Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

The book itself was as close as I have ever come to a big fat cigar, rolled by an expert, delivering the slow-burning pleasure of narrative intoxication. I inhaled it page after page. I blew smoke-rings of pleasure up at the ceiling.

I had an invisible cigar, and since the collapse of the Guardian Bank my money likewise was invisible. Still, I had my evening Mackeson and my copy of Satipatthana Sutta and Its Application to Modern Life — so much better as a guide to life than the Daily Telegraph. I could even look forward to legal sexual expression only a few years down the road, as long as I could keep my desire for uniforms under control. For now, only the songs on the radio gave a feeling of what I was missing by spending most of the Summer of Love in the Château d’If.

I was relatively indifferent to my surroundings during this period, not entirely thanks to my absorption in The Count of Monte Cristo . This was something that made an impression in its own right. I wasn’t my usual chatty and forthcoming self. My fellow patients hardly seemed worth the trouble of cultivating, since they were mainly in-patients for a few days only. Why waste precious charm on transients?

My appetite for books had slackened off, and this too was interpreted as a sign of low mood. Of course I finished reading The Count of Monte Cristo , but that was different. I was on the last 400 pages by then, so I was really only coasting home. A certain amount of chivvying was set in motion on an administrative level, which took the final form of Ansell sitting on the bed one more time and urging me to cheer up — I was on the last lap, after all, and mustn’t lose heart. The second operation hadn’t been a roaring success, but I was still much better fitted for life than I had been before the whole cycle of surgery and rehabilitation began.

I’m not sure my mood was really so low — Western culture, uncomfortable with inwardness, tends to interpret it negatively — but I went along with the fiction of depression, smiling wanly and promising to buck myself up.

Of course it’s natural, as Dad was always pointing out, for baby birds to be pushed out of the nest by their parents, to fend for themselves. But it’s also natural, when it’s time to leave any place of safety, for even a senior chick to go back to bed and pull the bedclothes over his head.

Chronic female veto

There was a surprise waiting for me when I came out of CRX the second time, as rehabilitated as I ever would be: Mum and Dad had put up a greenhouse! I was delighted. I showed every shade of appreciation and wonder that the human face can manage. Possibly I overdid it. I didn’t know when to stop. I couldn’t recognise the point where plausible extremes of joy had been acted out to everyone’s satisfaction.

It was an act because I knew quite well what had been going on. My plan all along. I’d been using Peter as my cat’s-paw in a campaign of action-at-a-distance, briefing him when he visited me and sending him letters with additional instructions when necessary.

First he had suggested the whole scheme to Dad. The experiment was designed to exploit Peter’s standing in the family — I had the idea that Dad was less fully armoured against his second-born than his first-. Dad didn’t dismiss the scheme, but he wasn’t exactly encouraging, pointing out that Mum would exercise her chronic female veto.

After a suitably calculated interval, Peter was primed to remark that Mum would dearly love somewhere to sunbathe out of the wind. What a shame there was nowhere suitable in the garden … particularly as you could divide off one section of a greenhouse — if you had one — and call it a sun-lounge. Was there a nicer word than ‘greenhouse’, do you think, Dad? Didn’t some people say ‘conservatory’ instead? Perhaps Mum would like the idea better if we used the word ‘conservatory’…

The vocabulary was a critical element. I thought of using the word ‘solarium’ instead of sun-lounge, but it was a matter of knowing your market. Dad might enjoy the word, but he wasn’t the one with a passion for burning his skin, and Mum would find it intimidating.

Dad said he’d think about it. Maybe it wasn’t out of the question. Then the final touch was for Peter to say that Mum would have to be careful not to get sunburn even if there was glass between her and the sun, wouldn’t she? I relied on this very oblique hint tipping the scales with Dad.

This was string-pulling in the grand tradition of Granny, although on a humble scale and without real ruthlessness. Everyone was happy, weren’t they? I had somewhere to grow Drosophyllum lusitanicum , Dad had an indispensable aid to his own more ambitious gardening projects, and Mum had somewhere to bask like a lizard in sunny weather, even on windy days.

That greenhouse was as much my work as if I had slipped out of the body every night, using the handy exit of a dream of knowledge, and dug the foundations with my own astral hands.

I wondered how Granny found the strength to conduct such campaigns on a number of fronts at a time. Yes, I had got my way, and it was fascinating to see that under certain circumstances people could be flicked against each other in predictable pathways like so many marbles, but still I felt depleted and even a little sick.

Peter had had a few Boy-Scoutish qualms about his rôle in the experiment. ‘Aren’t we being a little …?’ he asked, and I cheerfully supplied the missing word as ‘sneaky’.

It was all very well for him to have high standards, he could wipe his own bottom. I depended on paid strangers or close kin for humiliating tasks and had no prospect of equal dealing, so all I was doing was evening up the odds. Isn’t the Boy Scout motto ‘Be prepared’ anyway? I was prepared to be sneaky. I can claim Homer in my corner, as well as Baden-Powell. All very well for Achilles to be heroic — he’s invulnerable as long as he does what his Mamma says and wears his riding hat and his special shoes. Odysseus has to be sneaky to get by.

There was only one detail of the scheme which caused me a little guilt. Dad and I knew perfectly well that the ‘sun-lounge’ wouldn’t help Mum tan, since window glass filters out the short-wave radiation responsible. We were more or less conspiring against her, he and I. We would have needed to fit Vita glass (very expensive) to lend real assistance to her sun-damage project, though this was the heyday of the suntan, its traumatic effects on the dermis unknown or unpublicised, and I can’t pretend we were actually looking out for her welfare. I didn’t know why Dad got a kick out of putting one over on Mum, but I knew it was so, and that a hint about the screening effects of window glass would give him a final nudge towards the project.

There was no need to mention any of this to the lady of the house. Her happy moods weren’t so common that we could risk spoiling them. She pulsated with contentment as she lay there out of the wind on the lounger, basking in placebo sunshine.

Of course we none of us said ‘sun-lounger’. Mum’s love of brand names had raised this item above the common ruck of loungers. This was the Relaxator.

Mum not only went around recommending products but advertised their disgrace if they failed to perform, denouncing them from her kitchen pulpit. Unable to live up to her mother’s religion of the Top Man, she made do with the cult of the household name and the Which? Best Buy. Top Thing was a better bet than Top Person — but if a well-known or much-recommended purchase let her down it was a devastating blow, a sort of compound treason-fraud-sacrilege. When a washing-machine got the shakes just out of guarantee (though multiply lauded and endorsed), this was an assault on the integrity of the entire market-place. Hers was a world-view in which trailing threads were always likely to unravel the flimsy gestalt , and any little snag could ladder the sheer stocking of her self-belief.