Cedilla (43 page)

There’s a lot of Mum in that sequence of actions. Who taught the bird dependence in the first place? What right did Mum have to pretend that she didn’t want it hanging on her every move? She could only go through the motions of rejection because she knew the returning instinct had been instilled almost on the molecular level. Mum would only risk throwing something away that would come right back. That’s where I was letting her down, but of course I was following a family pattern myself. Dad, if he needed her, never said so or showed it, which trapped her in her turn. If either of us had clung to Mum she might have found something else to do with herself than look after us. In the meantime she had Audrey, whose clinging was a stranglehold.

Vasanas
to the left of us,
vasanas
to the right of us. It’s hard to see the road for the ruts. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that there is any road apart from the ruts.

I had a letter of my own to write, expressing my sorrow to Mrs Arthur Osborne (Lucia). I felt I had to make the effort, though there were daunting obstacles. It was a sort of triple jump of condolence. On top of the foredoomed inadequacy of any attempt to express grief on paper there was the fact of my never having met either party, neither the bereaved nor the deceased. Then there was the faith we all shared, with its withholding of importance equally from birth and death.

My first draft had no spiritual underpinning. To boil it down: I’m sorry for your loss. My second attempted to go a little deeper beneath the surfaces of things. Baldly: ‘Seeming-I is as-it-were sorry for seeming-
you’s apparent loss.’ I read over it and gave it the lowest possible marks, then went back to the first version. Again Peter escorted me to the postbox. There were some messages I didn’t altogether trust Mum to transmit – at least without scrawling
Please if you have any pity in
you discourage my deluded boy
on the back of the envelope. Then all I could do was wait and hope for deliverance. The time of my flight was coming near, and I didn’t want to be left to the mercies of the road, which refuses no one and by the same logic welcomes no one either.

Meanwhile a window was mysteriously left open by Audrey, and that was the last we knew of the bird with no name. I suppose Audrey may have been jealous of Mum’s bird, at some level, but it’s also true that the namelessness didn’t help. Of course we’re none of us real, and names are no less unreal, but having a name does seem to keep us going, doesn’t it?

With Sultan Audrey tried a charm offensive. Her philosophy was that you could make any creature love you if you set your mind to it, by grabbing and smothering if need be. Mum would sometimes give Sultan orders to stay on Audrey’s bed till she fell asleep. Sultan would do it, but you could feel every feline fibre straining to be gone. Every pet we ever had was wary of Audrey, perhaps knowing things we didn’t.

Two days before the date of my flight, when Mum had cried all the tears she had in her and Dad had taken to leaving travel brochures for Paris around, remarking (as if casually) that the lifts on the Eiffel Tower went right the way to the top, a letter came from Mrs Osborne. I hadn’t managed to strike the right note when I tried to write a Hindu letter of condolence to Mrs Osborne, but her reply had perfect pitch. She said that she would have learned nothing from Ramana Maharshi if she let the shedding of an old coat get in the way of welcoming a fellow devotee.

The arrangements could stand. There was a place made ready for me thousands of miles from home, and I was expected by strangers I loved already. Of course if life and death don’t qualify as real, then family has quite a nerve to make such claims on us,. It’s only common sense that the family you choose outranks the one you were given.

I was taking a leap in the dark, the enlightening dark, in a body ill suited to any sort of run-up. A solo trip to India was a fairly adventurous thing for anyone to do in 1970, but my case was almost insanely bold. Over the years I had moved from a hospital to a special school and then to a normal one. With each successive change of address I had whittled away at the elaborateness of the infrastructure that was needed to support me. In India I would have absolutely nothing familiar to rely on. I would be travelling on a wing (two wings, thanks to Air India, and First Class wings at that) and a prayer. At Burnham Grammar School my falls had been cushioned by willing helpers, and India was even more richly supplied with personnel – but it seemed foolish to expect the entire population to act as ramshackle shock-absorbers protecting me from the impact of so much difference.

I had decided on five weeks as the right period for my pilgrimage. It was a length of time which would allow me a full month of devotion in Tamil Nadu, the Indian state where Ramana Maharshi had lived and died, with half a week at each end of that to recover from arriving, and to prepare myself for departure.

I’m good at packing. Packing for me is something that takes place on a piece of paper, where I list objects and actions as precisely as possible. The satisfaction only begins to leak out of the process when I have to pass the list over to someone else – to Mum, in this period, for the executive stage of packing, the actual gathering and encasing of possessions.

At that point you might think my involvement in packing was over, but not so. That’s when I have to maintain the greatest vigilance. Otherwise when the case is opened at the other end of a journey there are extensive omissions, bonuses and maddening bits of improvisation. When my outrage is reported back to the executive I never get a more satisfactory response than
I couldn’t see what you wanted with X
or
You can’t have too many Ys
. I have to anticipate the perverse algebra
of the proxy packer, complicated in this case by the fanciful travel priorities of a virtual agoraphobic.

There was a certain amount of worldly advice current about what to take with you to India, things which were scarce there, and consequently better than hard currency – bottles of whisky and razor blades. I wasn’t going to be able to be my own porter, but even so, travelling light was part of my agenda. Travelling light was an admirable goal in itself, even if Dad, the family’s supreme exponent of the art, sometimes came close to showing off. He had arrived in Tanganyika once with all his possessions (toothbrush, flannel, razor) rolled in a towel under his arm.

The bottles disqualified themselves immediately, but I dare say I could have managed some razor blades – except that a pilgrim doesn’t bring contraband or even legitimate wares. A pilgrim brings only his submission to the sacred, and I refused to be canny or self-serving on this devotional journey.

Mrs Osborne had given the travelling-light agenda a wonderful boost by saying that I should bring a single change of clothes and no more. That was all I would need. There wasn’t much Mum could do to overrule such a definitive pronouncement. I took with me a suitcase to go in the hold of the aeroplane, and a carrier bag which would hang on the crutch when I walked. The carrier bag held crucial objects like my flannel, tooth-cleaning equipment, bum-wiper, passport and traveller’s cheques. By now I had developed considerable expertise with the bum-snorkel, to the point where I could do a better job using remote-control toilet paper origami than any nurse who had looked after me at CRX, or any helper at Hephaistos. Have snorkel, will travel. I would have hated to have to put my bum in the hands of strangers during my pilgrimage. The strangers themselves would have been less than thrilled, brahmins aghast and even pariahs not best pleased.

Mrs Osborne had specifically asked me to bring some Marmite, as that strange substance (which I remember calling ‘salty jam’ as a child) wasn’t available in India. Mum insisted that she’d read some
where that the manufacturers of Marmite were so keen on their product that they would send it anywhere in the world for a modest sum of money. When I expressed doubt about this, she did one of her rare Granny impersonations, smiling sweetly and saying, ‘Let’s write to Marmite and find out, shall we?’ She didn’t veto the purchase of a large jar of Marmite for my Indian expedition, but all the same she wanted to be vindicated before I left if at all possible. Marmite replied by return of post. Mum was in the right. The company would send a large jar of Marmite anywhere on the globe for the sum of 9/6 (including postage).

‘That makes sense, whichever way you look at it, doesn’t it, Mum?’ I said. She didn’t quite get the joke at first, so I wrote ‘9/6’ on a piece of paper and then turned it upside down to show her that it still said ‘9/6’. She was impressed and congratulated me on my cleverness. I didn’t have the honesty to confess that the idea wasn’t mine. I’d pinched it from an old advertisement for Castella cigars. I was baffled by the variability of Mum’s intelligence: she could sometimes be very sharp, while other times she was like a sort of super-parrot repeating things she’d read or heard. On my side, though, there was a relentless need to impress her with my brain and the constancy of its whirring. All this knotting-up of family emotion, of dependency and resentment, was something I hoped would simply fall away when I was in India and could look at the world through other eyes, eyes freed of their Bourne End blinkers, able to see beyond the sun.

Mum said if I really wanted to travel light why didn’t I send the Marmite as the company recommended instead of taking it myself? 9/6 wasn’t a great deal of money, and the jar was heavy. I pointed out that I’d already bought the jar, but Mum said she would pay me back and take it off my hands. So huge a quantity of yeast extract would give depth of flavour to her soups and stews for years to come. I held firm, and finally she had to give in.

This was typical of our arbitrary wrangles at that time. If I had learned about the Marmite despatch service before Mum did, I would have been on fire to take advantage of it, while she would have poured all her energy into making the case against. No stick was too small for us to lunge at, determined to get hold of it by the wrong end. These were the sticks of disputation, which have no right end.

It bothers some people that Marmite is saline mulch thrown off in the process of beer-making, defined historically as a waste product until people could be persuaded to buy it. I think that’s typical of Maya’s work, which is really only advertising. I don’t think there’s such a thing as original sin, but I do think there’s such a thing as believing your own publicity.

At this point in the drama of packing the battle of wills shifted ground. The next conflict was over confectionery. Mum had finally been gracious on the Marmite question, but she took a harder line on the issue of Cadbury’s Roses. Suddenly travelling light was less of a priority. She was very insistent that I should take a tin with me to India. In fact she unilaterally packed one in my suitcase, ignoring my protests, saying, ‘You never know when a box of chocolates will come in handy – you know, to say thank you to your hostess. That sort of thing.’

I managed not to point out that I was going on a pilgrimage, not a house party – you don’t struggle half-way across the world hot on the heels of self-realisation only to bleat out, ‘Thank you for having me.’ Still, I couldn’t shut up altogether. The need to have the last word in argument was as strong as ever, and serenity was well beyond the horizon. I said, ‘I’ll be staying at the ashram, or else with a fellow devotee, and the only person I will want to thank will be my guru, whose body died in 1950, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned, leaving him impervious to chocolate.’

‘Don’t snap at me, please, John.’ With a sigh she took the offending Cadbury’s Roses out of my little bag. ‘I’m trying to help you as best I can. I just
wish
I knew where exactly you’ll be staying – will there be running water and proper conveniences at this guest-house?’

‘An ashram is a sort of monastery, not a guest-house.’

‘Well, will they be giving you a proper breakfast? Who will look after you when you get ill – you will get ill, won’t you? It stands to reason. So far from home, eating strange food.’

‘I trust my guru that my pilgrimage is pleasing and is meant to happen. Plumbing and cooking are not interesting subjects to the evolved mind. And it’s meat-eaters such as yourself who get into trouble in foreign parts, not vegeteerians. As you like to call us.’

Ramana Maharshi had also had a sticky relationship with his mother. After she had despaired of persuading him to come home and had moved to Tiruvannamalai herself, she pestered him with her attentions. First she prepared a vegetable dish, than a little soup, and soon she was wandering all over the hill gathering provisions, murmuring, ‘He likes this vegetable, he likes this fruit,’ entirely ignoring his remonstrations. She took silence for assent, and his indifferent eating, absolved of appetite, as Thanks Mum, What Would I Do Without You?

Once he teased her while she was cooking, saying, ‘Beware of those onions, Mother. They are a great obstacle to deliverance!’ Onions in the Hindu classification being
tamasic
, darkness foods, though not strictly forbidden like other substances in their category (such as meat).

I was lucky that Mum’s phobias would prevent her from following me to the holy mountain under any circumstances. Out of the corner of my eye I could see her sneaking the Cadbury’s Roses back into my case. I made a mental note to ask Peter, when he got home from work, to remove them and hide them somewhere safe. Inside his digestive system if need be.

I was beginning to understand the spiritual value of the family as an institution, which is nil. The family stands for everything that religion (properly understood) opposes – in a word, attachment. Christ showed he grasped this when he rejected his blood family in favour of something more real:
¶Know you not I must be about my father’s busi
ness?
Slyly he used the rhetoric of family while slipping out of its clutches.

Mum said that worrying over me was turning her hair white. There was no sign of that, but I did try to be sympathetic about her little obsessions. At her urging I even went to see Flanny the GP, complicit in Mum’s sneering at vegeteerians, for something to take with me in case of diarrhœa. Her response was typically forthright, typically unhelpful: ‘
Of course
you’ll get diarrhœa,’ she said, as if this was the real underlying purpose of the trip. ‘But I’m not allowed to prescribe for things you haven’t got yet.’

I always found Flanny difficult to deal with, which may only mean that she found me difficult. Doctors like to make a difference. They don’t like the patients who keep turning up when there’s nothing wrong with them, and they don’t enjoy the long-term cases whose lives aren’t susceptible to transformation. Hypochondriacs and chronics alike undermine the self-respect of professionals. The fact that I stubbornly turned up from time to time with a new demand must have seemed like malingering of a perverse sort, as if I was playing for sympathy from the far shores of ill health. In fact I don’t want sympathy from a doctor (
sympathetic
in medicine being strictly a description of one branch of the nervous system). I’d rather have a snappy diagnosis or a script made out with no questions asked.

In the end I had to fork out for some Lomotil on a private prescription, which rather rankled. 10/6 it cost me, making a considerable hole in my budget. You could send a large jar of Marmite anywhere in the world for a sum like that, and still have a shilling left over for emergencies.

Mum refused to look at Tamil Nadu on a map, though Dad took an interest in that aspect of the expedition, and insisted on referring to my whole summer of pilgrimage as ‘John’s trip to Timbuktu’ – despite his having spent some time in those parts himself.

There was very little that reassured Mum about my five weeks of proposed self-discovery, but at least there was the late Arthur Osborne’s social status. He was a graduate of Oxford University, which counted for a lot in her eyes, and he had even written a book, which I had on long loan (thanks to Mrs Pavey’s good offices) from Bourne End Library. Mum would have the book to hang on to while I was away.

She was comforted, too, that I would be cared for by Mrs Osborne. Wives and mothers were the same the world over, weren’t they? ‘Mrs Osborne’ was a name with an uncommonly reassuring cadence, suggesting Queen Victoria (wasn’t Osborne the name of her house on the Isle of Wight?). Nothing would go wrong, surely, while I was in the charge of a Mrs Osborne. I don’t know exactly what Mum’s mental picture of Mrs Osborne amounted to, but in my eyes Mrs Osborne was a sort of anti-Mum, blonde where she was dark, perhaps a little plump, serene and indulgent, like a Roman goddess of the crops depicted
in a sentimental painting – like the lady on the jar of Ovaltine, in fact, clutching to her boozzie a bountiful cereal sheaf which promised restful nourishment. Realising that the late Arthur Osborne had been in his sixties, so that his wife, even if she had been (as I vaguely remembered) a student of his at one stage, couldn’t be so very young, I sowed silver hairs among the imaginary gold, and adorned her face with glasses whose frames curved jauntily up at the sides.

In the car Mum was tense, tense even for her. When we were some way from the airport Dad pulled the car over, but it must have been a signal from Mum which made him stop. From my position in the front seat, required by the inflexibility of my legs, I dare say I missed a lot of byplay over the years. Then Mum had another go at asserting herself. When she spoke, she leaned over between the seats so that her rapid breaths sounded in my ear and buffeted against my face. In that posture she wasn’t properly in my line of vision – for a true confrontation she would have had to get out of the car and face me down through the windscreen, but that would hardly fit as the setting for this little tableau, A Mother’s Final Appeal, though it might have fitted with her general sense that the world was bearing down on her.