Brother of the More Famous Jack

by Barbara Trapido

  ‘I’d rather pay for my own dinner,’ I said. ‘My guess is that your haircuts cost more than three pounds. There’s something very becoming has happened to your hair.’ Jonathan laughed and pocketed the money.

  ‘Good thinking.’ he said, appreciatively.

  For nearly two weeks Jonathan escorted me to and from Jacob’s house in this way, like a devoted custodian, sensing that I was a poor convalescent creature fit only for chicken broth and hot-water bottles. Elgar and hot milk. I went with Jacob, at first, to visit Jane each day. Jonathan came in the evenings and walked with me, sometimes with Jake also, on the Heath. I recalled occasions when we had done this before, because Jacob often went for walks in Sussex with Jonathan and sometimes also with me. It was delightful to do what I had done before in a sense. It filled me with a quiet muted pleasure. I cared for Jane, who had come out of hospital but couldn’t lift things and needed to rest.

  Rosie came one day. A lovely, tall, dark creature with cropped hair and no breasts, wearing vibrant ethnic leg-warmers against a sudden unseasonal chill and matching mittens strung on a woollen cord around her neck. Looking at her made me wonder whether John Millet, before he died, took her to the hairdresser. Rosie fell into my arms with a childish cry of delight. She had brought with her a young man who was neither black nor proletarian of whom she was manifestly fond. He hung back shyly, holding the flowers which Rosie had brought for Jane. Then they went, hand in hand.

  I walked again with Jonathan on the Heath.

  ‘She’s very pretty,’ I said, ‘your sister.’

  ‘She’s okay,’ he said. ‘Would you say she fancies that kid? That little druggie?’

  ‘Druggie?’ I said. ‘He seemed like a nice middle-class boy to me. Jacob claims that she only likes brick-layers’ apprentices.’

  ‘Syringe marks all over his arm, for Godssake,’ Jonathan said. ‘Sleeves rolled up especially for us to notice. You are as blind as my mother, Kath. Why don’t you wear glasses?’

  ‘I’m too vain,’ I said.

  ‘Listen,’ he said suddenly, rather tensely, ‘can we get the hell out of these parts and go to my place? Can I get you on your own somewhere without my family?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  ‘Wait for me,’ he said. ‘I’m going back to tell Jane not to expect us back till late. Okay?’

  ‘You don’t think I ought to stay with her till Jake comes in?’ I said.

  ‘For Godssake, Katherine,’ he said. ‘Can you not understand that if I don’t unzip my bloody flies and climb into you, I will go bloody mad?’

  Jonathan knew a bus that would take us to Kilburn. It took for ever to come.

  ‘What’s the state of you?’ he said. ‘I’m not going to hurt you, am I?’ He had touched a morbid fear of mine: that those parts of me, so recently a mess of septic swelling and staple-clips, were no longer capable of functioning.

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t tried since just after I got pregnant. I’ve been very celibate. Though I haven’t always been so celibate,’ I tell him, fired by some curious puritanical need to breast-beat, some hangover from the Methodist Sunday School. ‘The year I went to Italy, after your brother dismantled my character, I went through about thirty men in less than a year.’ Jonathan, as I ought to have predicted, was nobody’s conscience but his own.

  ‘You remind me of Jake’s joke about the cakes at the Jewish wedding,’ he said without concern. ‘Mrs Goldberg five, Mrs Goldman six, but who’s counting? Do you know that joke?’ I told him no.

  In Kilburn High Road, I said to him, ‘Do you ever still do that alto singing that your mother made you do?’ Jonathan shrugged.

  ‘It could be my party trick, I suppose,’ he said, ‘if I ever went to parties, which I don’t. In short, no. I don’t get a call for it, Kath.’

  ‘But I’m calling for it,’ I said.

  ‘You mean you want me to sing to you?’ he said incredulously.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, laughing.

  ‘What, here? In the street?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Are you out of your mind?’ he said. ‘You want me to sing like a transvestite in the street? This is Kilburn, lady. Do you want six drunken Irishmen to step out of the pub and beat me to death?’ Jonathan was so solid, somehow, death seemed remote.

  ‘They’ll think it’s me,’ I said. Jonathan conceded and, after looking furtively over his shoulder, sang a small rustic stanza in Italian which beseeched a barefoot nymph not to disturb the dewfall on the grass. Quite unlike the usual hey nonny no.

  ‘I can’t sing any more of it,’ he said. ‘After that you need more voices.’

  ‘That was lovely,’ I said, because it was. Quite beautiful. ‘Some soothing rustic trad for us pavement bashers.’ It had got of late to unnerve me that I always walked on concrete.

  ‘It’s not trad. It’s Monteverdi,’ he said. Monteverdi and I shook hands across the gap and put down our cudgels.

  ‘I’ll tell you something you’ll hate, shall I?’ I said to him. ‘You’re cultured, Jonathan. You always were.’

  Forty-One

  In bed, Jonathan loomed over me, pausing like a compassionate executioner.

  ‘Scream at me to get out if I hurt you,’ he said. He didn’t. What he did to me caused me instead to stir quietly like a moth emerging slowly from a cocoon. Jonathan, who is a flamboyant and copious talker, didn’t talk during the act, a thing which pleased me since I preferred the uninterrupted and more primitive pleasure of muscle and gland. Afterwards he carefully picked off the few dark chest hairs which he had shed into the sweat between my breasts.

  ‘You okay?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve got some intriguing ridges where you’ve been stitched,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t in the least detract.’

  ‘Have I?’ I said.

  ‘You’ve also still got some lactation going on in your right breast,’ he said. ‘Do you know that?’ I shook my head. He got up to pee. I watched him go, feeling reluctant to leave the warmth of the quilt. When I did, I found that the bathroom was not in fact the bathroom at all, but a small makeshift kitchen. A narrow wedge-shaped afterthought like a slice of brie, with enamelled sink and ancient gas cooker.

  ‘Where is your loo?’ I said to him.

  ‘On the landing,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to get dressed. I used an empty milk bottle, but it’s a system which favours a gentleman.’

  ‘Some gentleman,’ I said as I climbed resignedly into my clothes. ‘First it’s your mother’s wellingtons and then it’s milk bottles. What next?’ A domino theory of personal hygiene.

  ‘I’ll make some tea,’ Jonathan said without contrition. He had evidently become a prodigious drinker of tea.

  Jonathan’s landlady’s loo was a delightful period piece with a wooden seat, brass hinges and a porcelain handle saying PULL in elegant blue characters, fixed to the clanky chain. It bore its name in the bowl. It was called ‘The Chine’. Over the bath was a notice which said ‘Not more than two baths a week, please’. I was tempted to lift it and post it to Michele. I could contemplate, after all, the prospect of writing to him without tears. I would write some day very soon and tell him that I had slept with the English Jew, which went to prove that he never made a meestake and that my life, while somewhat precarious, was no longer in pieces. I would transcribe for his amusement the notice pertaining to the landlady’s ablutions, and tell him that I would always love him, which, in a sense, was perfectly true.

  Jonathan had made the tea and was waiting for me in bed with it when I returned.

  ‘Take your clothes off and come back to me,’ he said. We drank the tea with our knees under the quilt. On his bed Jonathan had an incongruously expensive down quilt poppered into an elegant greenish trellis-patterned cover.

  ‘Jonathan,’ I said, ‘how was it when your wife gave birth?’

  ‘Two hours,’ he said. ‘No vaginal stitching. Very good medical care. She was dead lucky, I suppose. And y
ou?’

  ‘Lots of technology,’ I said. ‘Haemorrhaging. An appalling ache in the back. I won’t tell you. Not now. I was too bloody Anglo-Saxon to scream, Jonathan. I lay there apologising for my own pain. For about ten days I was not so much myself as a compound of Hoffman la Roche. It wasn’t half expensive. The doctors got it wrong. My cervix got messed up. My stitches went septic. The works.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I loved your patchwork crotch, if that is any comfort to you.’ He anointed my vaginal lobes with a few brief kisses.

  ‘Jonathan,’ I said, ‘was it ever difficult for you when we were younger? Did I ever make you unhappy? I mean long ago?’ Jonathan thought.

  ‘I suppose I persuaded myself that I didn’t care,’ he said. ‘I was okay. It made me more objectionable than I might have been. That’s all. I persuaded myself that women were all much the same, once you got their knees apart. I went on a grotesque promiscuous binge. That year Roger came back I made my way with a vengeance through the girls’ netball team.’

  ‘When you were seventeen?’ I said, finding this hard to believe. ‘Do you know what I was doing at seventeen, Jonathan? I was sighing gently over portraits of Lord Byron in school library books.’ Jonathan, smiling sweetly, kissed my cheek.

  ‘You see how much less depraved you were than I?’ he said. ‘You can’t get much more depraved, I expect, than to shove your cock endlessly up navy skirts behind the sports pavilion. I probably did for the drainage, clogging it up with used French letters. Dearest Kath. Lovely woman,’ he said euphorically. ‘This is a very special day for me. “This is the birthday of my life, because my love has come to me.”’

  ‘Is come,’ I said, because he had misquoted. It shocked me. For this, I thought snootily, he got a first at Oxford.

  ‘Is come,’ he said, without apology. ‘That’s even better. It’s sexier. My love is come.’ He kissed me all over my mouth. ‘Why is it you come so beautifully, my love? My love is come – to me, under me, with me, all over me. The birthday of my life is come, because my love is about to come with me for the second time in one evening. Kath, sweet, beautiful, ravaged Kath, will the scars up your esteemed fanny stand it if I turn you over and fuck you from behind?’ I nodded shakily, because I could not speak. It was too much of joy.

  * * *

  I woke Jonathan at one o’clock in the morning, saying that I ought to go home.

  ‘Home?’ he said, yawning, blinking vaguely.

  ‘If you will put me in a taxi, I’ll go to Jake’s,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry to wake you.’ I had been watching him sleep, in that curious protective mothering way in which one watches the sleep of a man who has entered upon it after visiting sexual pleasure upon one. Jonathan mumbled into the pillow, blinking against the light.

  ‘They’ll know you’re with me,’ he said. ‘Go to sleep.’

  ‘I think it’s bad form,’ I said, ‘not to turn up. I ought to be there in the morning.’ Jonathan sat up suddenly and looked at me, shaking off sleep.

  ‘Hello, my love,’ he said. ‘Are you talking to me?’

  ‘I’ll come back tomorrow, of course,’ I said. ‘After I’ve had lunch with Jake. Okay? Jon, please wake up. I’m a bit reluctant to step out into the street at this hour on my own. As you said, this is Kilburn, isn’t it? I mean, I haven’t yet been on the Women’s Self-Defence course like your sister.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. The agony of the night air, after the warmth of bodies and the down quilt, was quite terrible for us both.

  At lunchtime the next day, having previously spent some minutes trying to tone down, with nettle-rash cream, a compromising abrasion on my upper lip caused by Jonathan’s moustache, I met Jacob who was lunching with his publisher. He offered me over the table to the publisher, vouching generously for my abilities. Was I in the corridors of power?

  ‘That’s excellent,’ said the publisher. ‘We’ll advertise the job, of course, but it’s yours.’ Then I took a bus to Jonathan’s flat where I found him sitting at his typewriter, wearing, of all things, the aged black pullover which I once made. A quality garment, made to last.

  ‘You can walk this morning,’ he said. ‘All that bashing at your maimed interior has done you no violence.’

  ‘It’s the afternoon,’ I said. ‘It’s half-past three.’ Officiously, because intensity is difficult to bear, I quoted him am and pm. Jonathan had a curious quiet heaviness about him.

  ‘I love you,’ he said, not without some pain. ‘Dare I love you? Tell me that, Kath.’

  ‘I’ve got a job,’ I said shiftily, through fragility and fear. ‘Your father’s publisher is going to advertise for a copy-editor but fix it for me. Shocking, isn’t it?’ Jonathan held me.

  ‘Terrible,’ he said. ‘They’re a funny lot, these publishers. They publish all this left-wing stuff because only radicals read, and then they send out the printing work to Hong Kong for the cheap labour. It’s a bad world, Kath. Come. Lie in my arms on the darkling plain. Live with me. Don’t go away tonight, please. I need you. I need to stuff you full of my spew. Have some tea.’

  ‘I’ll stay with Jake for a week or two,’ I said, ‘if you don’t mind.’

  Jonathan made us tea, which we drank with our knees again under the quilt.

  ‘This quilt,’ I said, ‘this quilt is a fine thing, Jonathan. How do impoverished writers in garrets buy things like this?’

  ‘In sooth, somebody stole it for me from Heal’s,’ he said. ‘She had a Christmas job there. I didn’t ask her to, mind.’

  All the residual adolescent trouble-maker within me stirred at the thought that a man who had received stolen goods was about to make love to me.

  ‘I’m not altogether impoverished, as a matter of fact,’ Jonathan said. ‘I am a man of property. You are in bed with the clandestine owner of a heap of damp stones in Kilkenny. A house, Kath, but it’s still in my grandmother’s name because I’m scrounging dole money, you see. It’s been used for storing hay, so it’s got rather damp. I intend to live in it. Rogsie says he will spend two weeks in it with me in September and we’ll make a start on repairing it. He knows about damp-coursed concrete and reinforcing joists. I’ve got some money too, just a bit, to fix it up. Jane is going to come and set up the garden for me when it’s habitable. It’s near where she spent her childhood holidays. Will you share it with me?’ I tried not to respond.

  ‘Is this a hand-out from your grandfather?’ I said.

  ‘Indirectly,’ Jonathan said. ‘He died last year and left some of the loot to Roger and me. Not Jane, of course, the old bastard, but she doesn’t need it anyhow.’

  ‘She’s got the aunt’s money,’ I said, much amused. ‘What about your poor sisters? Will you have to keep them in the groom’s cottage?’

  ‘My house is the groom’s cottage, and worse,’ he said. ‘The sisters are okay. They’ve got the other grandmother’s house in Golders Green coming to them. Lots of boats coming in. All most embarrassing for Jake. Roger has just moved his family into that house the grandparents had in Oxford. Remember that house? It’s a bloody palace. Room for the grand piano at last. It’s a hard life in this country today for the industrious middle class.’

  ‘It jolly well is,’ I said. ‘Ask my stepfather. Your grandfather wasn’t middle class. What you’ve got is the pickings of the declining minor aristocracy. It’s money stolen from the Irish peasantry.’

  ‘We’ll halve it and say no more,’ Jonathan said. ‘Let’s eat.’

  It was wonderfully evident to me that evening that Jonathan could cook. Without engaging in that dreary gourmet show of stone mortars and egg-yolks, he produced an edible meal, frying up vegetables in a pan.

  ‘Would you like to see Rogsie again?’ he said. ‘Would that lay a ghost for you? A confrontation with your teenage crush?’

  Forty-Two

  Meeting Roger again was not a thing I sought out and neither did he. He had my telephone number after all. I met him willynilly when he came to collect Jonathan for the
ferry crossing to Ireland one weekend. A month before, I had moved in with Jonathan, which was working well. It suited me comfortably and Jonathan was overjoyed. I went to work each day for Jacob’s publisher and left Jonathan at home to peg out washing and stir the soup in between his bursts of typing. He was very nice to come home to and strove to nourish me each evening with dishes culled from The Pauper’s Cookbook. He washed the plates – thanks either to his mother’s resolute indoctrination or in spite of it – without the familiar conflict between immediate gratification and deferred punishment. My earnings came to more than his dole money, which he ceremonially gave up.

  ‘Sit down, my dearie,’ he said to me one evening. ‘Nice cup of tea? Your pipe and slippers?’ Then he brought me the day’s Guardian. ‘How’s you, my love?’ he said. ‘I have been having such a lovely orgy of dominating male fantasies about you today.’ He was wearing a funny little gingham apron which looked like the kind of thing schoolgirls make in their first year at high school in preparation for the next term’s cookery class. A thing left behind by his ex-wife. ‘All while I was running the iron over your Viyella shirt,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, good,’ I said.

  ‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ he said, sitting down beside me. ‘You like your blokes to kick you around, don’t you? First there’s my brother who assaults your mind and then there’s the fascist lunatic who assaults your body and nearly kills you on the road. But they’ve neither of them got anything on me when it comes to proper male brutality.’

  ‘What’s your line then, Jonathan?’ I said, wondering if all that murdering of fish he did in his youth was what made him so kind.

  ‘I plan to rape you with my new Bisset mop while you read Jill Tweedie,’ he said.

  ‘Having first tied me to the bed with your apron strings,’ I said. He kissed me.

  ‘My brother telephoned today,’ he said. ‘He sends you his love. He’s coming down on Sunday to take me to Ireland. Tell you something funny about Rogsie – shall I? – thinking of male domination. If he’s late back from his seminars of an evening, his wife doesn’t feed him. He slopes off to the Chinese takeaway to sustain himself. There’s some good, old-fashioned petticoat government in that house. All that monosodium glutamate is damaging to the brain, you know. He is a mathematician, after all. Deterioration of the brain is an occupational hazard.’