Brother of the More Famous Jack (24 page)

We walked from the Oxford railway station along the Oxford canal, passing occasional barges as we went. Even the dossers who hobnobbed under the bridges looked younger. We made our way up into salubrious north Oxford, to what used to be the grandparents' house. Roger's grandmother had moved, with a friend, to a cottage in Wolvercote. Sally was there to meet us, but Roger was still in his Institute. She had brown curly hair and pretty, laughing eyes which fixed one in a most forthright manner, quite unlike Roger, who shifted his eyes about nervously and blinked a lot. She had a skin like the bloom on an apricot, and a slightly disfiguring swollen lip where somebody had accidentally bashed her with a briefcase as she boarded a train the previous day, but it did nothing to shake her self-possession. The crucifix was not visible to me, since she was wearing a high-necked sweater. Unlike me, she had taken no trouble to adorn herself – she didn't need to: she had more self-assurance.

‘Hello, Jonathan,' she said warmly. She offered her cheek for a kiss. ‘And this is Katherine. I'm so glad to meet you at last.' She shook my hand. ‘Come in.'

The house was all changed. It was, as always, palatial in its solidity and proportion, but innocently unadorned. Stripped of the grandparents' rather looming antiques, it also had none of the arty clutter of needlepoint cushion covers and applique'd hangings that I went in for. There was new, stone-coloured Wilton carpeting throughout, and the white walls had no pictures. There was one educational wall frieze in the vestibule, because Sally was obviously a conscientious, pedagogical mother. She had magnetic numbers on the door of the fridge and she had painted the letters of the alphabet, in lower case, around the walls of the downstairs loo with marker pens. Her kitchen was large and beautifully appointed. The plum trees, visible through
the kitchen window, were heavy with fruit. We drank a pleasant cup of coffee with her. There was no suggestion that she would report me for wearing my beret at a rakish angle.

‘Roger is bringing home a colleague for lunch,' she said. ‘His wife has just had a baby. They may well be a little late. I wonder if you people would care to collect Glare for me? She's with a friend in the next street. That would please her no end. She considers you a great treat, Jonathan.' She had a way of managing one with politeness. When she said, ‘I wonder if you would care to?' she meant, ‘Do it.' Perhaps that was what Roger liked. Somebody to boss him around. Somebody to tell him to stop chewing grass and go and practise the G Minor. That never occurred to me before.

Jonathan and I walked the tree-lined streets till we found ourselves admitted into the neighbour's kitchen, where Roger's daughter was watching her friends paint on computer printouts. A three-year-old, with her mother's straight glance and none of her father's apprehensiveness. She accosted Jonathan like a brisk committee woman.

‘You weren't supposed to get me, Jonerfun,' she said. ‘Mummy was supposed to get me.'

‘And why haven't you got a stack of paintings to your name, like the other chaps?' Jonathan said, calling her bluff.

‘Because I just like to play running around,' she said. ‘Is she your wife?'

‘She's Katherine,' Jonathan said. ‘She's my friend.' He crouched to button up her duffle-coat.

‘Are you going to marry her?' the child said. The hostess laughed a little, nervously.

‘No,' Jonathan said.

‘Why not?' said the child. Jonathan smiled.

‘Because I see no reason why I should tolerate the interference of Church and State in my love affairs,' he said, being deliberately incomprehensible to her. ‘Or of your good self, you nosey little bugger.' She giggled with delight at the insult. We said
goodbye and went out into the street where she ran on ahead of us, scruffling through fallen leaves.

‘Would you like one of those, Kath?' he said. ‘One of those little people? Would you like it if I got you up the spout?'

‘Forget it,' I said, ‘I'm all right.'

Roger entered, accompanied, talking shop.

‘Sorry I'm late,' he said. ‘This is Donald.' His colleague was bald and bearded, but I knew him.

‘I know him,' I said. ‘We don't need an introduction.' Donald O'Brien looked baffled. I enjoyed his slight embarrassment.

‘I'm sorry,' he said, in that gorgeous unreformed accent. ‘Remind me.'

‘Eleven years ago,' I said. ‘South Parks Road. On a wall. In the rain.' Donald snapped his fingers.

‘Bullseye,' he said, grinning broadly. ‘You were waiting for your boyfriend.' He was a relief beside Roger, being, as he was, so composed and affable. I gestured commandingly to Roger, feeling the irony of being a woman who had, for a time, enjoyed the admiration of all the men in the room.

‘Roger was the boyfriend?' Donald said in disbelief. He enjoyed the idea no end. ‘Wouldn't you know it? I made a pass at your girlfriend, Roger, but I'll tell you this: I couldn't move her. She insisted on waiting for you in the rain. I couldn't lure her away for a drink.' Roger weathered the coincidence, picking a little at his fingernail. We went through to the living room where Donald sat down beside me on the sofa, beaming effusively.

‘You had more hair on your head and less on your face,' I said, ‘but I'm glad to say that your accent hasn't changed.'

‘Really?' he said. ‘Because back in Melbourne they tell me I sound like a Pommie.'

‘Well, they're quite wrong in Melbourne,' I said, ‘because you sound like Barry McKenzie. You wouldn't want to sound like a Brit, would you? You're not going to tell me you actually live here, in this penal colony, are you?' Donald laughed.

‘You don't forget much, do you?' he said.

I flirted with him because he invited it. We engaged in a great effusion of warm mutuality. I did it, I think, to show up Roger, who must have perceived it as a reproach to himself, who knew me so much better, but found it much more difficult to engage people.

‘Nothing,' I said magnificently. ‘I forget nothing. I'm like an archaeologist on past conversations. I will quote you chapter and verse if you like.'

‘Only you can't remember to visit the dentist,' Jonathan said. I'd stood up the dentist the previous day. Darling Jonathan, bless him, was wanting it to be known that he was the one who was party to my domestic habits. That he was the one who knew the colour of my toothbrush. There was credit to be got from knowing me. I was playing the enjoyable game of upstaging Roger in his own house.

‘What's an archaeologist?' Glare said.

‘A man who digs up bones,' Donald said.

‘A man, eh?' I said, laughing. ‘You big Aussie sexist.'

‘Digs up bones?' Glare said incredulously. ‘Is he a dog?' It made us all laugh. Donald took her on his knee. It was curious how much pleasure the meeting gave us both when we did but sit on a wall together for twenty minutes such a long time ago. We were both having hard times, I suppose. Roger was making me more miserable than I had realised. Donald was suffering the absence of Melbourne.

‘And now you live here?' I said. ‘And you've married one of these awful Oxford women you complained about, who has just had a baby?'

‘She's from Sydney,' he said. ‘She's just had her third baby, as a matter of fact. Another male, I'm afraid.' He had a thing for Glare, quite obviously, and wanted a daughter. Then blow me if the man didn't pull out from his wallet, upon the instant, a picture of the wife and kiddies. On a beach. Aussie beach. Wife in bikini. 38.22.38. Undulating blonde hair. Sons grinning under blonde fringes.

‘Wow!' Jonathan said, who was sitting on the other side of me. He was not slow to see merit in a half-naked woman with unmistakeable attributes. ‘This is a woman who has had two children?' he said.

‘She's bloody handsome, Donald,' I said. ‘She's quite something for a bald colonial mathematician, isn't she? I'll bet she's dead nice and all. Do you always keep her in your wallet, along with your money and your credit cards?' I was behaving like a shrew with Donald because I knew he had the strength to weather it, and indirectly I was passing a message to Roger. The message was that if he were to try on me now what he pulled over me in my youth, I would have his bloody balls in the mincer and make no mistake. Donald laughed.

‘Jesus, baby,' he said.

‘Jesus, baby, what?' I said. He laughed again.

‘Jesus, baby, I never knew you had the power of tongues. It's good to see you again. I mean, really.'

Roger opened some very nice college wine for us to drink with our lunch. We ate in the kitchen at a slinky black table with shiny chrome legs. There was a wonderful serpentine aluminium tube which ran out through the kitchen wall. It must have been a central heating ventilator or a thing for extracting cooking fumes. It was then that it dawned on me that everything in Roger's house was new. I wondered what had happened to his instinct to feather his nest with other people's junk. My guess was that Sally simply wouldn't have it. Sally's lunch had been efficiently prepared beforehand. Things had been drawn out of the freezer in plastic containers. It gave the gathering a nice homeliness. It gave one the feeling of being present at a Tupperware party, but Clare wouldn't eat her pate. She was quite a presence for Sally to contend with, because Sally wasn't pliable. She placed a value upon behaviour. She liked sitting up straight at table and eating what was on your plate. Clare defiantly dumped her pate on my plate and dug her heels in. Sally apologised to me.

‘She really is a very naughty little girl,' she said. I was not comfortable with the word ‘naughty'. It had to do, in my philosophy, with seaside postcards and the music hall.

‘Why don't you stop moralising and make her chips?' Jonathan said impertinently. To my great surprise, Sally blushed suddenly and looked rather coyly at Jonathan. She was completely undone.

‘She's a lovely kid,' Jonathan said. He picked up the wine bottle to fill her glass. ‘Why aren't you boozing, sister?' he said. She smiled at him primly. I found it hard to be rational about Sally Goldman. The bloody woman was not only bossy, I thought enviously, but she had feminine wiles of the most blatant kind.

‘I'm pregnant,' she said. The place was an obscene seething hive of fecundity. ‘Only just, but that's when it's most important to be careful, of course.' Jonathan smiled at her, and did sums in his head.

‘He came home after laying my floor and got you pregnant,' he said. ‘That's nice. A little brother or sister for Small here. ‘Phone me when you're eight months pregnant and I'll take you out to dinner, because he won't, will he? That miserable husband of yours.' Sally shook her head, pouting prettily. She was flirting with him. Flirting. With my bloke, the hussy. And I with my wretched contraceptive pills in Jonathan's kitchen. A foil package in a jam jar. Pills which I probably didn't need anyway. But how do you know whether or not to believe some morbid, scandal-mongering Italian nurse? You had only to look at IRA funerals, as Jonathan once said, to see how much Catholics liked death and bad news.

‘Will you let me feel your foetal jerks through your flesh?' Jonathan said. ‘I fancy pregnant women.' I was almost ready to run the bread knife through his leg. Sally disguised her pleasure in his attentions under a small rebuke.

‘Why don't you and Katherine get married and have your own children if you like it all so much,' she said. ‘Frankly, being pregnant makes me feel like a cow.'

‘It wouldn't be a marriage in the eyes of God,' he said, to have her on. Sally looked at him sceptically.

‘A fat lot you care for the eyes of God,' she said.

In the afternoon, when Donald had gone, Jonathan and I took Clare to the Science Museum where his niece challenged Jonathan's powers of rhetoric with regard to the afterlife. She didn't like the dinosaur bones, she said.

‘They're dead,' Jonathan said.

‘But they can come alive again,' she said. ‘Jesus came alive again, didn't he?'

‘Search me,' Jonathan said. ‘He ain't never been no friend of mine.' Upstairs, while Jonathan grappled with the resurrection, I made a sentimental journey to the limestones and cast an eye over the stencilling on the iron girders.

‘You were flirting with Roger's wife,' I said accusingly on the train.

‘Self-defence,' Jonathan said. ‘You were flirting with that Aussie.'

‘Did you like my charming Aussie?' I said.

‘He was all right,' Jonathan said without enthusiasm. ‘He obviously gets you ten foot in the air.'

‘You exaggerate,' I said. ‘I'd have him for a weekend, but not for keeps.'

‘It's all right,' he said. ‘You do the same for him. He was in the air, same as you. If I hadn't been there he'd have asked you upstairs.'

‘He hardly needs me,' I said, ‘with a wife like that.'

‘Miss Down Under for 1975 has been out of the market for a week or two, if you remember,' he said. ‘She's just had a baby.' A great thing about Jonathan and me was that we gossiped something chronic. No holds barred. All that malice we wouldn't venture before others. I think he got it from his mother, because Jacob was too good on the whole – he never displayed this flaw.

‘There's a lot of breeding in Oxford,' I said. ‘The place is like a bloody factory.'

‘There's too much leisure,' Jonathan said, ‘too much coming home for lunch,' but the joke didn't altogether work for us. ‘Flush those bloody pills of yours down the loo, Kath,' he said. ‘Go on. Like you did with the Valium. All those million highly-motivated sperm for Godssake. You don't think one of them might pull it off?' I turned to the window, straightening my shoulders, thinking that Jonathan was Jacob's flower child was he not? That people couldn't just go around having babies in bedsitting rooms when they'd got jobs to do; that no baby would ever again be like my baby; that no baby would ever again gnaw its purple mottled fists with such dexterity and charm. I watched the wet green flatness of the Oxfordshire fields thinking suddenly of the baby's mob caps. English babies didn't wear those little cotton mob caps to keep off the sun like babies in Italy wore; like Janice had bought in the clothing chain-store on the way home from work, the sweet thing. Suddenly I found that the fields had developed watermarks like the undulations in shot taffeta because my vision was blurred with tears.