Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

The meal had taken a very miserable turn. When I had locked horns with Marion Wilding, sole principal of Vulcan School, I had been prepared for confrontation and I had been clear about what I wanted from her — nothing. I had even enjoyed the clash. This was different. Granny and I were on the opposite of a collision course. If neither of us bent then we would dismiss each other from our lives with a finality not to be taken back. I began to get a sense of the suddenness of schism, crisis that no one saw coming until it had already undone the seams of the world.

The bitterness of it was that I did want something from Granny. I needed a car, and the lessons which I must have before I could tame it. If I broke with Granny, then I was stuck with Mum and Dad and the suffocation of dependency. This wasn’t just about vodka and counting peas, ice cream and coffee. Homeric geography had put in an appearance in a hotel dining room in Marlow, Scylla and Charybdis bursting up through thick carpeting. If I wasn’t dashed against the harsh rock of Granny’s willpower, then I was doomed to the sludge-whirlpool of life in Bourne End. And from my storm-tossed barque I was counting on the implacable Granitic rock to cough up an outboard motor, so that I could skim away from the entire dismal scene. Why would it want to provide that?

Still, if we were trembling on the brink of rupture, neither of us took a step either further or back. If this was High Noon at the Compleat Angler, at least no one was in a hurry to shoot first. Then Granny found a way to negotiate without either party having to back down. She picked up her spoon and stirred her black coffee. Then she turned the spoon upside down over her diminutive cup, took the cream jug and poured from it carefully over that dainty inverted scallop so that the cream didn’t dive into the black liquid but seemed to float on the surface, revolving in spiral scrolls.

Granny had to look at what she was doing, which made me feel that the pressure on me was less. I almost thought her hands were shaking, but I knew better than to consider feeling sorry for her. She made her voice soft when she spoke. ‘Ivo, who wasn’t of course your grandfather though we call him so, liked his coffee like this.’ We had never in our conversations referred to the squire or the birth certificate. Perhaps she simply divined that I had been told Mum’s side of events. Granny had the knack of having the last word without even opening her mouth. ‘If anything he liked coffee more than coffee liked him, as his adventure in East Africa tended to shew.’ ‘Shew’ was the archaic spelling she used in her letters, and I felt sure that was the form of the word fixed in her mind. ‘Even before he left on that silly sojourn I told him that I personally would not consider him a success unless Messrs Fortnum & Mason accepted him as a supplier.’

‘The top people,’ I managed to croak.

‘Precisely. In the event he fell short of his own rather modest ambitions. But perhaps you would like me to add cream to your cup in the same way? The taste is quite different, or perhaps it is the texture which is altered. For some reason a little sugar in the coffee helps the cream to float — and I speak as someone who in the normal run of life abhors sugar in coffee. If I can break my own rules so I’m sure can you. It is something which every young man, however stubborn, should try at least once.’

Somehow she had managed to get me off the hook without budging an inch. Even when she made concessions she held firm. ‘Thank you Granny,’ I was able to say, ‘that sounds delicious.’

I’m not sure it was, really. That style of drinking coffee has never caught on with me personally. Perhaps people whose hands have more control than mine can make the cream flow over a sort of miniature weir of coffee as the cup tips, liquid gliding over liquid, so that the elements remain in suspension within every sip, but I couldn’t manage that. The demitasse was light and easy to lift, but its small size made it awkward for me to make it travel the last couple of inches to my lips. I had to push my head uncomfortably far forward to bridge the gap. Still, I appreciated the gesture, if not the treat it delivered. Granny with her coffee spoon might seem to be watching over the separation of cream and coffee, but in another way she was stirring incompatibles diligently together, restoring between us some sort of social emulsion.

Passive resistance had served me well, but I can’t help thinking it’s most effective when it isn’t your only option. After all, Gandhi wasn’t strongly built, but he could certainly have given you quite a smack with his charkha — his portable spinning wheel — if he had wanted, and he would certainly have benefited from the element of surprise.

Flinging biscuits blindly at the orifice

When we had finished our coffee, Granny said, ‘Normally a two-course table d’hôte at a reputable restaurant is enough to satisfy even a teenager’s ravening belly, but perhaps you are still hungry?’ In fact my teenager’s ravening belly might be heard protesting its emptiness at some distance. ‘I believe I have some biscuits in my room, if that would allay the pangs.’

They might. Granny’s preference was always for a room on the ground floor, for reasons of her convenience rather than mine, but I reaped the benefit. She even pushed me there. There was a lip on the threshold of her room, not a true step but a rounded edge of metal which gave her some little difficulty to negotiate.

The biscuits were in the same category of presenting a little difficulty. Biscuits in general aren’t the easiest things for me to eat, but if I break them into rough quarters I can get them to my mouth without seeming to fling them blindly at the orifice.

‘Unless I’m imagining things, John,’ Granny said, ‘you had something to ask me. I am trying to find a new way of talking to you, since you are clearly no longer quite the person I have assumed. You don’t much resemble your mother, or your father either. Perhaps in fact it is me whom you resemble.’ I disputed this but gave no sign. ‘Is it about the electric wheelchair? Does it need attending to in some way? Perhaps a new battery is required.’

For someone who had helped to fund my adventures in locomotion she was rather in the dark about the details. Perhaps she thought it was in the shed, on blocks, with Dad frantically tinkering in every spare moment. Perhaps she thought I should make a point of coming to see her in the wheelchair she had paid for, just as she would expect me, if she had bought me a smart tie as a present, to wear it when invited to lunch with her. ‘The electric wheelchair is at home, Granny, and it’s in perfect working order. This is the old pushing chair which it replaced — it’s just that the Wrigley you were so kind as to help to buy doesn’t fold up very easily. It doesn’t fit in a taxi. I don’t use it at school either.’

‘Oh? And why is that?’

‘I have to be carried up and down stairs in it, and I can’t keep my balance in it. At school I use the Tan-Sad — you remember, the trolley thing. You’ve seen it.’

‘You’re still spending your days in that baby carriage? That overgrown pram? No wonder you wanted to see me, John. What is the alternative?’

‘I’m stuck with the Tan-Sad, Granny, and really I don’t mind.’ Here it was, then, the only chance I would ever have to make my case, to explain that I was hoping to do without the expensive wheelchair altogether, to trade it in for something with a roof and doors. ‘But at the moment I’m driven to school in a taxi.’

‘Really? How odd. How do your parents afford that?’

‘They don’t. The local authority pays.’

‘How perfectly extraordinary.’