Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

I didn’t know that Peter Finch was a film star. All I knew was that I had never seen an adult squat on his heels for so long at a time. He seemed to shift his weight very gradually from side to side. When I asked him how he had learned this useful knack, he explained that he was originally from Australia, and had taught himself by watching the Aborigines there. They could squat like that all day.

Peter Finch offered to give Peter and me a ride in his enormous car, but Mum wouldn’t let us go. I don’t think she was actively alarmed by his celebrity, it was just the old rule about not accepting lifts from strange men, which applied even to strange film stars.

Tom Stoppard was a different matter. He had moved to Bourne End in the spring of 1968, about the time the Mini arrived. Not just to Bourne End but to our neck of the woods, the Abbotsbrook Estate. His house was called River Thatch. A thatched house, obviously, with a small drive. A front lawn that was laid out for croquet. A large tree shading the sitting room, which faced the stream. Stoppard lived there with his wife Jose (could that be right, wondered the sewing circle collectively? Perhaps it was pronounced Josie?) and their small son.

A conspicuously clever writer was living a few hundred yards away from her front door, and Mum felt thoroughly undermined. She heard about it through her sewing circle, where tongues darted like needles and neighbours or strangers might be thoroughly stitched up. The news, heard over coffee and biscuits, knocked her right off her precarious perch.

Except with Mum, the famous playwright was personally popular. The young literary lion had selected Bourne End to be his personal safari park. He brought an extra bit of distinction to the area — not that we needed it. The great man did his writing in a Victorian boat-house, also thatched, which stood on a tiny island reached by a narrow bridge.

Some of his neighbours, true, complained about the noise. It wasn’t wild Bohemian parties, it was peacocks. They made those cries like tortured babies, and they didn’t stay where he put them, on the lawn. When he acquired them he seemed to assume with his playwright’s imagination that they would stay decoratively put, like stage props, waving their ocellate plumes. In fact your peacock is a wanderer and a pecker. In India peacocks are common wild birds, celebrated in Hindu cosmology as the resplendent vehicle on which the God Murugan rides. They are experts at catching snakes, seeming to enjoy dodging the strikes of a cobra with its hood raised, to the point where it is widely believed that they ‘dance’ with cobras.

Mum didn’t care about where and how Tom Stoppard did his writing, she didn’t care about his ornamental livestock. She only cared that he was on the loose, brainy and philosophical, virtually in her street, certain to make her look stupid if they met. The things that he was famous for, the mental quickness, the cunning jokes, the animation and charm, were exactly the things that gave her the screaming ab-dabs. How would she defend herself? How was she supposed to cope, if she found herself standing next to him in the queue at the butcher’s or the greengrocer’s? He would grin with his vast white teeth, shake his tousled mop of hair, and subject her to an onslaught of epigrams, paradoxes, philosophical conundrums. He would reduce her to mumbling rubble. His brain would crackle with cleverness and hers would simply short-circuit. She would be humiliated and shown up. She would die, that’s what she would do.

The chore of being clever all the time

Dad refused to humour her compulsions, saying she should make more effort to control herself. I thought she was doing her best, myself, and I did my bit to help her along. I said I thought it was very unlikely that famous playwrights did their own shopping. Had she ever actually seen him in the butcher’s or the greengrocer’s? She insisted that she’d seen him coming out of a shop. She recognised him from a picture in the local paper. If he could come out of a shop then he must have gone in, which meant that nowhere was safe. Which shop was it? The off-licence. He had seemed to leave the premises surfing on a wave of highbrow laughter. I said he had probably only popped in to pick up a bottle of wine to take to a dinner party — he would have been in a mad rush and in no mood to stop and banter. There was no risk of his queuing up for lamb chops at the butcher’s. Couldn’t she see she was safe?

I could see I was getting nowhere so I changed my approach, saying that it was never wrong to make neutral comments about the weather — it was expected. In fact that was probably why he had moved to Bourne End, to escape the chore of being clever all the time in London. She wasn’t reassured, I have to say, but for the moment her nerve held steady. She might adjust the lie of her scarf in the hall mirror for a long moment before she left the house to go shopping, taking a deep breath as if she was about to go on stage, but she made herself do it.

Mum’s equilibrium was under threat, but mine was pretty sturdy at this time. Eckstein had read my essay. He had got more than he bargained for, I dare say, but then he didn’t know that I had a hotline to Lorca’s secret soul in the person of María Paz Binns. ‘This is a bit sketchy, John,’ he said in class, ‘it needs some more flesh on the bones. But the bones aren’t too bad.’ This faint praise was a deafening accolade by Eckstein’s standards, and just as well. There weren’t many people I’d let talk to me about bones in that way. ‘I take your point,’ said Eckstein, ‘about Lorca’s … women …’ He was signalling pretty clearly that my knowledge of Lorca’s most tortured thoughts should remain private. I’m not sure anybody else at school would have been particularly interested.

With Mum feeling so shaky, there was more than enough agora-phobia around. I began to suffer from the opposite condition, and to feel the urge to get out and about, to profit from my new mobility. One weekend I decided I would hurl myself out of the nest good and proper. I set off for London with only the vaguest idea of how to get there, or what I would do when I did. Would Dad draw me a map? He would not. Dad, who was perpetually on the lookout for strangers looking even vaguely lost, so that he could overwhelm them with hand-drawn maps and sketches of landmarks, instructions in numbered paragraphs, told me to use my initiative. Initiative! If Dad had had any initiative himself, he wouldn’t have ended up under my orders, growing mushrooms that had a death-wish.

I wanted to find Covent Garden, having fond memories of My Fair Lady , and fetched up in Soho instead. At first I thought the women who accosted me in my car were flower-girls like Eliza Doolittle, but they weren’t, not quite. They were themselves the flowers they sold, and very good saleswomen they were too. Very friendly, very confident of giving me a good time. There was no talk of giving me a discount, which was a definite sign of progress.

I didn’t tell Mum and Dad about the chatty prostitutes, but Peter was fascinated and wanted to come with me on my next expedition. I let him do the map-reading, and somehow we ended up at the Palm Beach Casino Club. I got Peter to push me inside, more or less as a dare. The moment we were inside he said, ‘This place is rigged. Everything’s crooked.’ Under the tacky glamour it smelled of stale flowers and desperation, and I was sure he was right, but that was no reason not to play. It turned out, though, thanks to the Gaming Act, that you had to join the club 24 hours before you played, so I joined on the spot and made plans to come back the next weekend. Peter, not yet eighteen, wasn’t eligible to play, but I was all right. Peter could come to push, and watch.