The Fowler Family Business
Page 20
The wooden stop which had held it in the frame was missing. Such stops which were until the 1920s precentor-jointed were habitually thereafter glued (and this was the case here: assume that the glue’s potency had suffered from three decades of central overheating). Henry had explored that desk for as long as he could remember. When he was little it had seemed like a model of the world. When he was older he considered it the family museum with its aesthetically null, sentimentally charged keepsakes, the coronation mug for pencils, framed photographs, letters tied with string. His father, as fastidious a funeral director as ever lived, kept his pencils sharpened and his drawers locked. And Henry, an obedient son, had never sought to delve in those drawers. If they were locked it was for a reason.
‘Wha’ thith?’ cried Teresa. Her right hand was examining the void between where the bottom of the fallen drawer had rested and the floor. ‘Paperth.’
Henry grunted. He hauled himself from the sofa and padded across the room. He could feel a renewed penile engorgement. So soon! What a man he was. He kissed the nape of her neck, knelt, peered into the void which was contained by the drawer above, and the sides and bottom of the chest. The thin sheaf of papers had been long undisturbed. The accretion of dust was a felt layer. He turned from her and blew at it. Then he wiped it on the carpet. Then he looked at the first sheet, headed, in underlined majuscules:
THE CHURCH ADOPTION SOCIETY
4a Bloomsbury Square, London W.C.I
Telephone: HOLborn 1281/3310
APPLICATION FOR ADOPTION
Points on which enquiries must be made in the
case of every child proposed to be delivered by
or on behalf of a registered Adoption Society
into the care and possession of an Adopter.
‘It’s amazing,’ Henry said, ‘the way you can centre text with just a tab setting – you know, on a typewriter. Manual …’
What was this document doing under his father’s desk? Where had the desk come from? No – that wasn’t the right question, for it had been secreted between desk and floor:
EVERY QUESTION MUST BE ANSWERED
1
‘Name and present address of child Henry Dogg c/o Connaught Barracks, Woolwich New Road, S.E. 18
Henry guffawed at the name. Then he looked at the next line:
Date and place of birth 7. 10. 45
Royal Herbert Garrison Hospital, Shooters Hill Road, Woolwich
That was his own birthday. The answers were written with a fountain pen in a jagged old-fashioned copperplate. The numeral seven was crossed.
2
Is the child British? Yes
If baptised state date and place of baptism and denomination – Why is the child being offered for adoption? Because my husband, not being the father of the child, is not willing to support or maintain the child.
3
Name of father Unknown
Address Unknown
Occupation Unknown
Date of birth Unknown
Religion Unknown
4
Name of mother Vera Sophie Dogg
Address Connaught Barracks, Woolwich New Road, S.E.18
Occupation –
Insurance number –
Date of birth 18. 6. 26
Religion Protestant
Henry sat on the floor. His throat was constricted. He sweated. His heart was repeatedly throwing itself against his chest. His unsteady hands turned the pages.
I HEREBY GIVE NOTICE THAT
1 An application has been made by Edgar George Fowler and Stella Mary Fowler of 17 Bedwardine Road, London SE 19for an adoption order to be made in respect of Henry Dogg.
Chapter Twenty-One
When I stare at strong light with my eyes closed the corpuscular tides seething in the lids are crimson.
That, Vera Sophie Dogg, is the colour of your snug wet womb where you fed me because you had no choice, succoured me against your will, deigned to let me squat for your two hundred and eighty days. Your body obeyed the dictates of its generative apparatus. Did you want the leeching burden excised? You have left me with nothing but a colour which I simulate with sun and bulbs. I have no face to fit the uterus I lived in.
But you could have extinguished me, made me an imaginary child. You spared me. I thank you for not having topped me so you could pretend intactness, immaculacy.
You hid me didn’t you? You kept it from them just as you’ve kept yourself from me. How did you account for the expanding medicine ball? Did you plead weight gain, glandular mayhem, nutritional disorder, a craving for cake? Did you make sure there were always Dundee crumbs round your mouth? Did you build a disguise from dried fruit and flour?
There must have been those who knew. I am someone’s grandson. And someone’s nephew, very likely. I am, without doubt, someone’s son. I have a father. It’s just that he’s Unknown. But you knew him. Did you really not know his name? Did you marry Dogg without telling him you were bearing me? Did you hope to pass me off as his? He found you out. He did his sums. Smart Dogg.
Did my father hit you? Did he punch me? Did my father flit within hours of your bringing him the bad tidings from the doctor about the intruder who was going to replace the moon as your internal janitor then gaol you for a stretch of as many years as you had already lived? You were young, you were eighteen and a half when you conceived me.
Was it drizzling when you shuffled back from the surgery to the furnished room with the greedy meter? That’s already one mouth to feed.
Men are quick to pack. They load that old valise like there’s no tomorrow. The way to tomorrow is somewhere else, through the drizzle, through the autumn dusk, across the rusty old girder bridge, on the first train that leaves for an unknown town whose streets are paved with drizzle and there is no woman.
There are only women. Loitering in the lamplight down the hill from the station.
My mother wasn’t one of those women. She didn’t belong to the sisterhood of the lamplit. Please God tell me she wasn’t that sort of woman.
So he disappears, supping in saloons with bonhomous fellows, forgetting. He’ll have had no memory of me, no inkling of my sex, even. He might have been at the other end of the world by the time I was ready to be passed on.
Tell me you keened when I was taken from you. I know you wanted to keep me. Tell me that but for my father’s fatal illness, but for his death from war wounds, but for your parents’ objections, but for the money worries, you would have kept me. And I would not have been Henry.
They were such good people, Stella and Edgar. I was theirs and they were mine. They had no appetite for hurt. They should have told me. They might have chosen a picnic day, an ox-tongue-and-hamper day. My real father died for his King. In a night raid over Essen. Beside a bridge near Wesel. In a wood at Verdun. My unreal father had been excused a fighting role due to his asthma.
I dream of you Vera Sophie Dogg! You were young when you bore me. You’re not that much older than I am. We’re almost coevals now. We belong to the same generation. Is it from you that I got the blondness that is now besieged by grey?
Mama-mamamamama.
Were you eating when I sat down to eat, sleeping when I slept? My breath found its way to you and you felt a rush in your marrow, you recognised it and suffered a pang of maternal want.
We need to meet, to hug in a lachrymose tangle of regret and relief. You listened out for me. You blessed me as I snuggled in the depth of bed. The same stars shone for you as for me.
Who am I? I’m waiting for Shaun Memory to tell me.
If I am a bastard then I might as well be a royal bastard, a Royal Bastard with capitals and a bloodline to a distinguished traceable tree, noble as oak. Now there’s a tree fit for a King to hide in.
I owe it to me.
Look at metempsychotics – you’ll never catch them claiming to have been reincarnated from a navvy or a gravedigger. They’re all former Kings, Pharaohs, Margraves – in the old days there were many chie
fs and few Indians. Either that or only the chiefs are reckoned to have done well enough to deserve another turn. Unfairness extends to the afterlife too, it’s inescapable.
I have forfeited all the years I have lived. I grieve for me, for my loss. I grieve for the deceived child I was. All children, I am told, fear that they are not their parents’ child. All children save me. (And my non-children, my former children? What has Naomi told Ben and Lennie? Has she spilled the beans just as Freddie Glade – Freddie Glade! – spilled his queer seed in her? I’ll bet she hasn’t. Not her, with her fetish about standards.)
It never crossed my mind that I was not me, that I might be a ready-made, bought in to make up numbers. They spun for a child at dusk in the old mill’s glassy pool where the water babies lived, the rejects who fed on algae and green weed. How often had they fished there before? Did they seek a son from early on? They married in the first month of 1933. It cannot surely have been twelve years before they sought to satisfy their want? Or were young undertakers different then?
Were there other versions of me? The precursors who might have been me but who were returned with a sigh?
I must not demean Stella and Edgar with the suggestion that their desire or duty to carry on the name (let alone the business) was what moved them. They were bigger than that. Their glee in my tiny advances was palpable. Their doting pride was unqualified. By the age of eight I could ride a bicycle. I learned to swim. I passed my exams. Congratulations on each count.
It’s too late to ask whether she was barren or he infertile (that’s one which can’t be passed on). They possessed, in response to the one or the other’s procreative lack, a united gift for parenthood. Begetting and nurture are not conditional upon each other. They may have been incapable of the sprint but they never flagged all down the marathon years. They took to parenthood, they adopted it as an ideal as surely as they had adopted me to be their fellow player in the masque of family life.
How could they have left me to discover my orphanhood in squalidly cached posthumous papers? Give them the benefit – by the time they were old they may even have forgotten where
I had come from, who I had been. They were that practised in self-delusion.
It’s every funeral director’s wish that his own funeral should be directed by his son. That goes without saying. I could not deny him even though I was intoxicated by the shock of what I had discovered.
His colleagues were generous after the service:
‘You’re your father’s son all right …’
‘You did him proud …’
‘He was a great man, Edgar – and your mother, too …’
‘The joy they’d have taken in how you done it …’
‘Simple, rich – and just a touch different …’
‘That was one of the finest jobs I ever had the privilege …’
‘That was more than professionalism, that was filial devotion …’
‘That was fit for a King …’
I embalmed the bodies of the man who was not my father and the woman who was not my mother to the best of my ability and was flattered that my prowess was acknowledged by his (and my) peers. He had taught me well. He developed my gift.
My funerary idiom was not his. Had we not shared a name no one would have discerned a connection. No one would have claimed to perceive a dynastic style. Couldn’t they see the difference?
Little Cyril and Squinting Arthur and Mouthy Lawrie and all the rest who filed past with their hats to their hearts would have thought the less of Edgar had they learned that he was not the biological father of the mourning man who had lent him such a semblance of life.
They had their own sons – the purser, the bankrupt surveyor, the Dubai catering manager – who had neglected to follow their fathers’ trade, who had turned their back on it because they lacked the gift, the will, the bent for the trade, properties which are not, then, merely passed on.
They were properties I owned. I could bring the dead to life, I bestrode the boundary. When they looked fearfully down at Edgar, with his babyish bloom, they regretted that when their time came to lie in the purple satin of mortality it would not be their sons who had dressed them but hired hands. That’s what they rued. They believed that I was the blood successor to the Undertaker’s Undertaker. I colluded in the lie about my provenance so that his name and memory – and hers – should remain unstained and his posthumous reputation attain perfection.
I need words that are full of hate, whose very utterance expresses cosmic contempt, which require no qualification.
A stroke of luck, then, that there is a ready supply of such words, all the words which the Chosen have caused to be coined against them throughout a millennium of usury, cheating, parasitism and looking after number one. Mothers may, down the years, have scalded, drowned, maimed, and starved their offspring but there is still no store of hostile synonyms for them. It’s a lack that I really must attend to …
But no matter how zealously I seek such words I shall never be able to address the woman who pretended to have given me life with such justified hatred as I did Naomi in my last letter to her.
‘Darling Oven Dodger …’
I wrote it for the sake of that form of address alone. The rest of it was simply nasty stuff which I expect her not to have read.
All the casual verbal offences which I railed against for more than twenty years are now mine to deploy.
When Teresa called the other day to tell me she was pregnant I laughed before she had even finished slobbering into the mouthpiece. She can have had no idea why. I sang her ‘Teresa’ – and repeated the line ‘Your blue eyes tell me white lies’. I was glad of that line. I’m not going to be duped again. I put the phone down. Then I realised I should have changed it to ‘blind eyes’.
I am nobody.
I can hear the irritation in Shaun Memory’s voice every time I call. ‘It’s a slow process.’ That’s all he has to say.
Days pass and I am still nobody.
I have nobody. I haven’t even myself.
What’s in a name? Everything.
Me, I don’t have a name, the one I bore was a chance mask, a slave name.
I am disappearing, I’m disappearing fast.
This is the last you’ll hear from Henry Fowler.
This is not the last you’ll hear from Me.
About the Author
The Fowler Family Business
Jonathan Meades is the author of Filthy English, Peter Knows What Dick Likes and Pompey. He has written and performed in some twenty-five TV films on such subjects as the utopian avoidance of right angles, vertigo’s lure, beer and Birmingham’s appeal. He is a columnist on The Times.
Other Works
ALSO BY JONATHAN MEADES
Filthy English
Peter Knows What Dick Likes
Pompey
Copyright
This edition first published in 2003
First published in Great Britain in 2002 by
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Copyright ©Jonathan Meades 2002
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