Brother of the More Famous Jack (19 page)

‘Jesus, child,' he says, ‘eleven weeks? That's yesterday. Well, cry. You have things to cry about.' I get by with a quick controlling sniff, a swallow and a blink, wondering why the shrink never had the humanity to say that to me. That I had things to cry about.

‘You've covered the Lady Gregory chair,' I say. ‘The Celtic Twilight chair. I like to do that kind of embroidery.'

‘Ach,
yes,' Jacob says carelessly. ‘Jane found a humble young woman who undertakes these things.'

‘Like Little Dorrit,' I say. Jacob smiles at me.

‘What a girl you always were for the apt literary reference,' he says. ‘I ought really to have turned you over to the Little Dorrit crowd when you came to me all those years ago. I suspect you never had much enthusiasm for abstract reasoning.'

‘It's a showy habit I've got,' I say. ‘To be always quoting poetry and stuff. Some of us use our brains, and some of us use our memories.'

‘Not at all,' he says, ‘it's charming. You were always charming. Remember that day you came to see me? Apple for teacher. Sixpence for Oxfam. “Of course there's sex in
Emma.”
I telephoned Jane as soon as you left, you know, and told her about you. It was right up her street. “Have her,” Jane said. “Grab her before some place like Girton gets her.”'

‘Don't embarrass me, Jacob,' I say.

‘Best legs I interviewed that year,' he says. ‘It
was
your legs I was interviewing, wasn't it? Do you remember that remarkable purple mini-dress? Oh Katherine, child, a dead baby. For God's sake, what happened?'

‘Don't know,' I say. ‘I thought she was having her first night sleeping through. I went to congratulate her.' I stuff the corner of one of Jacob's sofa cushions into my mouth to muffle my oncoming choking gasp. ‘Oh Jesus God, Jacob. It was so bloody awful.' Jacob has an arm around my shoulders for a good while, saying nothing.

‘It gets better, you know, as time piles up,' he says eventually. ‘Last year, in Berlin, I walked the streets. No trouble. Even the one I'd lived in.' It is the first time he has ever made a reference to that particular loss to me.

‘You'll be surprised,' he says. ‘One day some kind and sensible man will come along and give you another baby.' I don't like to tell him that I can probably not have another child.

‘Are you here to stay,' he says, ‘or just visiting?'

‘I don't know,' I say.

‘Stay,' he says. ‘Get yourself a rest. Get a nice job somewhere. East Finchley, that's the place to be. Some nice place like that.'

‘You mean, and find a nice English husband?' I say. Jacob laughs, admitting to it.

‘Why not?' he says. ‘A nice reliable English husband.'

‘You're the only one of those that I know,' I say, ‘and you're a foreigner. I turned thirty-one last week, Jacob. I'm too old.'

‘Happy birthday,' he says. ‘Yes, I can see you're getting wrinkles, but they're very nice wrinkles. What is life but a progression from pimples to wrinkles, but for the getting of wisdom?'

Jacob's books line the walls from floor to ceiling. In superior panel-backed shelving it is all there, as of yore, plus additions. The long runs of academic journals, the
New Left Review,
the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, Isaac Deutcher on Trotsky. All the German heavy stuff, the metaphysics and lots of lovely poetry. I think of Jacob as a great reader of poetry, having seen him once hurl his Heinrich Heine deftly across the room at Rosie's head when she knocked over his coffee with an ill-timed cartwheel; having seen him in a deck-chair of a Sunday, reading
Paradise Lost
and call it ‘relaxing'.

‘Did Jane find a humble young woman to make your bookshelves?' I say.

‘A man,' Jacob says. ‘Rosie's boyfriend. One of Rosie's many boyfriends. Rosie's men are all either carpenters, brickies, plumbers or bloody floor-layer's apprentices. She has a strong proletarian bias in her choice of men. She also prefers them to be black. I don't know what's the matter with that girl. She's prettier than is good for her. Too many options, I think. Is that your trouble too, perhaps?' Of Jacob's children, Rosie and Roger were always the only really pretty ones. It amuses me to sit opposite Jacob's rows of revolutionary books and listen to him grumbling about his daughter's working-class leanings.

‘And Annie and Sylvia?' I say. ‘What's with them? Do they like brickies too?'

‘Annie is a sensible young woman,' he says. ‘Annie is a great comfort to my old age. Sylvia, of course, is a child. Annie sculpts at the art college in Hornsey. She lives with a collection of nice youngsters in a house with hazardous floorboards. They work very hard. They eat a lot of brown lentils. They make a lot of love. She's a splendid girl, my Annie. Big. Not one to accost in a dark alley. She keeps all these damned chisels in the bib pockets of her overalls.' He gestures in the region of his chest. ‘She's taken herself to the Women's Self-Defence class, has Annie. She knows how to kick a man in the face.' He points proudly to an object on the floor. ‘That's a thing of Annie's,' he says. A life-size clay head, it is, by the plate-glass window. It has a spider plant growing out of its hollow cranium. ‘That creature with the green hair.'

‘And Sylvia?' I say.

‘Sylvia is thirteen and goes to a boarding school,' he says.

‘Boarding school?' I say in disbelief. Lacrosse sticks in the hall. A vision of Mam'zelle in the curl-papers. ‘You send your daughter to boarding school? What boarding school? Mallory Towers?'

‘Bedales,' he says without shame. ‘She likes it. She gets on well there. The comprehensive seemed to be doing her no good.' He catches my eye and laughs. ‘My head for the block, is it?' he says. ‘Quite right. More power to the axe-man. Do you know, Katherine, Roger won a scholarship to one of these filthy public schools once. Jane set it up when I was too busy to pay any attention. She has this bee in her bonnet about music. She wanted him to get more of it. I refused to let the poor child take it up. I had both of them united against me in fury for days on end. Neither of them would talk to me. I got enough black looks from that blue-eyed little Mafia to make me expect ground glass in my coffee. It didn't shake me. One is so high principled in one's youth. I made the little bastard pedal off in his cycle clips to the local grammar school every morning.' I laugh in spite of myself at this cheery and wholly unrepentant account of
patriarchal tyranny, I suspect because I get pleasure from the thought of Roger being stuffed in the eye.

‘Shame on you, Jacob,' I say. ‘You were always a pig to Roger.'

‘Ach,'
Jacob says. ‘He didn't know how lucky he was. He was a sweet-looking kid, my little Roger. Put him in a surplice and he'd have had half the Upper Sixth up his backside.' Jacob, who is in general well acquainted with the ways of the Enemy, is unshakeable in his conviction that not much goes on at public schools other than cold showers and buggery in the choir stalls.

‘But here I am,' he says, ‘spending my own money on sending this pampered baby of mine to Bedales. Roger was, at least, deserving of an elite education.'

‘Bedales is different,' I say comfortingly. Jacob is amused by my tactfulness.

‘Don't be kind to me,' he says. ‘It's the acceptable face of privilege.'

‘What I want to know is, how do you pay for it?' I say. ‘I mean, pardon my asking.'

‘I get paid too much,' he says. ‘All this money and no expenses. I'm a landlord, of all things, Katherine. People pay me rent for the house in Sussex. Jane had an old aunt who died and left her a house in Cadogan Square. Nice old creature. Full of advanced causes from yoga to nude bathing. The house of hers, it more than paid for this place, of course. I'm planning to sell the Sussex house in a year or two and buy a garage for my Sam. He likes to fix cars.'

‘Fix cars?' I say. Another proletarian bias.

‘He appended himself to a motor mechanic in Brighton when he was sixteen,' Jacob says. ‘The chap sends him off on day-release courses to the college of FE. He's a nice kid. Disturbingly sane, however. Always knows where he's going. The only one in the family, other than Roger, who knows how to get the back off the washing-machine. Now then, Katherine, are you hungry? Shall I wine and dine you somewhere?'

‘Somewhere really Ritzy,' I say, ‘since you're so rich. I've been working hard these years, Jake. I've spent ten years teaching in a language school. I'd love some glamour.'

‘Glamour you always had,' Jacob said. ‘Direction you had less of. Yes, come along, sweetheart. Let's eat elegantly. Bestow on me some lovely vicarious glamour. It's not a thing my wife goes in for, as you know. The wretched woman has refused for thirty-odd years to pierce her ears for me. What do you make of a woman like that?' I laugh.

‘I might get used to you over the waste-disposal unit,' I say, ‘but never to Jane with pierced ears.'

‘Tell me, child,' he says, as we walk down the street, ‘why did you never marry that boy of mine? Suddenly you were off. Like a bird. Might it have been a satisfactory alternative, do you think? A north Oxford wife? Pedalling off to the Bodleian in the rain to take the master his reader's ticket? Lots of jolly children at Phil and James or Pip and Jimmy, or whatever the hell that damned school is called? Not for you, perhaps, but I always thought that you cared for him. Did you not, in fact, care for him?'

‘He wouldn't have me, Jacob,' I say firmly. ‘Why do you pick my brain? Why don't you ask Roger?'

‘Roger has never really talked to me, to tell you the truth,' he says.

‘I take it he's still in Oxford?' I say. ‘He never went back to

Africa?'

‘He's still there,' Jacob says. ‘Bright lad, Roger. It suits him, Oxford does, I think. He got a very good first, you know. Instant college fellowship. He researches in the Mathematical Institute.'

‘I spoke to his wife on the ‘phone,' I say. ‘She gave me your number. How long has he been married?'

‘Couple of years,' he says. ‘Four, come to think of it. A nice young woman. A proper wedding in the college chapel, my dear. Rather lovely, as a matter of fact, these Christian rituals. He's taken to the Church, in recent years.'

‘The
Church?'
I say, with my soul in tears for my bold iconoclast. My Roger, who lobbed defiant stones into the sea. My Roger, who put down the Holy Ghost so effectively at the age of six.

‘Oh, yes,' Jacob says, ‘and sings in the choir, of course. So you see, he got the surplice after all.' The image of Roger on his knees is an obscenity to me. I almost cry.

We eat in Hampstead. Lots of veal and cream and stinky cheese. Jacob smokes foul smelly cigars over coffee in place of his foul smelly cigarettes in an effort to stave off the decay of the flesh.

‘Now tell me about Jonathan,' I say. ‘Did Jane ever get him to Oxford, or is he still walking the Pyrenees?'

‘Yes, of course she did,' he says. ‘She bribed him. With my money.' He laughs. ‘I'm still paying it off, as a matter of fact, on the twenty-five-year mortgage. Modern languages. Another first, I may say. A family tradition, the Oxford first. Perhaps Oxford gives them away.'

‘Perhaps you've got very bright children,' I say. ‘Crumbs, Jake, you could paper your bathroom with first-class degree certificates.'

‘No, no,' he says modestly. ‘Only those two. The rest of my children are not that way at all. Jonathan isn't academic either, for that matter, he's just highly intelligent. The whole damn thing was a waste of his time. It simply delayed his going to Europe.'

‘And where is he?' I say. ‘I got a letter from him once which suggested he was in Athens.' Jacob smiles indulgently because, as always, Jonathan can do no wrong.

‘In Kilburn,' he says, ‘living on the dole and writing a novel. He can't throw it off, I suspect. It's my guess that he likes it too much to let the publishers have it. Yes, he spent some years in Athens. He came back here two years ago with a Greek child bride and a lovely dark-eyed baby. The wife, not surprisingly, upped and left for home after a couple of months, taking the baby with her. She couldn't adapt. Lunacy, the
whole thing. Typical Jonathan. He had got the child pregnant. A student, she was, in the school he was teaching in. Father a well-off shoe manufacturer. He spent some time living with her people but couldn't survive it and brought her to London. A nice bourgeois merchant's daughter in need of a solid, dependable husband.'

‘You make her sound like me,' I say. Jacob throws up his eyes in disbelief.

‘Anything less like you would be hard to imagine,' he says. ‘You – apart from being slightly crazy – are a traitor to your social group, Katherine, I'm happy to say. Like Jane. Like all of us, come to that. It's my belief the poor sweet boy was too nice not to marry her. He was received into the Greek Orthodox Church for the purpose of marrying her. The whole damn thing lasted all of eighteen months.'

‘They're a churchy pair then, your two older sons,' I say, thinking to myself, Wouldn't he, wouldn't Jonathan screw around and get schoolgirls pregnant, the little swine.

‘I'm very fond of that young man,' Jacob says, ‘as you may remember. Perhaps you ought to take him on.'

‘Jesus, Jacob, why don't you offer me Sam as well and be done with it? Why not Sam? What's wrong with Sam?' I say, getting rattled. Jacob enjoys it.

‘Sam is too young for you,' he says, ‘and Sam is too straight. Have Jonathan.'

‘I'll tell you this, Jacob,' I say, ‘I've had enough of your sons. To coin a phrase, right now I need your Jonathan like I need a hole in the head. I'd sooner have the one you've got lined up for me in East Finchley.'