Cedilla (30 page)

On top of which, you have to put your chosen college in the space on the form, not just ‘Cambridge’, so my first choice was
Downing
College, Cambridge
. Downing being where Eckstein had studied, and where he had his contacts.
1. Downing College, Cambridge. 2. Keele.

Keele offered me an interview first, in May. I was surprised when Dad said he’d come with me. I’d be doing all the driving, though, I’d promised myself a real safari. I supposed he wanted to get away from Mum, who was being rather difficult, but I was pleased all the same. He was even taking two days’ leave from work. Dad and I only ever seemed to be on the same path for a little while and by accident. I felt that I was basically a nuisance as far as he was concerned. I didn’t look beneath the surface. I was content with self-pity and a limited view of a complex man. I didn’t try to understand more deeply, by making myself sensitive to undercurrents, or the lack of them. Dad thought I was a nuisance, yes, but he also thought Peter and Audrey were a nuisance. It wasn’t personal.

Of course it wasn’t flattering that one of Dad’s routine words for describing us and our behaviour was ‘nauseating’, and I had been quite shocked when I learned its exact meaning (when Flanny our GP gave me an injection to help me keep food down when I got the measles at last). So Dad was actually saying his children induced the desire to vomit! It served him right that I passed measles on to him so promptly. But after all, if I had wanted a different father, all I would have needed to do was choose another womb. He was only really part of the fittings and furnishings of the womb of my choice, one of the mod cons if you choose to think of it that way.
Dad en-suite, liable to
vomit on contact with his children.

Dad liked being a father, he just didn’t like having children. It’s not really a paradox. Family life didn’t bring out the best in him, but
in whom does it bring out the best, exactly? Certainly not me. I could be a perfect beast on evenings when I had decided to bait him.

Peter and I had different approaches to the adolescent task of annoying our parents. I sometimes had set-piece arguments with Dad at the dinner table, while Peter watched wide-eyed, thrilled by the conflict, waiting his turn in life to be bolshie. I certainly had the edge in argumentativeness, but I was hopelessly tongue-tied when it came to body-language, while he had a whole range of physical options open to him. When summoned to table, he could slouch, saunter, drag his heels, or march with exaggerated precision, as if he was on parade or else about to be court-martialled. He had an equal talent for sullenness and for robot impersonation. At the end of a meal he could always slope off with provocative casualness or scamper out and slam the door.

The best I could hope for was to be so annoying that I had to be removed bodily. For instance I might suggest to Dad that the continental approach to water purification was preferable to ours. Why not buy bottled water for drinking purposes and save yourself the trouble and expense of purifying the domestic supply, which was largely going to be used for baths and washing-up anyway? Dad might say that in point of fact very little water in France went for baths, but I would declare this slander irrelevant and return to my needling thesis. Knowing that Dad’s goat would infallibly be got, that his goat was a dead duck from the beginning of the sentence, with the whole idea that anything about France or Spain could be sensible. For a man who had seen much of the globe, thanks to the RAF, and was now professionally involved in moving people round it, he seemed to have no idea why they might actually want to travel. If we granted the superiority of the French way of life in any small detail, then very rapidly every doorknob and handrail would bear the taint of pungent garlic and runny cheese. If the Spanish weren’t kept in their place, likewise, there would be bull-fights at Lord’s and the habañera would replace ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ on the last night of the Proms. Everything would become erotic and unreliable.

When tensions at table were reaching a rolling boil, Mum would simply grab the handles of the wheelchair and trundle me out of the dining room. She would camouflage the emergency exit by saying it was time for that programme on television I especially wanted to see. I didn’t put up a struggle or try to fight the strong hand which clicked the brake off. I was well pleased with my work. This was as close as I could get to banging the door on my own account, having it vicariously slammed behind me while Dad returned to his pudding, digestive juices in uproar. It counted as a victory. I enjoyed the picture of myself as a junior dissident being hustled from the debating chamber. It was only a year since Russian tanks had rolled over the Czech enlightenment, as decisively as the one which had crushed my Vulcan headmaster Alan Raeburn’s legs during his army training, and I was learning to use current events to dramatise myself.

I was a little uneasy about our leaving Mum on her own during our expedition to Keele, though Dad was confident it was just what she needed. Her phobia about the clever playwright had intensified, and at some stage had crossed the border, always hard to define, into active delusion. It wasn’t just in shops that she feared the sudden apparition of her nemesis. He might pop up round the corner, with an escort of peacocks making that strangled-baby cry, spreading his own great tail of blue-green wisdom wide, until the sunlight sparkled unbearably on all the eyes of his mind.

She no longer felt safe even inside the house. She could sense, almost hear, Stoppard’s brain working unstoppably, while she tried to read her library book. She felt as if that brain was an oversized appliance draining the National Grid, siphoning off what little mental power she could muster. If he made her feel so stupid when he was still (relatively) far off, what would it be like if they were ever in the same room? It didn’t bear thinking about – which didn’t mean she could stop herself. A plume of intellectual radiation was drifting across Bourne End. And she was the only one who knew about it.

I went to the trouble of laying hands on a copy of
Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead
, thanks to Mrs Pavey. Having read it, I told Mum with the full authority of an A-level student that it was clever but not
that
clever, but she wouldn’t be comforted. She could tell that my heart wasn’t in it, or perhaps that only my heart was in it,
while my mind dissented. She knew me too well to be fooled by good intentions.

My trip to Keele wasn’t optional, though Dad’s attendance was. Still, if my long-term goal was trying not to dance to Mum’s tune, then I could hardly blame Dad for sharing it. What could I do, in practical terms? I did what I could. I phoned Muriel Foot, the linchpin of Mum’s sewing circle, asking her to look in on Mum while we were away.

Dad was my map-reader for the journey to Keele. He was predictably exacting in this rôle, allowing only one stop on the way. He already had a spot picked out. It wasn’t even on the direct route, but I knew better than to complain. This was the longest bit of driving I had ever done, and I was knackered by it, but I put up a good show. Finally we arrived at the designated lay-by, and Dad got out, saying he needed to stretch his legs and he’d heard this was a good spot to find viper’s bugloss, which you certainly didn’t see every day. There was a stile nearby, which he climbed. He practically twinkled over it. I admired the fluency of the movements that put space between us so smartly. He was stretching his legs already.

He was gone for the best part of an hour. It got hot inside the Mini. If I had been a dog he would have left a window open for me, I was sure of that, but then I could crank the handle myself after a fashion.

Suddenly he was back, out of breath and bleeding from scratches on his leg. He was wearing shorts, to be more comfortable on the journey, though of course he would change before we got to Keele into a presentable pair of trousers. He scrambled into the car, shaking and muttering, ‘Bloody thorns’. I misjudged his mood by trying to make a joke of it, saying, ‘That viper’s bugloss must have quite a bite.’ He ignored me and said, ‘Start the car please John. Let’s go.’ I started the engine but didn’t move off right away. ‘What happened, Dad?’

‘A bull chased me across the last field, that’s what happened. Can we get a move on?’ Dad never normally let a little thing like a bull worry him. He’d pushed me past any number of bulls in the past. ‘I thought you said it was only people who didn’t know what they were doing who got chased by bulls?’

‘Never mind what I said, John. Move off. Chop chop. Time’s getting on. We’ve got somewhere to go.’

I thought that was a bit rich after leaving me twiddling my thumbs for so long. I was the driver, wasn’t I? He was only hitching a lift, and it would have served him right if I had gone on without him. I said, ‘I’m just taking one last look at this lovely spot.’

‘I must insist that you start driving.’

‘Granny always said that I shouldn’t waste the privilege of the view. Otherwise I’ll get bored and crash.’

‘Crash later if you must but drive
now
.’ Sullenly I obeyed him. ‘Your grandmother, John,’ he went on, ‘is a surly old witch who has never said a sensible thing or done a useful one.’

‘Apart perhaps from buying the car you’re riding in.’

That stopped him short, but only for a moment, and then he added, ‘Oh, she’ll make you pay, never fear. Don’t you know that?’ I knew that. Afterwards he calmed down a bit, though the earlier sunny mood was in no hurry to re-form.

We were given a good welcome at Keele. It seemed a pretty little campus. It looked to me rather an artificial environment, which didn’t put me off, rather the opposite. I quite fancied the idea of being a student of the University of Toytown. It was like a more modern version of the village in
The Prisoner
, a television programme which had many devotees at Burnham Grammar, enigmatic spy drama set in a seaside resort, with splendid neo-Edwardian charabancs to carry everyone around. I found myself imitating the ritual leave-taking from the series by saying ‘Be Seeing You’ rather meaningfully at the end of my interview, instead of the conventional Goodbye.

The interview wasn’t easy, though, and I found myself getting flustered. My German pronunciation faltered. It wasn’t what it should have been. It rather let me down.

The canteen offered not one but two vegetarian options. I was told that if I was accepted I would be allowed to drive the Mini on the pedestrian walkways. All of this added to the seductiveness of the place – my bright red charabanc would have right of way.

There was a Victorian mansion which was part of the complex, with an enormous holly hedge which Dad and I admired. It must
have been hundreds of feet wide, thirty foot high and almost as thick.

As we were leaving in the morning, Dad pointed out a disabled student, a girl in a motorised wheelchair. I could recognise the dawdling progress of an Everest & Jennings from some way off. I thought her presence was a good sign, but Dad was discouraging. ‘While she’s there,’ he said, ‘you don’t have a chance. Not a chance in hell – that’s just the way these things work.’ I pointed out that if she was a second-year she would have graduated by the time I arrived, but Dad wasn’t convinced.

I asked Dad if he wanted to do any more botanical sight-seeing on the way home, but he said he’d had enough of nature for the time being. We made do with coffee and sandwiches at a pub.

Muriel Foot was at Trees when we got there, to keep Mum company. Muriel had been worried, and though she hadn’t spent the night she had stayed late that evening and returned early in the morning.

The day before, she had found Mum painting over the inside of a window with whitewash, and it had taken some time before Mum gave any sort of explanation. In fact she was putting into practice one of the procedures recommended in the event of nuclear war. The whitewash was intended to reflect the visible wave-lengths of an explosion, but Mum wasn’t thinking in terms of a bomb. She was trying to protect us all against the catastrophic flash from Stoppard’s brain.

Muriel tried to think of something else to suggest, to take her mind off things. Mum was willing to be distracted, but only up to a certain point. They sat down to draft letters to the local paper instead, warning people of the danger in which they all lived.

Muriel told Dad she thought Mum was having a nervous breakdown, but Dad didn’t give that idea house room. ‘That’s not how Laura’s breakdowns go. If she has the energy to whitewash a window it means she’s holding her own.’ Which wasn’t exactly reassuring to Muriel, or indeed to me. It was news (to both of us, I imagine) that Mum had had breakdowns in the past.

Dad shooed Muriel away. She went without verbal protest – everyone knew better in those days than to come between husband and wife – though the set of her shoulders told a different story. Then Dad threw the draft letters in the bin, poured the whitewash away and
made a start on cleaning the affected window. Then he went into the garden to see how things were getting along there in his absence. He paid no direct attention to Mum, but that wasn’t the way their marriage worked (to the extent that it did). He had a steadying effect unconnected to any communicative current, and being ignored by him at close range was almost enough to bring her back to herself. To love, honour and obey – all those actions were promised at the wedding and, I’m sure, sincerely meant at the time. But they were hardly the operative verbs of the marriage. Almost-hearing, not-quite-looking-through, leaving-the-room-without-actually-moving – nothing was said in church about any of those.

As part of my application to Cambridge I had to write an essay on any subject under the sun. Free choice, that terrifying obligation. I decided I wanted to write something which proved my mind and my character went in more than one direction, both outward and inward, so I described the various stages a flame passes through before it starves to death. Thanks to my candle-making with Mum I had a good grasp of what went on in a flame. I made it as exact and technical as I could, describing the adventures of the flame as a scientific event, a nuanced narrative of physics and chemistry, but then I changed gear and wrote, ‘I am now exactly that tiny blue tongue of combustion on a cushion of gases. You, dear examiner, can snuff me out once and for all. Or you can prolong the wick of my mind’s life so that I burn yellow and burn bright.’ Good manipulative pyræsthetics, though it was sentimental of me to use the image of a candle flame in such a way. In Hindu mysticism it is used to represent an opposite truth, the inconstancy of personality.