Cedilla (100 page)

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 ranks, 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.

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.

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.

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 was 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.