Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  I had asked Mum and Dad to leave the door open and now I punted myself out into the common spaces of the staircase. A mother came bustling down the stairs from where she had been fussing over her chick. ‘He’s supposed to be seeing his tutor at 3.30 – Dr Mays. I’m afraid we’re totally lost. Is there anywhere we ought to be? Anything we should do?’

  I raised my chin and supported it with my stick – my approximation of the stroking-chin-with-hand gesture, denoting thought. I frowned and then smiled and said Dr Mays would be along presently.

  The flustered mum was enormously grateful and bustled back up the stairs to pass on these words of comfort. Of course I had no idea who Dr Mays was, but if it pleased this mother to put her trust in a stranger it pleased me to play along. It was good to know that I had the look of someone who knew things. That was a definite advantage, and I didn’t have many.

  That first evening in Downing I could hear the other freshmen ritually revving up their record-players. The volume rose in stealthy and then flagrant increments until the noise became outrageous. I could hear Beatles, I could hear Stones, statements of counter-cultural allegiance, though the Beatles had recently betrayed their devotees by breaking up – having found out the hard way that being a guru is an exhausting business. Not everyone can stand the pressure of other people’s hopes. I could also hear something rather wild, with squawks and squeaks and a deep harsh male voice wailing.

  The whole upwelling of noise was a sort of instinctual ritual of arrival. The new intake was marking its territory with music. I have no doubt that there were students on the staircase whose tastes ran to the gentler strains of folk or the singer-songwriters then coming into fashion. But first night in college is no time for the roundelay, for the ballad. What marks territory is rhythm, glandular presence, energy that explodes into a chorus.

  I had a gramophone of my own – a brand-new Hacker obtained direct from the factory in Maidenhead. I had a few albums – I could contribute my pennorth of racket. The machine had been set up and plugged in by Dad before he left. Yet the labour of removing a disc from its sleeve and manœuvring it down onto the spindle was daunting. I didn’t feel up to it. I was tired from the effort of keeping two illusions going in a single day, the mirages of Bourne End and Cambridge University, even if I couldn’t quite claim the double-strength Maya of jet lag. I wanted to go to bed, really, but that too seemed a daunting effort. There would be a meal available in Hall in an hour or so, but it seemed more fitting to fast. Perhaps I should let the toxins of my old life drain away before I started to build a new self on new food. In other words, I was a little intimidated by my new surroundings.

  My shoulder ached from the drive. The technical term is adhesive capsulitis, and it has always comforted me to know the technical terms. Yet the common description is a good one. Frozen shoulder. It sounds as if it was coined by someone who had personal experience of the condition, not just a bystander or coiner of slogans.

  I used my stick to draw the curtains, by pushing with the rubber tip, sealing myself off in what was to be my nest, this educational cave. The curtains moved smoothly on their runners to shut out the outside world, so I could tell myself that at least something was working as it should.

  There was no toilet en-suite, of course, but Dad had delivered my maroon leatherette commode to one of the cubicles of the communal toilets, so I could manage perfectly well.

  For the first time in my life there was no one hovering to offer help, however little I wanted it. I don’t mean that I didn’t already perform my own chores, in terms of changing clothes and brushing teeth. My snorkel technique impeachably improved. I had managed well for years, but I had always been aware of Mum in the background, seething with the need to be needed. Even in India there was some sort of back-up – if I had dawdled beyond a certain point Mrs O would have issued gruff orders for Kuppu to assist me. Here I was really on my own, and that took a certain amount of getting used to. It would be wrong to say that I missed it, but I registered that it wasn’t there, the mothering tide against which I had struggled to swim for so long, swimming until my shoulder froze from the effort of keeping afloat.

  It’s never easy to get to sleep in a new place, where you don’t instinctively know where the pee bottle is, for instance. The Margaret Erskine Dream-Cloud provided the chief element of continuity. As I lay awake on the bed I could hear the mournful chiming of a church clock – every hour on the hour, as confirmed by the Relide watch from my childhood, still keeping good time despite the inferior glow which faded long before morning. There was something wrong with the chime of the clock, so that one strike was replaced by a muffled thud. It maddened me, as if I couldn’t help making a connection between the defective chime and something inside myself. A dull thud where a clang should be.

  In the morning I met my bedmaker, a thin woman of about fifty with yellow hair. Her manner was frantic motion from the moment she edged open the door, pure distilled bustle. She had knocked so quietly that I hadn’t been sure there was anybody there. ‘Morning, Mr Cromer,’ she said. ‘I’ve brought you a cup of tea.’ She put it carefully on the desk. ‘I’ll just have a quick go-round and get out of your way. I’ll say one thing – there’s not a lot of room to man-oover.’

  ‘To man-oover,’ I suggested, ‘your lovely hoover.’ Her face went blank. It was a mistake to start out on a playful note, as I should certainly have known. I’ve learned that beginnings must be neutral. My little sally hadn’t broken the ice but plunged her into terror and dismay. After that, the vacuum cleaner was a mad dodgem car of suction bumping back and forth in that confined space, her duster was a blur. I let her get on with it.

  Can I really have wanted to impress her with my cleverness? If so then I was demonstrating the opposite. She didn’t need to be shown I was clever – why else would I be here, unless I could manage a certain something in that line? – but human and unfrightening.

  I was familiar with the spectacle taking place in front of me, of tension being discharged through the medium of housework. I was installed in the Parker-Knoll, so I just pulled the joystick to lift my legs out of her way. Her gaze kept skittering to the corners of the room as if she had spotted a spider there. After a time I realised that I had the situation reversed. If there was a spider in the room, it was me, and she was doing all she could not to stare into its arachnid eyes.

  I considered the cup of tea she had brought me. Was this part of a bedder’s duties, to slake the morning thirst of students? It seemed unlikely. I imagined the bedder way of life as something handed down over the years, a samurai code. So these must be c tea-bag of charity. I would spurn them. Special treatment was exactly what I didn’t want, not noticing that it can sometimes be the product of ordinary kindness.

  The patience of water

  I refused to be a charity case, and so I made it my mission to turn my bedder into a sort of friend. I would have to win her over very delicately. Patience was the key. Sooner or later this woman who had been assigned to me would look me in the eye, and at that point the charm offensive proper could begin. I was used to people who stared at me, or kept their distance, but her job required her to come close. She couldn’t clean the room from outside the premises, and I didn’t really see why I should struggle to vacate my room for her benefit.

  In the meantime I needed a neutral question. I asked her about the clock I had heard in the night. She put her head on one side and gave it some thought. When she said she thought it must be the Catholic Clock – I suppose she meant the clock from the Catholic Church – her eyes just barely grazed my face. Progress enough for one day. I didn’t even know her name yet. She would tell me in her own good time. I told myself with feeble bravado that I wasn’t in a hurry. Time was on my side, and I would wait it out. Her name wouldn’t change between now and the time she told me what it was. I’d be seeing her often enough. I had the patience of water, and would wear her petrified face down into a smile.

  The bedmaker makes the bed. That
’s all there is to it. She does some low-level tidying-up and some low-level snooping. She’s supposed to report you if you haven’t slept in the bed allotted you by the college, or if you’ve infringed regulations in some other way. Perhaps you have been cooking gourmet meals on your gas-ring. Traces of feathers and scales on the Formica reveal that you have been stuffing swans with sturgeons – two slaps in the face for the Queen if you’ve only been poaching them, a third for the college if you’ve gone mad with the frying pan. Your bedmaker will prepare a dossier.

  The gas-ring is intended for the boiling of water – milk at a pinch. Any dish more complex or whiffy than a boiled egg amounts to infraction. Frying is a mortal sin, as I had been warned well ahead of time. Time would tell if I was capable of staying on the right side of such pettifogging regulations. Meanwhile I would try my luck in the dining hall.

  Of course it wasn’t easy to get into Hall, physically – there were the usual couple of massive Downing steps. It was as if the architect had wanted to set up regular barriers against me personally, ritual road-blocks in my path, to remind me I was only there on sufferance and must constantly apologise for my presence by asking for help.

  There was a ticket system for Hall, with everyone being issued a little book of vouchers. Eating in Hall wasn’t compulsory, but undergraduates were charged for one book of tickets a term, whether they used them or not.

  The vouchers were collected when you queued for your meal, and that was where I had the advantage. I wasn’t expected to queue, and the staff rarely bothered to collect my tickets. Perhaps once a week a waiter would murmur, ‘Better take a ticket from you today, sir, eh?’ and give me a nice wink. Outrageous, really. Quite unfair on the other students, the wheelchair-deprived.

  Three of us were vegetarians, out of a student body of three hundred. Three! It’s an astonishingly low figure, with all the cultural upheavals of the 1960s still echoing, but there it is. Perhaps engineering and medicine, the traditional Downing subjects, attract the deep-dyed carnivore. Any reference in conversation to Gandhi’s vegetarianism would be countered by a reference to Hitler’s. One-all. Student culture, wavering between ideologies of diet, was waiting for the decider.

  I soon made friends with one of the other dissidents, a third-year medical student called Alan Linton, and after that he sometimes helped me up the steps to the Hall with a mighty hoick. As an able-bodied third-year he didn’t live in college, or else I’m sure he would have been my mainstay in terms of getting around the college at mealtimes.

  I was a rather hard-line vegetarian in those days. I would call carnivores (since flesh is flesh) cannibals by proxy. I called fish ‘sea flesh’ or ‘meat-that-swims’. Of course as a child I myself had been fond of (whisper it) cold tongue, which I had chosen to think of as a close-textured vegetable bearing no resemblance to the talking muscle installed in my own head. Perhaps I was atoning for that now, in some contorted fashion, by being so doctrinaire. I was so much at sea in my new surroundings that I made rather a meal of the few certainties I thought I had.

  The standard vegetarian meal was a cheesy ratatouille-y concoction, usually served on toast. It was tasty enough, certainly not bad. Monotonous – but I was used to monotony, having grown up in its bosom. Relentless variety would have been a more searching test of character. The college meat-eaters seemed to think that what they were served was actively inedible, so we in the grazing minority weren’t badly off in relative terms.

  The choice of Downing hadn’t been initiated by me but by Klaus Eckstein, but I’m happy to detect a deep logic to it. Downing wasn’t a glamorous college, not a Cambridge icon – not famous for age or beauty, for façade or choir, student princes or Nobel laureates. It was central but tucked away, since a hedge of shops had grown up around it. It had roughly the status of a prominent recluse. The only well-known scandal in its history was of a bursar who had run off with vast sums, requiring the college to sell off a substantial tract of its holdings to the university. Hence the Downing Site of faculty buildings just next door.

  Downing was mainly a slow-working factory for turning out engineers and medics. Unforeseen side-effects of the manufacturing process seemed to be drunken shouting late at night, wild laughter and a certain amount of scuffling.

  Some mornings I would see half-skeletons left out in the courtyard, suggestively posed. A little later their owners, red-eyed and stumbling – the present owners, rather than the original inhabitants – would retrieve the bones from these tableaux of post-mortem dissipation.

  A good joke never grows old. I soon got used to the sight of skeletal arms waved in my line of sight by giggling students crouched below the level of my window.

  On her second visit the bedmaker must have been looking about her in a more relaxed fashion than before, because she got an eyeful of something even more outlandish than me. There was a tropical millipede, a nice brownish colour and about a foot long, on the windowsill. In a plastic box, mind you, not roaming free. It had cost me £1 in Maidenhead. What with the millipede and the stereo, Maidenhead had yielded quite a trove of bargains.

  Actually the reason she hadn’t seen it the first time was that I had stowed it in a drawer beforehand. Just being tactful, like Bluebeard not wanting to mention the wives on a first date, knowing there would likely be complications later, and wanting to get off on a good foot. Or two feet. But no more than that.

  When my millipede curled up it looked very much like a Catherine wheel, though I didn’t like to see it in that position too often, curling up in such creatures being an indicator of stress. This particular morning, though, it was feeding very happily. Millipedes do very well on rotten fruit.

  My bedmaker stared at it. ‘What on earth is that Nasty Thing?’ I tried to explain the beauties of the creature, but I could make no headway. There’s something about segmented arthropod bodies, legs that dance in squadrons, that seems to upset people. Coördination which would produce wild applause in a chorus line and enthusiastic cheering at a sports ground – there’s something called a Mexican wave, where people raise their arms in raucous sequence – just gives people the horrors in an inoffensive giant insect.

  There was only one thing my bedmaker wanted to know about this beautiful creature: whether she was expected to clean out its box. I reassured her. I myself was the millipede’s bedder. She could relax.

  There were no signs of relaxation as yet, but it was early days. At least she was dividing her alarm between two objects, now that she had seen the millipede, so logically she must be feeling more at ease with me. We were on our way.

  I knew my millipede was bisexual and hoped it would breed, not realising that you need two of them for that – any two, but you do need two. So my knowledge was curled up round a core of ignorance. Any passing biologist (and there must have been a few such at Downing) could have put me right.

  The millipede had a name, but somehow I’ve forgotten it, and The Nasty Thing is all that remains.

  Over the railings outside the back entrance of my staircase was a building on the Downing Site labelled Department of Parapsychology, which I thought was a wonderful omen and a testimony to the open-mindedness of the university – until I realised I had been misreading Parasitology. Also an honourable discipline, of course.

  When I arrived with Mum and Dad on that first day I had been issued with a key to the door of A6, something that presented practical problems from the start. Where was I to keep it, for one thing? Pockets and I don’t get on, never have and never will. Something in a pocket is as far out of my reach as a jar on a high shelf.

  I asked my bedmaker for help. By now she had a name. She hadn’t volunteered it, but I had extracted it like an expert dentist while her attention was elsewhere.

  I had it all planned. I let her surprise me at my typewriter, tapping cheerfully away. I called out, ‘I love typing, don’t you? Ten tiny tendrils tapping in tempo! I’m just writing to my mother about you, only – so embarrassing! – your name has slipped my min
d. I swear, I’d forget my hips if they weren’t screwed on!’

  She gave a little gasp and then it came out. She was Mrs Beddoes. The reluctant stump was held safe in my pliers. And it hadn’t hurt a bit. ‘Beddoes by name and bedder by nature,’ she said. Mrs Beddoes the bedder, next card along from Mr Carve the Butcher in the Happy Families pack.

  Her fear of me was still great and it was important to be delicate in my approaches. If I could I would tempt her into making the first move, as if I was coaxing a squirrel down from its branch.

  I spoke soothingly, knowing that tone of voice was more important than my choice of words. ‘I wish,’ I said, ‘I could find some way of keeping track of my room key. Perhaps a piece of string would do the trick.’ This was the equivalent of the peanut on the back of my hand, tempting the flighty creature to come close.

  Mrs Beddoes frowned and produced a length of string from the pocket of her pinny. Then she came up to me of her own accord, close enough to attach it to my trousers. Her hand held the string, but in another way it was me who reeled her in.

  Town full of scrappy facial hair

  First we tied one end to the key and the other to a belt-loop. I could retrieve the key reasonably easily by pulling on the string, but I couldn’t always tuck it away again, so the whole arrangement was a bit of a business. Eventually I realised that it was simpler to have the key on its string round my neck, even if it sometimes got tangled up with my clothes. By then Mrs Beddoes was almost tame, though still a long way from eating out of my hand. Progress enough for one day.

  She had gone on bringing me cups of tea, and I had gone on not drinking them. Finally she broached the subject. ‘Aren’t you going to have your tea, Mr Cromer?’ she asked. ‘I should have asked how you take it – perhaps you need sugar? If it’s cold I can make you another. It’s no trouble.’