The Fowler Family Business. Jonathan Meades
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she exposed a wedge of slimy grey-pink mucous membrane and wiped his ear with its tip. She withdrew it into her mouth and sang ‘Que sera sera’ with a giggle. Stanley joined in: Henry felt left out, in the back – he wasn’t part of the party. He felt that even before Mo called him ‘a quiet one’ in a testily admonitory tone and Stanley neglected to speak up for him. Later, as they drove through a town with a swollen river and formal public gardens, Stanley listed for Mo what he aspired to wear: Aqua Velva, a burnt-in parting, almond-toe Densons, Cambridge-blue trousers with a fourteen-inch cuff.
‘And he wants a white mac don’t you, Stanny … That’ll turn the birds’ heads. What you think Mo?’
‘Oh it’d suit him ever so.’
Henry wondered where such sartorial licence would end. He knew, because his father had told him so, that the sort of clothes Stanley would be wearing after Christmas were wrong – which is why he kept his copy of the Denson shoes catalogue with his copies of Kamera and QT and Spick, hidden beneath toys he’d grown out of. He didn’t want to own that catalogue any more than he wanted to own those corrupting photographs – but both shoes and flesh shared a lubriciousness, both belonged to the forbidden world of sleek sinuousness. He was ashamed of his thraldom to it, of how it might taint him, of how those possessions debased him, of how they represented the threshold of sinfulness, of how they made him betray the trust of his parents. He was used to the complicity between Stanley and Mr Croney, to their familiarity: it was so unlike the proper relationship he enjoyed with his father. He envied Stanley, yet despised Mr Croney’s laxity.
It took Mr Croney a while to see Mo home once they’d stopped in a lay-by next to the woods. Her mother must have lived in a cottage in a clearing, with a little curl of smoke from its fairy-tale chimney and no road to it. Mr Croney had taken Mo’s arm as they set out on a worn path between the trees. He had held her arm to prevent her slipping on the leaves and the bony roots exhumed by years of feet. As they had vanished from view Henry had seen Mr Croney take her by the waist: he needed to support her because she was wearing stilettos and a hobble skirt like a regular piece of homework. It wasn’t the kit for a hike.
Stanley grinned: ‘That’s my mac taken care of I’d say.’ He took his father’s flask from the glove compartment. ‘Just so long as I don’t split on him to Mum … I saw a beaut with leather buttons in Wakeling’s. Swig?’
Henry shook his head. He leafed through a leatherette-bound guide to hostelries, hotels, inns, the entries annotated in Mr Croney’s hand. He was a commercial who sought bargain beds and bargain bed mates. He travelled in hosiery and jocular smut. He preyed on what Mr Fowler called the Holy Order of the Sisters of the Optics. He was a saloon-bar flatterer who gave his samples to floozies, in hope. He referred to himself as Knight of the Road.
‘He’d buy you a tie if you wanted.’ Stanley was already a future man, already drawn into men’s deceits and duplicities.
Henry replied, lamely: ‘I’ve got enough ties at the moment.’ It had not occurred to him, till Stanley made it plain, that Mr Croney was doing anything other than see the girl back to her infirm mother. To have accepted a tie would have made Henry tacitly complicit. In Henry’s family, the universe of three, bribes were not offered because there was no need, there were no secrets shared between two parties to the exclusion of the third.
Mr Croney did not possess his son’s candour. Henry saw him returning, saw him brush himself down, trying to divest himself of hanks of earth and moss and leaf meal and clinging twigs. When he realised that Henry had been watching him he said: ‘Had a fall … Slippery way … Don’t want to dirty the car.’ He was breathless, he was panting. He had to refuel with air between each lie. He gulped gusts bearing fungal spores and intimations of winter. His trouser knees were wet. His welts were encrusted. His improvisational fluency was polished: ‘Hasn’t been herself, Maureen’s mother, not since she lost her husband. Gets very browned off, it seems, down in the dumps. Takes a lot of ladies that way, their loved one passing on – your dad’d know about that … They feel at a loss – it’s rotten luck on them. And what with the winter …’ He shook his head in grave sympathy. ‘Maureen’s a good girl I’d say, tries to help the old dear keep her pecker up but the old dear’s lost her will. It’s a horrible sight lads, seeing someone wanting to do away with theirself. Tragic. Tragic. I tell you one thing Stanny – I don’t want Mum to hear about any of this. She gets most upset by any talk of suicide. It’s a woman thing and us men got to protect the womenfolk. You can bet that Henry’s dad doesn’t bring his work home, in a manner of speaking. Am I right Henry? Wouldn’t be quite nice. Not on. Mum’s touchy Stanny … They say that women never get over losing a kiddie. A little bit of them dies inside.’
They drove into the early dusk of a thick sky. The fields were flat, the earth was heavy and laden with moisture, mist hung over dully lustrous cabbage rows.
‘What,’ asked Stanley, idly, as though curiosity was merely an alleviation of boredom, ‘did she use? How did she do it? Gas oven, sleeping pills? Barbiturates? Razor in the bath Dad?’
‘You’re well up on it. You been reading a Teach Yourself? Barbiturates – I hadn’t even heard of barbiturates when I was your age. Does Mum know you know about barbiturates?’
‘Is that what it was then Dad?’ he asked sweetly.
‘Yes … Or something like them. Neighbour come by for a natter and saw her through the window. Thought she was asleep till she noticed the bottle. Had an ambulance there quick as a flash.’
‘Didn’t they take her to hospital then?’
‘She’s a veterinary nurse the neighbour. Knew the form. Fist down the neck – brought up the entire stomach contents.’
‘Must have smelled.’
‘They’re walking her round and round her little lounge – stop her nodding off. Very shaky. Keeps bumping into the furniture. And tripping over, oh what-d’you-call – hassocks. Kneelers. She embroiders them.’
Henry watched Mr Croney’s scrawny pomaded nape. He marvelled at his off-the-cuff inventiveness. It didn’t sound like a story that he was making up … it sounded plausible, credible: he wasn’t the sort to conjure veterinary nurses and embroidered hassocks out of nowhere.
Could it be that Stanley was ascribing adulterous wickedness to his father to glamorise him, to lend him a raciness that he didn’t possess? Was Stanley creating his own father, supplying him with moral deficiencies which Stanley himself hoped one day to manifest and which in the meantime gave him something to boast of in the want of anything else, such as a family business, in which to take filial pride?
Henry said nothing to his parents about the near tragedy that he had so nearly witnessed. He was loyal to Stanley and to Mr Croney and, besides, he knew the embarrassment that suicides occasioned at Fowler & Son. Their burials were grudgingly prosecuted. The specific grief prompted by such willed deaths was more than usually infected by remorseful guilt. It was the denial of fate that took the kith’n’kin so bad – that was Mr Fowler’s opinion, and he’d put on his philosophical hat to ponder the rank arrant presumption of cheating on chance. And he’d put on another hat, a black topper that shone like metal, to complain of the practical problems of a suicide’s funeral. No one enjoys them. That was trade wisdom in those days when shame and disgrace attached to the nears and dears and the welcome death stained the name of all who bore it and the deceased was a skeleton to be buried deep in the family closet and will not, please God, set a familial precedent for we know that it does run in families whether through genetic command or exemplary licence. Not that, Mr Fowler insisted to Henry, it was merely the trade which abhorred such self-abnegation but the entire Commonwealth of Her Majesty’s (the Queen’s, not the tree’s) subjects. Funeral directors do not lead the nation in matters of moral choice. They follow. That is why the state of undertaking perfectly reflects the state of society at a given moment, that is why Mr Fowler considered himself and his peers social barometers. Each year at conference, which Henry would attend from the age of fifteen, speakers would emphasise this point and append the corollary