Father of the Man

by Stephen Benatar

  But despite such visions the years had swiftly passed, bringing children, removals, money worries. No study, no desk, and only a secondhand portable typewriter, whose keys had soon begun to jump. And there were times now, after a quarter of a century of removals and money worries, times when—especially if he were depressed—he couldn’t be sure he hadn’t killed off most of the affection she had once felt for him; and whatever Shakespeare might say about love not being love that alters when it alteration finds…(Had he also written: Hunger looks in the window, love flies out the door. Well, if he hadn’t, that gave someone else a break.) She had recently said—during a row when he had asked her: what do you really want from life?—“I’ll tell you what I want! I want a mother. I want a wife. I want a hero out of Georgette Heyer. I want to be nurtured!” And he was none of these things; he never would be. He suddenly had such a longing for his own mother, for his childhood, for a time when he had been loved and secure and had never had to worry about how to pay the mortgage or how to cope with failure—well, never at least with any failure that was comparable to the kind he now faced, because Jean couldn’t live even the simple sort of life for which she so despairingly hankered.

  Despite the narrowness of the pavement, his own umbrella hadn’t collided with anyone else’s; nor at the bottom of the hill, where at this hour the traffic was always busy, had he caused any kind of accident. He had turned, correctly, into Huntingdon Street.

  But here his automatic pilot developed some malfunction: at his subsequent crossing point, a motorist had to brake.

  “Jesus Christ! What the fuck—?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m very sorry.” Ephraim stood alongside the driver’s window. He managed a conciliatory smile.

  “Suppose I’d gone into a skid—what then? Suppose the car behind me couldn’t stop?”

  Ephraim drew in a bit, allowing those other cars, which fortunately hadn’t been any nearer, to move out round him. For some reason he closed his umbrella, as if wet hair and face might emphasize his penitence. “Yes. I’m sorry.” He couldn’t think what else to say.

  “You tired of living, then?” The fellow seemed relentless.

  “Possibly.”

  It all happened at a great speed. Suddenly the man was out of his car, with one large hand grasping the collar of Ephraim’s raincoat. “Right, so it’s a joke, is it?” He was probably en route to a building site. He wore torn jeans and scuffed boots and his grey jumper could now be seen to be cement-smeared.

  It was also inevitable he should be about three inches taller than Ephraim. Let alone some twenty years younger.

  Ephraim thought: All right, let him take a swing, I don’t care. He had a fleeting image of that cup he’d won all those many years ago—saw it sitting on the mantelpiece in one of their former houses. In London it had got relegated to a cupboard. Here, he believed, it was still in one of the packing boxes.

  “No, it isn’t a joke. And I’ve said I’m sorry. And, anyhow, I don’t see why cars should always be given preference over pedestrians.”

  As a general maxim this might have been perfectly valid but he realized that in the present context it didn’t quite fit.

  “Because they’re fucking well bigger than you are.”

  The same as I am, mate.

  “Is that a proper reason?” asked Ephraim.

  The man stood staring at him. Both hands were now gripping his collar and their faces very close. There was a brief hiatus, comical as well as threatening. Ephraim noticed the uneven trimming of the man’s moustache.

  Then, with a shove, he was released.

  “No, you’re not worth bothering about. Prick. Go and kill yourself somewhere else. And this time make a decent job of it.”

  “I wouldn’t mind,” Ephraim told him—or told the departing end of his car. “I wouldn’t mind, you bastard. I honestly wouldn’t.”

  In fact, at times, it sounded quite appealing.

  9

  “Fairy tales can come true,

  It can happen to you,

  When you’re young at heart…”

  Henry Maynard, who was one of the part-time staff at the umbrella shop in Bloomsbury, had, surprisingly, a rather pleasant singing voice.

  “For as rich as you are

  It’s much better by far

  To be young at heart…”

  He was apt, however, to show it off a good deal when he was down in the basement of the shop. The basement was where the new umbrellas were made and the old ones got repaired—ditto the walking sticks; where the stock was stored and the parcels prepared for post; where elastic bands were sewed on—and rosettes—as well, of course, as covers; where the staff, at their appointed times, could make themselves a hot drink and sit with their newspaper and sandwiches, or possibly their pot noodles.

  “You can go to extremes

  With impossible schemes,

  You can laugh when your dreams

  Fall apart at the seams…”

  The public was never allowed in the basement other than in highly exceptional circumstances—and this depended somewhat on the mood of the manager. Journalists, an art student, representatives of the National Theatre researching a production, photographers, even a small party of schoolchildren working on a project, all these had been permitted down to it within the past twelve months, and Norman, who was close to retirement, and Joe, his West Indian assistant, had patiently explained and illustrated (and cunningly propelled the children towards a cache of Mars Bars left by Mr Cavendish); but during that same period the only people to receive such treatment without a prior understanding were a couple from Atlanta—and not just because they had given the shop a lot of business through the mail, nor yet because it had been their long-cherished aim to see the surroundings in which their umbrellas were made and to shake hands with the craftsmen mainly responsible, but much more because, indeed entirely because, they had declared it their intention to start a fan club which would celebrate the history of the company…Mr Cavendish envisaged no vast financial gain arising from such an enterprise but he had a weakness for engaging eccentricities; it was for this image of a fan club that he had broken his rule.

  Roger, to a small extent, quite often broke it. He did so for anybody elderly, pregnant or distressed who asked him for the toilet—or, more frequently, the bathroom. (“If you must appoint yourself the patron saint of bladders and bowels,” Alan Cavendish had said, “although it is not my intention, you understand, to encourage the use of either of those words in this establishment, nor either of those functions they are unhappily associated with, then you must warn these geriatrics before any of them attempt the descent that it will be pointless their trying to sue us if they fall”—the narrow, twisting staircase was certainly a structure which had to be negotiated with care—“and you must go ahead of them so that if they do fall it’s you they fall upon. And if they do fall,” he had added, with a certain gloomy relish, “I hope they’re heavy. Very heavy indeed.”) Roger didn’t actually enjoy conducting customers to the lavatory. The lavatory itself was always spotlessly clean but the room in which it was housed looked almost prehistoric, while the passageway outside the door could easily have led into the catacombs; it made all too feasible the story of the ghost—albeit a benevolent ghost—supposed to haunt the premises. With a mention of Uncle Henry, indeed, during the brief journey to the lavatory, did Roger seek to distract from the bare brick walls and from the impression, perhaps more than the reality, of dust and filth and cobwebs.

  Uncle Henry’s namesake had no connection to the family. Henry Maynard had been taken on partly because of the bias Mr Cavendish felt in favour of things eccentric; his belief that people who were characters blended well with the whole anachronistic flavour of the place. Though even Mr Cavendish admitted that—in this one instance—he might conceivably have made a mistake.

  Henry was a man of about sixty, balding, portly, always smartly dressed. His blue pinstripes looked as though he pressed them every night; he w
ore a fresh buttonhole daily—picked by his loving and obviously green-fingered wife from the boxes on their Neasdon balcony—and his black shoes were never once unshone: if the weather was in any way inclement he brought them in a carrier bag. But the self-importance of the man, thought Roger; the sheer stupidity of him! And this intolerance was clearly mutual. Almost from Henry’s first week at work he had been making snide remarks about Roger—Mr Cavendish had privately told Roger to ignore them, they could only be a form of jealousy. If Roger committed any sort of infringement, if for instance he was a few minutes late returning from his lunch or from a tea-break, Henry would remark on it in a loud voice; ostensibly to be humorous or even comradely, in reality to make sure that the manager, up at his desk in the gallery, was fully aware of the fact.

  There were three incidents concerning Henry that had particularly remained with Roger, out of a host of similar occurrences. When Alan Cavendish’s wife had made one of her rare visits to the shop and Henry had been introduced to her he had said afterwards to Mr Cavendish: “Very charming, very pretty; as a matter of fact she reminded me a great deal of my own dear wife; and, do you know, the moment that she opened her mouth I could tell she was a lady.” (Mr Cavendish had written it down immediately, in case he should have forgotten any of it by the time he arrived home that evening.) Secondly, when a customer, who had been holding what was plainly an extremely sophisticated camera, had asked if it would be all right to take some pictures of the shop, Henry—who fancied himself a photographer—had answered, “Certainly, madam. If you’ll let me finish helping this gentleman I’ll be glad to come and show you how to do it.” And thirdly—but this wasn’t the sort of thing that made you want to hide, pretend you weren’t associated in any way with such a person; this was just pathetic—when another part-timer had casually remarked about himself that one day he might like to write a book, Henry had nodded very wisely and declared, “As a matter of fact one of my best friends is a very famous writer. He lives on the same floor that we do and coincidentally I happened to travel down in the lift with him this very morning.” It was only natural, of course, that Henry should have been asked what this man’s name was; surely it would have been very strange indeed, discourteous, unkind, if no one had inquired. There was a pause. Unaccountably, Henry looked uncomfortable, a little shifty. “Well, the next time I see him,” he had said at last, “I must remember to find out.”

  Another thing which was pathetic was that he’d been telling everybody for weeks that tomorrow was his birthday and inquiring from all of them, even from Roger, what kind of cakes they liked the best. It was not the custom in the shop for people to bring cakes on their birthday or even to announce that in fact it was their birthday. Henry had been going round with a list on which there were such headings as Almond horseshoes (chocolate-tipped), Danish pastries (apricot, apple, raisin), poppy seed cakes (delicious), rum truffles (a bit on the stodgy side but my beautiful and darling wife enjoys them) and had stood patiently with pencil poised, purse-lipped, looking over the tops of his glasses and nodding importantly at each slow but well-considered response…This morning, while Henry was downstairs, Roger wanted to know if Mr Cavendish—or anybody else—was buying him a present. “Then oughtn’t we to organize a small collection?”

  “Oh, for goodness sake!” exclaimed Mr Cavendish, from on high. “No precedents, if you please! Just think where it could all end. We might even have to give Rose a birthday present—and she has many more birthdays ahead of her than I do. Would you call that fair?”

  “Not even a card?” asked Roger.

  “I’ll buy him a toilet roll!” said Rose. “Well, what I mean is—I’ll tear him off a couple of sheets, anyhow.”

  For once, the manager didn’t appear to disapprove of such a sentiment. Roger felt surprised. Mr Cavendish was one of the most generous people he’d ever encountered and Rose herself was far from mean.

  Equally, sent downstairs a short time later, he felt as surprised as he always did by Henry’s easy way with a song…although today he was also vaguely disconcerted. ‘Young at Heart’ had always been a favourite of his father’s and Roger didn’t like to hear it coming from Henry—who now sat contentedly on a stool in the stockroom counting rubber ferrules and sorting them carefully into their correct sizes. It was all right for Frank Sinatra to sing his father’s song; it was far from all right for Henry Maynard. Roger, who had been dispatched to fetch more hazel and cherrywood knobs for the baskets by the entrance, was very seldom dilatory about taking stuff up to the shop—but on this occasion he really did get a move on.

  Nevertheless, he was still saddened to recall that he was in his final week—and grateful for the sanctuary he found between train journeys, even in the company of such as Henry Maynard. Not that this morning’s journey, in fact, had been particularly awful: all he’d had to do was to give the conductor, or ticket collector, or inspector, he didn’t know the right designation, a brief rundown of the situation, followed by his name and address; and no one had appeared especially interested; unusually, it hadn’t been a very full compartment. He’d had two sandwiches packed with shrimps and mayonnaise—with a warning note to be sure to eat them for his breakfast and not risk saving them for lunch—plus a carton of fruit yoghurt; and he’d managed to make a good start on (what had been his final choice) Assess the contribution of the Cecil family to Elizabethan government. But all the same it didn’t make the prospect of this evening’s encounter any less nerve-racking. He felt very much tempted to catch a later train but considered that somehow this wouldn’t quite be playing the game. (Game?) If, as occasionally happened, he had a last-minute customer who kept him late, well then, that would be splendidly providential; but whenever it looked as though he were going to be delayed, Mr Cavendish—supposing that for some reason he hadn’t already left—was practically certain to say, “You go off, Roger, you’ve got your train to catch; I’ll attend to this gentleman.” Very occasionally Mr Cavendish had said to him, “Look, since we’re quiet and since I happen to be in a good mood—which, as you know, doesn’t occur all that often—I think you may as well slip away and catch an earlier train. Why shouldn’t your parents be made to suffer for a change?” And that too would be terrific. But not to be expected, let alone actually asked for.

  He hadn’t informed his manager of what was going on. To satisfy the demands of British Rail, Mr Cavendish would instantly have taken the money out of the till, or out of his pocket, and Roger didn’t want that—he genuinely did not want that. He wasn’t quite clear why this should be.

  Whatever it was, though, the same complicated motive must have kept him from phoning the stationmaster at Nottingham. Pure cussedness was definitely a part of it, he knew, but surely it couldn’t be the sole ingredient.

  At any rate, Directory Inquiries were still able to be of service. At twelve o’clock he rang the Guardian.

  The telephone was in a cubbyhole between the staircase and the counter and only an eavesdropper could have overheard much of what was said on it.

  “Is there any chance, please, of my being able to speak to…to Ms Melanie Phillips, please?”

  Apparently, there was every chance. Ms Phillips showed herself to be both accessible and sympathetic.

  “I can well understand,” she said, “how it’s come to be this big an issue for you. But I’m afraid that from our point of view it sounds like small potatoes. I am sorry. And I certainly wish you lots of luck…”

  In truth, he hadn’t expected anything else—hadn’t even known he was going to make the call until about two in the morning. Nevertheless, he felt disappointed.

  Small potatoes. He knew what she meant, of course, but still had something of a struggle not to let it rankle. The phrase itself, as much as what it stood for.

  At lunchtime, hoping to cast off his disgruntlement, he went out. The rain had stopped; sporadically a weak sun was shining and he’d been thinking he might get some reading done—preferably, around the subject of the Cecils.


  However, instead of his crossing New Oxford Street and heading for the benches outside the British Museum—or if those weren’t dry enough the ones a little way within—some instinct made him turn to the left and round the corner into Shaftesbury Avenue. Not long since he had last done this: a week, maybe two, it could scarcely have been more. But in any case he was surprised to discover—barely a few yards from the last of their own windows, the one displaying riding crops and swagger sticks—that something new had taken the place of the expected travel agent’s. This was a shop selling greetings cards and wrapping paper, handmade chocolates and reproductions of old photos. At the moment it had no customers and seemed to be staffed by only one person.

  Roger nodded to her and then wandered over to the rack of birthday cards, where he was relieved to find an interesting selection. And nearly straightaway he saw the perfect card for Henry: a man and woman and three small children having a picnic in a field where the grass was studded with daisies and splashed with poppies and where from the other side of a low stone wall a couple of cows looked on in somnolent curiosity. But the main thing was, the adults were clearly the grandparents…and one of Henry’s few redeeming features in Roger’s eyes was the pride he took in his grandchildren. Practically every week he would bring in a new wallet of photographs, pictures not quite so technically accomplished as he always implied they were—and, most especially when the subject was grandchildren, he even appeared to forget he didn’t much care for Roger and would include him as eagerly as he did everybody else in his stately yet chuckling monologues. Henry’s son, his only child, had two little boys and a girl, and here, on the card, there were two little boys and a girl. “Do you believe in divine guidance?” Roger asked the young woman, without taking thought, and then began to blush, because she would no doubt think him a religious freak.