Cedilla

by Adam Mars-Jones

  ‘Lovely,’ I said, and María Paz replied offhandedly that one of the major ingredients of a panellet was potatoes. ‘Michael won’t even try it – catch him, he says, eating cake of spuds.’ Michael of course being her husband. ‘So you see’ – she gave me a very winning smile – ‘you are already more open-minded than he.’ She might not have thought me open-minded if she’d mentioned the spuds in advance, but the panellet’s flavour bloomed on my tongue.

  ‘One more thing about Catalonia … there is a special patron saint for the region – you may recognise him. St Jordi? Is he ringing a bell?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘He killed a dragon, like the English St George. They are in fact the same person.’

  ‘I never knew that.’

  ‘One saint for two countries. More than two – St George is also patron of Greece and of Georgia. But the official patron saint of Spain is Santiago. Santiago of Compostela. St James the Greater. Saint Jordi is a forbidden saint, thanks to that whelp-of-a-hound Franco. Parents are not allowed to baptise their sons Jordi. Imagine not being allowed to name an English boy George!’ This would indeed be a strange embargo, though George was not at the time a fashionable name.

  If María Paz had happened to mention that St James the Greater was also the patron saint of vets and of arthritis sufferers, as he is in his spare time, then I might have rocketed off into Catholicism and not taken my present course. There are other saints with arthritic responsibilities (take a creaking bow, St Colman, St Alphonsus Maria de Liguori, St Servatus, St Totnan, St Killian) as well as others who watch over vets (St Blaise, St Eligius), but St James the Greater is the only one to hold down both jobs.

  The devil smokes black tobacco

  Even without knowing about the broad portfolio of St James the Greater’s patronage, I was thrilled by the oppression of the Catalans and the whole idea of a forbidden saint. I would name my first-born Jordi – boy or girl, the name worked as well for either. My first-born, or my first cat.

  María asked for the poem and read it in silence. She stopped after a few seconds to light an unfamiliar-looking cigarette, its tobacco oddly dark. She inhaled the smoke through her mouth and expelled it thoughtfully from her nose. Dad smoked as if it was a military drill, a form of exercise for the lungs, while Mum smoked du Mauriers with her nerves (it was never just ‘a cigarette’ any more than the Relaxator was ever just ‘the lounger’). It was easy to think that María Paz drew smoke directly into her brain, bathing her cerebral involutions with the cigarette’s piquant incense.

  She saw me studying her and asked me if I would care to try one of her cigarettes. ‘I know it has a rather acrid pong, but is really very gentle and smooth,’ she said. ‘I depend on my Ducados. Michael gets them for me from Spain when he goes there.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘To be honest, if all I could get was English cigarettes I wouldn’t go to the trouble of smoking at all.’ Sycophantically I agreed with what she said about English cigarettes. It tickled me that my guardian angel brought temptation as well as rescue, making her a sort of double agent. Surely only the devil would smoke black tobacco.

  Thanks to the family’s birthday and Christmas protocol, I was neither an addict nor altogether a novice when it came to cigarettes. I accepted her kind suggestion. After she had offered me the packet and while she was still brandishing her lighter, she mentioned that she had a cigarette holder somewhere, which might make my first Spanish cigarette a little kinder on my inexperienced throat. ¡Tactful María! She must have noticed that my lack of flexibility would make it awkward for me to bring a cigarette to my lips. Not impossible, but awkward – a certain amount of the movement would have had to come from the neck. It was really my bones and my blushes she was sparing, rather than my tender throat.

  The cigarette holder, when it was installed between my lips, gave me a feeling of baleful sophistication, either a matinée idol’s or a Bond villain’s. I was Noël Coward or else Goldfinger. With our Ducados safely lit, we began the seminar. I would need all available forms of sophistication to cope with the information my guardian angel had to offer.

  ‘John,’ she said, folding her arms. ‘No one will ever understand this poem without knowing that Lorca was jomosexual. ¡It is an elegy for his lover, who was killed in the bull ring!’

  It’s true that on the qwerty keyboard the letter h snuggles up to the letter j, but María’s delivery wasn’t any sort of metaphysical typing error. The Spanish j converges on the English h sound, but is much raspier, as different as panellet is different from Victoria sponge or a Ducados from a du Maurier. When Mrs Paz Binns told me that Lorca was jomosexual, the Spanish j came smokily from her lips with just the same passionate and committed intonation that Eckstein had used, when he told me that ‘joder’ was a third conjugation Spanish verb.

  My modest physical size makes any drug work on me rather powerfully. I think I managed to conceal from my hostess the intensity of the nicotine intoxication I was receiving from the Ducados, though at one point I came close to jabbing myself in the eye with the cigarette holder.

  María spoke with passion, reverence and proud humility as she explained the fierce national temperament. Bull-fighting was the heart’s blood of Spain. She said the first word anyone should learn in Spanish was duende, about which Lorca had much to say. Only with this background knowledge could the reader begin to know the way Lorca had felt about his lover Ignacio Sánchez Mejías.

  Background knowledge about Spanish culture was exactly what I lacked, and I was particularly hostile to bull-fighting. ¿How could I not be, when even the jar of Bovril in Mum’s larder, that nightmarish concentrate of abattoir run-off, filled me with horror and disgust? Still, by the time she had finished speaking and I had taken a final puff on my Ducados, whose butt I jabbed out in the glass ashtray which she held up for me, we agreed that I understood Lorca very well. Also that I should never waste my time with English cigarettes.

  Before I left, I asked María to read the whole poem aloud to me. While she spoke I kept my eyes closed. She made the repeated lines pound in fatalistic rhythm, like a funeral train. My mouth was sour with cigarette smoke, but I could still taste the panellet, infusing my saliva with its aromas. I sat there concentrating on María’s diction, and the exact flavouring of her Spanish vowels and consonants. There’s no way you can be sure in advance that any individual native speaker will be a suitable model for your own accent, but for now I would trust my guardian angel to guide my tongue.

  When Mum asked me how my lesson with María had gone, I didn’t have an answer ready. I had been so busy mulling over the new flavours I had learned, and the problem of forging within my soul a vegetarian duende, that I hadn’t remembered to concoct an innocent version of the seminar for parental consumption. I certainly didn’t want to mention the sexual secret that María had shared with me, nor my adventures with Spanish cigarettes, so I simply said that she was very nice and very helpful, and had given me some nice home-made cake.

  I could hardly have been more stupid. Mum might have been troub led by Spanish cigarettes and the discussion of jomosexuality, but she was certain to feel the threat if I touched another woman’s cake. It pierced her in her inner core of catering. She grilled me about the cake’s texture and probable ingredients. She was keenly competitive when it came to cooking. Her soufflés always rose and stayed risen, unlike those of some neighbours in Bourne End. She even borrowed a trick from Fanny Cradock by playing an electric fan on the fluffy ramparts of the finished soufflé before serving, to show that it wouldn’t collapse. It wouldn’t dare.

  I said that the cake was low to the plate, as if it had hardly risen or not been made with flour at all. It certainly contained almonds, vanilla, perhaps some orange or lemon essence. I didn’t quite play into Mum’s hands by mentioning the potatoes. She seemed mollified and snorted that it didn’t sound like much of a cake, but I wasn’t sure I had fully made amends for my cake adultery in the kitchen of María Paz Binns.

  His
own costly Bovril

  My essay on ‘The Tragic Bull in Lorca’ was delivered to Eckstein after school the next Tuesday. I had taken a day off sick in order to write it. It was a pretty torrid piece of analysis, fuelled by my anxiety to please my benignly scowling teacher, by the unique smoke rising from the black tobacco of a Ducados cigarette, and by my own abstract desire for the handsome bull-fighter, as long as he didn’t hurt the bull. His lithe body now lay twisted and crumpled in the sawdust of the bull ring, the suit of lights stained with his own costly Bovril. It was all very feverish, masochistic and pretentious. I was proud of it.

  When I came in after delivering my essay, Mum was making a cake, and almost dancing around it, in an unusually sprightly way.

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, just trying out a new recipe,’ she said. I knew she couldn’t be as casual as she was trying to seem. ‘I got it from María Binns, who got it from Ideal Homes. The entire cake collapsed on her – poor dear! – so I told her I’d give it a try.’ She had already baked her cake bases, the bricks as I thought of them, and had mortared them together with her home-made buttercream filling. Now she was mixing something else in her pudding basin. ‘It’s a chocolate icing which goes all over the outside of the cake,’ she said, her voice as light and airy as a meringue. In fact she had just popped a batch of meringues into the oven on a low temperature. It was her thrifty habit to let meringues hitch a lift from the relatively high heat that had been used to bake the cakes. The extra expense was minimal.

  After she had beaten her egg whites with the rotary whisk, she would hold it above the bowl of stiff peaks and gently work the handle back and forth about half-way round the circle of its action. If the movement was too fast then centrifugal force would spatter the kitchen with flying froth, but if she judged it properly then she could get a trailing sheet of woven foam to lower itself onto the rest of the whipped whites from the whisk, whose meshing blades were almost clean before they even reached the washing-up bowl.

  The kitchen was her pride and her parish, although food in its finished form had little interest for her. She rarely served herself more than a few spoonfuls at mealtimes, and though she hated waste she sometimes left even that untouched. She was always saying she would eat later, and perhaps sometimes she did.

  Her soft chocolate icing smelled as good as it looked.

  ‘Would you care to try a bit, JJ?’ she asked with a bright smile. ‘I know you say you don’t like cakes, but perhaps this is the recipe that will convert you!’

  She passed me a spoonful of the mixture and returned to her creation. As she picked up her palette knife I noticed that she had now combined her sprightly dance with a færie flick. She was smothering the cake with the soft mixture, and as she worked she danced some more. She kept dipping her blade at lightning speed into a pot of water she had nearby. ‘It’s important to get only a thin film of water on the knife,’ she said, and the light flashed on her palette knife as she plied it about. Her blade plunged and scooped, making little peaks and valleys in the edible geography of the cake. I put the spoon into the cave of my mouth to test her offering, nearly fainting as the mixture dissolved back into the nothingness from which it was created, leaving my tongue-buds drugged and exulting in the subtle sweetness of chocolate, with a touch of bitterness pulling on my heart.

  ‘Oh, and there’s just one more thing,’ she said, ‘ – before I do the washing-up, of course! – that might interest you, JJ, as a scientist.’ She showed me the palette knife, so that I could see that there wasn’t a mark on it, in spite of all the sculpting it had done, the wonderful irregular symmetry it had given to the finished cake. I suppose the water she’d been dipping it in had been warm.

  I didn’t need to say anything, and nor did she. The whole scene had expressed what she wanted to say. The equilibrium of the world had been restored, the proper balance of things. So much for Spanish cakes that don’t even rise! Poor dear María Paz Binns, such a darling, brainy as all get-out – and can’t even make a simple chocolate cake from a magazine!

  Irrational fear of Tom Stoppard

  Bourne End wasn’t exactly a glamorous place, but it was always a desirable place to live, and it was beginning to fill up with go-getters. It had been a big step up socially for Mum after years in RAF housing. Among the other service wives she had been something of a queen bee, but she felt the strain of her new surroundings. She was afraid of being shown up as stupid or tongue-tied. That was why the sewing circle, and the company of women who respected her needlework, had become such a necessity to her.

  Not everyone triggered her reflex of panicked inadequacy. Jon Pertwee the actor, who was a neighbour, had become very friendly – even though he had been guilty of drawing the eyes of the world to the area, a few years previously, by recommending it as a location for the filming of The Pumpkin Eater. We could do without that sort of attention, thank you.

  Pertwee knew how to butter Mum up, saying what a gem the house was – how had he missed it when he was looking for a house in the area? She must promise to let him know if she ever planned to sell.

  He buttered us all up, telling Peter and me to call him Poetry – not Pertwee, which sounded like a baby trying to say poetry (he did a killing imitation) but ‘Poetry’ as a proper thespian would say it, chest out and shoulders back. He was entirely approachable, and younger than we originally thought, since at the time he had his hair dusted grey for a rôle.

  Poetry was the life and soul of any party. Mum told us about one riverside gala (she heard about it at her sewing circle) at which Jon Pertwee had rowed an abandoned boat until it sank, then swam ashore fully clothed to wild applause.

  I hadn’t minded when the film people came to make The Pumpkin Eater, being thirteen or so at the time. The only complication of the shoot was that one elderly resident turned out not to have signed the release prepared by the production company. She refused to take direction, and would trot out of her front door (innocently or not) whenever the cameras rolled.

  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 whe
re 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?