Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido

pocket. The poem made Jacob laugh appreciatively.
    â€˜What did you stand to win then, Jont?’ he said.
    â€˜A hundred pounds,’ Jonathan said.
    â€˜Make me a copy and I’ll give you a fiver for it,’ Jacob said.
    â€˜Okay,’ Jonathan said. ‘Hey, Jake, look at Katherine’s essay. Isn’t it neat?’
    â€˜I know what her essays look like,’ he said.
    â€˜But it’s her writing,’ Jonathan said persistently. ‘Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it sensational?’
    â€˜It’s women, Jonathan,’ Jacob said. ‘Women write like that. That is the way middle-class women write. Search me how they do it. The only man I know who writes like that is John Millet.’
    â€˜Don’t you visit this bigotry on my children,’ Jane said.

Eighteen
    Jacob’s mother appeared that weekend, with her grey hair, set like the Queen’s, and with her handbag full of Suchard chocolates which she produced like treasure for the children. With the help of German war reparation she had made the climb to Golders Green and appeared to ask for no more. Rosie behaved very shabbily with her, I remember, squirming away from her kisses and grabbing the loot. She embraced me, smelling genteelly of 4711. She called Jonathan ‘Yonny’ and, since her eyesight was failing, had him read to her from some weighty Teutonic version of
Woman’s Own.
Jonathan read the German to the manner born because accents were a great talent with him, but the content got him down.
    â€˜Jesus wept,’ he said after a while, ‘I can’t go on reading this crap.’
    â€˜No asides please,’ Jane said. ‘Read it, Jont. It’s good for your soul.’ Grandmother offered Jonathan another chocolate, smiling upon him benignly and taking no offence.
    â€˜It’s all right for you, isn’t it?’ Jonathan said to Jane. ‘You can’t understand it. It’s about the Shah of Iran’s ex. It’s fawning bullshit about a fascist’s wife who can’t have bloody babies. So what? That makes less dictators, doesn’t it?’
    â€˜You wait till it’s your wife who can’t have a baby,’ Jane said. Jonathan threw his eyes impatiently to heaven, before guzzling his chocolate and sportingly continuing with his text. Later thatday I went for a walk with Jacob and Jonathan, during which Jonathan enacted the episode for his father, catching his grandmother’s speech and gesture with astonishing and wicked accuracy. I remember that the three of us cackled treacherously along the hedgerows, with great enjoyment, feeling, for that moment, comfortably together. Jake’s mother was the daughter of a butcher. She had married above herself into the Berlin intelligentsia. Jacob produced, as we walked across the field, a childhood memory of his maternal grandfather telling him not to block the shop window.
    â€˜Stand avay from ze vindow, boy. And let ze people see ze sausages. And let ze sausages see ze people.’ I am very fond of this anecdote. I told him then that my father had been a greengrocer. He probably knew this anyway, from my university application form. Jacob said, very sweetly, that it accounted for the bond between us, that we had roots in the petit bourgeois trading class. I think this may have been true.
    I thought about Roger almost all of the time. I put the thought by while I wrote my essays, read or slept, but in between paragraphs, at the ends of chapters, and as I turned on my pillow towards dawn, I would fix my mind again upon his appearance and gesture. It gave me energy and inspiration, that quiet romanticism. I did some very good work that year. The taxpayer’s money was not misspent upon me.

Nineteen
    Roger telephoned me from Heathrow Airport the day he came back from Kenya, and appeared at my mother’s door two hours later. I saw him from the landing window before he rang the bell, and made