Brother of the More Famous Jack (8 page)

‘It wasn't very polite of you to stay on when you knew the baby was coming,' my mother said. Mothers never believe that you know how to respond to your friends. They are so concerned that you shall not go friendless through this life that they become overprotective in this respect.

I never again went to bed with John Millet, though I went occasionally to the theatre with him. Sometimes he brought along a rather pretty solicitor with whom he had goings on, and sometimes he brought Jane. Jane would leave Jacob and Jonathan to mind the children, climb out of her wellingtons and threadbare jeans, and clothe herself with indifference in a dowdy two-piece more suitable for prison visiting. It only served to underline her remarkable good looks. It was always great fun to be on the town with her. In spite of the age difference, Jane superseded most of my friends and became my foremost giggling companion. I spent quite a lot of time at her house. Once in the ladies' loo at the Purcell Room she tried on my mascara.

‘Say, why do you think he likes to ask us out together?' she said. ‘It's like a polygamous marriage, isn't it, without either children or Jacob. What a soothing fantasy.' I laughed, not realising in my inexperience, of course, quite what an assault on her identity and peace of mind Jacob constituted. Or quite how difficult it was for either of them to kick against the idea that the loveliest of women born were born for loveliness alone.

Once, she turned to me from the passenger seat of John's car and said, ‘Roger wants your address, Katherine. Some cover-up nonsense about needing you to buy a book for him. Could it be that my lovely boy is fond of you?' I caught my breath in the darkness and said nothing.

‘Send him my address too,' John said. A remark he would never have made in Jacob's presence, and one which Jane clearly found quite alarming.

‘One move in that direction and I'll send my Jacob round to break your jaw,' she said, overreacting, perhaps. John laughed at her. ‘I mean it,' she said. ‘He's damned good at making fisticuffs. He didn't grow up in the Mile End Road for nothing, you know, with all those disgusting Mosleyites. Your nice sanded floor would be a mess of blood and teeth.' John laughed again.

‘I'm teasing you,' he said. ‘Your Roger is too intense for me in any case. You've got yourselves a genuine little neurotic there between the two of you, haven't you?'

‘Take me to the railway station,' she said.

‘I'm teasing you,' he said.

‘Take me to the bloody railway station before my breasts become engorged,' she said.

At Victoria station I got into the vacant front seat. John Millet drove me home. I said nothing, having been disturbed by his unaccustomed malice. John Millet had, I believe, set me up in the first place to threaten Jane, who enjoyed his attentions, and to compromise Jacob, who had taken on the woman he might have taken on, had he but had it in him to face the ensuing mess of human life. It had certainly not been part of his design that his latter-day quattrocento should end up in the arms of Jane's son, whom he had last seen at fifteen. Perhaps it had slipped his mind that children grew. He never, in any case, liked the idea that Jane had Jacob's children.

In their house the Goldmans had a small edition of the Shakespeare
Sonnets,
bound in red leather, which had a pointed little message on the flyleaf directing one to Sonnet 87. Sonnet 87 is the one that goes,

Farewell thou art too dear for my possessing
And like enough thou knowest thy estimate.

It had been given to Jane as a wedding present by John Millet. I found it one day on the bathroom floor, where it had been left by Jonathan, who was by then using it as part of his A level English course.

Roger's handwriting was a shock to me. I had until then made the assumption that all superior people were acquainted with the necessity that calligraphic characters were parallel, thick on the down-stroke and joined by upward angles of forty-five degrees. Roger's handwriting was small, inconsistent in its slope and difficult to read. I therefore revised my opinion to the effect that Roger, as the pinnacle of superior man, had licence to make his own manners and that his handwriting was the mark of his magnificent disregard for the standards of the world. The truth of the matter was simply that Roger had lousy, undistinguished handwriting. It was a thing he was no good at.

Roger, in his first letter to me, said that he was helping to teach maths in a country high school in a Nissen hut, and that in addition he banged out hymn tunes every morning on a piano which gave him the horrors. There was no felt left on the hammers, he said, and there was too much Christianity about. The buses had no springs, but carried you into town and slung your bicycle on the roof if you were lucky enough to have one. Everybody insisted on sharing bananas with you on bus journeys. Neighbourliness, he said, drove him mad. The houseboy, who came with the house, drove him mad too, he said, taking hours to scrub with steel wool at a few aluminium saucepans which he could polish off in minutes. The same despised menial, he said, got insulted if you washed your own shirts and chose instead to
scrub at them with blocks of blue mottled soap because he was so used to white employers crabbing at him about the cost of Square Deal Surf. There were mangoes more profuse than people, more wonderful than Christianity, and he would bring some back for me. He had forgotten to take his transistor radio and he needed it, he said, to prevent the possibility of conversation with the people who shared his house. ‘Provincial English bores,' he said, who thought that progress was making ‘the whole world like West Hartlepool'. They drove him mad. Everything drove him mad. I loved him for his commanding snobbery.

‘I want to tell you that you sing well,' he wrote. ‘Also that I hope John Millet is no great friend of yours.' As a result of this curious letter, which I reread every hour, I struggled to improve myself by looking up West Hartlepool on the map and resolving from then on to wash my own clothes which, until then, my mother had always washed for me. My mother, unfortunately, manifested herself as a person as possessive of her territory as Roger's houseboy.

‘When you have your own house you can do what you like,' she said, insufferably, denying me access to the washing-machine. When I complained to Jane about this high-handed dismissal of my rights, I found, understandably, that her perspective on the matter was different.

‘Any place where somebody else does the washing can't be all bad,' she said. ‘Do you know, Katherine, when my twins were born I screwed out of Jacob the right to use disposable nappies only to find that the bloody things didn't work.'

I wrote back to Roger, telling him warmly how sorry I had been to go without saying goodbye. I told him, in order to recreate the moments of our togetherness, that I believed the piano to be the Holy Ghost's revenge for his insults in the blackberry bushes. I told him that I had been to a concert with his mother who had tried on my eye make-up in the loo and what a smashing lady I thought her. That my term had begun and that I had had the great joy of spending my book allowance.

That I had covered all my clip-back files in Florentine wrapping-paper out of pure joy, and sharpened all my green Venus pencils. That I found it all delightfully unlike school and that Jacob was a terrific hit with the students, being a very racy and lucid teacher. John Millet, I assured him, was a very casual friend who occasionally took me to the theatre. I wished him many happy evenings escaping the sound of steel wool on tin and speculated upon whether or not my letter would be delivered to him by a runner who would carry it, mud-stained, in a forked stick.

‘I have been singing on my way from the underground station because you praised my voice,' I wrote. ‘Tell me what I should sing.' Thinking back, I could probably not have written him a more annoying letter. Had he not already decided that he was in love with me the correspondence would have ceased right there. I had mocked his irritation with the piano and with the houseboy, when he was a young person who wished his aversions to be treated with respect. I had committed the folly of praising his parents. I had exposed myself to my high-minded crusader as a young person seeking after venial delight: I wore eye make-up and covered my notebooks – those symbols of plain living and hard thinking – in gilded wrapping-paper.

Roger's next letter, written in fury, said that somebody had just stolen his violin. I was not to tell his parents, he said, because Jacob would storm about the expense of replacing it, being a tightfisted old bastard, and he wasn't going to be abused behind his back. He would rather I told his parents nothing at all about him, he said, because he would sooner not have his affairs talked about. He then advised me to buy myself some folk song scores in Cecil Sharpe House and to sing those. He wrote, rather witheringly, of the school he taught in, that its object seemed to be to push the pupils into clerical jobs in government offices and the result was terrific grinding emphasis on the three Rs and on respectability. The students were conforming and deferential to a man, he said. There was nobody in the place like his brother Jonathan.

‘Everyone polishes his shoes,' he wrote in disgust, with an assumption that this obsolete custom had been dead since the demise of National Service. I gave up polishing my shoes forthwith, and committed the additional folly of seeking out for Roger, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, a postcard of a Stradivarius violin which I sent him with my commiserations. I also confessed that musical scores were not much more to me than tadpoles running up and down stairs, since I had never learned how to read them, and that I had got a wonderfully high mark for an essay on a priori knowledge, which was a great feather in my cap since I thought a priori was the kind of word reserved for people who gave talks on the Third Programme and that I never expected to be one of the people who knew what it meant.

Roger replied to the effect that what he wanted, if I was going to send him photographs, was a photograph, please, of me. He had got the violin back, he said, but without the bow. He enclosed a money order and instructed me to go to Wardour Street and buy him another one, which I did, feeling as unequal to the task as I might have done had I been sent out to buy a packet of contraceptive sheaths from a male hairdresser. I despatched the bow to him, feeling that it would never arrive; that somebody would acquire it along the way and use it to shoot rabbits. It had not occurred to me until I made this purchase how similar a violin bow was in appearance to the other kind. I also sent him a photograph of myself taken at the Vanessa Bell chapel by John Millet.

Roger's embroidered butterfly fell into my lap from his next letter, and also a photograph of himself. His letter said that he loved me. Would I please wear his butterfly, which the houseboy was in danger of scrubbing into oblivion. That was, if I felt I could return his feeling for me. If not, could I pitch it in the rubbish bin and tell him so immediately?

The photograph was a delight, since until then I had reconstructed him only out of Jane's smile and Jane's eyes. But the
elements of beard shadow and youth were not there. And also not those elements of zeal and righteousness, which made me fall at his feet. He was depicted standing – brown as a hazelnut, in most un-English sandals – beside his Nissen hut with some of his pupils. All of them sharply defined in the bright light. Behind them a tangle of vegetation without haze. The students posed rather formally, unused to being photographed. Straight ties. Products of a mission school education which Roger despised. Roger, with his hands in his pockets, was smiling slightly, with a degree of controlled impatience, as though he were about to give the photographer a lecture on the correct use of the light meter.

I kept his photograph slid into the frame of my dressing-table mirror. A little white-painted plywood thing with curtains around the base. A relic of more youthful tastes.

‘You wouldn't know he was Jewish,' my mother said, ‘would you?' She said this by way of complimenting me on the quality of male I had at last reassured her by pulling in.

‘He isn't Jewish,' I said irritably. ‘You're only Jewish if your mother is Jewish.' My mother looked at me knowingly, almost sympathetically, understanding that I wished to deny any stigma attached to my young man. She hadn't lived in north London for so long and not learned that if you were called Goldman you were a Jew.

‘I've got nothing against Jews,' she said. ‘It's such a pity he has to be in Africa when you could do with his company. Aren't there enough blacks for him in England?'

I wore the butterfly pinned to my book-bag which caused Jacob, with whom I shared the library lift one day, to remark innocently that the young these days seemed curiously disposed to lepidoptery.

‘My boy has just such an insect tacked to his jeans,' he said. ‘He doesn't write to us, you know, the little bastard. Jont is in receipt of the odd letter from time to time, so we have no reason to await the black-edged telegram.'

‘Perhaps he's busy,' I said. Jacob looked sceptical.

‘Schoolboys running amok in foreign parts. Roger and his like are defined as “Aid to Developing Countries”,' he said, with caustic amusement. ‘It's your taxes and mine, Katherine, pays for this piece of neo-colonialism.'

‘I don't pay taxes,' I said. Jacob laughed.

‘In that case it's only mine. He tells Jont that he plays hymns on the piano every morning. Is that part of the export drive, Katherine? Christianity and Commerce hand in hand? First sell the Protestant ethic and then sell the rest? The poor child has had his violin pinched, it appears. Hey, Katherine – have you ever had mumps?'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘Why?'

‘Annie has mumps,' he said. ‘You wouldn't like to come down and support my suffering wife, would you? As you will appreciate, the quality of life is somewhat reduced for women when there
are sick children and suckling babes in the house. The babe has a stuffed-up nose and needs to be fed every ten minutes. She has to let the nipple go to breathe, you see. Not much goes down at any given time.' Jacob was always explicit in these matters. ‘It's dehumanising for women,' he said, ‘this incessant nurturing of sick children.'