Brother of the More Famous Jack (16 page)

He went so far as to suspect me with women too. He came to pluck me out one evening from my friend Janice's flat, where we were sewing together using her machine. I was very fond of Janice, who taught with me. She was a plain, rather mouse-coloured woman of middle age who was cursed with a bad, acne-marked skin and was not altogether happy.

‘Why,' Michele said in the car, ‘why are so many English women lesbian?' I assumed this to relate to some item he had absorbed from the gutter press, because Michele had a remarkable, innocent susceptibility when it came to the gutter press.

‘Name me five,' I said. Sometimes I considered myself a lot brainier than Michele.

‘You spend your evening with Janice,' he said. ‘How does it feel to go to bed with a woman?' I thought he was, quite simply, out of his mind.

‘You should know,' I said.

‘Is it because the woman is too ugly to find a man that you do this for her? Or do you want to be a man, my Caterina?' he said, pityingly. ‘You are lacking in important respects.' I found this so absurd, not to say distasteful, that I could not take it seriously. I thought he was soliciting for praise. Praise for his maleness. Thank you, Michele, for your male crotch which no Meccano can simulate. Remembering Jake, I said that we used spanners, Janice and I. This was a mistake, because he believed me, I think.

Once, only once, Jonathan Goldman came to see me, en route for Greece. Unhappily, I missed him. A grown-up Jonathan, who had sat resolutely in the flat for an hour, weathering Michele's hostility. And who was this Goldman? Michele demanded. This Goldman who saw fit to wait a whole hour in the flat? I got quite wild with excitement, thinking Roger had come to see me. Roger Goldman in Rome and coming to see me.

‘Where?' I said, with undisguised fervour. ‘Where is he? I have to see him.' Michele, delighted to be vindicated in his suspicions, presented me with a note. A note scribbled by Jonathan under Michele's searching eye. It gave an address and telephone number in Athens and went as follows:

Kath,

I came to leave you a million pounds but sadly you were out. Now you ask me how I found you in this town where all the streets appear to be called
Senso Unico?
I crossed the Tiber by the Ponte Garibaldi and asked in French for a gorgeous
Inglese.
Your man thinks I'm here to steal the silver and looks as if he means to throw me to the lions.

‘Phone me in Athens sometime.

Jonathan G.

‘And who is this Goldman?' Michele said again. ‘This big English Jew who waits for you a whole hour in my apartment, and wants to be telephoned in Athens?'

‘He's the younger son of my philosophy professor,' I said. Michele looked infinitely sceptical.

‘Credo,'
he said, nastily. It had ceased to bother me that Michele didn't believe a word that I said. It gave me the liberty to lie whenever I chose.

For all this I never felt that Michele was crushing me. He didn't attempt to warp my soul or manipulate me the way Roger had done. I make an analogy, I hope not unforgivably, with
The Taming of the Shrew.
It has always seemed to me about that play that it is not the terrible, delightful Petruchio (unscrupulous chancer that he is) who warps and crushes the girl, but the dreadful combination of that goody-goody sister, who warps her with feminine wiles, and that hidebound, favouritising father, who tells her to go ply her needle and grovel for a husband. They are the ones who knock her about. After them, life with Petruchio is a day out from a sadistic nunnery. He and she are equal in high spirits. And how does he tame her? He makes her kiss him in the street. He makes her enact the hilarious burlesque of embracing a strange old man and calling him a sweet young virgin. Tame girls don't kiss in public and embrace strange men. He gives her scope for a comic talent, he is no more a respecter of orthodox behaviour than she is. At the end of the play she is not tame, she is the wench with the wit to win her old man's bet for him. They leave Padua a few hundred crowns richer, thanks to her. I do not wish to whitewash the issues. The play is about wife-beating. The colour it comes only half offends me. Michele played Petruchio-style mating-games with me all the time. It only half offended me. The rest was terrific fun.

There was the time he drove in the wrong direction to a lunch date. I told him. I said the Thingummies didn't live there any more. Michele, inevitably, approached the challenge in the spirit of who is driving, him or me? I answered provokingly, in English, because Michele, thanks to me, had by then the crudest rudiments of that tongue.

‘Michele', I said between my teeth, ‘you make meestake.
Beeg
meestake.'

‘No meestake,' he said. ‘Caterina, you meestake.'

‘I say you meestake, you big slob,' I said.

‘Allora.
Meestake, eh?' he said, challengingly. He stopped the car without warning, in the middle of the road. Around us a crescendo of blasting horns. ‘Meestake?' he said.

‘Yes,' I said. He got out of the car and sauntered to the sidewalk, where he made as if to enter a pizza shop. I couldn't drive the thing to the side of the road, so I got out and joined him on the sidewalk where we fell laughing with delight into each other's arms.

‘Andiamo,'
he said. We jumped back into the vehicle and drove like hell, before the
carabinieri
descended upon us.

‘Meestake?' he said.

We never got to our lunch party because the sex was better at home.

The year I turned thirty I got pregnant. I forgot to take a contraceptive pill. We are all of us so well acquainted with this kind of error in the post-Freudian era that I might as well confess to it immediately and save myself the trouble of constructing my defence. I am indeed an only child who never had anything to cuddle. I had a cat, I say, feebly. I even accept that much of the sleeping around I did, when it wasn't directly to spite Roger Goldman, had to do with the urge to nurture and be nurtured and not all that much to do with the pleasure I got from the act. It was not until I met Michele that I discovered sex as something seriously worth staying at home for. It took me over half a decade to discover what Jane Goldman had obviously found out in one night. That, to quote her, sex was ‘unexpectedly jolly'. Jonathan Goldman once told me a terrible schoolboy joke about the rabbi and the priest in the train compartment exchanging confidences. They both confess to having broken the taboos of their religion. The rabbi has eaten pork. The priest has had sex with a woman. The punch line is perfectly obvious, and thanks to Michele I discovered, as the rabbi observes, that sex is better than pork. This discovery was so delightful to me that we were almost never out of bed.

But I digress. I got pregnant. I had no hope of hiding the fact since Michele was wont to watch my ovulation like a hawk. I told him as soon as I suspected it. Michele had a habit of downing
nasty eggnog stuff for breakfast in the belief that this was beneficial to his health. It was in effect raw
zabaglione.
He choked on it. Having recovered, he bawled wonderfully colourful oaths at me. He had a way of rolling composite insults which involved casting doubt on the virtue, not only of one's female relations but upon the holy Mother of God and the Pope's great-grandmother. In short, he was not pleased. He added his only English insult to the rest and called me a ‘beetch'. I began to giggle nervously when he said ‘beetch', because it made me think of the seaside. Then I hopped it before he resorted to physical violence. He was very nice to me when I came home that evening, which I ought to have known was suspect. He embraced me very sweetly and kissed my hair.

‘Come stai?'
he said solicitously. I said I was, frankly, bloody scared of him, that's how I was. He made some sweet gentle love to me, after which he went so far as to quote me some old Tuscan poetry and to tell me I was the most pure and beautiful of women. He had a present for me, he said. He got up and brought it to me in an enormous bag from the Via Lombardia. Jesus. It was a mink coat. There was something inept in this, I couldn't help thinking. I couldn't say to him that nothing could be calculated to make one feel less pure and more like the proverbial kept woman, more like the landlord's moll. The coat was, of course, a bribe. I said thank you very much. Michele had a plan. We would take a week off from work, he said, and go to London, where we would have the foetus aborted in a good private clinic. These things were easy in London, not so? Then I would show him London. Nice for me, eh? To see London again. And to show it to him, as he had shown me Venice. He got quite spritely on the idea. He could be as phoney as plastic daffodils at times. London was beautiful, was it not? he said. What he knew about London was Buckingham Palazzo and the Horse Guards. He combined this with his own belief that the women in the British royal family rode horses all the time to give themselves orgasms. (Their blokes couldn't, of course, being without chins and other attributes.
Unlike himself. Michele, with his imperial jaw and his well-bedded English girlfriend.)

I took a shower. When I came out I told him, in trepidation, what I wanted. I said that I wanted him to take the coat back to the shop and to give me the money, and that I would use it towards paying for my antenatal care. The effect was astonishing.

‘Come with me,' he said. He took me in one hand and the coat in the other. We went down the street and across the square. By the time we reached the black-market cigarette lady he was holding my arm behind my back like the bouncer at a Working Men's Club. He gave me the coat.

‘Give the coat to the
signora,'
he said.

‘You're crazy.'

‘Give the coat to her.'

‘Signora,'
I said, ‘my boyfriend wants you to have this coat.' In English I said, ‘Michele, will you stop breaking my arm, you big fucking yobbo?'

‘Tell her your boyfriend especially wants her to have it,' he said.

‘Tell her yourself,' I said. ‘I'm not going to insult an old woman. Do it yourself, you crude bastard.' Michele performed on my arm what we used to call ‘Barley Sugars' in our infancy. A subtle and agonising twist.

‘Signora,
my boyfriend especially wants her to have it,' I said, like a parrot.

‘Grazie, signore,'
she said, without emotion. Not to me. To Michele. He was the one dispensing the goodies. She couldn't miss the coercion. Then he marched me home, delighting the neighbours. Wife-clobbering, to catch the eye of the groundlings.

I watched him pack a few things. He packed them into Roger's hold-all. I saw him take a good look at the label. It still said R.J. GOLDMAN. He stuffed a few of his clothes into the bag and opened the zip pocket to throw in his shaving stuff. Then he pulled out a letter, which must have hibernated in the bag those ten years or more, and gave it to me.

‘Goldman,' he said, reading the envelope.
‘Ciao,
Caterina. Now you may go to Athens and sleep with your English Jew.'

‘Michele,' I said as he got to the door, ‘I only once before went to bed with a man who smoked French cigarettes, like you. But he was a homosexual.' Michele didn't blow a fuse, as I thought he might. Perhaps I had hoped to provoke a cathartic explosion and have him make it up to me. Perhaps I was crazy enough to imagine it was worth it to me to spend the next ten years watching Michele clip my child over the head with the back of his hand, shouting
‘Basta!'
and making it do sums over breakfast. Perhaps I was simply proving to myself that I had claws to show. That nobody was going to walk out of my life into a sunset of limestones no more and do so with impunity. He approached me, scrutinising my face wistfully and tenderly with his marvellous brown eyes, and held my chin for a moment between his thumb and forefinger.

‘Ciao, amica,'
he said.

Jonathan's letter had evidently been written to Roger twelve years before in Kenya.

Rogsie,

Don't fret about your fiddle. Try a comb on paper. Didn't Mozart stoop to a glass harmonica? Here's to make you homesick. Mother has bought Rosie a ‘cello. She won't get her knees around the bloody thing and is throwing herself all over the floor in hysterics. Annie has got the mumps, which makes you impotent if you catch it. Ma has spent the morning wringing her hands over the prospect of Jake's balls and mine placed in jeopardy. That's when she isn't using them to pull out her tits and feed Sylvia, who is a right tit-freak if ever there was one. The bloody bathroom smells of curdled baby shit and chlorine bleach. The headmaster refused to submit my poem because ‘tis, as I told you, about lust. Speaking of lust, we have the delectable Katherine in the house again, writing her essays in beautiful italic script and scivvying for Jane. Jesus, I'd pawn
the Holy Grail for an hour up that woman's skirt, wouldn't you? It's time we had some women, Rogsie. How many Green Shield stamps does it take to hire them? And can one be sure that they aren't traffic wardens in disguise?

If we do not meet again in this life, dearest Brother, I trust we will meet in the next.

Love and kisses

Jont.

Since I was already feeling vulnerable, the letter made me cry a little for my lost youth. Michele did not evict me and neither did he leave me high and dry. He fetched his chattels from the apartment when I wasn't there, and deposited one million lire in my bank account. I do not think that any of it was any easier for him than it was for me. Once or twice I saw him afterwards, when I was pregnant and bulging, in the company of a very small, delicate Libyan girl who walked like a ballet dancer. Out of respect for him, I think, I kept out of his way.

I loved being pregnant. I felt very well. During the first few months I enjoyed carrying the fact around in secret. I missed Michele something chronic. I was not miserable, as I had been when Roger left me. My own violent frustration at his absence even amused me at times. I lived up to the most compromising of male chauvinist stereotypes – I missed him in bed. I was the lady who needed servicing. I didn't want anybody, mind, I wanted him. But I survived. Janice was absolutely irreplaceable to me. She threw herself with unconcealed enthusiasm into the project of preparing for the baby. She uncovered an entire network of people with cots to dispose of and nappies to hand on. She acquired squeaky pink elephants and books on how to handle childbirth, brought out in English by the National Childbirth Trust. Together we went to the flea market and found an old pram. We made fitted cot sheets in apple green and navy, and knitted woolly caps and arty baby-bags. I made a quilted patchwork lining in a Moses basket, which was a thing of great beauty. As I began to bulge conspicuously I provided entertainment for some of my neighbours, for whom I had gratifyingly changed from being the glamorous mistress of the
signore
of means to being the loose foreigner with a bun in the oven. I didn't mind too much. I even, after some audible speculation about my condition, brazenly told a group of housewives on one occasion
that we had pulled it off on the autostrada doing 90 kilometres an hour.