Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

Mrs Beddoes must have dozed off in her armchair as instructed. She was snoring softly. I hoped that at least she had put her mug down.

Barry’s vocabulary became technical as he cut into the vegetable flesh. Most of the Latin terms eluded me. Still, I could see for myself that the entrance to the flower was like the opening to a cave. The inside was black and mysterious. The only way we could get a proper look was by cutting a cross-section. Once this was done, I could see that the entrance was lined with cells which were waxy in character and pointed only in one direction.

Voodoo Lily certainly gave the illusion of being carnivorous. She reminded me very much of my old friend the pitcher plant. There was also a series of jagged spikes just inside the cave entrance. Barry explained that this was the secret of the seeming ‘bad smell’. All it took was the swapping over of a single molecule. The spiky configuration presented the greatest possible surface area so as to maximise the efficiency of the process. As the original odour passed over these keys, the molecular exchange converted its perfume into the smell of carrion or stale urine, giving Mrs Beddoes every excuse for thinking that one of her ‘gentlemen’ was a bed-wetter.

Barry held S. guttatum up to my nose and gave it a gentle squeeze to diffuse the foul fragrance. For a few seconds there was perfect symmetry in Creation, with squeezes above and squeezes below. ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘Have a good sniff …’ He didn’t say, ‘Give me a good squeeze while you’re at it,’ but by that stage it could be taken as read.

I was as nauseated as ever by the stench of the flower but thrilled by the extra squeeze I was licensed to give with my left hand. ‘Now,’ he said, putting the bulb down again, ‘if I’m not very much mistaken…’ — deftly he cut away the spiky keys — ‘deep down this flower doesn’t have a bad smell at all. With the pheromone-exchange matrix out of the picture, I think you’ll find that the object of our study plays a different tune …’ He held it up again, squeeze upon squeeze. ‘Go on … inhale deeply. Take your time.’

This time my olfactory brain was flooded with heavenly scent, and all the richness that the word lily conveys. My head reeled and I experienced God, but my hand didn’t forget its lower business. Barry seemed entirely caught up with the respectable side of our scientific project, or perhaps he too had the knack of processing different streams of information separately.

Like a baker in a hurry

Mrs Beddoes began to stir from her rêverie. I could hear the soft thump of her mug being returned to the table. At last she came over to take a look, and this time I didn’t try to stop her. My cock dwindled back to an unembarrassing size, and Barry and I moved smoothly on to erudite botanical niceties.

‘So, Barry, to sum up — can you understand how a lay person might think of the flower as carnivorous?’ I asked, borrowing the manner of a television interviewer, as if I hadn’t been kneading his privates mere seconds before like a baker in a hurry. We played out the scene in full, jointly explaining the mystery to an amazed bed-maker.

‘Oh yes,’ he replied. ‘It’s an elementary mistake, but very understandable. The essential oil manufactured by the plant is sweet and alluring, but not to a fly. So the plant needs to use a trick to make the fly believe that there is rotting flesh nearby. As I told you, it’s a very simple molecular switch to make the conversion to this odour. The flower’s only interest is in getting itself pollinated. It just so happens that a trapped fly struggling to get out provides just the right amount of jiggling to attach the pollen. There are species native to Britain which use the same sort of technique — lords-and-ladies, for instance.’

‘That’s cuckoo-pint, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right. Arum maculatum . Just like this exotic beauty here, the flower isn’t equipped to eat the fly, but sometimes the fly dies of exhaustion before it can escape. If it just stayed where it was and bided its time, it could escape later on, once the flower had slackened its grip. But flies don’t think of that!’ In fact the whole procedure seems to be an evolutionary dead-end. Dead flies don’t pollinate — unless the system depends on a super-fly with greater endurance, which subsequently spreads the pollen further than its inferior siblings would have managed.

‘Well at least the fly died happy,’ mused Mrs Beddoes who had become thoroughly fascinated with the proceedings by this time.

‘Oh no, dear lady,’ Barry said sharply, in a way that was almost rude. ‘We humans may find the carrion smell disgusting, but it’s nectar to a fly. The fly imagines that it’s going to fulfil its own desire by following the “stink” — its drive to reproduce itself by laying its eggs. However, once past the matrix, the entrance, it finds there is nothing rotting there at all, only a sweet smell. And since the plant’s real perfume is not so nice for the fly, we could say rather that the fly died in Hell!’

This was quite enough for Mrs Beddoes in the way of botanical lecturing. She produced her duster from an apron pocket. If she had really done all her housework early, then this was a little piece of theatre. I’m not sure she ever did anything that would have qualified in Granny’s view as dusting. The worn yellow duster was as symbolic in its own way as a freemason’s trowel.

‘I mustn’t let the whole day run away from me, must I?’ she said, and took from another of her apron pockets an item much more central to her practice as a cleaner, an aerosol of air freshener. Her fondness for it was natural, considering that she cleaned the rooms of young men with hardly the faintest idea of how to maintain themselves. She gave the room a parting squirt with the aerosol, moving her arm in a large half-circle, then a series of loops in our direction, or towards the stench that had already been dissected out of existence. She was so generous with the volatilisation of industrial fragrance that she walked through a cloud of it on the way out, and set herself coughing. Perhaps the coughing prevented a strange thought from coming any further forward than the back of her mind: If I didn’t know better, I’d think Mr Crow-maire was giving the other chap a thorough squeeze of the privates …

It was only after she had gone, as Barry began to pack up his equipment, that we stopped being at ease with each other. Mrs Beddoes hadn’t been an impediment to the scene between us, as I had thought at first, but an essential ingredient in our tiny erotic drama, the spectator who didn’t see a thing. In those days my sexual imagination was at least as attuned to the creation of a tableau as to any actual intimacy.

Of course eroticism is only the Ego’s vain attempt to unite with the Self. The ego itself is a paradoxical amalgam of inert body and the true Self. The aim is admirable, but the ego gets it all wrong. Watching the ego try to wrestle reality into submission is like watching Laurel and Hardy move a piano. They’ll move it all right, but you won’t be able to get much of a tune out of it afterwards.

As for the scene with Barry, I didn’t regret that it had lacked an actual sexual climax. Release of that sort would have taken away from an excitement that remained infinite because it never toppled over into the reality that is all illusion and disappointment. It was a wave that never needed to break.

I might imagine in those days that I wanted openness of expression, closeness of rapport and meaningful glandular release. What I actually enjoyed was this sort of mixture, hiding and flaunting simultaneously, which was only a new twist on being invisible and incredibly conspicuous at the same time, my normal state.