Cedilla (79 page)

Downing had a chaplain, but I had little contact with him. He was very tactile, and I don’t mean anything sinister by that. It’s just he was very keen on the hugs and pats, which I don’t find it easy to discourage (there’s never an electric fence around when you need one), and on one occasion he took a small liberty. He ran his hand over my starveling and lop-sided beard, saying with a twinkle, ‘John Cromer, you’re only half a man, aren’t you?’, which I found rather wounding. I should have stood up for my peculiarity and my faith both, by saying, ‘I take that as a compliment, chaplain. Ardhanishvara is Lord Shiva represented as half man and half woman. It’s your loss that callow Christianity has no time for such subtleties of incarnation. The interest is all in the half-tones.’

Sometimes I missed the evening meal in Hall and went out to eat with a group. The favoured destination was a cheap place called the Eros on Petty Cury. One reason for the low prices was that it occupied relatively undesirable premises on the first floor, which necessitated much human machinery to get me upstairs and downstairs again at the end of the meal. The descent was frightening since cheap wine was likely to have boosted the confidence of my porters at the expense of their coördination. The staple dish was moussaka (can it really have cost only six shillings, thirty new pee as we practised saying?), but the Eros also offered a ‘Florentine’ pizza, topped with spinach and a rather sinister, glistening fried egg.

That wasn’t the reason, though, for my never ordering it. I have nothing against pizza beyond the fact of its being unitary. Admiral Nelson never ordered pizza either, and the reason is obvious. Two good arms are required to dismantle the savoury disc. Of course Nelson had Emma Hamilton, but for once she was no substitute. There’s no getting around it – having your food cut up for you beyond the age of five is bearable only in surroundings of relaxed intimacy, and not always then. A plate of pasta, on the other hand, by the generosity of its composite nature, offers tendrils to the questing fork. Even to the fork that twirls ineptly in slow motion.

The restaurant was hardly one which Granny would have recognised
as such, what with the chipped plates and the unmatched cutlery. But there was one little waiter, from the Philippines I think, who was vaguely reminiscent of the waiter at the Compleat Angler, so expert at buttering up a woman who prided herself on immunity to flattery.

This Filipino would sometimes ask an undergraduate for a phone number as well as his address on the back of a cheque. This was in the days before cheque guarantee cards, when no pledge more formal than an address was required. He certainly took the name of the establishment at face value. The god of boyish desire threw arrow after arrow into his heart, till it must have had the pitted texture of a pub dartboard.

I was the only one who seemed to notice the glaring inappropriateness of the extra request. This waiter only asked the pretty ones for this detail, and was perhaps shrewd enough to ask only parties whom wine had fuddled. Not shrewd enough, though, to realise that the numbers he was given were never more intimate than those of the public phones on some privileged staircases, which took incoming calls. The best he could hope for was pot luck. Perhaps the right person would pick up the phone and hear the plaintive murmur of ‘Here is Eros boy. You are nice James?’

Some of the letters which the porters kindly delivered to A6 were government circulars to do with decimal currency, which would be introduced in February of 1971. These circulars with their jaunty tone nevertheless managed to suggest that decimal currency was an impossibly difficult challenge for young, old and everyone in between. I determined to master it. Time is an illusion, absolutely right – but that’s no excuse for being stuck in the past.

By the time my Heffers bill for the term arrived I was well ahead of the game. Laboriously I converted all the sums from pounds shillings and pence into New Pennies, and wrote out a cheque accordingly. There’s a thin line between being cheeky-charming and getting people’s backs up, and I don’t always know which side I’m on. Heffers returned the cheque, with a wry covering letter saying they were impressed by my preparedness for change, not to mention my computational skills, but would I mind replacing the old cheque drawn on the new system with a new one drawn on the old?

The tides of history were rising over Britannia’s knees on the big old dirty copper penny, but she hadn’t been swept away just yet. I can’t help feeling it would have been more fun if Heffers had given me credit as a pioneer of the new world of sensibly divisible money, by holding on to the cheque for a couple of months, till it ripened into legal validity.

When I went home for the Christmas vacation I didn’t know what sort of welcome I would get from the family. By the family I mean Mum. The others were dependable in their ways. Peter would be quietly happy, Audrey would blow hot and cold, and Dad would greet me absently, as if he was pretty sure he knew me but couldn’t remember the context.

I even considered staying in Cambridge over the vacation, though Hall would close down and I would have to cater for myself. I would also need my Tutor’s permission, which pretty much ruled it out. Graëme Beamish had obviously made a resolution, well ahead of the New Year, to refuse any further requests from the occupant of A6 Kenny. I made a resolution not to put his resolution to the test.

In the event Mum was warm and gracious, very much on best behaviour. It seemed that at last she accepted me having a home elsewhere. I wouldn’t keep coming home if she made it an ordeal when I did. It made a difference that she was having great trouble with Audrey.

Audrey was hardly more than ten, but her wilfulness was phenomenal. She would never back down. Sometimes I think she was frightened by her own anger. She wasn’t alone in that.

The present I remember most fondly from my twenty-first birthday (it did for Christmas as well) was a purse containing twenty-one fifty-pence pieces. The coins were legal tender already, as ten shillingses, though I felt honour-bound to wait until decimalisation dawned to spend them. This was from my other grandmother, Dad’s mother. We hardly ever saw her. By this time she was retired, living in a part of Edinburgh called Hunters Tryst, which I loved even before I learned that it was pronounced to rhyme with ‘Christ’. She was a rather childlike creature who had spent most of her life running her own little gift shop, specialising in glass animals. She was always feeling sorry for people and giving them ridiculous discounts. Not much of a businesswoman. Eventually the shop burned down, and we learned that it
had never been insured. She seemed remarkably calm about it, saying that she had had fun out of it for years and years without doing anyone any harm, and that was the main thing, wasn’t it?

Perhaps no one can watch everything they care about going up in flames without feeling a certain lifting of the spirits. Few of us get the chance to find out, and so we pay lip-service to the notion of catastrophe.

She said she would have liked to send me the full twenty-one pounds, but her funds wouldn’t stretch so far. I was very pleased with my stack of coins. Peter too was impressed by my new purse bursting with freshly minted heptagons, and asked who had given it to me. ‘Granny,’ I said, and then, seeing his incredulous expression, ‘The other one. Nice Granny.’ There was no implied criticism of the one who came first in our minds, the ur-Granny, who wouldn’t have thought much of an unconditional gift. For her, presents came into the same category as kites, balloons and aprons, having strings attached by definition.

Dad’s mum loved animals even when they weren’t made of glass. As a child I asked her, where do the animals go? Go after death. And she said, ‘I’m sure there’s a little corner of heaven God keeps for animals.’ A paddock in paradise – why not? It’s what Nice Granny would have provided herself.

The only limit on her niceness was that she didn’t love her children. Nature and strangers but not her own children. A worm in a jar was ‘a perfect lamb’ (as she had said once), but her own children were perfect nuisances. When children got to be about eight years old they began to be bearable to her – they were allowed to say goodbye to her then, gently clasping the tip of her outstretched finger.

Luckily there was Midge to bring them up, a local girl who had joined Nice Granny’s household when she was twelve and never left. When Nice Granny was getting old Midge said she wanted the house, and Nice Granny said, Then you’d better have it.

Understandably Dad had no more than a pained fondness for his mother, and a deep though resentful bond with Midge. If it turned
out that his mother hadn’t put anything in the will about Midge getting the house, he would certainly have seen her right.

I spent a lot of time getting my thanks about my birthday down on paper, which was probably wasted effort. There’s nothing that introduces a false note into a thank-you letter more reliably than actual gratitude. It’s a container that can accommodate almost anything more easily than what it was specifically designed to hold. A sincere thank-you letter is a live chick pecking its way out of a dyed egg on an Easter table-decoration, and giving everyone a turn.

Returning to Cambridge after Christmas didn’t exactly feel like a home-coming, but there were fewer possibilities for explosion and upset on Kenny A staircase than in Bourne End. It was too peaceful to feel like home. I almost felt I was getting to know the ropes.

Jean Beddoes had started to confide in me – not about private matters, though I could have compiled a fair-sized dossier on her husband’s health from what she let slip on the subject, and I picked up a certain amount of information about her money worries. It was more when she felt out of her depth as a bedmaker that she would come to me for advice. One day, for instance, she told me that she didn’t know what to do about a student on my staircase. Should she report him to the college authorities, or was it none of her business? She couldn’t make up her mind.

The student in question, Dexter Hoffman, was known to me, since he would stay talking over coffee and cigarettes when everyone else had gone. At last I would simply tell him to go. He was impervious to hints, but oddly docile when given a clear directive.

Hoff was reading philosophy, though our discussions were not philosophical in any obvious sense. Dexter (always known as ‘Hoff’) was known as a conversationalist, meaning that he paid only the slightest attention to what anyone else said, just enough to turn the talk back to the rut of his preference when it deviated.

Hoff was a college character whose foibles were much discussed. He filed his collection of albums by an esoteric system which remained mysterious in its details even when the general principle became known. The record at the extreme left was Love’s
Forever Changes
, while the one at the other extreme was
An Electric Storm
by White Noise, a group known only to Hoff, or so it seemed.

Privileged guests would be challenged to put the record on Hoff’s turntable back where it belonged in the ranking. It was considered a triumph to be only ten places off. The criterion was ‘heaviness’, a quality which obsessed the student population but had never before been systematically considered. The Vietnam War was
heavy
, Blind Faith were
heavy
, the prospect of getting a job and joining an oppressive Establishment was undeniably
heavy
, but no one before Hoff had even attempted to rank them comparatively.

It wasn’t clear if he was serious about this, or making one of his jokes. Since he rarely laughed at other people’s jokes, and never at his own, it was hard to tell. About his albums he seemed to be serious.
Forever Changes
earned its place by being ‘deep’ but not
heavy
.
An Elec
tric Storm
, on the other hand, was absolute heaviness, a sort of Kelvin zero. As he put it, ‘If you listen to the last track late at night and you’ve
smoked some shit
, you can think that it’s you that’s dying.’ And this was not a dreadful warning but a recommendation.

Our conversations, though, were about sex. He was a ladies’ man of some obsessiveness, though his preferred term was ‘girls’. He was always smuggling girls into his room at night and sneaking them out again in the morning. He strongly opposed co-education (technically, co-residence), and thought it would never come to pass in Downing.

From his philandererer’s perspective, co-residence would take all the excitement out of his conquests. As he explained it to me, ‘If you can just click with the girl in the next room, well – where’s the challenge in that?’ It was a question of sportsmanship. When the grouse moor is right next to the gun room then there’s nothing to brag about in bagging a huge tally.

If there had been women on the premises, he would still insist on hunting abroad, on principle. Well, partly on principle – it was also a lot easier to stop girls hanging around after he lost interest if they didn’t live there in the first place.

I did wonder whether Hoff was really the womanising sensation he claimed, but his word was broadly accepted on the matter. Some dissidents suggested that girls took their clothes off just to get him to stop talking, though others questioned whether even such a drastic measure would necessarily shut him up. ‘They expect me to try it on,’ he would say. ‘They’d never forgive me if I didn’t. They’d take it
personally.’ He took his rôle very seriously, though I didn’t think it was strictly necessary for the smooth running of the town, or even the nurses’ hostel.

He had a strange hairstyle, though it was probably more of a refusal to have a hairstyle. His hair was naturally frizzy, and he both let it grow and tamed it with a savage parting, so that the ensemble looked like a cottage loaf which has risen unevenly. Of course women often like an element of helplessness in men, but I doubt if that was part of the plan.

Most of our conversations were about women’s thoughts and feelings, which might seem an unlikely interest for a womaniser. But think about it: at a conference of safe-breakers the subject of discussion wouldn’t be money, bullion and booty but rather tumblers, alarms and time-locks. In the same way Hoff was preöccupied with women’s emotions and ideas – everything he had to get past before the marvellous mechanism swung open at last, and he glimpsed the ingots of shining pleasure stacked high on the shelves.