I leave the kitchen and find Jane Goldman alone in her vegetable garden, stringing onions. She asks me to join her at it when I approach, which I do. She says apologetically that it looks a little William Morrisy, but that it makes sense if you don’t want them to rot. To me, straight from the outer reaches of the Northern Line, it looks positively Robinson Crusoe and I tell her so.
‘But I’m good at knots and weaving,’ I say, recommending myself. Mrs Goldman gives me a friendly smile.
‘Jake is a very urban person too,’ she says. ‘If you mention the Northern Line to him he goes quite starry-eyed. He likes to see Coke tins in gutters. He likes to be five minutes’ walk from the Hampstead Everyman. He finds this hopelessly countrified.’
‘It’s very nice here,’ I say. ‘Your house. It’s very nice.’
‘And very dirty,’ she says. ‘Do you mind the dirt, Katherine?’ I am surprised by the question. It requires a quick decision from me and with a sudden instinct to emulate her, I commit myself against the grain to the ideology of dirt.
‘It’s nice dirt,’ I say. She looks up at me, trying to make me out.
‘It saves us from people, this house does,’ she says. ‘I’m very fond of it. Tell me where you met John.’
‘In Dillon’s bookshop,’ I say.
‘How wonderfully highbrow,’ she says. ‘I met him in Woolworths when I was about your age. It’s very flattering, I think, to be noticed by him. He says he likes the quattrocento profile.’ But Jacob, who has picked his way along a row of her inverted jam jars, is there behind her.
‘Quattrocento lahdeedah,’ he says. ‘He likes women with no tits.’ To be sure, neither of us is particularly well endowed in that respect.
‘Give me the nuts and bolts of the sleeping arrangements,’ he says. ‘Where are these chaps going to lay their heads?’
‘In the guest room,’ she says. ‘Roger has done it already. I asked him to.’
‘This young person is one of my up-and-coming first years,’ he says. They look at each other with meaning.
‘Really?’ Jane says. ‘Now there’s a thing.’ I feel myself on the rack with awkwardness.
‘I’m very sorry about this,’ I say. ‘I didn’t know I was coming here or I wouldn’t have come.’
‘Now see what you do, Janie,’ he says accusingly. ‘You make the sweet creature feel unwelcome. It only wants a little tact and delicacy.’ Jane Goldman gives me a delightful conspiratorial smile which makes me feel a lot better.
‘I see,’ she says with quiet sarcasm. ‘Well, fire away then, my tactful friend. I hope you’re not planning to take a great stand.’
‘The point is this,’ he says. ‘We all know and love John as a dear friend, not so?’
‘Naturally,’ she says.
‘And we all know, of course, that some of our best friends go in for sodomy, buggery, child-abuse, you name it.’
‘Have a heart, Jacob, there’s no call for poetic licence,’ Jane says.
‘The point is quite simply this,’ he says. ‘I will not have this old faggot come here to my house in order to indulge a sideline in female children. Not with my pupils. Not with Katherine here. Is that clear to everyone present?’
I believe it is no exaggeration to say that I took a few steps forward that day. I had cried into my pillow the night my mother called John Millet queer, but I perceived a world of difference between that and Jacob’s calling his house guest an old faggot. For one thing, he said it so loudly that it filled the air without shame. It had none of the same prim moral censure. But I was a little taken with the idea of sexual induction. It was for John Millet that I had ironed my beautiful Liberty lawn nightdress and for him that I wore my palest consumptive stockings and high-heeled shoes. Jacob, with his unhesitating way of bulldozing through to the heart of any matter, not only confirmed that my mother was right, but eroded my privacy, leaving me feeling like an Arab bride whose wedding sheets are being hung out for the villagers to inspect for blood stains.
‘Perhaps Katherine would oblige you and accept Roger’s bedroom?’ Jane says. ‘And Roggs can move in with Jonathan. Would you, Katherine? It’s a lethal muddle of electronic wiring, I’m afraid.’
‘Of course,’ I say, making nothing of the momentous event, being by training polite and accommodating.
‘You haven’t fallen for this character?’ Jacob says to me. ‘Nothing more, I hope, than a little indulgent sehnsucht? No?’
‘No,’ I say, with my fingers crossed, wondering what sehnsucht could be. Jacob uses German words quite a lot. He had his origins in pre-war Germany and therefore has no difficulty with getting his Londoner’s tongue round words like Wirtschaftgeschichte and Weltanschauung.
‘That’s my girl,’ Jacob says. ‘Tell him to use his own house, lovey, and don’t you venture into the bedroom without taking a spanner with you.’ To this day I don’t really know what he meant by it, but it made me laugh a little which was a gratifying release. He turns back to Jane. ‘And are we going to eat at all today, Janie, or have you forgotten us, as usual, here among your shallots? My sweetie, it’s nearly half-past two.’ He gains strength from the myth of his wife’s incompetence.
‘I never forget you,’ she says mildly. ‘But he’s coming, husband, our maligned friend. Be sure to use your tact and delicacy on him, won’t you?’ John is strolling up to us, slapping his thigh lightly with the Sunday glossy.
‘I thought you were incarcerated with your proofs,’ he says to Jacob. He makes up to Jane, leching, as he does, without apparent intent.
‘You smell very French,’ he says. They laugh together, very close and affectionate.
‘Balls, John,’ she says, ‘it’s onions.’
‘I’m revising the sleeping arrangements,’ Jacob says, tenaciously. ‘We’re giving you the guest room, as befits your station as our more senior guest, and bunging Katherine in with the children. Okay?’
‘What, what?’ John says vaguely, looking at all of us in turn. ‘What’s this?’
‘Katherine here is one of my students,’ Jacob says.
‘I know,’ John Millet says. The swine, I think, wretchedly. He knew all the time. Did he set it up to have an audience? Did he in his urbane wisdom merely not give it a thought? Did he hope to make Jane Goldman jealous by requiring her to share a niche in his pantheon of superior women?
‘I have no wish to be charged with corrupting the youth of Athens,’ Jacob says coldly. ‘Let’s not ruin our Sunday over it, eh? Let’s just leave it at that.’ But John can be fairly persistent, and all of them having been absent from each other, they are now feeling their way back into a tolerance of each other’s idiosyncrasies.
‘Is your husband being serious, Jane?’ John says. ‘Has he become a member of the Church of England Committee for Moral Reform?’ Jacob is incensed at this supercilious use of Jane as intermediary. He appears suddenly very large.
‘I am the Church of England Committee for Moral bloody Reform,’ he says ominously. ‘And much more besides, as you’ll find out if you try me.’ Jane takes John’s arm.
‘Please don’t rise to him, John,’ she says. ‘It’s not worth it for any of us. We both know how frightfully rhetorical and hysterical Jake will get. If you make an issue of this, Jake and I could well end up screaming at each other, because that’s the way it works, isn’t it? It’s an awful bore for the children and Katherine will feel wretched. Now, if you will just kindly fetch us that very special booze you have in your car, we can drink it with our lunch. I’ve worked like blazes on this lunch, I don’t mind telling you, though Jake hasn’t noticed. The babes have made you blackberry tarts and whipped up great quantities of cream. Please, John. You must know that with enemies like Jake you don’t need friends.’ This proves with John to be an effective piece of diplomacy, but Jacob is, alas, not pleased with it.
‘Jesus Christ, Janie,’ he says angrily. ‘I’ll thank you not to bloody well talk about me like that. “Humour the old bastard because he’s a harmless lunatic.” All that. I pay the bloody mortgage here and I’ll lay down the bloody rules if it bloody well suits me. I say who sleeps in what bed here and don’t you forget it.’ Jane Goldman is impressive in the face of male paranoia.
‘I won’t stay and listen to this, Jake,’ she says quietly. ‘And neither will Katherine.’ We go ahead into the house, where I watch her frying courgettes.
‘I’m bound to say you weathered all that with admirable composure,’ she says. ‘My congratulations to you. Are you as composed as you look?’ To my embarrassment I find that I am crying. Jane embraces me remorsefully.
‘Sweet child,’ she says. ‘How awful this must be for you. What sods we are.’
‘I think I’d like to go home,’ I say. She embraces me. I find it strangely comforting, the contact with a highly pregnant woman. I am the only child of my parents.
‘I find that very understandable,’ she says. ‘But I should be very sorry to see you go.’ I cry fairly copiously into her shoulder, wiping mascara on to the yoke of her shirt.
‘What an old bastard he is to bring you here,’ she says, ‘and raise all this hue and cry. You don’t half get all sorts when it comes to men. As for my Jacob, you want to pay him no attention. He behaves like Heathcliff to everyone, you know.’ She gets me a wad of kitchen towel. ‘He’s very kind, if the truth be known. You wouldn’t happen to be his young woman who likes Mrs Weston and her baby’s caps, would you?’
‘I think I must be,’ I say, sniffing inelegantly.
‘Well now,’ she says cheerfully, ‘my old man is most impressed with you. He thinks you’re terrifically bright and he thinks, between us and the gate post, that you’ve got the best legs since Marlene Dietrich. What a delightful coincidence to have you here. I can’t let John Millet drive you away. I insist that you stay. Can I say, in Jake’s defence, that he wouldn’t ordinarily snoop into your sleeping habits? It is a bit compromising isn’t it, for him, though God knows why he has to make a five-act play about it in the vegetable garden – stalking about and bloodying everything, but that’s the way it is. I should think it’s quite enough to make you consider going to university in Leeds or Bristol. If you’re feeling better I might tell you about the time I met John, shall I?’ I say yes. I like autobiography and I like her.
‘He asked me to come and see him at his place in Belsize Park. I was spending the summer with my aunt in Cadogan Square at the time. When I got there I found him on the chaise-longue with a beautiful young man. They were kissing each other passionately on the mouth. I wasn’t anything like as sophisticated as you. I was very straight-laced, Katherine. I was a dear little flat-chested, upper-class Christian, buttoned up in cashmere. The product of a Scottish nanny and a girls’ boarding school. Jacob found me white-faced in the hall. He was John’s upstairs neighbour, you see. The two of them got on like a house on fire. He took me upstairs and succeeded in persuading me that there were worse things afoot in 1945 than a little aberrant sex. He was very kind to me and also very amusing. He took my head apart while I scrambled for the bits and determinedly stuffed them back. I spent the night with him,’ she says, ‘to my very great surprise. I was such a little prude, you see. John spent the night downstairs with his boyfriend. We met for breakfast. There was a shared kitchen. I in Jacob’s pyjamas, John and the boyfriend in matching Norwegian fisherman’s jumpers, as you might see on a knitting pattern. The V-neck and the button through. John’s mother had knitted them – one for John and one for the boyfriend. Splendid woman, John’s mother. Jacob naked from the waist up, sprouting hair from every follicle.’
I find her wonderfully gossipy and conspiring. We are drawn together into an intimacy not only by the melodrama in the onion patch, not only by a happy accidental affinity of mind, but because I believe that I answer a need. As women do, she has sacrificed distant female friendships on the altar of a contented marriage. She has been assimilated into her husband’s tribe of male academics, male bohemians, male politicos and predominantly male children. She makes rapid commitments with the logical clarity of hallucination. She tells me at once that she jacked in Oxford after knowing Jacob for three days and went to live with him instead.
‘He was much more fun. And all that sex, Katherine, was so unexpectedly jolly,’ she says, in her headmistressy voice. ‘One had been led to believe that it would be such a hurdle.’ As she catalogues her early life for me, it assumes all the properties of an eighteenth-century burlesque. There is the runaway daughter, the intractable father, the foreign-born lover, the instant romantic commitment, and, of course, the routine poverty. Her father, a highly conservative Oxford theologian, now retired, cut her off like the blight along with his sister in Cadogan Square.
‘My brother declared himself determined to avenge my lost honour,’ she says. ‘But he never came, poor Henry. I think he got wind of the fact that Jake was a pretty big chap. Jake looked very ferocious in those days. He was bearded, you see, like whatshisname. The old biddy in Highgate Cemetery.’ She got pregnant immediately to preempt any attempt her family might make to tear her away.
‘And you lived happily ever after?’ I say.
‘We fought like cat and dog as it happens,’ she says. ‘I’m quite sure I’d have picked up my little baby and run back home if it hadn’t been made so clear to me that I wouldn’t be welcome. Culture shock is no small thing, you know. Once I ran into Henry as I was pushing Roger in his pram on Hampstead Heath. He walked straight past me. I remember thinking, funny, I used to toast marshmallows with that person. I went home to cry over Jake, but he had his whole damned Kapital reading group all over the furniture. I was obliged to cry over John instead. I was often obliged to cry over John. Jacob was always too busy flogging leaflets or mounting the tub on street corners in those days.’
When Jacob and John come in, having made their peace, she and Jacob mime brief reassuring kisses to each other.
‘What have you been hatching?’ Jacob says, noticing the glow in her cheeks. He puts his hands over her breasts. He has no restraints about laying hands on her in public.
‘I have been filling in Katherine on my past,’ she says without apology.
‘Not a thing to inspire imitation,’ he says. ‘Why do women always talk intimacies about themselves? To listen to women talking is like sitting in on an encounter group. I cannot wander among the library shelves without being a party to whispered confidences. They will spread their personal lives like jam all over the stacks.’
‘I must tell you something amusing, John,’ Jane says, ‘if you promise you won’t start with Jake. My father is on the Church of England Committee for Moral Reform.’