The Fowler Family Business (27 page)

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 chiefs 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.

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.

ALSO BY JONATHAN MEADES

Filthy English
Peter Knows What Dick Likes
Pompey