The Fowler Family Business (26 page)

‘I don’t think I’d want to stay there.’

‘Uhnh?’

‘Those hotels like that: they’re always so …’

‘Th’not ’n notel. Tha’th nurthing ome. Tha’th where I had Deneeth and Alith.’

‘Where what?’

‘Thath where I had my childrenth. The girlth: Deneeth and Alith. I talk to them eberyday.’

Henry gaped at her. ‘I thought you said – you said you had to …’

‘Yeth … But I thtill talk to them – Deneeth ith theven now, Alith ith fibe. They wen strwaight to heaven of courth … I tell them what I been doing. I think imaginawy children are better than weal oneth. No meth, no pith eberywhere, no nappieth etthetewar. And imaginawy oneths are pwettier.’

Henry heard her in disbelief. Was this an unfunny joke against herself? It evidently wasn’t. She explained that her children were angels. They were fairies too. And fairies live in gardens because they seek ‘a domethtic enbiroment’. They are also benign ghosts. They lead a better life than they would have done on earth. They stay young for ever.

She refused his offer to see her down the sloping path to the front door. Jane knew the way. There were lights on in the small house. A bulky figure moved in silhouette across a thinly curtained window. Teresa? – or was this Uncle Father Roy whose bed she claimed to no longer share.

He sat in the car with the engine running. He could discern broken fences, gardens’ back ends, bent boughs, little sheds. A fox sauntered delicately across the road. Trees, there are quiet trees in the gardens: do they ever precisely repeat the pattern of their last gentle movement? He shook his head, blinked. He glanced at the illuminated instrument panel, wondered what he was doing here, thirty miles from Home. His memory of the journey he had just made was mostly erased. Who was this infirm woman with a dog? What was happening to him?

Henry Fowler had not previously considered himself an imaginary father. But that precisely, he acknowledged, was what he was. He was less of a father than Teresa Sullivan was a mother. He drove slowly away.

The next night Henry Fowler wept. It was the eve of his parents’ funeral and he wept because it was all done, because he had achieved the apogee of his craft, because that is as far as any funeral director can go in deploying the old skills that are ever more contracted out to freelance embalmers. How peace had come upon his parents – lifelike parodies of themselves, beneficent smilers. They both had teeth, though not their own, and those teeth were good, so take due advantage, let them grin in their rigidity.

That was the night Teresa Sullivan fucked him. It was a sympathy fuck, a response to his sobbing, a response he solicited. He imagined Lavender. Who, or what, did Teresa imagine? She wouldn’t touch his face with her hands to get a reading of his features. Only the birth blind, she claimed, can make a construct by touch, because they have had a lifetime’s experience uninhibited by the sight of a face, they don’t know what an eye looks like. Henry was humilated by the sight of her manifold flesh slapping against his, by the realisation that her pubic bush was invisible beneath her sow’s multi-bellies. Her weight upon him was immense. She clamped him by labial suction. Her genital musculature was prizewinning. He feared castration. She showed no respect for him as a man. His penis might be a simulacrum of a fascinum, made by chance of human tissue. It might be stubbornly engorged but her arhythmic bucking, her jolting lunges will surely twist it, tear it, uproot it from the sod of his body so that a gush of blood spurts from the rent left by her act of vaginal plunder. He was humiliated by his conduct, by this animal congress worthy of a freak show. He took pleasure in that humiliation, in his gutter cunning and exploitative self-abasement.

He was mutating. Henry Fowler was turning into someone different. He was no longer a father, no longer a son, he was no longer inhibited by familial obligations. Henry Fowler was a name that would soon be attached to a man free for the first time in his life to invent himself. He could paint over the old predetermined canvas. It was an exhilarating prospect, and one which rendered him fearful for he had led a life largely bereft of choice. Choice is a labyrinth, and – late in life – he was about to enter it, as Stanley would, perforce, have done, had, had … In that matter Henry Fowler had no choice. Some force was pulling him – towards an unknown locus, towards a revised destiny.

When they had finished Teresa asked him whether she should give him a hot lunch the way Uncle Father Roy liked her to. He had not previously heard the phrase. When she explained what it meant he was, to his astonishment, not repulsed. He was curious, excited. Moral fetters were to be unlocked. The warmth, the smell, the intimacy, the barely discernible clammy weight on his chest constituted a golden key, a clue to the many mazes of his future. And they linked him, too, to the child within the man, to the primal child who smears his nappy contents across his face. This formerly fastidious man suffered
nostalgie de la boue.

When Teresa Sullivan walked about the old home that night it was as though she had eyes. He followed her, anxious lest she fall, bumping up against door jambs and never sure where the vase in the dark was. But she got the hang of a house in her dark as he never could. If a house had a soul she’d find it. If a house had a secret she’d find it. Wrapped in a towel she sat on a cushioned swivel chair at Henry’s father’s old roll-top desk with its now mostly cleared compartments, the desk that was a near-deserted universe of pull-outs and drawers. She ran her hand again across the wood’s dried grain.

He watched her touch this instrument of his father’s authority. Her fingers inventoried a Staffordshire figure, a porcelain menagerie, an ivory letter opener. She dredged in drawers for bent paper-clips, rubber bands perished to a crisp, erasers turned to stone, dried ballpoint refills, powdery scraps of paper, fluff, a button. Henry was stretching on a sofa in his unbelted dressing-gown when she tugged the bottom drawer to her right and pulled it out of its chest on to the worn carpet with a squeak, a thud and an exclamation: ‘Damn and blath!’

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 19
for an adoption order to be made in respect of
Henry Dogg
.

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.