The Fowler Family Business

Now he was a married man with hopes of fatherhood, a house with underfloor heating and a picture window which framed the gables and cupolas of houses whose inhabitants his grandfather had buried and beyond them the ordered Kentish fields where his grandfather’s father had picked hops and pears before the creation of the family business and liberation from such seasonal slavery.

Henry stood there waiting to direct a procession of Fowler & Son’s (he wasn’t the initial son in that name, that was his father, when he’d been the son – but it had passed down, and when he, Henry, had a son and his father had retired, he would be the father and so it would remain in mutating constancy). The procession of vehicles, of Rolls-Royces and Austin Sheerlines, was held up because of a traffic fatality on Beulah Hill. The deceased – the one in the coffin, not the headless motorcyclist – had been something in show business. A manager or agent or promoter – it wasn’t a world Henry Fowler was acquainted with. Though when he had visited the bereaved and the brittle bespectacled daughter who was attending her at the big house on Auckland Road he had been impressed by the number of photographs signed by stars he recognised. Charlie Drake was there, and Maureen Swanson who’d married a toff, and Al Bowlly whose death in the Blitz while Mr Fowler was stationed on the Isle of Wight denied him the opportunity of posthumously brilliantining the only crooner he’d ever met.

Henry considered mentioning this to the bereaved but the daughter would keep butting in, talking for her and, anyway, he was not certain where he stood in the debate between formality and friendliness that had riven his trade, the two sides denouncing each other as Robots and Mateys. He knew that with his blond hair, black suit and martial bearing he looked like a Robot but that his gravely worn concern for the grieving might mark him as a Matey. He kept quiet rather than risk what might be considered an unseemly disclosure.

He did suggest, however, that the cortège leaving Auckland Road should best process by way of Annerley Hill, Westow Hill and Central Hill because of the long-term roadworks and temporary traffic lights on Beulah Hill (it was these which were thought to have caused the fatal accident). But the bereaved had insisted on Beulah Hill: ‘Cyril loved it. He just loved it. He used to stand there you know and look out across Thornton Heath and Croydon and say thank God I don’t live there. You can see all the way to the downs. No, he wants to go along Beulah Hill.’

That was the Thursday.

The Sunday, Henry did his potting – black tulips (a family tradition), narcissi, three sorts of daffodil. Naomi spent the day inside acting on the precepts laid down by Consultant Jilly Morgan in an article called ‘An End To Maquillage Monotony’. When they snuggled up together on their tufty fabric sofa she was wearing oyster-pink lip gloss and Qite-A-Nite mascara. The news was cast by his favourite, though not hers, Corbett Woodall: ‘More than forty police officers, including five mounted …’

They gaped at the scenes of Grosvenor Square. There were longhairs, moustaches, police macs, police truncheons, police horses, wobbly film frames, inchoate grunts, faces of terror and hatred.

‘Vandals,’ said Henry.

‘Goths and vandals,’ said Naomi.

They agreed that should any of the Vietcong who had thrown themselves beneath the ironclad hooves of Emperor, Berty, Throckmorton, Monty and Rex II die in a South London hospital Fowler & Son would not undertake to undertake. They laughed, two as one. And that’s how undertake to undertake became a catch-phrase in their family: they were to teach it to the children, when they came along. They cuddled and they thanked each other for each other’s love and blessed presence which would endure till one of them was undertaken with due ceremony by their first-born boy, one far-off day at the other end of a fulfilling half century – at least.

Henry Fowler waited patiently as the gatehouse attendant at West Norwood Crematorium Mr Scrivenson listened agitatedly to the phone’s earpiece and plaited his nostril hair and gurned and pointed with a Capstan-strength forefinger to the handset and repeated: ‘If that’s the best ETA … if that’s the best you can do … if that’s your ETA we’re looking at a log-jam – it’s going to be Piccadi—they what? … Right you are then … Okey-dokey.’

He put down the phone, flicked at his collar and its icing of seborrhoea, the dandruff with the larger flake, rubbed his hands to say chilly, twirled a tuft of hair protruding from his phone ear, dimped a butt from his great wheel of an ashtray and said: ‘No disrespect to your dad Henry – but … Beulah Hill, I mean to say …’

‘That’s what they wanted, insisted on. Nothing to do with Dad Mr Scrivenson. Me – me. Mrs Ross has got this idea – you know, it’s a road he loved.’

‘Henry. Henry. You’re a funeral director. You direct the funeral. I dunno. Your grandad wouldn’t have stood for it. Even the best of times you got problems along Beulah Hill – there’s mineral wells there. Tarmacadam’s worst enemy. It’s why it’s always erupting. And all that subsidence in them twinky-dinky new houses. You got to learn to put your foot down – A Generation Out of Control.’

‘What?’

‘That’s what it said in the paper this morning. That’s you lot. My God.’ Mr Scrivenson stood and gaped through the dust-blasted panes. ‘You got a crow. Who’s this feller?’

‘Uh?’

‘The deceased.’

‘Mr Cyril Ross he was called. Lived in—’

‘What line?’ Mr Scrivenson looked at Henry looking blank against the dun wall of this tiny home-from-home. ‘What did he do?’

‘Some sort of show business. Agent, you know … produ—’

‘Could have told you. It’s only the theatre and the military you get crows with nowadays.’

Crow was old funerary trade slang for a mourner who dressed the part, who outdid the funeral directors in their bespokes from Kidderminster, who turned mourning into black dandyism. The blacker the garb the deeper the feeling – it’s like the paint on a Sheerline. A score of coats of jet enamel signals solemnity. Black – figurative and ceremonial uses of. That’s an area of Henry’s expertise. Henry hurried out of Scrivenson’s fug to warn the crow of the delay, inform him of its cause, apologise: ‘Excuse me sir,’ he called to the man who had his back to Henry and was scrutinising an art-nouveau headstone in the form of an escutcheon. He half turned, raising his toppered head. The crow’s garb – black barathea, black satin facings, black frogging, black moiré jabot – subjugated all individuality in the cause of ostentatious or, as Mr Fowler would have it, boastful grief. Henry was addressing a man playing a role, a machine for mourning who thanked him for the information with a nod and a tight-lipped smile. Henry turned back towards Scrivenson’s lodge. He had walked a couple of steps before he realised whom he had been talking to. Henry hurried after the crow who was alarmed by the heavy footfalls on the metalled drive.

‘I just wanted,’ Henry panted, ‘to say, if I might, how much “Teresa” meant to me you know. Well, still means to me. It’s difficult to explain – my great mucker was called Stanley.’

The crow looked even more alarmed, as though he feared Henry might assault him. ‘Stanley?’

‘Yes,’ confirmed Henry, ‘it was today he died.’

‘Today,’ echoed the crow.

‘Well, not today, today.’

‘Ah.’

‘See – I always think of you when I think of Stanley because of “Teresa”. And Jesse-Hughes.’

The crow surveyed Henry with appalled distaste: ‘Jesse-Hughes? The murderer?’

‘Oh I thought you’d have known … His last request – you must have known. I knew because of my dad but it was in the papers. Someone must have told you.’

A shake of the toppered head, a black gloved hand raised as if to silence Henry: ‘I’m sorry – I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.’ He tried to put a laugh in his voice.

Henry grinned come off it, mock reproachfully, wagged a conspiratorial finger. He failed to recognise that the crow regarded him as a nuisance, or worse.

‘It’s all right,’ Henry assured him, ‘it’s just we don’t get so many celebrities here – it’s not Golders Green or Putney Vale.’

‘Of course not.’

‘I just wanted to tell you, when I saw you, tell you to your face how important “Teresa” has been in my life …’

The trade never reckoned crows to be anything more than vanity and fancy cuffs. Crows were not considered to be thoughtful mourners. Nor were they reckoned passionate. No tears, no throwing themselves into the oblong hole, lest they muddy their precious clothes (not hired).

The fourth time Henry mentioned “Teresa” this one, all cold corvine politesse, turned sibilant. Every S was a venomous dart. ‘This Teresa, this woman, who is this woman?’

Henry enjoyed a spot of the old joshing. Taking the Michael (thus) was the family way. It was the lime in the mortar that bound the Fowlers. Henry would normally have reckoned the crow to be a misogynist queen because of the way he uttered woman, with contempt. But Henry knew a piss-taking joker when he met one, and he respected the ruseful stratagem, admired the implicit knowledge of the game’s rules, warmed to the deadpan performance, resolved to play along with it but could not stem his giggling as he mocked: ‘So you don’t know the handbag shop on Holloway Road then?’

The crow’s jaw plummeted on puppeteer’s wires.

‘Erherch – you didn’t know I knew about it did you urchaf? Go on – tell me that Heinz is fifty-seven varieties.’

‘Heinz? Heinz … Holloway Road … hand, handbags?’

‘That’s you,’ Henry winked, archly.

‘That’s me?’ He grimaced, a first try at a grin.

Henry was getting through. He twinkled.

But the crow shook his head in pitiful incomprehension. He turned and strode with his metal heels clicking towards the cemetery chapel.

Henry caught up with him, grasped him by the upper arm: ‘Fair’s fair, I only wanted …’

The crow jerked his arm to secure its release. And then, in an eliding gesture, he briskly flicked at Henry’s face. Henry had not been slapped since haughty Miss Gordon had grown exasperated with his inability to memorise his three-times table when he was three times three, equals nine. The crow’s black glove stung. Henry clung to his hot jowl, gaped at his antagonist like a hurt animal.

After the ceremony whilst the mourners queued in the foggy late afternoon to shake the hands of the immediately bereaved, to kiss and hug them, Mr Fowler growled from a miserly slit at one end of his mouth: ‘I want to talk to you Henry. Later.’

Henry watched dusk crêpe the headstones and the balding branches. He looked out for the crow but didn’t see him among the people who by the time they reached the two weeping ashes had ceased to be mourners and were themselves again, free once more to exclude death from their quotidian routine, a freedom which Henry rarely enjoyed, he was born to death, it was his crust. It was death that paid for the ruggedly chunky gold earrings Naomi was wearing when she said: ‘You shouldn’t put up with him Henry. Why do you put up with him?’

Mr Fowler had just left.

‘He’s my father.’

‘So what. That doesn’t mean he can just talk to you like …’

Henry looked at her so angrily. She’d never seen that before, in all their months of marriage. Henry had never tried to make her cry and now here he was, doing it with his eyes and his tight jaw when all she wanted to do was to comfort him, cuddle him better after the protracted rebukes he had received. She’d heard every word through the thin walls of their first home where there were no secrets. They lived as one. They had lived as one till he made that face at her, till he told her it was none of her business, till he accused her of eavesdropping, of spying, of covert intrusion into a private matter. It was family business.

‘I am your family too.’

That is going too far, thought Henry. That is above and beyond. ‘In a different sense,’ he sneered.

Naomi sobbed. She spoke his name, lengthened it imploringly. ‘I’m your wife Henry – that’s family.’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘And when someone speaks to you like that …’

‘Someone? Someone? You call my father someone … like, like he’d wandered in off the street. God.’

‘Henry you’re not a child. They may treat you like you’re still ten …’

‘He was right. That’s all there is to it. Nothing to do with being treated like a child. He was right. I fucked up. I am his son, and Fowler & Son does not fuck up. I was out of line. No question. He was right. So he gives me a bollocking and that’s that. I can take it. No big deal,’ he lied, stretching to save lost face with front rather than conviction. She had heard them. She had heard her husband repeat: ‘Bobby Camino … Bobby Camino … Bobby Camino …’

And she heard her father-in-law: ‘Even if he had been this Bob, Bobby … What sort of name’s that? Camino.’

‘Not his real name, Dad – Doug Truss s’matter of—’

‘I don’t care if he’s calling himself Dr Crippen and Ethel le Neve.’

‘Dad. You used to hum along to it. “Teresa, Tayrasor, Trasor, Tayrayayaysoar.” You used to sing along with me. I still got it – Top Rank.’

‘What? Henry – you’ve got to take control. He gave me his card. Norman Idmiston.’

‘It’s b’cause he was a one-hit wonder – he’s changed his name. Again.’

‘He’s a barrister. LLB, MA Oxon. Rope Court, Middle Temple.’

She heard nothing. Henry did not reply. He must have stood there with his mouth open.

‘We reflect society,’ Mr Fowler told him. ‘And I’m afraid my boy that the only section of society your behaviour this afternoon reflected was our friends the unwashed jackanapes, the great unwashed, the ingrates. The United States is our ally. You don’t burn your ally’s flag. We’d be speaking Germ—what I mean is we’ve got a lot to thank Uncle Sam for.’

‘I couldn’t agree more Dad.’

‘You’re not there as Henry Fowler, Henry. You’re there in a ritual role. Like the Queen … We have to preserve our mystery. That’ll be what shocked Mr Idmiston – not that you’d got him mixed up with this Bobby chap but that you broke the spell. That’s what it is – I’ve thought long and deep about our calling as you know Henry. And the one thing you cannot do under any circumstances is reveal what I like to call the human beneath the hat. If you were anyone else Henry you’d be looking at probation. And I’d dock your wages if you weren’t a newly married man. It’s not just Fowler & Son, it’s the whole profession – we’re butlers to the dead, we’re a caste and we stand together, abide by the caste’s code.’

‘It was wishful thinking – you know, I let it get the better of me. I suppose I must have wanted him to be Bobby Camino.’

‘You haven’t been listening have you Henry. What I’m saying is, even if this Bobby Camino does attend a funeral where you’re there in an official capacity you do not on any account go running after him asking for his autograph. Not if it’s Warren Mitchell or Dick Emery or Gerald Harper or Ted Moult you do not even if you are right about who it is. Do you read me? There’s no place for Mateys in Fowler & Son, no place whatsoever.’

‘Yeah, of course – but I wouldn’t with them anyway – it’s just that “Teresa” … It’s about Stanley. That’s what it’s about.’ And Henry Fowler hangs his head.

‘Teresa’, written by Doug Truss, Joe Meek and Mike Penny, was recorded by Joe Meek at his makeshift studio above Messrs Kaplan’s handbag-and-suitcase shop at 417 Holloway Road N7 in June 1961. Roger Laverne (né Jackson) and Heinz (Burt) played organ and bass. The record’s release on the Top Rank label was delayed because of Truss’s (Bobby Camino’s) contractual obligations to Pye.

The first time Henry Fowler and Stanley Croney heard it was shortly before noon on 28 October 1961 on the BBC Light Programme’s ‘Saturday Club’. Henry persistently opened the breakfast-room window and flapped at the air with a tooled-leather magazine holder to remove the smell of Stanley’s cigarettes – his current and last brand of choice was Kent. Henry kept an eye on where Stanley was putting his feet, shod today in mock-croc almond-toed slip-ons with a rugged buckle. He feared for the cushion tied to a ladder-back chair, he feared what his parents might say if they saw the heeled depressions in the oat fabric and if they detected the sweetish odour of the tobacco. Stanley feigned oblivion to Henry’s concern, observed that the song was ‘for kids’ even though he’d keenly beaten the table in time to the repetitive scat wail.

When the programme ended Stanley went to the toilet, so he never heard the name Jesse-Hughes. Henry, plumping the cushion flattened over two and a half decades by his father’s weight, listened to the midday news bulletin: at a special sitting of St Alban’s magistrates court a forty-three-year-old grocery company representative had been remanded in custody in connection with the murder of five women. Dudley Jesse Hughes (there was no indication that the name was primped with a hyphen) spoke only to confirm that name.

When seven months later at the Old Bailey he pronounced the sentence of death by hanging on Jesse-Hughes Lord Justice Killick ejaculated as was his wont and because it was his wont his marshal had a spare pair of slightly too-tight trousers at the ready so that when His Lordship went to dine at his club, a hank of white shirt protruded from beneath his waistcoat, from the top of his flies, prompting murmurs of approval from novice members such as Norman Idmiston.

Jesse-Hughes asked in his death cell to hear ‘Teresa’ by Bobby Camino. Teresa was the name of his poliomyelitis-stricken wife for whose sake he had polygamously married five widows in the counties of Hertfordshire, Northamptonshire (two), the Soke of Peterborough and Suffolk, had had them amend their wills in his favour and had then over twelve years killed them with atropine, in a dometic accident (shiny stair treads), by drowning (a bath, a river), and by tying a fifth, a jabbering Alzheimer, to a chair in a frosty garden for the night. It was the variety of method which according to former Reynold’s News crime reporter Claude Vange in ‘The Last Gentleman Murderer’ kept the police off his trail for so long.

Henry Fowler was to follow the case with scrupulous attention. His father joked that the judge’s black cap should be replaced by a topper because the name was a better fit! Not that Mr Fowler was pro hanging. There is, tragically, little that the embalmer can do with a roped throat. The contusions will always show through. They are the brand the hanged take to the other side. The hanged are marked with a blue-black thyroid beyond eternity – no wonder, then, that suicide in the cell the night before is so favoured an option. Henry was never sure whether Jesse-Hughes’s request to hear ‘Teresa’ was granted. He was not sure whether Jesse-Hughes had really asked for it or whether that was a journalistic fabrication. Indeed he was not even sure if he had read it or had been told it by some schoolmate (sychophant? tease?) who knew of his fondness for both case and record. He wondered how the request would have been granted. Was there an electric socket for a portable record-player in the death cell? Did Jesse-Hughes, a non-smoker with a horror of nicotine-stained fingers, succumb and smoke his first and last whilst he listened to Bobby Camino’s song about the imaginary girl who shared his crippled wife’s name?

The last cigarette that Stanley Croney smoked was an Olivier, one of a handful he had helped himself to from Mr Fowler’s EPNS cigarette box on the way back from the toilet and put in his flip-top Kent pack. He had also swallowed a draught of White & Mackay’s whisky from the bottle’s neck. When he returned to the breakfast room with one arm into a sleeve of his bronze mac Henry had switched off the radio and was wiping invisible ash from the table with his sleeve before casting his eye about the room to ensure that there was nothing for his parents to complain of. Then Henry checked his hand-me-down wallet’s contents of ten pounds, his aggregate sixteenth birthday present from three weeks previously. They left the house at 12.09 to catch a train into central London. They walked down the hill where the big Victorian mansions glared through dripping laurels and rhododendrons. Stanley, anxious about his shoes, walked on the road rather than on the pavement whose drift of wet leaves might conceal a surprise gift from a dog. They passed the forlorn park and the pavilion surrounded by scaffolding and the malnourished trees. A Kent-bound train rattled past the allotment strip where old men hid from life in huts made of doors and iron and wire and string, smoking copious weights of shag. The smoke from their makeshift chimneys was hardly distinguishable from the glary white sky. The road curved after a terrace of railway cottages, and there was the rusty old girder bridge.

Chapter Three

It was going on fifty feet that Stanley Croney fell. It was a seventy-foot drop to the rain-glossed cinders beside the shiny tracks that stretched into oblivion. It was almost a hundred feet high, that rusty old girder bridge. The representatives of the emergency services casually disagreed about how far the tragic lad had fallen – but who, naked eyed, can estimate height or distance with anything more than a well-meant guess when a young life has been lost and there are procedures to follow and the dense nettles on the embankment sting through uniform trousers and speed is vital because all train services have been halted. It was high, that rusty old girder bridge.

The coroner noted but did not question the disparities. He scratched at his eczematous wrists that cuffs couldn’t quite hide and listened with sterling patience to the policeman, to the ambulancemen, to the doctor, to the firemen who had surely overestimated the distance because of the duration and difficulty of their haul of the unbruised, uncut body up the steep embankment. And he had heard evidence from PC 1078 Grady in two previous cases and considered him to be a cocky smart alec and careless of details.

Thus he assumed (wrongly, as it happens) that the bridge was seventy feet above the tracks. He heard evidence from Henry Fowler; from the hairdresser Jimmy Scirea whose salon Giovanni of Mayfair Henry Fowler had run into, ‘all agitated’, asking to use the phone; from Janet Cherry who had talked to the two youths before they turned on to the bridge and who described Stanley as being ‘in a definitely frisky mood, you know, sort of excitable … show-offy – he was often like that. He was a character.’ He had performed ‘this funny bow, old-fashioned, sort of like in the olden days if you follow my meaning’. His friend, whom she knew only by sight, had merely nodded curtly and looked ostentatiously at his watch whilst she talked briefly to Stanley about a party they might both attend that night. She had been surprised not to see Stanley there because he had asked twice whether Melodie Jones would be going. ‘He was very direct. He wasn’t shy.’

Of course he wasn’t. He was a one, a daredevil, a cheeky monkey. This wasn’t the first time. Everyone can remember the early hours of New Year’s Day 1960 when after being ejected from the Man Friday Club (under age, over the limit, we’ve our licence to think of sonny) he had run up a drainpipe and had scaled a roof of the Stanley Halls and had stood silhouetted against the full-scale map of the heavens shouting to the stumbling revellers in the street below: ‘I am Stanley and this is my hall.’

He had offered variations on that boast to Henry for so long as Henry could recall. Henry’s memories of it were in his ribs. That’s where Stanley would elbow him when they walked past the Stanley Halls and Stanley Technical Trade Schools. They walked past so often that Henry suffered costal bruising from his quasi-brother’s joshing prods and proud jabs. Stanley’s identification with W.R.F. Stanley might have been founded in nothing more than the coincidence of a common name but it had grown from that frail beginning into heroic idolatry. W.R.F. was the odd one out in Stanley’s personal pantheon of sideburned rock and rollers, quiffed balladeers, d.a.’d teen idols, bostoned film actors, Brylcreemed footballers. W.R.F. was old, dead, from long ago when they wore the wrong haircuts. But, as Stanley persistently reminded Henry, he was his own creation: he had had no family business to enter, he had started from nothing and had gone so far that he had been able to buy the land and to design and build the loud structures at the bottom of South Norwood Hill. That his philanthropy was boastful is unquestionable – why else make buildings of such striking gracelessness and coarse materials if not to clamour for attention for oneself and one’s inventions.