Brother of the More Famous Jack

by Barbara Trapido

‘I don’t deny that he’s very clever,’ she said, ‘but clever people are very delicately balanced.’ The implication, intended to be flattering to myself, was, of course, that I was not clever and therefore quite sane. Cleverness was not something she hoped for in her daughter. Prettiness was what girls required, and I was quite pretty enough, though I became less and less so in her eyes as I strove to please Roger, who let it be known that he disliked the clink of silver bracelets on the wrist and preferred unpainted faces.

It had ceased to bother me that Michele didn’t believe a word that I said. It gave me the liberty to lie whenever I chose.

‘He couldn’t cast me off without unloading blame,’ I say. ‘He made me a devastating heap of my iniquities.

Perhaps it is possible to come together only after one has been through the fire, battered and maimed, like Jane Eyre and her Rochester.

‘I love you, Jonathan.’ I said this gratefully and realistically, because it was true. I fell in love with Jonathan slowly and judiciously. A thing I had never done before.