Roger told me, on one occasion, that I laughed too much. There were other things I did which caused him displeasure. I read Vogue magazine and I did my knitting in public. These were badges of female subjection which Roger attempted to eliminate in order that I might go forth as his brave and equal consort. All of it was little more than a punitive desire to scratch my face with briars. I laughed too much. ‘Especially at Jake’s jokes,’ he said.
‘You should try not to,’ he said. ‘It encourages him to perform.’ I was too much in love with him and too young to perceive him as an absurd and petulant Hamlet, screwed up with sexual jealousy where Jacob was concerned. Refrain tonight, as it were, and that shall lend a kind of easiness to the next abstinence. It seems obvious to me now that Roger, who had been allowed by his mother, in the initial shock and loneliness of her marriage, to believe himself more important to her than anybody else, was more than commonly beset with the fantasy that she belonged to him. It did not help, of course, that Jacob went in for biting his wife’s neck sexily in public or for making after-dinner conversation of the state of her post-natal cervix. Jacob would come in off his commuter train and get his hands up Jane’s jumper as she stood about making toast for the children’s tea. Having got over my surprise at this, I did not find it offensive or unattractive. I found it rather sweet. Also that he would quite blatantly invite her upstairs sometimes in the middle of the afternoon. It helped me to accept the difficult fact that one owed one’s existence to one’s parents’ coming together. It helped me to think more charitably of my parents’ demure twin beds with their matching candlewick spreads. It helped me to acknowledge that passion might go on even under candlewick. Even with the Eno’s Fruit Salts on the table between the beds.
‘He’s like the bloke in the Cloggies,’ Jonathan once said cheerily to Roger, as Jacob was engaged upon feeling up his wife over the sink. ‘He never stops raping her in public.’ Jonathan seemed not to notice or care that Roger swallowed hard and began to examine his fingernails.
Jonathan was a mystery to me. Roger evidently admired and respected him. Jonathan, unlike me, could read Vogue, Beano, or any damn thing he liked without incurring Roger’s disapproval, and a lot of the time he did. For Jonathan was powerfully streaked with anti-Culture. He alternated between the most god-awful vulgar comics full of blood and lust, and avant garde forms of highbrow literature. He was the only person I had ever met who had read Finnegans Wake. He had read The Tin Drum in German. He almost never uttered a sentence without saying fuck. If I had been his mother I’d have been moved to wash his mouth in carbolic soap. It was not at all that Jane had no control over her children, but she seemed not to mind it. I could see that he was very nice with his little brother and sisters, and that he had a brazen childlike innocence himself at times which contradicted his more menacing characteristics. On the occasion of his seventeenth birthday, for example, he telephoned me to say he was having a birthday tea and would I come. It materialised as the most delightfully innocuous occasion, to which he had invited his two best schoolfriends, his entire family including his German grandmother, and me. Jane had made him a birthday cake which Sam and Annie had iced for him, and Rosie had done the writing with an icing forcer. He insisted on its having candles. The children sang to him in paper hats:
Happy Birthday to You
Squashed tomatoes and stew.
Bread and butter in the gutter
Happy Birthday to You.
It could have been made by Elstree Studios. Roger would never have submitted himself to the indignity. His presents – his John Williams record, his subscription to Private Eye, his wonderful equipment for murdering river fish – all came wrapped in flowered paper with ribbon bows and tags. After tea there was a treasure hunt with clues. Hard clues for us older people devised by Jacob in the style of The Times crossword puzzle, and more charitable clues for younger people, which Rosie said were easy-peasy-Japanesy. Having been at a loss as to what to give him, I gave him a Magic Roundabout bell for his bicycle with Zebedee on it, because it was cheap. As it turned out, it fell in very suitably with the regressive nature of the occasion, pleased Jonathan no end, and was the envy of Annie and Sam. Also, I suspect, of Roger, who wouldn’t admit to it. I would never have presumed to have given Roger such a piece of Japanesy tat.