Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido Read Free Book Online Page B

says. ‘The lash falls heaviest on the last man to brush his teeth.’ The tiny ones go giggling up the stairs. Rosie lingers in the doorway.
    â€˜I’m not a man,’ she says, ‘so I don’t have to go.’
    â€˜Go, my love,’ Jacob says. ‘School tomorrow and your mother is grinding her teeth.’ Rosie manifestly gets on Jane’s nerves.
    â€˜I want to show you my handstand,’ Rosie says.
    â€˜Why are you such a bloody nuisance?’ Jacob says affably. She sits down in the doorway.
    â€˜I’m too tired to walk,’ she says. ‘Carry me.’ Jane is beginning to get visibly tense around the mouth. Jacob gets up and slings her across his shoulder like a sack.
    â€˜Come on, Flower,’ he says. ‘And
go to bed,
woman. You’re pregnant.’ Roger, who suffers no slight degree of revulsion for Jacob’s extrovert goings on, has quietly slipped away. Jonathan, scuffling conspicuously in the sink, appears to take it on in kind.
    â€˜God, you’re like a bloody storm-trooper, Jake,’ he says. He does the accent. ‘Prizes for ze first man to vash himself in his own soap,’ he says. A remark which adequately exceeds the bounds of good taste. How much it does so, I realise only when I discover from Jane, as our acquaintance evolves, that Jacob’s father disappeared in Nazi Germany – a fact which causes me to deduce at the same time that Roger doesn’t balk at wearing a dead man’s hat. A martyr’s hat. He runs, as it were, not only the ordinary risk of leaving it on the bus, but the more profound risk of catching death by contagion.
    â€˜I’ve done your dishes, Ma,’ Jonathan says, while John Millet is out of the room. ‘Everything except for the sieve. I’m not picking that effing muck out of the sieve for your poncy geriatric friends.’
    â€˜They’re not my dishes, Jont,’ she says. ‘Did you catch anything today?’
    â€˜I’ve given up fishing,’ Jonathan says. ‘It’s cruel. Ask her.’ He nods rudely in my direction. Jane smiles.
    â€˜Go on,’ she says, ‘I don’t believe it. In a suffering world, Katherine?’
    â€˜Because some things are worse doesn’t make it less cruel,’ I say. Perhaps it is a foolish debate to carry on with the wife of a man who has worn a yellow star in his time.
    â€˜Think of the milk in your coffee,’ she says. ‘It was snatched from a suckling calf.’
    â€˜Don’t talk to her,’ Jonathan says to me as he moves to leave us. ‘She murders greenfly.’ He almost collides with Roger who re-enters the room. Jane looks at him, watching his face with surging maternal tenderness. Jane Goldman is manifestly a great admirer of male flesh in general, but has a special thing for Roger. He is undeniably lovely. She strokes his cheek as he sits down on the table beside her.
    â€˜Mother,’ he says peevishly, ‘if Jake is taking the car to London tomorrow, how am I getting to my music lesson?’ She sighs impatiently, wanting to love him but not to solve his problems for him.
    â€˜You’ll resolve it, Roger,’ she says indifferently. ‘People played the violin before they drove motor cars.’
    â€˜It’s twenty miles,’ Roger says. ‘Why can’t he take the train? He always does.’ Jane smiles at him knowingly.
    â€˜Villainous man, your father,’ she says, ‘to use his own car when it suits him. He needs to get about a bit tomorrow, that’s the point. But, even so, if you tried asking him civilly he might leave it for you. He hasn’t got three heads. Why do you never speak civilly to him?’
    â€˜I hate him,’ Roger says. ‘He snipes at me.’
    â€˜I’ll tell you something, my sweetie,’ she says, with her hand again on his cheek. ‘If you talked to me the way you talk to him, I wouldn’t