Brother of the More Famous Jack (2 page)

‘Listen, Flower,' he said when I took my leave, ‘people who come here do so on the back of the British Taxpayer. I expect my people to work. If they don't I do my best to have them thrown out.'

During the summer vacation I received notification – Jacob's ultimate compliment to me – that the department would have me on three Es.

Not long afterwards I met a man called John Millet in Dillon's bookshop.

‘Just the jam and the poetry?' he said into my ear. I didn't know who he was. He approached me in the stacks as I browsed. He spoke BBC English and wore a slightly preening twisted smile. In my string bag, over my shoulder, I had a jar of cherry jam and a paperback John Donne. I blushed deeply, embarrassed by the cliché of his good looks, because John Millet looked like a man in an Austin Reed shirt advertisment. He was clad in stylish pale linen and had a squashy packet of Gallic fags jutting from his breast pocket.

‘Careful I don't make you blush again,' he said, relishing my embarrassment. ‘It doesn't match the clothes you're wearing.' I was dressed on that day in an outsize purple football jersey which I had worn to my interview with Jacob. I wore it, as was then the fashion, well over half way up my thighs. Pulled over one eye I had a small crocheted string hat which I had made myself. I have a great love affair with clothes. They are consumingly important to me and I often pull off a successfully Voguey look. Once when I was crossing Tottenham Court Road a team of Japanese photographers began to click their shutters. I was more than chuffed that they should have risked the traffic for my image. I like crafty clothes especially. I like shepherd smocks and intricate knitting. I can knit prodigious landscapes into my jerseys. I can
do corded piping in seams and beaded embroidery. I like to make quilted cuffs and bodices.

John Millet that summer was wearing his middle age with a casual grace. That afternoon he drove me along the Embankment to the Tate Gallery in his white Alfa Romeo, which he had recently driven across the Alps. He was an architect just returned from four years in Rome. Lined and brown, he stood among the smooth pebble-white Henry Moores. In the basement cafe with its charming murals he fed me doughnuts and talked about the Portland Vase. Enclosed by the rustic idyll of the walls, watching the smoke rise from his Gauloise, I thought, romantically, of a goat-boy playing the flute. Three days later he told a hairdresser in Sloane Square how to cut my hair.

‘Like this. Like this,' he said.

I watched my hair drop in pale clods to the floor. The effect, I had to admit, was astonishing. With my almost nonexistent breasts and my narrow hips, I looked alluringly hermaphrodite. I came out holding my head high, reaching for the gallant curtleaxe I felt upon my thigh.

‘That's better,' he said, running his thumb down the newly exposed groove in the nape of my neck. He was considerately restrained always in his touchings. We dined in an Italian restaurant where before my eyes he devoured a daunting plate of snails with a squeeze of lemon, while I wrestled with my pasta. My understanding of foreign foods at that time was limited to the conviction that paprika in the stew made it Hungarian and tinned cocktail fruits made it Caribbean.

‘Like this,' he said, demonstrating with fork and spoon, Roman-wise. When I achieved, with this technique, something the size of a cricket ball wound on to the end of my fork he was charmed by it as a symptom of my innocent youth.

‘It's not good enough, you know,' he said, eyes smiling. ‘Florentines manage it using only the fork. I'm spending a couple of days with some friends in the country,' he said. ‘Will you join
me?' Olive oil on my chin was enough to make me feel daringly bacchanalian.

‘Yes,' I said. ‘Yes, yes.' From the deserted offices of his architectural partnership in Hampstead he telephoned his friends.

‘Jane,' he said wooingly. ‘My sweet and lovely Jane, may I bring a friend?' I sat perched on the desk beside him, hearing every word. His friend had her mouth full of marbles and replied after a pause with caution.

‘You know I don't like people, John,' she said. ‘Would I like your friend, do you think?'

‘Definitely,' John said. ‘I guarantee it.'

‘And tell me, John, if I may make so bold,' she said, ‘are you and your “friend” together or apart?' John smiled at me reassuringly as I glowed with the excitement of no retreat.

‘Together,' he said.

My mother coincided only once with John Millet. The day before we left for Sussex. He caused her a burst of subsequent indignation.

‘He's queer,' she said, priding herself on her instinct for nosing out sexual deviance. ‘The world is full of nice young men. Why do you go out with an old queer?'

The house, as it presents itself from the road, is like a house one might see on a jigsaw puzzle box, seasonally infested with tall hollyhocks. The kind one put together on a tea tray while recovering from the measles. We are in the Sussex countryside, not far from Glyndebourne. We are in Virginia Woolf country. Mrs Goldman is in her vegetable garden, but leaves it and comes over when she sees us. She puts down a gardener's sieve containing potatoes and a lettuce and takes John's hands warmly in her own.

‘Darling John,' she says. ‘How truly lovely to see you. You're as handsome as ever, but I have to tell you you are going grey.' Her voice is a stylish combination of upper-class vowels and tongue-tied sibilants.

‘You're pregnant,' John says reproachfully, still holding her hands. ‘You were pregnant when I left.' She smiles at him.

‘But not quite as pregnant as this, was I?' she says. Jane Goldman has that indiscreet full-term bulge women get when the foetal head engages. She stands hugely in strong farmer's wellington's into which she has tucked some very old corduroy trousers. She has these tied together under a man's shirt with pyjama cords because the zip won't come together over the bulge. Bits of hair are falling out of her dark brown plait. She has a face like a madonna. She wears a contained, ironic smile which makes dimples in her cheeks and is blessed with the bluest of eyes. A neglected Burne-Jones, she is, in wellingtons.

‘New babies have such lovely legs,' she says in her own defence. ‘That's an awfully nice pullover thing you're wearing, John. What elegance you always bring to our establishment.' John Millet has clad his torso in an impeccable sky-blue velour article with sleeves that blouse into ribbed wristbands.

‘This is Katherine,' he says. Jane Goldman peers at me with her myopic blue eyes in the bright sunlight.

‘Hello there,' she says, taking my hand and bestowing her smile upon me.

‘Why have you grown your hair?' John says possessively. ‘This heavy Teutonic hairstyle. I don't like it.' Jane laughs.

‘It's not a hairstyle. It's neglect,' she says. ‘Go and admire my daughter. Rosie is over there. Isn't she nice?' She gestures to where her leggy, dark nine-year-old and friend are making a tent with a garden bench and a collection of dusty Persian rugs.

‘Your children are dragging your heirlooms in the mud,' John says. Jane surveys her worldly goods with marvellous indifference.

‘Any such heirlooms you see are what my mother sneaks out of the shed,' she says. ‘How are you, John? Did you have a lovely time?' John doesn't talk about himself. He prefers forms and artefacts.

‘You never came to see me in Rome,' he says. She smiles at him tolerantly.

‘Have you stopped to think of the cost of getting the Goldmans to Rome?' she says. ‘Anyway, Jake likes day trips to Worthing. He doesn't like holidays abroad.'

‘Worthing smells of seaweed,' John says. ‘Your husband is mad. You could have left him at home.'

‘You should be so lucky,' she says. ‘And aren't all the best people mad?'

‘Your garden is better than ever,' he says, taking in the lovely wildness of self-seeding flowers.

‘I give it no attention,' she says. ‘I spend all my time among the cabbages these days. I've been having words with Jake about it
this morning as a matter of fact. He says I give it too much of my time.' She laughs briefly. ‘What he means is that he needs a proper wife who will type his manuscripts and listen to him carping over the Sunday papers.' John smiles.

‘How is Jake?' he says.

‘He couldn't be better,' she says, making the admission sound like a conspiracy. ‘I would say things were going rather well for him. He won't admit it to you of course. He's such a posturing old bastard. He likes to suffer in public. He is spending the weekend grumbling over his proofs. He's taking his new book to London tomorrow.' John clearly finds reassurance in the fact that his friends are unchanged. He needs them to be unchanged.

‘Let's go in,' she says. ‘He'll be very glad to see you.'

‘And your children?' John says as we walk slowly towards the house.

‘The children are lovely,' she says. ‘Roger and Jont are giants with deep voices and big feet. Roger is about somewhere. Jonathan is fishing as always but he'll appear at lunchtime. They're much the same really. Roger is gorgeous and Jonathan is trouble. Equally gorgeous, but trouble. Rosie is a dear little creature, but idle and spoilt. I believe she has the art of making herself pleasing to men,' she says. ‘Jacob at any rate is charmed by her. She does nothing but swim and turn cartwheels. The babies are delightful. They're no more bother than a pair of kittens. Neither of them can count to ten. Do you remember Roger at four, John? How he discovered Infinity while standing at the window counting MGs? It struck him suddenly that numbers could go on for ever. Do you remember how Jacob made us go out and spend the milk money on sticky buns to celebrate? Weren't we daft?'

‘I've always felt indebted to Roger,' John says, gallant and gently humorous. ‘He told me when he was three that the sperm whale enjoyed occasional snacks of small shark and I have never forgotten.'

‘He read all those remarkable dinosaur books,' Jane says. Roger Goldman has recently won an
Observer
competition, it appears, with a bogus essay in natural history arguing that the earth is flat. John makes a reference to this which pleases his mother. He has seen it in the
Observer,
which was of course available to him in Rome. John Millet pronounces his name like the grain, not like the painter. It typifies his air of well-bred understatement. He has clearly been expressing his love for Jane Goldman in courtly tributes these twenty years.

In the sitting room, in the company of two dark and curly tots and surrounded by a great volume of Sunday newsprint, is my philosophy professor: a coincidence which leaves me feeling more than compromisingly marginal to a middle-aged reunion of old friends. He wears his shirt unbuttoned and reveals to me, thereby, that the hair grows like a blanket to his navel. I assume this to be a minor deformity which he bears with fortitude. He booms a welcome to John and gets up, buttoning his shirt.

‘You're grey,' he says, inspecting him jovially. ‘You look like an eminence. Jesus, John, you look like the Chairman of the National Coal Board.' He embraces John effusively, like a football star. John speaks quietly, but with no less pleasure in the meeting.

‘I've heard it rumoured that you're on the BBC these days,' he says in self-defence. ‘How are you, Jake? You look terrific.'

‘Tottering on,' Jacob says. ‘Tottering on.'

‘I have brought a sweet young woman for you,' John says. To say that he offers me to Jacob in any real sense would of course be misleading. In his manner he likes to imply more than is there. Jacob is in any case too resolutely monogamous, too involved with Jane to contemplate others and too upright in matters of fraternising. He says it perhaps to compromise us both or to create a myth for himself which makes more legitimate his flirtation with Jacob's wife.

‘This is Katherine,' Jane Goldman says. My presence seems to cause him no discomfort.

‘Well, well,' he says enigmatically. ‘Katherine, is it? And these are my lovely children. Sam and Annie.' His little twins have made a mountain by gathering every cushion in the house and in it they are merrily trampling about. One of the cushions has burst its seam and is spewing out foam chunks on to the carpet which is in any case full of coffee stains and dust. ‘Aren' t they big?' he says. ‘Too late to put them down for Eton.'

‘One of them appears to be a girl,' John says. ‘Hey, Jake, your wife is pregnant. What's the matter with you people?'

‘We like fucking,' Jacob says. The word drops like a rock on to my uninitiated sensibilities, but does nothing to shake his wife's composure, or John' s.

‘Don' t be evasive,' John says. ‘I want to know what's the matter with you. Four children I accept is perhaps not an intolerable number – and I can appreciate that nobody could have predicted twins. But six? Why do you have six children?' Jacob won' t be drawn, sensing, perhaps, a degree of unwitting prurience in John's insistence.

‘I like to get her knickers down,' he says. ‘I like her, for Christssake. She's my lawful wife.'

‘But you' re not Catholics yet, are you?' John says.

‘You want her to swallow hormone pills and get cancer?' Jacob says extravagantly. ‘Or would you prefer her to stuff copper hooks up her cervix?' (I had no idea until this moment that I possessed such a thing as a cervix and the knowledge caused me, prophetically, to contemplate my pelvic region, for the first time, as a potential disaster area.) ‘A hundred years ago women ruined their health swallowing lead pills,' he says, ‘and poking at themselves with crochet hooks. Now they ruin their health swallowing hormone pills and pushing copper hooks into the neck of the uterus. You may call it progress if you like.' I have never before heard private parts made public. I find it quite astonishing.