Audrey was frankly panting when she came back from the house. She’d been running. She thrust the keys into my hands. ‘Hurry up,’ she wailed. ‘They saw me. Go! Go now! They’re going mad in there …’ I had the sense that things had returned to normal. The divine whisper had said what it had to say, and we were on our own now. At any moment Audrey’s eyes might slide towards the dark corners of the garage and she would start to hug herself nervously.
That was when we heard the gravel smartly crunching, and Dad closed the garage door. I could see his sports jacket in the mirror of the Mini, the triangle of neat hanky in his breast pocket, before the daylight was cut off. Of course it hadn’t been very bright inside the garage before, but the sudden darkness made Audrey whimper. I started the engine, blessing the general reliability of Maestro Issigoni’s economical masterpiece, and switched on the headlights. Audrey wasn’t comforted by the brightness. It made her cower in a corner of the garage. The divine wind which had filled her sails had well and truly blown itself out. I shouted ‘WATCH YOURSELVES OUTSIDE!’ as loud as I could over the sound of the engine and waited five seconds, as timed by two breakneck Om-Mane-Padme-Oms, so that Mum and Dad at least had time to act on the warning. Then I found reverse and backed out of the garage.
Warmed his astral cockles
I didn’t smash the doors open, but of course ‘John nudged the garage doors open at quite a speed’ has as little prospect of finding an ecological niche in family history as ‘John nearly scorched the greenhouse.’ John smashed, John burned – that’s the official version.
I admit that the doors swung open pretty briskly. I was far more afraid of losing momentum than of doing damage to fixtures and fittings. The doors swung open as far as the hinges allowed then rebounded. As they closed again, they feebly retaliated for the initial impact by scraping the sides of the Mini. Between the first and second impacts I had a glimpse in the mirror of Mum and Dad reeling backwards. Rage was still ruling Dad’s facial muscles, but Mum’s expression held a sort of agony of worry. It was too late to build on that.
I had always coveted the ability to slam a door at the climax of an argument, and now I had my wish. It’s true I slammed the garage doors open rather than shut, but that’s a technicality. It was well worth waiting for. The noise was marvellous.
In the exhilaration of the moment, the terrible longed-for moment of breaking with my family, I did the finest three-point turn of my driving career. It was textbook. It would have cheered the shade of John Griffiths himself, patron saint of the disabled driver. Not the ghost of a graze on the garden gate or posts. It would have warmed his astral cockles.
As I turned the car I could see Audrey slinking out of the garage and back to the house. Mum and Dad kept pace with the Mini but didn’t get too close, as if they were trying to herd some unfamiliar beast back to its cage, not sure whether it would actually charge them. As I came round the side of the house I saw that Prissie was still sitting on the lawn. She stood up and brushed the grass stems off herself, smiling at me incredulously. I stopped the car by her. The passenger door wasn’t properly closed, so I was able to push it open with my stick. As I did so I barked, yes I barked a magnificent cliché out of the window. I had earned it. I for whom drawing the curtains in the morning was quite an enterprise had taken part in a scene of action. There had been shouting, threats, divine intervention and a getaway car. I had also, whether or not Dad noticed, performed a driving manœuvre that would have met his highest standards.
I barked: ‘Let’s get out of this madhouse, Prissie!’ No guru was needed to give the script any polishing at that point. Of course Prissie lived only down the road, she came on foot and could have left the same way, but she scrambled in, sitting awkwardly on my cane and gleefully shouting ‘Fuck, what fun!’, and we were off.
I’d have had a go at spinning my wheels and giving the gravel a good scatter if I hadn’t been afraid of spoiling our exit by stalling or running the Mini into a wall.
Suddenly Prissie said, ‘Stop, John! Stop the car!’
‘I’m not going back there, Prissie,’ I said grimly.
‘Of course you’re not. Better stop now, all the same.’
Turning round to observe the Cromers frozen in their tableau of conflict, she had seen Audrey running after us, pushing the wheelchair. Clever girl! I wouldn’t have managed very well with that particular hostage left in enemy hands.
I don’t have enough experience of intensely dramatic scenes to know if anti-climax always comes along for the ride. Perhaps Mum shared my feeling, and did what she could with the modest resources at her disposal to keep the emotional temperature high. She threw one of her shoes at us. I’m not sure if it had slipped off her foot or if she had taken it off expressly. It was one of those funny summer shoes with rope soles. Mum had displaced all her griefs and furies onto the flinging of an espadrille. In my memory of that afternoon it bears the perfume of solar amber as it describes its modest arc from Mum’s infuriated hand, the Ambre Solaire sun-cream she rubbed into herself while she basked in the filtered sunshine of the conservatory.
When Audrey had caught up with us, I said to Prissie, ‘Can’t we take her with us?’
‘Not unless you want to see me in jail.’ I knew she was right, but it was important that she said it out loud. I wanted Audrey to understand that my hands were tied. I couldn’t return the favour of rescue.
Prissie got out and loaded the chair in the boot, leaving us to say our goodbyes. I might not see Audrey again until she came of age and could make her own decisions. When there’s a decade’s worth of age-gap between siblings, conversation doesn’t often run smoothly. She looked now like a tired and frightened child. I wondered how much she remembered of what had gone on in the last fifteen minutes, hoping that there would be some balm left behind by the guru when he departed. It wouldn’t be fair if she suffered after-shocks of intervention.
Then I realised that I had been given a cue, the same cue as hers, and from the same benign source. Ramana Maharshi’s influence persisted like the Cheshire Cat’s discarnate smile. This was the twinkle without the guru, the starman remotely beaming.
‘Let the children use it …’ I said gently. ‘Let the children lose it …’
I waited for her to finish the refrain. Her eyes went very wide, so that she seemed to be regressing after so much precocious growing-up. ‘Let … all the children boogie?’ she said at last, with an upward intonation, as if after all those listenings she still wasn’t sure of the words.
If Prissie had second thoughts about being the catalyst of my freedom, she didn’t admit it on the (ridiculously short) drive to her house. I asked, ‘Will Malcolm mind if I stay at your house for a night or two?’
‘Stay as long as you like,’ she said. ‘He’ll be thrilled.’ This hardly seemed possible, though she didn’t seem to be joking. With her I never quite knew. ‘He’s always saying he needs someone to talk to. Listen, John, do you love your mother very much?’
I did my best to be honest. ‘I try not to.’
A suitably plumbed bolt-hole
‘I think that’s sensible. Best to get along without her. She doesn’t really want you to have a life of your own.’ It was shocking to hear something like that, something I had come to believe, stated so calmly by someone outside the family. ‘I do feel sorry for Laura,’ Prissie went on, ‘but she doesn’t own you and she shouldn’t try. I’ve learned the hard way with the twins – your children are not your children, and all that – they are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself. Kahlil Gibran, you know. Preachy stuff and no mistake, but Malcolm adores it. So be warned. If you get him started on the glories of The Prophet I’ll phone Laura to come and pick you up. Understood?’
I thought I could abide by this condition of residence. When we got in, Prissie couldn’t wait to get unshod. She had been wearing stout walking shoes which looked particularly wrong on someone almost caricaturally free-spirited. I imagine she had chosen them as muc
h to cope with the formality of confrontation as for the discomfort of gravel.
The twins Joss and Alex, now twelve, had been farmed out in France, spending the summer in France to improve their language skills, so there was room to spare chez Washbourne. In her own way Prissie seemed to share Dad’s idea of the importance of pushing chicks out of the nest, though she made sure that they had a parachute of money and some useful addresses.
Chez Washbourne was relatively similar to Trees, though the downstairs facilities only ran to a lavatory, not a bathroom. Granny had missed a trick by omitting to fund an extension at a neighbour’s house, so as to provide me with a suitably plumbed bolt-hole in case of family crisis.
Malcolm came home from work on his usual train to find a houseguest installed, a house-guest who was both easy and difficult. Easy in himself (let’s hope), difficult by virtue of his needs. Without the bum-snorkel the lavatory would be a bit of a challenge. I decided to go easy on the Washbournes’ food, at least until my indispensable utensil had been restored to me. I envy the hauteur of cats at stool, the way they dissociate themselves so successfully from basic acts. By that reckoning my experience is canine. With me it’s all shameful straining, wagging my tail and hoping to be forgiven for being such a dirty dog. I would also need to be helped upstairs every now and then to bathe unless I was to smell like a young goat.
Prissie hadn’t bothered to alert her husband by phone of the dramatic changes in Cromer family life. ‘Malcolm, darling,’ she said, ‘Laura and Dennis have completely lost their senses. There was nothing else I could do. They’ve always been, shall we say, remarkably uptight, but this time they were downright crazed.’ That was as close as she got to explaining herself to the man of the house. He took it completely in his stride. I thought this rather splendid, coming as I did from a household where Mum forgetting to warm the plates before a meal could cast a pall that might not lift for days, even if no word of reproach was uttered.
The rest of the conversation was equally off-hand.
Malcolm: ‘Is there a chance of their coming to their senses any time in the foreseeable future?’
Prissie: ‘Not really.’
Malcolm: ‘That’s all right, then.’
I thought that was splendid too.
My full-blooded participation in a family showdown (once I’d actually worked out that I was being held against my will) came at a certain price. My shoulder froze after all that driving out of garages and down driveways, that adrenalin-boosted three-point turn. I would have been happy to be excused driving for a few days while my shoulder loosened up, but I was determined not to cut a helpless figure in this new household. The Washbournes for their part were anxious to reassure me I wasn’t being a burden, so there were all sorts of errands cheerfully suggested and accepted that both parties could happily, I dare say, have done without.
I was in pain and I was separated from my supplies of Fortral. It would be exaggerating to say that I was in withdrawal, but I certainly missed my pharmaceutical crutch, the crutch that formed a sturdy enough tripod with my actual crutch and cane.
Prissie treated the whole situation as an adventure and a joke. She looked out some paper knickers for me, which she’d bought for a holiday in Greece to save the trouble of laundry, though Malcolm in a rare assertive moment had refused to wear them. Sniffing a pair, she claimed that they had absorbed the aroma of olives, even a distant whiff of retsina.
I couldn’t expect to go on with my dissolute Cambridge ways, doing without socks and underpants, while I was a guest in someone’s home, but my heart sank at the prospect of those disposables, with their thin thread of elastic and doubtful absorbency. Still, I had company. Prissie insisted that Malcolm wear the paper pants too – this was her revenge for his lack of coöperation on the Greek holiday. If they were good enough for me, she said, they were certainly good enough for him, and this time he didn’t put up a fight.
By now I had given an account of the row over the contents of my shoulder-bag, feeling that those who were offering me sanctuary had a right to know the crimes of which I stood accused.
Prissie said, ‘Malcolm can go up to Soho at the weekend and pick up some queer filth for you. You can wait that long, can’t you, John? But he’s not normally a very inspired shopper. Best to give him an exact title, or else give him a general subject area and sort through his haul later on. As for the cannabis, we’re very moderate users here. A few puffs every month or so. I’m sorry we’re so unadventurous. Tell us what you need and we’ll try to get it.’
I could never quite make up my mind whether she was telling the simple truth, cracking jokes or engaged on some sort of double bluff. No more was said about Malcolm’s proposed Soho pornography trawl, and nothing was smoked in my presence that would have shocked the author of Gardening for Adventure. The household’s actual level of taboo-breaking was low. Malcolm’s bookmark seemed stuck in the early pages of Last Exit To Brooklyn, a landmark work, an earthquake of the mind guaranteed to shock and horrify, but not necessarily to hold the attention.
The next morning a letter arrived for me, in the early hours, with the words BY HAND written on the envelope. It’s a phrase that has always puzzled me. Could people not have worked out by themselves that an unstamped envelope had not been delivered by the postman? And doesn’t the postman deliver by hand too?
The letter was from Dad. He took me to task about how much I had hurt Mum by my bad behaviour, Mum who had devoted her entire life to me. The phrase was doubly underlined. Of course that was the whole trouble, as Dad could see in more lucid moods – devotion (as she interpreted devotion) inflamed and corroded her character.
The lair he shared with her
Dad’s letter gave offence in its turn. He must have got out his ruler to make those double underlinings under ‘her entire life’. Truly I knew the depth of my disgrace when I saw that the full panoply of the family stationery was ranged against me: best notepaper, fountain pen and ruler – the bell, book and candle of the writing-desk. Another passage showed a complete refusal to accept reality: ‘I don’t know what you said to Audrey to get her to help you, but I hope you’re ashamed of yourself.’ Even he had seen there was something mysterious about Audrey’s participation, but he was temperamentally inclined to look for the working of sinister rather than radiant forces.
Worldly powers rule by consent, and I didn’t consent to these rulings. Nor did I take kindly to being told I should buck up my ideas and apologise to Mum, or else everything I had left behind would be ‘put in sequestration’. Dad seemed to savour the legal formula with a bailiff’s solemn gloating.
I showed the letter to Prissie. Her reaction was to send Malcolm round to Trees in the car, to beard Dad in his lair and ‘thrash things out’ with him man to man. Malcolm had instructions to demand the return of my possessions (that’s why he was to go by car, to carry off my reclaimed goods). I wasn’t at all keen on this line of approach, and Malcolm certainly flinched from the mission proposed for him. Eventually, though, he realised that bearding Dad in his lair presented fewer risks than thwarting Prissie in the lair he shared with her.
He came back with my things, seeming faintly stunned by the success of the project – and rightly so, since thrashing things out man to man is one of the least successful courses of action ever devised. Prissie seemed almost disappointed, though she rallied and teased Malcolm about his great bravery. He wouldn’t go into detail about the encounter, but said that Dad hadn’t made difficulties. He was reasonable in the end – and I don’t think divine intervention has to be dragged in for everything mildly surprising, only the epic departures from precedent.
It’s unlikely the guru was working overtime. Normal service had resumed. It was probably enough for Mum to be out at the shops, or at her sewing circle, for Dad to come to his senses and side against her, with almost anyone.
If she was at the sewing circle she wouldn’t be mentioning the recent traumas. She was in no hurry to join their troubled rank
s, the parents whose children drank till they passed out, or went through handbags for money to buy drugs.
I was glad to have my books restored to me, but the bum-snorkel had been top of the list of my needs. Its return was particularly welcome. I hadn’t been looking forward to an extended period of bathroom wheedling in that house of wayward welcome.
I was fascinated by the workings of the Washbournes’ marriage. Prissie didn’t believe in giving Malcolm too many choices. In the matter of their children’s names, for instance, he had been given free rein, but within a very restricted area. It was Prissie who had selected the names Jocelyn and Alex for the twins, with her stubborn jokiness persisting at the most serious moments. It was up to him to attach these ambivalent tags to the children when they arrived (a boy and a girl, as it happened). The names were like strips of litmus paper which only turned pink or blue when touched to an actual child.
Malcolm never seemed to feel undermined or embarrassed by Prissie’s bossiness. I felt that this was a healthy marriage despite the lopsided distribution of power, much healthier than Mum’s and Dad’s, where the rôles were conventionally assigned but eaten away from inside. In practical terms Dad had no more assertiveness than Malcolm did, but he spent a lot more time and energy simulating the proper male behaviour.
I suppose Malcolm and I, kitted out in our disposable knickers, were Prissie’s babies that summer, in the absence of Joss and Al. In fact things worked out pretty well. She sent Malcolm on a second expedition to Trees, since some clothes and medication hadn’t found their way to my new address. This time his reception was distinctly frosty, since it was Mum who answered the door. She told him that family life had been quite tricky enough before he put his oar in. His ‘oar’ presumably being Prissie! It was a bit much to blame him for her actions, since she was so obviously an oar unto herself. Still, nothing was said about refusing me my things, nothing about sequestration or distraint of goods.
Cedilla Page 80
