Brother of the More Famous Jack

by Barbara Trapido

  I took a shower. When I came out I told him, in trepidation, what I wanted. I said that I wanted him to take the coat back to the shop and to give me the money, and that I would use it towards paying for my antenatal care. The effect was astonishing.

  ‘Come with me,’ he said. He took me in one hand and the coat in the other. We went down the street and across the square. By the time we reached the black-market cigarette lady he was holding my arm behind my back like the bouncer at a Working Men’s Club. He gave me the coat.

  ‘Give the coat to the signora,’ he said.

  ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘Give the coat to her.’

  ‘Signora,’ I said, ‘my boyfriend wants you to have this coat.’ In English I said, ‘Michele, will you stop breaking my arm, you big fucking yobbo?’

  ‘Tell her your boyfriend especially wants her to have it,’ he said.

  ‘Tell her yourself,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to insult an old woman. Do it yourself, you crude bastard.’ Michele performed on my arm what we used to call ‘Barley Sugars’ in our infancy. A subtle and agonising twist.

  ‘Signora, my boyfriend especially wants her to have it,’ I said, like a parrot.

  ‘Grazie, signore,’ she said, without emotion. Not to me. To Michele. He was the one dispensing the goodies. She couldn’t miss the coercion. Then he marched me home, delighting the neighbours. Wife-clobbering, to catch the eye of the groundlings.

  I watched him pack a few things. He packed them into Roger’s hold-all. I saw him take a good look at the label. It still said R.J. GOLDMAN. He stuffed a few of his clothes into the bag and opened the zip pocket to throw in his shaving stuff. Then he pulled out a letter, which must have hibernated in the bag those ten years or more, and gave it to me.

  ‘Goldman,’ he said, reading the envelope. ‘Ciao, Caterina. Now you may go to Athens and sleep with your English Jew.’

  ‘Michele,’ I said as he got to the door, ‘I only once before went to bed with a man who smoked French cigarettes, like you. But he was a homosexual.’ Michele didn’t blow a fuse, as I thought he might. Perhaps I had hoped to provoke a cathartic explosion and have him make it up to me. Perhaps I was crazy enough to imagine it was worth it to me to spend the next ten years watching Michele clip my child over the head with the back of his hand, shouting ‘Basta!’ and making it do sums over breakfast. Perhaps I was simply proving to myself that I had claws to show. That nobody was going to walk out of my life into a sunset of limestones no more and do so with impunity. He approached me, scrutinising my face wistfully and tenderly with his marvellous brown eyes, and held my chin for a moment between his thumb and forefinger.

  ‘Ciao, amica,’ he said.

  Jonathan’s letter had evidently been written to Roger twelve years before in Kenya.

  Rogsie,

  Don’t fret about your fiddle. Try a comb on paper. Didn’t Mozart stoop to a glass harmonica? Here’s to make you homesick. Mother has bought Rosie a ‘cello. She won’t get her knees around the bloody thing and is throwing herself all over the floor in hysterics. Annie has got the mumps, which makes you impotent if you catch it. Ma has spent the morning wringing her hands over the prospect of Jake’s balls and mine placed in jeopardy. That’s when she isn’t using them to pull out her tits and feed Sylvia, who is a right tit-freak if ever there was one. The bloody bathroom smells of curdled baby shit and chlorine bleach. The headmaster refused to submit my poem because ‘tis, as I told you, about lust. Speaking of lust, we have the delectable Katherine in the house again, writing her essays in beautiful italic script and scivvying for Jane. Jesus, I’d pawn the Holy Grail for an hour up that woman’s skirt, wouldn’t you? It’s time we had some women, Rogsie. How many Green Shield stamps does it take to hire them? And can one be sure that they aren’t traffic wardens in disguise?

  If we do not meet again in this life, dearest Brother, I trust we will meet in the next.

  Love and kisses

  Jont.

  Since I was already feeling vulnerable, the letter made me cry a little for my lost youth. Michele did not evict me and neither did he leave me high and dry. He fetched his chattels from the apartment when I wasn’t there, and deposited one million lire in my bank account. I do not think that any of it was any easier for him than it was for me. Once or twice I saw him afterwards, when I was pregnant and bulging, in the company of a very small, delicate Libyan girl who walked like a ballet dancer. Out of respect for him, I think, I kept out of his way.

  Thirty-Six

  I loved being pregnant. I felt very well. During the first few months I enjoyed carrying the fact around in secret. I missed Michele something chronic. I was not miserable, as I had been when Roger left me. My own violent frustration at his absence even amused me at times. I lived up to the most compromising of male chauvinist stereotypes – I missed him in bed. I was the lady who needed servicing. I didn’t want anybody, mind, I wanted him. But I survived. Janice was absolutely irreplaceable to me. She threw herself with unconcealed enthusiasm into the project of preparing for the baby. She uncovered an entire network of people with cots to dispose of and nappies to hand on. She acquired squeaky pink elephants and books on how to handle childbirth, brought out in English by the National Childbirth Trust. Together we went to the flea market and found an old pram. We made fitted cot sheets in apple green and navy, and knitted woolly caps and arty baby-bags. I made a quilted patchwork lining in a Moses basket, which was a thing of great beauty. As I began to bulge conspicuously I provided entertainment for some of my neighbours, for whom I had gratifyingly changed from being the glamorous mistress of the signore of means to being the loose foreigner with a bun in the oven. I didn’t mind too much. I even, after some audible speculation about my condition, brazenly told a group of housewives on one occasion that we had pulled it off on the autostrada doing 90 kilometres an hour.

  Near where I lived was the beautiful old church of Santa Cecilia. Often, as I passed it, I thought briefly of Roger who, being a music wallah, had always made a thing of St Cecilia’s Day. On this particular St Cecilia’s Day, I was sitting wrapped in a loose coat in the Piazza di Santa Cecilia listening to the music emanating from within and knitting baby clothes. I was two months pregnant and without external evidence of the fact, but an old man stopped before me, saw what I was knitting and said, babbling absurdly, ‘Knitting on the day of St Cecilia! Your child will have bad luck.’ He tottered off like the bad fairy, the old fool. People don’t leave you alone in Italy. There is no privacy.

  I was sitting in the cinema with Janice next April when I began to give forth copious gouts of blood. This was not at all like the blueprint. Before I knew it I was on a mobile hospital bed being strapped up to machines and pumped with drugs. I thought, rather wistfully, as somebody shoved a suppository up my anus, of Jane Goldman puking into her antique jug and subsequently giving birth in her pretty brass bed with Jacob to hold her legs while she pushed the baby out. I wondered, as I tried to breathe around contractions, why I had a continuous, screaming ache in the back. I was all politeness and control, which seemed to amuse my attendant doctor. All around me were the sounds of Roman women enacting the vocal melodrama for which they had been reared.

  ‘Come look at this, Claudio,’ he said at one point, calling a passing colleague into the room and indicating me on the bed. ‘Good, eh? It’s another race, no?’

  Nothing I had read, useful as it was, had prepared me for the degree or duration of pain. There was some mistake about the state of my cervical dilation. The baby came too early and then could not be delivered without forceps. There followed a great deal of injecting and hacking at my pelvic floor. The baby was female and instantly removed, having been diagnosed as suffering from mild inflammation of the lung, which required intensive care. We stayed in the hospital for over two weeks, where my internal stitches went septic and where I was told I would subsequently need some repair work on my cervix. I was provided with an expensive space-age machine which expresse
d my breast milk for the baby. Finally I went home in a taxi with my lovely baby in the Moses basket. It was the happiest day of my life. She had been so initiated into the hospital routine that she cried for food exactly every four hours. I could have set my watch by it. I had lovely enlarged boobs which leaked milk every time she cried. The pull of the toothless infant mouth on one’s nipple is highly erotic, I discovered. It induces ecstasy. The little hand on one’s breast and the tiny piggy gruntings are a delight. When she was a month old I wheeled her out in her flea-market pram, to the horror of the populace who considered her pram grievously lacking in flounces because most Italian prams are a jungle of festoons and lace. She looked hilariously like Michele and not at all like me. I called her Simonetta, after Botticelli’s lady with whom he had been in love. When she was five weeks old she slept through the night. I was so proud of her, when I woke at six, aching with milk, to find that it was morning that I went to smother her with praise. The baby was dead.

  Janice and the doctor were very nice. They came immediately. The doctor was at pains to emphasise that it was not my fault. That it happened sometimes and they didn’t know why. He stayed for quite a while and Janice stayed all day. I became hysterical and said I wanted to bury her under the geraniums on the roof outside my bathroom. That the body was mine and oughtn’t to be removed. I found to my cost, over the next few days, that to bury the bastard child of a foreigner is no easy matter and requires a lot of standing in queues. The bureaucracy, which had always seemed baroque, had become macabre. After that I went to pieces. I didn’t know what to do. I tried ‘phoning Jonathan in Athens, but got nobody on the line who knew what I was talking about. In that way in which, inevitably, one is attentive to people who are geographically close and inattentive to the remote, I had years before stopped communicating with Jane Goldman. I now remembered Jacob saying to me that it was an easy thing to pick up the ‘phone and reverse the charge. It was not an easy thing at all. The telephone exchange, after repeated enquiries, insisted that the Goldmans’ telephone number did not exist.

  I returned to the hospital after the baby died to have my cervix patched up. Janice must have told Michele because he came white-faced to see me the day before I was to leave. I say with gratitude for his sensitivity on this occasion that he did not bring me presents, but only himself. It hurt unbearably to have him there.

  ‘Santo Cielo,’ he said. ‘These things that have happened to you.’ He sat beside the bed, having kissed my cheek, and he took my hand. His presence caused me an uncontrolled and painful flood of tears which ran coldly into my neck and my hair.

  ‘The baby was a girl,’ I said. ‘She was so lovely, Michele. I’ve never loved anything so much in my whole life. Never. Not even you.’ I wept into my neck. ‘She was my friend,’ I said. He was quite evidently affected by the sight of my grief and his involvement in it.

  ‘Come back to me,’ he said, ‘dearest Caterina. I will make you another baby.’ He was crying too, though not so copiously. A rather tactless nurse that morning had told me I would probably never have another baby.

  ‘I want that baby,’ I said, ‘not any other.’

  ‘I want to be good to you,’ he said. ‘Please. Come back to me.’ I loved him all the more for his obtuse romanticism, for he touched in me that yearning for the once-upon-a-time when hearts were brave and arms were strong.

  ‘I never left you, remember?’ I said. I even smiled at him a bit. ‘You always were good to me. Thanks for the money,’ I said. ‘Is it dreadful for me to say that it’s not actually enough? Janice gave me all the money she had, but I want to pay her back.’ He wrote me a cheque on the spot to give her, and said he’d see to the rest. I felt extremely uncomfortable. He was well off but he wasn’t a millionaire, and the baby had been my indulgence.

  ‘Stupida,’ he said. It cheered me up no end. ‘Is it possible that I can love you so much?’

  ‘You can’t come back to me because you’ve got another woman,’ I said. Michele shrugged indifferently. What is a woman, after all, if not expendable in the face of another one you like better?

  ‘I’ve seen her,’ I said, trying to smile. ‘You’d better not try any rough stuff on her or you’ll break her in half. Have you given away any fur coats lately?’ Michele smiled.

  ‘Allora,’ he said, ‘I come for you tomorrow. We learn by making mistakes.’

  A meestake, Michele? You admit to a meestake?

  ‘I’m going to England tomorrow,’ I said, rejecting him horribly. ‘My mother is coming for me. Goodbye, Michele. Get that girl of yours sterilised.’ Though I turned my back on him, Michele wouldn’t leave until the nurse threw him out.

  Janice had telephoned my mother on the day I went into hospital. She got on an aeroplane as soon as she could and came to take me home. She was very decent to me and didn’t moralise. I knew that in her eyes, I had gone on a predictable and unnecessary downward slope, from homosexuals and Jews to married foreigners. I sat about in her house, noticing with relief that the ducks had moved with her to Dorset, and reading back numbers of the Reader’s Digest. They all left me feeling that if cancer didn’t get me then germ warfare would. I couldn’t revert with any ease to the role of dependent daughter and seeing Michele again had not been especially good for my peace of mind. I tried repeatedly to write letters to him. I felt I owed it to his concern to tell him where and how I was, but the letters collapsed, always, into tear-stained wallowing. I noticed that my mother on one occasion found it embarrassing to answer a neighbour’s question about what my baby’s name had been. I called her Simonetta Janice out of recognition for Janice’s kindnesses to me.

  ‘For me she will always be Janice,’ my mother said in reply.

  Because I did not sleep very well, the GP gave me sleeping tablets and also anti-depressants. Then after a couple of weeks he sent me to the outpatients’ clinic of a local mental hospital to get me through the day, which I was finding not impossible but not easy either. It could be that this was a mistake. My mother drove me there in the morning and back again in the evening. I could see that she was terribly worried about me. It made me humble and apologetic. I began to do terrific postmortems on my past. Roger kept coming back to me. I cried all over the shrink one day, in a fit of regression, that if Roger Goldman had only gone on loving me my life would have been different and better. They put an awful lot of junk on you when you’re down, do psychiatrists, I discovered. They have enormous sway with you, not only by virtue of their expertise but because when your self-esteem is low you gratefully receive any analysis of yourself, no matter how unfavourable. Every two days I was interviewed by the psych allotted to me, who seemed to have had all the humanity trained out of him. He kept his distance in a most demoralising way, as if he felt familiarity with me would give me a hold on him. Heaven forbid, I might ring him up at home or greet him in the supermarket. Loonies bearing down upon him during weekend outings with the wife and kids. He told me, to my horror, that I was, he thought, incapable of love. Instead of throwing my coffee in his face, I took it to heart. Perhaps it wasn’t love that made me sleep in Michele’s nightshirt when he had stayed overnight in Florence, or cry into the telephone at four in the morning when Roger left me. And the baby? Perhaps that wasn’t love either.

  ‘All your relationships have been constructed in defiance of your upbringing,’ he said, as though this necessarily made them invalid. What was normal was not to defy one’s upbringing. It was to enact the whole bloody roadshow as scripted by one’s aunts and grandmothers. When I wasn’t with the psych I was with the occupational therapist, together with half a dozen very sad middle-aged housewives and three depressed adolescent girls. There was one man among us, unattached and silent. We wove wicker edgings around rather tasteless tea trays displaying chocolate-box pictures of poodles and knitted up string into dishcloths. After lunch we slopped our uneaten marrowfat peas and Miracle Whip into the pig bins. If Michele could have seen the hospital food he would have sworn, by the Pope’s
foreskin, that the English were more uncivilised even than he had hitherto conceived.

  Thirty-Seven

  I spent my thirty-first birthday listening to the radio news in the bin. I was knitting up the dishcloth string at the time and beginning to feel a little better. A little less desolate. The radio announcer addressed an eccentric remark to me.

  ‘Now we have a humanist’s despair before the News,’ he said.

  ‘Did you hear what he said?’ I said.

  ‘A few minutes to spare before the News?’ said the occupational therapist. The radio announcer had obviously said it only to me. There is a comfort to be got out of feeling that you are completely crazy. You feel that you have hit rock bottom and you have no fear that you are going to fall. You can only rise. Or maybe just stay there taking in the view. Down and arise I never shall. Also, you can make a fuss. I am no good at making a fuss, as I have said. But when you’re crazy it’s legitimate. That’s what loonies do, isn’t it? Fuss. That morning I began to split hairs over the dishcloth string instead of knitting it up like a good girl. At first I said that if she gave me a safety-pin I’d do her a dishcloth with a cable-stitched border. When I got no response to this, I unravelled the thing in an exhibitionist manner and announced that I was bloody well going to knit hats with the string instead, and sell them in the King’s Road.

  ‘Right on,’ said the occupational therapist.

  ‘Aren’t the mentally ill supposed to have any taste?’ I said. ‘Why wicker edges around these simpering dogs? Couldn’t it at least be Gainsborough?’ I gestured towards the trays. ‘What about us loonies with arty pretensions?’ I said. ‘And aren’t most people here in the first place because of all this trays and dishcloth stuff? Else why are we all women? The kitchen sink and the idea of service? If you want to make us better, put us in a charabanc and take us to the theatre.’ I remember that one of the depressed housewives muttered that I was a hussy, but that the occupational therapist broke into a generous smile.