The Fowler Family Business

by Jonathan Meades

  Henry asked: ‘Did he really take off his head?’

  ‘Near as dammit. What’s ’e called? Sstt – chum o’ yours – copper with the lupus and the squeaky voice …’

  ‘Dai Turnbull?’

  ‘That’s the feller … Reckoned a hit man with a chain-saw couldn’t have done a better job … He cut an ear off the poodle as well,’ Verdon added gravely.

  Six youths on community-service orders took four hours to clean the pavement, gutter and road of blood. They never joyrode again.

  ‘Guess it’ll grow out won’t it … Go to seed … Turn into just another hedge, any old hedge,’ Henry mused ruefully.

  His appetite for nostalgia and for its sibling, self-pity, was so keen that he was able to mourn the disappearance of a parochial folly before it happened. No matter that he had previously regarded the ten-foot-long indeciduous poodle, like its late maker, with a grudgingly tolerant disdain. Now that it was to be lost to him, now that it was to become another blemish on his patrimonial patch, he discovered a well of affection for it, he recognized its value as an eccentric landmark, he wanted to go and see it, to fix it for ever among the memories he collected and curated for future Fowlers.

  ‘Must have taken a fair old spot of upkeep,’ observed Verdon. ‘Shame really, fellow of his talents with no one to pass it on to. There’ll have been a bit of wedge there too.’

  ‘There will indeed: Dappled Glade, Leafy Glade, Ever Glade – think about it … what was it, boof, five? seven? years when he was never off the telly.’

  ‘More like ten, Henry. And all his book writing.’

  ‘All right for some, eh? Do we know the identity of the bum bandit who has copped the wad?’

  ‘As they say.’

  ‘In their line of business.’

  ‘We like to call at the back door,’ Verdon rejoined. ‘Noo – we do not know which particular plague-ridden bender just won the pools. The solicitors are what you’d call terminally discreet. M-A-N-C-H-E-S. Pronounced, would you believe, man cheese. You can see why they got his patronage.’

  ‘You know it’s something I couldn’t never figure – how did he keep it out of the papers?’

  Verdon was exaggeratedly incredulous: ‘Come on, old son. There’s no story is there. Freddie Glade and rent-boy? Freddie Glade takes it up the gary? I mean, it’s like, y’know – Gorby discovered to have mark on head, or … or Pope shits in the woods. Now, Freddie Glade comes out as hetero – now you’re talking.’

  ‘And pigs might fly,’ nodded Henry.

  ‘Pre-cise-ly.’

  ‘Look. I must actually. Fly. Naomi.’

  ‘Self-fulfilling prophecy old son. Be seeing you. Look how you’re going.’

  The cloister cypresses reminded Henry of an oleographic reproduction of a Victorian painting on the landing in his parents’ house: those trees, a dozen nuns, raspberry cirrus, an intimation of happy death, of heaven even. He hadn’t looked at it in years. He felt an unwonted surge of affection for Freddie as he walked along the outside of the brick arcade, which was unfamiliar to him – only two miles from home, yet he’d never previously set foot in the place, dedicated to St Blaise, patron of the throat: one reason, no doubt, why Freddie had stipulated it. Another would be that this Anglo-Catholic church’s ritual was even more elaborate than the usual run of such smoky Guignol. Henry imagined that each of the hieratic battalion which officiated wore beneath his chasuble a studded leather bollock holster and a bolt through the glans. And the taste for incense’s choking reek must be determined by sexual preference like the taste for poodles, mauve, walnut coffins, art and antiques – all the things that the family man with a proper job and responsibilities has no time to like. Nor the inclination.

  Naomi, who had sobbed to exhibition level throughout the service, was standing outside the church’s showy west front with a hanky to her face, with Ben and Lennie clinging to her and Curly doing staunch backup work. Henry didn’t know the three other people with them, a buxom Titian and two lean, crop-haired men. They formed one of twenty or so groups, passing their germs on to each other’s cheeks, gripping arms in competitive caring. Henry, exiting the cloisters, was wondering how many of the mourners had actually known Freddie and how many were what his trade knows as vultures: given Freddie’s predilections he had probably known the lot of them.

  ‘Where the hell have you been Henry?’ Naomi asked.

  Grieving faces turned. Henry winced at her loudness. Ben and Lennie scowled at him with their mother’s accusatory eyes.

  ‘I was just having a word with Verd there.’

  ‘It’s a funeral Henry, not an effing trade convention.’

  Henry’s expression manifested an evident puzzlement which further stoked Naomi’s ire.

  ‘Henry, this is about life … death. D’you see? Someone has died. This is not about swapping gossip and … and picking up tips from other bloody funeral directors. You’re a mourner, not some … you’re not here to do industrial espionage.’

  Henry was mildly affronted. ‘I don’t think Fowler & Son have got anything to learn from Meckiff & Miller.’

  The buxom Titian mouthed ‘Whoops!’ over Naomi’s shoulder.

  Naomi sobbed incredulously: ‘You really don’t get it do you … you … He’s just a number to you. Isn’t he? You aren’t even working and he’s just a number. Another day, another body, another box.’

  Henry shook his head at her miscomprehension. He realised that, in their nineteen years of marriage, he had never previously been to a funeral with Naomi.

  He had lived to that day in complacent ignorance of what sort of mourner-profile she would possess, of how such an occasion might affect her. And despite her turning away with Ben and Lennie knotted to her, despite his humiliation in witnessing his adored family stumble like one misbegotten sexiped across the blowy yard so that Naomi might express her grief to another group, he was uxoriously proud of how touched she was, of how wholeheartedly she had entered into the spirit of the event, of how she had responded the way any funeral director would have wished. Verdon was doing something right, then. Henry was jealous.

  ‘Henry. This is Lavender,’ Curly said. His hand tentatively contacted the buxom Titian’s lower back. ‘Lavender. Beard, Henry Fowler.’

  Henry nodded offhandedly at the woman whilst watching Naomi hugging strangers and dabbing her streaked eyes and stroking Lennie’s bob and gesturing. Lavender Beard followed his eyes to demonstrate her sympathy for him and to forgive his brusqueness: ‘They’re never easy, these partings … The English way of death … The embarrassment of it all … Are we allowed to cry … I sometimes wonder if anyone even knows how to cry. Good for her.’

  Portings, dearth. Her accent was New England aping the old English of black-and-white films.

  ‘Naomi’s Jewish – they’ve got a different … uh. It’s a …’

  ‘Let’s say they’re not bound by a Protestant strait-jacket.’

  ‘Something like that,’ Henry agreed.

  ‘It’s the real English disease,’ said Lavender, ‘inhibition. It’s a cultural … it’s a behavioural virus.’

  ‘Didn’t appear to affect Freddie,’ Curly observed.

  ‘Well if he was as much of a nelly as you make out …’

  ‘Didn’t you know him then?’ Henry asked, surprised.

  Lavender Beard smiled and whispered: ‘I’m a gatecrasher. Promise not to tell.’

  ‘We’re going straight on after. It’d have been logistical mayhem if Lavender hadn’t come,’ Curly explained.

  ‘And I’ve got this thing about widow’s weeds,’ she trilled. She was wearing a tightly cut black grosgrain suit with a peplum and a hobble skirt, a sort of black boater with a veil, high black courts, a jet choker above a thick lardy roll of cleavage.

  ‘Ah … Where you off to?’

  ‘Newhaven … Going over to Rouen for a couple of nights.’

  Henry gaped, unwittingly. Curly noticed. He grinned slyly, like a child who has behaved wi
th unprecedented self-determination. Curly … Rouen … With a vamp, a size 16 vamp maybe – but what a piece of homework, what a piece of liquid engineering, her lips were the colour of the plums on Her Majesty. From the same mould as Jane Russell. Curly … How had this happened?

  The only holidays Curly took were with Henry and Naomi, Ben and Lennie: he’d join them for a seaside week at Wimereux or Sables d’Olonne, at De Panne or Plougastel – he loved to build model roads in the sand. Otherwise his travel was restricted to traffic-light conferences in Essen, pedestrianisation fests in Chemnitz, hard-shoulder binges in the suburbs of unpronounceable towns in week-old republics: postcard from Brno.

  ‘Rouen? Great!’ Henry Fowler had a ready gift for bogus enthusiasm. ‘Don’t tell me: medieval cathedral.’

  ‘That’s the one,’ said Curly.

  ‘Lots of scoff and lots of boff. That’s the one,’ Lavender purred.

  Chapter Eight

  When an Englishman dies what happens to his personal pewter tankard that has always hung above the bar in his local? Is it reclaimed by his estate? Is it kept as a memorial to him in situ, in the place where, so his drinking pals would claim, he had spent the best years of his life? Is it used to toast him on the anniversary of his death so that his name will live for ever more? Does it merely become part of the common store of jugs which mine host jovially fills with a short measure of watered ale for passing trade?

  Such questions preoccupied Lavender Beard Croney whose retention of her name was mocked by Naomi Fowler as ‘token feminism’, as ‘having her cake and eating it’, as ‘precious’. Naomi was also fiercely derisive of:

  a)Her so-called profession of social-bloody-anthropologist and her use of the title Doctor: she doesn’t go so far as to introduce herself thus, but it’s there on the business card.

  b)Her pointless wanky jobs teaching bollocks at the LSE and UCL and doing research, whatever that means, at somewhere called the Institute which is probably one and a half dismal rooms in Euston (it was).

  c)Her piddling preoccupation with the Pewter Tankard question, and with countless others like it. She gnawed at them, wouldn’t ever let go. Talk about curiosity killed the cat – but it didn’t, of course. Didn’t kill her. The cow’s got a constitution like an ox and at least nine lives.

  d)Her casual boastfulness about her ‘cultivated’ background, her parents’ taste, her idyllic WASP childhood, her wonderful years at Brandeis, her familiarity with select country clubs – all of which might be interpreted as covert anti-Semitism.

  e)Her patronisation of everyone, but everyone, as a case study like we’ve got saucers deforming our mouths and human bones dangling from our ears and we run around in the buff apart from parrot feathers and lion intestines and have three tits and belong to some tribe for God’s sake.

  Cf:

  f)Her Anglophilia, and her wanting to be more English than the English, to be terminally English – just listen to her accent. She can’t quite get it right but does she try! She is a walking inventory of castles and moated manors. When she drops names it’s like an avalanche. She has memorised Debrett’s. Lords, she loves them. But maybe that love is not reciprocated. For, six years after arriving in England as some kind of research student, she has settled for Curly who is indeed a younger son but not in the sense that Lavender uses it. Why is it that when a certain sort of English queer gets married he always gets married to an Anglophiliac American? Don’t these women know, or is it that in their anxiety to land a mate they are prepared to overlook the matter of contrary sexual preference? And their wedding! She drove round for weeks looking for the perfect church, like something off a greetings card, and when she found it she dreamed up a lie about her ancestors’ links with that part of Kent – or is it Sussex? Near Ashdown Forest and Frant, round there. She even serves you warm white wine because she read that that’s what the fridgeless aristocratic English do.

  g) Her energetically faked, deafeningly protracted orgasms – which caused the precocious, mock-innocent Lennie to ask at breakfast in the thin-walled holiday bungalow on Noirmoutier whether the previous evening’s molluscs and crustacea had disagreed with her.

  Forsaking her self-tutored Englishness, evasiveness, discretion and periphrasis she replied, ‘Curly – sorry, Uncle Curly, is tireless, sweetheart, he likes to keep a girl awake all night. And I’m the lucky girl.’

  Henry Fowler, reading a two-day-old Daily Mail and dunking a croissant in a cup of British Working Man’s tea as his concession to France, raised his eyebrows to Naomi, who wasn’t taken in for a moment. She was in no doubt that Lavender’s bed opera was occasioned by the presence of an audience, which included, of course, Henry – just as her bulging bikini top and tiny thong with its russet fringe of vermicular hairs were worn for the entire beach.

  She and Curly would condescend to join the Fowlers after a punishing daily round of churches, châteaux, galleries, tumuli, salt pans, windmills, canal systems, U-boat pens, bookshops, stationery shops, charcuteries, antiques warehouses. And as for Lavender’s French! Naomi was convinced by the courteous bewilderment of waiters and garage staff and by the helpless grimaces of the appliqué-pullovered, silver-nailed, platinumblonde crone from the letting agency that Lavender spoke the language as a boast, as a means to impress the monoglot Fowlers rather than as a medium of international communication – which it evidently wasn’t. Lavender was blithely unembarrassed by the incomprehension which met her most elementary requests and greetings. She ascribed it to the unfamiliarity of south Breton tradesfolk with her Parisian accent. When her telephonic order of, inter alia, 2 kilos of onions had resulted in the delivery of 2 kilos of kidneys (and a change of menu) she poured herself a late-morning pastis and with a forbearing smile asked Naomi, standing outside the window with Ben’s surfboard: ‘What can you expect of people who don’t even know the subjunctive?’ Naomi couldn’t remember what the subjunctive was, and didn’t care that she couldn’t remember. It wouldn’t have surprised her, however, if Lavender was merely parroting a specious polemic in a news magazine headlined ‘Les Jeunes: pourquoi suppriment-ils le subjonctif?’

  Both women knew that this first joint holiday, already long postponed, would also be the last. Not that it had been without its successes. They had enjoyed two high tides together sitting with a bottle on the slope at the end of the causeway from Beauvoir-sur-Mer watching as drivers stranded by the surging ocean abandoned their cars to run for the structures like high-diving boards which punctuated the road every 200 metres and offered refuge if not solace as those cars were inundated.

  Another day they were in a tailback caused by the fatal collision of two vans and a lorry on a shimmering black road lined with hypermarkets and furniture megastores in the outskirts of La Roche-sur-Yon when Curly uttered a triumphal ‘Yes!’, scrambled blindly from the driver’s seat, causing a screeching ambulance to swerve and its crew of paramedics to wish him dead, and ran across the forecourt of Tiffauges S.A., through the ranks of primary-coloured, factory-fresh tractors, autoharrows and combines and into the showroom where, surrounded by dummies kitted for pest control (apple-green protective clothing, breathing apparatus, sprays, dorsal canisters), generators, pumps, sample fences, cow prods, was displayed a metallic-green Citroën SM, c. 1972.

  He stroked it, contorted himself to squint at it, was so rapt by it that he started when a mottled nose with moustache attached greeted him.

  ‘He’s got a real thing about those,’ rued Lavender, watching anxiously as Curly nodded to the loquacious salesman. ‘He bid for one at Bonham’s – I had to stop him when he got to 12,000.’

  Naomi wasn’t sure whether this was a pecuniary boast, another of Lavender’s fantasies.

  ‘How many Citroëns has he got? At the most recent count?’

  Lavender, distracted, shook her head: ‘Eight? Ten? I don’t know – there are some I’ve never seen.’

  ‘I always,’ said Naomi with gauged nonchalance, ‘think of them as his children.’


  Lavender turned sharply towards where she sat on the back seat and fixed her with angry eyes. They were also vulnerable eyes, hurt eyes.

  ‘His children? What do you mean – his children? They’re his … They’re cars. Which he happens to believe are works of art. And collects. Like other people collect … Coalport – or netsuke.’

  ‘I know they are cars.’ Naomi emphasised each word. ‘Doesn’t stop them being child substitutes though does it?’

  ‘I guess we’ll have to wait till we have children to find out,’ Lavender replied. ‘If he sells them then we’ll know you were right.’ And she turned to monitor Curly as two police cars screeched past.

  He bought the Citroën SM. It’s in a lock-up off Gypsy Hill. He drives it a couple of times a month. He hasn’t sold his collection; indeed he goes on adding to it. His latest acquisition is a van with corrugated-metal sides which Lavender has nicknamed Ted’s Fort after a shack on the Maberley Road allotments of the same material.

  He hasn’t sold the collection. Curly and Lavender have no children, so the matter of child substitutes has not been put to the test. Why do they have no children when both so want them? When they both so yearn for their life’s orderly straits to be breached by noise and egg stains? They have tried for children, how they’ve tried. They have paid rapt attention to Lavender’s calendar and diet.

  Secretly she rocks old cradles in museums. She’ll always offer to tend a buggy for a mother whose baby is making its first steps – such displays of selflessness are treated with wariness by teen slatterns with their white stilettos, stonewashed jeans and blue-veined, maggot-white skin. They clutch their three packs of Raffles and gape at her with victim eyes. She extends the superstition of the empty pram to supermarket trolleys with seat and harness, she wheels them dreamily for hours, an indecisive shopper, talking under her breath, attracting CCTV’s attention before she makes her first purchase. She despises her behaviour. She despises herself for brushing against pregnant women in trains, for patting the distended bellies of strangers at parties – she feels an impudent fool when they turn out merely to be fat. She cooks only odd numbers of eggs. She drew the line at vaginal pessaries steeped in the first faeces excreted by a newborn baby, and there are no hayricks to sleep on in South London. She avoids lettuce and parsley, picking the one from mixed salads, scraping the other from potatoes, fish, whatever surface it speckles. She ingests proprietary preparations of ginseng, deeming it to be a form of mandrake.