Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

I could hear the gurgling of Alan’s stomach, as a digestion at the peak of its young powers smoothly converted pasta salad into radiant heat and the faculty of embracing. ‘Just to let you know where I stand,’ he told me. ‘I have a strong aversion to queers and their ways. I shouldn’t be prejudiced, but there it is. Any sort of poovery gives me the creeps. At least I’m honest about it.’

He told me he’d been briefly involved with an organisation called the Monarchist League, whose members were strongly in favour of the monarchy, obviously, but not the monarchy we actually had. They believed the Queen was an impostor of some sort. He had been to one of their dinners in a house in Trumpington. At the end of the meal, after elaborate toasts to the rightful royal family, he had seen a man put his hand between another man’s legs. He took the only proper action available and fled the premises, quite fast I imagine since his legs were long.

I wanted to wriggle up and be close to Alan’s face, and also to wriggle downwards and be aligned with his crotch. I couldn’t do both, so I made my choice. I chose down. Belatedly Alan detected the erotic vibration in what we were doing. ‘Now John,’ he said, ‘I must remind you that if I thought for one solitary second there was anything sexy for you in this, I’d be out of here like a shot!’

I’m fine about being sly, but flat dishonesty isn’t really in my nature, so I said, ‘Then I am very sorry, Alan. I have to confess that you’re making me as randified as anything.’ I resigned myself to the interruption of this delightful adventure, pushing myself against him one last time.

Strangely, though, just when I had come clean he started to make excuses for me. ‘Yes, well, John, you should understand that you are a person who D. H. Lawrence would say is very “alive in the groins”. It’s nothing to worry about, nothing to worry about at all … Greatly to your credit, in fact. Human beings are only animals, when you get right down to it.’

I blessed the holy name of David Herbert Lawrence, about whom I had mixed feelings. On the one hand I adored Women in Love , particularly the wrestling scene by the fireside — unclothed apotheosis of the tender grappling I had dreamed of in my sickbed and coveted as a Burnham schoolboy. This very encounter on institutional carpet was the closest I could ever hope to come to recreating it. I had taken an oath not to see the film, because I wanted to imagine the faces of my choice on the bodies of Gerald and Birkin. Some things are sacred, and I wouldn’t let Ken Russell wrestle me away from the casting couch of my fantasies.

It was Lady Chatterley’s Lover I shied away from. Somehow I didn’t think Lawrence’s plan, when he put Lady C’s husband in a wheelchair, was to indicate that he was alive in the groins.

Alan kept faith with our Buddhist experiment until he started to get pins and needles, and that was as close as I got to Alan on the physical plane. It turned out that a little grounding went a long way.

The consolation prize for me was news of this amazing club called the Monarchist League. I had no interest in the royalist aspect either way. For me the hand between the legs was the good bit. Surely it must be the core value of the organisation? I didn’t dare to ask any more questions, but I became obsessed with the idea that hands were being thrust between legs only a couple of miles away. Once I even drove the Mini out to Trumpington and pestered innocent pedestrians, saying, ‘Ex cuse me! Could you possibly direct me to Headquarters of the Monarchist League?’ Nobody knew, or they were all in on it and weren’t accepting new recruits.

The friendship didn’t exactly fizzle out, in fact it flourished in its own way, but I have to own up to a little disappointment. Perhaps it was simply that the polarity of the discipleship had switched, now that the enlightenment was flowing all the other way, and Alan was delving into homœopathy with a diligence I couldn’t match.

I didn’t consciously take credit for inspiring him, any more than I would have congratulated myself, after introducing bacillus culture into milk of the correct temperature, on having invented yoghurt, but isn’t that always the way? The cry goes up of ‘The ego is dead!’, but when you look around it is the ego which has shouted the words, and is even now measuring itself for coronation robes. Perhaps there was pique at the way my small expertise had been superseded. I had yet to learn the deep spiritual significance of disappointment.

I felt sadness at the defeat which was thrown into relief by this small triumph. The real discipleship was my relationship with my guru, and however exciting and revelatory I managed to make my reminiscences of India, I knew that some longed-for process of kindling, of catching fire at last, had not in fact taken place despite my conviction of flammability. The quest and its goal seemed further away than ever.

I almost longed to be proselytised by those of other religions, so that I could have my convictions honed by the abrasion of alien creeds. In fact I didn’t suffer unduly from the attentions of the God Squad — it was as if I had been inoculated by that clumsy first approach from the apostle Colin. Others weren’t so lucky. One lovely gentle student called Chris Charnock, reading English, who had religious feelings that weren’t fully formed, felt so persecuted by the evangelical wing of the university that he had a sort of nervous breakdown. I didn’t know him very well, but we had enjoyed some vague spiritual chats, and he had lent me his copy of Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy . Now he couldn’t stop weeping and had to be sent home. He didn’t come back the next term. I felt sorry to lose an ally, someone with whom in time I might have shared my own feelings of falsity and strain, but I was glad for him that he was away from what had been for him a place of torment. Nothing could have been more damaging to this shy mystic, feeling his way towards his inklings, than to be lectured on hell and its fires.

Downing had a chaplain, but I had little contact with him. He was very tactile, and I don’t mean anything sinister by that. It’s just he was very keen on the hugs and pats, which I don’t find it easy to discourage (there’s never an electric fence around when you need one), and on one occasion he took a small liberty. He ran his hand over my starveling and lop-sided beard, saying with a twinkle, ‘John Cromer, you’re only half a man, aren’t you?’, which I found rather wounding. I should have stood up for my peculiarity and my faith both, by saying, ‘I take that as a compliment, chaplain. Ardhanishvara is Lord Shiva represented as half man and half woman. It’s your loss that callow Christianity has no time for such subtleties of incarnation. The interest is all in the half-tones.’

Nelson never ordered pizza

Sometimes I missed the evening meal in Hall and went out to eat with a group. The favoured destination was a cheap place called the Eros on Petty Cury. One reason for the low prices was that it occupied relatively undesirable premises on the first floor, which necessitated much human machinery to get me upstairs and downstairs again at the end of the meal. The descent was frightening since cheap wine was likely to have boosted the confidence of my porters at the expense of their coördination. The staple dish was moussaka (can it really have cost only six shillings, thirty new pee as we practised saying?), but the Eros also offered a ‘Florentine’ pizza, topped with spinach and a rather sinister, glistening fried egg.

That wasn’t the reason, though, for my never ordering it. I have nothing against pizza beyond the fact of its being unitary. Admiral Nelson never ordered pizza either, and the reason is obvious. Two good arms are required to dismantle the savoury disc. Of course Nelson had Emma Hamilton, but for once she was no substitute. There’s no getting around it — having your food cut up for you beyond the age of five is bearable only in surroundings of relaxed intimacy, and not always then. A plate of pasta, on the other hand, by the generosity of its composite nature, offers tendrils to the questing fork. Even to the fork that twirls ineptly in slow motion.