The Fowler Family Business

by Jonathan Meades

  Henry added: ‘I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting him.’

  Lavender trilled: ‘It’s brilliant isn’t it? It’s classic Arends and Page.’

  She excitedly cited those authorities’ ‘classic study’ of the breakdown of marriages between partners of different races, colours, religions, nationalities. They had investigated 500 or perhaps 900 such broken marriages (Henry wasn’t hearing well, he had neglected his earwax routine since returning Home). One of their conclusions was that women who have contracted exogamous marriages and who subsequently conduct adulterous liaisons are three times as likely to conduct them with members of their own tribe/race/sect, etc, than with members of their husband’s or other alien group. Such liaisons may be regarded as redemptive. By entering into such a union the woman is reaffirming her link with the group which she has betrayed and whose genes she has depleted.

  ‘That’s pretty deep … Yeah, thought-provoking,’ said Henry.

  Is that why Naomi had slept with Freddie Glade?

  It didn’t make him feel any different about it. He remained, more than a month after the revelation of the deception practised on him, numb and peculiarly invulnerable. Hurt? Hurt was to come. He had yet to appreciate the weight of his loss. He was rehearsed at telling himself that he was no longer obliged to endure Lennie’s aspirantly worldly sarcasm and her brother’s sullen sexuality. He was spared the burden of commenting enthusiastically on Naomi’s purchases of the day. Just how many ways were there of murmuring appreciation whilst hinting that pecuniary prudence might be in order tomorrow, or next week – fairly soon anyway?

  ‘Could be, though,’ he suggested, ‘that they’re just homesick – so to speak.’

  ‘But why are they homesick? What are they homesick for? Obviously,’ Lavender observed, ‘there’s the question of … of the identification of the lover with the father.’

  She was into her stride. A Jewish woman who marries an uncircumcised gentile will suffer difficulty in deluding herself that she is marrying (and re-enacting the primal scene with) her father. And things are even harder for a black woman married to a white man. How can she pretend that it is her father’s flesh which she takes within her, which surrounds her, when that flesh is the wrong colour.

  Henry thought, she can wear a blindfold. People do.

  ‘All sex aspires to the state of incest,’ Lavender murmured as though her contention were beyond dispute.

  Curly smiled: ‘I’m your Daddy darling. And later, my sugarsweet, Daddy’s going to leave you to play with your Uncle Henry here. And you’re to do just what Uncle asks.’

  Henry eurekaed to himself, loud enough though to be heard: ‘Of course – that’s it.’

  Lavender was surprised and alarmed before she was flattered. This was different. Henry’s swollen mauve top looked dangerous. This was different. On every previous occasion he had sprawled on her. He had covered her as a practised stallion might a mare, with a hireling’s brisk efficiency. The end had been the thing, not the means. Indeed the procedure had been almost chaste. He had been there on generative business: a gent from the fertiliser trade, spraying. His embarrassed jocularity was anaphrodisiac.

  But tonight his behaviour is that of a lover. He doesn’t envelop her in an embrace as if to conceal his sex and to avoid meeting her eyes. He kneels. Their only contact is genital. His eyes feast on her dark aureola. She responds by grasping his scrotal sac, by digging her nails into its tight skin, by trying to pierce it with their almond tips. She can’t stop herself. This is dirty sex. She tells herself so even as she is in her gasping throes. This is outside their procreative compact. Limits have been exceeded. She is enjoying this – she feels that she is committing an adulterous act, that the pumping is more important to her than anything in the world, more important to her than the putative fruit of the seed which Henry declines to release into the womb whose neck he bruises with his ceaseless thrusting: an obdurate cyclops roving on urgent business attempts to batter down a door which opens the other way.

  That night Lavender feigned sleep when Curly returned, murmured his surprise at finding the light out and slipped into bed beside her. Her body was a plausible liar: the rhythm of her breathing, her susurrus hum, the roll of her limbs as they swam in dreams. It didn’t occur to him that she might be keeping her eyes tight shut against the memory of the preceding hours, against him. It didn’t occur to him that she’d been crying at her infidelity.

  It would have shamed her to face him. She despised herself for having permitted Henry to treat her like a lover. She despised herself further for having acted like a lover, for having conjoined him in a manner determined by concupiscence rather than by generational urgency. No one ever got pregnant by ingesting sperm: indeed the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) specifically proscribed fellatio, ‘lunching off the cardinal’ as novices in the Holy See have it, as an inadmissible form of contraception.

  The next night was even worse.

  Curly was green from drinking. He was red from crying. He had his chin in his hands at the kitchen table. A bowl of melting ice-cubes stood beside an almost empty bottle of pastis.

  Lavender, a ziggurat of supermarket bags, gaped in alarm.

  ‘What … Whatever’s the matter? What’s happened?’

  Curly shook his head.

  ‘Darling!’

  She dropped the bags and kneeled beside him.

  ‘What is it?’

  He put his hands on her shoulders. He wore the expression of a wronged pet. He persisted in shaking his head: ‘I can’t … I can’t believe it. Oh …’ ‘It’s OK. Just …’

  ‘I’ve never felt so fucking betrayed in all my life.’

  A skein of wool filled her throat. Her heart capsized.

  How did he know? What had she done to give herself away? Had she spoken in her sleep? Are there no secrets?

  She flung herself against him, hugged him, beseeching forgiveness.

  She pleaded: ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry – I never meant …’

  Curly wasn’t listening. He sobbed. His speech was snuffly with thick vibrato: ‘How how could he? How could he do it? He knew … It’s the most … most grotesque abuse. It’s me. It’s my fault. I should never … God, darling please forgive me, please … I must have been mad … dream up an idea like that. And him just take fucking advantage …’

  A shiny squeezer in the open dishwasher glared accusingly at her.

  ‘Darling it’s not your fault,’ she said. She stroked his cheek. His face was tear blotched. ‘It’s mine.’

  ‘All you wanted was a child … God what a …’ Curly’s hands suddenly frisked his body questingly. He looked around him, as though dislocated, as though intoxication had so amended his perception that his everyday surroundings were alien when they were merely askew. He stumblingly rose from his chair, tripped on a disgorging polythene bag, crushed a tub of double cream without realising he’d done so and steadied himself on the chair where his jacket was slung with a sleeve inside out escaping from itself. He struggled with the writhing garment. He eventually extricated a quartered sheet of writing paper which he thrust at Lavender at the second attempt. He was bustled backwards as if a burly gust of gale had struck him. From his position buttressed by the wall he gestured and exhorted: ‘Look at that. Look at it.’

  She hesitated. Whose poison pen? Was Henry so consumed by guilt that he must confess? Still kneeling, she winced at Curly, an imploring ‘Must I?’ which also hinted at her helplessness. She unfolded the paper.

  The name William Savage-Smith was printed in Baskerville at the top. She did not immediately recognise it. She read the slightly smeared script – trust a pompous doctor to use a fountain pen she thought.

  Dear Mr Croney,

  I should be grateful if you would telephone me in a matter of the utmost confidentiality.

  Yours sincerely,

  William Savage-Smith

  6th November

  This man apparently had a role to play in their li
fe. He had already been a harbinger of ill tidings. Now he was a scarlet-letter man, a whisperer. She sensed his shadow over what was left of their marriage. This is the end she told herself. And all for what? How cheaply we sell what’s precious. How biddable we are. How …

  What was that date? That was last week. That was nine days before last night.

  ‘Went to see him. Know what he told me. Didn’t actually tell me. No, no, no, no. Oh no. Far too discreet. Hippocratic … the privacy, all that. He sort of left me to discover – uh, obliquely. We, you and me, are not going to have a baby. No mewling, no … no nappies – look on the bright side, eh? D’you know why? Because Henry is infertile. We’re two of a kind. No baby juice. He’s betrayed me, he’s betrayed us, worst of all he’s betrayed you. And it’s all down to my fucking stupid … Never going to let him in this house again. Next time he calls … I never want to see him again … I never thought I’d say that of anyone.’

  The table edge moved in and out of focus before Lavender’s eyes. She was buffeted by a rush of indignation, by all-consuming anger, by massive relief. She was sorrier than ever for her sullied self. She could see a way to hating Henry. Traitorous Henry. Contemptible Henry. Infertile Henry.

  She rejoiced that Curly had no idea that she had deceived him with her lubricious abandon. He didn’t know that she had adulterated the marriage which meant the world to her: he was ignorant of last night’s transgression. It was better for both of them that way.

  She flung herself across the spilled bags and through the smeared puddle of cream and clutched him and repeated: ‘You’re my love. You’re my love. You’re my love. Darling so long as I’ve got you …’

  Curly recounted as much of his day as he could recall whilst Lavender mashed potatoes and grilled mackerel fillets for his stress and heart.

  Mr Savage-Smith had haltingly small-talked for an embarrassed while. Then he mentioned ‘the fellow you sent along to me: your friend?’.

  He pointedly avoided using Henry’s name.

  He spoke of ‘the extraordinary coincidence of a shared condition – not only shared, but unprecedented in my experience’.

  He asked Curly what diseases they had suffered in common. Curly shrugged, shook his head, rubbed his jaw as though it were the site of memory and might be urged to yield up some fragment which, like a photograph developed but never printed, had failed to find a place in the album of his life.

  ‘Did you ever, ah, go abroad together?’ winced Savage-Smith: he was, morally, a member of a far-off generation which was disgustedly fascinated by Port Said’s dirty postcards, which considered French to be a synonym for gross licence complemented by retributive disease.

  Curly wondered if he had asked this because he was too inhibited to ask if they had ever had sex together.

  ‘France a number of times. You know there’s one thing … we both got poisoned, when I was ooh fifteen, fifteen I guess, something like that. Contaminated water – we were camping. We drank from this stream and next morning – ’cause we drank out of it at night and couldn’t see – next morning we found it was full of dead fish and it was this sort of, uhm, bluey green, very opaque.’

  ‘And what reactions did you have to it?’

  ‘This was years ago … Delirium, fever … We vomited a lot. Cramps. Terrible cramps. And I had headaches for weeks after, maybe months.’

  ‘What treatment did you receive?’

  ‘Spent a night – two nights? can’t remember – in some sort of backwoods hospital.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Where was this? There may be records still. I have no idea whether the French keep records as diligent …’

  ‘Wasn’t France. Sorry I… No. No. It was Cornwall. Bodmin Moor. The doctor, the one at the hospital, he thought it might have something to do with some tin workings, tin mine.’

  ‘Tin! Oh fuck!’ exclaimed Mr Savage-Smith in a most unladylike way.

  The next day Curly sat in his office, dehydrated, with a mouthful of felt, composing a letter to Henry. He wrote and deleted for going on an hour:

  Dear Henry,

  I think I understand why you did what you did …

  Too placatory.

  Dear Henry,

  I cannot tell you how hurt I am by …

  Too polite and long-suffering.

  Dear Henry,

  Friendship involves and depends on companionship, compatibility, mutual appreciation, trust, tolerance, indulgence. But there are limits and I fear that you have perhaps overstepped them …

  Too understanding, too reasonable, too qualified: this should be hate mail proclaiming a severance, not a disquisition on the nature of camaraderie. And why address him as ‘dear’?

  At 11.40 he wrote:

  You have abused our trust. You have abused my wife. You have treated her like a prostitute. You have exploited our vulnerability and our longing for a child. Your deceit is unforgivable. We entered into a contract which you have dishonoured. You have forfeited our friendship. We do not want to see you again. Do not attempt to contact us. Curly.

  He stared at the screen, astonished by his directness and hostility. It was as though someone else had written it. He pressed Ctrl+P. He watched transfixed as the page emerged from the printer. He didn’t sign it in his hand, reckoning that its authority would be mitigated by that gesture. He typed an envelope in Reception.

  He attached a stamp. He didn’t want it franked with his company’s name. This was personal.

  It was whilst he was sauntering back from the post box that the matter of Ben and Lennie’s paternity occurred to him. He stopped, pondered a moment then laughed so violently that an approaching aggressive beggar started and gave him a miss.

  Chapter Seventeen

  It was a boy of Ben’s age that had just been buried in the sluicing rain. Mr and Mrs Legge, the parents, hadn’t got beyond the stage of numb bewilderment.

  Rudolph had been trouble in life. Rudolph was grief in death. He had self-mutilated since he was twelve, punishing his body for its pubescence. Then he had taught himself to hide in the boots of cars parked at supermarkets. He’d sidle down the ranks till he found an unlocked one.

  When Mrs A—and her two daughters returned to their family Fiat with a laden Tesco trolley they opened the boot and screamed at the blood-smeared moaning boy inside. He wasn’t fussy. Asda, B&Q, Safeway, Sainsbury, Comet … so long as there were cars he could pursue his obsession. He was never more excited than when anticipating his discovery, during those moments when the footfalls ceased and he could hear the voices, the puffing, the click of the trolley, the struggle for keys and, in the final second, the mutual blaming when it was realised that the car and boot were unlocked. The subsequent shriek caused him to ejaculate then to enter a profound comatose sleep.

  Rudolph Legge died unrequited in the boot of an old Escort which had been joyridden and abandoned. No one remarked on the long-stay banger in a far corner of the Dog Kennel Hill car park where rust-coloured weeds erupted through the tarmac and dog roses climbed the thick wire fence and polythene bags blew like wind-socks in the bare boughs.

  He had chosen badly. No one came to proffer his release. He was missing for sixteen days.

  Mr Legge’s moustache was a decomposing roll-up. Henry watched the bedraggled couple whose hair was tight to the crown. Their stoop-shouldered clothes shone dark with rain. They weighed like ill-fitting pelts. He wondered whether their grief was tempered by the relief that they were no longer parents to an aberrant son and by the knowledge that he had perished doing the thing he loved. Henry saw the very lack of release from the boot of JWW 583S as a greater release – from a consuming possession, from a cupboard demon which could never be sated.

  Mr and Mrs Legge were spared. They might have been victims of fate, of minor crime, of a car-park attendant’s lack of vigilance and curiosity. But they were also beneficiaries. They would no longer be dogged by Rudolph’s behaviour. They would no longer inhabit a world of perpetual anxiety. Blessing in disguise thought Hen
ry, yes, blessing in disguise. Best thing that could have happened to them – and to Rudolph too: what sort of life was his? Where’s the quality of life in a life like that? There are lives that aren’t worth living.

  There are people whom we can learn not to love even though the consequent void hurts and the loss makes us pine. Henry wished he had not exhumed Naomi’s secret. He had been so steady, so modestly content in his ignorance. His heart ached. He was working on learning not to love. There was no one to show him how. To how many parents is it vouchsafed that they are not parents? How many men have fatherhood torn from them? The very rarity of Henry’s predicament militated against its alleviation. There was no form to follow, no etiquette to ape. The erasure of paternal love is not among the practices and customs which comprise the common store of moral gambits. Henry had to teach himself, had to find his own way and finding his own way had not hitherto been Henry’s way. He was a man who went by the book. But this book was unwritten.

  He sought, then, lessons from life. He was eagerly on the lookout for families more rent than his own. The Legges fitted the bill. He was proud to grief-manage such people. And he hoped that he might learn from observation and understanding of them. He was looking for other parents whose presumed equivocation about their children (live, dead or imposturous) would sanction his own. He sought to legitimise his willed antipathy to Ben and Lennie. He wanted to hear that the unconditional love of parent for child was a sentimental invention, not a law of nature. Henry wanted to persuade himself that his indulgence of Ben and Lennie was more than adherence to generational orthodoxy. He told himself that his paternal laxity was an expression of his indifference to them and to their well-being, that it was neglect by deep wallet.

  The last of the seven drenched mourners had shaken hands with the bereaved parents.

  The car that would take them to their childless home drew up beside a threadbare cypress. The wipers groaned against the rain’s tide. The driver’s condensed breath obscured his face. Droplets posing as mercury slipped across the profound black enamel.