Brother of the More Famous Jack (18 page)

‘He made it thirty-one, because he naturally assumed that you would be settled with a family by thirty,' she said, ‘and growing children are a great expense.' One has to allow one's mother the odd aggressive aside. An unattached, childless outpatient is no sort of daughter to have. The policy was worth three hundred pounds, but it made me feel like an heiress. I had been going about with permed, greasy hair and in shapeless jerseys, but it came to me then that I had the inclination to go and blow the whole lot on clothes.

I woke from a very funny dream that week. Jacob Goldman had written me a reference for a job as nanny in the Gulf States. I saw the headed college notepaper and the Germanic handwriting, clear as day. He had written as follows:

Katherine Browne is an admirable young woman with a small
inherited income and a small inherited brain.

The swine, I thought. Damn him! Hadn't the psych said that my IQ was around 140? I woke feeling that I had to get him on the 'phone. The dream was so much with me that I told my mother about it at breakfast, with a certain righteous conviction.

‘But he didn't say it,' she said, ‘you dreamed it.'

‘I don't care,' I said. ‘It's none of his business whether he said it or not. I'm going to get him on the 'phone.'

‘I think that's a good idea,' she said.

I got no proper tone from the Goldmans' number in Sussex. The directory enquiries confirmed for me again that the number didn't exist. I railed at my mother.

‘Perhaps they've moved,' she said. Perhaps they've moved! Foolish woman. The Goldmans don't move. I move. They stay there in Sussex providing me with a rock upon which to prop my insecurities.

‘Why should they move?' I said. My mother shrugged.

‘I moved,' she said. ‘Sometimes people do.' Well, so she did. She, a creature of fixed habits, who could only wash dishes from left to right. But where would they go? Then I remembered the Northern Line and the Everyman Theatre.

‘Hampstead,' I said. ‘Mark my words. They've moved to Hampstead.' The directory enquiries told me that the number of subscribers residing in NW3 under the name of Goldman ran into pages. Would do.

‘Professor,' I said. ‘Could you try Professor?' There were two Professors Goldman J. in NW3, but one was Joel and the other was Julian.

‘Try Dr,' I said.

‘There are hundreds of them,' said the lady at the switchboard. She read me out, at my request, the numbers of the first half dozen. I took them down. They were all very kind and took time off from fixing bones and teeth to answer the telephone. I gave up in despair. I found my mother in her kitchen and stormed at her.

‘The place is full of them,' I said, angrily. ‘The whole of Hampstead is full of bloody Jews.'

‘Well,' my mother said, venturing to tread on marshy ground because I had opened the gate, ‘frankly, nobody else can afford to live there these days.' I got hysterical almost with laughter and embraced her as I hadn't done in years. A great surge of warmth as we were united, uncompromisingly, by a burst of gut anti-Semitism.

‘Why don't you try the University?' my mother said. This was an excellent idea, which I had been too agitated to hit upon. I tried the department.

Jacob's secretary wouldn't give me the telephone number. I almost screamed at her.

‘He's left emphatic instructions with me that he is not to be telephoned at home,' she said.

‘I'm an old friend,' I said. ‘I haven't seen him for ten years.' She told me to try the next morning, when he would be in the building.

‘I'm sorry,' she said.

‘Well, put me on to Dr Hunt,' I said. He was the Symbolic Logic man.

‘Who?' she said. They had all, no doubt, moved on to chairs in Leicester, or fellowships abroad. Departed and left no addresses.

‘Please give me the number,' I said. ‘I promise you he won't mind.'

‘Professor Goldman said nobody,' she said, getting heated. ‘Not the Queen of Sheba offering her body.' Wouldn't he? I put the 'phone down in rage. Then I telephoned Roger's grandparents' house in Oxford. The number had come back to me, all at once, over the decade. Roger's grandfather was, in times past, wont to pick up the 'phone, which stood on his desk, and bark ‘Fitz-Whatsit' into one's ear, but on this occasion a woman answered. A woman with a rather high, rather girlish voice.

‘Sally Goldman here,' she said. Godalmighty, I thought, there's another one of them. Seven children. What must John Millet be saying about it?

‘Excuse me,' I said, ‘I wonder if you can help me. Are you connected with Jane Goldman at all, who used to live in Sussex?'

‘I'm her daughter-in-law,' said the voice. ‘I'm Roger's wife. To whom am I speaking?' For a moment I think I couldn't speak.

‘My name is Katherine Browne,' I said, feeling like someone come back from the dead. ‘It's possible that you've heard of me. I'm a friend of Roger's parents. I'm trying to trace them.'

‘I know exactly,' she said. ‘We even have a photograph of you somewhere. Jane and Jacob would love to see you, I know. You must 'phone them at once.' She gave me the number.

‘May I take your number?' she said. I gave her my mother's telephone number. She couldn't have been nicer.

‘They're in Hampstead,' she said.

Bullseye.

Then it was no time at all before I had Jacob on the line, blasting my eardrum with his glottal stops.

‘Katherine?' he said.
‘Katherine?
Where the hell are you?'

‘In Dorset,' I said. ‘Why aren't you in the telephone book, Jake?'

‘I'm ex-directory,' he said. ‘Did you have any trouble finding me?'

‘I've had a nervous breakdown over it,' I said, which was not altogether untrue. Jacob laughed.

‘Sorry, my love,' he said. ‘The idea is that I stay home some days and write without getting interrupted, but my secretary gives my number to every Tom, Dick and Harry who sees fit to ask her for it, while nice people like you are put to all this trouble.'

‘She didn't give it to me,' I said. ‘I couldn't wring it out of her.' There was a sober pause.

‘Blame me,' he said contritely. ‘I told her just yesterday that I'd fire her if she gave it to anybody. Anybody.'

‘Including the Queen of Sheba flogging her body,' I said. Jacob laughed again.

‘That's right,' he said. ‘Why can these wretched women not use a little judgement?' Something in my early childhood must be answerable for the fact that I find certain forms of male chauvinist piggery such a turn-on.

‘It could be that they're traumatised by overbearing employers,' I said.

‘When are you coming to see me?' he said. ‘Today? Tomorrow? Why have we not heard from you since God knows when?' I arranged that I would catch the train the next day, be in Hampstead by lunchtime, and stay over for a while. Left at the Everyman, left and left again. I was also longing to see north London.

It is very soon apparent to me that the Goldmans have experienced a delightful financial step up, not to say a change in lifestyle. Their charming new maisonette in Hampstead, tall and thin, built into existing house backs like a mews, has climbing geraniums at the cobbled front doorstep and a speaky thing, which you talk into before the door unlocks. The ground floor is all garage and laundry. Above, from whence Jacob comes to greet me, is a long narrow living room, lined with two large cushioned sofas fitted into piped chintzy covers. Plants hang and trail from a wall of glass which overlooks the back gardens of substantial Victorian town houses, rich in Galt climbing-frames and pretty garden furniture. Beyond that is Hampstead Heath. The floor on which Jacob stands is sanded pale and gleaming. Somebody has dry-cleaned the Persian rugs which Rosie once dragged through the mud and which now lie on the floor. But Jacob, who greets me with open arms, is the greatest surprise of all. His black horsehair eyebrows and wiry hair have turned an elegant silver white. My first response is to think that he is got up for a play.

‘God, Jacob,' I say, ‘you look amazing.' We embrace emotionally.

‘Let me get a look at you,' he says, after a moment, and holds me out at arm's length. ‘You look the same,' he says.

‘I don't,' I say.

‘Very well, you don't,' he says. ‘You look better. You were red-eyed and pimpled when you left. Now you are a woman of the world.' I laugh.

‘And you, Jacob? How are you? How do you manage to intimidate your students these days, without your ferocious eyebrows?'

‘I retire in five years,' Jacob says. ‘I'll be an Old Age Pensioner. An “OAP”, Katherine, as the sign says outside the cinema – “Children and OAPs half price”. It happens to us all. Even you, sweetheart.'

‘I hope I'll be an OAP with such lovely white hair,' I say. ‘And how is Jane? Where is Jane?'

‘Jane is in hospital, as a matter of fact,' he says, ‘recovering from a hysterectomy. A small growth. Nothing to worry about. She's better. A week ago she looked like a corpse hanging on a glucose drip, but now I can see that she looks better every day. You'll stay, won't you, and come with me to visit her? She'll be more than delighted to see you again. She was always very partial to you, Katherine. There's not many people get the seal of approval from my wife, as you may remember. You have to talk into my left ear, Kath. I've had some trouble with the other one.'

‘It's such a pleasure to talk to you, Jake,' I say, swapping ears. ‘Either ear is a great treat for me. Is she really all right?'

‘Fine,' Jacob says. ‘She's fine. My poor old mother died, you know. Just a month or so ago. Upset us both a bit. She was uphill work for Jane, mind, so perhaps it's for the best. Her eyesight was gone, you see. There's not much left when you can't watch the telly any more.'

‘No,' I say. ‘I'm sorry, Jacob.'

‘Coffee,' he says briskly. The kitchen shares the first floor with the living room. An open slatted staircase runs through the middle of the house to the floor above.

‘Golly, Jacob,' I say. ‘What a four-star, Double O Seven kitchen you have. This is not the Goldman kitchen as I remember it.' Jacob's kitchen has double sinks and a waste grinder into
which he pitches the coffee grounds. He has a dishwasher under the workboard and an extractor fan above it. Some Edward Lear watercolours which used to hang awry on the stairs have been beautifully mounted and hang against a wall of brown cork wallpaper. There is a very nice Brecht poster from the German Democratic Republic framed in aluminium over the breakfast table. The Windsor chairs have been bleached and waxed.

‘Why is it all so clean?' I say. ‘This is very bad for my nostalgia. I always thought dirt was a principle.' Jacob laughs a little and shrugs.

‘Dirt is in a sense a principle, isn't it?' he says. ‘One doesn't want to have one's wife on her knees chasing dirt. One wants to put the needs of one's children before the needs of one's possessions. One doesn't want to bow down to wood and stone, you know, like the heathen in his blindness. My children are grown up. You want me to tread fish fingers underfoot for ever just to please you, Katherine?' I like him as much as I ever did. Having him in a new setting makes no difference at all. It only lends novelty.

‘Do you miss your house in Sussex?' I say, casting off with ease, myself, that great symbol of hard-won domestic security. What is it but wood and stone?

‘No,' he says with certainty. ‘That was always my concession to Jane. Now this is her concession to me.' He is five minutes' walk from the Hampstead Everyman, but the neighbourhood is too salubrious for Coke tins in gutters and very nice too.

‘Doesn't Jane miss the garden?' I say. He shrugs it off.

‘Who needs to garden that much?' he says. ‘It was a device she had for escaping the children. That's my belief. A way of demonstrating to them that she was busy. She gardens a bit on the roof and all over the window-sills, as you see. You can't close the blinds without knocking the bloody things down, but that's Hampstead for you, isn't it? The gardens are all full of furniture and the houses full of plants. She's playing the piano most of the time these days, before the arthritic joints get her.
And learning German. We were in the GDR together last year. It bothered her not talking to people. So that's what she's doing. She's thriving, is Jane. No need to bother your head about her. I recommend it to you, Katherine. The post-menopausal phase. She enjoys it. So do I. For five years now I've been screwing her without making her pregnant.' It makes me smile, thinking how Jacob always felt impelled to put his house guests in the picture with regard to his sexual habits. I can't resist the temptation.

‘You mean old guys like you can still do it?' I say.

‘We do our best,' he says. ‘I shouldn't be depressing you. I expect you are in the middle of all that breeding. How many babies have you got, my child? And where are they? Why have you not brought some fat little Italian babies with you for me to show my wife?'

‘Haven't got any,' I say.

‘And how is that?' he says. The nosey bastard.

‘Because I'm a socio-gynaecological disaster, Jake,' I say, trying to be flip. ‘I had one baby that died and a man that upped and left. The last of many. I'm also a little buggered up around the cervix. I'll tell you about it in detail if you like because I know how you like private parts, but I'm warning you I'm very likely to cry.'

Jacob gives me my coffee in silence and we take it through to the living room and drink it on one of the sofas.

‘Well, well,' he says. ‘Poor Katherine. When?'

‘Eleven weeks,' I say. ‘That's when the baby died. The man left when I got pregnant. She was five weeks old, the baby.'