My Brother Jack

by Johnston, George

  When I got up close I saw it was the body of a man who looked enormously big but might have just been swollen, a man in black trousers and a blue jersey and one seaboot (the other foot seemed to be missing altogether), with a complexion that had turned a sort of glossy, bruised-looking purply-black. The body was bumping around, sliding this way and that in the shallow water beneath soapy clots of yellowish foam, underneath that raggedy grey wet stormy sky, and a drab canvas lifejacket was still attached to the man although not properly fastened, or maybe it had been fastened at first and he had tried to get rid of it.

  I waded into the sucking hiss of the sea and grabbed at the arm that was flung out and sort of stiffly and spasmodically beating at the wet shingle, and I began to haul the dead sailor out on to the drier part of the shore, but as soon as I exerted force the arm pulled right out of its socket, and I fell over backwards, still clinging to the corpse’s arm, which had pulled away with the blue jersey sleeve and rotted threads and everything, and the stump of the limb was a ghastly transparent quick shimmer of sea-lice, that leaped and flickered and moved as if they were insane, and then I could feel them jumping and tickling all over my own hand, and I dropped the dead arm back into the sea and put my head down on the wet murmuring sand and vomited.

  Yet from the newspaper point of view it was a good story, and exclusive to the Post, and it established the very time of the River Tamar’s sinking, and the Marine Board sent coast parties down and they eventually found eleven other bodies of the crew. (I never told anybody about the dead man’s arm coming away in my hand.) With Condon this story more or less cancelled out my mutiny on the matter of the interviews, or I suppose it did, because he never mentioned it again, or perhaps he was exhausted himself by the long strain of those days and nights. All the complicated coverage had had to be organized by Condon, and he had scarcely taken a minute off, and his jowls had dropped and he looked unshaven and more piggy-looking than ever, but you had to admire him for the way he had done it.

  On the night the storm ended there were about half a dozen of us still sitting around in our wet raincoats in the reporters’ room at about half-past three in the morning, too exhausted, and too excited and overstrained in a way, to want to go home. The final edition had just been locked up and sent away, and the subs’ table was empty because they were all upstairs in the cafeteria having snacks and coffee, and from the deep guts of the building we could hear the growling roar of the big Hoes running out the last of the country edition, and at this point Condon came out of his box, grey with tiredness and strain, and he went to every table in the reporters’ room and examined each of the big pewter inkwells, and they were all dry, every one of them, so he took them all to a central table and stacked them one on top of the other until he had a tall, wobbly column of pewter ink-wells nearly five feet high, and then he went to the corner lectern and took the big leather-bound assignment book and hurled it with all his force at the column of ink-wells, and sent them clattering and bouncing all over the room. I think every one of us liked Curtis Condon at that moment.

  Mother had her sixtieth birthday not very long after these events – the storm and the loss of the River Tamar and the sailing off to Europe of the Aller with Johnny Drew and Noel Grantham aboard, but without me – and since I now felt, or had been made to feel, almost formally betrothed to Helen Midgeley, even though I was still not quite sure how this had happened, it seemed to me that this would be an appropriate occasion for her to meet my family. I knew that Mother’s birthday party would be both festive and formal, with high tea in the front room and a general family reunion, and since I wanted to make Helen’s début equally an occasion, I got Dad to let me have the car to pick her up and drive her home.

  We had been lovers for nearly four years, yet this was the first time I had ever called for her. She lived in the old section of Brighton in part of a big, gloomy, decaying weatherboard house that seemed to be breaking apart at every joint: it was a gaunt, two-storied place with a slate roof covered in coloured lichens and hung with old swallows’ nests, and it was remarkable for the things about it that were broken, because it had a broken tower with a broken clock-face and a broken staircase and a broken weather-vane and a broken dove-cot and broken spouting hanging from the eaves and a broken summer-house and broken swings in a rank, overgrown garden which at some time or another seemed to have included a tennis court and a croquet green. It was the sort of house which one always enters with the thought that somebody has just scuttled off to keep out of sight: you never quite hear anything or see anything, but there is always this absolutely distinct sense of having an emptiness where an instant before no emptiness existed. With me the vanished figure was always quite definite. She was a very tiny frail old lady with white hair and pale skin and pink-rimmed albino eyes, and she was supposed never to show herself to anybody, and she always wore an old Japanese kimono, faded to a sort of greenish-black, with a yellow crane embroidered on it. I never saw her because she never existed, but I seldom visited that house without imagining that I had just missed her by a split second, and she had vanished around the corner only an instant before with her eyes dilated and her fingers spread against her mouth. I always expected to find a thread of greenish-black silk caught on some obstruction, or an old tortoise-shell comb dropped in a passageway, but I never did. Still, that was the sort of house it was, and the tangled garden suited it.

  The front door had enormous brass bell-pulls that didn’t work and two massive lion’s-head knockers which had got so rusty they were too stiff to move, and so you just had to beat at the cracked door panelling with your fists or knuckles. When the door was opened there was an awful jangling clamour because a huge bell was fastened to the inside of the door on a loop of spring steel. I never got used to this, and it always startled the wits out of me. Usually when this din subsided there was something else that was strange, because almost always you would hear, from some room high up and very far away, ‘Humoresque’ being played very thinly on an out of tune piano. I never found out by whom. The albino woman, probably …

  Helen’s mother had died some years before and she lived with her father, a nervous, shy mousy little man who worked as a tailor’s cutter somewhere in the city (Leverson’s, I think it was, who were the first to introduce the extra pair of trousers with the £3 suit), and a surly younger brother who was studying bookkeeping at Zercho’s Business College. On this day when I first called for her I met neither her father nor her brother, because she must have been looking from a window waiting for me, and she opened the door with a wild clanging from the hidden bell even before I had time to work out the system of the exterior bell-pushes and knockers, and said, ‘I’m all ready, so let’s go,’ and took me by the arm with a dazzling smile and twisted me round and walked me straight back to the front gate and the waiting car.

  She had dressed herself very smartly in a suit of imitation Donegal in flecks of greys and blues, and the jacket was cut like an Edwardian Norfolk jacket with severe pleats and leather buttons. With this costume she wore gunmetal silk stockings, expensive matching shoes and handbag of some reptilian skin the identity of which I have forgotten, a mannish white blouse, frosty white gloves, and a strange soft little hat of blue felt. There was some strong masculine quality to it all that only accentuated her femininity and the shining gold of her hair. I felt intensely proud of her.

  Driving back, I thought I should try to fortify her against any possible shocks or disappointments – she seemed in every way so superior to my own background, so utterly different in every imaginable aspect from my two sisters – and although I was relieved that I had no need to make excuses for our own house, so recently renovated and at least not disintegrating underneath one’s eyes, I did say: ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to take my people as you find them, Helen. Jack’s a bit of a rough diamond,’ I said, ‘and Dad’s a pig-headed old so-and-so and he can be difficult if he’s in one of his moods, and Mother might seem rather … well, I don’t mean she�
��s ignorant about things, but she really doesn’t take much interest in what’s going on outside the home, and —’

  ‘Darling, you are sweet,’ she said, and pushed her gloved hand affectionately between the car seat and the underpart of my thigh. ‘As if I care … I shall be very proud of you, and I’ll adore them, you’ll see …’

  The others were all there by the time we got to the house, and the place, rather to my consternation, seemed to be swarming with children, although there were really only six – Jean’s and Bert’s four sturdy boys, and Jack’s two girls, Sharon and Kathleen, and Sheila, I saw, was well advanced into another pregnancy, and Jean always looked pregnant whether she was or not, so the impact of it all on Helen in the confined area of that little house admittedly must have been rather shattering. (Years afterwards, when we were separating finally, she evoked that day in a bitter recollection which startled me for the particular detail she had preserved of it. ‘The place stank of a shameless fecundity,’ she said. ‘That’s what I really remember of it now, and I should have been warned then – damp patches on blouses and a stink of mother’s milk and urine and soggy napkins, and children crawling around your legs and dribbling, and jelly stains on bibs …’)

  Mother came to the panelled front hallway when we arrived, clearly a little over-awed, and startled too, I think, at how smart and mannish Helen looked, and quite obviously intimidated by her tallness, but she was very cordial and welcoming, and she held out her hand and this caused the first little contretemps of that very unsuccessful day, for Helen insisted on making an elaborate business of taking off her glove, and poor Mother was left with her hand sticking out and she didn’t know what to do with it, and she looked embarrassed and blinked at me nervously as if I could instruct her, and then she wiped her hand on her apron and put it behind her back and finally got out of the situation by leading us both into the front room. ‘You’d better make the introductions yourself, Davy,’ she said, and hurried off to the kitchen in obvious relief.

  They were all waiting there – Dad and Jack and Sheila and Bert and Jean and Marj; and Little Jack, Jean’s eldest, was belting out ‘American March Medley’ on the pianola, and some of the other kids were crawling around the floor, under the table, or building walls out of the pianola roll-boxes, and in the hush that marked our entrance – if anything could be called a hush with ‘Light Cavalry Overture’ continuing on the loud pedal – I made the introductions and Jack at once poured a tall glass of beer and handed it to Helen with a pleasant welcoming grin.

  Jean and Marj did the usual women’s thing of smiling watchfully over their ‘Pleased to meet you’ and ‘How d’you do’, and of running their eyes up and down the Donegal costume, the sheer gunmetal stockings, the shoes and the handbag, the blouse and the hair style, and after a few moments they made their excuses and left the room, ostensibly to help Mother bring things in from the kitchen, although it was quite obvious they were really withdrawing for a comparison of opinions on Helen and her clothes and her general appearance.

  The room had been rather hideously decorated with twisted paper streamers and coloured bells and lanterns of frilly paper, and pleated collars of coloured crêpe-paper had been arranged around the ferns and the flower-pots and what Mother always called the ‘jarderneers’, and in the centre of the table was a frosted birthday cake with no candles but a centrepiece of marzipan violets and a sugar ‘60’ (later to be preserved with all the other memorable fragments under the glass dome on the pianola) and the words ‘Happy Birthday to Mum’ flowing over the almond-flavoured glaze in pink hard icing; and Mother and Jean and Marj kept coming up from the kitchen with still more dishes to add to the prodigious bounty on the big table. My sisters, I suddenly realized, must have been baking and cooking and preparing for two whole days! There were dishes of cold chicken and ham and corned beef and brawn and pork sausage, there were salads and beetroot and radishes and spring onions, there were sandwiches of cheese and of egg-and-lettuce and meat and of lemon-butter for the children, there were plain scones and fairy scones and sultana scones and date scones, there were Banbury tarts and apple tarts and jam tarts and pikelets and queen cakes and rock cakes and éclairs and napoleons and lamingtons, there was sliced Madeira cake and sliced plain cake and sliced caraway seed cake, there were mince pies and sausage rolls and coffee scrolls, there was a plain cream sponge and a chocolate sponge and a coconut sponge and an orange sponge, there were jellies and wine trifles and neapolitan blanc-manges and fruit-salad-and-cream, there were bananas and passion-fruit and pineapples, there were cheese straws, and there were milk arrowroot biscuits and rusks for the babies.

  There was no organized point at which the party began, for in a sense it was a family gathering and not a party at all, but suddenly everybody was in the room at once, and seated, and passing dishes around, and Jack, the eternal barman, was pouring the drinks, and Jean was saying to her kids, ‘You just sit there where you are and keep quiet and wait till the grown-ups are served.’

  I think I saw them all more clearly on that birthday afternoon than I had seen them for years: I suppose it was that I was instinctively scrutinizing them for the faults or merits that I felt Helen might find in them.

  Mother and Sheila both sat back from the big table, Mother with her knitting and Sheila, her heavy rich ripe figure full and splendid in a grey linen maternity smock, relaxed in the big rocking-chair. The womanly things agreed with Sheila, motherhood and fertility and family devotion: to me she had grown much more beautiful since her marriage: her hands were clasped uninhibitedly across the swollen mound of her stomach, her pretty knees, as always, were exposed, her blouse was cut as provocatively as ever, the bold teasing wickedness was still there in her sharp quick Irish eyes … but now there were new and deeper qualities which enhanced all the younger attributes – a kind of mature vitality seemed to pump through her; one sensed the subdued vigour of fulfilment tempered by a powerful and deeply lodged serenity; it was almost as if the fruitfulness of her womb was like some great riparian flooding which gave a renewal of richness to all the other humours of the body. It always astonished me that Helen should have so instantly disliked her …

  Mother, naturally, was knitting the baby’s layette, because she had knitted all six of the babies’ layettes, and for the rest of her life she would go on knitting babies’ layettes. The bone needles moved with a magical flickering rapidity while Mother talked, watched, listened, smiled, blinked away behind her glasses, suggested a helping of chicken or of brawn, corrected a grandchild, or surreptitiously examined Helen Midgeley.

  When she was knitting or crocheting, Mother almost never looked down at what she was doing, unless she was working on socks and had come to the turning of a heel or something like that, so that she gave the impression of being enslaved to a completely mechanical mannerism, but this knitting and the crochet had become, in fact, a quite crucial factor in her existence: through these tireless flickering needles she had been able to sublimate all her problems and re-establish the importance of her being. At sixty she seemed very diminutive and almost entirely spherical, for she also knitted everything for herself, usually on thick wooden needles, and she had knitted herself into what was very nearly a cocoon of gruel-coloured wool. She knitted herself suits, she knitted herself dresses, she knitted herself shawls and singlets and petticoats and stockings. Dad, too, was now almost permanently swathed in knitted singlets and undershirts and pullovers in heavy cable-stitch, and cardigans in moss-stitch, and mufflers to help fight his bronchial cough.

  The reason for this was that in her pattern-books, in her bone and wood and metal knitting-needles, in her inexhaustible stock of coloured balls of Beehive Super-Fingering, in her crochet-hooks, Mother had found the symbols of a total security and had fashioned herself a kind of impermeable armour within which she existed absolutely safe from attack or doubt or harm. She had long since passed her change of life and had freed herself from the shackles of the flesh, and in the knitted self-sufficiency
of a new benignity Dad was powerless to hurt or intimidate or frighten her. What she had done, of course, was to subordinate her own ambitions and desires to an undemanding state of identification with the happiness and the needs of others, and when the needs did not exist she simply invented them, and in the interminable clicking and flashing of these ever-restless needles she went on fashioning in purl and plain the palisades of her own composure and security – in bed-jackets, twin sets, suits and dresses, mufflers, shawls, pullovers, cardigans, sweaters, mittens and gloves, ties, socks and bed-socks, quilts, layettes, tea-cosies, doilies, pram-covers, table runners, even stuffed woollen toys for the children – knitted golliwogs and clowns and monkeys and lions and camels and giraffes and elephants …

  Where Mother had achieved a new and permanent kind of stability, Dad’s grip on things had grown far more shaky, and he gave the impression that he was moving towards at least a partial disintegration.

  I remember looking at him on that birthday afternoon and thinking of the thistledown clocks of our childhood. He seemed a little like a thistledown clock, with some of the seed-darts blown away by the first puff, ‘One o’clock!’ and the breath already being inhaled for the second puff, ‘Two o’clock!’ … He seemed shrunken and far more frail than one had realized, and his head was quite, quite bald, and flecked with little brown liverish blotches, and there was a sort of lost, uncertain, futile pugnacity about him, as if he still might try to force a pretence but knew really that all the foundations of his angers had been undermined. His claws had been drawn. He was like an old circus lion, grown mangy and a little smelly and with no appetite for his bones. Mother kept tossing him cable-stitch pullovers and new cardigans and thick mufflers, and he went on shrinking inside them.