Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  The introductory paragraph of the list explained how the system operated. All seeds in the list were equal, and as far as Major Howell was concerned one item could never be more (or less) equal than any other item – even if one was the size of a cannonball and the other a sprinkling of dusty spores. So you could choose whichever seed you wanted. As far as I remember these were the rules:

  Seeds shall be ordered in units. A UNIT shall be six packets of seed plus a GRATIS specimen. A customer who orders two units shall be entitled to a third GRATIS unit, as well as the GRATIS specimens included in the units themselves.

  If you have seed which is not in the list, you may exchange it for any item in the list when ordering one or more units. Major Howell does not give cash for seeds.

  A packet of seeds (which might contain many seeds, or a few, or just one, depending on size and rarity) cost 5d, so that each unit cost 3/-. It was all splendidly idealistic but also terribly practical. Dad and I ordered two units from the list. I tried to scribble ‘Cocos nucifera’ on the form while he wasn’t looking, but furtiveness is not my forte and he found me out. He wouldn’t wear it. ‘Besides,’ he added, ‘I hope you realise that the old boy has to pay postage costs. In his eyes all seeds may be equal, but I doubt if the GPO will see it that way. Coconuts are heavy items. It will be expensive and inconvenient for him. And I know exactly why you’re trying this on. You enjoy creating maximum inconvenience with everything you do. That’s you all over, John! But not this time.’ I don’t think my psychology was really so complicated. I hadn’t wanted Cocos nucifera in the first place until I was told I couldn’t have it. Then it became a project and the thing I wanted above all others. It’s a mental mechanism which has served me well, all in all – it got me walking, didn’t it?

  When I looked wounded, Dad suggested that we add an extra packet of Drosera seed to our order. Trying to get around the rules paid the usual dividends.

  I can’t say Dad was entirely wrong about me. I was always experimenting, taking things to their limit. Wherever I was I would try to turn my surroundings into a laboratory, whether I was making soapsuds from nowhere in CRX, performing mantras in toilets or creating mouth-vacuums in school-issue Bic Biro pens in Vulcan so that the ink got everywhere. There are only so many ways I can play, and this is one of the best. And to be even fairer than fair, to be fair to myself now that I’ve been fair to Dad, I think that he was a little blind in rejecting Cocos nucifera out of hand. It wasn’t long before we learned that botanic samples of the seed are very different from the cultivars in the supermarkets.

  Over that tantalising ledge

  The seeds arrived. They nearly all germinated. The Drosera did particularly well, and soon we had the beginnings of an impressive collection. We were encouraged to order a packet of Drosophyllum Lusitanicum, the Portuguese Sundew, the uncoöperative Holy Grail of our carnivorous plant-rearing. Good seed added to Dad’s refined gardening technique produced astounding results, and Major Howell’s name began to smell like a rose.

  If there was a slow submarine detonation in progress underneath the whole established culture, then the ripples had lapped against my wheelchair and I too was restless. In terms of doing things for myself my best bet, perhaps my only chance, was independent motion, even if that meant also losing Broyan. I would have to learn to drive. The Wrigley was all very well for getting me to the railway station and the concert venue, and for menacing pop stars, but I needed a bigger engine if I was to reach escape velocity.

  This is a standard teenage urge, but in my case it couldn’t be fulfilled in a series of gradual stages. My fellows faced a smooth ramp of choices – driving lessons, borrowing the family car, finally getting their own. I, though, would have needed stilts to reach the pedals of the family car. I would have to do the whole thing in a single mighty flying leap, and I would need my own vehicle from the word go.

  Or the word stop. Mum, being a non-driver herself, was likely to be discouraging. Dad was unpredictable, but certainly couldn’t afford to buy me a car. I would have to organise an embassy to Granny.

  The whole family seemed to be a complex mechanism for frustrating desires – like the machines at fairgrounds which Peter had always liked so much, aligning the mechanical grab directly over a desired trinket, so that it couldn’t miss, and then pressing a button, and watching as it did. Or glass cases full of pennies stacked so thickly on ledges that a payout was inevitable. Trustingly Peter would send penny after penny down the chute to trigger the avalanche that never came. And now, despite my poor coördination, it was my turn to work the family machine, to send the grab down towards the elusive prize of a car, or push the necessary funds over that tantalising ledge. If there was no jackpot there could be no driving licence, and my life would never broaden out from the straits I was in.

  I thought of making my eighteenth birthday the occasion for an extraordinary appeal to Granny – except that she didn’t really recognise the pressure of the calendar. It was actually better to steer clear of landmarks such as birthdays and Christmas, and to give her a stronger sense of her own arbitrary grace. The scratching of the pen in her chequebook made a red-letter day all by itself.

  Birthdays had always seemed a bit hollow to me also, if only because mine was always overshadowed by Christmas. Then the last days of 1967 showed me a further deterioration of the festival. Mum was determined to mark the occasion, not with a present but with an attempt to pass on a legacy: her own ancient injuries.

  On my big day Mum sat me down and told me something she’d been told in a similarly formal manner. By ‘sat me down’ I mean formally commandeered the wheelchair and manœuvred me into the sitting room. It’s to her credit that she let the birthday unfold a little way before she took centre stage and made her announcement. She could have pinned me down in the bed at first light and passed on the trauma tidings – trauma for her, no more than casual interest for me. I chose the womb, and the womb has its own attachments, which aren’t mine.

  Before she said anything she offered me a drink. That was standard practice for birthdays – it was family custom, enlightened or corrupt as you choose to look at it, to allow us, when we had passed a minimum age, a drink and a smoke on birthdays. One drink and one cigarette. And not just your own birthday, but any birthday in the family, so Peter too would be given his own ration, invited to splice the mainbrace. This, though, was different.

  Live coal burning her tongue

  Mum took ages to get going. How hard is it to say ‘Happy Birthday, John’? Not hard. There was miles of ‘I don’t know quite how to say this’ and ‘I’ve never found it an easy thing to talk about’ before she started to come out with anything significant at all.

  ‘Your grandfather Ivo, my father’ – and already there was a sort of gulp invading those phrases – ‘went out to East Africa in the 1920s to make his fortune coffee farming. That was where the money was to be made.’ This much I knew. Families have histories. People seem to enjoy being ruled by them. Grandpa’s people weren’t rich, he had married above himself in that way, and this was his chance to equalise things. ‘Then while he was away, your grandmother my mother’ – these tags of kinship received a much harsher intonation – ‘had a … love affair with one of the local squires. A great love affair.’ I think Mum had left space for a mocking laugh for this point in her speech, but it didn’t quite come off. The bitterness in her voice was too stark to be laughed away.

  This was certainly new. Not exactly what I wanted for my birthday, but still, a surprise. Not to be sniffed at, though hardly riveting. As she moved towards the parts of the story she found unbearable, she fought to control herself, leaving big pauses and looking right past me. She was making some sort of impersonation of female pluck, as we know it from films of the 1940s. Greer Garson, Celia Johnson – and now Laura Cromer, refusing the easy release of tears. ‘When her husband returned, my mother was pregnant.

  ‘Pregnant with me.

  ‘These things happen, of course –
they always have. But they tend to be hushed up.

  ‘No hushing-up was done in this case.

  ‘In the Father column on my birth certificate my mother put the truth. She had the name of her lover entered, not the name of the man she was married to. She wasn’t going to give the world the satisfaction of making her lie. And she wasn’t going to spare me the shame that bothered her so little. Luckily’ – and here there was a laugh that did more or less come off – ‘Ivo had lost his shirt in East Africa. His hair was still dark, she told me, but his moustache had turned white.’ Many families have these tales of follicles blasted by shock, fate’s lightning earthed by the roots of the hair.

  ‘Anyway, after his little adventure in the coffee business he didn’t have a bean. He was in no position to dictate terms. He depended on his wife’s financial resources. He wasn’t a hero. I suppose he wasn’t a fool. He must have thought – better a cuckold than a bankrupt.

  ‘Better to have a bastard being brought up in your house, even one that everyone knows about, than debts that everyone knows about. Mummy’s people cut her allowance to the bone for some years, they never quite cut her off.

  ‘They punished her. They said she had made her bed and must lie in it, but they didn’t disown her. Perhaps they even noticed that there was someone else involved who had to lie in a bed she hadn’t chosen. That was me.

  ‘They have provided for me in their way, but I was never made welcome. I never felt I was part of the family, and I didn’t know why until I came of age. Then my mother was kind enough to tell me. And now I’m telling you. Now you know what my family is like.’

  This was all fairly interesting, but it didn’t shake me to the core or even blight my birthday. Mum had even cheated a bit. Granny had spoiled her twenty-first birthday, not her eighteenth. From anyone else’s point of view, this was all ancient history, a grate of cold ashes, fully raked over, but it was still a live coal in Mum’s mouth, burning her tongue, and she couldn’t wait another three years to spit it out. She accepted me as an adult ahead of schedule, even if it was only to load me down with the family secrets.

  I couldn’t feel particularly upset. If I had chosen Mum’s womb, hadn’t she chosen Granny’s? We both had a chance to read the fine print, between lives. There’s plenty of time. I asked, out of politeness really, ‘Did you ever see your real father?’

  ‘Sometimes. In church. Obviously he’d always known who I was. I only knew about him when my mother told me the story. After that I could feel him not looking at me. If you mean did we ever have a conversation about it, then no. Nothing more than Hello and How are you? I called him Uncle Arthur.’ She looked at me a little flatly. Neither of us had touched our drink. ‘I expect you need some time to take this all in.’

  I didn’t think I did. I’d already taken it in, more or less. I had disappointed Mum with the evenness of my reaction. She had dropped her bombshell on the appointed day, and it had been something of a dud. The trauma fizzled, though I managed not to say, ‘Is that all?’ When Dad came in she said, ‘I’ve just been telling John about “Uncle Arthur”,’ and he only said, ‘Oh yes?’, as if this might be someone from her sewing circle. Dad was very good at letting things pass without comment, letting them more or less blow through him, and for once I followed his lead.

  I don’t even remember what Mum gave me for my birthday that year – her real present was that conversation. She was issuing a sort of certificate of damage. It was official, now, that she had never had a chance of happiness, but I honestly didn’t see what it all had to do with me.

  There was poignance, of course, in Mum’s status. The child of a great love, not greatly loved herself. Much was explained about her – her unending quest to be accepted by her own mother, her eagerness to get married, properly married in church and to acquire the respectability of a wife, since she had been cheated of it as a daughter. I understood better now the way Granny seemed to glide on warm and lofty currents, while Mum was always frantically flapping the middle air.

  The period of impoverishment, coinciding with her early life, had obviously left its mark. It was like the period of starvation in the womb when a mother is deprived of nutrients, leaving her fœtus underdeveloped. Granny hung on to her sense of entitlement, but absolutely failed to pass it on.

  There was more to the story, which I gradually pieced together. After the coffee fiasco my grandfather Ivo (though of course he wasn’t actually my grandfather) laid siege to the marital bed. He laid the ghost of Uncle Arthur, and that was the beginning of Roy.

  When there was a legitimate son as well as an illegitimate daughter, mother love was poured out till it ran over. On darling Roy. Not because of his legitimacy, I don’t think, though I dare say Granny appreciated the neatness of the stitching which repaired the family’s ravelled hem. Everything looked more or less conventional again, and her family’s allowance was restored to its original value.

  It’s just that Granny, from her first breath to her last, preferred men to women, boys to girls. Even if Laura had been loved in the cradle she would have been abandoned in the nursery, when Roy came along to take all the love that was going.

  Mum and Roy chose the same womb, but Roy had the better sense of timing. It was a different place by the time he occupied it. As between the claims of a girl who was the child of her great love and a boy – any boy – there would never really be a contest, in Granny’s eyes. Mum had done nothing wrong. She just couldn’t do anything right.

  Granny made things worse by taking in a local boy during the war. There would never be enough boys, and perhaps there was one girl too many already. I began to understand Mum’s passionate desire for a daughter, to show at least one female soul that she was welcomed, even if the idyll with Audrey hadn’t quite worked out like that.

  After the birthday briefing I wasn’t supposed to think of Granny as anything but monstrous. Of course she was monstrous! But the nerve it must have taken, to insist on the truth being put down on that official piece of paper. To testify against herself in that stubborn way, insisting on disgrace.

  The seeming slope of time

  Mum’s sense of unbelonging was the great business of her life, but it wasn’t going to be mine. I wouldn’t let that happen. Never mind that I didn’t exactly know what the great business of my life was.

  You can’t be traumatised by a history whose reality you don’t accept. I wasn’t yet an informed Hindu, but I had cottoned on to a fundamental concept. Blood isn’t thicker than water. Blood is only water carrying a particular charge of deluded affinity.

  If I’m not tempted to repeat the family mistakes, there’s still a real danger of repeating mistakes made in a previous life. In Hinduism, where there are always (thank God) technical terms for spiritual things, these are called vasanas. Ruts of the spirit, liable to churn up the clean sand of a new existence. How can you avoid them if you don’t know what they are? You have to work backwards, deductively, from your temptations. It’s not an exact science, obviously. If you’re bossy in your current life, for instance, this may mean that you were the same way in earlier flesh, or that you were completely under someone’s heel – hence the current overcompensation.

  If by a great stroke of luck you’re both powerless and bossy as things stand, then perhaps you’re being given a chance to dismantle your ego’s engine completely in these highly propitious circumstances. A brief glance is enough to show that the ‘engine’ is connected only to the horn, and to the indicators – indicators which only signal a change of direction after the event, feebly claiming credit for having caused it. There’s nothing under the bonnet. The steering wheel is as irrelevant as the one on a toy car in a fairground ride. Fixed or wildly spinning, it turns nothing. The whole incarnate vehicle slips serenely on free wheels down the seeming slope of time.

  In practice, even before I was able to line up actual driving lessons, I clung to my dummy steering wheel as tightly as anyone. I couldn’t trust my guru enough to abandon the I-am-the
-doer illusion. My will was all I trusted. I hadn’t learned that life is a stolid nag that clops indifferently on, whatever we imagine we’re doing with the whip and the reins. It’s one of Maya’s favourite tricks, her impersonation of a frisky filly to be mastered.

  Let the reins go, and there’s every chance you’ll be bucked into bliss. Hinduism recognises that the last moments of a life have a crucially determining rôle as regards the next. Serenity at the moment of death may not guarantee escape from the cycle of birth and death, but at the very least it greases the wheels for the next go-round and leads to reconciled babies who sleep through the night and hardly cry.

  Poor Mum still couldn’t do anything right, even when she was trying to set the record straight. She hadn’t managed to condemn Granny in my eyes, as she must have hoped. Clearly Pamela, all thousand-plus pages of it, wasn’t a complete guide to the behaviour of the posh and wayward of the 1920s, but it was the closest thing I had, and it did paint a picture of a world in which the odds were stacked against women. Granny wasn’t having that. She flouted the conventions of her day and her class without consenting to be martyred by her own rebellion. She had taken a lover and kept a husband.

  I don’t know about the ingredients of her motive for having Mum officially registered as an outcast. Was she obsessed with a man she couldn’t have, or only with getting her revenge on him? The woman I knew as Granny certainly had a talent for settling scores. Or to put it another way – she trusted antagonism as a sort of bedrock for relationships. It wouldn’t let her down.

  I’m tempted to see the business with the birth certificate as a sort of one-woman suicide pact – a willed social death that was supposed to take her lover with her, dragging the squire down into the sucking bog of disgrace. She signed her own death warrant on that piece of paper, and then she survived after all, her head above water even if she was floating at a lower level than before. Her luck held, when it turned out she had nothing to fear from her husband. Slowly she came back to respectable life, even to prosperity, and it was only Laura who was left out in the cold and wet.