Brother of the More Famous Jack (12 page)

‘Thank you, my sweet boy,' he said. Jonathan leaned over Jacob's shoulder and read delightedly from the front page of the local rag.

‘BLAZE FAMILY IN KITCHEN FIRE SHOCK,' he read, sending up the prose. He and Jacob fell about sharing a favourite joke.

‘Ah, yes,' Jacob said. ‘Our friends the unfortunate Mr and Mrs Blaze. Another shock for them. I wonder they aren't catatonic with shock by now, eh, Jont?' Rosie and I giggled girlishly. Jane smiled indulgently. Only Roger was unamused.

‘What's funny?' Annie said, agitating to be included. ‘Tell me what's funny.'

‘Somebody's house has burned down,' Roger said. ‘Ask Jake why that's funny.' Jacob ignored him. He scuffled resolutely through the small ads for farm machinery and bay gelding horses, past the wedding pictures and the furniture shops advertising sales.

‘Now then, Roger,' he said,
‘Women in Love.
Just the thing for Katherine. A film of
Women in Love.
Lots of heavy breathing among the bracken. Take her, Roggs. Don't be such a snotty bloody tiresome swot.'

‘He's not a swot, Jake. He's merely interested in the work,' Jane said.

‘I know,' Jacob said. ‘I know. He can nevertheless take this presentable young woman to the pictures, can't he? Work tonight, Rogsie. Down some black coffee at midnight.'

‘I cannot think that Katherine is a young woman who needs to have you tout for her escorts,' Jane said.

‘Oh, for Christssake!' Jacob said impatiently. ‘Jonathan, you take her.'

‘Neither Katherine nor Jonathan has a driver's licence, Jacob,' Jane said, ‘and Katherine doesn't cycle.'

‘Then you'll very sweetly get the car keys, Janie, and run them into town,' Jacob said.

‘I won't, as it happens,' Jane said. ‘This has nothing to do with me, or with Katherine. You are simply becoming manic in the face of a project.'

‘Jont,' Jacob said, ‘can you drive that bloody car?'

‘Sure,' Jonathan said.

‘Jacob,' Jane said ominously, ‘he hasn't got a licence.'

‘And tell me, Jont. Can you park the thing?' Jacob said.

‘Of course,' Jonathan said. ‘Jane knows I can. She taught me how to do it.'

‘Jacob,' Jane said, ‘he hasn't got a licence. Will you stop behaving like a teenage delinquent?'

‘Take her,' Jacob said.

‘If Katherine will come with me,' Jonathan said. I had never seen him so decently humble. Jacob clapped a hand impatiently to his brow and sighed.

‘Katherine,' he said sarcastically, ‘will you go with my son to the pictures? You don't have to marry him, you understand? Just to sit next to him for an hour or two.' I tried not to explode with laughter, because Roger was suddenly passing me messages of black intensity with his eyes.

‘I'll go,' I said. Roger got up and walked out. The dark indigo patch on his jeans, where he had removed the butterfly, was glaringly obvious to anyone with eyes. I knew immediately that Jacob knew whose butterfly it was that I had on my book-bag.

Half of Jonathan's grammar school class appeared to be at the cinema that afternoon judging by the craning of necks which went on to verify that it really was Goldman there, in the flesh, with a glamorous bird they'd never seen before, and to establish exactly what it was he intended to do with her once the lights went out. Somebody graciously hurled a paper ball at me, which bounced off the front of my shirt. Jonathan, having acquired a bag of popcorn, slouched stoically in his seat until his neck disappeared into the collar of his reefer jacket and did nothing, other than offer me popcorn, which I refused. One could have heard a pin drop as the men wrestled naked before the fire. Even
with the text behind me, I was convinced that one of them would fall in. They looked so vulnerable with their absurd, pendant genitalia and bald buttocks. They had none of the nobility of wrestling stags. There was a nice homosexual mime at the end which reminded me of John Millet.

The other half of Jonathan's grammar school class was hanging loose on the town as we came out.

‘Hey, Goldman,' one of them called bawdily as we moved off, ‘what have you got that we haven't got?' Jonathan glared over his shoulder.

‘Charm,' he said ferociously.

‘Serenade her, Jonathan,' one of them said, below the belt, in a mimicking falsetto voice.

‘Get lost,' Jonathan said, in his manly baritone. It occurred to me then that, among the indignities Jonathan had survived as the child of cultivated and arty parents, he had evidently survived having to sing male alto at school.

‘You didn't have to go to the pictures with my brother,' Roger said when I got back. ‘I don't believe that you love me.'

The day Roger gave me up for his pianist I had spent two hours waiting for him in a draughty hall where he was rehearsing the King of Hades in Monteverdi. It was within days of my final exams. The three of us went thereafter to the Science Museum, where I caught my destiny in the innuendo of ganging up. While his young woman gave her attention to a showcase of limestones, Roger diverted me on to the upper-floor landing beyond the skeleton of the hanged man. The thing was as efficient as a premeditated putsch. Exorcising his own guilt, no doubt, and uneasiness, he made me a careful articulate pyramid of my shortcomings, which was anything but kind. It said, in short, that, weighed in the balance, I showed up trivial. That I covered my notebooks in Florentine wrapping-paper like a Girl Guide on a nature trail, that I cared more for knitting than logic, that I made a brazen virtue of all that was unfortunate, vulgar and semi-educated in my own history, that, frankly, my mother's plaster ducks left him feeling ill, that I fondled my earrings while he, Roger Goldman, played the violin, that I laughed too much, that in that very Science Museum I had, that very day, spent the bulk of my time admiring the stencil designs on the iron vaults, ‘as if', he said, ‘as if the place were housing an annual craft exhibition run by the Women's Institute'.

I think that before he turned and walked away from me I said that I was sorry. In this life there are those that apologise and
those that do not. I am a person who says sorry if a passer-by stands on my foot. I thought, first, crazily, that I ought to tell him that my mother's ducks were china and not plaster; that my mother, whose chocolate cake he had not disdained, was my property to criticise, not his. Then, as the tears spilled in silence down my face, I thought that I would do anything, anything to get him back. That I would do algebra in sackcloth for the privilege of touching the hem of his hand-on Sea Scout jumper. Suddenly, as I saw him reach his showcase of limestones, my only thought was to get my stuff from his room and go before they came back to it; before Roger could encounter the disfiguring squalor of my tears, and to go quietly, without fuss. I was no good at rage and indignation. It had never been encouraged in my house. I had never told my parents, for example, to fuck off, or thrown garlic bread across the dinner table. These things were not licensed in my house. I did not pursue the option, therefore, of following Roger across the floor to his limestones and dismantling his personality, as he had done mine. Of screaming at him, gratifyingly, that he was an arrogant and joyless youth, rejoicing righteously in the fate of the damned; scrambled, punitive and jealous. Might we have hammered out something and moved on together? Perhaps not, though I will never know. Perhaps all Roger's words said nothing more than that he wanted his pianist in his bed, not me. Perhaps I was always more in love with him than he with me. To this day I cannot watch Roger Goldman shake hair from his eyes without some pain. He is an absurd, abiding, adolescent passion, which I resolve by being seldom in his company.

In Roger's bedsitting room I took down from the cupboard the travelling bag with which he had come back from Kenya two years before. Into it I stuffed my mother's whistling kettle, which he had on loan, my two patchworked sofa cushions with which I had adorned his room, and an Aran sweater of my own making which we had shared. The routine petty division of property. In the train I registered over and over, through a film of tears, that
the bag still bore an East African Airways luggage-label on which was written, in block capitals, R.J. GOLDMAN. It put me in mind of the laundry basket full of old wellington boots. It evoked for me, vividly and painfully, an image of Roger at the kitchen table in the Hamlet hat, raising his eyes for the first time to encounter mine. It made me, quite simply, want to die.

After that, the nights were the worst. In the daylight I occasionally talked the thing over with a girlfriend or in my own mind, working my misery into a rational shape which gave an hour's relief. But alone, at the end of the day, the painful fact of Roger was still there, impinging like the appalling and sudden scream of brakes. Sometimes I did not sleep at all. Twice on these occasions I tiptoed downstairs and sat wrapped in a blanket on a tree-stump in that rigid little suburban garden, watching distant inky clouds blow across the moon, watching the relentless progress of each one towards its own disintegration, as it crossed the moon, into dispersed and tortured fragments. I cried a lot, but only to myself. I telephoned the speaking clock in the small hours for the sound of a voice.

‘At the first stroke it will be four forty-two and ten seconds,' said the voice. ‘Peep, peep, peep.' I never telephoned Roger. I slipped politely and obligingly out of his life without a word of recrimination. Once, at a news-stand, I went so far as to buy for him a picture postcard of a snarling female tiger, feeling that in that creature's rage I could take some vicarious, impotent stand. I never posted it. I wrote my final exams in an almost indifferent stupor, drugged up on purple hearts, wondering what Jacob would say to me if I failed. It had ceased to matter to me for myself. Wondering would the British taxpayer rise up, with just clamour, for the return of his money? After that I did what I hadn't done for a long time. I telephoned John Millet and told him.

John Millet's house in Greenwich can be approached by rail from London Bridge. The trains rumble high over Southwark, haunt of Geoffrey Chaucer's pilgrims, and lure one with the emotive promise of Rochester, Chatham and Gillingham at the end of the line. It was the romance of the platform announcement which gave me the idea of going away. John was lunching with a friend upon German wine and onion quiche made, of course, by himself.

‘We didn't wait for you,' he said. ‘You were rather vague about your plans.'

‘Sorry,' I said. ‘I look terrible, John. Don't look at me.' Because I knew appearances mattered to him, I felt that I was an affront to his aesthetic senses. John smiled quite kindly.

‘Boyfriend trouble is only temporarily disfiguring,' he said. ‘Sit down. Alex,' he said, ‘Katherine.' He handed me an engraved hock glass containing chilled wine. A great pleasure to have in the hand.

‘Katherine is embroiled in a poor little tottering affair with Jake Goldman's son,' he said. ‘Remember Jake? My neighbour in Belsize Park? Stunning wife. Beautiful eyes. Yes?' He made a fluent cosmopolitan gesture, drawing a circle in the air and lightly kissing his fingers. An ironic, romantic, harlequin gesture. His friend had taken off his suit jacket and was sitting in his waistcoat and pinstriped shirt sleeves.

‘I never met him,' he said, ‘but I remember the woman. A handsome, tired young woman, with a mewling toddler.' John gestured again, spreading his hands to denote, with resignation, the condition of mortality which besets us all.

‘The “mewling toddler” is now the cause of Katherine's scorbutic pallor,' he said. ‘We are none of us getting any younger, Alex.'

That afternoon we walked alone along the waterfront, he and I, to the naval college where he expanded upon the decorative use of symmetry in wrought iron.

‘I thought I might go to Rome,' I said.

John lent me a book called
Italian without Toil.
It came with a set of records. Then he wrote letters on my behalf to two of his friends, employing, in my interest, his stunning left-handed writing which Jacob had previously slandered. He gave them to me to post.

‘Cheer up, Katherine,' he said. ‘That pretty little Goldman is not the only man in the world.' I replied with simple commitment that he was for me. John, having given me a glass of brandy, sat opposite me for an hour or so and sketched me as I sat on his sofa, chronicling, in brown chalk, a phase of my unhappiness. Then he got up and ran a bath. He came back and handed me a large porridge-coloured bath towel. To resist would have seemed gauche. It was when he entered the bathroom to get me out, had wrapped me in the towel, with my arms pinned to my sides, and propelled me towards his bed, that I remembered the spanner.

‘Jacob says–' I said. I was not going to tell him about the spanner. Merely to gabble nervously, to break the dignity of his hypnotic magic, that Jacob had said – as he had in a light moment – that John slept in black sheets. John put his index finger over my lips.

‘Shshsh,' he said. And very quietly, very strangely, I thought, he said into my ear, ‘You will say after me, “Jacob is the butcher's grandson.”' I found this so perverted, so bizarre, so
ridiculous, that I pulled away from him in ungainly, childish confusion and scrambled clumsily for my clothes.

‘I think I hate you,' I said.

In the train I opened the book. ‘Non
e difficile I'italiano per un francese,'
it said, encouragingly. ‘Italian is not difficult for a French person.'

Three weeks later I stole like a thief into the Philosophy Department to return some books. I had no plan to wait for my results, but simply to shake the dust from my feet and light out for the territory, as Huck Finn says. John Millet had set it up for me to teach in a language school in Rome and to stay with friends of his until I found my feet. I had been avoiding Jacob like the plague, but I ran into him in the vestibule on my way in.