Brother of the More Famous Jack (29 page)

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.'

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.

‘You did that very well, Jacob,' I said. ‘You looked like the real thing.' Jacob smiled manfully.

‘It's the last time I give away a daughter,' he said. ‘I'm planning to sell the next one.'

That was the last time I saw Jacob. Shortly afterwards he fell down with a fatal heart attack one Sunday morning in his beautiful kitchen, attempting to mouth words, which Jane couldn't catch. I will say, to honour his dear and glorious memory, that I never think of the dialectic without glottal stops; that I never think of
Women in Love
without heavy breathing in the bracken. I have thought, at times, of Jacob's preface which so impressed me, because since then Jonathan has given me a mention in his own. Jacob's is, of course, a pretty piece of dishonesty, through and through. As always, he has his cake and he eats it. It manages, under the guise of a pretty compliment, to take shots both at his fellow academics and at Jane. What he is really saying is that his colleagues have inferior wives. Poor humdrum creatures who edit and annotate, while his own wife is a goddess, who is above such things. What he is saying, also, is, ‘Dammit Janie, why the hell can't you be a proper wife to me?' The greatest dishonesty of all lies in his assertion that he never ‘presumed to expect' her continuing presence. Of course he did. He took it for granted, as he took for granted that the milk and the
Guardian
came around breakfast. Jonathan's mention of me, by contrast, says only:

‘My thanks to Kath, whose earnings have kept me in socks.'

THE END

Barbara Trapido was born in South Africa and is the author of
six novels –
Brother of the More Famous Jack
(winner of a Whitbread
special prize for fiction),
Noah's Ark, Temples of Delight
(shortlisted
for the
Sunday Express
Book of the Year Award),
Juggling,
The Travelling Hornplayer
(shortlisted for the 1998 Whitbread
Novel Award) and
Frankie and Stankie
. She lives in Oxford.

Noah's Ark

Temples of Delight

Juggling

The Travelling Hornplayer

Frankie and Stankie

Noah's Ark

Ali Bobrow is an other-worldly single parent with a fraught
nine-year-old daughter, a malevolent ‘ex' with a grabby new wife,
and an underused artistic talent. A pushover when it comes to
needy neighbours and uninvited children, she allows her house to be
the local drop-in centre, until she collides with Noah Glazer, who
falls for her pale red hair. A solid man of science, Noah walks into
her over-populated life bringing good sense, order and security. But
ten years on, Ali is drawn back into the complexities of her past:
an old lover, two ex-spouses, a colleague from clown school
and a small smuggled cat all help to rock the boat.

Buy this book at
www.bloomsbury.com
or call our sales team on 020 7440 2475

‘I adored
Brother of the More Famous Jack
. It is redolent of classics like
The Constant Nymph
with both its true voice and wonderfully sage and sanguine heroine'

Sophie Dahl

‘
Brother of the More Famous Jack
remains in my mind as a moving, intense, earthy and witty book, both illuminating and extraordinary as a first novel'

The Times

‘A highly promising debut – fast, inventive, and funny'

London Review of Books

‘More Ms Trapido, rapido'

New Statesman

‘A pleasure… full of excellent things, enormously exuberant, carried along for the most part on vivid dialogue for which Ms Trapido has an uncannily perceptive ear'

Evening Standard

‘An unpretentious and very funny book… a complex and highly polished work'

New York Times

‘This is a first novel for Barbara Trapido, but if established writers could get this good on a seventh try, readers would be the richer for it… What a lovely novel – charming, intelligent and a happy ending too. Barbara Trapido, where have you been?'

USA Today

‘Very funny, very English, very sad'

Daily Telegraph

‘Written with quite exceptional assurance and control. Barbara Trapido is a novelist to look out for'

The Scotsman

‘Shines with off-beat charm and sprightly intelligence'

San Francisco Chronicle

Copyright © 1982 by Barbara Trapido
Introduction copyright © 2007 Rachel Cusk

This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 4088 2272 2

Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New York and Berlin

www.bloomsbury.com/barbaratrapido

Visit
www.bloomsbury.com
to find out more about our authors and their books
You will find extracts, author interviews, author events and you can
sign up for newsletters
to be the first to hear about our latest releases and special offers