‘Make us some coffee, Flower,’ he says benignly.
‘Make it your bloody self, you schmuck,’ Jonathan says.
‘Sweet Jont,’ Jacob says, ‘be kind to us.’ Rosie takes a whole plum out of her mouth to air a profundity before putting it back in again.
‘Jonty is showing off,’ she says. Jonathan laughs good-humouredly.
‘Okay, Jake,’ he says. ‘I’ll make it, but only if I can make instant, mind? I’m not going to stand over that cocked-up filter. It takes for ever.’ Jacob licenses what to me is an alarming amount of blasphemy, insubordination and defiance. He seems to set it up. It’s as though he were all the time taking his children through an assault course in defiance. Jane by contrast is surprisingly school-marmish and she clearly believes in child labour. She could surely rise to a dishwasher, but she prefers to use her children. She believes that a row of children chopping vegetables is a better thing than a machine.
‘Make the coffee, Jonathan,’ she says icily. ‘We’ll have the real thing and brought to us in the sitting room.’ Jonathan goes with the alacrity of Mustardseed. ‘Stack the dishes, Rosie,’ she says, ‘so that Roger can wash them.’ She is more demanding with Roger than with any of the others. Before the day is out I see her accost him where he engages in chewing grass on the front lawn and say to him, ‘Go and have a bash at the G Minor, Roggs.’
‘The G Minor is hard,’ Roger says.
‘Of course it’s hard,’ she says, working on him with her powerful elitism, ‘but not altogether beyond the likes of you, my darling.’ I find this more than rigorous, coming as I do from a world where Purcell is a washing powder.
John Millet, over the coffee, talks lyrically about Rome. About the bell tower near his flat in Trastevere, about the fading gradations of mud-brown paint on the house fronts, about huge stuffed tomatoes in the piazza restaurants and the macho roar of Fiats. The images incorporate themselves into the composite romantic blur of my impressionable aspiration. Thereafter, while Jacob consumes what remains of the afternoon working on his proofs, John Millet reads the Sundays in a deck-chair with his shirt off. I read Dr Seuss books to Sam and Annie, and Rosie borrows my earrings to try on upstairs. Jane plays the Suite Italienne with Roger, and Jonathan on his bicycle sets out to take his fishing tackle to the stream. With the heat of the day he has taken off his jeans and is wearing fraying shorts and nasty, algae-ridden tennis shoes. He gets to the gate but then wheels round, hunched over his racing bike which he controls with one hand since he has his fishing rod in the other. He stops in front of me.
‘Want to come fishing?’ he says. He has a bold stare and big legs. He is the kind of schoolboy one avoided sitting next to on the bus home from school. ‘You could use Jane’s bicycle,’ he says.
‘She might need it,’ I say.
‘She can’t use it at the moment,’ he says. To be sure, Jane would have some difficulty squeezing herself in behind the handlebars in her condition. ‘If you’re scared, we can walk,’ he says, ‘I don’t mind.’ Silently, I curse Jonathan for plucking out the truth and handing it to me with such offensive frankness. I last rode a bicycle at the age of nine. I fell off and broke my arm the day after my father died. Jonathan and Roger, by contrast, are the kind of people who use bicycles with the accomplishment of Vietnamese peasants, capable of carrying children on crossbars and luggage carriers – and simultaneously bringing home great loads of shopping in back-packs. The kind of people who inspire a belief in the future for intermediate technology.
‘I’d need to find you some shoes you could sludge around in,’ Jonathan says, eyeing my strappy T-bars. I find it difficult to look back and realise that the single most important factor among my reasons for turning down Jonathan’s offer was the prospect of having to put on hand-on wellington boots from the laundry basket.
‘I think I’ll just stay and listen to the music,’ I say. ‘I think catching fish is cruel, actually.’ Jonathan throws me a look of impatient contempt. ‘Spare a tear for the bait,’ he says, as he takes his leave.
Seven
At six o’clock in the afternoon Jane brings us tea and toast on the grass. Jacob emerges from his work room for this pleasant ritual and Jonathan is back from his fishing. Rosie’s friend, who disappeared at the lunch-hour, has reappeared to continue improvements to the play tent. Roger, who is flushed from the effort of playing his violin, makes a tangram with a slice of toast as he stretches on the grass.
‘Give it to Rosie,’ Jane says. ‘See if she can put it together.’
‘Give it to Katherine, Roggs,’ Jacob says. Roger hands me the plate, lying on his belly in the grass, stretching out an arm. He watches me as I do it. It takes me some time, but I do it. John Millet applauds me. Roger averts his eyes self-consciously as I look back at him. On the bum pocket of his Levi’s he has a brightly coloured embroidered butterfly.
‘We oughtn’t to be letting John know that us Goldmans eat pre-sliced, steam-baked bread,’ Jane says gaily. ‘John is a believer in superior food.’
‘So are you, Jane,’ John says. ‘You cover it under a veil of inverted snobbery.’
‘True enough,’ Jane says contentedly. ‘Each of us to his own necessary snobbery. We ought to make some music, all of us, before the day is out.’
‘You have been doing nothing else all day,’ Jacob says, ‘but making music and cultivating your garden.’
‘Producing food,’ Jane says. ‘Bringing you lunch and tea. What should I be doing, Jake? Taking a course in psychology at the Brighton Polytechnic? Earning extra money to buy you elegant sweaters like John’s?’ Jacob turns to fix her with a mixture of caustic resignation and love.
‘I heard all that this morning,’ he says. ‘I don’t need a replay. All I’ve got to say is if there’s any more music brewing in this house, John and I are off to the pub. The rest of you can get your rocks off Nymphs and bloody Shepherds. A highly suitable pursuit, on reflection, for women and children of a Sunday evening.’ He is sitting on the grass at her feet with his head between her knees. She is in an upright wicker chair behind him. Having put down her tea cup, she is running her hands through his hair.
‘As if we don’t all know you can’t sing in tune,’ Jonathan says, rising to him obligingly. Jane smiles. ‘Quite so, Jont,’ she says. ‘There’s never much to be gained from having Jake sing, other than the odd International Brigade song, got out of tune. Sweet husband, why not take John to the pub for an hour? Then he can make us amends and do us some lovely supper on your return.’
‘With the greatest of pleasure,’ John says.
They go, Jacob and John, in a spirit of attractive but excluding male camaraderie, snatching up cigarettes and keys.
‘We’ll take my car,’ John says. ‘There’s just the two of us.’
‘Call that thing a car?’ Jacob says. ‘I call it an ego trip.’
We sing ‘O Worship the King’ in four parts unaccompanied. It would be like being back in the school choir, were I not so dazzled by the sonorous depth of Roger’s voice. Jane, who stands beside me, begs me to overlook her sibilant S. Then Roger and Jonathan sing for us. Two beautiful, mournful songs full of black despair and crystal tears. Christall Teares. The songs cause me ever after to speak the name of John Dowland with reverence.
‘Here,’ Jane says. ‘These.’
‘I can’t sing tenor,’ Roger says, declining the first with too much nicety for the spirit of the occasion.
‘Oh for Christssake, Rogsie,’ Jonathan says, coaxingly. ‘Jane sings sounding as though she needs a new bloody washer in her larynx.’
‘Thanks, Jont,’ Jane says.
‘I can’t sing tenor, that’s all,’ Roger says. ‘You sing it.’
‘Okay, okay, I’ll sing it,’ Jonathan says. ‘Give us the bloody thing.’ He raises his hands like a stage pedagogue. ‘Quiet, quiet,’ he says preciously. ‘Absolute quiet please. Stick your chewing gum behind your ear, Rosie.’
Go christall teares
Like
to the morning showers
And sweetly weepe
Into thy Ladyes brest.
The second is a duet. Jonathan, to my very great surprise, flukes his voice up into a piercing alto for this item. I have never heard a post-pubertal male sing like a girl before and it confronts me at first like the shock of meeting a man in drag at a street corner. Down and arise goes the refrain. Down and arise I never shall. With their respective appearances they contradict the song in its picturesque melancholia. Roger with his jaunty butterfly appliqué’d to his bum pocket. Jonathan with his hairy rugger legs and sockless feet. Both of them so manifestly on top of the heap and very likely to stay there. Jane plays the piano for them. She turns to Roger when they get to the end.
‘Very nice, chaps,’ she says. ‘Get the babies out of the bath will you, Roggs,’ she says, delegating incorrigibly. As he complies, Jonathan fits his flute together, making trial blows over the mouthpiece. Rosie blows a wobbly minuet and shakes spittle out of her descant recorder. The little Goldman twins come in then, standing damp at the gills in their cotton-knit pyjamas, and listen to Jonathan, who plays them ‘Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son’. They try to join in but forget the words, which makes Jane smile.
‘Darling babies,’ she says, allotting them a moment’s casual attention. They appear on the whole to be the successful product of benign neglect. Jane is nothing if not eclectic and has her family make chamber music of the ‘Yellow Submarine’ on the flute, violin, piano and descant recorder. They end prematurely in laughter.
‘You’re too good for the rest of us, Rogsie,’ she says. ‘How do you bear with us?’ From Roger’s expression, it is clear that he does so only with difficulty.
Eight
Fish fingers and beans from a tin is what Jacob crams into his three youngest children upon his return. It is his weekly gesture towards domestic involvement. He processes both food and children very fast, giving orders like a genial Scout master. I observe him at it, because I am in the kitchen participating in John Millet’s prodigious soup-making. He makes a soup with Jane Goldman’s excess tomatoes, donning her butcher’s apron and pushing up his sky-blue wristbands to reveal the bronzed sinews of his lovely wrists. He requires, for his creation, the addition of ground rice, egg yolks, a great deal of grinding in a stone mortar and some careful sieving. Jonathan and I are delegated to dip strips of bread first into a pool of melted butter and then into Parmesan cheese which Jane draws out of her larder in a large caterer’s pack. These are then toasted in the oven and are to be eaten with the soup. Roger is at the table, once again in the cap, reading a Swahili phrasebook.
‘Jont,’ he says, ‘listen to this. “Boy, I asked you to bring all my bags. You have brought me only three.”’ There is more levity in his dealing with Jonathan than with anyone else. Jonathan laughs.
‘Jesus,’ he says.
‘Who writes this drivel, Rogsie?’ Jacob says. He takes the book from his son and examines the fly leaf. ‘German missionaries,’ he says in disgust. ‘What can you expect?’
‘The sieve is most important,’ John Millet says to me. I have done with the bits of bread and have taken on the sieve. ‘Don’t put it back on the heat, child, or we’ll have scrambled eggs.’
‘Twiddled egg soup,’ Jonathan says, playing the fool. Jane is sitting at the table with Roger, looking tired and pregnant. We eat at the kitchen table when the children have finished, and all agree that the soup is quite delicious.
‘These infants must go to bed,’ Jacob says. ‘And you too, Mrs Goldman. You look like a corpse. You bang at that klavier all day when you should be in bed with your feet up.’ He initiates the process of getting the children to bed by enacting an evening burlesque, making jokes and uttering threats which creates a crescendo of boisterous indignation. He is a great prima donna over precisely which bedtime stories he will and will not read. He vetoes everything the little ones propose.
‘Ameliaranne Stiggins!’ Annie screeches excitedly.
‘Ameliaranne Stiggins?’ Jacob says, affecting stern, incredulous disgust. ‘Backwards is the only way I will consent to read Ameliaranne Stiggins. Now John here – he’s your man. He’ll do you Ameliaranne Stiggins translated into Italian.’ John smiles. ‘Give us “Mrs Stiggins sat bump upon her favourite chair” in Italian, John.’ John doesn’t rise to it.
‘Children are your fix, Jake,’ he says, ‘not mine. I’ve left my cigarettes in the car.’ He leaves to get them. Jane selects Jonathan to wash the dishes.
‘Come on, troops,’ Jacob says. ‘Go on ahead of me. Ten seconds is all I need to finish my coffee. We’ll have the Just So Stories or the E. Nesbit.’ Surprisingly, Jacob is a traditionalist, it seems, when it comes to child literature. He swats his twins on the rump with Roger’s Swahili phrasebook. ‘Move,’ he says. ‘The lash falls heaviest on the last man to brush his teeth.’ The tiny ones go giggling up the stairs. Rosie lingers in the doorway.
‘I’m not a man,’ she says, ‘so I don’t have to go.’
‘Go, my love,’ Jacob says. ‘School tomorrow and your mother is grinding her teeth.’ Rosie manifestly gets on Jane’s nerves.
‘I want to show you my handstand,’ Rosie says.
‘Why are you such a bloody nuisance?’ Jacob says affably. She sits down in the doorway.
‘I’m too tired to walk,’ she says. ‘Carry me.’ Jane is beginning to get visibly tense around the mouth. Jacob gets up and slings her across his shoulder like a sack.
‘Come on, Flower,’ he says. ‘And go to bed, woman. You’re pregnant.’ Roger, who suffers no slight degree of revulsion for Jacob’s extrovert goings on, has quietly slipped away. Jonathan, scuffling conspicuously in the sink, appears to take it on in kind.
‘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 su
its 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.
Brother of the More Famous Jack Page 4