Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

Family trigonometry

I suppose Mum’s ultimate priority, if she had been able to formulate it, would have been to set me against Granny. Granny meant money, though she also meant somehow being above money, and Mum had conflicting feelings on these important topics. Her ideal solution would be to set me against Granny at a mathematically precise angle: just enough to send the message that we couldn’t be bought, but not enough for us actually to be written out of The Will. There was some vengeful family trigonometry Mum would have liked to get exactly right, but she wasn’t quite confident enough to make the shot.

In the meantime she was short of allies, and the best one would certainly have been Dad — if she hadn’t been running her own campaign against him. She kept on asking me which of them I loved more. I didn’t know the word ‘comparison’, and hadn’t yet picked up the skill of refusing to answer a question. The best I could do was to say, an orange is a norange (I loved ‘noranges’, the word more than the fruit) and an apple is a napple. The rules that govern ‘a’ and ‘an’ were easy to learn — I picked them up from Granny. Oranges used to be noranges, apples used to be napples, until the ‘n’ popped across the gap and never came back.

Oranges were oranges and apples were apples, and how could you say which was better? Better didn’t come into it. I loved Mummy with all my heart and I loved Daddy with all my heart, and when I said ‘Mum’ or ‘Mummy’ I always inwardly intoned, ‘The best Mummy in the world.’ Wasn’t that enough for her?

It was not. She wanted a definite answer, one way or the other. Day after day she worked on me. I was to take sides. There must be schism. She said I should think it over, and not forget all the things she had done, the things she was still doing for me. Dad was away most of the time — I should remember that when I gave my answer. Then she would leave my bedroom with her head held high, leaving me to sadness and guilt. I was not to be allowed to love in peace.

Later Mum would make an entrance and come over to ‘hug’ me, being careful to let me feel mostly her aura rather than her body. She would have put on fresh scent while she was out of the room. I loved Intimate , which Dad had been trained to buy her for birthdays, not anticipating that it would be used as an instrument of brain-washing against him. I would reel from the beauty of the smell. Then while she had me spellbound she would drip the words ‘Who do you really love most, me or Daddy?’ into my ears and I’d rouse myself out of my trance to say, ‘The same!’

For a while she would go easy on me, till it almost seemed that I had got away with my crime of being equally attached to both parents. Then she went back onto the attack. Finally one day, when she came over to hug me, I caved in. I did what she wanted. I whispered into her ear that I loved her more than Daddy. She was my darling. At the same time I sent off a prayer, begging forgiveness for telling what I was almost positive was a lie.

Perhaps it was as a reward for my knuckling under that Mum came up with a new sort of treat. To be fair, she and Dr Duckett were always putting their heads together to come up with some form of entertainment that would somehow fall within the proper bounds, warming the brain without heating the heart. Being in charge of a telephonic grocery order was no longer the privilege it had been.

‘I Spy’ had lost its charm, and our games were becoming more sophisticated. The family re-jigged Grandmother’s Footsteps to suit me — I would hold a hand-mirror up, a little one from Mum’s handbag, instead of physically turning round. I always had to be Grandmother, of course, there was no taking of turns. In the family version, it wasn’t at all easy for anyone to get within reach of the bed (to give me the lightest possible tap), even after Gipsy had been sent out of the room. She had to go, otherwise she would bark. There was something about the heightened atmosphere of the game which set her off.

The only way for me to lose was by consent. I would relax my vigilance just long enough to be tagged, otherwise I was invulnerable. That may have been the whole virtue of the game, that it humoured me by giving me some experience of humouring others, while Gipsy softly scrabbled at the door to be brought in from the long seconds of exile.

Pelted with woven snakes

A more exciting game, with a definite element of transgression, involved one of Dad’s treasured accessories, the Brummell Tie Press. It could only be played while he was away and Mum out of the room. Peter would fetch the Brummell Tie Press from Dad’s dressing table. It was a box of dark-toned Bakelite resembling a small radio, except that it had an opening on the sloping front panel and a single large knob on one side. You turned (or rather Peter turned) the knob and carefully fed a tie into the interior, where it was wound round a central drum and kept free of creases. When you wanted to retrieve the tie, you pressed a lever on the front which released the spring. The tie was projected out of the opening with great force and a loud whirring. Properly aimed, it could cross the room.

I wasn’t able to do the winding, but Peter scrupulously gave me turns at the exciting part, the dramatic discharge of Dad’s formal neckwear. Illness hadn’t deprived me of seniority, only the means of enforcing it. Peter never challenged my status. He would aim the loaded Brummell, and all I had to do was release the catch. If we aimed the tie towards Gipsy, she would bark madly at the noise and the fright of being pelted with woven snakes, and then the game acquired a hectic second phase. Peter must dash out of the room with the tie press, and return it to its place on the dressing table before Mum came to investigate.

Windfall panorama

One morning Mum asked, out of the blue, ‘John, how would you like to go with Dr Duckett on his rounds?’ Any child would be thrilled by such an offer, surely, let alone one who had been living in horizontal exile. I was all agog. Between them, Mum and Dr Duckett padded the front seat of the car for my benefit, and Dr Duckett drove very slowly. Gipsy rode in the back seat. I didn’t mind about the slow speed, though. ‘I’ve never been in a car before,’ I told Dr Duckett, and he smiled at me, though it can’t quite have been true. I didn’t walk all the way to Manor Hospital to have my bones scraped, did I?

I liked being close to Dr Duckett, who was sort of a dad away from Dad, though he was much more likely to touch me. I was disappointed, though, that when Dr Duckett actually arrived at a patient’s house I was left in the car. I’d thought that I would be involved in the consultations. Not that I would be giving advice or choosing medicines, but at least I’d be able to frown and nod my head in unison with the doctor, as I had been so plentifully nodded and frowned over in my time. I wouldn’t talk about what was wrong with people. I could keep secrets.

I took advantage of my novel surroundings for the rest of the trip by playing ‘I Spy’ with the doctor. B is for Bus, P is for Puddle. I was growing too old for the game, really, but it would have been mad to waste this windfall panorama.

There were things I would have liked to ask Dr Duckett, things I couldn’t talk about to Mum or Dad. I had been thinking about the unchanging ‘I’ burning deep within. The body went through states of pain and ease, of nice and nasty, well and sick and sicker still, but the ‘I’ didn’t change. It was like a brown candle, or like the bulb of my sailing-boat night-light showing through the deckled parchment sails. By ‘brown’ I mean the colour you get when you close your eyes and take in the light that filters through the lids. I understood that I would still be John if I lost a finger, but did that mean I would still be ‘I’ if I lost my whole body? Yet I must have sensed that this was not truly a medical question, because I never actually raised it with dear Dr Duckett.