‘Stay,’ he says. ‘Get yourself a rest. Get a nice job somewhere. East Finchley, that’s the place to be. Some nice place like that.’
‘You mean, and find a nice English husband?’ I say. Jacob laughs, admitting to it.
‘Why not?’ he says. ‘A nice reliable English husband.’
‘You’re the only one of those that I know,’ I say, ‘and you’re a foreigner. I turned thirty-one last week, Jacob. I’m too old.’
‘Happy birthday,’ he says. ‘Yes, I can see you’re getting wrinkles, but they’re very nice wrinkles. What is life but a progression from pimples to wrinkles, but for the getting of wisdom?’
Jacob’s books line the walls from floor to ceiling. In superior panel-backed shelving it is all there, as of yore, plus additions. The long runs of academic journals, the New Left Review, the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, Isaac Deutcher on Trotsky. All the German heavy stuff, the metaphysics and lots of lovely poetry. I think of Jacob as a great reader of poetry, having seen him once hurl his Heinrich Heine deftly across the room at Rosie’s head when she knocked over his coffee with an ill-timed cartwheel; having seen him in a deck-chair of a Sunday, reading Paradise Lost and call it ‘relaxing’.
‘Did Jane find a humble young woman to make your bookshelves?’ I say.
‘A man,’ Jacob says. ‘Rosie’s boyfriend. One of Rosie’s many boyfriends. Rosie’s men are all either carpenters, brickies, plumbers or bloody floor-layer’s apprentices. She has a strong proletarian bias in her choice of men. She also prefers them to be black. I don’t know what’s the matter with that girl. She’s prettier than is good for her. Too many options, I think. Is that your trouble too, perhaps?’ Of Jacob’s children, Rosie and Roger were always the only really pretty ones. It amuses me to sit opposite Jacob’s rows of revolutionary books and listen to him grumbling about his daughter’s working-class leanings.
‘And Annie and Sylvia?’ I say. ‘What’s with them? Do they like brickies too?’
‘Annie is a sensible young woman,’ he says. ‘Annie is a great comfort to my old age. Sylvia, of course, is a child. Annie sculpts at the art college in Hornsey. She lives with a collection of nice youngsters in a house with hazardous floorboards. They work very hard. They eat a lot of brown lentils. They make a lot of love. She’s a splendid girl, my Annie. Big. Not one to accost in a dark alley. She keeps all these damned chisels in the bib pockets of her overalls.’ He gestures in the region of his chest. ‘She’s taken herself to the Women’s Self-Defence class, has Annie. She knows how to kick a man in the face.’ He points proudly to an object on the floor. ‘That’s a thing of Annie’s,’ he says. A life-size clay head, it is, by the plate-glass window. It has a spider plant growing out of its hollow cranium. ‘That creature with the green hair.’
‘And Sylvia?’ I say.
‘Sylvia is thirteen and goes to a boarding school,’ he says.
‘Boarding school?’ I say in disbelief. Lacrosse sticks in the hall. A vision of Mam’zelle in the curl-papers. ‘You send your daughter to boarding school? What boarding school? Mallory Towers?’
‘Bedales,’ he says without shame. ‘She likes it. She gets on well there. The comprehensive seemed to be doing her no good.’ He catches my eye and laughs. ‘My head for the block, is it?’ he says. ‘Quite right. More power to the axe-man. Do you know, Katherine, Roger won a scholarship to one of these filthy public schools once. Jane set it up when I was too busy to pay any attention. She has this bee in her bonnet about music. She wanted him to get more of it. I refused to let the poor child take it up. I had both of them united against me in fury for days on end. Neither of them would talk to me. I got enough black looks from that blue-eyed little Mafia to make me expect ground glass in my coffee. It didn’t shake me. One is so high principled in one’s youth. I made the little bastard pedal off in his cycle clips to the local grammar school every morning.’ I laugh in spite of myself at this cheery and wholly unrepentant account of patriarchal tyranny, I suspect because I get pleasure from the thought of Roger being stuffed in the eye.
‘Shame on you, Jacob,’ I say. ‘You were always a pig to Roger.’
‘Ach,’ Jacob says. ‘He didn’t know how lucky he was. He was a sweet-looking kid, my little Roger. Put him in a surplice and he’d have had half the Upper Sixth up his backside.’ Jacob, who is in general well acquainted with the ways of the Enemy, is unshakeable in his conviction that not much goes on at public schools other than cold showers and buggery in the choir stalls.
‘But here I am,’ he says, ‘spending my own money on sending this pampered baby of mine to Bedales. Roger was, at least, deserving of an elite education.’
‘Bedales is different,’ I say comfortingly. Jacob is amused by my tactfulness.
‘Don’t be kind to me,’ he says. ‘It’s the acceptable face of privilege.’
‘What I want to know is, how do you pay for it?’ I say. ‘I mean, pardon my asking.’
‘I get paid too much,’ he says. ‘All this money and no expenses. I’m a landlord, of all things, Katherine. People pay me rent for the house in Sussex. Jane had an old aunt who died and left her a house in Cadogan Square. Nice old creature. Full of advanced causes from yoga to nude bathing. The house of hers, it more than paid for this place, of course. I’m planning to sell the Sussex house in a year or two and buy a garage for my Sam. He likes to fix cars.’
‘Fix cars?’ I say. Another proletarian bias.
‘He appended himself to a motor mechanic in Brighton when he was sixteen,’ Jacob says. ‘The chap sends him off on day-release courses to the college of FE. He’s a nice kid. Disturbingly sane, however. Always knows where he’s going. The only one in the family, other than Roger, who knows how to get the back off the washing-machine. Now then, Katherine, are you hungry? Shall I wine and dine you somewhere?’
‘Somewhere really Ritzy,’ I say, ‘since you’re so rich. I’ve been working hard these years, Jake. I’ve spent ten years teaching in a language school. I’d love some glamour.’
‘Glamour you always had,’ Jacob said. ‘Direction you had less of. Yes, come along, sweetheart. Let’s eat elegantly. Bestow on me some lovely vicarious glamour. It’s not a thing my wife goes in for, as you know. The wretched woman has refused for thirty-odd years to pierce her ears for me. What do you make of a woman like that?’ I laugh.
‘I might get used to you over the waste-disposal unit,’ I say, ‘but never to Jane with pierced ears.’
‘Tell me, child,’ he says, as we walk down the street, ‘why did you never marry that boy of mine? Suddenly you were off. Like a bird. Might it have been a satisfactory alternative, do you think? A north Oxford wife? Pedalling off to the Bodleian in the rain to take the master his reader’s ticket? Lots of jolly children at Phil and James or Pip and Jimmy, or whatever the hell that damned school is called? Not for you, perhaps, but I always thought that you cared for him. Did you not, in fact, care for him?’
‘He wouldn’t have me, Jacob,’ I say firmly. ‘Why do you pick my brain? Why don’t you ask Roger?’
‘Roger has never really talked to me, to tell you the truth,’ he says.
‘I take it he’s still in Oxford?’ I say. ‘He never went back to
Africa?’
‘He’s still there,’ Jacob says. ‘Bright lad, Roger. It suits him, Oxford does, I think. He got a very good first, you know. Instant college fellowship. He researches in the Mathematical Institute.’
‘I spoke to his wife on the ‘phone,’ I say. ‘She gave me your number. How long has he been married?’
‘Couple of years,’ he says. ‘Four, come to think of it. A nice young woman. A proper wedding in the college chapel, my dear. Rather lovely, as a matter of fact, these Christian rituals. He’s taken to the Church, in recent years.’
‘The Church?’ I say, with my soul in tears for my bold iconoclast. My Roger, who lobbed defiant stones into the sea. My Roger, who put down the Holy Ghost so effectively at the age of six.
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br /> ‘Oh, yes,’ Jacob says, ‘and sings in the choir, of course. So you see, he got the surplice after all.’ The image of Roger on his knees is an obscenity to me. I almost cry.
We eat in Hampstead. Lots of veal and cream and stinky cheese. Jacob smokes foul smelly cigars over coffee in place of his foul smelly cigarettes in an effort to stave off the decay of the flesh.
‘Now tell me about Jonathan,’ I say. ‘Did Jane ever get him to Oxford, or is he still walking the Pyrenees?’
‘Yes, of course she did,’ he says. ‘She bribed him. With my money.’ He laughs. ‘I’m still paying it off, as a matter of fact, on the twenty-five-year mortgage. Modern languages. Another first, I may say. A family tradition, the Oxford first. Perhaps Oxford gives them away.’
‘Perhaps you’ve got very bright children,’ I say. ‘Crumbs, Jake, you could paper your bathroom with first-class degree certificates.’
‘No, no,’ he says modestly. ‘Only those two. The rest of my children are not that way at all. Jonathan isn’t academic either, for that matter, he’s just highly intelligent. The whole damn thing was a waste of his time. It simply delayed his going to Europe.’
‘And where is he?’ I say. ‘I got a letter from him once which suggested he was in Athens.’ Jacob smiles indulgently because, as always, Jonathan can do no wrong.
‘In Kilburn,’ he says, ‘living on the dole and writing a novel. He can’t throw it off, I suspect. It’s my guess that he likes it too much to let the publishers have it. Yes, he spent some years in Athens. He came back here two years ago with a Greek child bride and a lovely dark-eyed baby. The wife, not surprisingly, upped and left for home after a couple of months, taking the baby with her. She couldn’t adapt. Lunacy, the whole thing. Typical Jonathan. He had got the child pregnant. A student, she was, in the school he was teaching in. Father a well-off shoe manufacturer. He spent some time living with her people but couldn’t survive it and brought her to London. A nice bourgeois merchant’s daughter in need of a solid, dependable husband.’
‘You make her sound like me,’ I say. Jacob throws up his eyes in disbelief.
‘Anything less like you would be hard to imagine,’ he says. ‘You – apart from being slightly crazy – are a traitor to your social group, Katherine, I’m happy to say. Like Jane. Like all of us, come to that. It’s my belief the poor sweet boy was too nice not to marry her. He was received into the Greek Orthodox Church for the purpose of marrying her. The whole damn thing lasted all of eighteen months.’
‘They’re a churchy pair then, your two older sons,’ I say, thinking to myself, Wouldn’t he, wouldn’t Jonathan screw around and get schoolgirls pregnant, the little swine.
‘I’m very fond of that young man,’ Jacob says, ‘as you may remember. Perhaps you ought to take him on.’
‘Jesus, Jacob, why don’t you offer me Sam as well and be done with it? Why not Sam? What’s wrong with Sam?’ I say, getting rattled. Jacob enjoys it.
‘Sam is too young for you,’ he says, ‘and Sam is too straight. Have Jonathan.’
‘I’ll tell you this, Jacob,’ I say, ‘I’ve had enough of your sons. To coin a phrase, right now I need your Jonathan like I need a hole in the head. I’d sooner have the one you’ve got lined up for me in East Finchley.’
‘You’ll like Jonathan,’ he says. ‘Jonathan will surprise you.’ If there were not still a degree of deference in my relationship with Jacob, I would kick him under the table.
‘Nicely brought-up Greek women don’t drop their knickers for anybody, after all, do they?’ he says. It is such a long time since I’ve heard anyone say ‘knickers’.
On the way to the hospital, Jacob begins to set me up in a job. His publisher needs a copy-editor, he says. Should it be my good self? He is due to see his publisher in ten days, he says.
‘I’m not a copy-editor, Jake,’ I say, ‘I’m a lackey in a language school.’
‘You can turn your hand to it,’ he says, ‘you’re a literate woman.’
‘Daughters at Bedales, jobs for the boys,’ I say. ‘I haven’t lived in Rome for ten years without getting to know corruption when I see it.’ Jacob raises his eyebrow.
‘Get along with you,’ he says. He is driving a very nice new Volkswagen Golf. ‘You’re man enough to accept a little honest graft, aren’t you?’
Thirty-Nine
In her hospital ward, Jane has Jonathan with her. He is in the process of replenishing her illicit supplies of Guinness and sneaking out the empties.
‘The Mum’s Ruin,’ he says, with reference to the empty Guinness bottles which he transfers to his left armpit. He takes my hand across the bed. ‘Katherine,’ he says. ‘It’s been a long time.’
‘Yes,’ I say. It is an absurd and omnipotent but very common response to be surprised that people grow and change when you are not there to observe the process. For this reason, Jonathan’s appearance at least is indeed a surprise. I find both that, and his bearing, highly prepossessing. This is perhaps because my tastes have evolved. He wears his wild hair clipped poodle-wise in two-inch lengths all over his head. It could be mistaken for a fashionable perm. The look has caught up with him. This is the age of the unset frizz; we grew up in the age of the undulating curl. Jonathan has squarish steel-framed glasses which interrupt the inquisitorial power of his great nose and he wears a small thick well-cut tortoiseshell moustache. He has about him the same confident ease but carries it with greater subtlety and wears cleaner clothes.
‘My dearest Katherine,’ Jane says. She invites me to sit beside her on the bed and inches up cautiously, clutching at her abdominal scar. ‘I may look decrepit but I’m absolutely fine,’ she says. She kisses me, and I her. In her dowdy NHS glasses, leaning on the iron bedhead, her hair streaked with grey, she looks, as always, miraculously beautiful. ‘What a lovely surprise!’ she says. ‘Oh, Jake, where did you find her? You got lost. And to have you visit me with your dowry in your hair. What a tonic you are.’ I have plaited gold beads into the ends of my hair, which is longish and crepe. I sit with her, loving her as much as always.
‘Look at my companions,’ she says after a while, in a conspiratorial whisper. ‘This sweet young thing here on my right has been forced to have her tubes tied by her husband. Him in the army boots. He refuses to have a vasectomy, of course. She’s twenty-one. That one is a martyr to her vaginal prolapse and she can’t wear a diaphragm because she’s allergic to rubber. The old lady there has just returned from a three-day ordeal with her legs up in stirrups being treated with radiation for uterine cancer.’ I regard this by now as a typical Goldman conversation, and feel cosily at home with her at once.
‘I’ve got some plastic surgery on my cervix for you,’ I say invitingly, closing the decade of our long separation. Jacob and Jonathan glance at each other with ironic implication, seeking mutual support as aliens in a world monopolised by female complaints. Jonathan smiles.
‘I’m getting out of here before I get lunched,’ he says. ‘I need tea.’ He kisses Jane’s forehead. ‘Goodbye, Ma. Jake, I’ll wait for you in the canteen. Katherine, come and have some tea with me. There’s a slop house on the premises.’ In the corridor we pass the trolleys and the stink of meths. Jonathan, whose adolescent belligerence has evolved into a certain bold charisma, evokes glances from some comely nurses on the way. He steers me with a comfortable, brotherly arm into the canteen. In the other hand he has a plastic carrier-bag containing Guinness bottles.
‘I hope you still have Zebedee on your bicycle,’ I say.
‘I don’t,’ Jonathan says with feeling. ‘Some dirty swine pinched that bell from me in my first term at Oxford.’ At the counter we pick up some dark brown tea and Jonathan rises to doughnuts.
‘I’m rich today,’ he says, ‘I’ve just got my first publisher’s advance. Six hundred pounds.’ I associate him recurringly with sums of six hundred pounds.
‘Good Lord,’ I say, much impressed. ‘How do you feel?’
‘Like a person who is abou
t to buy an electric typewriter,’ he says. We sit at a formica-topped table displaying pools of slop and the odd abandoned yoghurt carton.
‘Drink up,’ he says cheerily, when I get a little snooty over the tea. ‘It’s guaranteed to put hairs on your chest.’ I laugh, at no more than the unstated and amusing fact of our physiological difference.
‘What do you expect of your tea then?’ he says, smiling at me. ‘Ice-cubes? Sprigs of mint?’ ‘Yes,’ I say.
‘Where’ve you been? Italy? All the time? Just come back?’
‘Yes,’ I say, lying a little. ‘Yes, yes.’
‘How’s tricks, Katherine?’ he says. ‘How are you?’
‘Ravaged,’ I say, protectively mock-dramatic. ‘Don’t ask me. I’ve just been through it all with Jake.’
‘You look marvellous,’ he says, ‘but then you always did. You graced my boyhood fantasies as a thing of pendant shiny objects and pale gleaming hair.’ He makes me laugh.
‘Have you seen Roger?’ he says.
‘Nope,’ I say bravely, ‘not in ten years. Only thing I see from time to time of Roger’s is that embroidered butterfly patch he gave me from his bum pocket. It turns up now and again in my work-basket.’ Jonathan pulls a face.
‘Etherised, I hope?’ he says. ‘Impaled on a pin.’ He gestures with a teaspoon, grinding it into the formica. ‘You ought to know that Roggs keeps his bifocals in his bum pocket these days. He sat on them not long ago, the silly bugger. He’s got them all taped together with Sellotape.’ He gestures again to indicate the makeshift repair.
‘Jake says he goes to church,’ I say. ‘Is that a malicious fabrication?’
‘Not a bit of it,’ Jonathan says. ‘All week he’s in the Mathematical Institute, is Roggs, trying to devise ways of measuring Infinity, and on Sunday, there he is in church, on his knees before the Unknowable. Isn’t it wonderful what Oxford does for people? They get to know more and more about less and less. He’s a dear chap, I have to say, for all that.’ It occurs to me that Roger’s Christianity could be a gigantic act of aggression towards Jacob, but I don’t want to sound like the Tavistock Clinic or anything. Psychs are not my favourite people.
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