Father of the Man (17 page)

His first distinct memory of Joan had, paradoxically, nothing in it of Joan. It was of an incident that had happened on the staircase in the days when the High Street had still had something of a village character (the small open greengrocer’s, with the shutter rolled down at night, where Mrs Brown saved him and his mum his first-ever bananas—slightly disappointing after all he’d been led to expect of them; the Ridgeway, occupying a large site on the corner of Devonshire Street, where waitresses like the ones you got in cinema restaurants brought you toasted teacakes or salads or, once eggs were available again, poached eggs on toast; Gaylor & Pope’s, the haberdashery store that had those overhead tracks along which ran brown balls containing your change, after the assistant had dispatched your money, rocket-like, up a hissing chute)…still something of a village character, despite the side-street slums and also the bombsites, covered in rosebay willowherb, to front and rear of the flats.

The staircase was of bare stone, light grey, the colour of cement. Dingy. Its walls were just as bare; the white distemper flaking, grimy. There were four flats in the building, one on each floor, except at ground level, where there was only access to the basement and the dustbin area and space to keep his brother’s bike—which later had been passed on to him—solid, black, and rusty. On every half-landing was a grimy sash window that looked out on the backs of other tenements; and on every full landing was a green front door—and a push button encased in brown Bakelite to operate the lights. The lights lasted solely for a minute and went out with a loud click. Of course, during the day you never needed them, unless the sky was exceptionally overcast. In the daytime it naturally grew lighter between the third floor and the fourth. It also grew more cluttered: an upturned trunk and empty suitcases in the corner opposite their own front door (the third), tea-chests and cartons covered by a large blue-gingham cloth—or sometimes green-gingham—outside Neville and Joan’s, overhead.

Joan was the one person who lent an air of luxury to the staircase; and that, not because of her draped gingham but because of her perfume. Ephraim couldn’t think how she had managed it. You always knew when she had recently come in or gone out…even in 1945 or ’6. And he was sure it wasn’t cheap or sickly; that wouldn’t have been at all in character. She was at that time the most glamorous woman he had ever encountered. (Still rated amongst them.) Red fingernails weren’t, he supposed, unknown to him; but blue- or green-shadowed eyelids were.

One afternoon he met her on the staircase—or so he thought. It was that twilight time of day when the place was at its gloomiest and yet for some reason (she had a shopping bag in each hand) they’d neither of them bothered with the lights. He was no more than eight-and-a-half but ghosts had never been a thing to worry him. At that point Joan and Neville had only just moved in, and, despite Neville’s being Ephraim’s first cousin once removed, they were still comparative strangers to him. Ephraim had seen Joan perhaps two or three times previously—that’s what his mother said—but his recollection of their meetings remained hazy.

However, she seemed slightly different now—he realized that—as regards her makeup and her dress, her lack of scent and lack of laughter (or at least the lack of welcome in her smile). But the change that really shocked him was her heavy built-up shoe and calipers.

“Oh, crumbs!” he exclaimed. “Oh, crikey! Whatever’s happened to your leg?”

There was a moment of stunned silence.

“I think you are a very rude and nasty little boy!” Joan’s sister eventually remarked.

And she continued on up, pushing brusquely past him and leaving him to stare, cringing heartsick in the corner by a window.

For a long time—maybe several months—he couldn’t really quite believe this was her sister: that the faces of two women who weren’t twins could look so very much alike that it was possible to do what he had done. For those several months he even half-believed in a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde scenario: a Joan who wore high heels and perfume and was friendly and vivacious; a Joan whose club foot and set, unsmiling features expressed the darker side of her personality—with this one, if he met her in the street or on the stairs, he merely touched his cap and hurried on. Awkward. Baffled. Ashamed.

Humiliated.

Angry.

This incident ranked in embarrassment next to one which had taken place in Wales a couple of years earlier, involving the headmaster, who at the time had seemed so old to Ephraim, old and thin and unapproachable, but who in fact could have been only in his mid-thirties (and if you heard him spelling out his name over the telephone to some poor silly operator—silly, because even Ephraim at six knew how to spell it—it would make you want to giggle: “S for Stuart, T for Tuart, U for Uart…”). Mr Stuart had taken some children on what had seemed a long nature-walk, through damp sweet-smelling woods filled with rhododendron, down to the rocks and sandy winding tracks and creek and estuary, and during their return Ephraim, who’d been too diffident to mention his extremely urgent need, had shat in his short trousers; and the headmaster, noticing his slow distressful progress and no doubt ascribing it to tiredness, had suddenly scooped him up and sat him on his shoulders, uttering a merry whoop as he did so. Mr Stuart, though, must soon have realized what had happened. Yet he didn’t say anything about it to Ephraim and, when they had reached the school, merely set him down to scurry off to Matron…

And that excruciating little episode (yet it was mainly the tact which he remembered now) matched another, when he had been travelling up in the train, accompanied by Nathan, to that farm holiday near Lincoln, and there’d been an airman sitting just across from him, not yet demobbed, who’d been entertaining them with noughts and crosses and I Spy and by sketching aeroplanes and helicopters and parachutists; and Ephraim, who had been leaning forward so as to see better, and who had invariably suffered from travel sickness—yet supposedly on this occasion had had no warning of what was imminent—suddenly spewed up into the airman’s lap…

How one thing led on to another…all while Ephraim unhurriedly washed his hands at Columbia. One Christmas Day at the flat—surely it must have been in ’45?—there’d been another airman, only this time an American, and Ephraim could remember the two of them lying on their stomachs on the floor in the lounge playing a game of…“
Checkers
? It’s not called checkers! It’s called draughts!” and during the course of the afternoon his falling in love with the man. He never saw him again but he thought about him for weeks: cast him as father, brother, friend. It was like a little later when he fell in love first with Laurence Olivier, after seeing a revival of
Lady Hamilton
, and then with Gregory Peck (
Gentlemen’s Agreement
), and dreamt about having each of them, too, as a father and about performing heroic exploits that would save their lives or their reputations or their careers or
something
…but generally their lives…Laurence Olivier had died some three or four months ago but Gregory Peck was still flourishing, had just made a film called
Old Gringo
which Jean was keen to see…Ephraim would have loved to know the story of that Christmas airman, whose name he had forgotten. He hoped he’d led a happy life. He wondered if, once in a blue moon, he ever thought of that little English boy who had lain next to him on the carpet and gazed at him with growing veneration, despite his earlier note of pained incredulity. “
Checkers
?”

Joan had always been good to him. For even the simplest shopping errand she would give him a shilling—when his pocket money had been just threepence a week—and, once, when he brought a duckling home from Regent’s Park because it had strayed from its mother, it was she who looked after it overnight, found a box and padding and tried to feed it, she and not Nan, who was a little frightened of birds, who accompanied him back to the park the following morning to look for a duck who might adopt this wandering homeless chick amongst its own progeny. (They discovered one who, whilst waddling across the grass, looked back at the line of her offspring as though she might be counting, but then entered the water with all the ducklings fanning out behind her and to Ephraim’s huge relief seemed finally unflummoxed by the increase to her retinue.) Neville, years later—long after Joan was dead, of cancer, and when he himself had reached his late seventies—used to say that she’d been hard and mercenary and selfish and that the breakdown of their marriage had been absolutely her fault; but Neville by then, with a failed acting career behind him, followed by a failed writing career, followed by thirty years of merely selling handmade chocolates, had been a cynical and disappointed man; and Ephraim heard that even in his youth he’d had a budding persecution complex. But by then also he’d had eight years of singlehandedly nursing Liz, whom he’d married when they were both approaching fifty: Liz, who could more justifiably, it seemed to Ephraim, have been described as hard, although he thought that she’d become much nicer, gentler, after she’d contracted Alzheimer’s. (Once, looking up at a jumbo jet flying out of the clouds, she had argued sweetly, “No, Nev, you must be wrong! How could anyone ever fit inside something so
tiny
?”) Neville had refused to put her in a nursing home, had cleaned her, cleaned up after her, with such exemplary patience and humour and undiminished fondness—still, even when she was completely gaga, dreaming up new ways to try to stimulate her, “my poor old hopelessly bewildered darling”—while remaining lively company for other people, well-informed, amusing, challenging, generally tipsy, full of exciting plans, an excellent cook and generous host (although he took offence easily, suspected everybody’s motives, bemoaned their shallowness—and did this to their faces—felt that the family had never given him its full support)…so that in a way, despite such paranoia, you could almost think that this had been his one unqualified success, looking after Liz, for surely few husbands could have coped with it so admirably. (And, atrociously, there were moments when Ephraim nearly envied him the chance.)
A ministering angel, he
…Even in his seventies he had still looked a little like an angel, a paunchy angel, with his round good-natured face, although the plummy voice and the throaty laughter, and the
dear boy
that larded his conversation, tied him forever to the theatre; but when Ephraim had first known him his golden curls and his good looks and typically jocular expression had given him very much the air of a raffish cherub. Perhaps it was an attribute of angels, however: he had by and large been excessively happy-go-lucky: my dear child, heaven will provide. To Joan it had seemed that she was the one doing the providing—she was assistant to an art director in the film business—added to which, Neville was far more often away on tour than he was ever at home (Ephraim had seen him, though, at the Metropolitan in Edgware Road…
Worm’s Eye View
…dancing on a table spread for tea and sticking his bare foot into a plateful of jelly). With only a little more luck the providing aspect might so easily have been taken care of: he sold a script to Hollywood, about a vampire named Lilith, but it was never filmed and he received only two hundred pounds for it. He had a play put on in Shaftesbury Avenue; yet
All the Year Round
, drawing on his experiences of the family, ran for just two nights and although it was subsequently produced on television this didn’t help a great deal at the bank. He had a comedy tried out at Kew—Ephraim could remember finding it extremely funny—but it was a week that coincided with the sort of pea-souper in which conductors had to walk in front of their buses carrying a lantern, and none of the hoped-for impresarios turned up. (One person who saw it, however,
To Christabel
, was Robertson Hare, that stalwart of the Aldwych farces, and he liked it so much he asked Neville to write a play especially for him. This could have been the making of Neville, theatrically, and along with that the salvation of his marriage, but frustratingly for all concerned he just couldn’t come up with anything)…In the middle Fifties, when he had started living apart from Joan, he had had to be rushed into hospital to have his stomach pumped out; but ever afterwards denied, apparently, that his overdose had been anything but accidental.

Something else that might have saved the marriage was the survival of their son, stillborn. They would undoubtedly have made devoted parents…although Neville, with his persecution complex, might finally have grown a bit demanding, a bit possessive, who could say…? As an old man he’d certainly have adored—spoilt—been adored by—the grandchildren he’d have wanted to have staying with him, constantly. Between them, they’d have given smashing birthday parties; Neville would have been the conjuror, the magician, always with one further item to produce out of his wondrous sleeve…

So, childless, Joan had rescued Ephraim’s waifs-and-strays and taken him on treats and, borrowing his bicycle for
The White Unicorn
, had made sure he not only got paid for it but paid for it extremely well (and that was the film, too, for which his beloved Norwegian aunt had prepared table-loads of
smorgasbord
; but then the sequence containing them had been cut); and carried his autograph book to and from the studios and on at least three evenings a week regaled him and Nan with fascinating firsthand anecdotes—he particularly remembered one about a display of temperament by Marlene Dietrich, during the making of
No Highway
—and generally made him feel…what?…grown-up, important, a
somebody
. He could recall the impression he’d had of standing out from the crowd; he could recall carrying himself extra straight and being self-consciously charming and debonair—and no doubt a very great pain in the arse. Especially when seen not in the company of just a pretty woman (after all, his mother was a
very
pretty woman) but in the company of a strikingly glamorous one…then had he walked tall.

It was good to have people turn to notice you.

In fact, it had been one of the major disappointments of his life when he had finally realized he’d stopped growing at five foot nine inches. In his late teens and again in his middle twenties he had experimented, uncomfortably, with platform shoes. It was a source of occasional reassurance, however—even now—that Alan Ladd had been a heartthrob; and Ephraim sometimes reminded himself he would practically have
towered
over Alan Ladd—by a full four inches.