Henry opened the door for Mr and Mrs Legge.
‘Are you going to be able to get off somewhere … bit of a break?’ he asked chirpily. ‘Without the worry … You deserve it. Must have been difficult – getting away when you, ah, never knew what Rudolph was going to be up to … Free agents again … Berlin?’
Mrs Legge snuffled. Mr Legge peered incredulously at Henry.
‘Good choice this time of year they say,’ Henry was anxious to assure him as he crouched to get in the car. ‘City break. I had a dream about Hitler the other night. Quite jovial he was. Talked about the improvements in drinking chocolate.’
Henry, stooping, felt the door handle jerked from his grasp. He raised his hat as the car rolled gently away. Mr Legge’s expression was that of a man concerned for his own safety.
Henry was thinking, I’d like whipped cream on top of mine.
‘Mr Fowler! Sir!’ Erskine the Work Experience, a mite lost inside his coat, knock-kneed across the puddled asphalt from the Crematorium Superintendent’s.
He spoke as loud as he dared. ‘Urgent phone call sir. Can you phone the office sir.’
Henry rolled his eyes, wondered what it could be this time and, as he followed the cowering boy to the stuffy room, rued his ban on his staff even carrying mobiles (but you really can’t have them going off during a service, especially not the ones which ring by playing ‘O Mein Papa’ or ‘Mamma Mia’).
Everyone blamed the rain.
‘It was so heavy I couldn’t see across the road.’
‘I’d just had my hair set – had to go back and get it done again.’
‘Like Thailand.’
Everyone blamed the rain apart from Henry Fowler (who regarded himself as the third victim).
Henry didn’t blame the rain. He had no doubt about the real cause. He knew the reason the eggs got broken in the meridional gloom and how the yolks, mixed with blood as though just fertilised, eddied in a nacreous pool of petrol and rain. How many eggs had there been?
He’d warned them against getting egg bound. He’d warned them against being tempted by the prices – ‘We Must Be Clucking Mad’ – at the farm beside the road at Biggin Hill. Constipation can be a real danger in the elderly. A killer even, what with all the straining. It’s an undignified way to pass on, with your smalls round your shins and your veins popping out, all for the sake of an omelette.
He’d buried some that had died like that. He’d been to fetch them stiff off the Armitage Shanks – rigor develops quicker in the smallest room because the smallest room is the coldest room in the older-style house. The smallest room is often so small the door needs sawing out.
They had at least died instantly. This was supposed to be some consolation. They hadn’t really suffered in the tumbling box, nothing but death, anyway. This was supposed to be some consolation. Henry knew it. But it didn’t lessen the shock. His initial reaction was that this call was a malign hoax. When he realised it wasn’t, his anger was complemented by helpless grief. He was glad that it had been instantaneous, he was thankful for that – but what about me, he screamed to himself.
There was no breath left in them when the first horrified witnesses arrived at the overturned car. Every one of these witnesses showed off gums in rictal extremis. That’s how incidents take you. The wheels were still spinning. Like a stranded, struggling turtle the car rocked precipitously on its roof on a guideblock. No breath, but blood all over the old folks’ faces and dribbling down their chins as if they were messy eaters, blood smeared across the windscreen. Eyes like fish eyes in a freezer. Surprised at what is happening to them, at what has just happened to them, that nothing’s going to happen to them again. Faces pressed up against the windows the better to see the void beyond. There was no doubt that they were dead. Nonetheless a red-headed mackintosh returning from the PDS A with her cat in a basket, a retired fireman with a rucksack full of tinned soup, a limping chiropodist and a solicitor’s receptionist’s stalker attempted to pull them from the hardly dented vehicle. The four of them ignored the danger to themselves. It was when the nearside door was opened that the cargo of eggs was released. It flowed and flowed. Yolk lent colour to the scene. It combined with the blood and the rain and the seeping petrol. The amalgam formed pools where the road was painted with orange-and-purple stripes.
Mr and Mrs Fowler were the fourth and fifth persons to die at Curly Croney’s experimental mini-roundabout cluster in Eden Park.
The two previous fatal accidents had also occurred during periods of limited visibility. The Sikh sergeant who drove Henry from the police station to the mortuary for the formal identification told him that the irregular shapes of the guideblocks made them difficult to discern in heavy rain and at dusk before the street lights came on. ‘Bits crop up where you’re not expecting them. They won’t do anything about it. They keep going on about the integrity of the design.’
They hadn’t been an overtly emotional family.
In the fluorescent chill of the bare tiled room which he had so often attended with professional disinterest, Henry held his father’s hands.
He whispered: ‘Thank you.’
There was work to be done on his father’s face and head. The sparse hair was pompadoured by blood.
‘I’ll see you right Dad,’ Henry told him.
He nodded to the young attendant who hurried to shut the drawer that was an undignified resting place no matter how temporary it might be. Henry turned away: purgatory is a filing cabinet.
He kissed his mother’s cold forehead as he ever had.
Again he whispered: ‘Thank you.’ He meant thank you for bearing me, for giving me life.
Her mortal serenity should, he knew, console him. Perhaps she hadn’t even screamed. He was going to have to work out how to take solace from their presumed lack of pain. They won’t have felt a thing. But right now that happy failure hardly impinged on his startled grief.
Henry felt cheated. He felt robbed. He had been robbed of the opportunity to say one last thing to them. Years of loitering at death’s door had taught him that the bereaved always secreted something they had wanted to impart to the deceased. Indeed there was an apparent obligation on the bereaved to complain that Mum’s/Dad’s/Gran’s death meant they could never tell Mum/Dad/Gran that …
Henry had no idea what might have caused him to converse with his parents. Since returning to live with them he had had every opportunity to tell them whatever he wished but, irritated by their invariable incomprehension or mishearing, he sat with his supper on his knee, doggedly silent, staring at the telly. And so it might have continued.
But weeks or months hence there could have occurred to him a momentous observation he wished to share with them. He would have been prepared to bellow slowly, to explain it to them as to imbecilic infants.
Then again, he could very well have had some vital question for them. There was no doubt in his mind that he had been denied the opportunity to ask them that question, whatever it was, just as they had been denied a future of rages, chair-lifts, incontinence, slobbering aphasia, fright, wind, butter on the rug, soup on the cardi.
Chapter Eighteen
The house was unlit. It was the first time Henry had seen it thus since he had returned Home.
Every previous evening that he had walked up the chequered path towards the front door and buttery toast the stained-glass lozenges in the fanlight had shone their welcome, pinchbeck jewels promising hearth and safety.
Tonight he shivered in the damp night air. He was reaching in his pocket for his latchkey when the phone rang inside. He hurriedly turned the key in the tumbler. Oh dear! They’ve forgotten to double-lock again.
He picked up the phone in the dark hall. ‘Hullo.’
‘Edgar?’
‘It’s Henry.’
‘Ooh! Ooh you do sound so like him. You’ve got the voice all right. It’s Marge, love. It’s your mother I was wanting to speak to – about Saturday. If I may. Has she told you about Saturday?’
‘I’ll just call her.’
He was jolted to a halt.
My mother is dead and cannot come to the blower (as she called it when Henry was just a bundle in nappies). Henry gripped the Bakelite handpiece to his face. It was not as black as it once had been. Where it had been most held it was stained by the long decades’ accretion of salt, imperceptibly mottled like a stone scraped of lichen. It smelled of his father’s breath, this old blower. It had always smelled that way. He pressed it to his chest like a favourite soft toy.
‘I … Madge …’
‘Marge!’
‘Marge. Sorry. Sorry. Mum an’ … Mum and Dad are …’ He lapsed into a locution of his trade, his voice dropped in register and volume. ‘They aren’t with us any more. There’s … there’s been an accident. Eden Park. This aftern … It was about lunch-time it happened. In the rain. I’m so sorry to …’
He listened to the gulp, the gasp, the glottal revulsion. This information was bitter to receive. And, he realised, he was going to have to impart it over and over. He was going to have to utter those words repeatedly or, according to recipient, a variation on them. He was going to have to listen to variations on Marge’s distended ululation: ‘Oh you poor boy you poor poor ooohh …’
‘Oh Henry – what can I say … I can’t believe it. I really can’t believe it.’
‘What’m I going to tell Cecil.’
‘It’s like a bad bad dream it is and no mistake.’
‘Anything we can do for you Henry – anything, you just let us know.’
‘If you need a shoulder – I say would you like Jack and me to come round? It’s a good three hours before I have to put him on the whatsit.’
‘You have our deepest sympathy, deepest sympathy – they were parents in a million old boy. Most heartfelt.’
And so it went on.
It was way past supper-time when he realised that he’d been reading the numbers in the tooled-leather phone book without a light. Thanks be for the clarity of Mum’s hand then. He smiled and shook his head, remembering her despisal of early Biros, her contempt for throwaway Bics. How she’d tutored him in ledger clerk’s copperplate with his Platignums and Osmiroids and, ultimately, the cowl-nibbed Parker he’d always craved. Neatness. Slope to the right because otherwise people will think you’re left-handed and where’s that going to get you? Don’t cross a T before it’s joined to an H. Never cross a seven like them, it’s foreign, never, or you’ll be taken for one of them. He laughed. Out of affectionate memory for his young self as much as for her.
He walked to the kitchen and opened the fridge to get a drink. He gasped, he moaned tearfully. There in the cold white light they stood, brown fists in their sea of snowy lard, speckled with pale caul, all ready to be heated up. He had for weeks been beseeching her to make faggots the way she made them when he was a child. Here they were. And the flour, pea and potato mix for the fritters? Maybe she hadn’t got round to it yet. He still cried even though the promised meal was incomplete. She had made such an effort. He wanted to thank her with a hug. She must have spent the morning before she set off on what was to be her last journey devotedly chopping the pig’s pluck and wrapping it in its membranous web. The dead are always with us – their actions and gifts stretch beyond their last breath. His mother would be with him in the fat he wiped from his lips and the strands of minced spleen he flossed from his teeth. That is a meaning of legacy. Henry wondered where his parents’ wills were. He must make a start on Father’s roll-top desk in the morning.
He wasn’t hungry. Shock suppresses appetite. He went back to the phone with a can of beer and a bottle of whisky. He had his speech off pat now. It was a hardly varying litany that he recited into the mouthpiece long into the night, till eventually he heard himself pausing for portentous effect and letting his words dissolve in cadent melancholy. How the undertaker makes the man! The prowess Henry displays in implying sympathy for the recipient of his sad tidings is founded in a lifetime’s negotiation of grief’s thin ice.
If only he had his family which was not his family to comfort him in this sad dark house of cold tiles and human absence.
He dialled without consulting the phone book.
Naomi said: ‘This is a funny time to call.’ She said: ‘Oh Henry … I am so sorry. Oh no … I can’t believe …’ She sobbed as though suffering whooping cough. She snuffled forlornly. ‘I really liked them. You know that don’t you Henry. I really loved them. They were family to me … Oh excuse me I know how it must be for you the last thing you want is me getting all weepy.’
Ben was playing in a tournament in Cardiff. Lennie was sleeping over at a friend’s.
‘They’ll be upset. I’m sure they will. I’ll let them know first thing in the morning.’ Then she paused and asked: ‘Do you want me to come round? I’m not all that asleep.’
‘It’s nice of you,’ he replied, ‘it really is but no, no. No this is one I got to sort out on me tod love. Know what I mean? Yeah?’
His lapse into stage cockney surprised him. It was a shared habit of their long marriage, an affectionate bent which he had forgotten and which had sprung unbidden from wherever it was buried. He rued the implication that a bond survived between him and Naomi. He thought he had excised her from his life.
He readopted a brusque tone: ‘I’ll keep you posted about the service then.’
It was one o’clock when he called a bemused, drowsy Curly.
Henry could sense him trying to extricate himself from sleep’s trammel, wriggling this way and that, wiping his eyes with one hand whilst listening guiltily with the other.
Henry whispered the word again: ‘Murderer … Murderer. You killed my parents. It was all for vanity wasn’t it. To satisfy your own precious—’
‘I told you never to get in touch with us.’ And Curly put down his bedside phone.
Henry tardily rejoined: ‘Get you dux!’
That was the first of the nights that he wandered through the house, listening to it, trying to fit it to him now it was his, trying it on for size as he never would his diminutive father’s suits. He stroked the handles his parents had grasped, he ran his knuckles across the rough and the smooth of their lifetime’s accumulated dressing-gowns which hung as a headless humpback from their bedroom door. Had there ever been a time when he didn’t succumb to the reassurances of candlewick and quilting? His parents belonged to a generation which lay under eiderdowns separated by an arm’s contraceptive length. When did they make love? Where? Who visited whose snug estate? In which of these two suddenly redundant beds had the procreative act occurred?
Every bed is a coffin in waiting. Henry slumped on his mother’s. It was like throwing himself into the grave beside her. He hugged the pillow. He suffused himself in the smell of her oldness, the smell of exhaustion, bone fatigue, systems winding down. He wondered how much longer she would have kept going. How long he would have had to prepare himself for the embalming job of a lifetime, how long he would have had to watch as all dignity left her and she became a machine for processing soup into diarrhoea. It might be painful watching them turn into veg, decline into insentient senescence before our eyes but at least it’s a process that acquaints us with loss gradually.
He was touched and surprised by his staff’s solicitude. Mrs Grusting manifested near-human emotions for the first time in her twenty-three years’ service and attempted, despite being his senior by only a month, to position herself in loco parentis. She offered cooking, sewing and a shoulder to cry on whilst persisting in addressing him as Mr Henry. Few other employees were left from his father’s era. They were, however, familiar with the old man, they knew to doff their hats with due respect. But it was him, Henry, they felt for.
He had never realised that he was held in such affection. All this on top of his recently changed domestic arrangements, which although he had never even mentioned them, were whispered about, which were the reason, it was reckoned, why Miss Royston was taking that much more trouble w
ith her shaving and personal hygiene.
By day he embalmed his parents, rendered them more like themselves than they had ever been. He glossed their cheeks and blancoed their teeth, teased their hair and clipped their nails (he painted Mother’s the lovely shade of violet he remembered her wearing on holiday in Bonchurch, the superior part of Ventnor IOW).
He did away with the wounds Curly had inflicted on his father.
It was a time of ecstatic concentration, of joy at a craft practised with a purpose that it had never previously attained. Only in such extremis does a craftsman become an artist, only then is his work infected by a meaning that is more than a sum of its techniques. Henry remembered the young carpenter who had carved for his four-month-old baby girl a coffin which represented the cot she had died in – every fold of the sheets and the asphyxiating blanket was hewn from a beech block.
Whilst Henry laboured, Mrs Grusting and Miss Royston phoned the nation’s most distinguished funeral directors with the double funeral’s date, time, location.
They sought and received Henry’s permission to hire a temp to help arrange the function rooms, the catering, the horses, the countless little details that would make the big day one to remember, one that would set the standard for funeral directors’ funerals for the foreseeable future.
They didn’t expect the agency to send someone like Miss Sullivan.
‘Mr ’enry,’ simpered Mrs Grusting, hurrying to him as he wriggled from his car in the yard, ‘it’s ever so embarrassin’ but Ai’m not quaite sure that this new girl has the skills concomitant to ’er position. I wonder if you’d be so kaind as to …’
Henry had several of his mother’s mothballed dresses laid deep across his forearms. He believed that the one on top, an amethyst grosgrain ballgown, her life’s one ballgown, would best suit her. But he carried options: her elaborately bodiced, rustily watermarked wedding dress; a floral suit as garish as a senior royal’s; a little black number for the cocktail parties she never attended. Laden, he grudgingly went with Mrs Grusting through the side entrance into the office. He put his head round the door. Miss Royston’s smile was a Chevrolet radiator.
The Fowler Family Business Page 16