Jonathan returned with me to Jacob’s house where we sat for a while on one of the sofas.
‘I thought your mother looked well,’ I said. ‘I was relieved to see her look so well.’
‘I think she’s perfectly okay,’ Jonathan said. ‘She’s a tough old bag. Jake was paralysed with anxiety last week. He was convinced she was three-quarters dead.’
‘Poor Jacob,’ I said. ‘Dear Jacob. Ought we to cook him something, do you think?’
Jacob evidently didn’t cook much with Jane not there. He had one onion, one egg and a few withered potatoes sprouting at the eyes. The cupboards contained a sparse collection of useless and rather way-out tins from the delicatessen. We sliced the potatoes and the onion between us and baked them in Jake’s wonderful oven with some milk and black pepper. Jacob came back with his arms full of Hampstead afterthoughts. Pate and salt beef and rye bread and apfel strudel.
‘We cooked your spuds,’ Jonathan said. ‘Your cupboards are full of Polish earlobes in tins. Why do you keep nothing edible, Jake?’
Jonathan left us early, saying he would come for me the next day. Jacob found me some puce Habitat sheets and directed me to Sylvia’s bedroom. A nice little room with Abba posters and little woolly souvenirs. Hanging on the door of her cupboard was a shimmering cerise disco suit. We were none of us getting any younger.
‘I’ll leave you one of my Mogadon, shall I?’ Jacob said thoughtfully, before we turned in.
‘I’ve brought my own, thanks, Jacob,’ I said.
We made for Kentish Town the next evening, Jonathan and I, which was a lot smarter than I remembered. When I lamented this, Jonathan undertook to find me the last greasy spoon in the area – which he did. We ate kebabs stuffed into unleavened Greek bread, and washed them down with beer. Then we ate pastries oozing sugar syrup. At least I did. Jonathan said no thanks, it reminded him too much of his mother-in-law. I told him Roger’s story about the Holy Ghost and the blackberries and the wrath of God. Jonathan couldn’t remember the episode.
‘But I’ll tell you why not,’ he said. ‘Why the Holy Ghost didn’t descend. ‘Tis my belief that Rogsie is the Holy Ghost.’ Then I said that I could drink some of that Turkish coffee, that sweet Turkish mud.
‘Greek mud,’ Jonathan said, ‘if you please. Unless you want the waiter to up and black my eye.’ I felt very comfortable with him. I was impelled to confide in him.
‘It’s not altogether true that I’ve just come back,’ I said. ‘I’ve been with my mother for five weeks. In Dorset. I’ve been in the outpatients’ clinic. I’ve been very sad, Jonathan. I may have seemed rather high yesterday, I know, but I’ve been a heap. I cry very easily. Ignore it, won’t you?’ My tears began to ooze a little. ‘In the trade it’s called “discharging’,” I said, ‘all the snot and tears. It’s called discharging. That is what the psychs call it.’
‘Let’s call it crying,’ Jonathan said. ‘Use the paper napkins. It’s what they’re for.’
At Jacob’s door I remembered my debts to him. I drew three pounds out of my purse and handed it to him.
‘This is yours,’ I said. ‘You paid for my supper.’ Jonathan declined to take it.
‘Come off it, Kath,’ he said. ‘No need to be scrupulous over the price of a kebab.’
‘Oh, but there is,’ I said. ‘I’d like us to have proper financial arrangements. I’ve had some most improper ones in the past.’
‘Pay for my next haircut,’ he said.
‘I’d rather pay for my own dinner,’ I said. ‘My guess is that your haircuts cost more than three pounds. There’s something very becoming has happened to your hair.’ Jonathan laughed and pocketed the money.
‘Good thinking.’ he said, appreciatively.
For nearly two weeks Jonathan escorted me to and from Jacob’s house in this way, like a devoted custodian, sensing that I was a poor convalescent creature fit only for chicken broth and hot-water bottles. Elgar and hot milk. I went with Jacob, at first, to visit Jane each day. Jonathan came in the evenings and walked with me, sometimes with Jake also, on the Heath. I recalled occasions when we had done this before, because Jacob often went for walks in Sussex with Jonathan and sometimes also with me. It was delightful to do what I had done before in a sense. It filled me with a quiet muted pleasure. I cared for Jane, who had come out of hospital but couldn’t lift things and needed to rest.
Rosie came one day. A lovely, tall, dark creature with cropped hair and no breasts, wearing vibrant ethnic leg-warmers against a sudden unseasonal chill and matching mittens strung on a woollen cord around her neck. Looking at her made me wonder whether John Millet, before he died, took her to the hairdresser. Rosie fell into my arms with a childish cry of delight. She had brought with her a young man who was neither black nor proletarian of whom she was manifestly fond. He hung back shyly, holding the flowers which Rosie had brought for Jane. Then they went, hand in hand.
I walked again with Jonathan on the Heath.
‘She’s very pretty,’ I said, ‘your sister.’
‘She’s okay,’ he said. ‘Would you say she fancies that kid? That little druggie?’
‘Druggie?’ I said. ‘He seemed like a nice middle-class boy to me. Jacob claims that she only likes brick-layers’ apprentices.’
‘Syringe marks all over his arm, for Godssake,’ Jonathan said. ‘Sleeves rolled up especially for us to notice. You are as blind as my mother, Kath. Why don’t you wear glasses?’
‘I’m too vain,’ I said.
‘Listen,’ he said suddenly, rather tensely, ‘can we get the hell out of these parts and go to my place? Can I get you on your own somewhere without my family?’
‘Sure,’ I said.
‘Wait for me,’ he said. ‘I’m going back to tell Jane not to expect us back till late. Okay?’
‘You don’t think I ought to stay with her till Jake comes in?’ I said.
‘For Godssake, Katherine,’ he said. ‘Can you not understand that if I don’t unzip my bloody flies and climb into you, I will go bloody mad?’
Jonathan knew a bus that would take us to Kilburn. It took for ever to come.
‘What’s the state of you?’ he said. ‘I’m not going to hurt you, am I?’ He had touched a morbid fear of mine: that those parts of me, so recently a mess of septic swelling and staple-clips, were no longer capable of functioning.
‘I don’t know. I haven’t tried since just after I got pregnant. I’ve been very celibate. Though I haven’t always been so celibate,’ I tell him, fired by some curious puritanical need to breast-beat, some hangover from the Methodist Sunday School. ‘The year I went to Italy, after your brother dismantled my character, I went through about thirty men in less than a year.’ Jonathan, as I ought to have predicted, was nobody’s conscience but his own.
‘You remind me of Jake’s joke about the cakes at the Jewish wedding,’ he said without concern. ‘Mrs Goldberg five, Mrs Goldman six, but who’s counting? Do you know that joke?’ I told him no.
In Kilburn High Road, I said to him, ‘Do you ever still do that alto singing that your mother made you do?’ Jonathan shrugged.
‘It could be my party trick, I suppose,’ he said, ‘if I ever went to parties, which I don’t. In short, no. I don’t get a call for it, Kath.’
‘But I’m calling for it,’ I said.
‘You mean you want me to sing to you?’ he said incredulously.
‘Yes,’ I said, laughing.
‘What, here? In the street?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Are you out of your mind?’ he said. ‘You want me to sing like a transvestite in the street? This is Kilburn, lady. Do you want six drunken Irishmen to step out of the pub and beat me to death?’ Jonathan was so solid, somehow, death seemed remote.
‘They’ll think it’s me,’ I said. Jonathan conceded and, after looking furtively over his shoulder, sang a small rustic stanza in Italian which beseeched a barefoot nymph not to disturb the dewfall on the grass. Quite unlike the usual hey nonny no.
‘I can’t sing any more of it,’ he said. ‘After that you need more voices.’
‘That was lovely,’ I said, because it was. Quite beautiful. ‘Some soothing rustic trad for us pavement bashers.’ It had got of late to unnerve me that I always walked on concrete.
‘It’s not trad. It’s Monteverdi,’ he said. Monteverdi and I shook hands across the gap and put down our cudgels.
‘I’ll tell you something you’ll hate, shall I?’ I said to him. ‘You’re cultured, Jonathan. You always were.’