The Fowler Family Business

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No, Curly didn’t forget the ring though for a moment he searched his pockets in the pretence that he had!

No, he didn’t embarrass the guests by telling off-colour gags – though he suggested that he was about to do so by talking about the day that Henry hid the salami! This, however, was merely the introduction to an anecdote about Henry removing a pork product from the table on one of Naomi’s early visits, before he realised that her family’s assimilation was such that they ignored dietary proscriptions.

‘My dad’s motto,’ Naomi never tired of explaining, ‘is – the best of both worlds, salt beef and bacon, Jewish when it suits!’ Not all of Naomi’s family and friends were as blithely indifferent to observances as she and her father were. Curly Croney was, even then, at the age of eighteen, canny enough not to stir things between the bride’s two factions. Having felt the coolness with which that allusion to the Lewises’ casual apostasy was received he made no further mention of it.

He spoke instead, with the persuasive humility which was to stand him in such favourable stead in his professional life, about his debt to his friend, the bridegroom Henry Fowler, his brother and comforter Henry Fowler, who had taken the place of his real brother Stanley. Irreplaceable Stanley – save that Henry had replaced him, as much as anyone ever could.

It was Henry who despite the almost five years’ difference in their ages had guided him through the bewilderment and grief that they had both suffered. It was Henry who had been his guiding light and mentor; he had become, as a result of a silly accident, an only child in a shattered family. And it was through Henry’s belief in the integrity and sanctity of family that the Croney family had been able to repair itself. (At this juncture Curly smiled with radiant gratitude towards the grey mutton-chop sideburns covering his father’s face and to the white miniskirt exposing his mother’s blue-veined thighs.) Henry, not least because of his own parents’ example, understood the strength of family and the importance of its perpetuation whatever losses it might suffer: a strong family is an entity which can recover from anything, and Henry had shown the way.

Curly didn’t know that Naomi’s mother had only returned to the family home in Hatch End fourteen months previously after a three-year liaison with a wallpaper salesman in Cape Town which ended when Louis died in the bedroom of a client’s house during a demonstration of new gingham prints and Louis’s daughters brought an action to remove Naomi’s mother from the green-pantiled Constantia bungalow which was now theirs. Nor did he know that fourteen of Naomi’s mother’s aunts, uncles and first cousins had died at Sobibor and Treblinka and that there is no familial recovery from such thorough murder.

But those in the Classic Rooms of the Harrow Weald Hotel that squally afternoon of 25 August 1968 who had evaded or who had survived industrial genocide were in no mood to oppose the patently decent, patently grateful young man and were inclined, too, to conjoin with him in his celebration of the tanned blond undertaker whom Naomi so obviously loved and had chosen to make her own family with far away, on the corresponding south-eastern heights of the Thames Basin – there, see them there, through the rolls of weather, places we’ve never been to, goyland, where the JC means Jesus Christ, where yarmulkes are rarely seen, where it may not even be safe to practise psychiatry, where a vocabulary of hateful epithets is nonchalantly spoken, unreproached, in the salons and golf clubs. There are sixty-five synagogues north of the Thames; there are five south of it, and about as many delis. No ritual circumcisers, either – a lack which had not even occurred to Curly Croney, which duly went unmentioned although in later years Naomi’s father, Jack Lewis, would sometimes jocularly greet Henry as ‘the man the mohel missed’. Henry took this in good spirit and was unfazed by the overintimate coarseness, because it was so obviously true – no one would expect a strapping, big-boned blond with almost Scandinavian features to have been circumcised, and, besides, his exaggerated respect for his parents extended to his parents-in-law. It was a respect which Curly illustrated by referring to an incident Naomi had mentioned to him.

On their third date, one Sunday in May, Henry had called for Naomi in his sports car and had driven her first to the Air Forces Memorial at Runnymede to admire ‘a properly tended garden of remembrance – tidiness equals respect’, then to see the brash rhododendron cliffs at Virginia Water, and on to a riverside restaurant where they ate a chateaubriand steak because it was to share and by such gestures would they unite themselves. They gazed at each other oblivious to river, weir, swans, pleasure craft, laburnums, magnolias (past their best in any case). Henry was explaining the massage procedure that must be applied to a body to alleviate rigor mortis in order to make it pliable for embalming. Naomi leaned across the table, clasped his hands and asked, poutingly, ‘Who’s your ideal woman?’

Henry was puzzled by this question. And whilst Naomi’s pose – eyes fluttering and index finger tracing the line of her lips – might have encouraged most young men to achieve the correct answer Henry contorted his face in effortful recall as though the quarry were some irrefutable slug of information like the chemical formula for formaldehyde CH

0 rather than a softly smiling ‘You’ or ‘You are’. If Henry realised that he was being asked to provide proof of the compact between them he was too shy to acknowledge it.

Suddenly his face cleared. He’s got it, she thought to herself, warm with the anticipation of an exclusive compliment. He reached inside his jacket, withdrew his wallet and removed from it a photograph which he handed to her. It showed a middle-aged woman, her face partly obscured by the hair blown across it by a gust. Naomi looked at it, as though this was some sort of trick. Then she waited for the clever pay-off.

‘That’s my mother,’ said Henry. ‘My ideal woman.’

Curly, whom Naomi regarded as a child, was blind to Naomi’s hurt when she told him of that day. He supposed that this vignette was an affirmation of her pride in her future husband’s filial loyalty and he recounted it thus, causing his audience to wonder why he should wish to slight the bride at the expense of her mother-in-law. Was he trying to ingratiate himself, in the belief that to be Jewish is to be mother fixated? Was this an expression of covert anti-Semitism? No, it was just gaucheness tempered with Curly’s steadfast idolatry of Henry. Do you know what Henry did the day after they got engaged?

The guests awaited the revelation of a passionate gesture, of some act characterised by irrationality and violins. With his father’s permission, since it was his father who had bought it for him on his twenty-first birthday, Henry traded in his two-seater, open-topped, wire-wheeled MGB for a four-seater Rover 2000 saloon ‘because we’re going to be a family and a sports car’s not suitable. Not safe either.’

‘I really liked the MG, Henry,’ murmured the bride, nuzzling her husband of an hour’s neck, ‘all that fresh air can get a girl quite excited.’

‘The Rover’s got a sun-roof,’ he replied, tersely. ‘All you’ve got to do is wind it.’

Henry had, anyway, made the right car choice in the opinion of Curly’s audience. Every one of them was beaming at him. He might not have made a theatrically romantic gesture but he had expressed a long-term commitment by buying, by investing in, a vehicle renowned for its craftsmanship and reliability, a vehicle with two extra seats to fill, in time and with God’s blessing, two extra seats which seemed to predict a nursery gurgling.

Curly finished his speech with the wish that: ‘Next time I offer a toast to these two I hope it will actually be to these three – but, for the moment, I give you Naomi and Henry.’ Naomi and Henry – their names were multiplied in the gaily decorated Classic Rooms. Curly sat down and Henry gripped him around the arm, patting his shoulder, nodding in satisfaction, a trainer whose dog has had its day. That speech had cemented their brotherhood. Naomi’s mother said what others must have thought when she muttered: ‘Who’s getting married here I want to know? Henry, ob-vi-ous-ly, but who to? I’d never heard it was the best man’s role to declare his love for the groom. What did he mean by these three? Is he expecting them to adopt him?’ And so on.

Curly would not, at that time, have admitted to loving Henry. Affection, respect, gratitude, guilt – these were the sentiments he allowed. And a sort of relief, an inchoate conviction that without someone whom he could take for granted he would not have recovered from the loss of Stanley. He did not delude himself: Henry was more of a brother to him than Stanley could ever have been, while they were young, at least, and the age gap told. He knew that had Stanley lived, reckless, selfish, apple of his father’s wandering eye, Henry would not have been his brother and that Henry would have taken no notice of him, that Henry would forever have been trailing Stanley. His guilt sprang from his having been blessed by Stanley’s death, from having been liberated by it, from having been dragged from the shadows by a true soulmate. It was as it was meant to be, according to fortuity and fatidic law. He was thankful that Henry had stuck with Stanley for all of Stanley’s life for otherwise he would not have inherited Henry. But why had Henry stuck by his childhood friend? Is friendship, too, merely a matter of habit? Was Henry so desperate that he was prepared to suffer Stanley’s routine disloyalty and infidelity? Henry was a loner, unquestionably, and not by choice: his parents’ age was, no doubt, one of the causes – they were not quite of the generation of his contemporaries’ grandparents, but they were of a generation whose children had been born before the war; Henry’s father was eighteen years older than Mr Croney whose laments for Stanley included the one that ‘we grew up alongside him’.

No mention there of Curly who had come along only five years later. Curly considered himself an afterthought. His father, besotted by Stanley who was made in his image, loved Curly when he remembered to, and when he was reminded to by his wife who clawed the smoky air as though punch drunk when she tried to beat him for his hopelessly disguised infidelities.

She wasn’t punch drunk, Mr Croney didn’t hit her, she was merely drunk, gin and sweet vermouth, so drunk that she left meat in the oven to turn to charcoal, so drunk that she lost the hang of clock time and would wake Stanley to go to school at 3 a.m. and run a bath for his little brother as soon as she had packed him out the door into the freezing fog and obfuscated sodium light, so drunk that Mr Croney grew neglectful of his excuses. He saw the error of that particular way when he returned one night to find her sober because there was no more credit at the off-licence. Her fury when in that state was focused, hurtful, shaming; he felt he had no right to be alive. So first thing in the morning he hurried to the off-licence, paid her debt and advanced the shop £30, in cash, with a wink. An investment, he said to himself, an investment – and alcoholic oblivion is a blessing to her, it helps her to forget the terrible loss of her baby and should thus be encouraged. No amount of alcohol could inhibit her breakfast screams at yet another boiled wasp preserved in a jar of plum jam.

The Fowlers’ old-fashioned house was Curly’s refuge from home, his home from home. He first came by one frosty morning six weeks after his brother’s funeral (directed by Fowler & Son) having shyly phoned to ask if he could sort through Stanley’s electric model train set which Stanley had pooled with Henry’s because the Fowler house was big enough to accommodate a permanent layout in an unheated semi-attic bedroom. The 00 ctagon of track matted with dust rested on a trestle-table along with a streaky grey aluminium control box, carriages with greasy celluloid windows, an A-4 Gresley Pacific, a Merchant Navy class locomotive, a shunter with a broken wheel, an EDL17 0–6–2 still in its royal-blue-and-white pinstriped box because by the time Stanley had been given it he was past playing with model trains. Mrs Fowler suspected that Curly, too, was past that age. She had a feeling in her waters that Curly was, though he might not know it, in search of something other than metal Dubio and plastic Tri-ang. Mrs Fowler dusted around the track, excusing her negligence, watching Curly as he picked through toys he was interested in only as souvenirs of his brother. He picked up a cream metal footbridge, fondled it with puzzled familiarity, held it out to show her.

‘That’s the bridge. It’s just like the bridge,’ he said before he wept.

She comforted him. She made him hot chocolate. She made him drop scones with honey. She held his reticent hands and hugged him. When Henry came in from work experience (at Fowler & Son) she told her son that she and Curly had just been having a little talk. Henry was startled, and it showed. They sat, the three of them, at the breakfast-room table where he had so often sat with Stanley. Mrs Fowler made a gesture to Henry, the sort of gesture a different mother might have made to her son in the presence of a girl, a nodding smile of connivance which implied more than approval, which implied a duty to go for it. So Henry suggested to Curly that they have a kick-about on the lawn. It was frosty all that day, and the ground was slippy. Neither the sixteen-year-old nor the eleven-year-old could control the old sodden ball on the crunchy grass but they played happily, in earnest, straining to tackle, diving to save, deflecting the ball off Her Majesty’s trunk, getting up a sweat and blowing white fire from their throats. When the dark came down on the garden they went inside for a tea of anchovy toast and lemon barley water.

That evening’s panel on Juke Box Jury was Jack Good, Johnny Tillotson, Helen Shapiro and, making his only appearance on the show, Bobby Camino. Curly was also a fan, and hung on every word he had to say about the Dovells’ ‘Bristol Stomp’ before he was shut out by Mr Fowler’s chortling joke that ‘They’re more like the Bristol Zoo than the Bristol Stomp. That’s hungry animals crying out to their keepers, that’s what that is.’ And Henry and Curly longed for the day when they would agree with him, without equivocation, without even a frisson of excitement at the wailing which defied propriety. That was the teatime when the Fowlers taught Curly canasta.

Then it was Henry and Curly, Curly and Henry. Curly wasn’t a card, nor was Henry. Curly wasn’t a caution the way his brother had been, he was as cautious as Henry. It was always Henry and Curly, in that order, according to age and experience. Henry took the boy they had somehow overlooked off his parents’ hands, their cack-hands when it came to their younger one, now, terribly, their only one. They were happy, Mr and Mrs Croney, to let their boy hang around with their lost one’s friend. It never occurred to them, nor should it have, that there was anything mucky (a well-used word of Mr Fowler’s) about this friendship. They were right. Henry and Curly never even talked of girls or sex. Stanley’s death had relieved Henry of the pressure to compete in an adolescent contest which he’d not wanted to partake in. He was no longer obliged to boast of conquests which he hadn’t made, hadn’t the nerve to make, lacked the will to make. Had Stanley really believed him when he said he’d fingered Cathy Pelly, when he said that Sally Sanger had unzipped his Terylene trousers? He had only been echoing Stanley after all. Stanley had never expressed incredulity, had never questioned his seductive prowess. So he had believed him? Not on your life.

Henry was happy that the onerous obligations of mucky behaviour had been lifted. He was a loner in most regards – he had few friends other than Stanley and now Curly – so why not be a loner in sex too? It was a private matter, sex, not to be shared, not to be witnessed save by the morosely mocking eyes of the monochrome girls in the discreetly proportioned pocket magazines which he stole from the near-blind Mr Gough, the newsagent whose devotion to such magazines had brought him to that state, had brought him out in brown stains on his skin, had done for his hearing too. Henry could open the door to the shop without causing the sprung bell to ring, without disturbing Mr Gough, frotting and coughing in his cell of tobacco and flesh at the far end of the shop.

Henry knew it was wrong to steal these profane images. But stealing was appropriate because it augmented his shame, it doubled his sin, it increased the guilt attached to his betrayal of his parents with meaty tarts, it made sex conditional on crime even if that crime was venial and the sex was the glueing together of silky pages that were potent beyond their size. These thefts were, so far as he could recall, the only crimes he had ever committed. Try as he might he couldn’t remember anything half as bad. He was out of step with his contemporaries’ judicious delinquency. He saw the good sense in not jaywalking. He was contemptuous of the kudos attached to getting (a girl) into trouble. And whilst other adolescents were swept along by the glandular revolution within their bodies and allowed it to determine their mores, Henry resisted the hormonal call. At the age of sixteen he was already the victim of a longing for the certainties and stasis of his comfy past.

Stanley had persuaded him to read books by writers with beards. He preferred tales of wartime aircrews’ escapes after being shot down over occupied France. He enjoyed the pitchfork’s tynes in a haystack, the shy peasant girls, the radio transmitters disguised as sewing machines, the mortal sacrifices, the Gestapo beating testicles with rubber truncheons. He admired the looks of the men shown in the jacket paintings: tough yet kind, decent and modest, with regular brave blond acne-free features. They were adventurers with right on their side, heroes whose lives were uncontaminated by equivocation and impure thoughts. Henry lent Curly such memoirs as T.D.G. Teare’s Evader, Bruce Marshall’s White Rabbit and D. Baber’s Where Eagles Gather. Curly had only just finished Fugitives by Night when Mrs Croney asked Henry to take the boy for a dental check-up.

Curly was soon anaesthetised, soon dreaming that Mr Etherington was the collaborationist dentist to whom Squadron-Leader Victor Wraxall had had to submit. He was grateful when he came round that Henry was with him. His mother so loathed the smells of gas and burning tooth enamel that she might have had a turn. Henry claimed – stoically? genuinely? – to enjoy those smells which are also undertakers’ trade smells, the smells of crematoria which are also the smells of duty and profit.

This was not the only dream that aircrew yarns would prompt.

Curly dreamed of Stanley falling, parachuteless, from a fuselage which burned to reveal an armature of riveted girders. Stanley’s howl as he plummeted through the night sky was the howl that Curly made as he woke before the body made contact with the sinuous lines of a marshalling yard where Wehrmacht troops patrolled between flaming braziers. He woke, twisted and sweating, uncertain where he was – where had the window moved to?

His howl of terminal fear woke Henry in the sleeping-bag along the other side of the small tent pitched beside a stream on a damp Cornish moor. That was the summer they took their bicycles on the train to Exeter and headed west. At Henry’s insistence – he was in loco parentis and now working in the family business thus a routine witness to the result of quotidian rashness – they pursued his safe-cycling policy. Viz.: ride up hills, tonic for Achilles’ tendons and hamstrings; dismount and push bicycles down hills because to achieve speeds of over thirty miles an hour on these precipitous gradients is a risky frivolity, a brief gratification of an appetite that is better suppressed. There were enough dangers without courting supplementaries – there were caravans listing and swaying like the callipygian buttocks of drug-tranced dancers; there were cars performing six-point turns in sunken lanes jammed by caravans; there were bulls sated on meadow grass and anxious to exercise; there were vipers on the heaths; there were sheep everywhere.

They bathed in hidden coves. They lay under the sun on cropped turf incised with rabbit paths. The confectioner’s red of sunset delighted them. They learned not to pitch the tent near trees which were contorted and silently screaming because that was the way the wind went, whistling as it bullied. They cooked on a spirit stove and convinced themselves that bacon and beans so prepared tasted miles better. They got used to damp clothes, to rising at daybreak, to lying outside the tent feeling themselves part of the system to which the stars belonged, marvelling at the sidereal patterning and misnaming formations with confident ignorance. When they drank from burbling steams they were, Henry insisted, refreshing and feeding their bodies as man had done since the dawn of time but without the intercession of engineers who had so denatured water that it is taken for granted rather than regarded as a gift from the Earth to its children, a gift from the Earth’s core welling through strata of immemorial accretions to be lifted high as clouds and returned to earth in a cycle of beneficence and generative necessity.

Henry and Curly lunched on crisps outside pubs whose names proudly celebrated the West Country’s criminal past: the Smugglers’ Inn, the Skull and Crossbones, the Buccaneer, the Pirates’ Nest, the Wreckers’ Flare, the Slave Master’s Arms. The descendants of criminals sported lavish widow’s peaks which began between their eyebrows. Their arms were girt as telegraph posts and blue with tattoos from all the world’s ports. Their faces were all avarice and cunning. They ran pubs with the same relish their forebears had brought to running slaves. They treated their customers, the grockles and emmets, with bonhomous contempt and smiling malice.

Henry asked a licensee called Dennis Jacka where they might camp nearby. Mr Jacka slid his tongue inside a nostril to think. Then he told them how to reach ‘a beautiful spot’ further down the wooded estuary. That was the afternoon Curly got sunburned. He stretched out prone squinting through tufts of grass towards the headland and the river’s mouth, listening to the narcotic drone of bees in broom, getting the perspective wrong as he grew drowsy and dozed off. Henry sat, all the while, beneath a stunted tamarisk, neglectful.

It was too late when he rubbed sunblock into Curly’s back and shoulders which had gone red as an angry glans.

The dogs arrived just after dusk, galloping across the scrubby plateau, their pelts bouncing with belligerent ire, their tongues like horizontal pink standards, barking war cries and followed by Dennis Jacka’s cousin Ted Nancecarrow who had no teeth but made up for that lack with a string of convictions for assault, ABH, GBH, affray, etc. He couldn’t remember the number of foreigners he had fought for Cornwall and he never allowed anyone on his land. He carried a torch like a cosh, his stick quivered as though the hand holding it was in the throes of a fit. Henry and Curly used the crossbar of a bicycle as a ladder to the boughs of a sycamore. Curly was sore. He’d have been sorer still had the dogs known how to climb but they didn’t because they were dogs. Ted Nancecarrow struck the tree with his stick, he referred to the dogs as ‘my wolfs’. He struck them too. ‘My wolfs is hungry,’ he repeated. The torch’s beam picked out a leaf, a grimace, a wrist, a sappy twig broken in the rush to escape the slavering fangs. ‘Don’t like strangers on my land … don’t like strangers at all.’

He walked around the tent, prodding the canvas. He tried and failed to pull up a peg with his mud-crusted clumsy boot. He kicked over a jerrycan spilling all the water they had. He picked up a pack of sausages from beside the Primus stove and threw it to the dogs at the foot of the tree. They demonstrated their teeth, their greed, their ingestive urgency.

‘They like their scran: don’t you my wolfs? They’re not too fussy about it neither. Eat anything, they would.’

‘We didn’t know,’ said Henry. ‘Please …’

Ted Nancecarrow toyed with the fearful rictus in the boughs. He took pleasure in the pleading whine – it meant that he had stripped the foreign trespassers of their dignity and English pride. They were almost as humiliated as victims with bleeding eyes and hairline fractures begging him to put down the adze. He took pity on himself: he couldn’t chance it – another offence and he’d go down again, even if he was justifiably exercising a landowner’s right. His most recent suspended sentence had fourteen months to run. What would his wolfs do without him? They might attack the wrong people – they had a taste for Meriel Spargo, had to be held back, and they always went for old Bob Nankivell because he’d never washed beneath his foreskin for forty or more years ‘tis said. They might even be put to sleep.

‘You two. You got ten minutes. I’ll be back in ten minutes. And if you’re still here … You want to learn to keep off of other people’s land. Ten minutes I say.’ He had saved face. He could live with himself. He clapped his hands and the dogs followed him out of Henry’s and Curly’s lives.