He seemed very young, even for those days, when freshers arrived with their mothers’ kisses still evaporating from their cheeks, and the scarves their aunts had knitted wound tightly round their necks.
I liked the way that, after a lecture, he just watched with amusement as our fellow students either made themselves scarce or squared up to volunteering to help me, as if they were signing up for years of military service. Noel seemed to find this comical, which was very much the perspective I aspired to myself.
There was no real significance to our going out together. We just arranged, after a lecture, to meet at the cinema. The choice of film was an accident from my point of view — Noel had mentioned in conversation that he would be going, and I had asked to tag along. I knew that without a definite social obligation I would back out of the expedition and all its uncertainties.
I had the sneaky feeling that our arrangement was asymmetrical. If I didn’t turn up Noel would have no difficulty proceeding with his evening, but if he didn’t turn up I was stymied. Before I set out I did what students so often did at the time, when puzzled over questions great or small. I would consult the Book of Changes, the yarrow-stalk oracle — the I Ching. I used the Westernised coin-throwing option rather than the traditional version with the yarrow stalks, although with my contacts at the Bot I should have been able to come up with the authentic flora. My question, of course, was ‘How am I to dissolve myself into the life of this indifferent city while continuing to ask “Who am I?”?’ The reading that came up always seemed to be The leather belt of office will be given and taken away three times in one day. Lovely, poetic, highly suggestive, but what I wanted was more along the lines of Go to the flicks with someone you hardly know — make it something arty.
I could have asked Noel to collect me from Downing, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that I was forcing myself to put in the effort, hoping that there would come a moment when I stopped noticing all the hard work I was doing. That was the moment I would find my place among the mobile.
The Arts Cinema lay down its own little passage off Market Hill (a hill which isn’t a hill at all, thank God, but a square with a slight tilt), so it was particularly unhandy for me to get to, even in a city of awkward access. Cambridge and above all its university is strongly fortified even against the able-bodied — the grass is always greener in the Fellows’ Garden, and that’s out of bounds to students except for the occasional summer party.
I hitch-lifted my way out of the car and into the wheelchair, but no one seemed to be going my way, and I ended up having to punt myself laboriously down Arts Cinema Passage.
When I arrived, Noel was looking at the showcases of stills from forthcoming attractions. Rather daunting attractions: troubled Nordic eyes and stern cheekbones gazed out of the cases. It must have been a Bergman season. Noel turned to greet me with a dazzling smile, as if he too was about to be photographed, wanting his expression to be at its peak of bloom when flashbulbs exploded to record it.
The ushers at the Arts were normally students themselves, friendly rather than businesslike. They watched with interest as I gave Noel instructions about propping me against the wall while he collapsed the wheelchair, then toting me into the cinema. Noel seemed happy to be observed coping so splendidly. Good luck to him! He might not enjoy the same level of attention if it came along every minute of the day.
When we were in the modest little auditorium I indicated a couple of empty seats in the middle of a row. That’s where I wanted us to sit. Why should I have a sidelong view just to save him a little trouble? Let him earn his keep. ‘They’re numbered seats, John,’ he whispered, ‘and ours are here.’
‘Tell you what, then,’ I said. ‘We’ll move if we’re asked.’ I wasn’t normally so bolshie, but I wanted to make clear that I wasn’t just a charity parcel. You like being conspicuous? I’ll give you conspicuous.
As Noel carried me along the row of seats I could feel little extra movements in his arms, which made me suspect that he was shrugging every few feet, to convey an apology to the people we were disturbing. Terribly sorry. This is what he’s like.
He needn’t have bothered. The people in those seats couldn’t do enough to oblige us. They were practically hurling themselves out of our way. They’d have lain flat on the floor if they’d thought it would help, they would have stood on the backs of their chairs. It’s wonderful what a little embarrassment can do. Most of the time I work hard to put people at their ease, but once in a while it’s good to let rip and have everyone cower in their Englishness.
Then in the dark I had to revert to a meeker style. I found that I couldn’t see the bottom of the screen — and consequently the subtitles — so I had to ask Noel to improvise a cushion for me out of his rolled-up coat. I certainly wasn’t going to allow him to ask for one of the cushions they keep for children’s screenings. Before I had new hips installed my position in a cinema seat was more upright, since I wasn’t actually sitting. It was more that I was leant against the seat like an umbrella. Still, it’s not something you can expect to find in even the smallest print, is it? Warning: artificial hips may limit your enjoyment of foreign-language films.
As the film got into its dour stride I realised that there were compensations to having company. Noel had brought along some butterscotch. Not just any butterscotch but the good stuff, Callard & Bowser’s, which came in an oddly fortified packet, braced with cardboard, wrapped first in paper and then cellophane. Perhaps it still does. In those innocent days of packaging, it was a very distinctive product. It suggested a childish treat that was only accessible to deft and determined adult fingers. The sweet itself came in double tablets, wrapped one more time in a sturdy lined silver paper which retained traces of the sticky virtue it had wrapped and kept safe.
The naked butterscotch
The double shape of the sweet suggested that a mother might snap it in two where the brittle toffee narrowed, before popping one tablet in her child’s mouth and one in her own. Personally I had always favoured sucking the sweet entire, though the double tablet would hardly fit in my mouth. The opposite ends of the flat finger of burnt sugar poked at the insides of my cheeks in a way that was almost painful, until the oral solvents had done their leisurely work.
Noel asked in a whisper if I wanted him to unwrap the butterscotch for me. Why ever not? I wasn’t in the mood for handicraft. He got points for treating me as his equal in greed — it didn’t seem to occur to him to snap the tablet in two. He posted the naked butterscotch into my mouth, his fingers brushing past my lips in a way that I didn’t find presumptuous or unpleasant. Then my consciousness slid back into the film and all its radiant gloom.
At the end of the showing I stayed put, and not only because it would be foolish to make a move immediately, before the lights were put on, and be jostled in the crush. It was still my habit to watch the screen till the very last credit.
To me it was a tiny crime not to finish a film or a book or even a record. I stood firm even on the issue of ‘Within You Without You’ at the beginning of Side Two of Sergeant Pepper, when everyone else wanted to plunge the needle straight into ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’. I fought many battles on behalf of George Harrison’s rotten pseudo-Indian song.
Swedish end-credits were no less entitled to sympathetic vibration than English ones, sympathy being distinct from understanding, and many of the names were beguiling in their own right. After Wild Strawberries, Noel had the sense to humour me, perhaps seeing from the set of my body that I wasn’t prepared to budge just yet. He set off to retrieve the wheelchair, which had been tucked in the box office for safe-keeping.