My Father's Fortune

by Michael Frayn

  My wonderful grandfather negotiates a compromise: I can sit in his lap and keep my eyes closed. I climb into that vast, warm, luxuriously upholstered human settee and eat fairy cakes by touch. After a while I feel so secure that I risk opening one eye a little and taking a peep. The great black entanglements on the other side of the table are beetling away at me just as menacingly as before. I close my eye again.

  *

  These dozen, perhaps fifteen people, are wedged around the table in a room eighteen feet long by twelve feet wide. I know the dimensions of the dining room, as I do of Nanny’s room, so precisely because, many years later, I made a television film about the streets where I grew up, and I acquired the plans of the house from the local council. While I was making the film I got myself invited back by the then occupiers. Your childhood surroundings are said to look always distressingly small when you go back with an adult eye. I can’t say that my old home did, though. It had been smartened up beyond recognition, but the general layout was entirely familiar – and it seemed rather spacious.

  Particularly the dining room, the biggest room in the house. But then, when I went back, there weren’t fourteen or fifteen people sitting in it, and a table which, with its leaves extended, must have been about nine feet long, but it wasn’t the only thing occupying the available space. Against the long wall on one side of the table was a sideboard, and on Sundays, when the relatives came, a tea trolley with my grandmother hovering anxiously over it. On the other side of the table was a bureau, with a sloping lid which could be let down to make a writing surface, and which sometimes suddenly let itself down with a sharp crack under the pressure of all the junk taken off the tea table and wedged behind it.

  I’ve been making a few rough calculations. If you add up reasonably plausible widths for the sideboard, the table and the bureau, it leaves a space of about two foot six on either side to accommodate the guests, and allow access for people bringing round the cups of tea and the slices of sponge cake. A good job, perhaps, that the Frayns are all so wispy – particularly since all fourteen or fifteen of the people at the table must be sitting along its two long sides. Why can’t some of them be sitting at either end? – Because the southern end of it is hard up against the French windows, and the northern end is pressed against the back of the settee.

  A settee? In the dining room? Slightly surprising, now I come to think about it after all these years. And why is it pushed up against the table? It can’t be more than about three feet deep, which must leave another six feet of dining room free beyond it. Couldn’t it be moved a little further away from the table?

  Not really, because on the other side of the settee are two armchairs. It’s not just a settee, in other words, it’s a three-piece suite, and on the other side of the three-piece suite is the fireplace. There has to be a foot or two left between the fire and the knees of the people on the three-piece suite. You could safely sit with your feet in the grate in summer, it’s true… No, you couldn’t, actually, because the gap between knees and fire is also the flightpath running laterally between the darts board on the right-hand wall and the dart-launching position near the left-hand wall. Even if no burning coals were falling on your feet there would be ricocheting darts falling on your head.

  Leaving aside the question of whether this is a good place to play darts, why is there a three-piece suite, upholstered in brown mock leather, studded with round-headed brass tacks, in the dining room? Because we’ve nowhere else to put it, obviously. But we do! We have another reception room, as an estate agent would call it, twelve feet square, called the lounge. The lounge is presumably the place where you lounge, and if you’re lounging it would seem natural to have a settee and two matching armchairs to do it in. Why isn’t the three-piece suite in the lounge?

  Because in the lounge there’s another three-piece suite. This one’s covered not in brass-studded mock leather but in a grimy grey fabric with large green leaves sprawling across it. As prominent labels on each of the three pieces announce, it comes from Bentalls, in Kingston, where Father Christmas lives. There’s something depressing about its appearance, and it’s probably stuffed with material that would burn like dry tinder if you dropped a lighted cigarette on it. No one does, though, in spite of the fact that my parents and many of the relatives who come to the house work hard at smoking. They don’t drop anything on it because they don’t sit on it. No one sits on it. Everyone who wants to sit on a three-piece suite sits on the brown mock-leather one in the dining room. If my grandfather sleeps on a settee it certainly isn’t the one in the lounge. If the dog had still been around even the dog wouldn’t have slept on it.

  So obviously we’re keeping the lounge for best, in the time-honoured tradition of the lower classes. We’re saving it for funerals, weddings and visits from the vicar.

  We’re not, though. There are no weddings in the house, no visits from the vicar, and only one funeral. If anyone had got married the wedding breakfast would have been served on the dining table. In the unlikely event that my father had admitted a minister of religion into the house, he would have been sat on the brown mock leather in the dining room like everybody else. I can’t remember whether anyone ever came back to the house after the one funeral we had in the family. If they did then they would have got exactly the same treatment – dining room, brown mock leather.

  So, if the lounge isn’t being kept for best, why don’t we sit in there ourselves? Or – another possible solution – if we like sitting on the mock brown suite, why don’t we get rid of the one with the banana leaves and move the mock brown into the lounge?

  Because we never do anything in the lounge. The front door and the staircase open directly into it, which makes it cold and draughty. The lounge is the main highway from the front door and the stairs to the rest of the house, and there are always people going back and forth through it. Even going back and forth through it is difficult, though, because the great bulk of the unused settee and the two unemployed armchairs takes up most of the space, and if you sat in them you’d have people squeezing past you and falling over your feet all the time.

  We don’t like the lounge. This is the long and short of it. And we do like the dining room. In the dining room we’re at home.

  I suppose the truth is that my father’s still finding it difficult to adjust from being one of seven people living in two rooms to being one of five living in seven. He’s simply not used to life in such a plethora of rooms. The jam of people on Sunday, when the family comes, is his attempt to recreate the population density of 62 Devonshire Road.

  *

  No, I’m exaggerating again, as I’m genetically programmed to. There is something we do in the lounge. In fact there are two things. My sister and I open our Christmas presents in it, for some mysterious reason, and it’s where we telephone. We don’t have a hallway, which is where the phone’s traditionally kept, so we keep it in the nearest equivalent – the cold and draughty gloom of the lounge. It’s the old candlestick model, and it stands on the window ledge with its nose in the air, reluctant to be spoken to by subscribers whose social origins are so dubious. You need both hands to deal with it, one to hold the heavy receiver to your ear, the other to lift the even heavier base and bring the mouthpiece into proximity with your mouth. Having a settee next to it should mean that we can at least make ourselves comfortable while we’re using it, but we don’t. We take telephoning too seriously for that. We perch on the arm of the sofa, keeping our backs straight. The grey fabric and green leaves on the arm are worn threadbare.

  I say ‘we.’ The only person I can remember using the phone is my father, to talk to his customers. ‘Right you are, then, guv’nor. I’ll say ta-ta for now, but I’ll give you another little tinkle on Friday week.’ I suppose my mother must sometimes phone the local shops. I think I can recall Nanny being fetched to speak to somebody once, and getting into a terrible tangle of earpieces and mouthpieces, wires and nerves.

  No, I’m still exaggerating. Or simpl
y forgetting. There was something else that we did in the lounge – or at any rate something my mother did, all through the thirties. There must have been. She must have played the piano in here.

  There’s a piano in here? – There was a piano. There was a grand piano. I can just catch the last faint traces of it in my memory. What I remember perfectly clearly, though, is the story of what happened to it, because my father told it again and again. He got rid of the thing. He managed to choose a time when war was threatening, and apparently when war is threatening no one wants grand pianos, so he didn’t get a good price for it. He didn’t get a price for it at all. He had to pay someone to take it away.

  Were the piano and the Bentalls three-piece suite all in here together? I don’t think this is physically possible. He must have got rid of the piano to make room for the suite. The situation is this, then: they had had a piano that my mother must sometimes have played (she had been studying piano as well as violin at the Academy), on which she might have accompanied him while he sang Fling Wide the Gates, and on which his two children might have had piano lessons. He had got rid of it. He had paid money to get rid of it. And he had paid Bentalls more money to deliver in its place a grey three-piece suite festooned with tropical leaves on which no one was ever going to sit.

  I don’t suppose our neighbours realised quite how odd our arrangements were, because (with one or two exceptions much later) none of them in all the fourteen years we lived there ever set foot in the house. Is this possible? The children, certainly, but not their parents. In my imagination I try to drag each of the neighbours through the front door in turn … They will not come. Not even Barlow. George Davis I can get as far as the front door, but not across the threshold.

  But then nor do my parents set foot in our neighbours’ houses. Actually none of the adults in the street visits back and forth, only the children. I suppose, with hindsight, that every household would have had its little oddities and anomalies, if only we’d known. George Davis should have done some of his cutaway drawings for us.

  *

  Most days of the week, of course, even when my father’s at home, there aren’t fourteen or fifteen of us in the dining room. There are only the five of us who live there.

  So what exactly are we doing? Dining, of course, except that we don’t call it that (it should be the supping room), and lounging. Listening to the wireless set in the alcove on the left-hand side of the fire. On winter evenings the glowing glass valves inside it cast a warm silhouette of the fretted back panel over the wall behind it. The lighted window at the front opens on to far-off parts of the world, most of which remain as mysterious to me now as they were then: Beromünster, Athlone, Hilversum, Stuttgart, Soissons, Sundsvall, Nice-Corse. There seems to be little going on in these places except various forms of shushing and buzzing, with occasionally a human voice or a dance band struggling to make itself heard over the vast remotenesses of Europe and the perpetual tinnitus of the ether. Not that we often investigate. For the most part we listen to the BBC – to music hall comedians, palm court trios, light classics, adapted stage plays, the news, of course, and a magazine programme that begins with the noise of roaring buses and hooting cars, and then a mighty voice crying ‘stop!’ Sudden silence, followed by the important clipped public school accent of the BBC announcer: ‘Once again we stop the mighty roar of London’s traffic to talk to some of the interesting people who are …’ (Pause – title:) ‘… IN TOWN TONIGHT!’

  What else? My father writes his reports. Reports on what? His sales, I assume, now I come to think about it, though I never did at the time. Reports are simply reports. They’re the things my father writes. He sits at the dining-room table, or in the armchair by the wireless set, with bulging folders of loose papers in front of him. Some of the papers have printed headings with the initials of the firm, TAC, and he signs them with his own initials, TAF. He writes long columns of tiny figures with his silver Eversharp pencil, his index finger braced against the tip in its disturbing double-jointed concave arc. He tots up the cramped sums with effortless speed, writes totals at the bottom of columns and underlines them, tots up again, marks checked totals with little ticks.

  He passes on swathes of TAC’s stationery to me – important blank forms headed ‘Memo’ and ‘Expenses’, sheaves of white and pink flimsy, thick foolscap volumes with interleaved tear-out report forms and blank pages, each volume with a sheet of carbon paper that can be moved from page to page. I cover the pages with inept drawings and make flicker books out of the thick volumes. Somehow, though, the movements of my laboriously repeated stick figures never have the smoothness of my favourite professional flicker book, which bears the logo of Wakefield ‘Castrol’ engine oil and shows George E. T. Eyston getting into his car Thunderbolt before his attempt on the world land speed record in 1938, and then, if you turn the book over and flick it back the other way, Thunderbolt tearing across the speed-blurred Bonneville Salt Flats at 357 miles per hour. As I get older my pictures give way to words, but I never achieve anything that has the neatness, tininess, opacity and authority of the writing in my father’s reports.

  I suppose we also read. Read what, though? The News Chronicle has been read over breakfast, which we had in the kitchen. What do we read on the brown mock-leather three-piece suite in the dining room? One thing that my sister and I certainly don’t read is comics – we aren’t allowed them. We read them in other people’s houses, of course, but even away from home I should never stoop to the Beano or the Dandy, which are now rated so highly by the historians of childhood. I do condescend to Radio Fun and Film Fun. The formula of the two is identical – strips featuring characters and entertainers from the respective media – but for me they’re as different as suet pudding and profiteroles. The characters in Radio Fun are dully, almost embarrassingly, familiar from the radio shows we listen to: Old Mother Riley and her Daughter Kitty, Tommy Trinder, Arthur Askey, Flanagan and Allen. The characters in Film Fun – Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Joe E. Brown – have an alien and slightly threatening sophistication because they inhabit a universe almost completely closed to us. With the very occasional exception for school outings, the News Cinema on Victoria Station, and Walt Disney’s more notable efforts to induce childhood trauma, we’re not allowed to go to the cinema – particularly not children’s Saturday morning cinema, which forms the taste of so many of my contemporaries, but which would be full of disease-ridden council school children. Live theatre – yes. Or at any rate the panto at Christmas and music hall as a birthday treat at the Kingston or the Croydon Empire. Not to mention our own home live theatre, usually at Christmas: my efforts at conjuring, at puppets and nativity plays – and shows written by my father starring himself as a comic schoolmaster, with my sister and me as his pupils and feeds. His character is based on an original created by Will Hay, and what puzzles me now I come to think about it again is how my father managed to imitate Will Hay without ever seeing the films he was in. Is he bunking off work on his travels to pay secret visits to forbidden picture palaces in Herne Hill and Wandsworth?

  Back to the three-piece suite, though, and what we read on it. Books, certainly. Though there is a certain ambivalence about them, and you have to contrive some way of reading them that doesn’t involve having your nose stuck or buried in them, which is frowned upon. I think my mother looks at an occasional novel, in a detached, nose-free way, when she puts her feet up on the sofa after lunch, and Nanny certainly does, because I feel tremendously self-important when she confuses one of her books with the one that I’m reading, a grown-up-looking volume about the building and operation of the Queen Mary. I read quite a lot of books, and the danger to my nose sometimes arouses comment. I discover a small circulating library in a newsagent’s in Ewell Village, and bring home endless Just William and Wodehouse, and novels by someone called Joan Butler about people misbehaving at country-house weekends, which I find a little too shocking for my taste. At some point I’m given a subscription to Boots Cir
culating Library in Epsom, and even brave the local public library, in spite of its being full of germs left on the books by the lower social orders.

  What reading matter do we actually own? There are stacks of back numbers of the Saturday Evening Post, passed on to us each week by a neighbour, I think Shakespeare at No. 1. I’m not sure that anyone reads it, even me. What seizes my imagination is the America revealed in the advertisements, which is so unlike Hillside Road. Suntanned worldly men drive suntanned worldly women in enormous open Pontiacs and Studebakers to country clubs where Chris-Craft motor boats wait dancing on sunlit blue waters. They’re smoking Camels and Chesterfields with a casual distinction that seems to be impossible with English cigarettes like Players and Gold Flake. Is this how my grandfather and grandmother lived, in the famous days in Chicago? Did they emerge into the blue American midnight from grand hotels where tophatted doormen saluted as they held open the door of a Lincoln cabriolet with crimson upholstery and white sidewall tyres?

  Books, though. Do we actually own any books? I have a few: the one about the Queen Mary, a children’s encylopaedia, various children’s annuals passed on from Enfield and elsewhere. But as a family? Well, we have a telephone directory and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare; we don’t read the Shakespeare. The only other books I can remember are two volumes of photographs of Switzerland. Switzerland, it appears, is a tidy kind of place. The mountains are well-organised and sharply defined, dramatically lit, with clean white snow on them and well-formed banks of clouds in the background. Switzerland offers, as America does, an instructive contrast with the contents of the dining room. All the same, we have never been to Switzerland, we have no plans to go there; Switzerland is a matter of complete indifference to us. It might seem odd that no less than half of the family library is devoted to the subject.

  There’s a reason for this, though, just as there’s a reason for the presence of a three-piece suite in the dining room. It’s the same reason that another quarter of the library is a telephone directory: because all three books we were given, the telephone directory by Post Office Telephones, the volumes of Swiss photographs by Shakespeare – not of course the Shakespeare who confusingly wrote the Complete Works but the better-known Shakespeare who lives at No. 1 on the corner, and who’s something to do with lithography. The books are presumably surplus stock, or presents intended for customers of the firm. A lot of our possessions have come to us in a somewhat similar way. Barlow’s two watercolours must have been a gift from the artist, unless my father got talked into some canny Scots bargain. Much of the tangled and broken chaos in the toy cupboard upstairs began life as the carefully constructed models in George Davis’s studio. My fairy cycle in the garage and my sister’s pushchair are part of the overspill of largesse from our stockbroking relations in Enfield. All the stationery in the house, and all the pens, pencils, rulers and diaries, carry the logo of my father’s firm.