My Brother Jack

by Johnston, George

  ‘Yes, well I think we’d better be getting back inside,’ I said impatiently, and turned away from him and began to walk towards the house, but he called to me before I had reached the door:

  ‘Hey, hold on a jiffy! No need to rush it. Why not give the women a chance to get together with each other? You know, I’d like Sheil’ to have a bit of a talk with your girl.’ He had stopped half-way along the brick path and was staring at the squalid, scruffy little back garden. ‘Jesus, a lot of things have happened here, haven’t they?’ he said musingly, and put his hands on his hips and looked around with interest at the broken palings of the fence and the wizened fig-tree and the patchy unkempt lawn with the nettles and the clover coming through, and the tangled wire of the ruined fowl-house and the old wood-shed with the chassis of some ancient invalid wheel-chair rusting on its roof and the shabby privy crouched beneath its hump of honeysuckle, and the sycamore-tree that didn’t seem anywhere near as big as it used to be and the messy thickets of the untrimmed shrubs. ‘Remember the old Dollicus that used to be here?’ Jack said reminiscently, moving forward and rubbing his fingers across the new wire screen of the sleep-out. ‘I miss that, you know,’ he said. ‘I liked it better when that was growing here. Oh, it’s neater now, yeah, and a bloody sight cleaner, and I bet it’s got rid of all those bugs, but I sort of preferred it the way it was. Inside the place, too, up there in the hall and Mum’s bedroom and the kitchen … I admit it’s all nice and up-to-date with that panelling they’ve put in and the new paint and all that, but I still miss it a bit the way it used to be …’

  I suppose it was the beer he had drunk and his emotional concern for me and the sentiment engendered by Mother’s birthday that set his mood and brought it all back to him, for he seemed to want to just stand there on the cracked brick path looking at this shabby suburban squalor that surrounded him, this sad and pointless world confined within the patched palings of the dividing fences and the red, ribbed rooftops of the Gillons’ bungalow and the dusty pepper-trees that shaded Mrs Hartrick’s smelly hen-run, and seeing only the flickering sequence of visions that his nostalgia evoked.

  ‘Remember all those nights,’ he said, ‘when Mum was hiding up there in the fernery, and the Old Man was out here in the dark chargin’ around all over the joint and waving that whacking great pistol about and threatening to blow everybody’s bloody brains out! Eh? He had another think coming, didn’t he? Poor old bugger could hardly blow a candle out now! And old Gran’, remember the way she’d always empty the pisspots up there under the fig-tree, and then Bert’d get ropable at the smell of it because that’s where he used to like to sit waxing his thread and sewing soles and singing those damned army songs. No wonder the tree looks so bloody shrivelled up, eh? … although, come to think of it, out the front there where we used to stand by the gate and pee on the privet, that end always grew a good three feet taller than the other end, and a thicker growth too, so maybe it’s coming out fresh that does it, and not being stale and out of a jerry …’ He shook his head in a reflective pleasure at this. ‘You know, Davy, we had a lot of fun here one way and another, didn’t we? Don’t you reckon we did? Remember the punching-ball there under the trellis, and you and me with the gloves on, and Jean tearin’ in to tell Mum that day I gave you the black eye, and when we put those live crabs down in the socket of Bert’s wooden leg, and d’you remember the tame magpie we had that used to pull all the pegs out of the washing and send Mum into a tizzy, and Dad swapping it for that bloody terrible cockatoo that moulted away until it didn’t have one flamin’ feather to its name, and —’

  ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m going back inside,’ I said, for I was in no mood for this maudlin flood of reminiscence, and Jack just shrugged and said, ‘All right, let’s join the women, if that’s what you want,’ and although he smiled it didn’t quite conceal the trace of hurt in his eyes, but I shied away from that and deliberately walked in ahead of him.

  It was like walking back into some staged dramatic tableau.

  Helen was sitting rigidly in her chair, much as I had left her, but with a pale, set face, and Mother was flushed and kneeling on the carpet beside her rubbing at the Donegal skirt with a table napkin which she kept dipping in a shallow bowl containing some liquid, and one of Jean’s kids was howling in a corner as if it had just been smacked, and Jean was standing over Mother with a nerve-blotched upset face and saying, ‘I tell you if you sprinkle ordinary salt over it and rub it well in it doesn’t leave a mark at all,’ and Sheila, who was the only one who seemed unruffled, said, ‘Mum knows what she’s doing, and even if it does leave a bit of a stain it can always be dry-cleaned, can’t it?’ and Helen looked up as I came into the room, and offered me, as if it were some gracious private privilege, a smile that was cool and brave, and the smile was like a net drawing me inexorably into alliance with her, into the isolation of her separateness, into the little enclave of our proven superiority, and she said, ‘Davy, darling, do tell them that it doesn’t really matter at all, it’s nothing, I can attend to it when I get home and you’ll never see it, and …’ – she broke off and turned quickly and touched Mother’s shoulder lightly, solicitously, with her long, fine, aristocratic-looking fingers – ‘oh, please don’t worry about it, Mrs Meredith, you mustn’t!’ and Mother looked up at her and shook her head helplessly, and she was blinking away behind her glasses in that confused, beseeching way she had that could sometimes stab at me like real pain.

  It was the combination of that cool and binding smile of Helen’s and the look of baffled consternation on Mother’s face that told me where I stood with a chilling finality. I realized that from the very first moment of our arrival at the house the visit had been fateful, that everything had been working towards this point we had now reached, momentous and irrevocable, where I had to choose between inflicting pain or suffering it, and the thrall of this cool and beautiful woman reached me like a command across the crowded tension of the room, and I realized that the price of alliance had been fixed and that it would have to be a continuation of the hurt I had deliberately given to Jack in the back yard, and that I would have to go on hurting and hurting and hurting, and that I was as totally committed to a proving of myself, just as imperative and just as wrong, as when poor, epileptic Harry Meade had blundered past me on the football field at school and I had had to hit him and hit him and hit him until he had fallen writhing and twitching at my feet, and it didn’t matter any longer whether Jack was there to slap my face or not. We were men now, not children, and we were fighting for different things.

  ‘What’s happened?’ I asked with a sinking heart, and Bert scowled and glared at the weeping child in the corner and said, ‘That damned clumsy brat of ours tipped a whole bowl of trifle and jelly all over Miss Midgeley’s best suit!’ and at this the offending brat howled all the louder, and Jean turned on Bert with a snappish, ‘Well, the child didn’t do it on purpose, did he?’ and Helen gave a deft, light underlining to it all with a dismissive, ‘But all this fuss is so silly, really …’

  ‘It’s damned silly the way we put up with all these blasted children!’ I said hotly. ‘Why the devil do they have to be under our feet all the time? Can’t they go outside and play? God almighty, this is like living in a damned crèche!’

  And then, deliberately, I turned to face Jack. He was leaning against the door-frame, and although there was no particular expression on his face I knew that he would meet it square on, without slapping my face perhaps, but without side-stepping.

  ‘Well, what’s a bit of jelly and trifle between friends?’ he said quietly. ‘It’ll clean off, won’t it? The skirt isn’t ruined.’

  ‘Yes, it’s all very well for you to just stand there and shrug it off,’ I said angrily. ‘But why do we have to have these confounded kids swarming everywhere?’

  ‘Because it’s Mum’s birthday. And these are her grandchildren. And she’s very fond of ’em. Isn’t that right, Mum?’

  ‘Then why the hell do
esn’t someone keep an eye on them?’ I demanded, more riled than ever by a sudden disturbing realization that, in his own way, he was about to slap me across the face, for in his eyes was exactly the same hard, set expression as when he had looked at me across the fallen figure of Harry Meade.

  ‘What’s got into you?’ he said. ‘You’re really trying to make something of this, aren’t you? But you don’t want to get above yourself, you know. Maybe Miss Midgeley would be interested to hear that when you were just about the same age as young Derek there we had a party in this very room, it was Pop’s Welcome Home, the night he came back from the war, and you puked all the way from that end of the table to the outside vestibule door. You puked over aunts and cousins and neighbours and God knows who else … you’ve never seen such a mess! … and nobody thought a thing about it, they just rolled you up in an old quilt and put you to bed on that couch over there.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, keep your revolting stories to yourself! Helen’s not interested, and neither am I. You’re having quite a field day with your reminiscences, aren’t you?’ I added sarcastically, hoping to wound him again.

  ‘Am I?’ He gave me a long, careful look – that same measuring look with which he had accepted Helen’s challenge earlier. ‘If I am,’ he said, ‘it might be because I’m trying to make you see a few things straight, like. This business I was trying to talk about outside just a while back. About give and take. That’s one of ’em. But since you’re the one who seems to want to make a first-class Kilkenny out of a little thing like a blob of jelly on a skirt, let me tell you something else. You seem to have got it into your head that you’re a pretty superior sort of person – and maybe you are, for all I know – but it doesn’t necessarily follow, remember, that we’re not good enough for you. This is still your family. And kids are part of a family whether you like ’em or not. The Old Man there was one of nineteen, wasn’t he? Don’t you reckon they must have been a bit under each other’s feet. Eh? Anyway, you were a kid yourself once, and you puked over people and you dribbled gravy and Mum had to sew a whole row of buttons on the sleeves of your jackets to stop you wiping your snotty nose there. So don’t make the error of thinking yourself too superior, son! And if you and your sheila here are going to get spliced you might wake up to a few of these things. Like give and take. And realizing that kids are kids.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake stop this fighting, you two!’ pleaded Mother, scared and anxious and still kneeling beside Helen with a stricken face, and Jean was standing very stiffly and gnawing at her lower lip, and Bert was looking down and rubbing at his knotty knuckles as if he’d just realized how nasty they looked, and I knew that Helen was trying to catch my eye but I wouldn’t look at her, and Sheila had taken little Kathleen on her knee and was tweaking at her bare toes, and Dad lifted his head and for a moment seemed to sniff at the smell of hostility and conflict like some old war-horse, but then the belligerent fire faded in his bloodshot eyes and he hiccuped quietly and sank back into his pullover …

  ‘Who’s fighting?’ said Jack. ‘Stone the crows, Mum, this is your birthday, isn’t it? This is a happy family gathering, isn’t it?’ He turned and his eyes met mine evenly. ‘Isn’t it, Davy?’ he said.

  ‘And whose bloody fault if it isn’t?’ I snapped. ‘You’ve been spoiling for a fight ever since we came into the house! You’ve —’

  ‘Don’t, Davy,’ I heard Helen say. ‘It isn’t worth it, darling, it —’

  ‘What do you really mean, Miss Midgeley?’ Jack said, turning on her swiftly. ‘What does he really mean? It isn’t worth it, or we aren’t worth it?’

  ‘I mean – I mean all this fuss and anger over such a trivial little thing,’ she said, smiling at him, and detesting him.

  ‘That’s just what I think,’ he said. ‘It’s what I’ve been saying. So suppose you ask him what else it is he’s got stuck in his crop! You never know, it might just be this room that puts him on edge. First time he was ever in here he threw up. This is where he used to hide from his bogy-men, in that sea-chest over there. He never could stand the old women dying in here, or the coffins on the table. And now he can’t stand the kids being here, his own nephews and nieces! All I can say is he seems bloody hard to please!’ He looked across at his wife and said, ‘Soon as you’re ready, Sheil’, you’d better get your things, and I’ll clean the kids up. It’s time we were pushing along.’ He moved into the room and bent over Mother and kissed her on the forehead and said, ‘Sorry your party ended up in a yike, Mum. Never mind. The tucker was marvellous.’

  I drove Helen home in a cold and bitter fury. She was very quiet and she kept rubbing with her fingers at the big damp patch on her skirt.

  It was they who had let me down, I told myself in raging indignation. The whole family! Every one of them! It wasn’t just that none of them had approved of my choice, that might have been expected … but not a single one of them had had the ordinary common or garden intelligence to see that she was as different from them as chalk was from cheese. She had shown them all up, that was the blunt truth of it, shown them up in all their snide, shabby little pettiness … the whole bunch of them were just small enough and ignorant enough to realize that she was a cut above them, and to resent it! Well, I was a cut above them, too! I was just as different from them as she was, and that was something they were damn’ well going to have to realize! I didn’t belong to them any longer! They had no claim on me. I had fought my own way free of them – and without any bloody help on their part, by God! – and as long as I lived they were never going to drag me back again to their trumpery lives, to their uncouthness and stupidity and vulgarity and the crippling impossibility of that awful existence of theirs!

  ‘To hell with them all!’ I shouted aloud. I shouted it through the windscreen to the road down which we were driving, to a channel of asphalt that was grey and flat and treeless, like a dead drain running through a dead landscape, to the slithering flickering of the picket fences and the hedges and the lamp-posts and the neat letter-boxes and the names on gates.

  Helen sat in silence, still rubbing at the damp patch on her skirt.

  ‘I did warn you,’ I said. ‘When we were going out there I told you they might be difficult. At least I tried to warn you.’

  She reached over and squeezed my arm.

  We were married two months later. I had just turned twenty-six, and Helen was thirty. The wedding took place on the day that Guernica was bombed, although this had no connection with us, of course, and by that time neither Helen nor I had much real interest left in what was happening in Spain. It was the quietest ceremony possible, commensurate with Helen’s insistence on wearing a bridal veil and a superb, sheath-like gown of ivory satin which she had designed herself, and the formal and unadorned service was held in the little Anglican church of St Catherine’s.

  What I principally remember about it is that while waiting for the bride in the church vestry with Jerry Farley, who had been chosen by Helen to stand as my best man (his sister Moira being the only bridesmaid), I had the odd wish that something calamitous would happen, like the roof of the church falling in, which might bring to a stop, or at least to a postponement, a series of fantastic processes which quite suddenly seemed to me to be moving me against my will and better judgment towards a suspect destiny. Nothing so convenient happened. I cannot really claim this as any psychic presentiment, because my other memories of that wait in the vestry are equally ridiculous – the fact that one of Steiner’s old calendars of years before was hanging there on the wall above the prayer books advertising Malvern Star Bicycles, that a fox-terrier dog walked in and lifted its leg against a chair and trotted out, that the vicar wore grey flannel bags under his surplice and had odd socks on, one brown and one black.

  These absurd memories of then, of course, are in no way related to the perspective of now, when everything has long since run its course. On the much longer view I suppose one might claim that the odd little prickle of premonition was a sort of
subconscious intuition that I was committing myself to a rash act of self-betrayal. Like the reassessment some military historian might make of a confused battle years after the smoke has blown away, it is often possible – sometimes, indeed, unavoidable – that one sees all the aspects of valour and of cowardice in a totally different way; the heroic general whose equestrian statue is in the square is proved a blundering idiot, stark panic has been mistaken for reckless courage, gunpowder was wasted, and there was no justice in the awarding of the laurels. This is the tragical comedy that the historian defines as a re-appreciation. It is, alas, only possible to do this very much later.

  So that now it is difficult not to feel some genuine sympathy, some stirring of compassion, for that younger David Meredith of years ago praying for sublime catastrophe in a church vestry, yet entirely unaware of the self-delusions that have placed him there. It is so easy to be wise after the event …

  As far as the wedding was concerned, it was Helen who supervised, with her customary neat efficiency, almost all of the planning and arrangements. It was she who decided on the church, the restricted list of invitations, the officiating cleric, the photographer who took our pictures, and the rather depressing hotel on the Esplanade at St KiIda, in the ‘Blue Room’ of which the stilted little reception was afterwards held. It was she, too, who, with scrupulous cordiality, won my family over to an uncritical if somewhat nervous acceptance of the situation, although there was still something of reserve and uncertainty in their attitudes towards her personally which they could never entirely conceal, and I think they realized this and it made them more uncomfortable than ever, and so none of them stayed for very long at the reception afterwards.

  Only Jack, whose just and passionate spirit could never neglect a generosity, concealed his misgivings – if he still held them – behind the enormous festive sprig of orange-blossom he wore in the buttonhole of his new navy-blue suit, and he kissed the bride as if he really meant it and there was genuine admiration in his tone when he said, ‘He’s always been the dark horse of the family, this one, and here he’s gone and done it again, grabbin’ the prettiest missus this side of the Black Stump!’