Prissie, on the other hand, actually had bowls in avocado colours, a darker green on the outside, creamy-pale within. When she came back in to the dining room where Malcolm was holding my hand she’d ask sweetly, ‘Is this homosexuality, Malcolm?’ He’d simply say, ‘You don’t understand, darling. I get such pure energy from John.’
‘Don’t mind me,’ she said, with the same large calm. ‘Just carry on with your canoodling. The wife is always the last to know, of course. And it serves her right.’
What went on between me and Malcolm wasn’t canoodling so much as low-level mystical chat. Perhaps Malcolm felt piqued that I had gone to India, where my guru was, and talked about his plans to visit his own inspiration, Don Juan, in Mexico. He had read Carlos Castaneda’s books, which Penguin published and which adorned almost every student’s shelves those days. Later they were exposed as ‘fakes’ — the inverted commas seem appropriate because it’s a hard position for someone like me to defend, that time and space, life and death, are all unreal, but Carlos Castaneda is more unreal than any of these and must therefore be shunned. If you’re not careful you can end up saying that the unreality of Carlos Castaneda’s mystical claptrap is the only real thing in the whole of Maya.
Finch, Pearsall & Mephistopheles
I’m afraid we got into something that was almost an enlightenment competition. I’d quote something Ramana Maharshi had said, and he’d quote something that Castaneda’s Don Juan had said, though we were neither of us tremendously up on our subjects. Under the influence of peyote Castaneda had a vision of Mescalito, seeing him as a green man with a pointed hat. I decided not to mention that I had gone him one better by being granted an interview with Mescalito, and had been trusted with some important dendrological work.
At one stage I remember intoning, ‘Those who know do not speak;’ and while I was taking a breath at that semi-colon, he completed the aphorism with ‘those who speak do not know.’ Then we smiled enigmatically at each other.
This was the shallowest of profundities, filched from Alan Watts’s Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, also published by Penguin — worse still, filched from the blurb about that book printed at the back of another one. Prissie looked up from her Heyer and gave us her own little smile, which recognised us as spiritually pretentious fakes, bluffers to our very souls. Certainly her relationship with Georgette Heyer was more authentic than ours with Alan Watts. We didn’t even realise, while we parroted Zen quotes, how neatly they summed us up.
If Prissie overheard Malcolm telling me, not for the first time, that advertising was killing his soul, she would say, ‘Malcolm, darling, that’s the whole point of the enterprise. Why do you think your firm is called Finch Pearsall & Mephistopheles, for heaven’s sake? If you haven’t sold your soul yet, it’s because nobody wants it. Face it, Malcolm, you’re a lost soul, you’re not damned at all. Only lost souls wear Hush Puppies. The damned have a lot more style.’ These, though, were tender squabbles, quite outside my experience, with all the rancour on the surface.
While I stayed chez Washbourne I tried to ration my intake of liquids, so as not to have to go to the toilet too often. I didn’t overdo it. There was no virtue in dehydrating myself in a warm season, parching my kidneys just to avoid embarrassment. It made sense to discipline my bladder so that I could last the night, like a well-trained dog, to spare the household the duty of emptying a pee bottle. Gradually I worked up to a steely continence. In fact I may as well admit that since then I have often used the call of the bathroom as a way of getting some good earthed contact, whether with strangers or old friends. Nothing breaks the ice like embarrassment in a bathroom.
I could hardly expect there to be no repercussions from the rupture with Mum and Dad, but I hoped not to have to deal with them until after the vacation. No such luck. One day the phone rang and Prissie told me it was for me. Her voice was rather hushed. ‘Who is it?’ I mouthed, and she answered in a whisper, ‘Perhaps a bishop?’
It was Graëme Beamish, my tutor.
‘John,’ he said, ‘please find it in your heart to forgive me for disturbing you in the well-earned rest of your vacation. Then I will try to find it in mine to forgive your mother for disturbing the peace of mine.
‘I would have left her letter unanswered were it not for the fact that I am taking next term as a sabbatical. It didn’t seem fair to pass on to my replacement the obligation of dealing with as tricky a customer as I have come across in my experience as a tutor.’
I could hear regular metallic impacts in the background, from which I deduced that Dr Beamish was finding amusement in setting Newton’s Balls a-clack.
‘I’m not referring to you, John, though you yourself do not offer the authorities the easiest of rides. I mean your mother.
‘As you may not know, your mother has written to me roughly every two weeks of university term since you first came up.
‘John? Are you there?’
‘Yes, Dr Beamish.’ I was very shocked to learn that Mum had been so hideously active on what she imagined to be my behalf. Knowing that my tutor had been screening me from her interference for the last two years felt almost as bad as being pushed down King Street by him with a stranger’s sick caking my wheels.
‘Shall I continue? I hope I’m not interrupting any important activity. The file on Cromer, Mrs L is even larger than the one on Cromer, J. For some time her idea was that I should forbid you from changing your course of study. Now it seems that your family has exploded in some way. I have to say I have no interest in how you all get on with each other. I propose simply to read you my reply to your mother’s latest letter so that you know where you stand. Is that agreed?’
‘Agreed.’
‘“Dear Mrs Cromer, I am sorry to learn that John has fallen victim to sexual deviance and drug addiction. These scourges do unfortunately claim a small proportion of undergraduates, and not always the unpromising ones, during their years of study. The evidences of wrongdoing which you mention, however, came to light during the vacation and on private property: as such they cannot be said directly to involve the College or indeed the University. If John is found in possession of further caches of smut or illegal narcotics I will, of course, inform you at once. I myself had always imagined that his temptations were the more traditional ones of strong drink and bad company.”’
I could hear a self-satisfied smile in his voice, and could imagine him looking at me over the tops of imaginary half-moon glasses, while he congratulated himself on the neatness of this oblique reference to my kidnap at the hands of Write Off Tuesday.
He was certainly getting his pennyworth of revenge for an evening when he was made to feel uncomfortable in the Senior Common Room, sniffing the air from time to time and checking his smart shoes for traces of undergraduate vomit.
Eats doctors for breakfast
‘“As for your suggestion that he should receive medical treatment, although it is true that the University has access to the ‘top men’ in many fields, most of them indeed the products of our system of education, it is my impression that John knows almost as much as any of the health professionals with whom his difficult history has brought him into contact. Some say that he eats doctors for breakfast, others that he merely chews them and spits them out, without going to the trouble of swallowing.”’ It is perhaps true that I was impatient with the general practitioner assigned by the university to preside over my health. Dr Beamish paused, as if trying to detect down the telephone wire whether his bufferish persiflage was succeeding in making me squirm.