As he slipped the ring on, I could see the grey-green ghost of its tarnish on the finger. The Sultana herself either had a higher grade of silver jewellery, or gave her hands a good scrub before she risked betraying her marriage vows.
Meaning osteotomy
While I looked at Patrick’s hands, he was preöccupied with my right knee, and how bent it was. He asked me if it hurt, and I tried to laugh it off by saying, ‘Only when I pole-vault.’ He said at least once, ‘I don’t know how you cope — I could measure that angle with my protractor!’ and I admit I winced. His protractor wasn’t the relevant part of his geometry set just then. It felt more as if he was sticking the points of his dividers into the unbeautiful joint which jarred his sense of proportion.
I began to brood about it a little bit. My sense of unlovability began to take up residence in that knee. Perhaps he (or someone) would only be able to love me back if I did something about its ugly protrusion. ‘Something’ here meaning ‘osteotomy’.
The cult of Broyan made a good stop-gap when I felt ill at ease with Patrick. In the early days I sat in the back of the taxi, and then I decided to change things. I took a vow to get myself promoted to the passenger seat, so as to sit by Broyan.
It was roll-call all over again — a major campaign of attrition. When I was given a privilege I wanted to renounce it, but if I was treated equally I pined for my perks. And this time, when I’d got my way, with much wheedling and blackmail (greymail at the very least), I wished I’d left well alone. It wasn’t the same at all. Promotion to the front of the car didn’t solve anything. My head turns to the left much more easily than the right, so I saw no more of Broyan. What I really wanted to see was his thick neck, which didn’t look as if it could turn at all. I found myself wanting things the way they were, before I had shaped them to my will and spoiled the morning drive to school.
I would sit there next to Broyan grieving while he drove, and dully revising my Latin, which wouldn’t go in. I seemed to have some sort of specific resistance to the language. Particles of Latin were so compacted they failed to travel osmotically in the normal way across the semi-permeable membrane of the page, and on into the language tanks of my brain. No sooner had I absorbed an irregular verb into my bloodstream than it was attacked and destroyed by the antibodies of ignorance. I had a pack of Latin Grammar cards (Key Facts) which I would wrestle with in the taxi on the way to school, a plastic pack of revision aids in its own little wallet, moderately well tailored to the measure of my hands. The process was satisfactory, but there was no product. Wasn’t I supposed to be good with languages? Perhaps it was just German that I was good at. Latin words just lay there on the page supine and senseless.
Everyone else groaned at the very idea of grammar, but that wasn’t the problem with me. Mr Nevin had slogged me through all that at Vulcan, and I rather enjoyed it. Grammar was like the algebra of language, except that I could understand it. I could grasp the underlying structure of Latin, but not put flesh on its bones.
I was entered for Latin O-level, but was regarded as very much a borderline case. The set book was Georgics IV — the one about bees. By rights I should have been fascinated by this snapshot of past attitudes to the natural kingdom — Virgil, like everyone else until about the eighteenth century, took it for granted that the supreme bee was a king and not a queen. Aristotle installed a piece of polished horn into a beehive so he could watch what went on, without managing to spot that it was a matriarchal society on the other side of that yellowy window.
The exam was scheduled for a Tuesday. On the Saturday night I opened the book for one last despairing bout of revision, and the language looked quite different. It was lucid. It coöperated. Dead language or no dead language, it had come alive. It had only been lying doggo, and it wanted to play after all. The Key Cards shone with meaning in Broyan’s taxi on the day of the exam, as if someone had turned on a spotlight on the other side of a keyhole while I crouched to spy on the principal parts of verbs.
In a strange way it was modern teaching methods that had held me back. Previous languages I had learned by rote and repetition, at least in the early stages, whereas Latin at Burnham was taught by stages, through progressive understanding. It’s a splendid notion, but I wonder if it suits the brain, really. It’s a question of neurology. To learn and understand at the same time is a perverse undertaking, like that silly thing people are always trying to do — what is it, to pat your head and stroke your tummy in a circle at the same time? It’s something like that.
I know I’ve always managed better when I’ve learned mechanically and understood after the event. Fewer simultaneous mental processes are required. That seems to be the key. It’s best if new shapes are allowed to sink into the brain-mush undisturbed. Then they’ll pop up somewhere else, in another lobe perhaps, bathed in understanding. Whatever the exact mechanics of my late burst of comprehension, I who had given such ample grounds for doubt earned a 2 Grade and the school’s usual response to surprises of this kind, a little flattering sheaf of book tokens.
The witching hour was 4.20
One more thing I hadn’t really considered before I started at Burnham Grammar was that a day school only functions in the day. Another sad lapse of common sense, another bit of clever-person’s stupidity. The whole point of attending a mainstream school was to be absorbed into a wider world, but that wasn’t really on the cards. The problem was Broyan. The magic coach which carried me to the academic ball every morning also came to fetch me, and its summons was imperious. The witching hour was 4.20 rather than midnight, but that was a technicality. Yes, Broyan would wait, but why should he? True, Broyan was employed on a contract basis and there was no meter running except the one in my head (I was very aware that the local education authority wasn’t made of money). I could have sent him away but then my predicament, as a young man in an invalid carriage with no way home, would be at least as awkward as Cinderella’s.
I was effectively debarred from teenage society by my exclusion from loitering. Teenage society and loitering are two words for the same thing. Without hanging around there can be no hanging together. I did my best to loiter in free periods, but you can’t get into the swing of loitering when you’re on the clock. In fact I was debarred from taking part not only by the practical difficulties but by my own exhaustion. I just wanted to ride back in Broyan’s taxi to Trees, where the cry of ‘The ruddy crutch!’ could almost sound like ‘Welcome Home’.
Unable to build relationships with my fellows at the end of the school day, I couldn’t really hope to fill up my schedule at weekends, except with homework. So normally I would badger Dad into taking me to the library on a Saturday. That’s where I did my loitering instead, while Dad ran errands. I can’t imagine what they were, Dad’s errands — shopping wasn’t on the agenda for a husband and father of that vintage, except when it came to special errands to select things that women couldn’t possibly know about, such as wine.
Dad wouldn’t stay when he took me to the library, not being on good terms with Mrs Pavey, whom he described as ‘doolally’, saying he couldn’t understand how she kept her job. It was true that she had her little ways, but none of the patrons minded that. We all have our little ways.