Brother of the More Famous Jack (3 page)

‘As I understand it, childbirth is also dangerous,' John Millet says.

‘That's as maybe,' Jacob says. ‘But childbirth is natural. It's a nicer thing than pills and hooks.'

‘You sound like Malcolm Muggeridge,' John says. He offers Jane one of his cigarettes, which she accepts. He lights it for her and watches her inhale appreciatively. She looks all the time remarkably serene and as if containing some benign, ironic joke.

‘If you want the truth, John,' she says, ‘you won't get it from Jake. I'm pregnant because it seemed a delightful idea to him and me after we'd blown all the twins' birthday money last winter on an extravagant drunken lunch. I'm afraid it impaired our judgement. We made eyes at each other over grilled lobsters and resolved to jettison our humble rubber goods. I agree with Jake about the pills and the other things. You may not, but then you haven't been on the slab in the Family Planning Clinic. Anyway, the point is that any day now we'll suffer for it. My darling Jake will hold bowls for me half the night, while I vomit in labour and botch the breathing exercises, which I always do. Then he'll spend the next three years suffering his insomniac's agony after being woken at night. And he'll put up with us having our bed peed on and his manuscripts scribbled over. Jonathan woke him up nearly every night for four years. He and Roger are violently allergic to each other. Rosie caused him to slip a disc last summer. He had to spend all his income tax rebate on what Sammy here calls his fizzy old therapist. Oh, if only they weren't always so lovely, John, it wouldn't be half so tempting.' John smiles at her.

‘You are both insane,' he says. ‘I've brought you some very special wine, by the way, from a vineyard near Amalfi. I've got it in my car.' He has seated himself by this time in a small, beautiful lyre-backed chair. The seat is loose and the legs are splaying outwards at the joints. Anyone in my mother's circle would have done it up years ago in tasteful Dralon.

‘It wants some glue here,' John says moderately, inspecting the joints. ‘I'll do it for you if you like.'

‘Please do,' Jane says. ‘Before my mother comes to see us next week. She has a special thing for that chair. Lady Gregory gave it to her mother. She thinks that Yeats might have sat in it.' Jane Goldman's family is patrician Anglo-Irish. She has married her Mile End Jew in defiance of them.

‘Yeats, William Butler,' Jacob says. ‘Brother of the more famous Jack, of course.' He turns to me, to where I have seated myself, alongside the children, in the heap of cushions. ‘Jane went to a local auction sale once, Katherine,' he says. ‘Chap spells his name for the auctioneer. ‘Yeats,' he says. ‘Gates?' says the auctioneer. ‘No, no,' says Jane's chap, ‘Yeats,
like the poet.
' Does that amuse you?' he says. It obviously does because I giggle appreciatively.

Jacob's small daughter has decided suddenly to flatter John with her intimacy.

‘Jane's baby is going to get born through a very stretchy hole,' she says. ‘And only girls have them. If you are a boy or a girl you stay a boy or a girl, you know.' There is more sex education about than I have encountered in all of my life.

‘Absolutely,' John says, full of sober conviction.

‘And when the baby is inside, it can suck her nipples from the inside, can't it?' she says.

‘I think you may be wrong there,' he says without displaying a hint of mirth. ‘I think there's another system for inside.'

‘Something to drink,' Jacob says decisively. ‘Come with me, Katherine. I'll find my son for you.' He is seeking to protect me from the fantasy, which John Millet allows me, that I am one of the grown-ups. In the back hallway before the kitchen door is a large laundry basket, such as is used to accommodate Falstaff, which contains a great tumble of wellington boots. All the visible ones say R.J. GOLDMAN in marking ink, presumably because his oldest son Roger wears them all first. It underlines for me Roger's glorious ascendancy. At the kitchen table Roger
Goldman is poring over the
Observer
theatre reviews, stretching long denim-clad legs before him. He has, on his comely dark head, a remarkable floppy black beret which gives him the look of having come but late from Wittenburg. He is scratching idly at his dandruff where his hair protrudes at the back of the cap.

‘I'll give you that hat, shall I?' Jacob says agreeably.

‘Thanks,' Roger says, still reading and scratching. Jacob pulls the cap over his eyes.

‘Stop reading for a moment, will you?' he says. ‘It's only the routine Sunday pap for the
lumpenintelligentsia.'

‘Fuck off, Jake,' Roger says, tensing with antipathy. He looks up, however, and sees me. He has the same stunning blue eyes as his mother and a similar fine face.

‘This person is Katherine,' Jacob says. ‘She's a pupil of mine. Look after her for me.' He pulls out a chair for me. A Windsor kitchen chair with wobbling spindles in the back. ‘Jesus,' he says, ‘there's more bloody hopeless chairs in this house than makes sense. Has Goldilocks paid us a visit? Stick this one in the shed, Roggs. Use it for bails and stumps.' As Roger begins to get up, Jacob changes his mind. ‘Forget it,' he says. ‘How many bails and stumps can one family reasonably use?' He pulls out another for me. ‘Have this one, Katherine,' he says. ‘We'll save the other one for unwelcome guests. Give her a drink, Roger.' He plants before Roger a half-empty bottle of white wine from the fridge and two glasses. Then he carts off the hard stuff to the sitting room.

Roger, for all he is endowed with distinguishing beauty and the benefits of his parents' bold, radical iconoclasm, is as shy and awkward with me as any other sixth-former. We punctuate awkward silences with snatches of factual information and seek refuge in the newspaper. Roger has the advantage here, but I have never found reading upside down all that difficult. Roger is going to Kenya for a year on VSO before going to Oxford the following summer to study mathematics. I venture so far as to tell him I like his hat.

‘It's a German student's hat,' he says. ‘It belonged to Jake's father.' Jacob's family has fallen and risen again in defiance of Hitler. Inwardly, a little sycophantically, I admire the impressive ethnic muddle of his origins.

‘Try it,' he says. He puts it briefly on my head, while I blush and think of dandruff.

‘You look very nice in it,' he says shyly and, averting his eyes, he takes it back. Outside somebody has begun to groan noisily over the pulling off of wellington boots.

‘Roggs?' says the voice. ‘That poovy Millet has brought a woman with him. Have you seen her?' Roger tenses in an agony of embarrassment.

‘Don't shout,' he says, a little piously.

‘Listen, Shitface,' says the voice, ‘this doll is worth a bloody sight more than the Queen's Christmas message.' He comes in, having slung the boots roughly into the basket. He has large bare feet and has evidently been going sockless in wellies. His eyes widen with shock when he sees me, but he is not half so embarrassed as Roger and starts to laugh.

‘Okay, what's your ‘phone number, then?' he says facetiously.

‘Don't be cheeky, Jont,' Roger says hurriedly. ‘She's one of Jake's pupils.'

Jonathan sits down. ‘Does that mean you actually pay to listen to him?' he says to me. ‘Roggs and I would pay to shut him up, wouldn't we, Rogsie? A sponsored silence, like they have in the Brownies.'

Jonathan Goldman, who is sixteen, is taller than his brother and coarser looking. He has unbecoming frizzy hair and, underneath his boisterous humour, a slightly menacing adolescent belligerence. He looks, when I come to analyse it, not unlike Jacob – or as my mother would put it, who has none of my liberal squeamishness – he looks ‘like a Jew'.

‘That Millet makes the parents twitter,' he says cheerfully. ‘Do you think he gives Jane the flutters?'

‘They always twitter,' Roger says in disgust, fixing his eyes
somewhere beyond the kitchen clock. ‘All of them. This time next week, I'll be on another continent.'

The kitchen is large and dauntingly grotty. There is excess rubbish piling up in a Heinz bean carton beside the overflowing rubbish bin. Where the legs of the table meet the floor there are encrustations of toddler food. The tops of some homegrown vegetables are wilting on the work-board alongside seeping used tea-bags and half-eaten bowls of that morning's cornflakes. It is also perfectly apparent to me that the Goldmans write their telephone messages all over the wall. Alongside the kitchen telephone the wall looks like a defaced urban street hoarding. Rosie has scratched up a conspicuous message in black marker pen for her father. ‘Jake must fone criss,' it says. Underneath it, Jacob has written, ‘If criss fones me again tell him to phuck off.'

I leave the kitchen and find Jane Goldman alone in her vegetable garden, stringing onions. She asks me to join her at it when I approach, which I do. She says apologetically that it looks a little William Morrisy, but that it makes sense if you don't want them to rot. To me, straight from the outer reaches of the Northern Line, it looks positively Robinson Crusoe and I tell her so.

‘But I'm good at knots and weaving,' I say, recommending myself. Mrs Goldman gives me a friendly smile.

‘Jake is a very urban person too,' she says. ‘If you mention the Northern Line to him he goes quite starry-eyed. He likes to see Coke tins in gutters. He likes to be five minutes' walk from the Hampstead Everyman. He finds this hopelessly countrified.'

‘It's very nice here,' I say. ‘Your house. It's very nice.'

‘And very dirty,' she says. ‘Do you mind the dirt, Katherine?' I am surprised by the question. It requires a quick decision from me and with a sudden instinct to emulate her, I commit myself against the grain to the ideology of dirt.

‘It's nice dirt,' I say. She looks up at me, trying to make me out.

‘It saves us from people, this house does,' she says. ‘I'm very fond of it. Tell me where you met John.'

‘In Dillon's bookshop,' I say.

‘How wonderfully highbrow,' she says. ‘I met him in Woolworths when I was about your age. It's very flattering, I think, to
be noticed by him. He says he likes the quattrocento profile.' But Jacob, who has picked his way along a row of her inverted jam jars, is there behind her.

‘Quattrocento lahdeedah,' he says. ‘He likes women with no tits.' To be sure, neither of us is particularly well endowed in that respect.

‘Give me the nuts and bolts of the sleeping arrangements,' he says. ‘Where are these chaps going to lay their heads?'

‘In the guest room,' she says. ‘Roger has done it already. I asked him to.'

‘This young person is one of my up-and-coming first years,' he says. They look at each other with meaning.

‘Really?' Jane says. ‘Now there's a thing.' I feel myself on the rack with awkwardness.

‘I'm very sorry about this,' I say. ‘I didn't know I was coming here or I wouldn't have come.'

‘Now see what you do, Janie,' he says accusingly. ‘You make the sweet creature feel unwelcome. It only wants a little tact and delicacy.' Jane Goldman gives me a delightful conspiratorial smile which makes me feel a lot better.

‘I see,' she says with quiet sarcasm. ‘Well, fire away then, my tactful friend. I hope you're not planning to take a great stand.'

‘The point is this,' he says. ‘We all know and love John as a dear friend, not so?'

‘Naturally,' she says.

‘And we all know, of course, that some of our best friends go in for sodomy, buggery, child-abuse, you name it.'

‘Have a heart, Jacob, there's no call for poetic licence,' Jane says.

‘The point is quite simply this,' he says. ‘I will not have this old faggot come here to my house in order to indulge a sideline in female children. Not with my pupils. Not with Katherine here. Is that clear to everyone present?'

I believe it is no exaggeration to say that I took a few steps forward that day. I had cried into my pillow the night my mother
called John Millet queer, but I perceived a world of difference between that and Jacob's calling his house guest an old faggot. For one thing, he said it so loudly that it filled the air without shame. It had none of the same prim moral censure. But I was a little taken with the idea of sexual induction. It was for John Millet that I had ironed my beautiful Liberty lawn nightdress and for him that I wore my palest consumptive stockings and high-heeled shoes. Jacob, with his unhesitating way of bulldozing through to the heart of any matter, not only confirmed that my mother was right, but eroded my privacy, leaving me feeling like an Arab bride whose wedding sheets are being hung out for the villagers to inspect for blood stains.

‘Perhaps Katherine would oblige you and accept Roger's bedroom?' Jane says. ‘And Roggs can move in with Jonathan. Would you, Katherine? It's a lethal muddle of electronic wiring, I'm afraid.'

‘Of course,' I say, making nothing of the momentous event, being by training polite and accommodating.

‘You haven't fallen for this character?' Jacob says to me. ‘Nothing more, I hope, than a little indulgent
sehnsucht?
No?'

‘No,' I say, with my fingers crossed, wondering what
sehnsucht
could be. Jacob uses German words quite a lot. He had his origins in pre-war Germany and therefore has no difficulty with getting his Londoner's tongue round words like
Wirtschaftgeschichte
and
Weltanschauung.

‘That's my girl,' Jacob says. ‘Tell him to use his own house, lovey, and don't you venture into the bedroom without taking a spanner with you.' To this day I don't really know what he meant by it, but it made me laugh a little which was a gratifying release. He turns back to Jane. ‘And are we going to eat at all today, Janie, or have you forgotten us, as usual, here among your shallots? My sweetie, it's nearly half-past two.' He gains strength from the myth of his wife's incompetence.