I spent my thirty-first birthday listening to the radio news in the bin. I was knitting up the dishcloth string at the time and beginning to feel a little better. A little less desolate. The radio announcer addressed an eccentric remark to me.
‘Now we have a humanist’s despair before the News,’ he said.
‘Did you hear what he said?’ I said.
‘A few minutes to spare before the News?’ said the occupational therapist. The radio announcer had obviously said it only to me. There is a comfort to be got out of feeling that you are completely crazy. You feel that you have hit rock bottom and you have no fear that you are going to fall. You can only rise. Or maybe just stay there taking in the view. Down and arise I never shall. Also, you can make a fuss. I am no good at making a fuss, as I have said. But when you’re crazy it’s legitimate. That’s what loonies do, isn’t it? Fuss. That morning I began to split hairs over the dishcloth string instead of knitting it up like a good girl. At first I said that if she gave me a safety-pin I’d do her a dishcloth with a cable-stitched border. When I got no response to this, I unravelled the thing in an exhibitionist manner and announced that I was bloody well going to knit hats with the string instead, and sell them in the King’s Road.
‘Right on,’ said the occupational therapist.
‘Aren’t the mentally ill supposed to have any taste?’ I said. ‘Why wicker edges around these simpering dogs? Couldn’t it at least be Gainsborough?’ I gestured towards the trays. ‘What about us loonies with arty pretensions?’ I said. ‘And aren’t most people here in the first place because of all this trays and dishcloth stuff? Else why are we all women? The kitchen sink and the idea of service? If you want to make us better, put us in a charabanc and take us to the theatre.’ I remember that one of the depressed housewives muttered that I was a hussy, but that the occupational therapist broke into a generous smile.
‘Knit anything you like,’ she said. ‘I don’t somehow think that you need me any more.’
That afternoon I saw the psych. He observed, as a result of my unwonted jauntiness, that I appeared to waver dramatically between arrogance and humility. As if I couldn’t have told him that ten years before.
‘My IQ is 98,’ I said, to be cheeky. ‘I tested it with that Eysenck paperback when I was sixteen.’ This is true. I did. My score was 98. The psych laughed.
‘Your IQ is more in the region of 140,’ he said. Jesus Christ, I thought. Here’s a man of science who thinks I’m brainy, the bloody fool. I had read in the local paper a week before that my very same psych had given a paper to a conference on whether or not Queen Boadicea had been a transvestite. The sure mark of a fool.
‘I do not think that I need to see you again,’ he said. I shook his hand.
Lord dismiss us with thy Blessing
Those who here will meet no more.
My mother’s husband suggested that evening, as a birthday treat for me, that we dine out. We had a lovely British gorge upon gammon and tinned pineapple in the Berni Inn, with Irish coffee for afters. It was a Saturday night. I remembered that R.J. Goldman had always declined to go out with me on a Saturday night, because that was the night when the lower orders had time off to polish their fingernails and hit the town, which was, in consequence, too crowded for him. My mother told me over the coffee that a small insurance policy which my father had taken out for me had just matured.
‘He made it thirty-one, because he naturally assumed that you would be settled with a family by thirty,’ she said, ‘and growing children are a great expense.’ One has to allow one’s mother the odd aggressive aside. An unattached, childless outpatient is no sort of daughter to have. The policy was worth three hundred pounds, but it made me feel like an heiress. I had been going about with permed, greasy hair and in shapeless jerseys, but it came to me then that I had the inclination to go and blow the whole lot on clothes.
I woke from a very funny dream that week. Jacob Goldman had written me a reference for a job as nanny in the Gulf States. I saw the headed college notepaper and the Germanic handwriting, clear as day. He had written as follows:
Katherine Browne is an admirable young woman with a small
inherited income and a small inherited brain.
The swine, I thought. Damn him! Hadn’t the psych said that my IQ was around 140? I woke feeling that I had to get him on the ’phone. The dream was so much with me that I told my mother about it at breakfast, with a certain righteous conviction.
‘But he didn’t say it,’ she said, ‘you dreamed it.’
‘I don’t care,’ I said. ‘It’s none of his business whether he said it or not. I’m going to get him on the ’phone.’
‘I think that’s a good idea,’ she said.
I got no proper tone from the Goldmans’ number in Sussex. The directory enquiries confirmed for me again that the number didn’t exist. I railed at my mother.
‘Perhaps they’ve moved,’ she said. Perhaps they’ve moved! Foolish woman. The Goldmans don’t move. I move. They stay there in Sussex providing me with a rock upon which to prop my insecurities.
‘Why should they move?’ I said. My mother shrugged.
‘I moved,’ she said. ‘Sometimes people do.’ Well, so she did. She, a creature of fixed habits, who could only wash dishes from left to right. But where would they go? Then I remembered the Northern Line and the Everyman Theatre.
‘Hampstead,’ I said. ‘Mark my words. They’ve moved to Hampstead.’ The directory enquiries told me that the number of subscribers residing in NW3 under the name of Goldman ran into pages. Would do.
‘Professor,’ I said. ‘Could you try Professor?’ There were two Professors Goldman J. in NW3, but one was Joel and the other was Julian.
‘Try Dr,’ I said.
‘There are hundreds of them,’ said the lady at the switchboard. She read me out, at my request, the numbers of the first half dozen. I took them down. They were all very kind and took time off from fixing bones and teeth to answer the telephone. I gave up in despair. I found my mother in her kitchen and stormed at her.
‘The place is full of them,’ I said, angrily. ‘The whole of Hampstead is full of bloody Jews.’
‘Well,’ my mother said, venturing to tread on marshy ground because I had opened the gate, ‘frankly, nobody else can afford to live there these days.’ I got hysterical almost with laughter and embraced her as I hadn’t done in years. A great surge of warmth as we were united, uncompromisingly, by a burst of gut anti-Semitism.
‘Why don’t you try the University?’ my mother said. This was an excellent idea, which I had been too agitated to hit upon. I tried the department.
Jacob’s secretary wouldn’t give me the telephone number. I almost screamed at her.
‘He’s left emphatic instructions with me that he is not to be telephoned at home,’ she said.
‘I’m an old friend,’ I said. ‘I haven’t seen him for ten years.’ She told me to try the next morning, when he would be in the building.
‘Well, put me on to Dr Hunt,’ I said. He was the Symbolic Logic man.
‘Who?’ she said. They had all, no doubt, moved on to chairs in Leicester, or fellowships abroad. Departed and left no addresses.
‘Please give me the number,’ I said. ‘I promise you he won’t mind.’
‘Professor Goldman said nobody,’ she said, getting heated. ‘Not the Queen of Sheba offering her body.’ Wouldn’t he? I put the ’phone down in rage. Then I telephoned Roger’s grandparents’ house in Oxford. The number had come back to me, all at once, over the decade. Roger’s grandfather was, in times past, wont to pick up the ’phone, which stood on his desk, and bark ‘Fitz-Whatsit’ into one’s ear, but on this occasion a woman answered. A woman with a rather high, rather girlish voice.
‘Sally Goldman here,’ she said. Godalmighty, I thought, there’s another one of them. Seven children. What must John Millet be saying about it?
‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘I wonder if you can help me. Are you connected with Jane Goldman at all, who used to live in Sussex?’
‘I’m her daughter-in-law,’ said the voice. ‘I’m Roger’s wife. To whom am I speaking?’ For a moment I think I couldn’t speak.
‘My name is Katherine Browne,’ I said, feeling like someone come back from the dead. ‘It’s possible that you’ve heard of me. I’m a friend of Roger’s parents. I’m trying to trace them.’
‘I know exactly,’ she said. ‘We even have a photograph of you somewhere. Jane and Jacob would love to see you, I know. You must ’phone them at once.’ She gave me the number.
‘May I take your number?’ she said. I gave her my mother’s telephone number. She couldn’t have been nicer.
‘They’re in Hampstead,’ she said.
Bullseye.
Then it was no time at all before I had Jacob on the line, blasting my eardrum with his glottal stops.
‘Katherine?’ he said. ‘Katherine? Where the hell are you?’
‘In Dorset,’ I said. ‘Why aren’t you in the telephone book, Jake?’
‘I’m ex-directory,’ he said. ‘Did you have any trouble finding me?’
‘I’ve had a nervous breakdown over it,’ I said, which was not altogether untrue. Jacob laughed.
‘Sorry, my love,’ he said. ‘The idea is that I stay home some days and write without getting interrupted, but my secretary gives my number to every Tom, Dick and Harry who sees fit to ask her for it, while nice people like you are put to all this trouble.’
‘She didn’t give it to me,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t wring it out of her.’ There was a sober pause.
‘Blame me,’ he said contritely. ‘I told her just yesterday that I’d fire her if she gave it to anybody. Anybody.’
‘Including the Queen of Sheba flogging her body,’ I said. Jacob laughed again.
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Why can these wretched women not use a little judgement?’ Something in my early childhood must be answerable for the fact that I find certain forms of male chauvinist piggery such a turn-on.
‘It could be that they’re traumatised by overbearing employers,’ I said.
‘When are you coming to see me?’ he said. ‘Today? Tomorrow? Why have we not heard from you since God knows when?’ I arranged that I would catch the train the next day, be in Hampstead by lunchtime, and stay over for a while. Left at the Everyman, left and left again. I was also longing to see north London.