Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

The letter was from Dad. He took me to task about how much I had hurt Mum by my bad behaviour, Mum who had devoted her entire life to me. The phrase was doubly underlined. Of course that was the whole trouble, as Dad could see in more lucid moods — devotion (as she interpreted devotion) inflamed and corroded her character.

The lair he shared with her

Dad’s letter gave offence in its turn. He must have got out his ruler to make those double underlinings under ‘ her entire life ’. Truly I knew the depth of my disgrace when I saw that the full panoply of the family stationery was ranged against me: best notepaper, fountain pen and ruler — the bell, book and candle of the writing-desk. Another passage showed a complete refusal to accept reality: ‘I don’t know what you said to Audrey to get her to help you, but I hope you’re ashamed of yourself.’ Even he had seen there was something mysterious about Audrey’s participation, but he was temperamentally inclined to look for the working of sinister rather than radiant forces.

Worldly powers rule by consent, and I didn’t consent to these rulings. Nor did I take kindly to being told I should buck up my ideas and apologise to Mum, or else everything I had left behind would be ‘put in sequestration’. Dad seemed to savour the legal formula with a bailiff’s solemn gloating.

I showed the letter to Prissie. Her reaction was to send Malcolm round to Trees in the car, to beard Dad in his lair and ‘thrash things out’ with him man to man. Malcolm had instructions to demand the return of my possessions (that’s why he was to go by car, to carry off my reclaimed goods). I wasn’t at all keen on this line of approach, and Malcolm certainly flinched from the mission proposed for him. Eventually, though, he realised that bearding Dad in his lair presented fewer risks than thwarting Prissie in the lair he shared with her.

He came back with my things, seeming faintly stunned by the success of the project — and rightly so, since thrashing things out man to man is one of the least successful courses of action ever devised. Prissie seemed almost disappointed, though she rallied and teased Malcolm about his great bravery. He wouldn’t go into detail about the encounter, but said that Dad hadn’t made difficulties. He was reasonable in the end — and I don’t think divine intervention has to be dragged in for everything mildly surprising, only the epic departures from precedent.

It’s unlikely the guru was working overtime. Normal service had resumed. It was probably enough for Mum to be out at the shops, or at her sewing circle, for Dad to come to his senses and side against her, with almost anyone.

If she was at the sewing circle she wouldn’t be mentioning the recent traumas. She was in no hurry to join their troubled ranks, the parents whose children drank till they passed out, or went through handbags for money to buy drugs.

I was glad to have my books restored to me, but the bum-snorkel had been top of the list of my needs. Its return was particularly welcome. I hadn’t been looking forward to an extended period of bathroom wheedling in that house of wayward welcome.

I was fascinated by the workings of the Washbournes’ marriage. Prissie didn’t believe in giving Malcolm too many choices. In the matter of their children’s names, for instance, he had been given free rein, but within a very restricted area. It was Prissie who had selected the names Jocelyn and Alex for the twins, with her stubborn jokiness persisting at the most serious moments. It was up to him to attach these ambivalent tags to the children when they arrived (a boy and a girl, as it happened). The names were like strips of litmus paper which only turned pink or blue when touched to an actual child.

Malcolm never seemed to feel undermined or embarrassed by Prissie’s bossiness. I felt that this was a healthy marriage despite the lopsided distribution of power, much healthier than Mum’s and Dad’s, where the rôles were conventionally assigned but eaten away from inside. In practical terms Dad had no more assertiveness than Malcolm did, but he spent a lot more time and energy simulating the proper male behaviour.

I suppose Malcolm and I, kitted out in our disposable knickers, were Prissie’s babies that summer, in the absence of Joss and Al. In fact things worked out pretty well. She sent Malcolm on a second expedition to Trees, since some clothes and medication hadn’t found their way to my new address. This time his reception was distinctly frosty, since it was Mum who answered the door. She told him that family life had been quite tricky enough before he put his oar in. His ‘oar’ presumably being Prissie! It was a bit much to blame him for her actions, since she was so obviously an oar unto herself. Still, nothing was said about refusing me my things, nothing about sequestration or distraint of goods.

One morning the postman knocked on the door, not because he had a parcel to deliver but because he wanted to know why my car was parked outside, four doors from home. This sort of thing is the reason people want to live in small communities, until they do. Prissie said brightly that I was having a change of scene. A rest cure.

I wouldn’t put it past the postman to have knocked on the door of Trees for more information, which would have been a bad moment for Mum and no mistake. But what was I supposed to do — cover the Mini with turves and branches?

At first I tried to keep my distance from Prissie. My emotional distance, of course — there wasn’t much I could do to avoid her physically. Better the mother you know than the mother you don’t. I was afraid I would turn into her confidant willy-nilly, going from being a captive at Trees to being a captive audience at Heron’s Gate.

While she painted her toenails

In fact Prissie was a fairly undemanding companion. She read the romantic-historical novels of Georgette Heyer much of the time, so she didn’t pester me with conversation. Of her chosen author she would say, ‘Georgette Heyer really does write wonderfully well, and you can usually tell quite early on (not that I mind) if it’s one that you’ve read before …’ She really enjoyed buying a more serious novel, something by William Golding or Margaret Drabble, and then going right on reading Georgette Heyer instead. Playing truant from a real engagement with life, like someone keeping an important visitor waiting while she painted her toenails.

You could often catch her looking with simple pleasure at her own pink feet. I say you could catch her at it, but there was nothing furtive about her appreciation of herself. If she became conscious of my gaze she would meet it, with a further flowering of her smile. She would lean her head back and stroke her own plump throat in the same admiring spirit. This was all rather disconcerting — we’re all so used to people who are on bad terms with their bodies that anything else comes to seem slightly mad. Of course the body is unreal, but you really sit up and take notice when someone wears it well.

Prissie told me about a famous flight of fancy — that Heaven would be like eating foie gras to the sound of trumpets. Her own equivalent of this, she said, was reading Georgette Heyer to the sound of the Jacques Loussier Trio playing Bach. It wasn’t extravagant. Those who couldn’t afford her modest Heaven could easily order its ingredients from the local library.

The weather was fine, and she’d often take me out into the garden with her. That was a little odd, being so like the garden at Trees and so very unlike it. I’d be trying to meditate, or perhaps simply dozing, and I’d hear scraps of conversation that might have been Mum and Audrey in the garden of Trees, and echoes of ‘Starman’ (now charged with purely human meanings) carried on the breeze.