My Father's Fortune

by Michael Frayn

  Upstairs is a large bedroom for me – and in the back garden, at the side of the wide emerald lawn, a damp but palatial concrete-built air-raid shelter which I am to have as my darkroom. The garden is tended by another long-serving retainer, Port. Beyond the lawn is a rose pergola; beyond the pergola a kitchen garden; beyond the kitchen garden, on the triangle of waste ground at the back the houses, an allotment where yet more vegetables are growing – most of them given away each week to Port and Mrs Tunner.

  In the garage, waiting for Elsie’s weekly trip to the shops, is a stately Rover, with gleaming coachwork and chromium, glowing leather upholstery and walnut fitments.

  My father has come a long way from Devonshire Road, Holloway. We’ve all three of us come a long way even from Hillside Road, round the corner, and we’re all considerably awed by the grandeur of our new surroundings. I don’t think, though, that the radiogram, the abundance of vegetables or even the television set have been the attraction for my father. I think he likes Elsie, in spite of his terrible misgivings when he found himself actually marrying her. Likes teasing her, and being teased himself in return. Likes the dancing and the laughter, the sense of life returning. It takes him back to his Fred Astaire days.

  Most of all, I think, he’s trying to do the best for my sister and me. After the four difficult years first with Nanny, then the housekeeper, then Nanny again, he’s trying to find an arrangement that will really work. A widower with two children who need mothering; a widow looking for children to mother. Could he ever have dreamed of a better solution?

  *

  So, our new mother.

  If I think of Elsie the first picture that comes into my mind is this: a tiny woman with a vast open snakeskin handbag. She’s holding the bag in front of her face and screwing up her eyes to see what she’s doing, which is taking handfuls of five-and ten-pound notes out of the bag uncounted, and stuffing them into someone’s hand. Mrs Tunner’s. Port’s. Mine. She’s merrily brushing aside the recipient’s polite reluctance and thanks. ‘No – go on! Take it! Don’t start being all hooty-tooty!’

  That £7 in my passport for my first trip to France was probably doled out to me from the handbag. It seems an uncharacteristically modest sum, but her combination of impulsiveness and myopia means that her generosity is always a bit random; she may have thought she was giving me a handful not of pound notes but of tenners. Much more typical are her Christmas presents. The Toscanini Pastoral Symphony, for example (specified by me, of course) – and not just half a movement but all five, spread across six discs – together with the C sharp minor quartet, Opus 131, by the Busch, on another six, to be played on the great radiogram, over and over again, with the special fibre needles I’ve acquired, which have to be resharpened after each side (or half a side, in the case of the storm movement in the Pastoral). In other years it’s luxuriously thick cable-knit sweaters and a goose-down sleeping bag for my travels, and a little later cigarettes – gold-tipped Sobranie Black Russian, and Senior Service in packs of 400. She also buys, and maintains, a subscription to the New Statesman for me, to further my aims of undermining the capitalist system that’s providing her (and me) with the money.

  My father soon finds a name for her. Just as I’m still affectionately Willy, at any rate when he’s not too irritated with me, she becomes first Little Tich, like the diminutive music-hall comedian (himself, I discover from Wikipedia, called after the undersized claimaint in the Tichborne case), then simply Tich. She has to have a cushion under her when she drives her Rover, and can still barely see over the steering wheel. Not that she can see all that much, even leaning anxiously forward on top of the cushion with her eyes screwed up, and she drives very slowly, zig-zagging cautiously between the kerb and the cat’s eyes in the middle of the road. My father, who is occasionally allowed to drive the Rover himself for family outings, always refers to it as the Old Box of Bells. ‘I’ll Old-Box-of-Bells you!’ snorts Tich scornfully. ‘The Old Box of Bells will outlast that jollapy of yours, never you fear! I’ve never seen such a wreck! The chromion’s flaking off the rodiator already!’

  She’s particularly good at humorous snorting because she has a permanently stuffed-up nose. She suffers from polyps, but refuses to have them treated, or to see a doctor for any other reason. ‘Doctors? Don’t talk to me about doctors! They don’t know anything! They give you this wonderful dognosis, then they kill you! It was the doctors that killed my dear Frank. He’d still be alive today if it hadn’t been for doctors and dognosises.’ Her background’s not entirely unlike my father’s. Her own father was a newsagent in Noel Street in Soho, then still a poor immigrant quarter. Crowded into the houses on either side of the shop, according to the 1901 census, were waiters, cooks, tailors and charwomen, many of them hailing from France, Germany, Austria, Hungary and Russia. As a child Elsie used to earn pennies as a shabbasgoy, lighting fires and ovens on the Sabbath for her Jewish neighbours. Her family, the Rickies, had the house in Noel Street to themselves, but by the time of the 1911 census they had moved to Whitfield Street, on the other side of Oxford Street, where Elsie, her parents and her three younger sisters were now reduced to two rooms. Her father was no longer listed as being in business on his own account but as a ‘worker’, a dentist’s mechanic, so maybe the newsagent’s had failed, just as my grandfather’s china shop in Plymouth did. On the Epsom wedding certificate his profession has been restrospectively upgraded from dentist’s mechanic to dentist. Something a bit oedipal here, if this was Elsie’s mistake – she’d no more consult a dentist than a doctor.

  Like my father she left school at fourteen, but she’d started at the old French elementary school in Noel Street, so, unlike my father, who at his central school in Holloway had any traces of French knocked out of him, she actually speaks the language, or at any rate as much of it as young children use – and speaks it better and more fluently than I will achieve through two years in the sixth form with Gobbo. Most of the records in the cupboards of the radiogram, apart from the Warsaw Concerto and the fragment of Tchaikovsky, are French cabaret songs, some romantic, some slyly suggestive, some faux-naifs, sung by two of the great night-club chansonniers of the thirties, Jean Sablon and Charles Trenet. I have to struggle to catch the colloquial usage. Elsie sings happily along, entirely at home with them, suddenly a Paris sparrow like Piaf. When she left school she went into the tailoring, as she always calls it, apprenticed to one of the grand bespoke firms in Savile Row, possibly Kilgour, French and Stanley, though a legendary figure called Stanbury (who may of course be Stanley) comes into the story somewhere. She seems to have enjoyed it, and I should think she was a lively, eager, pretty girl whom everyone in the workshop must have doted upon. Her sister Doris is still in the business. Instead of a wealthy grocer Doris has married a tailor, Phil Bargstedt, who has gone through the North African and Italian campaigns with the Eighth Army as a lorry driver. Phil and Dot (or Doc, in Elsie’s version of her name, as if she were a member of the despised profession) live as council tenants in a single requisitioned room in Hampstead, and they work together, for John Morgan in Savile Row, he making the jackets, she the trousers. They’re both as plain as potatoes, endlessly cheerful and unfailingly good-hearted. I visit them sometimes in their workshop, high up under the eaves of the West End. Phil, a huge ruined hulk of a man like a retired heavyweight boxer, sits among the other tailors as tailors have always sat, cross-legged on a great table – an English Buddha, coughing and choking in the smoke of the cigarette he keeps burning like a joss stick in the ashtray beside him. Every few stitches he stops, takes another drag on the cigarette, and cracks another soft-hearted bantering joke. Doris sits straight-backed on a chair in front him, coughing and laughing. They’re sewing by hand, of course, and working so fine that the stitching can scarcely be seen even by someone whose eyes aren’t watering from the smoke.

  Later in life Elsie developed most of the prejudices known to mankind, but she had always lived and worked among immigrants, and no one seem
s to have explained to her that she could easily have extended her range to include xenophobia. When Frank Smith carried her off out of the tailoring and into the groceries they travelled all over Europe, to Holland and Denmark to buy the ham that he tinned under the Olde Oak label, to Paris because it was Paris, to Switzerland and Germany for the winter sports. Just as Frank is her lost love, so the Continent in the twenties and thirties is her land of lost content. She loves telling me about it. We’ve been cut off from it by the war, but, even before Michael Lane and I set out to trudge the French roadsides with our jars of English butter and strawberry jam, Abroad has been mythologised for me by Elsie’s shining-eyed tales of Pullmans and wagons-lits, of the sparkling white snows of yesteryear in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, of coffee and croissants on the terrace of the Café de la Paix – all of it as remote to me as ever, of course, even when I get there, with only seven pounds in my pocket. Actually there are unpredictable exceptions to even the most entrenched of her prejudices. She is rigidly puritanical about any reference to sexual deviancy – or to any other kind sexual behaviour – yet she adores the extravagant dresses of Danny La Rue, the female impersonator, and laughs over and over again as she listens to a recording she has of Max Miller, the Cheeky Chappie, whose smutty innuendos shock my own highbrow sensibilities. Another prejudice she has missed out on completely is anti-Semitism, even though it’s still pretty generally taken for granted in the suburbs. She seems unaware of the possibility. She was brought up among Jews and worked with them in the tailoring. They’re as much a part of her life as Mrs Tunner, or an old friend she sometimes takes me to visit, Girlie. (Girlie! Were there really people then called Girlie? Or was that yet another mishearing, another mispronunciation?) At the end of her life Elsie settled in a part of Hove where most of her neighbours were Jews, was invited to all their weddings and bar mitzvahs, and sat shivah with them when they were bereaved. At her own funeral they all came and wept for her in their turn, which not too many of her Gentile acquaintances did.

  She and I soon get on quite well together. I’m a little seduced, I have to confess, by the French cabaret songs, the half movement of Tchaikovsky and all the other attractions of our new home. I’m won over by Elsie herself, in spite of my intellectual snobbery – intrigued by her memories of pre-war Europe and her malapropisms, disarmed by her vivacity. I develop a slightly distanced, ironic, bantering manner with her – imitated, I suppose, from my father – which provokes her to the same kind of performance as his does.

  So there we are – the perfect iconic family again: mother, father, one boy, one girl – now even a dog. Not to mention the television and the radiogram. How long can it last?

  Not long, it turns out. The first problem is my sister.

  *

  I realise that I haven’t said much about Jill in the course of this story so far. The trouble is I don’t know quite what to say. She still puzzles me. She’s so much cleverer than me, but somehow, when she’s a child, it doesn’t take effect in the world, either at school or in any other way. She doesn’t do anything much. She doesn’t really seem to be interested in anything, except perhaps dogs. When she marries and has children in the years to come this is all going to change – often in rather disconcerting ways. She’s a late starter, though. I try belatedly as I write this to see life from her perspective, and I do begin to understand how much harder things were for her than they were for me. Her elder son, Julian, told me when he read my first draft something that I found deeply surprising and painful: that she had always been top of the class at school until our mother died. This at last makes sense of a lot of things. But how is it that I’d never known it, or had somehow forgotten it? I suppose, with hindsight, that I’d cast a shadow over her life even while our mother was alive. In later years she came to believe that I had always been our father’s favourite. I really don’t think this is right. I suppose I may have been our mother’s favourite, and perhaps, since Jill was scarcely able to remember her, she somehow transferred her sense of injustice to our father as a more accessible object. But, as I recall it, she and our father had a natural bond – they were both so quick, and so impatient of my slowness. And yet, slow as I was, I was always passing exams, and jumping through most of the other hoops that were held up in front of me. I see how exasperating this must have been.

  I made a second surprising discovery about my sister through writing this book: that she was almost someone else altogether. My cousin Jean asked me, after she’d read the draft, if I knew that during the three and a half years between my own birth and my sister’s our mother had conceived another child. I had not known. I’ve had to wait seventy-four years to hear about this little complication in the apparently straightforward creation of our iconic family, and I don’t know even now whether I should have had a brother or another sister. This potential sibling of mine apparently died in my mother’s womb at the age of six months. Jean says that my mother had to spend Christmas in hospital. This would have been just possibly in 1934, but more probably in 1935, when I was two. The first memory that I can date is of my third birthday, nine months later, and even with hindsight I can’t locate so much as the faintest trace of a Christmas with no mother in the house, let alone an explanation for her absence. How extraordinary, though, that no one ever told my sister or me! I suppose our mother died before she thought we were old enough to understand, and our grandmother would have trapped any revelation so intimate behind that nervously concealing hand of hers. But didn’t it ever cross my father’s mind that we might like to know? Jean was told about it by her mother, and it’s odd that Phyllis never thought to mention it in the memoir of my mother that she wrote for me. So strange, what families preserve of the past, and what they fail to. Jean herself didn’t know, until she read this book, that her father had served so glamorously during the war in Bomber Command. But for me not to know until now of the existence of someone who would have been a sibling of mine! And for my sister never to know that someone else had almost forestalled her very existence!

  When we were younger, I and the sister who has now so suddenly almost vanished before my eyes played together and squabbled and dared each other quite a lot. But over the years a disparity develops. I’m always tediously doing things – trying to make things, taking photographs, showing off, writing poems, being religious. For a lot of my enterprises I require her to be involved, as assistant, disciple or audience. I can’t recall ever doing the same for her. Well, I’m three and a half years older – but the real difference is that she doesn’t ever undertake any activity that I could possibly be involved in. She never makes me pray instead of opening my Christmas presents. She never forces me, as I do her, to spend hours watching inept puppet shows and incompetent conjuring. I don’t have to play bit parts in plays she has written for the local children to perform. She doesn’t make me run about the garden for hours calling ‘What am I doing now?’, as I do her when I’m lying in the darkened bedroom on a sunlit summer’s day after having a tooth out, and I discover the camera obscura – a blurred image of outside events cast on the ceiling by light passing through a small hole in the wartime blackout. I recall one of my impositions on her, when I was about twelve, with particular shame. My friend David and I have decided to make our fortunes by manufacturing conjuring sets. We produce a sample, which Jill is to take to school and show to her friends, so that she can then secure orders from them, as my father does with his asbestos gutters and downpipes. A week or two go by. Each evening I question her about her sales figures. Nothing. No orders at all. And then I discover the sample set, still in her satchel, now crushed flat. She has been carrying it back and forth every day, too embarrassed to show it to anyone.

  The death of our mother brings us closer again for a while. We huddle together in our misery, and then by unspoken agreement collaborate in making the lives of her replacements impossible. By the time our father remarries, though, I’m sixteen, which is getting a bit old for this kind of entertainment, and in any case I’
ve moved further and further away into the new worlds I’m discovering of music and poetry. Jill’s part of the world I’m leaving behind. She’s still only twelve, and has little life outside the family. For her, when we move into Elsie’s house, everything changes. Even our father, the person to whom she’s closest in the world, has become someone else in these new surroundings. She’s alone. Her stepmother’s recollections of Paris and snatches of French are of no interest to her. She and Elsie don’t find a way of being together. And yet, since Jill’s so much younger than me, she can’t escape as I do. They have to be together. Jill is dependent on her. Elsie has to tell her what to do, and scold her when she doesn’t do it.