Authors: Adam Mars-Jones
My appetite for books had slackened off, and this too was interpreted as a sign of low mood. Of course I finished reading
The Count
of Monte Cristo
, but that was different. I was on the last 400 pages by then, so I was really only coasting home. A certain amount of chivvying was set in motion on an administrative level, which took the final form of Ansell sitting on the bed one more time and urging me to cheer up – I was on the last lap, after all, and mustn’t lose heart. The second operation hadn’t been a roaring success, but I was still much better fitted for life than I had been before the whole cycle of surgery and rehabilitation began.
I’m not sure my mood was really so low – Western culture, uncomfortable with inwardness, tends to interpret it negatively – but I went along with the fiction of depression, smiling wanly and promising to buck myself up.
Of course it’s natural, as Dad was always pointing out, for baby birds to be pushed out of the nest by their parents, to fend for themselves. But it’s also natural, when it’s time to leave any place of safety, for even a senior chick to go back to bed and pull the bedclothes over his head.
There was a surprise waiting for me when I came out of CRX the second time, as rehabilitated as I ever would be: Mum and Dad had put up a greenhouse! I was delighted. I showed every shade of appreciation and wonder that the human face can manage. Possibly I overdid it. I didn’t know when to stop. I couldn’t recognise the point where plausible extremes of joy had been acted out to everyone’s satisfaction.
It was an act because I knew quite well what had been going on. My plan all along. I’d been using Peter as my cat’s-paw in a campaign of action-at-a-distance, briefing him when he visited me and sending him letters with additional instructions when necessary.
First he had suggested the whole scheme to Dad. The experiment was designed to exploit Peter’s standing in the family – I had the idea that Dad was less fully armoured against his second-born than his first-. Dad didn’t dismiss the scheme, but he wasn’t exactly encouraging, pointing out that Mum would exercise her chronic female veto.
After a suitably calculated interval, Peter was primed to remark that Mum would dearly love somewhere to sunbathe out of the wind. What a shame there was nowhere suitable in the garden … particularly as you could divide off one section of a greenhouse – if you had one – and call it a sun-lounge. Was there a nicer word than ‘greenhouse’, do you think, Dad? Didn’t some people say ‘conservatory’ instead? Perhaps Mum would like the idea better if we used the word ‘conservatory’…
The vocabulary was a critical element. I thought of using the word ‘solarium’ instead of sun-lounge, but it was a matter of knowing your
market. Dad might enjoy the word, but he wasn’t the one with a passion for burning his skin, and Mum would find it intimidating.
Dad said he’d think about it. Maybe it wasn’t out of the question. Then the final touch was for Peter to say that Mum would have to be careful not to get sunburn even if there was glass between her and the sun, wouldn’t she? I relied on this very oblique hint tipping the scales with Dad.
This was string-pulling in the grand tradition of Granny, although on a humble scale and without real ruthlessness. Everyone was happy, weren’t they? I had somewhere to grow
Drosophyllum lusitanicum
, Dad had an indispensable aid to his own more ambitious gardening projects, and Mum had somewhere to bask like a lizard in sunny weather, even on windy days.
That greenhouse was as much my work as if I had slipped out of the body every night, using the handy exit of a dream of knowledge, and dug the foundations with my own astral hands.
I wondered how Granny found the strength to conduct such campaigns on a number of fronts at a time. Yes, I had got my way, and it was fascinating to see that under certain circumstances people could be flicked against each other in predictable pathways like so many marbles, but still I felt depleted and even a little sick.
Peter had had a few Boy-Scoutish qualms about his rôle in the experiment. ‘Aren’t we being a little …?’ he asked, and I cheerfully supplied the missing word as ‘sneaky’.
It was all very well for him to have high standards, he could wipe his own bottom. I depended on paid strangers or close kin for humiliating tasks and had no prospect of equal dealing, so all I was doing was evening up the odds. Isn’t the Boy Scout motto ‘Be prepared’ anyway? I was prepared to be sneaky. I can claim Homer in my corner, as well as Baden-Powell. All very well for Achilles to be heroic – he’s invulnerable as long as he does what his Mamma says and wears his riding hat and his special shoes. Odysseus has to be sneaky to get by.
There was only one detail of the scheme which caused me a little guilt. Dad and I knew perfectly well that the ‘sun-lounge’ wouldn’t help Mum tan, since window glass filters out the short-wave radiation responsible. We were more or less conspiring against her, he and I. We would have needed to fit Vita glass (very expensive) to lend real
assistance to her sun-damage project, though this was the heyday of the suntan, its traumatic effects on the dermis unknown or unpublicised, and I can’t pretend we were actually looking out for her welfare. I didn’t know why Dad got a kick out of putting one over on Mum, but I knew it was so, and that a hint about the screening effects of window glass would give him a final nudge towards the project.
There was no need to mention any of this to the lady of the house. Her happy moods weren’t so common that we could risk spoiling them. She pulsated with contentment as she lay there out of the wind on the lounger, basking in placebo sunshine.
Of course we none of us said ‘sun-lounger’. Mum’s love of brand names had raised this item above the common ruck of loungers. This was the Relaxator.
Mum not only went around recommending products but advertised their disgrace if they failed to perform, denouncing them from her kitchen pulpit. Unable to live up to her mother’s religion of the Top Man, she made do with the cult of the household name and the
Which?
Best Buy. Top Thing was a better bet than Top Person – but if a well-known or much-recommended purchase let her down it was a devastating blow, a sort of compound treason-fraud-sacrilege. When a washing-machine got the shakes just out of guarantee (though multiply lauded and endorsed), this was an assault on the integrity of the entire market-place. Hers was a world-view in which trailing threads were always likely to unravel the flimsy
gestalt
, and any little snag could ladder the sheer stocking of her self-belief.
Examples: Kit-Kat (chocolate-covered snack) was on her blacklist because she could never get the wafer fingers to
snap
as crisply as they did on the advert, despite the foil wrapper which undertook to keep them fresh. Kit-e-Kat (cat food) was condemned because it intensified the vileness of feline breath.
When we were slumming it by watching ITV and Kit-e-Kat was advertised during commercial breaks, with a voice asking cheerily, ‘Is your cat a Kit-e-Kat?’ we would all answer in mock-Cockney accents, ‘Then it mustn’t ’arf stink!’ This was our Bourne End saturnalia – sneering at the common people from our precarious upper rung. The only ITV programme which commanded our full respect, though it was always turned on ‘for John’, was the Saturday-night wrestling. It
was the squirming aspect which spoke to me, I think, not the throwing about – I can’t answer for anyone else. I found it utterly thrilling, and was amazed it was allowed in any way at all. I kept quiet but Mum felt free to comment, saying, for instance, ‘Amazing to think that all these wrestling positions have names!’ One evening a wrestler was pinned on his back with his hands immobilised, so all he could do was push up with his pelvis in the hope of unseating his opponent, busy pushing down in the same style. Mum just said, ‘Gosh, Dennis, anybody would think those two were mating!’
It was strange to be home at Trees with my newly adjusted disability (Granny had drummed into us the vulgarity of adorning your house name with inverted commas). The spaces were deeply familiar but had to be negotiated in a new way. As I moved around the house I had new problems of balance to contend with. I could now make reasonable progress, for instance, advancing towards the kitchen sink or the basin in the bathroom, but I needed somewhere to stow my crutch and cane while I used the facilities once I had reached them. No question of putting them on the floor, obviously, so I would lean them against the sink or the basin. Usually the cane stayed put but the crutch, being top-heavy, invariably fell with a scrape and a crash. Then the cry would go up, ‘The ruddy crutch!!’ Humorous, mock-exasperated. Or rather, expressing true exasperation beneath the mockery of it.
Audrey would repeat the phrase in fun, copying those around her. She must have been six at the time, seven at the most. Mum and Dad seemed disproportionately irritated by the jarring noise, while Audrey’s laugh was genuine and delighted, which should have taken the sting out of it. Yet her repetition, though perfectly innocent, was the one I found most wounding. There was joy in it, and the joy that was in it made it so much worse – but I knew better than to ask her not to say it. Audrey’s wilfulness was already highly developed, and it was wisest not to alert her to her power to hurt, in case she explored it at her leisure.
When the crutch fell, after the family hubbub had died down, I’d
either have to lever it up somehow with the cane or ask for help. Peter would help me very willingly, and Audrey would return the crutch to my possession with exaggerated graciousness, as if it was a prize at the village fête, and she the Lady Mayoress doing the honours.
No one thought of doing anything silly, like attaching a simple bracket to the basin and the sink, some little retaining hook for the crutch to lean against.
It strikes me now how ridiculously easy such a gadget would have been to make. It would hardly test anyone’s do-it-yourself skills, but of course do-it-myself isn’t an option. Even Peter could have had a shot at it, if he had dared to swim against the tide. All he would have needed was a wire coathanger, bent so that one end curled round the base of one of the taps, the other run to the front of the basin and formed into a hook – into which I could tuck the crutch and still have it handy. Professor Branestawm would have been proud of Peter for such a useful bit of bodging, and so would I. But everyone seemed to prefer waiting for the crash and then raising an outcry. The whole family was oddly attached to my status as a nuisance.
In the kitchen I liked to perch on a stool if given a choice, a privileged position bought with much effort. Perching was always my attitude relative to furniture, I was only pretending to sit out of politeness. I’d need help to get up there, but it was worth it. Perching was my great delight. Of course I had to leave the crutch somewhere, and someone would knock against it, and then the senseless cry would go up, as if in some way it was all my fault. The ruddy crutch. The ruddy family. The ruddy business of being alive.
A tube of Immac, procured with much labour from a chemist in Bourne End, had delayed the moment when physical maturity had to be acknowledged, but there was only so much a depilatory could be expected to do. The caustic smell, moreover, was hateful, and I certainly didn’t dare use it lower down, though my almost luxuriant pubic hair gave the lie to the Mummy’s-little-darling idea, on which tender relations with Mum depended, at least as much as my ghost of a moustache.
Perhaps because of distaste for my sprouting groin, Mum made over responsibility for bathing me to Dad, who almost seemed to enjoy it. He was always drily complimenting me on the excellence of my equipment, which was nice the first time – I so rarely seemed to meet his standards – and rather awkward after that. No teenager wants to be told more than once that he is in possession of a magnificent beast, does he? Not more than a few times anyway, and not by a parent.
Wiping my bottom was a grey area that became a battlefield. In theory this was a job which fell to Dad before he set off for work (I was a reliable morning defæcator), but he soon learned to get an early start so as to leave bog duty to Mum. There was no obvious willpower in the man, yet it was remarkably difficult to get him to do anything he didn’t want to do. He didn’t seem to have any personal preference until the air around him thickened with an implied course of conduct, and then he generally voted against it.
It’s odd, but I don’t remember seeing Granny at all during the period of my operations and rehabilitations, but then hospital visiting wouldn’t have been her style. She didn’t go in for sustained nurture but spectacular interventions. Not for her the weeding and the watering of some humble patch of garden. She would rather just happen to be passing when a hundred-year cactus bursts into the ecstasy of flower, charmingly disowning any credit but letting people come to their own conclusions.
Now and then the trolley which carried the ward telephone would bear down on me, with Granny’s precise diction ready to pounce from the receiver, so I had occasional bulletins about her activities. During this period, rather to her surprise, she had made friends with a neighbour in Tangmere. Mere friendship was rather a come-down for someone whose preferred style of relationship was the slow-burning feud. She found a strange sort of nourishment in antagonism, and there was active disappointment for her in soft emotions and smooth dealings.
The mutual benefit of the friendship was that Granny had money but no car, the neighbour a car and no money. All of this may also be part of the explanation for Granny’s absence from my bedside, that she and her neighbour were busy motoring to country towns and staying in what Granny never wavered from calling Otels.
At the end of such conversations Granny would say, ‘That’s all my news, John, and I won’t embarrass you by asking you for yours. How could you have any, marooned as you are? And I’m sure the food is terrible. Make sure your mother brings you something better. She has no talent as a maker of salads, as you will undoubtedly know. If she has forgotten how to make the salad dressing I showed her, tell her to telephone me. She has only to ask.’