Brother of the More Famous Jack (20 page)

‘You'll like Jonathan,' he says. ‘Jonathan will surprise you.' If there were not still a degree of deference in my relationship with Jacob, I would kick him under the table.

‘Nicely brought-up Greek women don't drop their knickers for anybody, after all, do they?' he says. It is such a long time since I've heard anyone say ‘knickers'.

On the way to the hospital, Jacob begins to set me up in a job. His publisher needs a copy-editor, he says. Should it be my good self? He is due to see his publisher in ten days, he says.

‘I'm not a copy-editor, Jake,' I say, ‘I'm a lackey in a language school.'

‘You can turn your hand to it,' he says, ‘you're a literate woman.'

‘Daughters at Bedales, jobs for the boys,' I say. ‘I haven't lived in Rome for ten years without getting to know corruption when I see it.' Jacob raises his eyebrow.

‘Get along with you,' he says. He is driving a very nice new Volkswagen Golf. ‘You're man enough to accept a little honest graft, aren't you?'

In her hospital ward, Jane has Jonathan with her. He is in the process of replenishing her illicit supplies of Guinness and sneaking out the empties.

‘The Mum's Ruin,' he says, with reference to the empty Guinness bottles which he transfers to his left armpit. He takes my hand across the bed. ‘Katherine,' he says. ‘It's been a long time.'

‘Yes,' I say. It is an absurd and omnipotent but very common response to be surprised that people grow and change when you are not there to observe the process. For this reason, Jonathan's appearance at least is indeed a surprise. I find both that, and his bearing, highly prepossessing. This is perhaps because my tastes have evolved. He wears his wild hair clipped poodle-wise in two-inch lengths all over his head. It could be mistaken for a fashionable perm. The look has caught up with him. This is the age of the unset frizz; we grew up in the age of the undulating curl. Jonathan has squarish steel-framed glasses which interrupt the inquisitorial power of his great nose and he wears a small thick well-cut tortoiseshell moustache. He has about him the same confident ease but carries it with greater subtlety and wears cleaner clothes.

‘My dearest Katherine,' Jane says. She invites me to sit beside her on the bed and inches up cautiously, clutching at her abdominal scar. ‘I may look decrepit but I'm absolutely fine,'
she says. She kisses me, and I her. In her dowdy NHS glasses, leaning on the iron bedhead, her hair streaked with grey, she looks, as always, miraculously beautiful. ‘What a lovely surprise!' she says. ‘Oh, Jake, where did you find her? You got lost. And to have you visit me with your dowry in your hair. What a tonic you are.' I have plaited gold beads into the ends of my hair, which is longish and crepe. I sit with her, loving her as much as always.

‘Look at my companions,' she says after a while, in a conspiratorial whisper. ‘This sweet young thing here on my right has been forced to have her tubes tied by her husband. Him in the army boots. He refuses to have a vasectomy, of course. She's twenty-one. That one is a martyr to her vaginal prolapse and she can't wear a diaphragm because she's allergic to rubber. The old lady there has just returned from a three-day ordeal with her legs up in stirrups being treated with radiation for uterine cancer.' I regard this by now as a typical Goldman conversation, and feel cosily at home with her at once.

‘I've got some plastic surgery on my cervix for you,' I say invitingly, closing the decade of our long separation. Jacob and Jonathan glance at each other with ironic implication, seeking mutual support as aliens in a world monopolised by female complaints. Jonathan smiles.

‘I'm getting out of here before I get lunched,' he says. ‘I need tea.' He kisses Jane's forehead. ‘Goodbye, Ma. Jake, I'll wait for you in the canteen. Katherine, come and have some tea with me. There's a slop house on the premises.' In the corridor we pass the trolleys and the stink of meths. Jonathan, whose adolescent belligerence has evolved into a certain bold charisma, evokes glances from some comely nurses on the way. He steers me with a comfortable, brotherly arm into the canteen. In the other hand he has a plastic carrier-bag containing Guinness bottles.

‘I hope you still have Zebedee on your bicycle,' I say.

‘I don't,' Jonathan says with feeling. ‘Some dirty swine pinched that bell from me in my first term at Oxford.' At the counter we pick up some dark brown tea and Jonathan rises to doughnuts.

‘I'm rich today,' he says, ‘I've just got my first publisher's advance. Six hundred pounds.' I associate him recurringly with sums of six hundred pounds.

‘Good Lord,' I say, much impressed. ‘How do you feel?'

‘Like a person who is about to buy an electric typewriter,' he says. We sit at a formica-topped table displaying pools of slop and the odd abandoned yoghurt carton.

‘Drink up,' he says cheerily, when I get a little snooty over the tea. ‘It's guaranteed to put hairs on your chest.' I laugh, at no more than the unstated and amusing fact of our physiological difference.

‘What do you expect of your tea then?' he says, smiling at me. ‘Ice-cubes? Sprigs of mint?' ‘Yes,' I say.

‘Where've you been? Italy? All the time? Just come back?'

‘Yes,' I say, lying a little. ‘Yes, yes.'

‘How's tricks, Katherine?' he says. ‘How are you?'

‘Ravaged,' I say, protectively mock-dramatic. ‘Don't ask me. I've just been through it all with Jake.'

‘You look marvellous,' he says, ‘but then you always did. You graced my boyhood fantasies as a thing of pendant shiny objects and pale gleaming hair.' He makes me laugh.

‘Have you seen Roger?' he says.

‘Nope,' I say bravely, ‘not in ten years. Only thing I see from time to time of Roger's is that embroidered butterfly patch he gave me from his bum pocket. It turns up now and again in my work-basket.' Jonathan pulls a face.

‘Etherised, I hope?' he says. ‘Impaled on a pin.' He gestures with a teaspoon, grinding it into the formica. ‘You ought to know that Roggs keeps his bifocals in his bum pocket these days. He sat on them not long ago, the silly bugger. He's got them all taped
together with Sellotape.' He gestures again to indicate the makeshift repair.

‘Jake says he goes to church,' I say. ‘Is that a malicious fabrication?'

‘Not a bit of it,' Jonathan says. ‘All week he's in the Mathematical Institute, is Roggs, trying to devise ways of measuring Infinity, and on Sunday, there he is in church, on his knees before the Unknowable. Isn't it wonderful what Oxford does for people? They get to know more and more about less and less. He's a dear chap, I have to say, for all that.' It occurs to me that Roger's Christianity could be a gigantic act of aggression towards Jacob, but I don't want to sound like the Tavistock Clinic or anything. Psychs are not my favourite people.

‘Perhaps he goes for the plainsong,' I say.

‘Time was when he went for the plainsong, Kath,' Jonathan says, ‘but now he goes for the hard stuff. The Body and the Blood. It's the real McCoy with Rogsie, I assure you.' Rather successfully, he takes the pain out of the thing for me. I never heard anyone call the transubstantiation the real McCoy before, though I am accustomed to irreverence.

‘He's very generous with it,' he says. ‘Made me his child's godfather. A little archaic do around the font. He knows I intend to be an altogether secular godfather, of course. I deal in icecream and treats, not in the word of God. None of it could really surprise you, Kath. Didn't he always behave like Savonarola?'

‘Bloody Jiminy Cricket, more like,' I say, provoked a little by Jonathan's indulgence towards him.

‘Oh, come,' Jonathan says reproachfully, ‘you can't mean to be so nasty.'

‘He used to wear that hat,' I say, ‘that dead grandfather's hat. That morbid Hamlet hat.' Jonathan is clearly delighted to be reminded of it.

‘The hat,' he says, ‘exactly so. A Hamlet hat. “Lay not that flattering unction to your soul that not my madness but your trespass speaks.”'

‘Other way round,' I say, ‘else it doesn't make sense. “Not your trespass but my madness speaks.”'

‘Right,' he says. ‘He's a poor, sweet, loony Jew. File him away. I expect you have. He was never all that nice to you.'

‘He couldn't cast me off without unloading blame,' I say. ‘He made me a devastating heap of my iniquities. All nice and symmetrical. Everything, Jonathan. You wouldn't believe. How I'd disappointed him reading
Good Housekeeping
when I had a brain to feed. How I was hick enough to knit.' Jonathan grins.

‘I did try laying him a bet once, that you'd knit your own graduation robes,' he says, ‘but Rogsie was not amused.'

‘I don't want to hear a word in his favour,' I say. ‘He was a pig to me, your brother. He made me feel like Mrs Weetabix. I was so under his spell I believed him in a way. He buggered up my self-esteem. I didn't have his advantages, did I? He got me where I was most vulnerable and all because I wouldn't dress like a kibbutznik for him.' Jonathan laughs.

‘Don't be humble, Kaffrin,' he says. ‘You've no cause to be humble. It might comfort you to know that the last time I saw Roggs he was making a violin from a paper pattern. Crosslegged, he was, on the floor, like the Tailor of Gloucester. He's Mr Fixit, is Roggs. He makes little red lights go on and off on the cooker for his wife. It's like
Star Wars
in there. You know that he's married, do you? A sweet Christian wench, part-time Maths tutor for the Open University.' I pull a sour face, to cover the fact that I find this threatening.

‘Don't let that trouble you, Kath. It's a putting-out system for dons' wives. It isn't the big time.' Jonathan has inherited Jacob's ability to air a good prejudice without inhibition.

‘Is she flat-chested?' I ask, because, to my shame, this is important to me. Jonathan can obviously not believe what he hears.

‘What?' he says.

‘Is she flat-chested?'

‘No,' he says. ‘Did you want her to be?'

‘I am sorry to say that it would have been a great comfort to me,' I say.

‘Good God, Kath,' he says, ‘the woman is an innocuous parsonage-educated school-marm with pretty boobs. Since she troubles you so much, I will be good to you and tell you that she wears a crucifix in her cleavage.'

‘Thank you, Jonathan,' I say, ‘that's a big help. A crucifix in the cleavage is more hick than knitting, isn't it? Don't you think so?'

‘I confess it's not a great turn-on for me. It says to me, I know you want them, but I have committed them to Jesus. It mixes the sacred and the profane in a manner which doesn't excite me.'

‘Yes, exactly,' I say.

‘Sally wouldn't see it that way,' he says. ‘She's not devious. She's just a nice little Maths bod. She's not a creature of subtle charm like you.'

I find Jonathan's brazen and extravagant compliments rather enjoyable.

‘Are you married, Kath?' he says. ‘Are you committed?' I reach instinctively for signs of commitment around the cleavage but I have none. Neither cleavage nor commitment. Jonathan notices and tries not to smile.

‘No,' I say, ‘why?'

‘Because I'd like to chance my arm,' Jonathan says. ‘I fancy you. I always have.'

‘Rubbish,' I say. Listening to Jonathan talk has left me slightly high. It is like watching somebody relentlessly winning at ninepins.

‘It's the truth,' he says. ‘From the moment you walked into my parents' house wearing those sexy fantastic shoes, I said to myself, Jesus, Goldman, you were born too late.'

‘What a shameless, filthy liar you are, Jonathan,' I say, but I enjoy the game. ‘This is all complete rubbish.'

‘It's not rubbish,' he says. ‘Roggs had the advantage over me, didn't he? He was older, and turning your head with his pretty face and cultured talk. Always impelled to improve your mind, he was. If it wasn't Thomas bloody Morley and the broken consort, it was the chemical elements or some other damn thing. You wouldn't even come fishing with me, that day. You chose to listen to Roger playing Stravinsky.'

‘I was scared of you, Jonathan,' I say, blushing foolishly. ‘You were a very bolshie, menacing adolescent. I must say that I noticed how you pined and gave up eating for me.'

‘Did you want homage then?' he says. ‘Yellow stockings, cross-gartered?'

‘Not on those butchy rugger legs of yours,' I say. Jonathan casts an eye over a section of grey sock protruding below his trouser hem.

‘Oh, come on, Kath. Tell me at least that you know I'm no mean Philistine jock.'

‘Of course I know,' I say.

‘Rogsie was the one who played rugger, you know,' he says. ‘I was the gentle arty one who wrote poetry. I wrote a poem about you once, for a competition, but the Head wouldn't have it.' I enjoy this flirting over doughnuts and tea. The last time I did it was in the Tate Gallery with John Millet.

‘How is John Millet?' I say.

‘Dead,' Jonathan says. ‘Lung cancer.'

‘Dead!'
I screech hysterically, for my nerves are not yet quite what they should be. I keep my Valium in a little tin box with my initial on it which Rosie once gave me when I visited the Goldmans at Christmas. Jonathan is puzzled, even a little alarmed, by the vehemence of my response. Protectively, he puts a hand over mine on the table.

‘Nothing and nobody lasts for ever, Kath,' he says, watching me carefully as my tears fall. Sensing that he is kind, I pour out to him my sadness and my loss, dripping tears and snot on to the formica and wiping my nose crudely on the back of my hand. He
does nothing but hears me out, as I tell him of my overwhelming urge to carry the little creature out under my coat and bury her in the geraniums; of the standing in queues and signing things, the listening to bureaucratic telephones ring; of my months communing in the evenings with the bulge; of the strong urge to hold and possess something after the jarring and violent assault on the cervix.