The Fowler Family Business

‘That’s the bridge. It’s just like the bridge,’ he said before he wept.

She comforted him. She made him hot chocolate. She made him drop scones with honey. She held his reticent hands and hugged him. When Henry came in from work experience (at Fowler & Son) she told her son that she and Curly had just been having a little talk. Henry was startled, and it showed. They sat, the three of them, at the breakfast-room table where he had so often sat with Stanley. Mrs Fowler made a gesture to Henry, the sort of gesture a different mother might have made to her son in the presence of a girl, a nodding smile of connivance which implied more than approval, which implied a duty to go for it. So Henry suggested to Curly that they have a kick-about on the lawn. It was frosty all that day, and the ground was slippy. Neither the sixteen-year-old nor the eleven-year-old could control the old sodden ball on the crunchy grass but they played happily, in earnest, straining to tackle, diving to save, deflecting the ball off Her Majesty’s trunk, getting up a sweat and blowing white fire from their throats. When the dark came down on the garden they went inside for a tea of anchovy toast and lemon barley water.

That evening’s panel on Juke Box Jury was Jack Good, Johnny Tillotson, Helen Shapiro and, making his only appearance on the show, Bobby Camino. Curly was also a fan, and hung on every word he had to say about the Dovells’ ‘Bristol Stomp’ before he was shut out by Mr Fowler’s chortling joke that ‘They’re more like the Bristol Zoo than the Bristol Stomp. That’s hungry animals crying out to their keepers, that’s what that is.’ And Henry and Curly longed for the day when they would agree with him, without equivocation, without even a frisson of excitement at the wailing which defied propriety. That was the teatime when the Fowlers taught Curly canasta.

Then it was Henry and Curly, Curly and Henry. Curly wasn’t a card, nor was Henry. Curly wasn’t a caution the way his brother had been, he was as cautious as Henry. It was always Henry and Curly, in that order, according to age and experience. Henry took the boy they had somehow overlooked off his parents’ hands, their cack-hands when it came to their younger one, now, terribly, their only one. They were happy, Mr and Mrs Croney, to let their boy hang around with their lost one’s friend. It never occurred to them, nor should it have, that there was anything mucky (a well-used word of Mr Fowler’s) about this friendship. They were right. Henry and Curly never even talked of girls or sex. Stanley’s death had relieved Henry of the pressure to compete in an adolescent contest which he’d not wanted to partake in. He was no longer obliged to boast of conquests which he hadn’t made, hadn’t the nerve to make, lacked the will to make. Had Stanley really believed him when he said he’d fingered Cathy Pelly, when he said that Sally Sanger had unzipped his Terylene trousers? He had only been echoing Stanley after all. Stanley had never expressed incredulity, had never questioned his seductive prowess. So he had believed him? Not on your life.

Henry was happy that the onerous obligations of mucky behaviour had been lifted. He was a loner in most regards – he had few friends other than Stanley and now Curly – so why not be a loner in sex too? It was a private matter, sex, not to be shared, not to be witnessed save by the morosely mocking eyes of the monochrome girls in the discreetly proportioned pocket magazines which he stole from the near-blind Mr Gough, the newsagent whose devotion to such magazines had brought him to that state, had brought him out in brown stains on his skin, had done for his hearing too. Henry could open the door to the shop without causing the sprung bell to ring, without disturbing Mr Gough, frotting and coughing in his cell of tobacco and flesh at the far end of the shop.

Henry knew it was wrong to steal these profane images. But stealing was appropriate because it augmented his shame, it doubled his sin, it increased the guilt attached to his betrayal of his parents with meaty tarts, it made sex conditional on crime even if that crime was venial and the sex was the glueing together of silky pages that were potent beyond their size. These thefts were, so far as he could recall, the only crimes he had ever committed. Try as he might he couldn’t remember anything half as bad. He was out of step with his contemporaries’ judicious delinquency. He saw the good sense in not jaywalking. He was contemptuous of the kudos attached to getting (a girl) into trouble. And whilst other adolescents were swept along by the glandular revolution within their bodies and allowed it to determine their mores, Henry resisted the hormonal call. At the age of sixteen he was already the victim of a longing for the certainties and stasis of his comfy past.

Stanley had persuaded him to read books by writers with beards. He preferred tales of wartime aircrews’ escapes after being shot down over occupied France. He enjoyed the pitchfork’s tynes in a haystack, the shy peasant girls, the radio transmitters disguised as sewing machines, the mortal sacrifices, the Gestapo beating testicles with rubber truncheons. He admired the looks of the men shown in the jacket paintings: tough yet kind, decent and modest, with regular brave blond acne-free features. They were adventurers with right on their side, heroes whose lives were uncontaminated by equivocation and impure thoughts. Henry lent Curly such memoirs as T.D.G. Teare’s Evader, Bruce Marshall’s White Rabbit and D. Baber’s Where Eagles Gather. Curly had only just finished Fugitives by Night when Mrs Croney asked Henry to take the boy for a dental check-up.

Curly was soon anaesthetised, soon dreaming that Mr Etherington was the collaborationist dentist to whom Squadron-Leader Victor Wraxall had had to submit. He was grateful when he came round that Henry was with him. His mother so loathed the smells of gas and burning tooth enamel that she might have had a turn. Henry claimed – stoically? genuinely? – to enjoy those smells which are also undertakers’ trade smells, the smells of crematoria which are also the smells of duty and profit.

This was not the only dream that aircrew yarns would prompt.

Curly dreamed of Stanley falling, parachuteless, from a fuselage which burned to reveal an armature of riveted girders. Stanley’s howl as he plummeted through the night sky was the howl that Curly made as he woke before the body made contact with the sinuous lines of a marshalling yard where Wehrmacht troops patrolled between flaming braziers. He woke, twisted and sweating, uncertain where he was – where had the window moved to?

His howl of terminal fear woke Henry in the sleeping-bag along the other side of the small tent pitched beside a stream on a damp Cornish moor. That was the summer they took their bicycles on the train to Exeter and headed west. At Henry’s insistence – he was in loco parentis and now working in the family business thus a routine witness to the result of quotidian rashness – they pursued his safe-cycling policy. Viz.: ride up hills, tonic for Achilles’ tendons and hamstrings; dismount and push bicycles down hills because to achieve speeds of over thirty miles an hour on these precipitous gradients is a risky frivolity, a brief gratification of an appetite that is better suppressed. There were enough dangers without courting supplementaries – there were caravans listing and swaying like the callipygian buttocks of drug-tranced dancers; there were cars performing six-point turns in sunken lanes jammed by caravans; there were bulls sated on meadow grass and anxious to exercise; there were vipers on the heaths; there were sheep everywhere.

They bathed in hidden coves. They lay under the sun on cropped turf incised with rabbit paths. The confectioner’s red of sunset delighted them. They learned not to pitch the tent near trees which were contorted and silently screaming because that was the way the wind went, whistling as it bullied. They cooked on a spirit stove and convinced themselves that bacon and beans so prepared tasted miles better. They got used to damp clothes, to rising at daybreak, to lying outside the tent feeling themselves part of the system to which the stars belonged, marvelling at the sidereal patterning and misnaming formations with confident ignorance. When they drank from burbling steams they were, Henry insisted, refreshing and feeding their bodies as man had done since the dawn of time but without the intercession of engineers who had so denatured water that it is taken for granted rather than regarded as a gift from the Earth to its children, a gift from the Earth’s core welling through strata of immemorial accretions to be lifted high as clouds and returned to earth in a cycle of beneficence and generative necessity.

Henry and Curly lunched on crisps outside pubs whose names proudly celebrated the West Country’s criminal past: the Smugglers’ Inn, the Skull and Crossbones, the Buccaneer, the Pirates’ Nest, the Wreckers’ Flare, the Slave Master’s Arms. The descendants of criminals sported lavish widow’s peaks which began between their eyebrows. Their arms were girt as telegraph posts and blue with tattoos from all the world’s ports. Their faces were all avarice and cunning. They ran pubs with the same relish their forebears had brought to running slaves. They treated their customers, the grockles and emmets, with bonhomous contempt and smiling malice.

Henry asked a licensee called Dennis Jacka where they might camp nearby. Mr Jacka slid his tongue inside a nostril to think. Then he told them how to reach ‘a beautiful spot’ further down the wooded estuary. That was the afternoon Curly got sunburned. He stretched out prone squinting through tufts of grass towards the headland and the river’s mouth, listening to the narcotic drone of bees in broom, getting the perspective wrong as he grew drowsy and dozed off. Henry sat, all the while, beneath a stunted tamarisk, neglectful.

It was too late when he rubbed sunblock into Curly’s back and shoulders which had gone red as an angry glans.

The dogs arrived just after dusk, galloping across the scrubby plateau, their pelts bouncing with belligerent ire, their tongues like horizontal pink standards, barking war cries and followed by Dennis Jacka’s cousin Ted Nancecarrow who had no teeth but made up for that lack with a string of convictions for assault, ABH, GBH, affray, etc. He couldn’t remember the number of foreigners he had fought for Cornwall and he never allowed anyone on his land. He carried a torch like a cosh, his stick quivered as though the hand holding it was in the throes of a fit. Henry and Curly used the crossbar of a bicycle as a ladder to the boughs of a sycamore. Curly was sore. He’d have been sorer still had the dogs known how to climb but they didn’t because they were dogs. Ted Nancecarrow struck the tree with his stick, he referred to the dogs as ‘my wolfs’. He struck them too. ‘My wolfs is hungry,’ he repeated. The torch’s beam picked out a leaf, a grimace, a wrist, a sappy twig broken in the rush to escape the slavering fangs. ‘Don’t like strangers on my land … don’t like strangers at all.’

He walked around the tent, prodding the canvas. He tried and failed to pull up a peg with his mud-crusted clumsy boot. He kicked over a jerrycan spilling all the water they had. He picked up a pack of sausages from beside the Primus stove and threw it to the dogs at the foot of the tree. They demonstrated their teeth, their greed, their ingestive urgency.

‘They like their scran: don’t you my wolfs? They’re not too fussy about it neither. Eat anything, they would.’

‘We didn’t know,’ said Henry. ‘Please …’

Ted Nancecarrow toyed with the fearful rictus in the boughs. He took pleasure in the pleading whine – it meant that he had stripped the foreign trespassers of their dignity and English pride. They were almost as humiliated as victims with bleeding eyes and hairline fractures begging him to put down the adze. He took pity on himself: he couldn’t chance it – another offence and he’d go down again, even if he was justifiably exercising a landowner’s right. His most recent suspended sentence had fourteen months to run. What would his wolfs do without him? They might attack the wrong people – they had a taste for Meriel Spargo, had to be held back, and they always went for old Bob Nankivell because he’d never washed beneath his foreskin for forty or more years ‘tis said. They might even be put to sleep.

‘You two. You got ten minutes. I’ll be back in ten minutes. And if you’re still here … You want to learn to keep off of other people’s land. Ten minutes I say.’ He had saved face. He could live with himself. He clapped his hands and the dogs followed him out of Henry’s and Curly’s lives.

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