Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

The extension to the house must also have been funded by Granny, though I don’t know how it was negotiated. Extensions don’t grow on Trees, and I should have realised that the family exchequer was being topped up. Granny still kept her distance, but Mum must have hated the being beholden.

Money has a way of estranging even as it reconciles, which of course was one of the things that Granny liked about it.

The conversation about Roy and Caroline marked a further phase of warming in family relations. The Cold War was almost over. Granny and Mum were united at last by their compulsion to meddle.

Granny took to staying the odd weekend at an Otel on the riverside not far off, a rather grand one in fact, the Compleat Angler at Marlow. Rooms there could easily cost ten pounds a night. It was one of her favourite quips to say that Cockneys should be encouraged to run Otels, ‘since they can at least pronounce the word properly, unlike so many people these days’. I was keen for Granny to come and stay with us in the house, but there were limits to détente.

A summons to join Granny at the Compleat Angler would come for the whole family or, according to her mood, for Peter and me, or just one of us. These occasions were balanced on a knife-edge between treat and ordeal. A knife-edge, or a fork-point — since the use of cutlery turned out to be something of a mine-field.

Granny developed the habit, while staying at the Compleat Angler, of sending a taxi to pick up Peter and me for our meal at her expense. The taxi was expensive but not extravagant, since it served a double purpose. Quite apart from conveying her grandchildren the few miles required it delivered a satisfactory snub to Mum and Dad.

The first time Peter went there for a meal on his own, he ordered a prawn cocktail. He had only just conveyed the first spoonful safely into his mouth when Granny came out with her whiplash whisper: ‘ One uses a fork! ’ He came home from his evening with Granny more or less gibbering with etiquette trauma. Another time we were both there, and it was my turn to order the prawn cocktail. I did my ankylosed best with a fork. This time Granny seemed almost puzzled, saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be easier with a spoon? The rules don’t apply to you, John. You may eat it in any way you please.’ I had noticed, though, that my exemption from rules was a precarious dispensation. It was best not to rely on it.

Granny always ordered the same way, and usually the same thing. ‘I’m going to plump for the lamb and mint sauce,’ she would say. ‘What would you like, boys?’ Granny always ‘plumped’ for things. I would usually plump for an omelette. Peter plumped for steak.

In fact Granny didn’t have much of an appetite. When the main course arrived, she would say, ‘You boys carry on. All Granny does is make a little road right through the middle.’ She did exactly that, while Peter stuffed himself. I didn’t do badly either, in my weight class. After she had made her little road across the plate, Granny would put her knife and fork down and say, ‘Well, I’m defeated .’

Granny gave Peter a little lecture on what to look for in a good restaurant like the one at the Compleat Angler. She told him to watch the waiters, to see how their job should really be done. ‘It’s not just a matter of serving from the right and taking away from the left, though that’s part of it. It’s an attitude, an attentiveness, which holds lessons for everyone. It should never be difficult to catch a waiter’s eye.’

Granny waited until every last waiter had his back turned, dealing with other diners, and then murmured, ‘Excuse me!’ Immediately one of them appeared at her shoulder, leaning forward with a neutral readiness. ‘Would you be so kind as to bring me a fresh fork, please? This one has rather a mark.’ ‘Of course, Madam,’ he murmured, ‘right away.’

‘Do you see, boys?’ she said. ‘Some may say that being a waiter is a lowly career, but there’s nothing more important than seeing that people are properly fed. I myself ran a British Restaurant during the war, and it was no small thing to organise. Once I had my staff properly drilled — I had to make do with waitresses, of course — the whole mood of the place changed. It became a pleasure to be there, even if the food was basic at best. We created the right atmosphere, do you see?’

At the end of the meal Granny announced, ‘Peter, I think waiting would be a suitable job for you, in due course. I’ll look into it. The best waiters are of course foreign. It might be necessary for you to be trained abroad — Switzerland, perhaps, if not France itself.’

Peter managed to keep his feelings hidden until we were in the taxi on the way home. He despised waiters absolutely, hating in particular the way they walked. When we were home, he did an impression of a waiter’s walk, wiggling his bottom absurdly. How could Granny give so much as a penny to those waltzing ninnies, let alone tell him he should become one of them?

‘Don’t be too hasty, Peter,’ I said. ‘The old lady may be on to something.’ I was thinking of something quite different, about how nice waiters’ bottoms looked in their tight black trousers. Their short jackets could almost have been designed to draw attention to those bottoms, and I liked the fact that you were allowed to inspect them quite closely before you plumped for your omelette.

Granny never referred to the long absence of social contact. She didn’t seem actively happy to see us, but then that was never her style. Mum for her part had a sort of masochistic glow, as if a stone was back in her shoe that she had never really learned to do without.

Perhaps the attempt to make a match between Roy and Caroline was just an excuse for something that would have happened anyway, but I remember meals at the Complete Angler where strategy was discussed. Dad had no interest in the romantic plotting, and stayed away.

‘We must be very careful how we handle this, Laura,’ said Granny. ‘I rather think it will be like stalking wildlife in Africa. We should keep ourselves well and truly down-wind of Roy and, for that matter, Caroline as well.’ It simply wouldn’t do to clash batch and spinst together like a pair of cymbals.

Damp powder

Despite the subtle seethe of planning behind the scenes, nothing much came of the cruise. Caroline had followed her mother under the surgeon’s knife, and was now by all accounts much less top-heavy. She wasn’t fully used to her new centre of gravity, all the same, and part of the idea behind the cruise was that dancing on a boat made everyone’s movements reassuringly clumsy. She would be able to take to the floor without embarrassment. I think that was how the whole curious business was explained to me.

Anyway, it didn’t work. Either romance fizzled out early or the powder was damp from the beginning. Granny had listed the subjects in which Roy took particular interest, and Mum had passed them on to Muzzie. Caroline had lightly read up on them, being careful not to show undue independence of mind, but even so Roy was not to be taken out of himself. As Caroline reported to her mother, who passed the news on to Mum, ‘It was all jolly hard work, and Roy was strange. He was always polite and courteous to me, but his attention always seemed to be on … another man.’ Mum left the insinuating three dots intact when she passed this information on to me. I think it must have been a marginally censored version which reached Granny. I can’t see Mum retaining that punctuational innuendo.

I was slow to connect Granny’s reappearance with the fact that Dad had resigned from the Air Force. Wing Commander Cromer came back down to earth, with something of a bump. It was no small thing, as he discovered, to be looking for a job at forty-plus. He held onto his rank, of course, but it was a rather different thing to be a Wing-Co at an altitude of zero feet. There was no reason given for this drastic change of life. I doubt if I even asked. The reasons grown-ups gave for things never made sense to me anyway. Mum didn’t say in so many words that she put pressure on him. All she said was that a family needed a father. He couldn’t expect to go on a foreign posting and then walk in whenever he felt like it for a hero’s welcome.