John Millet is alone in the kitchen next morning when I come down, having exposed his face both to his electric razor and to the morning dewfall. He has taken a country walk before breakfast with his sky-blue velour pulled on over his naked skin. The Goldman car is crunching on the gravel outside, because Jane has come back from delivering children to nursery school and to junior school. Jonathan has gone off earlier on his bicycle.
‘Did you sleep well?’ John says to me, meaning to amuse himself slightly at my expense as Jane comes in. He gives me a wild flower. A flower for the virgin.
‘Woodsage,’ he says.
‘Woodspurge,’ Jane says, correcting him. ‘Is Jake still asleep? I left him asleep in our bed with Annie. Did you hear us prowling last night? Annie was sick three times. I think she has swollen glands.’
Jacob, when he comes in, grumbles ostentatiously that he has not slept at all and gropes for the coffee pot. This is a manifest lie since his wife has told us she left him asleep.
‘I shared my bed with two women,’ he says. ‘One of them pregnant and the other vomiting.’ It is a relief, I find, with the passing of time, to watch Jacob operating without the company of John Millet, who, for all that he is sexually ambidextrous, represents a threat to Jacob in his devotion to Jacob’s wife and in his waspish high breeding. I am, to an extent, a pawn in Jacob’s consequent displays of virility.
‘How goes it with the conceptual framework this morning, sweetheart?’ he says to me, as he slaps his proofs down on the table. What is one supposed to reply to such a question?
‘Fine, thanks,’ I say.
‘Her conceptual framework is fine,’ he says. ‘Where’s the bloody Guardian? Have those bloody lazy children not delivered it?’
‘Oh come on, Jake,’ John says coaxingly. ‘You couldn’t be through with yesterday’s news yet.’
‘Yesterday’s news is what I’m after,’ he says. ‘It’s what I get every day in the Guardian.’ I find him on the whole a creative and inspired grumbler. Give him the CBI, the Queen Mum or the bourgeois press and with any one of them he will grumble new hypotheses into being. I like him enormously. More than anyone I know.
‘Have some breakfast, Jake,’ Jane says. ‘Roger has got the Guardian. He’s got it upstairs. Leave him alone.’ Toast and coffee for Heathcliff, and marmalade.
‘Why is it none of my socks match, Jane?’ he says. ‘Why is it other men’s socks match? Do they have nicer wives?’
‘Perhaps they wash their own socks,’ Jane says. ‘You ought to go now, Jake.’
‘Now remember that child, Janie, will you?’ Jacob says, as he begins to make a move. ‘There is a sick child in the house. Can I rely on you to remember that?’ Roger comes in with the Guardian and with his transistor radio. He is listening to a string symphony. ‘Roger, Annie is ill,’ Jacob says. ‘She needs attention. Will you ensure that your mother gives her some? Will you get her to call the doctor if it’s necessary?’
‘Is that Purcell, Rogsie?’ Jane says.
‘William Boyce,’ he says.
‘Of course,’ she says. She has occasionally a togetherness with him which reminds me wistfully of a time when my mother and I cried together during The Sound of Music when Julie Andrews went back to the nunnery. I look at the first page of Jacob’s proofs, being a natural reader of other people’s papers.
‘I cannot in good conscience give the statutory thanks to my wife,’ it says, etcetera. ‘Without her, no books would be to me worth writing.’
‘Your proofs,’ Jane says, as he kisses her goodbye. ‘Don’t forget your proofs.’
‘Good God,’ he says, slapping his forehead. ‘My proofs.’