It is temporarily impossible for me to enter the Goldmans’ dining room because Jonathan has been gunned down by Sam with a plastic machine gun and has thrown himself in a convulsive dying agony across the doorway. I consider stepping over him but it occurs to me that the little bastard might well use the opportunity to look up my skirt. Rackatackatackatack.
‘Get up, Jont,’ his mother says briskly, in her hot potato voice. ‘Katherine wants to come in.’
Jane has made us some aromatic, garlicky iced soup for lunch, served with hot garlic bread and followed by pork loin simmered in milk. There is also an abundance of her homegrown vegetables.
‘What is it I can taste?’ John Millet asks her solicitously.
‘Coriander,’ she says. ‘You roll it up with coriander and seal it in butter. Then you pour boiling milk over it which forms a crust and reduces to this pleasant grainy stuff around the meat.’ John and she do some rather in-group cookery talk, being the only ones that know about it. John is a kind of gastronomic Lionel Trilling and likes to pursue every morsel down his throat with analysis and appraisal. ‘It’s dead kosher,’ she says, to amuse him.
‘It could be neither more sinful nor more delicious,’ Jacob says graciously. ‘You may produce lunch two hours late, but you make it worth the eating, Janie.’ Each in their own way, they honour the same mistress. ‘Thank you,’ she says. Jacob, with a forkful of pig meat seethed in milk, celebrates perhaps not so much a release from ethnic taboos, as from the distant nightmare of his own truncated childhood, the marvel of his latter-day bourgeois gemütlichkeit in which I suspect he can never quite believe.
John Millet, as he hands me the salad, passes messages of bottomless innuendo in his smiles. I hold nothing against him. On the contrary, I have become rather elated. I consider myself, after talking with Jane, to be rather stylishly at the point where it all is. Where I always wanted to be. In the company of urbane, emancipated people. Some of my best friends are Jews and homosexuals. Besides, the idea of the sex act is so bizarre in any case, so appalling, so terrifying, that the element of the participant’s gender hardly signifies. I am not shocked by his versatility.
‘Do you still play that fiddle, Roger?’ he says.
‘He’s the best violinist in the National Youth Orchestra by a mile,’ Jane says. She has a tendency to answer questions for him as if he needed her as a buffer between himself and a hostile world, her lovely first-born child. But Roger chooses to answer for himself. He chooses to take a stand, holding his head high, his Adam’s apple twitching slightly in his throat, armed strong in undergraduate righteousness.
‘I don’t play a fiddle,’ he says. ‘I play the violin.’
‘Don’t you be so damned churlish, you miserable nitpicking boy,’ Jacob says rather violently. He and Roger exchange a moment’s hatred. Roger wears his principles, a little provocatively, high on his shoulder like a schoolboy’s dufflebag.
‘I am merely pointing out that to call a violin a fiddle is a form of name-dropping,’ he says coldly. ‘It’s a familiarity you earn the right to use – that’s if you like name-dropping.’
It may appear melodramatic for me to interject here that in the face of that impressive vulnerable zeal, that high-minded verbal coup, I fell in love with Roger Goldman. I remember the moment as vividly as I remember the turn of his head. I cannot send up the emotion as I do so much of my youthful self, for though I have made many compromises with it, it has never completely left me.
‘Save your Oxford style till you get to Christ Church, sonny,’ Jacob says, with terrible put-down. ‘And in the meantime remember that to pick nits at my table, with my guests, is a form of bad manners.’ Jonathan, promptly and hair-raisingly, throws a large chunk of garlic bread at Jacob’s head. It misses him and hits the wall behind.
‘Fiddle schmiddle,’ Jonathan says. ‘What’s all this “my table” crap, Aged Parent? Ma bought this table from the shop that closed down. What makes it yours? You really like to make a big patriarchal spiel over grub, don’t you, you big Jewish yobbo.’
Nobody requires him to remember either his manners or the starving. Jacob merely instructs Sam in the subversive art of throwing the bread back. They appear to get on extremely well, do Jacob and Jonathan. Jacob is sufficiently opinionated to appreciate in Jonathan so much of himself.
‘Make us some coffee, Flower,’ he says benignly.
‘Make it your bloody self, you schmuck,’ Jonathan says.
‘Sweet Jont,’ Jacob says, ‘be kind to us.’ Rosie takes a whole plum out of her mouth to air a profundity before putting it back in again.
‘Jonty is showing off,’ she says. Jonathan laughs good-humouredly.
‘Okay, Jake,’ he says. ‘I’ll make it, but only if I can make instant, mind? I’m not going to stand over that cocked-up filter. It takes for ever.’ Jacob licenses what to me is an alarming amount of blasphemy, insubordination and defiance. He seems to set it up. It’s as though he were all the time taking his children through an assault course in defiance. Jane by contrast is surprisingly school-marmish and she clearly believes in child labour. She could surely rise to a dishwasher, but she prefers to use her children. She believes that a row of children chopping vegetables is a better thing than a machine.
‘Make the coffee, Jonathan,’ she says icily. ‘We’ll have the real thing and brought to us in the sitting room.’ Jonathan goes with the alacrity of Mustardseed. ‘Stack the dishes, Rosie,’ she says, ‘so that Roger can wash them.’ She is more demanding with Roger than with any of the others. Before the day is out I see her accost him where he engages in chewing grass on the front lawn and say to him, ‘Go and have a bash at the G Minor, Roggs.’
‘The G Minor is hard,’ Roger says.
‘Of course it’s hard,’ she says, working on him with her powerful elitism, ‘but not altogether beyond the likes of you, my darling.’ I find this more than rigorous, coming as I do from a world where Purcell is a washing powder.
John Millet, over the coffee, talks lyrically about Rome. About the bell tower near his flat in Trastevere, about the fading gradations of mud-brown paint on the house fronts, about huge stuffed tomatoes in the piazza restaurants and the macho roar of Fiats. The images incorporate themselves into the composite romantic blur of my impressionable aspiration. Thereafter, while Jacob consumes what remains of the afternoon working on his proofs, John Millet reads the Sundays in a deck-chair with his shirt off. I read Dr Seuss books to Sam and Annie, and Rosie borrows my earrings to try on upstairs. Jane plays the Suite Italienne with Roger, and Jonathan on his bicycle sets out to take his fishing tackle to the stream. With the heat of the day he has taken off his jeans and is wearing fraying shorts and nasty, algae-ridden tennis shoes. He gets to the gate but then wheels round, hunched over his racing bike which he controls with one hand since he has his fishing rod in the other. He stops in front of me.
‘Want to come fishing?’ he says. He has a bold stare and big legs. He is the kind of schoolboy one avoided sitting next to on the bus home from school. ‘You could use Jane’s bicycle,’ he says.
‘She might need it,’ I say.
‘She can’t use it at the moment,’ he says. To be sure, Jane would have some difficulty squeezing herself in behind the handlebars in her condition. ‘If you’re scared, we can walk,’ he says, ‘I don’t mind.’ Silently, I curse Jonathan for plucking out the truth and handing it to me with such offensive frankness. I last rode a bicycle at the age of nine. I fell off and broke my arm the day after my father died. Jonathan and Roger, by contrast, are the kind of people who use bicycles with the accomplishment of Vietnamese peasants, capable of carrying children on crossbars and luggage carriers – and simultaneously bringing home great loads of shopping in back-packs. The kind of people who inspire a belief in the future for intermediate technology.
‘I’d need to find you some shoes you could sludge around in,’ Jonathan says, eyeing my strappy T-bars. I find it difficult to look back and realise that the single most important factor among my reasons for turning down Jonathan’s offer was the prospect of having to put on hand-on wellington boots from the laundry basket.
‘I think I’ll just stay and listen to the music,’ I say. ‘I think catching fish is cruel, actually.’ Jonathan throws me a look of impatient contempt. ‘Spare a tear for the bait,’ he says, as he takes his leave.