Brother of the More Famous Jack Read Online Free PDF

over it, eh? Let’s just leave it at that.’ But John can be fairly persistent, and all of them having been absent from each other, they are now feeling their way back into a tolerance of each other’s idiosyncrasies.
    â€˜Is your husband being serious, Jane?’ John says. ‘Has he become a member of the Church of England Committee for Moral Reform?’ Jacob is incensed at this supercilious use of Jane as intermediary. He appears suddenly very large.
    â€˜I
am
the Church of England Committee for Moral bloody Reform,’ he says ominously. ‘And much more besides, as you’ll find out if you try me.’ Jane takes John’s arm.
    â€˜Please don’t rise to him, John,’ she says. ‘It’s not worth it for any of us. We both know how frightfully rhetorical and hystericalJake will get. If you make an issue of this, Jake and I could well end up screaming at each other, because that’s the way it works, isn’t it? It’s an awful bore for the children and Katherine will feel wretched. Now, if you will just kindly fetch us that very special booze you have in your car, we can drink it with our lunch. I’ve worked like blazes on this lunch, I don’t mind telling you, though Jake hasn’t noticed. The babes have made you blackberry tarts and whipped up great quantities of cream. Please, John. You must know that with enemies like Jake you don’t need friends.’ This proves with John to be an effective piece of diplomacy, but Jacob is, alas, not pleased with it.
    â€˜Jesus Christ, Janie,’ he says angrily. ‘I’ll thank you not to bloody well talk about me like that. “Humour the old bastard because he’s a harmless lunatic.” All that. I pay the bloody mortgage here and I’ll lay down the bloody rules if it bloody well suits me. I say who sleeps in what bed here and don’t you forget it.’ Jane Goldman is impressive in the face of male paranoia.
    â€˜I won’t stay and listen to this, Jake,’ she says quietly. ‘And neither will Katherine.’ We go ahead into the house, where I watch her frying courgettes.
    â€˜I’m bound to say you weathered all that with admirable composure,’ she says. ‘My congratulations to you. Are you as composed as you look?’ To my embarrassment I find that I am crying. Jane embraces me remorsefully.
    â€˜Sweet child,’ she says. ‘How awful this must be for you. What sods we are.’
    â€˜I think I’d like to go home,’ I say. She embraces me. I find it strangely comforting, the contact with a highly pregnant woman. I am the only child of my parents.
    â€˜I find that very understandable,’ she says. ‘But I should be very sorry to see you go.’ I cry fairly copiously into her shoulder, wiping mascara on to the yoke of her shirt.
    â€˜What an old bastard he is to bring you here,’ she says, ‘and raise all this hue and cry. You don’t half get all sorts when it comes to men. As for my Jacob, you want to pay him noattention. He behaves like Heathcliff to everyone, you know.’ She gets me a wad of kitchen towel. ‘He’s very kind, if the truth be known. You wouldn’t happen to be his young woman who likes Mrs Weston and her baby’s caps, would you?’
    â€˜I think I must be,’ I say, sniffing inelegantly.
    â€˜Well now,’ she says cheerfully, ‘my old man is
most
impressed with you. He thinks you’re terrifically bright and he thinks, between us and the gate post, that you’ve got the best legs since Marlene Dietrich. What a delightful coincidence to have you here. I can’t let John Millet drive you away. I insist that you stay. Can I say, in Jake’s defence, that he wouldn’t ordinarily snoop into your sleeping habits? It is a bit compromising isn’t it, for him, though God knows why he has to make a five-act play about it in the vegetable garden