My Father's Fortune

by Michael Frayn

  Why couldn’t we always have talked to each other like this?

  *

  Meanwhile my father soldiers on at Chez Nous, as persistent in his second marriage as he had always required me to be in my own failed enterprises. Through the good bits – the holidays with Elsie in Switzerland and Holland; through the bad bits – her week-long, month-long depressions; with my sister on his side, with her on Elsie’s side. My occasional reappearances fail to change the pattern much. ‘Elsie-trouble,’ says one brief entry in my diary when I’m home on leave. Then again: ‘Slight relaxation of notalking rule.’ A week later: ‘Row with Elsie. Air cleared. Talking.’ Another visit: ‘Home. Incredible hell from first moment.’ In 1959, two years after I started work on the Guardian, I took my future wife, Gill, down to Ewell for Sunday lunch to meet my parents. As we drove off afterwards we hadn’t reached the end of Queensmead Avenue before she burst out. ‘That was the most awful woman I’ve ever met!’ she cried. I thought I had prepared her, but evidently not thoroughly enough. You get used to anything in time, and I’d forgotten quite how powerful an impression Elsie might make upon someone at a first meeting. She had evidently misidentified Gill as another Michael Lane. Within minutes of being introduced, Elsie had taken her out to the breakfast room and poured forth her venom about my father. ‘She was plain, dumpy, and her voice was raucous,’ wrote Gill when I asked her recently about her recollections of this disastrous encounter, and she remembered that Elsie had for good measure also denounced my previous girlfriend, the older divorcee, not because she was older or divorced – though I remember Elsie making her feelings plain to me at the time on both counts – but because she’d helped herself from the fruit bowl without asking.

  She alienated Gill still further by telling her about her wonderful first husband, Frank Smith of blessed memory. Much later Gill asked Doris, Elsie’s sister, if the first marriage had really been as happy as all that. ‘Doris just rolled her eyes … Very similar problems … Elsie had never accepted the family’s hardship when they were growing up and had never done a hand’s turn to help out. She was always set on becoming a wealthy woman but it was never good enough even when it materialised thanks to Ye Olde Oak ham …’ Elsie and my father, says Gill, were ‘a complete and utter mismatch’. Gill liked my father (as he did her, in a rather awestruck way), and it was Elsie’s attack on him for which Gill could never forgive her.

  One of the things that Elsie told Gill about him, while Gill ‘gallantly tried to adjust to the idea we were not just going to have a pleasant Sunday lunch’, was that she’d found the photograph of another woman in his pocket. Neither of us can remember now for sure, but I think that this was the first that we’d heard of her – the third (I’m fairly sure) and certainly final woman in my father’s life.

  *

  It’s February, and as the light fades at the end of the short winter day Gill and I drive off in our tiny Renault quatre chevaux for our honeymoon. Nothing’s fixed, nothing’s planned. We seem to be heading in a generally westerly direction, down the old Great West Road, and for the next few days we wander about the Cotswolds and the Mendips, as free as birds. Our families and the variously ordered lives they have constructed for themselves are behind us. Before us is the open road, and all the endless possibilities of a life not yet lived. We sing as we drive. Fling wide the gates, of course, and The Old Bull and Bush, but also new songs, the songs my father never knew, including all eleven verses of Auprès de ma blonde. The hills of Somerset and Gloucestershire, the plains of Wiltshire, fly past the windows of the little Renault. How lightly we move over the earth, and how unlike the girl in the song we are as she mourns the happiness she has lost! Meanwhile Gill’s parents are back on the South Coast, no doubt still exchanging appalled comments on the new relations they have just acquired, and mine are back in Ewell. Two months after me my sister gets married and moves out, and henceforth every evening and all weekend my father and Elsie and the ageing, increasingly evil-smelling dog are left alone together. Except for each Saturday morning, when they have a visitor – my sister, bustling cheerfully back to see what she can get for Tich on her weekly shopping trip. Until one Saturday, for reasons which my sister finds compelling but can never explain so that anyone else can understand (bought Elsie her groceries in the wrong shop, Gill says), she and Elsie fall out, and don’t see or speak to each other again for eleven years.

  I doubt if there are any visitors at all at Chez Nous after this. My father and Elsie are totally alone. Alone with the hide armchair that has its back turned towards the television set, the Ye Olde Oak on the supper table, the smell of the dog in his basket beside it, Elsie’s ever-longer silences, the memory of the photograph in the pocket, and each other.

  One day at the beginning of 1962, when my father just happens to be passing through Notting Hill, and his homburg and smile have appeared round the door of the two-room flat where Gill and I are then living, I tell him that he’s going to become a grandfather. The news leaves him surprisingly unmoved; perhaps he has other things on his mind. Gill’s contractions begin in the small hours of Sunday, 6 May, and at first light I drive her to the old Charing Cross Hospital. The avenues of Hyde Park are deserted in the spring dawn air, and the bright new green leaves and the fresh blossom of the horse-chestnut trees are totally still, as if the whole world is holding its breath for us.

  All day Gill’s labour goes on, agonising and exhausting. It’s evening when our daughter is put into my arms. She screws up her eyes and utters a blast of angry sound, louder and more furious than I could have imagined possible. Her tiny jaw vibrates with the violence of it – and it’s this that shatters me. I have one of those sudden thunderclaps of enlightenment that makes theoretical knowledge concrete and real. I understand, as perhaps my father did when I was put it into his arms nearly twenty-nine years earlier, that this is another human being – not an extension of her mother or me, but an individual quite separate from either of us, whose standpoint in the world is unique and whose will is sovereign – a self, just as each of us is. A new life has begun, and a new generation. Forty-seven years later that little scrap of human willpower is going to persuade me to write this book, and to tell her a little more about the world, for ever lost to her, which has helped to make her what she is.

  As I get back to our flat late that evening, almost too tired to take my clothes off, the phone’s ringing.

  ‘Where have you been?’ says my father, audibly displeased. ‘I’ve been trying to call you all day.’

  He’d wanted me to help him move his stuff, he explains, out of Chez Nous and into a furnished flat he’s found at short notice. I don’t suppose there was much to move – no more than he could ferry in the back of his car, probably, but I suppose he was hoping for some moral support on what must have been a very bleak day in his life. No chance to give me any advance warning; Elsie had only just told him that the moving van was arriving first thing Monday for all the contents of the house apart from him. She has sold it from under him, and is moving to Hove.

  I explain to him where I’ve been all day. He’s not entirely mollified.

  7

  Legatees

  The flat my father has found is in Wimbledon, in a vaguely Georgian-looking post-war block with vaguely Regency-looking furnishings – the kind of place husbands move into at short notice when they’ve been thrown out by their wives. My father’s personal possessions are too few to make much visible impact upon it; his hearing aid and a copy of The Times on the vaguely Festival of Britain coffee table, perhaps a mug of tea or Nescafé that he’s made for himself. (Cookery – a new activity for him, because the only thing to eat or drink that I can remember his ever making before were the sandwiches we cut for Elsie’s coronation guests.) His footprint on the earth is lighter than ever. The flat has two rooms, so he’s back to where he was when he started out in life sixty years earlier, in Devonshire Road. Except that in these two rooms he’s alone.

  Or is he? Somewhere in the
background of his life lurks another person, the woman Elsie has seen in the photograph. None of the rest of us has caught the slightest glimpse of her.

  I’m not sure that we know even her name yet. We’re simply aware, from things he says, that he has another life going on. He’s not always as we see him, sitting alone in the flat, or coming alone to tea with us. He has been for walks in the country, to concerts at the Festival Hall – and not just as ‘I’ but as ‘we’. At some point he must actually mention her name, though, because we begin to ask politely after her: ‘And how is Gladys?’ Gladys, yes. Mrs Steele. But we never meet her. My father invites Gill and me to tea, or my sister and her husband Robin, or all four of us, and there’s nothing to see in the flat but the carefully impersonal furniture, the hearing aid, The Times, the tea things. He’s making tea for one, for three, for five, but apparently never for two. Often, though, you have an indefinable feeling that somebody else has just been there but left no trace. We boldly ask him if he’d like to bring her when he comes to lunch or tea with us. It’s never possible for her, though; she has an elderly mother to look after, who seems to require attention at every imaginable mealtime.

  Why is he so bashful about her? Why doesn’t he tell us that he wants to have a little talk with us, as he did when he first took up with Elsie? Sit us down on the Regency-style soft furnishings. Say: ‘Supposing I were to tell you that I’m having a relationship with someone? She doesn’t have a dog or a radiogram – but on the other hand she’s not manic-depressive, and we don’t all have to move into her house.’ I suppose he’s embarrassed. He’s still married, after all, and he’s more conventional than he seems. Gladys, he makes clear, is divorced. What we don’t know yet is that she’s thirty years younger than him.

  Then again, time has continued to change the politics of the family. My sister and I are both married, and it would be difficult to catch us on our own for a little private talk. He would have to address all four of us together, half of us still comparative strangers; it would be like testifying at an evangelical prayer meeting. And we’ve all become so respectable. Gill and I are acquiring a second daughter, my sister and Robin their first son. We’re family people, with homes to guard and the values and ideals that this entails. We’ve committed ourselves to a way of life that perhaps seems to exclude enjoying yourself in the company of young women you’re not married to. My father’s a bit in awe of my sister now, in any case; she’s helping Robin to set up a new business and, as my father reports to me with an astonishment and respect that none of my efforts in life has ever elicited from him, has mastered double-entry book-keeping. I think he might have taken me into his confidence if I’d been on my own. I could have returned some of the understanding that he showed me when I confided in him about that relationship of my own a few years earlier. Now that both his children have parents-in-law he’s no longer the single head of the family, merely one of three, and he’s being absorbed into the increasingly complex cat’s cradle of relationships that we’re weaving to cocoon our children. My sister and Robin (soon with a second son) are part of a network that also involves all Robin’s relatives; Gill and I (with a third daughter) of a network that also involves hers. The two networks overlap; we supply each other with the extra uncles and aunts that our children need. We spend alternate Christmases with each other, we designate each other as potential foster-parents. Each set of children needs a pair of grandfathers, so our father finds himself as half of each pair. Saturday with this one, Sunday with that. Lunch here, tea there. Presents and birthday cards going off in two different directions by every post. Gladys bundled out of the flat as Jill and Robin arrive. Gladys back – no, out again, because here come Gill and I.

  A full complement of three grandmothers the family can’t supply. Only the two, one on Gill’s side and one on Robin’s, plus, occasionally, a step-grandmother in Hove. And the ghost of a quasi-step-grandmother, in Wimbledon.

  We reopen family ties that have been effectively extinct for years. The children have more great-uncles and second cousins than they have teddy bears, more places to go to tea on Sunday afternoons than there are Sunday afternoons. On my side of the family alone there are Uncle Sid, Auntie Phyllis, Cousin Jean and Nanny. Phil and Doris. Cousin Maurice and Enid and their three sons. Cousin John and Joyce and their daughter. Cousin Philip and Hazel and their two daughters … And often we take our children’s grandfather with us.

  We’re recreating for the next generation the overcrowded dining room of our own childhood, the convivial scrum around the tea table, the conversations about how to get across London. We’re bringing back to life as best we can the uncle with the beetling eyebrows, the glamorous young aunt with the Evening in Paris, the whistling grandfather with the plus fours and the enormous lap. We’re putting the whole show back on the road.

  *

  For three years my father keeps up the farcical alternation of Gladys and the rest of us. Then one Saturday morning Gill and I, in Wimbledon for some other reason, call in on him unannounced. And there she is.

  She certainly makes a change from Elsie. Everything about her – her style of dressing, her whole manner – suggests that the self-effacement she has been practising for the last few years comes quite naturally to her. If the living room of my father’s flat had been any larger we might never have noticed her standing there, smiling awkwardly, already getting her things together to take flight. We insist that she stays, tell her how pleased we are to meet her at long last, physically restrain her. She does a lot of smiling. She’s reluctant to sit down.

  She looks as if she has served in the war; as Gill notes, she has a distinctly ATS hair style. I’ve just discovered the registration of her birth, though, and it was in 1931 – she’s only two years older than me. She speaks very gently and softly. This is the most surprising thing about her – that she speaks so softly to my father – more softly to him, I think, than to anyone else. Slowly and clearly, though, and looking smilingly straight at him. He smiles back, and seems to have no difficulty in understanding her.

  She’s head of the typing pool at Turners Asbestos, and in time we realise that she’s probably a firmer boss than her manner suggests; although she’s divorced from Mr Steele she retains some of the qualities suggested by his name. She carries herself very erect and has alarmingly authoritarian views, expressed with deceptive mildness. She lives with her aged mother in a tiny terraced house in Mitcham. Many of my father’s complex short cuts on his way into work pass through Mitcham – or did while he was still living in Ewell. This is how it started, apparently, when he began giving her lifts to the office and back during a train strike. Anyway, the farce is over. We invite them both to dinner, with Jill and Robin, and from then on Gladys is incorporated into our web of interconnected relationships. This gives my father his cue for how to introduce her at social occasions – she’s ‘a friend of the family’. His embarrassment hasn’t disappeared. They begin to go on holiday together, or to admit that they do, but my father’s careful to stress to me the difficulty of getting two single rooms. He retains his flat in Wimbledon, she the little house in Mitcham. There’s no sign – or no sign that I’m allowed to see – of their ever being at only one of the addresses overnight. Perhaps they never are. I wish I could put my arm round his shoulder and say, ‘Dad! Please! Simplify your holiday bookings! Don’t pay more than one lot of rates and gas bills!’ But I can’t. I do try to persuade Elsie, since I’m still on speaking terms with her, to do what I think my father himself feels unable to suggest – to divorce him. She scornfully refuses.

  It’s only a year after Gladys has joined the visible world that my father reaches sixty-five, and has to retire from Turners Asbestos. He has been dreading this for some time – not so much for the loss of earnings as for the loss of occupation. He can’t face the prospect of sitting around all day with nothing to do, he tells me. The skills that he deployed to insinuate me into the grammar school haven’t failed him, however. At an age when no one can ge
t a proper job he gets one, travelling South London to sell the services of a firm called Wembley Roofing. The work calls on all his old abilities, all his knowledge of the South London streets, all his old contacts. He obviously does well, because he and Gladys become personal friends of the managing director and his wife. There are photographs of all four of them together in evening clothes, with impressive ranges of wine glasses on the gleaming tablecloth in front of them. This is a good period of his life – the best, I think, since that November night in 1945.

  Perhaps my sister and I have got the whole show going again. Found a grandfather for our children, a happy father for ourselves.

  Three years this Indian summer lasts, then my father goes into hospital for tests. The results are not good. He has cancer of the bladder.

  *

  The hospital where the tumour’s cut out of him is in Wimbledon. The drive there in the days and weeks that follow the operation, through the tail of the rush hour, from south-east London to south-west, gives me an intimacy with the South Circular and its various escape routes and back-doubles that almost expunges the memory of the Elephant and Castle.