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.
‘As I understand it, childbirth is also dangerous,’ John Millet says.
‘That’s as maybe,’ Jacob says. ‘But childbirth is natural. It’s a nicer thing than pills and hooks.’
‘You sound like Malcolm Muggeridge,’ John says. He offers Jane one of his cigarettes, which she accepts. He lights it for her and watches her inhale appreciatively. She looks all the time remarkably serene and as if containing some benign, ironic joke.
‘If you want the truth, John,’ she says, ‘you won’t get it from Jake. I’m pregnant because it seemed a delightful idea to him and me after we’d blown all the twins’ birthday money last winter on an extravagant drunken lunch. I’m afraid it impaired our judgement. We made eyes at each other over grilled lobsters and resolved to jettison our humble rubber goods. I agree with Jake about the pills and the other things. You may not, but then you haven’t been on the slab in the Family Planning Clinic. Anyway, the point is that any day now we’ll suffer for it. My darling Jake will hold bowls for me half the night, while I vomit in labour and botch the breathing exercises, which I always do. Then he’ll spend the next three years suffering his insomniac’s agony after being woken at night. And he’ll put up with us having our bed peed on and his manuscripts scribbled over. Jonathan woke him up nearly every night for four years. He and Roger are violently allergic to each other. Rosie caused him to slip a disc last summer. He had to spend all his income tax rebate on what Sammy here calls his fizzy old therapist. Oh, if only they weren’t always so lovely, John, it wouldn’t be half so tempting.’ John smiles at her.
‘You are both insane,’ he says. ‘I’ve brought you some very special wine, by the way, from a vineyard near Amalfi. I’ve got it in my car.’ He has seated himself by this time in a small, beautiful lyre-backed chair. The seat is loose and the legs are splaying outwards at the joints. Anyone in my mother’s circle would have done it up years ago in tasteful Dralon.
‘It wants some glue here,’ John says moderately, inspecting the joints. ‘I’ll do it for you if you like.’
‘Please do,’ Jane says. ‘Before my mother comes to see us next week. She has a special thing for that chair. Lady Gregory gave it to her mother. She thinks that Yeats might have sat in it.’ Jane Goldman’s family is patrician Anglo-Irish. She has married her Mile End Jew in defiance of them.
‘Yeats, William Butler,’ Jacob says. ‘Brother of the more famous Jack, of course.’ He turns to me, to where I have seated myself, alongside the children, in the heap of cushions. ‘Jane went to a local auction sale once, Katherine,’ he says. ‘Chap spells his name for the auctioneer. ‘Yeats,’ he says. ‘Gates?’ says the auctioneer. ‘No, no,’ says Jane’s chap, ‘Yeats, like the poet.’ Does that amuse you?’ he says. It obviously does because I giggle appreciatively.
Jacob’s small daughter has decided suddenly to flatter John with her intimacy.
‘Jane’s baby is going to get born through a very stretchy hole,’ she says. ‘And only girls have them. If you are a boy or a girl you stay a boy or a girl, you know.’ There is more sex education about than I have encountered in all of my life.
‘Absolutely,’ John says, full of sober conviction.
‘And when the baby is inside, it can suck her nipples from the inside, can’t it?’ she says.
‘I think you may be wrong there,’ he says without displaying a hint of mirth. ‘I think there’s another system for inside.’
‘Something to drink,’ Jacob says decisively. ‘Come with me, Katherine. I’ll find my son for you.’ He is seeking to protect me from the fantasy, which John Millet allows me, that I am one of the grown-ups. In the back hallway before the kitchen door is a large laundry basket, such as is used to accommodate Falstaff, which contains a great tumble of wellington boots. All the visible ones say R.J. GOLDMAN in marking ink, presumably because his oldest son Roger wears them all first. It underlines for me Roger’s glorious ascendancy. At the kitchen table Roger Goldman is poring over the Observer theatre reviews, stretching long denim-clad legs before him. He has, on his comely dark head, a remarkable floppy black beret which gives him the look of having come but late from Wittenburg. He is scratching idly at his dandruff where his hair protrudes at the back of the cap.
‘I’ll give you that hat, shall I?’ Jacob says agreeably.
‘Thanks,’ Roger says, still reading and scratching. Jacob pulls the cap over his eyes.
‘Stop reading for a moment, will you?’ he says. ‘It’s only the routine Sunday pap for the lumpenintelligentsia.’
‘Fuck off, Jake,’ Roger says, tensing with antipathy. He looks up, however, and sees me. He has the same stunning blue eyes as his mother and a similar fine face.
‘This person is Katherine,’ Jacob says. ‘She’s a pupil of mine. Look after her for me.’ He pulls out a chair for me. A Windsor kitchen chair with wobbling spindles in the back. ‘Jesus,’ he says, ‘there’s more bloody hopeless chairs in this house than makes sense. Has Goldilocks paid us a visit? Stick this one in the shed, Roggs. Use it for bails and stumps.’ As Roger begins to get up, Jacob changes his mind. ‘Forget it,’ he says. ‘How many bails and stumps can one family reasonably use?’ He pulls out another for me. ‘Have this one, Katherine,’ he says. ‘We’ll save the other one for unwelcome guests. Give her a drink, Roger.’ He plants before Roger a half-empty bottle of white wine from the fridge and two glasses. Then he carts off the hard stuff to the sitting room.
Roger, for all he is endowed with distinguishing beauty and the benefits of his parents’ bold, radical iconoclasm, is as shy and awkward with me as any other sixth-former. We punctuate awkward silences with snatches of factual information and seek refuge in the newspaper. Roger has the advantage here, but I have never found reading upside down all that difficult. Roger is going to Kenya for a year on VSO before going to Oxford the following summer to study mathematics. I venture so far as to tell him I like his hat.
‘It’s a German student’s hat,’ he says. ‘It belonged to Jake’s father.’ Jacob’s family has fallen and risen again in defiance of Hitler. Inwardly, a little sycophantically, I admire the impressive ethnic muddle of his origins.
‘Try it,’ he says. He puts it briefly on my head, while I blush and think of dandruff.
‘You look very nice in it,’ he says shyly and, averting his eyes, he takes it back. Outside somebody has begun to groan noisily over the pulling off of wellington boots.
‘Roggs?’ says the voice. ‘That poovy Millet has brought a woman with him. Have you seen her?’ Roger tenses in an agony of embarrassment.
‘Don’t shout,’ he says, a little piously.
‘Listen, Shitface,’ says the voice, ‘this doll is worth a bloody sight more than the Queen’s Christmas message.’ He comes in, having slung the boots roughly into the basket. He has large bare feet and has evidently been going sockless in wellies. His eyes widen with shock when he sees me, but he is not half so embarrassed as Roger and starts to laugh.
‘Okay, what’s your ‘phone number, then?’ he says facetiously.
‘Don’t be cheeky, Jont,’ Roger says hurriedly. ‘She’s one of Jake’s pupils.’
Jonathan sits down. ‘Does that mean you actually pay to listen to him?’ he says to me. ‘Roggs and I would pay to shut him up, wouldn’t we, Rogsie? A sponsored silence, like they have in the Brownies.’
Jonathan Goldman, who is sixteen, is taller than his brother and coarser looking. He has unbecoming frizzy hair and, underneath his boisterous humour, a slightly menacing adolescent belligerence. He looks, when I come to analyse it, not unlike Jacob – or as my mother would put it, who has none of my liberal squeamishness – he looks ‘like a Jew’.
‘That Millet makes the parents twitter,’ he says cheerfully. ‘Do you think he gives Jane the flutters?’
‘They always twitter,’ Roger says in disgust, fixing his eyes somewhere beyond the kitchen clock. ‘All of them. This time next week, I’ll be on another continent.’
The kitchen is large and dauntingly grotty. There is excess rubbish piling up in a Heinz bean carton beside the overflowing rubbish bin. Where the legs of the table meet the floor there are encrustations of toddler food. The tops of some homegrown vegetables are wilting on the work-board alongside seeping used tea-bags and half-eaten bowls of that morning’s cornflakes. It is also perfectly apparent to me that the Goldmans write their telephone messages all over the wall. Alongside the kitchen telephone the wall looks like a defaced urban street hoarding. Rosie has scratched up a conspicuous message in black marker pen for her father. ‘Jake must fone criss,’ it says. Underneath it, Jacob has written, ‘If criss fones me again tell him to phuck off.’