Cedilla (74 page)

As Noel carried me along the row of seats I could feel little extra movements in his arms, which made me suspect that he was shrugging every few feet, to convey an apology to the people we were disturbing. Terribly sorry. This is what he’s like.

He needn’t have bothered. The people in those seats couldn’t do enough to oblige us. They were practically hurling themselves out of our way. They’d have lain flat on the floor if they’d thought it would help, they would have stood on the backs of their chairs. It’s wonderful what a little embarrassment can do. Most of the time I work hard to put people at their ease, but once in a while it’s good to let rip and have everyone cower in their Englishness.

Then in the dark I had to revert to a meeker style. I found that I couldn’t see the bottom of the screen – and consequently the subtitles – so I had to ask Noel to improvise a cushion for me out of his rolled-up coat. I certainly wasn’t going to allow him to ask for one of the cushions they keep for children’s screenings. Before I had new hips installed my position in a cinema seat was more upright, since I wasn’t actually sitting. It was more that I was leant against the seat like an umbrella. Still, it’s not something you can expect to find in even the smallest print, is it?
Warning: artificial hips may limit your enjoyment of
foreign-language films.

As the film got into its dour stride I realised that there were compensations to having company. Noel had brought along some butterscotch. Not just any butterscotch but the good stuff, Callard & Bowser’s, which came in an oddly fortified packet, braced with cardboard, wrapped first in paper and then cellophane. Perhaps it still does. In those innocent days of packaging, it was a very distinctive product. It suggested a childish treat that was only accessible to deft and determined adult fingers. The sweet itself came in double tablets, wrapped one more time in a sturdy lined silver paper which retained traces of the sticky virtue it had wrapped and kept safe.

The double shape of the sweet suggested that a mother might snap it in two where the brittle toffee narrowed, before popping one tablet in her child’s mouth and one in her own. Personally I had always favoured sucking the sweet entire, though the double tablet would hardly fit in my mouth. The opposite ends of the flat finger of burnt sugar poked at the insides of my cheeks in a way that was almost painful, until the oral solvents had done their leisurely work.

Noel asked in a whisper if I wanted him to unwrap the butterscotch for me. Why ever not? I wasn’t in the mood for handicraft. He got points for treating me as his equal in greed – it didn’t seem to occur to him to snap the tablet in two. He posted the naked butterscotch into my mouth, his fingers brushing past my lips in a way that I didn’t find presumptuous or unpleasant. Then my consciousness slid back into the film and all its radiant gloom.

At the end of the showing I stayed put, and not only because it would be foolish to make a move immediately, before the lights were put on, and be jostled in the crush. It was still my habit to watch the screen till the very last credit.

To me it was a tiny crime not to finish a film or a book or even a record. I stood firm even on the issue of ‘Within You Without You’ at the beginning of Side Two of
Sergeant Pepper
, when everyone else wanted to plunge the needle straight into ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’. I fought many battles on behalf of George Harrison’s rotten pseudo-Indian song.

Swedish end-credits were no less entitled to sympathetic vibration than English ones, sympathy being distinct from understanding, and many of the names were beguiling in their own right. After
Wild
Strawberries
, Noel had the sense to humour me, perhaps seeing from the set of my body that I wasn’t prepared to budge just yet. He set off to retrieve the wheelchair, which had been tucked in the box office for safe-keeping.

As we left the Arts, Noel scanned the dispersing crowd while remaining attached to me. ‘Are you looking for someone?’ I asked, but he said no, he was all mine. When we reached the car, I asked if there was somewhere I could drop him – an absurd idea, since he lived in
Christ’s, barely a hundred yards away. Even I could walk that distance, though perhaps not in one go. ‘Do you want me to see you home?’ he asked, as if I was a debutante at a dance. I was going to tell him not to bother – how did he think I coped on a daily basis? – when I realised that by this time the Tennis Court Road gate would be closed. I would need to get someone to open up, and I might as well take Noel along. He could scamper into the Porter’s Lodge and make the request on my behalf. It isn’t easy to summon people with a toot on your horn without seeming lordly.

The colleges were still officially sealed by a ten o’clock curfew, but in practical terms they were porous. Authority was crumbling of its own accord, without needing to be actively overthrown. It was common knowledge which sets of railings offered easy informal access to the various colleges. Monumental architecture offered any number of handholds to youth and recklessness stoked by beer. The back streets of the town were full of excited young men, clambering up and sliding down. Some stretches of railing saw heavy traffic even on weeknights.

If men were reckless mountaineers of the railings after dark, then women still liked to be climbed up to, rather than doing the climbing themselves. They had a rooted preference for Juliet’s rôle in the balcony scene, looking down on her swain as he ascended, sweating and cursing, with a bottle of rock-bottom Hirondelle from his college buttery sticking precariously out of his jacket pocket.

The women’s colleges made an effort to discourage such overnight visitors, but it was no more than a show of discipline. One second-year in my college spent most nights in New Hall. While his girlfriend dutifully entered by way of the Porter’s Lodge he would shin up the wall (the modernist architecture of the college offering as many aids to climbing as the Gothic) and in through her window. His route was much quicker than hers – he boasted that by the time she reached her room he would be waiting for her in bed, wearing her nightie for that androgynous 1970 frisson, and with the kettle sighing its way to the boil.

There were times when it seemed as if I was the only one to whom a curfew still applied, though any number of undergraduates solemnly assured me that I could safely be transferred by a chain of hands over
the railings in Trinity Lane, the wheelchair following, into Bishop’s Hostel in Trinity and out again whenever I wanted. I never dared to accept such offers. To be transported by many hands, like a crumb at a picnic being carried off by a thousand ants, was a frightening prospect. People seemed keener to convey me over the railings of colleges after hours than to help me get to lectures in the mornings, which would have made far more difference to my university life.

The ascension glide which had conveyed me up the steps of the temple in Tiruvannamalai, a hundred hands in mystical unison, didn’t seem likely to be duplicated on a secular climb in Cambridgeshire. The young men who made the offer were really only paying lip service to a favourite notion of the period, that everything was always possible for everyone without exception, with no clear idea of how it might be done.

I remember the Mistress of Girton (I think it was Muriel Bradbrook) defending the exclusion of men from the college after ten at night, though it was pointed out to her that anything men could do after ten o’clock they could also do before. ‘Oh yes,’ she replied, ‘but if they stay after ten they may do it again.’ One testy don was reported as describing this as shutting the stable door after the mare has been mounted. In circumstances like these the don being quoted was invariably from Peterhouse.

I let Noel take charge of me. My need of help was a sore point, of course, but then by this time I was mainly sore points. I do more than my fair share of sitting and my bum was sore from the pressure of the Arts Cinema’s worn-down plush upholstery. If he didn’t help to transfer me from car to room and wheelchair then I’d only have to hitch a carry from someone else.

In the car, Noel started to talk about how terrifying he had found
Wild Strawberries
. He didn’t see how he was going to sleep that night. I was puzzled. ‘But I thought you’d seen it before.’

He opened his eyes very wide. ‘What makes you think that?’

I said I must have got the wrong end of the stick, but I was sure he had referred to the film as one of his favourites.

Apparently it was the dream sequence at the beginning of the film which had done for him – a famous example in that line, virtually an encyclopædia of oppressive imagery. Clocks without hands, runaway
hearses. The face appearing from between the boards of the shattered coffin turning out to be the dreamer’s own.

I had enjoyed the film, but I can’t say it touched any particular nerve. It wasn’t even an X-certificate, for Heaven’s sake! Still, it made sense to assume that my history had left me with off-kilter fears and immunities. Perhaps Noel’s upbringing had left him unusually vulnerable to the Gothic in some way. At the same time, I was thinking back to that part of the film. At the moment when the professor in his dream sees his own body in the coffin, I could swear that I had heard a distinctive sound from my neighbour’s mouth. I could have sworn it was the juice-muffled snap of a tablet of butterscotch being divided in two by a rooting tongue unable to defer the pleasure any longer.

Of course existential dread and greedy sweet-sucking can occupy a single individual simultaneously, but I had to wonder if Noel wasn’t putting it on. The
Angst
, I mean. My own tablet of butterscotch was still fat in my mouth at that stage of the film, only just beginning its dwindling to a brittle blade of sweetness.

When the porters had been sweet-talked and I had safely parked the car at the back of A staircase, Kenny Court, I was in a little quandary. I didn’t particularly want to invite this person in, but I needed a certain amount of assistance to get back into my room. Those two steps in my path had social repercussions. I couldn’t dismiss Noel after letting him install me in the wheelchair, because it would then be obvious that I was stuck on the lower level. But if I let him help me up those steps then it would be impossible not to invite him in.

Those steps had a lot to answer for, but if ever I mentioned them to someone sensible – such as Alan Linton while we savoured the excellent vegetarian fare in Hall – he didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. Steps? What steps?

I’ve noticed that steps have an almost evanescent quality. Are they there or are they not? It seems to be a moot point. They evaporate and then condense once more. As stone and brick they should have got the knack of seeming substantial, but they’re hard to see and hard to hold in the memory.

I phone you up in advance of a visit, and I ask, are there any steps where you live? And you say, ‘Steps? No, no steps.’ As if it was an outlandish question. Obscurely insulting, even. Except that when I arrive, there are little steps, one, two, even three. Multiple changes of level between the street and the path, the path and the door surround, the surround and the door itself. Very real obstructions, all of them. You scratch your head, as if you have never seen them before, or as if they’ve only just appeared. Earthquakes aren’t common in these parts, and even the ones that happen at night make a bit of noise. They’re not usually so tidy either, simply extruding a building a few inches up from the ground. We stare at your puzzling steps, you and I. I’m the one who doesn’t subscribe to the doctrines of materialism, and you’re the one who thinks the external world is constant and consistent, but perhaps this is not the best time for either of us to draw attention to the fact that we’re dressed in each other’s clothes.

When I ask if there are steps, I don’t necessarily mean a grand staircase leading up to the entrance. I rather hope you’d tell me about that without being prompted. I’m talking about the little changes of level that your legs take in their stride – and that your automatic pilot negotiates without your needing to switch to manual control. I suppose it all comes down to maths, to rounding up and rounding down. If there are fewer than five steps people round down and say there aren’t any. If there are more than five, that counts as a flight. That’s makes a quorum and can’t be ignored. But fewer than five doesn’t count, apparently. It’s only me that feels excluded, and I apologise for being small-minded. It’s actually this body that is small-minded, and can’t get over the fact of your steps.

I imagine the little meeting at which rooms were assigned to the incoming freshers of Downing. Someone would be sure to say, ‘
Cromer,
J.
, uses a wheelchair, poor beggar, so we’d better give him a room on the ground floor, don’t you think?’ And somebody else would say, ‘How about A6 Kenny, that’s just the ticket.’ I realise that university business in 1970 was not conducted by World War II personnel, but I can’t help that. That’s how it plays out in my mind. Then the pretty WAAF comes in with the tea, and says, ‘But aren’t there steps outside A staircase Kenny? That’ll be jolly awkward.’ Everyone looks at her as if she was mad, and someone says, ‘I say, little girl, you’d better not
poke your nose in where it’s not wanted. We’re not fools, you know. We’ve put him on the ground floor, haven’t we? He’ll be rocketing about, you’ll see. There’ll be no stopping him.’ And the WAAF sniffs and says, ‘No epidermis off my proboscis, I’m sure.’

With those steps taking his side, Noel simply assumed that he was coming in with me, and then something happened that took the initiative away from me for the duration. It wasn’t anything in the least dramatic – it was just that I had a bit of trouble opening the door. It was locked (I had learned my lesson) and I could manage perfectly well, as long as I wasn’t hurried. I could refuse Noel’s help in opening the door, and I did. But I couldn’t prevent cutting a figure of bravery and pathos in the eyes of a spectator, and then the drama took on its own meaning and momentum. On an ordinary night the scene would have been one of serene difficulty unobserved, but not now. I could send Noel smartly away, but that would only emphasise my bloody bravery and the sodding pathos of it all. Better to let him come in and hope to get rid of him soon.