After I had married Jonathan, my mother expressed to me the opinion that I ‘could have done a lot worse’. We paid her a weekend visit where he did all the right things. He opened doors for her, laced his shoes properly and sat down beside her to watch an evening’s weekend rubbish on the box. She had reduced her standards for me so considerably since I entered the husband market at nineteen that she was, most of all, relieved. Her next-door neighbour had told her that Jews were ‘very good to their own and especially to their wives’, and she had passed this on to me that I might similarly snatch some comfort from the fact. Because I was not nineteen, I made no attempt to deny that Jonathan was Jewish. But nor did I tell her, as I would have done then, that Jonathan had been baptised into the Greek Orthodox Church. The object, after all, was not to be cheeky, but – having done what I wanted to do – to make her happy if I could. In return she respectfully eliminated bacon from our Sunday breakfast on Jonathan’s account. Jonathan was charmed by this and asked me afterwards how he could be sure she hadn’t gone in for any ungodly mixing of meat and milk in the washing-up.
‘She bungs the lot into the dish washer,’ I said. ‘We must tell her then that for my next visit I want two dishwashers,’ he said. ‘For the truly righteous washing up is an expensive business.’ I hung about his neck, as they say, like a new wife.
‘Before you touch me,’ Jonathan said, ‘assure me that you aren’t bleeding. I cannot suffer the taint of a menstruating woman.’
‘I’m not bleeding,’ I said. It was then that it occurred to us both that I was not bleeding when I ought to have been.
‘Don’t get excited. You’ll bleed tomorrow,’ he said. I shook my head.
‘It’s the only consistent and dependable thing about me,’ I said.
‘Bless the woman,’ Jonathan said. ‘Perhaps she’s pregnant. Wouldn’t that be a joke?’ We had gone through the ritual of marriage, involving if not the Church then at least the State in our love affairs, and for what? For the sole reason that it would improve our chances with the adoption agency.
‘There she is,’ he said, ‘Spare Rib under her arm. Claws into my defenceless brother. Fee Fi Fo Fum. Big talk with that poor innocent Aussie maths bloke. And look at her. She can’t get pregnant until she’s got a husband.’
A nice reliable English husband.
For a wedding present, my mother gave me a very advanced knitting-machine. It was just what I wanted. We planned to take it with us to Ireland and to use it to earn our keep, topped up with what Jonathan and I could earn from bits of editing and with his capital, if necessary. We planned to do what Jacob called ‘some comfortable middle-class slumming’. To this end I had taken samples of my work around shops in the King’s Road – of all places – and to other places too. I had got myself some commissions and Sally, in her truly Christian way, had found time between her children and her teaching to hawk my stuff round the rich tourist towns of the Cotswolds. Sally, who has her head screwed on tighter than I have mine, said right away that the place to sell the stuff was Switzerland. She arranged this via the previous year’s Swiss au pair. Thus it was that I came, through her, to acknowledge that head girls have uses beyond the field of detention and running on the stairs.
‘Roger can set things up for you in New York,’ she said. ‘He’s going to a conference there next Christmas.’ Nothing I could think of would have castrated Roger as effectively as to find himself taking my knitwear round the shops in Manhattan, an agent for his kooky one-time girlfriend.
‘Roger can’t do that,’ I said. ‘I won’t hear of it.’
‘Why not?’ she said. ‘I shall insist upon it.’
‘Hawk jerseys?’ I said. ‘He would have to talk to people. I mean ordinary people – people engaging in commerce. Sally, please, I would die of embarrassment if you asked him. Really. I would never be able to talk to him again.’ Sally looked nonplussed.
‘I don’t understand you sometimes,’ she said, ‘but if you insist, I won’t.’
I wrote to Michele after I got married, although he hadn’t replied to my earlier letter. I told him that Jonathan and I were married and that I was pregnant again. He responded to this in style by sending us a most enormous Tuscan cake. A cake which appeared to be suffering the effects of hormone treatment. It came with a card addressed, saucily, to ‘Caterina and the English Jew’ and which said, gallantly, that he had only once made a mistake.