Cedilla (96 page)

Finally the echoes of sobbing died away from the courtyards of the golden colleges. Spilt emotion evaporated relatively quickly from ancient flagstones, but for quite a while many undergraduate hearts would feel an affinity with the lawns where marquees had stood, drained to yellowness and marked by the sharp heels of hollow revelry.

I stayed in A6 just as long as I could. I would have loved to convalesce at Mr Johnson’s Home in Bognor, but from health there can be no convalescence. Any other sort of institution might take me in but wasn’t guaranteed to let me out. Finally there was nothing for it but to face the family, with nothing to shield me but a thick sheaf of the strongest prescriptions I could think of, endorsed with the autographs which Flanny distributed so freely.

Peter was away on holiday. He took a train to Inverness and spent the summer hitch-hiking round the Highlands. Audrey was in residence, but we had never really been friends. She was in a state of wildly excited transition, spending most of the time with her best friend Lorraine Leeming. They would walk around with rolled-up tights stuffed into their tops, modelling the soft shapeliness to come. They would shout, ‘What God has forgotten we stuff with cotton!’ then roll on the floor shrieking with laughter, till their makeshift busts were squashed flat.

The rest of the time they would write cheques in each other’s favour. Pay Audrey Cromer Two Million Pounds. Pay Lorraine Leeming Two Million Pounds. It was always two. A single million wasn’t enough for these plutocrats in the making. They were too young to have chequebooks so they drew their own from scratch. Freed from the constraints of plausibly representing legal instruments of exchange their cheques grew physically large, sometimes made up of several pieces of cardboard taped together.

The closest thing I had to allies in Bourne End were the Washbournes, Malcolm who shared my spiritual interests and his wife Priscilla who warmly mocked them. ‘Call me Prissie,’ Priscilla said from the first, meaning I suppose that she wasn’t. Wasn’t prissy, that is.

Mum seemed to think that the Washbournes were only trying to be youthful and trendy by being friendly to me, sucking up to the young, as if I was obviously a waste of an older person’s time. I said to Dad once, I don’t think Mum is very keen on the Washbournes, and Dad said, ‘Let’s face it, John, your mother isn’t very keen on anybody.’ Which was true enough but didn’t help in the short term.

The women were different types, and had no use for each other. Everyone always complimented Mum on how thin she was – how did she manage it? What was her secret?

Her secret was not eating. No great mystery. And to Prissie’s eyes Mum was actually too thin, a monument to appetite repressed. ‘You need some meat on your bones, Laura dear,’ she said once, which I think Mum never forgave. In her own eyes, if she wasn’t thin, she wasn’t anything.

Prissie for her part made her mark in the short period, a half-decade perhaps of heyday, when undernourishment was not quite compulsory and the phrase
earth mother
had an edge of awe rather than disdain. She looked good in a kaftan, the only one I ever saw (in that age of kaftans) who did. She could carry herself.

Prissie lived in bare feet – I don’t know why that way of putting it sounds so strange – though she would reluctantly put on shoes to go to the pub, slipping them off the moment she was ensconced with a drink.

From Mum’s point of view, of course, she was simply obese. I heard her mutter once, ‘That woman! Even her earrings are fat.’ She particularly disapproved of Prissie’s love of going barefoot. Mum seemed to think that shoes were necessary, like moulds for jelly, to stop the feet from spreading. Prissie would find, when she finally acknowledged the need for shoes, that she couldn’t force her feet back inside them.

I would often go out to the pub with the Washbournes. In fact I’d give them a lift. Prissie would be terribly appreciative, saying what a relief it was to be able to drink and not worry, since I was so
responsible. She would keep up a running commentary in the car, saying, ‘John, you are miraculous. You must be the best driver in the world, that’s all I can say. I mean, there hasn’t been a peep out of Malcolm all this time’ – perhaps two minutes – ‘but when I’m driving he winces and groans the whole time. And now look at him – he’s blushing. Rather sweet. That must be your doing. I haven’t been able to get a blush out of him for years.’

‘How marvellous,’ she went on, ‘that you can park anywhere you like!’ – since I had the benefit of my parking permit from the council, an orange card with a revolving indicator inside, on which I could show how long I expected to be away from the car.

‘How long do you think we’ll be?’ I asked. ‘Not long,’ said Prissie, ‘we’re just having a drink or two,’ and I told her to set the clock for four hours, just to be on the safe side. The joke of the whole rigmarole being that the Black Lion was only walking distance from home, for them anyway, and there were no restrictions on parking in any case.

The comedy continued inside the pub. Malcolm would install me on one of the high bar stools. I was conserving my funds, which meant I would order water with a dash of lime cordial, costing all of 4p, and nurse it all evening if need be. I’d buy a packet of peanuts for entertainment value. At one time peanuts had been provided free in a dish (a powerful dehydrating agent, and so hardly an unselfish gesture from the management), but people had been seen wrapping some up in a napkin for later, and that was that.

Rather than treating me to round after round, the Washbournes thought it was better sport to encourage me to do my party trick with the peanuts, flicking them into my mouth. Then they’d egg someone on to betting that I couldn’t still do it – and stay on the stool – if I had ‘a proper drink’. In this way I got a certain amount of free alcohol and became discreetly merry. When the second packet of peanuts arrived I might eat them out of Malcolm’s hand, funnelling my lips forward in a delicate trumpet, leaving his hand completely dry. Prissie, drinking her Campari, would say to no one in particular, ‘Really it’s just the other way about, you know. It’s Malcolm who eats out of John’s hand. Almost sinister, but what’s a girl to do?’ She sounded supremely unbothered, but then it took a lot to bother her.

She was affectionate to Malcolm but didn’t in the least defer to him. There was sarcasm there, which he accepted and even seemed to enjoy. He was the breadwinner and she didn’t work, though the description ‘housewife’ didn’t remotely suit her. Their twins Joss and Alex were about to start at a fashionably progressive secondary school, and they had long been encouraged to explore other social contexts, or – as Mum would have it – ‘farmed out’ on the slightest pretext. Prissie was like a rich field lying fallow after her single (double) crop, not in the least beholden or unfulfilled, an earth mother who wasn’t unduly addicted to the presence of her children. She certainly didn’t mother Malcolm. I suppose she mainly mothered herself.

Eventually Prissie Washbourne played a walk-on part in the big drama of that summer, the family crisis which was all about me, though I hardly noticed it at first. When I say that she had a walk-on part, I mean a little more than that. She walked up the drive, she knocked on the French windows and she shouted a bit, refusing to go away. But her appearance on the scene, her splendid interference, made everything move up a gear and become more colourful, positively psychedelic in its emotional hues.

Dimly I had noticed that Mum and Dad were having one of their rows, which could simmer on for days. I also registered that every now and then they would seem to address me as much as each other. In some strange way they seemed to take it in turns to badger me. Could this really be happening? It was unlike them to coöperate so smoothly on any enterprise. I wondered vaguely what it was all about. Sometimes, of course, they sent messages to each other through me, bouncing messages off my bonce like schoolboys flicking paper pellets. I let them get on with it.

I had the good sense to absent myself mentally. There’s some debate about whether you should have your eyes open or closed when you’re meditating. It’s a question that often came up among Bhagavan’s adherents and disciples. His answer was that it didn’t matter – should you even know whether your eyes are open or not? That’s just the sort of Western binary opposition that Bhagavan is so good at dissolving.

Who is that wants to know? Trace that impostor to his lair. Is it even fair to describe your eyes as ‘open’ when they are absorbing the infinite deceptive variety of Maya, and ‘closed’ when you are perceiving the world in its reality?

Still, it seems very likely that during those days at home a lot of my meditating was done behind open eyes. Even when I wasn’t meditating my attention wasn’t completely attuned to the externals. Whenever I drifted back into my alleged body and took up the reins of mundane vision things looked very much the same. Mum and Dad might have changed places, but they were still taking turns to badger me. The sun might have moved round a fraction, the shadows might fall a little differently, but really that was all.

At one point the pot plant on the table seemed to blossom with a sudden movement, almost a lunge. The great red trumpets of its blooms seemed abruptly larger and more lustrous, which suggested that I had dropped a stitch, or even a whole row, in my knitting together of time and space. The plant itself had featured in earlier disputes between Mum and Dad, with her calling it an amaryllis and him insisting it was technically a
Hippeastrum
. Mum said he was being ‘predantic’, a mistake which set Dad off on a fresh bout of correction. I’m my father’s son in these matters, which is no doubt why I chose Mum’s womb, wanting to be brought up in a properly pedantic environment, among precise taxonomies and word-use sanctioned by dictionary. I vote for
Hippeastrum
.

I seemed to have regressed, to the point of needing to be taken to the loo, though it had been second nature for me to manage by myself for years. Mum would escort me and wait in the background while I performed, but there was a sort of truce until she pushed me back into the sitting room. Then it would start all over again – whatever it was.

I knew that there had been a knocking at the door earlier on, and even that it had gone on for some time, while Mum and Dad stopped talking and more or less stayed rigidly in their places. I even knew that the phone had rung a few times, and that Mum and Dad hadn’t answered it. Again they had stopped talking and stayed frozen where they were, as if
the phone could detect movement even without being picked up. Then they started right up again the moment it stopped ringing.

I was being asked a lot of questions, or else being asked the same question many times, in slightly different forms. In the course of my engagement with the
vichara
, the self-enquiry, I’d decided that if you were a non-dualist, resisting the division of reality into This and That, body and soul, real and unreal, then it followed that you couldn’t answer any questions that were put to you, which always rested on assumptions of that kind. I’d read in a book the suggestion that when confronted with a false set of alternatives, you should reply simply ‘Mu’, meaning ‘Your question cannot be meaningfully answered, since it is the product of a misconception. Please examine your premises afresh.’

So when Mum said, ‘Is it your bag or not, John? We need to know,’ I giggled and answered ‘Mu.’

The giggle was there because when anyone of my generation, however estranged from the groovy, asked if something was your bag, it meant ‘Do you like it?’ Is Acid Rock your bag? Is
Buddenbrooks
your bag? Is the
vichara
your bag? From my point of view the
vichara
was the bag in which all other bags could be stored without taking up any room.

The
vichara
– the only question. Who am I? (Who is it that asks this?) I understood now why I had gone to see The Who in Slough and not some other group. I needed to devote myself to the question of The Who.

And when Dad said, ‘It’s a simple enough question, John. Don’t be mulish. For the last time, is it your bag?’ – the giggle was no longer a temptation but the answer was still Mu. With another annoying giggle because saying Mu got me called Mulish.

At some stage Mum asked me what I wanted for supper, as if this was an ordinary day, which it obviously wasn’t. She put the question in an exasperated voice, admittedly, but that wasn’t such a rare event. And perhaps this time I didn’t answer ‘Mu’, because she said, ‘Better not have eggs again, John, you know how binding they are.’ Om Mane Padme Om. Om Mane Padme Om-pa-pah. I kept losing the thread of my threadlessness, my immersion in blissful absence. I wished Mum and Dad would let me be. I wish they’d let me Be.

‘If it’s your bag, John, then what’s in it is also yours, isn’t it?’ Mu – Mu – Mu. ‘That’s only logical.’ Exactly. Logic based on false premises can only generate nonsense.

Everything happened that day in stages which didn’t quite follow on from what had gone before. They were like reels from different films. I wondered idly if Bhagavan had ever used that analogy. Or they were like different versions of the same scene, not properly edited for continuity.

At some stage Audrey came back from a friend’s birthday party. A twelfth birthday, I expect. We heard her being dropped off in the drive, saying her goodbyes and thank-yous as nicely as Mum could wish. As she let herself in, Mum and Dad greeted her with ‘Nice party, dear?’ Anyone could tell that they weren’t really interested, they were only marking time. They were waiting for her to go to her room, so that they could carry on whatever business was being transacted where I was.

Audrey didn’t go to her room just yet. She went into the kitchen, and then she came to have a little chat with me. Meanwhile Mum and Dad busied themselves nonsensically. Mum started picking up magazines and putting them away in the rack where they lived. The moment she had finished, Dad started searching through it, as if suddenly he couldn’t live without reading a particular article. Mum made one of her many noises of exasperation and went over to fiddle with the telephone. It vexed her that the cord was always getting snarled up – she thought that Dad gave the receiver a half-turn when he answered the phone, and another half-turn in the same direction when he returned it to its cradle. She blamed him for charging the cord with kinks, even if she could never catch him at it. She knew full well that at her mother’s house the flex wouldn’t dare to stray from its spiral.