The Fowler Family Business

by Jonathan Meades

  Because Uncle Father Roy was a priest without convictions for driving offences the Archdiocese of Southwark had appointed him Chaplain to the M2 and the M20. He administered extreme unction to bodies broken in scrap sculptures in the fog, to concertinaed victims of unforeseen tailbacks, to somersaulters and hard-shoulder strays. But because he was now so fat that he had his own climate and each of his chins its own postcode, he and his 58-inch waist wouldn’t fit into the rusty ten-year-old Punto that went with the job. He had to be chauffeured to death sites in big cars (Dennis Wendy Taxis Maidstone Ltd: a rosary was slung from the rear-view mirror). So as soon as Teresa passed her driving test she was able, whenever she wanted, to make her own way to Lazaretto Farm. She was never stuck for scrumpy. Nor for its distillate. Rowan and Annick were self-proclaiming antinomians, renegade industrial chemists, veterans of a thousand trips, former commercial synthesisers of LSD. They had stashed the profits, paid their debt to society (Winson Green, Holloway), sold up on Exmoor after their release and had relocated to Kentish isolation in the belief that this was a county whose police force was too overworked in the Crime Belt that extends from Chislehurst to Thanet to concern itself with a couple of myopic hippies making sheep cheese and cider. An incorrect belief, it turned out. Idle rozzers are always keen for easy prey. They tend to visit on the flimsiest of pretexts, they love a Christmas box in July. And because they were prone to watch the causeway to Lazaretto Farm from a copse beside the rutted field where races were held every Sunday in the stock-car season Rowan and Annick suggested that if Teresa slake her addiction at the farm she stay the night. The eyes in the copse knew precisely the point where the farm’s property ended and the public road (and over-the-limit arrest opportunities) began.

  She had never stayed in anyone else’s house. She had never, as a child, been allowed to sleep over. She was astonished by the teenagers Hardin and Owsley; by their treatment of their parents as friends, by their effusive demonstrations of affection, by their disrespectful obstinacy, by their sexual candour.

  In this house where she would eventually lose her sight she first lost her sense of clock time. She would stumble along the unlit corridors, bumping into teetering bookshelves and pictureless frames slumped against the walls, the legless tables, the collapsing settles. She would wake Saffron, the youngest child, and offer to take her walking on the marshes. Saffron would look at her alarm clock whose hands were grinning cats and tell Teresa that it was half past three in the morning and that she wanted to get back to sleep. An hour later Teresa, having returned meanwhile to a scrumpy barrel, is again in Saffron’s room, oblivious of her last visit and eager to read the girl a bedtime story.

  When she had gained her secretarial qualification Rowan and Annick invited her to work at Lazaretto Farm. She milked ewes, forked manure, baited eel traps, hauled them filled with writhing silver life from vernal leets in the morning, skinned them, skinned rabbits, bottled damsons, picked apples, made the mash to make the scrumpy to sell to jacks from Chatham, to pongos from Brompton Barracks. She marvelled at the tidal mud’ banks rendered edible-looking by the setting sun. She composed a morbid litany of the names of the saltings and the creeks to make her spine alive: The Shade, Slaughterhouse Point, Ham Ooze, Bedlam’s Bottom, Deadman’s Island. And all the while she was drinking, drinking, staring at the sky to tell her mother there how much she loved this close-knit chaotic family and their wandering friends who arrived without warning, careless toking folk who believed in karma and hand-painted vans.

  She returned to the clergy house often enough to keep Uncle Father Roy warm with her bloated body, with bottles of applejack which burned so much he needed more. When she was paid she was paid a pittance most of which Uncle Father Roy took for household contributions. That left her short but she never went with a lad for money, never went with one for love or fun, never went with one at all.

  When Rowan and Annick couldn’t afford to pay her at all she would find work as a secretary. Never for long. It was the people. They were chatty, lippy, prying. She could tell that they thought her a queer one. They exploited her diligence by giving her as much of their work as they dared so she had to stay late and all that was to be said for that was that she didn’t have to partake in the communal ritual of the after-office drink: drinking was what she did alone, with her mother and her dreams.

  It was during such a period, whilst temping in the claims department of a freight haulage company, that the initial sign of optic atrophy manifested itself. One Thursday lunch-time she walked across the office to look down into the yard where the liveried artics were loaded. They had changed colour. These must, she initially assumed, be vehicles that she hadn’t seen before, part of an auxiliary fleet. Then she realised that the company logo and name were blurred. Had she not known that the marginally inclined capital letters spelled GIBSON & MILLS she would not have been able to distinguish the name.

  There can be no doubt that the multiple vitamin deficiencies she suffered as a result of alcohol’s ruseful ability to persuade the body that it is being fed, as well as drugged, contributed to the onset of the condition known, because it is observed in populations whose diet is reliant on cassava, as ‘West Indian amblyopia’ or ‘Jamaican amblyopia’. That lunch-time when she looked at the soft-edged, chromatically amended lorries she barely nibbled her peanut-butter sandwich.

  The drizzle she saw was fine, relentless, perpendicular, yet the asphalt yard didn’t turn from matt to gloss, nor did the lorries’ paintwork gleam.

  Chapter Twenty

  Henry Fowler was shocked by Teresa Sullivan’s story, by her willingness to tell it to a stranger in such detail, with such dispassion, as if it had all happened to someone else, someone unknown.

  Had she invented the pitiful creature who shared her name? Was this humiliating biography a nightmare fomented by her sensory lack? A masochistic compensation? Are the blind not blessed with heightened imaginative faculties just as they are with increased senses of smell and touch? If they make such efficient smoke alarms and masseurs maybe they are also consummate fantasists. But could Uncle Father Roy have been dreamed up?

  He was shocked, too, that he should pay such keen attention to the way she bulged within and without his mother’s wedding dress.

  The stays were stretched. The upper bodice’s hooks didn’t reach their eyes. Her pudgy arms were distended by the puffed sleeves’ tight cuffs. Neck folds lapped over elaborate stitching. He feared the dress might burst. It pulled at the seams to reveal margins of material that had not been exposed to light since the garment was made and whose hue was denser. Her grubby, once-white brassière’s frayed back was exposed. Her spine’s course was obscured by a rolling landscape of fat.

  She curtsied. She twirled clumsily. Like a navvy executing a ronde de jambe: he immediately regretted his ignobility of thought. She was giving herself such enjoyment that she displayed a hefty grace. This was for her, not for him. He wasn’t meant to be watching, wasn’t meant to be torturing himself with invented remembrance of his mother’s proud day and repining at this betrayal of her sacred garment. He was ashamed that the eyes he cast over the figure in the dress in the stale, dead bedroom were the eyes of a man observing a woman. Such eyes consume dance, and dance is the precursor of love. Henry was worried by himself. He feared too that she might detect his mute fascination, that his intentions might be misunderstood by Jane. The bitch was slumped against a pile of blankets, moistening them with her viscous slobber, but her eyes were open and she was watching Henry. Miss Sullivan stomped about. Was she essaying ballroom steps?

  ‘Do I look ath lubbely ath your mump did?’

  He said: ‘Of course you do.’

  She stood facing the drawn curtains as a sighted woman might a mirror. She wriggled, she plucked at the sleeves, smoothed the material across her buttocks and thighs, turned to scrutinise the profile.

  ‘I can see that he’th gone neeb lettib out.’

  ‘I suppose so … Yes.’

 
How, he wondered, could he so recklessly dishonour his mother? He was touched by the ingenuous presumption of suggesting it should be altered. Inside the near-dropsical body that demanded the garment’s expansion was a near-child. Her wish to possess, uninfected by covetousness, was an expression of delight. It was an adventure prompted by want. This is what Henry told himself. He was fascinated by his slight act of altruism, by his readiness to put himself out during such difficult days. He wondered why he should have acceded to her request. There but for the grace of … He pitied her for her use of see even if it was merely figurative, unconsidered habit. Her blindness was unqualified. She couldn’t see the disparity between her body and the dress that bandaged it. She couldn’t see Henry.

  He asked: ‘What do you imagine I look like?’

  She giggled and replied, clumsily coquettish: ‘Tall, dar, hanthobe.’

  ‘Two out of three.’

  ‘Wish two?’

  ‘Ah-ha!’

  She turned towards him, all the better to scrutinise him.

  She inclines her head, tilts it from side to side. Her movements are founded in forgotten gestural memory. She cannot see. She cannot see that Henry Fowler’s erection is outside his trousers, that the thick vermicular creature from the deep is polished mauve for her, that it’s emitting a leucous dribble. Only he knows how long it has been there, beyond his button flies, proud of the formerly containing black twill tailored in Kidderminster.

  She cannot see, but she can sense the change in his breathing, the systolic pounding, the tension. She knows. She knows. The way she reaches out, searches for it: he might be seven years old again in his flannel shorts, tempting fate in a game of blind man’s buff with Stanley in the blindfold.

  ‘You’re a nauthy one Mithtar Fowler. He feelth like a right prettyith fellow.’

  Her left hand was coarsely vigorous. He was reminded of the way milkmaids practise on cows. Her right hand held to her gobbling mouth a cold faggot from the fridge.

  He ejaculated on the straining belly of his mother’s wedding dress. His mother was dead, she didn’t feel a thing.

  The stains were, immediately, someone else’s, they belonged to the past, to a past as distant as that in which he had smelled Ben’s sweat-ringed squash shirt when he put it in the washing machine and had convinced himself that it must be OK because the boy, the future champion, was his son and he was a fertile father doting on his son’s pubescent secretions.

  Teresa insisted that she had to get home. Even though, she said, she hadn’t shared his bed for years Uncle Father Roy fretted if she wasn’t there. Bad things happen to the blind at night, she didn’t want to cause him any worry, not with his heart.

  It was the least Henry could do to take her, it was the gentlemanly thing to do. And, besides, he loved driving through the long suburbs at night, as hermetic in his locked car as his people in the safety of their bolted homes – what triumphs of cocooned privacy, what fertile groves for the pursuit of lives free of collective imperatives, for individuality and discreet hobbies. Here was the lamplit core of England’s happiness.

  Then there came a swath of inhospitable countryside: commons, fenced fields, bungalow smallholdings, scars of raw chalk, horses, coppices, water tanks in silhouette, a motorway whose roar alerted her to its proximity before he saw its chains of red-and-white light.

  Some while after they had crossed it, on the edge of a straggling village where they waited at a junction for a gap in traffic, she asked him if he could hear a noise. He cocked his head. From somewhere in the night came a repetitive lowing groan. A far-off creature in terrible pain?

  ‘Thas the paper mill. Know tha’ noise anyfwhere.’

  ‘Oh …’ He laughed: ‘That’s all right then.’

  ‘You look oppsit the gatesh.’

  The mill entrance was marked by a presently lowered barrier and a brick hut at a gap in a line of poplars. On the other side of the road a multiply gabled late-Victorian house stood beyond a car park where a signboard was under-lit from such an angle that it was glaringly illegible.

  ‘I don’t think I’d want to stay there.’

  ‘Uhnh?’

  ‘Those hotels like that: they’re always so …’

  ‘Th’not ’n notel. Tha’th nurthing ome. Tha’th where I had Deneeth and Alith.’

  ‘Where what?’

  ‘Thath where I had my childrenth. The girlth: Deneeth and Alith. I talk to them eberyday.’

  Henry gaped at her. ‘I thought you said – you said you had to …’

  ‘Yeth … But I thtill talk to them – Deneeth ith theven now, Alith ith fibe. They wen strwaight to heaven of courth … I tell them what I been doing. I think imaginawy children are better than weal oneth. No meth, no pith eberywhere, no nappieth etthetewar. And imaginawy oneths are pwettier.’

  Henry heard her in disbelief. Was this an unfunny joke against herself? It evidently wasn’t. She explained that her children were angels. They were fairies too. And fairies live in gardens because they seek ‘a domethtic enbiroment’. They are also benign ghosts. They lead a better life than they would have done on earth. They stay young for ever.

  She refused his offer to see her down the sloping path to the front door. Jane knew the way. There were lights on in the small house. A bulky figure moved in silhouette across a thinly curtained window. Teresa? – or was this Uncle Father Roy whose bed she claimed to no longer share.

  He sat in the car with the engine running. He could discern broken fences, gardens’ back ends, bent boughs, little sheds. A fox sauntered delicately across the road. Trees, there are quiet trees in the gardens: do they ever precisely repeat the pattern of their last gentle movement? He shook his head, blinked. He glanced at the illuminated instrument panel, wondered what he was doing here, thirty miles from Home. His memory of the journey he had just made was mostly erased. Who was this infirm woman with a dog? What was happening to him?

  Henry Fowler had not previously considered himself an imaginary father. But that precisely, he acknowledged, was what he was. He was less of a father than Teresa Sullivan was a mother. He drove slowly away.

  The next night Henry Fowler wept. It was the eve of his parents’ funeral and he wept because it was all done, because he had achieved the apogee of his craft, because that is as far as any funeral director can go in deploying the old skills that are ever more contracted out to freelance embalmers. How peace had come upon his parents – lifelike parodies of themselves, beneficent smilers. They both had teeth, though not their own, and those teeth were good, so take due advantage, let them grin in their rigidity.

  That was the night Teresa Sullivan fucked him. It was a sympathy fuck, a response to his sobbing, a response he solicited. He imagined Lavender. Who, or what, did Teresa imagine? She wouldn’t touch his face with her hands to get a reading of his features. Only the birth blind, she claimed, can make a construct by touch, because they have had a lifetime’s experience uninhibited by the sight of a face, they don’t know what an eye looks like. Henry was humilated by the sight of her manifold flesh slapping against his, by the realisation that her pubic bush was invisible beneath her sow’s multi-bellies. Her weight upon him was immense. She clamped him by labial suction. Her genital musculature was prizewinning. He feared castration. She showed no respect for him as a man. His penis might be a simulacrum of a fascinum, made by chance of human tissue. It might be stubbornly engorged but her arhythmic bucking, her jolting lunges will surely twist it, tear it, uproot it from the sod of his body so that a gush of blood spurts from the rent left by her act of vaginal plunder. He was humiliated by his conduct, by this animal congress worthy of a freak show. He took pleasure in that humiliation, in his gutter cunning and exploitative self-abasement.

  He was mutating. Henry Fowler was turning into someone different. He was no longer a father, no longer a son, he was no longer inhibited by familial obligations. Henry Fowler was a name that would soon be attached to a man free for the first time in his life to invent hims
elf. He could paint over the old predetermined canvas. It was an exhilarating prospect, and one which rendered him fearful for he had led a life largely bereft of choice. Choice is a labyrinth, and – late in life – he was about to enter it, as Stanley would, perforce, have done, had, had … In that matter Henry Fowler had no choice. Some force was pulling him – towards an unknown locus, towards a revised destiny.

  When they had finished Teresa asked him whether she should give him a hot lunch the way Uncle Father Roy liked her to. He had not previously heard the phrase. When she explained what it meant he was, to his astonishment, not repulsed. He was curious, excited. Moral fetters were to be unlocked. The warmth, the smell, the intimacy, the barely discernible clammy weight on his chest constituted a golden key, a clue to the many mazes of his future. And they linked him, too, to the child within the man, to the primal child who smears his nappy contents across his face. This formerly fastidious man suffered nostalgie de la boue.

  When Teresa Sullivan walked about the old home that night it was as though she had eyes. He followed her, anxious lest she fall, bumping up against door jambs and never sure where the vase in the dark was. But she got the hang of a house in her dark as he never could. If a house had a soul she’d find it. If a house had a secret she’d find it. Wrapped in a towel she sat on a cushioned swivel chair at Henry’s father’s old roll-top desk with its now mostly cleared compartments, the desk that was a near-deserted universe of pull-outs and drawers. She ran her hand again across the wood’s dried grain.

  He watched her touch this instrument of his father’s authority. Her fingers inventoried a Staffordshire figure, a porcelain menagerie, an ivory letter opener. She dredged in drawers for bent paper-clips, rubber bands perished to a crisp, erasers turned to stone, dried ballpoint refills, powdery scraps of paper, fluff, a button. Henry was stretching on a sofa in his unbelted dressing-gown when she tugged the bottom drawer to her right and pulled it out of its chest on to the worn carpet with a squeak, a thud and an exclamation: ‘Damn and blath!’