Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  One morning the postman knocked on the door, not because he had a parcel to deliver but because he wanted to know why my car was parked outside, four doors from home. This sort of thing is the reason people want to live in small communities, until they do. Prissie said brightly that I was having a change of scene. A rest cure.

  I wouldn’t put it past the postman to have knocked on the door of Trees for more information, which would have been a bad moment for Mum and no mistake. But what was I supposed to do – cover the Mini with turves and branches?

  At first I tried to keep my distance from Prissie. My emotional distance, of course – there wasn’t much I could do to avoid her physically. Better the mother you know than the mother you don’t. I was afraid I would turn into her confidant willy-nilly, going from being a captive at Trees to being a captive audience at Heron’s Gate.

  While she painted her toenails

  In fact Prissie was a fairly undemanding companion. She read the romantic-historical novels of Georgette Heyer much of the time, so she didn’t pester me with conversation. Of her chosen author she would say, ‘Georgette Heyer really does write wonderfully well, and you can usually tell quite early on (not that I mind) if it’s one that you’ve read before …’ She really enjoyed buying a more serious novel, something by William Golding or Margaret Drabble, and then going right on reading Georgette Heyer instead. Playing truant from a real engagement with life, like someone keeping an important visitor waiting while she painted her toenails.

  You could often catch her looking with simple pleasure at her own pink feet. I say you could catch her at it, but there was nothing furtive about her appreciation of herself. If she became conscious of my gaze she would meet it, with a further flowering of her smile. She would lean her head back and stroke her own plump throat in the same admiring spirit. This was all rather disconcerting – we’re all so used to people who are on bad terms with their bodies that anything else comes to seem slightly mad. Of course the body is unreal, but you really sit up and take notice when someone wears it well.

  Prissie told me about a famous flight of fancy – that Heaven would be like eating foie gras to the sound of trumpets. Her own equivalent of this, she said, was reading Georgette Heyer to the sound of the Jacques Loussier Trio playing Bach. It wasn’t extravagant. Those who couldn’t afford her modest Heaven could easily order its ingredients from the local library.

  The weather was fine, and she’d often take me out into the garden with her. That was a little odd, being so like the garden at Trees and so very unlike it. I’d be trying to meditate, or perhaps simply dozing, and I’d hear scraps of conversation that might have been Mum and Audrey in the garden of Trees, and echoes of ‘Starman’ (now charged with purely human meanings) carried on the breeze.

  In its way this was an idyllic period. The Washbournes weren’t vegetarians or anything like it, but they catered to me without fuss. Their loose hippie allegiance tended to exclude meat from their table, at least in blatant slabs, though mince might pass muster (flesh once safely granulated dips below the ethical radar of so many). From that summer I remember avocado pears (which we ate, I think, every day) and the deliciousness of French bread, the surprise of French cheese, the revelation of olives both black and green.

  Prissie had been the first person in our social circle to risk the technical marvel of Gold Blend (freeze-dried granules, imagine!). Later, Muriel Foot got in on the act on behalf of the sewing circle, joining the Licensed Victuallers’ association for the sake of wholesale prices and buying tins of Gold Blend the size of waste-paper bins, despite the palaver required to decant granules from the tin into manageable jars.

  At Downing I practised a little religion of ‘proper coffee’, but the Gold Blend at Prissie’s, made with hot milk, offered its own pleasures.

  I felt guilty to have left Audrey vulnerable in Trees, house of misrule, but hadn’t she always known how to wind Mum round her little finger? Surely she wouldn’t have lost that skill. Perhaps things would be easier for her in my absence. It was perfectly possible that Audrey had on some level wanted me out of the house, which wouldn’t in the least invalidate the miraculousness of her intervention.

  Peter came back from his travels to find a home transformed. He hated it. He would call in morosely on Prissie’s house on his way to or from work, and begged me to ask her to take him in also. I had to explain it wasn’t on. This was a sanctuary for one, rather than a mass adoption programme. There wasn’t a vacancy in the Paper Pants Club.

  The household in Trees now contained two males who hated scenes in their different ways and two females who, in their different ways, required them, Audrey hell-bent on winning (unless the guru in passing had changed her habits), Mum bagsy-ing the rôle of tragic victim. The emotional barometer of the household would be stuck on Stormy for some time.

  Up to this point Peter’s plan in life had been summed up by Granny (who was baffled by it) as: Earn some money. Get on a train or a plane until it’s gone. Start again.

  But now he made the decision to move out himself and find somewhere else to live. So perhaps I can take credit, by leaving the house under such a cloud, for clearing the skies for Peter and letting him escape his rut of travel and return. Unless my long residence in the house is to blame for his slowness in taking up his birth-right of independence – so deep and foundational was fraternal loyalty in his make-up.

  When Malcolm came home from work he’d usually sit with me rather than his wife. He’d even hold my hand and close his eyes, while Prissie idly mustered food in the kitchen. Mum had never got to grips with avocado pears. Of course we’d seen them in shops. They had been talked about. They were even on the menu at the Compleat Angler where Granny stayed, but how to manage them at home was beyond Mum. I had tried to reassure her that it couldn’t be hard to know when the enigmatic objects were ripe, but Mum was convinced that there were tenderising protocols withheld from laymen outside the restaurant trade, and that Peter wasn’t telling.

  Prissie, on the other hand, actually had bowls in avocado colours, a darker green on the outside, creamy-pale within. When she came back in to the dining room where Malcolm was holding my hand she’d ask sweetly, ‘Is this homosexuality, Malcolm?’ He’d simply say, ‘You don’t understand, darling. I get such pure energy from John.’

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ she said, with the same large calm. ‘Just carry on with your canoodling. The wife is always the last to know, of course. And it serves her right.’

  What went on between me and Malcolm wasn’t canoodling so much as low-level mystical chat. Perhaps Malcolm felt piqued that I had gone to India, where my guru was, and talked about his plans to visit his own inspiration, Don Juan, in Mexico. He had read Carlos Castaneda’s books, which Penguin published and which adorned almost every student’s shelves those days. Later they were exposed as ‘fakes’ – the inverted commas seem appropriate because it’s a hard position for someone like me to defend, that time and space, life and death, are all unreal, but Carlos Castaneda is more unreal than any of these and must therefore be shunned. If you’re not careful you can end up saying that the unreality of Carlos Castaneda’s mystical claptrap is the only real thing in the whole of Maya.

  Finch, Pearsall & Mephistopheles

  I’m afraid we got into something that was almost an enlightenment competition. I’d quote something Ramana Maharshi had said, and he’d quote something that Castaneda’s Don Juan had said, though we were neither of us tremendously up on our subjects. Under the influence of peyote Castaneda had a vision of Mescalito, seeing him as a green man with a pointed hat. I decided not to mention that I had gone him one better by being granted an interview with Mescalito, and had been trusted with some important dendrological work.

  At one stage I remember intoning, ‘Those who know do not speak;’ and while I was taking a breath at that semi-colon, he completed the aphorism with ‘those who speak do not know.’ Then we smiled enigmatically at each other.

  This w
as the shallowest of profundities, filched from Alan Watts’s Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, also published by Penguin – worse still, filched from the blurb about that book printed at the back of another one. Prissie looked up from her Heyer and gave us her own little smile, which recognised us as spiritually pretentious fakes, bluffers to our very souls. Certainly her relationship with Georgette Heyer was more authentic than ours with Alan Watts. We didn’t even realise, while we parroted Zen quotes, how neatly they summed us up.

  If Prissie overheard Malcolm telling me, not for the first time, that advertising was killing his soul, she would say, ‘Malcolm, darling, that’s the whole point of the enterprise. Why do you think your firm is called Finch Pearsall & Mephistopheles, for heaven’s sake? If you haven’t sold your soul yet, it’s because nobody wants it. Face it, Malcolm, you’re a lost soul, you’re not damned at all. Only lost souls wear Hush Puppies. The damned have a lot more style.’ These, though, were tender squabbles, quite outside my experience, with all the rancour on the surface.

  While I stayed chez Washbourne I tried to ration my intake of liquids, so as not to have to go to the toilet too often. I didn’t overdo it. There was no virtue in dehydrating myself in a warm season, parching my kidneys just to avoid embarrassment. It made sense to discipline my bladder so that I could last the night, like a well-trained dog, to spare the household the duty of emptying a pee bottle. Gradually I worked up to a steely continence. In fact I may as well admit that since then I have often used the call of the bathroom as a way of getting some good earthed contact, whether with strangers or old friends. Nothing breaks the ice like embarrassment in a bathroom.

  I could hardly expect there to be no repercussions from the rupture with Mum and Dad, but I hoped not to have to deal with them until after the vacation. No such luck. One day the phone rang and Prissie told me it was for me. Her voice was rather hushed. ‘Who is it?’ I mouthed, and she answered in a whisper, ‘Perhaps a bishop?’

  It was Graëme Beamish, my tutor.

  ‘John,’ he said, ‘please find it in your heart to forgive me for disturbing you in the well-earned rest of your vacation. Then I will try to find it in mine to forgive your mother for disturbing the peace of mine.

  ‘I would have left her letter unanswered were it not for the fact that I am taking next term as a sabbatical. It didn’t seem fair to pass on to my replacement the obligation of dealing with as tricky a customer as I have come across in my experience as a tutor.’

  I could hear regular metallic impacts in the background, from which I deduced that Dr Beamish was finding amusement in setting Newton’s Balls a-clack.

  ‘I’m not referring to you, John, though you yourself do not offer the authorities the easiest of rides. I mean your mother.

  ‘As you may not know, your mother has written to me roughly every two weeks of university term since you first came up.

  ‘John? Are you there?’

  ‘Yes, Dr Beamish.’ I was very shocked to learn that Mum had been so hideously active on what she imagined to be my behalf. Knowing that my tutor had been screening me from her interference for the last two years felt almost as bad as being pushed down King Street by him with a stranger’s sick caking my wheels.

  ‘Shall I continue? I hope I’m not interrupting any important activity. The file on Cromer, Mrs L is even larger than the one on Cromer, J. For some time her idea was that I should forbid you from changing your course of study. Now it seems that your family has exploded in some way. I have to say I have no interest in how you all get on with each other. I propose simply to read you my reply to your mother’s latest letter so that you know where you stand. Is that agreed?’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘“Dear Mrs Cromer, I am sorry to learn that John has fallen victim to sexual deviance and drug addiction. These scourges do unfortunately claim a small proportion of undergraduates, and not always the unpromising ones, during their years of study. The evidences of wrongdoing which you mention, however, came to light during the vacation and on private property: as such they cannot be said directly to involve the College or indeed the University. If John is found in possession of further caches of smut or illegal narcotics I will, of course, inform you at once. I myself had always imagined that his temptations were the more traditional ones of strong drink and bad company.”’

  I could hear a self-satisfied smile in his voice, and could imagine him looking at me over the tops of imaginary half-moon glasses, while he congratulated himself on the neatness of this oblique reference to my kidnap at the hands of Write Off Tuesday.

  He was certainly getting his pennyworth of revenge for an evening when he was made to feel uncomfortable in the Senior Common Room, sniffing the air from time to time and checking his smart shoes for traces of undergraduate vomit.

  Eats doctors for breakfast

  ‘“As for your suggestion that he should receive medical treatment, although it is true that the University has access to the ‘top men’ in many fields, most of them indeed the products of our system of education, it is my impression that John knows almost as much as any of the health professionals with whom his difficult history has brought him into contact. Some say that he eats doctors for breakfast, others that he merely chews them and spits them out, without going to the trouble of swallowing.”’ It is perhaps true that I was impatient with the general practitioner assigned by the university to preside over my health. Dr Beamish paused, as if trying to detect down the telephone wire whether his bufferish persiflage was succeeding in making me squirm.

  ‘“There seems no pressing need to add to the list of casualties, unless of course John’s academic progress begins to suffer. If and when that happens, we will certainly seek medical help.”

  ‘Does this reply seem satisfactory to you, John?’

  ‘Perfectly satisfactory, Dr Beamish. Thank you.’

  ‘Not at all, John. I shall see you in the new year, after my sabbatical term. But please go easy on my replacement. Not everyone has my inner strength.’

  All in all it was a fine show of donnish humour, in a style which I imagine has changed little over the decades, even the centuries. I had to be grateful to Beamish for fobbing off Mum and Dad with his elegant mockery, even if it did sting me a little in the process. To judge from his sardonic references to drink and so on he regarded me as having good character more or less by default. Mechanically unable to sin rather than either virtuous or vicious on the level of morals.

  With the Washbournes’ permission I phoned Granny. I wasn’t sure which way she would jump, which was of course just the way she liked it. Her tone was predictably crisp from the word go. ‘Halnaker 226.’

  ‘Hello, Granny, this is John.’

  ‘Good morning, John.’

  ‘Have you heard from Mum lately?’

  ‘Indeed I have not. We are not in morbidly regular communication. Laura seeks to shield me from good and bad news alike. Luckily Peter retains some dim memory of his grandmother.’

  ‘Well, Granny, the thing is, we had a row and I’ve moved out.’

  ‘So I hear. People are always saying that blood is thicker than water but I can’t say I’ve noticed.’ Wonderful Granny, so unsuspectingly Hindu in her instincts! So right in thinking that the fluids of kinship have no metaphysical claim to viscosity. ‘Are you well placed where you are staying now?’

  ‘Very well placed, Granny.’

  ‘I am pleased to hear it. I take it your allowance has been discontinued?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘What sums were involved?’

  ‘Dad gave me £10 a month.’

  ‘I will maintain that level of stipend. Were there other expenses met by your parents?’

  ‘Only books.’

  ‘I see. I will carry that burden also, though I shall expect scrupulous accounts. Goodbye, John.’

  ‘Of course, Granny. Thank –’

  But she had already put down the receiver at the Tangmere end. It’s true she was of a generation
that didn’t necessarily perform expansively on the phone, but I think her brusqueness was more idiosyncratic. Granny just got a kick out of hanging up, without footling politesse. And for all the terseness of the conversation, that was my finances fixed, for the time being, without opposition or even haggling. It’s true that Granny liked any such arrangement to be provisional, renewed or withdrawn as she pleased.

  In her financial conversations she could be oddly playful, even skittish. She might say, ‘I had a little investment, John, and nothing would it bear – not even a silver nutmeg or a golden pear, I’m afraid, though that would have been charming. But now the King of Spain’s daughter has paid me a rather nice dividend after all, and I thought I would send you some of it – not all the fruit from my little nut tree, but enough I hope to give you a pleasant taste.’ Or else: ‘I’m afraid my portfolio has caught rather a bad cold, John – it may even be ’flu – so we must both tighten our belts for the time being and hope for improvement. Portfolios are particularly susceptible to coughs and sneezes at this time of year, as perhaps you know. Cases of pneumonia have been reported in the Square Mile. We must watch and wait.’

  I returned to Cambridge for the academic year 1972–3 as an honorary orphan (at least in my own mind), and deprived of the tutor who had protected me in previous years.

  It was my chance to get a telephone installed. I seized it. I got to work right away. I wasn’t confident of putting one over on his replacement – I could all too easily imagine Graëme leaving a note saying THE ENDLESSLY PESTERING JOHN CROMER IS NOT TO HAVE A TELEPHONE HOWEVER ELOQUENTLY HE PLEADS HIS SPECIOUS CASE – but it was worth a go. And then it went like a dream. I had my paperwork with me: the original note from Roy Wisbey proposing it, not to mention my photocopy of the relevant section of the Disabled Persons Act 1971. The tender-hearted substitute asked for no documentation (locums are usually pushovers). My case spoke for itself. I should have asked for a fridge and a shower in my room while the going was good.