Brother of the More Famous Jack

by Barbara Trapido

  ‘Sit down, young man,’ Jacob said irritably. ‘All the chairs in this house are mine.’ I escaped, like a coward, to the kitchen where I helped Jane with the food.

  ‘My daughter!’ Jacob hissed semi-hysterically to Jane when he came in. ‘She’s in the clutches of a county solicitor.’

  ‘Calm yourself, Jacob,’ Jane said witheringly. ‘He looks to me like a nice young man who sells leather goods in Liberty’s. He’ll last a week, no more.’

  ‘You told me she liked proles,’ I hissed. ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘It’s the truth,’ Jacob hissed back. ‘This is all quite new. What is he? Is he from Sandhurst? For Godssake, Janie, he’s intolerable.’

  ‘You’re neurotic about your daughter,’ Jane said. ‘You won’t be happy until she shaves her head and enters the convent.’

  Everyone drank to Jonathan and me and wished us well, but Jacob, who had crabbed at us ever since we conceived the idea of going to Ireland, could not even in the eleventh hour let it rest.

  ‘Well, Jont,’ he said, ‘we’ll have to make the best of this harebrained scheme of yours, though I’ll never know what’s wrong with London. The country is for peasants and milkmaids as you’ll find out. And then who is going to buy this miserable, derelict house off you?’

  ‘Now then, Jacob, leave him alone,’ Jane said firmly.

  ‘Jonathan likes the country. He always did. Just accept that you differ in this respect.’ Annie had her mouth open with indignation on our behalf.

  ‘And who are you to say Jont’s house is derelict?’ she said. ‘He’s had a builder in it, hasn’t he? You haven’t even seen it, you old bore. Roggs has seen it and he’s not complaining.’

  ‘When are you going to come and see it then, Jacob?’ I said. ‘You’re not going to wait for the half-price fares, I hope?’ Jacob smiled.

  ‘Katherine, my sweet girl,’ he said, ‘do you have any idea what isolation means?’ I thought yes, that I did. It meant telephoning the speaking clock at four in the morning from Hendon. It meant being with the Bernards in a crowded city. It did not mean being alone in the country with Jonathan.

  ‘I’ll have Jonathan,’ I said, sounding hopelessly starry-eyed.

  ‘And a small child?’ Jacob said. ‘Motherhood is isolating enough, sweetheart. You will be cut off and tied to your child. All this knitting nonsense of yours will peter out because the child will claim your time. And because there’s nobody left employed in this country to buy the things you make.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ Rosie said. ‘The West End is full of shops selling classy jerseys. So is Hampstead. You don’t notice. You only notice bookshops. Of course people buy them. I buy them, don’t I? We don’t all buy our clothes in Oxfam, you know, like some I could mention.’ Jane smiled, undisturbed by the jibe.

  ‘Why is it nonsense to knit jerseys, then, Jake?’ Annie said. ‘Coming from someone who teaches metaphysics, I must say, it’s a bit of a cheek isn’t it? I mean which do people need more of? Jerseys or metaphysics?’

  ‘The fact is, darling, people pay me to do it,’ Jacob said. ‘But these two here – God help them, Annie, between them they’ve got no practical sense at all. Which one of them is it that has the entrepreneurial spirit?’

  ‘Me,’ I said. ‘My father was a shopkeeper, Jacob. Jonathan knows about the country and I know about selling things. You think I won’t work hard. Admit it. You still think I’m a scatty girl with no application.’

  ‘Flower,’ Jacob said, ‘I think you’re lovely.’ I laughed.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘A lovely scatty girl with no application.’

  ‘He’s a sod, Katherine,’ Jane said. ‘I hope you are fully aware of that.’

  ‘My dear child,’ Jacob said, ‘what has hard work got to do with it? Money was never made out of hard work. Nobody ever got rich through labouring. Money is made through the exploitation of the labour of others. What you need, Katherine, is enough knitting-machines to supply all the local women who will then do the work for you while you people live off the surplus. That’s what you have to do. That is the only rationale for going to Ireland, as any good capitalist can tell you. In a situation of high unemployment you exploit the opportunities for low-paid, homebound female labour. Then you hire an accountant to fiddle your books and you cheat the tax man. That’s called initiative. That’s what you don’t have, Katherine, though your charms are many.’

  ‘Notebooks out, chaps,’ Jane said. ‘I hope you’re all taking this down. What a frightful old pedant you are, Jake. I’m bound to say it makes one proud not to have opened a book with footnotes in twenty years.’

  ‘But Jont,’ Jacob said, ‘the point is that I don’t and can’t see why you people set out to starve. Surely it is important not to starve? Surely you remember the words of the great Brecht on the subject? “Erst komt das Fressen, dan komt die Moral.”’

  ‘Why are you so greedy for them?’ Annie said. ‘Perhaps you’re a frustrated capitalist, Jake. Katherine doesn’t want to get rich. She wants to make beautiful things. That’s all there is in life worth doing.’ Jacob was touched by her sweetness.

  ‘You’re a beautiful thing,’ he said. ‘Once upon a time I made a beautiful thing.’ Annie jabbed him amiably in the ribs, and smiled engagingly.

  ‘Two fingers to you, you silly old man,’ she said. ‘Just because my nose is nearly as big as yours. Don’t think that I care.’

  Jane moved closer to me in that attractive, conspiring way she had which was always so flattering in its implication about oneself. She put a hand on mine.

  ‘You’re getting an awful lot of advice from Himself,’ she said. ‘This day and every day. I hardly like to add my own, but it is this. Your scheme to make things will work splendidly because – no matter what Jake says – there are always enough very rich people to buy a few very beautiful things. Rosie is perfectly right. Jacob knows this too. He is simply concerned about losing Jonathan’s company.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ Jacob said. Poor Jacob, lying through his teeth, the old bastard. Jane ignored him.

  ‘Your scheme will work on one condition, Katherine, if I may say so,’ she said, ‘and that is that you wring – I emphasise wring–from that stubborn and truculent son of mine, a very specific and very business-like commitment to share the domestic work and the child-care with you.’

  ‘He will,’ I said. ‘He does. He couldn’t be nicer to me, Jane.’

  ‘We’re all nice to you, Katherine,’ she said. ‘You’re having a difficult pregnancy. But I’m talking about the long run. I know all about these clever chaps like yours and mine you see. I know all about their nice impressive commitments to the rights of women and the division of labour, because they’re very good at articulating these things and it costs them nothing to say it all as nicely as they do. If you are going to earn a living, Katherine, and keep up seriously with your orders, you will not do it and mind a small, active child at the same time. Jonathan must mind that babe for you, either every morning, or for four whole working days a week. Not as a favour, mind, but as a necessity. Along with the shopping and the cooking and cleaning and laundry. Just as women do it. Make him earn the right to sit at his typewriter. That’s his indulgence. All the men in this family are distinguished by the fact that they earn a living from their favourite pastime. That is a luxury in a suffering world. Jonathan doesn’t even earn a living by it yet, but that is by the by. He will.’

  ‘Just carry on, Ma,’ Jonathan said. ‘Don’t mind me.’

  ‘Thank you, Jonathan,’ Jane said, ‘I will.’

  ‘Or you could save your breath,’ Jonathan said, ‘and have my head right off. On a bloody plate. Go on.’ Jane laughed briefly.

  ‘Katherine,’ she said, ‘this is what you do. You put down a schedule for him, in writing, and make him sign it. Get him drunk first if necessary, or threaten to hide his fishing tackle.’ Jonathan was miming her behind her back, making horrible, schoolboy yakkity-yak faces which made me want to laugh. ‘
Photocopy it and leave a copy with me,’ she said, ‘because if you don’t, I have a good idea how it will be in that little house of yours. Lots of lovely fresh fish on the fire and you sitting down to that knitting-machine after sluicing the nappies at midnight.’ Jonathan had stopped pulling faces at her and was eyeing her suddenly like a gathering storm cloud.

  ‘Are you trying to be funny?’ he said. ‘Because you’re not succeeding. Sharing the work is what I do now. She tells you so herself, but you’re so busy grinding your axe you don’t even listen to her. What makes you think I’m like Jake?’

  ‘I wonder,’ Jane said provocatively. ‘Now whatever could make me think such a thing?’

  ‘I don’t need Katherine to find my stinking socks for me,’ Jonathan said indignantly. ‘I’m not like Jake. I cook. I cook all the time. Now leave me alone.’

  ‘My darling Jontikins,’ Jane said, ‘we all agree that your gingerbread men are lovely.’

  ‘Oh shut up, you old cow,’ Jonathan said. ‘Don’t bloody patronise me.’

  ‘And he goes to the launderette,’ I said. I held an impeccable sleeve for effect. ‘See this shirt. Jonathan ironed this shirt.’

  ‘Look,’ Jane said, ‘I don’t deny for a moment that he is some what better than Jake in that respect. The times have moved to make him so. Don’t think I haven’t heard him in that funny little kitchen of yours, whistling Boccherini over The Pauper’s Cookbook. I won’t say I wasn’t impressed, but quite a lot of men will cook now and again if their wives lay in the garlic and root ginger and whatever else is necessary for the star turn.’ ‘Oh fuck off, you bitch,’ Jonathan said. ‘Just get off my back, lady.’

  ‘Babies tie women at home, Katherine,’ Jane said. ‘There is nothing like having a woman at home to create dependence. Jonathan’s last baby was born in such very different circumstances, you see. Hosts of aunts and grannies falling over themselves for the privilege of rinsing the nappies. Now look at the poor man. I’ve made smoke pour out of his nostrils.’

  ‘When Katherine needs your advice she’ll bloody well ask for it,’ Jonathan said. ‘Okay?’

  ‘Or perhaps she won’t,’ Jane said. ‘Not when she needs it most. So I give it to her notwithstanding.’

  ‘Her experience is infinitely wider than yours,’ Jonathan said. ‘She’s had more men in her life than you’ve had hot dinners. What makes you think she needs your advice on how to protect herself against me, you evilminded crone? She spent four years living with a fascist lunatic.’

  ‘Six,’ I said.

  ‘You surely can’t mean that charming man who sent you the cake?’ Jane said, but Jonathan ignored her.

  ‘What did you ever do but flutter your eyelashes at an arty queer to make Jake miserable, you patronising bitch?’ he said. Jacob was smoking one of his smelly cigars.

  ‘Calm down, Jont,’ he said mildly through the fog. ‘She patronises everybody. We all like to display our greatest talents. That is hers. That and enumerating female grievances. Jane took out a monopoly on hardship for the female sex long before anyone thought to burn a bra in a public place. Jane invented the Women’s Movement in my back yard.’

  ‘Over your babies’ cot sheets more like,’ Jane said. ‘Over your rubbish bin, Jacob, scraping chop bones off dinner plates. Over the wash basin, picking out your beard remnants while you sat and wrote your lovely books. Now it’s your son who’s writing books. Why should the same thing happen to Katherine? Why shouldn’t she benefit from my experience?’

  ‘Because she can’t,’ Jacob said shortly. ‘People don’t. You’re very boring, Janie.’

  ‘Being boring has never inhibited you from carping at them, has it, Jake?’ Jane said. ‘Now it’s my turn.’

  ‘You sound like any one of a thousand band-wagoning harridans,’ Jacob said. ‘Women against the world. Women against the bloody works.’ Mike leaned over to Annie.

  ‘Does he call himself a radical or something, your father?’ he said, sotto voce. It made them giggle quietly together. ‘He sounds like Genghis Khan.’

  ‘Don’t,’ Annie said, whispering back.

  ‘Your children have grown up, for Christssake,’ Jacob said. ‘You haven’t washed a cot sheet in years. Look at them. They’re lovely rational adults. You have a cleaning woman to muck out the kitchen for you. If you find yourself having to pick my beard out of the wash basin from time to time, I’m sorry for you, but what the hell else have you got to do with your time, other than harass your daughters-in-law? You can’t want to spend your whole life at that damned piano. That is your indulgence, sweetheart, and it never paid the gas bill.’

  Jesus, I thought to myself. Jacob, you swine. You absolute bloody swine. Why is it I have always liked you so much?

  ‘My quarrel is with Jane,’ Jonathan said. ‘With Jane, who has this persistent fantasy about me as some jackbooted hood. Don’t sidetrack her with all this clap-trap about the Women’s Movement.’

  ‘It isn’t altogether clap-trap to anyone like me, Jont, who’s had six children,’ Jane said. ‘Seven, counting Jake.’

  ‘Oh please, Ma,’ Annie said. ‘Please stop it.’

  ‘I have no quarrel with the Women’s Movement,’ Jonathan said, ‘just so long as it isn’t my sperm goes into the freezer to fertilize lesbian marriages.’

  Sally, who was offering her lovely breast to her new baby, tensed slightly, with disapproval at Jonathan’s terminology, though she weathered it well enough. In her hierarchy of human secretions, she obviously found breast milk more acceptable than sperm. But Jane smiled, as Jonathan meant her to. In his kindness, he was exercising for her benefit a flair for comic relief.

  ‘You’re very sweet, Jontikins,’ she said, ‘and very clever. Don’t be angry with me. It was injudicious of me to meddle in your affairs and I hope you will forgive me.’

  Roger’s small daughter was frustrating herself with a gyroscope which she could not manipulate. She was bumping up against Roger’s thigh, trying to attract his attention, but he didn’t hear her – I don’t think he really heard any of us. In a house full of talkers Roger never talked much. He always disliked the unremarkable small change of conversation. It was persistently a difference between us – I love what people say to each other. For this reason I like to stand in queues while Roger, in my experience, avoided shops for fear that he might be called upon to say whether he didn’t think that the weather had come on a trifle nippy. He had a nice enough gentle manner with his child, but he did not play with her. Not in that wild and wonderful way in which Jacob played with children; that way which made watching adults cry, ‘Stop it, Jacob, she’ll break a leg. It’ll only end in tears.’

  ‘He’s not listening to you, Small,’ Jonathan said to her. ‘Bring it here. I love those things. I’ll make it go like the clappers.’ He caused the thing to spin on the string in a most accomplished way and gave her the ends of the string to hold. It made me stir with pleasure to think that Jonathan would make gyroscopes spin for my child. Besides, the idiom turned me on. To go like the clappers.

  Sally transferred the baby to the other breast and tucked the first away into a copious front-fastening nursing bra.

  ‘Watching you, Sally, makes my nipples twitch,’ Jane said, wishing to make herself agreeable. ‘I could wish it was me all over again.’ But Sally was needing to unload annoyance. She did not like complainers and Jane had broken the code.

  ‘I don’t wish to revive what has just passed,’ she said. ‘Also I do accept your point, Jane, and I do incidentally wish that Jonathan would try not to become abusive, but really, aren’t you going to ridiculous extremes? Roger and I don’t sign things. We simply help each other. We both teach. We both fetch Clare from nursery school. It depends on which one of us is free in the lunch-hour. Anything else would be selfishness, wouldn’t it? We have our rules. I cook at the same time every evening for whoever is there to eat and I don’t do it again. Roger sees Clare to bed while I do the dishes. We both work till bedtime and if Clare wakes we tak
e turns to go to her. I can’t imagine having to wave bits of paper under his nose.’ For Sally, living was a simple art of which she had clearly always had the mastery.

  ‘So who was it had a baby in Eighth Week?’ Jonathan said, to take her down. ‘That’s very bad news for an Oxford man. And poor old Rogsie rushed off his feet with the work.’

  ‘All right, Jonathan,’ Sally said a little irritably. ‘I had the baby in Eighth Week. That was beyond my control.’ During Sally’s highly reasonable little speech, smacking somehow of the simplicity of Toytown, I happened to catch Jacob’s eye. He blew me a perfect and very saucy smoke ring, which I acknowledged furtively as if accepting a note passed secretly during prayers, under the eye of the headmistress.

  ‘Roger is different,’ Jane said. ‘He was always serious-minded, hard-working and obliging. And you, Sally, you are different too. You are much better than Katherine at putting across to people exactly what suits you.’

  ‘She means you’re bossy, sister woman,’ Jonathan said.

  ‘I mean nothing of the kind,’ Jane said. ‘Sally is very clear about her own needs, that’s all.’

  ‘Not like you, you poor, timid creature,’ Jonathan said. ‘You let everyone walk over you I suppose? Jesus, Ma, my memory of you is of a dominating virago. Do this. Do that. Especially with Roggs. Simon says clean out the sink. Simon says play the flute. Simon says if you haven’t got any French verbs to sort out, bring in the coal. When you’ve done that stand on your head and recite your twelve times table in Latin.’ Jane laughed.

  ‘But it took me years of practice, Jonathan,’ she said. ‘I was hoping to save Katherine the trouble. I’ve offended you, my darling. I’m sorry. It isn’t my place to give your wife advice. I do hope you can still see your way to having me come in the spring and do your garden for you and see my grandchild. I shall be very scrupulous and not interfere. You may turn me out if I do.’ Jonathan eyed her with some sceptical amusement during this piece of caustic humility.