Brother of the More Famous Jack (26 page)

For a wedding present, my mother gave me a very advanced knitting-machine. It was just what I wanted. We planned to take it with us to Ireland and to use it to earn our keep, topped up with what Jonathan and I could earn from bits of editing and with his capital, if necessary. We planned to do what Jacob called ‘some comfortable middle-class slumming'. To this end I had taken samples of my work around shops in the King's Road – of all places – and to other places too. I had got myself some commissions and Sally, in her truly Christian way, had found time between her children and her teaching to hawk my stuff round the rich tourist towns of the Cotswolds. Sally, who has her head screwed on tighter than I have mine, said right away that the place to sell the stuff was Switzerland. She arranged this via the previous year's Swiss au pair. Thus it was that I came, through her, to acknowledge that head girls have uses beyond the field of detention and running on the stairs.

‘Roger can set things up for you in New York,' she said. ‘He's going to a conference there next Christmas.' Nothing I could think of would have castrated Roger as effectively as to find himself taking my knitwear round the shops in Manhattan, an agent for his kooky one-time girlfriend.

‘Roger can't do that,' I said. ‘I won't hear of it.'

‘Why not?' she said. ‘I shall insist upon it.'

‘Hawk jerseys?' I said. ‘He would have to
talk
to people. I mean ordinary people – people engaging in commerce. Sally, please, I would die of embarrassment if you asked him. Really. I would never be able to talk to him again.' Sally looked nonplussed.

‘I don't understand you sometimes,' she said, ‘but if you insist, I won't.'

I wrote to Michele after I got married, although he hadn't replied to my earlier letter. I told him that Jonathan and I were married and that I was pregnant again. He responded to this in style by sending us a most enormous Tuscan cake. A cake which appeared to be suffering the effects of hormone treatment. It came with a card addressed, saucily, to ‘Caterina and the English Jew' and which said, gallantly, that he had only once made a mistake.

I had sailed through my first pregnancy with the serenity of the ignorant. It had not crossed my mind that the process of birth could be anything but textbook or the baby anything but unimpaired in body and mind. I was different the next time. Morbid thoughts overwhelmed me in the small hours, when Jonathan would wake to find me pacing the floor inventing for myself a hierarchy of congenital disasters to see which one I could look squarely in the eye. Once, even, clutching a hot-water bottle in terror, having just dreamed that I had given birth to a dead cat in a pool of gore like Leone's miscarriage.

‘Oh Jesus!' Jonathan said impatiently, suffering slightly from interrupted nights. ‘After a nine-week gestation period I hope? Don't be perverted Kath.' Jonathan, who had so loyally defended my sanity before the gynaecological consultant, must have had his doubts. Babies had always just happened in his life. They had always come live, with their faculties intact, bringing with them no more than the minor inconvenience of curdled shit and the smell of chlorine bleach. He therefore had no understanding of my intermittent visions of harbouring monsters and dead cats. As far as he was concerned, all this belonged to a genre of mediocre horror. Years of adolescent exposure to low comics had inured him to it.

I was, in addition, a somewhat decrepit case of pregnancy. Not only was I sexually immobilised from the start but I was
required, during the first three months, to spend occasional week-long spells in hospital in a special ward for the observation of problem pregnancies. A macabre spirit of female camaraderie prevailed among the victims of fluctuating blood pressure, obesity and diabetes, which caused the sufferers to gather in huddles of quilted nylon dressing-gown and fur-fabric mules, swapping tales of previous disasters. I reverted, as I do in moments of crisis, to rereading
Emma,
with cotton wool in my ears. Such sleep as one achieved was interrupted by the bedtime trolley peddling laxatives, or by the junior doctors roaring their showy little sports cars into the hospital car park.

It goes without saying that I gave up my job. We lived very largely off Jacob, who came forth with generous and regular hand-outs in the form of the rent he got for his house in Sussex. He would press the money on Jonathan, saying that giving it away saved him from the crime of owning two houses and that he was ‘so bloody rich' anyway, he had no use for it. He was concerned for my comfort and safety to a ludicrous degree, which caused me on the whole to retire to my couch like Volpone at the sound of his foot upon the stair and to reach for my smelling salts. Once he caught me at the knitting-machine.

‘What the hell are you doing?' he said, like an old fusspot.

‘Fair Isle,' I said saucily. ‘Oh come on, Jacob, one of the first things I ever remember hearing you say was that childbirth was natural. Women have been known to squat down in the wilderness and to chew up the umbilical cord.'

‘Don't talk nonsense to me,' Jacob said. He brought me books to read. Improving books, and bunches of grapes: I could tell that he was trying not to relish too much the prospect of playing with his grandchild because my condition was slightly dodgy and because we planned, after the fourth month, to go away – to which end my hospital consultant had arranged to hand me on to a colleague in Dublin. Jacob was guilty of nagging Jonathan terrifically on the subject, in an attempt to make him change his mind about going, and blackmailed him shamelessly with the
fact of my health. Jonathan, in turn, accused Jacob of relishing the idea of women in delicate conditions, so that he could the more easily manage and manipulate them. After a while Jonathan took to going out when he came, which Jacob found a little rejecting, I think. Jane came to see me in the mornings without him, always talked sense and on one occasion had the excellent idea of bringing Sally with her, in order that her very newly born baby might give me hope. Her only failing was to imply unfairly that Jonathan wasn't doing enough for me.

I felt so much for Jonathan during those months. He was being driven mad by his father's alarmism and by his mother's occasional brisk implications that he was exploiting me; by my repeated midnight anxieties and by his own reluctance to use his typewriter for fear of waking me; not least by sexual frustration. I found him one night standing in his socks at the kitchen sink. He had placed his typewriter on two deal boards across the sink and – since there was no electric power socket in the kitchen – had plugged it in beside the record player with the help of a lengthy extension cord.

‘Come to bed with me,' I said with feeling. ‘I need you.' So Jonathan spilled his seed on to my navel and cried some terrible male tears on to my naked shoulder. That same night he stepped out of bed on to his glasses, which he had left on the floor.

‘Oh shit,' he said, irritably. ‘Too much sex makes you shortsighted.' He liked to think that only Roger was capable of absent-mindedly destroying his glasses and found it compromising that he had done so too.

Jacob had evidently enjoyed the drive from Bedales. He liked black comedy. He had brought his daughter Sylvia home for the weekend together with two of her friends. Sylvia's birthday coincided with the weekend that Jonathan and I departed for Ireland. They entered in a girly babble wearing bizarre clothing: white drill-cloth dungarees worn with satinised cummerbunds; red stilettos worn with horizontally striped ankle socks; sleeveless padded jerkins like nautical life jackets; harem pants made up in camouflage battle dress tied at the ankles with hair ribbons. The bravest of them had a green stripe powdered into her hair and outsize mirror lenses. Sylvia, who was fourteen, was still occasionally to be caught sucking her thumb. She had abundant frizzy hair like Jonathan's which she wore long and attractively looped up at the temples with apple-green plastic hair grips. Relentlessly, her friends called Jacob ‘Professor Goldman'. They used their considerable girlish wiles to draw him out and were delighted by almost anything he said.

‘I'm not Professor Goldman,' Jacob said. ‘I'm Jacob.' ‘Sorry, Professor Goldman,' said the cheeky one with the green stripe.

‘He's nearly retired,' Sylvia said. ‘He's nearly not a professor any more. Isn't he old? You're old, Jake. You're the oldest father in my whole class.'

‘I'm not in your class,' Jacob said. They giggled. ‘I won't hang about to shame you, Sylvie. I'll shuffle quietly into the Home for Retired Gentlefolk.'

‘He's nice, your father,' said the other one to Sylvia, whispering audibly. ‘His eyebrows are cute. Don't you think his eyebrows are cute?'

‘They're funny, aren't they?' Sylvia said.

‘Hello Katherine,' Jacob said, acknowledging my presence, escaping to the elderly. ‘Harpies, this lot, aren't they? Budding Margaret Thatchers, the lot of them.'

‘Harpic?' Sylvia said.

‘Tell this child, Katherine, with her expensive education, what harpies are,' he said.

Roger was there to say goodbye to us, with Sally and the two small children. Also Annie, who had come on her motorbike with her boyfriend on the back, and Sam, who had come alone. Rosie was expected, but hadn't come yet.

‘Meg, Mog and Owl,' Jacob said, introducing Sylvia and her girlfriends. He catalogued us for Sylvia's friends.

‘My son Roger, my son Jonathan, my daughters-in-law Sally and Katherine. Sally's babies, with whose names I will not trouble you. My daughter Annie and her friend Mike, wearing his heart upon his chest, as you see.' Mike had a T-shirt with a large Hammer and Sickle across the front and a badge which read ‘Nuclear Family, No Thanks'. Annie, who was the most benign product of a nuclear family, had a badge to match. ‘Over there,' Jacob said, ‘the handsome one is Sam.' Sam caused a slight temporary swoon since he had turned out almost as handsome as Roger was at nineteen, but he carried it more easily, without any of Roger's shy, febrile intensity. He talked motorcycle engines with Mike, and they went out together to cast an eye over Annie's bike which she had parked alongside the climbing geraniums at the front door.

Jonathan had made some delightful gingerbread men for Sylvia's tea, which was to be later that day. First the girls
intended to go swimming at the house of a neighbour who owned a pool. They were still children enough, once the living room was empty of Sam and Mike, publicly to strip off their clothing and pull on their charming little scanty black bikinis. I was in the kitchen with Jane and Sally, but we could see them through the open doorway behaving as though Roger and Jonathan were too old to take into account. Roger had very properly picked up a copy of the
New Statesman
in which to bury his head and for a moment had turned, in any case, to look at his tiny son who was asleep in my rush basket under Jane's palm tree. Jonathan was involuntarily staring at Sylvia's friends. One of them had profoundly attractive dimples showing above her buttocks.

‘Look at Roger and Jonathan,' I said, whispering to Jane. ‘Roger is reading the
New Statesman
and Jonathan is picking the girls over to see which one of them he wants.' Jonathan, who had sharp ears, heard his name immediately. He got up and came through to the kitchen.

‘What are you saying about me?' he said.

‘Never mind,' Jane said. ‘We forgive you because you made such charming gingerbread men.'

After the girls had gone, Annie thoughtfully made a neat pile of the vibrant teenage tote-bags so that we could sit down and drink some wine and eat some cheese without the clutter. Annie was a large square young woman with more than a hint of facial hair. She contradicted the popular myth that men like pretty women. Men loved her. She was always surrounded by groups of attentive males talking sandstone and bronze.

Jane looked terrifically well and blooming. She also looked more beautiful than ever. Her manner of dress had changed since I first knew her in that she humoured Jacob by putting on things which he bought for her. She was wearing such a thing today: a soft light-blue woollen dress which fell from a high collar and which Sally admired.

‘Jake bought it for me as a garment suitable to my age and station in life,' Jane said, putting down the compliment. He had
quite evidently bought it to match her eyes. It was at this point that Rosie came in. She had with her a man so profoundly lacking in proletarian accoutrements that one could only stand and stare. He was Michele's stereotype of the chinless Englishman, whose existence I always patriotically denied. He was wearing his old school tie. He called Jacob ‘sir'. He almost clicked his heels when Rosie presented him.

‘How do you do, sir?' he said. Jacob was in and out of his kitchen carrying things for Jane. He paused in the sitting room to review the need for glasses, which the poor young man misread. He leaped out of his chair. ‘Sorry, sir,' he said, ‘am I sitting in your chair?'

‘Sit down, young man,' Jacob said irritably. ‘All the chairs in this house are mine.' I escaped, like a coward, to the kitchen where I helped Jane with the food.

‘My daughter!' Jacob hissed semi-hysterically to Jane when he came in. ‘She's in the clutches of a county solicitor.'

‘Calm yourself, Jacob,' Jane said witheringly. ‘He looks to me like a nice young man who sells leather goods in Liberty's. He'll last a week, no more.'

‘You told me she liked proles,' I hissed. ‘I don't believe you.'

‘It's the truth,' Jacob hissed back. ‘This is all quite new. What is he? Is he from Sandhurst? For Godssake, Janie, he's intolerable.'

‘You're neurotic about your daughter,' Jane said. ‘You won't be happy until she shaves her head and enters the convent.'

Everyone drank to Jonathan and me and wished us well, but Jacob, who had crabbed at us ever since we conceived the idea of going to Ireland, could not even in the eleventh hour let it rest.