The Fowler Family Business

by Jonathan Meades

  ‘Yes. I did.’

  He had had an appointment at four o’clock with Dai Turnbull who had overcome the handicaps of a facial lupus the size of a fist, a fluting voice, two aborted corruption inquiries, a dismissed charge of causing death by dangerous driving, a dismissed sexual-harassment suit and perennial alcoholism to achieve the rank of Detective Chief Superintendent.

  Dai’s catch-phrase was ‘never kick a nigger … till he’s down’: he was a legend for the way he extended the pause. It had made him a sought-after after-dinner speaker on the South London circuit because, as every Rotarian, Lion and Mason agreed, the Super after-dinner spoke as he found.

  They met in a not-very-French café in Upper Norwood where Gordon the owner knew better than to present Turnbull with a bill, and the waitresses in horizontally striped tops knew better than to complain about Turnbull’s octopus hands. Hands which when Henry arrived were occupied tearing up a cake and dipping the pieces into a stiffly corrected coffee.

  They small-talked:

  ‘How’s the lad then Henry?’

  ‘He’s at Solihull this week.’

  ‘Shacken are son goo.’

  ‘No. The N.S.R…. whatsit. Centre of Excellence – for squash …’

  ‘Oh that’s right yeah. Yeah, remember he was a bit of a player. Course his mum was—’

  ‘That was tennis.’

  ‘Same basic skill though. What I mean, Henry, is he doesn’t get it from you, does he?’

  Henry winced.

  Turnbull ordered more coffee. ‘And bring the bottle this time if you would. I dunno – optics, measures. In Spain they’ve never heard of them.’ He leaned back. ‘So …?’

  ‘Now Dai. This is strictly, uh …’ And he brushed the side of his nose.

  ‘Ontrah noo. Course it is Henry. You know me old son.’

  ‘Thing is, well, I, I need to get some DNA tests done. And I was wondering if there was any way you could discreetly bung ’em through one of your labs …’

  ‘Oh dear Henry. Oh my. You been playing away haven’t you … and someone’s saying you’ve stuck one in the back of the net.’

  Henry did his best to grin his roguish grin.

  ‘Whoops-a-daisy. I feel for you Henry I truly do. But the answer is no. No can do. The flesh is willing but my hands are tied – there is ab-so-lute-ly no way round the … It’s watertight you know. The procedures. Don’t think we haven’t conducted a thorough … Why d’you need the Met to do it?’

  ‘Well … I guess … Well suppose I don’t. Really. Not specifically. The Met. I mean I don’t know how you go about …’

  ‘Aaah. Haah. Someone Else’s Baby! That’s what you need Henry. Just the ticket. Someone Else’s Baby.’

  He observed Henry for a sign of recognition that didn’t come.

  ‘No? All that fuss over the advert? No? Doesn’t ring a bell?’

  Two weeks before Christmas 1989 Shaun Memory, a former Detective Inspector who had taken early retirement, sometime celebrity security executive and currently the managing director and sole employee of AAAA Investigations, was unable to afford even the services of the equally unsuccessful one-man advertising consultancy which rented the neighbouring plasterboard-and-asbestos partition in a Tulse Hill office block. He was ‘just another struggling trace agent going under for lack of curiosity, for criminal lack of interest in the where-do-I-come-from factor’.

  He wrote his own advertisement and took a display space in the personal classifieds of two broadsheet and three tabloid national newspapers.

  * * *

  You’re Dark. She’s Blonde. The Kid’s Ginger.

  How Do You Know It Wasn’t The Milkman?

  SOMEONE ELSE’S BABY

  0(8)1 674 1910

  * * *

  The response was immediate and various.

  By the third week of January 1990 Someone Else’s Baby was investigating seventeen cases in which a husband or male partner suspected that a child which bore his name might have been conceived of a covert liaison of the mother. In four cases the child had already attained majority, and in one the client was the paternal grandmother, acting without the knowledge either of her son or of the daughter-in-law whom she suspected of having betrayed him.

  Shaun Memory was obliged to take on extra investigative staff, one of them a former colleague who had paid his debt to society, the other a moonlighter still employed by the Met. A further partition was rented and a school-leaver hired to answer the phone, open the mail, paint her nails, etc. It was this girl Vandella who excitedly told her boss one late January afternoon that a researcher from BBC2’s mid-morning flagship Hare Dares Share Cares was on the line.

  It was his appearance on that programme which made his memorable name. Memory was quick-witted and canny, and in an agitated studio discussion with representatives of angry women’s groups and resentful men’s groups and wronged family groups and fearful children’s groups he convincingly refuted the accusation that he was preying on the basest of fears and was pandering to the paranoia of the sort of men whose appetite for domestic violence was whetted by the aggressive selling of his agency.

  No one was obliged to seek Someone Else’s Baby’s services – he was a small business, not an arm of a police state.

  Was he not creating problems where none had existed? asked Jane Hare, the grossly over-promoted telly gardener (who had made her début as the simpering, sexy [for a gardening programme] trug interest on Leafy Glade).

  Of course not.

  Was there not the possibility that his investigations might touch people’s very identity?

  Of course there was: that was their point. Wasn’t a father’s identity bound to that of his children, was it not even defined by the sureness of his paternity?

  And surely children should not in this day and age live in ignorance of their natural parents as he had done …

  It was here that Shaun Memory broke down and tearfully recalled in agonised detail the agony of his very own personal agony.

  The evening of the day they had buried his father (Dad) his mother (Mum) had taken him aside and had confessed to him, her only child (Son), what she had had to keep, Son, all these years from Dad: that he (Son) was, how can I say this, in fact the son of Angelo Bravin. Remember him – the half-Italian chap – who used to come down with his wife Augusta to visit once a year from Scotland when you were just a nipper? Angelo who had been with Dad in the REME during the Berlin Airlift. Angelo who always used to give you a florin and a slice of the dry salami he kept in his pocket.

  But then Augusta died and Angelo remarried and we (Mum and Dad [who wasn’t Dad]) never heard from him again but they heard about him, not, evidently, directly from him but from other REME veterans Dad was in touch with, that he had had a family with the new wife and they must be taking up all his time at that time in life.

  Shaun Memory almost held back his tears, but not quite.

  The special pleaders and the studio audience were silenced.

  Shaun Memory’s parents, Shaun Snr and Betty, would not have been surprised, would indeed have been gratified by their son’s performance.

  They were in their apartment above their nest-egg-cum-golden-goose, the Bar Crystal Palace in Estepona, bought for a song when Shaun Snr had taken his early retirement from the Met in 1972, and although they had a nice satellite dish among the characterful tiles they weren’t watching.

  Dai Turnbull was watching. Not normally an avid mid-morning telly potato, he was having to wait on a tired shiny sofa because his Thursday masseuse Avril was taking her time with her eleven-o’clock gentleman, a mug payer, apparently.

  Having served with both Memory father and Memory son he had a bit of a titter to himself. He began to calculate the odds against the creation of a new pass number into the Central Police Computer being uncovered. Then he thought through how he could put it to Shaun Memory Jnr who was as bent as the day is long. He swiftly buried his head in Slutlust’s centrefold when Avril’s eleven-o’clock
gentleman at last appeared – the Metropolitan stipendiary magistrate Mr Robert Edwin with a fresh bloom on his failed-barrister face. Dai noted this for future reference.

  The vein stood proud of Henry Fowler’s skin, a worm gorged on blue cheese. It shone when a dab of spirit was applied. Then the needle went in. The dropper filled with crimson of such splendour and chromatic richness that Henry told himself of course it’s all right, of course it’s the right blood, it’s just a cock-up, with blood like that how can I be infertile.

  That blood has signs within it. That blood is a message, it’s the book of my life, it’s what I inherited and what I passed on, it’s the vector of my essence.

  ‘I hear you – I know what you’re looking at,’ Shaun Memory, himself, told Henry. ‘This is one for me personally … I’ll look after this one myself … any friend of Dai’s …’ Bloke to bloke, geezer to geezer. ‘I’ll get you a result … Didn’t get this little lot by not getting them.’

  Shaun Memory congratulated himself by stretching back like God in his padded leather recliner and swivelling to include everything around him in his office on the ground floor of the fancy Gipsy Hill villa where he now employed a staff of twenty-two. There it all was, all that other people’s misery and suspicions had bought him: the heirloom range of furniture, the ancestor paintings, the heritage features (age-old putti at the corners, deep cornice moulding all around the ballroom-size room), and through the long windows an abundantly sylvan garden whose boundary was invisible, which might, thought Henry, have stretched to West Norwood Cemetery.

  ‘So – we got your blood sample, we got the girl’s hair and … what we got of the boy’s?’

  ‘Wristband,’ Henry reminded him.

  ‘Wristband! I like it … That’s how we slapped one on that heavy-metal feller. See it in the papers? Krait – Darryl Fox. Refused to give a sample … So we had Vandella there liberate one of his sweatbands. After a gig. Souvenir for a loyal Krait fan eh?’

  Shaun Memory’s laugh was vicious.

  ‘OK Henry – if I may – you just leave it to us and we’ll be in touch … should be Friday. Oh – and the girls know to give you a Dai special: 12½ per cent discount.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Another lazy afternoon for them, but not for me, Henry told himself. Another ignorant afternoon for them. Maybe the last.

  He fixed a sandwich of thickly buttered bread and ham. He stared out into the drowsy garden where bikinied Lennie was sprawled behind a stockade of sunblock bottles. Ben and Ben’s fellow squash prodigy, keen, bulgy-muscled Nolan Oates lolled side by side on a striped recliner and a Portofino chair chosen by Naomi and bought by Henry out of the fruits of his labours burying and burning the dead for the children of the dead.

  The last time he had looked Nolan had been rubbing tanning oil into Ben’s thighs with what seemed to him like undue zeal.

  A glass jug sweated on a table shaded by the thatched South Seas parasol. The carmine fluid in it was evidently iced. He wondered what combination of sticky liquors they were drinking.

  Then he wondered why he cared.

  He tried to persuade himself that he was indifferent to them and to their behaviour, that he didn’t care if they turned into teenage drunks, thence into pocked derelicts, diseased runaways peddling their bodies at King’s Cross for the price of however many grams of crack it took to achieve blissful oblivion. But he did care: the thought of them screaming as their most intimate quarters were ripped and bludgeoned by drunken middle managers from the soot towns sickened him. The habit of worry was not one that could be quashed at a whim. He was going to have to learn lack of concern, he was going to have to work on post-paternal indifference. His fatherly instincts were not going to die of their own accord. They would have to be smothered. He needed to perform a psychic excision.

  His unconditional love for Ben and Lennie had initially surprised him with its stealth and then with its steadfastness. No matter how bolshie, no matter how sarky they became he tolerated them, excused them, told himself that he had behaved that way too at their age (he hadn’t – and he knew it). Ben’s selfishness was of course singlemindedness. Lennie’s petulant sulks were expressions of her high standards. She was bound to be bitchy because she was so much cleverer than her contemporaries.

  He remembered the squashy batches of Pampers and the smells of powder, of pink ointment, of Milton steriliser which he, who had lived a lifetime with formalin in his nostrils, could still not abide. He remembered the brief period when they had been of a size to share a double buggy which slithered on slimy bronze leaves on Fox Hill and how they all ended up in a pile against a none-too-steady fence with an excited spaniel on the other side. For years after they’d ask him to tell the tale of how he’d stopped their buggy racing down the hill, of how close they’d come to a terrible accident, of the dangers in wait at the bottom. Fifteen years ago, fifteen years! It seemed no time at all. The spaniel was called Biscuit, it must be dead by now.

  He hadn’t thought of them as cuckoos then. He had believed then (or would have done had it ever occurred to him) that they had every right to the most precious place in his life, every right to his heart. And to his pocket: how much was it supposed to cost to bring up a child?

  All his love, all his energy, all his money, all his care and kindness and forbearance and sufferance – all for what?

  For two counterfeit children. For two bastards with a wobbly provenance. For two gets got on his strumpet wife by …?

  Now, there was the question. Who’s your father?

  Should he be consumed with hatred for the unknown seedsman? Should he confront him whilst his wife and children (and God knows where they came from) cower behind him down the hall when truth comes rapping on the door.

  In his wallet, stapled to two flimsy slips of indecipherable printout bearing figures, percentages, arrows and ratios, was a personally written note from Shaun Memory himself on paper bearing the Someone Else’s Baby logo:

  It’s a sickener but as anticipated. But it’ll be best at the end of the day for one and all if you can clear the air. The analysysis conclusion there’s no profile compatibility between your profile and the kids. It also is 99% certain that the two kid’s have the same father. I have instructed further tests of this instant to ensure 100% watertight but take it for read that it is the same father. This fits with the circumstantial closeness of them being born so close to each other. Formal breakdown of analysysis and explanation follows but I have taken the liberty of informal message in as much as you wanted the results double quick time. Speak soon to pursue how we proceed the matter from here. Cheers. Shaun.

  Henry ran his hand over the front of the fridge where magnetised sheep, cows, trees and fences had once been ranked. Those attachments had constituted the children’s rustic world. He had used them to teach Ben and Lennie about the countryside which they seldom visited because of Naomi’s antipathy to the smells and her appraisal of mud as inconvenient and her fear of quadrupeds unless they were tinned or in a packet. He could list all her foibles, all her whimsies, all her enthusiasms: he had lived with them half a lifetime.

  And nothing could dissuade him from being charmed by them, vain and trivial as they were – nothing. Not even this epic betrayal which Henry Fowler knew to be the stuff of the old Greek myths and on which shrinks had founded their trade: ‘Their fraudulent trade. You might even call it freudulent! They’ll still be at it come the millennium. They give a different meaning to Grecian 2000.’

  That was one of the gags he had made in his address, ‘Special Concerns Prompted by Filial Grief for a Mother’, to the Lowestoft conference the previous autumn. It won him two big laughs and a round of applause which he reckoned to be genuinely felt, well deserved.

  It would have been his absence at conference all those years ago that had allowed Naomi the opportunity to conceive and gestate the two insults in the garden.

  He hadn’t always wanted to go but it was duty, it was family tradition. What
was conference without a Fowler?

  No wonder Ben lacked an appetite for funeral direction. No wonder when he had spent a week in the office during his Easter holiday to get a feel for his future he had moped and had treated the staff with an offhand indifference as though the very notion of contact with the business was beneath him – the very business which was starting its tenth decade, which had provided him with all that he had ever asked for, which bore his name. No wonder – it wasn’t in his blood; the boy lacked the genetic pattern which had made generation upon generation of Fowler supreme in his field between Streatham and Beckenham. Henry had instructed him that his hauteur was despicable, that Fowler & Son would be around long after they were both dead, that the family business was bigger than any single Fowler. But then, Henry told himself, at Easter Ben had been a Fowler. Now he wasn’t. That was his problem. That was the burden he was going to have to bear throughout life. Henry had spent hours deliberating about how he should break the news.

  You are not you.

  No. No. How could he hurt them thus. They were his children.

  Even when concentrating on the very matter of how to tell them that they were not his children he would forget that they were not his children. He was so much a prisoner of paternal habit. He had defined himself as a father above all else. And now he was an ex-father, a father who had never been a father, a delusory father. He was a cuckold duped into caring for a family of cuckoos. He was no bodily part of the family which had been his family, his life, for seventeen years; it was more than eighteen since Naomi had told him with a sly, proud smile that she was pregnant.

  Had she believed he was the father? She must have known.

  The day of Ben’s birth had been the most thrilling of his life. He had himself felt reborn. He had been granted a further identity. He was no longer just the son who had become a husband. His accretion of roles had further swollen: he had driven excitedly, but observing the speed limit, from graveside to bedside, from a finished life in Hither Green to a fresh one in Denmark Hill.