Brother of the More Famous Jack

by Barbara Trapido

  ‘Does that mean I won’t see you for a fortnight?’ I said. I had never enjoyed anybody’s company as much before. We contemplated the prospect of separation bleakly.

  ‘Bloody terrible, isn’t it?’ he said.

  Over the years I had envisaged that, in meeting Roger again, I would make myself invulnerable by the careful magnificence of my appearance. I found this a useful thing to do when I was feeling insecure. In the event, he came to the door before we had got up in the morning and I received him improperly dressed in the giant T-shirt in which I slept, thinking, self-consciously, that I had not yet brushed the night’s fur from my teeth. We embraced briefly and awkwardly in the doorway, where he let in a rush of cold air. Roger had not changed at all in appearance. There he was, the same comely schoolboy, shaking lank hair from his eyes, not knowing quite where to look, fidgeting a little with his keys which he had attached to a large plastic key-ring made in the image of a fried egg. Life-size.

  ‘I’m early,’ he said. ‘Is Jonathan awake yet?’

  ‘Of course I’m awake,’ Jonathan said from within, his early morning voice tellingly an octave lower than usual. He climbed out of bed in his Marks and Spencer underpants.

  ‘Coffee,’ he said, ‘that’s what meets the case.’

  ‘I’m early,’ Roger said again. His speech, which had never been as pronouncedly Sussex as the others, had lost all trace of region. I have this trait myself. I am so eager to please my reference group that, unwittingly, I assimilate its accent. I develop marbles in my voice when I talk to strangers and always talk posh on the telephone. Jonathan doesn’t have this problem. He can catch any accent he chooses but his natural speech is still unreconstituted Sussex grammar school.

  ‘Have some coffee, Roger,’ I said. ‘I like your fried egg.’

  ‘My wife gave it to me for my birthday,’ he said. ‘It helps me not to lose my keys. I have a tendency to lose keys.’ He looked so young that it seemed to me an affectation on his part that he should not only have a wife and be entrusted with keys, but that he should presume to be absent-minded with it as well.

  ‘Aren’t you tempted to gnaw upon it?’ I said. ‘Would you like some breakfast?’ Roger smiled his dimpled smile, tolerating the jape but not amused by it.

  ‘Just coffee,’ he said. Jonathan pulled on his jeans over his underpants and followed this with the previous day’s sweater.

  ‘What else shall I take, Kath?’ he said.

  ‘Ibsen?’ I said. ‘Woolly socks? Your flute?’

  ‘Kath has made me some socks, Roger,’ Jonathan said. ‘Two, to be exact. One for each foot. Socks to go fishing in. Not so much socks as an art form, they are. They ought really to hang in the Whitechapel Gallery, these socks. They exhibit an inspired union of form and function.’ They were Fair Isle socks with lovely scolloped tops. Roger didn’t respond.

  ‘You aren’t planning to go fishing, I take it?’ he said. ‘Because I’m planning to have you hump bags of cement.’

  ‘You don’t think I might catch the supper?’ Jonathan said. Roger might have made quite a creditable schoolmaster, after all, had he not been seduced by fellowships and the pursuit of the Infinite.

  ‘We’ll open tins,’ he said firmly.

  ‘If you say so, Gaffer,’ Jonathan said. ‘And what about my woman? Have you got room in the boot for my woman?’ Jonathan embraced me, thoughtfully, giving me the security of that well-defined status, sensing that I might be a little at sea. Roger smiled again, I suspect rather wishing that he had the power of entering into Jonathan’s high spirits, but remaining aloof from it.

  ‘Could we make tracks soonish, Jont?’ he said.

  I sat alone among the coffee cups after they had gone, feeling the after-effect of Jonathan’s unshaven cheek upon my face, and stared rather morosely at the floor. Roger had been so miserably undemonstrative that it had left me feeling very flat. He had not brought himself to engage in so much display of politeness, even, as to ask what I had been doing with myself all these years, or how it felt to be back.

  I felt a bit like a hermit in London without Jonathan. My friends had all left, following men and jobs. John Millet was dead, who might once have stepped in and taken me to Manon Lescaut. I got dressed and walked through Kilburn into the Finchley Road and on through Hampstead Village, towards Jacob’s house. On the way I bought a pint of milk which I drank for my breakfast, and a Sunday newspaper. The newsagent’s young man chatted me up jovially.

  ‘Get off, Ron,’ said the newsagent, ‘she’s got her own young man, haven’t you, miss?’ I was flattered to be called miss. The day warmed up nicely as I walked. Jacob and Jane were drinking coffee on their roof when I got there. Jacob called to me, over the balustrade, to come up and fetch a cup on my way. They had a large thermal coffee-pot up there and some hot croissants, wrapped in a cloth. The last of the terry-cloth baby’s nappies, I suspected.

  ‘And what have you done with Jonathan?’ Jane said. It was very nice there, on their airy perch.

  ‘He’s gone to Ireland,’ I said. I surprised myself by engaging in a compromising and foolish snivel. Nothing more than a fleeting moist eye.

  ‘Give the child a nose-rag, Janie,’ Jacob said. Jane sought me out a crumpled tissue from her dressing-gown pocket and gave it to me. I blew my nose hard and laughed.

  ‘I’m afraid that, one way or another, my sons cause you a lot of trouble,’ Jane said.

  ‘Jonathan isn’t trouble,’ I said. Jane raised an eyebrow. She habitually perceived Jonathan as her enfant terrible and nothing would shake her.

  ‘Jonathan was always trouble,’ she said.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Jacob said. ‘In any case it’s not your sons, Janie, it’s men. Men cause Katherine a lot of trouble. That’s not unusual. Men are well-known trouble-makers. There’s only one kind of person causes more trouble than men, and that’s women. You were lucky in this respect. You settled down early to a righteous and sober domestic life with me, didn’t you, sweetheart?’ Jane threw him a wonderful black look.

  ‘If you are going to rewrite history,’ she said, ‘I’ll get this on the record for Katherine. The only reason that Jacob and I are so nice to each other these days is that we both of us know we may well be dependent on the other any day now to push us around in a bath chair.’

  ‘I hope you will have one of those stylish wicker ones,’ I said, ‘like a chaise-longue on wheels.’ I wondered, in the face of their example, whether I would be necking with my bloke at sixty, or if one ought not to presume to expect these things. I ate croissants with them and stayed for an hour, looking at an old photograph album. I love people’s photographs. Photographs of people, that is. I cannot bear tasteful shots of historic buildings and scenery. I like those to come on postcards or in Kenneth Clark. There was Jane with her Angela Brazil haircut and swimsuit, fooling on the sand with her brother, who, five years on, wanted to make fisticuffs with Jake. There was Roger on Jacob’s shoulders on Hampstead Heath in little dungarees. There was a wedding photograph, showing Jane manifestly pregnant on the arm of Jacob’s professor outside the registry office, and another of Jacob, with an arm around each of two mothers – his own and Jane’s.

  ‘She came to our wedding, you know,’ Jane said. ‘She slammed the door on the old man for once, and along she came.’

  There was a picture of Jonathan leering toothless out of a wigwam in cardboard feathers, and a press clipping of Jonathan as Julius Caesar wearing tinfoil oak leaves jammed over his ungainly frizz and making hamming gestures towards a male junior, who was got up as Calpurnia. Forget not in your speed Antonius to touch Calpurnia. Oh shit, Caterina, shut up, because the babe is dead. Dead, for Christssake.

  Forty-Three

  Jonathan threw down a clutter of back-pack and wellingtons when he came back, and took me for a moment in his arms before he fell heavily into a chair.

  ‘Make us some tea, Kath,’ he said. ‘We’ve been working like war horses. Rogsie doesn’t believe in tea breaks. There’s a
new floor, all the plaster is off the walls, we’ve got a man to make rafters and a new front door. Roger is going to make us new windows in his garage. He’s got all the measurements there in his pocket diary, haven’t you, Rogsie? All squashed in between the autumnal equinox and the maths prelims. Sit down, Rogsie. Don’t do that bloody nervous hovering.’ Roger smiled.

  ‘He’s a wreck,’ he said to me a little smugly because, appearances to the contrary, he was stronger than Jonathan and better at humping cement, ‘I must go,’ he said. ‘I must look in on Mother and Sally is expecting me. That was good for us, Jont. I enjoyed it. It’s a good idea to fix one’s mind on a manual task from time to time.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ Jonathan said and laughed on a yawn. ‘That was above and beyond the call of brotherly love, what you did. Thanks, Roger. You were prodigious. See him out, Kath, because my legs don’t work.’ I walked Roger to his car in total silence. In the back he had a large spirit level and a bag of tools wedged between the door and the child seat. He took the fried egg out of his pocket.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he said. ‘It’s been good for me, Katherine, to see you and my brother so happy. I’ve had you on my conscience intermittently over the years.’ Did Roger imagine himself to be dispensing patronage to his brother? Who giveth this woman to this man? And for whom was it good? For me and for Jonathan, surely. Why should it be good for him?

  ‘There’s no need,’ I said. ‘I haven’t been idle, you know. I haven’t been hemming sheets these years.’ Roger nodded.

  ‘No, I’m sure of it,’ he said. ‘But I was unkind to you. They were things I felt I had to say, those things I said.’

  ‘I stole your travelling bag,’ I said. ‘I can’t even give it back to you because somebody stole it from me.’

  Roger smiled and touched my cheek, briefly, with the fried egg. It was, I think, the most affectionate gesture I ever got from him. Because he made the gesture I took the chance to hit him below the belt.

  ‘Do you really go to church, Roger?’ I said. ‘Did the Holy Ghost appear to you in the blackberry patch?’ Roger laughed, but he wasn’t put out.

  ‘It’s not a thing you are required to understand, Katherine,’ he said. ‘It has to do, if you remember, with the peace which passes all understanding.’ Another verbal coup.

  ‘You’re damned clever, Roger,’ I said admiringly, ‘no wonder you’re a don. You always did talk back in that smart way. Shall I tell you something that came as a great surprise to me? I’m clever too. When I had a spell in the loony bin, a while back, the shrink measured my IQ.’

  ‘I never had any doubt of it,’ Roger said. ‘Listen. If you should ever need my help, Katherine, you’ve only to ask, okay? Remember, I’m your friend.’ King Cophetua and the Beggarmaid.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Goodbye, Roger.’

  ‘Come and see us,’ he said. ‘Sally would love to meet you and my daughter is always pleased to see Jonathan. You will come, won’t you? Come soon.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. Jonathan was almost asleep when I got back.

  ‘Jon,’ I said, ‘could one actually fancy a man who prayed to God? I mean, be screwed by a bloke who’d just got off his knees?’

  Before he fell asleep Jonathan, sensibly, offered me John Donne.

  Forty-Four

  Meeting Roger’s wife was an event for which I prepared myself with care. I groomed before the glass, having clothed myself in tight burgundy velvet trousers and a soft matching knitted thing with Fair Isle bands around the yoke and wrists, which showed the contours of my nipples. Thanks to Michele, who went in for expensive bribes, I had some long Italian millionairess boots which came up over my knees. My cheekbones were aglow with artful gleam and I had bundled my crepe hair under a maroon beret with studied carelessness. I pulled over the lot my hand-quilted chintz jacket splashed with faded pink roses, which I made once out of my aunt’s discarded curtains. Then I stared at myself in the glass, gorging on self-love.

  ‘Let’s not miss the train, shall we?’ Jonathan said. ‘What a grade A sex object you are. Jesus, I’ve gone out with some birds in my time, but never with one who wore such high-class fisherman’s waders. She was a head girl, you know, Roger’s wife,’ he added sadistically. I stopped in my tracks.

  ‘You’re having me on,’ I said. ‘You’re trying to scare me.’ Jonathan laughed.

  ‘Gospel,’ he said. ‘Head girl of that direct grant girls’ school in Cambridge. Now I’ve made you sweat.’ He held my hand on the way to the underground. ‘I love you, Kath,’ he said. ‘It was worth it to me, you see. If I’d got you long ago I wouldn’t have you now, would I?’ I shook my head. In all probability he wouldn’t. They seldom come off, teenage crushes, do they? Perhaps it is possible to come together only after one has been through the fire, battered and maimed, like Jane Eyre and her Rochester.

  We walked from the Oxford railway station along the Oxford canal, passing occasional barges as we went. Even the dossers who hobnobbed under the bridges looked younger. We made our way up into salubrious north Oxford, to what used to be the grandparents’ house. Roger’s grandmother had moved, with a friend, to a cottage in Wolvercote. Sally was there to meet us, but Roger was still in his Institute. She had brown curly hair and pretty, laughing eyes which fixed one in a most forthright manner, quite unlike Roger, who shifted his eyes about nervously and blinked a lot. She had a skin like the bloom on an apricot, and a slightly disfiguring swollen lip where somebody had accidentally bashed her with a briefcase as she boarded a train the previous day, but it did nothing to shake her self-possession. The crucifix was not visible to me, since she was wearing a high-necked sweater. Unlike me, she had taken no trouble to adorn herself – she didn’t need to: she had more self-assurance.

  ‘Hello, Jonathan,’ she said warmly. She offered her cheek for a kiss. ‘And this is Katherine. I’m so glad to meet you at last.’ She shook my hand. ‘Come in.’

  The house was all changed. It was, as always, palatial in its solidity and proportion, but innocently unadorned. Stripped of the grandparents’ rather looming antiques, it also had none of the arty clutter of needlepoint cushion covers and applique’d hangings that I went in for. There was new, stone-coloured Wilton carpeting throughout, and the white walls had no pictures. There was one educational wall frieze in the vestibule, because Sally was obviously a conscientious, pedagogical mother. She had magnetic numbers on the door of the fridge and she had painted the letters of the alphabet, in lower case, around the walls of the downstairs loo with marker pens. Her kitchen was large and beautifully appointed. The plum trees, visible through the kitchen window, were heavy with fruit. We drank a pleasant cup of coffee with her. There was no suggestion that she would report me for wearing my beret at a rakish angle.

  ‘Roger is bringing home a colleague for lunch,’ she said. ‘His wife has just had a baby. They may well be a little late. I wonder if you people would care to collect Glare for me? She’s with a friend in the next street. That would please her no end. She considers you a great treat, Jonathan.’ She had a way of managing one with politeness. When she said, ‘I wonder if you would care to?’ she meant, ‘Do it.’ Perhaps that was what Roger liked. Somebody to boss him around. Somebody to tell him to stop chewing grass and go and practise the G Minor. That never occurred to me before.

  Jonathan and I walked the tree-lined streets till we found ourselves admitted into the neighbour’s kitchen, where Roger’s daughter was watching her friends paint on computer printouts. A three-year-old, with her mother’s straight glance and none of her father’s apprehensiveness. She accosted Jonathan like a brisk committee woman.

  ‘You weren’t supposed to get me, Jonerfun,’ she said. ‘Mummy was supposed to get me.’

  ‘And why haven’t you got a stack of paintings to your name, like the other chaps?’ Jonathan said, calling her bluff.

  ‘Because I just like to play running around,’ she said. ‘Is she your wife?’

  ‘She’s Katherine,’ Jonathan s
aid. ‘She’s my friend.’ He crouched to button up her duffle-coat.

  ‘Are you going to marry her?’ the child said. The hostess laughed a little, nervously.

  ‘No,’ Jonathan said.

  ‘Why not?’ said the child. Jonathan smiled.

  ‘Because I see no reason why I should tolerate the interference of Church and State in my love affairs,’ he said, being deliberately incomprehensible to her. ‘Or of your good self, you nosey little bugger.’ She giggled with delight at the insult. We said goodbye and went out into the street where she ran on ahead of us, scruffling through fallen leaves.

  ‘Would you like one of those, Kath?’ he said. ‘One of those little people? Would you like it if I got you up the spout?’

  ‘Forget it,’ I said, ‘I’m all right.’

  Roger entered, accompanied, talking shop.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said. ‘This is Donald.’ His colleague was bald and bearded, but I knew him.

  ‘I know him,’ I said. ‘We don’t need an introduction.’ Donald O’Brien looked baffled. I enjoyed his slight embarrassment.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, in that gorgeous unreformed accent. ‘Remind me.’

  ‘Eleven years ago,’ I said. ‘South Parks Road. On a wall. In the rain.’ Donald snapped his fingers.

  ‘Bullseye,’ he said, grinning broadly. ‘You were waiting for your boyfriend.’ He was a relief beside Roger, being, as he was, so composed and affable. I gestured commandingly to Roger, feeling the irony of being a woman who had, for a time, enjoyed the admiration of all the men in the room.