Brother of the More Famous Jack Read Online Free PDF Page A

friends go in for sodomy, buggery, child-abuse, you name it.’
    â€˜Have a heart, Jacob, there’s no call for poetic licence,’ Jane says.
    â€˜The point is quite simply this,’ he says. ‘I will not have this old faggot come here to my house in order to indulge a sideline in female children. Not with my pupils. Not with Katherine here. Is that clear to everyone present?’
    I believe it is no exaggeration to say that I took a few steps forward that day. I had cried into my pillow the night my mothercalled John Millet queer, but I perceived a world of difference between that and Jacob’s calling his house guest an old faggot. For one thing, he said it so loudly that it filled the air without shame. It had none of the same prim moral censure. But I was a little taken with the idea of sexual induction. It was for John Millet that I had ironed my beautiful Liberty lawn nightdress and for him that I wore my palest consumptive stockings and high-heeled shoes. Jacob, with his unhesitating way of bulldozing through to the heart of any matter, not only confirmed that my mother was right, but eroded my privacy, leaving me feeling like an Arab bride whose wedding sheets are being hung out for the villagers to inspect for blood stains.
    â€˜Perhaps Katherine would oblige you and accept Roger’s bedroom?’ Jane says. ‘And Roggs can move in with Jonathan. Would you, Katherine? It’s a lethal muddle of electronic wiring, I’m afraid.’
    â€˜Of course,’ I say, making nothing of the momentous event, being by training polite and accommodating.
    â€˜You haven’t fallen for this character?’ Jacob says to me. ‘Nothing more, I hope, than a little indulgent
sehnsucht?
No?’
    â€˜No,’ I say, with my fingers crossed, wondering what
sehnsucht
could be. Jacob uses German words quite a lot. He had his origins in pre-war Germany and therefore has no difficulty with getting his Londoner’s tongue round words like
Wirtschaftgeschichte
and
Weltanschauung.
    â€˜That’s my girl,’ Jacob says. ‘Tell him to use his own house, lovey, and don’t you venture into the bedroom without taking a spanner with you.’ To this day I don’t really know what he meant by it, but it made me laugh a little which was a gratifying release. He turns back to Jane. ‘And are we going to eat at all today, Janie, or have you forgotten us, as usual, here among your shallots? My sweetie, it’s nearly half-past two.’ He gains strength from the myth of his wife’s incompetence.
    â€˜I never forget you,’ she says mildly. ‘But he’s coming, husband, our maligned friend. Be sure to use your tact and delicacyon him, won’t you?’ John is strolling up to us, slapping his thigh lightly with the Sunday glossy.
    â€˜I thought you were incarcerated with your proofs,’ he says to Jacob. He makes up to Jane, leching, as he does, without apparent intent.
    â€˜You smell very French,’ he says. They laugh together, very close and affectionate.
    â€˜Balls, John,’ she says, ‘it’s onions.’
    â€˜I’m revising the sleeping arrangements,’ Jacob says, tenaciously. ‘We’re giving you the guest room, as befits your station as our more senior guest, and bunging Katherine in with the children. Okay?’
    â€˜What, what?’ John says vaguely, looking at all of us in turn. ‘What’s this?’
    â€˜Katherine here is one of my students,’ Jacob says.
    â€˜I know,’ John Millet says. The swine, I think, wretchedly. He knew all the time. Did he set it up to have an audience? Did he in his urbane wisdom merely not give it a thought? Did he hope to make Jane Goldman jealous by requiring her to share a niche in his pantheon of superior women?
    â€˜I have no wish to be charged with corrupting the youth of Athens,’ Jacob says coldly. ‘Let’s not ruin our Sunday