My Brother Jack

by Johnston, George

  When we were driving home Helen suddenly began to laugh, and said, ‘And there was I thinking the Turleys would probably have a butler! David, how can people like Gavin and Peggy live in such a shambles! In that midden! Goodness! wouldn’t you just love to put a vacuum-cleaner through it?’

  I only grunted, and pressed down harder on the accelerator of the little red MG, and drove faster and faster through the night-shrouded suburbs, for all the world as if I had a desperate anxiety to get back to my own home.

  13

  The next morning was a Sunday, and after breakfast I went in to my own study, with the pretext that there were some letters I wanted to write, and I closed the door on myself, and, like Carl Sandburg’s fog, every doubt crept in with me on little cat feet and moved noiselessly around on the burgundy-coloured square of feltex, and I think I stood there for a long time just looking at it all.

  I can see it even now to the last detail of all its imprisoning shamefulness, as vividly as I must have seen it on that despondent morning when I stood there, tense and wary as a trapped animal, with the Sunday morning sounds drifting to me through the thin brick walls, of Beverley Grove awakening to the active pursuits of its day – the snarling chirrup of its lawn-mowers and the hiss of garden hoses and the snipping of the sécateurs and the idling cough of the cars coming out of their fibro-plaster garages for the ritual washings …

  It had been Helen who had decided on what she had called the ‘motif’ – flattering to me, she had reasoned, because of my interest in the ‘old days of sail’ – and on the granulated plaster walls that even yet retained the smell of the cream eggshell-finish paint were only two pictures, big expensively-framed reproductions, one of Turner’s ‘The Fighting Téméraire’ and the other of Somerscales’ ‘Off Valparaiso’ – and although I had looked at this last one a hundred times it was only then at this moment of troubled self-examination that I found myself remembering that it was from Valparaiso that they had shipped Jack out as a DBS – and there was a decorative circular wastepaper basket covered with a lacquered reproduction of Spurling’s painting of the famous clipper Cutty Sark, and on the desk a pottery ash-tray in the shape of a lifebuoy and a miniature binnacle and steering-wheel that was really an ink-stand and a cigarette-lighter.

  But there was no ash in the ash-tray. There was no crumpled paper in the waste-paper basket or on the floor. There was no ink-mark on the handsome leather-cornered blotter stamped in gold with my initials. The sleek new Royal portable typewriter which had supplanted the cumbersome Remington hid chastely beneath its shiny dust-cover. No loose papers or scattered books marred the bevelled glass top of the angular modern desk of waxed light-oak; nothing was there save the handset extension telephone, serviceably black, and a little copper bowl for pins and paperclips, and the queer-looking draughtsman’s work-lamp, a mad flamingo of a thing spindly on tube-legs of adjustable metal, and a leather-covered book embossed with the words Where Was It? There was no clutter anywhere. There was nothing anywhere …

  Behind the desk, which was centred on the square of Feltex – the room, I suddenly realized, had the horrible proportions of an exact cube – was an arm-chair of stout stiff leatherette on a chromium tubular frame and alongside this comfortless monstrosity stood a chromium pedestal reading-lamp with a witch’s hat of pleated wax-paper. Across from this, in the middle of one wall, stood the book-case, in light-oak to match the desk, with dustproof doors of sliding glass, and the books were arranged on the shelves in tidy little platoons according to their bindings or their authors. The curtains, of the same colour as the floor covering, exposed my one small window, and looking out I could see, through the faint green diffusion of the fly-wire screen, the top of a paling fence, part of a red brick wall, and the plumbing outlets from the Phylands’ bathroom.

  The window of Gavin Turley’s study, I reflected, would open on to the rank vegetation and the mysteriously splendid decay of that old garden, with perhaps a piece of broken statuary strangled by the vines. Once, through fly-wire, there had been the Dollicus …

  ‘You will be washing the car, darling?’ Helen called to me from the corridor, and through the closed door I called back, ‘No!’ and she said, ‘What?’ and I said, ‘Later. I’m busy now. I’ll do it later,’ and I prayed that she would not come in, and so I stood there, quite tense, listening, until I could hear her singing to herself in her sewing-room …

  I realize now, as I try to reassemble in my mind the incidents of that Sunday morning and of what followed from it, that this was the precise point where my injustice to my wife became a deliberate, planned thing. I was at bay in my privacy and I wanted no intrusion, yet until that moment Helen had always been coming into the room, and I had liked her visits and had encouraged them. I had not sought privacy then, I had preferred to be sharing things with her. I had enjoyed her frivolous, inconsequential half-flirtations when she would be there, sitting on the edge of the desk, swinging her long beautiful silken legs and chattering gaily to me about the arrangements for some party she was planning, or the new ‘outfit’ she was making, or some scheme she had just devised for rearranging the dining-room furniture, or an idea she had had for a new painting she would like to do, and what did I think about this detail of the composition? Both of us had enjoyed the very particular camaraderie that was associated with ‘the den’, so she had got into the habit of using the telephone on my desk rather than the one in our bedroom for her social calls to her friends or when she was going over her shopping-list with Cullingford the grocer.

  And now, quite suddenly, all this had changed. ‘For Christ’s sake go away and leave me alone!’ I said savagely under my breath, and that was when I began my attack.

  I opened the desk drawers first because this was where everything I had brought from the old house had carefully been put away, and there it was, or what was left of it, the strivings and the absurdities and the lost adventures, and I took it out, bit by bit, and strewed it on the Feltex – the glossy postcards of old ships bearing the stamp of the Nautical Photo Agency, the ones I had preserved for God knows what reason, and the drafts of never-finished articles and the outlines of stories, and several carefully trimmed clippings of ‘The Glory That Was’ by Stunsail fastened together with a brass clip, and the sad, dog-eared manuscript of Pearls of Maiëta, and the old exercise books scrawled with embarrassing Viking sagas, and the big spiral-bound sketch pad in which so laboriously I had practised the bizarre hieroglyphics of Ancient Egypt, and I held this in my hands for a long time, marvelling at the hours of patient and meticulous and wasted work that had gone into the now pathetic and rather ridiculous affectation of the cover, for I had treated this as an exact facsimile of part of an inscribed wall on the temple of Queen Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir el-Bahri with each of the hundreds of hieroglyphic characters shaded and high-lighted as if incised into the stone itself, a copy far more remarkable in its way than the forged painting of the Grafton …

  Yet there had been adventure then, and excitement, and strangeness, and challenge, a sense of struggling through towards something, and even the failures and the affectations were not without a certain brave significance … and Sundays then had been days to wander solitary along South Wharf or Victoria Docks groping for some identification with beauty and mystery and poetry, and one then would gather together the few bright grains of it that one had been able to pick up, like the glittering dust of hard-won gold that had been in the aspirin bottle Jack had brought back from Berringa, and this would be carried home very carefully, like treasure, to be examined and admired in privacy and seclusion. There had been privacy and seclusion then, and in an old room with a crude work-table that was littered with papers and books and the urgent waste of reference, and important things were pinned up on walls, and hopes were there, spilled in the cluttered tangle, and beliefs too, and there had been shelves that I, also, had hammered up against a wall to hold the books I felt I had had to keep, and through the window of that room, with its fly-wire scr
een, there had been a fernery and a tangle of dusky vegetation that had hidden my mother on occasions and could at least hide the dividing fence and the plumbing outlets of the house next door …

  I got up then from the floor litter and pushed the desk all the way back against the wall, shoving against the tenacious cling of the Feltex, because I could only work facing a wall, and it had to be a blank wall, and that was when I tore the two big pictures down from their hooks and flung them with the other things on the floor, and after this I turned my attention to the book-case because I realized that I hated books behind glass anyway, and there were all the books so treacherously imposed – the order required reading specially selected by the ‘librarian’ – in the stipulated dosage of necessary culture, and I began to shovel them out on to the floor and then one of them was in my hand and I was looking at it and it was Ibsen’s The Master Builder, and the whole spurious futility of it all burst in a fury of choking, impotent rage, and I hurled the book at the wall with all my strength and at the top of my voice I shouted, ‘And I don’t even understand Ibsen!’ and then I turned wildly and kicked a hole clean through the Cutty Sark waste-paper basket, and that was when Helen burst in and cried, ‘David! My God! What in heaven’s name is going on?’ and I turned to face her in a gasping spasm of rage and hatred that left me empty of words and I could only stare at her and shake my head.

  ‘What are you doing? What is this?’ she cried, aghast, and she was frightened by the look of me, I could see that, but when I still made no reply she took one step towards me and said, ‘What is it all about, darling? … tell me for God’s sake.’ She stared around helplessly. ‘All this stuff on the floor … and … the pictures pulled down. And why is the desk over there? … it – it spoils the whole look of the room, David, darling, for heaven’s sake what is the matter?’

  I took a long deep breath. ‘I am rearranging my study,’ I said stiffly. ‘That stuff on the floor’s only junk and I just felt I wanted some rubbish to put in my waste-paper basket.’

  ‘In that?’ she said numbly. ‘You’ve broken it.’

  ‘I’ll get another. I might even get two or three. Plain ones. I’ve pulled the pictures down because, frankly, I’m sick and bloody tired of them. And the desk is over there because I don’t like a desk that’s out from the wall. In fact I don’t like desks. That desk especially. I’m going back to a work-table.’

  ‘But the books! Just look at the books, for heaven’s sake!’

  ‘Oh, I’m cleaning out the book-case too. This is a real clean sweep! I think I’ve decided I’d rather have open shelves. Besides, there’s only one book I want at the moment,’ I said, and I went over and very deliberately put the little volume entitled D. H. Lawrence in Australia exactly in the middle of the bare top shelf where the ‘classics’ had been arranged.

  ‘What was that you were shouting about Ibsen?’ she asked nervously.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I distinctly heard —’

  ‘Nothing!’ I repeated harshly. ‘I have nothing to say about Ibsen. Except that I can’t bloody well read him, that’s all.’

  ‘You’re in a very queer mood, David,’ she said. ‘You are. You’re strange. I … I’ve never seen you like this. I’ll … I think I’d better go and make you some coffee.’

  ‘I don’t want coffee. Just go away. Just please go away and leave me to my rearrangements.’

  The quick hurt in her eyes told me how badly I was behaving – sullen, defiant, vindictive, like some rebellious child – and I was aware that she was behaving, and would behave, better than I: yet with a deep and passionate certainty I knew that I was right and she was wrong.

  She did make coffee – I think she retreated to the kitchen really to pull herself together, and because she did not yet know what to do about the confusion in the room – but her being in the kitchen had the effect of sharpening the hostility I felt towards her, for it made me think of the steak-and-kidney pie at the Turleys’, and she was out there and there were no smells coming from the kitchen, no food smells, Sunday morning smells, and I thought of all the meals we had eaten together that had had no smells, all the clever exotic imaginative tasteless plates of nothing that we had eaten by the refined glow of coloured candles.

  When she returned with the coffee she brought much of her composure with her. I knew that she was still scared underneath and upset and bewildered and hurt, but she dissembled it well, even with a slight air of conciliation, as if she had decided that with a little patience and a little tolerance it would all be explained. And she sat on the desk in her yellow house-coat, swinging those gorgeous legs of hers above the mess on the floor as if it wasn’t even there, and she gave me a gentle, understanding smile as if she wanted to reassure me that she had no intention of condemning me or punishing me: but she had not visited her hairdresser during all that week and for the very first time I noticed that there was a dark discolouration at the roots of her hair, not grey really, but dry and dull and flaky, like the ashes of a fire.

  ‘I did put the car things out for you earlier,’ she said. ‘At the top of the drive. The buckets and the sponges, and that new polish you asked Wally to get. There’s a new chamois if you want it in the kitchen cupboard.’

  ‘I’m not cleaning the car,’ I said. ‘I’m taking it out. I’m going for a drive.’

  ‘On Sunday morning? Where would you go on Sunday morning?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t decided. Anywhere. I’d just like to get out of the house, that’s all.’

  ‘Yes, I think that might be a very good idea,’ she said carefully. ‘If you are in this strange, funny mood it —’

  ‘I might call in on Mum and Dad. I want to ask about that old work-table of mine, anyway. Or I might even go on down to see Jack and Sheila and the new baby. I’ll decide when I’m out on the road. I’ll find somewhere to go.’

  The telephone rang then and she took the call, saying, ‘Speak!’ the way she always did, then, ‘Oh, it’s you. We’re fine, yes. No, of course we hadn’t forgotten. I’m just doing crumbed cutlets to-day anyway, so between twelve and half-past would be perfect.’ She put her hand over the mouth-piece and turned to me. ‘It’s Sandra,’ she said. ‘So don’t go too far, David, will you? You hadn’t forgotten that we promised to pop over there before lunch to try that new Pimms’ drink that Wally’s been raving about.’

  ‘How could I ever forget that?’ I said as I went out the door.

  I did clean the car the following Sunday morning, though, and altogether there were seven cars out along Beverley Grove, all being hosed or polished or rubbed at, and Wally Solomons came across from the big cream company Plymouth he had taken out for the week-end, with a handsome yellow polishing-cloth of a new sort, impregnated with something or other, which he presented to me because General Motors were sending them out with their country salesmen as a little goodwill stunt, and he said, ‘It’s this chemical stuff that’s in the cloth, it just shifts the road-scum like that,’ and I said, ‘Oh?’ and he said, ‘It’s windscreens and hub-caps that give the final touch to a polish job, you know, if they’re not sparkling the whole vehicle looks like nothing on earth.’ And under my breath I said, ‘Go and get stuffed.’

  And then Phyland the chartered accountant came up from his neat black Hillman wiping the dipstick on a clean pull of cotton-waste, Phyland the accountant with his pale, pinched-up little widowed woman’s face, the sort of face, I found myself thinking, that he must take out from a locked filing-cabinet each day and put on very carefully and accurately like a company audit. Solomons showed him the new impregnated polishing-cloth and explained it, and Phyland said, ‘By Jove, that sounds pretty good,’ and Solomons promised to try to get one for him too, and then for five minutes they just stood there beside the red MG discussing whether Karkleen Rapid was a better polish than Caldwell’s Hi-Glass, and I thought of the balanced, audited Phyland turds flowing down the plumbing outlet outside my study window, and under my breath I said, ‘You can
both go and get stuffed,’ and turned my back on them and pretended to be busy on something to do with the front suspension. But even from there I could see old Treadwell pottering among his dahlias, and looking rather critically across the dividing fence at Helen’s cinerarias.

  It was worse the Sunday after that. Two days previous to this the van had delivered our new console-radio, which Helen and I had chosen after hours of poring over catalogues, and which had been delivered from the same company which had made my desk and much of the furniture in the house. Although the wood was plain and waxed and solid, the contraption was deceptively elaborate, for in addition to the sunken wireless it contained a record-player and a compact cocktail-cabinet with a coloured cut-glass set for twelve, and I hated it from the moment it was delivered to our house, although I had thoroughly approved of it at the beginning and had signed the time-payment agreement without a qualm.

  On the Sunday morning I had to get up on the roof to fit the stubby tubular mast which would take the new long aerial, and it had to be made fast to the chimney with the bolted metal straps which had come with the set, and for this I borrowed the Solomons’ ladder. When I had finished the job – which didn’t take long because the pamphlet which had come with the radio gave detailed illustrated instructions for fixing what was called the Quicktite Patent Antenna Clamp, and added, ‘Even a child can do it!’ – I stayed up on the roof, sitting on the sloping, terracotta tiles with my back wedged against the chimney because for the first time in weeks I had an odd feeling, not only of being alone and away from everything, but of being in some way unassailable as well, and I had not been up on the roof of a house since the time, more than twenty years before, when I had looked down in the rain on old Grandma Emma raging around the back garden brandishing the castor-oil bottle.