As far as the family went, Peter fell in line right behind me. He supported me in everything I said. He was a staunch ally and a brick beyond praise, but he had his own vulnerabilities. Each of us had spent months in Mum’s karpa-paay, her womb-bag, and she knew how to undermine us from within as well as erode us from the outside. The fraternal fortress of tranquillity was under constant attack.
I reached the point where I really didn’t see how I could hold out much longer. I prayed for help — help sooner rather than later. Sri Bhagavan was the shape divinity took in my mind, but as I was back in England now, worse luck, it seemed a good idea to hedge my bets, so I prayed to my old friend Jesus Christ, and to God the Father as well. I didn’t forget to add a dash of Allah to the cocktail of divine appeal. Desperation is a strongly œcumenical force.
It wasn’t more than a few hours later when the phone rang. Mum answered with genteel poise and warmth (‘Bourne End 21176’) as she always did. The world of tele-communications was expanding convulsively around us, and we in Bourne End now had five-digit numbers.
No one could have guessed the bleakness of Mum’s underlying mood from the way she crooned into the receiver. ‘Oh, hello, Malcolm … how lovely to hear your voice … Yes … yes … yes he’s back and well settled in … yes … yes … brown as a nut. Oh, he had a wonderful time. He’s very full of his experiences … No it doesn’t do much for me I’m afraid, but that’s really not the point, is it? My only concern is for his happiness … Yes, Downing College. After that, who knows? I don’t think there are many vacancies these days for people to get paid for sitting around on their bottoms doing nothing, but if anyone can make a living from that I dare say John can …’
Mum’s theory of conversation seemed to be that you could say any number of disobliging things about people as long as the last thing you said was more or less positive, so I wasn’t surprised to hear her start to sign off with ‘Perhaps we should all take a leaf from his book … wouldn’t life be lovely if it all worked like that?’
Then the conversation took a new turn. Mum’s voice became if anything even sweeter, but her hand tightened on the receiver and she stuck her chin out. ‘What’s that? … Oh yes, Malcolm, of course you can … You know John, he’d love it … But promise you’ll say if you get bored? There’s no kindness in humouring him. Shall we say about three? … Perfect! … bye-eee …’
Her obliging manner was a pale shadow of itself by the time the phone was back in its cradle. ‘That was Malcolm Washbourne,’ she said sourly. ‘He says he’s dying to hear all about your experiences in India, and he’s coming over to see you at about three o’clock. How lovely for you.’
The last door-slam
She seemed enormously put off herself. ‘Now, what do you want for lunch? If you can think of a way of getting a meal to cook by itself while you sit on your bottom, please pass it on. I’d be glad to put my feet up myself.’ She went into the kitchen, slamming the door behind her, so that I ached to be back with Mrs Osborne, with her wild-fig dishes and her big dog-battering stick and the scoldings that seemed loving by comparison.
I couldn’t understand why I was being reproached for needing food, while Peter was catered for as a matter of course. He could easily have managed for himself in the kitchen, and would have left enough mess to keep Mum grumbling contentedly for days. I didn’t argue the toss. In theory I could always get the last word, but Mum would always have the last door-slam. Conversational manœuvres, however crushing, will always come second to repartee of that physical sort. The doors in that house must have been sturdy indeed, to survive the years of melodramatic slamming.
Still, I had resources of my own. Mrs Osborne had scared me half to death about the use of aluminium pans in cookery. We were destroying ourselves at every mealtime, as surely as the Roman patricians did with their lead plates and cutlery, poisoning their brains while the plebs ate off wooden plates with their hands. There was a book on the subject: Aluminium: A Menace to Health by Mark Clement.
When I got home, I got hold of a copy (it was published by Thorsons). I must have driven Mum mad by waving it under her nose, and refusing to eat anything ever again that came out of one of those sinister health-destroying pans. As if I wasn’t fussy enough about food, without becoming obsessed about its preparation and accusing her of killing us all under cover of nurture. If she had beaten me about the head with an aluminium pan, screaming, ‘How’s your brain working now? Rotting, is it? Is it?’, any decent lawyer would have got her off with probation, maybe words of praise from the judge.
Peter joined the conspiracy by looking for scratches in the pans Mum used. ‘That shows the bits which came off when she slashes the potatoes with her knife,’ he told me. ‘And we’re all eating them!’ We made her buy a stainless-steel one, though on the Granny principle of balancing the books, albeit with lopsided contributions, I gave a little something towards it — ten shillings. I’ve stuck to my guns, though, and avoided aluminium ever since. If my brain goes bad I won’t hold the kitchen cupboard responsible.
Mum hated it when we ganged up on her. Unfortunately she had a talent for uniting the opposition, and had inherited none of Granny’s flair for playing people off against each other.
After that miraculous phone call I felt a deep thrill of hope within me. I had prayed to God to send reinforcements, and now Malcolm was coming to visit. He was the only one of our neighbours who seemed to enjoy spending time with me, and Mum had never really understood that. I didn’t exactly understand it myself — we weren’t on a wave-length, exactly, we were like two notes at opposite ends of a keyboard, so that you can’t really decide whether they harmonise or clash. But Mum couldn’t believe his interest in me was real, that two such different people could agree on anything. Malcolm worked in advertising, which made his spiritual interests no more than playacting to her way of thinking.
I disagreed. The products Malcolm was called on to sell were dreams in the first place, and the slogans and campaigns he came up with were dreams about dreams. They were Maya squared, Maya rampant and in spades. Dreams were his medium and his currency, so it followed that reality must be his consolation. He must find the square root of Maya in meditation, where objects, symbols, words and ideas dissolve impartially, leaving a light that has no source and casts no shadow.
I was benefiting from the resumption of my meditation practice, now that I was no longer trying to light my little match in the up-draught of a huge conflagration.
Malcolm and I would talk for hours, on subjects literary and metaphysical. Malcolm always said we were ‘crackajolking away like a hearse on fire’, a splendid phrase he had picked up from Finnegans Wake. Like most people (not just advertising men, those great experts at making a little go a long way) he had probably read only one page, but he’d found himself a good one. I hadn’t so much as looked at the book, and when I did I was disappointed to find nothing that fell under my eyes matching up to the sample.
Malcolm enjoyed banter and teasing. In fact I think he positively enjoyed being told what a hopeless case of materialism he was. I dare say the actual cultivation of his spirituality came second, though he had read almost as many of the relevant books — or book-jackets — as I had and kept up pretty well.