Hoff was above such fetishes (and extravagances) as Christmas presents, but others were more sentimental. I was clearly making an impact on Downing, to judge by the fact of receiving as presents not one but two copies of Christy Brown’s Down All The Days, an autobiographical novel by an Irish spastic whose condition (doubly athetoid) was particularly severe. I suppose one could have been for Christmas, the other for the birthday which trailed along behind Jesus’s.
I don’t think they were telling me to count my blessings, exactly, though Brown’s disability certainly put mine in the shade — this was cerebral palsy beyond anything I saw at Vulcan.
I tried to like the book, at least I think I did. I didn’t care for the style, though, which was all rather clottedly poetic, as if the poor man was afflicted by an inflamed blarney duct on top of his other troubles. My reservations about the book must have made me seem churlish and hard to please. It was as if I’d been served the vegetarian option in a restaurant, and had sent it back just to be difficult. Bad John, wicked John. So ungrateful, after all the trouble people have gone to. A wicked part of me speculated that if they’d met Christy Brown in person, rather than through a book, they wouldn’t have been able to understand a word he tried to say. And perhaps that was the way they preferred it.
I didn’t need to wait till spring to get started on another Voodoo Lily. Providentially the bulbs were available at the seed merchants. The bulbs were as eager as I was. They were even attractively priced, perhaps because they were so ready for planting they were jumping the gun. The protuberance on one had already started to seek the light. I bought that one in preference to any other, knowing there wouldn’t be so long to wait. Next time Whiffy Barry wouldn’t miss his inflorescent cousin. He promised to come at a moment’s notice.
When the day of the second Voodoo Lily’s flowering arrived I sent Whiffy Barry a message to come at once. Mrs Beddoes took a keen interest in what was going on, and was very willing to run the errand for me. Like any victim of a practical joke, she couldn’t wait to see it played on someone else, not realising that Barry as a botanist was well prepared for what had caused her so much dismay.
She returned to tell me that Mr Barry would be along soon. ‘Today of all days,’ she said, ‘he’s taking a bath.’ She hoovered the room, then settled down in the Parker-Knoll with a cup of tea. She was enjoying herself. It wasn’t every day she could eavesdrop on a miniature botanical congress, convened to inspect the plant which had played such a mean trick on her.
I took another look at the star of the show. Sauromatum’s purple-and-brown-spotted hood reared up like a cobra behind the glistening spadix. The smell was entirely disgusting, but there was a deep spiritual message latent here. If I had described the smell to Bhagavan as disgusting, he would certainly have replied, ‘Disgusting for whom?’ Then I would have had to enter the deepest sanctum of awareness, embarking on the vichara (Self-Enquiry). The answer was that it was disgusting for me. And who am I?
His date with Voodoo Lily
It wasn’t disgusting if you were a fly, that was for certain. I pretended to be a fly and tried to tell myself that the smell was beautiful, but still I felt sick. I asked Mrs Beddoes to open the windows to their widest, which she did rather unwillingly — there had been no such concession when she was the one being tested — but the smell was still overpowering. It took a lot of determination to stay in the room.
Then there was a knock at the door and Barry came in. Mrs Beddoes was so much at home by now that she gave a happy little yawn and a wave of the hand. Barry had done more than just take a bath. He had smartened himself up considerably for his date with Voodoo Lily. He was wearing tight (and crisply ironed) black flannel trousers and a white shirt. He had the instruments of dissection in one hand and a clipboard in the other.
He grinned and shifted his legs a bit, making the rough shape of his genitals materialise and then disappear in a way which would have been irresistible if I had found him the slightest bit attractive. I may live my life at what is cock level for most people but still I have my standards.
He put his things on my cluttered table, while I made my way over to the window-sill. From there I invited him to join me. Not only was he clean, but he was wearing some sort of perfume or cologne which I found tantalising. The high notes were flirty and fleeting, but the bass notes were deep shadows, like a grotto cool with ferns on a hot summer’s day. If I closed my eyes and let my nose stand in for all the other senses, I might even begin to be aroused by the information it passed on. Perhaps I had been too hasty in dismissing this lonely botanist as ‘Whiffy Barry’.
Suddenly there was a connection between us. I was susceptible to him in ways I hadn’t expected, yes, but I also had the sense that he was susceptible to me, as if he was in a mild hypnotic trance. An astral umbilical seemed to link us on this malodorous morning, threading through our navels and groins, weaving a cat’s-cradle of chakras.
Patrly this had to do with the psychology of touch. Young English men of the period were so unaccustomed to touch, ordinary nonsensual human contact, that when it happened — and with me it had to happen — they were oddly disoriented, lightly bewitched. It was as if I had flown under their radar and disarmed them. I could give a young man’s hand and arm a tug in a certain direction, and it would follow my lead. It had nothing to do with a dormant attraction to other men — in fact I suspect it worked best with those who, like Barry, had never had such thoughts. If this was voodoo then it was quite ordinary everyday voodoo. It functioned perfectly well without the help of the lily whose foulness we were gathered to analyse.
I did realise, though, that however many times I went to Sanders Seed Merchants in Regent Street Cambridge, and however many Sauromata guttata I paid for and set a-growing, I would never happen on anything as promising as this delightful situation again.
What had started out as a simple project of botanical research had forked deliciously. Now I had two experiments on the go simultaneously. I was confident I had enough mental power to be able to divide my attention cleanly in two. Yes, I would examine the anatomy of this araceous species, but I would also do what I could to satisfy my curiosity about the lie of the land in Barry’s trousers.
All the time we probed S. guttatum I would be pumping power into my personality-magnet, which had seemed so defective these last few months. I would tug him about into any position I wanted. It would be child’s play to come up with any number of creative adjustments of posture — because ‘my arms can’t reach that far’. I could do the heavy lean against his leg, mentioning that it was vital for me not to lose my balance. Of course there was no real coercion involved. Whenever he wanted to, Barry could wriggle out of any entanglement, but I had the sense that my little magnet was working again at full power, and today he would go along with anything I suggested.
After a while, as he became more deeply hypnotised, a Gulliver immobilised by the thousand tiny threads of my suggestion, we would enter into Union. Barry was already intoxicated with touch, his whole body reverberating with longing. He was only a whisker away from swimming with me in the Ocean of Desire.
I knew my magic would only work if I was alone with the hypnotic subject, and here was Mrs Beddoes sitting in my Parker-Knoll savouring the last gulps of her tea and perhaps even contemplating the making of another cup. I asked her if she hadn’t got more rooms to clean, and she said no, she’d got an early start and cleaned out the other students’ rooms while I was sleeping. She batted away every hint I could come up with that we should be left alone together to do our research.