The Fowler Family Business

The most celebrated of W.R.F.’s inventions was the Stanley Knife, the sine qua non of a particular sort of South London conversation. Although the plump bulk of the handle militated against the achievement of the bella figura that Stanley Croney was keen to exhibit, he invariably carried a Stanley Knife: a natty dresser needs protection against the sartorial hun. His knife was his daily link to W.R.F., to the self-made man Stanley longed to be. Stanley Croney was going to emulate him. He too would have a house like Stanleybury, he too would endow a clock tower in his native suburb to commemorate his wedding, he too was on the way to being his own man, and that meant having a way with what Mr Croney called ‘the ladies’. Henry despised Stanley’s ingratiating charm, his flimsy slimy stratagems.

He knew Janet Cherry by her loose reputation. And he despised her, and her kind, for their susceptibility to Stanley who was never at a loss for a quip. How could they fail to see through his corny ploys? How could they like someone who had no respect for them as people? Did they not realise that he was an apprentice wolf, preying? Stanley greeted her with lavish rolls of his right hand and a balletically extended leg as though he were a peruked fop, Sir Grossly Flatterwell making the first step in the immemorial dance which culminates horizontally. They had, Stanley hinted when he had observed Henry pointing to his watch and she had gone her stilettoed beehived way, already culminated. That anyway was how the virgin Henry interpreted Stanley’s ‘It’ll have to be another bite at the cherry if Melodie J doesn’t come across. Not that she won’t – she’s just rampant for it.’ It was a foreign country, yet unvisited by Henry who’d never been on a Continental holiday either.

‘And,’ Stanley went on, confidential, man of the world to a mere boy, ‘they say she gobbles.’

Henry, morose, didn’t know what Stanley meant. He was ashamed that he had not entered the carnal world of which Stanley was now a citizen. Stanley was less than six months his senior: he told himself, without conviction, that six months hence he, too, might … might what? Do wrong, that’s what he knew it to be. Premarital intercourse, as it was then known, was as wicked as electric guitars and didn’t happen to nice people, to responsible people, to people called Fowler who attended church. It was for gravediggers, not for funeral directors. It was not for those who respected their mothers, their mothers’ sex, the primacy of Christian marriage, the sanctity of the family, the notion of true love as explained by Tab Hunter who wore neither hair cream nor sideburns: ‘They say for every girl and boy in this whole world there’s just one love …’Just one love. Wait till she comes along. You’ll know it’s her. And it is invariably attended by God’s revenges of pregnancy, gonorrhoea, syphilis, gonorrhoea and syphilis (‘a royal flush’ according to sailors, and they know), social disgrace: ‘She’s had to go away’ was what Mrs Fowler said of more than one office help. If the fallen one was a cleaner who couldn’t type and wasn’t allowed to answer the phone because of her common accent she eschewed euphemism: ‘She’s gone to have an illegit. No one’ll want her now.’

This carnal world was fraught with such dangers – social, moral, irreligious, medical – that Henry Fowler was not sure he wished to enter it. Yet he was achingly jealous of Stanley who was so confident in his new knowledge, so easy with it. And he broached the subject of that evening with trepidation and with a resentment at what he knew would be Stanley’s response.

‘You … you’re going to a party then?’

‘Dave Kesteven’s sister, Sheila. Parents are away so …’

‘I thought we were going to the flicks.’

‘Yeah … look sorry. But we can go any time. Can’t we? Eh? You can come. Have a crack at the cherry – never knowingly says no.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ said Henry, meaning ‘no’.

‘Your choice.’

And here Stanley did one of his party tricks. He put his hands in his jacket pockets and turned a standing somersault. A man, obediently pushing his bicycle from the end of the pedestrians-only rusty old girder bridge gaped in astonishment then scooted with one foot on a pedal before mounting the black Hercules with calliper brakes. He has never been traced.

Henry Fowler, the only living person to have seen him, described him as ‘quite old, wearing an old man’s cap, sort of unhealthy looking, and he had this kitbag thing which was all mixed up with his cape – he had a cape like a tarpaulin and it was all bunched and sticking out funny because of the kitbag; he had cycle clips, and very big feet’.

Unhealthy, how? A sort of creamy yellow complexion. Waxy, you might say, very like some laid-out corpses. Henry Fowler, who often helped out around the family business which he would enter when he left school next summer, was well acquainted with such.

Stanley clapped his hands in self-applause, grinned madly, made Charles Atlas gestures and saluted the horizontal cape which was now astride its saddle and peddling unsteadily in the direction of the allotments. He marched from the pavement on to the rusty old girder bridge with Henry (as usual) trailing behind him. The bridge was just wide enough for three persons to walk side by side without brushing its sides, which were sheer metal sheets – those of average height had to jump to get a sight of the distant track below, a sight which would thus be retinally fixed. The bridge was lavishly riveted, the rivet heads stood proud of the metal like dugs. Each side was topped by a horizontal parapet, eight inches wide, also sewn with rivets. The flaked paint was a history of the Southern Railway’s and the Southern Region’s liveries – dun, cow brown, algae green, cream, battleship. There were crisp islets of rust, ginger Sporades which shed flakes among the puddles on the threadbare macadam of the walkway.

This is where flowers would be left for Stanley, for years to come, left to die.

The Croney family never forgot their Stanley who, larky as ever, climbed on to the parapet and walked like a tightrope artist until his smooth heel slipped on a rounded rivet head, until he stubbed his foot against an uneven joint, until he overcompensated when the friable rusty surface had him stumble, until he dropped those fifty-five or seventy or hundred feet to the cinders beside the shiny tracks below.

‘You ought,’ Stanley is now speaking his penultimate words, to the top of Henry’s head which is at the same level as his feet, ‘you really ought to come. You don’t want to worry about your wols. Everyone gets them.’ Henry’s acne, miniature crimson aureola with milk-white nipples, were his shameful secret. They were for the whole world to snigger at when his back was turned but they were, nonetheless, still a secret because they had never been mentioned – not by parents, not by brusque Dr Oxgang, not by bullies. Their existence was confined to the bathroom mirror. Now Stanley had lifted them from that plane. He had ruptured the compact between Henry and his reflection. Henry was overwhelmed by hurt.

‘Just squeeze them. That’s what I did,’ counselled Stanley, picking his way among the rivets.

Henry’s cutaneous ignominy turned to destabilising anger, to a rage as red as those aureola (let’s count them: how long have you got? No, let’s not bother), to a churning indignation. By what right? The words ‘wols’ and ‘squeeze’ echoed in his head. Friendship was suspended, blotted out. He felt a momentary resistance to his hand, he walked on, not noticing the depth of the puddles, aware of a bronze streak across the perimeter of his sinistral vision like a light flaw, deaf to the mortal howl because of the thudding clamour in his head. At the end of that moment he became aware of the absence of Stanley’s feet a few inches above him. He had gone from A (the bridge’s mid-point) to, say, D (the worn metal steps at its end) and arriving there had realised that he had no memory of B and C.

That’s when he ran, with his coat inflated by the wind. He ran to the parade of single-storey shops. He noticed how the pediment above the middle shop had lost some of its dirty white tiles, how it was an incomplete puzzle. That shop was a florist’s. There was a queue of macs and handbags which turned in unison to gesturing Henry. He stepped out as soon as he had stepped in, his nostrils gorged by funeral perfumes.

The next shop was all dead men’s clothes and their repulsive cracked shoes – you can never get the sweat out of leather, that’s undertaker lore, family wisdom. Closed, anyway, gone early for lunch, said a note taped to the door’s condensing glass. Which is why he hustled past two new hairdos with jowly flicks coming out the door of Giovanni of Mayfair and slithered down the chequered corridor flanked by the stunted cones on the heads of women who would be visitors from the Planet Kwuf. ‘Jimmy, Jimmy,’ he panted: Henry knew Jimmy Scirea because Jimmy advised the family business on dead hair and how to dress it.

Henry was all agitated. Jimmy had never seen him even mildly agitated, had always considered him a calm boy, so this was unusual. Even so Henry controlled himself enough to act with what his father counselled, with all due decorum: no ears were sheared by the sharpened scissors of the high-haired apprentices who augmented the numbers every Saturday.

They were not privy to Henry’s brief conversation with Jimmy, and Carolle the receptionist was used to Jimmy mouthing ‘Say goodbye’ and making a gesture with a flat hand across his throat when he needed the phone. There was no panic. She told her new love Salvador that she had to go and handed the apparatus to Jimmy and to the pimply boy whom she had thought at first must be the son of one of the ladies under the driers. She couldn’t help but hear the name of Stanley Croney, the beautiful boy, the cynosure of every hairdresser’s receptionist’s eyes.

Henry’s face was puffy, sweaty, tearful. There was a film of salty moisture all over its manifold eruptions, there were greasy rivulets between them like the beginnings of brooks just sprung from the earth. He rapped impatiently on the phone’s ivory-coloured handset and glared at it as though it might be faulty. He took against a fancifully framed, pertly coloured photograph of a hairdo like a chrysanthemum. He spoke, at last, in urgent bursts as though his breathing was asthmatically impaired. There was a flawed bellows in his chest.

He declined the receptionist’s offer of water. He detailed the circumstances with cursory precision. He listened intently, told the ambulance how to get to the bridge. He was calmer when he made his next call, to the police. He used the words ‘larking about, having a bit of a laugh’. He rather impertinently added: ‘Remember the traffic lights are out by the station there.’ He put down the phone, sighed, wiped his face with a paisley handkerchief, thanked the receptionist for the use of the phone and thanked Jimmy Scirea who was putting on an overcoat. Henry seemed surprised that the hairdresser should follow him from the salon. The hairdreser was in turn surprised that Henry, instead of hurrying back to the site of the accident, should amble across the road to Peattie’s bakery to buy a bag of greasy doughnuts which he began to eat with absorption as he made his way back to the bridge. He covered his face with sugar. He inspected the dense white paste. He thrust his tongue into the jammy centre. He ate as if for solace or distraction just as a smoker might draw extra keenly on a cigarette. When they reached the bridge Jimmy Scirea hauled himself on to the top of the side to look down at the body below. Then he tried to loosen a cracked fence pale to gain access to the embankment. Henry shook his head and said, with his mouth full, extruding dough, ‘Don’ rye it. Don’ bother. Bleave it to them. Too steep.’ He stuck a hand in his mouth to release his tongue from his palate. ‘Ooph – bit like having glue in your mouth but they’re very tasty. Think I’ll get some more later. Yeah definitely.’

Chapter Four

When Henry Fowler married Naomi Lewis his best man was Stanley Croney’s brother.

No, Curly didn’t forget the ring though for a moment he searched his pockets in the pretence that he had!

No, he didn’t embarrass the guests by telling off-colour gags – though he suggested that he was about to do so by talking about the day that Henry hid the salami! This, however, was merely the introduction to an anecdote about Henry removing a pork product from the table on one of Naomi’s early visits, before he realised that her family’s assimilation was such that they ignored dietary proscriptions.

‘My dad’s motto,’ Naomi never tired of explaining, ‘is – the best of both worlds, salt beef and bacon, Jewish when it suits!’ Not all of Naomi’s family and friends were as blithely indifferent to observances as she and her father were. Curly Croney was, even then, at the age of eighteen, canny enough not to stir things between the bride’s two factions. Having felt the coolness with which that allusion to the Lewises’ casual apostasy was received he made no further mention of it.

He spoke instead, with the persuasive humility which was to stand him in such favourable stead in his professional life, about his debt to his friend, the bridegroom Henry Fowler, his brother and comforter Henry Fowler, who had taken the place of his real brother Stanley. Irreplaceable Stanley – save that Henry had replaced him, as much as anyone ever could.

It was Henry who despite the almost five years’ difference in their ages had guided him through the bewilderment and grief that they had both suffered. It was Henry who had been his guiding light and mentor; he had become, as a result of a silly accident, an only child in a shattered family. And it was through Henry’s belief in the integrity and sanctity of family that the Croney family had been able to repair itself. (At this juncture Curly smiled with radiant gratitude towards the grey mutton-chop sideburns covering his father’s face and to the white miniskirt exposing his mother’s blue-veined thighs.) Henry, not least because of his own parents’ example, understood the strength of family and the importance of its perpetuation whatever losses it might suffer: a strong family is an entity which can recover from anything, and Henry had shown the way.

Curly didn’t know that Naomi’s mother had only returned to the family home in Hatch End fourteen months previously after a three-year liaison with a wallpaper salesman in Cape Town which ended when Louis died in the bedroom of a client’s house during a demonstration of new gingham prints and Louis’s daughters brought an action to remove Naomi’s mother from the green-pantiled Constantia bungalow which was now theirs. Nor did he know that fourteen of Naomi’s mother’s aunts, uncles and first cousins had died at Sobibor and Treblinka and that there is no familial recovery from such thorough murder.

But those in the Classic Rooms of the Harrow Weald Hotel that squally afternoon of 25 August 1968 who had evaded or who had survived industrial genocide were in no mood to oppose the patently decent, patently grateful young man and were inclined, too, to conjoin with him in his celebration of the tanned blond undertaker whom Naomi so obviously loved and had chosen to make her own family with far away, on the corresponding south-eastern heights of the Thames Basin – there, see them there, through the rolls of weather, places we’ve never been to, goyland, where the JC means Jesus Christ, where yarmulkes are rarely seen, where it may not even be safe to practise psychiatry, where a vocabulary of hateful epithets is nonchalantly spoken, unreproached, in the salons and golf clubs. There are sixty-five synagogues north of the Thames; there are five south of it, and about as many delis. No ritual circumcisers, either – a lack which had not even occurred to Curly Croney, which duly went unmentioned although in later years Naomi’s father, Jack Lewis, would sometimes jocularly greet Henry as ‘the man the mohel missed’. Henry took this in good spirit and was unfazed by the overintimate coarseness, because it was so obviously true – no one would expect a strapping, big-boned blond with almost Scandinavian features to have been circumcised, and, besides, his exaggerated respect for his parents extended to his parents-in-law. It was a respect which Curly illustrated by referring to an incident Naomi had mentioned to him.

On their third date, one Sunday in May, Henry had called for Naomi in his sports car and had driven her first to the Air Forces Memorial at Runnymede to admire ‘a properly tended garden of remembrance – tidiness equals respect’, then to see the brash rhododendron cliffs at Virginia Water, and on to a riverside restaurant where they ate a chateaubriand steak because it was to share and by such gestures would they unite themselves. They gazed at each other oblivious to river, weir, swans, pleasure craft, laburnums, magnolias (past their best in any case). Henry was explaining the massage procedure that must be applied to a body to alleviate rigor mortis in order to make it pliable for embalming. Naomi leaned across the table, clasped his hands and asked, poutingly, ‘Who’s your ideal woman?’

Henry was puzzled by this question. And whilst Naomi’s pose – eyes fluttering and index finger tracing the line of her lips – might have encouraged most young men to achieve the correct answer Henry contorted his face in effortful recall as though the quarry were some irrefutable slug of information like the chemical formula for formaldehyde CH20 rather than a softly smiling ‘You’ or ‘You are’. If Henry realised that he was being asked to provide proof of the compact between them he was too shy to acknowledge it.

Suddenly his face cleared. He’s got it, she thought to herself, warm with the anticipation of an exclusive compliment. He reached inside his jacket, withdrew his wallet and removed from it a photograph which he handed to her. It showed a middle-aged woman, her face partly obscured by the hair blown across it by a gust. Naomi looked at it, as though this was some sort of trick. Then she waited for the clever pay-off.

‘That’s my mother,’ said Henry. ‘My ideal woman.’

Curly, whom Naomi regarded as a child, was blind to Naomi’s hurt when she told him of that day. He supposed that this vignette was an affirmation of her pride in her future husband’s filial loyalty and he recounted it thus, causing his audience to wonder why he should wish to slight the bride at the expense of her mother-in-law. Was he trying to ingratiate himself, in the belief that to be Jewish is to be mother fixated? Was this an expression of covert anti-Semitism? No, it was just gaucheness tempered with Curly’s steadfast idolatry of Henry. Do you know what Henry did the day after they got engaged?

The guests awaited the revelation of a passionate gesture, of some act characterised by irrationality and violins. With his father’s permission, since it was his father who had bought it for him on his twenty-first birthday, Henry traded in his two-seater, open-topped, wire-wheeled MGB for a four-seater Rover 2000 saloon ‘because we’re going to be a family and a sports car’s not suitable. Not safe either.’

‘I really liked the MG, Henry,’ murmured the bride, nuzzling her husband of an hour’s neck, ‘all that fresh air can get a girl quite excited.’

‘The Rover’s got a sun-roof,’ he replied, tersely. ‘All you’ve got to do is wind it.’

Henry had, anyway, made the right car choice in the opinion of Curly’s audience. Every one of them was beaming at him. He might not have made a theatrically romantic gesture but he had expressed a long-term commitment by buying, by investing in, a vehicle renowned for its craftsmanship and reliability, a vehicle with two extra seats to fill, in time and with God’s blessing, two extra seats which seemed to predict a nursery gurgling.

Curly finished his speech with the wish that: ‘Next time I offer a toast to these two I hope it will actually be to these three – but, for the moment, I give you Naomi and Henry.’ Naomi and Henry – their names were multiplied in the gaily decorated Classic Rooms. Curly sat down and Henry gripped him around the arm, patting his shoulder, nodding in satisfaction, a trainer whose dog has had its day. That speech had cemented their brotherhood. Naomi’s mother said what others must have thought when she muttered: ‘Who’s getting married here I want to know? Henry, ob-vi-ous-ly, but who to? I’d never heard it was the best man’s role to declare his love for the groom. What did he mean by these three? Is he expecting them to adopt him?’ And so on.

Curly would not, at that time, have admitted to loving Henry. Affection, respect, gratitude, guilt – these were the sentiments he allowed. And a sort of relief, an inchoate conviction that without someone whom he could take for granted he would not have recovered from the loss of Stanley. He did not delude himself: Henry was more of a brother to him than Stanley could ever have been, while they were young, at least, and the age gap told. He knew that had Stanley lived, reckless, selfish, apple of his father’s wandering eye, Henry would not have been his brother and that Henry would have taken no notice of him, that Henry would forever have been trailing Stanley. His guilt sprang from his having been blessed by Stanley’s death, from having been liberated by it, from having been dragged from the shadows by a true soulmate. It was as it was meant to be, according to fortuity and fatidic law. He was thankful that Henry had stuck with Stanley for all of Stanley’s life for otherwise he would not have inherited Henry. But why had Henry stuck by his childhood friend? Is friendship, too, merely a matter of habit? Was Henry so desperate that he was prepared to suffer Stanley’s routine disloyalty and infidelity? Henry was a loner, unquestionably, and not by choice: his parents’ age was, no doubt, one of the causes – they were not quite of the generation of his contemporaries’ grandparents, but they were of a generation whose children had been born before the war; Henry’s father was eighteen years older than Mr Croney whose laments for Stanley included the one that ‘we grew up alongside him’.

No mention there of Curly who had come along only five years later. Curly considered himself an afterthought. His father, besotted by Stanley who was made in his image, loved Curly when he remembered to, and when he was reminded to by his wife who clawed the smoky air as though punch drunk when she tried to beat him for his hopelessly disguised infidelities.

She wasn’t punch drunk, Mr Croney didn’t hit her, she was merely drunk, gin and sweet vermouth, so drunk that she left meat in the oven to turn to charcoal, so drunk that she lost the hang of clock time and would wake Stanley to go to school at 3 a.m. and run a bath for his little brother as soon as she had packed him out the door into the freezing fog and obfuscated sodium light, so drunk that Mr Croney grew neglectful of his excuses. He saw the error of that particular way when he returned one night to find her sober because there was no more credit at the off-licence. Her fury when in that state was focused, hurtful, shaming; he felt he had no right to be alive. So first thing in the morning he hurried to the off-licence, paid her debt and advanced the shop £30, in cash, with a wink. An investment, he said to himself, an investment – and alcoholic oblivion is a blessing to her, it helps her to forget the terrible loss of her baby and should thus be encouraged. No amount of alcohol could inhibit her breakfast screams at yet another boiled wasp preserved in a jar of plum jam.

The Fowlers’ old-fashioned house was Curly’s refuge from home, his home from home. He first came by one frosty morning six weeks after his brother’s funeral (directed by Fowler & Son) having shyly phoned to ask if he could sort through Stanley’s electric model train set which Stanley had pooled with Henry’s because the Fowler house was big enough to accommodate a permanent layout in an unheated semi-attic bedroom. The 00 ctagon of track matted with dust rested on a trestle-table along with a streaky grey aluminium control box, carriages with greasy celluloid windows, an A-4 Gresley Pacific, a Merchant Navy class locomotive, a shunter with a broken wheel, an EDL17 0–6–2 still in its royal-blue-and-white pinstriped box because by the time Stanley had been given it he was past playing with model trains. Mrs Fowler suspected that Curly, too, was past that age. She had a feeling in her waters that Curly was, though he might not know it, in search of something other than metal Dubio and plastic Tri-ang. Mrs Fowler dusted around the track, excusing her negligence, watching Curly as he picked through toys he was interested in only as souvenirs of his brother. He picked up a cream metal footbridge, fondled it with puzzled familiarity, held it out to show her.