Brother of the More Famous Jack

by Barbara Trapido

  ‘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?’

  Seventeen

  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.’

  ‘I’ll come tonight if you like,’ I said. ‘I’m going home after this. I’ll get some things.’

  ‘Bless you, my dear,’ he said. ‘The wife enjoys your company. I don’t mean to have you scrubbing floors, you understand?’

  We caught the train together that afternoon where Jacob, having gallantly paid my train fare, offered me the choice of the Guardian or New Society. I chose New Society.

  ‘Terrible rag,’ he said apologetically. ‘Cooked up by the kind of chaps who need fifteen-hundred-pound research grants from the Social Science Research Council before they can tell you the way to the nearest brothel.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. I had never read it before. ‘Why do you buy it, Jacob?’ He smiled. According to Jane he was addicted to newsprint in any form. If there was none about he would search through old chests in the hope of finding that the drawers had been lined with the previous year’s Hampstead and Highgate Gazette. He read the Guardian like a practised commuter, folding it longitudinally into eight-inch lengths. He read the business page, which even now is a thing I use only to wrap vegetable peelings, but Jacob always liked to know the enemy.

  One of the first things I did when I got to the Goldmans’ house was scrub the kitchen floor with washing soda crystals, while Jane played picture dominoes with Annie and breast-fed Sylvia at the same time. Jacob, who had so effectively articulated for me the dilemma of the captive wife, had, of course, locked himself in his study with a thermos flask of coffee and a nice fat biography of Rosa Luxemburg.

  ‘If my sons have any sense they’ll marry girls like you,’ Jane said to me. ‘I could no more bring myself to scrub that floor than fly. When I got married, Katherine, I would let Roger’s cot sheets and nappies pile up in the bath and then go out and grumble over Jacob’s mother. She was an absolute brick to me, Jacob’s mother. Spoke almost no English, which was a great advantage, of course. She always accepted me without question. Such a pleasant change she was from my own crowd. Even the coming of the first male grandchild brought not a word on the subject of genital mutilation.’ I paused in my scrubbing to contemplate the advantage of this foreknowledge – this evidence of Roger’s unassailed foreskin.

  ‘There she was in her pokey little flat, hoarding Nescafe and dark chocolate among her underwear,’ Jane said. ‘Husband missing, presumed dead, surrounded by the bigoted British proletariat. Not a bad word to say against anybody. It’s no wonder Jake is so very nice. I’ve never liked people much. Leaving aside Jacob and the children, there’s a half-dozen people in this world I care for, not much more.’

  I scrubbed the floor for her, being honoured to be one of them.

  ‘She’s a knitter like you,’ Jane said. ‘Not of your class, you understand. She used to knit Rogsie nasty little matinee jackets out of unravelled jerseys, the sweet thing.’ I had recently knitted Rosie a mini-dress in broad horizontal stripes of candy pink and orange which had won her heart utterly and which she frequently pulled, wet and smelling, out of the laundry basket, because she wouldn’t have it plucked from her. Jane had then asked if she could employ me to knit, in secret, a large black pullover for Jonathan to have at Christmas.

  ‘Because he would love it so much,’ she said, ‘and he would look so sweet in it, don’t you think? He imagines that he will look wonderfully sinister.’ Jonathan in a black pullover, I considered, would look like the God of Thunder with a migraine. Because I loved her, I refused to accept more than one shilling the ounce for undertaking this project. It was sweated labour if anything was.

  I babysat for the Goldmans that night, while they went to the cinema, because Jonathan had something on at school. He returned at ten, burning up with anger because the headmaster, who had asked him to submit a poem for a competition, had then turned down his consequent offering as unsuitable.

  ‘I’d lay my head on the bloody block,’ he announced to me, ‘that if I’d copied out the fucking “Scholar Gypsy” and handed it to him as my own, he’d have had it. I reckon these stupid fucking headmasters get their jobs for being on their fucking knees in church every fucking Sunday and twice on fucking Good Friday.’ I was in the playroom carefully transcribing the rough draft of my essay on to lined foolscap with margins on either side.

  ‘Jesus, aren’t you neat?’ he said. ‘Isn’t your writing beautiful?’ He was still talking to me when his parents came home, to whom he relayed his somewhat subdued indignation.

  ‘Can I see it?’ Jacob said of the poem. Jonathan pulled it out of his trouser pocket. The poem made Jacob laugh appreciatively.

  ‘What did you stand to win then, Jont?’ he said.

  ‘A hundred pounds,’ Jonathan said.

  ‘Make me a copy and I’ll give you a fiver for it,’ Jacob said.

  ‘Okay,’ Jonathan said. ‘Hey, Jake, look at Katherine’s essay. Isn’t it neat?’

  ‘I know what her essays look like,’ he said.

  ‘But it’s her writing,’ Jonathan said persistently. ‘Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it sensational?’

  ‘It’s women, Jonathan,’ Jacob said. ‘Women write like that. That is the way middle-class women write. Search me how they do it. The only man I know who writes like that is John Millet.’

  ‘Don’t you visit this bigotry on my children,’ Jane said.

  Eighteen

  Jacob’s mother appeared that weekend, with her grey hair, set like the Queen’s, and with her handbag full of Suchard chocolates which she produced like treasure for the children. With the help of German war reparation she had made the climb to Golders Green and appeared to ask for no more. Rosie behaved very shabbily with her, I remember, squirming away from her kisses and grabbing the loot. She embraced me, smelling genteelly of 4711. She called Jonathan ‘Yonny’ and, since her eyesight was failing, had him read to her from some weighty Teutonic versio
n of Woman’s Own. Jonathan read the German to the manner born because accents were a great talent with him, but the content got him down.

  ‘Jesus wept,’ he said after a while, ‘I can’t go on reading this crap.’

  ‘No asides please,’ Jane said. ‘Read it, Jont. It’s good for your soul.’ Grandmother offered Jonathan another chocolate, smiling upon him benignly and taking no offence.

  ‘It’s all right for you, isn’t it?’ Jonathan said to Jane. ‘You can’t understand it. It’s about the Shah of Iran’s ex. It’s fawning bullshit about a fascist’s wife who can’t have bloody babies. So what? That makes less dictators, doesn’t it?’

  ‘You wait till it’s your wife who can’t have a baby,’ Jane said. Jonathan threw his eyes impatiently to heaven, before guzzling his chocolate and sportingly continuing with his text. Later that day I went for a walk with Jacob and Jonathan, during which Jonathan enacted the episode for his father, catching his grandmother’s speech and gesture with astonishing and wicked accuracy. I remember that the three of us cackled treacherously along the hedgerows, with great enjoyment, feeling, for that moment, comfortably together. Jake’s mother was the daughter of a butcher. She had married above herself into the Berlin intelligentsia. Jacob produced, as we walked across the field, a childhood memory of his maternal grandfather telling him not to block the shop window.

  ‘Stand avay from ze vindow, boy. And let ze people see ze sausages. And let ze sausages see ze people.’ I am very fond of this anecdote. I told him then that my father had been a greengrocer. He probably knew this anyway, from my university application form. Jacob said, very sweetly, that it accounted for the bond between us, that we had roots in the petit bourgeois trading class. I think this may have been true.

  I thought about Roger almost all of the time. I put the thought by while I wrote my essays, read or slept, but in between paragraphs, at the ends of chapters, and as I turned on my pillow towards dawn, I would fix my mind again upon his appearance and gesture. It gave me energy and inspiration, that quiet romanticism. I did some very good work that year. The taxpayer’s money was not misspent upon me.

  Nineteen

  Roger telephoned me from Heathrow Airport the day he came back from Kenya, and appeared at my mother’s door two hours later. I saw him from the landing window before he rang the bell, and made my way sedately downstairs, containing a surge of youthful joy. And there he was, fulfilling my every tremulous expectation, tossing dark schoolboy hair from his eyes, smiling dimples from bronzed cheeks, travelling light in every sense, being suspended above geographical and social involvement.

  ‘Your doorbell is in the key of D Major,’ he said. My mother’s doorbell was one which played a snatch of the Big Ben chime. Welcoming, but nonetheless pregnant with suitably petit bourgeois implication, it was called ‘The Harmonious Chime’.

  ‘It’s not my doorbell,’ I said defensively, ‘it’s my mother’s.’ We began as we went on. Roger representing, with his arrogant febrile grace, what seemed to me an awesome accumulation of high breeding. Me, breast-beating and struggling to improve myself. King Cophetua and the Beggarmaid. But I noticed only that Roger’s light blue eyes showed themselves to quite startling effect in his delicate brown face. He had in his left hand two duty-free Johnny Walker whisky carrier bags bulging with freckled mangoes, and all for me. He had argued zealously with customs officials to get them through and had succeeded, because conviction can move mountains and Roger had conviction in no small measure. I believe that Roger would have put his hand in the fire rather than bow to false gods, at that time.

  Roger ate my mother’s chocolate cake with a schoolboy appetite which charmed her and told us that he had spent the three days before his flight lying on a beach in Mombasa. He pulled photographs out of an overnight bag, stuck with East African Airways luggage-labels, of Arab dhows and market stalls. He had a photograph of a rickety little Asian hotel with a tin roof and a veranda. The hotel was signposted ‘Bond Street Hotel, Piccadilly’, and bore an enamelled hoarding advising one to drink Coca-Cola ice-cold. They depicted another world which he had slowly come to enjoy. When he had finished at Oxford, he said, he would go back to East Africa and teach. It embarrasses me to confess with what innocent suburban promptitude I began to build into my scheme of things the unlikely prospect of becoming a schoolmaster’s wife on the slopes of Kilimanjaro. I would peg up sun-bleached terry napkins on a line which fluttered among burgeoning hibiscus bushes, while Roger stretched long legs and paused in his perusal of exercise books, covered in brown wrapping-paper, to contemplate, contentedly, his satisfactory domestic situation.

  ‘My family thinks I’m arriving tomorrow,’ Roger said. ‘I’ll spend tonight in Golders Green with my grandmother.’ The announcement opened up for us the delightful prospect of being on the loose in the metropolis for one whole day.

  ‘Is she expecting you?’ my mother said. Roger shook his head.

  ‘I’ll telephone her a bit later,’ he said.

  ‘But your parents,’ my mother said incredulously. ‘Won’t they be at the airport tomorrow to meet you?’ That was what one did. One met people at airports. Particularly one’s kith and kin.

  ‘My parents?’ Roger said. ‘No fear.’ Roger’s parents would more likely have expected him to earn the train fare home, or to leg it with the help of the Ordnance Survey map and a little ‘O’ Level Geography. For my mother this rather confirmed that the Goldmans, who had in the first place been irresponsible enough to have had six children, were now as neglectful of them as was to be expected. She sighed, displaying the merest hint of vicarious pique.

  We walked, later, on Primrose Hill, Roger and I, and pressed our faces and limbs inexpertly together in the privacy of the wooded verges.

  ‘I love you,’ Roger said. ‘I missed you. I thought about you all the time.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said.

  ‘You’re so lovely,’ Roger said. I remember that as he said this I was too much aware that I had on my cheekbone a small rash of pubescent spots, partially obscured with medicated cake makeup, and that I was humbled before his perfect brown skin.

  ‘I can do you the Coventry Carol on the descant recorder,’ I said. ‘The two flats and the one sharp.’ Roger smiled and kissed me rather clumsily on the mouth, causing my earring to fall off into the grass.

  At the top of the hill Roger initiated a game which we played with sunlight. We stared into the sun, then covered our eyes with our fingers and described the patterns on the retina. Endlessly repeating cones and vibrant amoebae in tones of red and green. Then he talked about Oxford. Roger loved Oxford. It was the place where he had spent his childhood holidays, away from his quarrelling parents. His grandfather who, inconceivably, persisted in refusing to harbour Jane, had always been perfectly willing to harbour Jane’s children, provided his wife made the arrangements for their visits. Roger’s perception of this person to whom Jane referred as ‘the old Gothic Horror’ was of somebody who played three-legged races with one in the Fellows’ garden and allowed one to try out his pipes. Oxford was a place of magical cobbled lanes which led to the sweet-shop. It was a place where tea came with strawberries before the peal of bells for Evensong, where Grandmother, in a Pringle sweater and thick stockings, took one to watch punters from the bridge over the High Street, and where one went through doors into secret gardens with high stone walls. He never came to see it as a place afflicted with too much trad and old stones. He was not, as I was, embarrassed by the idea of privilege. He described to me with an almost holy joy the journey he would make from the railway station, past the litter and grot beside the slime-green canal, past the jail and on into St Ebbes towards the ample splendour of Christ Church.

  ‘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.

  Twenty

  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?