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.
Nine
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.’
Ten
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.’
Eleven
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.
Bl
ess 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.
‘You are cheeky, Jont,’ Jane says without concern. ‘I consider it part of your charm, but you cannot expect others to do so.’
‘The bloody fool asks me to paraphrase “heaven’s cherubin, horsed upon the sightless couriers of the air”,’ he says, thumping about. ‘What’s the fucking good of paraphrasing it? It sounds better the way it is.’
‘What did you say to him, Jont?’ Jane says.
‘But don’t you agree, Jane, it makes nonsense of it to paraphrase it?’ Jonathan says.
‘What did you say to him, Jont?’ Jane says insistently.
‘I said if he didn’t understand it he shouldn’t be doing it with us.’
‘And?’ she says archly.
‘He said if I was so clever would I like to take the class. So I took the class. A bloody sight better at it I was, too, but he made me stop after about ten minutes because it showed him up. He’d better not try and be funny with me again,’ Jonathan says. This is bigger and better trouble-making than I ever dreamed of. Silently, resentfully, I hand him the crown.
‘You watch it, Jonathan, that’s all,’ Jane says. ‘Neither Jake nor I will be on our knees before the Head, pleading on your behalf when he decides to throw you out.’ She turns to Roger. ‘The young ladies ‘phoned for you, Roger. The ones with the tennis court. They want you to play tennis with them tomorrow.’ Roger shrugs.
‘They play tennis in white togs,’ he says nastily, ‘like walk-ons for Cinderella on Ice.’ I quail before this snobbish indictment and thank God that I always hid in the library during games. If I had played tennis I would almost certainly have done so in white togs.
‘Go on, Rogsie,’ Jonathan says, as Jane makes us tea. ‘I’d go for the one with the legs.’ Roger says nothing. He goes out to fetch his violin. ‘I have to go now,’ he says to John, who gives him the car keys.
Twelve
That evening, in the garden, Jane forgives me for picking a half-grown cucumber which I mistake for a courgette. Potatoes come out of the ground white, I discover. The brown skin forms afterwards. Jacob joins us on his return, in the company of Annie and Sam whom he has met at the gate. He has the Listener in his hand and a parcel of cheese wrapped in vine leaves for his wife.
‘For you, my love,’ he says. ‘Not for anybody to share with you.’
‘Not even you?’ she says. She is touched. ‘Oh, Jake.’
Wrapped in the Listener he has a Dillon’s bag which he hands to me. In it is a copy of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.
‘Take a holiday from The Great Tradition,’ he says. I thank him, profusely, being honoured by the gift.
‘A Young Person’s Guide to the New Jerusalem, eh, Jake?’ Jane says. ‘I’m rather glad I got the cheese. I’m too old to be converted.’
‘I’m coming out simultaneously in paperback,’ he says to her. She rejoices and kisses him.
‘Oh, wow,’ she says. ‘Oh, Jake, wow.’
‘Come out with me tonight,’ he says. ‘Leave the children, leave the guests and come out with me. Hold hands with me at the pictures.’
‘I have to tell you, Jake, that I’ve been having fairly regular labour contractions this afternoon,’ she says.
‘Christ,’ he says. ‘That’s it then for the next six months. Or can one hire a wet nurse? Who needs an au pair? Why is the world full of au pairs? A wet nurse is what we need.’
‘I’m sorry, Jake,’ she says, ‘I’d better not go anywhere tonight.’
‘Sweetheart,’ he says, accepting the inevitable. He turns to Annie and Sam. ‘Jane will have a baby for you tomorrow. Rosie will be more than pleased to see you two lose your place as the family babies.’ Jane laughs a little.
‘She will, won’t she?’ she says. ‘Poor Rosie.’
Jane makes the children’s supper that evening, leaning against the table periodically, to breathe deeply as her uterine muscles contract. She has ‘phoned the midwife and the doctor from the kitchen telephone. I find it all more exciting than I can say and am astonished at how cool she is.
‘I thought people gripped a bed and screamed,’ I say.
‘That happens later,’ she says. ‘Later on is when I go to pieces. I’ve never been one of these insufferable people who does it all right.’ Jacob and John are watching the television news in the playroom. Jonathan is doing some homework at the kitchen table. He had spread a newspaper over the mess and has his Latin on top of it. I engage Rosie and the twins in a game of Snap on the kitchen floor, but Rosie’s perception is, of course, too quick for the others. Nor is she old enough yet to indulge their urge to win.
‘Snap!’ she shouts relentlessly. ‘Snap! Snap!’ The babies storm her to grab back their cards. Jane despatches the twins sharply to the playroom to join Jacob before she goes into another of her spasms.
‘Jont,’ she says, ‘I’m going to be sick.’ Deftly, Jonathan grabs a large antique jug from the shelf beside him and inverts, on to the table, a small pile of paper clips, trading stamps and string before handing it to her.
‘Heave into this, Ma,’ he says, which she does.
‘Get Jake,’ she says, when she can raise her head. ‘Tell him I’m going to bed. Tell him there’s puke on the table.’
‘Snap!’ Rosie shouts. ‘I’ve won.’
Roger comes home with his violin in its case.
‘Hello,’ he says. He turns a chair round and sits on it astride the back. He puts his violin on top of Jonathan’s Latin. Rosie is doing a handstand against the kitchen door.
‘Jane is having her baby,’ she says, glad to be first with the news. Jonathan comes in.
‘Mother is giving birth,’ he says. He picks up the jug of vomit and goes to the door with it. ‘Cheers,’ he says, disgustingly. We hear him flush it away in the downstairs loo. Roger says nothing but the event puts him on edge.
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ he says. We coincide with the midwife on the path to the front door. I eye her bag for signs of crochet hooks and lead pills.
‘Which one are you?’ she says heartily to Roger. ‘Did I deliver you?’ In spite of their differences, the Goldman children
have the look of having come off the same conveyor belt.
‘I am Myself,’ Roger says witheringly. He has a powerful line in animosity. He pulls the Hamlet hat further over his eyes to hide from her. We walk across a field to the right of the house towards a stream. Beyond the stream, which we cross, is a rather morbid little chicken battery belonging to the neighbouring farm, and, alongside that, a blackberry wilderness where we pick and eat.
‘Jane says you can get blackberries without thorns,’ he says as he examines a scratch on his wrist. ‘She’s going to grow them.’
‘Have you always lived here?’ I say. He shakes his head.
‘Since I was five,’ he says. He hands me some blackberries which he has picked from beyond my reach. ‘We used to live in Belsize Park. Where do you live?’
‘Hendon,’ I say. ‘I take my cat to the vet in Belsize Park.’
‘We used to live on Haverstock Hill,’ he says. I grow silently desperate, thinking that Roger will be gone in four days and all we do is have these dead-end conversations. Suddenly Roger says, ‘Once Jont and I were picking blackberries in Oxford. In my grandmother’s garden. We tried an experiment to prove the existence of God, because the grandparents had been converting us. We were about four and seven, I think. We kept muttering abuse to the Holy Ghost to see if the wrath of God would come down. The neighbours heard and told on us. I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life. My grandfather tried to make us pray for forgiveness. I wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t.’
‘Isn’t praying embarrassing?’ I say. ‘Isn’t it excruciating?’
‘At least C of Es do it with a book so that there’s an end,’ Roger says. ‘Quakers go on for ever when the spirit moves them. Our headmaster was a Quaker.’ He gives me another handful of berries.
‘Pentecostals do it to a Wurlitzer,’ I say. ‘Get moved, I mean. I heard them on the radio.’ I walk six feet in the air for noticing that I have made Roger laugh. As we walk back to the house, as I try not to break a leg in my silly shoes, I think admiringly that I have taken berries from the hand of one who does not balk at performing experiments on the Almighty.
Brother of the More Famous Jack Page 5