Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

I would ask him to show me his fidelity ring. These were craze objects of the time — compound rings of silver wire, easily tarnished, which fell apart (when taken off the finger) into half-a-dozen linked subsidiary rings, mysteriously and irregularly kinked.

Patrick felt awkward showing me the ring, on the usual basis. Any activity seemed to be inhibited which might draw attention to my incapacities, and my fingers certainly couldn’t provide any sort of perch for the ring, but what was Patrick going to do, refuse me? When I was at my most pretty-please-with-cream-and-sugar? He pulled the ring off his finger and held it over his palm. Then he dropped it those few inches, giving it just enough of a spin for it to come apart into its connected fragments before it landed. Then he put it back together at top speed, racing through the enigmatic moment when a looping-the-loop movement was needed to make the individual rings nest against each other properly and coalesce into a unit, their kinks unified into a sort of turk’s-head motif.

I wasn’t satisfied. ‘You haven’t told me the story. The story is a part of it — you can’t show someone the ring without telling the story. You have to do it again.’ He sighed and said, ‘All right.’ He dropped it back into his palm and the one ring became many.

‘Once there was a Sultan …’ — the owners of other identical rings might say Maharajah or Sheikh, we had a very undifferentiated sense of the exotic — ‘who gave his wife a silver ring to be sure of her fidelity. Everyone in the kingdom’ — if I was feeling mischievous I might correct him with ‘Sultanate’ — ‘knew the ring of the Sultan. Now the Sultan went away on a journey —’

‘Was he a Muslim?’

‘Er … possibly. Why?’

‘He might have been going on the hajj , you know, the pilgrimage to Mecca.’

‘Fine, he went on a pilgrimage. But before he left he gave her this very special ring. Then while the Sultan was on pilgrimage, to Mecca, his wife fell in love with a noble at court. With her husband’s deputy.’

‘Deputy?’

‘Chancellor.’

‘“Grand Vizier” sounds better. Go on.’

‘The Grand Vizier fell in love with her too, and they went to bed. But before they did, she took off the ring …’

‘Why did she do that?’

‘Because it was her fidelity ring and she was being unfaithful.’

‘Why not leave it on, all the same, with someone who knew all about it? The story would work better if she was going to bed with someone who didn’t know she was even married — say a travelling lute-player.’

‘How is a travelling lute-player going to fall in love with the Sultan’s wife and not know who she is?’

‘She could go to a concert of his in disguise.’

‘And then she says, “Come back to my palace for some Turkish delight?” How’s that going to work any better?’

Eventually we’d hammer out a more or less plausible story. If I suggested that a sensible adulteress would carefully slip the ring off her finger and onto, say, a candle, he would agree rather uneasily and then say, rather desperately, that the lovers were so passionate that the candle fell off the Sultana’s dressing table. Sometimes I could persuade him to say ‘Sultana’. A burst of invention along those lines would cheer him up. The point of all this from my point of view, of course, was to make him concentrate on the narrative — on the Sultan returning so that the wife panics as she tries in vain to reassemble the pledge of her honesty — and not think of his hands while he spoke.

Not all hands are beautiful. I’ve seen plenty that have made me feel happy with what I’ve got. But Patrick ’s hands were both large and handsome. It was part of the mystery of the twins that they should be so broad and well-built. It seemed miraculous that a single wombful could yield such a tonnage, even after a decade and a half’s regular feeding.

At the end of the demonstration Patrick would return the ring to his finger — the little finger, the only one on which it would fit. Perhaps it really was made for a woman’s hand, though there was nothing effeminate about the way the cheap silver gleamed on his adult paw, despite the nails left a little long for extra purchase on the fretboard of his guitar. It was the other, plucking hand which had the calluses on the tips of its fingers.

As he slipped the ring on, I could see the grey-green ghost of its tarnish on the finger. The Sultana herself either had a higher grade of silver jewellery, or gave her hands a good scrub before she risked betraying her marriage vows.

Meaning osteotomy

While I looked at Patrick ’s hands, he was preöccupied with my right knee, and how bent it was. He asked me if it hurt, and I tried to laugh it off by saying, ‘Only when I pole-vault.’ He said at least once, ‘I don’t know how you cope — I could measure that angle with my protractor!’ and I admit I winced. His protractor wasn’t the relevant part of his geometry set just then. It felt more as if he was sticking the points of his dividers into the unbeautiful joint which jarred his sense of proportion.

I began to brood about it a little bit. My sense of unlovability began to take up residence in that knee. Perhaps he (or someone) would only be able to love me back if I did something about its ugly protrusion. ‘Something’ here meaning ‘osteotomy’.

The cult of Broyan made a good stop-gap when I felt ill at ease with Patrick . In the early days I sat in the back of the taxi, and then I decided to change things. I took a vow to get myself promoted to the passenger seat, so as to sit by Broyan.

It was roll-call all over again — a major campaign of attrition. When I was given a privilege I wanted to renounce it, but if I was treated equally I pined for my perks. And this time, when I’d got my way, with much wheedling and blackmail (greymail at the very least), I wished I’d left well alone. It wasn’t the same at all. Promotion to the front of the car didn’t solve anything. My head turns to the left much more easily than the right, so I saw no more of Broyan. What I really wanted to see was his thick neck, which didn’t look as if it could turn at all. I found myself wanting things the way they were, before I had shaped them to my will and spoiled the morning drive to school.

I would sit there next to Broyan grieving while he drove, and dully revising my Latin, which wouldn’t go in. I seemed to have some sort of specific resistance to the language. Particles of Latin were so compacted they failed to travel osmotically in the normal way across the semi-permeable membrane of the page, and on into the language tanks of my brain. No sooner had I absorbed an irregular verb into my bloodstream than it was attacked and destroyed by the antibodies of ignorance. I had a pack of Latin Grammar cards (Key Facts) which I would wrestle with in the taxi on the way to school, a plastic pack of revision aids in its own little wallet, moderately well tailored to the measure of my hands. The process was satisfactory, but there was no product. Wasn’t I supposed to be good with languages? Perhaps it was just German that I was good at. Latin words just lay there on the page supine and senseless.

Everyone else groaned at the very idea of grammar, but that wasn’t the problem with me. Mr Nevin had slogged me through all that at Vulcan, and I rather enjoyed it. Grammar was like the algebra of language, except that I could understand it. I could grasp the underlying structure of Latin, but not put flesh on its bones.

I was entered for Latin O-level, but was regarded as very much a borderline case. The set book was Georgics IV — the one about bees. By rights I should have been fascinated by this snapshot of past attitudes to the natural kingdom — Virgil, like everyone else until about the eighteenth century, took it for granted that the supreme bee was a king and not a queen. Aristotle installed a piece of polished horn into a beehive so he could watch what went on, without managing to spot that it was a matriarchal society on the other side of that yellowy window.