Brother of the More Famous Jack (7 page)

‘You
are
cheeky, Jont,' Jane says without concern. ‘I consider it part of your charm, but you cannot expect others to do so.'

‘The bloody fool asks me to paraphrase “heaven's cherubin, horsed upon the sightless couriers of the air”,' he says, thumping about. ‘What's the fucking good of paraphrasing it? It sounds better the way it is.'

‘What did you say to him, Jont?' Jane says.

‘But don't you agree, Jane, it makes nonsense of it to paraphrase it?' Jonathan says.

‘What did you say to him, Jont?' Jane says insistently.

‘I said if he didn't understand it he shouldn't be doing it with us.'

‘And?' she says archly.

‘He said if I was so clever would I like to take the class. So I took the class. A bloody sight better at it I was, too, but he made me stop after about ten minutes because it showed him up. He'd better not try and be funny with me again,' Jonathan says. This is bigger and better trouble-making than I ever dreamed of. Silently, resentfully, I hand him the crown.

‘You watch it, Jonathan, that's all,' Jane says. ‘Neither Jake nor I will be on our knees before the Head, pleading on your behalf when he decides to throw you out.' She turns to Roger. ‘The young ladies ‘phoned for you, Roger. The ones with the tennis court. They want you to play tennis with them tomorrow.' Roger shrugs.

‘They play tennis in white togs,' he says nastily, ‘like walk-ons for
Cinderella on Ice.'
I quail before this snobbish indictment and thank God that I always hid in the library during games. If I had
played tennis I would almost certainly have done so in white togs.

‘Go on, Rogsie,' Jonathan says, as Jane makes us tea. ‘I'd go for the one with the legs.' Roger says nothing. He goes out to fetch his violin. ‘I have to go now,' he says to John, who gives him the car keys.

That evening, in the garden, Jane forgives me for picking a half-grown cucumber which I mistake for a courgette. Potatoes come out of the ground white, I discover. The brown skin forms afterwards. Jacob joins us on his return, in the company of Annie and Sam whom he has met at the gate. He has the
Listener
in his hand and a parcel of cheese wrapped in vine leaves for his wife.

‘For you, my love,' he says. ‘Not for anybody to share with you.'

‘Not even you?' she says. She is touched. ‘Oh, Jake.'

Wrapped in the
Listener
he has a Dillon's bag which he hands to me. In it is a copy of
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.

‘Take a holiday from The Great Tradition,' he says. I thank him, profusely, being honoured by the gift.

‘A Young Person's Guide to the New Jerusalem, eh, Jake?' Jane says. ‘I'm rather glad I got the cheese. I'm too old to be converted.'

‘I'm coming out simultaneously in paperback,' he says to her. She rejoices and kisses him.

‘Oh, wow,' she says. ‘Oh, Jake, wow.'

‘Come out with me tonight,' he says. ‘Leave the children, leave the guests and come out with me. Hold hands with me at the pictures.'

‘I have to tell you, Jake, that I've been having fairly regular labour contractions this afternoon,' she says.

‘Christ,' he says. ‘That's it then for the next six months. Or can one hire a wet nurse? Who needs an au pair? Why is the world full of au pairs? A wet nurse is what we need.'

‘I'm sorry, Jake,' she says, ‘I'd better not go anywhere tonight.'

‘Sweetheart,' he says, accepting the inevitable. He turns to Annie and Sam. ‘Jane will have a baby for you tomorrow. Rosie will be more than pleased to see you two lose your place as the family babies.' Jane laughs a little.

‘She will, won't she?' she says. ‘Poor Rosie.'

Jane makes the children's supper that evening, leaning against the table periodically, to breathe deeply as her uterine muscles contract. She has ‘phoned the midwife and the doctor from the kitchen telephone. I find it all more exciting than I can say and am astonished at how cool she is.

‘I thought people gripped a bed and screamed,' I say.

‘That happens later,' she says. ‘Later on is when I go to pieces. I've never been one of these insufferable people who does it all right.' Jacob and John are watching the television news in the playroom. Jonathan is doing some homework at the kitchen table. He had spread a newspaper over the mess and has his Latin on top of it. I engage Rosie and the twins in a game of Snap on the kitchen floor, but Rosie's perception is, of course, too quick for the others. Nor is she old enough yet to indulge their urge to win.

‘Snap!' she shouts relentlessly. ‘Snap! Snap!' The babies storm her to grab back their cards. Jane despatches the twins sharply to the playroom to join Jacob before she goes into another of her spasms.

‘Jont,' she says, ‘I'm going to be sick.' Deftly, Jonathan grabs a large antique jug from the shelf beside him and inverts, on to the table, a small pile of paper clips, trading stamps and string before handing it to her.

‘Heave into this, Ma,' he says, which she does.

‘Get Jake,' she says, when she can raise her head. ‘Tell him I'm going to bed. Tell him there's puke on the table.'

‘Snap!' Rosie shouts. ‘I've won.'

Roger comes home with his violin in its case.

‘Hello,' he says. He turns a chair round and sits on it astride the back. He puts his violin on top of Jonathan's Latin. Rosie is doing a handstand against the kitchen door.

‘Jane is having her baby,' she says, glad to be first with the news. Jonathan comes in.

‘Mother is giving birth,' he says. He picks up the jug of vomit and goes to the door with it. ‘Cheers,' he says, disgustingly. We hear him flush it away in the downstairs loo. Roger says nothing but the event puts him on edge.

‘Let's go for a walk,' he says. We coincide with the midwife on the path to the front door. I eye her bag for signs of crochet hooks and lead pills.

‘Which one are you?' she says heartily to Roger. ‘Did I deliver you?' In spite of their differences, the Goldman children have the look of having come off the same conveyor belt.

‘I am Myself,' Roger says witheringly. He has a powerful line in animosity. He pulls the Hamlet hat further over his eyes to hide from her. We walk across a field to the right of the house towards a stream. Beyond the stream, which we cross, is a rather morbid little chicken battery belonging to the neighbouring farm, and, alongside that, a blackberry wilderness where we pick and eat.

‘Jane says you can get blackberries without thorns,' he says as he examines a scratch on his wrist. ‘She's going to grow them.'

‘Have you always lived here?' I say. He shakes his head.

‘Since I was five,' he says. He hands me some blackberries which he has picked from beyond my reach. ‘We used to live in Belsize Park. Where do you live?'

‘Hendon,' I say. ‘I take my cat to the vet in Belsize Park.'

‘We used to live on Haverstock Hill,' he says. I grow silently desperate, thinking that Roger will be gone in four days and all we do is have these dead-end conversations. Suddenly Roger says, ‘Once Jont and I were picking blackberries in Oxford. In
my grandmother's garden. We tried an experiment to prove the existence of God, because the grandparents had been converting us. We were about four and seven, I think. We kept muttering abuse to the Holy Ghost to see if the wrath of God would come down. The neighbours heard and told on us. I've never been so embarrassed in my life. My grandfather tried to make us pray for forgiveness. I wouldn't do it. I couldn't.'

‘Isn't praying embarrassing?' I say. ‘Isn't it excruciating?'

‘At least C of Es do it with a book so that there's an end,' Roger says. ‘Quakers go on for ever when the spirit moves them. Our headmaster was a Quaker.' He gives me another handful of berries.

‘Pentecostals do it to a Wurlitzer,' I say. ‘Get moved, I mean. I heard them on the radio.' I walk six feet in the air for noticing that I have made Roger laugh. As we walk back to the house, as I try not to break a leg in my silly shoes, I think admiringly that I have taken berries from the hand of one who does not balk at performing experiments on the Almighty.

At eleven o'clock, Jacob comes into the kitchen with the doctor, who takes his leave. I am there with John and Jonathan; Roger has gone to bed.

‘Well,' Jacob says stoically, ‘I've known worse.' He puts the kettle on to make Jane and the midwife some tea. ‘She's got it all out. The babe is female and a very decent size.'

‘How is she?' John says.

‘Fine,' he says. ‘Somewhat grey and washed out, of course. The human frame is not particularly well designed for the purpose. It's easier for cats and horses. The infant is nibbling happily. Come in and see her.'

Jane is sitting up in a very pretty old brass bed, propped on candy-striped pillows. Her face is lined and slightly puffy. The midwife is sitting on the bed with her, talking coaxingly, rather idiotically, to the baby.

‘Come on, don't be a lazy girl,' she says, ‘take the whole nipple, darling, or your mother will get sore. We can't have that, can we?' She pushes the dark surround of Jane's nipple expertly into the baby's mouth. The room smells faintly of menstrual blood. On a tea trolley at the end of the bed is an enamel basin containing an organ, in appearance not unlike an ox heart, as one might see in the butcher's shop, but trailing bluish umbilical cord. She sees Jonathan look at it.

‘It's my placenta, Jont,' she says, reaching out to him. ‘Nature is very messy sometimes. Would you like to hold her?'

‘Okay,' Jonathan says. He takes the baby with its head in the palm of his hand, swaddled, as it is, in cellular blanket like an infant Christ. Quattrocento. ‘Hello, little rat,' he says.

‘She's beautiful,' says the midwife reproachfully.

‘Just a good size to go in your saddle-bag, isn't she, Jont?' Jane says. ‘Would you like to take her to school tomorrow? Bumpety over the cobbles?'

‘It is tomorrow,' John says. ‘Katherine and I are off now, Jane.' He gives her a kiss. ‘Don't exhaust yourself, will you? We'll meet again soon. Come up to London.'

‘Come again, Katherine,' Jane says to me. ‘Write me your ‘phone number on the wall in the kitchen.' She kisses me. ‘Jacob, make her do it,' she says. ‘Where's Roggs?'

‘He fell asleep,' Jonathan says, ‘playing himself at chess.'

John drives us with grim and silent purpose to the nearest hotel and signs us in. I have no power to object. I feel, as I enter the foyer, that I have an electronic beeper on the third finger of my left hand announcing the absence of the wedding ring. I am morbidly fascinated by his preening beauty, which borders upon the physically repulsive in its narcissism. Although he takes the precaution of undressing in the dark I am aware of grotesquely enlarged male parts in silhouette, as you get in Aristophanes, tied on for ribald effect. As my mind connects, suddenly, with what the biology teacher told us about erectile tissue in the reproduction of the rabbit, I realise, with relief, that this is routine. There is no difficulty of access and no pain. Just a comforting and unremarkable filling of a gap. Easier than one's first tampon. John, presumably, experiences the additional pleasure of confounding Jacob's prohibition. In the morning, he drives into London and drops me off at the Hampstead underground station before going on to his office.

‘I'll be in touch,' he says.

My mother had missed me. That was obvious. And I had not given her a thought.

‘Did you have a nice time?' she said.

‘Yes,' I said.

‘What did you do?' she said. I had been deflowered in a hotel room and had taken blackberries from the hand of a beautiful young man who played the violin and routed the Holy Ghost. I had seen a human placenta and a new-born baby. I had learned about crochet hooks and copper clamps in the cervix and egg yolks in the soup. I had found an older woman to emulate and admire in place of my mother.

‘I watched Ava Gardner on the telly,' I said.

‘Is that all?' she said.

‘I went to the seaside in Brighton,' I said.

‘I missed you,' she said. My mother gave me a cup of coffee which I drank on the sofa, staring across at the painting over her fireplace. A painting of a child with Murillo eyes weeping a contrived glass tear. To my mother this sweat-shop Woolworths oil painting said Childhood. I had never been able to compete with its posey guile. I asked myself reproachfully why one glass tear should be more acceptable than another, as I thought of the Goldmans singing Dowland. My mother would go to the ends of the earth if I lay dying, and once did.

‘It was my professor's house,' I said, loosening up excitedly. ‘The one who interviewed me. His wife had a baby last night. She had it in the bedroom. It got born in their bed.' Between the lines of what I said my mother read the message. The message was rejection, and it made her hostile.

‘What next?' she said tightly. ‘When you get to having a baby you'll realise the place to have it is in hospital.' My mother's house appeared to me confiningly neat and ineptly contrived. She went in for that style of interior decoration which ought, given the evidence, to have induced epilepsy in its profusion of optical effect. A confusion of conflicting patterns on floor and wall. On the floor, autumnal patterned Axminster carpet. Patterned, my mother said, because it wouldn't show the dirt, but since our activities were restricted to those which would not create dirt, there was never any dirt to show. Cleanliness dominated our domestic lives, as I remember the Hoover factory – that imposing period piece – dominated the outer reaches of London. Displayed behind me on the wallpaper, which my mother called ‘contemporary' (meaning to denote thereby that its design was nonrepresentational), was a more than adequate collection of bas-relief china ducks. ‘A goodly bloody third of the transatlantic migration,' Jonathan Goldman called them once in years to come, by which time they had become smart kitsch.