If I’m not tempted to repeat the family mistakes, there’s still a real danger of repeating mistakes made in a previous life. In Hinduism, where there are always (thank God) technical terms for spiritual things, these are called vasanas. Ruts of the spirit, liable to churn up the clean sand of a new existence. How can you avoid them if you don’t know what they are? You have to work backwards, deductively, from your temptations. It’s not an exact science, obviously. If you’re bossy in your current life, for instance, this may mean that you were the same way in earlier flesh, or that you were completely under someone’s heel — hence the current overcompensation.
If by a great stroke of luck you’re both powerless and bossy as things stand, then perhaps you’re being given a chance to dismantle your ego’s engine completely in these highly propitious circumstances. A brief glance is enough to show that the ‘engine’ is connected only to the horn, and to the indicators — indicators which only signal a change of direction after the event, feebly claiming credit for having caused it. There’s nothing under the bonnet. The steering wheel is as irrelevant as the one on a toy car in a fairground ride. Fixed or wildly spinning, it turns nothing. The whole incarnate vehicle slips serenely on free wheels down the seeming slope of time.
In practice, even before I was able to line up actual driving lessons, I clung to my dummy steering wheel as tightly as anyone. I couldn’t trust my guru enough to abandon the I-am-the-doer illusion. My will was all I trusted. I hadn’t learned that life is a stolid nag that clops indifferently on, whatever we imagine we’re doing with the whip and the reins. It’s one of Maya’s favourite tricks, her impersonation of a frisky filly to be mastered.
Let the reins go, and there’s every chance you’ll be bucked into bliss. Hinduism recognises that the last moments of a life have a crucially determining rôle as regards the next. Serenity at the moment of death may not guarantee escape from the cycle of birth and death, but at the very least it greases the wheels for the next go-round and leads to reconciled babies who sleep through the night and hardly cry.
Poor Mum still couldn’t do anything right, even when she was trying to set the record straight. She hadn’t managed to condemn Granny in my eyes, as she must have hoped. Clearly Pamela, all thousand-plus pages of it, wasn’t a complete guide to the behaviour of the posh and wayward of the 1920s, but it was the closest thing I had, and it did paint a picture of a world in which the odds were stacked against women. Granny wasn’t having that. She flouted the conventions of her day and her class without consenting to be martyred by her own rebellion. She had taken a lover and kept a husband.
I don’t know about the ingredients of her motive for having Mum officially registered as an outcast. Was she obsessed with a man she couldn’t have, or only with getting her revenge on him? The woman I knew as Granny certainly had a talent for settling scores. Or to put it another way — she trusted antagonism as a sort of bedrock for relationships. It wouldn’t let her down.
I’m tempted to see the business with the birth certificate as a sort of one-woman suicide pact — a willed social death that was supposed to take her lover with her, dragging the squire down into the sucking bog of disgrace. She signed her own death warrant on that piece of paper, and then she survived after all, her head above water even if she was floating at a lower level than before. Her luck held, when it turned out she had nothing to fear from her husband. Slowly she came back to respectable life, even to prosperity, and it was only Laura who was left out in the cold and wet.
Perhaps in church, when Mum could feel her real father not looking at her during services, he was really not-looking at Granny. Or perhaps he glared at her during the sermon. I can imagine Granny enjoying that.
Whatever she was in church for, it was hardly the spiritual experience. I dare say she was putting in an appearance out of sheer defiance, as a way of saying, I’m as good as anyone here. I have a right.
It’s true that in later life she went to early Communion in Tangmere whenever it was offered, but her agenda was strongly earth-bound. She wasn’t so much consuming the Body and Blood of her Redeemer as keeping an eye on the set of communion plate she had given the church, in her husband’s respectable name, after he died. She never really trusted anyone else’s cleaning. So when she knelt at the altar rail her posture was submissive, but if she saw any discoloration of chalice or paten there would be harsh words in the vestry afterwards. It’s customary for communicants to close their eyes when they consume the elements, but convention wasn’t going to make Granny turn a blind eye to tarnish.
Mum expected me to send Granny to Coventry after her revelations, but that was hardly likely to happen. I wouldn’t have made an immediate appointment with Granny out of spite, but I wasn’t going to penalise her either, for things that were none of my business. There was no alternative to Granny as the motor of the family finances. No one else was going to help me buy a car. My hands were tied. I had to be in the driving seat.
Bird gotta swim, fish gotta fly. John needs driving lessons to fall from the sky …
The next time an invitation came for Peter and me to eat at the Compleat Angler, I decided I would get to work on Granny on the car angle. Peter and I had become more or less used to such hybrids of treat and ordeal. We had learned at least some of the rules, though of course Granny could always come up with new ones. She was a living workshop for the manufacture of social stumbling-blocks.
Twinge of superannuation
Granny had recently revised her opinion of Peter. It was Granny who had first proposed that he work as a waiter (‘the world will always need waiters, Peter’), but it wasn’t his new part-time job which had earned her respect. All he had done was have a growth spurt, but that was enough.
Only the year before she hadn’t trusted Peter to cross the road by himself, which would have been funny if it wasn’t so embarrassing. Wasn’t it supposed to be the other way round, he asked me, young men helping frail old ladies across the street? But now she couldn’t get over how tall he’d grown, and kept on saying what a fine figure of a man he had turned out to be. She even started stooping while she was walking with him, to make him even prouder of his new stature.
I’m not sure Peter really enjoyed the fuss, but he certainly got a kick out of being taller than Dad. Dad who claimed five foot eleven but was short of Peter’s attested five ten. I was a non-starter in this particular race, but I too enjoyed the twinge of superannuation in Dad’s shoulders.
Perhaps it was to celebrate Peter’s spurt that Granny offered us a drink on this occasion. By this time, as the birthdays rolled by, Peter and I had sampled most things from the family’s scanty drinks cupboard. They were all pretty awful, except for liqueurs which could have proper tastes like coffee, peppermint, even chocolate. Otherwise sweet sherry was the best of a bad lot, until I discovered vodka. Vodka had hardly any character of its own, but was a sort of chameleon which could bring out other flavours. Added to BritVic Orange it provided a good imitation of the much missed Government Orange, the wonderful concentrated juice drink of my childhood.
I knew alcohol was supposed to have a physical effect, but the single measures meted out on birthdays had no effect in my case. They were a complete waste of money. A double vodka did a little something. That was the ticket for me.
So I asked the waiter for a double vodka, and Peter chose sherry. Granny added ‘Dry,’ before he had a chance to say ‘Sweet’. Granny wanted us to order in French, saying this would improve Peter’s skills as a waiter — it was clear she had never eaten at the Spade Oak Hotel, where he worked. I managed better than Peter and was praised. He was told he could do worse than model his accent on mine. I don’t think she was trying to open a rift between us in any specific way. She just couldn’t help herself. As if he needed any reasons to hate me! Or would have needed any, if there had been hatred in him.