Cedilla (12 page)

It’s only now that I realise that there is a simpler explanation for absence than either a preference for other styles of charitable act or else her Otel commitments. Ridiculously simple, once the Granular mystique has worn away and you’ve given the thought permission to occur. Granny hated hospitals, and so she stayed away.

What do people hate about hospitals? The smell. The lighting. Bad tea in the canteen. The fact that death comes calling.

So when people say they ‘hate’ hospitals, it only means they fear them. Normally Granny embraced hatred with a certain amount of affection, and left the fearing to other people. But during the year-plus of my operations and rehabilitations, it was fear which drove her in any direction but mine, far more reliably than her neighbour’s car.

Despite everything I remember the sense of a warm breeze moving through the house, which was partly summer, of course, but also corresponded to a break in the family weather, a climate in which lightning hardly ever flashed but clouds were slow to clear. Tensions never seemed to come to a proper rolling boil, but it was rare for them to stop simmering altogether for the duration of a radiant interlude. It was our nature as a family to seethe rather than explode, and even when we did explode there was no actual violence and very little damage to property. Admittedly Audrey showed signs of being a wild card, who would not play by the established rules that were good or bad enough for everyone else.

Dad had a new job with BOAC, I had a new hip and a crutch whose misadventures seemed to tickle everybody, Peter had a paper round and Audrey hadn’t yet devised a hiding place beyond Mum’s power to find.

I felt proprietorial about the conservatory-greenhouse (although of course I couldn’t say so) and I liked to be parked by it. I was already planning what Dad should grow there, apart from the
Drosophyllum
lusitanicum
in whose interest the whole long-distance hypnosis experiment had been conducted.

My next project would be to persuade Dad to experiment, in the new greenhouse, with another of Menage’s tips,
Musa ensete
– the Abyssinian banana. If we sowed it in spring next year it would reach nearly four foot by early autumn, needing to be transplanted first into a seven-inch and then a twelve-inch pot. By the end of the second year it would be pressing outwards against the panes of the conservatory, and Menage’s advice was to get rid of it and start again from scratch. It would be interesting to see whether Dad could be so casual about the fate of the cuckoo in his greenhouse – a plant which would have by then more or less the status of a family member. Then we’d see how good a job he made of rejecting the claims of a vegetable child.

Mum fussed over me endlessly, which I tried whole-heartedly to hate. What do fully-fledged chicks feel when the mother bird regurgitates food down their throats, long after they’ve learned to feed themselves? Love, I expect, love in the key of exasperation.

She was good at the job. She was more than competent. She wasn’t like some of the professionals I had experienced over the years, who had secretly hated the job, or parts of it, and had passed that hatred on. With Mum it was just the reverse. She liked it too much. It would fit her personality and her character (
Heather
) in the Bach herbal system, for there to be one child who never outgrew the need for her. Then she would never need to outgrow her own need. Audrey wasn’t the answer to her prayers after all, was in fact showing signs of being a right little madam, while Peter (with that paper round and pub work in prospect) was almost out of her orbit already.

I wanted Mum’s life to have meaning – of course I did – as long as its meaning wasn’t that she had a tragically stricken son who couldn’t manage without her. Unfortunately that was the meaning she had her heart set on.

She was always on my side, but whose side was I on? Not hers. I couldn’t afford to be. She was a helper who was also an obstacle. Mum
wasn’t the alternative to an ‘institution’, she was an institution in her own right, a one-woman hospice-hermitage yawning to receive me.

I spent a lot of time viewing Mum through the wrong end of a mental telescope, practising the Buddhist vision –
bare observation
, indifferent to the agreed meanings of things – taught by the
Satipat
thana Sutta
. What was Mum? Mum was a fathom-long carcass (closer to the fathom mark, in fact, than I would ever be), fat, tears, grease, saliva, etc. More to the point, Mum was the champion of the Relaxator, the Bernina – the sewing-machine – and Sqezy (I was troubled and thrilled by the manufacturer’s licence to drop the mandatory
u
after
q
), booster of the Kenwood, the Rayburn, Kia-Ora, Yeast-Vite and Nescaff, compulsive denigrator of Kit-e-Kat and Kit-Kat. The layman’s term for this spiritual enterprise is ‘hardening the heart’.

When his family spilled out into the garden which was his exclusive province for much of the year, Dad tended to retreat into the shed. Mum’s main reason for being in the garden was to pick herbs. She had white paving stones laid in the back plot just outside the kitchen door, in the form of a chess board. Her herbs grew in the black squares, and she could walk on the white squares when she wanted to pick them.

The first thing she did on a picking expedition was to shake her right hand, as if she was holding an invisible thermometer and trying to get the mercury back down to its bulb. When I asked her what she was doing, she explained it was to make her hand go floppy. ‘I want to be guided by influences far from the brain,’ she would say with a faraway look in her eyes. Her loosened arm would then rise smoothly up and get its bearings. Within a second or two it had jerked decisively towards the appropriate accents to be added to lunch.

Clearly this was herbalist dowsing, yet Mum was horrified when she found out that Peter and I had been playing with ouija boards. I couldn’t see the difference – except that regimented herbs don’t talk back. But when it was me calling on influences far from the brain, that was somehow sinister and appalling.

In our ouija sessions Peter and I had been having snatches of conversation
with two ancestors, Great-Grandpa who designed the Cambridge Divinity School and Newnham College (not to mention bits of Girton) and Mum’s Uncle Ted who suicided himself at Jesus College, Cambridge. The ouija board seemed to have a strong Cambridge bias. If it was controlled (Mum’s theory) by a minor devil, then it was one that sported a light-blue scarf.

The ouija board was a homely device, nothing more than a glass upside-down on a piece of Dad’s shirt-cardboard marked with the letters of the alphabet. It wasn’t practical for me to put my hand on top of the glass, so Peter was flying solo. I suppose he might have been cheating, but the messages which came through weren’t in his style. Great-Uncle Ted kept saying
I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE QUICK,
round and round again, and then the astral switchboard seemed to lose interest, saying
BLAH BLAH BLAH
instead. ‘Are you tired?’ I asked, and the answer came back,
SURE AM, BOSS
. After that, no movement at all, however long we tried. Peter seemed disappointed, but I thought this was a good result. A pair of teenaged boys at a loose end had bored the Spirit World out of its tiny mind. Something to be proud of.

We were fairly bored too, on our side of the spectral divide, with Great-Uncle Ted and Great-Grandpa endlessly repeating the same things. Even knowing the ouija board was prohibited couldn’t make it interesting indefinitely. There’s some forbidden fruit that tastes of nothing much.

One particular song sums up that summer for me. Memory chooses a slice to sum up the whole, but it’s no great feat of compression in this case since the record was hardly ever off the turntable. ‘Good Vibrations’ by the Beach Boys, as radiant and bouncy a song as ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ was strange and riddling.

The record wasn’t newly released or even newly bought. It was bought with a Christmas present, but not in a hurry. Peter and I had consulted extensively about it. Mum and Dad had actually given him a book token, in an attempt to enlarge his rather basic library (
Jane’s Fighting Ships
and the
Observer Book of Aeroplanes
). I didn’t think presents should have strings attached, so I had taken the educational sting from Christmas by agreeing to swap the reproachful token for cash. It was no sacrifice. There were always books I wanted to buy.

I did find it funny that it was Jane who catalogued the fighting ships – it seemed so much more a job for Tarzan. But maybe he was busy picking nits off Cheeta’s fur or gathering fruit for lunch.

Soon, of course, with the benefits of his paper round accruing (and lucrative pub work looming), Peter would be standing casually at the counter of a record shop to ask for a single, positively willing the assistant to ask if he had just had a birthday, just so that he could answer ‘No’ in a faintly baffled tone, as a way of signalling that he was now a man of the world – emancipated from the yearly cycle of presents, rising above the grudging shillings of pocket money, able to plonk down eight-and-sixpence from his earnings as a matter of course, with only a trifling acceleration of the heartbeat at the rash committing of cash to an object that was perishable both in terms of material and its vulnerability to fashion. Those cash-flush days were only just round the corner, but for now expenditure still needed to be carefully monitored, and ‘Good Vibrations’ had proved a solid investment, vindicating the long period of consultation.

Mum and Dad were predictably incompatible in their tastes for entertainment. Mum favoured light comic songs and routines – her top favourite being Joyce Grenfell, sly, posh, spinsterly and shrewd, because her observations were ‘so true’.

Dad on the other hand admired Eartha Kitt, who was sexual and predatory – she even called Father Christmas ‘Santa baby’, for Heaven’s sake, as if he was no more than a sugar daddy in fur-trimmed pyjamas – yet somehow blatantly for sale herself. No better than she should be, and out for what she could get.

I wonder, though, if Mum had her priorities right. Eartha Kitt was no real threat. If she had turned up in Dad’s office he wouldn’t have known what to say. He would have looked at his shoes, not her cleavage. Joyce Grenfell, though, could be much more dangerous in her quiet way.

I don’t think Mum ever knew that Grenfell was a niece of Nancy Astor’s (not to mention a fellow Christian Scientist) and had a cottage on the Cliveden estate. It would have given her the willies to think
that Joyce Grenfell might have sat near her in the CRX cafeteria one day, inconspicuous in a little tweed hat and fawn coat, on the alert for intonations and mannerisms. Mum’s admiration for the truthfulness of Joyce Grenfell’s would have turned to panic. She would hardly have dared to listen to her on the radio for fear of hearing herself transformed in a monologue. It would have been hellish to be on the sharp end of that truthfulness.

When from time to time Dad threatened to buy Mum a record of Eartha Kitt’s for Christmas he was teasing, exaggerating for comic effect an insensitivity to her tastes which was perfectly sincere. Like all the men of the era he took something like pride in being a hopeless shopper, clueless and mildly resentful when confronted with a lingerie department, a perfume counter or a high-class confectioner’s. Why should he be expected to know what size his wife was, what she liked to smell of, whether she favoured the hard centres or the soft, chocolate plain or milky? These were feminine mysteries and husbands found them baffling on principle. A man who understood his wife’s needs would be regarded with something like suspicion. Something must have gone rather badly wrong to produce this morbid state of communication.

Dad despised florists not in his capacity as a male but as a gardener. If Mum wanted to be bought flowers by her husband, she had married the wrong man. In any case, buying her flowers would always have been a perilous enterprise. That whole area was hedged about with superstitions which the most innocent bouquet-giver was sure to trespass onto, let alone Dad. It was unlucky to give lilies, those deathly blooms, or a bunch which mixed red and white flowers. Once when a neighbour gave her just such a bunch for her birthday – carnations – Mum hardly waited to say Thank You before frantically segregating them by colour in different vases so that the bad luck drained away, muttering ‘blood and bandages’ the whole time. Apparently those were the ominous associations of the ill-starred mixture, though I was mystified by the fuss kicked up. If there’s blood, don’t you want to have bandages handy?

In the case of ‘Good Vibrations’ Mum overcame her prejudices, while Dad remained stubbornly attached to his. He violently disapproved of everything about the record, from the barbarous phrase
‘Beach Boys’ down. It was obvious to him that ‘beach boys’ were no more than loafers and layabouts. What they needed was jobs. I know Peter could imagine no better job than being in the Beach Boys, but he couldn’t quite find the words to say so.

This was a song which really came into its own when the sun shone and the French windows were thrown open. Day by day the volume dial on the household’s Bush radiogram crept up, in stealthy increments.

When ‘Good Vibrations’ was playing, Mum’s herb-picking became especially adventurous, with the music pulsing and prancing behind her. She would execute a courtly dance among her plantings in search of the right flavours, like a bee spoiled for choice between flowers. She danced a happy bumbling gavotte around the aromatic chequerboard of the herb garden.

Audrey trotted out from the house and joined in, treating the paving stones as a sort of practice court for hopscotch. Sometimes she lost her balance and trod on a planting, which seemed genuinely accidental, though taking a small revenge on anything which attracted Mum’s attention away from her wouldn’t have been out of character. She knew exactly how many times she could get away with saying, ‘Oh dear, I’ve treaded on Mummy’s parsy,’ before she was suspected of systematic trampling. For Audrey in those days, parsley was
parsy
and there was no other herb, hardly another piece of greenery. From her point of view the vegetable kingdom was made up of the holy trinity, parsley, rose and Christmas tree.