‘That’s right,’ he said, with a degree of affection. ‘Crawl, you old cow. Humility is right up your street.’
Rosie’s man could bear no more.
‘I say,’ he said suddenly, ‘I don’t like to interfere, old chap, but a chap oughtn’t to talk to his mother like that. Not in my book.’ The embarrassment following upon this utterance brought a blush to Annie’s cheek, and Mike stared awkwardly at his feet. Jacob looked around unabashed, as though somebody had just raised a point in a seminar and he was waiting for a volunteer to take it up. Roger looked at him with the contempt he might once have visited on a man who cleaned his shoes.
‘And what book is that?’ Jonathan said. ‘Biggles? Who are you, anyway?’ Rosie lost her cool.
‘You can shut up, Jonathan,’ she said. ‘Understand? Jeremy is going to marry me, as a matter of fact. So that’s who he is. My fiance. We came here to say goodbye to you and that’s what we’re doing. Saying goodbye and good riddance.’ She got up to go. Her young man followed, pausing only to nod politely to Jane and say goodbye.
‘Goodbye, Mrs Goldman,’ he said. ‘Goodbye, sir.’ They left behind them silence and astonishment.
‘Ought I to catch up with her?’ Annie said.
‘Leave her,’ Jane said. ‘It’s all nonsense. I assure you, it’s nonsense. Rosie is histrionic. Like Jake.’
‘Go to hell,’ Jacob said. He got up and made himself ready to go after her, wasting no time.
‘Now I’ve remembered something I wanted to ask you people,’ Jane said. ‘Do you want the bed ends of that very nice old brass bed Jake and I used to have? We threw away the wires and the mattress but perhaps Roger could manufacture a new base for you. Jacob and I can’t get on with a double bed any more. It makes us sleep fitfully. We come together from separate bedrooms like royalty.’
‘Mother,’ Roger said, ‘at the risk of appearing ungracious, I have to point out that the University pays me to spend some of my time in the Mathematical Institute. It may be my indulgence but it is also my job.’
‘Sorry, Roggs,’ Jane said. ‘Of course it is. I only suggested it because you are so wonderfully clever.’
Jane, Jonathan and I went into her bedroom to admire the bed ends. She had them stored in her bedroom against the wall.
‘We can take them like that and find a carpenter,’ I said. ‘Everything else is on the roof rack. Why not these?’
‘I’ll bring them when I come, shall I?’ Jane said. ‘Then I will have to come.’
‘Of course you’ll come,’ Jonathan said. ‘You must know that Katherine will insist on it. You must know she is devoted to you, you warped old battle-axe.’
‘As I am to her,’ Jane said. ‘And I want to tell you that I’ve had enough complimentary epithets from you to last me quite some time, Jontikins. I’m sorry that my private life impresses you with its limited range, but it wasn’t for lack of opportunity. I’m sorry if you found my flirtations with John offensive. It’s funny. It was Roger who I thought would be the one to mind. He always had such high standards for me. I always worried terrifically about Roger. Do you think it upset him?’ Jonathan shrugged.
‘I was talking off the top of my head, Ma,’ he said. ‘Slinging mud. Don’t fret about Rogsie. He’s grown up. He’s thrown away what Kath calls his Hamlet hat. He’s done you proud. You gave him no choice, of course.’
‘You are nasty to me, Jonathan,’ she said. ‘You want me to beat my breast. All right, I will. I’m worried about Rosie. I was never a good mother to her. She was always such an ordinary little girl, Jonathan. I wasn’t ready to accept it. I thought then that all children came like you and Roger. I didn’t know any better.’
‘She’s all right,’ Jonathan said. ‘She won’t marry that creep.’
‘If I come and stay with you, you won’t see it as a threat to your wellbeing, will you, Jont?’ she said. ‘I mean, you’re not anything like as mad as your father, are you? Not meaning anything by it, of course. He’s so much more than I deserve. Don’t think I don’t know that, Jonathan.’
Jonathan was tired of quarrelling with her, of going through that human spider-dance which expressed no more than her own pain in losing him and her own pain in losing her youth; her love for me and her irrational urge to will happiness upon us.
‘Katherine is getting more like you as the days go by,’ he said teasingly. ‘She keeps cracked antique jugs on the mantelpiece full of string and shirt buttons and library tickets. She’s developed a thing for that repulsive Staffordshire Salt Glaze.’
‘I never knew you disliked it,’ I said. ‘I think it’s beautiful.’ Jonathan laughed.
‘You never asked me. I think it’s disgusting.’
‘It’s perfectly lovely,’ Jane said with finality. ‘Of course it is.’
‘It makes me think of aberrant growths on the skin,’ Jonathan said. ‘It puts me in mind of scurfy excrescences.’
Jane took Jonathan in a motherly embrace. ‘But that is not the salt glaze, my dear Jonathan,’ she said. ‘That is you. Everything reminds you of something nasty. I only discovered how much when I read your novel.’
‘Oh, you’ve read it, have you?’ Jonathan said. ‘Is that why you’re getting at me today?’
‘I am not getting at you, Jont. I merely tell the truth about you. That you are a terrible nuisance like Jake. I’m not denying that you’re worth it. I was naive. Forget it. Katherine will throw away the Staffordshire Salt Glaze and you will both be very happy. But about your novel, Jont. God in heaven, isn’t it smutty? How do you come to be so smutty, Jonathan? It isn’t half good, though. I found it quite terrifyingly funny at times. There’s nothing piffling about your smut. Some really noble smut you’ve got there. With justice, it ought to make you famous. Don’t you think so, Katherine?’
Jonathan’s novel was actually more than I could cope with during pregnancy, being a spirited if macabre four-hundred-page satirical hallucination, rich in shots up the female crotch. I had promised myself to read it properly while I breast-fed, if it didn’t have the effect of curdling the milk.
‘You make me think of Swift,’ she said. ‘Another Jonathan with a nasty powerful mind. It’s most appropriate that you are going to Ireland.’ Jonathan was pleased and also a little embarrassed.
‘You do me too much honour, lovely lady,’ he said. ‘Carry on. You give me conviction.’
‘I thought Swift was kinky,’ I said. ‘I mean, sexually arrested.’ Jane delivered to me, in a glance, the school-marm put-down.
‘We’ll have less of that, Katherine,’ she said. ‘You know perfectly well what I mean. It’s prose I have in mind. I’ll tell you what, chaps,’ she said conspiringly, ‘though I shouldn’t tattle and I won’t, but just this once. I made strong efforts to keep my copy from Sally when she came this morning, but I don’t think I succeeded. I think she’s been and taken a peek, don’t you? You aren’t in her good books today. Have you noticed?’ Jonathan shrugged without interest.
After the birthday tea and the gingerbread men, after the schoolgirls, with their concave virgin navels and wet hair, had retired to listen to taped New Wave, after Roger had gone, taking his family back to Oxford with his sweet children clipped into safety harnesses and carry-cot straps, after Annie and her boyfriend had zoomed off in their ghastly rollerball helmets, and Jacob had taken off with Sam for a walk on the Heath, Jonathan and I, with some difficulty, said goodbye to Jane. We drove off in the car, which Sam had put together for us, with our luggage stuffed into the back and tied to the roof. Jonathan heaved a tired and grateful sigh.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s the family off our backs.’ Jonathan was not in fact menaced in any way by my fondness for his family. He was fond of his family himself but his tolerance for most things ran out sooner.
‘If this car were only less jammed up and you less hopelessly untouchable,’ he said. ‘I would practise some discreet, therapeutic fucking upon you in the next lay-by.’
‘Would you?’
I said. ‘I love you, Jonathan.’ I said this gratefully and realistically, because it was true. I fell in love with Jonathan slowly and judiciously. A thing I had never done before.
‘I need it after my mother,’ he said. ‘By what right does the woman talk about me as if she had letters patent from God on the subject?’ Jonathan talked sex using words to deputise for the act which it was not opportune for us to commit.
‘There’s going to be some incessant and prolonged activity in that little house of ours, Kath,’ he said. ‘Making up for lost time. I’m going to heave my weight off your ribs every morning and leave you in a tacky pool of my ooze.’ Jonathan, I considered, had a more than average involvement with his ooze. He liked to make reference to it. (I give you this for the analyst’s casebook, merely.)
‘Very nice,’ I said politely, over the twitching in my groin.
‘Then I’ll bring you your breakfast,’ he said, ‘in bed. Boiled eggies and tea for my lovely sexy, oozy, pregnant Kath. We don’t really want that old bed, do we? Let’s have a new one six feet wide.’
I was very romantic about the prospect of our lives in that house, though, I hope, not without a degree of protective irony. I hoped to be a caustic romantic. I learned it from Jane. What though my goat boy peed into milk bottles and lived off my earnings? He assured me that he didn’t actually play the flute very well either, though it sounded all right to me. I pictured myself sitting by the fire and knitting the Celtic mists and shadowy pools into my cloth. I pictured Jonathan getting up from his typewriter and going out to split wood like a man in Ingmar Bergman, and the child, with woollen mittens flapping at its cuffs, tottering after him.
‘And don’t think I didn’t see you eyeing up the schoolgirls,’ I said challengingly. Jonathan laughed and put his left hand on my thigh.
‘Sweet, that little blonde in drill-cloth, wasn’t she?’
‘That’s my knitting-machine in the back,’ I said. ‘I own the means of production, so you watch it.’
Forty-Nine
THE HOUSE WAS beautiful. Like a harlequin’s coat it was put together through the love of friends. Annie and her housemates, for the price of a week in the country and warming bowls of soup, slept on our floor at Christmas and painted all the walls. A very nice local carpenter made us some doors and skirtings and a kitchen work-board. He made some window seats, which I varnished and fitted with cushions. We rushmatted the floors. I made patchwork curtains and took unashamed pleasure in what Jacob – damn him – called ‘the womanly art of homemaking’. Annie stencilled patterns around the fireplace, having no Roger over her shoulder to put her down, but only Mike, who helped. Jonathan, as Jane predicted, fished and typed, but also fed us all and praised. There were days when I thought we would freeze to death. For Christmas Jonathan bought me a thermal vest and men’s long Johns. Sally sent, with Annie, her hand-on carry-cot and countless Baby-Gro suits. Roger sent, in the post to Jonathan, some well-disposed reviews clipped from the newspapers. The baby was female, born by Caesarean section, suckled first under a plaster figure of the Virgin Mary and later at home on a mattress on the floor of our bedroom. I tried reading Jonathan’s novel as I fed her, but gave it up in favour of Emma, which is still my favourite. Jonathan, who did indeed bring me boiled eggs in bed, bathed her in a plastic washing-up bowl at the feet of my convalescent self. She was quite different from my other baby, being nocturnal, irregular and greedy in her feeding habits. We called her Stella, having been put in mind of it by Jane’s reference to Swift, which caused Jonathan to return to a favourite poem of his youth. Swift’s ‘Birthday Poem to Stella,’ which goes as follows:
Stella this Day is thirty-four,
(We shan’t dispute a Year or more)
However Stella, be not troubled,
Although thy Size and Years are doubled,
Since first I saw Thee at Sixteen
The brightest Virgin on the Green,
So little is thy form declin’d
Made up so largely in thy Mind.
Jane came, buttoned up once more in cashmere to keep out the wind and wearing her hair pulled back in a headmistressy bun. She drove me off to plant nurseries where she chose us the best of disease-resistant apple trees and a carefully staggered collection of shrubs and climbing things, so that our garden should have what she called ‘winter interest’. She bought us things to make fires in and things to make compost in, a set of tools and a very space-age mower.
‘Have them on me,’ she said, when we tried to pay her. She was terrific at getting a spade into the earth when it came to digging up rocks.
‘This needs cutting back in the autumn, Jont,’ she said. ‘Pay attention or you’ll have me back again in September.’ Jonathan wouldn’t ever come shopping with us, saying that he’d had enough of shopping with Jane in his childhood and couldn’t stand that class-bound way in which she barked at shop assistants.
‘I hate my accent as much as you do,’ she said, ‘and if I do bark at people it’s only because I’m so frightened of them, Jonathan. I’m not a poised and coping person like your Katherine.’
‘Me?’ I said in disbelief.
‘Her?’ Jonathan said, with equal disbelief.
‘Why do you think I had all my lovely babies?’ she said. ‘It was a way of ensuring that I never had to go out to work. You know me, Jont. I couldn’t have run a flower stall.’
‘You always played the piano uncommonly well,’ Jonathan said.
‘Could I have held down a job in the village hall thumping out the music for the Saturday ballet classes, do you think?’ she said.
‘Why do you knock yourself so much?’ Jonathan said.
‘Isn’t that what women do?’ Jane said.
‘Only until they read Spare Rib, Jonathan said; since setting up with me he had taken to reading the odd issue of this publication because I intermittently introduced it into our lives, but he didn’t care for it much.
‘That’s not for nice old ladies like me, is it?’ Jane said. ‘It’s for advanced young women.’
‘It’s for raped lesbians,’ Jonathan said. ‘Go and buy me some fucking apple trees, both of you.’ We did that, leaving the baby tied to Jonathan’s chest in a canvas bag – bought cut-price through the pages of Spare Rib – and came back, of course, to find her sucking frantically at the wool of his jersey in the vicinity of his milkless paps.
‘I like it here,’ Jane said, over her tea, while I fed the baby. ‘Jake was wrong about this place, wasn’t he? It suits you very well. I could stay here for ever. Rosie is determined to marry that young man, you know. I don’t like it one bit. That’s what I’m going back to – planning a wedding.’
Fifty
The last thing I will tell you about is Rosie’s wedding. It was one of those weddings where the bride’s and the groom’s families stand out like opposing football teams, wearing their colours. All the decent hats were, thank God, on our side. We slid into position, late, beside Jane, having been travelling half the night, and placed the carry-cot at our feet. It was just as the organ swelled.
‘She’s a mouth-breather, that baby,’ Jane whispered to me across Jonathan. Rosie was beginning to make her way down the aisle on Jacob’s arm in white satin.
‘Watch this for a lark,’ Jane whispered, rather bitterly.
‘Shut up and behave properly,’ Jonathan whispered back.
I came upon Rosie in her parents’ house after the wedding reception, struggling out of white satin in Sylvia’s bedroom.
‘The bloody zip has stuck,’ she said. ‘Help.’ We giggled over it together, till we had her standing in her pants.
‘You looked stunning,’ I said, which was true. Rosie laughed, brightly and on edge.
‘Isn’t it a hoot?’ she said. ‘God, I wonder if Jeremy’s mother has the slightest idea of how many men I’ve slept with.’
‘What are you going to put on?’ I said.
‘That,’ she said. She pulled a rather wonderful brown silk thing from under a
coat on the bed. ‘Jake spent a day in Regent Street with me, signing cheques,’ she said. She climbed into the dress feet first and looked at herself in the glass. ‘I’m glad John Millet isn’t around to see me,’ she said. ‘He told me, once, that I had destiny. Did he give you that stuff, Katherine? I mean the hot bath and the black sheets and all?’ I nodded.
‘Something like that,’ I said. ‘I think it had to do with power.’
‘Do you think he gave my Ma the treatment too?’ she said.
‘I think Jake got to her first,’ I said. Rosie looked at herself in the glass in the brown silk.
‘Some people have all the luck, don’t they?’ she said. ‘The only man I ever cared about killed himself. Slit his wrists with one of those knives you use to cut carpets with. You know? Like carpenters have. You met him, actually. He was with me that day I saw you again, after you came back. When Jane had her operation, remember?’
‘I remember,’ I said.
‘Don’t tell my parents,’ she said. She seemed determined to be alone. ‘What’s the point? Tell Jonathan I’m sorry I yelled at him that time. I like Jonathan. He helped me lose my ‘cello once when I was a kid. It got me off the hook. I haven’t got any brains, you see. Not for any of the stuff my mother cares about. You made a lot of difference to me. I used to go to sleep in that dress that you made me. I used to try and copy your writing. I even stole a drawing of you once from John’s house, when I was fifteen. I’ve still got it somewhere. You look as though you were about to burst into tears.’ Rosie laughed. ‘I’m a bit drunk,’ she said. ‘I’m off to the bridal suite, no less.’ At the bottom of the stairs Roger had sought out Jonathan. I heard him say, with his transcending snobbery, of Rosie’s mother-in-law, ‘She’s like a grocer’s wife who has just won a lottery.’
‘Me?’ I said, to embarrass him, because aggression is the device I have for surviving the pain of Roger’s presence. ‘Jon, let’s go; get the carry-cot and let’s go.’ Jacob saw us out.
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