I wore the butterfly pinned to my book-bag which caused Jacob, with whom I shared the library lift one day, to remark innocently that the young these days seemed curiously disposed to lepidoptery.
‘My boy has just such an insect tacked to his jeans,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t write to us, you know, the little bastard. Jont is in receipt of the odd letter from time to time, so we have no reason to await the black-edged telegram.’
‘Perhaps he’s busy,’ I said. Jacob looked sceptical.
‘Schoolboys running amok in foreign parts. Roger and his like are defined as “Aid to Developing Countries”,’ he said, with caustic amusement. ‘It’s your taxes and mine, Katherine, pays for this piece of neo-colonialism.’
‘I don’t pay taxes,’ I said. Jacob laughed.
‘In that case it’s only mine. He tells Jont that he plays hymns on the piano every morning. Is that part of the export drive, Katherine? Christianity and Commerce hand in hand? First sell the Protestant ethic and then sell the rest? The poor child has had his violin pinched, it appears. Hey, Katherine – have you ever had mumps?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Why?’
‘Annie has mumps,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t like to come down and support my suffering wife, would you? As you will appreciate, the quality of life is somewhat reduced for women when there are sick children and suckling babes in the house. The babe has a stuffed-up nose and needs to be fed every ten minutes. She has to let the nipple go to breathe, you see. Not much goes down at any given time.’ Jacob was always explicit in these matters. ‘It’s dehumanising for women,’ he said, ‘this incessant nurturing of sick children.’
‘I’ll come tonight if you like,’ I said. ‘I’m going home after this. I’ll get some things.’
‘Bless you, my dear,’ he said. ‘The wife enjoys your company. I don’t mean to have you scrubbing floors, you understand?’
We caught the train together that afternoon where Jacob, having gallantly paid my train fare, offered me the choice of the Guardian or New Society. I chose New Society.
‘Terrible rag,’ he said apologetically. ‘Cooked up by the kind of chaps who need fifteen-hundred-pound research grants from the Social Science Research Council before they can tell you the way to the nearest brothel.’
‘Really?’ I said. I had never read it before. ‘Why do you buy it, Jacob?’ He smiled. According to Jane he was addicted to newsprint in any form. If there was none about he would search through old chests in the hope of finding that the drawers had been lined with the previous year’s Hampstead and Highgate Gazette. He read the Guardian like a practised commuter, folding it longitudinally into eight-inch lengths. He read the business page, which even now is a thing I use only to wrap vegetable peelings, but Jacob always liked to know the enemy.
One of the first things I did when I got to the Goldmans’ house was scrub the kitchen floor with washing soda crystals, while Jane played picture dominoes with Annie and breast-fed Sylvia at the same time. Jacob, who had so effectively articulated for me the dilemma of the captive wife, had, of course, locked himself in his study with a thermos flask of coffee and a nice fat biography of Rosa Luxemburg.
‘If my sons have any sense they’ll marry girls like you,’ Jane said to me. ‘I could no more bring myself to scrub that floor than fly. When I got married, Katherine, I would let Roger’s cot sheets and nappies pile up in the bath and then go out and grumble over Jacob’s mother. She was an absolute brick to me, Jacob’s mother. Spoke almost no English, which was a great advantage, of course. She always accepted me without question. Such a pleasant change she was from my own crowd. Even the coming of the first male grandchild brought not a word on the subject of genital mutilation.’ I paused in my scrubbing to contemplate the advantage of this foreknowledge – this evidence of Roger’s unassailed foreskin.
‘There she was in her pokey little flat, hoarding Nescafe and dark chocolate among her underwear,’ Jane said. ‘Husband missing, presumed dead, surrounded by the bigoted British proletariat. Not a bad word to say against anybody. It’s no wonder Jake is so very nice. I’ve never liked people much. Leaving aside Jacob and the children, there’s a half-dozen people in this world I care for, not much more.’
I scrubbed the floor for her, being honoured to be one of them.
‘She’s a knitter like you,’ Jane said. ‘Not of your class, you understand. She used to knit Rogsie nasty little matinee jackets out of unravelled jerseys, the sweet thing.’ I had recently knitted Rosie a mini-dress in broad horizontal stripes of candy pink and orange which had won her heart utterly and which she frequently pulled, wet and smelling, out of the laundry basket, because she wouldn’t have it plucked from her. Jane had then asked if she could employ me to knit, in secret, a large black pullover for Jonathan to have at Christmas.
‘Because he would love it so much,’ she said, ‘and he would look so sweet in it, don’t you think? He imagines that he will look wonderfully sinister.’ Jonathan in a black pullover, I considered, would look like the God of Thunder with a migraine. Because I loved her, I refused to accept more than one shilling the ounce for undertaking this project. It was sweated labour if anything was.
I babysat for the Goldmans that night, while they went to the cinema, because Jonathan had something on at school. He returned at ten, burning up with anger because the headmaster, who had asked him to submit a poem for a competition, had then turned down his consequent offering as unsuitable.
‘I’d lay my head on the bloody block,’ he announced to me, ‘that if I’d copied out the fucking “Scholar Gypsy” and handed it to him as my own, he’d have had it. I reckon these stupid fucking headmasters get their jobs for being on their fucking knees in church every fucking Sunday and twice on fucking Good Friday.’ I was in the playroom carefully transcribing the rough draft of my essay on to lined foolscap with margins on either side.
‘Jesus, aren’t you neat?’ he said. ‘Isn’t your writing beautiful?’ He was still talking to me when his parents came home, to whom he relayed his somewhat subdued indignation.
‘Can I see it?’ Jacob said of the poem. Jonathan pulled it out of his trouser pocket. The poem made Jacob laugh appreciatively.
‘What did you stand to win then, Jont?’ he said.
‘A hundred pounds,’ Jonathan said.
‘Make me a copy and I’ll give you a fiver for it,’ Jacob said.
‘Okay,’ Jonathan said. ‘Hey, Jake, look at Katherine’s essay. Isn’t it neat?’
‘I know what her essays look like,’ he said.
‘But it’s her writing,’ Jonathan said persistently. ‘Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it sensational?’
‘It’s women, Jonathan,’ Jacob said. ‘Women write like that. That is the way middle-class women write. Search me how they do it. The only man I know who writes like that is John Millet.’
‘Don’t you visit this bigotry on my children,’ Jane said.