Brother of the More Famous Jack (28 page)

Sally transferred the baby to the other breast and tucked the first away into a copious front-fastening nursing bra.

‘Watching you, Sally, makes my nipples twitch,' Jane said, wishing to make herself agreeable. ‘I could wish it was me all over again.' But Sally was needing to unload annoyance. She did not like complainers and Jane had broken the code.

‘I don't wish to revive what has just passed,' she said. ‘Also I do accept your point, Jane, and I do incidentally wish that Jonathan would try not to become abusive, but really, aren't you going to ridiculous extremes? Roger and I don't sign things. We simply help each other. We both teach. We both fetch Clare from nursery school. It depends on which one of us is free in the lunch-hour. Anything else would be selfishness, wouldn't it? We have our rules. I cook at the same time every evening for whoever is there to eat and I don't do it again. Roger sees Clare to bed while I do the dishes. We both work till bedtime and if Clare wakes we take turns to go to her. I can't imagine having to wave bits of paper under his nose.' For Sally, living was a simple art of which she had clearly always had the mastery.

‘So who was it had a baby in Eighth Week?' Jonathan said, to take her down. ‘That's very bad news for an Oxford man. And poor old Rogsie rushed off his feet with the work.'

‘All right, Jonathan,' Sally said a little irritably. ‘I had the baby in Eighth Week. That was beyond my control.' During Sally's highly reasonable little speech, smacking somehow of the simplicity of Toytown, I happened to catch Jacob's eye. He blew me a perfect and very saucy smoke ring, which I acknowledged furtively as if accepting a note passed secretly during prayers, under the eye of the headmistress.

‘Roger is different,' Jane said. ‘He was always serious-minded, hard-working and obliging. And you, Sally, you are different too. You are much better than Katherine at putting across to people exactly what suits you.'

‘She means you're bossy, sister woman,' Jonathan said.

‘I mean nothing of the kind,' Jane said. ‘Sally is very clear about her own needs, that's all.'

‘Not like you, you poor, timid creature,' Jonathan said. ‘You let everyone walk over you I suppose? Jesus, Ma, my memory of you is of a dominating virago. Do this. Do that. Especially with Roggs. Simon says clean out the sink. Simon says play the flute. Simon says if you haven't got any French verbs to sort out, bring
in the coal. When you've done that stand on your head and recite your twelve times table in Latin.' Jane laughed.

‘But it took me years of practice, Jonathan,' she said. ‘I was hoping to save Katherine the trouble. I've offended you, my darling. I'm sorry. It isn't my place to give your wife advice. I do hope you can still see your way to having me come in the spring and do your garden for you and see my grandchild. I shall be very scrupulous and not interfere. You may turn me out if I do.' Jonathan eyed her with some sceptical amusement during this piece of caustic humility.

‘That's right,' he said, with a degree of affection. ‘Crawl, you old cow. Humility is right up your street.'

Rosie's man could bear no more.

‘I say,' he said suddenly, ‘I don't like to interfere, old chap, but a chap oughtn't to talk to his mother like that. Not in my book.' The embarrassment following upon this utterance brought a blush to Annie's cheek, and Mike stared awkwardly at his feet. Jacob looked around unabashed, as though somebody had just raised a point in a seminar and he was waiting for a volunteer to take it up. Roger looked at him with the contempt he might once have visited on a man who cleaned his shoes.

‘And what book is that?' Jonathan said. ‘Biggles? Who are you, anyway?' Rosie lost her cool.

‘You can shut up, Jonathan,' she said. ‘Understand? Jeremy is going to marry me, as a matter of fact. So that's who he is. My fiance. We came here to say goodbye to you and that's what we're doing. Saying goodbye and good riddance.' She got up to go. Her young man followed, pausing only to nod politely to Jane and say goodbye.

‘Goodbye, Mrs Goldman,' he said. ‘Goodbye, sir.' They left behind them silence and astonishment.

‘Ought I to catch up with her?' Annie said.

‘Leave her,' Jane said. ‘It's all nonsense. I assure you, it's nonsense. Rosie is histrionic. Like Jake.'

‘Go to hell,' Jacob said. He got up and made himself ready to go after her, wasting no time.

‘Now I've remembered something I wanted to ask you people,' Jane said. ‘Do you want the bed ends of that very nice old brass bed Jake and I used to have? We threw away the wires and the mattress but perhaps Roger could manufacture a new base for you. Jacob and I can't get on with a double bed any more. It makes us sleep fitfully. We come together from separate bedrooms like royalty.'

‘Mother,' Roger said, ‘at the risk of appearing ungracious, I have to point out that the University pays me to spend some of my time in the Mathematical Institute. It may be my indulgence but it is also my job.'

‘Sorry, Roggs,' Jane said. ‘Of course it is. I only suggested it because you are so wonderfully clever.'

Jane, Jonathan and I went into her bedroom to admire the bed ends. She had them stored in her bedroom against the wall.

‘We can take them like that and find a carpenter,' I said. ‘Everything else is on the roof rack. Why not these?'

‘I'll bring them when I come, shall I?' Jane said. ‘Then I will have to come.'

‘Of course you'll come,' Jonathan said. ‘You must know that Katherine will insist on it. You must know she is devoted to you, you warped old battle-axe.'

‘As I am to her,' Jane said. ‘And I want to tell you that I've had enough complimentary epithets from you to last me quite some time, Jontikins. I'm sorry that my private life impresses you with its limited range, but it wasn't for lack of opportunity. I'm sorry if you found my flirtations with John offensive. It's funny. It was Roger who I thought would be the one to mind. He always had such high standards for me. I always worried terrifically about Roger. Do you think it upset him?' Jonathan shrugged.

‘I was talking off the top of my head, Ma,' he said. ‘Slinging mud. Don't fret about Rogsie. He's grown up. He's thrown away
what Kath calls his Hamlet hat. He's done you proud. You gave him no choice, of course.'

‘You are nasty to me, Jonathan,' she said. ‘You want me to beat my breast. All right, I will. I'm worried about Rosie. I was never a good mother to her. She was always such an ordinary little girl, Jonathan. I wasn't ready to accept it. I thought then that all children came like you and Roger. I didn't know any better.'

‘She's all right,' Jonathan said. ‘She won't marry that creep.'

‘If I come and stay with you, you won't see it as a threat to your wellbeing, will you, Jont?' she said. ‘I mean, you're not anything like as mad as your father, are you? Not meaning anything by it, of course. He's so much more than I deserve. Don't think I don't know that, Jonathan.'

Jonathan was tired of quarrelling with her, of going through that human spider-dance which expressed no more than her own pain in losing him and her own pain in losing her youth; her love for me and her irrational urge to will happiness upon us.

‘Katherine is getting more like you as the days go by,' he said teasingly. ‘She keeps cracked antique jugs on the mantelpiece full of string and shirt buttons and library tickets. She's developed a thing for that repulsive Staffordshire Salt Glaze.'

‘I never knew you disliked it,' I said. ‘I think it's beautiful.' Jonathan laughed.

‘You never asked me. I think it's disgusting.'

‘It's perfectly lovely,' Jane said with finality. ‘Of course it is.'

‘It makes me think of aberrant growths on the skin,' Jonathan said. ‘It puts me in mind of scurfy excrescences.'

Jane took Jonathan in a motherly embrace. ‘But that is not the salt glaze, my dear Jonathan,' she said. ‘That is
you.
Everything reminds you of something nasty. I only discovered how much when I read your novel.'

‘Oh, you've read it, have you?' Jonathan said. ‘Is that why you're getting at me today?'

‘I am not getting at you, Jont. I merely tell the truth about you. That you are a terrible nuisance like Jake. I'm not denying
that you're worth it. I was naive. Forget it. Katherine will throw away the Staffordshire Salt Glaze and you will both be very happy. But about your novel, Jont. God in heaven, isn't it smutty? How do you come to be so smutty, Jonathan? It isn't half good, though. I found it quite terrifyingly funny at times. There's nothing piffling about your smut. Some really noble smut you've got there. With justice, it ought to make you famous. Don't you think so, Katherine?'

Jonathan's novel was actually more than I could cope with during pregnancy, being a spirited if macabre four-hundred-page satirical hallucination, rich in shots up the female crotch. I had promised myself to read it properly while I breast-fed, if it didn't have the effect of curdling the milk.

‘You make me think of Swift,' she said. ‘Another Jonathan with a nasty powerful mind. It's most appropriate that you are going to Ireland.' Jonathan was pleased and also a little embarrassed.

‘You do me too much honour, lovely lady,' he said. ‘Carry on. You give me conviction.'

‘I thought Swift was kinky,' I said. ‘I mean, sexually arrested.' Jane delivered to me, in a glance, the school-marm put-down.

‘We'll have less of that, Katherine,' she said. ‘You know perfectly well what I mean. It's prose I have in mind. I'll tell you what, chaps,' she said conspiringly, ‘though I shouldn't tattle and I won't, but just this once. I made strong efforts to keep my copy from Sally when she came this morning, but I don't think I succeeded. I think she's been and taken a peek, don't you? You aren't in her good books today. Have you noticed?' Jonathan shrugged without interest.

After the birthday tea and the gingerbread men, after the schoolgirls, with their concave virgin navels and wet hair, had retired to listen to taped New Wave, after Roger had gone, taking his family back to Oxford with his sweet children clipped into safety harnesses and carry-cot straps, after Annie and her
boyfriend had zoomed off in their ghastly rollerball helmets, and Jacob had taken off with Sam for a walk on the Heath, Jonathan and I, with some difficulty, said goodbye to Jane. We drove off in the car, which Sam had put together for us, with our luggage stuffed into the back and tied to the roof. Jonathan heaved a tired and grateful sigh.

‘Well,' he said, ‘that's the family off our backs.' Jonathan was not in fact menaced in any way by my fondness for his family. He was fond of his family himself but his tolerance for most things ran out sooner.

‘If this car were only less jammed up and you less hopelessly untouchable,' he said. ‘I would practise some discreet, therapeutic fucking upon you in the next lay-by.'

‘Would you?' I said. ‘I love you, Jonathan.' I said this gratefully and realistically, because it was true. I fell in love with Jonathan slowly and judiciously. A thing I had never done before.

‘I need it after my mother,' he said. ‘By what right does the woman talk about me as if she had letters patent from God on the subject?' Jonathan talked sex using words to deputise for the act which it was not opportune for us to commit.

‘There's going to be some incessant and prolonged activity in that little house of ours, Kath,' he said. ‘Making up for lost time. I'm going to heave my weight off your ribs every morning and leave you in a tacky pool of my ooze.' Jonathan, I considered, had a more than average involvement with his ooze. He liked to make reference to it. (I give you this for the analyst's casebook, merely.)

‘Very nice,' I said politely, over the twitching in my groin.

‘Then I'll bring you your breakfast,' he said, ‘in bed. Boiled eggies and tea for my lovely sexy, oozy, pregnant Kath. We don't really want that old bed, do we? Let's have a new one six feet wide.'

I was very romantic about the prospect of our lives in that house, though, I hope, not without a degree of protective irony. I
hoped to be a caustic romantic. I learned it from Jane. What though my goat boy peed into milk bottles and lived off my earnings? He assured me that he didn't actually play the flute very well either, though it sounded all right to me. I pictured myself sitting by the fire and knitting the Celtic mists and shadowy pools into my cloth. I pictured Jonathan getting up from his typewriter and going out to split wood like a man in Ingmar Bergman, and the child, with woollen mittens flapping at its cuffs, tottering after him.

‘And don't think I didn't see you eyeing up the schoolgirls,' I said challengingly. Jonathan laughed and put his left hand on my thigh.

‘Sweet, that little blonde in drill-cloth, wasn't she?'

‘That's my knitting-machine in the back,' I said. ‘I own the means of production, so you watch it.'

THE HOUSE WAS beautiful. Like a harlequin's coat it was put together through the love of friends. Annie and her housemates, for the price of a week in the country and warming bowls of soup, slept on our floor at Christmas and painted all the walls. A very nice local carpenter made us some doors and skirtings and a kitchen work-board. He made some window seats, which I varnished and fitted with cushions. We rushmatted the floors. I made patchwork curtains and took unashamed pleasure in what Jacob – damn him – called ‘the womanly art of homemaking'. Annie stencilled patterns around the fireplace, having no Roger over her shoulder to put her down, but only Mike, who helped. Jonathan, as Jane predicted, fished and typed, but also fed us all and praised. There were days when I thought we would freeze to death. For Christmas Jonathan bought me a thermal vest and men's long Johns. Sally sent, with Annie, her hand-on carry-cot and countless Baby-Gro suits. Roger sent, in the post to Jonathan, some well-disposed reviews clipped from the newspapers. The baby was female, born by Caesarean section, suckled first under a plaster figure of the Virgin Mary and later at home on a mattress on the floor of our bedroom. I tried reading Jonathan's novel as I fed her, but gave it up in favour of
Emma,
which is still my favourite. Jonathan, who did indeed bring me boiled eggs in bed, bathed her in a plastic washing-up bowl at the feet of my convalescent self. She was quite different from my other baby,
being nocturnal, irregular and greedy in her feeding habits. We called her Stella, having been put in mind of it by Jane's reference to Swift, which caused Jonathan to return to a favourite poem of his youth. Swift's ‘Birthday Poem to Stella,' which goes as follows: