Brother of the More Famous Jack (4 page)

‘I never forget you,' she says mildly. ‘But he's coming, husband, our maligned friend. Be sure to use your tact and delicacy
on him, won't you?' John is strolling up to us, slapping his thigh lightly with the Sunday glossy.

‘I thought you were incarcerated with your proofs,' he says to Jacob. He makes up to Jane, leching, as he does, without apparent intent.

‘You smell very French,' he says. They laugh together, very close and affectionate.

‘Balls, John,' she says, ‘it's onions.'

‘I'm revising the sleeping arrangements,' Jacob says, tenaciously. ‘We're giving you the guest room, as befits your station as our more senior guest, and bunging Katherine in with the children. Okay?'

‘What, what?' John says vaguely, looking at all of us in turn. ‘What's this?'

‘Katherine here is one of my students,' Jacob says.

‘I know,' John Millet says. The swine, I think, wretchedly. He knew all the time. Did he set it up to have an audience? Did he in his urbane wisdom merely not give it a thought? Did he hope to make Jane Goldman jealous by requiring her to share a niche in his pantheon of superior women?

‘I have no wish to be charged with corrupting the youth of Athens,' Jacob says coldly. ‘Let's not ruin our Sunday over it, eh? Let's just leave it at that.' But John can be fairly persistent, and all of them having been absent from each other, they are now feeling their way back into a tolerance of each other's idiosyncrasies.

‘Is your husband being serious, Jane?' John says. ‘Has he become a member of the Church of England Committee for Moral Reform?' Jacob is incensed at this supercilious use of Jane as intermediary. He appears suddenly very large.

‘I
am
the Church of England Committee for Moral bloody Reform,' he says ominously. ‘And much more besides, as you'll find out if you try me.' Jane takes John's arm.

‘Please don't rise to him, John,' she says. ‘It's not worth it for any of us. We both know how frightfully rhetorical and hysterical
Jake will get. If you make an issue of this, Jake and I could well end up screaming at each other, because that's the way it works, isn't it? It's an awful bore for the children and Katherine will feel wretched. Now, if you will just kindly fetch us that very special booze you have in your car, we can drink it with our lunch. I've worked like blazes on this lunch, I don't mind telling you, though Jake hasn't noticed. The babes have made you blackberry tarts and whipped up great quantities of cream. Please, John. You must know that with enemies like Jake you don't need friends.' This proves with John to be an effective piece of diplomacy, but Jacob is, alas, not pleased with it.

‘Jesus Christ, Janie,' he says angrily. ‘I'll thank you not to bloody well talk about me like that. “Humour the old bastard because he's a harmless lunatic.” All that. I pay the bloody mortgage here and I'll lay down the bloody rules if it bloody well suits me. I say who sleeps in what bed here and don't you forget it.' Jane Goldman is impressive in the face of male paranoia.

‘I won't stay and listen to this, Jake,' she says quietly. ‘And neither will Katherine.' We go ahead into the house, where I watch her frying courgettes.

‘I'm bound to say you weathered all that with admirable composure,' she says. ‘My congratulations to you. Are you as composed as you look?' To my embarrassment I find that I am crying. Jane embraces me remorsefully.

‘Sweet child,' she says. ‘How awful this must be for you. What sods we are.'

‘I think I'd like to go home,' I say. She embraces me. I find it strangely comforting, the contact with a highly pregnant woman. I am the only child of my parents.

‘I find that very understandable,' she says. ‘But I should be very sorry to see you go.' I cry fairly copiously into her shoulder, wiping mascara on to the yoke of her shirt.

‘What an old bastard he is to bring you here,' she says, ‘and raise all this hue and cry. You don't half get all sorts when it comes to men. As for my Jacob, you want to pay him no
attention. He behaves like Heathcliff to everyone, you know.' She gets me a wad of kitchen towel. ‘He's very kind, if the truth be known. You wouldn't happen to be his young woman who likes Mrs Weston and her baby's caps, would you?'

‘I think I must be,' I say, sniffing inelegantly.

‘Well now,' she says cheerfully, ‘my old man is
most
impressed with you. He thinks you're terrifically bright and he thinks, between us and the gate post, that you've got the best legs since Marlene Dietrich. What a delightful coincidence to have you here. I can't let John Millet drive you away. I insist that you stay. Can I say, in Jake's defence, that he wouldn't ordinarily snoop into your sleeping habits? It is a bit compromising isn't it, for him, though God knows why he has to make a five-act play about it in the vegetable garden – stalking about and bloodying everything, but that's the way it is. I should think it's quite enough to make you consider going to university in Leeds or Bristol. If you're feeling better I might tell you about the time I met John, shall I?' I say yes. I like autobiography and I like her.

‘He asked me to come and see him at his place in Belsize Park. I was spending the summer with my aunt in Cadogan Square at the time. When I got there I found him on the chaise-longue with a beautiful young man. They were kissing each other passionately on the mouth. I wasn't anything like as sophisticated as you. I was very straight-laced, Katherine. I was a dear little flat-chested, upper-class Christian, buttoned up in cashmere. The product of a Scottish nanny and a girls' boarding school. Jacob found me white-faced in the hall. He was John's upstairs neighbour, you see. The two of them got on like a house on fire. He took me upstairs and succeeded in persuading me that there were worse things afoot in 1945 than a little aberrant sex. He was very kind to me and also very amusing. He took my head apart while I scrambled for the bits and determinedly stuffed them back. I spent the night with him,' she says, ‘to my very great surprise. I was such a little prude, you see. John spent the night downstairs with his boyfriend. We met for breakfast. There was a shared
kitchen. I in Jacob's pyjamas, John and the boyfriend in matching Norwegian fisherman's jumpers, as you might see on a knitting pattern. The V-neck and the button through. John's mother had knitted them – one for John and one for the boyfriend. Splendid woman, John's mother. Jacob naked from the waist up, sprouting hair from every follicle.'

I find her wonderfully gossipy and conspiring. We are drawn together into an intimacy not only by the melodrama in the onion patch, not only by a happy accidental affinity of mind, but because I believe that I answer a need. As women do, she has sacrificed distant female friendships on the altar of a contented marriage. She has been assimilated into her husband's tribe of male academics, male bohemians, male politicos and predominantly male children. She makes rapid commitments with the logical clarity of hallucination. She tells me at once that she jacked in Oxford after knowing Jacob for three days and went to live with him instead.

‘He was much more fun. And all that sex, Katherine, was so unexpectedly jolly,' she says, in her headmistressy voice. ‘One had been led to believe that it would be such a hurdle.' As she catalogues her early life for me, it assumes all the properties of an eighteenth-century burlesque. There is the runaway daughter, the intractable father, the foreign-born lover, the instant romantic commitment, and, of course, the routine poverty. Her father, a highly conservative Oxford theologian, now retired, cut her off like the blight along with his sister in Cadogan Square.

‘My brother declared himself determined to avenge my lost honour,' she says. ‘But he never came, poor Henry. I think he got wind of the fact that Jake was a pretty big chap. Jake looked very ferocious in those days. He was bearded, you see, like whatshisname. The old biddy in Highgate Cemetery.' She got pregnant immediately to preempt any attempt her family might make to tear her away.

‘And you lived happily ever after?' I say.

‘We fought like cat and dog as it happens,' she says. ‘I'm quite sure I'd have picked up my little baby and run back home if it hadn't been made so clear to me that I wouldn't be welcome. Culture shock is no small thing, you know. Once I ran into Henry as I was pushing Roger in his pram on Hampstead Heath. He walked straight past me. I remember thinking, funny, I used to toast marshmallows with that person. I went home to cry over Jake, but he had his whole damned
Kapital
reading group all over the furniture. I was obliged to cry over John instead. I was often obliged to cry over John. Jacob was always too busy flogging leaflets or mounting the tub on street corners in those days.'

When Jacob and John come in, having made their peace, she and Jacob mime brief reassuring kisses to each other.

‘What have you been hatching?' Jacob says, noticing the glow in her cheeks. He puts his hands over her breasts. He has no restraints about laying hands on her in public.

‘I have been filling in Katherine on my past,' she says without apology.

‘Not a thing to inspire imitation,' he says. ‘Why do women always talk intimacies about themselves? To listen to women talking is like sitting in on an encounter group. I cannot wander among the library shelves without being a party to whispered confidences. They will spread their personal lives like jam all over the stacks.'

‘I must tell you something amusing, John,' Jane says, ‘if you promise you won't start with Jake. My father is on the Church of England Committee for Moral Reform.'

It is temporarily impossible for me to enter the Goldmans' dining room because Jonathan has been gunned down by Sam with a plastic machine gun and has thrown himself in a convulsive dying agony across the doorway. I consider stepping over him but it occurs to me that the little bastard might well use the opportunity to look up my skirt. Rackatackatackatack.

‘Get up, Jont,' his mother says briskly, in her hot potato voice. ‘Katherine wants to come in.'

Jane has made us some aromatic, garlicky iced soup for lunch, served with hot garlic bread and followed by pork loin simmered in milk. There is also an abundance of her homegrown vegetables.

‘What is it I can taste?' John Millet asks her solicitously.

‘Coriander,' she says. ‘You roll it up with coriander and seal it in butter. Then you pour boiling milk over it which forms a crust and reduces to this pleasant grainy stuff around the meat.' John and she do some rather in-group cookery talk, being the only ones that know about it. John is a kind of gastronomic Lionel Trilling and likes to pursue every morsel down his throat with analysis and appraisal. ‘It's dead kosher,' she says, to amuse him.

‘It could be neither more sinful nor more delicious,' Jacob says graciously. ‘You may produce lunch two hours late, but you make it worth the eating, Janie.' Each in their own way, they honour the same mistress. ‘Thank you,' she says. Jacob, with a
forkful of pig meat seethed in milk, celebrates perhaps not so much a release from ethnic taboos, as from the distant nightmare of his own truncated childhood, the marvel of his latter-day bourgeois
gemütlichkeit
in which I suspect he can never quite believe.

John Millet, as he hands me the salad, passes messages of bottomless innuendo in his smiles. I hold nothing against him. On the contrary, I have become rather elated. I consider myself, after talking with Jane, to be rather stylishly at the point where it all is. Where I always wanted to be. In the company of urbane, emancipated people. Some of my best friends are Jews and homosexuals. Besides, the idea of the sex act is so bizarre in any case, so appalling, so terrifying, that the element of the participant's gender hardly signifies. I am not shocked by his versatility.

‘Do you still play that fiddle, Roger?' he says.

‘He's the best violinist in the National Youth Orchestra by a mile,' Jane says. She has a tendency to answer questions for him as if he needed her as a buffer between himself and a hostile world, her lovely first-born child. But Roger chooses to answer for himself. He chooses to take a stand, holding his head high, his Adam's apple twitching slightly in his throat, armed strong in undergraduate righteousness.

‘I don't play a fiddle,' he says. ‘I play the violin.'

‘Don't you be so damned churlish, you miserable nitpicking boy,' Jacob says rather violently. He and Roger exchange a moment's hatred. Roger wears his principles, a little provocatively, high on his shoulder like a schoolboy's dufflebag.

‘I am merely pointing out that to call a violin a fiddle is a form of name-dropping,' he says coldly. ‘It's a familiarity you earn the right to use – that's if you like name-dropping.'

It may appear melodramatic for me to interject here that in the face of that impressive vulnerable zeal, that high-minded verbal coup, I fell in love with Roger Goldman. I remember the moment as vividly as I remember the turn of his head. I cannot
send up the emotion as I do so much of my youthful self, for though I have made many compromises with it, it has never completely left me.

‘Save your Oxford style till you get to Christ Church, sonny,' Jacob says, with terrible put-down. ‘And in the meantime remember that to pick nits at my table, with my guests, is a form of bad manners.' Jonathan, promptly and hair-raisingly, throws a large chunk of garlic bread at Jacob's head. It misses him and hits the wall behind.

‘Fiddle schmiddle,' Jonathan says. ‘What's all this “my table” crap, Aged Parent? Ma bought this table from the shop that closed down. What makes it yours? You really like to make a big patriarchal spiel over grub, don't you, you big Jewish yobbo.'

Nobody requires him to remember either his manners or the starving. Jacob merely instructs Sam in the subversive art of throwing the bread back. They appear to get on extremely well, do Jacob and Jonathan. Jacob is sufficiently opinionated to appreciate in Jonathan so much of himself.