Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

In its way this was an idyllic period. The Washbournes weren’t vegetarians or anything like it, but they catered to me without fuss. Their loose hippie allegiance tended to exclude meat from their table, at least in blatant slabs, though mince might pass muster (flesh once safely granulated dips below the ethical radar of so many). From that summer I remember avocado pears (which we ate, I think, every day) and the deliciousness of French bread, the surprise of French cheese, the revelation of olives both black and green.

Prissie had been the first person in our social circle to risk the technical marvel of Gold Blend (freeze-dried granules, imagine!). Later, Muriel Foot got in on the act on behalf of the sewing circle, joining the Licensed Victuallers’ association for the sake of wholesale prices and buying tins of Gold Blend the size of waste-paper bins, despite the palaver required to decant granules from the tin into manageable jars.

At Downing I practised a little religion of ‘proper coffee’, but the Gold Blend at Prissie’s, made with hot milk, offered its own pleasures.

I felt guilty to have left Audrey vulnerable in Trees, house of misrule, but hadn’t she always known how to wind Mum round her little finger? Surely she wouldn’t have lost that skill. Perhaps things would be easier for her in my absence. It was perfectly possible that Audrey had on some level wanted me out of the house, which wouldn’t in the least invalidate the miraculousness of her intervention.

Peter came back from his travels to find a home transformed. He hated it. He would call in morosely on Prissie’s house on his way to or from work, and begged me to ask her to take him in also. I had to explain it wasn’t on. This was a sanctuary for one, rather than a mass adoption programme. There wasn’t a vacancy in the Paper Pants Club.

The household in Trees now contained two males who hated scenes in their different ways and two females who, in their different ways, required them, Audrey hell-bent on winning (unless the guru in passing had changed her habits), Mum bagsy-ing the rôle of tragic victim. The emotional barometer of the household would be stuck on Stormy for some time.

Up to this point Peter’s plan in life had been summed up by Granny (who was baffled by it) as: Earn some money. Get on a train or a plane until it’s gone. Start again.

But now he made the decision to move out himself and find somewhere else to live. So perhaps I can take credit, by leaving the house under such a cloud, for clearing the skies for Peter and letting him escape his rut of travel and return. Unless my long residence in the house is to blame for his slowness in taking up his birth-right of independence — so deep and foundational was fraternal loyalty in his make-up.

When Malcolm came home from work he’d usually sit with me rather than his wife. He’d even hold my hand and close his eyes, while Prissie idly mustered food in the kitchen. Mum had never got to grips with avocado pears. Of course we’d seen them in shops. They had been talked about. They were even on the menu at the Compleat Angler where Granny stayed, but how to manage them at home was beyond Mum. I had tried to reassure her that it couldn’t be hard to know when the enigmatic objects were ripe, but Mum was convinced that there were tenderising protocols withheld from laymen outside the restaurant trade, and that Peter wasn’t telling.

Prissie, on the other hand, actually had bowls in avocado colours, a darker green on the outside, creamy-pale within. When she came back in to the dining room where Malcolm was holding my hand she’d ask sweetly, ‘Is this homosexuality, Malcolm?’ He’d simply say, ‘You don’t understand, darling. I get such pure energy from John.’

‘Don’t mind me,’ she said, with the same large calm. ‘Just carry on with your canoodling. The wife is always the last to know, of course. And it serves her right.’

What went on between me and Malcolm wasn’t canoodling so much as low-level mystical chat. Perhaps Malcolm felt piqued that I had gone to India, where my guru was, and talked about his plans to visit his own inspiration, Don Juan, in Mexico. He had read Carlos Castaneda’s books, which Penguin published and which adorned almost every student’s shelves those days. Later they were exposed as ‘fakes’ — the inverted commas seem appropriate because it’s a hard position for someone like me to defend, that time and space, life and death, are all unreal, but Carlos Castaneda is more unreal than any of these and must therefore be shunned. If you’re not careful you can end up saying that the unreality of Carlos Castaneda’s mystical claptrap is the only real thing in the whole of Maya.

Finch, Pearsall & Mephistopheles

I’m afraid we got into something that was almost an enlightenment competition. I’d quote something Ramana Maharshi had said, and he’d quote something that Castaneda’s Don Juan had said, though we were neither of us tremendously up on our subjects. Under the influence of peyote Castaneda had a vision of Mescalito, seeing him as a green man with a pointed hat. I decided not to mention that I had gone him one better by being granted an interview with Mescalito, and had been trusted with some important dendrological work.

At one stage I remember intoning, ‘ Those who know do not speak; ’ and while I was taking a breath at that semi-colon, he completed the aphorism with ‘ those who speak do not know. ’ Then we smiled enigmatically at each other.

This was the shallowest of profundities, filched from Alan Watts’s Zen Flesh, Zen Bones , also published by Penguin — worse still, filched from the blurb about that book printed at the back of another one. Prissie looked up from her Heyer and gave us her own little smile, which recognised us as spiritually pretentious fakes, bluffers to our very souls. Certainly her relationship with Georgette Heyer was more authentic than ours with Alan Watts. We didn’t even realise, while we parroted Zen quotes, how neatly they summed us up.

If Prissie overheard Malcolm telling me, not for the first time, that advertising was killing his soul, she would say, ‘Malcolm, darling, that’s the whole point of the enterprise. Why do you think your firm is called Finch Pearsall & Mephistopheles , for heaven’s sake? If you haven’t sold your soul yet, it’s because nobody wants it. Face it, Malcolm, you’re a lost soul, you’re not damned at all. Only lost souls wear Hush Puppies. The damned have a lot more style.’ These, though, were tender squabbles, quite outside my experience, with all the rancour on the surface.

While I stayed chez Washbourne I tried to ration my intake of liquids, so as not to have to go to the toilet too often. I didn’t overdo it. There was no virtue in dehydrating myself in a warm season, parching my kidneys just to avoid embarrassment. It made sense to discipline my bladder so that I could last the night, like a well-trained dog, to spare the household the duty of emptying a pee bottle. Gradually I worked up to a steely continence. In fact I may as well admit that since then I have often used the call of the bathroom as a way of getting some good earthed contact, whether with strangers or old friends. Nothing breaks the ice like embarrassment in a bathroom.

I could hardly expect there to be no repercussions from the rupture with Mum and Dad, but I hoped not to have to deal with them until after the vacation. No such luck. One day the phone rang and Prissie told me it was for me. Her voice was rather hushed. ‘Who is it?’ I mouthed, and she answered in a whisper, ‘Perhaps a bishop?’

It was Graëme Beamish, my tutor.

‘John,’ he said, ‘please find it in your heart to forgive me for disturbing you in the well-earned rest of your vacation. Then I will try to find it in mine to forgive your mother for disturbing the peace of mine.