The last thing I will tell you about is Rosie’s wedding. It was one of those weddings where the bride’s and the groom’s families stand out like opposing football teams, wearing their colours. All the decent hats were, thank God, on our side. We slid into position, late, beside Jane, having been travelling half the night, and placed the carry-cot at our feet. It was just as the organ swelled.
‘She’s a mouth-breather, that baby,’ Jane whispered to me across Jonathan. Rosie was beginning to make her way down the aisle on Jacob’s arm in white satin.
‘Watch this for a lark,’ Jane whispered, rather bitterly.
‘Shut up and behave properly,’ Jonathan whispered back.
I came upon Rosie in her parents’ house after the wedding reception, struggling out of white satin in Sylvia’s bedroom.
‘The bloody zip has stuck,’ she said. ‘Help.’ We giggled over it together, till we had her standing in her pants.
‘You looked stunning,’ I said, which was true. Rosie laughed, brightly and on edge.
‘Isn’t it a hoot?’ she said. ‘God, I wonder if Jeremy’s mother has the slightest idea of how many men I’ve slept with.’
‘What are you going to put on?’ I said.
‘That,’ she said. She pulled a rather wonderful brown silk thing from under a coat on the bed. ‘Jake spent a day in Regent Street with me, signing cheques,’ she said. She climbed into the dress feet first and looked at herself in the glass. ‘I’m glad John Millet isn’t around to see me,’ she said. ‘He told me, once, that I had destiny. Did he give you that stuff, Katherine? I mean the hot bath and the black sheets and all?’ I nodded.
‘Something like that,’ I said. ‘I think it had to do with power.’
‘Do you think he gave my Ma the treatment too?’ she said.
‘I think Jake got to her first,’ I said. Rosie looked at herself in the glass in the brown silk.
‘Some people have all the luck, don’t they?’ she said. ‘The only man I ever cared about killed himself. Slit his wrists with one of those knives you use to cut carpets with. You know? Like carpenters have. You met him, actually. He was with me that day I saw you again, after you came back. When Jane had her operation, remember?’
‘I remember,’ I said.
‘Don’t tell my parents,’ she said. She seemed determined to be alone. ‘What’s the point? Tell Jonathan I’m sorry I yelled at him that time. I like Jonathan. He helped me lose my ‘cello once when I was a kid. It got me off the hook. I haven’t got any brains, you see. Not for any of the stuff my mother cares about. You made a lot of difference to me. I used to go to sleep in that dress that you made me. I used to try and copy your writing. I even stole a drawing of you once from John’s house, when I was fifteen. I’ve still got it somewhere. You look as though you were about to burst into tears.’ Rosie laughed. ‘I’m a bit drunk,’ she said. ‘I’m off to the bridal suite, no less.’ At the bottom of the stairs Roger had sought out Jonathan. I heard him say, with his transcending snobbery, of Rosie’s mother-in-law, ‘She’s like a grocer’s wife who has just won a lottery.’
‘Me?’ I said, to embarrass him, because aggression is the device I have for surviving the pain of Roger’s presence. ‘Jon, let’s go; get the carry-cot and let’s go.’ Jacob saw us out.
‘You did that very well, Jacob,’ I said. ‘You looked like the real thing.’ Jacob smiled manfully.
‘It’s the last time I give away a daughter,’ he said. ‘I’m planning to sell the next one.’
That was the last time I saw Jacob. Shortly afterwards he fell down with a fatal heart attack one Sunday morning in his beautiful kitchen, attempting to mouth words, which Jane couldn’t catch. I will say, to honour his dear and glorious memory, that I never think of the dialectic without glottal stops; that I never think of Women in Love without heavy breathing in the bracken. I have thought, at times, of Jacob’s preface which so impressed me, because since then Jonathan has given me a mention in his own. Jacob’s is, of course, a pretty piece of dishonesty, through and through. As always, he has his cake and he eats it. It manages, under the guise of a pretty compliment, to take shots both at his fellow academics and at Jane. What he is really saying is that his colleagues have inferior wives. Poor humdrum creatures who edit and annotate, while his own wife is a goddess, who is above such things. What he is saying, also, is, ‘Dammit Janie, why the hell can’t you be a proper wife to me?’ The greatest dishonesty of all lies in his assertion that he never ‘presumed to expect’ her continuing presence. Of course he did. He took it for granted, as he took for granted that the milk and the Guardian came around breakfast. Jonathan’s mention of me, by contrast, says only:
‘My thanks to Kath, whose earnings have kept me in socks.’