My Father's Fortune

by Michael Frayn

  My first intimation of mortality. The war has at last come home to me.

  *

  And then it’s all over. The Duration, that dour explanation for the state of everything, that had stretched ahead to eternity as comprehensively and dully as the Law of the Conservation of Matter, has ceased to be.

  An official day of rejoicing is decreed, VE Day, to mark our victory in Europe. My sister and I celebrate by starting another war of our own, against each other. She marches into Poland – deliberately snaps one of the paint brushes from my watercolour set. I honour my obligations towards my paint brush. A blitzkrieg of punching, scratching and weeping ensues, followed by a second blitzkrieg of slapping, raging and screaming from our mother. I sit chastened in the garden on my own after the battle has died down, very aware of the irony, ashamed of my part in events, pierced to the heart by the sadness of things.

  In the evening there’s a huge communal bonfire on the waste ground at the back of the houses, where all the neighbours sing patriotic and sentimental songs together. An asbestos sheet – not one of my father’s samples but part of someone’s abandoned chicken run – explodes and almost kills the man who’s stoking the fire. (I don’t think TAC’s publicity about the fire resistance of asbestos mentions its weakness for exploding.) What we’re watching burn, though we don’t yet know it, is the last of the wartime communal spirit that got this bonfire built.

  In August there’s another day of celebration, VJ Day; even the war in the Far East is over. Peace at last, and the good years starting. We certainly have plenty to rejoice about. Fifty-five million people have died since 1939 – and in our immediate family we have all survived, apart from my grandfather and the drake. My cousin Maurice, who came through Dunkirk, and in 1944 volunteered to go back to France as a glider pilot, is OK. So is my cousin Philip, after his time as a rating in destroyers in the North Atlantic, then rising to lieutenant-commander in the Pacific. Even Nanny has managed to hang on so far, just.

  On a misty Saturday evening that autumn, my parents, my sister and I are invited to another bonfire, this time for Guy Fawkes Day. My sister and I are even more excited by this one, because it will be the first Guy Fawkes with fireworks since before the war. And it’s in the paddock of our wealthy neighbour Mr Warbey, the cardboard-box manufacturer with the tennis court. We’re on the up and up in every way.

  So there we are, waiting to go out to the fireworks that misty Saturday evening, the 3rd of November 1945. It’s about 6 p.m. My father’s in the back bedroom, changing, my mother’s in the dining room with Nanny. Nanny (as I discover later) is suggesting a glass of sherry, and I suppose my mother’s feeling, ‘Well, why not?’ Everything’s still rationed, it’s true, England’s still bleak and grey. But it’s the end of another week, it’s Saturday. Tommy’s home, the children are upstairs playing, our wealthy neighbours have invited us out, and there are sky rockets and sparklers to look forward to. And when she thinks of everything that has happened since that party in Holloway twenty-six years earlier … Her father’s ruin, and her farewell to music. The long wait to marry. The move to Ewell. The struggle to support parents and parents-in-law, to feed the family, to keep our battered little ark afloat … It’s a life, though, no doubt about it. She and Tommy have made a reasonable go of it. There’s something to celebrate.

  Or perhaps she’s just thinking about a shirt collar to be turned, a sheet to be patched.

  But, yes, a small glass of sherry, certainly.

  My friend David and I are in the front bedroom, trying to play a serious game. My sister’s with us, annoying us.

  ‘Tommy!’

  It’s Nanny calling up the stairs, and there’s something terrible in her voice that I’ve never heard before in all her cries of alarm and despair.

  ‘Tommy! Quick! It’s Vi!’

  We all stop what we’re doing, paralysed by that note in her voice. We can hear her struggling up the stairs, gasping and sobbing, and my father running down them.

  The 3rd of November 1945. About six in the evening. My father’s fortune, after forty-four years, has just run out. So has Nanny’s, such as it was, so has my sister’s and mine.

  So, absolutely and finally, has our mother’s.

  PART TWO

  1

  Childcare

  ‘Had she touched the sherry, though? Had she drunk any of it? That’s very important. Dr Wilde will want to know that.’

  The weird forensic detachment of my father’s question has made it stick in my mind – one of the few clear recollections I have of that evening. It’s like something written down on the page, or spoken by a character in a drama – something out of someone else’s story. Our own story has suddenly become incomprehensible. We have all been plunged into a world where nothing has any recognisable outlines any more, nothing any continuing substance. My father’s trying find some footing in practical reality. So, I suppose, am I, in my memory.

  My grandmother had poured my mother a glass of sherry. My mother had walked across the room to take it. But, no, she hadn’t touched it. She had never reached it. She had died halfway. I can remember my father’s actual question, but not my grandmother’s actual reply, only her weeping wildly and saying, over and over again, ‘It should have been me! It should have been me!’ I know the general outline of the events in the dining room, but the particular words it was constructed from have vanished. My mother has had a heart attack and died – though how I know even that much I can’t remember. How exactly did the event unfold? If Nanny was pouring sherry then she was probably by the sideboard, using not the sherry decanter, which is always empty, but a bottle taken out of the cupboard beneath it. If my mother had to cross the room to take the glass then she must have been at the other end of the room, perhaps by the fireplace. To get to the sideboard she will have had to pick her way around the settee. How far did she get? Where exactly did she fall? On the floor? Across the arm of the settee? Was she already unconscious by the time my grandmother put the glass down and got to her? Already dead, even? How did my mother spend the last few seconds of her forty-one years in this world?

  When, for that matter, does my father’s interrogation of my grandmother occur? Some time in the next half hour, I suppose, before Dr Wilde has arrived. And where? Upstairs somewhere. The dining room has become a forbidden area, a non-existent space in the geography of the house. The whole ground floor has become infected by non-existence.

  Yes, I remember that my sister and I have had to stay upstairs. My friend David has somehow vanished from the picture.

  What have my sister and I been doing while my father and grandmother were still downstairs in the dining room with … with … with what can’t be thought about … and we were waiting upstairs alone? What have we said to each other? What have we been thinking and feeling? Do we really understand what’s happened? Has our father come upstairs and explained to us? If so, how? How could he have even begun to explain?

  David’s mother has appeared round the bedroom door at some point. Has said something. Said what? What could she have said?

  There’s a time later, I think after the doctor has been, when my father, my sister and I are sitting in a row along the edge of my bed, and we’re all three of us howling like animals.

  ‘You know who’ll miss her most?’ cries my father. ‘Me, because I’ve known her longest.’

  I remember those precise words, and I remember feeling even in the midst of that formless swamp of uncomprehending grief that there’s something absurd about them, something childish about the claim. There’s another point, later still, when the District Nurse is there. The undertakers must already have called and removed the … removed the … removed it, because we’re all now in the dining room, sitting on the three-piece suite. The District Nurse is drinking a cup of tea, very straight-backed. Conversation is difficult. It suddenly comes into my head that I should give her a brave smile. She looks taken aback, and I realise with a belated shock of embarrassment how inappropria
te my impulse was.

  Then what? I suppose my sister and I must eventually clean our teeth, put on our pyjamas, and go to bed. Sleep. Wake up …

  In the morning Auntie Phyllis arrives on an early train. She has come to look after us.

  On the Monday I’m back at school. I’m obliged to wait after class to explain to the Reverend J. B. Lawton why I haven’t done my French homework. ‘My mother died on Saturday,’ I tell him. I’m aware that my voice is hushed and self-important.

  His close-set eyes rest neutrally on me for a moment, assessing the plausibility of my claim. Then he nods briefly. He has accepted my excuse.

  *

  And that’s the end of my mother. My sister and I aren’t allowed to go to the funeral, I suppose for fear that it would upset us. What do we do instead, while our father and the rest of the family are at the graveyard in Ewell that November day, and my sister and I are staying behind at home, not being upset? Are we on our own? Am I looking after my sister?

  One thing we’re certainly not doing is talking about our mother. So far as I can recall, she’s never mentioned in our house again. Not by any of us. Not by my father or grandmother. Not by me or my sister. She has been airbrushed out of the historical record, like one of Stalin’s victims. She has become an unperson. And when I’m grown up, and have to explain to people about my past, I find it difficult to be exact about even the date of her death. Was it 1945, or was it 1946? I tell some people that I was thirteen, others that I was eleven. Now, as I write this, sixty-five years later, and try to recapture the past as fully as I can, I’m able to fix the date from the death certificate. But of what actually happened on that date the scattered recollections above are the only ones I have left. I spent so many years not thinking about it too closely, or not thinking about it at all. My sister couldn’t remember anything about it, even though she was already eight at the time. Her son says that she told him our mother had died while she was cycling to the shops. This is a confabulation with something that one of our neighbours said much later. She had seen our mother struggling back with the shopping on her bicycle during the war, and believed that this was part of the strain that had overtaxed her heart. In my sister’s memory, evidently, not even the most general outline of the events on that November night remained.

  One of the reasons that my sister and I never mentioned her is that we lacked the words. We had no name for her. We couldn’t call her Vi, as all the grown-ups did when she was alive, because we never had. ‘Our mother’? We’d never called her that, either, not to each other, and to start now would have been ridiculously formal. No, worse than formal – impersonal. It would have placed someone with whom each of us had a unique relationship, and for whom each of us had a unique personal name, in a general class. I did try it once, nearly sixty years later, when my sister was very ill, and I thought that she might want to talk about some of the things that we had once shared so intensely, and that we had never spoken about since. But it sounded wrong, and she didn’t respond.

  We had had a name for her when she was alive, of course. We had called her what most English children call their mothers. Somehow, though, we could no longer say the word. I’m not sure I can even now, even to myself. I’m not sure I can write it down …

  Yes. She was Mummy. It was Mummy who had died.

  There – done. For the first time in sixty-four years.

  *

  Why couldn’t we say it? I don’t know. But we couldn’t. Naming her wouldn’t really have been a problem for our father. He could have said ‘your mother’ to us, in the way that divorced and separated fathers do – even, in a humorous tone of voice, fathers who are still happily married. It wouldn’t have been too painful. Our grandmother might have done the same. But I don’t think either of them ever did. Or perhaps they did. They must have done! They must sometimes have said something about her!

  Yes – my father somehow conveyed to me at some point that she had once played the violin in the Queen’s Hall Light Orchestra. I can’t remember precisely what words he used. Perhaps I’m suppressing something.

  For thirty years it never occurred to me to visit her grave. It was only in 1979, when I was making a television film about the streets I grew up in, that I went to the churchyard in Ewell to look for it. I found two headstones for other people marked with dates just before and just after 3 November, 1945, and between them an unmarked plot, so I suppose her bones must have been down there. It would have been characteristic of my father not to put up a stone. I’m tempted to say, not unless George Davis or our relations in Enfield had happened to have one spare. I don’t think it was meanness. It was simply not his style to fix the flow of experience in possessions and portraits and speeches and gravestones. When someone was dead they were dead, and there was no palliating it. It was part of his matter-of-factness. No, it went deeper than that. He had a certain lightness of being. And I think on the whole he was right. Gone is gone – until thirty or sixty years later, when just for once you want to revisit that lost land, and then a few words in a letter or on a stone are a sudden blessing.

  I’ve no letter from her, now I come to think about it. Not so much as a birthday card. It never seems to have occurred to anyone that I might be interested to have a photograph of her, until I started asking around the family half a century later. But then why hadn’t I asked sooner? No one for that matter had ever thought that I might care to have a copy of her death certificate, and I can’t remember now how I first came by it – only the painful irony of the history that it at last began to reveal. I have it in front of me now. In Column 6, Cause of Death, as certified by the Surrey Coroner after a post mortem without inquest, it records (a) myocardial degeneration, and (b) mitral regurgitation. This is a slightly odd way of putting it, because what it presumably means is that the first was the cause of the second – that she had a long-term condition, a deterioration of the heart, as a result of which a particular event occurred – the heart attack that I had (somehow) always known about. Heart disease is often hereditary, so that, before I found the certificate, I had for years been careful to report, as I was required to, my mother’s premature death from it to doctors and insurance companies; and it sometimes occurred to me that the implications of this might not be purely theoretical – that just as I might inherit my father’s deafness, so I might actually suffer a similar fate to my mother’s, and at a similar age.

  So far, though, I have survived, and without any protest from my heart, for thirty-five years longer than her, and the certificate may help to explain why, because under Cause of Death it also lists (c) scarlet fever. This is again a somewhat curious formulation, because what (I assume) it’s trying to say is that this was the start of the causal chain. One of the complications of scarlet fever in childhood is rheumatic fever, and one of the possible effects of rheumatic fever is long-term damage to the heart and the heart valves.

  Yes, said Phyllis, when I asked her, my mother as a child had had scarlet fever. According to my cousin Jean it had begun as measles, but her GP wasn’t sure about his diagnosis, so he’d sent her to hospital. At the hospital she was put in the isolation ward with the scarlet-fever patients. From a simple case of measles, and the efforts of her doctor and parents to treat it, she had traded up, cause by cause and effect by effect, to death at the age of forty-one.

  And why had the hospital put her in with the scarlet-fever patients? To be on the safe side, because there were no doctrors on duty to examine her. They were all off playing cricket. The effects of cricket on my mother were in the end as catastrophic as the cricket ball in the kidneys had been for my great-uncle Robert.

  *

  But she’s not dead!

  She’s not dead at all! It was some kind of mistake, some ridiculous misunderstanding! She’s right here! In the room with me, just as she always was! She’s laughing at my silliness, and hugging me to reassure me. I can’t believe it! How can I have got things so wrong?

  Never mind, though, because now
that terrible time’s over, and everything has been put right, everything is as it was. I’m so happy, so helplessly, childishly happy!

  Now the grey morning light is filtering through the curtains of the front bedroom. I’m awake … and yes, it’s still true! It wasn’t a dream! She’s alive, and nothing has changed after all! I lie basking in the sweet intensity of my joy.

  And then, gradually, the certainty begins to fade …

  Night after night I have the same dream. Night after night I make that same wonderful discovery, feel that same rush of overwhelming happiness. Morning after morning I have the same joyous awakening, then suffer the same agonising desolation as the joy ebbs away and I find myself back in the empty grey world where nothing will ever be right again.

  Is my sister, in her bed a few feet away, having similar dreams and similar awakenings? Is my father, in the bedroom on the other side of the landing, alone in the double bed where his body and hers had breathed and snored side by side each night in all the irreducible substantiality that had so reassured me? Is my grandmother, in her little nest of chiffon and sepia downstairs? Or my mother’s sister, cramped and aching on the mock-leather settee in the dining room? Is each of us shut away alone in that same parallel alternation of illusion and re-emergence, of joy and anguish, that can never be shared?

  I can’t recall ever at the time lifting my eyes above the greyness of my own waking world and trying to imagine what it was like for the others. Now, with children of my own, I can hardly believe that I never wondered what that time must have been like for my grandmother. My mother was her child! This is not something that ever occurred to me at the time. She has lost her child! Her firstborn! For a child to lose its mother is terrible. But to a child – in the waking hours, if not in dreams – the world is what it is. You’re motherless? So, you’re motherless. But for a mother to lose her child … How can she ever stop thinking that it might have been otherwise? How can she ever reconcile herself? As she said that night, over and over again, it should have been her, it should have been her.