The Pagan House

‘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

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.