In the shock of rapport with Noel her cheeks were now quite pink. Somehow they had got on to the subject of favourite pieces of music. Mrs Beddoes was saying, ‘It’s my husband who knows about things. Alf’s favourite piece is classical music, and I really like it too. It’s by Beethoven.’
‘Really, Mrs Beddoes? One of the symphonies?’ He thought for a moment. ‘Perhaps the Pastoral? You may know it from Fantasia — the Disney film.’
‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘It’s not from a film.’ I was delighted that Noel’s patronising suggestion had fallen flat. ‘It’s called … it’s gone out of my mind. It’s called … that’s right, “Wellington’s Victory”. It’s on the same record as the “1812”, but it’s even better.’ She clapped her hands together on either side of the pillow, to plump it up, but almost as if she was playing the cymbals. ‘Even more cannons and whatnot!!’
Which made Noel’s day, perhaps even his term. I had hoped he would leave before Mrs Beddoes did, so I could be spared the inevitable sneer about her musical taste, but he stayed on to round off the lovely morning he was having. I didn’t know ‘Wellington’s Victory’, but it seemed strange that liking Beethoven could be such a faux pas. Wasn’t Beethoven supposed to be the tops?
It was perfectly possible that Mrs Beddoes knew more of Beethoven’s music than I did. Once you’d mentioned Moonlight, Für Elise and Da-da-da-Dum, you’d just about exhausted my expertise on the subject. I wasn’t in a position to call Noel’s bluff, but I wished someody would.
What he said when we were alone was, I suppose, quite a mild exercise in contempt. ‘Good for Madame Beddoes,’ he said. ‘If you’re tone-deaf and pig-ignorant, you might as well go for the piece with the loudest bangs.’
Watching the way Noel played along with innocent Mrs Beddoes, I realised that my social skills were very partial. I needed to develop new ones. All this time I had been thinking in terms of bringing people within the orbit of my personality, entirely overlooking the fact that they were always going to be people, like the blond germ working his ’fluence on Mrs Beddoes, who badly needed to be kept at a distance. Poor mobility meant poor avoiding skills, so I would need to add an annexe to my laboratory of personal accomplishments. It wasn’t enough to have charm, I needed antidotes to the charm of others. Countercharm. Even the Everest & Jennings hoist I had brought from Bourne End had a red control as well as a green one.
I wanted to be able to accept the world’s butterscotch with the proper appreciation, while refusing its helping hand on my shoulder, its shallow fascination with the details of my daily life, its snores in my bed. I must learn the technique of ruling these things out of court so crisply that the offer never came again. There must be an end to haggling with the well-intentioned, the clueless and the plain invasive.
If I had liked Noel I might have crowned his name with a sparkly diæresis, so: Noël. As things stood, I stripped him mentally of any such insignia. He didn’t deserve them.
I was offended by Noel’s manner with Mrs Beddoes, but I also envied it. It obviously didn’t strike him as unnatural that he should be looked after at his college by a sort of servant, well on his way to adulthood. Perhaps he didn’t notice his dependence, but mine was highly visible to me. My independence was opening up by the slowest possible stages, and the leisure of the process maddened me. With every emancipation I became more chafed by the restrictions remaining.
Certainly Noel was a great hit with the woman he had taken so much trouble to mock. For weeks after his overnight stay, she would ask, ‘And how is Mr Noel? Sleeping again at nights, I hope?’ She would obviously have enjoyed a repetition of his visit. It had slipped her mind that one of her purposes, according to the university’s administration, was to make sure that the students in her charge spent the stipulated number of nights a term within a one-mile radius of Great St Mary’s, unless they had their tutor’s permission, in their own beds and alone.
Austere brickwork lingam
What lay outside that magic circle was off the map and off the radar. As far as the rule was concerned, the university might be surrounded, like the earth in Hindu cosmology, by concentric oceans of (in order) brine, sugar-cane juice, wine, ghee, milk, whey and fresh water.
To me the University Library was far more plausible as the centre of student life than Great St Mary’s. People were always complaining that it looked like a power station, as if they had spotted a flaw in the design, when that industrial imagery was exactly what the architect intended. The UL was a mighty pulsing electromagnet, which drew towards it with implacable force two copies of every book published in the country, on the very day it appeared. It was a royal engine of bibliophilia, it was an austere brickwork lingam throbbing with imaginative power. What it wasn’t — with its staircase upon staircase — was a place I could go. The front entrance crowned a flight of steps with that abomination, a revolving door, hateful symbol of my banishment from the engine room of learning. No one has ever been able to explain to me why the trivial advantages of the revolving door are held to outweigh its obvious defects. Yes, it excludes draughts. It also excludes me.
I made one forlorn attempt at entering the premises by another avenue. There was a goods entrance at the back, where crates of books could be wheeled in. I would explore the possibilities there. Of course I had to make an appointment (more phone calls from the Porter’s Lodge) to be shown the ropes — the ramps, the lifts. Of course a ramp isn’t much use to a wheelchair-user unless he has a motorised chair or strong arms, and the lifts were pretty much hopeless, hardly larger than the ones at Vulcan, being designed in the first place for books and not people. All in all, the prospect of being an honorary book-crate in the UL was a lot less fun than being an honorary suitcase on trains leaving Bourne End station. It wasn’t a solution. I would have to find other means of gaining access to the treasure-house of books.
Luckily my status as a second-class citizen wasn’t a simple thing. It was speckled with exemptions and concessions. With a little cajoling on my part, there was a system in place. All I had to do was toot the Mini’s horn outside the Library at a prearranged time and the books I wanted would be brought down to me. The able-bodied undergraduates of the university, the hale and the hearty — they were the underprivileged ones. At the feast of learning offered in that rather sombre-looking building, they had to eat on the premises. I was entitled to take-away.
The library’s statutes allowed for special arrangements to be made at the discretion of the Librarian, but in practice it was only necessary to adapt the mechanism which allowed third-year undergraduates to borrow books. My Tutor became my proxy — so technically he was the one who borrowed up to five volumes on my behalf, and incurred any penalties also. There was a certain amount of paperwork, since Graëme Beamish had to give his authorisation. He had a supply of forms already printed up (normally for the use of those lucky third-years), but he did need to sign them. ‘I must say, John,’ he remarked once, ‘that I never dreamed that writer’s cramp would be part of the price I pay — with joy in my heart, I assure you — for the pleasure of acting as a moral tutor.’
Wheelchair access to libraries is a major cultural advance, but there’s no doubt about the greater poetry of the old arrangement. The boy at the foot of the steps whistles a special signal, and the books he wants come fluttering down from the roof of the building, birds of knowledge which alight on his fingertips. It’s all very Omar Khayyam.