Cedilla (62 page)

She seemed enormously put off herself. ‘Now, what do you want for lunch? If you can think of a way of getting a meal to cook by itself while you sit on your bottom, please pass it on. I’d be glad to put my feet up myself.’ She went into the kitchen, slamming the door behind her, so that I ached to be back with Mrs Osborne, with her wild-fig dishes and her big dog-battering stick and the scoldings that seemed loving by comparison.

I couldn’t understand why I was being reproached for needing food, while Peter was catered for as a matter of course. He could easily have managed for himself in the kitchen, and would have left enough mess to keep Mum grumbling contentedly for days. I didn’t argue the toss. In theory I could always get the last word, but Mum would always have the last door-slam. Conversational manœuvres, however crushing, will always come second to repartee of that physical sort. The doors in that house must have been sturdy indeed, to survive the years of melodramatic slamming.

Still, I had resources of my own. Mrs Osborne had scared me half to death about the use of aluminium pans in cookery. We were destroying ourselves at every mealtime, as surely as the Roman patricians did with their lead plates and cutlery, poisoning their brains while the plebs ate off wooden plates with their hands. There was a book on the subject:
Aluminium: A Menace to Health
by Mark Clement.

When I got home, I got hold of a copy (it was published by Thorsons). I must have driven Mum mad by waving it under her nose, and refusing to eat anything ever again that came out of one of those sinister health-destroying pans. As if I wasn’t fussy enough about food, without becoming obsessed about its preparation and accusing her of killing us all under cover of nurture. If she had beaten me about the head with an aluminium pan, screaming, ‘How’s your brain working now? Rotting, is it? Is it?’, any decent lawyer would have got her off with probation, maybe words of praise from the judge.

Peter joined the conspiracy by looking for scratches in the pans Mum used. ‘That shows the bits which came off when she slashes the potatoes with her knife,’ he told me. ‘And we’re all eating them!’ We made her buy a stainless-steel one, though on the Granny principle of balancing the books, albeit with lopsided contributions, I gave a little something towards it – ten shillings. I’ve stuck to my guns, though, and avoided aluminium ever since. If my brain goes bad I won’t hold the kitchen cupboard responsible.

Mum hated it when we ganged up on her. Unfortunately she had a talent for uniting the opposition, and had inherited none of Granny’s flair for playing people off against each other.

After that miraculous phone call I felt a deep thrill of hope within me. I had prayed to God to send reinforcements, and now Malcolm was coming to visit. He was the only one of our neighbours who seemed to enjoy spending time with me, and Mum had never really understood that. I didn’t exactly understand it myself – we weren’t on a wave-length, exactly, we were like two notes at opposite ends of a keyboard, so that you can’t really decide whether they harmonise or clash. But Mum couldn’t believe his interest in me was real, that two such different people could agree on anything. Malcolm worked in advertising, which made his spiritual interests no more than playacting to her way of thinking.

I disagreed. The products Malcolm was called on to sell were dreams in the first place, and the slogans and campaigns he came up with were dreams about dreams. They were Maya squared, Maya rampant and in spades. Dreams were his medium and his currency, so it followed that reality must be his consolation. He must find the square root of Maya in meditation, where objects, symbols, words and ideas dissolve impartially, leaving a light that has no source and casts no shadow.

I was benefiting from the resumption of my meditation practice, now that I was no longer trying to light my little match in the up-draught of a huge conflagration.

Malcolm and I would talk for hours, on subjects literary and metaphysical. Malcolm always said we were ‘crackajolking away like a hearse on fire’, a splendid phrase he had picked up from
Finnegans
Wake
. Like most people (not just advertising men, those great experts at making a little go a long way) he had probably read only one page, but he’d found himself a good one. I hadn’t so much as looked at the book, and when I did I was disappointed to find nothing that fell under my eyes matching up to the sample.

Malcolm enjoyed banter and teasing. In fact I think he positively enjoyed being told what a hopeless case of materialism he was. I dare say the actual cultivation of his spirituality came second, though he had read almost as many of the relevant books – or book-jackets – as I had and kept up pretty well.

It was high time for some spiritual work. The hearse might be on fire, but I had a firm grip on the appropriate extinguisher. Truly our astral tongues were hanging out for water to quench the hearse-fire of the Samsara, the action-reaction Ocean of births and deaths. Now that I was fully tanked up with Indian juice, I could provide him with the first cooling drink for months. I would lead us out of the maze of misery and set us on the road to freedom.

Mum bustled about Malcolm when he arrived, exactly as if he was her guest rather than mine, plying him with tea and cakes. Malcolm asked me about what I ate in India, a subject that made Mum roll her eyes, out of his line of sight but well within mine. Shouldn’t it have been the other way round, making him complicit with her exasperation? Mum could never quite get the hang of conspiracies.

I suggested that we go to my room (mine and Peter’s) and try to meditate. Malcolm was a dab-hand at sitting with his legs crossed, in a sort of informal lotus position, although conditions on the floor weren’t ideal (Mum had insisted on lino rather than carpet for fear of what the wheelchair would track in). I could just about manage a symbolic crossing of the ankles in the wheelchair. After a minute or so even this token position became painful, but I knew from the Maharshi’s example that a dispensation from orthodox posture was spiritually unimportant.

From the perspective of the wheelchair I could see the zone of thinning in Malcolm’s hair, where the scalp showed dimly pink. It was a joy in itself to be looking down rather than up. I felt a rush of privileged piety.

‘I really don’t think I need a mantra,’ Malcolm said. ‘After a week at work my mind goes blank of its own accord.’

‘The mantra is nothing in itself,’ I cooed. ‘But the mind, like the tip of an elephant’s trunk, must always be grasping something. So the mahout gives the elephant a chain to hold and it loses its restlessness. Similarly when provided with a mantra the mind stops twitching.’ I didn’t actually claim to have seen elephants and their keepers in India, but I let it be understood. In fact I had seen elephants only at Whipsnade. In India I had seen nothing larger than water buffalo. Large enough, particularly from my low angle of vision. In worldly terms they were larger than the cow on the mountain. Her immensity was of a different kind.

Peter came to join us, slipping into the room and joining our meditation like someone sliding into still, deep water. The atmosphere was blissful, a dynamo of silence in a house too often agitated by unadmitted discord and dissension.

After a period that we could only have guessed at in our timeless state, but was certainly less than ten minutes, Mum eased the door open. She couldn’t bear not knowing what we were up to. She moved like an actress tiptoeing ostentatiously on stage to do something illicit. After peering round, she retreated in the same way, closing the
door with a careful quietness that was existentially much more definite than a bang.

Malcolm’s eyes flew open, and mine must have been open already, to notice it happening. He frowned. ‘I’m afraid my psychic capacitors aren’t up to the job of absorbing Laura’s surplus energies. And what a shame – meditation would do her no end of good.’ He hoped she would come round to the idea of such soul-refreshment in time. I tried to imagine it.

‘The world is too much with us,’ I said thoughtfully, and Peter said, ‘
Mum
is too much with us.’ We tried to be faithful to our task, but then Audrey and her friend Lorraine crept in, shushing each other, and took up enviably supple lotus positions, their bones flowing round corners, on a spare patch of floor. They started to murmur something just below the level of distinctness, so that ears which were straining to tune out had no choice but to tune back in. As the murmuring became louder, their mantra revealed itself in a storm of giggles as ‘Mrs Brown went to town, With her knickers hanging down, Mrs Green saw the scene, Put it in a magazine.’

That broke the mood for good. Malcolm stretched and stood up, and Peter chased the girls out of the room, which was exactly what they wanted.

Later that evening I heard Mum complain about it to Dad. ‘He’s trying to turn this house into a bloody ashram,’ she said, ‘or whatever we’re supposed to call it.’ Dad’s reply was him all over, changing sides to keep her guessing: ‘And would it be such a bad thing if he succeeded? You’ve got your sewing circle, after all. Let him have his prayer meeting, and try to look on the bright side – at least they don’t sing.’ Dad seemed to have the knack of tossing a coin inside himself at times like these, letting Heads or Tails decide which way he would jump in an argument, so that agreement and dissent were equally disorienting for Mum.

She wasn’t someone with any talent for looking on the bright side, but on this occasion Dad wanted her at least to try. At other times when Malcolm came over to meditate, she made a better job of keeping her distance. She went to the other end of the house and emitted her sighs from there, though I’m sure she knew they could find me through the walls.

I felt that a campaign of holiness had been well begun. I was quite able to overlook the hypocrisy of the whole thing. Underneath my Indian tan I was a whited sepulchre, far whiter than the Taj Mahal. I was really enjoying ruling the roost. We are always fighting back our tears at the cremation of the ego, only to find it has been throwing dust in our eyes, not ashes, all along.

I had a nerve leading a group in meditation, when I had only been able to achieve that mind-free state of mind since my return from India. I was teaching lessons that I barely knew myself. In Dad’s vocabulary I was shamming and no mistake. My disciples deserved better, even if they were only an advertising man with a bad conscience and a trainee chef with an unkillable respect for his older brother. Audrey and Lorraine had pretty much the right idea.

It would have served me right to be found out, except that there were others involved. I would have betrayed my guru by allowing Malcolm and Peter to have a low opinion of him through my own bad behaviour.

I went to India a Hindu, and I returned to Bourne End a Hindu and a homœopath. Soon I had Mrs Pavey hard at work tracking down copies of
Magic of the Minimum Dose
and its indefatigable sequels, and helping me to read widely in the subject.

Finally I summoned up the courage to ask Flanny for a referral to the Royal Homœopathic Hospital, on Great Ormond Street, the institution which had achieved marvellous results in a long-ago cholera epidemic, and so given a dissident tradition a foothold in national life. Flanny snorted a bit down her horse’s face, but she had learned by this time to let me go my own way.

The pretext for this visit to what I regarded as the mother church of the whole fascinating cult was to find a remedy for the dandruff that had plagued me for years. More than a pretext, really – I’d have been happy to see the back of those flakes which Mum and Dad refused to refer to except as scurf. I don’t know why
scurf
is U and
dandruff
is a suburban condition. Like any euphemism it soon takes on a taint of the word that’s being avoided. Call it what you like,
call it seborrhœa if you must – just stop it happening to my scalp.

The hospital looked like any other, both inside and out, but I was heartened to realise the hospital smell was faint, barely detectable. The doctor asked me a whole range of wide-ranging questions. Not just the usual ones, but impressionistic ones – what did I dream about, habitually? What was my favourite, what was my least favourite type of weather? He was being unusually thorough, I thought, but perhaps some of these were trick questions.

Of course it was no more than good homœopathic practice. No symptom should be regarded as insignificant, or artificially separated from the person. There’s an enormous amount of cross-referencing required for diagnosing even minor ailments – though the minor/major distinction doesn’t really apply in homœopathy. Hierarchies don’t really come into it, when the smallest leaf and twig can be as instructive as the trunk or roots. A headache in a redhead who has nightmares about rain and feels tired in the early afternoons may lead to a quite specific remedy, which would have no healing effect on a blonde headache with insomnia.

Then a trolley was wheeled in, and the world changed around me. I was used to instruments of various sorts being used on my body, from the needle-hook for tickling the bone at Ipswich to the drill which ground into my calcified hips at Wexham Park. It’s true that the body was asleep during those latter interventions, but consciousness and unconsciousness (neither of them being real awareness) aren’t such separate states as we like to think. So if I didn’t look up immediately, to see what was on the trolley, it was because I had no reason to expect anything good to be brought in by such a mode of transport.

When I looked at what was on the trolley, it was something astounding. A pair of enormous books, too big to carry, and nothing else. Too big for anyone to carry, not just me. They were repertories – the technical term for the comprehensive and cross-indexed volumes of symptoms and remedies. The holy books of the cult, with the word C L A R K E faded but still visible on the spine. It felt like an annunciation, a trumpeting revelation. I had found the most divinely bookish of all therapies. This was medicine as librarianship.