My Father's Fortune

by Michael Frayn

  She has seen something. Something in the lavatory. She can’t bring herself to specify what it is – but she has never in all her life seen anything like it! She has warned Tommy that something of this sort would happen! She knew she should have stayed with us, even if it had killed her! What kind of world are we living in? She has never in all her life … has warned Tommy over and over again … always knew it was going to be a disaster …

  ‘Calm down, Nanny,’ says Olive, in her most good-humoured and well-modulated tone. (She calls her Nanny! She’s that much at her ease socially!) ‘Something the matter in the lavatory? I’ll have a look.’

  I know what Nanny has seen, because I’ve seen it already. I’m just as unable to talk about it as she is. I have never in all my life seen anything like it, either. I’m just as shocked, only into silence rather than hysterics.

  On the forest-green wall of the lavatory, a good three feet away from the bowl itself, a small brown heart-shaped decoration has appeared. Nanny must have bent down curiously to inspect it, as I did, and discovered, as I did, that it was a dollop of excrement. How had it got there? It seemed to me unlikely that anyone in the family was responsible. Scruffy as we are in so many ways, we’re all properly inhibited about matters of evacuation. I think I realised that it was also not very likely to be the handiwork of someone as socially poised as Olive. So it must be the kind of thing you learn to do at a progressive school. I suppose Nanny must have followed a somewhat similar line of reasoning.

  Even allowing for the encouragement given by progressive educators to the most extreme forms of self-expression, though, I still couldn’t understand how she’d actually done it. Even now, when my shock has subsided, and with the benefit of a wider experience of the world, I still can’t.

  *

  In the end Nanny’s got out of the house, and Olive settles everything down, sensibly, reasonably. And that’s how she runs the household over the coming months – sensibly, reasonably, never raising her voice, never pressing her hand to her heart and saying that she won’t last much longer. She brings some order into our lives, without trying to impose too many of her own ideas. She gets my sister and me to behave more or less acceptably, and does it without any great confrontations. She finds some intelligent compromise between what she proposes to cook and what we’re prepared to eat. She has a sense of humour, and she talks to us as if we were, like her, sensible, reasonable human beings. She raises her well-modulated voice enough when she’s talking to our father for him to hear at any rate a little of what she’s saying.

  On Saturday evenings sometimes she walks us into Epsom to take part in the social activities at her daughter’s school. It’s a funny sort of place. The children cycle wildly round and round an old gravel pit in the grounds, then sprawl about in the darkness with their arms round each other, farting and shouting out and drinking cocoa and watching old Charlie Chaplin films. I love the whirring of the projector, and the magical pictures on the wall, but it doesn’t seem to me much of a school. No corrugated iron. No one, so far as I can see, getting caned. None of the grey gloom of fear and misery that’s necessary for proper education. Somehow, out of nowhere, our father has conjured the perfect housekeeper – the more than perfect housekeeper – the kind of housekeeper you could not reasonably hope to find, even if you had a stately home to attract her to and could pay vastly more than I imagine my father can. She’s the antithesis not only of Nanny, but of all my father’s other arrangements – the rusty chopper, the waterlogged air-raid shelter, the asbestos flower boxes.

  And yet, and yet … the arrangement doesn’t ever quite work. We never take to Angela, for a start, and Angela never takes to us. Olive manages this little difficulty very diplomatically – but then we never really take to Olive. She remains an outsider in the house. She’s not quite one of us.

  If I have to put my finger on her single but fatal defect it’s this: she’s not our mother.

  I wonder now, of course, what her feelings were about us. It must have been horrible for her, living in that alien house, looking after two alien children. Doing it so well, too, and with some reasonable semblance of love – but getting no love back. For whatever reason she’d taken the job on, whether out of desperation or the goodness of her heart, she must have felt in the end that it was a defeat.

  I don’t know how long she stayed. Six months perhaps. I don’t know why she finally went, whether it was at her wish or my father’s, nor where she went on to. No explanations or farewells come to mind. She’s just another of the debts that I’ve accumulated in life – and one that I’ve scarcely even thought about until now. She deserved better.

  Nanny returns. Again, I can’t recall any explanations, or any scenes of glad reunion. Nothing. Only, as the weeks go by, the rudeness and disobedience of my sister and me. Only Nanny’s little gasps and cries, the pressing of hand to breast, the predictions of her approaching demise.

  Only the same familiar, muddled wretchedness as before.

  2

  Top to Bottom

  What those bleak years after my mother’s death were like for my father is perhaps indicated by the state of his health. I don’t know what the original symptoms were, but he was diagnosed as ‘run down’, that vague metaphor of an overtaxed car battery, and was prescribed a daily dose of burgundy – Australian burgundy, which at the time was probably rather like topping him up with battery acid. Perhaps as a result of this his stomach became too acid, and after he had choked down many pints of glutinous barium meal to outline his digestive tract for the X-ray machine a duodenal ulcer was diagnosed. He had to give up not only the burgundy, but pipe and cigarettes, any thought of bread and cheese and beer on Saturday evenings, and the cheeky carver’s perks on Sunday. For months – years – he was restricted to a diet of steamed white fish and milk pudding, both of which he found as flavourless as his life had now become. He was often confined to bed. His flu one winter turned into double pneumonia. He lay in delirium in Epsom Cottage Hospital, and then in the middle of an icy January night awoke to find himself, still in his pyjamas, on an unlit path halfway home; he had to find his way back to the hospital and present himself at the porter’s lodge for re-admission. Later he slipped a disc in his back, and could scarcely get in and out of his car. For months or years he was in constant pain and undergoing constantly changing treatments. When my sister and I visited him, in the Cottage Hospital once more, we found him in traction, still struggling to smile, tied into the the kind of archaic industrial machine that you see in cartoons of people in hospital. In desperation he was reduced to osteopathy, a form of faith healing, as he saw it, in which he had no more faith than in the doctrine of the Trinity. He had two sessions, at thirty shillings a go – and his slipped disc was cured, never to trouble him again; the only serious challenge he ever encountered to his general scepticism. Even he must have had the smile wiped off his face for a bit in sheer surprise.

  Through all this, though, he’s kept things going for my sister and me. For Christmas one year he’s thrown lifelong practice to the winds and somehow bought me a chest of second-hand but genuine carpenter’s tools. He’s dragged us out through rain and sleet for health-giving walks. Short walks, round the unmade-up roads where the Warbeys and other millionaires live. Long walks, across the farm towards the Downs – forced marches so gruelling that they have to be done in stages, like the ascent of Everest and Scott’s trek to the South Pole, with rests in numbered camps along the way. He’s walked us into Epsom on Saturdays, along the same path on which he awoke from his midwinter noctambulation, to have roast beef, Yorkshire pudding and two veg in a teashop. He’s taken us off for weekend Easter breaks in a gloomy B&B that Kerry had recommended on the Kent coast. He’s done his best to recreate the old summer family holidays. We’ve sat together in the car in windswept car parks, waiting for the worst of the rain to stop, my father in his trilby hat, and the passenger’s seat beside him empty. When the rain moderated a little we’ve walked along the narrow
Devon lanes, throwing a tennis ball back and forth, my sister and I shouting to warn him when we heard a car coming. Water seems to have been the element in which all these holidays were spent, as if nature were weeping the tears that we were no longer able to weep ourselves. Not only rain, but the rainswept sea. Spray finding its way in through our always inadequate raincoats. Streams, into which I always managed to fall, so that our walks were accompanied by the dull squelching of my two shoefuls of water. Water underfoot, water overhead. In North Wales one year, after a long day tramping through the rain, the only way we could see of getting back to the car and some hope of dryness involved crossing a single narrow girder remaining after the rest of the bridge had fallen into the raging torrent in the gorge far below. My father walked insouciantly across and back to demonstrate how easy it was – it was the kind of thing he did all the time when he was inspecting the progress of TAC’s roofing contracts. I realised that as a boy I had no option but to do likewise. My sister, thank God, realised that as a girl she was allowed to weep and refuse. He didn’t insist. He found a detour, only four or five miles longer.

  On that same holiday he walked us almost to the top of Snowdon through the freezing hurry of soaking cloud that concealed everything around us. In Llandudno, where he had been sometimes in the twenties with Vi, he took us one evening, largely I think to get us all out of the rain for a bit, to a restaurant he remembered where there was dancing. We sat at our table, long past our bedtime, while he gazed at the couples turning and turning, lost in each other, under the endlessly cascading light from the mirror ball. Gazed and gazed, smiled and smiled. Perhaps it gave him some comfort, having us with him, looking after us on his own for a couple of weeks.

  I don’t want to make too much of our misfortune. Our father wasn’t the first man to have lost his wife, nor were we the first children to have lost their mother. It was worse for my sister than for me, since she was three and a half years younger. And I have to recognise that for me that agonising severance had some positive effects. I had been a bit of a mother’s boy, with my sixpences for coming top and my failures at manly sports. Her death hardened me a little; I didn’t any longer have her to run to. I find it difficult now, looking back through the grey murk that seems to cover those years, to follow what was going on inside me. The family snapshots cease after 1942 and don’t resume until the beginning of the fifties, so it’s impossible to see whether there was any change in the external appearance of the disconcertingly soppy little boy that I’d become. I think, though, that I was beginning, consciously or half-consciously, to reconstruct myself.

  In this I had advice and assistance from a number of people. Uncle Sid, for a start. Undeterred by his earlier failure to teach me to catch a ball, he took me out for a walk one grey afternoon and gave me a kindly but firm talking-to in his most avuncular voice. No one, he said, liked a home man, which is what I was in danger of becoming. A home man, he explained, was someone who hung about the house reading books instead of getting out on the playing field. The shame of being a home man, and the fear of the universal dislike this would call down upon me, has never quite left me. I’m not sure, though, how much practical effect it ever had on me. Whereas Mrs Absolon changed my life.

  Among the books I’d read as I skulked shamefully about at home had been Scouting for Boys. I’d been entranced by the world it had opened up of knots and lashings, of tracking wildebeests though the veldt and helping old ladies across the street, of honour to God and loyalty to the King, of camp fires and wide-brimmed hats. I had taught myself to suppress a sneeze (only to be done when absolutely necessary to preserve secrecy!) by biting my top lip with my lower jaw. I had resolved always to drink at least a glass of hot water before setting out into the bush if circumstances should ever force me to go without breakfast, and to avoid larking about with girls, even though this sounded as if it was very much what I had found so intoxicating in the summer twilight with Jennifer, because apparently it caused babies. I longed to join the Boy Scouts and live the book out, but I knew without even asking that the Scouts were exactly the kind of organised do-goodery that my father disliked – particularly after he had made an exception for the Crusaders, and I had so rapidly come round to his point of view. Mrs Absolon was the next-door neighbour of my friend David, round the corner in Queensmead Avenue. She was a widow, and her own son was growing sisal in Tanganyika, so she had time to invite David and me to tea, and to take us trainspotting at Euston and King’s Cross. She was a forthright, outspoken, no-nonsense sort of person, and her late husband had been something high up in the local Scouts. She marched round the corner to see my father. I don’t know exactly what she said, but within a couple of weeks I was standing on parade in the grimy church hall in Ewell Village with a wide-brimmed hat on my head and a pole in my hands – both acquired from a shop, for money, in the normal way of the world – wearing a ramshackle collection of whatever brownish bits and pieces could be assembled by the methods more usual in our family.

  It was a wild success, quite unlike the Crusaders earlier and the Cadet Corps later. During the next three years I acquired a proper Scout shirt and a sleeve covered with badges, camped and tramped and knotted and lashed, rose to the rank of Patrol Leader, and led my patrol with much embarrassing fervour to win various awards. In the shade of that broad-brimmed hat my innate weediness was much less noticeable, and my threatened exile from decent society as a home man was at any rate postponed. I even enjoyed the weekly session of British Bulldogs, an even rougher game than cricket, which involved trying to subdue struggling, farting opponents, often from the lower social orders, by the kind of brute force for which I had hitherto shown little taste or aptitude. Perhaps my fellow Boy Scouts, unlike cricket balls, were simply large enough for me to see.

  *

  The most far-reaching practical consequence for me of my mother’s death, though, was that it took me out of Sutton High School for Boys.

  At least, I think it did. I think my father realised that he couldn’t pay two lots of school fees as well as a housekeeper. By this time he may in any case have become a little uneasy about the character of the school. Not because of the caning or the corrugated-iron walls, neither of which I would have mentioned to him. It was the age of some of my classmates that unsettled him. I was twelve, and in a class that was preparing to take the Common Entrance Examination the following year. The prospects of some of us were dubious. ‘You, boy?’ snarled Mr Plummer, a former First World War officer with the face of a bloodhound and a larynx kippered by the fags he drew upon so desperately in the playground, who taught us maths and various other subjects with world-weary efficiency. ‘Pass the Common Entrance to a public school? You’ll never wash the common entrance to a public house!’ A number of us had already taken the exam and failed, often years before. Among my classmates were hulking great layabouts with nicotine-stained fingers and smokers’ coughs, whose prospects even as cleaners of licensed premises seemed far from assured. I recall my father taking sardonic note when I told him that one of them was leaving to begin employment, not in a pub, but as a teacher in another private school a mile or two down the road.

  I’m probably being unjust about the Reverend J. B. Lawton and his academy. Caning wasn’t the only way he related to pupils. He’d sometimes appear beside you and put his arm round your shoulders, though whether as a sign of affection or an alternative form of punishment it was difficult to tell, since he had no expression in his close-set eyes, only a distinctive and discouraging smell about him, of harsh ecclesiastical cloth and stale tobacco. And there were plenty of able boys in the school – many of them a lot more able than me – and some of them certainly survived it well enough. I subsequently met two of them who had actually passed Common Entrance and gone on to public schools. They recalled the old place with some affection. One of them, by then a leading public relations consultant, told me that he looked back on it as a haven of peace and happiness before his public school, where he had been tarred and f
eathered and thrown out of an upstairs window. For me at this point, however, my father decides that he will have to find some alternative. I will have to get, not just a place at a public school, which he could afford even less than Sutton High, but a scholarship. I borrow a set of old papers from a boy who’s going to take the scholarship for Dulwich, and my father and I sit at the dining-room table and work our way through them. Neither of us can begin to answer any of the questions. More desperate measures are required. My father goes to see the Surrey Education Officer at County Hall in Kingston. It’s arranged that I’m to take not the Common Entrance or a scholarship paper but some other sort of exam I’ve never even heard of, which I immediately suspect is really supposed to be sat by Council School children. My father has evidently had to use considerable powers of persuasion, because I’m twelve, and this exam is apparently one that you’re supposed to take at eleven-plus.

  In the examination room I am indeed surrounded by Council School children, and of course, since I’m a year older than I should be, I pass. I can tell that my father feels he has done well; he has carried off a considerable piece of salesmanship with the Education Officer, getting his product placed, like his roofing, in some official institution, and in spite of defects unknown in asbestos. In return he has allowed himself to be impressed by the Education Officer’s advocacy of Kingston Grammar School, to which I’ve apparently been assigned. ‘Pretty good school, you know,’ he assures me, as he might about the Forty-Eight Preludes and Fugues or the Château d’Yquem, with the wink, the twitch of the head, and all the rest of it. ‘Pretty good reputation in educational circles.’