Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

She came back, frowning, to the window side of the room. ‘Well …’ was all she could manage to say.

‘Once you have eliminated the all-too-likely, Mrs Beddoes,’ I said, triumphantly indicating the unprepossessing flower, ‘whatever remains, however preposterous, must be the truth. May I present Sauromatum guttatum , also known as the Voodoo Lily? Voodoo Lily, Mrs Beddoes, Mrs Beddoes, Voodoo Lily. This flower is responsible for the sinister smell, the smell like a neglected jakes.’

I could have added that the Voodoo Lily is also known as Sauromatum venosum, Typhonium venosum , and Arum cornutum , but not everyone finds Latin names easy to understand and remember, so I kept things simple.

Mrs Beddoes’ face went entirely empty, blank as a doll’s must be before the paint is applied. She just stood there. It was very disconcerting. It was as if she had entirely forgotten who she was — a potential breakthrough during meditation, since personality must dissolve before the self can be manifested, but downright disconcerting in a college room reeking like a urinal.

Flames of laughter and relief

I started to lose confidence in my joke. ‘It flowers very briefly, Mrs Beddoes. It’ll be gone by tomorrow.’ It was as if she was having some sort of fit, a hidden convulsion which prevented her from taking in a word I was saying. Nervously I took my explanation down a few levels of complexity. ‘No more stink — everything sweet.’ Then the blank look she wore suddenly went away. Her face was no longer vacant premises but a full house. It was standing room only, and the whole crowd screaming with laughter.

With the release of tension she wept hysterical tears. She had to sit down to get her breath. She made several attempts to speak, saying, ‘I never … I never …’, before she was able to go on with her sentence. ‘I never … in all my years at Downing, in all my puff … I never heard of such a thing.’ Her nervousness went up in flames of laughter and relief. The conflagration was almost alarming. She wasn’t producing tears enough to put it out.

Finally she got her breath back. ‘But if you’re thinking of playing any more tricks like that, then you’d better be careful. My health won’t stand it. It’s a good job it’s Alf who has the heart problem and not me. If it had been me … then what the consequences might have been … well, I wouldn’t like to say, Mr Crow-maire. I might have slipped away, and you without a phone in your room to call for help.’

‘I would have screamed, Mrs Beddoes,’ I told her. ‘I can make quite a noise when I have to.’

By taking liberties with her which she might easily have resented I had made her my friend. Charm could get me only so far, but now cheekiness had worked a magic of its own. I felt the release of tension too. I had dared to make a joke about something which had once been a baleful part of my history, bedwetting, and now I was free of the fear as well as the habit.

After that everything went smoothly between me and Mrs Beddoes. Nothing was too much trouble. Now it was official. The little yellow-haired squirrel eating out of my hand.

She started washing my hair, for one thing, though she didn’t exactly volunteer. I had to do some prompting before it occurred to her to make the offer. Day after day I left a bottle of shampoo out in a conspicuous place, so that she would have to move it to clean properly. Eventually the discrepancy between the constant presence of the shampoo and the actual greasiness of my locks became impossible to ignore, and she said, ‘Mr Cromer, I was wondering … would you mind if I had a bash at washing your hair? No offence, but it could do with a wash. Not in the bathroom, mind — I could do it here, wrap a towel round you and use a bowl …’

And I said, ‘Well …’ rather grudgingly, as if I would try to put up with her fussing round me. Anything for a quiet life.

After that, she would even cut my hair, just ‘tidying it up’, which was all that I would have wanted anyway. So the Voodoo Lily was anything but an ill wind from my point of view. It blew me no end of good. Mrs Beddoes would cut my fingernails for me and even squeeze unreachable pimples on my nose or forehead. This was a service which Mum rendered with a certain amount of cooing and scolding and chafing, saying, ‘You’re probably not getting enough chlorophyll in your diet’ or ‘Have you tried rubbing in half a fresh lemon?’, but it was far too intimate to be mentioned when it was performed on an undergraduate by his bedmaker. It suited us both to pretend it wasn’t happening.

Once in a while Mrs Beddoes would take a piece of my clothing home with her and wash it herself, but it was always clear between us that this was a personal favour and no part of the duties she performed for the college. It was between ourselves.

The flower of Sauromatum guttatum only lasts for the one day, and Whiffy Barry missed the show. He came along the following day, and together we examined the shrivelled and entirely odourless stem, which offered no insight into how the mechanism of the terrible smell might actually operate. That was my real interest in the Lily, to get hard evidence for Mr Mole at CRX, porter and self-appointed gardening expert, being wrong all those years ago. Mr Menage and Gardening for Adventure had sided with me in classifying S. guttatum as non-carnivorous, but I wanted proof, and Barry as an expert witness.

I had contradictory expectations of my fellow members of the student body. Colin the evangelical engineer wanted to get a firmer grip on his own soul by gathering mine in, and Noel the film-going chancer only wanted to pose and preen. Barry was the only one of the bunch who didn’t even pretend to take an interest in me personally, and he was the only one I welcomed in.

I would invite people back to my room after lunch, bribing them with better coffee than the college provided and making sure (less defensibly) that I always had cigarettes on hand. Only my neighbour P. D. Hughes ever replaced my supply, but I didn’t mind being exploited. At this point what I seemed to need was a definite idea of what my guests got out of my hospitality. What I wanted from them was less definite, in fact I can own up and say that it’s a complete mystery to me now. The room was far too small for ambitious entertaining, but I liked it when people were wedged in anywhere they would fit and the ceiling swirled with smoke.

Once a guest of mine brought me a present — a lava lamp. Admittedly it was defective and a cast-off, something that had been returned to Joshua Taylor and replaced. That swanky emporium had no use for the faulty product, and so it came to me. It was prematurely aged, so that it no longer quite had the effect desired, of distended yolks of wax rising and falling through excited oil. In my lava lamp the wax was tired and unresponsive, circulating in globules and clots, weary melting streamers. You’re not supposed to leave lava lamps on for extended periods, but I didn’t have a lot of choice — the power point not being accessible to me. Friends would drop round for coffee and turn it on for their amusement, and then it would stay on till the next morning, when I’d ask Mrs Beddoes to turn it off. It’s bad for lava lamps to be left on for so long, but what could I do? It was broken already, and I became accustomed to its sour ozone smell.

Pete had started to get weekend visits from his old girlfriend, Helen. She was from his home town (Birmingham) and they had gone out together for quite a while, but then before he went up to Cambridge he told her that a clean break was best.

Now he wasn’t so sure. He felt defeated by the sheer weight of numbers, the odds against finding a student girlfriend, and he was too shy to meet girls from the town, or the nurses of Addenbrookes who were in a special category, supposedly nymphomaniacs without exception. One night, tipsy and self-pitying, he had written a letter to the girl he had dumped back home, repenting of his callousness.