Three weeks later I stole like a thief into the Philosophy Department to return some books. I had no plan to wait for my results, but simply to shake the dust from my feet and light out for the territory, as Huck Finn says. John Millet had set it up for me to teach in a language school in Rome and to stay with friends of his until I found my feet. I had been avoiding Jacob like the plague, but I ran into him in the vestibule on my way in.
‘I’ve been avoiding you,’ I said.
‘And how is that?’ he said. I talked very fast, sounding very unbalanced, I suspect.
‘I didn’t mean to write you so much drivel,’ I said. ‘None of you. I mean, feel free, all of you, to throw my scripts into the fire. Well, you haven’t really got fires, I suppose. The wastepaper baskets will do. I’m not really all that much of a skive, Jacob, it’s just that it wasn’t a good time for me. As a matter of fact, it’s still not so good. It’s, well, a crisis, Jacob. I was having an emotional crisis. That’s it. It’s not good for people when they’re writing exams. I’m sorry.’
‘You look like the back of a bus, sweetheart,’ Jacob said candidly. ‘What the hell is the matter with you? Your face looks different. Are you pregnant?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s pimples, Jacob. Like people get when they’re upset.’ Jacob smiled.
‘You’re a sweet child,’ he said. ‘You’re a funny child, do you know that? I was a crazy, bright, fatherless child like you once upon a time. I like you.’ We repaired to the coffee machine where I was, all the time, jumpy and slightly manic. I got my head in the way as he bent to get the cup out for me.
‘Careful I don’t spill it on you,’ he said, to jolly me along. ‘You might get a swollen head.’
‘I’ve got one of those already,’ I said.
‘Yes and no,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing this morning, shall I? I’ve been interviewing my seventh case of premenstrual depression. Perhaps that’s what’s wrong with you, Katherine. You’re pre-menstrually depressed. Why haven’t you come to see me about it? You’re in a minority of two or three. I thought that the entire female student population wrote exams in a state of pre-menstrual depression these days. Or so they all tell me after the event.’ I got a little uneasy sometimes with Jacob’s male-oriented jokes. I didn’t altogether know what he was saying.
‘Perhaps they could all get pregnant before the exams,’ I said sarcastically.
‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘In truth, Katherine, pregnancy is, in my admittedly limited and vicarious experience, a very favourable time.’ Was he saying that he wasted his time on the education of women when biology pulled them more effectively in another direction?
‘Do they want you to bump up their marks?’ I said. I am a person who has been known to approach him, after the return of an essay, with the request that he lower the mark for the following reasons, which I then conscientiously enumerate for him.
‘Sure,’ he said, ‘all the time. In my day such women students as there were didn’t have this female trouble. I tell you this, Katherine, I don’t pretend to understand the present.’ I suspected him of saying that he understood the present perfectly and wished to take a snipe at the first rumblings of reviving feminism. I had a sound hunch that, for Jacob, this was a manifestation of middle-class female parasitism, spreading false consciousness in the class war. (Jacob was, of course, the first always to put his hand in his pocket if one was collecting for the cleaning ladies’ strike fund.)
‘What’s the cause of these crises, then?’ he said. ‘It is not, I hope, that son of mine who causes you these crises?’
‘Just the one,’ I said. ‘That’s all. One crisis, Jacob. I expect you know about it anyway. That we’re not together any more.’
‘Don’t imagine that Roger tells me anything,’ he said. ‘In any case, he’s climbing rocks in Wales. Anything I can do about it? Bang your heads together, perhaps?’ Oh, Roger, with your rope and spiked boots, will I never see you again? Will we meet as polite strangers in polite sitting rooms?
‘Oh, no,’ I said hastily. ‘Nothing. Mutual consent. You know. Let’s not even talk about it.’ Jacob nodded, understanding that there was nothing he could do.
‘We must have a talk about your future, you and I,’ he said. ‘What do you think of doing with yourself? What do you imagine a degree in philosophy equips you for?’ I eyed him shiftily, not wishing to make the approach.
‘Are you saying I’ll have a degree in philosophy?’ I said. ‘Because you don’t have to pass me, you know. I mean, I know this isn’t a charitable institution, Jacob. I didn’t come here to try and get you to give me a degree, you know. I don’t think that you ought to feel that just because you think I’m deserving –’ Jacob laughed.
‘Stop this, Katherine. You know that I know that you’re a bright young woman. Are you telling me you don’t know you’re a comfortable upper second? Come now. I am aware that for reasons which I cannot fathom you are completely neurotic in this area. Not so? We neither of us can win. Whatever I tell you will simply lead you to believe that my judgement is impaired.’
‘But Jacob,’ I said, ‘have you actually looked at my scripts?’
‘Course I have,’ he said, ‘I and my colleagues. Even if the external examiner decided to have you for breakfast, you’re a cert, my lovey. Find something else to worry about.’
‘I’m going to Rome, you know,’ I said. ‘I’m going to teach.’
‘Good God,’ he said. ‘Has John got anything to do with this?’
‘Not really,’ I said.
‘Does that mean yes or no?’ he said.
‘It means only insofar as I asked him to help me,’ I said.
‘To teach what?’ he said.
‘English,’ I said, ‘to foreigners. Well,’ I said, attempting a joke, ‘they won’t be foreigners, will they? Not in Italy. I’ll be the foreigner.’ Jacob looked both concerned and unamused.
‘Come home with me,’ he said. ‘Let Jane put you to bed, for heaven’s sake. Sleep on it.’ I could not face the thought of entering his house, to give in under the influence of kindness.
‘I want to be on my own,’ I said, ‘I really do.’ Jacob had manifestly not slept much of late either, but then this was a perennial affliction of his.
‘To speak true, it’s not much fun at home at present,’ he said. ‘Jane is behaving like any other pressuring bloody bourgeois parent with poor old Jonathan. She’s driving him away. I’ve been watching her at it for days on end. She fancies that he should sit the Oxford Entrance Examination. I’m not against it, you know, but she can’t make the child do it. He has decided in consequence of her nagging to take himself off to Europe.’
‘To do what?’ I said. Jacob shrugged.
‘God knows,’ he said. ‘You know Jonathan. He’s a flower child. He wants to walk the Pyrenees. Doss on riverbanks. Scrounge. Earn pennies at a street corner with that bloody flute. He says, right now, that he will never come back. Do I believe him? For myself, I don’t give a damn for the Oxford Entrance Exam. I don’t care if he takes himself to the Huddersfield Poly or the Labour Exchange. People as bright as Jonathan don’t need degrees, after all. Jane, of course, thinks differently. People always do who haven’t been through it themselves. It’s all surrogate gratification for her. What concerns me is, will I ever see that boy again? Will I ever know if he’s been kicked in the head in a gutter somewhere?’
‘Won’t he come home when he’s hungry?’ I said, inadequately. ‘The way he does when he’s fishing?’
Jacob was no longer thinking of me. He was thinking of his favourite child. For is there not a pity beyond all telling hid in the heart of love, as Yeats says? Yeats, W.B. That brother of the more famous Jack as Jacob once called him. Do not the very stars threaten that beloved head?
‘Well,’ he said, suddenly, briskly, ‘I’m sorry to hear that you’re having these, these…’
‘Crisis,’ I said.
‘To be sure,’ he said, ‘just the one. If you are determined to go, you’ll absolutely come down and say goodbye to Jane, eh? She’ll miss you. Rosie, I may say, will be prostrated with grief.’
‘I’ll come,’ I said. ‘You must know that I’ll miss you all terribly. Jane has been very important to me, Jake,’ I said, tears welling in my eyes. ‘Tell her – tell her that her kitchen has been my other university.’ Jacob laughed.
‘I will,’ he said. I fell upon his hairy chest and cried like hell. Jacob kept patting my shoulder.
‘If you’re in trouble ever, you’ll reverse the charge on the ‘phone?’ he said. ‘It’s an easy thing, Katherine, to pick up the ‘phone, eh? And reverse the charge?’
‘I’ll remember that,’ I said.
‘Good,’ he said, ‘and don’t you let any of those Catholic bloody foreigners grind you down.’
When I next saw Jacob the hair on his chest had turned completely white.