Cedilla (27 page)

yielded only

To be fair to myself, I did manage to nudge the poem a little further towards English than that – but Eckstein wanted more than a translation. He wanted understanding in depth – an essay. My excitement collapsed. All I could do was pray for my guardian angel to deliver a miracle of understanding – a forlorn hope, since understanding is what miracles leave grasping. On its own my brain could manage nothing. The cells were stumped.

Mum asked what the matter was, and for once I welcomed her fussing. I explained that I had to write about an important poem in Spanish when I didn’t know any Spanish. That my wits were at the end of their tether. Mum didn’t say anything but moved quietly into the hall, shutting the door behind her.

There was murmuring on the phone. Then Mum came back to tell
me that she had arranged for me to see a friend and neighbour of hers, who lived on the other side of the Abbotsbrook Estate.

‘María Binns will see you at eight, JJ. She’ll be happy to help you with your Spanish poem.’ I must have looked doubtful about someone called Binns being an Iberian scholar, because she added, ‘María is as Spanish as it’s possible to be. Michael – that’s her husband – must like her that way. I made a blouse for her once, and when I saw her wearing it, I thought, “Why did I bother to sew on those top three buttons? They’ll never be used.”’

So Mum had met this Spanish godsend through the sewing circle. It made sense that the
de luxe
dressmaker’s dummy, delivered in error, held on to with a passion and named after the intended owner, Mum’s guardian angel (or as close as she would ever get), should have a hotline to a whole network of higher powers. Miss Pearce was sending me along to the top woman, and my prayers seemed to have been answered. My guardian angel would rescue me as long as I put in a bit of effort and drove to meet her myself. The system seemed to work more or less on Granny’s principles, making sure I contributed energy of my own instead of coasting on bounty. This is a sound spiritual principle too. As one famous formula puts it, the guru is a mother monkey not a mother cat. She won’t pick you up by the scruff of your neck and carry you bodily to self-realisation. You have to cling to her fur.

An attractive, well-turned-out woman was waiting for me at the gate of her charming house when I pulled up in the red Mini. My guardian angel was lithe and handsome and dressed in a black suède skirt and jacket which looked brand new. Her welcome was marvellously warm.

‘¡Come in, dear John! I am María Paz.’ She pronounced her surname the way someone from the North of England would say ‘path’. María Paz Binns – the name had its own poetry, though very far from Lorca’s. ‘¿Can I assist you in getting over this small step? ¡Very good! Now if you can manage OK, I thought we’d spread this poem out on the big kitchen table. ¿Would that be suitable for you?’

Before anything else she offered me a little irregular cake she told me was called a
panellet
. ‘If you are going to learn Spanish you must learn Spanish tastes as well as Spanish words. The more Spanish food you try, the better will be your pronunciation. There is nothing more
Spanish than
panellet.
In reality …
panellet
is Catalan and not Spanish. ¡So you can start by learning that there is more than one Spain! More than one language, more than one tradition, more than one style of food
.’
She broke the cake in half and popped my piece right into my mouth. Even in those days I didn’t enjoy having people make decisions like that without consultation. It replaces one form of embarrassment with another. It may be decisive but it ain’t polite. On the other hand, the cake was delicious. That made a difference.

‘Lovely,’ I said, and María Paz replied offhandedly that one of the major ingredients of a
panellet
was potatoes. ‘Michael won’t even try it – catch him, he says, eating cake of spuds.’ Michael of course being her husband. ‘So you see’ – she gave me a very winning smile – ‘you are already more open-minded than he.’ She might not have thought me open-minded if she’d mentioned the spuds in advance, but the
panellet
’s flavour bloomed on my tongue.

‘One more thing about Catalonia … there is a special patron saint for the region – you may recognise him. St Jordi? Is he ringing a bell?’

‘Not really.’

‘He killed a dragon, like the English St George. They are in fact the same person.’

‘I never knew that.’

‘One saint for two countries. More than two – St George is also patron of Greece and of Georgia. But the official patron saint of Spain is Santiago. Santiago of Compostela. St James the Greater. Saint Jordi is a forbidden saint, thanks to that whelp-of-a-hound Franco. Parents are not allowed to baptise their sons Jordi. Imagine not being allowed to name an English boy George!’ This would indeed be a strange embargo, though George was not at the time a fashionable name.

If María Paz had happened to mention that St James the Greater was also the patron saint of vets and of arthritis sufferers, as he is in his spare time, then I might have rocketed off into Catholicism and not taken my present course. There are other saints with arthritic responsibilities (take a creaking bow, St Colman, St Alphonsus Maria de Liguori, St Servatus, St Totnan, St Killian) as well as others who watch over vets (St Blaise, St Eligius), but St James the Greater is the only one to hold down both jobs.

Even without knowing about the broad portfolio of St James the Greater’s patronage, I was thrilled by the oppression of the Catalans and the whole idea of a forbidden saint. I would name my first-born Jordi – boy or girl, the name worked as well for either. My first-born, or my first cat.

María asked for the poem and read it in silence. She stopped after a few seconds to light an unfamiliar-looking cigarette, its tobacco oddly dark. She inhaled the smoke through her mouth and expelled it thoughtfully from her nose. Dad smoked as if it was a military drill, a form of exercise for the lungs, while Mum smoked du Mauriers with her nerves (it was never just ‘a cigarette’ any more than the Relaxator was ever just ‘the lounger’). It was easy to think that María Paz drew smoke directly into her brain, bathing her cerebral involutions with the cigarette’s piquant incense.

She saw me studying her and asked me if I would care to try one of her cigarettes. ‘I know it has a rather acrid pong, but is really very gentle and smooth,’ she said. ‘I depend on my Ducados. Michael gets them for me from Spain when he goes there.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘To be honest, if all I could get was English cigarettes I wouldn’t go to the trouble of smoking at all.’ Sycophantically I agreed with what she said about English cigarettes. It tickled me that my guardian angel brought temptation as well as rescue, making her a sort of double agent. Surely only the devil would smoke black tobacco.

Thanks to the family’s birthday and Christmas protocol, I was neither an addict nor altogether a novice when it came to cigarettes. I accepted her kind suggestion. After she had offered me the packet and while she was still brandishing her lighter, she mentioned that she had a cigarette holder somewhere, which might make my first Spanish cigarette a little kinder on my inexperienced throat. ¡Tactful María! She must have noticed that my lack of flexibility would make it awkward for me to bring a cigarette to my lips. Not impossible, but awkward – a certain amount of the movement would have had to come from the neck. It was really my bones and my blushes she was sparing, rather than my tender throat.

The cigarette holder, when it was installed between my lips, gave
me a feeling of baleful sophistication, either a matinée idol’s or a Bond villain’s. I was Noël Coward or else Goldfinger. With our Ducados safely lit, we began the seminar. I would need all available forms of sophistication to cope with the information my guardian angel had to offer.

‘John,’ she said, folding her arms. ‘No one will ever understand this poem without knowing that Lorca was jomosexual. ¡It is an elegy for his lover, who was killed in the bull ring!’

It’s true that on the qwerty keyboard the letter
h
snuggles up to the letter
j
, but María’s delivery wasn’t any sort of metaphysical typing error. The Spanish
j
converges on the English
h
sound, but is much raspier, as different as
panellet
is different from Victoria sponge or a Ducados from a du Maurier. When Mrs Paz Binns told me that Lorca was
jomosexual
, the Spanish
j
came smokily from her lips with just the same passionate and committed intonation that Eckstein had used, when he told me that ‘joder’ was a third conjugation Spanish verb.

My modest physical size makes any drug work on me rather powerfully. I think I managed to conceal from my hostess the intensity of the nicotine intoxication I was receiving from the Ducados, though at one point I came close to jabbing myself in the eye with the cigarette holder.

María spoke with passion, reverence and proud humility as she explained the fierce national temperament. Bull-fighting was the heart’s blood of Spain. She said the first word anyone should learn in Spanish was
duende
, about which Lorca had much to say. Only with this background knowledge could the reader begin to know the way Lorca had felt about his lover Ignacio Sánchez Mejías.

Background knowledge about Spanish culture was exactly what I lacked, and I was particularly hostile to bull-fighting. ¿How could I not be, when even the jar of Bovril in Mum’s larder, that nightmarish concentrate of abattoir run-off, filled me with horror and disgust? Still, by the time she had finished speaking and I had taken a final puff on my Ducados, whose butt I jabbed out in the glass ashtray which she held up for me, we agreed that I understood Lorca very well. Also that I should never waste my time with English cigarettes.

Before I left, I asked María to read the whole poem aloud to me. While she spoke I kept my eyes closed. She made the repeated lines
pound in fatalistic rhythm, like a funeral train. My mouth was sour with cigarette smoke, but I could still taste the
panellet
, infusing my saliva with its aromas. I sat there concentrating on María’s diction, and the exact flavouring of her Spanish vowels and consonants. There’s no way you can be sure in advance that any individual native speaker will be a suitable model for your own accent, but for now I would trust my guardian angel to guide my tongue.

When Mum asked me how my lesson with María had gone, I didn’t have an answer ready. I had been so busy mulling over the new flavours I had learned, and the problem of forging within my soul a vegetarian
duende
, that I hadn’t remembered to concoct an innocent version of the seminar for parental consumption. I certainly didn’t want to mention the sexual secret that María had shared with me, nor my adventures with Spanish cigarettes, so I simply said that she was very nice and very helpful, and had given me some nice home-made cake.

I could hardly have been more stupid. Mum might have been troub led by Spanish cigarettes and the discussion of jomosexuality, but she was certain to feel the threat if I touched another woman’s cake. It pierced her in her inner core of catering. She grilled me about the cake’s texture and probable ingredients. She was keenly competitive when it came to cooking. Her soufflés always rose and stayed risen, unlike those of some neighbours in Bourne End. She even borrowed a trick from Fanny Cradock by playing an electric fan on the fluffy ramparts of the finished soufflé before serving, to show that it wouldn’t collapse. It wouldn’t dare.

I said that the cake was low to the plate, as if it had hardly risen or not been made with flour at all. It certainly contained almonds, vanilla, perhaps some orange or lemon essence. I didn’t quite play into Mum’s hands by mentioning the potatoes. She seemed mollified and snorted that it didn’t sound like much of a cake, but I wasn’t sure I had fully made amends for my cake adultery in the kitchen of María Paz Binns.

My essay on ‘The Tragic Bull in Lorca’ was delivered to Eckstein after school the next Tuesday. I had taken a day off sick in order to
write it. It was a pretty torrid piece of analysis, fuelled by my anxiety to please my benignly scowling teacher, by the unique smoke rising from the black tobacco of a Ducados cigarette, and by my own abstract desire for the handsome bull-fighter, as long as he didn’t hurt the bull. His lithe body now lay twisted and crumpled in the sawdust of the bull ring, the suit of lights stained with his own costly Bovril. It was all very feverish, masochistic and pretentious. I was proud of it.

When I came in after delivering my essay, Mum was making a cake, and almost dancing around it, in an unusually sprightly way.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ I asked.

‘Oh, just trying out a new recipe,’ she said. I knew she couldn’t be as casual as she was trying to seem. ‘I got it from María Binns, who got it from
Ideal Homes
. The entire cake collapsed on her – poor dear! – so I told her I’d give it a try.’ She had already baked her cake bases, the bricks as I thought of them, and had mortared them together with her home-made buttercream filling. Now she was mixing something else in her pudding basin. ‘It’s a chocolate icing which goes all over the outside of the cake,’ she said, her voice as light and airy as a meringue. In fact she had just popped a batch of meringues into the oven on a low temperature. It was her thrifty habit to let meringues hitch a lift from the relatively high heat that had been used to bake the cakes. The extra expense was minimal.

After she had beaten her egg whites with the rotary whisk, she would hold it above the bowl of stiff peaks and gently work the handle back and forth about half-way round the circle of its action. If the movement was too fast then centrifugal force would spatter the kitchen with flying froth, but if she judged it properly then she could get a trailing sheet of woven foam to lower itself onto the rest of the whipped whites from the whisk, whose meshing blades were almost clean before they even reached the washing-up bowl.

The kitchen was her pride and her parish, although food in its finished form had little interest for her. She rarely served herself more than a few spoonfuls at mealtimes, and though she hated waste she sometimes left even that untouched. She was always saying she would eat later, and perhaps sometimes she did.

Her soft chocolate icing smelled as good as it looked.

‘Would you care to try a bit, JJ?’ she asked with a bright smile. ‘I
know you say you don’t like cakes, but perhaps this is the recipe that will convert you!’

She passed me a spoonful of the mixture and returned to her creation. As she picked up her palette knife I noticed that she had now combined her sprightly dance with a færie flick. She was smothering the cake with the soft mixture, and as she worked she danced some more. She kept dipping her blade at lightning speed into a pot of water she had nearby. ‘It’s important to get only a
thin
film of water on the knife,’ she said, and the light flashed on her palette knife as she plied it about. Her blade plunged and scooped, making little peaks and valleys in the edible geography of the cake. I put the spoon into the cave of my mouth to test her offering, nearly fainting as the mixture dissolved back into the nothingness from which it was created, leaving my tongue-buds drugged and exulting in the subtle sweetness of chocolate, with a touch of bitterness pulling on my heart.

‘Oh, and there’s just one more thing,’ she said, ‘ – before I do the washing-up, of course! – that might interest you, JJ, as a scientist.’ She showed me the palette knife, so that I could see that there wasn’t a mark on it, in spite of all the sculpting it had done, the wonderful irregular symmetry it had given to the finished cake. I suppose the water she’d been dipping it in had been warm.

I didn’t need to say anything, and nor did she. The whole scene had expressed what she wanted to say. The equilibrium of the world had been restored, the proper balance of things.
So much for Spanish cakes
that don’t even rise! Poor dear María Paz Binns, such a darling, brainy as
all get-out – and can’t even make a simple chocolate cake from a magazine!

Bourne End wasn’t exactly a glamorous place, but it was always a desirable place to live, and it was beginning to fill up with go-getters. It had been a big step up socially for Mum after years in RAF housing. Among the other service wives she had been something of a queen bee, but she felt the strain of her new surroundings. She was afraid of being shown up as stupid or tongue-tied. That was why the sewing circle, and the company of women who respected her needlework, had become such a necessity to her.

Not everyone triggered her reflex of panicked inadequacy. Jon Pertwee the actor, who was a neighbour, had become very friendly – even though he had been guilty of drawing the eyes of the world to the area, a few years previously, by recommending it as a location for the filming of
The Pumpkin Eater
. We could do without that sort of attention, thank you.

Pertwee knew how to butter Mum up, saying what a gem the house was – how had he missed it when he was looking for a house in the area? She must promise to let him know if she ever planned to sell.

He buttered us all up, telling Peter and me to call him Poetry – not Pertwee, which sounded like a baby trying to say
poetry
(he did a killing imitation) but ‘Poetry’ as a proper thespian would say it, chest out and shoulders back. He was entirely approachable, and younger than we originally thought, since at the time he had his hair dusted grey for a rôle.

Poetry was the life and soul of any party. Mum told us about one riverside gala (she heard about it at her sewing circle) at which Jon Pertwee had rowed an abandoned boat until it sank, then swam ashore fully clothed to wild applause.

I hadn’t minded when the film people came to make
The Pumpkin
Eater
, being thirteen or so at the time. The only complication of the shoot was that one elderly resident turned out not to have signed the release prepared by the production company. She refused to take direction, and would trot out of her front door (innocently or not) whenever the cameras rolled.

I didn’t know that Peter Finch was a film star. All I knew was that I had never seen an adult squat on his heels for so long at a time. He seemed to shift his weight very gradually from side to side. When I asked him how he had learned this useful knack, he explained that he was originally from Australia, and had taught himself by watching the Aborigines there. They could squat like that all day.

Peter Finch offered to give Peter and me a ride in his enormous car, but Mum wouldn’t let us go. I don’t think she was actively alarmed by his celebrity, it was just the old rule about not accepting lifts from strange men, which applied even to strange film stars.

Tom Stoppard was a different matter. He had moved to Bourne End in the spring of 1968, about the time the Mini arrived. Not just to
Bourne End but to our neck of the woods, the Abbotsbrook Estate. His house was called River Thatch. A thatched house, obviously, with a small drive. A front lawn that was laid out for croquet. A large tree shading the sitting room, which faced the stream. Stoppard lived there with his wife Jose (could that be right, wondered the sewing circle collectively? Perhaps it was pronounced Josie?) and their small son.

A conspicuously clever writer was living a few hundred yards away from her front door, and Mum felt thoroughly undermined. She heard about it through her sewing circle, where tongues darted like needles and neighbours or strangers might be thoroughly stitched up. The news, heard over coffee and biscuits, knocked her right off her precarious perch.