Jake's Thing Read online

  "I said what on earth are you doing? You've been simply ages."

  Brenda had spoken. Alcestis was at her side. The two must have stolen up on him under the noise of the aircraft, which had begun to recede. Jake hoped he hadn't turned round too abruptly. There stood near him the two bottles each filled with what had been in the other and the jugs not noticeable. He said,

  "Just..... It took me a while to find the—"

  "Two bottles," said Alcestis. "I say, are we having a piss-up?"

  "That one's for dinner-time. These cheap plonks, if you take the cork out a couple of hours before you—"

  "Tunisian Full-Bodied..... This is good enough for me."

  "No really, it won't have—"

  "Suit me down to the ground. I'm not a connoisseur chappie like you."

  "No, the other one's much—"

  "No, you have that with your dinner. Able to appreciate it, mm?"

  "I'd far rather—"

  It was no good: she had noticed, again unconsciously, that he now wanted her to have what a minute earlier he hadn't wanted her to have, and maintained the appropriate reaction. (She must have grasped too that something was going on in the kitchen because he hadn't been out there that long.) Back in the sitting room she took a sip and raised her unabundant eyebrows.

  "I think this is awfully good, Jake. What did you pay for it if you don't mind my asking?"

  He took a gulp. Although he much preferred drink with food he was fucked if he was going to, etc. "I don't know," he said a little wildly. "One twenty-five .... ten...."

  "Where? No don't tell me, no point, memory like a sieve. Of course, I suppose with your experience and your palate, easy. Brenda love, aren't you drinking?"

  "No, I'm cutting down," said Brenda. She went to the tea-tray, poured herself a cup and added milk and three lumps of sugar.

  "But you're ..." said Jake and stopped.

  "I'm what?"

  "You're .... entitled to break the rules once in a way." He was acting on the principle that every drop of claret outside

  Alcestis was a drop saved. "Let me get you a glass."

  "No thank you." She spoke sharply. "What have you been up to today, Jake?".

  Distracted by Brenda's tone, which had led him to start reviewing his words and actions in the short time since he'd entered the house, he answered Alcestis without thinking. "Seeing the doctor."

  "Oh." She drew him down to sit beside her on the padded bamboo settee. "Anything .... troublesome?"

  "Not really," said Jake, who had recovered his wits enough to try to spread a little embarrassment. "What you might call a man's thing."

  "I see."

  "I don't expect to die of it exactly."

  "Good," she said, laying her hand on his shoulder for a moment. "Do you care for Curnow terribly?"

  "No, but I trust his judgement."

  "Neither do I, but Geoffrey swears by him." She referred to her husband. "He's Cornish, Curnow, you know. Like Michael Foot."

  "Is he?"

  "Oh yes my dear, in fact his name's Cornish for Cornish. Worse than the Welsh. Oh yes."

  "Ah."

  "Can I finish my story now, Brenda love?"

  "Oh yes Allie, do." This time Brenda's tone was warm but the warmth was firmly vectored on her friend.

  "I was just getting into it when you turned up, Jake."

  "Sorry."

  "Well, just to put you in the picture very briefly, Brenda's probably told you about the trouble we had with our drains last year. Well, the plumber was simply charming. Young fellow, very good-looking, extremely intelligent, all that. Now I can't quite explain it, but he rather fell for old Geoffrey and me. Nothing was too much trouble any hour of the day or night, brought us some little cake affairs his wife had made cookies, brought 'her' along one evening, said she'd been making his life a misery, always on at him to take her to see the people he'd told her so much about. Anyway, some time in the summer he said he'd had enough, of this country that is : no freedom, take all your money off you, won't let you work harder and better yourself. If you want to put it crudely, he felt his initiative was being strangled. Well, to cut a long story short he got a job in Nigeria and went off there with wife and two young kids for good. Emigrated. Out. Gone. Bang. This was last October, that's nearly .... six months .... ago."

  Alcestis paused, put the palms of her hands together and rested her chin on her thumbs. Jake asked himself which way it was going to go: Minister of Plumbing, uranium strike, massive diamond find, fleet of Cadillacs, gold bed? Surely not, and preferably not too in the case of a moron and pervert on the present scale: wild-life reserve trip, safari camp, freedom fighters, tribal ritual, cut off his, forced to eat....

  "And then, just last week, we had some news. A letter. I knew straight away who it was from by the stamp. I mean we don't know anyone else out there. I just opened it without thinking, as one would. No idea what was in it. Geoffrey was with me. And what it said, quite simply and straightforwardly, was this. Everything had gone fine, they have a lovely house, got on splendidly with all the people there, job's evidently exactly what he wanted, the whole thing. Now don't you think that's marvellous?"

  "Oh how exciting," said Brenda.

  Jake was dose to tears. In that moment he saw the world in its true light, as a place where nothing had ever been any good and nothing of significance done: no art worth a second look, no philosophy of the slightest appositeness, no law but served the state, no history that gave an inkling of how it had been and what had happened. And no love, only egotism, infatuation and lust. He was glad when, two or twenty-two minutes later, Geoffrey Mabbott turned up, and not just because the fellow's purpose was to take Alcestis away; he was actually glad to see Geoffrey himself, even offered him wine. By now this seemed almost natural, unimportant: Jake's feelings of self-identification with Graham Greene's whisky priest, who sat helplessly by while greedy berks drank the wine he had meant to use at a communion, had reached their peak when old Smudger, what there was of her eyebrows again raised, silently held out her glass for a second dose after bringing her plumber story to its climax.

  Rotten bastards might have said that Geoffrey was Alcestis third husband just as Brenda was Jake's third wife, but they would have been getting the just-as part all wrong. Just as was just as it wasn't. Jake had had two unsatisfactory former wives, or so he would have put it; Alcestis had exercised a mysterious attraction and then an unmysterious repulsion on two former husbands, the second of whom had had to resort to fatal coronary disease to get away from her. It was to be presumed that Geoffrey was in some uncertain intermediate state. That would at any rate be typical: he was in uncertain states of one sort or another far more than not. One of his specialities was the inverted pyramid of piss, a great parcel of attitudes, rules and catchwords resting on one tiny (if you looked long and hard enough) point. Thus it was established beyond any real doubt that his settled antipathy to all things Indian, from books and films about the Raj to Mrs Gandhi, whom by a presumably related crotchet he took to be a daughter-in-law of the Mahatma, was rooted in Alcestis second husband's mild fondness for curries. His preference for Holland's gin over the London and Plymouth varieties, often-mentioned partiality for cream cakes and habit of flying by KLM had been less certainly connected with his possession of a sketch by Van Dyck, whom on a good day lie might very well have supposed to have been a Dutchman. How he managed to be a buyer for a firm of chutney-manufacturers, or indeed be paid for doing anything, was an enigma, a riddle. His taste in clothes was odd too.

  He frowned, as he so often did, when he looked at the wine-bottle, and said nothing at first. Jake waited expectantly, running his eye over Geoffrey's conventional dark-grey suit, self-striped orange shirt, pink bow-tie and thick-heeled white shoes: what far-distant event, rumour or surmise was plodding on its way to decide the issue for him?

  "It's frightfully good, darling," said his wife.

  "Mm." Then all at once his brow cleared and he spoke with h
is usual liveliness. "First-rate notion. Thanks, I'd love some. You know, these Middle East wines are about the best value there is these days. Algerian, of course. And some very, very decent Moroccan red I had the other day." (He must have remembered being annoyed by a Jew, or meeting or seeing one, thought Jake as he handed him his glass.) "Oh, thanks most awfully. Mm. Well, it's no vintage claret, but it's a good honest drink. Better than tequila, anyway."

  "It's certainly that," said Jake. "But aren't they rather different types of drink?"

  "Aren't which?"

  "Wine and tequila."

  "Well of course they are, that's what I'm saying. Wine comes from grapes and tequila comes from cactuses."

  "Well actually it's a—"

  "Vile stuff. Make it in the Argentine, don't they?"

  "Mexico, I think."

  "Really? Ever been there?"

  "No, never," said Jake lightly, and added even more lightly,

  "You, er .... you been there, Geoffrey?"

  "Me? But..... Why should I have been there?" Geoffrey's frown was turning his forehead white in patches. "I've never even been to the States, let alone South America."

  "Actually Mexico's in—"

  It must have been that Alcestis felt she had done enough in the way of holding her mouth open in a smile and blinking her eyes quickly to show how bowled over she still was by her husband even after all these (five? seven?) years. Certainly she changed her expression to one of a kind of urgency and said, "Some of this modern architecture they've got in Mexico City, finest in the world you know, especially the museums and the university. 'And' some of the blocks of flats and offices. Something to do with the use of materials. Just nothing like it anywhere."

  She ended up looking at Jake, so he said, "How did you, er .... ?"

  "Common knowledge." Oh I see."

  "How are you, Brenda dear?" Geoffrey spoke as if in greeting, but the two had exchanged warm hugs and several words on his arrival; it was just that he hadn't noticed her since then. "Fat," said Brenda, and everyone laughed; Jake saw that Alcestis put her head back further than usual, to show that she knew what had been said was 'a joke'. Brenda went on to ask Geoffrey how he was.

  "About the same, thanks. Yes, very much the same. Well, no, actually, not really. All right if I have a slice of this? One of my weaknesses, this sort of stuff."

  On Brenda's nod he picked up a large slice of cream cake and ate it carefully, his eyes fixed straight ahead of him. He was concentrating either on what to say next or on the cake, a small problem cleared up when he swallowed finally, said "Quite delicious" and emptied his glass.

  "In what way aren't you the same?" asked Brenda. "Not what?"

  "You said you weren't—"

  "Oh, that's right. Well, that's a jolly good instance. Physically no problem, just getting older as who isn't. It's concentration.

  You know the sort of thing I mean—you go up to your bedroom to get a clean handkerchief and when you get there you've forgotten why you've come and have to go back downstairs to where you started. Quite normal up to a point. But with me, I've got to the stage where I take a cup over to the stove to pour some tea into it and find there's one there already, from .... half a minute before. And then I have to taste it to see if I've put sugar in. Now that's still just annoying. As I say, it just adds on a few seconds to some of the things I do. But .... er .... the .... silliest part is what I'm thinking about instead of what I'm doing. It's me I'm thinking about, and that's not a very interesting subject. I mean, if a chap's thinking about his, er, his mathematics instead of his teacup, or his .... symphony, then that's all right, that's reasonable. It's in proportion. But me—I ask you!"

  Geoffrey had not departed from his cheerful tone. The two women laughed affectionately. Jake held up the wine bottle, which still held about a glassful, but Geoffrey smiled and shook his head and went on as before.

  "And the stupidest thing of the lot is, I don't think poor old me, or poor old me in the financial sense, though I jolly well could like everybody else these days, and certainly not 'brilliant' old me. Just, just me. It's not enough, you know."

  "It certainly is not by a long chalk," said Alcestis, going up to her husband and putting her arm through his. "I only married you because you were the most boring chap I knew so nobody but me could stand you. Now I'm going to take you home, or rather you're going to take me home and we'll leave these good people in peace."

  "Why don't you stay to supper?" asked Brenda. "There's nothing very much but I'm sure you and I could knock something up, Allie."

  .. .Yes, do," said Jake.

  "No, sweet of you, but we've tried your patience long enough already." Alcestis embraced Jake briefly. "Come along Mabbott, let's hit the trail."

  By custom Brenda saw the visitors out while Jake stayed behind in the sitting room. Normally at such a time he could count on a good five minutes to himself, but today it was only a few seconds before he heard the front door slam and his wife approach along the passage.

  3—Domestic Interior

  "When the bishop farted we were amused to hear about it," said Jake. "Should the ploughboy find treasure we must be told. But when the ploughboy farts .... er .... keep it to yourself."

  Brenda had started putting the tea things together, not very loudly. With her back turned she said in her dear soprano, "Did you make that up?"

  "Free translation of one of Martial's epigrams."

  "Quite good, I suppose."

  "It enshrines a principle poor old Allie would do well to—"

  A saucer whizzed into the empty fireplace and broke. "You leave Allie alone! You did quite enough when she was here l"

  "What? I didn't do anything at all."

  "Much! I know you can't be expected to like my friends, that isn't reasonable, why should you, we can't all be the same, I don't necessarily like your friends." Brenda was talking very fast, though not for the moment quite at the pitch to be expected from someone who had reached the crockery-throwing stage. Now she paused and bit her lower lip and gave a shaky sigh. "But I don't see why you feel you have to make your low opinion of my friends so devastatingly crystal-clear!"

  Jake heard the last part with annoyance and some self-reproof. He had thought his behaviour to the Mabbotts a showpiece of hypocritical cordiality. And now he came to think of it, hadn't Brenda said something of this sort the last time they had seen Alcestis, or the time before? "I haven't got a low opinion of Allie," he said with an air of slight surprise, "I just find her a bit of a—"

  "She knows exactly what you find her, she's not a fool whatever you may think, though even a fool could tell. The way you imitate her and take the mickey out of her and the way your face goes when she tells a story and the way you 'sit,' I didn't think it was a very terrific story either but she wouldn't have told it if you hadn't shut her up and absolutely sat on her about the doctor and brought the whole conversation to an absolute full stop. You used to quite like her, I can't understand it."

  "I didn't want to discuss the doctor with her, obviously." Jake poured out the last of the wine. He longed for a smoke but had given it up four years previously and was determined to stick to that. There were no cigarettes in the house anyway.

  "You still had no need to sit on her and be crushing," said Brenda in about the same tone as before. Although she was standing above him she talked with her chin raised, a mannerism that had stood her in good stead since she began to put on weight. "And I don't know what she thought when she finished her story and you just 'sat' there as if you hadn't heard a word, or rather 'I do'."

  "I didn't realise it was over at first. I honestly thought that couldn't be the end. And what do you mean she wouldn't have told it if I hadn't shut her up about the doctor? She'd already started to tell it to you before I got back, that was quite clear."

  "I meant she wouldn't have gone on with it. She'd been telling it to me because it was a tiny little thing in her life that she thought might interest me for about five seconds. That
's what old friends do when there's just the two of them together, or didn't you know that? I tell her the same sort of thing all the time. We don't go on swapping translations of epigrams by Martial hour after hour."

  "No of course you don't, I quite see," said Jake mildly, as opposed to saying harshly that that would be all right if the story didn't take fifty times as long as it was supposed to be interesting for.

  Brenda's expression softened in response but a moment later it had hardened again. "And the way you treat poor old Geoffrey, as if he's off his head or something."

  "I think he is a bit off his head, always has been as long as I've known him. Look at those bloody silly clothes he—"

  "That's no excuse for treating him like that. You should have seen the way you were looking at him."

  "When?"

  "'When?' Whenever he said anything or was getting ready to say anything, when he said he'd like some wine... And what was all that about the wine in the kitchen? What were you up to?"

  "Nothing, just opening it. The other bottle was...."

  "No, you were up to something but I know it's no use going on about it. When he said something about Mexico and when he said he was absent-minded, Allie saw the way you were looking at him, and then when I asked them to stay and after about five minutes you said what a good idea as if it was your own funeral. You should have heard yourself."

  She paused. Jake looked up at his wife. Her breasts were about as large as Curnow's receptionist's but her hips were large too. And, partly concealed by the loose-fitting cardigan, one of her favourite forms of dress over the last couple of years, her waist, her thighs and her upper arms were also large and her paunch was fairly large. But her face, as he had recently noticed from a photograph, had hardly changed in ten years: it was still the face of a woman anxious not to miss anything good or happy that might come her way in the future. That anxiety in it had been the second thing he had observed about her, after her eyes. She turned their glance on him now. He reached out his hand and she took it; he considered getting up and putting his arms round her but somehow decided not to. Without hostility she soon withdrew her hand.