Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  I took it for granted that Noel would be on his way as soon as he could. No such luck. He seemed annoyingly refreshed, and in a mood to be further entertained. He had exhausted his curiosity about me, but had apparently promised himself the treat of meeting my bedder.

  His smile was on full disarming power from the moment Mrs Beddoes arrived. She’d barely had time to say, ‘Hello, and who are you?’ than he’d offered her a cup of coffee. My coffee, not actually a plentiful resource. Reluctantly I introduced them. From nowhere Mrs Beddoes produced something which she’d been keeping dark, a Christian name. ‘Jean Beddoes.’

  Noel said, ‘John kindly let me stay last night after I had a fit of the heebie-jeebies from a film we saw. Have you ever had a fit of the heebie-jeebies from watching a film, Mrs Beddoes?’

  She hardly hesitated. ‘There was one … what was it called? Gravestones, and a man pouncing on a boy. Staring eyes. I couldn’t sleep for weeks after that.’

  Noel raised his hands in front of him and gave a theatrical shudder. He even closed his eyes. ‘Magwitch!’ he whispered, in reverent horror, and then they were away, fast friends already on the basis of Great Expectations. At that moment, peeking out at Mrs Beddoes from behind a finger fence of artificial surprise, he looked like a minor Dickensian character himself. Minutes later he was helping her to make the bed.

  Since I slept wrapped up in a cloud of dreams there was actually no need to do any such thing, but Mrs Beddoes would not be deflected from her professional code. There was no question of slackening off even when rigour was nonsensical. So every day she would unmake the bed and remake it, tucking the coverlet in with brisk determined movements so there was no possibility of the pillow making a run for it. I had shown her once that this technique would have made it hard for me to get into bed, if I hadn’t preferred the Dream-Cloud. I had slid my stick in and then yanked sideways to open a usable gateway to the sheets, like Dad using his paperknife on a letter, to show her how preposterous she was being. She stuck to her principles.

  In the shock of rapport with Noel her cheeks were now quite pink. Somehow they had got on to the subject of favourite pieces of music. Mrs Beddoes was saying, ‘It’s my husband who knows about things. Alf’s favourite piece is classical music, and I really like it too. It’s by Beethoven.’

  ‘Really, Mrs Beddoes? One of the symphonies?’ He thought for a moment. ‘Perhaps the Pastoral? You may know it from Fantasia – the Disney film.’

  ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘It’s not from a film.’ I was delighted that Noel’s patronising suggestion had fallen flat. ‘It’s called … it’s gone out of my mind. It’s called … that’s right, “Wellington’s Victory”. It’s on the same record as the “1812”, but it’s even better.’ She clapped her hands together on either side of the pillow, to plump it up, but almost as if she was playing the cymbals. ‘Even more cannons and whatnot!!’

  Which made Noel’s day, perhaps even his term. I had hoped he would leave before Mrs Beddoes did, so I could be spared the inevitable sneer about her musical taste, but he stayed on to round off the lovely morning he was having. I didn’t know ‘Wellington’s Victory’, but it seemed strange that liking Beethoven could be such a faux pas. Wasn’t Beethoven supposed to be the tops?

  It was perfectly possible that Mrs Beddoes knew more of Beethoven’s music than I did. Once you’d mentioned Moonlight, Für Elise and Da-da-da-Dum, you’d just about exhausted my expertise on the subject. I wasn’t in a position to call Noel’s bluff, but I wished someody would.

  What he said when we were alone was, I suppose, quite a mild exercise in contempt. ‘Good for Madame Beddoes,’ he said. ‘If you’re tone-deaf and pig-ignorant, you might as well go for the piece with the loudest bangs.’

  Watching the way Noel played along with innocent Mrs Beddoes, I realised that my social skills were very partial. I needed to develop new ones. All this time I had been thinking in terms of bringing people within the orbit of my personality, entirely overlooking the fact that they were always going to be people, like the blond germ working his ’fluence on Mrs Beddoes, who badly needed to be kept at a distance. Poor mobility meant poor avoiding skills, so I would need to add an annexe to my laboratory of personal accomplishments. It wasn’t enough to have charm, I needed antidotes to the charm of others. Countercharm. Even the Everest & Jennings hoist I had brought from Bourne End had a red control as well as a green one.

  I wanted to be able to accept the world’s butterscotch with the proper appreciation, while refusing its helping hand on my shoulder, its shallow fascination with the details of my daily life, its snores in my bed. I must learn the technique of ruling these things out of court so crisply that the offer never came again. There must be an end to haggling with the well-intentioned, the clueless and the plain invasive.

  If I had liked Noel I might have crowned his name with a sparkly diæresis, so: Noël. As things stood, I stripped him mentally of any such insignia. He didn’t deserve them.

  I was offended by Noel’s manner with Mrs Beddoes, but I also envied it. It obviously didn’t strike him as unnatural that he should be looked after at his college by a sort of servant, well on his way to adulthood. Perhaps he didn’t notice his dependence, but mine was highly visible to me. My independence was opening up by the slowest possible stages, and the leisure of the process maddened me. With every emancipation I became more chafed by the restrictions remaining.

  Certainly Noel was a great hit with the woman he had taken so much trouble to mock. For weeks after his overnight stay, she would ask, ‘And how is Mr Noel? Sleeping again at nights, I hope?’ She would obviously have enjoyed a repetition of his visit. It had slipped her mind that one of her purposes, according to the university’s administration, was to make sure that the students in her charge spent the stipulated number of nights a term within a one-mile radius of Great St Mary’s, unless they had their tutor’s permission, in their own beds and alone.

  Austere brickwork lingam

  What lay outside that magic circle was off the map and off the radar. As far as the rule was concerned, the university might be surrounded, like the earth in Hindu cosmology, by concentric oceans of (in order) brine, sugar-cane juice, wine, ghee, milk, whey and fresh water.

  To me the University Library was far more plausible as the centre of student life than Great St Mary’s. People were always complaining that it looked like a power station, as if they had spotted a flaw in the design, when that industrial imagery was exactly what the architect intended. The UL was a mighty pulsing electromagnet, which drew towards it with implacable force two copies of every book published in the country, on the very day it appeared. It was a royal engine of bibliophilia, it was an austere brickwork lingam throbbing with imaginative power. What it wasn’t – with its staircase upon staircase – was a place I could go. The front entrance crowned a flight of steps with that abomination, a revolving door, hateful symbol of my banishment from the engine room of learning. No one has ever been able to explain to me why the trivial advantages of the revolving door are held to outweigh its obvious defects. Yes, it excludes draughts. It also excludes me.

  I made one forlorn attempt at entering the premises by another avenue. There was a goods entrance at the back, where crates of books could be wheeled in. I would explore the possibilities there. Of course I had to make an appointment (more phone calls from the Porter’s Lodge) to be shown the ropes – the ramps, the lifts. Of course a ramp isn’t much use to a wheelchair-user unless he has a motorised chair or strong arms, and the lifts were pretty much hopeless, hardly larger than the ones at Vulcan, being designed in the first place for books and not people. All in all, the prospect of being an honorary book-crate in the UL was a lot less fun than being an honorary suitcase on trains leaving Bourne End station. It wasn’t a solution. I would have to find other means of gaining access to the treasure-house of books.

  Luckily my status as a second-class citizen wasn’t a simple thing. It was speckled with exemptions and c
oncessions. With a little cajoling on my part, there was a system in place. All I had to do was toot the Mini’s horn outside the Library at a prearranged time and the books I wanted would be brought down to me. The able-bodied undergraduates of the university, the hale and the hearty – they were the underprivileged ones. At the feast of learning offered in that rather sombre-looking building, they had to eat on the premises. I was entitled to take-away.

  The library’s statutes allowed for special arrangements to be made at the discretion of the Librarian, but in practice it was only necessary to adapt the mechanism which allowed third-year undergraduates to borrow books. My Tutor became my proxy – so technically he was the one who borrowed up to five volumes on my behalf, and incurred any penalties also. There was a certain amount of paperwork, since Graëme Beamish had to give his authorisation. He had a supply of forms already printed up (normally for the use of those lucky third-years), but he did need to sign them. ‘I must say, John,’ he remarked once, ‘that I never dreamed that writer’s cramp would be part of the price I pay – with joy in my heart, I assure you – for the pleasure of acting as a moral tutor.’

  Wheelchair access to libraries is a major cultural advance, but there’s no doubt about the greater poetry of the old arrangement. The boy at the foot of the steps whistles a special signal, and the books he wants come fluttering down from the roof of the building, birds of knowledge which alight on his fingertips. It’s all very Omar Khayyam.

  I don’t have a nostalgic bone in my body, and I wouldn’t willingly go back to any day gone by. Adhesion to the past is as bad as wanting to sew yourself into your old clothes. I can’t help it if my times of waiting for books to be ferried down the steps are among the brighter spots in an overcast time.

  Of course the real difficulty in the library lay in locating the books in the catalogues, writing down the relevant class-marks and placing my order. I made another attempt to sell Beamish on the idea that a telephone in Kenny A6 was the final element required to make the whole system workable. The staff of the Library wouldn’t mind my ordering books by phone. They might even look things up in the catalogue for me.

  The Beamish wasn’t having it. ‘I’m beginning to see, John,’ he told me, ‘that you have quite a talent for sweet talk. It’s a fact that the Library and indeed the whole university is full of pussycats who could easily be talked into anything by someone with your wheedling skills. But at the moment our splendid Bursar is under the impression that disabled students are rather expensive to run, something of an extravagance in administrative terms. If I tell him you now need a phone in your room, he’ll be absolutely sure of it. So don’t over-play your hand. Put that honeyed tongue away.’

  He seemed to have a very precise idea of his rôle: to make my life possible but not easy. ‘As I may have mentioned,’ he went on, ‘it was only quite recently that the colleges began installing telephones for their Fellows. I’m not sure it counts as progress. It makes it much harder to get work done when the phone keeps ringing. Forgive me if I am repeating myself. A repetitious demand deserves a repetitious answer.’

  The lowest vesicle of the lingam

  This was a bit much to swallow, the physicist as Luddite, and I’d only just explained that having a phone would actually help me with my work. Still, I had to knuckle under. Technically, under Regulation 8(a) of the University Statutes, it was my Tutor who was held hostage when books were entrusted to me by the Library. He was responsible for any penalties incurred, as if he had borrowed them himself.

  So I had to put up with a rather unsatisfactory system, relying on other people to chase up the catalogue, dropping off notes with my requirements or taking my turn on the long-suffering phone in the Porter’s Lodge. All too often a porter would come down the steps to me at the agreed time, in response to my horn signal, with fewer books than I had hoped, or even none, saying cheerfully, ‘I’m afraid we’ve run into some problems, sir!’ And of course there was no possibility of appeal, to see where the system had failed.

  Still, I now had at my disposal one of the great libraries in the country, stuffed with treasures Mrs Pavey could only dream of. I was determined to exploit it, and I wasn’t going to wait for an academic emergency which might never arise. I was determined to dredge up a wriggling rarity from the depths of the lingam, from its lowest possible vesicle.

  It was Mrs Pavey who gave me the idea, when she was looking into different systems of shorthand at my request. I had acquired a competence in Pitman, but then become disillusioned with it because it was so angular. On the rebound I fell into the arms of Gregg, with which I was very happy for a while before I had to admit that it was simply too curvy. I gave up for a while, without altogether abandoning the hope that out there somewhere there was a baby bear of a shorthand system, neither too curvy nor too angular but just right. And I had never forgotten Mrs Pavey saying, ‘I did come across a reference to a book based on another system, John, but it’s impossibly rare. Still, it might be just what you’re looking for – it’s called Brachystography. Not just shorthand, which would be brachygraphy, but the shortest shorthand of all. From the Greek brachistos, shortest.’ And I had almost-nodded, as if I had been born knowing Greek.

  So that was my choice. J. A. A. Percebois’s Brachystography, from 1898. At first the omens were good. The book had been located, in a sub-basement. There was a label on it saying NOT TO BE LENT OUT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Just the sort of prize I was after. There was a waiting period, while the case was referred indefinitely upwards for judgement, and then finally I received a note saying the book was ready for collection.

  It was all terribly disappointing. The moment the glassy-eyed cœlacanth was in my fishing-net I realised I’d have had more fun with a goldfish in a plastic bag from the fair.

  I shouldn’t have been expecting a little book, just because it was about a system of extreme abbreviation, and anyway my love of such things should have been exhausted a long time ago, when I was in CRX and Mum gave me the World’s Smallest Bible and a tiny Webster’s Dictionary. More to the point, Percebois’s system was about as sensible a way of representing the sounds of words as pictures of birds’ feet. No wonder it hadn’t caught on! I was reduced to my least favourite position, of agreeing with what everyone has always thought. That’s guaranteed to put my teeth on edge.

  My status as Downing’s first disabled student wasn’t clear-cut. It turned out that there was another already, a blind student called Kevin who was reading Law. I would see him around the college, laden with textbooks in Braille. He was very popular, both in his own right and because he had somehow landed a job writing record reviews for the Melody Maker. LPs arrived for him by every post, and he was generous in passing them on. I wondered darkly whether he had a phone in his room. He seemed very favoured – and of course he hadn’t needed to have a rail fitted in the college bathroom he used. He represented a modest institutional investment. Unlike some people. Mentioning no names.

  The college had assigned me a room that was accessible, give or take, to someone with my poor mobility, but had overlooked the need to make a similar arrangement for my pigeon-hole, where mail would be distributed. The alphabetical run was maintained, with the result that Cromer, J.’s pigeon-hole was set at a height which Cromer, J. would never be able to reach. I considered protesting, in the hope of being granted a more convenient slot roughly two feet off the floor, but I was learning to ration my appeals for special treatment. Wheedling was apt to blow up in my face, and the honeyed tongue was beginning to receive caustic answers.

  It would have been futile in any case, since I couldn’t get into the Porter’s Lodge unaided. When I needed to use their phone, I took the porters on a trip back in time, to the etymological roots of their calling. If they had been able to vote on the phone-in-John’s-room question, they would have been solidly behind me, for the sake of equal rights and their backs. As for mail, they delivered it direct to my room.

  The UL staff would only convey books t
o the bottom of the steps outside the front entrance, or a few paces further, to the door of the Mini. The personnel at Heffers, the university’s foremost bookshop, would come much closer to home. They matched the efforts of the college porters. In an attempt to fight off the challenge of rival businesses such as Bowes & Bowes and (who knows?) even W. H. Smith, Heffers would deliver books to undergraduates at no charge. What an enlightened gimmick! The books came to my door.

  If I had only had a phone in my room the whole book-buying transaction could have been accomplished without labour on my part, and I would have become an early example of the stay-at-home shopper. Even allowing for bookshop visits to place my order, it was a lot better than nothing.

  I’m happier with hardbacks than soft covers, which isn’t snobbery but pure practicality. With a paperback the only way you can avoid breaking the spine is to cradle it with your outstretched fingers. My fingers won’t reach that far, so it’s a matter of either balancing the book on the backs of my hands or going ahead and breaking the book’s back, flattening it against the table-top. There’s no room for sentiment when it comes to something as important as reading. Tender-hearted book-lovers wince when they see me in action, and I don’t care.

  The first book I asked about that wasn’t on a course reading list was Ramana Maharshi and the Path of Self-Knowledge. After some inner wrestling I had finally surrendered ‘my’ copy, the Bourne End Library’s copy, back to Mrs Pavey, though she would have been happy to go on renewing it indefinitely. Holding on to it would be wrong – a small civic crime, like wearing the life-belt that has been used to drag you out of the Slough of Despond on a permanent basis, though it is clearly marked Property of Slough Borough Council.