‘That’s cuckoo-pint, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right. Arum maculatum. Just like this exotic beauty here, the flower isn’t equipped to eat the fly, but sometimes the fly dies of exhaustion before it can escape. If it just stayed where it was and bided its time, it could escape later on, once the flower had slackened its grip. But flies don’t think of that!’ In fact the whole procedure seems to be an evolutionary dead-end. Dead flies don’t pollinate — unless the system depends on a super-fly with greater endurance, which subsequently spreads the pollen further than its inferior siblings would have managed.
‘Well at least the fly died happy,’ mused Mrs Beddoes who had become thoroughly fascinated with the proceedings by this time.
‘Oh no, dear lady,’ Barry said sharply, in a way that was almost rude. ‘We humans may find the carrion smell disgusting, but it’s nectar to a fly. The fly imagines that it’s going to fulfil its own desire by following the “stink” — its drive to reproduce itself by laying its eggs. However, once past the matrix, the entrance, it finds there is nothing rotting there at all, only a sweet smell. And since the plant’s real perfume is not so nice for the fly, we could say rather that the fly died in Hell!’
This was quite enough for Mrs Beddoes in the way of botanical lecturing. She produced her duster from an apron pocket. If she had really done all her housework early, then this was a little piece of theatre. I’m not sure she ever did anything that would have qualified in Granny’s view as dusting. The worn yellow duster was as symbolic in its own way as a freemason’s trowel.
‘I mustn’t let the whole day run away from me, must I?’ she said, and took from another of her apron pockets an item much more central to her practice as a cleaner, an aerosol of air freshener. Her fondness for it was natural, considering that she cleaned the rooms of young men with hardly the faintest idea of how to maintain themselves. She gave the room a parting squirt with the aerosol, moving her arm in a large half-circle, then a series of loops in our direction, or towards the stench that had already been dissected out of existence. She was so generous with the volatilisation of industrial fragrance that she walked through a cloud of it on the way out, and set herself coughing. Perhaps the coughing prevented a strange thought from coming any further forward than the back of her mind: If I didn’t know better, I’d think Mr Crow-maire was giving the other chap a thorough squeeze of the privates …
It was only after she had gone, as Barry began to pack up his equipment, that we stopped being at ease with each other. Mrs Beddoes hadn’t been an impediment to the scene between us, as I had thought at first, but an essential ingredient in our tiny erotic drama, the spectator who didn’t see a thing. In those days my sexual imagination was at least as attuned to the creation of a tableau as to any actual intimacy.
Of course eroticism is only the Ego’s vain attempt to unite with the Self. The ego itself is a paradoxical amalgam of inert body and the true Self. The aim is admirable, but the ego gets it all wrong. Watching the ego try to wrestle reality into submission is like watching Laurel and Hardy move a piano. They’ll move it all right, but you won’t be able to get much of a tune out of it afterwards.
As for the scene with Barry, I didn’t regret that it had lacked an actual sexual climax. Release of that sort would have taken away from an excitement that remained infinite because it never toppled over into the reality that is all illusion and disappointment. It was a wave that never needed to break.
I might imagine in those days that I wanted openness of expression, closeness of rapport and meaningful glandular release. What I actually enjoyed was this sort of mixture, hiding and flaunting simultaneously, which was only a new twist on being invisible and incredibly conspicuous at the same time, my normal state.
Although I saw Barry around, and we talked very happily about our common interests, I never had the faintest whiff of desire for him thereafter. The beauty of Whiffy Barry — that too was an inflorescence which blossomed and shrivelled in a single day.
I was especially in need of diversions like the dissection of Voodoo Lily, since I already knew that my field of study was a dead end. Not a dead end in general terms but a dead end in my particular case. Under neath gruffness a mile deep Eckstein had been too excited by my academic prospects to give me the guidance I needed. He passed the buck. Perhaps he was relying on my chosen university to warn me of the disillusionment that lay in store.
A. T. Grove had been so exclusively interested in my mobility that he hadn’t offered me the benefit of his advice about my course. I ended up having to learn the hard way that disability debarred me from making real progress in the study of my chosen languages.
I was able to reconstruct the way my interview should have gone, if it had been designed to lay the foundations for an undergraduate career rather than to assess my ability to go for a coffee at Snax on Regent Street without depending on the wheelchair. Because a wheelchair saps independence of outlook (as everyone knows who doesn’t need one), without which the human spirit withers away.
What A. T. Grove should have said was this: ‘John, you need to be aware that certain courses of study presuppose certain abilities that are not merely intellectual. Your chosen subject, Modern and Mediaeval Languages, is intended to immerse you in a foreign culture, so that you end up being able to spend large parts of your mental life in Spanish or German. The finishing touch applied to this process is a period of residence abroad.
‘Klaus Eckstein strongly champions your cause, in a way that hardly chimes with his continued insistence that your German accent is terrible. But I suspect that even he has not looked far enough ahead. Your independence of mind is a condition that does not extend to your body.
‘How will you be able to manage abroad, when that time comes? It is difficult enough for us to place students in suitable households without the additional burden of meeting your special needs. You are hardly in a position to risk immersion in a foreign culture, when you can hardly keep your head above water in your own.
‘If you do try to live abroad, you will be living in a bubble of artificial behaviour. Your exposure to a foreign culture will be for practical purposes nil. A genuine traveller can take a cable car to a beauty spot in the mountains without a second thought, while the only cable car with which you are likely to be familiar while you study for a degree will be the one, whirring and trundling, which conveys you from your wheelchair to the bath on A staircase, Kenny Court, Downing. I do not say this to be cruel but to save you time.
‘Klaus Eckstein has painted a vivid picture of the hazards of travel on Spanish trains, warning you that it is polite, just as it would be in Britain, to offer to share any food you produce — but that you must be prepared, as you need not be in Britain, for people to accept your offer with alacrity, producing forks and spoons from their pockets and having a good old tuck-in. But how will you be able to experience this for yourself?
‘Consider. A language student with what we consider satisfactory conversational skills in German goes to stay in a family-run Gasthaus in Thuringia. He explores his surroundings, which means in practice that he becomes familiar with the excellence of German beer, thanks to the Reinheitsgebot, the purity laws of 1516, which prohibit adulteration of any kind. He has more than enough German to keep on ordering more beer.
A higher presence of offal
‘In the mornings his head is full of hammers, and he can hardly dare to look at the lavish breakfast his solicitous landlady brings to his room. He drinks the coffee gingerly, and takes a few tentative nibbles at a sort of roll which crumbles to dryness in his mouth.