My Father's Fortune

by Michael Frayn

  Jill becomes more and more difficult. She has always had a temper, which I suppose suggests the frustration she has suffered. She has often exercised it on me, reasonably enough, but also on our parents. At the age of seven or eight, for example, she developed a regular morning ritual of screaming tantrums about the sleeves of her school blouse, which all seemed to her either too long or too short. (I had tantrums, too. Mine were entirely reasonable – I was screaming at the nails that bent and the wood that split as I struggled to make things.) Now her rages start again, and this time they’re directed against Elsie. What are they about? The usual things, I imagine: demands to keep her room tidy and do her homework, reproaches for leaving laundry on the floor for Elsie to pick up. I seem to remember particular difficulties about food. Jill won’t eat the meals that Elsie has cooked. I sit in my large new room, memorising German strong verbs and simultaneously listening to yet another performance of the Eighth Symphony on the buzzy Bakelite radio that Elsie has dug out of store for me, and over the music, through the stout timber of the well-made door, I’m aware of raised voices and the slamming of other strongly constructed doors. I don’t go out to investigate. We poets are above such petty domestic disturbances.

  And then one evening, when I’m sitting in my room with Michael Lane discussing Schopenhauer or the forthcoming extinction of the bourgeosie, the door’s flung open and the family’s troubles come bursting in.

  It’s Elsie, weeping wildly. She throws herself down on her knees in front of me and buries her face in my lap. I’m frozen with shock and embarrassment, all my gallant bantering suddenly knocked out of my hand like a paper fan by a whirlwind. I’ve never seen anyone behave in such a way – not, at least, since the night my mother died – and I’ve never, even then, heard the secrets of family life broadcast in such a way to someone outside the family.

  ‘He’s going to leave!’ she sobs, when she can manage to speak. ‘He says he should never have come here and it’s all my fault because I don’t know how to get on with Jill! You and me will have to stay here, and he’s going to go off with Jill and find somewhere else to live!’

  I feebly pat her shoulder, completely out of my depth. My fellow poet, always more spontaneous and less inhibited than me, puts his arm round her and comforts her, then – even more like the man of the world he is – goes downstairs and pours her a stiff whisky.

  5

  Black Dog

  My father and sister don’t leave, of course. We’re all shocked by the crisis, but we somehow patch things up and carry on. For some weeks my father’s joshing is subdued. So, for a while, is my sister’s bad behaviour. I creep about the house like a candidate for beatification, clearing the table almost before it’s laid, taking the dog for walks. We all avoid each other’s eye. And we get back, more or less, to where we were before.

  Soon, though, another problem emerges. Not Jill this time – Elsie.

  The joie de vivre that bubbles out of her as effortlessly as spring water, we begin to discover, can, like spring water, run unpredictably low, slow to a trickle or dry up altogether. The open handbag can snap shut. The myopic sunshine can die out of her smile. The weather can quickly cloud over and become very grey indeed.

  She continues to go through the motions of family life when the depression strikes, cleaning, cooking, salting the water softener, issuing orders to Mrs Tunner and Port, doling out uncounted handfuls of banknotes, but she makes it clear that she’s continuing with the whole dreary charade simply from a sense of duty. Her stories of France and life in the tailoring cease. If she has to speak her voice is mournful. If you speak to her she looks away and up, at some uninhabited spot in the air, and if she responds at all it’s only with cryptic sarcasms. ‘Oh, really …?’ Derisive snort. ‘Oh, you are, are you? I’m sure you do …’ Another derisive snort. But the snorts are no longer humorously intended, and nor is the derision. These are serious snorts, seriously derisive. She slaps the supper down in front of us on the table in the breakfast room, and it’s simply a piece of organic matter which has been drudgingly boiled until soft enough to eat and then whacked on to a plate. Several times a week it’s a complete Ye Olde Oak ham, still retaining the shape of the tin – a brick with rounded shoulders, narrow at the top and wide at the bottom, which I suppose is intended to suggest the outline of an inverted pig’s leg. Graceless of me, I realise, to question even retrospectively the food that she has prepared for us. And pressed pig is actually a rather suitable dish for the three ungrateful pigs pressed into eating it – swine cast before swine. I grow to hate that shape, though – to hate all ham, even untinned, genuinely conoidal ham. We eat with our eyes on our plates, Elsie with her mouth open, unable to breathe through her nose.

  She has good reason to be dejected, it seems to me now that I look back on it. Out of the kindness of her heart she has let three strangers into her comfortable and well-run house, three refugees who had nowhere to live but a dump painted strawberry pink. She has tried to make a life for them. They have not responded. And I think her disappointment goes deeper still. She has always longed for children; they were the one thing lacking in her perfect marriage to the perfect Frank. She had once conceived, as she tells me sometimes when she’s in a mood to talk, and carried the baby to term, but after a prolonged and agonising labour it was stillborn, and she could never have another. Suddenly, years after all hope had been extinguished, she was offered another chance – two ready-made, reasonably presentable children, waiting only to be loved and mothered. I don’t suppose she ever had any great hopes of me – I was too old already, and too alien. My sister, though, could still be dressed and petted, guided and shaped. And it hasn’t worked out. My sister has rejected her love. She has clung to her father, and her father has taken her part. The strangers within our stepmother’s gates remain strangers, intruders from another tribe. She has made her great sacrifice in vain. Doris and Phil are not surprised to hear about her depressions; she’s always been subject to them. They laugh when I go to see them in their one room in Hampstead, where they’re sewing all weekend to make ends meet. ‘Oh Gawd!’ gasps Doris sympathetically, snorting in her turn. ‘You and Jill in the doghouse again? And your dad?’ ‘Poor old Tommy,’ says Phil. ‘Doesn’t know what’s hit him, does he. Be Dot and me next. Always something we’ve done wrong, isn’t there, Dot?’ ‘She’s used to having things her own way, Elsie, that’s the trouble.’ ‘Money, Michael! Doesn’t always make you happy!’ ‘Poor old Else. Never mind. Chin up. She’ll snap out of it.’

  And she does. She bubbles away for a bit. ‘Come on, then, old boy!’ she says to my father. ‘Get your hat and coat on! We’re going out! Where? Anywhere! And you can drive the Box of Bells, if you promise not to go pronging into anything.’ Even when the effervescence begins to go a little flat I can manage to keep her going for a while. Jolly her along, talk to her in French. Ask her about the old days. Listen respectfully as her recollections become increasingly mournful, particularly about her late first husband. ‘Oh, Michael, he was such a wonderful man, my Frank! Anything I wanted I could have. I’d just have to name it, and he’d get it for me. There aren’t men like that in the world any more.’

  When I start learning to drive she’s often pleased to let me chauffeur her. I change the silky smooth gears on the Rover with reverent care as we go to Streatham for her weekly descent upon Smith Brothers to collect her groceries. She’s received like a dowager empress looking in on her old palace. ‘And how many tins of ham this week, Mrs Frayn? Not at all, Mrs Frayn … Always a pleasure, Mrs Frayn.’ Sometimes Roland Smith is there to greet her in person – the youngest of the brothers, now running the firm. At the sight of his plump and prosperous face Elsie comes back to the bubble. ‘Come on, now, Rowley! When are you going to bring those lovely children of yours over to see me?’ Rowley steers her back towards the car, gallant, joshing. ‘I told them to put an extra dozen hams in the boot. I can see this handsome young chauffeur of yours needs feeding up.’ Yes, there are c
ertainly good times. We manage at any rate one family holiday, and it doesn’t go off too badly. Later Elsie even introduces my father to the pleasures of foreign travel – takes him to Switzerland and gets him briefly on to skis, then to Belgium and Holland to stay with some of her old friends in the pig-raising and pig-slaughtering industry. Persuades him to let her rub olive oil into his bald patch. Lets me attempt to cook spaghetti bolognese, which is then still as exotic as frogs’ legs, and which I have just discovered on my travels with Lane. She even gallantly tries to eat the result – grey nodules of half-cooked mince floating in a thin gravy.

  And then she’s down again. We’re all in the doghouse, Phil and Doris included. Even me, the peacemaker. The only creature who’s never in the doghouse is the dog. Rex is black, as black as an undertaker’s suit – the living embodiment of the black dog that Churchill, Elsie’s great hero, suffers from – his name for his own recurring depressions. Rex is never depressed himself, whatever’s going on in the house. He lies in his basket in the breakfast room, half an eye on the general world situation, ready to be instantly as jolly as his mistress at her jolliest at the possibility of a walk, or some suggestion of food – and he never has to eat Ye Olde Oak. He never takes sides – he will go walkies with any of us. While my father sits with my sister in the living room, trying to hear a variety programme on the television, or reads The Times on his own, and Elsie sits, also on her own, doing nothing, on a hard chair in the breakfast room, Rex is prepared to sit gazing soulfully up at her by the hour, even if she’s too depressed to speak, black dog with black dog, provided only that she scratches his stomach from time to time. But then he does much the same for my sister – even for me and my father, when we give him a passing scratch of the stomach ourselves. Elsie’s depressions get worse. For days she can’t speak at all. She can’t even snort – it’s as if the polyps have blocked her nose completely. This is the second image of her that comes to mind, to set beside the merry figure ladling money out of the open handbag: her sitting, too miserable even to scratch the dog, on the leather pouffe in front of the fire in the living room, gazing into the flames, with her knees sagging apart to reveal her long pink directoire knickers, as if she no longer has animation enough even to maintain the normal proprieties.

  Yes, poor Elsie, as Doris says. And my poor father. Well, my now rather more comfortably-off father. He’s risen from Technical Representative to Sales Manager by this time, and the marriage has put money in his pocket. He’s not paying rent any longer, and I suspect that he’s not making any contribution to the food bills or the upkeep of the house. His appearance is changing, and not for the worse, like Elsie’s. He looks more dapper than ever. The old hearing aid, with its pocketfuls of batteries and its web of connecting leads, has been replaced by something much more discreet and up to date. He takes to buying his suits and shirts in the West End – not quite in Savile Row, but in Harrods, where Vi had once served on the other side of the counter. He brushes his thinning short-back-and-sides flatter than ever, and grows his greying moustache thicker. The lines on his face are becoming more deeply etched. He looks rather distinguished – better turned out, I imagine, than most of the civil servants he’s selling asbestos to.

  At the weekend he takes himself off to the Members’ Enclosure at the Oval to watch cricket, or to the races, where he likes to mix with the owners and trainers in the paddock. His weekend appearance is as faultless as his weekday one: pale grey suit, carefully dinted trilby, tan toecaps with a mellow glow polished into them. When I’m a little older I sometimes go racing with him (I can’t face the cricket). He doesn’t look out of place among the owners and trainers.

  He’s given up the old liberal News Chronicle in favour of The Times. He’s ceased to call people Guv’nor. He’s becoming – almost – a gentleman. His wits remain as quick as ever, though. There’s a story about him demonstrating a sample of asbestos to someone at Heathrow to show how tough it was as fencing material. What they actually wanted, said the airport official, was not something tough at all, but something that would break on impact, to minimise damage to any aircraft that collided with it. ‘Just the thing!’ said my father, snapping the sample in two.

  Yet he’s somehow a lesser man than he was. He’s living in another house he doesn’t own – but now he doesn’t even own the furniture. And someone else does – owns house and furniture alike, the bed he sleeps in, the table he eats off, the walls around him and the roof over his head – and contrives to remind him of the fact in every gesture. His deafness seems even more profound and more isolating in a world where all the sound is soaked up by the heavy curtains and carpets, and where there are often in any case no words being spoken for him to hear. He has always moved lightly over the earth, but among the heavy alien furnishings and the heavy silences, against which all his quickness and banter are in vain, he seems suddenly even less substantial.

  Each day he escapes, as he always has done, into his own little world on four wheels. The car remains a bond between him and me, because he can still sometimes give me a lift up to town, and at the weekend he takes me out for driving lessons, which usually include a walk on Epsom Downs with the dog. The dog is Elsie’s, of course. Even the car is the firm’s.

  Daisy, his favourite sister, died back in 1943. For the death of his brother George in 1955 he buys me a black tie. ‘You’ll need it often enough in the years to come,’ he says. He’s right, and I still use it – it’s lasted longer than any other item of clothing I’ve ever possessed. I’m not sure exactly when poor Mabel goes. She vanishes from the electors’ list in 1960, but I can’t recall any opportunity to wear my black tie, and I can’t now trace a death certificate. Her niece says that she went into Moorfields Eye Hospital to have her cataracts removed, and died at some point while she was lying there – stone deaf, of course, and now with her eyes bandaged as well, under orders not to move. Mabel’s sister Nellie and her family were getting ready for a day trip to Kent when the news arrived. ‘Don’t tell your mother,’ said Nellie’s Frank to his daughter; ‘No need to spoil her day.’ Nellie takes a similarly robust view of death. When Frank dies in 1977, at the age of ninety-seven, Nellie, now ninety-four, declines to go to the funeral in favour of watching the Test match on television.

  On Sunday we sometimes drive over to Hendon to see Phyllis and Sid, where Nanny’s still alive, though only just. ‘I shan’t see another winter out, Michael.’ Phyllis, Sid and Nanny don’t return the visits. And none of my father’s family ever comes to the house.

  My sister’s changing, too. She’s settling down and cheering up; she’s beginning to make friends with Elsie, at any rate when Elsie’s in the positive phase of the cycle – becoming a little more like the daughter Elsie always wanted. Masking this new affection in mockery, just as our father does, she adopts his name for her – Tich. She also finds a new name for our father. He’s no longer ‘Daddy’. He’s ‘Pa’.

  I suppose it’s one of the ways in which she’s making herself independent of him, her equivalent to my Beethoven and adolescent Marxism. I don’t really like it. It makes him seem older, since Pa was what we used to call our grandfather. It distances him. It suggests that he’s a father in a story – a humorous story. Someone else’s story. Not quite the intimately familiar figure who begat us and cared for us, and with whom we have shared all the vicissitudes of life so far. All the same, I find myself calling him Pa as well – my sister’s very strong-willed when she finally gets going. The dynamics of the family have altered, and my father becomes even more an outsider in the house.

  *

  Whatever do we find to talk about at such length? Impossible to reconstruct old conversations after the event, but I’ve had a little help from another diary that I’m keeping intermittently around this time. It’s more expansive than previous attempts, which gives even more scope to my pomposity and self-importance. Waves of euphoria (‘… anything is possible, and great things probable … moments of ecstatic, dreamlike happiness…�
�) alternate with existential despair, precise cause unstated (‘I must have sincerity. Without that, a writer, indeed anyone, is a useless shell … My God! how can one hope to ever know what sincerity means even, down here in this dark world of lies and deliberate blindness, where there is no air, only dust, dust, dust; the dust of decay and not realising …?’) Some of our conversations seem to reflect the more negative moods. ‘A long discussion [with Lane, of course] on subjectivity and objectivity in literature in general and our own rubbish in particular… a grand orgy of mutual criticism … I need some of his super-egoistic subjectivity, which forces every thing about which he writes to become either an attribute or a gratification of his desires, while he needs some of my superaltruistic objectivity, which disconnects me from my subject as surely as death disconnects a man from life. Can a National Mind Transfusion Service be started?’ On another occasion ‘we tore to bits the character of nearly everyone in the sixth form, and then advanced to do the same thing with what our own were two years ago … agreeing that we must have been, in common with the rest of adolescents at that stage of development, living in a world of immaculate misconceptions’.

  When we meet much later in middle age, after being out of contact for many years, he’s a senior civil servant in Canada, and he tells me that I’ve caused him some professional embarrassment by announcing to the world, in a newspaper interview I’ve just given, that he and I had been communists, and that our friendship had had homo-erotic overtones. Did it, in fact? Well, it was certainly a love affair of some sort. I remember once waiting for him to arrive at my house. I’m standing in the living room looking out through the net curtains, as eager in my anticipation as I would be later waiting for a girl on a date … And here he comes, strolling in his nonchalant way, demonically handsome, in a belted raincoat of immense sophistication, like a gangster in a movie. He places a hand on the front gate, just above the plate that says ‘Chez Nous’ – hesitates for a moment – and then, instead of pushing it open, vaults it, his belted raincoat flying. My heart vaults it with him.