I had contradictory expectations of my fellow members of the student body. Colin the evangelical engineer wanted to get a firmer grip on his own soul by gathering mine in, and Noel the film-going chancer only wanted to pose and preen. Barry was the only one of the bunch who didn’t even pretend to take an interest in me personally, and he was the only one I welcomed in.
I would invite people back to my room after lunch, bribing them with better coffee than the college provided and making sure (less defensibly) that I always had cigarettes on hand. Only my neighbour P. D. Hughes ever replaced my supply, but I didn’t mind being exploited. At this point what I seemed to need was a definite idea of what my guests got out of my hospitality. What I wanted from them was less definite, in fact I can own up and say that it’s a complete mystery to me now. The room was far too small for ambitious entertaining, but I liked it when people were wedged in anywhere they would fit and the ceiling swirled with smoke.
Once a guest of mine brought me a present — a lava lamp. Admittedly it was defective and a cast-off, something that had been returned to Joshua Taylor and replaced. That swanky emporium had no use for the faulty product, and so it came to me. It was prematurely aged, so that it no longer quite had the effect desired, of distended yolks of wax rising and falling through excited oil. In my lava lamp the wax was tired and unresponsive, circulating in globules and clots, weary melting streamers. You’re not supposed to leave lava lamps on for extended periods, but I didn’t have a lot of choice — the power point not being accessible to me. Friends would drop round for coffee and turn it on for their amusement, and then it would stay on till the next morning, when I’d ask Mrs Beddoes to turn it off. It’s bad for lava lamps to be left on for so long, but what could I do? It was broken already, and I became accustomed to its sour ozone smell.
Pete had started to get weekend visits from his old girlfriend, Helen. She was from his home town (Birmingham) and they had gone out together for quite a while, but then before he went up to Cambridge he told her that a clean break was best.
Now he wasn’t so sure. He felt defeated by the sheer weight of numbers, the odds against finding a student girlfriend, and he was too shy to meet girls from the town, or the nurses of Addenbrookes who were in a special category, supposedly nymphomaniacs without exception. One night, tipsy and self-pitying, he had written a letter to the girl he had dumped back home, repenting of his callousness.
She took him back, but sensibly kept him on a short rein. No student girlfriend could have had him so completely under her thumb. Helen, who was crisp, organised and already in work, seemed very grown-up.
When Helen first saw me she said, ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Making yoghurt,’ I said, to which she replied with the greatest cheerfulness, ‘How revolting!’ We got on well from the start, though she had no plans to share the limited time she had with Pete. She pressed him to give up smoking (so that he could contribute to her travelling expenses, as was only right), which tended to prevent him from coming to my room after meals. Helen had no interest in plants, so it was handy that I had learned to dispense with Pete’s services as botanical escort at weekends.
He wasn’t entirely at ease with the company after meals at A6 anyway. He had acquired a nickname he disliked, and in a way it was his own fault. Like many people studying a language he was struck by the limited sounds of Russian (while of course forcing his tongue to master intricacies unknown in English). One day he happened to mention that there was no H in Rooshian, so that his own name, Hughes, would be pronounced Gooks. What he said wasn’t exactly ‘Gooks’, but that was what people decided they heard, and he was Peter Gooks after that, or just ‘Gooks’. I tried to set up a counter-tradition by calling him Pyotr or Petrushka instead, but no one ever used those fond forms but me.
Sites of sordid suffering
I’ve always been a slow eater, and always will be, but the improvement in what we ate in Hall made Alan Linton also linger over his food. Mealtimes became companionable, now that we could bask in the envious glances of our flesh-eating fellows, who would chew their corrupt rations in grim haste. Our plates were not sites of sordid suffering, and our forks were not burdened with karma.
The slow pace of eating suited rambling chat, but I was running out of subjects. I had qualms by now about turning my summer in India into a party piece. In any case it often fell flat. In practice, telling people about my sojourn as guest of the mountain only prompted questions about Indian restaurants. Which was better, the Sylhet or the Curry Centre on Castle Hill? I had no idea. I had spotted a restaurant called the Curry Queen on Mill Road, and had decided it would be my first port of call, but I hadn’t got round to it yet.
In those days even educated people knew only a tiny handful of words in any Indian language, and one of them was always Sutra. Another was Karma. I spent a lot of time explaining that the Kama in Kama Sutra was not the same thing as the Karma the hippies held so dear. To make the distinction clear I would roll the r in Karma exaggeratedly, until my whole brain shook in its moorings from the force of the alveolar trill.
In early days there was another obvious subject of conversation. For the amusement of my fellow-students in Hall I would imitate Mrs Beddoes, giving her an exaggeratedly strangulated voice which swooped from would-be posh to common in a single sentence. I don’t know how this fool’s route to popularity ranked, when set beside the folly of buying rounds indiscriminately in the college bar. Rather lower, I suspect.
I was repeating past successes in the rôle of raconteur, from the times I had beguiled the dorm at Vulcan with a thousand variations on themes of sexual passion and home cooking. Bit by bit I worked Mrs Beddoes up into a character, exaggerating her very mild mispronunciations and odd patterns of stress. ‘Oh Mr Crow-maire, if you really think my duties extend to tidying up after your friends you’re very much mis-taiken. Alf (that’s my husband) always tells me I do too much for others, but then Mr Crow-maire you are a child of God as good as any. Better than most.
‘All well and good, Jean, says Alf-that’s-my-husband, but if I’ve told you once I’ve told you times without number, your endless service to others may well se-coor your place in the blue hereafter, but what about the here and now, eh?
‘By which he generally means his tea.’
Such routines were much in demand, and if I didn’t announce a performance with a single stylised sniff the cry would go up of, ‘Come on John, entertain us. Do the bedder, she’s priceless.’ It was reassuring to have a routine that reliably brought approval.
It was only gradually that I became uncomfortable. Wasn’t I traducing the person who had shown me most friendliness, an intimacy without demands? (A cup of tea freely offered is a small miracle of consideration.) I determined to stop.
I wasn’t brave or self-righteous enough to lecture my faithful audience on the misrepresentation we were conspiring to perpetrate, to announce Mrs Beddoes in so many words as the salt of the earth without which there would be no savour. My conscience pushed me in the opposite direction from the one I had taken historically, not towards wilder flights but a greater fidelity. I added in more and more of the humble details — the caravan outside Beccles, the deaf sister in Waterbeach. Eventually people stopped asking me to ‘do’ Mrs Beddoes, and neighbours in Hall who had missed the performance for a while would receive frantic signals not to egg me on.