Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

‘Good lad. John?’

‘Labour, Dad.’

‘ Labour? ’

With that stubby little pencil I had pierced him to the heart. I had refused to support the powers of light against darkness. Dad gave a sort of growl, and though he didn’t lay a hand on me he came close. He grasped the handles of the wheelchair and pushed me roughly to my bedroom in disgrace, muttering, ‘You can stew in your own juice, you little turncoat!’ Peter had left the brakes of the wheelchair locked, and Dad had to wrestle to get it in motion. For a long moment his rage discharged electrically through the chair. It was a close thing. If the wheelchair hadn’t had rubber tyres I might have been cooked by that human lightning.

The whole adventure was thoroughly satisfactory. My period of house arrest as a class traitor would have been more arduous if the side door, which had a ramp installed for my benefit, hadn’t been wide open as usual throughout.

As it turned out the next day, Mr Heath turfed Mr Wilson out of Downing Street even without the help I had been supposed to give him, but that wasn’t the point. The point was probity, even if Peter and I defined that notion differently. He had retained his integrity despite the ham because he had been going to vote Conservative all along, while my conscience was easy as long as I hadn’t done what Dad wanted.

Our votes cancelled each other out, of course, so Dad had spent his ten shillings for nothing. If he hadn’t intervened in the first place, Mr Heath (or strictly speaking our local Tory candidate) would have had one more vote under his belt. All Dad had accomplished was the transfer of a Mivvi and a few ounces of ham from a deep freeze and a fridge respectively into the digestive systems of his sons. Dad was indeed a master conjuror and manipulator, a wizard of action at a distance, but only when dealing with grocery items on a small scale.

I hadn’t really changed my thinking about politics, and I wasn’t entirely motivated by the desire to get one over on Dad. I merely applied the teachings of Ramana Maharshi to the question. If a dream hunger requires a dream food then a dream election deserves a dream vote, and it certainly shouldn’t be a cheaply corrupt one. You couldn’t accuse Dad of losing his touch with his sons, since he had never set out to cultivate such a thing. But he might have chosen slightly more adult bribes if he wanted to suborn us. Show some respect!

A few days later the precarious equilibrium of my pilgrimage arrangements was upset all over again. One morning there was a knock at the door. Mum went into the hall wearing the cat. This was a fairly new arrival, a neutered male called Sultan — Mum left females alone but had males briskly disarmed, exercising summary powers in this area uniquely. Sultan liked to drape himself round her shoulders like a stole, even while she was doing the washing-up, his tail slowly lashing with contentment. I could hear a low murmur of voices, then a double thump as Mum brushed Sultan off her shoulders. Apparently this was too serious a conversation to be shared with a living fur stole. Or with me.

Once again there was a huddle and a confab just inside the front door, whispers and mysteries. This time it wasn’t Dad and Mum who were talking but I soon recognised the intonations of the new arrival. It was Pheroza Tucker, an Indian lady from the other end of the Abbotsbrook Estate.

Sultan came in to me in the kitchen, rather put out, but I set my stick at an angle to debar him from the consolation of my lap. Cats are too proud to sulk, but he wasn’t pleased with the turn of the day. Meanwhle I tried to tune in to the hushed voices inside the front door.

Ominous snatches of sense

Being excluded from conversations is bad for the character. It makes you construct conversations in your mind that would justify your being excluded. Plans to put something in your tea and be shot of you for good.

The murmurs in the hall yielded ominous snatches of sense — ‘What a blow for his hopes’, ‘How am I supposed to tell him?’, ‘Best just to come out with it.’ ‘I’d ask you in for a cup of tea, but I’ll have to break the news to His Nibs.’ I had a right to hear all this at first hand. It was humiliating to be on the edges of something which clearly concerned me first and foremost. I suppose I could have sidled into the hall, but sidling isn’t really a strong point, and it would have been the work of a moment for Mum and her visitor to step out of the front door and frustrate me again. If I sidled implacably on, they had only to float off into the depths of the garden.

At last the front door closed, and Pheroza was gone. It seems a little strange, looking back, that I took so little interest in an Indian neighbour and family friend. But I knew that Pheroza was a Parsee — who had married out of her religion — rather than a Hindu, without knowing exactly what a Parsee was. It’s almost as if I was being protected from distraction. If I’d known more about the Parsees and their rituals, who knows what might have happened? There’s fire involved in much Hindu observance, but nothing that can hold a candle to Zoroastrianism, where even the place of worship is called a fire temple. My pyrolatry might have become dangerously inflamed. It’s odd to think I had so little interest in India outside the life and teaching of Ramana Maharshi.

When Mum came into the kitchen I pretended to be taken up with Sultan, chiding him for the sour mood to which I had contributed. She stood behind me and I could hear the crackle of a newspaper with an unfamiliar smell. She took a breath and passed it to me at last, appropriately folded. It was the Times of India . The death of Arthur Osborne was announced, not in a small advertisement but in an article on the front page. The headline described him as ‘a good friend of India’.

She waited for me to read it and meekly asked, ‘What will you do?’ If her first reaction had been relief, at the prospect of such a body blow to my trip, she was politic enough to leave it in the hall.

What would I do? I didn’t know. I would go anyway and take my chances, I supposed. Or turn my face to the wall.

That evening I watched Mum as she wrote a letter on her beloved headed notepaper. Sultan was keeping to the garden, and a different animal member of the household was seizing its chance, a yellow bird without a name. I don’t know why the naming mechanism broke down. Normally the name is the first thing you think of.

The bird without a name perched on the end of the pen while Mum wrote her letter. There was nothing she could do to get rid of it — she would literally throw it away, pick it up and throw it across the room, and it would always come fluttering back while she muttered ‘Shoo!’

There’s a lot of Mum in that sequence of actions. Who taught the bird dependence in the first place? What right did Mum have to pretend that she didn’t want it hanging on her every move? She could only go through the motions of rejection because she knew the returning instinct had been instilled almost on the molecular level. Mum would only risk throwing something away that would come right back. That’s where I was letting her down, but of course I was following a family pattern myself. Dad, if he needed her, never said so or showed it, which trapped her in her turn. If either of us had clung to Mum she might have found something else to do with herself than look after us. In the meantime she had Audrey, whose clinging was a stranglehold.

Seeming-I is as-it-were sorry

Vasanas to the left of us, vasanas to the right of us. It’s hard to see the road for the ruts. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that there is any road apart from the ruts.

I had a letter of my own to write, expressing my sorrow to Mrs Arthur Osborne (Lucia). I felt I had to make the effort, though there were daunting obstacles. It was a sort of triple jump of condolence. On top of the foredoomed inadequacy of any attempt to express grief on paper there was the fact of my never having met either party, neither the bereaved nor the deceased. Then there was the faith we all shared, with its withholding of importance equally from birth and death.