rules will be subsumed by subjectivity. ‘What counts is how you feel.’

‘Oh it matters. If you don’t know where something comes from, you can never hope to understand it.’

I am troubled by your vehemence.

‘So, why are you keen on Rubens? The nudes?’

I am thrilled that a girl can ask me such a question.

‘Not at all. I find them oppressive: all that too, too solid flesh.’ You fail to respond; and the quotation hangs like a fart in the air.

‘The patron saint of the fuller figure.’

‘Oh no. It wasn’t that he found fat women more attractive, simply that the acreage of flesh gave him more scope to experiment with light.’

‘Oh dear, my last illusion shattered.’

‘You’re not fat,’ I say, picturing my mother’s middle-aged waistline.

‘I know.’ You move away to examine some stucco cherubs who appear to be laughing at my unease.

I cannot tell if it marks the end of the conversation. I suddenly need to know you better. ‘Are you an artist?’ I toss out my greatest compliment.

‘God, no.’ You explain that you are on a pre-university course in Venice and Florence and that you will be going up to Cambridge in the autumn. I reply that I am on an Easter tour with the Trelawnyd choir and that I will be going up to Cambridge in the autumn. At which you laugh and say that we might have been there for three years and our paths not have crossed, and yet here we meet in Santa Maria Zobenigo. I am struck by the thought that my life will never be as simple again.

We find a café. You smile as I order chocolate cake; I grimace as I remember that savouries are more sophisticated … and you are by far the most sophisticated girl that I have ever met. I know that if I don’t leave at once, I will be late for the choir; but I want you to see me as an individual and not as part of a group. For the first time I feel an individual … for the first time I am being irresponsible; and I wonder if they are the same. Then, when you ask if I want to go back to your pensione, as casually as you ordered a cappuccino, I say yes.

I never knew that fear could be so exciting; I am usually sick with nerves before I sing. Now here I am, about to attempt my first performance in a new register, and the agony is transmuted into energy. You lead me through overhung streets; Venice seems a city of hidden entrances and dead ends. We emerge at the Grand Canal and wait for a vaporetto. I suggest a gondola; romance makes me feel rich. We step in gingerly and squeeze into the seat. I put my arm behind your shoulders but keep an inch away from the skin. The gondolier is a distraction. As I pluck up the courage to kiss you, he signals approval with his pole.

The light of the room – is it brighter in retrospect? – streams across your skin as you strip off your clothes, while I shrug off mine like a snake’s dead skin. As I stare at the crumpled pile, I hear my mother’s voice, ‘Clothes don’t grow on trees’, and I suppress the urge to fold them; I see my mother’s face and I suppress the urge to scream. I am in Venice to sing, to send postcards and to look at churches. It was foreign frauds that she warned me against, not English sirens. You lure me towards the rocks … you plump the pillows. It is half-past three; I am in bed and I am not ill. It is half-past three; I am in bed and I am a man.

‘You’re wearing your knickers,’ you say; and I thrill to the image. Knickers are gymslips, hockey sticks and domestic science, filled with the frisson of the fetish; underpants are coarse, functional, stained with shame. And yet, as I fondle your breasts, I am sexually charged but not attracted. My penis curls like a comma, when it should rise in exclamation. It is the illicitness that excites me, which I try to translate into desire.

Sensing my inexperience, you guide me technically, too technically, and I rue the day that I gave up biology in favour of German. I am caught in a confusion of gender far greater than that between masculine and feminine nouns. What use is knowing der, die, dum when I am struck dumb by the lips of a vulva? Is it any wonder that English words are neuter? Am I a neuter or simply cold?

‘Relax,’ you say; ‘let me help you.’

‘It’s my first time,’ I say, in a blatant appeal for sympathy.

‘What have you been doing all these years?’ … I’m only seventeen, I want to reply, but nibble at your nipple to escape the need. I nuzzle in a fold of your flesh before venturing under pressure from your hands and my own expectations into the no-man’s-land between your legs.

I sniff tentatively and detect a faint aroma of gentleman’s relish. The skin is as soft as a baby’s but feels slightly chapped. I glimpse myself nose down, tongue out, and an image floods my brain of a hog rooting for truffles. I chuckle, which you take as a sign of pleasure; I am relieved. ‘Your first time,’ you coo and cradle my head. I know how easily I could play on your maternal instincts; but I am determined to avoid the trap.

My sex is still inert. My brow is wet; my hair is matted. All my blood is rushing to my head, which I will down to my middle. Has this happened to you before? Is it a copulational hazard? I long to ask about your previous experience and turn the coition into conversation. I want the intimacy without the indignity. I want painless, deathless love.

I connect with you, but inadvertently, as though my umbrella were caught in the loop of your coat. I thrust indiscriminately, desperately trying to feel something besides strain. The only naked women I have seen before were playing tennis in the pages of a naturist magazine; their fresh-faced smiles showed no more evidence of emotion than their airbrushed bodies did of sex. My penis pounds like a piston; the repetition is becoming wearing. I worry that I am sweating on your neck.

I have heard that making love is equivalent to playing two sets of tennis; I can well believe it. I have an ache in every muscle and incipient cramp in my back. How long is this supposed to last? Is it a hundred-yard sprint or a marathon? Is a quick spurt a sign of passion, or is a measured pace a sign of power? Please don’t hold this against me. I want to see you again, but next time in clothes.

I slip out of you and fall back. You lean over me and kiss me. You seem happy enough and I wonder if I have been worrying unduly. You put your hands between your legs.

‘You didn’t come,’ you say. I know what you mean; although I have never before heard the expression.

‘I tried to. It wasn’t you,’ I say lamely.

‘I should think not.’ You hand me some grappa which burns my throat.

‘I’m afraid men can’t fake orgasm.’

‘That’s a small consolation. They fake almost everything else.’

At another time I would find that witty, but now I am just conscious of the future opening up in front of me like a return to the past. I am a boy again, back in my own skin. I am a snake condemned to slide on my belly. I catch sight of my underpants and yearn to sneak them on.

‘I knew it wouldn’t work from the moment in the café when you said that your favourite artist was Michelangelo.’ I am startled; I imagine Michelangelo to be the most uncontroversial choice, a universal genius like Tolstoy or Bach. But I have yet to learn your theories of ‘fag’ art. In years to come, ‘he likes Michelangelo’ will be our coded shorthand, our own ‘friend of Dorothy’; the sculptor’s marble breasts no more convincing than a drag queen’s padded bra. But, for now, The Agony and the Ecstasy is showing in a double-bill with The Wizard of Oz.

‘It has nothing to do with art. It’s just that the chemistry wasn’t right.’

‘It wasn’t the chemistry but the biology.’

I don’t know … I don’t want to know what you mean. I put on my pants for protection. I want to go and sing: to lose myself in a madrigal’s six-part harmony, not this atonal duet.

‘You’re not angry with me?’ you say, shifting the sheet, making no attempt at modesty. ‘I like you so much; I felt at once we could be friends.’

‘I’m not queer,’ I insist.

‘What does it matter?’

‘It matters to me.’ I’m ready to pull off my pants and prove it to you; my anger is making me hard. ‘If you thought that I wasn’t interested, why did you suggest it? It was your idea not mine.’

‘Because I need a friend. And I somehow knew you were the one. We had to get this over with, or else it would have stood in the way. We’d always be wondering “could we? should we?” There’d be too many barriers between us. And I don’t believe in barriers … of any sort.’

‘I’ve had girlfriends.’

‘You said I was the first.’

‘The first in bed. There are other things to do.’

‘And we shall do them all. What’s the problem? Homosex is far superior to boring old heterosex. Look at Plato; look at the Greeks …’ You beguile me with a virile ideal that owes more to Mount Olympus than to Hampstead Heath. ‘Are you saying you’ve never had sex with another man?’

‘Yes,’ I lie, but honestly … it was not a man; it was a mouth.

‘I’ll introduce you to my friend Robin’ … a calling card that will be engraved on my heart. I strive to understand why you take such an interest. I thought that women despised men who failed to respond to them sexually; but with you it is quite the opposite … an admission of attraction is the quickest route to your scorn.

At first I wonder if you are a lesbian.

‘God, no! Women are such cows in every way. Flabby minds and flabby bodies. Udders and underwear. Parturition.’

I wish that I could establish the source of your self-disgust. Mine lies in the white-washed walls of a Methodist chapel; mine lies in the stale stranglehold of a rugby scrum; mine lies in a world of dreary Saturdays and dry Sundays: the petty paternalism of North Wales. But you have the liberty of the South of England. You have poetry and eccentricity and tolerance and travel. I fail to identify the worm in your bud.

Liberty bred liberality. ‘I’m such a slut,’ you used to say, ‘such a slut.’ And I never knew whether it was to punish yourself or men or other women. Edward told me, in a confession I never sought, that your favourite ruse was to play dead: to lie motionless – emotionless – while he assaulted you like a soldier with a bayonet. At first he found the power exciting, but then he found it daunting. He felt that he could have killed you and you would have maintained the same distant smile … But you always said that he was a liar; and it suited me to take your word.

However much your sexuality threatened him, it reassured me. I had the intimacy without the intrusion; I was spared the mechanics. My chaste cheeks were suffused with a post-coital glow. We outwitted the world; we wrote our own scenario. You were my public private life; I had no need to confront my own disgust or anyone else’s … I think it wise not to speculate as to why you found it equally important, why you desired a love uncompromised by the body, as we lay together on top of the sheets like an effigy on a medieval tomb.

But death is no longer set in such serene statuary. And I walk with Pagan up the path to the crematorium. With her chestnut hair swept back in a tortoise-shell band, her black velvet cape hiding a grey check dress, her socks unruffled, her shoes unscuffed, she might be making her way to a party, if it were not for the bunch of weeping lilies in her hand. She grips my hand, and offends me by skipping … until I realise that she is skirting the cracks in the stone and the unrealised dangers underneath.

The undertakers meet us on the steps and take us into the chapel, as austere as a prison waiting room – I think of Lewis – as though the absence of religion entails an absence of art. It smells of official disapproval, like the teacher at Pagan’s play group: why not give your daughter a Christian name …? Why not give her mother a Christian funeral …? You should be buried in a Temple of Love or a Temple of the Muses, under frescoes of Venus or murals of Mount Parnassus. But the only picture is a Constable landscape, which fails to hide an ancient dust patch; and the sound system stutters with a scratchy recording of Delibes.

Your coffin is on its bier. I look at Pagan. She sits quietly beside me, willing a smell out of the lilies. She refuses to lift her eyes. The seats are filling behind us. I feel the cold breath of condolence on my shoulder; I shake its clammy hand. The doors close and I recognise my cue to move to the lectern. For, in the absence of any cleric, I must guide the proceedings myself. Even the undertakers have disappeared, after showing me where to find the button. I am overwhelmed by the task. I want to disobey orders and declare myself agnostic, to run to another chapel and waylay a vicar. I want to escape the setting and the symbolism. I feel like a medieval cardinal burning a witch.

I take hold of myself and the lectern. I stare into the room and catch sight of friends and colleagues, all trying to register their presence without intruding on my grief. I start to speak but my eyes are transfixed by the button. I lose my thread; I find my notes; I lose my voice. I can only think of the rollers sticking, the curtains catching, the fire going out. I escape into the trivia of public appearances; I declare this supermarket open … this life at an end.

Your coffin slides forward with perfect equipoise and slips behind the curtains. We strain to imagine the other side like condemned schoolboys outside the Headmaster’s study. I drag my feet down the steps and return to my seat where Pagan is turning the pages of a book. I am torn between relief and revulsion at her detachment.

‘Can we go home now?’ she asks.

‘Let’s just sit here for a minute and think about Mummy.’

‘What about her?’

‘Anything you want.’

‘Her mummy died when she was younger than me.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Mummy. That’s why she was adopted. Will I be adopted?’

‘You have me.’

The service is over; the seats are hard; but no one stirs, as if this minor discomfort were itself a little death. I judge that it is time to lead the way out. We stand in the porch soaking up sympathy. I ask Susan to take Pagan home. I want to spare her the burden of adult inarticulacy; but she insists on staying and grips my hand, the trickle of sweat the only obstacle between us. As Melissa Franklin tells me in ponderous French that I was wrong to let her come, she takes refuge behind my legs.

The last cheek brushed, the last hand shaken, I walk to the office and wait for them to produce your ashes. I am startled by the residue of heat in the box. It is the ultimate indignity: this mockery of warmth. We return to the car; Pagan and Susan sit in the back with you in front beside me … the death seat I used to call it as a child. I try not to wonder whether the ashes are all yours; and yet if hospitals can make mistakes with newborn babies … So what do I suggest: some parody of a paternity test? I slam on the breaks at the lights.

We reach home. Consuela is preparing lunch. Laura has declared open house in Hampstead. I can hear your response ‘Just like her to push herself forward’; but I was grateful that she took the pressure off me. I have promised to go up there after seeing to Pagan.

‘You won’t leave me?’ she asks, as she toys with Consuela’s tortilla … I think that she is growing suspicious at being served so much of her favourite food.

‘What?’

‘You won’t go away and leave me like Mummy?’

‘Mummy didn’t leave you, my darling,’ I struggle to explain. ‘Mummy would never leave you. She had no choice; she was very ill.’

‘Why?’ she asks. ‘Why? Why?’

And I try to bury her fears in my chest.

‘I want Mummy,’ she cries, all semblance of bravery lost.

‘You mustn’t cry,’ I say, ‘or you’ll make me cry too. Then where will we be?’ But it is too late and my eyes start to water. She looks at me, aghast, as the voice of authority cracks and its face crumbles.

‘Stop it!’ she says, smacking my arm as if I were her wetting doll. ‘Grown-ups don’t cry.’

‘It’s just that I miss Mummy too.’

‘Naughty Leo,’ she says and goes on smacking, reassuring me by the force of her hands. ‘You mustn’t.’

‘Silly Leo; I know. I’m here to look after you.’

‘And I’m looking after you too. Mummy told me.’

‘Really?’ I wonder whether you did; and, if so, how her rudimentary reading picked up the phrase on the screen.

‘So we’ll both have to look after each other,’ she says, sharing my hankie; ‘and we’ll take it in turns to cry.’