Cedilla (75 page)

After that Noel pretty much had his own way. I said as nonchalantly as I could, ‘Perhaps you’d make me a coffee – and one for yourself, of course, if you’d like.’

Noel went on and on about the haunting power of Ingmar Bergman’s images. They had bored into his head. They had tapped into his darkest dreams. He wouldn’t be able to sleep, unless … Unless what? Unless he stayed the night with me. All Ingmar’s fault, of course. Noel wouldn’t be able to close his eyes for existential terror unless I was there to comfort him. I had been chosen (chosen from a list of one) to keep the Scandinavian demons at bay in A6 Kenny.

As Granny would have said, it was all very inconvenient, but I could hardly chuck him out, could I? Even if I had a phone in my room, I couldn’t quite see myself using it to call the Porter’s Lodge and asking them to repatriate a stray blond.

Once I had resigned myself to my fate, there was no further mention of Noel’s fears. He was obviously shamming, but why should he bother to tell untruths? Perhaps he really was suffering from angst – angst in his pants, that is. And he was presentable enough, but was he my type?

I wasn’t sure I could afford to have a type. There wasn’t enough
traffic for me to risk putting up road blocks. That would lead me right back to celibacy without even needing to take a vow.

The best approach seemed to be this: anyone who fetched up in my bed for whatever reason, including sham fears of clocks without hands, was my type until proved otherwise. Of course there was a snag when I considered my romantic prospects. It seemed unrealistic to expect anyone to help me go to bed and then enjoy my company once I was in it. I couldn’t quite visualise that. The waiter doesn’t sit down as guest of honour – though actually it’s an awkwardness that has come to pass often enough, when I have guests to a meal and then expect them to do a certain amount of fetching and carrying.

In my daydreams things were different. One person prepared me for bed and a quite different one joined me between the sheets, which is an arrangement reserved for the wedding nights of royalty. As a commoner I couldn’t see how Noel was going to combine the rôles. Still, rules were made to be broken. I had college authority for that.

Noel seemed rather fidgety as he boiled the kettle to make coffee. He asked if I had anything to eat and I reluctantly revealed a cache of biscuits. He looked through my record collection but found nothing that matched his mood, or perhaps his taste.

He couldn’t keep his hands away from his hair, smoothing it down far more, surely, than ordinary narcissism demanded. It made me grateful for my own narrow vocabulary of body language. What a waste of nervous energy, to thrash your hands about so! Every now and then he gave a little cat’s yawn, rolling his shoulders and even sticking out his tongue, as if he was poking fun at the idea of sleep as it slyly advanced on him.

I was ensconced in the Parker-Knoll with my drawbridge raised so that I was poised and nearly horizontal. Noel couldn’t seem to settle. He sat on the edge of the built-in desk, pushing back books and papers to make room for his narrow bum. I tried to protest, and then decided that I would make sure to ask him to reinstate everything in the morning. Unless things are near the front of a desk they’re not much use to me.

‘That’s a wonderful chair you’ve got there,’ he said. ‘I didn’t even see you get into it. How do you manage?’ There is occasionally something quite refreshing about unembarrassed curiosity, and I ended up
giving a repeat performance, struggling slowly to my feet and then relapsing onto the Granny-subsidised upholstery. It seemed unlikely that Noel had missed the first show, all the same, which must have taken perhaps two minutes from beginning to end. ‘Thanks – I feel privileged to see that,’ said my uninvited visitor. ‘You’ve really got your life worked out, haven’t you? Well done you!’ If I had really got my life worked out, I would have been alone in my room at this point, wouldn’t I? And spared this whole conversation.

Yawns are catching, alertness is not. By this time I was unconsciously copying Noel’s spasms of tiredness, and agreed that it was time for bed. Then Noel wanted to see how I managed in the bathroom. You would have thought, from his reaction, that he was positively jealous of my trolley commode, as if it was something he had wanted all his life. Finally he wanted to see how I used a flannel. Not very easily, would have been the short answer. I demonstrated, inwardly protesting. I used a table knife to bring the cloth within range of my face, and the whole operation was rather approximate. By this time I was feeling that naked curiosity wasn’t so very charming after all. Perhaps it should put on some clothes like the rest of us. Noel’s desire to know everything about my adaptation to life was beginning to seem rather oppressive. Of course he was just a little academic blob trying to rustle up a personality at short notice, like every other fresher, but I had stopped enjoying my part in the process.

‘You aren’t going to write an article about me, are you?’ I asked, realising as I spoke that this was a dreadful possibility. ‘I’m not going to be on the front page of
Varsity
, am I?’ To hold back from Jack de Manio and the
Today
programme only to end up as an item in
Varsity
! Quite a coup for the ego-diminishment project.

‘Of course not, I’m just interested. But you have to admit you’re one of a kind.’

‘Aren’t we all?’

‘You know what I mean.’

By now I was uneasy about the sharing of a bed. What if Noel did want to undertake the activity decriminalised by both the lower
chamber and the Lords Spiritual and Temporal? How could I refuse? It would be no earthly use squeaking ‘Stop what you’re doing at once! I won’t be of legal age till after Christmas!’, since he was clearly younger than me. If he wanted something to happen then happen it would.

Consent and refusal in my case were abstract notions. My Yes was taken as read, and my No was a silent scream that no one would hear, impotent mandrake struck dumb at the moment of its uprooting.

It was too late for second thoughts. I hadn’t made my bed, and now I would have to lie in it. Noel sat on the bed and supported me between his knees while he took my clothes off. His touch was awkward but not incompetent. This was the moment I must get through without my self-confidence shrivelling, buoyed up by nothing more than the habit of buoyancy.

Noel didn’t ask me what I wore at night. It would have been a polite enquiry to make, unless naked intimacy was on the menu. If he had asked me, I would have said ‘Nothing’, not because I had read the James Bond books and knew that a real man sleeps in the buff, but because it was enough trouble taking off one lot of clothes without having to struggle into another. Deprived of the Margaret Erskine Dream-Cloud I dare say I would have frozen to death in my undergraduate years.

He helped me onto the bed and then undressed himself. He kept on his singlet and Y-fronts. He even looked doubtfully at his socks for a moment before taking them off. This disparity in our costumes didn’t seem promising, but who was I to know what was promising? Perhaps there was striptease to come.

My sexual experiences had been fleeting, though rich in their way, and they had rarely been connected with beds. I had spent too long trapped in one to expect to discover much novelty on that terrain. A bed was far less promising a venue for me than a music room, a dark lane or a nice public lavatory.

He turned the light off and climbed into bed, moving carefully to avoid squashing me. He had a faint nutty smell, which started to interest me all over again. In the dark my nose came alive and had a sniff of something it liked. Free of visual reality, I could idealise his features. My third eye took a good look round and my third leg flexed.

I wondered if we were about to have carnal congress, and if so how much I really wanted it to happen. My consent and refusal had become elusive even to me. This was all so entirely different from any script I had ever imagined. All those back roads and lanes I had driven down, looking for the person who would inflict his secrets on me!

Was it possible to be sought out in my own bed, and be shown the skeleton key to intimate behaviour there? The thing that can happen between people who lie down together, the shiver of what is possible.

Then it turned out that Noel had no such plans, or if he had ever had them they had been overtaken by sleep. Angst or no Angst, he was well away. There would be no tickling-too-deliciously pleasure for me that night, and my reason was safe from being derailed by a landslide of bliss. Every fifteen minutes the Catholic Clock with its defective mechanism ironically saluted the protraction of my virginity. Unless I had lost it to the Yeti. Though I have to say, going by my shreds of memory about our encounter, that the Abominable Snowman behaved like a perfect gentleman.

It was strange that I regarded myself as a virgin despite having been superbly fellated more than once by the depraved and accomplished Luke Squires at Vulcan. Somehow that didn’t seem to count.

Having someone sleeping so near to me was a novelty, even without the active sensuality of touch. Peter’s life had been warm in our bedroom at Trees, but Noel’s life was warm in my actual bed – yet I got little joy from his presence. At one point I became so overheated that I had to nudge the Dream-Cloud aside.

Unconsciousness dissolved any pact between us, in terms of my separate space, which he invaded. In sleep he was all bones and angles. Bones and angles and rapt little snores. A hot hand inched between my legs, but it was innocent of any impulse to grope.

In the night I needed a pee. I lay there wishing my bladder could sit tight for the whole night – life would be so much easier if it could. There was nothing to stop me from using the pee bottle as usual, except that it wasn’t in its usual place. In the flurry of going to bed in company, I hadn’t left it within reach, so I gave Noel quite a bolshie nudge. Since he was here by his own wish, he might as well be useful. He groaned as he woke and went like a sleepwalker to fetch the pee bottle.

Then I must have slept more heavily. When I awoke I was alone in the bed. Then I started to hear strange grunting from floor level. When I wriggled myself round I could see Noel doing photogenic little press-ups. He grinned at me when he caught me looking. ‘I made you a cup of tea,’ he said.

I took it for granted that Noel would be on his way as soon as he could. No such luck. He seemed annoyingly refreshed, and in a mood to be further entertained. He had exhausted his curiosity about me, but had apparently promised himself the treat of meeting my bedder.

His smile was on full disarming power from the moment Mrs Beddoes arrived. She’d barely had time to say, ‘Hello, and who are you?’ than he’d offered her a cup of coffee. My coffee, not actually a plentiful resource. Reluctantly I introduced them. From nowhere Mrs Beddoes produced something which she’d been keeping dark, a Christian name. ‘Jean Beddoes.’

Noel said, ‘John kindly let me stay last night after I had a fit of the heebie-jeebies from a film we saw. Have you ever had a fit of the heebie-jeebies from watching a film, Mrs Beddoes?’

She hardly hesitated. ‘There was one … what was it called? Gravestones, and a man pouncing on a boy. Staring eyes. I couldn’t sleep for weeks after that.’

Noel raised his hands in front of him and gave a theatrical shudder. He even closed his eyes. ‘
Magwitch!
’ he whispered, in reverent horror, and then they were away, fast friends already on the basis of
Great Expectations
. At that moment, peeking out at Mrs Beddoes from behind a finger fence of artificial surprise, he looked like a minor Dickensian character himself. Minutes later he was helping her to make the bed.

Since I slept wrapped up in a cloud of dreams there was actually no need to do any such thing, but Mrs Beddoes would not be deflected from her professional code. There was no question of slackening off even when rigour was nonsensical. So every day she would unmake the bed and remake it, tucking the coverlet in with brisk determined movements so there was no possibility of the pillow making a run for
it. I had shown her once that this technique would have made it hard for me to get into bed, if I hadn’t preferred the Dream-Cloud. I had slid my stick in and then yanked sideways to open a usable gateway to the sheets, like Dad using his paperknife on a letter, to show her how preposterous she was being. She stuck to her principles.

In the shock of rapport with Noel her cheeks were now quite pink. Somehow they had got on to the subject of favourite pieces of music. Mrs Beddoes was saying, ‘It’s my husband who knows about things. Alf’s favourite piece is classical music, and I really like it too. It’s by Beethoven.’

‘Really, Mrs Beddoes? One of the symphonies?’ He thought for a moment. ‘Perhaps the
Pastoral
? You may know it from
Fantasia
– the Disney film.’

‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘It’s not from a film.’ I was delighted that Noel’s patronising suggestion had fallen flat. ‘It’s called … it’s gone out of my mind. It’s called … that’s right, “Wellington’s Victory”. It’s on the same record as the “1812”, but it’s even better.’ She clapped her hands together on either side of the pillow, to plump it up, but almost as if she was playing the cymbals. ‘Even more cannons and whatnot!!’

Which made Noel’s day, perhaps even his term. I had hoped he would leave before Mrs Beddoes did, so I could be spared the inevitable sneer about her musical taste, but he stayed on to round off the lovely morning he was having. I didn’t know ‘Wellington’s Victory’, but it seemed strange that liking Beethoven could be such a
faux pas
. Wasn’t Beethoven supposed to be the tops?

It was perfectly possible that Mrs Beddoes knew more of Beethoven’s music than I did. Once you’d mentioned
Moonlight
,
Für
Elise
and
Da-da-da-Dum
, you’d just about exhausted my expertise on the subject. I wasn’t in a position to call Noel’s bluff, but I wished someody would.

What he said when we were alone was, I suppose, quite a mild exercise in contempt. ‘Good for Madame Beddoes,’ he said. ‘If you’re tone-deaf and pig-ignorant, you might as well go for the piece with the loudest bangs.’

Watching the way Noel played along with innocent Mrs Beddoes, I realised that my social skills were very partial. I needed to develop new ones. All this time I had been thinking in terms of bringing
people within the orbit of my personality, entirely overlooking the fact that they were always going to be people, like the blond germ working his ’fluence on Mrs Beddoes, who badly needed to be kept at a distance. Poor mobility meant poor avoiding skills, so I would need to add an annexe to my laboratory of personal accomplishments. It wasn’t enough to have charm, I needed antidotes to the charm of others. Countercharm. Even the Everest & Jennings hoist I had brought from Bourne End had a red control as well as a green one.

I wanted to be able to accept the world’s butterscotch with the proper appreciation, while refusing its helping hand on my shoulder, its shallow fascination with the details of my daily life, its snores in my bed. I must learn the technique of ruling these things out of court so crisply that the offer never came again. There must be an end to haggling with the well-intentioned, the clueless and the plain invasive.

If I had liked Noel I might have crowned his name with a sparkly diæresis, so: Noël. As things stood, I stripped him mentally of any such insignia. He didn’t deserve them.

I was offended by Noel’s manner with Mrs Beddoes, but I also envied it. It obviously didn’t strike him as unnatural that he should be looked after at his college by a sort of servant, well on his way to adulthood. Perhaps he didn’t notice his dependence, but mine was highly visible to me. My independence was opening up by the slowest possible stages, and the leisure of the process maddened me. With every emancipation I became more chafed by the restrictions remaining.

Certainly Noel was a great hit with the woman he had taken so much trouble to mock. For weeks after his overnight stay, she would ask, ‘And how is Mr Noel? Sleeping again at nights, I hope?’ She would obviously have enjoyed a repetition of his visit. It had slipped her mind that one of her purposes, according to the university’s administration, was to make sure that the students in her charge spent the stipulated number of nights a term within a one-mile radius of Great St Mary’s, unless they had their tutor’s permission, in their own beds and alone.

What lay outside that magic circle was off the map and off the radar. As far as the rule was concerned, the university might be surrounded,
like the earth in Hindu cosmology, by concentric oceans of (in order) brine, sugar-cane juice, wine,
ghee
, milk, whey and fresh water.

To me the University Library was far more plausible as the centre of student life than Great St Mary’s. People were always complaining that it looked like a power station, as if they had spotted a flaw in the design, when that industrial imagery was exactly what the architect intended. The UL was a mighty pulsing electromagnet, which drew towards it with implacable force two copies of every book published in the country, on the very day it appeared. It was a royal engine of bibliophilia, it was an austere brickwork
lingam
throbbing with imaginative power. What it wasn’t – with its staircase upon staircase – was a place I could go. The front entrance crowned a flight of steps with that abomination, a revolving door, hateful symbol of my banishment from the engine room of learning. No one has ever been able to explain to me why the trivial advantages of the revolving door are held to outweigh its obvious defects. Yes, it excludes draughts. It also excludes me.

I made one forlorn attempt at entering the premises by another avenue. There was a goods entrance at the back, where crates of books could be wheeled in. I would explore the possibilities there. Of course I had to make an appointment (more phone calls from the Porter’s Lodge) to be shown the ropes – the ramps, the lifts. Of course a ramp isn’t much use to a wheelchair-user unless he has a motorised chair or strong arms, and the lifts were pretty much hopeless, hardly larger than the ones at Vulcan, being designed in the first place for books and not people. All in all, the prospect of being an honorary book-crate in the UL was a lot less fun than being an honorary suitcase on trains leaving Bourne End station. It wasn’t a solution. I would have to find other means of gaining access to the treasure-house of books.

Luckily my status as a second-class citizen wasn’t a simple thing. It was speckled with exemptions and concessions. With a little cajoling on my part, there was a system in place. All I had to do was toot the Mini’s horn outside the Library at a prearranged time and the books I wanted would be brought down to me. The able-bodied undergraduates of the university, the hale and the hearty – they were the underprivileged ones. At the feast of learning offered in that rather
sombre-looking building, they had to eat on the premises. I was entitled to take-away.

The library’s statutes allowed for special arrangements to be made at the discretion of the Librarian, but in practice it was only necessary to adapt the mechanism which allowed third-year undergraduates to borrow books. My Tutor became my proxy – so technically he was the one who borrowed up to five volumes on my behalf, and incurred any penalties also. There was a certain amount of paperwork, since Graëme Beamish had to give his authorisation. He had a supply of forms already printed up (normally for the use of those lucky third-years), but he did need to sign them. ‘I must say, John,’ he remarked once, ‘that I never dreamed that writer’s cramp would be part of the price I pay – with joy in my heart, I assure you – for the pleasure of acting as a moral tutor.’

Wheelchair access to libraries is a major cultural advance, but there’s no doubt about the greater poetry of the old arrangement. The boy at the foot of the steps whistles a special signal, and the books he wants come fluttering down from the roof of the building, birds of knowledge which alight on his fingertips. It’s all very Omar Khayyam.

I don’t have a nostalgic bone in my body, and I wouldn’t willingly go back to any day gone by. Adhesion to the past is as bad as wanting to sew yourself into your old clothes. I can’t help it if my times of waiting for books to be ferried down the steps are among the brighter spots in an overcast time.

Of course the real difficulty in the library lay in locating the books in the catalogues, writing down the relevant class-marks and placing my order. I made another attempt to sell Beamish on the idea that a telephone in Kenny A6 was the final element required to make the whole system workable. The staff of the Library wouldn’t mind my ordering books by phone. They might even look things up in the catalogue for me.

The Beamish wasn’t having it. ‘I’m beginning to see, John,’ he told me, ‘that you have quite a talent for sweet talk. It’s a fact that the Library and indeed the whole university is full of pussycats who could easily be talked into anything by someone with your wheedling skills. But at the moment our splendid Bursar is under the impression that disabled students are rather expensive to run, something of
an extravagance in administrative terms. If I tell him you now need a phone in your room, he’ll be absolutely sure of it. So don’t over-play your hand. Put that honeyed tongue away.’

He seemed to have a very precise idea of his rôle: to make my life possible but not easy. ‘As I may have mentioned,’ he went on, ‘it was only quite recently that the colleges began installing telephones for their Fellows. I’m not sure it counts as progress. It makes it much harder to get work done when the phone keeps ringing. Forgive me if I am repeating myself. A repetitious demand deserves a repetitious answer.’

This was a bit much to swallow, the physicist as Luddite, and I’d only just explained that having a phone would actually help me with my work. Still, I had to knuckle under. Technically, under Regulation 8(a) of the University Statutes, it was my Tutor who was held hostage when books were entrusted to me by the Library. He was responsible for any penalties incurred, as if he had borrowed them himself.

So I had to put up with a rather unsatisfactory system, relying on other people to chase up the catalogue, dropping off notes with my requirements or taking my turn on the long-suffering phone in the Porter’s Lodge. All too often a porter would come down the steps to me at the agreed time, in response to my horn signal, with fewer books than I had hoped, or even none, saying cheerfully, ‘I’m afraid we’ve run into some problems, sir!’ And of course there was no possibility of appeal, to see where the system had failed.

Still, I now had at my disposal one of the great libraries in the country, stuffed with treasures Mrs Pavey could only dream of. I was determined to exploit it, and I wasn’t going to wait for an academic emergency which might never arise. I was determined to dredge up a wriggling rarity from the depths of the
lingam
, from its lowest possible vesicle.

It was Mrs Pavey who gave me the idea, when she was looking into different systems of shorthand at my request. I had acquired a competence in Pitman, but then become disillusioned with it because it was so angular. On the rebound I fell into the arms of Gregg, with which
I was very happy for a while before I had to admit that it was simply too curvy. I gave up for a while, without altogether abandoning the hope that out there somewhere there was a baby bear of a shorthand system, neither too curvy nor too angular but just right. And I had never forgotten Mrs Pavey saying, ‘I did come across a reference to a book based on another system, John, but it’s impossibly rare. Still, it might be just what you’re looking for – it’s called
Brachystography
. Not just shorthand, which would be
brachygraphy
, but the shortest shorthand of all. From the Greek
brachistos
, shortest.’ And I had almost-nodded, as if I had been born knowing Greek.

So that was my choice. J. A. A. Percebois’s
Brachystography
, from 1898. At first the omens were good. The book had been located, in a sub-basement. There was a label on it saying
NOT TO BE LENT OUT
UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES
. Just the sort of prize I was after. There was a waiting period, while the case was referred indefinitely upwards for judgement, and then finally I received a note saying the book was ready for collection.