The Fowler Family Business (19 page)

‘Well?’ he insisted.

‘He’s
dead
,’ she panted.

‘So you said. Do you want to go through all this again? I’m sure I’m more up for it than you.’

‘It was Fred.’

‘Fred?’ Henry pondered the curt syllable. ‘Fred?’ He was nonplussed.

‘Did I know this Fred?’

‘Fred …
Freddie.
Freddie Glade?’ She bit her lip.

‘Freddie Glade. You’re joking. Ahahaha. And pigs might fly … Stop messing me about. Who was it?’

‘Henry. Freddie Glade was their father.’

‘Like fuck. Freddie Glade was a screamer, he was a pillow biter.’

‘We had an affair for three and a half years.’ She spoke with such cold authority that Henry’s doubt evaporated. ‘I stopped it because he wanted me to leave you … And I … I didn’t want to. I loved you. I couldn’t … That’s never going to come off the carpet.’ She looked down to where the unbroken glass had spilled its sticky contents.

‘So that’s where Ben gets it from.’ Henry gestured towards the garden where the two glistening boys were now gently wrestling each other under Lennie’s bored eye. ‘Solved that little mystery eh? The bender gene … Think about it… Your son’s a Jewish arse bandit. I’m glad he’s not mine. I’ve some packing to do.’

Henry Fowler, aged forty-six years and ten months, left his marital home which he soon came to understand had never been anything more than a provisional home, a home which he was surprised not to miss.

One spore-ridden autumn evening he sat in his car down the road from it, watching as a spurned spouse is meant to. The moon wore a shred of defiled nightie. Naomi pulled shut the sitting-room curtains. Lennie returned from school in an unlicensed cab with a smoking exhaust. A few weeks previously that would have worried him, and he’d have instructed her not to take risks with Nigerian taxi pimps. Now he was not so much concerned with her safety as with the lost opportunity to exercise paternal authority, exhibit paternal love. It wasn’t the children themselves he missed, it was being a parent, it was the way the children affected him. That was what Naomi had taken from him – his status, the role he defined himself by. The loss he suffered was not that of three individuals but of the composite unit of which he was the fourth part – the family,
his
family. He was no longer Henry Fowler, Family Man. His honorific had been stripped from him, and that shocked him.

He went Home to his octogenarian parents and to the room he had inhabited till he left Home to get married. He went Home to a room that was a museum of his former self. A museum made by his mother who, in the way of mothers, still thought of him as a child. To his mother Henry was a Meccano boy, a Denis Wheatley reader whose wet afternoons were passed with plastic cowboys and lead Indians. He was a boy who communicated with his mother and father through the medium of board-games: Monopoly, Halma, Scrabble (for which the familial name was Squabble).

It wasn’t that his mother ignored the evidence of the white tidemark round his blond head and of his cheeks’ paunches and of the overlapping labial folds his eyes peered out of But she believed that within every grown man there is a little boy fighting to get out – and only his mother has the key.

In that room she had recreated a synthesis of his childhood, a generalised remembrance. There were toys from age eight alongside clothes from age sixteen, his first driving licence, a torn duffle bag filled with ticket stubs and cigar boxes, stamp albums and copies of
Photoplay
, extinct fountain pens, an equestrian statuette of the Queen side-saddle, a money box in the form of a crown, a cricket bat with a perished rubber handle and Stanley’s name inked on its splice.

Henry showed it to his father.

‘He’s going to come a cropper up Her Majesty if he’s not careful. He’s such a climber Stanley is. Have you washed your hands for lunch?’

Mr Fowler suffered the immemorious state called CRAFT – Can’t Remember A Fucking Thing. (The BMJ’s Acronym of the Month prize went to Dr Tim Le Vasseur of the MRC, The Ridgeway, Mill Hill, London NW7, for that one.) CRAFT is the still smily end of Alzheimer’s, before the rage sets in. Before the jabbering and scowls.

‘I don’t know why we have that fellow in goal when we’ve got Sam Bartram.’

That Charlton Athletic goalkeeper had retired forty years previously, in the days when Brentford’s goalkeeper was Gerry Cakebread, a name that was a household joke because Mr Fowler had noticed a baker in Letchworth called Cakebread – ‘With a name like that …’ He ascribed Gerry’s supposed fumbles to his hands being slippery with dough. Forty years later he sat close by the TV screen on a Saturday afternoon watching the classified results with his tea and his dripping-soaked toast, with his Littlewoods coupon and chewed HB stub. He would chuckle if Brentford had conceded more than one goal: it would compensate for his never winning the pools.

Forty years later …

Why, it seemed like only yesterday.

Literally like only yesterday.

And that was Mr Fowler’s problem. The longer he had held a memory the clearer it was. The more recent the event the more CRAFT-affected its retention would be. His late middle age, his old age, his dotage had been scrambled without regard for sequentiality. The mnemonic store of a third of his life existed in a single plane. The trivial and the momentous piled up regardless of moral paramountcy and temporal linearity. The randomness of his remembrance rewrote his history.

His life had been dominated by a stone in his shoe which had caused him discomfort throughout many cremations. His life had been marred by his embarrassment at having addressed the Duke of—by the wrong style at His Grace’s former butler’s funeral. He reminisced persistently about a perfect sunset, stripes of baby pink and baby blue, which he had witnessed near Bridge of Allan on his Scottish honeymoon. It had set an unattainable standard. No subsequent day’s end had matched it. He railed against the raggedness of orange clouds and the untidiness of modern sunsets. Unleaded petrol doesn’t smell right. Cars today! He compared his tinny apple-green runabout to his stolid subfusc Rovers, he never forgot a car he’d owned, nor its registration number. This one, G849 ALB, it’s a Noddy car, a can on wheels, that’s all it is, not fit for a senior citizen – and apple green! He had forgotten that he had chosen it himself. He asks when Old Cyclops, a 1953 Rover, is going to be back from the garage. Plastic shoehorns break. Why can’t phones have proper dials so you know where you are with them? It’s always tricky dealing with women like that dog woman – you never know where you are with them …

Mrs Fowler hurriedly shushed him when he talked about the dog woman. Henry hardly looked up from his dinner on a tray. He was tired of feeling obliged to express curiosity about-a cast of nicknamed walk-ons promoted to starring roles. Most nights he stayed Home and ate TV Toastswitch, a favourite recipe of his early teens gleaned from a 1959 edition of
TV Times:
toasted sliced bread, grilled streaky rashers, chopped tomato, sprig of parsley to set it off. It tasted as satisfyingly delicious as it had when he had first eaten it. It took him back to those times of simple comforts in the overheated, brown house, times that seemed effortlessly to repeat themselves. He embraced the old routine. There were differences: in the morning he left for work in his car rather than for school on his bicycle; when he went out in the evenings it was to Curly’s house, not to Stanley’s.

‘Just popping over to see the kids,’ he’d lie to his mother.

He didn’t reveal to Curly and Lavender the reason why he had left his marital home.

Had he admitted to his infertility Lavender would have had no cause to copulate with him, he had no doubt of that. He lied in order to prolong the arrangement, to safeguard his thrice-monthly emissions.

He claimed that Naomi ‘was seeing someone else’.

Curly giggled at the euphemism: ‘To see. Verb, transitive. To register ocularly. To understand through the sense of sight. To fuck …’

Henry smiled wanly. His resignation was well practised. He had slipped into the role of the cuckold who does the decent thing for the sake of the kids. He hadn’t forced his adulterous wife from the house. He had provided for his family.

‘Who is he? Do you know him?’ Curly asked.

‘Some Jewboy from Edgware.’ Henry relished the racial slur of his lie, the breach of decency. There was an almost physical sense of release in speaking thus: it was like swearing as a child. Lavender glanced at Curly.

Henry added: ‘I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting him.’

Lavender trilled: ‘It’s brilliant isn’t it? It’s classic Arends and Page.’

She excitedly cited those authorities’ ‘classic study’ of the breakdown of marriages between partners of different races, colours, religions, nationalities. They had investigated 500 or perhaps 900 such broken marriages (Henry wasn’t hearing well, he had neglected his earwax routine since returning Home). One of their conclusions was that women who have contracted exogamous marriages and who subsequently conduct adulterous liaisons are three times as likely to conduct them with members of their own tribe/race/sect, etc, than with members of their husband’s or other alien group. Such liaisons may be regarded as redemptive. By entering into such a union the woman is reaffirming her link with the group which she has betrayed and whose genes she has depleted.

‘That’s pretty deep … Yeah, thought-provoking,’ said Henry.

Is that why Naomi had slept with Freddie Glade?

It didn’t make him feel any different about it. He remained, more than a month after the revelation of the deception practised on him, numb and peculiarly invulnerable. Hurt? Hurt was to come. He had yet to appreciate the weight of his loss. He was rehearsed at telling himself that he was no longer obliged to endure Lennie’s aspirantly worldly sarcasm and her brother’s sullen sexuality. He was spared the burden of commenting enthusiastically on Naomi’s purchases of the day. Just how many ways were there of murmuring appreciation whilst hinting that pecuniary prudence might be in order tomorrow, or next week – fairly soon anyway?

‘Could be, though,’ he suggested, ‘that they’re just homesick – so to speak.’

‘But why are they homesick? What are they homesick for? Obviously,’ Lavender observed, ‘there’s the question of … of the identification of the lover with the father.’

She was into her stride. A Jewish woman who marries an uncircumcised gentile will suffer difficulty in deluding herself that she is marrying (and re-enacting the primal scene with) her father. And things are even harder for a black woman married to a white man. How can she pretend that it is her father’s flesh which she takes within her, which surrounds her, when that flesh is the wrong colour.

Henry thought, she can wear a blindfold. People do.

‘All sex aspires to the state of incest,’ Lavender murmured as though her contention were beyond dispute.

Curly smiled: ‘I’m your Daddy darling. And later, my sugarsweet, Daddy’s going to leave you to play with your Uncle Henry here. And you’re to do just what Uncle asks.’

Henry eurekaed to himself, loud enough though to be heard: ‘Of course –
that’
s it.’

Lavender was surprised and alarmed before she was flattered. This was different. Henry’s swollen mauve top looked dangerous. This was different. On every previous occasion he had sprawled on her. He had covered her as a practised stallion might a mare, with a hireling’s brisk efficiency. The end had been the thing, not the means. Indeed the procedure had been almost chaste. He had been there on generative business: a gent from the fertiliser trade, spraying. His embarrassed jocularity was anaphrodisiac.

But tonight his behaviour is that of a lover. He doesn’t envelop her in an embrace as if to conceal his sex and to avoid meeting her eyes. He kneels. Their only contact is genital. His eyes feast on her dark aureola. She responds by grasping his scrotal sac, by digging her nails into its tight skin, by trying to pierce it with their almond tips. She can’t stop herself. This is dirty sex. She tells herself so even as she is in her gasping throes. This is outside their procreative compact. Limits have been exceeded. She is enjoying this – she feels that she is committing an adulterous act, that the pumping is more important to her than anything in the world, more important to her than the putative fruit of the seed which Henry declines to release into the womb whose neck he bruises with his ceaseless thrusting: an obdurate cyclops roving on urgent business attempts to batter down a door which opens the other way.

That night Lavender feigned sleep when Curly returned, murmured his surprise at finding the light out and slipped into bed beside her. Her body was a plausible liar: the rhythm of her breathing, her susurrus hum, the roll of her limbs as they swam in dreams. It didn’t occur to him that she might be keeping her eyes tight shut against the memory of the preceding hours, against him. It didn’t occur to him that she’d been crying at her infidelity.

It would have shamed her to face him. She despised herself for having permitted Henry to treat her like a lover. She despised herself further for having acted like a lover, for having conjoined him in a manner determined by concupiscence rather than by generational urgency. No one ever got pregnant by ingesting sperm: indeed the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) specifically proscribed fellatio, ‘lunching off the cardinal’ as novices in the Holy See have it, as an inadmissible form of contraception.