The Fowler Family Business

by Jonathan Meades

  He didn’t reply. She repeated: ‘I said nothing is happening.’

  ‘I heard. I was thinking, perhaps we should try someone else.’

  ‘Please … We’ve been here before. Who else?’

  Curly sat up and switched on the light. ‘I mean, maybe we ought to get Henry to see someone? One of the quacks I went to. Give him a boost. Shot of something.’

  Lavender’s cackling laugh ascended the scale. She bit his ear and exclaimed: ‘Darleenk, you is a gen-ee-us!’

  ‘Never know – might do the trick.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  Henry Fowler’s worst day yet was a bright blinding day.

  It was the hottest day of August – temperature: 31 degrees, humidity: 82 per cent.

  There was a look of murder on cabbies’ faces and a hose-pipe ban in the offing. The air was thick with particulates, with emitted grist, with gaseous suspensions which curried eyes and mucous membranes. The flies were the size of bees. In central London Henry felt like a foreigner.

  Who were all these bounteous girls with so few clothes on? With bottoms that had been poured into dangerous skirts. Oh there was so much skin, from tender biscuit to cooked crazed leather, from cleft chest to painted toe, from bra to mule. It was skin to devour. Henry wanted to be at the feast. No matter that his face was shinily self-basting. No matter that there were saline deposits describing arcs beneath his oxters and fretting his collar and spangling the chest of his royal-blue shirt. No matter – for this was Henry of the soon-to-be-reawakened appetite. He strode through the jellied air with inappropriate friskiness towards his second appointment with Mr William Savage-Smith.

  One professional to another – that’s how he conceived of his relationship with this consultant whose sobriety and respectability were such that he must have something to hide, some grubby buried vice, probably inherited from his father and practised in anonymous apartments at signal expense. He was so proper and, Henry reckoned, fee-greedy that he would not prescribe Henry the miracle drug Cocksure (not its real name, merely a ribald sobriquet) without Henry submitting to the test which had humiliated Curly, which had indirectly caused Henry, after years of near abstinence and meagre rations, once again to consider himself a sexual being.

  During their recent holiday in the northern Auvergne Henry had twice persuaded Naomi to agree that they should make love and the fact that at the last moment it hadn’t happened was due to the advice given to her by the thalassotherapist at the spa in Vichy rather than to her own unwillingness. Henry thought this promising. His brief disappointment was lifted by his delight in the verdant grandeur of the primitive post-volcanic landscape – it was as though the breasts of buried Amazons had been painted by a megalomaniac called Greenfinger. And there was solace to be had, too, in his anticipation of an appointment with Lavender the day after they returned to South London.

  He had, as Curly cannily believed he would, begun to forget the real purpose of the monthly trysts – the child, so far as Henry was concerned, would merely be the unfortunate by-product of the exercise of his lust, of the permitted adulteration of the Beard-Croney marriage: Henry would feel no more attachment to little Blenheim than a carefree rover would to a wild oat germinated far, far away over distant hills in a passing womb to which he could no longer fit a face or name.

  Henry sweated in Mr William Savage-Smith’s waiting-room. He had been disappointed on his previous visit to discover that the photographic assistance which Curly had incredulously reported was not provided here. It was, a nurse had told him, the ‘signature speciality’ of Mr Gervaise Bassett (currently holidaying at his villa near Urbino and so unavailable to see Mr Fowler). It was a speciality eschewed by Mr Savage-Smith not because it might be considered offensive to his all-female staff (their sensibilities were, anyway, perennially ignored) but because he was anxious not to be accused of plagiarising Mr Bassett, a man jealous of his reputation as a pioneer and innovator.

  ‘It’s very small, the genito-urinary world,’ the nurse had explained. ‘I mean, everyone knows everyone else’s business.’

  On this boiling day she brought Henry a cup of sweet tea. ‘There – that’ll cheer you up.’

  Henry shrugged quizzically as she left the room. He hoped that his demeanour was already cheerful. He was indignant that his cheerfulness had not been recognised. He had beamed at her with what he considered an appropriate interest – appreciative, certainly, but far from leering, well this side of lupine. Yes, with a smile that said ‘all’s well in the world of which we are equal (and only incidentally sexual) citizens’, with, indeed, a smile composed of good cheer and zealously tended teeth.

  Mr Savage-Smith hardly looked up. He mumbled a greeting. He shuffled in his chair – a gesture towards a gesture at standing. He continued reading a printout. He kneaded an ear lobe. Mr Savage-Smith’s professionalism impressed and enervated Henry. All this show to convince his patients (and himself) that he was more than a mere pill pusher. He was a past master at being an eminent consultant: his voluminous gamut of tics and his stagey business with his bifocals advertised the gulf between his side of the desk where an initiate of a profession’s arcana sits and the other side. Exclusion, Henry recognised, was what defined every profession. He practised it himself. It was what differentiated him from civilians. Without exclusion and the stamp of expertise it brought … well, the unthinkable might occur: the bereaved might realise that they could do it themselves, take the law into their own hands. They’d conduct backyard cremations. They’d dig graves in their gardens as though burying the family pet.

  Henry ran an eye over the silver-framed family photographs on the desk. The Savage-Smith children were animal lovers: they bestrode ponies and stroked labradors – experiences which had been denied to Henry’s family because of Naomi’s distaste for quadrupeds, their smell, their moult, their feed. There were group portraits at christenings: Henry’s children had not been baptised, nor, reciprocally, had they been bar mitzvahed. Here were the Savage-Smiths at one of their daughters’ weddings. That’ll come soon for Ben and Lennie, Henry thought fondly, smiling to himself about how quickly they’d grown up, wondering how he’d get on with their respective partners. He feared the prospect of being a grandfather but knew equally that he’d take pride in that status. He hoped that his parents would live long enough to see their great-grandchildren. Four generations of Fowler in a silver frame – now that will be something to celebrate.

  ‘This—’ Mr Savage-Smith cleared his throat: ‘This is difficult …’ He clenched his hands as though at prayer.

  What a performance!

  Henry was due later that afternoon to see a client, a Miss Moodyson, a septuagenarian spinster whose brusqueness and rudeness to him were inexcusable despite her having lost both parents (ninety-seven and ninety-nine) within three days of each other. It’s often the way, it’s the shock at the first’s fatal stroke that does for the second. Her manner at their previous meeting had been condescending, she had evidently been under the illusion that she was addressing a tradesman. Henry would borrow from Mr Savage-Smith, he would treat her to a magisterial display of professionalism. He felt inspired.

  ‘You’re married … Ah, what’s that, twenty-four years.’ His delivery as he read from a file was slow as if resolving a conundrum, as if speaking to himself. ‘Good innings nowadays,’ he added in a smiley aside, actually addressing Henry. ‘And two children … seventeen, sixteen … Uhmm. What did you, ah, do about the children? If I can put it that way.’

  Henry pulled a face of bafflement, regarded him askew: ‘Sorry but you’ve lost me there. I’m not quite with you.’

  ‘I’m loath to invoke our friends the shrinks … the chippy brigade. Trouble with most of them is they neglected the Airfix side of their development: you’ll never be a surgeon if you couldn’t glue models. Yah? Still, they may be on to something with this notion that, how shall I put it, that a continued appetite in middle life is dependent on fecundity in youth … comparative yo
uth. Of course there’s no absolute proof of a causal link, never is with Jimmy Shrink … But circumstantial … Thing is I suppose we have tended to overlook the possibility that infertility and impotence could be connected simply because they’re so routinely connected by the layman.’ He spoke the word ‘layman’ with an amused sneer.

  Henry nodded complicitly to signal that he, too, knew all about laymen a.k.a. the non-professionals, a.k.a. the pitifully uninitiated who demand to be led like lambs.

  ‘The new thinking on this one’s if a chap’s conscious of his infertility or a low sperm count it acts as an inhibitor. One’s touching here in a way on … on very big questions. What are we for? And the answer that our bodies seem to give us is that we’re for reproduction. And if we don’t reproduce our generative equipment takes industrial inaction, ha! Bit of a conundrum … If we don’t do our bit to increase the human race then it looks as though we’re supposed to forfeit the pleasures of sex – that’s the message I’m afraid. Not a very cheering one. Especially not for the gay tendency: astonishing the incidence of impotence in middle-aged homosexuals – they’re not necessarily infertile of course but they’re pretty much all childless, goes without saying. Electively childless … which is different. Haven’t reproduced by choice.’

  ‘I’m not homosexual. Never have been. And I wouldn’t describe … I mean it’s not impotence … not per se, nowhere near. Not actual—’

  ‘Course not. Course not. Appreciate that. What I’m suggesting is that your condition – I must say you’ve done jolly well to spot it, nip it in the bud. Early bird! Ah? It’s nothing that InterVene can’t sort out p.d.q. Indeed yours is precisely the sort of case it’s intended to treat. Childless … Symptoms of prospective impotence in middle life – hints at what’s to come. Eh?’

  ‘Yes …?’ Henry was ever more bemused. ‘But I’m not childless. I’ve got two children. Like you said. Sixteen and seventeen.’

  ‘Young adults … Their maturation, becoming sexual beings themselves – it’s just the thing to set off the sense of inadequacy which manifests in partial impotence.’

  ‘I don’t feel inadequate,’ replied Henry, stiffly.

  Mr Savage-Smith smiled: ‘Of course you don’t. The children. Boys? Girls?’

  ‘One of each.’

  ‘There you are then. They’re getting to the age when they’re going to reproduce and – well it’s like a worm isn’t it? Working away at you, that knowledge. Their generative capability is going to be a reproach to their adoptive father. Going to make him feel inadequate that he couldn’t have children of his own.’

  Henry shook his head long-sufferingly. He laughed. ‘No. No, I’m not their adoptive father. I think you’ve got your files in a twist.’

  ‘Ah … Ah, so you took the donor route. Heavens – that makes you something of a pioneer in …’ He scanned the file: ‘What? ’75?’

  ‘I don’t quite … This donor route. How’s that relevant? They’re our children. Our own – they’re not adopted. There weren’t donors involved. I don’t … I think there must be … It’s probably a computer error. Usually is.’ Henry grinned reassuringly.

  The grin dissipated as he witnessed Mr Savage-Smith’s aghast reaction. The consultant seemed to be suffering a turn. He cradled his forehead, covered his eyes. Then he worriedly studied the window – four panes, one so warped that the house opposite was all bendy bricks and vorticist cornice. He distractedly chewed the ball of his right thumb. He scrutinised Henry as though he had never seen him before. He was looking at a different man, at a man whose life he was about to change for ever, who was gaping at him with an inquisitive show of filled teeth. He fixed him eye to eye. He spoke slowly and warily with no attempt to dissemble either his shock or the gravity of what he had to impart.

  He could have spared Henry Fowler. Another consultant – Mr Gervaise Bassett, perhaps – might have allowed the man to live on in ignorance, in the comfort of his lie. Mr Savage-Smith didn’t hesitate. He took a momentous moral decision in a split second, in the conviction that to have evaded it would have been a hippocratic dereliction which he could never have forgiven in himself.

  ‘Mr Fowler, there’s no easy way to put this. You are infertile.’

  Henry’s disbelieving laugh was an articulated wince.

  ‘I hadn’t realised,’ continued Mr Savage-Smith, ‘you weren’t apprised of—’

  ‘Ridiculous. It’s … What … What are you basing it on? Infert—’

  ‘The test results are unequivocal I’m afraid … The samples you deposited—’

  ‘They’ll have mixed them up. They do it with babies. Do it all the time. You can’t pick up a paper without some … If they can do it with babies they’re not going to have any problem doing it with specimen jars are they?’

  ‘I only wish there had been a mistake – but they’re fail-safe, our procedures. Samples are split, they go to two laboratories, independent, no contact between them.’

  ‘Tell me this …’ Henry repeatedly jabbed a finger. He swallowed before he could speak again. There was a lachrymose catch in his voice. ‘How many infertile men … do you know … who’ve got two children?’ He stared at Mr Savage-Smith whose face was obscured by his hands. Was the man trying to hide? ‘Two children. How can I be infertile?’ He was accusing. He was pleading. Mostly he was pleading.

  Mr Savage-Smith’s sympathy was engaged. He murmured through clasped hands: ‘Ah, perhaps … perhaps you should have a talk with your wife.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  The scissors glimmer in Henry Fowler’s hand.

  The nocturnal city’s penumbra seeps through uncurtained windows. He steals through this house which is his house, which he knows so well, which is a history of more than a quarter of his life: here’s the parquet tile which clicks even when stepped on softly; here’s the stair-rod with the kink which wasn’t there one day and was the next; here are the prints of oasts and elms at the turn of the stairs; and here, invisible because of reflective glass, is the hand-coloured, yard-long photograph of the Crystal Palace.

  He opens the door of Leonora’s room, a door he used to open on all fours as Barry the Bear, roaring, when she was little, when she was a lost princess squirming with delighted fright. He used to open it as Thargul the Kreblonite when she was the doomed space maiden Zurgtrene. He was her father then. He longs to be her father still: he is her father, surely. The bedroom admits no light. He closes his eyes to prepare them for the solid blackness. Lennie insists on blinds and lined cutains. She smells the way young girls will, of warm laundry and newly baked biscuit, of downy skin and chewing-gum. Her breath fills the room. It guides him to her. He moves gingerly. As his eyes adjust to the darkness he begins to discern the disposition of her body beneath the single sheet’s pleats and folds. These are the soft contours of her shoulder. She lies diagonally across the bed, almost prone. How tall she has grown, a stretch-Naomi, fine and equine, long limbed with her mane of chestnut hair sweeping across the pillow as though fixed by a head wind. He looks down on her with a love that’s unconditional even though its very foundation is in question. His grief numbs him. He stares at her and wonders – who are you?

  Clenching his teeth in anxiety lest a cracking joint betray him Henry Fowler squats beside the bed, clutching the scissors. He fears that his balance is impaired so he slides his right leg behind him, kneels on that knee in a pose suggestive of chivalry. He lifts her thick hair from her pillow with his left hand, resisting all temptation to stroke it, grips a hank between thumb and forefinger, manoeuvres himself wrigglingly on the carpet, lifts the scissors and cuts. He puts them into his pocket and takes from it an envelope in to which he slides the lock of hair. And as Lennie stirs, murmuring in her sleep, Henry creeps from her room. He closes the door, sweeps his brow with his cuff, seals the envelope with what meagre spittle his dry mouth will yield, replaces it in his pocket and, a thief in the night, tiptoes away. He hears Naomi’s car draw up outside.

  There’s that
old familiar screech when she clumsily engages reverse as an auxiliary brake. It still brings a smile to his face, the way she can never get the hang of it, it still has him shaking his head in a pipe-and-carpet-slippers way, fondly.

  ‘Ooh. What a …’ Naomi sighed as she dumped her bag on a chair beside the kitchen table. ‘How are you?’ she asked Henry who sat at it pretending engrossment in the new edition of The Right Box.

  ‘OK,’ he lied, ‘all right. Yeah.’

  ‘I had to play with Sheila. Wuss – she’s so timid … No sense of adventure. Never taken a risk in her life. Still, I made a small slam – hearts. No thanks to her.’

  ‘Well done.’

  ‘I’m going to – d’you want a Cointreau or something? B and B?’

  Without waiting for his reply she walked from the room. Then her head reappeared round the door jamb: ’Oh ‘fore I forget – They’ve asked Ben to stay on … That’s good isn’t it. He’s going to come back after the weekend. Is that all right with you?’

  Henry raised his shoulders noncommittally and spread wide his palms, in one of his now unselfconscious ‘Jew-ish’ gestures. He cursed silently. She walked through to the dining-room where she kept an ebony-and-ormolu-effect trolley loaded with sweet liquors of the world. She raised her voice: ‘I did ring. At about four. But Horse Face said you were out.’

  He heard the chink of sculpturally extravagant bottles.

  ‘Mistuh Foalher hez en h’ppointment,’ she exaggerated Mrs Grusting’s parade-ground enunciation. ‘Did you?’ she yelled.

  ‘Did I what, love?’ He heard himself call her love. It formed on his tongue without his leave, exited his mouth before he could stop it.

  ‘Have an appointment at four o’clock. I never know with her. She might just be being difficult.’