Cedilla
Page 24
He took out his chewing gum and pressed it against the dashboard with his thumb. Then he was out of the car, joined a few moments later by another man, who materialised out of the shadows of the louchest lane in Marlow.
It was a setback, undoubtedly. No questing hero minds the odd failure. It’s just that there are many reasons for a sexy waiter to climb into your Mini in a dark lane, reasons good and bad. He may want to kiss you, he may want to rob you and murder you, he may want to listen to your garbled rendering of homoerotic Spanish poetry. Any or all of the above – just so long as he doesn’t want to talk about your grandmother. That’s too much to bear. That’s the pink limit.
I left his chewing gum where it was. I could have reached it with a little trouble, but it seemed somehow a meaningful memento. It was impregnated with the cigarette he had been smoking while he chewed, and added a sharp smell to the Mini’s interior for some time. It became the crusty relic of an ancient frisson. I let it fossilise.
The idea that a disabled boy might go to a normal school such as Burnham had seemed to be my own discovery, almost my own invention. I had hewn it out of the living rock. The idea that a disabled young man might go to a normal university was an idea that I hadn’t dared to propose to myself. Eckstein got there first. He had contacts at Cambridge University, but what on earth made him think I might make a suitable candidate? My essay on Lorca, that’s what, feverish adolescent outpouring perfumed with smoke from María Paz Binns’s sinister black cigarettes, the devil’s gaspers.
Eckstein even came to Bourne End to see Mum and Dad, so as to discuss the idea of my applying to university. This was a huge honour, and I did my best to respond appropriately, showing off horribly on the piano that Peter no longer even pretended to play, giving my all in pared-down versions of unkillable tunes, ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’ and ‘A Walk in the Black Forest’. He brought along a jar of cheese and marmalade, all mixed up, a russet and ochre paste, which he vowed was delicious. I tried some and liked it, but Mum set her mind firmly against it. It seemed to prey on her mind, as if this was some sinister Teutonic depth-charge lurking in her fridge, and she threw it away as soon as she decently could, claiming it had gone off. As far as she was concerned, it had been off from the word go.
It worried me that my A-level results might not be good enough, but Eckstein reassured me in the only way he knew, by making me feel I knew nothing about it. ‘If Eckstein recommends you, that counts for something. I don’t say they will take you, but they will give you an interview.’ From what he was saying, a set of A-level papers barely scratched the surface of the applicant’s abilities. A Cambridge interview was a sort of academic X-ray, which would examine the very bones of my mind and pronounce them sturdy or unsound.
His recommended strategy was to apply early. It made sense to allow extra time for the university to prepare properly for my needs (preferably not by coaching undergraduates in the art of cushioning the wheelchair’s falls downstairs). I thought back on the time at Trees before Granny’s chequebook made the extension happen – if it had taken years for my own home to begin to be tailored to my measure, then it made sense to give a mere institution as much notice as possible. Eckstein also pointed out with his usual tact, which was none, that with my disordered educational history I had some catching up to do. I shouldn’t expect to go up until 1970, when I would be a little older than my university equals.
I still wasn’t entirely sold on the idea – the idea of Cambridge, that is. I liked the idea of university. Setting my sights on Cambridge was too much like living Dad’s life as he would have wanted it to be. Under the trivial difference of disability, wouldn’t the other students be rather like me? There would be a sprinkling of toffs and some working-class boys on best behaviour, but there would be an awful lot of the inhibited middle class, from whom little could be learned. There would also be women, but I can’t say I gave them much thought. I hadn’t yet had my fill of young male company.
Perhaps there were other places than Cambridge that would have me, even without Eckstein’s recommendation. There was a cabalistic instrument called an UCCA form to be filled in. The letters stood for Universities’ Combined Clearing Apparatus or something of the sort. I describe it as cabalistic because there were strict rules about how to list your choices, not all of them printed on the form. There were rules behind the rules, and perhaps you were supposed to know them from birth. I believe in previous lives, but I don’t think mine were lived at graduate level. When the system was explained to me, with all the things that couldn’t be said or could only be said in a particular way, I began to think of Great Britain as one big application form bristling with invisible rubrics, needing to be actually filled out only by those who had been refused in advance.
Got an Egyptian tram-driver instead
By then I had found my other place, the university I preferred in my mind to Cambridge. Keele. Keele was new, Keele was modern. It was ‘red brick’ (it was even in Staffordshire, where they actually made red bricks), and had only been given the status of university a few years before. Fine by me. It made sense that Keele would suit me better. The syllabus there was progressive, requiring students to study both arts and sciences instead of narrowing themselves in the traditional way. I could almost feel my brain expanding at the prospect. Keele was also likely to place fewer stumbling-blocks in the path of a wheelchair than a labyrinth of ancient learning like Cambridge. Admittedly Burnham had failed to provide anything in the way of lifts, despite being new and modern, but the principle wasn’t discredited by a single disappointment.
My motoring map told me that Keele was comfortably further away from Bourne End than Cambridge, and this intensified its advantage. Dad was always talking about the excellence of nature’s way of doing things, that birds pushed their chicks out of the nest at the earliest opportunity, but it was clear that in this case I would have to push myself out, against the furious resistance of the mother bird. I told myself that at red-brick Keele I would meet true companions, mates, working-class fellows with brick-dust on their brawny arms. This sort of dream seems stupid right up to the moment when it is fulfilled. Didn’t E. M. Forster himself crave union with an English policeman? Okay, he got an Egyptian tram-driver instead, but he seems to have made the best of it.
I also had the idea that Dad wouldn’t be jealous if I went to Keele, since it would hardly count as a university in his eyes. Perhaps jealousy wasn’t even a factor in the equation. It was never easy to predict what would catch Dad on the raw and what he wouldn’t even register.
I wanted to put Keele as my first choice, Cambridge as my second, but that was ruled out of court. Cambridge had to come first, or not at all, though in theory the admissions authorities of Cambridge were airy about the irrelevance of other examination boards’ assessments of students, saying more or less If we wanted A-grades, we could take our pick of the best – but really, it takes something more than the ability to pass exams to make the sort of student we’re interested in.
They could see right through the shallowness of status and ranking. You, on the other hand, were required to pay the proper homage. It was legitimate to put Cambridge second if you put Oxford first, and vice versa, as long as you didn’t mind the bureaucratic equivalent of a bloody nose. Nothing good would come of such an act of provocation. It was within the rules – even the rules behind the rules – but it was completely stupid. So the sentence ‘I want to go to Keele and find proletarian love, but failing that, I suppose I’ll risk complicating Dad’s emotional state by plumping for Cambridge’, when translated into the language of UCCA, became 1. Cambridge, 2. Keele. How much was lost in translation? Just about everything. It was as inadequate as my first stab at Lorca’s poem.
On top of which, you have to put your chosen college in the space on the form, not just ‘Cambridge’, so my first choice was Downing College, Cambridge. Downing being where Eckstein had studied, and where he had his contacts. 1. Downing College, Cambridge. 2. Keele.
Of course it wasn’t flattering that one of Dad’s routine words for describing us and our behaviour was ‘nauseating’, and I had been quite shocked when I learned its exact meaning (when Flanny our GP gave me an injection to help me keep food down when I got the measles at last). So Dad was actually saying his children induced the desire to vomit! It served him right that I passed measles on to him so promptly. But after all, if I had wanted a different father, all I would have needed to do was choose another womb. He was only really part of the fittings and furnishings of the womb of my choice, one of the mod cons if you choose to think of it that way. Dad en-suite, liable to vomit on contact with his children.
Dad liked being a father, he just didn’t like having children. It’s not really a paradox. Family life didn’t bring out the best in him, but in whom does it bring out the best, exactly? Certainly not me. I could be a perfect beast on evenings when I had decided to bait him.
Peter and I had different approaches to the adolescent task of annoying our parents. I sometimes had set-piece arguments with Dad at the dinner table, while Peter watched wide-eyed, thrilled by the conflict, waiting his turn in life to be bolshie. I certainly had the edge in argumentativeness, but I was hopelessly tongue-tied when it came to body-language, while he had a whole range of physical options open to him. When summoned to table, he could slouch, saunter, drag his heels, or march with exaggerated precision, as if he was on parade or else about to be court-martialled. He had an equal talent for sullenness and for robot impersonation. At the end of a meal he could always slope off with provocative casualness or scamper out and slam the door.
A plume of intellectual radiation
The best I could hope for was to be so annoying that I had to be removed bodily. For instance I might suggest to Dad that the continental approach to water purification was preferable to ours. Why not buy bottled water for drinking purposes and save yourself the trouble and expense of purifying the domestic supply, which was largely going to be used for baths and washing-up anyway? Dad might say that in point of fact very little water in France went for baths, but I would declare this slander irrelevant and return to my needling thesis. Knowing that Dad’s goat would infallibly be got, that his goat was a dead duck from the beginning of the sentence, with the whole idea that anything about France or Spain could be sensible. For a man who had seen much of the globe, thanks to the RAF, and was now professionally involved in moving people round it, he seemed to have no idea why they might actually want to travel. If we granted the superiority of the French way of life in any small detail, then very rapidly every doorknob and handrail would bear the taint of pungent garlic and runny cheese. If the Spanish weren’t kept in their place, likewise, there would be bull-fights at Lord’s and the habañera would replace ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ on the last night of the Proms. Everything would become erotic and unreliable.
When tensions at table were reaching a rolling boil, Mum would simply grab the handles of the wheelchair and trundle me out of the dining room. She would camouflage the emergency exit by saying it was time for that programme on television I especially wanted to see. I didn’t put up a struggle or try to fight the strong hand which clicked the brake off. I was well pleased with my work. This was as close as I could get to banging the door on my own account, having it vicariously slammed behind me while Dad returned to his pudding, digestive juices in uproar. It counted as a victory. I enjoyed the picture of myself as a junior dissident being hustled from the debating chamber. It was only a year since Russian tanks had rolled over the Czech enlightenment, as decisively as the one which had crushed my Vulcan headmaster Alan Raeburn’s legs during his army training, and I was learning to use current events to dramatise myself.
I was a little uneasy about our leaving Mum on her own during our expedition to Keele, though Dad was confident it was just what she needed. Her phobia about the clever playwright had intensified, and at some stage had crossed the border, always hard to define, into active delusion. It wasn’t just in shops that she feared the sudden apparition of her nemesis. He might pop up round the corner, with an escort of peacocks making that strangled-baby cry, spreading his own great tail of blue-green wisdom wide, until the sunlight sparkled unbearably on all the eyes of his mind.
She no longer felt safe even inside the house. She could sense, almost hear, Stoppard’s brain working unstoppably, while she tried to read her library book. She felt as if that brain was an oversized appliance draining the National Grid, siphoning off what little mental power she could muster. If he made her feel so stupid when he was still (relatively) far off, what would it be like if they were ever in the same room? It didn’t bear thinking about – which didn’t mean she could stop herself. A plume of intellectual radiation was drifting across Bourne End. And she was the only one who knew about it.
I went to the trouble of laying hands on a copy of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, thanks to Mrs Pavey. Having read it, I told Mum with the full authority of an A-level student that it was clever but not that clever, but she wouldn’t be comforted. She could tell that my heart wasn’t in it, or perhaps that only my heart was in it, while my mind dissented. She knew me too well to be fooled by good intentions.
My trip to Keele wasn’t optional, though Dad’s attendance was. Still, if my long-term goal was trying not to dance to Mum’s tune, then I could hardly blame Dad for sharing it. What could I do, in practical terms? I did what I could. I phoned Muriel Foot, the linchpin of Mum’s sewing circle, asking her to look in on Mum while we were away.
Dad was my map-reader for the journey to Keele. He was predictably exacting in this rôle, allowing only one stop on the way. He already had a spot picked out. It wasn’t even on the direct route, but I knew better than to complain. This was the longest bit of driving I had ever done, and I was knackered by it, but I put up a good show. Finally we arrived at the designated lay-by, and Dad got out, saying he needed to stretch his legs and he’d heard this was a good spot to find viper’s bugloss, which you certainly didn’t see every day. There was a stile nearby, which he climbed. He practically twinkled over it. I admired the fluency of the movements that put space between us so smartly. He was stretching his legs already.
He was gone for the best part of an hour. It got hot inside the Mini. If I had been a dog he would have left a window open for me, I was sure of that, but then I could crank the handle myself after a fashion.
Suddenly he was back, out of breath and bleeding from scratches on his leg. He was wearing shorts, to be more comfortable on the journey, though of course he would change before we got to Keele into a presentable pair of trousers. He scrambled into the car, shaking and muttering, ‘Bloody thorns’. I misjudged his mood by trying to make a joke of it, saying, ‘That viper’s bugloss must have quite a bite.’ He ignored me and said, ‘Start the car please John. Let’s go.’ I started the engine but didn’t move off right away. ‘What happened, Dad?’
‘A bull chased me across the last field, that’s what happened. Can we get a move on?’ Dad never normally let a little thing like a bull worry him. He’d pushed me past any number of bulls in the past. ‘I thought you said it was only people who didn’t know what they were doing who got chased by bulls?’
‘Never mind what I said
, John. Move off. Chop chop. Time’s getting on. We’ve got somewhere to go.’
I thought that was a bit rich after leaving me twiddling my thumbs for so long. I was the driver, wasn’t I? He was only hitching a lift, and it would have served him right if I had gone on without him. I said, ‘I’m just taking one last look at this lovely spot.’
‘I must insist that you start driving.’
‘Granny always said that I shouldn’t waste the privilege of the view. Otherwise I’ll get bored and crash.’
‘Crash later if you must but drive now.’ Sullenly I obeyed him. ‘Your grandmother, John,’ he went on, ‘is a surly old witch who has never said a sensible thing or done a useful one.’
‘Apart perhaps from buying the car you’re riding in.’
That stopped him short, but only for a moment, and then he added, ‘Oh, she’ll make you pay, never fear. Don’t you know that?’ I knew that. Afterwards he calmed down a bit, though the earlier sunny mood was in no hurry to re-form.
My bright red charabanc
We were given a good welcome at Keele. It seemed a pretty little campus. It looked to me rather an artificial environment, which didn’t put me off, rather the opposite. I quite fancied the idea of being a student of the University of Toytown. It was like a more modern version of the village in The Prisoner, a television programme which had many devotees at Burnham Grammar, enigmatic spy drama set in a seaside resort, with splendid neo-Edwardian charabancs to carry everyone around. I found myself imitating the ritual leave-taking from the series by saying ‘Be Seeing You’ rather meaningfully at the end of my interview, instead of the conventional Goodbye.