Barry held S. guttatum up to my nose and gave it a gentle squeeze to diffuse the foul fragrance. For a few seconds there was perfect symmetry in Creation, with squeezes above and squeezes below. ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘Have a good sniff …’ He didn’t say, ‘Give me a good squeeze while you’re at it,’ but by that stage it could be taken as read.
I was as nauseated as ever by the stench of the flower but thrilled by the extra squeeze I was licensed to give with my left hand. ‘Now,’ he said, putting the bulb down again, ‘if I’m not very much mistaken…’ – deftly he cut away the spiky keys – ‘deep down this flower doesn’t have a bad smell at all. With the pheromone-exchange matrix out of the picture, I think you’ll find that the object of our study plays a different tune …’ He held it up again, squeeze upon squeeze. ‘Go on … inhale deeply. Take your time.’
This time my olfactory brain was flooded with heavenly scent, and all the richness that the word lily conveys. My head reeled and I experienced God, but my hand didn’t forget its lower business. Barry seemed entirely caught up with the respectable side of our scientific project, or perhaps he too had the knack of processing different streams of information separately.
Like a baker in a hurry
Mrs Beddoes began to stir from her rêverie. I could hear the soft thump of her mug being returned to the table. At last she came over to take a look, and this time I didn’t try to stop her. My cock dwindled back to an unembarrassing size, and Barry and I moved smoothly on to erudite botanical niceties.
‘So, Barry, to sum up – can you understand how a lay person might think of the flower as carnivorous?’ I asked, borrowing the manner of a television interviewer, as if I hadn’t been kneading his privates mere seconds before like a baker in a hurry. We played out the scene in full, jointly explaining the mystery to an amazed bed-maker.
‘Oh yes,’ he replied. ‘It’s an elementary mistake, but very understandable. The essential oil manufactured by the plant is sweet and alluring, but not to a fly. So the plant needs to use a trick to make the fly believe that there is rotting flesh nearby. As I told you, it’s a very simple molecular switch to make the conversion to this odour. The flower’s only interest is in getting itself pollinated. It just so happens that a trapped fly struggling to get out provides just the right amount of jiggling to attach the pollen. There are species native to Britain which use the same sort of technique – lords-and-ladies, for instance.’
‘That’s cuckoo-pint, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right. Arum maculatum. Just like this exotic beauty here, the flower isn’t equipped to eat the fly, but sometimes the fly dies of exhaustion before it can escape. If it just stayed where it was and bided its time, it could escape later on, once the flower had slackened its grip. But flies don’t think of that!’ In fact the whole procedure seems to be an evolutionary dead-end. Dead flies don’t pollinate – unless the system depends on a super-fly with greater endurance, which subsequently spreads the pollen further than its inferior siblings would have managed.
‘Well at least the fly died happy,’ mused Mrs Beddoes who had become thoroughly fascinated with the proceedings by this time.
‘Oh no, dear lady,’ Barry said sharply, in a way that was almost rude. ‘We humans may find the carrion smell disgusting, but it’s nectar to a fly. The fly imagines that it’s going to fulfil its own desire by following the “stink” – its drive to reproduce itself by laying its eggs. However, once past the matrix, the entrance, it finds there is nothing rotting there at all, only a sweet smell. And since the plant’s real perfume is not so nice for the fly, we could say rather that the fly died in Hell!’
This was quite enough for Mrs Beddoes in the way of botanical lecturing. She produced her duster from an apron pocket. If she had really done all her housework early, then this was a little piece of theatre. I’m not sure she ever did anything that would have qualified in Granny’s view as dusting. The worn yellow duster was as symbolic in its own way as a freemason’s trowel.
‘I mustn’t let the whole day run away from me, must I?’ she said, and took from another of her apron pockets an item much more central to her practice as a cleaner, an aerosol of air freshener. Her fondness for it was natural, considering that she cleaned the rooms of young men with hardly the faintest idea of how to maintain themselves. She gave the room a parting squirt with the aerosol, moving her arm in a large half-circle, then a series of loops in our direction, or towards the stench that had already been dissected out of existence. She was so generous with the volatilisation of industrial fragrance that she walked through a cloud of it on the way out, and set herself coughing. Perhaps the coughing prevented a strange thought from coming any further forward than the back of her mind: If I didn’t know better, I’d think Mr Crow-maire was giving the other chap a thorough squeeze of the privates …
It was only after she had gone, as Barry began to pack up his equipment, that we stopped being at ease with each other. Mrs Beddoes hadn’t been an impediment to the scene between us, as I had thought at first, but an essential ingredient in our tiny erotic drama, the spectator who didn’t see a thing. In those days my sexual imagination was at least as attuned to the creation of a tableau as to any actual intimacy.
Of course eroticism is only the Ego’s vain attempt to unite with the Self. The ego itself is a paradoxical amalgam of inert body and the true Self. The aim is admirable, but the ego gets it all wrong. Watching the ego try to wrestle reality into submission is like watching Laurel and Hardy move a piano. They’ll move it all right, but you won’t be able to get much of a tune out of it afterwards.
As for the scene with Barry, I didn’t regret that it had lacked an actual sexual climax. Release of that sort would have taken away from an excitement that remained infinite because it never toppled over into the reality that is all illusion and disappointment. It was a wave that never needed to break.
I might imagine in those days that I wanted openness of expression, closeness of rapport and meaningful glandular release. What I actually enjoyed was this sort of mixture, hiding and flaunting simultaneously, which was only a new twist on being invisible and incredibly conspicuous at the same time, my normal state.
Although I saw Barry around, and we talked very happily about our common interests, I never had the faintest whiff of desire for him thereafter. The beauty of Whiffy Barry – that too was an inflorescence which blossomed and shrivelled in a single day.
I was especially in need of diversions like the dissection of Voodoo Lily, since I already knew that my field of study was a dead end. Not a dead end in general terms but a dead end in my particular case. Under neath gruffness a mile deep Eckstein had been too excited by my academic prospects to give me the guidance I needed. He passed the buck. Perhaps he was relying on my chosen university to warn me of the disillusionment that lay in store.
A. T. Grove had been so exclusively interested in my mobility that he hadn’t offered me the benefit of his advice about my course. I ended up having to learn the hard way that disability debarred me from making real progress in the study of my chosen languages.
I was able to reconstruct the way my interview should have gone, if it had been designed to lay the foundations for an undergraduate career rather than to assess my ability to go for a coffee at Snax on Regent Street without depending on the wheelchair. Because a wheelchair saps independence of outlook (as everyone knows who doesn’t need one), without which the human spirit withers away.
What A. T. Grove should have said was this: ‘John, you need to be aware that certain courses of study presuppose certain abilities that are not merely intellectual. Your chosen subject, Modern and Mediaeval Languages, is intended to immerse you in a foreign culture, so that you end up being able to spend large parts of your mental life in Spanish or German. The finishing touch applied to this process is a period of residence abroad.
‘Klaus Eckstein strongly champions your cause, in a way that hardly chimes with his continued insistence that yo
ur German accent is terrible. But I suspect that even he has not looked far enough ahead. Your independence of mind is a condition that does not extend to your body.
‘How will you be able to manage abroad, when that time comes? It is difficult enough for us to place students in suitable households without the additional burden of meeting your special needs. You are hardly in a position to risk immersion in a foreign culture, when you can hardly keep your head above water in your own.
‘If you do try to live abroad, you will be living in a bubble of artificial behaviour. Your exposure to a foreign culture will be for practical purposes nil. A genuine traveller can take a cable car to a beauty spot in the mountains without a second thought, while the only cable car with which you are likely to be familiar while you study for a degree will be the one, whirring and trundling, which conveys you from your wheelchair to the bath on A staircase, Kenny Court, Downing. I do not say this to be cruel but to save you time.
‘Klaus Eckstein has painted a vivid picture of the hazards of travel on Spanish trains, warning you that it is polite, just as it would be in Britain, to offer to share any food you produce – but that you must be prepared, as you need not be in Britain, for people to accept your offer with alacrity, producing forks and spoons from their pockets and having a good old tuck-in. But how will you be able to experience this for yourself?
‘Consider. A language student with what we consider satisfactory conversational skills in German goes to stay in a family-run Gasthaus in Thuringia. He explores his surroundings, which means in practice that he becomes familiar with the excellence of German beer, thanks to the Reinheitsgebot, the purity laws of 1516, which prohibit adulteration of any kind. He has more than enough German to keep on ordering more beer.
A higher presence of offal
‘In the mornings his head is full of hammers, and he can hardly dare to look at the lavish breakfast his solicitous landlady brings to his room. He drinks the coffee gingerly, and takes a few tentative nibbles at a sort of roll which crumbles to dryness in his mouth.
‘The breakfast tray, however, holds far more than merely coffee and rolls. It is as if his landlady is trying to save him the expense of eating for the rest of the day. There are hard-boiled eggs. There are slabs of pale cheese the size of small books, if the books were pale and sweaty. There are churned and rendered meats – swollen sausages and motley slices. There is a higher presence of offal in these productions than he would welcome even without the hammers in his head. The purity laws in Germany seem to stop with the irreproachable beer. In the butcher’s shop anything goes.
‘He can face none of it, not even the second half of his roll. But it’s out of the question, the height of rudeness, to reject so lavish and considerate a morning offering (the rates of the Gasthaus are extremely reasonable). So he stows the food away in his suitcase, planning to dispose of it in some better place at a more convenient time.
‘The next morning the hammers in his head are if anything heavier and more efficient at blotting out thought with their crashing. The breakfast tray presented to him with a flourish is even more disheartening, because he is feeling yet worse than he did the day before – and because there is even more food this time. The landlady has taken his tray-clearing performance of the day before as a challenge. In retrospect he has miscalculated by not leaving at least some of the eggs on the tray, the cheese perhaps, certainly the meats of ill omen. Too late now, though. He has no alternative but to repeat his breakfast-hiding trick. Day after day the problem recurs, but the time when he might empty his suitcase never presents itself.
‘In the common spaces of the Gasthaus, as the week goes on, the landlady becomes both glowing and skittish, a preening hausfrau, making admiring comments about the healthy appetites of the English, comments which his better-than-average conversational skills enable him to acknowledge gracefully, and to deflect.
‘It is at the beginning of the second week that a reek from the cupboard draws the landlady, while cleaning her charming young guest’s room, to the cupboard and the suitcase it contains. Opening the case, she is confronted with a black museum of the previous week’s breakfasts. All her thoughtful kitchen gestures are mashed together in various states of decomposition. The delicacies she had prepared to sustain this cherished guest on his explorations of her beloved locality have been dumped into the vastly inferior digestion, assisted only by flies, of his luggage.
‘The student is out all day, which leaves the landlady many hours to perfect the outburst of grievance with which she will greet the guest who has insulted her hospitality. When he returns, dog-tired after a day of hiking, he will be faced with a problem for which no primer nor phrase book could prepare him. The words pour out of her like the waters of the Rhine in spate.
‘It is now his task to find the words to explain to his landlady why he has disposed of her breakfasts as if they were sordid secrets. Only the right words will stop this solid lady, steaming with rage, from knocking him down her front steps. A large vocabulary and a secure grasp of tone will be required. A good accent will help, to be sure, but only if every other element is in place.
‘We are worlds away here from such rudiments as “Can you tell me please the way to the station?” or indeed “‘Brecht’s genius is to make an élite feel like the rabble, and a rabble like the élite.’ Discuss.”
‘That, my dear John, is why we send students abroad to perfect their language skills. They must learn to manage with no protective barrier between them and the local inhabitants. You can never be in that situation. You must take that protective barrier wherever you go. You cannot expect to plumb the depths of another culture when you need a rubber ring to keep afloat in your own.
‘My advice is that you should consider applying to the college and the university, but with the intention of reading English. Then there need be no delay in admitting you, since a year at High Wycombe Technical College slaving over Spanish will not be required of you.’
And while he was at it, the A. T. Grove in my fantasy might have saved me from another poor decision. He might have added, so softly that I wouldn’t quite be sure he had really said it, ‘Please don’t have a bone cut as a way of pleasing others. Your knee already does the job adequately – the job is only part-time – and your friend either loves you or does not. Love is not fussy about knees. That is the truth of it.’ Fatherly.
When I realised that it was pointless to pursue my course to the bitter end of a degree, I felt let down to a certain extent. False hopes had been encouraged. I would have to finish Part One just the same, and satisfy the examiners at the end of the year. It was hard to see this as a purposeful endeavour, or a meaningful use of my time.
The analogy is pure swank
But at least (I thought) I would be able to conclude my undergraduate career in record time. Modern and Mediaeval Languages was a one-year Part I, English a one-year Part II – so I would get my degree in two years flat.
I had mixed feelings about this truncated course. I wasn’t happy enough at Cambridge to want to stay any longer, but what came after Cambridge? In any case I had paid too little attention to etymology for once. The course for a Cambridge degree is called the Tripos, which derives from the Greek word meaning three-legged. A two-year degree, apparently, would be an absurdity exactly equivalent to a two-legged stool. So I would have to spend two years on Part II of the English course.
I could see that it would have to be English. I had grown to love both Spanish and German. They were strong flavours, Rioja and Riesling exploding on the palate, though the analogy is pure swank since I had tasted neither, and my inability to drop into a bodega or Weinlokal to remedy my ignorance was very much to the point.
Now I would have to wean myself back onto the small beer of my native tongue. The mild and bitter.
I had always been a literary reader. My mind was retentive, particularly of poetry, though I can’t really take the credit for that. My childhood tutor Miss Collins gave me a real incent
ive, when she restricted my reading time and took the books away. After that, my memory worked overtime, in case it happened again. I could recite reams by heart.
I didn’t anticipate much of an academic challenge. English was widely regarded as a soft option. My broader European perspective would give me a significant advantage. In the Tragedy paper, for instance, which was compulsory, I would ramble on about Büchner. I’d always had a soft spot for Büchner.
I had made a head start by having a poem published in an undergraduate literary magazine. It was called ‘Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Wheelchair’. The title went Wallace Stevens one better. I had loved his poetry since Klaus Eckstein had thrillingly recited, ‘Let be be finale of seem / The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.’ I probably make too much of the parallels to Hindu thought in Stevens’s metaphysics, but they exist. They’re real. Or at least ‘real’, which is as much as any of us can hope for.
There may never have been a time when it was possible for a poem, legibly written or competently typed, to be rejected by an undergraduate magazine – with or without modernist flourishes and a disability-pathos undertone. If there was such a time it certainly wasn’t the early 1970s. Standards were much lower than those on Woman’s Own. I make no claims for the quality of my poem. I hope no one is ever mischievous enough to disinter it.
The magazine was called Freeze Peach. I don’t think the editors wanted to produce a magazine and then devised a suitably clever name. More likely that they thought Freeze Peach too good a name not to have a magazine attached to it. The originators of Woman’s Own, their eyes less clouded by Maya, avoided this mistake. Freeze Peach stumbled on as far as a third issue, then died in a ditch. I take no responsibility for that, though my contribution probably didn’t help. If the magazine had kept going a little longer, I would have tried to lumber it with another opus (in the same vein of manipulative pluck) entitled ‘Not Waving but Downing’. One more case of the title coming first, the actual artefact being an optional afterthought. I was getting on the magazine’s wave-length, by writing a poem that was entirely parasitic on its title.
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