Cedilla (23 page)

‘Some Grannies would have chastened you at the time, so as to nip the habit in the bud. However it would not have been nice for you to feel humiliation in front of the waiter, and of course Peter was there too, and I have never been one to intimidate …’

Granny’s image faded in front of me and I felt my face going bright red. I hated sodding strong drinks, hated sodding Grannies (and Mums and Dads for knowing better), and I hated sodding Otels like the Compleat Angler. I knew that the real reason she had arranged for Peter not to be there was that he would stand up for me. I wouldn’t have put it past him to push me from the scene, even at the loss of a perfectly cooked steak. But Granny picked her fights with care, and stage-managed the bouts to the moment of knockout. Now she had me where she wanted me.

Twigs and straws went on rushing down the weir, and the swans
just continued to be –
ser
rather than
estar
, in Spanish terms, inhabiting their essences. My eye drifted down to the sash window near our seat, where there was a gap which delivered a welcome breeze to my overheated cheek. A few ants were scurrying back and forth through it, having found a source of food. They had little bundles on their backs. At that moment I would have given anything to swap places with them, trembling with effort beneath the weight of a stolen crumb. The sound of Granny’s voice came back. She was saying,

‘So I hope, John, that for the remainder of your life you will never again degrade yourself by ordering a double vodka – or a double anything for that matter …’

She was a mind-reader all right. She knew I wanted something from her, even if she didn’t know exactly what it was, so there was no risk of her over-playing her hand. She couldn’t help herself, any more than a spider can ignore a trembling from the web just because it happens to be the birthday of the fly in question.

I decided my only dignified course was passive resistance. I would ignore Granny. I wouldn’t eat and I wouldn’t drink. She would find that her lunch guest today was Gandhi in person instead of her rather crushable grandson. When the waiter came and asked if we were ready to order, I went on contemplating the swans. I would live on air, I would eat less than an ant. Granny chose an omelette on my behalf, seeming quite untroubled by my silence, but the moment we were alone again she said sharply, ‘There is nothing I dislike so much as rudeness to staff. It is always unnecessary.’

When the food arrived she made the traditional little road across her plate, and I made no road of any sort. Granny apologised to the waiter when he collected our plates, saying that I wasn’t feeling well. She said, ‘I hope at least that they don’t make you eat what he has left!’, but this wasn’t one of her regular attendants, and he gave her a puzzled look.

Sitting in the Wrigley, while (on the astral plane) I spun cotton to weave a
lungi
in true Gandhi style, I reflected that if Granny had in fact been sensible enough to order two ounces of lamb chop and fifty peas then she wouldn’t have wasted so much food, and our waiter would have been spared some enigmatic banter.

Granny’s voice broke in on me. ‘John, I suggest you choose a dessert
for yourself, otherwise you can go home immediately. I never imagined you would be so mulish. All I have done is give you a lesson in good manners, which will pay dividends if taken to heart. At the very least you can speak to me. Mostly I enjoy our conversations.’ Too bad, I thought. She who pays the piper calls the tune. When everything she hears has been put on for her benefit then perhaps she will miss the real unrehearsed thing.

Granny ploughed on. ‘A young man should have something to say for himself, and I never thought you would be backward in that regard. You seemed positively eager to join me today, and I hope you are not so far gone that you need the lubricating effects of alcohol before you can chat with a grandmother who has been, I believe, of some use to you in the past.’

‘I’m just not hungry, Granny.’

‘Well, John, to save the appearances I suggest that you order ice cream for dessert. Then if you still don’t want to eat, it will simply melt, making it less obvious to the world at large that you are being childishly fractious. I will be spared other people’s knowledge that I have shared my luncheon with a very uncoöperative relation. I prefer to do without the sympathy of strangers, which has no value.’

Together we watched the ice cream melt. The Compleat Angler happened to be serving Neapolitan ice on that particular day, so the picture on my plate was of layered colours, pink and brown and white, losing their distinctness as their temperature rose to that of the room. I wasn’t sufficiently informed about physical law to know how long it would take, assuming that we both stayed in place to watch, for the stripes to turn into a single puddle of beige.

‘Shortly, John,’ Granny said, ‘I shall be ordering coffee for us both. If you don’t take at least a sip of coffee – and the coffee here is no disgrace to the rest of the menu, whatever your father might think – then there is really nothing left to say. I will be sorry to break off my dealings with you, but I have made hard decisions in the past and stuck by them. It would be a mistake to call my bluff. Stubbornness is bravery of a sort, John, but it is a bravery turned against yourself.’

The meal had taken a very miserable turn. When I had locked horns with Marion Wilding, sole principal of Vulcan School, I had been prepared for confrontation and I had been clear about what I wanted from her – nothing. I had even enjoyed the clash. This was different. Granny and I were on the opposite of a collision course. If neither of us bent then we would dismiss each other from our lives with a finality not to be taken back. I began to get a sense of the suddenness of schism, crisis that no one saw coming until it had already undone the seams of the world.

The bitterness of it was that I did want something from Granny. I needed a car, and the lessons which I must have before I could tame it. If I broke with Granny, then I was stuck with Mum and Dad and the suffocation of dependency. This wasn’t just about vodka and counting peas, ice cream and coffee. Homeric geography had put in an appearance in a hotel dining room in Marlow, Scylla and Charybdis bursting up through thick carpeting. If I wasn’t dashed against the harsh rock of Granny’s willpower, then I was doomed to the sludge-whirlpool of life in Bourne End. And from my storm-tossed barque I was counting on the implacable Granitic rock to cough up an outboard motor, so that I could skim away from the entire dismal scene. Why would it want to provide that?

Still, if we were trembling on the brink of rupture, neither of us took a step either further or back. If this was High Noon at the Compleat Angler, at least no one was in a hurry to shoot first. Then Granny found a way to negotiate without either party having to back down. She picked up her spoon and stirred her black coffee. Then she turned the spoon upside down over her diminutive cup, took the cream jug and poured from it carefully over that dainty inverted scallop so that the cream didn’t dive into the black liquid but seemed to float on the surface, revolving in spiral scrolls.

Granny had to look at what she was doing, which made me feel that the pressure on me was less. I almost thought her hands were shaking, but I knew better than to consider feeling sorry for her. She made her voice soft when she spoke. ‘Ivo, who wasn’t of course your grandfather though we call him so, liked his coffee like this.’ We had never in our conversations referred to the squire or the birth certificate. Perhaps she simply divined that I had been told Mum’s side
of events. Granny had the knack of having the last word without even opening her mouth. ‘If anything he liked coffee more than coffee liked him, as his adventure in East Africa tended to shew.’ ‘Shew’ was the archaic spelling she used in her letters, and I felt sure that was the form of the word fixed in her mind. ‘Even before he left on that silly sojourn I told him that I personally would not consider him a success unless Messrs Fortnum & Mason accepted him as a supplier.’

‘The top people,’ I managed to croak.

‘Precisely. In the event he fell short of his own rather modest ambitions. But perhaps you would like me to add cream to your cup in the same way? The taste is quite different, or perhaps it is the texture which is altered. For some reason a little sugar in the coffee helps the cream to float – and I speak as someone who in the normal run of life abhors sugar in coffee. If I can break my own rules so I’m sure can you. It is something which every young man, however stubborn, should try at least once.’

Somehow she had managed to get me off the hook without budging an inch. Even when she made concessions she held firm. ‘Thank you Granny,’ I was able to say, ‘that sounds delicious.’

I’m not sure it was, really. That style of drinking coffee has never caught on with me personally. Perhaps people whose hands have more control than mine can make the cream flow over a sort of miniature weir of coffee as the cup tips, liquid gliding over liquid, so that the elements remain in suspension within every sip, but I couldn’t manage that. The demitasse was light and easy to lift, but its small size made it awkward for me to make it travel the last couple of inches to my lips. I had to push my head uncomfortably far forward to bridge the gap. Still, I appreciated the gesture, if not the treat it delivered. Granny with her coffee spoon might seem to be watching over the separation of cream and coffee, but in another way she was stirring incompatibles diligently together, restoring between us some sort of social emulsion.

Passive resistance had served me well, but I can’t help thinking it’s most effective when it isn’t your only option. After all, Gandhi wasn’t strongly built, but he could certainly have given you quite a smack with his
charkha
– his portable spinning wheel – if he had wanted, and he would certainly have benefited from the element of surprise.

When we had finished our coffee, Granny said, ‘Normally a two-course
table d’hôte
at a reputable restaurant is enough to satisfy even a teenager’s ravening belly, but perhaps you are still hungry?’ In fact my teenager’s ravening belly might be heard protesting its emptiness at some distance. ‘I believe I have some biscuits in my room, if that would allay the pangs.’

They might. Granny’s preference was always for a room on the ground floor, for reasons of her convenience rather than mine, but I reaped the benefit. She even pushed me there. There was a lip on the threshold of her room, not a true step but a rounded edge of metal which gave her some little difficulty to negotiate.

The biscuits were in the same category of presenting a little difficulty. Biscuits in general aren’t the easiest things for me to eat, but if I break them into rough quarters I can get them to my mouth without seeming to fling them blindly at the orifice.

‘Unless I’m imagining things, John,’ Granny said, ‘you had something to ask me. I am trying to find a new way of talking to you, since you are clearly no longer quite the person I have assumed. You don’t much resemble your mother, or your father either. Perhaps in fact it is me whom you resemble.’ I disputed this but gave no sign. ‘Is it about the electric wheelchair? Does it need attending to in some way? Perhaps a new battery is required.’

For someone who had helped to fund my adventures in locomotion she was rather in the dark about the details. Perhaps she thought it was in the shed, on blocks, with Dad frantically tinkering in every spare moment. Perhaps she thought I should make a point of coming to see her in the wheelchair she had paid for, just as she would expect me, if she had bought me a smart tie as a present, to wear it when invited to lunch with her. ‘The electric wheelchair is at home, Granny, and it’s in perfect working order. This is the old pushing chair which it replaced – it’s just that the Wrigley you were so kind as to help to buy doesn’t fold up very easily. It doesn’t fit in a taxi. I don’t use it at school either.’

‘Oh? And why is that?’

‘I have to be carried up and down stairs in it, and I can’t keep my
balance in it. At school I use the Tan-Sad – you remember, the trolley thing. You’ve seen it.’

‘You’re still spending your days in that baby carriage? That overgrown pram? No wonder you wanted to see me, John. What is the alternative?’

‘I’m stuck with the Tan-Sad, Granny, and really I don’t mind.’ Here it was, then, the only chance I would ever have to make my case, to explain that I was hoping to do without the expensive wheelchair altogether, to trade it in for something with a roof and doors. ‘But at the moment I’m driven to school in a taxi.’

‘Really? How odd. How do your parents afford that?’

‘They don’t. The local authority pays.’

‘How perfectly extraordinary.’

‘Granny, I want to learn to drive myself.’

‘Is that possible?’

‘I think so.’

‘I rely on you to make very sure before committing me to expense. So it is lessons you want?’

‘I thought the British School of Motoring would be the right choice, Granny – they’re the top people, after all. I also need a car to take the lessons in. It will need to be modified.’

‘Well, John, I quite see why you wished to talk to me. Am I to buy you a Rolls-Royce? I believe that is still the top people’s car, though I have heard of the Aston Martin for a more headstrong style of person.’

‘Neither for me, thanks, Granny. I thought a Mini would be more practical.’

‘Quite right. It is rather a stylish little toy, designed by Signor Annigoni, I believe. People seem to be able to do everything these days.’ I didn’t think the name was quite right, though my information about cars was second-hand, a dilution of Peter’s expertise. Even if I had been surer of my ground, I would have been foolish to correct her, not just on general principles but because her mistake worked in my favour. If Signor Annigoni was good enough to paint portraits of the Queen, he might be good enough to build cars for her grandson. ‘Why not look into the matter and give me the figures later. You can take it that I am not opposed on principle.’