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  Afternoon

  of a Faun

  A Novel

  JAMES LASDUN

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SINCE 1923

  NEW YORK LONDON

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of

  the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events,

  locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by James Lasdun

  First American Edition 2019

  Originally published in Great Britain as one of the novellas in Victory.

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to

  Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

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  Production manager: Julia Druskin

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Lasdun, James, author.

  Title: Afternoon of a faun : a novel / James Lasdun.

  Description: First American edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018057124 | ISBN 9781324001942 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Psychological fiction. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6062.A735 A69 2019 | DDC 823/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018057124

  ISBN 9781324001959 (ebook)

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS

  Part One

  1

  “WHAT HE APPEARS TO HAVE DONE, and I’ll admit I’m as astonished as everyone else, is turn this election into a referendum on whether it’s okay to objectify women and, frankly, assault them. I can’t help noticing how frighteningly well he illustrates a phenomenon many women who’ve been assaulted describe, which is the double nature of the attack. First there is the physical assault, and then there is what I would call the epistemological assault, by which I mean the brazen denial that anything untoward took place. It isn’t enough to violate the woman’s bodily autonomy. Her version of events must also be seized and subjugated. In many cases it is this secondary attack, the seizing of a woman’s reality, so to speak, that proves the most traumatic in the long term . . .”

  The speaker, a woman in mauve tweed, was giving the lunchtime talk at the Irving Foundation, to which my friend Marco Rosedale had brought me. Her subject was rape, specifically the relationship between rape and memory. She herself had been raped thirty years earlier (she told us this in a tone of studied neutrality that seemed intended to spare us from having to react), and recently she’d curated a traveling exhibition consisting of several installations in which the circumstances of her own and other women’s assaults were reconstructed in whatever detail memory could supply, and with whatever distortions of scale memory lent those details.

  The striking thing about most of these exhibits, judging from her slides, was their seeming innocuousness. No scary dungeons or sketchy back alleys, no vans with blacked-out windows; just ordinary domestic spaces. There was a student dorm room with ashtrays and plastic cups; a pool house with tiny people swimming in the pool outside; an office mail room with a frozen waterfall of huge envelopes spilling from a box. There was a comfortable-looking bedroom in which a man’s suit and shirt were folded neatly over a chair. The man was in bed asleep while the woman lay beside him with her eyes open, staring at a crack in the ceiling. The two had matching wedding bands on their ring fingers.

  The speaker mentioned a trend reported by therapists in a recent newspaper article. “It’s purely anecdotal,” she told us, smiling pleasantly, “but it interests me greatly.” Large numbers of women patients had apparently begun talking to their therapists about long-ago episodes of harassment that they’d either forgotten or considered too insignificant to be worth discussing.

  “It appears to be a kind of spontaneous collective impulse . . .”

  Marco glanced up from his lunch plate, catching my eye. He’d become interested in these subjects lately—harassment, memory, the public reverberations of private conduct—ever since getting caught up in a drama of his own in which these topics featured prominently. The drama had ended before any serious damage was done, but he was still unnerved by the experience, and hungry for any kind of elucidation.

  I knew what his glance meant, more or less. Imitation had become a topic of particular interest to him, and it was predictable that he’d seize on the speaker’s anecdote as proof of his theories about his own accuser. “Why did she only come out with it now?” he’d begun asking in recent weeks. “Why not thirty years ago? Why not forty for Christ’s sake, when it happened, or rather didn’t happen? Was it just because suddenly everyone else was doing it? Was it some copycat cultural meme thing she’d succumbed to? I’d have thought Julia, of all people, would do anything to avoid seeming unoriginal . . .”

  I’d make some noncommittal noise. I wasn’t required to answer Marco, mainly just to listen, and not irritate him with comments suggesting he perhaps didn’t acknowledge the full extent of the wrong done by men to women over the centuries, because he did acknowledge it; he’d just never considered himself one of those men, and even now, when his ordeal appeared to be safely over, resented the threat of being stigmatized as one when he’d done nothing to deserve it.

  At any rate the speaker’s anecdote about women suddenly discussing harassment en masse with their therapists clearly played straight into his suspicions about Julia’s timing, even though that was hardly the point the speaker was trying to make. She was actually offering the report as a sign of newly awakening female strength (and I’m sure Marco understood this as well as I did): a silver lining to the cloud threatening the country in the form of a serial harasser of women having won the Republican nomination for the upcoming presidential election.

  Marco had grown up in the same London world as I had. His father was a barrister and the family belonged to the same circle of professionals and artists as mine; left-leaning ­bourgeois ­bohemians with large houses in Islington or Holland Park or Notting Hill Gate. He was a few years older than me, which meant we weren’t friends as children, but I was always aware of his existence: he was one of those boys who exude a magical charisma of good looks and easy confidence that marks them in the consciousness of their generation as people to watch. He had a striking face, hawkish but epicurean, with eyebrows coming in at an angle like arrow fletchings, giving his eyes the mira fuerte—“forceful gaze”—of macho movie stars from that distant era, and strong lines either side of his slightly abbreviated-looking nose, curving out in a bell-shaped flourish around a firm-set but sensual mouth. His mother had been a model in Milan before she married, and his looks came mainly from her. From his father came the ruddy coloration of his cheeks, which added an appealing look of wind-blustered vigor to the general effect. We overlapped for a year or two at the same school in London, after which he went off to Cambridge, emerging a few years later as a precociously assured young talent in British television. Longish news features were what he first became known for, usually about political conflict and almost always pervaded by an atmosphere of danger that, intentionally or not, cast him in a glamorously intrepid light.

  His first big coup came when the British ambassador to ­Uruguay was kidnapped by the Tupamaros guerrillas. Mar
co’s parents had a weekend cottage near the ambassador’s family farm in Sussex, and Marco was able to get an early interview with family members, blinking in shock outside their oast houses a few hours after news of the kidnapping reached England. On the back of this he got a commission to make a program about the guerillas themselves. Footage of Héctor Pérez distributing stolen food in the slums of Montevideo, along with a lingering close-up of the “People’s Prison” where the ambassador himself was possibly being held at the very moment of filming, provoked spasms of scandalized indignation in the right-wing press, ensuring Marco’s success with the Left, and providing the formula for future triumphs.

  From the Tupamaros he went on to embed himself for periods with insurrectionists and paramilitaries across half the world. He was in Northern Ireland in 1975, filming a program that upset even some of his admirers, when the actions he was accused of decades later were alleged to have taken place.

  The footage in question, of a young Catholic woman being tarred and feathered, had no direct connection with the private scene that occurred, or didn’t occur, in Marco’s hotel room a few hours after he filmed it, but a certain affinity exists between the two (or does in my mind), and I found myself thinking of both, as I listened to the tweed-clad woman at the lectern speaking about rape and memory, imitation and repetition, while Marco sat nodding, frowning, jabbing at ragged chicken bones on his plate, tilting his face this way and that in his usual unguarded fashion; every word seemingly triggering some reflex of warm approval or restless annoyance.

  2

  HIS “ORDEAL” (as he’d taken to calling it) began with, of all things, a private message on Twitter. He’d never used Twitter for private communication. For that matter, he’d never tweeted. The only reason he had a Twitter account at all was to search for tweets about himself (he told me this with an only mildly embarrassed grin).

  “@Marcorosedale,” the message read, “desperately need to get hold of you. Can you contact me asap?”

  The sender, a Mel Sauer, included his email address, the server for which was a British national newspaper. I’ll call it the Messenger.

  It depressed Marco a little to think he’d dropped so far off the map that a major newspaper couldn’t track down his phone number. But the message itself seemed to him to bode well. He wondered whether it might have something to do with his current project, a pilot for a series combining travelogue and crime reportage, provisionally titled A Crime and a Place. The idea—by his own admission more gimmicky than anything he’d tried before—was to attend trials at county courthouses across the United States, and look at the crimes through the lens of local cultural issues. “I’m thinking Artisanal murder for the tagline,” he’d joked, “or else Marco Rosedale sells out for one last gig . . .” Somewhat to his surprise, early reaction to a rough cut of a domestic violence trial in Maine had been positive, and he was already in talks with cable companies and independent financiers. Was it possible, he wondered, that the Messenger had got wind of the project and wanted to run a puff piece of some kind? Marco didn’t like to think he cared about such things any longer, but he admitted feeling a minor stir of excitement. It was years since he’d had any serious attention from the press.

  He made himself wait a couple of days, and then sent a laconic note with his number in Brooklyn.

  The phone rang almost immediately.

  “Marco? Mel Sauer here. So good of you to get back to me. We’re running an excerpt from a memoir by one of your old girlfriends, and I wanted to have a quick word with you about the contents. Take your temperature, as it were.”

  So much for the puff piece. The man’s tone—glib, presumptuous, a little nervous—put Marco on his guard.

  “Which girlfriend?”

  “Julia Gault.”

  The name surprised him—their affair had been brief, and he’d never actually thought of her as his “girlfriend.”

  “Julia’s publishing a memoir?”

  “She’s written one. I don’t know that she has a publisher, necessarily, at this point, but we’re keen to run the excerpt regardless. You’re in it, which is why I want to talk to you.”

  “What does she say?”

  “Well, it’s very candid, and somewhat . . . intimate.”

  Marco, who’d already been rifling his long past for an incident in his personal life that could possibly interest an English newspaper, and drawn a complete blank, blurted out the only thing he could think of:

  “You’re going to inform me I have a secret illegitimate child—is that it? All grown up presumably, given how long ago our little fling was . . .”

  Sauer chuckled.

  “No, nothing like that. Why don’t I email you the relevant passage, Marco, then you can read it and we can talk again?”

  “Okay.”

  “You may dispute one or two details, in which case we’d certainly consider running something in tandem by yourself. We’d be very open to that, in fact.”

  “Send it over,” Marco told him.

  An email arrived a few minutes later: “Here you go. Like I say, just taking your temperature at this point! Let me know your thoughts. Yours ever, Mel.”

  The passage from Julia Gault’s memoir was attached.

  I should mention that the name Julia Gault was familiar to me, and had been for almost as long as I could remember, though it was years since I’d heard it spoken. There was a time when I thought I might write a long novel, even a series of novels, about that distant English world of ours, in which Julia’s recurrent appearance at the periphery of my life as she transited through the many phases of her own, would form a significant motif. I can’t say I knew her in any way that properly qualified me to write about her. I was a shy teenager in the period when she was a regular presence in our house, and I don’t think I ever had a private conversation with her. But she made a strong impression on me, and as an adult, qualified or not, I spent many hours over many years making notes and sketches for what, in the grandiose ambition consuming me, was intended to be a portrait of her in the monumental manner of Proust’s Odette or Anthony Powell’s Pamela Flitton.

  I hadn’t realized she and Marco had had a fling, though it didn’t surprise me to hear it. She’d been something of a media star herself for a short time, a current affairs presenter on a popular but serious TV show (the combination existed once), though from what I knew, her own decline had been steeper and harder than Marco’s. The last news I’d heard of her involved money troubles stemming from a messy divorce and a house-sitting stint in the home of friends that had ended badly when she refused to leave.

  The passage from her memoir that Sauer had sent began as a reminiscence of the sexual mores of the 1970s in general and the behavior of men at that time in particular. Marco read it aloud from his phone to me and my wife when he visited us that spring to talk about his situation. The gist of it was that men were more overtly sexist then; more unabashedly condescending, imperious, entitled, aggressive and preeningly lustful than they were now, and that young women like herself had been duped into thinking that a reluctance to play along was evidence of a prudish spirit. Marco was offered up as a characteristic specimen of the period, strutting about the globe in his leather jacket and jeans, with a fixed grin of libidinous intent on his handsome face and various phallic items of photographic equipment slung over his shoulder.

  Despite the note of ridicule, it was, on the face of it, an affectionate portrait, and I believed Marco when he told me that on first reading it, he’d thought it pretty harmless. He wasn’t sure why the Messenger considered it worth publishing, but his feeling was that if Julia could make some money out of it, then good luck to her. He knew vaguely about her straitened circumstances, and was sympathetically disposed. The leather-jacketed stud stuff didn’t bother him; in fact, he told me it had made him briefly nostalgic for his younger, cockier self.

  He’d been about to email Sauer that he had no objections to the article, when a dim misgiving made him reread it.
Only on this second reading did he take in the potentially damaging part. It was packed into a relatively small space; just a few sentences two-thirds of the way through, easy to overlook, or at least misgauge. In them, Julia described an incident that occurred while she was working as the research assistant on his Belfast film. They’d been drinking at the bar of their hotel after a difficult shoot. At one point he’d kissed her, and after a while they’d gone upstairs to his room. She was in a serious relationship with someone else at the time—a university boyfriend whom she was planning to marry. Upstairs with Marco, she’d had an attack of fidelity and told Marco very apologetically that she didn’t want to go to bed with him after all. “Did he take any notice?” her piece continued in its oddly jaunty way. “Not a bit of it! Next thing I knew, my buttons and buckles and fasteners were being undone by what felt like about a hundred pairs of exceedingly powerful if also exceedingly nimble and well-practiced hands, and I was lying naked underneath him on the bed. If memory serves, it was all over very quickly.” From there the piece swerved back into affectionately lampooning mode, teasingly describing the long row of sharp-toed leather ankle boots lined up in the corner of Marco’s hotel room, along with its grimy corner ­washbasin and fly-specked ceiling light, but also praising his TV programs and declaring that “in spite of everything,” she was proud to have started her media career working with someone so talented and dynamic.

  The accusation he’d missed the first time around hit him squarely this time. She was saying he had assaulted her. Regardless of the cheery tone, regardless of the decades that had passed since the night in question, it was a statement that could cause him serious harm. It was the kind of thing that, once said about you in public, rendered you permanently suspect—at best.

  He emailed Sauer, telling him he considered the piece malicious and defamatory, and that he was astonished the Messenger would even consider publishing it. Sauer wrote back, suavely placating, assuring him that nothing was set in stone yet, repeating that for now he was just interested in, as he put it, “taking your temperature,” while also asking if Marco could be more specific about what he found “defamatory.” Reluctantly (unversed as he was in these matters, Marco sensed that to repeat an allegation, even if just to defend oneself against it, was a sure way to increase its weight and substance), he directed Sauer’s attention to the scene in the hotel bedroom. Sauer replied, “Are you suggesting you didn’t sleep with her that night?”