Brother of the More Famous Jack

by Barbara Trapido

  For Stan, Elaine and Susan

  Contents

  Introduction

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Praise for Brother of the More Famous Jack

  Introduction

  Rachel Cusk

  I read Brother of the More Famous Jack as an undergraduate student at university. It introduced me to the possibilities of the contemporary female narrative voice. And that unmistakable voice has stayed clear in my ear over the two intervening decades, so that I can still repeat numerous passages or observations from the novel now, entirely from memory. There are many, many books I admire to which I could not pay anything like that sort of compliment.

  The reason, I suppose, is that Brother of the More Famous Jack spoke to me. The story of an idiosyncratic young girl with literary tastes and a sense of humour, making her way through the world of men and finding that somehow, in her grasping of the nettle of romance, she has stung and stung herself into utter sorrow and submission, was of such personal interest to me that the novel in its entirety seemed a mere extension of this heroine’s interests, and my own. It was life itself as a literary enterprise: it was the personal as picaresque.

  We first meet Katherine standing in the foothills of experience, fresh from the suburbs and possessing not much more than a talent for self-adornment and a university place to study philosophy: we leave her years later at its peak, happiness. I wondered whether Katherine herself gave her life this readable form. Or do novels merely mirror the shape of fate, its twists and turns obscuring but never vitiating the hope of arrival? In Katherine’s rocky progress I saw evidence of both. In her world of thwarted love and feeling I found readings and rereadings of the novelistic concept of determinism. And the title itself, with its resounding literary reference cheek-by-jowl with its consolation for the hapless, the hopeless, the perennially – in matters of the heart – mistaken: at nineteen or twenty, I felt that in Barbara Trapido I had found a new and extremely sympathetic friend.

  But it is not unusual to see the art of writing and the art of living intertwined in an author’s first work. What is known as the ‘coming-of-age’ novel is often the tentative debut of both the writer and her heroine, who jointly attain different forms of competence in the sphere of human affairs before the reader’s eyes. Brother of the More Famous Jack is such a meditated example of this genre that it could almost be said to be a commentary on it: indeed, its clever interpolations of the subject of reading and writing, and of culture generally, make this ambition clear. From the first lines it is evident that we are to be given an account of inexperience that is the very opposite of tentative, that is as seasoned as its own rich repository of reference, and it is here that the novel makes its chief claim to originality. Few writers as talented as Barbara Trapido can wait very long before cracking open their store of material and hearing their authorial voice begin, however clumsily, to speak; and consequently, there are few modern tales of first love and its disillusions that are as thoroughly realised, as brilliantly lewd, and as hilariously satisfying to men and women of all ages as this one.

  Among other things, the story of Katherine, only child of a prim Hendon widow, and her dealings with the Goldman family, an eight-strong, lavishly obscene, bohemian tribe captained by a kindly Jewish intellectual, is a portrait of a particular England: the middle-class England of unsung diversity and moral confusion, whose denizens are forever struggling to establish definitions of right and wrong in everything from art to sexual politics. This is an England where Marxist ideology meets suburban net-curtain values, where feminism meets housewifery, where a great deal of soul-searching goes on as new generations grapple with established social and familial roles and responsibilities. It is also an England whose comic literary possibilities have been inexplicably neglected over the years. This is part of what makes Brother of the More Famous Jack such a very funny novel. It is the humour of the newcomer, the outsider – as its author, transplanted from South Africa, once was – and she revives the English gift for social comedy with a newcomer’s relish.

  But Brother of the More Famous Jack is first and foremost a book about destiny. It follows Katherine into womanhood, marriage, exile, motherhood, and indeed tragedy, and it implacably brings her back again to where she began. What seemed like a journey is in fact a slow process of recognition. It is one of the characteristics of youth – and particularly of early adulthood – that experience is formative; that events have a significance that feels in some sense fixed or preordained, as though in the first exposure of our fantasies and illusions to the world’s reality, a kind of hardening or permanence is conferred on them. This is perhaps our first – and sometimes only – experience of the notion of ‘plot’, of a course of events that are not random but meaningful, tutelary, even moral. Later, we learn that we gave these events their meaning, but at the time it feels the other way around. Brother of the More Famous Jack captures precisely the mixture of the carefree and the indelible that forms the atmosphere of this transaction. It is in our innocence, or in the loss of it, that we are formed in ways that can be reexamined but not undone. This novel teaches us to reread our lives, to look again, and to understand what escaped us the first time.

  One

  Since I have no other, I use as preface Jacob’s preface which I read, sneakily, fifteen years ago, when it lay on the Goldmans’ breakfast table, amid the cornflakes:

  ‘I cannot in good conscience give the statutory thanks to my wife,’ it says, ‘for helpful comments on the manuscript, patient reading of drafts or corrections to proofs, because Jane did none of these things. She seldom reads and when she does it is never a thing of mine. Going by the lavish thanks to wives which I find in the prefaces to other men’s books, I deem myself uniquely injudicious in having married a woman who refuses to double as a high-grade editorial assistant. Since custom requires me to thank her for something, I thank her instead for the agreeable fact of her continuing presence which in twenty years I have never presumed to expect.’

  It was a marriage characterised among other things by the fact that Jacob was alternately infuriated and enchanted by Jane’s resolutely playing the country wife. There is no doubt that it influenced the paths that I chose to tread.

  I met Jacob Goldman when he interviewed me for a university place in London, during my final year in the genteel north London day school to which my mother had sent me. My mother, the wi
dow of a modestly comfortable local green-grocer, had done so at some sacrifice to herself in the hope that I would acquire the right accent and be fit to mix in the right circles. As parents are destined to be disappointed, I believe she was disappointed that her decision ensured instead that I acquired a collection of creditable A levels and became one of Jacob’s pupils. Jacob – an impressive and powerful left-wing philosopher up from the East End – talked to us with a marvellous and winning fluency about the transcendental dialectic, in a huge cockney voice full of glottal stops, like a plumber’s mate. He was the Professor of Philosophy in that labyrinthine Victorian edifice and quickly became my father figure and cultural hero. I had read Lord David Cecil’s references to his ‘rooms’ at Oxford, but Jacob interviewed me in nothing one could dignify with such a word. He interviewed me in what appeared to be an aerated cupboard.

  ‘I’ll be frank with you,’ he said. ‘I had you up here because your Head’s report on you is so unfavourable, it leads me to suspect that you may be somewhat brighter than the Head. You may of course be no more than an opinionated trouble-maker. Which do you think you are?’ He fixed me under his black horsehair eyebrows with what I took to be smouldering animosity. It was, of course, well before the day I saw him ask into his kitchen a collection of rain-soaked Jehovah’s Witnesses and offer them cups of tea, for he was the kindest of people. He had hair to match his eyebrows sprouting, intimidatingly, like sofa stuffing from the neck of his open shirt. I must have shrugged in an unprepossessing manner. How could I put across to him how it was with me? How much I was driven timorously by a desire to please and yet found myself stubbornly unable to do so by obedience to any values but my own? Since my values were not shared by those around me, I couldn’t possibly win. The lack of recognition, I think, made me show off in an attempt to force it from those in authority over me.

  ‘Sometimes I show off,’ I said.

  ‘Me too,’ Jacob said.

  I was, in a minor way, a trouble-maker at school, always polite, guilty of little more than reading James Joyce under the desk in religious education classes, truanting from all sporting occasions and disregarding the finer points of the school uniform: balking, in short, at those aspects of school which seemed to me peripheral to the educational process. Education, as I had always hoped for it, is what I got from Jacob. Jacob clearly identified to a degree with trouble-makers, having, I discovered much later, come before a kindly Tory magistrate once in the course of a troubled youth. The magistrate’s Toryism had taught Jacob, I think – with Toryism and other forms of villainy – to hate the sin and not the sinner. A thing he was very good at.

  ‘Tell me what you like to read,’ he said. He smoked his disgusting proletarian cigarettes which he lit from a large box of household matches and gave me the floor. Somewhat to my retrospective embarrassment, I remember telling him, among other things, that I thought Wordsworth had ‘possibilities,’ that I thought Jesus Christ had been a Utopian Socialist and that I didn’t like the sex in D.H. Lawrence. It is a tendency I have, now kept in check, to compensate for my natural timidity with odd flashes of bravado.

  ‘The wife doesn’t care for it either,’ he said, which surprised me not a little. ‘She considers it not so much sex as indecent exposure. But is there not – forgive me, since this isn’t my cabbage patch – is there not an element of zealous pioneering about it? Is it not a little ungrateful to climb on the shoulders of the past and sneer?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I don’t much like having to be grateful for things.’ Jacob took this with an encouraging suppressed smile.

  ‘To be sure, I’ve never been hit with the Chinese jade,’ he said. ‘I’ve had the Heinz tinned oxtail thrown at my head and miss, but it doesn’t have anything like the same symbolic power.’ I went on then to make heavy weather of the only philosophy book I had ever read – a small Home University Library publication of Bertrand Russell’s which I had bought in the Camden Town market, I suspect to annoy my mother, who believed that I was becoming a blue-stocking and frightening away nice young men. It was I who was frightened of men, of course, but it worked two ways. As Robert Frost says, ‘There’s nothing I’m afraid of like scared people.’ I told Jacob then that Emma was my favourite novel. He allowed himself to remark at my expense that there was, at least, no sex in it. Sex, had I but known it, was one of Jacob’s favourite subjects. I blushed and said hotly to cover myself, ‘Of course there’s sex in Emma. Mrs Weston has a baby. It grows out of its caps, remember? You don’t get babies without sex, do you?’ Jacob produced a wonderful Rabelaisian laugh and volunteered some coffee which we acquired down the corridor from a dispensing machine.

  ‘Listen, Flower,’ he said when I took my leave, ‘people who come here do so on the back of the British Taxpayer. I expect my people to work. If they don’t I do my best to have them thrown out.’

  During the summer vacation I received notification – Jacob’s ultimate compliment to me – that the department would have me on three Es.

  Two

  Not long afterwards I met a man called John Millet in Dillon’s bookshop.

  ‘Just the jam and the poetry?’ he said into my ear. I didn’t know who he was. He approached me in the stacks as I browsed. He spoke BBC English and wore a slightly preening twisted smile. In my string bag, over my shoulder, I had a jar of cherry jam and a paperback John Donne. I blushed deeply, embarrassed by the cliché of his good looks, because John Millet looked like a man in an Austin Reed shirt advertisment. He was clad in stylish pale linen and had a squashy packet of Gallic fags jutting from his breast pocket.

  ‘Careful I don’t make you blush again,’ he said, relishing my embarrassment. ‘It doesn’t match the clothes you’re wearing.’ I was dressed on that day in an outsize purple football jersey which I had worn to my interview with Jacob. I wore it, as was then the fashion, well over half way up my thighs. Pulled over one eye I had a small crocheted string hat which I had made myself. I have a great love affair with clothes. They are consumingly important to me and I often pull off a successfully Voguey look. Once when I was crossing Tottenham Court Road a team of Japanese photographers began to click their shutters. I was more than chuffed that they should have risked the traffic for my image. I like crafty clothes especially. I like shepherd smocks and intricate knitting. I can knit prodigious landscapes into my jerseys. I can do corded piping in seams and beaded embroidery. I like to make quilted cuffs and bodices.

  John Millet that summer was wearing his middle age with a casual grace. That afternoon he drove me along the Embankment to the Tate Gallery in his white Alfa Romeo, which he had recently driven across the Alps. He was an architect just returned from four years in Rome. Lined and brown, he stood among the smooth pebble-white Henry Moores. In the basement cafe with its charming murals he fed me doughnuts and talked about the Portland Vase. Enclosed by the rustic idyll of the walls, watching the smoke rise from his Gauloise, I thought, romantically, of a goat-boy playing the flute. Three days later he told a hairdresser in Sloane Square how to cut my hair.

  ‘Like this. Like this,’ he said.

  I watched my hair drop in pale clods to the floor. The effect, I had to admit, was astonishing. With my almost nonexistent breasts and my narrow hips, I looked alluringly hermaphrodite. I came out holding my head high, reaching for the gallant curtleaxe I felt upon my thigh.

  ‘That’s better,’ he said, running his thumb down the newly exposed groove in the nape of my neck. He was considerately restrained always in his touchings. We dined in an Italian restaurant where before my eyes he devoured a daunting plate of snails with a squeeze of lemon, while I wrestled with my pasta. My understanding of foreign foods at that time was limited to the conviction that paprika in the stew made it Hungarian and tinned cocktail fruits made it Caribbean.

  ‘Like this,’ he said, demonstrating with fork and spoon, Roman-wise. When I achieved, with this technique, something the size of a cricket ball wound on to the end of my fork he was c
harmed by it as a symptom of my innocent youth.

  ‘It’s not good enough, you know,’ he said, eyes smiling. ‘Florentines manage it using only the fork. I’m spending a couple of days with some friends in the country,’ he said. ‘Will you join me?’ Olive oil on my chin was enough to make me feel daringly bacchanalian.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, yes.’ From the deserted offices of his architectural partnership in Hampstead he telephoned his friends.

  ‘Jane,’ he said wooingly. ‘My sweet and lovely Jane, may I bring a friend?’ I sat perched on the desk beside him, hearing every word. His friend had her mouth full of marbles and replied after a pause with caution.

  ‘You know I don’t like people, John,’ she said. ‘Would I like your friend, do you think?’

  ‘Definitely,’ John said. ‘I guarantee it.’

  ‘And tell me, John, if I may make so bold,’ she said, ‘are you and your “friend” together or apart?’ John smiled at me reassuringly as I glowed with the excitement of no retreat.

  ‘Together,’ he said.

  My mother coincided only once with John Millet. The day before we left for Sussex. He caused her a burst of subsequent indignation.

  ‘He’s queer,’ she said, priding herself on her instinct for nosing out sexual deviance. ‘The world is full of nice young men. Why do you go out with an old queer?’

  Three

  The house, as it presents itself from the road, is like a house one might see on a jigsaw puzzle box, seasonally infested with tall hollyhocks. The kind one put together on a tea tray while recovering from the measles. We are in the Sussex countryside, not far from Glyndebourne. We are in Virginia Woolf country. Mrs Goldman is in her vegetable garden, but leaves it and comes over when she sees us. She puts down a gardener’s sieve containing potatoes and a lettuce and takes John’s hands warmly in her own.

  ‘Darling John,’ she says. ‘How truly lovely to see you. You’re as handsome as ever, but I have to tell you you are going grey.’ Her voice is a stylish combination of upper-class vowels and tongue-tied sibilants.