Cedilla (71 page)

I was taken aback, but did my best to rally. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it states quite clearly that matriculands – is that the word? – must wear black shoes. It says in fact that there are
no exceptions
to this rule.’ I imagine there had been trouble in recent years with undergraduates expressing their contempt for the Establishment by turning up in blue suède shoes or Wellington boots, or perhaps barefoot.

I had only the dimmest idea about what matriculation actually was, but that was clearly not the point. The Bursar was nodding gravely, so I went on: ‘But you see, I have only the one pair of shoes, which are brown. There they are, see?’ His eyes slid past my feet as I
wiggled them faintly. ‘And I can’t just pop into a shoe shop and pick up another pair. They take months to make.’ I didn’t give him all the details, the numbered lasts, the annual entitlement. ‘It seems simpler not to go.’

‘Oh, don’t give up hope,’ said Mr Gates. ‘Do please attend. I can’t say matriculation, though an ancient ceremony, is a very thrilling event in the life of an undergraduate – certainly it pales beside a “demo” or a “sit-in”. But it is an academic milestone you have earned, so please attend. It doesn’t exactly mark your birth as a student member of the university. Your academic christening, perhaps. We shall wet a great many babies’ heads! But even so, yours would be sadly missed. So please attend. Pay no attention to trivial regulations. These rules were made to be broken.’

Which was a lovely thing to hear. It would be even lovelier if there was a list of the rules that were like that – which ones you could blow away with a single puff of breath, which ones would turn and sink their teeth into you.

I know we’re all supposed to adore the big-hearted small-mindedness of British life – the professor’s forbidden dog in his college rooms, for instance, classified by indulgent authority as ‘cat’. I suppose it’s easier to enjoy such things if you can be confident they will work in your favour.

It did seem strange that the phrase ‘no exceptions’ didn’t offer any sort of guide to the breakability of the rule to which it was attached. It was like hearing that Fragile labels are attached promiscuously to packages of every type, rubber balls as well as crystal. Fascinating but unhelpful, particularly if you were a fragile package yourself.

Of course, it’s possible to be too pedantic, though I can hardly believe I’m saying so. A number of times I’ve heard myself referred to as having brittle bone disease – I’ve even been told so to my face – and I’ve managed to stifle the urge to correct the mistake. This isn’t
University Challenge
, this is daily life in the Kali Yuga, and they’ve grasped the essential point. Don’t drop him.

While I was lucky enough to be holding a bursar captive in my room, carpeted between the Parker-Knoll and the wheelchair, I pressed my advantage and asked for exemption from another rule. I wanted a phone in my room. It was against regulations, of course,
but so was having a car and wearing brown shoes to matriculate (or be matriculated?), and I had cleared those hurdles in my own athletic fashion.

It turned out that Mr Gates could stone-wall as well as coax. ‘That’s something you’ll have to take up with your tutor,’ he said, ‘and I’m afraid university people get very worked up about possible precedents.’ University people – as if he was some other order of creature.

He seemed remarkably calm himself about the prospect that the next generation of freshmen, having learned of the trail I had blazed, would turn matriculation into an orgy of non-conformist footwear. Desert boots, flip-flops and Dunlop Green Flash tennis shoes would be flaunted without shame.

On the telephone question I felt confident about approaching Graëme Beamish for help. It seemed obvious that he would sympathise with the bind I was in. It leapt to the eyes. Consider: to request a telephone I needed an appointment with him, but without a telephone it wasn’t easy to arrange one. That was just the sort of thing we could avoid in future, with a little flexibility and some installed apparatus.

I already had the support of my director of studies and German supervisor, Roy Wisbey, a good teacher and a terrific chap. He would carry me up to his rooms without any fuss and then sit next to me on a sofa while he looked over what I had done. I remember him praising me for the phrase
ein flinkes Eichhörnchen
, saying there was no better match in the world of adjective and noun –
ein
Einhörnchen
being a squirrel and
flinkes
meaning ‘frisky’, though (his words not mine) frisky didn’t capture the full sense of the German, that pert alertness, bristling junior vitality. That kind comment made me feel pretty
flink
myself.

Didn’t Roy Wisbey keep urging me to phone him if I had a question of any sort? And every time I explained that this wasn’t possible he asked almost testily: ‘Why on earth haven’t you got a phone in your room?’, as if I might have thrown it out of the window in a fit of temper. ‘How are you supposed to manage?’ A very good question.
He suffered from tunnel vision as it strikes academics, mild mental glaucoma, so that although he didn’t miss a thing in his subject area, he could be very vague about other parts of life. I kept telling him I wasn’t on the phone, and he kept asking me for my extension number, undeterred.

Graëme (the academic who did academic impersonations) greeted me with great satisfaction. ‘It is as I promised you, John,’ he said. ‘The bill that has lost you so much sleep has been magicked away. It has been legitimately settled without requiring the draining of your father’s funds, which I’m sure are tied up as is proper in high-yielding bonds.’ Perhaps he was misled by our address on the Abbotsbrook Estate, realm of stockbrokers and advertising executives, suggestive of top-people status. We had a home there, but nothing so secure as a niche. Mum would have liked a niche, nothing better. About Dad I’m not so sure.

I was curious about how the trick was managed.

‘Ah, John, those who ask to have magic explained only guarantee themselves disappointment. The fact is, there exists a splendid organisation called the Bell, Abbott & Barnes Fund, whose help is available to undergraduates in hardship. I think there is a connection with the British Legion – at all events, when I learned of your father’s history in the armed services I decided they should be our first port of call. We needed no other. They were happy to oblige.’

This was not at all what I had expected. I didn’t know what to say. ‘Don’t thank me, John,’ said Graëme with what seemed to be withering irony. ‘I do these things for fun. It is my whim, my caprice, my joy, and no acknowledgement is expected.’ In academic fact Graëme, as I had found out by this time, was a physicist whose work on ‘lattice transformations in niobium disulphide’ had important implications for electronics or (for all I know) cookery. He specialised in compounds of niobium, named after a bereaved mother who never stops crying. He knew the secret sorrows of the periodic table. Why should he want to put on such a show of stuffiness in his rôle as a tutor?

Actually it made perfect sense. In the lab he wore a white coat and possibly goggles. Meeting his tutees he wore a different metaphysical uniform – university fustian from head to foot, with implied spats sticking out below the hem of his gown. His rooms, of course, corresponded
to his ‘real’ academic life rather than his persona, so there were no dusty books, wall hangings or tuns of madeira. The only thing that could be described as an ornament (though it would have drawn my eyes anyway) was an array of half-a-dozen polished globes, the size of steel marbles, suspended bilaterally from strings in a wooden framework, an executive toy designed to illustrate a physical law – to wit, the conservation of momentum. Newton’s Balls, they were called. I longed to set them going, but didn’t dare to ask. Silly, really. If it wasn’t childish for him to have them there then it was hardly childish for me to want to play with them.

‘Perhaps you have other errands for me to do, John. That would intensify the satisfactions of my job to an almost unbearable degree.’

I had come on an errand and this was an opening which could hardly be bettered, so I blundered in, not remembering that I had experienced the same sensation in a different context (with Granny) and had run into a brick wall glittering with broken glass.

There are times when the very brightness of the green light is a danger signal, but my worldly knowledge was very partial at the time. I should have cut my losses before I had any and come back another time, however foolish it would have seemed to beat a retreat just when the functionary entrusted with my welfare was advertising – however sardonically – his devotion to my cause.

Nonchalantly I laid out my case. I had decided during the negotiations about the ceiling rail that Graëme was a sensitive soul who protected himself with his stage-professorial manner. No matter – I had more than enough charm on hand to disarm him. And still the pettifogging persona adhered to the tender core. It wouldn’t be peeled away, and I was stuck with the husk of this human fruit.

Graëme turned down my eminently reasonable request with what was almost satisfaction. He wouldn’t even look at the note Roy Wisbey had written on my behalf, on the grounds that this was a college matter in which no faculty member should presume to meddle.

‘I wonder if you realise, John,’ he said, ‘that it is only recently that Fellows themselves have had telephones. The telephone is the bane of modern academic life and should not be a priority for you or any other undergraduate.

‘Your circumstances are not so exceptional, you know. Anyone would
think you were living in a croft in remotest Orkney, when in fact you will never be closer to the heart of a community than you are now. A telephone would only encourage you to withdraw from full participation in the life of the college.’ He sighed. ‘I wish I could get rid of my own apparatus. I would certainly get much more work done.’

As an argument this was pitiful, so the explanation of his refusal has to be sought elsewhere, in my own manner of asking. Perhaps I was simply too breezy, too sure of a positive response. It’s true that I have been called cocky in my time. The words ‘John’ and ‘bumptious’ have been brought into alignment within a single sentence. Authority likes a supplicant to roll over and play dead, not to claim help on all-but-equal terms – a factor I had failed to consider.

I can’t always be touching my forelock, though, can I? It’s boring to do things in the same way every time, and since my life is largely made up of asking for help I amuse myself by varying the phrasing. I can’t always be saying, ‘Could you possibly be so kind as to pass the salt? Seasoning is the making of a meal, don’t you agree? Even a little nearer, if you don’t mind, so that I can actually reach it with these unsatisfactory limbs. Infinitely obliged.’ Sometimes it’ll be more like ‘Pass the salt and make it snappy.’ Perhaps with Graëme, officially on my side, I was a tiny bit brusque about the need for a telephone.

I took it for granted that he was in my corner, but after all he was
in loco parentis
, and he took that responsibility seriously. It’s no small part of a parent’s job to thwart the wishes of the young – certainly that was how Mum and Dad operated.

Perhaps unconsciously I mimicked Granny’s imperious tone, asking how long it would take to install the phone, as if my time had a value in itself, a value perhaps greater than his own … I don’t remember now. If I did, then my imitation of her methods fell sadly short of the results they consistently achieved for her. But however the responsibility should be divided between us, Graëme Beamish set his face against the idea of me being connected to the wider world by a wire. And having weakly decided, he was strongly opposed to changing his mind. Intransigent even.

Luckily I like a little intransigence now and then. It gives me something to engage with, difficulty with a human face (even if set stonily against me) rather than a hostile impersonality. I would do some research on the legal position and ride back in triumph.

In the meantime I was able to examine my feelings about the way the bill for the rail had been ‘magicked away’. At the time I had been so taken up with mentally caressing my forthcoming phone that the information hardly registered. When it finally sank in I felt not just disappointment but actual resentment. This was chicanery pure and simple. I hadn’t wanted the bill paid for us, on the basis that my father had been in the Air Force and money was tight. I wanted it rescinded on the basis that it was unfair. I wanted it absorbed by the devious authorities who had secreted it in the first place, not mopped up by a bloody Fund. Dad too would far rather have settled an oppressive debt than be classified as a defaulting pauper. And now a sum intended for a poor student had been swallowed up by a rich college.

Of the two theories that could explain my presence at Downing, social experiment or academic charity, the social experiment theory seemed to be losing ground. Evidence was mounting that I was a charity case, and one that needed a special subsidy if he was to keep himself clean. I seemed to balance on a knife-edge between the deserving and undeserving (the deservedly grubby) poor.

I did a little research and then requested a second appointment with another flurry of intracollegial notes. I had prepared a little dossier, almost a legal case. I had mugged up on the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 1970, and was able to refer with great confidence to subsection c of section 2.1, which concerns the provision of telephones and any special equipment.

‘May I ask to see your paperwork?’ Graëme said firmly.

I pushed it towards him. He read it with close attention. I should have anticipated that he would be a dab hand on committees, highly sensitised to the pulling of wool over institutional eyes. He showed a quite new sharpness of style, his dusty manner being largely for undergraduate consumption. ‘It appears that such responsibilities devolve on local authorities rather than lesser institutions like our own. Perhaps you would like me to put a call through on your behalf to
Cambridge Council?’ I hesitated, wondering if I would be letting myself in for a long struggle. ‘I should warn you, though’ – and here he looked up to give me a smirk of forensic triumph – ‘that as an undergraduate you are unlikely to meet the criteria for being “ordinarily resident” in Cambridge. Three terms of eight weeks amounts to less than half the year. The local authorities are likely to regard Downing College as your holiday home. Is there a telephone at your parents’ house, which is I believe your ordinary residence?’