Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

He helped me onto the bed and then undressed himself. He kept on his singlet and Y-fronts. He even looked doubtfully at his socks for a moment before taking them off. This disparity in our costumes didn’t seem promising, but who was I to know what was promising? Perhaps there was striptease to come.

My sexual experiences had been fleeting, though rich in their way, and they had rarely been connected with beds. I had spent too long trapped in one to expect to discover much novelty on that terrain. A bed was far less promising a venue for me than a music room, a dark lane or a nice public lavatory.

He turned the light off and climbed into bed, moving carefully to avoid squashing me. He had a faint nutty smell, which started to interest me all over again. In the dark my nose came alive and had a sniff of something it liked. Free of visual reality, I could idealise his features. My third eye took a good look round and my third leg flexed.

I wondered if we were about to have carnal congress, and if so how much I really wanted it to happen. My consent and refusal had become elusive even to me. This was all so entirely different from any script I had ever imagined. All those back roads and lanes I had driven down, looking for the person who would inflict his secrets on me!

Was it possible to be sought out in my own bed, and be shown the skeleton key to intimate behaviour there? The thing that can happen between people who lie down together, the shiver of what is possible.

Then it turned out that Noel had no such plans, or if he had ever had them they had been overtaken by sleep. Angst or no Angst, he was well away. There would be no tickling-too-deliciously pleasure for me that night, and my reason was safe from being derailed by a landslide of bliss. Every fifteen minutes the Catholic Clock with its defective mechanism ironically saluted the protraction of my virginity. Unless I had lost it to the Yeti. Though I have to say, going by my shreds of memory about our encounter, that the Abominable Snowman behaved like a perfect gentleman.

It was strange that I regarded myself as a virgin despite having been superbly fellated more than once by the depraved and accomplished Luke Squires at Vulcan. Somehow that didn’t seem to count.

Having someone sleeping so near to me was a novelty, even without the active sensuality of touch. Peter’s life had been warm in our bedroom at Trees, but Noel’s life was warm in my actual bed — yet I got little joy from his presence. At one point I became so overheated that I had to nudge the Dream-Cloud aside.

Unconsciousness dissolved any pact between us, in terms of my separate space, which he invaded. In sleep he was all bones and angles. Bones and angles and rapt little snores. A hot hand inched between my legs, but it was innocent of any impulse to grope.

In the night I needed a pee. I lay there wishing my bladder could sit tight for the whole night — life would be so much easier if it could. There was nothing to stop me from using the pee bottle as usual, except that it wasn’t in its usual place. In the flurry of going to bed in company, I hadn’t left it within reach, so I gave Noel quite a bolshie nudge. Since he was here by his own wish, he might as well be useful. He groaned as he woke and went like a sleepwalker to fetch the pee bottle.

The shock of rapport

Then I must have slept more heavily. When I awoke I was alone in the bed. Then I started to hear strange grunting from floor level. When I wriggled myself round I could see Noel doing photogenic little press-ups. He grinned at me when he caught me looking. ‘I made you a cup of tea,’ he said.

I took it for granted that Noel would be on his way as soon as he could. No such luck. He seemed annoyingly refreshed, and in a mood to be further entertained. He had exhausted his curiosity about me, but had apparently promised himself the treat of meeting my bedder.

His smile was on full disarming power from the moment Mrs Beddoes arrived. She’d barely had time to say, ‘Hello, and who are you?’ than he’d offered her a cup of coffee. My coffee, not actually a plentiful resource. Reluctantly I introduced them. From nowhere Mrs Beddoes produced something which she’d been keeping dark, a Christian name. ‘Jean Beddoes.’

Noel said, ‘John kindly let me stay last night after I had a fit of the heebie-jeebies from a film we saw. Have you ever had a fit of the heebie-jeebies from watching a film, Mrs Beddoes?’

She hardly hesitated. ‘There was one … what was it called? Gravestones, and a man pouncing on a boy. Staring eyes. I couldn’t sleep for weeks after that.’

Noel raised his hands in front of him and gave a theatrical shudder. He even closed his eyes. ‘ Magwitch! ’ he whispered, in reverent horror, and then they were away, fast friends already on the basis of Great Expectations . At that moment, peeking out at Mrs Beddoes from behind a finger fence of artificial surprise, he looked like a minor Dickensian character himself. Minutes later he was helping her to make the bed.

Since I slept wrapped up in a cloud of dreams there was actually no need to do any such thing, but Mrs Beddoes would not be deflected from her professional code. There was no question of slackening off even when rigour was nonsensical. So every day she would unmake the bed and remake it, tucking the coverlet in with brisk determined movements so there was no possibility of the pillow making a run for it. I had shown her once that this technique would have made it hard for me to get into bed, if I hadn’t preferred the Dream-Cloud. I had slid my stick in and then yanked sideways to open a usable gateway to the sheets, like Dad using his paperknife on a letter, to show her how preposterous she was being. She stuck to her principles.

In the shock of rapport with Noel her cheeks were now quite pink. Somehow they had got on to the subject of favourite pieces of music. Mrs Beddoes was saying, ‘It’s my husband who knows about things. Alf’s favourite piece is classical music, and I really like it too. It’s by Beethoven.’

‘Really, Mrs Beddoes? One of the symphonies?’ He thought for a moment. ‘Perhaps the Pastoral ? You may know it from Fantasia — the Disney film.’

‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘It’s not from a film.’ I was delighted that Noel’s patronising suggestion had fallen flat. ‘It’s called … it’s gone out of my mind. It’s called … that’s right, “Wellington’s Victory”. It’s on the same record as the “1812”, but it’s even better.’ She clapped her hands together on either side of the pillow, to plump it up, but almost as if she was playing the cymbals. ‘Even more cannons and whatnot!!’

Which made Noel’s day, perhaps even his term. I had hoped he would leave before Mrs Beddoes did, so I could be spared the inevitable sneer about her musical taste, but he stayed on to round off the lovely morning he was having. I didn’t know ‘Wellington’s Victory’, but it seemed strange that liking Beethoven could be such a faux pas . Wasn’t Beethoven supposed to be the tops?

It was perfectly possible that Mrs Beddoes knew more of Beethoven’s music than I did. Once you’d mentioned Moonlight, Für Elise and Da-da-da-Dum , you’d just about exhausted my expertise on the subject. I wasn’t in a position to call Noel’s bluff, but I wished someody would.

What he said when we were alone was, I suppose, quite a mild exercise in contempt. ‘Good for Madame Beddoes,’ he said. ‘If you’re tone-deaf and pig-ignorant, you might as well go for the piece with the loudest bangs.’

Watching the way Noel played along with innocent Mrs Beddoes, I realised that my social skills were very partial. I needed to develop new ones. All this time I had been thinking in terms of bringing people within the orbit of my personality, entirely overlooking the fact that they were always going to be people, like the blond germ working his ’fluence on Mrs Beddoes, who badly needed to be kept at a distance. Poor mobility meant poor avoiding skills, so I would need to add an annexe to my laboratory of personal accomplishments. It wasn’t enough to have charm, I needed antidotes to the charm of others. Countercharm. Even the Everest & Jennings hoist I had brought from Bourne End had a red control as well as a green one.