Brother of the More Famous Jack (6 page)

‘God, you're like a bloody storm-trooper, Jake,' he says. He does the accent. ‘Prizes for ze first man to vash himself in his own soap,' he says. A remark which adequately exceeds the bounds of good taste. How much it does so, I realise only when I discover from Jane, as our acquaintance evolves, that Jacob's father disappeared in Nazi Germany – a fact which causes me to deduce at the same time that Roger doesn't balk at wearing a dead man's hat. A martyr's hat. He runs, as it were, not only the ordinary risk of leaving it on the bus, but the more profound risk of catching death by contagion.

‘I've done your dishes, Ma,' Jonathan says, while John Millet is out of the room. ‘Everything except for the sieve. I'm not picking that effing muck out of the sieve for your poncy geriatric friends.'

‘They're not my dishes, Jont,' she says. ‘Did you catch anything today?'

‘I've given up fishing,' Jonathan says. ‘It's cruel. Ask her.' He nods rudely in my direction. Jane smiles.

‘Go on,' she says, ‘I don't believe it. In a suffering world, Katherine?'

‘Because some things are worse doesn't make it less cruel,' I say. Perhaps it is a foolish debate to carry on with the wife of a man who has worn a yellow star in his time.

‘Think of the milk in your coffee,' she says. ‘It was snatched from a suckling calf.'

‘Don't talk to her,' Jonathan says to me as he moves to leave us. ‘She murders greenfly.' He almost collides with Roger who re-enters the room. Jane looks at him, watching his face with surging maternal tenderness. Jane Goldman is manifestly a great admirer of male flesh in general, but has a special thing for Roger. He is undeniably lovely. She strokes his cheek as he sits down on the table beside her.

‘Mother,' he says peevishly, ‘if Jake is taking the car to London tomorrow, how am I getting to my music lesson?' She sighs impatiently, wanting to love him but not to solve his problems for him.

‘You'll resolve it, Roger,' she says indifferently. ‘People played the violin before they drove motor cars.'

‘It's twenty miles,' Roger says. ‘Why can't he take the train? He always does.' Jane smiles at him knowingly.

‘Villainous man, your father,' she says, ‘to use his own car when it suits him. He needs to get about a bit tomorrow, that's the point. But, even so, if you tried asking him civilly he might leave it for you. He hasn't got three heads. Why do you never speak civilly to him?'

‘I hate him,' Roger says. ‘He snipes at me.'

‘I'll tell you something, my sweetie,' she says, with her hand again on his cheek. ‘If you talked to me the way you talk to him, I wouldn't snipe at you. I would black your eye. Now take Katherine to watch the television. I'm tired of you.' Roger sulks, feeling betrayed by her.

‘Is my car any good to you, Roger?' John Millet says, generously. ‘I'm going into Brighton tomorrow to look at a site, but I should be back by one o'clock.' Even Roger, infant wrestler with the Infinite, is not immune to the charms of a white Alfa Romeo. He stops sulking and looks up.

‘I take it that the left-hand steering won't trouble you?' John says.

‘No,' Roger says. ‘I have to go at four, if that's all right. Thank you very much. But are you sure you don't mind?'

‘Not at all,' John says. ‘such a small favour after all. Come with me to Brighton, if you like, and give it a try. I thought I might take in the chapel on the way back. The one with the Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell paintings. You know?' He fixes his elegant mind for a moment on walls adorned with fruit and flowers, as we sit under the Goldmans' Japanese paper lampshade, covered in fly spots and dust. The paper is beginning to come away from the wire frame and is spiralling gently downwards towards the table which it overhangs.

‘How very kind you are,' Jane says appreciatively. ‘Take Katherine too.'

‘Now I'm going to take a spirit-lamp into your shed and mend some of your chairs,' he says. He kisses her cheek. ‘Before one of your children breaks a leg,' he says.

Over our heads, Jacob is bawling voluminously, amid great hilarity, that he will lock in the broom cupboard anyone found out of bed after a count of five.

Roger takes me to the television. The Goldmans, being cultivated people, own a small and rubbishy television set which they banish to the children's playroom. The playroom is a devastation of Lego bricks and jigsaw bits. Faded children's drawings hang with curling edges from a pin-board alongside Rosie's swimming certificates which announce that she has satisfied the County Education Officer that she can swim a hundred yards, five hundred yards, one mile, and that she can also save lives. The playroom chairs are those uncut moquette iniquities patterned in red and grey blobs which one expects to find abandoned by disused railway sidings. I dare say that whatever the Goldmans' furniture says about them, it also says that they are articulate enough to contradict what it might attempt to say.

Jonathan has got to the playroom before us. Shamelessly he is reading his way through the
Girls' Crystal Annual
for 1964. Roger turns on the television. This being Sunday night the line is relentless low-brow moral uplift. It offers us interviews with people whose Christian faith has made possible for them the conquest of adversity. Roger sucks uneasily at his teeth throughout a resolutely positive account of paralysis from the shoulders down.

‘Jesus, Rogsie,' Jonathan says. ‘Switch off this bloody drivel. You really go for all this gangrene and snot disease, don't you?
No wonder you dream that your teeth fall out.' Roger laughs, colouring a little, nervous and lovely. He fiddles with the knobs to discover alternatives. They are the Royal Ballet in
Les Sylphides
and Ava Gardner in an ancient safari drama.

‘We'll have this,' Jonathan says. ‘Let's for God's sake not have Culture.' Ava Gardner's beauty, decked out in khaki, crosses the decades to us, even on the Goldmans' small screen.

‘I'll bet you this is Kenya,' Jonathan says, with his eyes on Ava Gardner's boobs in drill cloth. ‘They're all dressed up like boy scouts. Your clothes are going to be all wrong, Rogsie. You'll have to ferret about in the Oxfam shop for a bush ranger's hat.' Roger laughs again, tossing his lank dark hair from his eyes.

‘I'm going to miss you, Jont,' he says. ‘You're the only person I'm going to miss. You're the only person I know who is worth talking to, come to that.'

‘Balls,' Jonathan says. ‘And another thing. Mother is going to have me playing the flute double time once you and your bloody fiddle are out of the way. Or is it your violin? Why did you produce all that crap at lunch time, incidentally?' Roger shrugs.

‘I felt like it,' he says. ‘Both Jake and that Millet get on my nerves.'

John Millet is alone in the kitchen next morning when I come down, having exposed his face both to his electric razor and to the morning dewfall. He has taken a country walk before breakfast with his sky-blue velour pulled on over his naked skin. The Goldman car is crunching on the gravel outside, because Jane has come back from delivering children to nursery school and to junior school. Jonathan has gone off earlier on his bicycle.

‘Did you sleep well?' John says to me, meaning to amuse himself slightly at my expense as Jane comes in. He gives me a wild flower. A flower for the virgin.

‘Woodsage,' he says.

‘Woodspurge,' Jane says, correcting him. ‘Is Jake still asleep? I left him asleep in our bed with Annie. Did you hear us prowling last night? Annie was sick three times. I think she has swollen glands.'

Jacob, when he comes in, grumbles ostentatiously that he has not slept at all and gropes for the coffee pot. This is a manifest lie since his wife has told us she left him asleep.

‘I shared my bed with two women,' he says. ‘One of them pregnant and the other vomiting.' It is a relief, I find, with the passing of time, to watch Jacob operating without the company of John Millet, who, for all that he is sexually ambidextrous, represents a threat to Jacob in his devotion to Jacob's wife and in his waspish high breeding. I am, to an extent, a pawn in Jacob's consequent displays of virility.

‘How goes it with the conceptual framework this morning, sweetheart?' he says to me, as he slaps his proofs down on the table. What is one supposed to reply to such a question?

‘Fine, thanks,' I say.

‘Her conceptual framework is fine,' he says. ‘Where's the bloody
Guardian?
Have those bloody lazy children not delivered it?'

‘Oh come on, Jake,' John says coaxingly. ‘You couldn't be through with yesterday's news yet.'

‘Yesterday's news is what I'm after,' he says. ‘It's what I get every day in the
Guardian.'
I find him on the whole a creative and inspired grumbler. Give him the CBI, the Queen Mum or the bourgeois press and with any one of them he will grumble new hypotheses into being. I like him enormously. More than anyone I know.

‘Have some breakfast, Jake,' Jane says. ‘Roger has got the
Guardian.
He's got it upstairs. Leave him alone.' Toast and coffee for Heathcliff, and marmalade.

‘Why is it none of my socks match, Jane?' he says. ‘Why is it other men's socks match? Do they have nicer wives?'

‘Perhaps they wash their own socks,' Jane says. ‘You ought to go now, Jake.'

‘Now remember that child, Janie, will you?' Jacob says, as he begins to make a move. ‘There is a
sick child
in the house. Can I rely on you to remember that?' Roger comes in with the
Guardian
and with his transistor radio. He is listening to a string symphony. ‘Roger, Annie is ill,' Jacob says. ‘She needs attention. Will you ensure that your mother gives her some? Will you get her to call the doctor if it's necessary?'

‘Is that Purcell, Rogsie?' Jane says.

‘William Boyce,' he says.

‘Of course,' she says. She has occasionally a togetherness with him which reminds me wistfully of a time when my mother and I cried together during
The Sound of Music
when Julie Andrews went back to the nunnery. I look at the first page of Jacob's proofs, being a natural reader of other people's papers.

‘I cannot in good conscience give the statutory thanks to my wife,' it says, etcetera. ‘Without her, no books would be to me worth writing.'

‘Your proofs,' Jane says, as he kisses her goodbye. ‘Don't forget your proofs.'

‘Good God,' he says, slapping his forehead. ‘My proofs.'

Roger Goldman walks through the sea-front kitsch like a man in John Bunyan. The pedlars of human thighs modelled in candy, of corny hats with smutty messages, of Brighton rock, do but themselves confound. Such is his strength while I lust after hot dogs. All around us, families on holiday are pursuing relentlessly their forms of child-rearing. Educated parents lecturing babes in push-chairs, improvingly, at the appearance of every wave and seagull. Humbler parents indulging in that peculiarly Anglo-Saxon form of parental sadism which involves threatened smacks and offers of sweets. Toddlers all itching to get out of buggies as the sea invites. ‘Shut up, Stephen, you've had your crisps.'

Roger is wearing his butterfly jeans and a voluminous collar-less shirt belted at the waist. He has the martyr's hat tucked into his belt. We walk well beyond the inhabited stretch of beach and come to rest eventually on some rather oily pebbles. Roger lobs aspirant stones into the sea with a strong bowler's overarm which makes me catch my breath.

‘Are you glad you've left school?' I say.

‘Of course,' he says. ‘Aren't you?' I try to put across to him how heady I was with joy the day I left school. Perhaps I am a bit of a fool. I tell him how my best friend, my dearest and best giggling companion, and I stuffed our hankies in our mouths during the last absurd rendering of' Lord Dismiss Us' at the final
assembly; how we carted home a great quantity of accumulated litter from our desks in a plaid blanket which we carried between us down the hill. How we stuffed our school hats into a letter box and ate chips in the street, desecrating our uniforms.

Bless us all our days of leisure,
Help us selfish lures to flee,
Sanctify our every pleasure,
Pure and spotless may it be.

‘I bicycled straight home with Jonathan,' he says. ‘There wasn't anybody at my school I cared to celebrate with. My music teacher gave me a glass of terrible sherry.'

To meet up with John we walk up through the Brighton Lanes where I am too shy to stop and look in shoe shops lest Roger think me trivial. John, who is waiting for us, treats us to steak and chips like kids on a boarding-school outing. All my outings with him have this air of semi-lecherous avuncular treat. It could be, given his versatility, that he is savouring the prospect of either one of us. As he goes off to visit the men's loo the waiter brings me, as ordered, an apple pie with cream.

‘Nothing more for you, laddie?' he says coaxingly to Roger.

‘I'm not “laddie”,' Roger says haughtily. ‘I'm Roger Goldman.' I start to giggle.

‘Laddie!' Roger says to me in disgust when the waiter has gone. ‘It sounds like dog food.' United suddenly by our delicious youth and the folksy word the waiter has chosen to emphasise it, we both get very high on uncontrolled laughter.

‘Oh dear,' John Millet says patronisingly as he comes back.

The chapel is beautiful, hidden as it is among primeval green, being, as it is, more artfully lush within. John takes some photographs with a flashlight. It is as though the harvest festival were taking place on the walls. When I look down the nave, I see
that Roger has mounted the pulpit. A thing I would never presume to do.

Roger drives us home with John Millet beside him in the passenger seat. We get back to find Annie is completely recovered and pottering in the kitchen with Jane. Jonathan, who is in his awful school uniform, is railing against the new English master who has put him down for detention, he says, for being cheeky.