Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  The interview wasn’t easy, though, and I found myself getting flustered. My German pronunciation faltered. It wasn’t what it should have been. It rather let me down.

  The canteen offered not one but two vegetarian options. I was told that if I was accepted I would be allowed to drive the Mini on the pedestrian walkways. All of this added to the seductiveness of the place – my bright red charabanc would have right of way.

  There was a Victorian mansion which was part of the complex, with an enormous holly hedge which Dad and I admired. It must have been hundreds of feet wide, thirty foot high and almost as thick.

  As we were leaving in the morning, Dad pointed out a disabled student, a girl in a motorised wheelchair. I could recognise the dawdling progress of an Everest & Jennings from some way off. I thought her presence was a good sign, but Dad was discouraging. ‘While she’s there,’ he said, ‘you don’t have a chance. Not a chance in hell – that’s just the way these things work.’ I pointed out that if she was a second-year she would have graduated by the time I arrived, but Dad wasn’t convinced.

  I asked Dad if he wanted to do any more botanical sight-seeing on the way home, but he said he’d had enough of nature for the time being. We made do with coffee and sandwiches at a pub.

  Muriel Foot was at Trees when we got there, to keep Mum company. Muriel had been worried, and though she hadn’t spent the night she had stayed late that evening and returned early in the morning.

  The day before, she had found Mum painting over the inside of a window with whitewash, and it had taken some time before Mum gave any sort of explanation. In fact she was putting into practice one of the procedures recommended in the event of nuclear war. The whitewash was intended to reflect the visible wave-lengths of an explosion, but Mum wasn’t thinking in terms of a bomb. She was trying to protect us all against the catastrophic flash from Stoppard’s brain.

  Muriel tried to think of something else to suggest, to take her mind off things. Mum was willing to be distracted, but only up to a certain point. They sat down to draft letters to the local paper instead, warning people of the danger in which they all lived.

  Muriel told Dad she thought Mum was having a nervous breakdown, but Dad didn’t give that idea house room. ‘That’s not how Laura’s breakdowns go. If she has the energy to whitewash a window it means she’s holding her own.’ Which wasn’t exactly reassuring to Muriel, or indeed to me. It was news (to both of us, I imagine) that Mum had had breakdowns in the past.

  Dad shooed Muriel away. She went without verbal protest – everyone knew better in those days than to come between husband and wife – though the set of her shoulders told a different story. Then Dad threw the draft letters in the bin, poured the whitewash away and made a start on cleaning the affected window. Then he went into the garden to see how things were getting along there in his absence. He paid no direct attention to Mum, but that wasn’t the way their marriage worked (to the extent that it did). He had a steadying effect unconnected to any communicative current, and being ignored by him at close range was almost enough to bring her back to herself. To love, honour and obey – all those actions were promised at the wedding and, I’m sure, sincerely meant at the time. But they were hardly the operative verbs of the marriage. Almost-hearing, not-quite-looking-through, leaving-the-room-without-actually-moving – nothing was said in church about any of those.

  As part of my application to Cambridge I had to write an essay on any subject under the sun. Free choice, that terrifying obligation. I decided I wanted to write something which proved my mind and my character went in more than one direction, both outward and inward, so I described the various stages a flame passes through before it starves to death. Thanks to my candle-making with Mum I had a good grasp of what went on in a flame. I made it as exact and technical as I could, describing the adventures of the flame as a scientific event, a nuanced narrative of physics and chemistry, but then I changed gear and wrote, ‘I am now exactly that tiny blue tongue of combustion on a cushion of gases. You, dear examiner, can snuff me out once and for all. Or you can prolong the wick of my mind’s life so that I burn yellow and burn bright.’ Good manipulative pyræsthetics, though it was sentimental of me to use the image of a candle flame in such a way. In Hindu mysticism it is used to represent an opposite truth, the inconstancy of personality.

  Even before the interview I got the impression that Cambridge University wasn’t keen on disability, not in its heart of hearts. I decided that the only way I was going to persuade them otherwise was by being very full of the old can-do. Cambridge might agree to have me as long as I made out that I hardly needed the wheelchair. Only hanging on to it for sentimental reasons, like Evelyn Waugh’s silly Sebastian taking his teddy bear with him to Oxford.

  Dad didn’t offer to go with me this time, and anyway I thought it would be a good idea to tackle a substantial trip solo. I did ask him to draw me a map, though, one more time. ‘If you’re going to fly solo you must learn to navigate,’ he told me. ‘It’s all a matter of practice.’ Out of the nest pronto, my lad. Don’t expect any favours. Flap those stubby wings.

  Old Tin-Legs has a lot to answer for

  My interviewer was called Mr A. T. Grove. He met me outside the Porter’s Lodge, shook my hand and then said neutrally, ‘Shall we go for a little walk?’ Yes, let’s! All the way to this pebble here.

  It was exactly as I feared. My body would have to pass muster before my mind was even considered. ‘Certainly,’ I said, hoping he didn’t mean more than a few steps. ‘It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?’ The surface under my shoes, however, was anything but lovely. It was gravel. There is no less coöperative material to have underneath you when you’re ambulating feebly with a crutch and a cane. It’s a hellish surface for me, given the small square-inchage of my feet, and my very limited bracing skills with the hand-held implements. Rudimentary implements held in deficient hands.

  ‘How far can you go? I thought we might go to Regent Street for a cup of coffee. Is that too far for you?’

  I didn’t know where Regent Street was, but it seemed too much to hope that it was actually inside the college – might it perhaps be the nickname of the junior common room? I knew historic universities were full of charming bits of vocabulary. ‘No, indeed,’ I assured him. ‘A walk in the fresh air will do me good. It’ll give me an appetite for a nice cup of coffee!’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure I can quite promise you that,’ answered A. T. Grove. ‘But perhaps we’ll manage to choke it down.’

  And so I prattled on in agony, telling myself that at least it would all be worth while if it got me away from Bourne End. After a while I realised that my conversation was beside the point – I didn’t need to hold up my side of it more than notionally, as long as I kept moving. So I asked Grove about the architecture and history of the college, and nodded and smiled at a ghastly angle while he answered. If I was hoping he would be distracted then I was deceived. He shot sharp little sidelong glances at me, while I drew on the last vestiges of my CRX-and-Vulcan personality, making a final effort to pretend that ankylosed joints were quite workable, really, once I got going. Piece of cake. Lovely tasty cake. I summoned up a tutelary spirit from the past, Michael Flanders of Flanders and Swann, who had given such helpful advice in the dressing room of the Theatre Royal, Windsor, in my childhood. I imagined Flanders’s rosy lips and burly beard in my ear, murmuring, ‘You’ve got to show them the fighting spirit now and then, more’s the pity,’ and then, even more softly, ‘Damn that fellow Bader! Old Tin-Legs has a lot to answer for!’

  The effect of this phantom pep-talk was lessened by my knowledge that Michael Flanders had himself been an able-bodied undergraduate, who contracted polio at sea during the his war service. He could still be a hero of mine, but he wasn’t entitled to inspire me at this stage of a ritual ordeal he hadn’t shared.

  By the time we got as far as the college gates I was light-headed with pain. I suppose a Cambridge college was bound to have a more wor
ldly attitude than a grammar school. The idea must have been that if I was going to fall down anyway, it should ideally be now, before any institutional liability had been created, rather than after I had been admitted, when litigation against the college might bloom along with my bruises. As things stood, I was an outsider, responsible for my own risk. At least the gravel didn’t extend to the street – it was a strictly intramural torture. Beyond the college gates the world was stone, which wouldn’t normally be reassuring.

  The coffee bar was called Snax. By this stage I could hardly stand up, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if A. T. Grove had expected me to carry my coffee mug to our table. Perhaps his as well. Luckily he told me to sit down. ‘I’m going to have a sandwich,’ he said, ‘to take away the taste of the coffee. And vice versa. Can I get you something to eat?’ I was hungry but couldn’t see anything suitable. I asked for some chips and he looked at me rather strangely. ‘Not something they usually serve in sandwich bars, but I’ll make enquiries.’ He came back in a few moments with a packet of something called Chiplets, which were miniature chip-shaped snacks, notionally based on the potato, greasy of feel and salty in taste. He opened the packet politely and laid it on the table in front of me. Now I was really in trouble.

  By good fortune the mugs in Snax had their handles conveniently mounted, so that I could drink my coffee without drawing attention to myself. A. T. Grove, though, looked at me closely to see how I managed. I hold mugs with their handles towards me, then lift from the shoulder. It’s not elegant but it gets the job done.

  Eating sandwiches was quite impossible in front of a stranger, one who just happened to have the power of educational life or death over me. Chips would have been manageable with a fork. The hateful Chiplets were no sort of substitute. Throwing titbits into your mouth is a handy party trick, though I wasn’t sure I could bring it off accurately with these little salted javelins as opposed to the peanuts I was used to. I would need a few undignified tries to get my hand in. Any display of the sort would have been wildly at odds with the mood of an interview, if it was ever going to start. A. T. Grove was taking an awfully long time getting round to any sort of test for this mind as opposed to this body. When would he be turning on the X-ray machine that measured the mental apparatus?

  I leaned forward and sniffed the air above the packet of Chiplets, saying, ‘Stale, I’m afraid. I don’t think I’ll bother after all. But thank you very much anyway, sir.’ I had to raise the stakes with a bluff rather than admit the truth. I wasn’t going to admit that I couldn’t manage to eat the bloody things. The one thing I couldn’t do was admit that there was anything I couldn’t do. In this context it was perfectly fine to be disabled as long as you could participate fully across the board.

  If I couldn’t master a bag of snacks at Snax how would I be able to master a course of study at Downing? My legs were still registering aftershocks of agony, and I felt I had been humiliated enough already.

  I seemed to be doomed to alternate polite and prickly patterns of behaviour, first demanding delicacies out of season and then refusing them with a hint of apology. No wonder A. T. Grove looked at me rather oddly.

  He ate his sandwich with every sign of pleasure, while my tummy muttered to itself. Then he pushed his plate away and drank down the dregs of his coffee with an expression of sour determination. Now perhaps we would arrive at the intellectual portion to the day. He was nodding and murmuring, ‘Mmmmm … Mmmmm … Yes I think we know where we stand now.’

  Where did we stand? I hadn’t the faintest idea. My interviewer had asked no relevant questions. For all he knew I had intellectual marvels up my sleeve, spanking-new proofs of the existence of God. Then he said, ‘Is there anything you’d like to ask me?’

  I was very thrown by this. ‘Not really,’ I blurted, ‘but isn’t there anything you want to ask me?’

  He became vague, perhaps embarrassed. ‘I don’t think so, Mr Cromer. I had to see for myself what the difficulties were.’ Later I discovered that he was a geographer who simply happened to be handling admissions that year. His specialism was the desert. He might have been able to ask me about Thomas Mann’s prose style, but he wouldn’t have been able to assess the quality of the answer (which would have been another piece of bluff, since I had got stuck on the first few pages of Buddenbrooks, like so many thousands before me).

  By the end of our meeting, I would hardly have been surprised if A. T. Grove had said, ‘I have just one more educational question to put to you,’ reaching into his pocket to produce a handful of ball bearings to scatter at my feet. Then when I went arse over apex trying to leave that hellish coffee bar he could murmur sadly, ‘I’m afraid you’re not going to meet the academic standards for a course of study at the university. As we’ve always said, exams don’t give the whole picture. An interview is required to plumb the candidate in depth.’

  I thought that back at Downing A. T. Grove might pass me on to someone else for Assessment of Candidates’ Abilities Part Two. No. The intellectual part of the interview, the part that addressed capabilities of mind, never materialised. The specialist in deserts had conducted an interview that was a desert in its own right, a place where nothing could grow. All that had been proved was that I could go for a cup of coffee on Regent Street. Just barely.

  Dad debriefed me when I got home. When I told him I hadn’t been asked a single question in German – or even about German – he pulled a face, which had a stiff sympathy in its composition but perhaps something else as well. Perhaps it wasn’t altogether bad news that I wasn’t going to overtake him educationally, after all. I too had reached a dead end on the road to learning. He didn’t quite say, ‘I told you so,’ since in fact he hadn’t told me so. He had only thought of telling me so, and his face was saying, pretty clearly, ‘I thought of telling you so, and if I had actually gone through with it, “I told you so” is what I’d be saying now.’

  Green fronds of calm

  I wasn’t hell-bent on further education, but I could think of nothing else which would get me what I actually wanted, namely a bed away from home without any nurses attached to it or hovering nearby, waiting to be summoned. So this period of waiting for news of my future would have been a tense time, if it hadn’t been for Mrs Pavey. As dock-leaves never grow far from nettles, so now there were green fronds of calm pushing up beside the prickles of anxiety. Mrs Pavey came up trumps once again. In fact she came up with the ace of trumps, a spiritual bombshell.

  While I was still at Burnham she had sent along another book by Mouni Sadhu, in the wake of my beloved Tarot, called In Days of Great Peace. I read it without much excitement. It was about a particular guru in India, but I can’t say he made a huge impression. I was even able to read the sentence, ‘He walked with difficulty, as his joints and knees were affected by acute rheumatism’, without realising I had come across a spiritual leader tailor-made for me. A guru with rheumatism – wasn’t that just exactly the ticket?

  When you feel grace tugging at your heart and start looking for the Guru, it actually means he’s already found you. He was installed in your deepest life all along. You never met him because he was never not there. Grace proceeds not by ambushes of glory but sidelong and stealthwise, in a rosy pervasion.

  I don’t know why I hadn’t responded more strongly to that first refracted glimpse of my guru. Spiritually I had lain fallow for years, but now I was mysteriously cleared and ready for sowing. My mind was bringing a crop of language towards the brutal harvest of an exam, but in another way this was seed time, a season of rapid growth from nothing.

  Or perhaps the comparison should be with the germination of mushroom spores – in the wider world, rather than the botched artificial version Dad and I had tried to make happen at Trees. Under the ground the mycelial threads thicken and mature, but nothing appears above the surface until the right moment. Dry weather conditions impede any further progress, but when the drought breaks suddenly there are sporocarps everywhere, prodigious fruiting bo
dies.

  The label on Mrs Pavey’s bombshell was Ramana Maharshi and the Path of Self-Knowledge by Arthur Osborne. I expect it was the blurb which alerted her to its suitability: ‘Many forms of Yoga are unsuited to the Western way of life. The Yoga of Wisdom and Understanding as taught and lived by Ramana Maharshi, however, is a point where East and West can meet, since it does not demand withdrawal from the world. Nor does its practice entail tortuous exercises or the tying of the body in knots.’ Bless the blurb! And bless the librarian who popped the book into Mum’s bicycle basket.

  I had read about yoga, and been fascinated, though excluded from the physical practice. Yoga can give you a lovely flexible body, but only if you start off with one.

  As for withdrawing from the world, it was not an attractive idea for me. I had only a toehold there and could easily lose my very marginal place. To adapt an old joke: the family is an institution – but who wants to live in an institution? Certainly not me. Even if I established some sort of independence from Mum and Dad there would always be institutions – hospitals, ‘homes’ – yawning to swallow me. To enter one of those would not be a way of transcending the world, only being shut out of it. That’s not mystic withdrawal, that’s eviction.

  All my impetus was towards involvement. Between them my spiritual and pragmatic sides cooked up a rationale for this that suited them both: If you weren’t really part of the world then withdrawing from it had no value. Let me get stuck in to the life people lead. Then I would transcend its futility. But not before.

  Leisurely thunderbolt

  Before I read Arthur Osborne’s book I was searching at random. The fact that I didn’t know what I was looking for is proved by my having read about Ramana Maharshi in Mouni Sadhu’s book without really noticing. Now I was saved from any possibility of spiritual dilettantism by a leisurely thunderbolt of affinity. There’s a lot of guru-hopping goes on, but I’ve never swerved since then from Ramana Maharshi. Also known as Bhagavan. The change from the Maharshi as refracted by Mouni Sadhu and the robust presence in dear Arthur Osborne’s book reminded me of another subtly drastic change, only in reverse – the time that my ‘illuminous’ watch went to Maidenhead for its thousand-day service, and came back stripped of its radioactive paint.