Twenty-Four
For more than six months Roger enacted a convoluted charade with his parents where I was concerned, and said he didn’t want them to know that we were involved with each other. He didn’t want his parents invading his private life, he said. The result of this was that I was required to keep my visits there to a minimum, which was difficult, since Jane asked me fairly often to visit her. I declined to visit them at Christmas for this reason, even though she asked my mother to come too.
‘We’re going to have a super time,’ she said coaxingly. ‘I’ve just bought a whole blue Stilton cheese, Katherine. It’s enormous. And my mother has filched an entire crate of the old boy’s best claret for us and sent it down by rail. Go on. We’ll sing some lovely old carols and make Roger play for us. Roger would love it if you came.’
‘I have to go to my aunt’s,’ I said, feeling puny and dishonest.
‘Oh, Katherine,’ she said. ‘Go on. Jake is so much more bearable at Christmas if I bring in an outsider. If you don’t come he’ll crab on at us about the expense and the singing and wish us well over the fast like a great killjoy. I need you to come.’ It was ridiculous.
When I did succumb to invitations, or when Roger deemed it acceptable for me to come, he kept himself rather remote from me, which I could not but find unnecessary and rejecting. Being blessed, as he was, with parents who, unlike most, would not have raised an objection to him having his girlfriend in his bed, he chose instead to bed me on bits of grimy sacking in the farmer’s outhouse or in the cycle-shed on a plastic mac, with my vertebrae grinding into the concrete. As a fundamental human need, warmth takes precedence over sexual urges. In both of these locations I was colder than I have ever been in my life.
‘I love you,’ Roger said, as I eased the butt end of an old Dutch hoe out of my shoulder blade. If Roger could have screwed me on a bed of nails he would have done it.
There was the time, one warm spring day, when he wouldn’t come to the sea. He had to work, he said. I sat in the back of the car, therefore, between Jonathan and Rosie, missing him terribly, enduring the scufflings of Sam and Annie who were in the luggage space of the Goldmans’ sizeable estate car exhuming Ladybird books from among the debris on the floor and arguing over ownership.
‘Think of a game,’ Jane said from the front seat. She had Sylvia on her lap. Jonathan had a game which Rosie knew too.
‘You take imaginary pot shots at passers-by,’ Jonathan said, ‘and you score points on a scale between one and ten.’
‘Yes,’ Rosie said excitedly, ‘and you get ten for old ladies in wheelchairs and eight for old ladies with a stick.’
‘There’s a correlation between decrepitude and high scoring?’ Jacob asked.
‘And also if you’re black,’ Rosie said. ‘You get ten for a black person who’s old, even if they aren’t in a wheelchair.’
‘There’s a correlation also between stigmatising ethnic attributes and high scoring?’ Jacob asked. ‘Is that right?’
‘That’s it,’ Jonathan said.
‘And able-bodied pinkoes are consequently hardly worth aiming at?’ Jacob said.
‘Right,’ Jonathan said. Jacob shrugged. Mock despair.
‘Far be it from me to repress you with the Liberal Conscience,’ he said. ‘Carry on.’ The game broke down at a pedestrian crossing, when everyone claimed to have aimed the first shot at an aged crone in a red wig who was wheeling five toothless pekes across the street in a pram.
‘Can you stop this, chaps?’ Jane said. ‘I find it moderately disgusting.’
‘Tell me,’ Jacob said, ‘do you discriminate within the category of decrepit black persons? For example, between people of African and Asian origin?’
‘You get more for Pakistanis,’ Rosie said. ‘We do it on the bus to swimming.’
‘Good God,’ Jacob said. ‘Do you by any chance also get a bonus for a Jew?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Rosie said. ‘You can’t tell Jews. They just look like ordinary people.’
‘Like what sort of ordinary people?’ Jacob said. ‘Like ordinary black people, for example?’ Rosie growled impatiently. She had not much inclination for sociological analysis.
‘You’re so stupid, Jake,’ she said. ‘Why are you so stupid?’
On the pebbles where we stripped to our bathers, I discovered that Jacob’s chest hair continued black and copious over his shoulders and all the way down his back. It grew in tight curls along the breast bone and straightened out over the shoulders where it lay in smooth two-inch lengths. I stared at him surreptitiously, like a kid sizing up a hunchback.
‘Say,’ Jane said, who had noticed my gaping, ‘you really are most immoderately and unnaturally hirsute, aren’t you, my husband?’
Roger, when I got back to him, was engaged upon modifications to his homemade stereo equipment.
‘I love you,’ he said.
There was the Saturday afternoon when Roger wouldn’t take me to the pictures. Jane and Roger had spent the morning over the Spring Symphony while I minded the little ones. I enjoyed it. The worst they did, after all, was to blob finger paint on the kitchen floor, which was not going to bother anyone, and Sylvia ate paint which was reassuringly labelled ‘nontoxic’. I enjoy children’s paintings. Sam, I remember, painted a series of snappish crocodiles with zig-zag teeth, and Annie a ‘female onion tree’.
‘Only the girl ones grow them,’ she said. ‘These aren’t the kind that grow under the ground.’
‘Janie,’ Jacob said over lunch, ‘how is it you play the piano all morning and leave this poor young woman to care for your children?’ Jacob was neurotic about Jane’s piano-playing. Perhaps he couldn’t bear to have her involved in something other than himself, or perhaps it turned him on to the point where he couldn’t bear it.
‘My children, are they?’ she said, bestowing her winning smile upon him.
‘Damn it, Jane,’ he said, ‘I’ve got work to do. All I know is you ask the child to visit you and then you use her like a domestic.’
‘I really do not think that I need you to advise me on how to behave towards my friends,’ Jane said. ‘Katherine is a childless young woman. Child-minding is not her whole life. It makes a pleasant change for a person in her situation to care for children for an hour or two. They’re nice children, aren’t they? What’s the matter with them?’ Jacob stared at her sceptically.
‘Jacob, for heaven’s sake,’ she said. ‘She hasn’t anything else pressing to do. Ask her. Don’t make use of her to get at me.’
‘Katherine, where is this tin-pot university of yours that gives you nothing to do?’ Jacob said to me. ‘If you’ve got nothing to do, you should be enjoying yourself.’
‘I was enjoying myself,’ I said. ‘I like your children.’
‘I like my children too, but I also know that they are boring and irritating,’ he said. ‘Roger, take the girl to the pictures. Let’s find out what’s on. Get me the paper, Sammy. The local one. It’s on the bathroom floor.’
‘I’m too busy,’ Roger said. ‘I’m seeing my tutor on Monday.’ Sam returned with the newspaper, holding it in damp crumpled lumps. It hung in his arms like a dead bird. Jacob took it and bashed it into shape with a vengeance.
‘Thank you, my sweet boy,’ he said. Jonathan leaned over Jacob’s shoulder and read delightedly from the front page of the local rag.
‘BLAZE FAMILY IN KITCHEN FIRE SHOCK,’ he read, sending up the prose. He and Jacob fell about sharing a favourite joke.
‘Ah, yes,’ Jacob said. ‘Our friends the unfortunate Mr and Mrs Blaze. Another shock for them. I wonder they aren’t catatonic with shock by now, eh, Jont?’ Rosie and I giggled girlishly. Jane smiled indulgently. Only Roger was unamused.
‘What’s funny?’ Annie said, agitating to be included. ‘Tell me what’s funny.’
‘Somebody’s house has burned down,’ Roger said. ‘Ask Jake why that’s funny.’ Jacob ignored him. He scuffled resolutely through the small ads for farm mac
hinery and bay gelding horses, past the wedding pictures and the furniture shops advertising sales.
‘Now then, Roger,’ he said, ‘Women in Love. Just the thing for Katherine. A film of Women in Love. Lots of heavy breathing among the bracken. Take her, Roggs. Don’t be such a snotty bloody tiresome swot.’
‘He’s not a swot, Jake. He’s merely interested in the work,’ Jane said.
‘I know,’ Jacob said. ‘I know. He can nevertheless take this presentable young woman to the pictures, can’t he? Work tonight, Rogsie. Down some black coffee at midnight.’
‘I cannot think that Katherine is a young woman who needs to have you tout for her escorts,’ Jane said.
‘Oh, for Christssake!’ Jacob said impatiently. ‘Jonathan, you take her.’
‘Neither Katherine nor Jonathan has a driver’s licence, Jacob,’ Jane said, ‘and Katherine doesn’t cycle.’
‘Then you’ll very sweetly get the car keys, Janie, and run them into town,’ Jacob said.
‘I won’t, as it happens,’ Jane said. ‘This has nothing to do with me, or with Katherine. You are simply becoming manic in the face of a project.’
‘Jont,’ Jacob said, ‘can you drive that bloody car?’
‘Sure,’ Jonathan said.
‘Jacob,’ Jane said ominously, ‘he hasn’t got a licence.’
‘And tell me, Jont. Can you park the thing?’ Jacob said.
‘Of course,’ Jonathan said. ‘Jane knows I can. She taught me how to do it.’
‘Jacob,’ Jane said, ‘he hasn’t got a licence. Will you stop behaving like a teenage delinquent?’
‘Take her,’ Jacob said.
‘If Katherine will come with me,’ Jonathan said. I had never seen him so decently humble. Jacob clapped a hand impatiently to his brow and sighed.
‘Katherine,’ he said sarcastically, ‘will you go with my son to the pictures? You don’t have to marry him, you understand? Just to sit next to him for an hour or two.’ I tried not to explode with laughter, because Roger was suddenly passing me messages of black intensity with his eyes.
‘I’ll go,’ I said. Roger got up and walked out. The dark indigo patch on his jeans, where he had removed the butterfly, was glaringly obvious to anyone with eyes. I knew immediately that Jacob knew whose butterfly it was that I had on my book-bag.
Half of Jonathan’s grammar school class appeared to be at the cinema that afternoon judging by the craning of necks which went on to verify that it really was Goldman there, in the flesh, with a glamorous bird they’d never seen before, and to establish exactly what it was he intended to do with her once the lights went out. Somebody graciously hurled a paper ball at me, which bounced off the front of my shirt. Jonathan, having acquired a bag of popcorn, slouched stoically in his seat until his neck disappeared into the collar of his reefer jacket and did nothing, other than offer me popcorn, which I refused. One could have heard a pin drop as the men wrestled naked before the fire. Even with the text behind me, I was convinced that one of them would fall in. They looked so vulnerable with their absurd, pendant genitalia and bald buttocks. They had none of the nobility of wrestling stags. There was a nice homosexual mime at the end which reminded me of John Millet.
The other half of Jonathan’s grammar school class was hanging loose on the town as we came out.
‘Hey, Goldman,’ one of them called bawdily as we moved off, ‘what have you got that we haven’t got?’ Jonathan glared over his shoulder.
‘Charm,’ he said ferociously.
‘Serenade her, Jonathan,’ one of them said, below the belt, in a mimicking falsetto voice.
‘Get lost,’ Jonathan said, in his manly baritone. It occurred to me then that, among the indignities Jonathan had survived as the child of cultivated and arty parents, he had evidently survived having to sing male alto at school.
‘You didn’t have to go to the pictures with my brother,’ Roger said when I got back. ‘I don’t believe that you love me.’
Twenty-Five
The day Roger gave me up for his pianist I had spent two hours waiting for him in a draughty hall where he was rehearsing the King of Hades in Monteverdi. It was within days of my final exams. The three of us went thereafter to the Science Museum, where I caught my destiny in the innuendo of ganging up. While his young woman gave her attention to a showcase of limestones, Roger diverted me on to the upper-floor landing beyond the skeleton of the hanged man. The thing was as efficient as a premeditated putsch. Exorcising his own guilt, no doubt, and uneasiness, he made me a careful articulate pyramid of my shortcomings, which was anything but kind. It said, in short, that, weighed in the balance, I showed up trivial. That I covered my notebooks in Florentine wrapping-paper like a Girl Guide on a nature trail, that I cared more for knitting than logic, that I made a brazen virtue of all that was unfortunate, vulgar and semi-educated in my own history, that, frankly, my mother’s plaster ducks left him feeling ill, that I fondled my earrings while he, Roger Goldman, played the violin, that I laughed too much, that in that very Science Museum I had, that very day, spent the bulk of my time admiring the stencil designs on the iron vaults, ‘as if’, he said, ‘as if the place were housing an annual craft exhibition run by the Women’s Institute’.
I think that before he turned and walked away from me I said that I was sorry. In this life there are those that apologise and those that do not. I am a person who says sorry if a passer-by stands on my foot. I thought, first, crazily, that I ought to tell him that my mother’s ducks were china and not plaster; that my mother, whose chocolate cake he had not disdained, was my property to criticise, not his. Then, as the tears spilled in silence down my face, I thought that I would do anything, anything to get him back. That I would do algebra in sackcloth for the privilege of touching the hem of his hand-on Sea Scout jumper. Suddenly, as I saw him reach his showcase of limestones, my only thought was to get my stuff from his room and go before they came back to it; before Roger could encounter the disfiguring squalor of my tears, and to go quietly, without fuss. I was no good at rage and indignation. It had never been encouraged in my house. I had never told my parents, for example, to fuck off, or thrown garlic bread across the dinner table. These things were not licensed in my house. I did not pursue the option, therefore, of following Roger across the floor to his limestones and dismantling his personality, as he had done mine. Of screaming at him, gratifyingly, that he was an arrogant and joyless youth, rejoicing righteously in the fate of the damned; scrambled, punitive and jealous. Might we have hammered out something and moved on together? Perhaps not, though I will never know. Perhaps all Roger’s words said nothing more than that he wanted his pianist in his bed, not me. Perhaps I was always more in love with him than he with me. To this day I cannot watch Roger Goldman shake hair from his eyes without some pain. He is an absurd, abiding, adolescent passion, which I resolve by being seldom in his company.
In Roger’s bedsitting room I took down from the cupboard the travelling bag with which he had come back from Kenya two years before. Into it I stuffed my mother’s whistling kettle, which he had on loan, my two patchworked sofa cushions with which I had adorned his room, and an Aran sweater of my own making which we had shared. The routine petty division of property. In the train I registered over and over, through a film of tears, that the bag still bore an East African Airways luggage-label on which was written, in block capitals, R.J. GOLDMAN. It put me in mind of the laundry basket full of old wellington boots. It evoked for me, vividly and painfully, an image of Roger at the kitchen table in the Hamlet hat, raising his eyes for the first time to encounter mine. It made me, quite simply, want to die.
After that, the nights were the worst. In the daylight I occasionally talked the thing over with a girlfriend or in my own mind, working my misery into a rational shape which gave an hour’s relief. But alone, at the end of the day, the painful fact of Roger was still there, impinging like the appalling and sudden scream of brakes. Sometimes I did not sleep at all. Twice on these occ
asions I tiptoed downstairs and sat wrapped in a blanket on a tree-stump in that rigid little suburban garden, watching distant inky clouds blow across the moon, watching the relentless progress of each one towards its own disintegration, as it crossed the moon, into dispersed and tortured fragments. I cried a lot, but only to myself. I telephoned the speaking clock in the small hours for the sound of a voice.
‘At the first stroke it will be four forty-two and ten seconds,’ said the voice. ‘Peep, peep, peep.’ I never telephoned Roger. I slipped politely and obligingly out of his life without a word of recrimination. Once, at a news-stand, I went so far as to buy for him a picture postcard of a snarling female tiger, feeling that in that creature’s rage I could take some vicarious, impotent stand. I never posted it. I wrote my final exams in an almost indifferent stupor, drugged up on purple hearts, wondering what Jacob would say to me if I failed. It had ceased to matter to me for myself. Wondering would the British taxpayer rise up, with just clamour, for the return of his money? After that I did what I hadn’t done for a long time. I telephoned John Millet and told him.
Twenty-Six
John Millet’s house in Greenwich can be approached by rail from London Bridge. The trains rumble high over Southwark, haunt of Geoffrey Chaucer’s pilgrims, and lure one with the emotive promise of Rochester, Chatham and Gillingham at the end of the line. It was the romance of the platform announcement which gave me the idea of going away. John was lunching with a friend upon German wine and onion quiche made, of course, by himself.
Brother of the More Famous Jack Page 9