Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  One time, on the way back down from CRX, I was a little cocky. Going too fast, I misjudged the curve and charged up the bank. The car started to tip up. It almost reached the vertical and came within a whisker of tipping over. I tried to lean the other way. Then my little Mini thought better of its rush towards the orgasm of destruction and pulled back from the brink. I had a bumpy landing and was very much shaken.

  I just sat there trembling. My neck hurt. I knew I must put on a good show, though, when I got home. I was terrified that if Mum and Dad found out what had happened they would forbid me to drive, licence or no licence, and all my effort would be wasted. I had to saunter back into Trees Abbotsbrook Bourne End Bucks as though nothing had happened. I couldn’t really do much in the way of sauntering, but I tried to imagine I was whistling and had my hands in my pockets.

  A secret unless proved otherwise

  I couldn’t even confide in Flanny our GP about the shaking-up I’d had. Mum was always ganging up on me with her. Flanny disapproved of my being a vegetarian, though at least she pronounced the word properly, while Mum always said ‘Vegeteerian’, putting a sneer in the middle of the word to match the one in her heart.

  The first passenger I took in the Mini was Peter. I was greatly in his debt in the matter of transport. Now I could pay him back for all his weary pushing of the Tan-Sad. Mum never asked for a lift, and I never offered. I did invite Dad to come for a ride, but he said he’d rather wait until I’d had more practice. The vote of confidence was never really part of his repertoire as a parent.

  The first two times I had come a cropper in the Mini there were no witnesses. The third time, Peter was with me and we came a cropper together.

  The previous accidents hadn’t taught me much. That close shave on Hedsor Hill had made me take extra care, but I couldn’t keep away from those steep and twisty roads. We were even on the same deadly bend, only this time there was another car involved. For some mad reason, the driver behind chose to overtake, forcing me off the road in the process.

  Again I just sat there shaking, but Peter with his flexible neck had recognised the driver from the back of his famous head. Michael Aspel the broadcaster – a hero of his until that exact moment. We knew he lived locally, but this was our first actual sighting.

  ‘Nobody does that to my brother!’ Peter said, in a wonderful outburst of fraternal love. ‘If I see him in any of the shops I’ll give him one!’ All the fearfulness instilled in him at Lord Wandsworth had been melted away at Sidcot School. In our hearts Aspel was instantly reduced to the ranks, from honorary uncle to local villain, callous roadhog and reckless menace. From then on we could hardly bear to be in the room when Mum listened to Family Favourites.

  Peter had to help me wrench the steering wheel round before we could get on the move again. I didn’t need to swear him to silence about Michael Aspel’s endangering of our lives. By now we had lost the reflex of sharing things with Mum and Dad, and everything was a secret unless proved otherwise.

  The first day I turned up at school in the Mini I more or less provoked a riot. My schoolmates surrounded the car and begged to be given rides. My status slumped a bit when I had to transfer from car to Tan-Sad, but my image was certainly boosted overall. If only the school’s porterage scheme had extended to carrying me around on school premises, up and down stairs, in and out of lessons, in my nice new Mini! I could have attracted attention, when there was something I didn’t understand, by discreetly sounding the horn.

  Of course more than anything I wanted to give Patrick a ride in the Mini, to share the privileges that went with my disadvantages. Ideally it would have been at a weekend, when with any luck the bond between twins would be weaker. But at some point just before I got my test, near the end of the summer term, the Savages had broken off relations with me – both of them. I don’t know who had said what, but one day they just walked past me, and from then on we were classmates only, not friends at all. They didn’t push me around any more. Other hands gripped the controls of the Tan-Sad, though there was no hiatus in my transport schedule. The Savages had selected their own replacements. There seemed no anger involved, just a cool shedding of closeness.

  The obvious explanation was that Paul had told Patrick about my interest in him being more than amicable. That would explain why the wrong twin blushed on the day of rupture. As he passed me Paul and not Patrick showed the signs of beta-adrenergic stimulation. Adrenalin was binding to receptors on the surface of his responsive cells for once, triggering the enzyme adenylyl cyclase to raise levels of cyclic adenosine monophosphate (AMP). His face was blatant with secrets.

  Looking back I almost think myself pathetic for not insisting on some sort of reckoning. I had done nothing wrong. My love was discreet – how could it be anything else? I had no chance of forcing my affections on him or on anyone.

  I should have had my say, my day in court. Except that drama needs a stage, and I had none. How could I have made the estranged twins lean over the Tan-Sad to be arraigned, to have a grievance thrown in their faces? I never even looked into Patrick’s eyes again. I felt as if I had been clean bowled in a game of Howzat when I wasn’t even playing – worse, that I was out lbw. I had never understood how you could be dismissed for something that would have happened, when it hadn’t.

  Dad had always been convinced that I made the world dance to my tune, but the incompleteness of this theory was beginning to become obvious. I had a tune, all right, and could hear it myself most of the time, but I couldn’t make it audible to anyone else, let alone persuade them to dance to it.

  To raise a differential blush

  After breaking up with the twins I was at rather a loose end in matters of the heart. The new hands on the Tan-Sad were attached to bodies, of course, but there could be no question of my transferring my affections to the newcomers (who took quite a while to achieve the teamwork which had come so naturally to the Savages). It had suited me to be obsessed with Patrick Savage, and there was no obvious substitute. Free adults routinely fall in love with married men, creating obstacles to their own fulfilment. I couldn’t exactly reproduce that state of satisfying frustration, but I had come close by developing a crush on one of a pair of twins. It was a sort of insurance policy against anything actually happening. As long as I had devised an insoluble tangle I didn’t need to think about whether there was any risk.

  On some level I think I knew I was partly making it up, even at the time. The twins were almost always together – they were like the sets of toys advertised in catalogues, with the footnote not available separately. Perhaps the saddest words young eyes of the period could fall upon.

  Patrick and Paul were effectively a couple already, one which resisted the formation of another. I was a fifth wheel from the start. Still, there had been a real fascination in finding one human being bewitching, utterly distinctive even from the back or at a distance, and his twin warmly neutral, even though they were genetically and environmentally so close to identical, and I was one of the very select group that could see through the similarity to the difference. It was quite an achievement, while it lasted, the ability to create embarrassment on one face and leave the other unaffected, to raise a differential blush.

  My crush on Patrick Savage wasn’t a very realistic romantic proposition – or else it was profoundly realistic, if deep down I didn’t want things to go anywhere, if I wanted to stay secure in the magic circle of hopeless wishes.

  If as the Tibetan Book of the Dead informs us, we choose the womb, then twins also choose each other. Perhaps Patrick and Paul were husband and wife in a previous life, and couldn’t bear to be parted in the next. Except of course that rebirth isn’t a reward but a chore. It’s like getting an essay back with Must try harder written on it. Or else Don’t try so hard, which is a much harder instruction to obey.

  Every Friday I would go to the garage at the end of the village and buy a pound’s worth of petrol. That would set me up for the weekend, and give me five return trips
to school. It’s strange that I didn’t mourn the bewitching Broyan, who was of course rendered surplus to requirements by the arrival of the Mini. Peter and I had managed to lay our hands on some Gunmetal Blue of our own in the end, and drove Mum mad painting absolutely everything with it. Plastic kits, to which it wasn’t suited. Doorstops. Any old thing. Mum was mystified by the attraction this smelly stuff had for us.

  I don’t even remember my last ride in his taxi, nor our farewells to each other. I’d drunk deep of his being in the weeks when I was taking driving lessons in the evenings but was still being driven to school by him, knowing that I was between stages of life, with the Broyan era drawing to an end. Then in the end I missed him as little as I had missed my budgie Charlie after I had given him away. It was time to go separate ways, but I would never forget the meaty smell of him, or his characteristic gestures – the way, for instance, he would move his neck convulsively, as if he was choking, while actually sliding out his dentures so as to cement them more firmly in place. Pink glue from a little tube. Really, my love for the man was slightly mental. What was the most personal thing he had ever said? ‘Oh, so you had a birfday, did ya? Meant to get a card …’ That was our high-water mark.

  Klaus Eckstein was a canny creature, and it may be that he sensed my new availability for non-romantic interests, compensatory obsessions. In his campaign of match-making between me and the Spanish language he escalated from hints (you’ve got so much in common, he was asking about you) to commands (I’ve booked a table – don’t let me down).

  ‘Here,’ he said at the end of one German lesson, handing me a copy of Nos ponemos en camino, ‘You’ll easily be able to manage the first twenty chapters before the weekend is over, and considering that your work-load is so risibly light, you’ll also have time to take a look at this poem. You can write me an essay on it.’

  ‘But sir!’ I said. ‘I haven’t even started Spanish, I don’t know if I’m even going to like it or want to do it, and you’re asking me to write an essay on a poem I don’t understand and haven’t any way of translating!’

  ‘Oh, you’ll manage,’ Eckstein replied. ‘It’s hardly much of a challenge. I’m babying you, really. I had to move from absolutely nothing to degree level in eight months. You should easily manage A-level in a year. And here’s where you begin.’ It did sound easy when he put it that way.

  ‘So let this help you get off to a good start,’ he added. ‘I’ll expect to receive your completed essay by Tuesday.’ Perhaps he saw panic in my eyes, because he made an uncharacteristic concession. ‘Wednesday at the latest.’ He was even good enough to lend me some Spanish dictionaries. He carried them to the Mini for me, dropping them in the back with a thud. One big, one medium and one small, the Three Bears transformed into reference books.

  ‘I’ll give you one more bit of help,’ said Eckstein as I started the engine of the Mini. He was breathing heavily, his internal spaces clogged with snuff. ‘The first line of the poem means At five in the afternoon. So does the fourth line, and the sixth, and the eighth, and the tenth. So, you see, I’ve translated almost half the poem for you. Aren’t you going to thank me?’ I shouted ‘Thank you, sir!’ above the engine noise, but he muttered, ‘I thought not,’ so perhaps he didn’t hear me.

  Cling to the guru’s fur

  On the journey back to Bourne End that evening I was buoyed up by the challenge I had been given. I wasn’t paying due care and attention to the road. It was pure luck that I didn’t come adrift on that deadly curve from Hedsor Hill, pure luck that the arch-roadhog Michael Aspel wasn’t going home just as fast and carelessly, demanding right of way as a broadcaster’s privilege.

  I was downright bouncy when I went in to have my supper. Mum commented that her JJ was remarkably chirpy. And so JJ was. JJ liked having private confabs with teachers, special assignments. I had resisted Eckstein’s oblique academic overtures during German lessons, but I had appreciated them just the same. There was an aspect of surly intellectual courtship in the way he pushed me into the arms of Spanish. He never resorted to anything as lowly as charm, but his cantankerousness had its nuances, and I knew he wanted the best for me academically. Now I would have to buckle down and justify his interest, to earn the modified contempt which was the closest he could come to faith in anyone’s abilities.

  Soon the table in the kitchen was spread with papers and notes, as I grappled with the technicalities of a language that I had only just met, unless you count an inventive obscenity scrawled on a blackboard months before. Mum said that she had never seen me tackle a piece of homework with such determination. And still after two hours I was no further forward, despite having moved from the Baby-Bear dictionary to the Daddy. There are many wonderful short books in the world, but it isn’t every book that can afford to be short. A short dictionary is one which has weeded out just those language-flowers which you were wanting to sniff and maybe pick.

  Nos ponemos en camino was plain sailing, but the intricacies of the poem completely defeated me. This time I wasn’t starting on the nursery slopes of a literature, as I had with German and Hänschen klein, with a nursery rhyme tailored to my name and psychology. I was starting on one of the peaks, with Federico García Lorca’s ‘La cogida y la muerte’. My exhaustion wasn’t altogether mental: the whole business of manœuvring books about, consulting one for help with another, disinterring references then returning to where I started, was something my body rather resented. Not the intellectual legwork but the sheer lugging back and forth of tomes. The armwork.

  To start with I tackled the poem word by word, as if I was a translation machine, a language grinder.

  Cuando el sudor de nieve fue llegando

  a las cinco de la tarde,

  cuando la plaza se cubrió de yodo

  a las cinco de la tarde,

  la muerte puso huevos en la herida

  a las cinco de la tarde.

  A las cinco de la tarde.

  A las cinco en punto de la tarde.

  yielded only

  When the snow sweat was arriving

  to five of afternoon,

  when the square was covered with iodine (iodine?)

  to five of afternoon,

  the death put eggs in the wound

  to five of afternoon.

  To five of afternoon.

  To five o’clock of afternoon.

  To be fair to myself, I did manage to nudge the poem a little further towards English than that – but Eckstein wanted more than a translation. He wanted understanding in depth – an essay. My excitement collapsed. All I could do was pray for my guardian angel to deliver a miracle of understanding – a forlorn hope, since understanding is what miracles leave grasping. On its own my brain could manage nothing. The cells were stumped.

  Mum asked what the matter was, and for once I welcomed her fussing. I explained that I had to write about an important poem in Spanish when I didn’t know any Spanish. That my wits were at the end of their tether. Mum didn’t say anything but moved quietly into the hall, shutting the door behind her.

  There was murmuring on the phone. Then Mum came back to tell me that she had arranged for me to see a friend and neighbour of hers, who lived on the other side of the Abbotsbrook Estate.

  ‘María Binns will see you at eight, JJ. She’ll be happy to help you with your Spanish poem.’ I must have looked doubtful about someone called Binns being an Iberian scholar, because she added, ‘María is as Spanish as it’s possible to be. Michael – that’s her husband – must like her that way. I made a blouse for her once, and when I saw her wearing it, I thought, “Why did I bother to sew on those top three buttons? They’ll never be used.”’

  So Mum had met this Spanish godsend through the sewing circle. It made sense that the de luxe dressmaker’s dummy, delivered in error, held on to with a passion and named after the intended owner, Mum’s guardian angel (or as close as she would ever get), should have a hotline to a whole network of higher powers. Miss Pearce was sending me along t
o the top woman, and my prayers seemed to have been answered. My guardian angel would rescue me as long as I put in a bit of effort and drove to meet her myself. The system seemed to work more or less on Granny’s principles, making sure I contributed energy of my own instead of coasting on bounty. This is a sound spiritual principle too. As one famous formula puts it, the guru is a mother monkey not a mother cat. She won’t pick you up by the scruff of your neck and carry you bodily to self-realisation. You have to cling to her fur.

  An attractive, well-turned-out woman was waiting for me at the gate of her charming house when I pulled up in the red Mini. My guardian angel was lithe and handsome and dressed in a black suède skirt and jacket which looked brand new. Her welcome was marvellously warm.

  ‘¡Come in, dear John! I am María Paz.’ She pronounced her surname the way someone from the North of England would say ‘path’. María Paz Binns – the name had its own poetry, though very far from Lorca’s. ‘¿Can I assist you in getting over this small step? ¡Very good! Now if you can manage OK, I thought we’d spread this poem out on the big kitchen table. ¿Would that be suitable for you?’

  Before anything else she offered me a little irregular cake she told me was called a panellet. ‘If you are going to learn Spanish you must learn Spanish tastes as well as Spanish words. The more Spanish food you try, the better will be your pronunciation. There is nothing more Spanish than panellet. In reality … panellet is Catalan and not Spanish. ¡So you can start by learning that there is more than one Spain! More than one language, more than one tradition, more than one style of food.’ She broke the cake in half and popped my piece right into my mouth. Even in those days I didn’t enjoy having people make decisions like that without consultation. It replaces one form of embarrassment with another. It may be decisive but it ain’t polite. On the other hand, the cake was delicious. That made a difference.