‘We didn’t wait for you,’ he said. ‘You were rather vague about your plans.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I look terrible, John. Don’t look at me.’ Because I knew appearances mattered to him, I felt that I was an affront to his aesthetic senses. John smiled quite kindly.
‘Boyfriend trouble is only temporarily disfiguring,’ he said. ‘Sit down. Alex,’ he said, ‘Katherine.’ He handed me an engraved hock glass containing chilled wine. A great pleasure to have in the hand.
‘Katherine is embroiled in a poor little tottering affair with Jake Goldman’s son,’ he said. ‘Remember Jake? My neighbour in Belsize Park? Stunning wife. Beautiful eyes. Yes?’ He made a fluent cosmopolitan gesture, drawing a circle in the air and lightly kissing his fingers. An ironic, romantic, harlequin gesture. His friend had taken off his suit jacket and was sitting in his waistcoat and pinstriped shirt sleeves.
‘I never met him,’ he said, ‘but I remember the woman. A handsome, tired young woman, with a mewling toddler.’ John gestured again, spreading his hands to denote, with resignation, the condition of mortality which besets us all.
‘The “mewling toddler” is now the cause of Katherine’s scorbutic pallor,’ he said. ‘We are none of us getting any younger, Alex.’
That afternoon we walked alone along the waterfront, he and I, to the naval college where he expanded upon the decorative use of symmetry in wrought iron.
‘I thought I might go to Rome,’ I said.
John lent me a book called Italian without Toil. It came with a set of records. Then he wrote letters on my behalf to two of his friends, employing, in my interest, his stunning left-handed writing which Jacob had previously slandered. He gave them to me to post.
‘Cheer up, Katherine,’ he said. ‘That pretty little Goldman is not the only man in the world.’ I replied with simple commitment that he was for me. John, having given me a glass of brandy, sat opposite me for an hour or so and sketched me as I sat on his sofa, chronicling, in brown chalk, a phase of my unhappiness. Then he got up and ran a bath. He came back and handed me a large porridge-coloured bath towel. To resist would have seemed gauche. It was when he entered the bathroom to get me out, had wrapped me in the towel, with my arms pinned to my sides, and propelled me towards his bed, that I remembered the spanner.
‘Jacob says–’ I said. I was not going to tell him about the spanner. Merely to gabble nervously, to break the dignity of his hypnotic magic, that Jacob had said – as he had in a light moment – that John slept in black sheets. John put his index finger over my lips.
‘Shshsh,’ he said. And very quietly, very strangely, I thought, he said into my ear, ‘You will say after me, “Jacob is the butcher’s grandson.”’ I found this so perverted, so bizarre, so ridiculous, that I pulled away from him in ungainly, childish confusion and scrambled clumsily for my clothes.
‘I think I hate you,’ I said.
In the train I opened the book. ‘Non e difficile I’italiano per un francese,’ it said, encouragingly. ‘Italian is not difficult for a French person.’
Twenty-Seven
Three weeks later I stole like a thief into the Philosophy Department to return some books. I had no plan to wait for my results, but simply to shake the dust from my feet and light out for the territory, as Huck Finn says. John Millet had set it up for me to teach in a language school in Rome and to stay with friends of his until I found my feet. I had been avoiding Jacob like the plague, but I ran into him in the vestibule on my way in.
‘I’ve been avoiding you,’ I said.
‘And how is that?’ he said. I talked very fast, sounding very unbalanced, I suspect.
‘I didn’t mean to write you so much drivel,’ I said. ‘None of you. I mean, feel free, all of you, to throw my scripts into the fire. Well, you haven’t really got fires, I suppose. The wastepaper baskets will do. I’m not really all that much of a skive, Jacob, it’s just that it wasn’t a good time for me. As a matter of fact, it’s still not so good. It’s, well, a crisis, Jacob. I was having an emotional crisis. That’s it. It’s not good for people when they’re writing exams. I’m sorry.’
‘You look like the back of a bus, sweetheart,’ Jacob said candidly. ‘What the hell is the matter with you? Your face looks different. Are you pregnant?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s pimples, Jacob. Like people get when they’re upset.’ Jacob smiled.
‘You’re a sweet child,’ he said. ‘You’re a funny child, do you know that? I was a crazy, bright, fatherless child like you once upon a time. I like you.’ We repaired to the coffee machine where I was, all the time, jumpy and slightly manic. I got my head in the way as he bent to get the cup out for me.
‘Careful I don’t spill it on you,’ he said, to jolly me along. ‘You might get a swollen head.’
‘I’ve got one of those already,’ I said.
‘Yes and no,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing this morning, shall I? I’ve been interviewing my seventh case of premenstrual depression. Perhaps that’s what’s wrong with you, Katherine. You’re pre-menstrually depressed. Why haven’t you come to see me about it? You’re in a minority of two or three. I thought that the entire female student population wrote exams in a state of pre-menstrual depression these days. Or so they all tell me after the event.’ I got a little uneasy sometimes with Jacob’s male-oriented jokes. I didn’t altogether know what he was saying.
‘Perhaps they could all get pregnant before the exams,’ I said sarcastically.
‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘In truth, Katherine, pregnancy is, in my admittedly limited and vicarious experience, a very favourable time.’ Was he saying that he wasted his time on the education of women when biology pulled them more effectively in another direction?
‘Do they want you to bump up their marks?’ I said. I am a person who has been known to approach him, after the return of an essay, with the request that he lower the mark for the following reasons, which I then conscientiously enumerate for him.
‘Sure,’ he said, ‘all the time. In my day such women students as there were didn’t have this female trouble. I tell you this, Katherine, I don’t pretend to understand the present.’ I suspected him of saying that he understood the present perfectly and wished to take a snipe at the first rumblings of reviving feminism. I had a sound hunch that, for Jacob, this was a manifestation of middle-class female parasitism, spreading false consciousness in the class war. (Jacob was, of course, the first always to put his hand in his pocket if one was collecting for the cleaning ladies’ strike fund.)
‘What’s the cause of these crises, then?’ he said. ‘It is not, I hope, that son of mine who causes you these crises?’
‘Just the one,’ I said. ‘That’s all. One crisis, Jacob. I expect you know about it anyway. That we’re not together any more.’
‘Don’t imagine that Roger tells me anything,’ he said. ‘In any case, he’s climbing rocks in Wales. Anything I can do about it? Bang your heads together, perhaps?’ Oh, Roger, with your rope and spiked boots, will I never see you again? Will we meet as polite strangers in polite sitting rooms?
‘Oh, no,’ I said hastily. ‘Nothing. Mutual consent. You know. Let’s not even talk about it.’ Jacob nodded, understanding that there was nothing he could do.
‘We must have a talk about your future, you and I,’ he said. ‘What do you think of doing with yourself? What do you imagine a degree in philosophy equips you for?’ I eyed him shiftily, not wishing to make the approach.
‘Are you saying I’ll have a degree in philosophy?’ I said. ‘Because you don’t have to pass me, you know. I mean, I know this isn’t a charitable institution, Jacob. I didn’t come here to try and get you to give me a degree, you know. I don’t think that you ought to feel that just because you think I’m deserving –’ Jacob laughed.
‘Stop this, Katherine. You know that I know that you’re a bright young woman. Are you telling me you don’t know you’re a comfortable upper second? Come now.
I am aware that for reasons which I cannot fathom you are completely neurotic in this area. Not so? We neither of us can win. Whatever I tell you will simply lead you to believe that my judgement is impaired.’
‘But Jacob,’ I said, ‘have you actually looked at my scripts?’
‘Course I have,’ he said, ‘I and my colleagues. Even if the external examiner decided to have you for breakfast, you’re a cert, my lovey. Find something else to worry about.’
‘I’m going to Rome, you know,’ I said. ‘I’m going to teach.’
‘Good God,’ he said. ‘Has John got anything to do with this?’
‘Not really,’ I said.
‘Does that mean yes or no?’ he said.
‘It means only insofar as I asked him to help me,’ I said.
‘To teach what?’ he said.
‘English,’ I said, ‘to foreigners. Well,’ I said, attempting a joke, ‘they won’t be foreigners, will they? Not in Italy. I’ll be the foreigner.’ Jacob looked both concerned and unamused.
‘Come home with me,’ he said. ‘Let Jane put you to bed, for heaven’s sake. Sleep on it.’ I could not face the thought of entering his house, to give in under the influence of kindness.
‘I want to be on my own,’ I said, ‘I really do.’ Jacob had manifestly not slept much of late either, but then this was a perennial affliction of his.
‘To speak true, it’s not much fun at home at present,’ he said. ‘Jane is behaving like any other pressuring bloody bourgeois parent with poor old Jonathan. She’s driving him away. I’ve been watching her at it for days on end. She fancies that he should sit the Oxford Entrance Examination. I’m not against it, you know, but she can’t make the child do it. He has decided in consequence of her nagging to take himself off to Europe.’
‘To do what?’ I said. Jacob shrugged.
‘God knows,’ he said. ‘You know Jonathan. He’s a flower child. He wants to walk the Pyrenees. Doss on riverbanks. Scrounge. Earn pennies at a street corner with that bloody flute. He says, right now, that he will never come back. Do I believe him? For myself, I don’t give a damn for the Oxford Entrance Exam. I don’t care if he takes himself to the Huddersfield Poly or the Labour Exchange. People as bright as Jonathan don’t need degrees, after all. Jane, of course, thinks differently. People always do who haven’t been through it themselves. It’s all surrogate gratification for her. What concerns me is, will I ever see that boy again? Will I ever know if he’s been kicked in the head in a gutter somewhere?’
‘Won’t he come home when he’s hungry?’ I said, inadequately. ‘The way he does when he’s fishing?’
Jacob was no longer thinking of me. He was thinking of his favourite child. For is there not a pity beyond all telling hid in the heart of love, as Yeats says? Yeats, W.B. That brother of the more famous Jack as Jacob once called him. Do not the very stars threaten that beloved head?
‘Well,’ he said, suddenly, briskly, ‘I’m sorry to hear that you’re having these, these…’
‘Crisis,’ I said.
‘To be sure,’ he said, ‘just the one. If you are determined to go, you’ll absolutely come down and say goodbye to Jane, eh? She’ll miss you. Rosie, I may say, will be prostrated with grief.’
‘I’ll come,’ I said. ‘You must know that I’ll miss you all terribly. Jane has been very important to me, Jake,’ I said, tears welling in my eyes. ‘Tell her – tell her that her kitchen has been my other university.’ Jacob laughed.
‘I will,’ he said. I fell upon his hairy chest and cried like hell. Jacob kept patting my shoulder.
‘If you’re in trouble ever, you’ll reverse the charge on the ‘phone?’ he said. ‘It’s an easy thing, Katherine, to pick up the ‘phone, eh? And reverse the charge?’
‘I’ll remember that,’ I said.
‘Good,’ he said, ‘and don’t you let any of those Catholic bloody foreigners grind you down.’
When I next saw Jacob the hair on his chest had turned completely white.
Twenty-Eight
I made an effort to appear at my best for Jane. I had washed my hair and turned in early with a tranquilliser, washed down with a glass of beer. I painted my face for her and caught the train, secure in the knowledge that Roger wasn’t there. He was climbing rocks in Wales. I bought her a present in the flower shop in the High Street. A little indoor palm tree in a pot. Jane herself was certainly not at her best that day. I entered to find her crabbing unreasonably at Sylvia, who had wet her pants. Jonathan, who came into the kitchen to make cheese doorsteps for himself, ignored her very pointedly. As she had once said to me, she was not ‘one of those insufferable people who does it all right’. She did not, surprisingly, seem all that concerned over me and Roger. She had other things on her mind. Roger had told her nothing much and had seemed cheerful enough, she said, and I was determined to pose the same. Roger had always made a point of being thoroughly undemonstrative with me in the presence of his parents in any case. She said, a little wistfully, ‘That’s it then, is it? It does seem a shame, Katherine. But you cannot, of course, think of pleasing me. I will not hear a word against either of you. I’ll miss you terribly. Jonathan, will you bugger off, please?’ She clearly couldn’t bear to have him in the same room. Jonathan turned very slowly and looked at her, daggers in his eyes, and said nothing.
‘Katherine is going abroad,’ she said. ‘She’s got herself a very nice job. There’s a moral in that, somewhere, which you might pick up.’
‘Piss off,’ Jonathan said to her. ‘Where are you going, Katherine?’
‘Rome,’ I said. ‘I got some Italian money today. Can I show you my Monopoly money?’ I pulled out of my purse my wad of wonderful lire. We gazed at them, the three of us. Jane started suddenly with new inspiration.
‘You wouldn’t stoop to bribery, would you, Jontikins?’ she said. Jonathan, who had relaxed over the banknotes, returned to his hostile stare.
‘It’ll take you a lot of fucking Smarties to get me to write that exam, lady,’ he said.
‘I was thinking more of something like six hundred pounds,’ she said. ‘Stay and write the exam and I will give you six hundred pounds. You could have a better time in Europe with money, you know.’ Jonathan left the room, but suddenly he was there again.
‘You haven’t got it,’ he said.
‘I’ll borrow it, won’t I?’ she said. ‘I’ll tack it on to the mortgage. Useful things, mortgages.’
‘I want it in writing,’ Jonathan said. ‘I don’t trust you.’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Have seven. It’s only money, you know. Give me some paper.’
‘Jesus, Ma,’ Jonathan said, climbing down, ‘I don’t need it in writing. I don’t need seven hundred pounds. Give me four.’
‘Have six, Jont,’ she said, ‘and have it in writing. Don’t get soft on me.’ She wrote it down and signed it. I couldn’t believe it. Jonathan put the note in his pocket.
‘I make three conditions,’ she said firmly. ‘Come back next October and give Oxford a try. Send me a postcard every eight weeks, and don’t get anyone pregnant.’
‘I’m not stupid,’ Jonathan said.
‘As if I don’t know that,’ she said. ‘Why do you think I’m making all this fuss over you? But someone has yet to prove that bright young men are less capable of impregnating women.’
‘Don’t imagine I’m going to surround myself with pissing infants, like you,’ he said.
‘You, Jonathan,’ Jane said with emphasis, ‘you were the only one of my children who consistently peed into my wellington boots and don’t you forget it.’
After that she and I said goodbye. We both cried a little. Her gardening gloves were lying on the table. She picked up one of them to mop her eyes and gave me the other.
‘Here,’ she said, ‘have it for the train.’ I took it, knowing I would treasure it like a relic of the cross. Within the week I had packed my hand luggage into Roger’s hold-all and boarded a train for Europe.
Twe
nty-Nine
As we drew into Milan one of the two nuns in my train compartment fainted with the heat. She was revived by her companion with the help of two men in sweaty vests. I had never been in a train compartment before with nuns. No more with men in sweaty vests, and the Northern Line seemed light years away. The carriage was like a Daumier carriage. It had more in common, perhaps, with Roger’s Third World buses than with anything I knew. Nothing in my experience had prepared me for the visual impact of the countryside, for a landscape of vines and olive trees. When I later read, in D.H. Lawrence on Tuscany, that one expected Jesus to step out of the landscape, I thought Yes, exactly so. There were no slivers of mousetrap cheese enclosed in triangles of Wonderloaf to be had upon the station platform, only some rather biblical loaves and bottles of wine. The unfamiliar typeface on the newspapers jumped giddily at me from news-stands as I endured the terror of changing trains.
On the Rome train I shared a compartment with a respectable matron who scribbled postcards and asked me the date. John’s language course had taught me all kinds of stuff suitable to bizarre and remote eventualities. It had taught me (for example) to say that I had not, alas, read Dante because ‘what with my dear wife, my mother-in-law and the seven children’ I had not ‘felt the need of it’. In the face of a simple question I could only mumble and panic. After four weeks’ toiling I had, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, forgotten the words. In addition, I had yet to make the shattering discovery that nobody in Italy, other than myself, wore a mini-skirt.
John’s friends lived in Trastevere. To enter it is to enter a world which starts with the Romans and ends with the baroque. Unfamiliar human density in the narrow cobbled streets, no kerbs to distinguish traffic from pedestrian. My taxi hooted its way through football games which divided to let us pass. Footballs which bounced off twelfth-century church walls, pasted with election posters and daubed with aerosol slogans. And above the footballs and the posters and the slogans, rising in bright array of antique gold mosaic, the saints looked down on the fountain and the square and the bar and the buzzing Vespas.
Brother of the More Famous Jack Page 10