Miss Sullivan sat with her big buxom back to him at the desk his mother had used. She was talking indignantly on the phone. Her hair was a chaos of combs and grips, tussocks and wisps, faded stains – it was a history of failed chromatic indulgence. She was an ample size 16 squeezed into a size-10’s day-release clothes which corrugated her flesh. She wore a turquoise cardigan that had turned to felt, a bursting and seated ochre skirt, old woman’s man-tan tights so abundantly laddered they might have been woven in obeisance to a forgotten fashion, a pansy vandal’s pink patent Doc Martens.
Henry glanced at Mrs Grusting with for-the-life-of-me eyebrows.
Miss Sullivan was on the point of turning when she heard them come in but was irked into throwing out her phoneless hand in exasperation. Her speech was childish, impeded – and, at that moment, indignant, as though she had just suffered an insult: ‘That ith bot what we’re athking for. If you doan wob to do it pleath juth tell me and I’ll get ob to thumwub elth. Fowler & Thub have give you trade for fifteen yearth – the very leath you cab do …’
‘Blimey O’Reilly,’ Henry whispered to Mrs Grusting as she followed him across the yard to the Body Block where he was working on his parents. ‘Poor girl … You got to thympathise though eh?’ he laughed. ‘Still no slouch is she … sounds like she’s getting on with it.’ Then he halted and asked: ‘Any other problem is there? Apart from her dress sense, that is?’
Mrs Grusting shook her head at the child Henry. ‘Didn’t you see?’
‘What you …? See what?’
‘Didn’t you really? She’s, uhmm, she’s blind.’ Mrs Grusting, to whom euphemism was second nature, could hardly bring herself to enunciate the word.
‘Blind?’
‘You know. Blind. Her eyes? She can’t see.’
‘Oof. You sure? Oh God that’s all we need. Christ … Where’d we get her from?’
This, Mrs Grusting pronounced, is the last time Fowler & Son would ever hire from or pay a commission to Hang-On-A-Sec (Upper Norwood) Ltd.
‘Gor – that’s the last … Isn’t it just eh? Gee-suss! Oh well – grin and bear it, have to.’ Henry sighed. ‘No choice … Not on, in this day and age, is it, letting people go for being blind. Protected species. Like the Yids … The unsighted. It’s the way they always bump into you: that’s what gets me. Remember that … Clock House – oh what was he called? Dry cleaner he’d been. Daughter was an ugly little miss.’
‘Mr Root?’ suggested Mrs Grusting.
‘That’s the one. Spare me. Still this Miss Whatsit …’
‘Sullivan.’
‘Yeah this Miss Sullivan – sounds like she’s getting on with it … And it’s only a week.’
‘Two, I’m afraid, two weeks’ engagement,’ corrected Mrs Grusting through guilty teeth. She added, conspiratorially: ‘Of course – she may prove to be unsuitable for reasons not regarding her infirmity.’
By night Henry prowled the house which would never be his.
He might own it, it might be his to sleep and eat in, his to live and die in – but it would never belong to him save by the letter of probate. He was at best a steward, at worst an unwitting usurper.
It was no longer Home.
That state had been conditional upon his parents’ presence, upon his being their son whom they had not noticed turn into a man.
Now they were gone it pained him to realise how little he had impinged on the place’s fabric. He had lived there all those years, he had been back all these months – and it remained their domain, their bespoke shelter.
It was a sloughed skin, a doffed overcoat, a voided carapace.
He grew used to its echoing emptiness. It’s not till they’re not there that you realise what a noise they made, busying themselves, backchatting, talking at the wireless, opening doors and cans, oiling locks, hoovering, blowtorching ancient paint, slapping the newspaper on the table, grunting when the milk boiled over. Their absence fomented an inchoate guilt which he ascribed to his appropriation of their property, to his inadequacy as a son, to his failure to succeed his father as the Undertaker’s Undertaker (which he aimed to rectify, in pomp, in style, with his father’s funeral).
It calmed him to loiter in the house with undrawn curtains and extinguished lights, to move through it like a burglar reliant on the moon and street lamps. When caught in the searchlight sweep of passing cars he cast leaping shadows which morphed up the stairs, slipped across the landing’s ceiling, glided round the cornice to oblivion. It had never been like this before. The house had forever been bright lit because his mother feared the dark and slept with the door ajar. It had been headachingly hot because she feared the cold. If it couldn’t be his house it could be an eerily unfamiliar one, it could be rendered strange. He suppressed the heating too.
There were the objects which had surrounded him whilst he grew up, which had once been special because they belonged to Home, because they had been chosen by his parents. They were his early life’s inanimate familiars, invested with a greater authority than toys. Even though he could discern only their dim outlines and momentary reflections he had them off by rote, he knew where each one was, in its immutable place:
An amber-eyed brass owl money box whose head turned to reveal a slot for pennies.
Seven beersteins with hinged lead lids and low-relief representations (bucolic carousers, hop-bines, lusty Mädchen, pointy hats, etc) – souvenirs of the Black Forest and Freiburg holiday, summer ’37.
A statuette of a jolly, bald friar in a habit the colour of polished liver which was, perhaps, another souvenir of that momentous holiday.
An electric repro Georgian lantern clock smelling of metal polish.
A kukri in a scabbard of leather so thick it might be wood.
A Widdicombe Fair musical box in the form of a tankard illumined by a representation of the seven revellers on Tom Pearce’s grey mare and inscribed with the song’s verses and chorus: ‘Bill Brewer, Jan Stewer, Peter Gurney …’
A porcelain caricature of a fish, probably a John Dory.
A framed and glazed print of chalky downs, plough horses, seagulls, windmill.
A framed and glazed print of a wintry track, leafless hedges, skeletal elms, rookeries.
Each of them was chipped or tarnished, faded or cracked – done for, one way or another. And without the eyes which had selected them and the hands which had received them as gifts, without the sentimental pride that had patinated them and had lent them value their purpose was gone.
Had they been some other dead people’s cast-offs on a totter’s barrow Henry knew that he would have looked at them with contempt. All those years of Naomi’s sniping at his parents’ taste had affected him, and these objects were measures of the change. It was as if he was seeing them naked, deflated. They were correlatives of self-satisfied paltriness and aesthetic nullity-which he had refused to acknowledge whilst his parents were alive and which he was ashamed to discern now they were dead. He was as repulsed by his disloyalty as by the threadbare gewgaws. It was an illness, it was invasive and disfiguring. Nonetheless, in the dead hours of night, when few vehicles passed by, when the world was silent save for the aubades of birds with bad timing, he found himself gathering objects from shelves, stripping them of their half-century of familially acquired preciousness. He shoved them into cardboard boxes which he piled in the middle of the room.
In the morning he loaded the boxes of what was henceforth deemed junk on to the car’s back seat.
They lay in adjacent drawers of the fridge in the Body Block. They were dressed, crimped, tweezered, rouged, powdered, plugged.
Henry sat slumped close by them at the long chemical-stained table. He had completed the first stage of his professional and filial obsequies. His eyes were shut in perfunctory self-congratulation. He exhaustedly contemplated tomorrow’s tasks. He acknowledged that they were a welcome distraction. To how many is it given to grieve through deed – that was a perk of the trade. How privileged he was to be a Fowler, preo
ccupied by an exigent craft which by day allowed no time for reflection on the void, the mapless void. Sooner or later, he realised, he would, as we all must, turn cartographer of parental loss. He feared for himself, he feared how civilian grief might strike. He was grateful for its postponement. The greater the welter of tasks he set himself the longer it would be before he was forced to contemplate it. He feared it. Even the contemplation of contemplation caused him to scratch at the exematous crust on his crown till it bled and deposited ruddily flecked grease beneath his fingernails. He dissolved a granular quoit of ultramint beneath his tongue. He sought to relieve its anaesthetic sting with a swig of tea. This was cold and bag-in tannic.
He picked up the phone to the main office: ‘Mrs G – can I have a cup of tea please lot of milk and a chocolate digestive? Oh – so it is. If you could manage – before you go. Ta ever so. Two chocolate digestives.’
He distracted himself with the composition of a list:
Jesu Joy Of
Gather Lilacs in the Spring
My Special Angel
Oh Mein Papa
By a Babbling Brook
Jerusalem
Elizabethan Teresade OR Green sleaves
Al Bowley
He put a line through ‘Jerusalem’.
He added to the list ‘My Boomerang Won’t Come Back’.
Would Charlie Drake’s squeaky shrieks of indignation detract from the dignity of the occasion?
The door opened, too slowly.
His pen was poised above the paper. He asked without looking round: ‘Charlie Drake, Mrs G. Pro or …’ He turned. He had sensed a different presence: ‘Oh – hullo … Miss ah …’
Mrs Grusting’s space was occupied by a paunchy golden labrador in an elaborate harness and, behind the creature, Miss Sullivan clutching a mug in her leashless hand.
‘I’ve brought you your tea. Where thall I put it?’
‘Here, let me, let me,’ Henry clambered across the room. He gripped the mug tight then eased it from her.
‘And,’ her hand reached deep into her cardigan pocket, ‘your bithcuith. Excuthe fluff eh? They’re a bit sticky.’ She licked a tache of chocolate from a finger. ‘Pawph. Orrww. Whath that? Itham half whiffy im here.’
‘Preserving chemicals.’
‘Oh ith that what it ith. Whoog! Muth take a bit of gettib uth to. What d’you reckob Jane?’
The bitch Jane wore the expression of indignant resignation. What a job. What a fate. What a name.
‘You don’t smell it after a while. Don’t notice … Goes with the territory, as they say. You make yourself take it for granted. It’s like … ah …’ His search for a simile was stillborn by the sight of Mrs Grusting across the yard Nosy Parkering without dissemblance, attempting to gape through the half-open door of the Body Block.
‘Like a blime perthon hath no choith about beem blime.’
Henry only half-heard. He was waving his hand to decline Mrs Grusting’s gestural offer to come and fetch Miss Sullivan.
Then he recoiled from the oblique accusation of the message stored in his head: ‘No, no, no. That wasn’t what I was thinking.’
‘I dint thay you wath. What you doon?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Why were you boovim your armths like that? I cab feel, I cab. The air it booves too.’
‘I was just waving to Mrs Grusting.’
‘Thee thent me acroth here hoping I wath gomb to drob your tea dim’t thee?’
Henry spluttered into it. It seeped down his chin. Foam formed on its surface.
He knew that Miss Sullivan was right. This was Mrs Grusting’s means of proving the temp’s incompetence. The sly old thing. He realised he need not bother to keep a straight face.
‘What on earth makes you think that?’
‘Obviouth innit. Dithabilitith cam’t be fired, not for beem dithabilitith. Juth ‘cauth I’b blime duddon meab I’b dumb.’
Jane farted.
‘Wha …? No. Of course not. Christ what is that … Of course not.’
‘Amb it duddon meab I’b deaf. I ’eard ’er. Pathing notes to Mith La Dee Da. ’Bout be.’
‘I’m sure Mrs Grusting didn’t wouldn’t you know.’
‘It’s OK: there’s always subwun tryn’ it ob. Achually I tell you what, it’s bot OK. But – gothe with the territory, ath they thay.’
‘I’ll – I’ll look into it if you really …’
‘I woobm bother. Not om by accord. Eberywun taykth the pith owb uf dithabilitith. Uthed to ib. Uthed to do ib mythelth.’
Henry Fowler stared at Miss Sullivan, at her fat redundant eyelids, at the indignant head jerks, at the bodily lassitude learned, maybe, from the farting bitch Jane via the once-white leash. She might have just come out of hibernation.
He thought about her whilst he was hauling old encrusted sauce bottles and solidified packs of flour and greasy tins from kitchen cupboards around 19.50 on the 24-hour clock which had been bought despite familial objections to the EEC, the Fourth Reich – as Father was liable to call it before Mother urgently shushed him.
What an aggregate of misfortunes Miss Sullivan is. How massively insulted, how harmed, how resentful, how vulnerable to exploitation.
The next day Miss Sullivan crossed the yard again. She was still led by Jane but was less dependent on the drooling bitch. She walked steadily as though she retained a pedal memory of the path’s idiosyncrasies, of the sites where the asphalt was worn and the cobbles laid by Henry Fowler’s grandfather showed through. She had brought him a slice of Mrs Grusting’s cake. And Henry Fowler had dared say what he had never said before, never would have said during his parents’ era, during the thirty years of Mrs Grusting’s weekly cake which was an ‘office tradition’.
He said: ‘No wonder it’s called sponge.’ And he dipped it in his tea.
Miss Sullivan grunted quizzically.
‘Sponge? Like in the bath.’ he explained.
‘Oh! Thoap-yourthelf-down thponge.’
Hoops of mucus were suspended from Jane’s gums. He exhaled in repulsion.
‘Can’t be that bad,’ said Miss Sullivan.
Mrs Grusting phoned to remind Henry she was leaving early. He didn’t need reminding. This was another, more recent, office tradition. No matter how much work there was to do Mrs Grusting left an hour early every Wednesday to do her duty to her mother at a sunset home for the hard of hearing beside Gatwick Airport. Henry admired the logic of that enterprise.
‘Ai was wonderin’ if you wouldn’t maind as a special favour draivin’ Miss S. there to the station. Ai been attendin’ to the matter misel’. There’s no obligation. Just a little common kaindness – so long as she’s with us.’
Henry sighed yes.
‘Ai knew you would. It’s off to the hurlyburly of the M23 then. Byee.’
Miss Sullivan stretched to pat Jane’s slobbering nose. The bitch, off duty, was snoring on the back seat of Henry’s car.
Her hand stumbled. ‘Whass tha’?’
When he stopped in a traffic-lights queue he turned to watch Miss Sullivan kneading the fabric of his mother’s wedding dress, aquainting herself with the slub, the stitching, the sheerness of the satin puff sleeves. The Fowler wedding he had not participated in. 1933. How they’d waited to make him, how they’d waited twelve years till the world was safe for their precious child.
‘Wedding!’ She explored the raised, beaded bodice: ‘Feelth lubbely. Ith’t white?’
Even with functioning eyes she couldn’t have seen what he saw: the album’s pages interleaved with crisply creased tissue which he’d lift to reveal the fine grained prints of the severally textured dress, his monochrome mother’s plump radiance, his father’s bashful pride, the inky morning suits, the bouquets, the snag-toothed bridesmaid, the best man (drowned in a torpedoed submarine), the families united by love’s happenstance.
The van behind flashed its headlights.
‘Yes,’ he told her as he declutched, ‘it’s w
hite. Always were in those days.’
‘Fwhat fwhite?’
‘Uh? What d’you – well, white. Sort of …’
‘Ivowy? Polar?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fwhich?’
‘Bit of both?’
‘You woulb’t make much of a fwitneth to a cwime.’
‘Dear me, suppose not. Oh Jesus.’ Henry braked hard.
A bald head and a vestful of belly held up a lavishly tattooed arm to stop him whilst it guided a reversing pantechnicon. ‘Look at that – oh, sorry, sorry, I …’
‘Uthed to it.’
‘I tell you what,’ Henry’s fastidious eyes were fixed on the stained vest, ‘it’s snow white.’
‘Oh thath by fabouwite.’
Henry gaped. He didn’t ask: how do you know? He assumed that she preferred the sound of snow to that of ivory or polar, to dazzling, lily, chalk, fleece, blinding. Certainly, to blinding. He said nothing.
‘We did Thnow Fwhite at pwibawy thchool. I wath a dwarf… I wath the talletht in clath and they thtill mabe me be a dwarf.’
Henry gaped again. He didn’t ask: how did you avoid bumping into the other dwarfs?
‘I like thnow fwhite betht of all. Cab I twy it ob pleath. Will it fit be? Neber wore a weddib dreth. You cab tell be fwhat I look like in it.’
Henry glanced at her, appalled. The accepted rules of decorum, the etiquette of respect for the departed – these had evidently not been learned by Miss Sullivan. Nor had respect for the bereaved, let alone deference to a boss. This was a temporary employee, a woman aged – how old was she? Her childish voice was a mask. Old enough, anyway, to know better, blindness or no blindness. Blindness was no excuse. It didn’t absolve her of an obligation to courtesy, to the apparatus of restraint which anyone, anyone, not only a funeral director, will identify as a mandatory qualification of civilised adulthood. Checks and balances, checks and balances.
He nonetheless heard himself say: ‘I … uh – it’s my mother’s. Was my mother’s – yes …’
The Fowler Family Business Page 17