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

– stalking about and bloodying everything, but that’s the way it is. I should think it’s quite enough to make you consider going to university in Leeds or Bristol. If you’re feeling better I might tell you about the time I met John, shall I?’ I say yes. I like autobiography and I like her.
    â€˜He asked me to come and see him at his place in Belsize Park. I was spending the summer with my aunt in Cadogan Square at the time. When I got there I found him on the chaise-longue with a beautiful young man. They were kissing each other passionately on the mouth. I wasn’t anything like as sophisticated as you. I was very straight-laced, Katherine. I was a dear little flat-chested, upper-class Christian, buttoned up in cashmere. The product of a Scottish nanny and a girls’ boarding school. Jacob found me white-faced in the hall. He was John’s upstairs neighbour, you see. The two of them got on like a house on fire. He took me upstairs and succeeded in persuading me that there were worse things afoot in 1945 than a little aberrant sex. He was very kind to me and also very amusing. He took my head apart while I scrambled for the bits and determinedly stuffed them back. I spent the night with him,’ she says, ‘to my very great surprise. I was such a little prude, you see. John spent the night downstairs with his boyfriend. We met for breakfast. There was a sharedkitchen. I in Jacob’s pyjamas, John and the boyfriend in matching Norwegian fisherman’s jumpers, as you might see on a knitting pattern. The V-neck and the button through. John’s mother had knitted them – one for John and one for the boyfriend. Splendid woman, John’s mother. Jacob naked from the waist up, sprouting hair from every follicle.’
    I find her wonderfully gossipy and conspiring. We are drawn together into an intimacy not only by the melodrama in the onion patch, not only by a happy accidental affinity of mind, but because I believe that I answer a need. As women do, she has sacrificed distant female friendships on the altar of a contented marriage. She has been assimilated into her husband’s tribe of male academics, male bohemians, male politicos and predominantly male children. She makes rapid commitments with the logical clarity of hallucination. She tells me at once that she jacked in Oxford after knowing Jacob for three days and went to live with him instead.
    â€˜He was much more fun. And all that sex, Katherine, was so unexpectedly jolly,’ she says, in her headmistressy voice. ‘One had been led to believe that it would be such a hurdle.’ As she catalogues her early life for me, it assumes all the properties of an eighteenth-century burlesque. There is the runaway daughter, the intractable father, the foreign-born lover, the instant romantic commitment, and, of course, the routine poverty. Her father, a highly conservative Oxford theologian, now retired, cut her off like the blight along with his sister in Cadogan Square.
    â€˜My brother declared himself determined to avenge my lost honour,’ she says. ‘But he never came, poor Henry. I think he got wind of the fact that Jake was a pretty big chap. Jake looked very ferocious in those days. He was bearded, you see, like whatshisname. The old biddy in Highgate Cemetery.’ She got pregnant immediately to preempt any attempt her family might make to tear her away.
    â€˜And you lived happily ever after?’ I say.
    â€˜We fought like cat and dog as it happens,’ she says. ‘I’m quite sure I’d have picked up my little baby and run back home if it hadn’t been made so clear to me that I wouldn’t be welcome. Culture shock is no small thing, you know. Once I ran into Henry as I was pushing Roger in his pram on Hampstead Heath. He walked straight past me. I remember thinking, funny, I used to toast marshmallows with that person. I went home to cry over Jake, but he had his whole