The Fowler Family Business

by Jonathan Meades

  He feared that he might cause confusion at the hospital. He didn’t want this special day adulterated by presumptuous hospital staff directing him towards the mortuary. So he stripped off his jacket and waistcoat and tie at successive traffic lights, folding them with exhilarated abandon so as not to crease them and stacking them neatly on the passenger seat beside him. He was smiling rapturously, humming a tune, a soaring, hymnal tune whose name he had never known. He told himself I am a father now, I am a father now.

  I am not a father now.

  And he couldn’t remember the way the tune went.

  He wanted to hum it again to recover what he’d lost – that day zero of the most beautiful baby he had seen, his baby, coated in silky hair leeching the narcotic breast milk of the wife whom motherhood had transformed into a serene mammal. Mother and child formed an exclusive pair amongst the abundant flowers in baskets and vases and bouquets and cellophane which filled the small room. They were tied to each other. Naomi smiled at him from within a far state of dreamy detachment. Her absorption in the child was entire.

  Henry took the boy when he was sated. His eyes filled with terror. His face contorted like an inbred dog’s. He screamed. He wriggled. But Henry got the newborn’s rhythm – of course he did, they worked to the same blood clock, father and son – and the boy calmed. Henry claims he smiled. Then Henry began to sneeze with rhinitic spasms, shuddering uncontrollably.

  ‘You’re allergic to him,’ announced Naomi with proprietorial satisfaction.

  Henry passed his son to Naomi and struggled to pull a handkerchief from his trouser pocket.

  ‘’Snot him,’ he insisted. ‘It’s all these flowers. Like a florist’s in here it is.’

  He stepped back from the bed and tripped on a plastic bucket of exotics, breaking the stems of two parrot-beaked heliconia and making a puddle which he stooped to mop with clumsy paper towels.

  Naomi sighed and spoke to the baby: ‘He’s spoiling our lovely flowers.’

  The miracle of life. That baby could now bring a carbon-fibre racket into contact with a rubber ball travelling at 90 m.p.h. in such a way that the ball’s speed would be so reduced that when it touched the front wall of the court it would plummet vertically to the floor. That was a miracle. And so was the human ingenuity which made the connection between that ball’s terminal trajectory and a dead bird and advertised that ingenuity by the use of the figurative construction ‘to kill a ball’. Telephones, butterfly stroke, nylon-tip pens, the emotive capability of music, the way some people are blond and some are left-handed, the shapes of faces in clouds, water’s inability to flow uphill, the tastiness of animals’ flesh, pain, bustles, reptiles’ poison sacs, sinus drainage, cantilevering, DNA testing – miracles of life, all of them.

  Henry was in an ontological slump with his feet up, the curtains drawn and a cup of tepid tea when he heard Naomi return home.

  ‘What you up to?’ she asked through the gloom. She put down the shiny boutique bags she was carrying. ‘You got a headache or something?’

  Henry didn’t speak. He shook his head, stood and reached for his jacket, draped over a coffee table. He withdrew his wallet from an inner pocket.

  This was it. The moment he most feared. The moment whose anticipation had nagged at him fretfully. It was the moment that he couldn’t stop himself trying to foresee, trying to call.

  It wasn’t too late to pull back. He could continue to lead this life of lies that he had led for eighteen years. He hadn’t of course known the nature of the life he had been leading: thus it hadn’t been a life of lies. But once a dupe knows he’s a dupe he ceases to be a dupe. And if he doesn’t reveal his knowledge of the bad faith he has been subjected to and mutely plays along he colludes in his own betrayal. He blesses the hand that grips the hilt.

  Henry silently handed Naomi Shaun Memory’s memo and the attached test results.

  She peered at it in the half-light. ‘What’s … Someone Else’s …’

  She walked across the room, drew a curtain. She stood to read in the window bay. When she had finished she held the paper by her side and stared through the window. She scratched at a spot on a pane.

  She turned and spoke with wistful candour: ‘I’d almost forgotten … So you didn’t know … It’s funny – I often … I often used to tell myself that you knew, that you’d guessed and you didn’t say anything because you didn’t want to upset the apple-cart.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Well, they don’t look like you do they? You might have guessed. You probably should have.’

  ‘Lots of kids don’t look like their parents. I don’t look like my parents. Doesn’t mean to say that my mother was off with all and sundry getting knocked up.’

  ‘Henry! Don’t be coarse.’

  ‘That’s ripe. This, this is incredible.’ Henry hadn’t known what to expect but he had certainly not expected Naomi’s blithe and guiltless admission of her infidelity. But then Naomi had lived for years with the two consequences of that infidelity: she was aquainted with her mores – he didn’t doubt her protestation of near-forgetfulness. He had only the other day watched a telly programme about unsolved crimes in which a psychologist had claimed that the majority of murderers who go undiscovered forget their crime after the passage of years. Murder, though, does not generate lives.

  Henry wondered at her shamelessness.

  Sometime as that day worn on and vapour trails were scrawled across the blush in the West and the window-cleaner’s neligence became ever more apparent Naomi asked him brusquely: ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘I don’t think we can go on like this.’

  ‘We have for years – gone on like this.’

  ‘You have. You have. I haven’t. Not me.’

  ‘What are you going to say to Ben and Lennie?’ she asked.

  ‘What am I …? That’s up to you isn’t it – they’re your kids. I don’t feel inclined to say anything.’

  ‘Henry. Henry. Don’t be so … old-fashioned. You’re being like some sort of Victorian whatsit.’

  Henry remembered the print of Augustus Egg’s triptych Past and Present in his parents’ dining-room. A stern Victorian husband, despite her pleas for mercy, casts out his adulterous wife to live rough with her illegitimate child, rendering his own children by her motherless and bereft.

  ‘What are you smiling about?’ Naomi accused him.

  Henry shook his head. It was too complicated to explain. She would misunderstand. How times had changed.

  ‘Henry. How else did you expect to have kids?’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she parrotted. ‘I mean I couldn’t get pregnant by you … Seven years. Not on the pill. Seven years it was, Henry, seven years we were trying. I wanted children. I longed for children.’

  She comes now to as near tearfulness as she will get.

  He made stumblingly towards her.

  ‘Henry – I don’t need these … things.’ She waved the analysis strips. ‘You don’t need to give them to me. If that’s what they’re saying … It’s infertility isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s not what they’re for. You’ve just read it. They’re DNA matches.’

  ‘But you are. Aren’t you? Infertile.’

  He stood still, he cast his eyes down, he nodded.

  Naomi stretched out a hand to him. It rested on his forearm.

  ‘I think I’ve known for years,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t understand how you could do this.’ He flapped his arm to push her hand away.

  ‘They’re your children – just like if you’d adopted them … or I’d been married before or something.’

  ‘What! Oh don’t insult me. Please. My children. My children.

  My children don’t exist. I don’t have any children.’ Henry looked out into the garden where Ben straddled prone Nolan Oates and was anointing him with Tanfastic-Lite, rubbing the lotion into his fellow prodigy’s abdomen.

  ‘Whose children ar
e they, matter of fact?’ Henry tried to sound indifferent, unconcerned.

  ‘Henry – don’t.’ She mistook her cue, simpered sweetly: ‘Don’t be like that. They’re our children. You’re just—’

  ‘Stop being so fucking cute. You know what I’m talking about.’

  Naomi walked across the room. She tapped the corks and screwtops of several bottles before pouring herself a kümmel.

  ‘Do you want anything?’ She put on a little girl’s voice.

  ‘Just tell me,’ he replied brusquely.

  ‘The … their natural father—’

  ‘Cut the crap. Their father. Without the bleeding euphemism. Their father, all right.’

  ‘I was just going to say. Their birth father … is dead.’

  ‘Have a name? Did he have a name? This birth father.’

  ‘Oh Henry you were always so naive. I mean it’s not the sort of thing you discuss—’

  He hit her.

  That was the first and only time he thus contaminated their union. He smote with an articulate open palm, he stung with his wedding ring. She staggered back dropping her kümmel glass.

  She enquired incredulously: ‘Henry?’

  She could not believe what he had done to her. Nor could he.

  But his appetite was aroused. His big scrubbed pink hands grasped her by the neck.

  ‘Don’t!’ she yelped.

  She had never before seen the veins that rose like subcutaneous roots in his forehead. She had never before seen bedlam in his eyes.

  ‘OK. OK,’ she gasped.

  Henry relaxed his grip. She might have tricked him with her womb but he knew now that he could better her with his limbs. There was potency in his infertile body.

  ‘Well?’ he insisted.

  ‘He’s dead,’ she panted.

  ‘So you said. Do you want to go through all this again? I’m sure I’m more up for it than you.’

  ‘It was Fred.’

  ‘Fred?’ Henry pondered the curt syllable. ‘Fred?’ He was nonplussed.

  ‘Did I know this Fred?’

  ‘Fred … Freddie. Freddie Glade?’ She bit her lip.

  ‘Freddie Glade. You’re joking. Ahahaha. And pigs might fly … Stop messing me about. Who was it?’

  ‘Henry. Freddie Glade was their father.’

  ‘Like fuck. Freddie Glade was a screamer, he was a pillow biter.’

  ‘We had an affair for three and a half years.’ She spoke with such cold authority that Henry’s doubt evaporated. ‘I stopped it because he wanted me to leave you … And I … I didn’t want to. I loved you. I couldn’t … That’s never going to come off the carpet.’ She looked down to where the unbroken glass had spilled its sticky contents.

  ‘So that’s where Ben gets it from.’ Henry gestured towards the garden where the two glistening boys were now gently wrestling each other under Lennie’s bored eye. ‘Solved that little mystery eh? The bender gene … Think about it… Your son’s a Jewish arse bandit. I’m glad he’s not mine. I’ve some packing to do.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Henry Fowler, aged forty-six years and ten months, left his marital home which he soon came to understand had never been anything more than a provisional home, a home which he was surprised not to miss.

  One spore-ridden autumn evening he sat in his car down the road from it, watching as a spurned spouse is meant to. The moon wore a shred of defiled nightie. Naomi pulled shut the sitting-room curtains. Lennie returned from school in an unlicensed cab with a smoking exhaust. A few weeks previously that would have worried him, and he’d have instructed her not to take risks with Nigerian taxi pimps. Now he was not so much concerned with her safety as with the lost opportunity to exercise paternal authority, exhibit paternal love. It wasn’t the children themselves he missed, it was being a parent, it was the way the children affected him. That was what Naomi had taken from him – his status, the role he defined himself by. The loss he suffered was not that of three individuals but of the composite unit of which he was the fourth part – the family, his family. He was no longer Henry Fowler, Family Man. His honorific had been stripped from him, and that shocked him.

  He went Home to his octogenarian parents and to the room he had inhabited till he left Home to get married. He went Home to a room that was a museum of his former self. A museum made by his mother who, in the way of mothers, still thought of him as a child. To his mother Henry was a Meccano boy, a Denis Wheatley reader whose wet afternoons were passed with plastic cowboys and lead Indians. He was a boy who communicated with his mother and father through the medium of board-games: Monopoly, Halma, Scrabble (for which the familial name was Squabble).

  It wasn’t that his mother ignored the evidence of the white tidemark round his blond head and of his cheeks’ paunches and of the overlapping labial folds his eyes peered out of But she believed that within every grown man there is a little boy fighting to get out – and only his mother has the key.

  In that room she had recreated a synthesis of his childhood, a generalised remembrance. There were toys from age eight alongside clothes from age sixteen, his first driving licence, a torn duffle bag filled with ticket stubs and cigar boxes, stamp albums and copies of Photoplay, extinct fountain pens, an equestrian statuette of the Queen side-saddle, a money box in the form of a crown, a cricket bat with a perished rubber handle and Stanley’s name inked on its splice.

  Henry showed it to his father.

  ‘He’s going to come a cropper up Her Majesty if he’s not careful. He’s such a climber Stanley is. Have you washed your hands for lunch?’

  Mr Fowler suffered the immemorious state called CRAFT – Can’t Remember A Fucking Thing. (The BMJ’s Acronym of the Month prize went to Dr Tim Le Vasseur of the MRC, The Ridgeway, Mill Hill, London NW7, for that one.) CRAFT is the still smily end of Alzheimer’s, before the rage sets in. Before the jabbering and scowls.

  ‘I don’t know why we have that fellow in goal when we’ve got Sam Bartram.’

  That Charlton Athletic goalkeeper had retired forty years previously, in the days when Brentford’s goalkeeper was Gerry Cakebread, a name that was a household joke because Mr Fowler had noticed a baker in Letchworth called Cakebread – ‘With a name like that …’ He ascribed Gerry’s supposed fumbles to his hands being slippery with dough. Forty years later he sat close by the TV screen on a Saturday afternoon watching the classified results with his tea and his dripping-soaked toast, with his Littlewoods coupon and chewed HB stub. He would chuckle if Brentford had conceded more than one goal: it would compensate for his never winning the pools.

  Forty years later …

  Why, it seemed like only yesterday.

  Literally like only yesterday.

  And that was Mr Fowler’s problem. The longer he had held a memory the clearer it was. The more recent the event the more CRAFT-affected its retention would be. His late middle age, his old age, his dotage had been scrambled without regard for sequentiality. The mnemonic store of a third of his life existed in a single plane. The trivial and the momentous piled up regardless of moral paramountcy and temporal linearity. The randomness of his remembrance rewrote his history.

  His life had been dominated by a stone in his shoe which had caused him discomfort throughout many cremations. His life had been marred by his embarrassment at having addressed the Duke of—by the wrong style at His Grace’s former butler’s funeral. He reminisced persistently about a perfect sunset, stripes of baby pink and baby blue, which he had witnessed near Bridge of Allan on his Scottish honeymoon. It had set an unattainable standard. No subsequent day’s end had matched it. He railed against the raggedness of orange clouds and the untidiness of modern sunsets. Unleaded petrol doesn’t smell right. Cars today! He compared his tinny apple-green runabout to his stolid subfusc Rovers, he never forgot a car he’d owned, nor its registration number. This one, G849 ALB, it’s a Noddy car, a can on wheels, that’s all it is, not fit for a senior citizen – and apple green! He had forgotten that he had cho
sen it himself. He asks when Old Cyclops, a 1953 Rover, is going to be back from the garage. Plastic shoehorns break. Why can’t phones have proper dials so you know where you are with them? It’s always tricky dealing with women like that dog woman – you never know where you are with them …

  Mrs Fowler hurriedly shushed him when he talked about the dog woman. Henry hardly looked up from his dinner on a tray. He was tired of feeling obliged to express curiosity about-a cast of nicknamed walk-ons promoted to starring roles. Most nights he stayed Home and ate TV Toastswitch, a favourite recipe of his early teens gleaned from a 1959 edition of TV Times: toasted sliced bread, grilled streaky rashers, chopped tomato, sprig of parsley to set it off. It tasted as satisfyingly delicious as it had when he had first eaten it. It took him back to those times of simple comforts in the overheated, brown house, times that seemed effortlessly to repeat themselves. He embraced the old routine. There were differences: in the morning he left for work in his car rather than for school on his bicycle; when he went out in the evenings it was to Curly’s house, not to Stanley’s.

  ‘Just popping over to see the kids,’ he’d lie to his mother.

  He didn’t reveal to Curly and Lavender the reason why he had left his marital home.

  Had he admitted to his infertility Lavender would have had no cause to copulate with him, he had no doubt of that. He lied in order to prolong the arrangement, to safeguard his thrice-monthly emissions.

  He claimed that Naomi ‘was seeing someone else’.

  Curly giggled at the euphemism: ‘To see. Verb, transitive. To register ocularly. To understand through the sense of sight. To fuck …’

  Henry smiled wanly. His resignation was well practised. He had slipped into the role of the cuckold who does the decent thing for the sake of the kids. He hadn’t forced his adulterous wife from the house. He had provided for his family.

  ‘Who is he? Do you know him?’ Curly asked.

  ‘Some Jewboy from Edgware.’ Henry relished the racial slur of his lie, the breach of decency. There was an almost physical sense of release in speaking thus: it was like swearing as a child. Lavender glanced at Curly.