Cedilla (78 page)

He had taken the bait. ‘Then you know about the report on the epidemic prepared for Parliament by the Board of Health.’

‘What about it?’

‘The exclusion from it of the data from the Homœopathic Hospital in Golden Square, which was in the middle of the outbreak.’ After my visit to Great Ormond Street I had discovered that it wasn’t the original London base of homœopathy.

He went rather quiet. ‘I’m a little vague about that. Remind me.’

‘The Homœopathic Hospital gave the information as requested – names and addresses of patients, symptoms, remedies and results. The whole hospital had been given over to victims of the epidemic. Out of 61 cases of cholera, 10 died – a mortality of 16.4%. At the Middlesex Hospital nearby, 123 died out of 231. A mortality of over 50%. Under protest the Board of Health released these figures, which had been kept out of the original tally.’

‘Did they say why they had suppressed them in the first place?’

‘Oh yes. First because they were so out of keeping with the other results that they would have distorted the findings. Second because they didn’t want to lend support to “empirical practice”. You weren’t
supposed to cure illness without understanding its causes, and in homœopathy you just pay attention to symptoms and deal with those. Hahnemann himself, the chap who invented the system in the first place, came up with a therapy for cholera without seeing a single case, from the symptoms described by colleagues. Treatment without formal diagnosis is intolerable to the medical establishment which you’re so keen on joining. Better to let people die than have cures that don’t obey the formalities. But perhaps John Snow wasn’t the only one saving lives in Soho that year.’

‘Is this all on the record, John? I’d hate you to be pulling my leg.’

‘I can’t reach your leg. And yes, it’s on the record. Will Hansard do? I’m afraid I don’t have the exact references.’

‘I’ll manage.’

I’m sure I would have heard about it if Alan’s researches hadn’t corroborated what I had told him. His attitude towards homœopathy slowly changed. Soon he was saying that if I gave him a prescription he would take it with an open mind. I said that it would only be a fair test if some symptom was troubling him. Perhaps there was?

Apparently so. At least there was a physical condition, too trivial to be taken to the doctor, which could be examined for experimental purposes. The matter was intimate enough for him to deliver me back to A6 Kenny so that he could make his confession. It turned out that Alan was troubled by copious sweating under the arms, even in winter, and by an accompanying animal odour. In short, B.O.

He had an exaggerated idea of his case. I was well placed, after all, while he was labouring up and down steps with me, to detect any offensive aroma. He smelled like an animal, yes, of course, but only because he was one. He smelled clean, he smelled warm and alive. Barry, on the other hand, the botanist who had been a whiffy basidiomycetous saprophytic fungus in a (recent) previous life, would never be able to detect his own aroma, any more than saints can see their own haloes.

I didn’t have to work very hard to select a remedy for Alan. There’s a passage of
Magic of the Minimum Dose
– from which I had been freely
quoting, of course, preaching in borrowed robes – which describes just such a case. I knew I should ask a full set of questions, but on this occasion I went by hunch. Chronic issues require particular attention to the
Mind
section, and I let myself be guided by my impressions (
Nervous and excitable / ‘Brain-fag’ / Abstracted / Fixed Ideas
).

I took out an empty notebook and wrote
For Overactive Sweat Glands
in Young Adult Male –
Silicea 200
on the first page. Then I wrote
Alan
Linton / signetur 1/1 silicea c200
/
x3 gutt. sub linguam
on a label and attached it to a vial that had come with my starter kit of remedies. I enjoyed the paperwork for once, or more exactly the methodical feeling that comes from separating and labelling, even if there was an element of the rough and ready about my Latin. Nobody really reads the Latin – I could have written
lingam
for
linguam
without making any difference to Alan – but it massively reinforces the psychological effect. Slightly bogus Latin is the mother tongue of the placebo.

When I saw him next, Alan told me that from the first moment he held the pillule on his tongue he could feel it taking effect. His sweating moderated and any odour dissipated in a few days. Certainly his self-consciousness about it rapidly became a thing of the past. Of course homœopathy normally brings about improvements over a longer period of time, but rapid cures are not unknown. One of the great virtues of the method, in fact, is that it doesn’t persist with remedies that are proving ineffective. Not for the homœopath the GP’s reflex of the repeat prescription, the increased dosage. If it doesn’t make a difference at the first attempt, you stop and try something else.

‘What did I tell you?’ I crowed. Despite this I was astounded by the success of my first attempt at prescription. What had I told him, after all? Nothing that I really knew about. Could the whole pretty system possibly work?

From that moment on, Alan Linton was a believer, verging on zealotry. He started borrowing what books I had on the subject, but he soon exhausted my modest library and started researching on his own account. To some extent this played into my hands. I was someone, after all, who had special borrowing privileges from the University Library, but found it impossible to consult the catalogue so as to order books. Alan on the other hand could only consult the UL’s holdings, not take them away, but was easily able to do the legwork. So it was
agreed. He would use the catalogue for me, and I would borrow books for him.

I enjoyed the feeling that I had made a convert, even though it wasn’t to my religious perspective, as I had hoped before I came to Cambridge. Homœopathy wasn’t a core belief of mine, it hadn’t even had time to bed down as an obsession. It was no more than a hobby in waiting. I had written
Homœopathic
Prescriptions
on the cover of the notebook in which I had written Alan’s details, but it was quite a while before there was a second prescription noted down. In Hall at Downing, in the meantime, it was now Alan who would inform me about his latest discoveries as we took our time over tomato flan and that great novelty of vegetarian cuisine, as it seemed to us then, pasta salad.

In his own way Alan was rather a tactile person. Often he would put his arms round me and give me long hugs, saying that he got a very positive energy from being with me. Sometimes our lingering over the meal meant that he came back to A6 with me on his own.

At one stage we were talking about being ‘grounded’, and how wrong it was for us to elevate ourselves above the ground. The starting-point of the conversation was probably the traditional Buddhist strictures against sleeping away from the ground.

I agreed in principle, but had to add, ‘Yes, Alan, that’s all very well but because of my legs and whatnot, I
have
to sleep off the ground!’

‘Yes, but even a little time on the ground is better than nothing …’

‘I suppose so. Not something I know much about.’ It wasn’t the time to mention that I had been sexually initiated in a sleeping-bag on the ground, while at Woodlarks summer camp for disabled schoolboys.

‘I’m sure I could get you onto the ground for a bit. Shall we give it a try?’

‘If you like.’

Carefully he manœuvred me onto the ground, cradled in his arms. Then he made a disgusted face and said, ‘This carpet could certainly do with a clean …’

I hoped all the same that the pungency of the floor-covering wouldn’t lead him to break off our experiment. I was becoming excited by our entwined posture, and couldn’t help myself from pushing myself against Alan in a way that wasn’t particularly Buddhist.

It was a strange experience, all the same. There was so much of him. In fantasies my sexual partners – Blyton’s Julian, Rollo from the
Rupert
annual – were the same size as me. They didn’t extend beyond me, or protrude in awkward ways. Admittedly Julian Robinson at Vulcan was a big boy, but in our most memorable encounter, with a kindly observer providing the motive power, the feeling of a sensual pulsation was only part of the hilarity of the total event.

Now I was pressed up against a young man several inches taller even than Julian, and fully in charge of his parts. I seemed to occupy only an intermediate zone of this enormous physique. I felt cheated of the full picture – I was getting only fragmentary impressions of his body, while the warmth poured into me through his clothes.

I could hear the gurgling of Alan’s stomach, as a digestion at the peak of its young powers smoothly converted pasta salad into radiant heat and the faculty of embracing. ‘Just to let you know where I stand,’ he told me. ‘I have a strong aversion to queers and their ways. I shouldn’t be prejudiced, but there it is. Any sort of poovery gives me the creeps. At least I’m honest about it.’

He told me he’d been briefly involved with an organisation called the Monarchist League, whose members were strongly in favour of the monarchy, obviously, but not the monarchy we actually had. They believed the Queen was an impostor of some sort. He had been to one of their dinners in a house in Trumpington. At the end of the meal, after elaborate toasts to the rightful royal family, he had seen a man put his hand between another man’s legs. He took the only proper action available and fled the premises, quite fast I imagine since his legs were long.

I wanted to wriggle up and be close to Alan’s face, and also to wriggle downwards and be aligned with his crotch. I couldn’t do both, so I made my choice. I chose down. Belatedly Alan detected the erotic vibration in what we were doing. ‘Now John,’ he said, ‘I must remind you that if I thought for
one solitary second
there was anything sexy for you in this, I’d be out of here like a shot!’

I’m fine about being sly, but flat dishonesty isn’t really in my
nature, so I said, ‘Then I am very sorry, Alan. I have to confess that you’re making me as randified as anything.’ I resigned myself to the interruption of this delightful adventure, pushing myself against him one last time.

Strangely, though, just when I had come clean he started to make excuses for me. ‘Yes, well, John, you should understand that you are a person who D. H. Lawrence would say is very “alive in the groins”. It’s nothing to worry about, nothing to worry about at all … Greatly to your credit, in fact. Human beings are only animals, when you get right down to it.’

I blessed the holy name of David Herbert Lawrence, about whom I had mixed feelings. On the one hand I adored
Women in Love
, particularly the wrestling scene by the fireside – unclothed apotheosis of the tender grappling I had dreamed of in my sickbed and coveted as a Burnham schoolboy. This very encounter on institutional carpet was the closest I could ever hope to come to recreating it. I had taken an oath not to see the film, because I wanted to imagine the faces of my choice on the bodies of Gerald and Birkin. Some things are sacred, and I wouldn’t let Ken Russell wrestle me away from the casting couch of my fantasies.

It was
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
I shied away from. Somehow I didn’t think Lawrence’s plan, when he put Lady C’s husband in a wheelchair, was to indicate that he was alive in the groins.

Alan kept faith with our Buddhist experiment until he started to get pins and needles, and that was as close as I got to Alan on the physical plane. It turned out that a little grounding went a long way.

The consolation prize for me was news of this amazing club called the Monarchist League. I had no interest in the royalist aspect either way. For me the hand between the legs was the good bit. Surely it must be the core value of the organisation? I didn’t dare to ask any more questions, but I became obsessed with the idea that hands were being thrust between legs only a couple of miles away. Once I even drove the Mini out to Trumpington and pestered innocent pedestrians, saying, ‘Ex
cuse
me! Could you possibly direct me to Headquarters of the Monarchist League?’ Nobody knew, or they were all in on it and weren’t accepting new recruits.

The friendship didn’t exactly fizzle out, in fact it flourished in its own way, but I have to own up to a little disappointment. Perhaps it was simply that the polarity of the discipleship had switched, now that the enlightenment was flowing all the other way, and Alan was delving into homœopathy with a diligence I couldn’t match.

I didn’t consciously take credit for inspiring him, any more than I would have congratulated myself, after introducing bacillus culture into milk of the correct temperature, on having invented yoghurt, but isn’t that always the way? The cry goes up of ‘The ego is dead!’, but when you look around it is the ego which has shouted the words, and is even now measuring itself for coronation robes. Perhaps there was pique at the way my small expertise had been superseded. I had yet to learn the deep spiritual significance of disappointment.

I felt sadness at the defeat which was thrown into relief by this small triumph. The real discipleship was my relationship with my guru, and however exciting and revelatory I managed to make my reminiscences of India, I knew that some longed-for process of kindling, of catching fire at last, had not in fact taken place despite my conviction of flammability. The quest and its goal seemed further away than ever.

I almost longed to be proselytised by those of other religions, so that I could have my convictions honed by the abrasion of alien creeds. In fact I didn’t suffer unduly from the attentions of the God Squad – it was as if I had been inoculated by that clumsy first approach from the apostle Colin. Others weren’t so lucky. One lovely gentle student called Chris Charnock, reading English, who had religious feelings that weren’t fully formed, felt so persecuted by the evangelical wing of the university that he had a sort of nervous breakdown. I didn’t know him very well, but we had enjoyed some vague spiritual chats, and he had lent me his copy of Aldous Huxley’s
The Perennial Phil
osophy
. Now he couldn’t stop weeping and had to be sent home. He didn’t come back the next term. I felt sorry to lose an ally, someone with whom in time I might have shared my own feelings of falsity and strain, but I was glad for him that he was away from what had been for him a place of torment. Nothing could have been more damaging to this shy mystic, feeling his way towards his inklings, than to be lectured on hell and its fires.