Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

There was more to the story, which I gradually pieced together. After the coffee fiasco my grandfather Ivo (though of course he wasn’t actually my grandfather) laid siege to the marital bed. He laid the ghost of Uncle Arthur, and that was the beginning of Roy.

When there was a legitimate son as well as an illegitimate daughter, mother love was poured out till it ran over. On darling Roy. Not because of his legitimacy, I don’t think, though I dare say Granny appreciated the neatness of the stitching which repaired the family’s ravelled hem. Everything looked more or less conventional again, and her family’s allowance was restored to its original value.

It’s just that Granny, from her first breath to her last, preferred men to women, boys to girls. Even if Laura had been loved in the cradle she would have been abandoned in the nursery, when Roy came along to take all the love that was going.

Mum and Roy chose the same womb, but Roy had the better sense of timing. It was a different place by the time he occupied it. As between the claims of a girl who was the child of her great love and a boy — any boy — there would never really be a contest, in Granny’s eyes. Mum had done nothing wrong. She just couldn’t do anything right.

Granny made things worse by taking in a local boy during the war. There would never be enough boys, and perhaps there was one girl too many already. I began to understand Mum’s passionate desire for a daughter, to show at least one female soul that she was welcomed, even if the idyll with Audrey hadn’t quite worked out like that.

After the birthday briefing I wasn’t supposed to think of Granny as anything but monstrous. Of course she was monstrous! But the nerve it must have taken, to insist on the truth being put down on that official piece of paper. To testify against herself in that stubborn way, insisting on disgrace.

The seeming slope of time

Mum’s sense of unbelonging was the great business of her life, but it wasn’t going to be mine. I wouldn’t let that happen. Never mind that I didn’t exactly know what the great business of my life was.

You can’t be traumatised by a history whose reality you don’t accept. I wasn’t yet an informed Hindu, but I had cottoned on to a fundamental concept. Blood isn’t thicker than water. Blood is only water carrying a particular charge of deluded affinity.

If I’m not tempted to repeat the family mistakes, there’s still a real danger of repeating mistakes made in a previous life. In Hinduism, where there are always (thank God) technical terms for spiritual things, these are called vasanas . Ruts of the spirit, liable to churn up the clean sand of a new existence. How can you avoid them if you don’t know what they are? You have to work backwards, deductively, from your temptations. It’s not an exact science, obviously. If you’re bossy in your current life, for instance, this may mean that you were the same way in earlier flesh, or that you were completely under someone’s heel — hence the current overcompensation.

If by a great stroke of luck you’re both powerless and bossy as things stand, then perhaps you’re being given a chance to dismantle your ego’s engine completely in these highly propitious circumstances. A brief glance is enough to show that the ‘engine’ is connected only to the horn, and to the indicators — indicators which only signal a change of direction after the event, feebly claiming credit for having caused it. There’s nothing under the bonnet. The steering wheel is as irrelevant as the one on a toy car in a fairground ride. Fixed or wildly spinning, it turns nothing. The whole incarnate vehicle slips serenely on free wheels down the seeming slope of time.

In practice, even before I was able to line up actual driving lessons, I clung to my dummy steering wheel as tightly as anyone. I couldn’t trust my guru enough to abandon the I-am-the-doer illusion. My will was all I trusted. I hadn’t learned that life is a stolid nag that clops indifferently on, whatever we imagine we’re doing with the whip and the reins. It’s one of Maya’s favourite tricks, her impersonation of a frisky filly to be mastered.

Let the reins go, and there’s every chance you’ll be bucked into bliss. Hinduism recognises that the last moments of a life have a crucially determining rôle as regards the next. Serenity at the moment of death may not guarantee escape from the cycle of birth and death, but at the very least it greases the wheels for the next go-round and leads to reconciled babies who sleep through the night and hardly cry.

Poor Mum still couldn’t do anything right, even when she was trying to set the record straight. She hadn’t managed to condemn Granny in my eyes, as she must have hoped. Clearly Pamela , all thousand-plus pages of it, wasn’t a complete guide to the behaviour of the posh and wayward of the 1920s, but it was the closest thing I had, and it did paint a picture of a world in which the odds were stacked against women. Granny wasn’t having that. She flouted the conventions of her day and her class without consenting to be martyred by her own rebellion. She had taken a lover and kept a husband.

I don’t know about the ingredients of her motive for having Mum officially registered as an outcast. Was she obsessed with a man she couldn’t have, or only with getting her revenge on him? The woman I knew as Granny certainly had a talent for settling scores. Or to put it another way — she trusted antagonism as a sort of bedrock for relationships. It wouldn’t let her down.

I’m tempted to see the business with the birth certificate as a sort of one-woman suicide pact — a willed social death that was supposed to take her lover with her, dragging the squire down into the sucking bog of disgrace. She signed her own death warrant on that piece of paper, and then she survived after all, her head above water even if she was floating at a lower level than before. Her luck held, when it turned out she had nothing to fear from her husband. Slowly she came back to respectable life, even to prosperity, and it was only Laura who was left out in the cold and wet.

Perhaps in church, when Mum could feel her real father not looking at her during services, he was really not-looking at Granny. Or perhaps he glared at her during the sermon. I can imagine Granny enjoying that.

Whatever she was in church for, it was hardly the spiritual experience. I dare say she was putting in an appearance out of sheer defiance, as a way of saying, I’m as good as anyone here. I have a right.

It’s true that in later life she went to early Communion in Tangmere whenever it was offered, but her agenda was strongly earth-bound. She wasn’t so much consuming the Body and Blood of her Redeemer as keeping an eye on the set of communion plate she had given the church, in her husband’s respectable name, after he died. She never really trusted anyone else’s cleaning. So when she knelt at the altar rail her posture was submissive, but if she saw any discoloration of chalice or paten there would be harsh words in the vestry afterwards. It’s customary for communicants to close their eyes when they consume the elements, but convention wasn’t going to make Granny turn a blind eye to tarnish.

Mum expected me to send Granny to Coventry after her revelations, but that was hardly likely to happen. I wouldn’t have made an immediate appointment with Granny out of spite, but I wasn’t going to penalise her either, for things that were none of my business. There was no alternative to Granny as the motor of the family finances. No one else was going to help me buy a car. My hands were tied. I had to be in the driving seat.

Bird gotta swim, fish gotta fly. John needs driving lessons to fall from the sky …