The hypothetical language school, in Charlie’s opinion, is a crack-brained notion, but he wasn’t going to say as much to Celia, not bluntly, not when there’s a risk of her chucking the crockery out of the window. He asked for a look at the business plan, but – as you’d expect – there is no business plan, just some very optimistic guesswork. He proposed that it would be useful to draw one up; Celia took offence at this (she clearly wanted to take much more offence than she permitted herself, but prudence for once got the upper hand), but he can’t imagine why she should think he’d be ready to get out the chequebook when she hasn’t yet done even the most rudimentary sums. The thing hasn’t a chance, that’s Charlie’s line, and he also very much doubts that she’s as hard-up as she’s making out – she’s in work, she has her own flat in a nice part of town, she’s not buying her clothes from the flea market, she’s obviously eating well, therefore there’s no crisis. Celia has had some bad luck, but she should just get over it and forget about this ludicrous get-rich-slowly scheme.
With Charlie and Janina out for the evening, Celia does the catering. ‘Put your feet up, girl,’ she orders Ellen, placing a glass of wine in her hand. It’s a Morellino di Scansano from Charlie’s cellar, but the rest of the ingredients have been bought by Celia, from an Italian delicatessen recommended by Janina. ‘And I have to say, it is very good,’ she concedes, laying out the provisions. Last out of the bags is a cake – a squat cylinder of moist dark sponge, topped with thick shavings of top-grade chocolate in four different hues. ‘A thousand calories per spoonful, but what the fuck, eh?’ she says to Ellen.
She’s knocked together some figures for Charlie, whose interim judgement is that they strike him as ‘naive’. ‘So it’s back to the drawing board to make Big Brother happy. But stuff it. This wine is very agreeable, isn’t it? I’ll say this much for him, the boy knows his grapes.’ She asks Ellen if she’s been down into the cellar. It seems that this is going to be the prelude to another variation on the theme of anal-retentive Charlie, but she doesn’t make too much of Charlie’s rage for order (the bottles arranged rigorously by region and date; the climate controlled to the finest gradations of temperature and humidity) and pays him the compliment of contrasting him with others in Charlie’s wine crew. One of them, Celia tells Ellen, goes through this ludicrous rigmarole whenever he withdraws a super-special vintage from the cellar: he brings it up one step at a time, raising the bottle by one step every twenty-four hours, supposedly so as not to spoil it by hauling it too quickly into a higher temperature. This can’t be true, says Ellen, but Celia assures her that Charlie is incapable of inventing something as daft as this.
Not until we reach the cake course does Celia give voice to a complaint: Charlie never forgets anything she’s done wrong, or that he thinks she’s done wrong. And he has this compulsion to revisit her offences, apropos of absolutely nothing. This morning, in the kitchen, she pushed her hair back from her face and uncovered the scar on her hairline, which was enough to set him off. Seeing the scar, he started talking about the night she’d come home drunk from a party with Dan and had contrived to throw up all over the kitchen floor and then to skid on her own vomit and go head-first into the cooker. ‘He knows I remember it,’ Celia tells Ellen. ‘It goes without saying that I remember it. But he just loves to remind me of what a klutz I’ve been.’
Ellen states that she thinks Charlie is a nice man. ‘He can be,’ says Celia, then pauses to consider what she’s just said. ‘Yes,’ she decides, ‘he’s a decent chap. Very decent. And he genuinely wants me to be happy. But as long as that means being happy like Charlie. As head of the family – and he’s a man who believes that families should have a head – it’s his responsibility to save me, cost-effectively. But Janina thinks he shouldn’t bother. I’m not quite to her taste, as you may have gathered.’
‘And vice versa,’ I have to point out, and within a minute Celia has informed us that Janina, having had the household contents revalued for insurance purposes, was shocked by the premium she was quoted this morning. ‘“Really, I was appalled,”’ says Celia, placing a hand to her heart, fingers delicately arched to suggest the perfectly manicured fingers of the sister-in-law. ‘The earrings, Dan – you’ll never guess what they turn out to be worth.’ These earrings, she explains to Ellen, were items that our mother had always intended to bequeath to Janina, though no one other than Janina ever heard her say anything of the sort. ‘Our father’s will, that’s what it’s all about,’ she says, chucking back another glass. ‘Having done so much to help Mr Brennan in his last months, she and Charlie ended up getting the same share as me. Which was grossly unfair, of course, because I’d done nothing except gallivant about in Italy. The injustice rankles, believe me.’
I tell Ellen this isn’t true.
‘Yes it is,’ says Celia.
Soon after, Ellen thanks Celia for a lovely meal, declines coffee, and says she must get to bed. At Celia’s instigation there is a hug.
‘Did I go on too much?’ asks Celia, once the door has closed.
‘Yes,’ I answer.
‘I must try harder. But God, she gets on my wick. I’m trying, I really am. I’ve been with her to the shops. I’ve admired the great new washing machine. I’ve admired the new curtains in the bedroom. Sorry, that should be “the master bedroom”. I mean –“master bedroom”, for God’s sake. Nobody talks like that, except estate agents. Do they?’
It’s midnight; she looks tired. ‘You should be in bed,’ I tell her.
‘In a bit,’ she replies. Making herself a coffee with the state-of-the-art Italian machine, she says: ‘I’ll show you something.’ This is intended to appear as a sudden inspiration, but it’s obvious that whatever she’s going to show me has been on her mind for a while. She beckons me to follow her to Charlie’s study, where she goes to the computer and takes us to www.matttaussig.com. In the New Work section we see pieces from a collection entitled Boundary, currently on show at a gallery in Antwerp. Celia clicks on a small picture of a fence and it enlarges to the dimensions of the whole screen. The steel fence runs down one side of the photograph, with branches protruding through the bars at intervals; to the left a gum-scarred pavement stretches away. ‘They’re absolutely huge. Taller than me,’ Celia explains, opening another image. ‘He’s doing well,’ she says, returning to the home page. ‘London, Antwerp, group shows in Los Angeles, Berlin, Milan,’ she reads. At the bottom of the page we’re told that Matt Taussig lives in London with his wife Vanessa and son Lothar. Celia shuts down the computer. For a moment she stares at the dead screen, then we go back to the living room.
We watch a wildlife documentary. The blowhole of the Sperm Whale, we are told, is set slightly to the left of the top of the head, which gives its blow a characteristic tilt. The Fin Whale is unique among the larger whales in having clearly asymmetrical colouration: the left jaw is dark whereas the right jaw is white or light grey. The white markings on the pectoral fins of the Humpback Whale are unique to each individual. I knew none of this.
Turning off the television, she says: ‘I really do think he was the one, you know?’
‘Who?’ I ask, knowing what comes next.
‘Matt.’
‘Arse.’
‘It’s becoming clearer with every passing year. Matt was the one,’ she says, breezily nostalgic.
‘You don’t believe that.’
‘I do, Dan, I do,’ she says, with regret that this should be so.
‘You don’t.’
‘The one that got away.’
‘Cobblers.’
‘No, it’s true,’ she sighs cheerfully.
Ellen doesn’t approve of the way Celia talked about her brother, and didn’t much care for the way she talked about Janina either. ‘They are my hosts,’ she says, ‘and I like them both as well. She shouldn’t do it.’ She rips the sheets from the bed as though snatching them from Celia’s grip. I tell her that I’ll make sure the offence is not repeated. ‘No, don’t say an
ything,’ says Ellen. ‘I’m just saying I wish she wouldn’t, that’s all.’ The chores are completed in record time. She’s on her way out, bearing the dirties, when I call her back to take a look at the screen.
‘What do you think of this, El?’ I ask, showing her Matt’s photo of the back of a warehouse. Amid the pieces of broken glass and scraps of squashed cardboard there’s a flattened Coke can. ‘This is the same size as a real-life can,’ I explain. ‘And the ticket stuck to the ground right next to it – you can actually read what’s printed on it.’
Ellen doesn’t see the point. ‘I see old cans every day of my life,’ she points out. ‘I don’t need a photo to show me what they’re like.’
I tell her that the picture is by one of Celia’s ex-boyfriends.
‘Really?’ she says, as if I’ve told her that the Bishop of Aachen wears green silk socks in bed.
Charlie’s full name is Charles Philip Brennan. For a brief period, somewhere around the age of twelve or thirteen, he affected (on the cover of school exercise books, pencil cases, record sleeves and so forth) the title Charles P. Brennan, thereby distinguishing himself from the senior Charles Brennan – our father, Charles Bernard Brennan. The P, Celia liked to tell her friends, stood for Photocopy. Right from the start, Charlie’s face bore the unmistakeable stamp of his father (whereas Celia was a perfect hybrid, and I – after a little over a decade of being something like a twenty percent maternal to eighty percent paternal mixture – grew to be wholly my own man), but the resemblance was more than a mere matter of the disposition of the features. His expressions and mannerisms (the smile that didn’t quite take hold of the whole mouth; the arched left eyebrow; sitting with his hands on his belly, fingers interwoven), his general manner of addressing his surroundings (the air of cautious observation; the sustained silences) – these were all, well before he started school, uncannily like those of Charles the elder. To those who loved him, he possessed a gravitas in advance of his years; to those who didn’t, he was a rather heavy and dull little chap.
It soon became evident that there was a deep affinity between father and son. Young Charlie was never much of a reader, but there was one certain way to persuade him to persevere with his book, and that was to place him in the vicinity of the armchair in which his father was sitting: cross-legged on the floor, he would quietly mouth the words to himself for as long as his father was occupied with his paperwork. Their tastes were congruent: Laurel and Hardy films (unamusing to the rest of the family) they found hilarious; Steptoe and Son – which made Celia want to shoot the TV, or herself, and rarely eked from our mother anything more than a smile – was a favourite; ditto Up Pompeii. At weekends, if his friends weren’t playing football, Charlie would often take his homework to his father’s desk in the back room, deriving comfort and encouragement from the air of commerce that the ledgers exuded. And in the management of money the younger Charles Brennan was of the same mind as the elder, just as Charles the elder was proud to say that he took his essential values from his father, Stanley Charles Brennan, a man who is on record as having said repeatedly that he would have eaten stale bread for a week, and fed stale bread to his family too, rather than borrow a halfpenny from anyone. (Stiff as a portrait on a banknote, his skin as smooth and pale as alabaster, this exemplar of fiscal rectitude confronted you as you stood at our father’s desk; alongside, in a separate frame, was his wife Emily, wearing a hat that looked like a crushed cardboard carton, and slightly cross-eyed too – from the undernourishment of the Stale Bread Diet, according to Celia.) Our father’s often-repeated tale about the man to whom he once foolishly extended credit (a mistake never to be repeated), overriding his misgivings about this customer’s character (in a nutshell, there was simply too much blather about him; it has been pointed out by Celia that the man was Irish, and that plain prejudice plays a rather more significant role in this parable than Charlie is prepared to acknowledge), was absorbed by his eldest child in much the same way as other children absorb the lesson of Little Red Riding Hood. ‘Read people as carefully as you’d read a contract,’ our father urged, and Charlie listened. He is still proud of the fact that, as a mere beginner in the firm (he was just twenty), he sniffed that there was something wrong about a builder who wore a very expensive watch: the man appeared in the papers a couple of years later, having been sent down at the Crown Court for living off immoral earnings.
Anyway – young Charlie’s pocket money (stowed in a small wooden box like a scaled-down treasure chest) was invariably a fuller fund than the accounts of his siblings (it’s impossible to recall what he spent the money on, other than the occasional LP), and it was to be expected that when he learned that Celia had loaned a few pounds to Christine (whose favoured brand of make-up was too expensive for the miserly allowance she received from her parents), affronted Charlie would take the opportunity to caution her: ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be.’ This was something of a catchphrase (‘The only bloody line of Shakespeare he knows,’ said Celia, ‘and he doesn’t even know it’s Shakespeare’), and yet, finding herself somewhat short of cash (for a skirt in the January sales?) and needing an instant solution to the crisis, Celia did once, in an impulse of need, appeal to Charlie, who handed over the requested amount without hesitation, but not without delivering to his sister a homily on the virtues of thrift and self-sufficiency (despite the meagreness of his outgoings, Charlie had for a long time been doing a paper round five mornings per week – partly in the hope that he might pedal away some of the excess weight), a speech so patronising that Celia told him (after the money had been pocketed) that if he ever spoke to her like that again she would shove his money-box somewhere that would make riding his bike a very uncomfortable procedure. This was the last time prior to the present, I believe, that Celia asked Charlie for financial assistance.
Celia has always been prone to fads, says Charlie, and with little prompting he will list a selection of them: the Bob Dylan fad (circa seventeen years of age, deciding she loves Bob Dylan, she buys three of his albums in one batch; is forced within months to acknowledge that Bob’s voice is about as lovely as an unoiled bike chain; never listens to Bob again); the jogging fad (buys expensive trainers and slinky kit; joins club; decides that joggers are as tedious as bridge-players and her knees aren’t designed for this type of punishment anyway); yoga (she’s fundamentally ill-suited to the philosophies of the East and a low-velocity lifestyle); emigrating to India/a Greek Island/Japan … he could reel off a dozen inside a minute. The school, says Charlie, is just the latest of Celia’s whimsical schemes and will fade as quickly as all the others. He wishes she’d grow up and sort herself out, but what can he do? She doesn’t want advice from him, just money, but it’s advice she needs. Celia is a terrific teacher, he’s sure of that, but she hasn’t a clue when it comes to finance and she’d be bored witless by the day-to-day slog of running a business. She simply has not got what it takes to do this kind of thing, and deep down she knows she hasn’t, because otherwise she’d do what anyone else would do if they thought they had a viable commercial proposition, and that’s go to a bank.
In essence, my brother’s grand narrative of the adult lives of himself and his sister is as follows: he labours morning, noon and night to make a success of the business and to support his wife and sons; Celia fritters away her years at university, flibbertigibbets around Europe for years, and now earns her money (such as it is) by chatting away to a miscellany of Italians – an undemanding activity that leaves her with plentiful hours of leisure in which to conduct a succession of more or less unsatisfactory affairs. The caricature of himself is an accurate one. Charlie has worked hard, and the Brennan business was indeed in trouble until he took it in hand and – perceiving that it was impossible to compete with the DIY warehouses when it came to flogging the cheap stuff – persuaded his father (with assistance from Janina, whose taste was to prove infallibly attuned to emerging trends in the world of middle-class domesticity) that they should move upmarket and
offer the public such high-grade materials as Breton limestone, Turkish travertine, and Italian ceramics in any colour you could think of. When his sons babbled on about what an amazing thing the internet was going to be, Charlie took note, with the result that Brennan Tile & Stone had a website that was markedly superior to the competition’s, and had an employee answering queries by email at a time when others were still using postcards. Turnover increased steadily during the time that Charlie was working alongside his father, and rose even more steeply once Charlie alone was in charge. On his gravestone, says Celia, they’ll carve his name, dates and forty-year sales graph.
‘That makes your brother sound stodgy, but he’s not stodgy at all,’ says Ellen. ‘He’s a gentleman,’ she says, and she doesn’t see what’s so bad about being successful. What’s more, there’s a twinkle to him when he’s with Janina, which is nice to see. (This, I’m pretty sure, is the first time anyone has used the word ‘twinkle’ in connection with Charlie.) Furthermore, Ellen tells me, I’m a terrible snob about Janina. So what, if she buys a dozen different magazines each week? Everybody reads magazines. And some of the magazines that Janina buys are really beautiful.
‘I’m not a snob,’ I answer. ‘That’s not the right word.’
‘Yes it is,’ she insists.
‘No. I’m a sick and twisted gentleman.’
‘That you are,’ she says, scooping me off the mattress.
On the doorstep Celia puts her arms around Ellen and gives her an embrace, which Ellen reciprocates with a fine simulacrum of warmth. Tears from Celia. From the window I watch as she piles her bags into the car, while Charlie kicks the soggy tyre and shakes his head. He smiles and passes her a handkerchief for her eyes; they have a long hug, with Charlie gently patting her back. Then it’s Janina’s turn. Looking her squarely in the face and holding her by the wrists, Celia says something at which Janina shrugs, before giving her a delicate kiss on the cheek – just one cheek.
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