Read Brother of the More Famous Jack for Free Online
Authors: Barbara Trapido
damned
Kapital
reading group all over the furniture. I was obliged to cry over John instead. I was often obliged to cry over John. Jacob was always too busy flogging leaflets or mounting the tub on street corners in those days.â
When Jacob and John come in, having made their peace, she and Jacob mime brief reassuring kisses to each other.
âWhat have you been hatching?â Jacob says, noticing the glow in her cheeks. He puts his hands over her breasts. He has no restraints about laying hands on her in public.
âI have been filling in Katherine on my past,â she says without apology.
âNot a thing to inspire imitation,â he says. âWhy do women always talk intimacies about themselves? To listen to women talking is like sitting in on an encounter group. I cannot wander among the library shelves without being a party to whispered confidences. They will spread their personal lives like jam all over the stacks.â
âI must tell you something amusing, John,â Jane says, âif you promise you wonât start with Jake. My father is on the Church of England Committee for Moral Reform.â
Six
It is temporarily impossible for me to enter the Goldmansâ dining room because Jonathan has been gunned down by Sam with a plastic machine gun and has thrown himself in a convulsive dying agony across the doorway. I consider stepping over him but it occurs to me that the little bastard might well use the opportunity to look up my skirt. Rackatackatackatack.
âGet up, Jont,â his mother says briskly, in her hot potato voice. âKatherine wants to come in.â
Jane has made us some aromatic, garlicky iced soup for lunch, served with hot garlic bread and followed by pork loin simmered in milk. There is also an abundance of her homegrown vegetables.
âWhat is it I can taste?â John Millet asks her solicitously.
âCoriander,â she says. âYou roll it up with coriander and seal it in butter. Then you pour boiling milk over it which forms a crust and reduces to this pleasant grainy stuff around the meat.â John and she do some rather in-group cookery talk, being the only ones that know about it. John is a kind of gastronomic Lionel Trilling and likes to pursue every morsel down his throat with analysis and appraisal. âItâs dead kosher,â she says, to amuse him.
âIt could be neither more sinful nor more delicious,â Jacob says graciously. âYou may produce lunch two hours late, but you make it worth the eating, Janie.â Each in their own way, they honour the same mistress. âThank you,â she says. Jacob, with aforkful of pig meat seethed in milk, celebrates perhaps not so much a release from ethnic taboos, as from the distant nightmare of his own truncated childhood, the marvel of his latter-day bourgeois
gemütlichkeit
in which I suspect he can never quite believe.
John Millet, as he hands me the salad, passes messages of bottomless innuendo in his smiles. I hold nothing against him. On the contrary, I have become rather elated. I consider myself, after talking with Jane, to be rather stylishly at the point where it all is. Where I always wanted to be. In the company of urbane, emancipated people. Some of my best friends are Jews and homosexuals. Besides, the idea of the sex act is so bizarre in any case, so appalling, so terrifying, that the element of the participantâs gender hardly signifies. I am not shocked by his versatility.
âDo you still play that fiddle, Roger?â he says.
âHeâs the best violinist in the National Youth Orchestra by a mile,â Jane says. She has a tendency to answer questions for him as if he needed her as a buffer between himself and a hostile world, her lovely first-born child. But Roger chooses to answer for himself. He chooses to take a stand, holding his head high, his Adamâs apple twitching slightly in his throat, armed strong in undergraduate
Kapital
reading group all over the furniture. I was obliged to cry over John instead. I was often obliged to cry over John. Jacob was always too busy flogging leaflets or mounting the tub on street corners in those days.â
When Jacob and John come in, having made their peace, she and Jacob mime brief reassuring kisses to each other.
âWhat have you been hatching?â Jacob says, noticing the glow in her cheeks. He puts his hands over her breasts. He has no restraints about laying hands on her in public.
âI have been filling in Katherine on my past,â she says without apology.
âNot a thing to inspire imitation,â he says. âWhy do women always talk intimacies about themselves? To listen to women talking is like sitting in on an encounter group. I cannot wander among the library shelves without being a party to whispered confidences. They will spread their personal lives like jam all over the stacks.â
âI must tell you something amusing, John,â Jane says, âif you promise you wonât start with Jake. My father is on the Church of England Committee for Moral Reform.â
Six
It is temporarily impossible for me to enter the Goldmansâ dining room because Jonathan has been gunned down by Sam with a plastic machine gun and has thrown himself in a convulsive dying agony across the doorway. I consider stepping over him but it occurs to me that the little bastard might well use the opportunity to look up my skirt. Rackatackatackatack.
âGet up, Jont,â his mother says briskly, in her hot potato voice. âKatherine wants to come in.â
Jane has made us some aromatic, garlicky iced soup for lunch, served with hot garlic bread and followed by pork loin simmered in milk. There is also an abundance of her homegrown vegetables.
âWhat is it I can taste?â John Millet asks her solicitously.
âCoriander,â she says. âYou roll it up with coriander and seal it in butter. Then you pour boiling milk over it which forms a crust and reduces to this pleasant grainy stuff around the meat.â John and she do some rather in-group cookery talk, being the only ones that know about it. John is a kind of gastronomic Lionel Trilling and likes to pursue every morsel down his throat with analysis and appraisal. âItâs dead kosher,â she says, to amuse him.
âIt could be neither more sinful nor more delicious,â Jacob says graciously. âYou may produce lunch two hours late, but you make it worth the eating, Janie.â Each in their own way, they honour the same mistress. âThank you,â she says. Jacob, with aforkful of pig meat seethed in milk, celebrates perhaps not so much a release from ethnic taboos, as from the distant nightmare of his own truncated childhood, the marvel of his latter-day bourgeois
gemütlichkeit
in which I suspect he can never quite believe.
John Millet, as he hands me the salad, passes messages of bottomless innuendo in his smiles. I hold nothing against him. On the contrary, I have become rather elated. I consider myself, after talking with Jane, to be rather stylishly at the point where it all is. Where I always wanted to be. In the company of urbane, emancipated people. Some of my best friends are Jews and homosexuals. Besides, the idea of the sex act is so bizarre in any case, so appalling, so terrifying, that the element of the participantâs gender hardly signifies. I am not shocked by his versatility.
âDo you still play that fiddle, Roger?â he says.
âHeâs the best violinist in the National Youth Orchestra by a mile,â Jane says. She has a tendency to answer questions for him as if he needed her as a buffer between himself and a hostile world, her lovely first-born child. But Roger chooses to answer for himself. He chooses to take a stand, holding his head high, his Adamâs apple twitching slightly in his throat, armed strong in undergraduate