Cedilla (77 page)

I could have added that the Voodoo Lily is also known as
Sauroma
tum
venosum
,
Typhonium venosum
, and
Arum cornutum
, but not everyone finds Latin names easy to understand and remember, so I kept things simple.

Mrs Beddoes’ face went entirely empty, blank as a doll’s must be before the paint is applied. She just stood there. It was very disconcerting. It was as if she had entirely forgotten who she was – a potential breakthrough during meditation, since personality must dissolve before the self can be manifested, but downright disconcerting in a college room reeking like a urinal.

I started to lose confidence in my joke. ‘It flowers very briefly, Mrs Beddoes. It’ll be gone by tomorrow.’ It was as if she was having some sort of fit, a hidden convulsion which prevented her from taking in a word I was saying. Nervously I took my explanation down a few levels of complexity. ‘No more stink – everything sweet.’ Then the blank look she wore suddenly went away. Her face was no longer vacant premises but a full house. It was standing room only, and the whole crowd screaming with laughter.

With the release of tension she wept hysterical tears. She had to sit down to get her breath. She made several attempts to speak, saying, ‘I never … I never …’, before she was able to go on with her sentence. ‘I never … in all my years at Downing, in all my puff … I never heard of such a thing.’ Her nervousness went up in flames of laughter and relief. The conflagration was almost alarming. She wasn’t producing tears enough to put it out.

Finally she got her breath back. ‘But if you’re thinking of playing any more tricks like that, then you’d better be careful. My health won’t stand it. It’s a good job it’s Alf who has the heart problem and not me. If it had been me … then what the consequences might have been … well, I wouldn’t like to say, Mr Crow-maire. I might have slipped away, and you without a phone in your room to call for help.’

‘I would have screamed, Mrs Beddoes,’ I told her. ‘I can make quite a noise when I have to.’

By taking liberties with her which she might easily have resented I had made her my friend. Charm could get me only so far, but now
cheekiness had worked a magic of its own. I felt the release of tension too. I had dared to make a joke about something which had once been a baleful part of my history, bedwetting, and now I was free of the fear as well as the habit.

After that everything went smoothly between me and Mrs Beddoes. Nothing was too much trouble. Now it was official. The little yellow-haired squirrel eating out of my hand.

She started washing my hair, for one thing, though she didn’t exactly volunteer. I had to do some prompting before it occurred to her to make the offer. Day after day I left a bottle of shampoo out in a conspicuous place, so that she would have to move it to clean properly. Eventually the discrepancy between the constant presence of the shampoo and the actual greasiness of my locks became impossible to ignore, and she said, ‘Mr Cromer, I was wondering … would you mind if I had a bash at washing your hair? No offence, but it could do with a wash. Not in the bathroom, mind – I could do it here, wrap a towel round you and use a bowl …’

And I said, ‘Well …’ rather grudgingly, as if I would try to put up with her fussing round me. Anything for a quiet life.

After that, she would even cut my hair, just ‘tidying it up’, which was all that I would have wanted anyway. So the Voodoo Lily was anything but an ill wind from my point of view. It blew me no end of good. Mrs Beddoes would cut my fingernails for me and even squeeze unreachable pimples on my nose or forehead. This was a service which Mum rendered with a certain amount of cooing and scolding and chafing, saying, ‘You’re probably not getting enough chlorophyll in your diet’ or ‘Have you tried rubbing in half a fresh lemon?’, but it was far too intimate to be mentioned when it was performed on an undergraduate by his bedmaker. It suited us both to pretend it wasn’t happening.

Once in a while Mrs Beddoes would take a piece of my clothing home with her and wash it herself, but it was always clear between us that this was a personal favour and no part of the duties she performed for the college. It was between ourselves.

The flower of
Sauromatum guttatum
only lasts for the one day, and Whiffy Barry missed the show. He came along the following day, and together we examined the shrivelled and entirely odourless stem, which offered no insight into how the mechanism of the terrible smell
might actually operate. That was my real interest in the Lily, to get hard evidence for Mr Mole at CRX, porter and self-appointed gardening expert, being wrong all those years ago. Mr Menage and
Garden
ing for Adventure
had sided with me in classifying
S. guttatum
as non-carnivorous, but I wanted proof, and Barry as an expert witness.

I had contradictory expectations of my fellow members of the student body. Colin the evangelical engineer wanted to get a firmer grip on his own soul by gathering mine in, and Noel the film-going chancer only wanted to pose and preen. Barry was the only one of the bunch who didn’t even pretend to take an interest in me personally, and he was the only one I welcomed in.

I would invite people back to my room after lunch, bribing them with better coffee than the college provided and making sure (less defensibly) that I always had cigarettes on hand. Only my neighbour P. D. Hughes ever replaced my supply, but I didn’t mind being exploited. At this point what I seemed to need was a definite idea of what my guests got out of my hospitality. What I wanted from them was less definite, in fact I can own up and say that it’s a complete mystery to me now. The room was far too small for ambitious entertaining, but I liked it when people were wedged in anywhere they would fit and the ceiling swirled with smoke.

Once a guest of mine brought me a present – a lava lamp. Admittedly it was defective and a cast-off, something that had been returned to Joshua Taylor and replaced. That swanky emporium had no use for the faulty product, and so it came to me. It was prematurely aged, so that it no longer quite had the effect desired, of distended yolks of wax rising and falling through excited oil. In my lava lamp the wax was tired and unresponsive, circulating in globules and clots, weary melting streamers. You’re not supposed to leave lava lamps on for extended periods, but I didn’t have a lot of choice – the power point not being accessible to me. Friends would drop round for coffee and turn it on for their amusement, and then it would stay on till the next morning, when I’d ask Mrs Beddoes to turn it off. It’s bad for lava lamps to be left on for so long, but what could I do? It was broken already, and I became accustomed to its sour ozone smell.

Pete had started to get weekend visits from his old girlfriend, Helen. She was from his home town (Birmingham) and they had gone
out together for quite a while, but then before he went up to Cambridge he told her that a clean break was best.

Now he wasn’t so sure. He felt defeated by the sheer weight of numbers, the odds against finding a student girlfriend, and he was too shy to meet girls from the town, or the nurses of Addenbrookes who were in a special category, supposedly nymphomaniacs without exception. One night, tipsy and self-pitying, he had written a letter to the girl he had dumped back home, repenting of his callousness.

She took him back, but sensibly kept him on a short rein. No student girlfriend could have had him so completely under her thumb. Helen, who was crisp, organised and already in work, seemed very grown-up.

When Helen first saw me she said, ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Making yoghurt,’ I said, to which she replied with the greatest cheerfulness, ‘How revolting!’ We got on well from the start, though she had no plans to share the limited time she had with Pete. She pressed him to give up smoking (so that he could contribute to her travelling expenses, as was only right), which tended to prevent him from coming to my room after meals. Helen had no interest in plants, so it was handy that I had learned to dispense with Pete’s services as botanical escort at weekends.

He wasn’t entirely at ease with the company after meals at A6 anyway. He had acquired a nickname he disliked, and in a way it was his own fault. Like many people studying a language he was struck by the limited sounds of Russian (while of course forcing his tongue to master intricacies unknown in English). One day he happened to mention that there was no H in Rooshian, so that his own name, Hughes, would be pronounced
Gooks
. What he said wasn’t exactly ‘Gooks’, but that was what people decided they heard, and he was Peter Gooks after that, or just ‘Gooks’. I tried to set up a counter-tradition by calling him
Pyotr
or
Petrushka
instead, but no one ever used those fond forms but me.

I’ve always been a slow eater, and always will be, but the improvement in what we ate in Hall made Alan Linton also linger over his
food. Mealtimes became companionable, now that we could bask in the envious glances of our flesh-eating fellows, who would chew their corrupt rations in grim haste. Our plates were not sites of sordid suffering, and our forks were not burdened with karma.

The slow pace of eating suited rambling chat, but I was running out of subjects. I had qualms by now about turning my summer in India into a party piece. In any case it often fell flat. In practice, telling people about my sojourn as guest of the mountain only prompted questions about Indian restaurants. Which was better, the Sylhet or the Curry Centre on Castle Hill? I had no idea. I had spotted a restaurant called the Curry Queen on Mill Road, and had decided it would be my first port of call, but I hadn’t got round to it yet.

In those days even educated people knew only a tiny handful of words in any Indian language, and one of them was always Sutra. Another was Karma. I spent a lot of time explaining that the Kama in Kama Sutra was not the same thing as the Karma the hippies held so dear. To make the distinction clear I would roll the
r
in Karma exaggeratedly, until my whole brain shook in its moorings from the force of the alveolar trill.

In early days there was another obvious subject of conversation. For the amusement of my fellow-students in Hall I would imitate Mrs Beddoes, giving her an exaggeratedly strangulated voice which swooped from would-be posh to common in a single sentence. I don’t know how this fool’s route to popularity ranked, when set beside the folly of buying rounds indiscriminately in the college bar. Rather lower, I suspect.

I was repeating past successes in the rôle of raconteur, from the times I had beguiled the dorm at Vulcan with a thousand variations on themes of sexual passion and home cooking. Bit by bit I worked Mrs Beddoes up into a character, exaggerating her very mild mispronunciations and odd patterns of stress. ‘Oh Mr Crow-
maire
, if you really think my duties extend to tidying up after your friends you’re very much mis-
taiken
. Alf (that’s my husband) always tells me I do too much for others, but then Mr Crow-
maire
you are a child of God as good as any. Better than most.

‘All well and good, Jean, says Alf-that’s-my-husband, but if I’ve told you once I’ve told you times without number, your endless
service to others may well se-
coor
your place in the blue hereafter, but what about the here and now, eh?

‘By which he generally means his tea.’

Such routines were much in demand, and if I didn’t announce a performance with a single stylised sniff the cry would go up of, ‘Come on John, entertain us. Do the bedder, she’s priceless.’ It was reassuring to have a routine that reliably brought approval.

It was only gradually that I became uncomfortable. Wasn’t I traducing the person who had shown me most friendliness, an intimacy without demands? (A cup of tea freely offered is a small miracle of consideration.) I determined to stop.

I wasn’t brave or self-righteous enough to lecture my faithful audience on the misrepresentation we were conspiring to perpetrate, to announce Mrs Beddoes in so many words as the salt of the earth without which there would be no savour. My conscience pushed me in the opposite direction from the one I had taken historically, not towards wilder flights but a greater fidelity. I added in more and more of the humble details – the caravan outside Beccles, the deaf sister in Waterbeach. Eventually people stopped asking me to ‘do’ Mrs Beddoes, and neighbours in Hall who had missed the performance for a while would receive frantic signals not to egg me on.

All in all there has been quite a lot of eye-rolling in my immediate vicinity down the years, just outside my line of sight, or just within it when people have underestimated my peripheral vision. Most of the useful information I have gathered has reached me out of the tail of my eye.

With Alan I found myself talking about homœopathy. As a medical student, he was biased against therapies not based on the Western tradition, but he wasn’t entirely opposed to new ideas. His mind was neither open nor shut, but ajar. I argued that homœopathy was a Western tradition in itself.

I emphasised that homœopathy individuates, taking each person as a separate unit, while conventional science generalises and expects the same results to hold for everyone. Alan was intrigued by the unimportance
in homœopathy of theory without result, its sheer practicality as a set of techniques.

As always when homœopathy was the subject in those years, I was at least partly thinking about something else.
Similes similibus amen
tur
, if you like. I had heard of something called the Gay Liberation Front, which sounded angry rather than loving, and in any case hadn’t yet forced itself on my attention in the university or the town.

I asked Alan if he knew the story of the 1854 cholera epidemic in London. ‘Bloody hell, John,’ he said. ‘I am a medical student, you know. I know a little bit about the history of diseases and a few things about the human body. This is my third year of study, so I even know that the ribs aren’t located in the head.’ I rather enjoyed being on the receiving end of some sarcasm. It gingered me up. Normally people get rather mealy-mouthed in my vicinity. ‘So if you’re referring to the discovery of the water-borne transmission of cholera, and how the doughty John Snow saved lives in Soho by taking the handle off the Broad Street pump, then yes, I know the story of the 1854 cholera epidemic.’