Mother's Boy by Howard Jacobson

Author:Howard Jacobson [Jacobson, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473598188
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2022-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

12

Yenevelt

I had an unexpected botanical reaction to Australia. I opened like a flower the day I arrived. And I closed again the day I left.

On a hard, electric-blue day in February the SS Oriana slid through the Heads. The wind was hot. We could just make out the arch of the bridge, as full of promise as a rainbow. Seagulls twice the size of any I had ever seen in England hovered over us. ‘Waltzing Matilda’ was playing on the boat’s loudspeaker system. Yachtsmen in small crafts shouted us in, as though they’d been here for weeks, wondering what was keeping us. People lined the quay, waving flags and carrying pieces of cardboard with names on. It was an absurdly theatrical entrance, like sailing onto a stage. I felt the urge to cry. I filmed Barbara with her hair blowing, waving back at people she didn’t know. That was a great difference between us. She was a promiscuous waver. I waved rarely and reluctantly. She filmed me dabbing my cheeks – ‘Sea spray,’ I told her – and trying hard, after so many days on the undulating rubber mattress that was the Indian Ocean, to keep the contents of my stomach to myself. The ground would stay unsteady beneath my feet for the rest of my time here. But only a small part of that could be ascribed to seasickness.

Professor Goldberg – Sam – was waiting for us at the quay. Though he was said to have a devilish mind, he seemed an innocuous enough figure, short and round with a mouth like a cherub’s. Was he wearing shorts down to his knees? He might have been. Otherwise there was nothing overtly Australian about him. I can’t say I saw the devilishness of his internal workings all at once either, but among the innocents with whom I’d mixed at Cambridge I had encountered one or two academics who knew their way around the politics of literature and he reminded me of them. By the politics of literature I don’t mean understanding how to secure advancement through publication; I mean deploying the subtleties acquired in reading to gain mastery of those who don’t read as well, or who fear being known as a book is known. When I got to spend more time with him I’d be fascinated by the way he peeled an apple, in a single spiral of peel, as though leaving nothing to chance. Sometimes I would feel as the apple must have felt. Or indeed a poem when he’d finished with it. But for now I thought of him as a protector.

‘You will stay with us tonight,’ he said, ‘and before that, if you’re up for it’ – he noticed me swaying – ‘have dinner with the department.’

The department. There, in two words, was the drama – speaking only academically – that would engross the whole of my time at Sydney. Because we didn’t in fact have dinner with the department. We had dinner only with Sam’s departmental allies.

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