Brother of the More Famous Jack (11 page)

‘Is that prescribed reading at the LSE?' one of them said to me once.

‘I'm not at the LSE,' I said. This same character once observed, hilariously, to Roger that, ‘Just because I believe in God, your girlfriend thinks I'm Bolshie,' which, even Roger admitted, was highly amusing.

Only once during my visit to Oxford did I meet a truly delightful man. I met him on a wall near the science buildings where I was waiting for Roger. An Australian graduate student in mathematics, he was, called Donald O'Brien. The son of a policeman, I discovered, descended from an Irish convict labourer.

‘You attached to this here Uni?' he said. His terminology delighted me in its unbowed colonial assertiveness and made me laugh. I told him that I was not.

‘They don't on the whole breed them like you around here, if you'll pardon the liberty,' he said. I confess that this blatantly chauvinistic remark pleased me, since Roger had recently found a female piano accompanist from Dartington Hall with upper-class vowels and dowdy clothes like Jane's whose presence
reduced me to panic. I think I always knew that Roger would, in the end, abandon me for some Roedean-educated bishop's daughter who played the harpsichord; for some second cousin of the Huxleys who dissected frogs. It made me clinging and vulnerable.

‘It beats me,' said my Aussie, as we watched the oncoming drizzle, ‘why nobody thought of turning this place into a penal colony and exporting the British populace en masse to Australia.' The idea was logical in its simplicity. It caused me to acknowledge – perhaps for the first time – the uses of the mathematical mind.

‘Do you not like Oxford?' I said.

‘Sure, I like it,' he said. ‘It's a real place. Leaving aside that the colleges are like boarding school, the women are either nonexistent or ugly as sin, and the colonial Mafia like me talk about nothing but beer and pissing. The movies, I hand it to you, are a bit of all right. You can't sit around in the rain, baby. Come and have a drink with me.' I missed my chance with him. I passed him up, being as resolute as the unspotted Lucrece that nobody but Roger should ever know whether or not I bore a mole upon my breast. I remember thinking with affection as he left me that he made ‘can't' rhyme with ‘ant'.

Roger told me, on one occasion, that I laughed too much. There were other things I did which caused him displeasure. I read
Vogue
magazine and I did my knitting in public. These were badges of female subjection which Roger attempted to eliminate in order that I might go forth as his brave and equal consort. All of it was little more than a punitive desire to scratch my face with briars. I laughed too much. ‘Especially at Jake's jokes,' he said.

‘You should try not to,' he said. ‘It encourages him to perform.' I was too much in love with him and too young to perceive him as an absurd and petulant Hamlet, screwed up with sexual jealousy where Jacob was concerned. Refrain tonight, as it were, and that shall lend a kind of easiness to the next abstinence. It seems obvious to me now that Roger, who had been allowed by his mother, in the initial shock and loneliness of her marriage, to believe himself more important to her than anybody else, was more than commonly beset with the fantasy that she belonged to him. It did not help, of course, that Jacob went in for biting his wife's neck sexily in public or for making after-dinner conversation of the state of her post-natal cervix. Jacob would come in off his commuter train and get his hands up Jane's jumper as she stood about making toast for the children's tea. Having got over my surprise at this, I did not find it offensive or unattractive. I found it rather sweet. Also that he would quite blatantly invite
her upstairs sometimes in the middle of the afternoon. It helped me to accept the difficult fact that one owed one's existence to one's parents' coming together. It helped me to think more charitably of my parents' demure twin beds with their matching candlewick spreads. It helped me to acknowledge that passion might go on even under candlewick. Even with the Eno's Fruit Salts on the table between the beds.

‘He's like the bloke in the Cloggies,' Jonathan once said cheerily to Roger, as Jacob was engaged upon feeling up his wife over the sink. ‘He never stops raping her in public.' Jonathan seemed not to notice or care that Roger swallowed hard and began to examine his fingernails.

Jonathan was a mystery to me. Roger evidently admired and respected him. Jonathan, unlike me, could read
Vogue, Beano, or
any damn thing he liked without incurring Roger's disapproval, and a lot of the time he did. For Jonathan was powerfully streaked with anti-Culture. He alternated between the most god-awful vulgar comics full of blood and lust, and avant garde forms of highbrow literature. He was the only person I had ever met who had read
Finnegans Wake.
He had read
The Tin Drum
in German. He almost never uttered a sentence without saying fuck. If I had been his mother I'd have been moved to wash his mouth in carbolic soap. It was not at all that Jane had no control over her children, but she seemed not to mind it. I could see that he was very nice with his little brother and sisters, and that he had a brazen childlike innocence himself at times which contradicted his more menacing characteristics. On the occasion of his seventeenth birthday, for example, he telephoned me to say he was having a birthday tea and would I come. It materialised as the most delightfully innocuous occasion, to which he had invited his two best schoolfriends, his entire family including his German grandmother, and me. Jane had made him a birthday cake which Sam and Annie had iced for him, and Rosie had done the writing with an icing forcer. He insisted on its having candles. The children sang to him in paper hats:

Happy Birthday to You
Squashed tomatoes and stew.
Bread and butter in the gutter
Happy Birthday to You.

It could have been made by Elstree Studios. Roger would never have submitted himself to the indignity. His presents – his John Williams record, his subscription to
Private Eye,
his wonderful equipment for murdering river fish – all came wrapped in flowered paper with ribbon bows and tags. After tea there was a treasure hunt with clues. Hard clues for us older people devised by Jacob in the style of
The Times
crossword puzzle, and more charitable clues for younger people, which Rosie said were easy-peasy-Japanesy. Having been at a loss as to what to give him, I gave him a
Magic Roundabout
bell for his bicycle with Zebedee on it, because it was cheap. As it turned out, it fell in very suitably with the regressive nature of the occasion, pleased Jonathan no end, and was the envy of Annie and Sam. Also, I suspect, of Roger, who wouldn't admit to it. I would never have presumed to have given Roger such a piece of Japanesy tat.

For more than six months Roger enacted a convoluted charade with his parents where I was concerned, and said he didn't want them to know that we were involved with each other. He didn't want his parents invading his private life, he said. The result of this was that I was required to keep my visits there to a minimum, which was difficult, since Jane asked me fairly often to visit her. I declined to visit them at Christmas for this reason, even though she asked my mother to come too.

‘We're going to have a super time,' she said coaxingly. ‘I've just bought a whole blue Stilton cheese, Katherine. It's enormous. And my mother has filched an entire crate of the old boy's best claret for us and sent it down by rail. Go on. We'll sing some lovely old carols and make Roger play for us. Roger would love it if you came.'

‘I have to go to my aunt's,' I said, feeling puny and dishonest.

‘Oh, Katherine,' she said. ‘Go on. Jake is so much more bearable at Christmas if I bring in an outsider. If you don't come he'll crab on at us about the expense and the singing and wish us well over the fast like a great killjoy. I need you to come.' It was ridiculous.

When I did succumb to invitations, or when Roger deemed it acceptable for me to come, he kept himself rather remote from me, which I could not but find unnecessary and rejecting. Being blessed, as he was, with parents who, unlike most, would not have
raised an objection to him having his girlfriend in his bed, he chose instead to bed me on bits of grimy sacking in the farmer's outhouse or in the cycle-shed on a plastic mac, with my vertebrae grinding into the concrete. As a fundamental human need, warmth takes precedence over sexual urges. In both of these locations I was colder than I have ever been in my life.

‘I love you,' Roger said, as I eased the butt end of an old Dutch hoe out of my shoulder blade. If Roger could have screwed me on a bed of nails he would have done it.

There was the time, one warm spring day, when he wouldn't come to the sea. He had to work, he said. I sat in the back of the car, therefore, between Jonathan and Rosie, missing him terribly, enduring the scufflings of Sam and Annie who were in the luggage space of the Goldmans' sizeable estate car exhuming Ladybird books from among the debris on the floor and arguing over ownership.

‘Think of a game,' Jane said from the front seat. She had Sylvia on her lap. Jonathan had a game which Rosie knew too.

‘You take imaginary pot shots at passers-by,' Jonathan said, ‘and you score points on a scale between one and ten.'

‘Yes,' Rosie said excitedly, ‘and you get ten for old ladies in wheelchairs and eight for old ladies with a stick.'

‘There's a correlation between decrepitude and high scoring?' Jacob asked.

‘And also if you're black,' Rosie said. ‘You get ten for a black person who's old, even if they aren't in a wheelchair.'

‘There's a correlation also between stigmatising ethnic attributes and high scoring?' Jacob asked. ‘Is that right?'

‘That's it,' Jonathan said.

‘And able-bodied pinkoes are consequently hardly worth aiming at?' Jacob said.

‘Right,' Jonathan said. Jacob shrugged. Mock despair.

‘Far be it from me to repress you with the Liberal Conscience,' he said. ‘Carry on.' The game broke down at a pedestrian
crossing, when everyone claimed to have aimed the first shot at an aged crone in a red wig who was wheeling five toothless pekes across the street in a pram.

‘Can you stop this, chaps?' Jane said. ‘I find it moderately disgusting.'

‘Tell me,' Jacob said, ‘do you discriminate within the category of decrepit black persons? For example, between people of African and Asian origin?'

‘You get more for Pakistanis,' Rosie said. ‘We do it on the bus to swimming.'

‘Good God,' Jacob said. ‘Do you by any chance also get a bonus for a Jew?'

‘Don't be silly,' Rosie said. ‘You can't tell Jews. They just look like ordinary people.'

‘Like what sort of ordinary people?' Jacob said. ‘Like ordinary black people, for example?' Rosie growled impatiently. She had not much inclination for sociological analysis.

‘You're so stupid, Jake,' she said. ‘Why are you so stupid?'

On the pebbles where we stripped to our bathers, I discovered that Jacob's chest hair continued black and copious over his shoulders and all the way down his back. It grew in tight curls along the breast bone and straightened out over the shoulders where it lay in smooth two-inch lengths. I stared at him surreptitiously, like a kid sizing up a hunchback.

‘Say,' Jane said, who had noticed my gaping, ‘you really are most immoderately and unnaturally hirsute, aren't you, my husband?'

Roger, when I got back to him, was engaged upon modifications to his homemade stereo equipment.

‘I love you,' he said.

There was the Saturday afternoon when Roger wouldn't take me to the pictures. Jane and Roger had spent the morning over the
Spring Symphony
while I minded the little ones. I enjoyed it. The worst they did, after all, was to blob finger paint on the kitchen
floor, which was not going to bother anyone, and Sylvia ate paint which was reassuringly labelled ‘nontoxic'. I enjoy children's paintings. Sam, I remember, painted a series of snappish crocodiles with zig-zag teeth, and Annie a ‘female onion tree'.

‘Only the girl ones grow them,' she said. ‘These aren't the kind that grow under the ground.'

‘Janie,' Jacob said over lunch, ‘how is it you play the piano all morning and leave this poor young woman to care for your children?' Jacob was neurotic about Jane's piano-playing. Perhaps he couldn't bear to have her involved in something other than himself, or perhaps it turned him on to the point where he couldn't bear it.

‘
My
children, are they?' she said, bestowing her winning smile upon him.

‘Damn it, Jane,' he said, ‘I've got work to do. All I know is you ask the child to visit you and then you use her like a domestic.'

‘I really do not think that I need you to advise me on how to behave towards my friends,' Jane said. ‘Katherine is a childless young woman. Child-minding is not her whole life. It makes a pleasant change for a person in her situation to care for children for an hour or two. They're nice children, aren't they? What's the matter with them?' Jacob stared at her sceptically.

‘Jacob, for heaven's sake,' she said. ‘She hasn't anything else pressing to do. Ask her. Don't make use of her to get at me.'

‘Katherine, where is this tin-pot university of yours that gives you nothing to do?' Jacob said to me. ‘If you've got nothing to do, you should be enjoying yourself.'

‘I
was
enjoying myself,' I said. ‘I like your children.'

‘I like my children too, but I also know that they are boring and irritating,' he said. ‘Roger, take the girl to the pictures. Let's find out what's on. Get me the paper, Sammy. The local one. It's on the bathroom floor.'

‘I'm too busy,' Roger said. ‘I'm seeing my tutor on Monday.' Sam returned with the newspaper, holding it in damp crumpled
lumps. It hung in his arms like a dead bird. Jacob took it and bashed it into shape with a vengeance.