Free Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido Page A

the theatre with him. Sometimes he brought along a rather pretty solicitor with whom he had goings on, and sometimes he brought Jane. Jane would leave Jacob and Jonathan to mind the children, climb out of her wellingtons and threadbare jeans, and clothe herself with indifference in a dowdy two-piece more suitable for prison visiting. It only served to underline her remarkable good looks. It was always great fun to be on the town with her. In spite of the age difference, Jane superseded most of my friends and became my foremost giggling companion. I spent quite a lot of time at her house. Once in the ladies’ loo at the Purcell Room she tried on my mascara.
    â€˜Say, why do you think he likes to ask us out together?’ she said. ‘It’s like a polygamous marriage, isn’t it, without either children or Jacob. What a soothing fantasy.’ I laughed, not realising in my inexperience, of course, quite what an assault on her identity and peace of mind Jacob constituted. Or quite how difficult it was for either of them to kick against the idea that the loveliest of women born were born for loveliness alone.
    Once, she turned to me from the passenger seat of John’s car and said, ‘Roger wants your address, Katherine. Some cover-up nonsense about needing you to buy a book for him. Could it be that my lovely boy is fond of you?’ I caught my breath in the darkness and said nothing.
    â€˜Send him my address too,’ John said. A remark he would never have made in Jacob’s presence, and one which Jane clearly found quite alarming.
    â€˜One move in that direction and I’ll send my Jacob round to break your jaw,’ she said, overreacting, perhaps. John laughed at her. ‘I mean it,’ she said. ‘He’s damned good at making fisticuffs. He didn’t grow up in the Mile End Road for nothing, you know, with all those disgusting Mosleyites. Your nice sanded floor would be a mess of blood and teeth.’ John laughed again.
    â€˜I’m teasing you,’ he said. ‘Your Roger is too intense for me in any case. You’ve got yourselves a genuine little neurotic there between the two of you, haven’t you?’
    â€˜Take me to the railway station,’ she said.
    â€˜I’m teasing you,’ he said.
    â€˜Take me to the bloody railway station before my breasts become engorged,’ she said.
    At Victoria station I got into the vacant front seat. John Millet drove me home. I said nothing, having been disturbed by his unaccustomed malice. John Millet had, I believe, set me up in the first place to threaten Jane, who enjoyed his attentions, and to compromise Jacob, who had taken on the woman he might have taken on, had he but had it in him to face the ensuing mess of human life. It had certainly not been part of his design that his latter-day quattrocento should end up in the arms of Jane’s son, whom he had last seen at fifteen. Perhaps it had slipped his mind that children grew. He never, in any case, liked the idea that Jane had Jacob’s children.
    In their house the Goldmans had a small edition of the Shakespeare
Sonnets,
bound in red leather, which had a pointed little message on the flyleaf directing one to Sonnet 87. Sonnet 87 is the one that goes,
    Farewell thou art too dear for my possessing
And like enough thou knowest thy estimate.
    It had been given to Jane as a wedding present by John Millet. I found it one day on the bathroom floor, where it had been left by Jonathan, who was by then using it as part of his A level English course.

Sixteen
    Roger’s handwriting was a shock to me. I had until then made the assumption that all superior people were acquainted with the necessity that calligraphic characters were parallel, thick on the down-stroke and joined by upward angles of forty-five degrees. Roger’s handwriting was small, inconsistent in its slope and difficult to read. I therefore revised my opinion to the effect that Roger,