Cedilla (86 page)

Our first port of call on the Day of Action was W. H. Smith’s in Market Hill. Rebecca wanted to buy a clipboard, to lend a more formal edge to our inspections, but it made sense to treat the shop as our first official port of call. Someone held the door open for us, and Rebecca did her best to get me inside, but the task was beyond her. There wasn’t really a step, more of a ridge, but she was too little and
too light to nudge me over. ‘Looks as if we’ve got our first failure to record,’ she said. ‘Wait here.’ What else was I going to do?

By the time Rebecca came back with her clipboard, an assistant from the shop had come over to me. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, and Rebecca answered for me. ‘This young man can’t get into your shop.’

‘Well, that’s easily taken care of, miss. I’ll give him a hand.’

‘And what’s supposed to happen if he doesn’t have a friend with him? How’s he supposed to get help when he’s stranded outside the shop?’

‘I don’t know, miss. He could shout, or ask someone passing by to alert a member of staff.’

‘And how is that supposed to make him feel, when he has to go to such trouble even to get inside?’

How was it supposed to make me feel, come to that, being used as an object lesson in this way? I felt a warm and nasty glow. Shouldn’t I being doing some of the talking? But Rebecca was in full spate. ‘Do you want this young man’s custom or not?’

‘We want it, I expect, up to a point. What is it he wants to buy?’

‘Nothing at the moment, thank you. But I’ve bought one of your sturdy and economical clipboards, and I’m writing down what you say about your disabled customers.’

‘Are you from a newspaper?’

‘No. Why? Do you only care about disadvantaged members of the public when a reporter takes an interest?’

‘Not at all,’ said the assistant, beginning to get angry at last. ‘When this young man wants to make purchase – which isn’t today, apparently – he can rely on our most devoted attention. Thank you!’

‘Thank
you
!’ barked Rebecca, grabbing the handle of the wheelchair and giving me rather a jolt as we set off to our next targeted business. ‘What a lackey! What a running dog! The sooner everyone like that gets stood up in front of a wall the better for the rest of us!’ She seemed to be in a high good humour, all the same, and looking forward to the next ideological scrap on my behalf.

As we went from place to place we started to vary our approach. Sometimes I would get up out of the wheelchair, with her help, and try to totter in to premises that resisted me with every blue line on
the architect’s plans. We got a lot more attention after Rebecca started to mention that she was writing a piece for
Broadsheet
. It wasn’t much of a lie – it was as hard in those days to get an article rejected by a student newspaper as a poem. If she had ever written such a thing up it would certainly have appeared.

I tried to get a look at Rebecca’s face whenever she was in my line of sight, which was usually at times when she was using me as a reproach to a heartless world of business. I had decided that my first interpretation of her facial redness (the demon drink) had been prejudiced and wrong. Some redheads do have rather brickish complexions, of course, but I was working on a different theory. My diagnostic nose twitched and my pencil burned to label a vial of pillules.

After a few more skirmishes with lackeys and running dogs I was beginning to get hungry. I wondered which restaurant or café we were going to patronise and upbraid. It seemed fairer, somehow, to be pointing out the defects of establishments we actually wanted to attend, though embarrassment would run much higher in a place that offered atmosphere as much as food and drink.

There was also a budgetary element involved. We couldn’t afford the Blue Boar. In fact we settled for the Corner House on King Street. Rebecca seemed much less committed to the struggle than she had been in the shops that morning, which was partly explained when she said that there was nothing on the menu she could eat, since she was a vegan.

‘Oh, I’m a vegetarian too,’ I said, ‘but I’m sure we can find something.’ I had misheard her, and now she misheard me in her turn.

‘You’re really a vegan?’ she asked. ‘I thought I was the only one in Cambridge. I’m certainly the only one in Newnham.’

‘Really? There are three of us in Downing, and I thought that was a pretty feeble showing!’ Then the word she had used finally sank in. ‘Hold on – what was it you said? You’re a vegan? What’s that?’

‘I thought you said that’s what you were!’

‘I’m a vegetarian. What’s a vegan?’

‘A vegan is a vegetarian with a bit of backbone. Sorry, that’s what
my parents say but it’s true, isn’t it? Good luck being high and mighty about your lifestyle when you keep cows and hens as your slaves.’

I’d never thought about it in quite those terms, and it was a novel sensation having the ethical rug pulled from under me, when I had become spoiled by the feel of those cashmere tufts of ideology between my toes. Rebecca abandoned the disabled-access project for the time being, sitting me down to instruct me in living without cruelty instead. She took only a contemptuous glance at the menu, which was laminated and greasy. Even licking the menu at the Corner House could make you complicit in what she explained was called zooicide, the killing of living things.

‘Vegetarians are really fifth columnists, aren’t they? They commit zooicide just as much as the outright flesh-munchers. Where do you think the milk you drink comes from? Do you think the cows had no other plans for it? That they sent their calves away to school, perhaps, and had a surplus? Wake up! And how about cheese? Don’t you know what rennet is? It’s used to coagulate cheese, and it comes from a calf’s stomach! Isn’t that disgusting? Calves don’t give it away out of charity, they only want to use it to digest their own food, but then they’re killed and the lining is scraped out of their stomachs.
S-c-r-a-p-e-d
out. And all so that you can order a cheese omelette and feel pure. Slavery and slaughter on a single plate! Meaning no offence.’

‘Taking none,’ I said, through gritted teeth. I had indeed been about to plump for the cheese omelette. It was as if she could read my hungry mind. Admittedly the rennet question had bothered me from the moment I had heard about it. In those days vegetarian cheese seemed a purely theoretical possibility, like the eternal light-bulb and the razor blade that never lost its edge, neither of which big business would let us buy. I couldn’t find it in shops and I couldn’t expect even the most punctilious college kitchen to track it down.

Rebecca explained that her parents had been ‘almost’ founder-members of the Vegan Society, certainly among the first hundred to sign up. Her parents were Welsh speakers who had met, classically enough, at an eisteddfod. She herself had been brought up avoiding dairy produce as well as meat. Her body was uncontaminated with the pain of other species. In that respect she was like the hero of Roald Dahl’s story ‘Pig’, except of course that he ends up hanging from a
hook on a conveyor belt in an abattoir with his throat slit open. I hope I haven’t spoiled the story for you.

The moment she mentioned her parents, Rebecca’s voice started to betray the Celtic lilt for ever associated with Dylan Thomas. Perhaps it was true that she had avoided all dairy products from birth, but she hadn’t altogether been able to steer clear of
Under Milk Wood
.

I had to ask Rebecca to attract a waitress’s attention so that I could order my fifth columnist’s lunch, my feast of indirect animal suffering. The waitress was trying so hard to treat me like everyone else, not staring or anything, that I could have set fire to my hair and she wouldn’t have looked my way, telling herself it was all part of my unfortunate condition. ‘Plain omelette, chips and salad, please,’ I said, my voice a chastened whisper. I was still abusing the chicken, but cow and calf had a provisional reprieve.

Part of me, the part that loved rigour and clarity, found this new doctrine of eating very appealing. What a shock it would give Mum and Flanny if I returned to Bourne End saying No to a whole new range of foods! What consternation in the kitchen and the surgery. At the same time I had to acknowledge that as a vegan child in the bed-rest years, refusing to embark on Mum’s scrambled-egg boats, I would simply have faded away, my precious Christmas-present watch dangling loosely from my shrivelled wrist.

Perhaps I would stay where I was in the pecking order of eating after all, dismissed by one camp as a faddist and by the other as a gutless fellow-traveller of slaughter.

When my omelette arrived, Rebecca graciously consented to share my salad. She even helped herself to a few chips, after sniffing one to assure herself that it hadn’t been fried in an animal fat. Her nose could infallibly settle that question. After the main course she produced something she described as a carob bar from her pocket, some innocent treat which she understandably didn’t offer to share. I asked her the Latin name, which she didn’t know. That was a relief (it’s
Cerato
nia siliqua
, for the record). I was feeling oddly competitive.

I had expected to discuss Rebecca’s symptoms over the lunch table. Did the red patches on her face itch or perhaps throb? Were they hot or cold, even numb? Did the sensations vary with the time of day? Each answer would narrow down the possible diagnosis until a remedy
was found, as in a classic detective story – except that there would be no need to finger a culprit or even name the crime. I wouldn’t have to use the (admittedly pretty) word ‘Rosacea’.

M. L. Tyler in
Homœopathic
Drug Pictures
uses a lovely quotation from Robert Louis Stevenson to explain the method: ‘I only saw the things you did / But always you yourself you hid.’ Seeing the symptoms is plenty, as long as you see them clearly enough, and learn to make the crucial distinctions between apparent similarities. Colonel Mustard in the Library is given the relevant pillule, dusted off and helped to his feet. It’s not a dramatic story, granted, but something much more worthwhile, a happy ending. All friends again.

Rebecca addressed herself to the carob bar as if she was eating a shaft of sweetened sunlight. Was she more self-righteous than me? Not necessarily. Was she making a better job of it? Definitely.

I went on the offensive in a slightly indirect way. ‘Rebecca isn’t a very Welsh name, is it?’ She seemed very pleased with the question. ‘If you mean it sounds Jewish, then perhaps you’re referring to the theory that the Welsh are the lost twelfth tribe of Israel.’

Are they, by Jove!

I couldn’t begin to explain why I was so preöccupied with her ethnic identity. If it turned out that she put on a pointy hat between lectures and used her spinning-wheel to make the strings for harps why should I care?

‘In any case I’m not sure you know what you’re talking about. Rebecca and her daughters are important figures in Welsh history. They rioted against the English oppressor in the 1840s. They burned down toll-houses and terrorised the gate-keepers.’

‘And what did the men do while the women ran wild?’

She looked at me rather pityingly. ‘It was the men doing the rioting.’

‘But I thought you said …’

‘“Rebecca and her daughters” were men. They wore bonnets and petticoats over their working clothes. They took their name from Genesis – something about “possessing the gates of those which hate them”. Farmers taking cattle to a nearby market town might have to
pay six tolls. It was a group identity. They were all “Rebecca”. Have you seen
Spartacus
?’

‘No.’

‘Never mind, then.’

‘And did the brutal Establishment crack down as it always does?’

‘Not really. A commission was set up which was more sympathetic to local people and established County Roads Boards instead.’

‘Power to the people,’ I said hopefully, but I think Rebecca had realised that my political consciousness didn’t run either broad or deep.

Her carob bar was more or less Rebecca’s lunch, while if I was still hungry I could always order (for instance) an ice cream – even if it was little better in the moral scheme of things than a candied pig’s trotter, or a bunch of South African grapes visibly dripping with the blood of the oppressed.

Rebecca’s exposition of dietary virtue had distracted us from the main thrust of our Saturday, but in the afternoon we got back into our stride. In fact we made so much of a splash at Joshua Taylor, Cambridge’s poshest department store (universally known as Josh Tosh), that we came rather unstuck. By now our approach had become very slick. Perhaps our lunchtime conversation had put Rebecca back in touch with the preaching intonations of her forebears (though there must be a few Welsh folk without the pulpit in their veins). Meanwhile I had acquired the knack of helplessness – and it’s definitely a knack, whatever anyone tells you. It was only in the afternoon that I got the hang of it. It felt like filling my nappies on principle, long after I’d mastered potty-training. I just looked around as if I’d never seen a door before, as if I’d been protected from the harsh truths of the entrance-way.

Meanwhile Rebecca’s journalistic credentials had escalated from
Broadsheet
by way of
Varsity
to the
Cambridge Evening News
. As she helped me ostentatiously into the trendy-young-man section of the shop, which had a dandyish name all its own – ‘The Peacock’, the shop’s bold response to the vibrant and trendsetting ‘Way In’ men’s department of Harrods – we caused consternation. I don’t think it was because there was nothing in the shop I could conceivably wear, bar a few scarves. Perhaps word had gone round the retailers of Cambridge
city centre that a man in a wheelchair and a reporter were asking embarrassing questions.

We didn’t look like what we were, ill-assorted acquaintances enjoying an odd sort of day out under the umbrella of idealistic agitation. We looked like the advance party of a journalistic exposé, preparing the ground for the camera crew. We caused alarm, but it wasn’t too late. We could still be bought off.