Brother of the More Famous Jack

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Brother of the More Famous Jack Page 19

by Barbara Trapido


  ‘Roger was the boyfriend?’ Donald said in disbelief. He enjoyed the idea no end. ‘Wouldn’t you know it? I made a pass at your girlfriend, Roger, but I’ll tell you this: I couldn’t move her. She insisted on waiting for you in the rain. I couldn’t lure her away for a drink.’ Roger weathered the coincidence, picking a little at his fingernail. We went through to the living room where Donald sat down beside me on the sofa, beaming effusively.

  ‘You had more hair on your head and less on your face,’ I said, ‘but I’m glad to say that your accent hasn’t changed.’

  ‘Really?’ he said. ‘Because back in Melbourne they tell me I sound like a Pommie.’

  ‘Well, they’re quite wrong in Melbourne,’ I said, ‘because you sound like Barry McKenzie. You wouldn’t want to sound like a Brit, would you? You’re not going to tell me you actually live here, in this penal colony, are you?’ Donald laughed.

  ‘You don’t forget much, do you?’ he said.

  I flirted with him because he invited it. We engaged in a great effusion of warm mutuality. I did it, I think, to show up Roger, who must have perceived it as a reproach to himself, who knew me so much better, but found it much more difficult to engage people.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said magnificently. ‘I forget nothing. I’m like an archaeologist on past conversations. I will quote you chapter and verse if you like.’

  ‘Only you can’t remember to visit the dentist,’ Jonathan said. I’d stood up the dentist the previous day. Darling Jonathan, bless him, was wanting it to be known that he was the one who was party to my domestic habits. That he was the one who knew the colour of my toothbrush. There was credit to be got from knowing me. I was playing the enjoyable game of upstaging Roger in his own house.

  ‘What’s an archaeologist?’ Glare said.

  ‘A man who digs up bones,’ Donald said.

  ‘A man, eh?’ I said, laughing. ‘You big Aussie sexist.’

  ‘Digs up bones?’ Glare said incredulously. ‘Is he a dog?’ It made us all laugh. Donald took her on his knee. It was curious how much pleasure the meeting gave us both when we did but sit on a wall together for twenty minutes such a long time ago. We were both having hard times, I suppose. Roger was making me more miserable than I had realised. Donald was suffering the absence of Melbourne.

  ‘And now you live here?’ I said. ‘And you’ve married one of these awful Oxford women you complained about, who has just had a baby?’

  ‘She’s from Sydney,’ he said. ‘She’s just had her third baby, as a matter of fact. Another male, I’m afraid.’ He had a thing for Glare, quite obviously, and wanted a daughter. Then blow me if the man didn’t pull out from his wallet, upon the instant, a picture of the wife and kiddies. On a beach. Aussie beach. Wife in bikini. 38.22.38. Undulating blonde hair. Sons grinning under blonde fringes.

  ‘Wow!’ Jonathan said, who was sitting on the other side of me. He was not slow to see merit in a half-naked woman with unmistakeable attributes. ‘This is a woman who has had two children?’ he said.

  ‘She’s bloody handsome, Donald,’ I said. ‘She’s quite something for a bald colonial mathematician, isn’t she? I’ll bet she’s dead nice and all. Do you always keep her in your wallet, along with your money and your credit cards?’ I was behaving like a shrew with Donald because I knew he had the strength to weather it, and indirectly I was passing a message to Roger. The message was that if he were to try on me now what he pulled over me in my youth, I would have his bloody balls in the mincer and make no mistake. Donald laughed.

  ‘Jesus, baby,’ he said.

  ‘Jesus, baby, what?’ I said. He laughed again.

  ‘Jesus, baby, I never knew you had the power of tongues. It’s good to see you again. I mean, really.’

  Roger opened some very nice college wine for us to drink with our lunch. We ate in the kitchen at a slinky black table with shiny chrome legs. There was a wonderful serpentine aluminium tube which ran out through the kitchen wall. It must have been a central heating ventilator or a thing for extracting cooking fumes. It was then that it dawned on me that everything in Roger’s house was new. I wondered what had happened to his instinct to feather his nest with other people’s junk. My guess was that Sally simply wouldn’t have it. Sally’s lunch had been efficiently prepared beforehand. Things had been drawn out of the freezer in plastic containers. It gave the gathering a nice homeliness. It gave one the feeling of being present at a Tupperware party, but Clare wouldn’t eat her pate. She was quite a presence for Sally to contend with, because Sally wasn’t pliable. She placed a value upon behaviour. She liked sitting up straight at table and eating what was on your plate. Clare defiantly dumped her pate on my plate and dug her heels in. Sally apologised to me.

  ‘She really is a very naughty little girl,’ she said. I was not comfortable with the word ‘naughty’. It had to do, in my philosophy, with seaside postcards and the music hall.

  ‘Why don’t you stop moralising and make her chips?’ Jonathan said impertinently. To my great surprise, Sally blushed suddenly and looked rather coyly at Jonathan. She was completely undone.

  ‘She’s a lovely kid,’ Jonathan said. He picked up the wine bottle to fill her glass. ‘Why aren’t you boozing, sister?’ he said. She smiled at him primly. I found it hard to be rational about Sally Goldman. The bloody woman was not only bossy, I thought enviously, but she had feminine wiles of the most blatant kind.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ she said. The place was an obscene seething hive of fecundity. ‘Only just, but that’s when it’s most important to be careful, of course.’ Jonathan smiled at her, and did sums in his head.

  ‘He came home after laying my floor and got you pregnant,’ he said. ‘That’s nice. A little brother or sister for Small here. ‘Phone me when you’re eight months pregnant and I’ll take you out to dinner, because he won’t, will he? That miserable husband of yours.’ Sally shook her head, pouting prettily. She was flirting with him. Flirting. With my bloke, the hussy. And I with my wretched contraceptive pills in Jonathan’s kitchen. A foil package in a jam jar. Pills which I probably didn’t need anyway. But how do you know whether or not to believe some morbid, scandal-mongering Italian nurse? You had only to look at IRA funerals, as Jonathan once said, to see how much Catholics liked death and bad news.

  ‘Will you let me feel your foetal jerks through your flesh?’ Jonathan said. ‘I fancy pregnant women.’ I was almost ready to run the bread knife through his leg. Sally disguised her pleasure in his attentions under a small rebuke.

  ‘Why don’t you and Katherine get married and have your own children if you like it all so much,’ she said. ‘Frankly, being pregnant makes me feel like a cow.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be a marriage in the eyes of God,’ he said, to have her on. Sally looked at him sceptically.

  ‘A fat lot you care for the eyes of God,’ she said.

  In the afternoon, when Donald had gone, Jonathan and I took Clare to the Science Museum where his niece challenged Jonathan’s powers of rhetoric with regard to the afterlife. She didn’t like the dinosaur bones, she said.

  ‘They’re dead,’ Jonathan said.

  ‘But they can come alive again,’ she said. ‘Jesus came alive again, didn’t he?’

  ‘Search me,’ Jonathan said. ‘He ain’t never been no friend of mine.’ Upstairs, while Jonathan grappled with the resurrection, I made a sentimental journey to the limestones and cast an eye over the stencilling on the iron girders.

  ‘You were flirting with Roger’s wife,’ I said accusingly on the train.

  ‘Self-defence,’ Jonathan said. ‘You were flirting with that Aussie.’

  ‘Did you like my charming Aussie?’ I said.

  ‘He was all right,’ Jonathan said without enthusiasm. ‘He obviously gets you ten foot in the air.’

  ‘You exaggerate,’ I said. ‘I’d have him for a weekend, but not for keeps.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘You do the same for him. He was in the air, same as you. I
f I hadn’t been there he’d have asked you upstairs.’

  ‘He hardly needs me,’ I said, ‘with a wife like that.’

  ‘Miss Down Under for 1975 has been out of the market for a week or two, if you remember,’ he said. ‘She’s just had a baby.’ A great thing about Jonathan and me was that we gossiped something chronic. No holds barred. All that malice we wouldn’t venture before others. I think he got it from his mother, because Jacob was too good on the whole – he never displayed this flaw.

  ‘There’s a lot of breeding in Oxford,’ I said. ‘The place is like a bloody factory.’

  ‘There’s too much leisure,’ Jonathan said, ‘too much coming home for lunch,’ but the joke didn’t altogether work for us. ‘Flush those bloody pills of yours down the loo, Kath,’ he said. ‘Go on. Like you did with the Valium. All those million highly-motivated sperm for Godssake. You don’t think one of them might pull it off?’ I turned to the window, straightening my shoulders, thinking that Jonathan was Jacob’s flower child was he not? That people couldn’t just go around having babies in bedsitting rooms when they’d got jobs to do; that no baby would ever again be like my baby; that no baby would ever again gnaw its purple mottled fists with such dexterity and charm. I watched the wet green flatness of the Oxfordshire fields thinking suddenly of the baby’s mob caps. English babies didn’t wear those little cotton mob caps to keep off the sun like babies in Italy wore; like Janice had bought in the clothing chain-store on the way home from work, the sweet thing. Suddenly I found that the fields had developed watermarks like the undulations in shot taffeta because my vision was blurred with tears.

  ‘My baby had some mob caps,’ I said. ‘She hadn’t grown into them of course. I mean, she couldn’t even hold her head up, Jonathan.’ I bored my fists into my eye sockets to mop the copious flow.

  ‘I’ve made you cry,’ Jonathan said bleakly. ‘Oh God. Christ, my lovely, I’ve made you cry.’ He reached for my hand, but I shook him off with a sudden viciousness.

  ‘If you want a baby so much,’ I said, ‘why don’t you bugger off and fuck some bloody Sunday School teacher with her female parts intact, like your brother does? Perhaps she’s got a sister for you.’

  The outburst caused us to lapse into a silence which lasted till the ticket barrier.

  ‘You’ve got the tickets,’ Jonathan said. ‘Are you going to hand them over then, or not?’ The ticket man was waiting. I had them in my handbag.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. I produced them and we passed through the gate. ‘Hey, Jon,’ I said with some embarrassment, ‘I’m sorry. I was shitty to you.’

  ‘I was boring,’ Jonathan said curtly.

  ‘But Jon,’ I said, ‘if you were to bugger off, I’d feel bereft, you know.’

  ‘Who’s buggering off?’ he said. ‘Not me, snotface. I’m sticking here with you. Like a bloody barnacle. Listen love,’ he said earnestly, ‘if I’d known the woman was pregnant, we wouldn’t have gone.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to persuade me that you’re nice, Jonathan. It shows.’

  ‘If you want to know why I sounded so pleased about her boring pregnancy,’ he said, but I put a hand on his shoulder to stop him.

  ‘Because you’re nice,’ I said. ‘Why shouldn’t you be pleased? There’s no harm.’

  ‘Because I was so bloody glad that it was Sally who was having Roger’s babies,’ he said, ‘and not you. If you must know. I’m sorry to say this to you, Kath. I know it’s what you might have wanted. Sometimes I think it still is. But I have to see it my way, don’t I?’ It made me weep profusely on to his chest. ‘I’ve made you cry again,’ he said. ‘What’s the matter with me?’

  ‘I’ll chuck away the pills if you like,’ I said. ‘Right away.’

  ‘If you like,’ Jonathan said. ‘Only if you like.’

  ‘Okay, if I like,’ I said. ‘Of course I like, Jonathan. I mean, how churlish it would be of me not to like to have your baby. Can we just not talk about it please?’

  ‘Sure,’ Jonathan said. ‘We’ll just screw like blazes and not utter a word on the subject. Right?’ I laughed.

  ‘I’ll tell you this, though,’ he said, ‘and then I’ll shut up. If I make you pregnant, you get me too. You understand? No woman is going to pull that matriarchal shit over me again, Kath. Not you. Not nobody. You’ll have to stick with me.’

  ‘I think I could realistically envisage doing that,’ I said. ‘I find you a very thinkable proposition.’

  ‘Lady,’ Jonathan said. ‘I find you a rave-up.’

  Forty-Five

  The consultant had already seen me twice in his hospital clinic, but he had asked me to bring Jonathan to his private consulting rooms in Seymour Place. He liked to do Mr and Mrs together. He talked blandly and interminably over the top of his expensive glasses, intoning soothingly. He himself, he said, could see no striking and tangible reason why Mrs Browne should be unable to conceive a child. He addressed himself to Jonathan who appeared to have dominion, in his eyes, over my substandard private parts. I stopped listening to him from time to time and began to amuse myself by imagining the situation reversed. Were Jonathan to have consulted him, let us say, over a hernia in the groin, or retreating testicles, would he have been addressing me over Jonathan’s head in this way? Does one man ever discuss, over another man’s head, the problem of an incompetent penis? Mrs Browne’s cervix did display evidence of considerable surgical repair, he said. And there was a significant area of scar tissue in what he called ‘the front passage’, but he had known women in such cases go on successfully to bear subsequent children by Caesarean section. Mr Browne would, he hoped, indulge him if he ventured to suggest that it might not altogether be advisable to rule out the possibility of emotional factors inhibiting conception in this case. That, taking into account Mrs Browne’s highly regrettable previous experience of childbirth, and her experience of death – not once but twice (here he folded his hands like a clergyman and paused briefly to cast an eye over his notes) – for we must not disregard the matter of her father’s untimely death, he said, which occurred when Mrs Browne was, ah, was, let me see, was it nine years old? The sentence had no end. It was nothing but qualifying clauses. He clothed his propositions endlessly and skilfully in yards of wool. I had inherited from my mother a habit of treating men of the medical profession with an almost obsequious deference. Clean pillowcases for a home visit and best knickers for the surgery. One always apologised for calling out one’s GP to a fever, making the assumption that what one’s doctor both liked and deserved was patients who didn’t get sick. It was therefore a marvellous joy for me to watch Jonathan calmly take apart this high priest of female plumbing.

  ‘She didn’t come here to have you iron out her head,’ he said. ‘She came here to have you repair her reproductive equipment. What she wants to know is whether that is a thing which your particular tribe of mechanics can or cannot do. Spare us the O level psychology.’ The consultant, to my very great surprise, was unshakeable in his excessive politeness. He absolutely accepted Mr Browne’s point, he said. Absolutely.

  ‘Goldman,’ Jonathan said. ‘Goldman is my name.’ The consultant paused for a moment and looked again at his notes. Mr Goldberg was absolutely right, he said, in that he and his colleagues could never, of course, altogether be sure that there were not factors beyond what they perceived, which inhibited conception, but he would like to stress, he said, that in this case, given the circumstances, Mrs Goldberg might, subconsciously (and he would like to say altogether understandably), be balking at the alarming possibility of experiencing, once again, the agony of pain and death.

  ‘Garbage,’ Jonathan said. Since I assumed we were about to be thrown into the street I gathered up my handbag in readiness and sat on the edge of my chair, but the consultant waited for Jonathan to proceed.

  ‘You have made no test of her response to pain and her fear of death,’ Jonathan said. ‘You haven’t locked her up with maneating rats, for example, or made her wal
k the plank. You are fobbing her off with a hypothesis in the absence of knowledge. Nobody will blame you for your absence of knowledge, but the cover-up is dishonest. A collection of Italian butchers, who operate under the badge of your profession, have carved her up incompetently and your instinct is to make less of this and more of her psyche, because you are all members of the same closed shop. Blame the patient and save your face.’ He turned to me. ‘I can’t sit here and listen to any more of this, Kath,’ he said, ‘I’ll wait for you outside.’ He swept out, leaving me behind. Jonathan was always a master of the exit and entrance. Like Mr Knightley, he appears in doorways, knocking mud from his boots. As a card-carrying female masochist, I find both this, and his terrific cheek, quite essential to my sense of wellbeing.

  The consultant determined to be protective towards me, which was embarrassing in the extreme. I could see that if I stayed much longer, I would find myself in the marriage guidance department. He hoped I would forgive him, he said, but might he be permitted to ask whether these outbursts were typical of Mr Browne’s behaviour? Poor Mr Browne. He couldn’t have been more innocuous.

  ‘Only when he’s on acid,’ I said, treading in my master’s steps, before I left. In the waiting room, Jonathan was sitting among a collection of women and reading Cosmopolitan. He was the only man I knew who had always had the confidence to read women’s magazines in public. He was reading the Girl’s Crystal Annual the day I met him. I went up to him and kissed his cheek.

  ‘Bolshie, aren’t you?’ I said. Jonathan looked up.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Goldberg,’ he said. ‘What a timorous creature you are. You let a hack like that trample all over your subtle and lovely head. Jesus, I can get psychology like that in the barber’s shop for free.’ Jonathan, being a short-haired male, had developed the conviction that if people got their hair cut more often they wouldn’t need psychiatrists.

  ‘I took a stand,’ I said. ‘I told him you were on acid.’

  ‘What?’ Jonathan said.

 

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