Roger’s handwriting was a shock to me. I had until then made the assumption that all superior people were acquainted with the necessity that calligraphic characters were parallel, thick on the down-stroke and joined by upward angles of forty-five degrees. Roger’s handwriting was small, inconsistent in its slope and difficult to read. I therefore revised my opinion to the effect that Roger, as the pinnacle of superior man, had licence to make his own manners and that his handwriting was the mark of his magnificent disregard for the standards of the world. The truth of the matter was simply that Roger had lousy, undistinguished handwriting. It was a thing he was no good at.
Roger, in his first letter to me, said that he was helping to teach maths in a country high school in a Nissen hut, and that in addition he banged out hymn tunes every morning on a piano which gave him the horrors. There was no felt left on the hammers, he said, and there was too much Christianity about. The buses had no springs, but carried you into town and slung your bicycle on the roof if you were lucky enough to have one. Everybody insisted on sharing bananas with you on bus journeys. Neighbourliness, he said, drove him mad. The houseboy, who came with the house, drove him mad too, he said, taking hours to scrub with steel wool at a few aluminium saucepans which he could polish off in minutes. The same despised menial, he said, got insulted if you washed your own shirts and chose instead to scrub at them with blocks of blue mottled soap because he was so used to white employers crabbing at him about the cost of Square Deal Surf. There were mangoes more profuse than people, more wonderful than Christianity, and he would bring some back for me. He had forgotten to take his transistor radio and he needed it, he said, to prevent the possibility of conversation with the people who shared his house. ‘Provincial English bores,’ he said, who thought that progress was making ‘the whole world like West Hartlepool’. They drove him mad. Everything drove him mad. I loved him for his commanding snobbery.
‘I want to tell you that you sing well,’ he wrote. ‘Also that I hope John Millet is no great friend of yours.’ As a result of this curious letter, which I reread every hour, I struggled to improve myself by looking up West Hartlepool on the map and resolving from then on to wash my own clothes which, until then, my mother had always washed for me. My mother, unfortunately, manifested herself as a person as possessive of her territory as Roger’s houseboy.
‘When you have your own house you can do what you like,’ she said, insufferably, denying me access to the washing-machine. When I complained to Jane about this high-handed dismissal of my rights, I found, understandably, that her perspective on the matter was different.
‘Any place where somebody else does the washing can’t be all bad,’ she said. ‘Do you know, Katherine, when my twins were born I screwed out of Jacob the right to use disposable nappies only to find that the bloody things didn’t work.’
I wrote back to Roger, telling him warmly how sorry I had been to go without saying goodbye. I told him, in order to recreate the moments of our togetherness, that I believed the piano to be the Holy Ghost’s revenge for his insults in the blackberry bushes. I told him that I had been to a concert with his mother who had tried on my eye make-up in the loo and what a smashing lady I thought her. That my term had begun and that I had had the great joy of spending my book allowance.
That I had covered all my clip-back files in Florentine wrapping-paper out of pure joy, and sharpened all my green Venus pencils. That I found it all delightfully unlike school and that Jacob was a terrific hit with the students, being a very racy and lucid teacher. John Millet, I assured him, was a very casual friend who occasionally took me to the theatre. I wished him many happy evenings escaping the sound of steel wool on tin and speculated upon whether or not my letter would be delivered to him by a runner who would carry it, mud-stained, in a forked stick.
‘I have been singing on my way from the underground station because you praised my voice,’ I wrote. ‘Tell me what I should sing.’ Thinking back, I could probably not have written him a more annoying letter. Had he not already decided that he was in love with me the correspondence would have ceased right there. I had mocked his irritation with the piano and with the houseboy, when he was a young person who wished his aversions to be treated with respect. I had committed the folly of praising his parents. I had exposed myself to my high-minded crusader as a young person seeking after venial delight: I wore eye make-up and covered my notebooks – those symbols of plain living and hard thinking – in gilded wrapping-paper.
Roger’s next letter, written in fury, said that somebody had just stolen his violin. I was not to tell his parents, he said, because Jacob would storm about the expense of replacing it, being a tightfisted old bastard, and he wasn’t going to be abused behind his back. He would rather I told his parents nothing at all about him, he said, because he would sooner not have his affairs talked about. He then advised me to buy myself some folk song scores in Cecil Sharpe House and to sing those. He wrote, rather witheringly, of the school he taught in, that its object seemed to be to push the pupils into clerical jobs in government offices and the result was terrific grinding emphasis on the three Rs and on respectability. The students were conforming and deferential to a man, he said. There was nobody in the place like his brother Jonathan.
‘Everyone polishes his shoes,’ he wrote in disgust, with an assumption that this obsolete custom had been dead since the demise of National Service. I gave up polishing my shoes forthwith, and committed the additional folly of seeking out for Roger, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, a postcard of a Stradivarius violin which I sent him with my commiserations. I also confessed that musical scores were not much more to me than tadpoles running up and down stairs, since I had never learned how to read them, and that I had got a wonderfully high mark for an essay on a priori knowledge, which was a great feather in my cap since I thought a priori was the kind of word reserved for people who gave talks on the Third Programme and that I never expected to be one of the people who knew what it meant.
Roger replied to the effect that what he wanted, if I was going to send him photographs, was a photograph, please, of me. He had got the violin back, he said, but without the bow. He enclosed a money order and instructed me to go to Wardour Street and buy him another one, which I did, feeling as unequal to the task as I might have done had I been sent out to buy a packet of contraceptive sheaths from a male hairdresser. I despatched the bow to him, feeling that it would never arrive; that somebody would acquire it along the way and use it to shoot rabbits. It had not occurred to me until I made this purchase how similar a violin bow was in appearance to the other kind. I also sent him a photograph of myself taken at the Vanessa Bell chapel by John Millet.
Roger’s embroidered butterfly fell into my lap from his next letter, and also a photograph of himself. His letter said that he loved me. Would I please wear his butterfly, which the houseboy was in danger of scrubbing into oblivion. That was, if I felt I could return his feeling for me. If not, could I pitch it in the rubbish bin and tell him so immediately?
The photograph was a delight, since until then I had reconstructed him only out of Jane’s smile and Jane’s eyes. But the elements of beard shadow and youth were not there. And also not those elements of zeal and righteousness, which made me fall at his feet. He was depicted standing – brown as a hazelnut, in most un-English sandals – beside his Nissen hut with some of his pupils. All of them sharply defined in the bright light. Behind them a tangle of vegetation without haze. The students posed rather formally, unused to being photographed. Straight ties. Products of a mission school education which Roger despised. Roger, with his hands in his pockets, was smiling slightly, with a degree of controlled impatience, as though he were about to give the photographer a lecture on the correct use of the light meter.
I kept his photograph slid into the frame of my dressing-table mirror. A little white-painted plywood thing with curtains around the base. A relic of more youthful tastes.
‘You wouldn’t know he was Jewish,’ my mother said, ‘would you?’ She said this by way of complimenting me on the quality of male I had at last reassured her by pulling in.
‘He isn’t Jewish,’ I said irritably. ‘You’re only Jewish if your mother is Jewish.’ My mother looked at me knowingly, almost sympathetically, understanding that I wished to deny any stigma attached to my young man. She hadn’t lived in north London for so long and not learned that if you were called Goldman you were a Jew.
‘I’ve got nothing against Jews,’ she said. ‘It’s such a pity he has to be in Africa when you could do with his company. Aren’t there enough blacks for him in England?’