Brother of the More Famous Jack (10 page)

‘You can come and see me all the time,' he said. ‘I'll show you the bridge where Jont and I had spitting competitions.' In the contemplation of Oxford's sweet privilege we confronted our awakening selves. Roger slung his leg rather daringly over mine as we reclined on the grass.

‘Think of a fate worse than death,' he said. It made us both laugh briefly, excitedly, the melodramatic phrase and the reality behind it. Roger had used it with a sure intuition to cover, thereby, the awkwardness of our inexperience.

I had visited Oxford for the first time that summer and only briefly. I had driven with Jane to deposit Rosie with the grandparents for a week. They had moved by this time from their college house among the cobbled lanes to a comfortable Edwardian structure northwards of the town centre, set in a garden full of plum trees. Through the garden gate one could see, in the back garden, a sundial held up by two stone putti agreeably covered in lichen. On the way Jane had told me that her father kept a collection of antique Japanese swords in his study.

‘A very nasty collection of old knives for killing people,' she said. With a sudden crazy panic I had watched Rosie walk towards the door of a house full of knives.

Roger was what my mother called a ‘character'. This was largely because he laced his shoes with string. As time went on and she began to suspect that he would never buy me an engagement ring, she became rather hostile to him and conceived the idea that he laced his shoes with string to annoy her, and also that he was slightly unhinged.

‘I don't deny that he's very clever,' she said, ‘but clever people are very delicately balanced.' The implication, intended to be flattering to myself, was, of course, that I was not clever and therefore quite sane. Cleverness was not something she hoped for in her daughter. Prettiness was what girls required, and I was quite pretty enough, though I became less and less so in her eyes as I strove to please Roger, who let it be known that he disliked the clink of silver bracelets on the wrist and preferred unpainted faces.

Roger laced his shoes with string because he couldn't bring himself to go to Selfridges like other people when he needed anything. He almost never bought anything new. He was like Jane in this respect. When Jane or Roger needed anything they went to the Oxfam shop. They went to jumble sales, auction sales, and shops selling the leftovers of deceased estates. Roger, who had never, for instance, been a Sea Scout, went about for a long time in a cast-off Sea Scout jumper which he occasionally wore inside out. It bore a Cash's name-tape which said ‘John
Venables'. He wore what must have been one of the first calligraphically emblazoned T-shirts. It said ‘Mark' across the front, which caused his father to remark wittily (to Roger's annoyance) that he had ‘a mark on his shirt'. I found myself once wondering morbidly in the face of Roger's recycled size fourteen shirts whether size fourteen necks were mysteriously more vulnerable than most to deaths on the road or untimely terminal illness. How was it otherwise that the shops he frequented were so full of them?

Being a believer in works of reference, Roger had duly acquired us an antiquated sex manual by this process of ferreting in yesterday's meat. We found that it said, among other uproarious bullshit, that the semen of the young Aryan male was sweet-smelling, like chestnuts, and that the aureola surrounding the female virgin nipple was rose pink, but darkened to brown with increasing sexual experience. This wonderful book proved to be an endearing ice-breaker for us in a potentially awkward area, since it detailed various love positions so excessive in their rococo extravagance that we fell giggling into trying them out, zipped up as we were in our chaste corduroy jeans. Most of them involved unlikely entanglements with chairs and overhanging table tops. It allowed us to believe, by contrast, in our own urbane suavity in these matters.

Roger and I, let me confess it, never altogether got it right in bed, though we enjoyed the comforting proximity of flesh on flesh. It was never much different from PE classes at school, I found, and left me similarly sweaty, exhausted and sneaking glances at my watch to see how much longer it could possibly go on. Roger once caught me in the act of looking at my watch and took offence, being an arrogant and insecure young man. I had not yet realised that somebody as beautiful and clever as Roger could be as morbidly riddled with inadequacies as the next man. I was a rather hesitant person myself with a different collection of self-doubts. Thinking back, I realise that I had instinctively built my inadequacies into my public persona, in the hope that
thereby I could bestow upon them the dignity of a presence. Roger was different. Readers of Pogo may remember that Pogo's friend Albert kept a ‘Down with the Gummint' shout in a bag in the cupboard. When you opened the bag it said ‘Up with the Gummint' because the shout was heavily disguised. Roger kept his inadequacies in the cupboard and when you got at the bag it issued forth statements of withering omnipotence.

‘Sex ought to be no more than a routine and necessary function,' Roger said later that day, as he scratched his dandruff over his mathematical hieroglyphics. He had such a beautiful neck. ‘Like blowing one's nose,' he said. Roger, in his fierce instinct to protect himself from criticism, could leave one feeling like a dropped nose-rag.

We made each other very happy sometimes, I think. Because I was always a little in awe of Roger, I often cast myself in the role of entertainer for him, talked a lot and told stories against myself to make him laugh, never dreaming that he would store these up as ammunition against me. Roger quite often made me feel like the yokel in Shakespeare who concludes, in the presence of eminent personages, that ‘remuneration' is the Latin for three farthings. I played the part for him, regaling him with slices of my non-U childhood, my delicious orgies of Enid Blyton, my unrelieved childhood diet of the Bobbsey twins and the frivolous Mam'zelle in her curl-papers, who quailed at the sight of mice. Of bad golliwogs and whimsical spankings, of lacrosse sticks gathering in the hall as the hols came to an end. I painted disloyal portraits for him of my mother in her emerald Crimplene trouser-suit, reclining in her fringed garden seat with the latest Nevil Shute. I told him that my uncle collected George Formby records. I meant thereby more, I think, to indulge a comic sense than to ingratiate myself, but that, ultimately, was its effect. I had, after all, read books as a child, unlike his sister Rosie who, like a lovely barbarian, did nothing but jump and run.

I was a disappointment to Roger in the matter of Symbolic Logic. He was more academic than I could ever have been. I often felt, during my time in Jacob's department, that somebody would unmask me for a fraud. Each decent essay mark came as a new surprise to me and a temporary reprieve. It was a feeling not unlike the relief of waking to find that one has only dreamed it. That one has not in truth walked down the High Street in one's grubby vest on Saturday morning. I had been drawn to Philosophy for no other reason than that it seemed, after the solid pragmatism of the greengrocer's shop, to be elevated by a marvellous uselessness. It was the subtlest kick in the teeth I could deliver to my mother and aunts who saw me enshrined as the director's personal secretary. Having embarked upon it, I found it often crazily high falutin'. Jacob, who thankfully had his feet so firmly on the ground, was, of course, my grand exception. Because he taught so well, because he was not above making it perfectly clear that he had a political ideology which directed his approach, because he had roots in German history and intellectual life, these things enlivened a lot of what he said. When he talked to us about Kant, for instance, he made it seem as controversial as if the postillion had just delivered the stuff into our hands from eighteenth-century Koningsberg. He would pick delightful energetic holes in Marxist epistemology for us with the licence of the converted. Since most of us leaned towards the left,
we loved him in his critical analyses for never giving comfort to the right. Then came the business of Symbolic Logic.

I had been taught mathematics at school by the games mistress who did it on the side and did it badly. Mathematics, she said, was ‘exercise for the brain'. All I ever saw was sums with the numbers taken away. I never saw that system glowing with the beauty of pure reason which Roger saw. I was confirmed in my arty bias against it in the war of the two cultures. I liked the things of the heart. How could I therefore enter into a relationship with a's, b's and x's? It was manifestly true, also, that the girls from my school who went off to university to do sciences were those who couldn't compete with men for places in History and English. I was, therefore, a humanities bigot. Scratch me and I still am. Only because Roger's beauty and high culture took my breath away did I forgive him for his nasty fluids in jars and his collections of fossils chipped from the walls of old quarries. Then all of a sudden, in the middle of my arty education, came propositions expressed in the language of the games mistress.

‘I hate it,' I said to Roger, of the p's and q's, the following weekend. We were lying on the grass on Port Meadow watching sailing boats weaving between the ducks.

‘I'll explain it to you,' Roger said. On the back of his William Byrd, which he had in his pocket, he wrote, ‘If p then q. Not q … so not p.'

‘If all bread were sliced bread,' Roger said, ‘we would have no need of a bread knife, right?'

‘Except if you spread jam with the bread knife,' I said. A thing he always did. Roger ignored me.

‘We cannot do without the bread knife, so not all bread is sliced. Okay?'

‘Okay,' I said.

‘You are required to express this as ‘If p then q. Not q therefore not p,' because symbols are more use to you than the specific examples of the bread and bread knife.'

‘Yes,' I said, because I loved him, though for me all that mattered was the bread, glowing in a bag labelled Mother's Pride. As the afternoon wore on, Roger liquidated not only the bread, but also ‘if', ‘then' and ‘not'. The sliced bread had become bracket p hook q close bracket stroke q turnstile stroke p. The jam was nowhere. The strokes had to do with falsehood, I remember. They denoted that, within the proposition, was an odious damned lie. We classified propositions in rows of ones and zeroes. An hour later I drifted off in the axiomatic method.

‘If a binary constant is flanked by a propositional variable,' Roger said, ‘then the scope–' I noticed, at that point, that a small boy had caught a fish.

‘He's caught a fish,' I said. Because Roger was, at that stage, still in love with me, he didn't get nasty.

‘Katherine,' he said, ‘what use is your philosophy going to be to you without maths? You'll be like an architect with no engineering. Trust that father of mine to take you on with no maths, the shallow buffoon.' I had not considered my usefulness. The only use I had for my self was in pleasing Roger. I had dimly begun to notice that men students were different. That they thought about careers and research grants, while I thought about cultivating a range of accomplishments to gratify a grade A husband.

‘Not all of it is to do with p and q,' I said, which was perfectly true.

‘What isn't is an obsolete mish-mash of malignant demons and morality,' he said. His quarrel was with Jacob not with me, but, because he was slightly paranoid, he saw me often as Jacob's emissary.

‘Mathematically, you are like a person who pre-dates the invention of the printing press,' he said. ‘I have to go and sing.' Roger sang in the cathedral choir. He went off, summoned by bells, like somebody, one might almost say, who pre-dated the theory of evolution. He began to teach me algebra that evening
in the waiting room of the railway station – and left me shamed by my incompetence. I got on the train feeling uneasily that Roger would prefer not to make love to a woman who had an emotional block about substituting signs for concepts.

Roger was a great success at Oxford. I do not mean that he became a professional undergrad who took up oars and organised summer balls, because he didn't, but having been rather lonely and rather resented at school as haughty and precocious, he found recognition in Oxford's less philistine atmosphere and time-honoured elitism. Given his family background he had none of the common grammar school chips on his shoulder in the face of that great concentration of ex-public schoolboys. His tutors fraternised with him as a man who was going places. He loved the ancient music, in spite of its interweaving with the Church, which he professed to despise. Admittedly, such men of God as one encountered in Oxford appeared much too sophisticated to concern themselves with the mere naivety of belief. I perceived Christ Church as a place dominated by the temporal presence of Cardinal Wolsey. To my vestigial Methodism, wrapped latterly in the cloak of Jacob's Marxism, this appeared very shocking, that the churchmen should be the king's men, creating and transmitting an ideology of control to the ruling class. I also didn't care for the ex-choir school boys, clad in their Harris tweed, with whom Roger played the violin at weekends. I like people to defy stereotypes and these lived up to them. Roger considered it a churlish irrelevance to speculate upon their voting habits, when they made up the stuff of decent string quartets, but it got on my nerves to listen to their
in-group Oxford talk. It was the era of student revolt, after all, and they talked, instead, of being ‘up' and ‘down', of reading in the ‘Bod' and pedalling down the ‘High', of ‘handshake' and ‘Ninth Week'. I never got used to people being ‘up'. Up what? Up a bloody pole, like Simon Stylites? And ‘don' is a word I couldn't use. I found it embarrassing. My teachers were teachers, not ‘dons'. Jacob was never a don. A don to my mind evokes a person more than commonly incompetent at boiling an egg or tying a parcel. A person combing cobwebs out of his hair. A person brewing up magical green sparks in the potting-shed with batty conviction. Dr Faustus. A person always in mortar-board and horn-rims crashing eternally through the dean's cucumber frame. I took to reading breakaway Trot newspapers to provoke Roger's musicians as I hung around among the music bags and overcoats, waiting for Roger.