The Fowler Family Business

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The Fowler Family Business Page 11

by Jonathan Meades


  The experimental mini-roundabout cluster at Eden Park, the first of four such projected complexes, was commissioned by the London Borough of Bromley from Larsen Müller Jago (consultant engineer Roger Croney). It replaced traffic lights at a junction of six roads, one of them dual carriage of the 1930s with a rockery along the middle. The junction’s problems were further exacerbated by:

  a)An inconstant circulatory balance – flow and volume sampled over a three-month period showed no constant pattern save between c. 07.00 and 09.40 on weekdays. There was no complementary late-afternoon consistency.

  b)Two (half-timbered) shopping parades, each with a slip road of its own.

  c)A petrol station, which offered two means of ingress and one exit.

  d)A listed cedar of Lebanon, the only remaining vestige of the late-Georgian arboretum planted by the antiquary and amateur architect Holland Gibson. Its lower boughs had obfuscated the traffic lights and were reckoned to have been directly or indirectly responsible for more than twenty per cent of the accidents which occurred at the junction.

  In June 1990 there had been no fewer than seven accidents which the police had classified as ‘serious’, including two fatalities (‘very serious’).

  In the first three months of Curly’s scheme’s existence the number of accidents had risen from a weekly average, during the same period of the previous year, of 0.96 to 1.48. But not one of these had been classified as ‘serious’ and unofficial police opinion was that the majority, which occurred at low speeds, were ascribable to drivers’ unfamiliarity with what the designer himself, quoted in Girder, called the ‘quasi-molecular stratagem of the guideblocks’ disposition’ and with the introduction of ‘ambient riverflow’ (i.e. one-way traffic) to all the intersecting roads and, further, to the roads between them.

  The Beckenham, Bickley and Bromley Globe headlined its report of residents’ complaints: BEDLAM COMES TO EDEN PARK – AGAIN! – a reference to the Bethlem Royal Hospital which had removed from Lambeth to its Monks Orchard site, south of Eden Park Station, in 1926 and which had been an object of neighbourly resentment ever since. Interviewed by Globe reporter Gavin Stove, ‘Jack Bunce, 78, a retired soft-drinks executive of Orchardleigh Avenue, quipped: “We have to go all round the houses to get to our houses now. It’s bad enough having all the poor unfortunates lurking on the other side of the fence over there but letting them out so they can re-route the traffic at a notorious black spot – it’s like Arnhem all over again.’” Mr Stove concluded his report: ‘There’s no paradise in this Eden. Just a snake of unwanted lorries in residential roads built for yesteryear.’

  Curly parked on a pavement. Henry scrutinised the purple-and-orange lines painted diagonally across the roads at intervals which diminished as they neared the intersection. He pondered the curvaceous tumuli, the ‘guideblocks’, whose differing ground plans were markedly irregular and whose relationships to each other seemed to him to have been randomly determined. He followed Curly across one road after another, looking left, right and left again, and again, unable to get the hang of the layout, fearful that a vehicle coming from a direction he had not considered might wing him or worse.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ asked Curly with evident authorial pride, clapping his hands, smiling.

  ‘Yes … yes it’s interesting … very different.’

  ‘I’ll say. There’s nothing like it in Britain.’

  Henry nodded: ‘It’s certainly unusual.’

  ‘Sculptural engineering starts here.’

  ‘Uh-huh – it’s, urm, a whatchamacallit then? A you know …’

  ‘Installation?’ Curly near sang the word.

  ‘Yes. Installation … sorry, I’m not really up on all—’

  ‘Spot on. It is an installation. It’s a made object. We apply art to cars and to buildings and to furniture, to … to what have you – so, why not to roads? Eh?’

  Curly was not saying this for the first time. Henry had heard it all before. Bridges, hard shoulders, ramps, railings, crash barriers … Curly’s vainglorious mission was to make art out of the least-noticed public objects.

  ‘The flowers. What are they? They’re nice.’ Henry assessed them with a professional eye to future use: they possessed funereal potential. He hadn’t seen these before, hadn’t been shown them. But that’s florists for you: always letting you down.

  ‘They insisted on having something,’ Curly sighed, exasperated. ‘A design’s integrity … not a notion they understand. They’re canna lilies – they use them in France. Lavender’s idea.’

  They were standing outside a children’s clothes shop at the end of one of the half-timbered shopping parades. They both clasped Styrofoam coffee cups. Curly watched vehicles negotiate the junction. He concentrated with the tense application of a trainer or coach, now biting his lips as he willed on a speeding van, now tutting exasperatedly and clawing the thick suburban air as a Triumph Toledo with four blue rinses came to a perplexed halt among the guideblocks. He turned away, shaking his head. Then, all embarrassment and shyness, he mumbled over the shriek of an accelerating motorcycle: ‘I’m infertile Henry.’

  Henry was preoccupied by the ostentatious slink of a Chiselhurst wife from her metallic pink Shogun to the premises of Wax’n’Tan With Max’n’Fran. He marvelled at her ability to be simultaneously overdressed and underdressed. ‘Gosh! Look at that. D’you think she has to have a licence to wear one of those?’ He turned to Curly: ‘If you’re creative – it sort of goes with the territory … The child in the man. All that. Part of you’s bound to be.’

  ‘Wha …? What do you mean? Part.’

  ‘Well, you know, ah, Picasso – or was it … Thing – the one you lent me the book about. Always on about genius being infantile.’

  Curly smiled pathetically: ‘No! No! I said, I said: I’m infertile, Henry. In-fertile?’

  Henry’s brain went immediately to work to decode the syllables which it believed it had misheard. Curly could see his molar fillings, his tongue, and the elastic saliva strands extending from top lip to bottom on the point of snapping but just holding. Curly spoke with the jittery gabble of a tiro paying court with rehearsed words: ‘I’ve been talking this through with Lavender. In fact we haven’t been talking about much else …’

  Curly continued while Henry fixed on a carved neo-Tudor bressummer. The wood was faded, flaking. It could do with a tosh of paint pretty sharp. And that herring-bone brickwork really did need repointing a.s.a.p. The eyes of a child mannequin in the shop window fixed on his. They were lavishly lashed, liquid brown, pleading: they begged him to bring her to life, so she might go to the ball for which she was dressed in a sequinned bodice and satin puff sleeves with a velvet bow in her verisimilar Titian tresses. She would do anything to be brought to life, would pay whatever price he named.

  Curly stopped speaking.

  Henry knew this time that he had not misheard. He was startled, incredulous. He half-expected Curly to signal that he was being invited to participate in an elaborately perverse and circular practical joke whose primary victim was its author. But Curly was unquestionably in earnest. It was like being asked to assist in a suicide. But that, Henry told himself, is an end and this is a beginning. In his shock Henry was capable of realising that the ramifications would be manifold, knock-on, domino. The first domino had fallen with Curly’s extraordinary request. He tried to unpick the matted compress of the love called friendship, uxorious trust, charity, duty, favour, loyalty. But all Henry could actually think was: Is this the way that Curly should have approached him? Is this the correct way, the socially sanctioned way? Is there an approved form of etiquette for asking your oldest friend to impregnate your wife or is it nowadays like, say, what to wear when it says smart casual or addressing strangers by their Christian name – a free-for-all where anything goes?

  Curly took him by the arm. They walked away from Bedlam Corner as it would come to be known, past the pink Shogun and the copulating rhinoceroses on its spare-wheel cover,
by a circuitous route of roads whose gardens were gay with rose trellises and smiling gerbera and flowering lavender and lawns so green they seemed dyed, back to Curly’s car.

  When he saw a metalled surface whose aggregate was composed of ginger pebbles Henry could not but think of the Start-rite mites setting out hand in hand along life’s highway in the old advertisement. They’d be getting their bus passes soon. Had their journey fulfilled its promise of happiness and safety and chiropody-free radiance?

  His had – he could put hand on heart and swear to that.

  There had been setbacks, sure, messy blots here and there, an ingrown big toenail in ’77 and the same one again in ’82 since when he had followed Mr Scalby’s advice to abjure toecapped Oxfords no matter what the trade might say. But these had been the exceptions. Yes, the far side of his horizon was always going to be as unknown as that which the mites had approached all those years ago. Yes, it was always going to spring surprises. The trick was to make sure they were nice ones. That was an important part of Henry’s philosophy. It was always other people who got divorced, who had Down’s kiddies, who got into financial scrapes. It was other people who had the skeletons – the embezzler grandad in choky, the jabbering aunt in the bin, the schoolgirl daughter in the club. And Henry had sought to keep it that way. Such problems, conditions and fates were for other people. He didn’t want his life polluted by the grubby disgraces that other people were so prone to and which they increasingly failed to recognise as disgraces. Curly was proposing a future of conspiracy.

  He admitted as much when he suggested, in a calculated aside, that it would not be necessary to tell Naomi, that indeed everything might be easier, ‘less pressurised’, were she not privy to this compact between the three of them, this bond of blood and trust, this clandestine rendezvous of secret seed and discreet egg. But, of course, it was up to Henry and if he reckoned that his marriage vows decreed …

  No. Mum was, aptly enough, the word. Whatever he decided his lips would be sealed.

  ‘It’s between us,’ Henry agreed, digging himself in deeper. ‘Us three.’

  Curly smiled and started the car.

  ‘I could,’ Henry suggested modestly, ‘fill a jar – you know …’

  ‘You wouldn’t enjoy it. You don’t want to be a sad wanker. That’s the very point.’

  Curly posited his and Lavender’s theory of surrogacy which included the paradox of proxy paternity: that a man who has engendered a child by artificial means, without carnal knowledge of the mother, will, even if he knows the identity of the child, suffer a greater and more abiding sense of loss than one who has fomented conception by the usual means and he will attempt to overcome that loss by seeking the child whom he regards as ‘his own’ and taking possession of him/her. This is because his emissive gesture, which might not otherwise have been made, had a specifically procreative intent. There existed a willed link between cause and effect. A man who has, on the other hand, impregnated a woman as a result of enjoyable, recreational and apparently irresponsible concupiscence will regard the gratification achieved in the prosecution of that act as an end in itself and will not expect or desire to extend the relationship to one of joint parenting: the history of the world and of the Child Protection Agency suggest that man is an animal who is as likely to scarper as to nurture. Surrogacy is thus best undertaken in circumstances in which causal sex and casual sex are as close as the adjectives which describe them.

  Curly relished that juxtaposition, those scrambled letters. He repeated: ‘Causal, casual, causal, casual – Christ!’ He stamped on the brake to avoid a teenage girl who had stepped in front of the car. She hurried gauchely back on to the pavement and into gaping blimey denimed arms. ‘Look at her – look. They always do that … avoid mutilation by a hundredth of a second then have a giggle with their mates about it. Amazing. It’s genetic. Must be.’

  Chapter Twelve

  Month after month after month she bled, and because she bled she wept. Lavender Beard Croney’s menstrual pattern attained the uncanny invariability which she had yearned for when young and single, when she had occasionally been careless of contraception, when her diaries were pocked with red runic devices, underlinings and marginalia executed with such anxious intensity that their imprint carried through the page from one Sunday till the next. The memory of those prodigal years and their lost children reproached her now.

  Every month her breasts grew heavy on her and weighed dully with a pain that increased as she grew older. This was her body’s harsh means of telling her what she knew so well – that it was not fulfilling its function as an apparatus of reproduction, that she was not allowing it to fulfil that function, that she was fighting the instincts she was imprinted with. Her body had it wrong. She wanted what it wanted. She longed to be filled with a version of herself, with a being who would be their child, who would belong to her and to Curly, even if he did deprecate himself as the non-playing captain and as the loving nurse who almost thinks the child her own. He referred to their putative son as Blenheim and to their trinitarian enterprise as Operation Blenheim. It was a coinage which did not amuse Lavender. Anything which made light of their predicament combined with her frustration at her inability to stem her menstruation to render her fractious, snappy, ratty.

  Henry irritated her in many ways. When, as he entered the kitchen one night, he heard Curly say Blenheim he asked: ‘Is that Blenheim as in Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, Malplaquet? Or Blenheim as in Blenheim, Lancaster, Wellington?’

  ‘Neither – it’s as in Blenheim, Seaton Delaval, Grimsthorpe, Eastbury.’

  ‘Ah,’ Henry grunted, puzzled, and stuffed a chilli-red merguez in his mouth, retched but didn’t fetch, quite.

  ‘Why d’you say that in front of him?’ Lavender complained when he’d left. ‘It’s our secret. It belongs to us. Us. Why do we have to share everything? Isn’t it enough – me having to fuck Henry without letting him into every last cranny of our life? Christ, Curly – it’s not me, it’s not me, it’s not my being, it’s not my, my, self that he’s … It’s only my reproductive organs he’s meant to be … attending to. My ovaries. Not that he’s making much of a job of it. Is he?’

  ‘How – uh, how many …’

  ‘How many free fucking fucks has he had without delivering do you mean darling? Weell … By my reckoning – and I was there, remember – that makes, ooh,’ and she sighed with a profound weariness, unable to sustain her anger, ‘fourteen … fourteen times. It is never going to happen is it …’

  Curly scraped couscous, leek, smeared turnip and gamboge, harissa-stained lamb fat from a plate into the kitchen bin. He felt like scraping himself too into that bin (stainless steel, domed, overpriced). His life was now defined by his generative nullity. And it was measured by the very mark of Lavender’s fertility, her periods. He was, he told her, beginning to get the hang of what it was to be a woman. The two days each month when she ovulated and the day before them and the day after were like holy days, feast days, days when oblations were made to Henry, the harbinger of fecundity, in the form of post-coital slap-ups: souvlaki, paella, sauerkraut which Curly insisted on calling choucroute and which was Henry’s favourite: ‘A splendid reward for a task assiduously prosecuted,’ Henry pronounced tactlessly, pompously, whilst dog-sniffing the wine chosen by Curly to complement the fermented cabbage and smoked pork and cured sausages and junipers. ‘Umm, yes, that, as … as what’s-his-face, you know, on the telly, would call dry as a nun’s minge. Well he wouldn’t, actually – not on the telly so to speak …’ Lavender glared at the ceiling and the low-voltage lights. Curly bit his lip.

  Henry irritated her in many ways. She didn’t want her-little Blenheim or little Eastbury (a girl’s name) to talk like his or her birth father who blithely referred to couscous as tar-brush grub, and who cracked tiresomely unfunny gags like: What do you call an Arab with a suitcase? A terrorist. What do you call an Arab without a suitcase? A terrorist on a budget. It wasn’t so much the ugly senti
ments that she objected to as the coarseness of their expression. And what if this was not learned, not culturally acquired, but a genetic trait that might be passed on, might prove uncorrectable – like gesture or handwriting or voice?

  She was vexed too by the self-righteousness and piety of Henry’s philo-Semitism. Years of marriage to Naomi had turned him into a doggedly intransigent supporter of Israel (which he had visited once, pronounced ‘heaven on earth’, and had never returned to). Any act of belligerence or state-sanctioned terrorism perpetrated by that country met with his enthusiastic approval. Any action which threatened what he perceived as its interests would be characterised as Fascist and appended with the observation that Syria shelters Nazi war criminals. He was ostentatiously sensitive to real and imagined slights on his children’s maternal heritage. He was eager to take demonstrative offence on their behalf.

  It would have been insolent and ignominious to fault him. He was proudly loyal, paternally protective. Although he had never considered converting he had grown into the cliché of the zealous convert. Yet Lavender recognised a strain of sententiousness, of smugness, of moral aggrandisement through his very proxiness. He seemed to presume that his not belonging to that faith and race rendered his championship of Jewry and Zionism (which he didn’t differentiate) all the more laudable, all the more deficient in self-interest. It was as though Jews were ‘his’ tribe – which he had elected to support as someone else might choose to support a soccer team.

  If only he would impregnate her! If only she could be full with him! She could then be shot of him. She realised how contrary to her sex’s immemorial wish this sentiment was. But these were singular circumstances. What had been audacious in its conception was in practice trite and frustrating. ‘I do not,’ she told Curly as she lay beside him watching cars thrown across the ceiling by the camera obscura of a gap in the blinds, ‘enjoy getting banged by other people. For whatever reason. And nothing’s happening, is it?’

 

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