The Fowler Family Business (10 page)

‘Did he really make it himself?’ Ben would ask.

‘He did.’

‘Why? Why did he make it?’ Lennie was insistent.

‘I suppose he wanted a dog,’ said Henry.

‘It’s not a real dog you know,’ said Lennie. ‘He could have bought a puppy.’

‘He probably … just … felt like making it.’

‘Why?’

‘Why? Well. Well, ah, he – he doesn’t have a little boy and a little girl who take up all his time asking him questions he doesn’t know the answer to.’

‘Why doesn’t he?’

Even though they were across the road from the green poodle and descending hand in hand towards the ponds in Sydenham Wells Park Henry looked behind him towards the green pantiled house before he replied,
sotto voce
: ‘He doesn’t have anyone to be their mummy. He’s not lucky like me.’

And they skipped merrily down the gentle slope.

The flowers at Freddie Glade’s funeral!

And, thought Henry Fowler, the pansies! Pew upon pew of celebrity florists and telly gardeners and horticultural consultants and lawn doctors and petal sculptors and rockery gurus and green-fingered gingers and nameless celebs and telly barons and a national newspaper editor whom Henry took for an unsuccessful golf pro and moron journalists who special-pleaded the case that floral arrangement was the new rock and roll.

Henry attended at Naomi’s insistence. Busman’s holiday, he complained. He was glad, though, of the chance to be there as a civvy and to scrutinise the procedures and performance of Messrs Meckiff & Miller, Funeral Directors. It cheered him no end that one of M & M’s junior employees wore cracked black plastic shoes, that another had decorative crescents of filth beneath his fingernails and seborrhoeic epaulettes on his shiny jacket.

‘Hullo Henry, old son. Keeping a beady on the opposition then?’ Verdon Meckiff joshed him in the shadowy cloisters after the service. Henry grinned noncommittally.

‘Wouldn’t have guessed that the deceased was your cup of tea,’ Verdon went on, falsely innocent. Then, with a stagey drop of his bearded jaw as though afflicted by a sudden
aperçu:
‘Henry! You haven’t started shopping on the other side of the street have you?’

Henry grunted, sighed, spoke wearily: ‘Leave it out Verd … I’m on supportive-husband duty – Freddie was Naomi’s tennis partner, believe it or not. She’s choked.’

‘Spoke out of turn – sorry Henry.’

‘Accepted. Weren’t to know. They won a couple of cups. Mixed doubles. Club champions. That was a while back, mind you.’

‘Oh-huh. Didn’t have him down as the sporty type. I didn’t know him like you did, of course. You know, seen him around. I’m surprised it’s a C of E – I always had him down, you know, as, uh, as a Jew. If you don’t mind my – I mean I know Nao …’

‘It’s all right Verd … He
was.
I mean he had been. But soon as his parents passed on he jumped ship. Couldn’t find a brand of Judaism camp enough I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘What a bender eh? … But I liked that quiz – ufff – you know, he used to be on. Oh what was it called?’

‘
Make My Dahlia
’

‘That’s the one. Very droll. And she was a bit of an elbow bender that totty.’

‘Jane Hare,’ said Henry.

‘Jane Hare – that’s the one. Shall I tug your root Mr Glade … Terrible way to go.’ Verdon Meckiffs voice nearly broke with the sincerity of his funeral-directorial concern.

‘Doesn’t bear thinking of.’

‘I suppose you could say he went doing what he loved.’

Buggering boys?

No. Freddie Glade died crimping the topiary poodle that was his pride, his joy, his trademark – he had it on his letterhead.

It’s the same old story: a blustery day, a wobbly stepladder, a hedge trimmer with a dodgy safety catch.

Henry asked: ‘Did he really take off his head?’

‘Near as dammit. What’s ’e called? Sstt – chum o’ yours – copper with the lupus and the squeaky voice …’

‘Dai Turnbull?’

‘
That’s
the feller … Reckoned a hit man with a chain-saw couldn’t have done a better job … He cut an ear off the poodle as well,’ Verdon added gravely.

Six youths on community-service orders took four hours to clean the pavement, gutter and road of blood. They never joyrode again.

‘Guess it’ll grow out won’t it … Go to seed … Turn into just another hedge, any old hedge,’ Henry mused ruefully.

His appetite for nostalgia and for its sibling, self-pity, was so keen that he was able to mourn the disappearance of a parochial folly before it happened. No matter that he had previously regarded the ten-foot-long indeciduous poodle, like its late maker, with a grudgingly tolerant disdain. Now that it was to be lost to
him,
now that it was to become another blemish on his patrimonial patch, he discovered a well of affection for it, he recognized its value as an eccentric landmark, he wanted to go and see it, to fix it for ever among the memories he collected and curated for future Fowlers.

‘Must have taken a fair old spot of upkeep,’ observed Verdon. ‘Shame really, fellow of his talents with no one to pass it on to. There’ll have been a bit of wedge there too.’

‘There will indeed:
Dappled Glade, Leafy Glade, Ever Glade
– think about it … what was it, boof, five? seven? years when he was never off the telly.’

‘More like ten, Henry. And all his book writing.’

‘All right for some, eh? Do we know the identity of the bum bandit who has copped the wad?’

‘As they say.’

‘In their line of business.’

‘We like to call at the
back
door,’ Verdon rejoined. ‘Noo – we do not know which particular plague-ridden bender just won the pools. The solicitors are what you’d call terminally discreet. M-A-N-C-H-E-S. Pronounced, would you believe,
man cheese.
You can see why they got his patronage.’

‘You know it’s something I couldn’t never figure – how did he keep it out of the papers?’

Verdon was exaggeratedly incredulous: ‘Come on, old son. There’s no story is there. Freddie Glade and rent-boy? Freddie Glade takes it up the gary? I mean, it’s like, y’know – Gorby discovered to have mark on head, or … or Pope shits in the woods. Now, Freddie Glade comes out as
hetero
– now you’re talking.’

‘And pigs might fly,’ nodded Henry.

‘Pre-cise-ly.’

‘Look.
I
must actually. Fly. Naomi.’

‘Self-fulfilling prophecy old son. Be seeing you. Look how you’re going.’

The cloister cypresses reminded Henry of an oleographic reproduction of a Victorian painting on the landing in his parents’ house: those trees, a dozen nuns, raspberry cirrus, an intimation of happy death, of heaven even. He hadn’t looked at it in years. He felt an unwonted surge of affection for Freddie as he walked along the outside of the brick arcade, which was unfamiliar to him – only two miles from home, yet he’d never previously set foot in the place, dedicated to St Blaise, patron of the throat: one reason, no doubt, why Freddie had stipulated it. Another would be that this Anglo-Catholic church’s ritual was even more elaborate than the usual run of such smoky Guignol. Henry imagined that each of the hieratic battalion which officiated wore beneath his chasuble a studded leather bollock holster and a bolt through the glans. And the taste for incense’s choking reek must be determined by sexual preference like the taste for poodles, mauve, walnut coffins, art and antiques – all the things that the family man with a proper job and responsibilities has no time to like. Nor the inclination.

Naomi, who had sobbed to exhibition level throughout the service, was standing outside the church’s showy west front with a hanky to her face, with Ben and Lennie clinging to her and Curly doing staunch backup work. Henry didn’t know the three other people with them, a buxom Titian and two lean, crop-haired men. They formed one of twenty or so groups, passing their germs on to each other’s cheeks, gripping arms in competitive caring. Henry, exiting the cloisters, was wondering how many of the mourners had actually known Freddie and how many were what his trade knows as vultures: given Freddie’s predilections he had probably known the lot of them.

‘Where the hell have you been Henry?’ Naomi asked.

Grieving faces turned. Henry winced at her loudness. Ben and Lennie scowled at him with their mother’s accusatory eyes.

‘I was just having a word with Verd there.’

‘It’s a
funeral
Henry, not an effing trade convention.’

Henry’s expression manifested an evident puzzlement which further stoked Naomi’s ire.

‘Henry, this is about life … death. D’you see? Someone has died. This is not about swapping gossip and … and picking up tips from other bloody funeral directors. You’re a mourner, not some … you’re not here to do industrial espionage.’

Henry was mildly affronted. ‘I don’t think Fowler & Son have got anything to learn from Meckiff & Miller.’

The buxom Titian mouthed ‘Whoops!’ over Naomi’s shoulder.

Naomi sobbed incredulously: ‘You really don’t get it do you … you … He’s just a number to you. Isn’t he? You aren’t even working and he’s just a number. Another day, another body, another box.’

Henry shook his head at her miscomprehension. He realised that, in their nineteen years of marriage, he had never previously been to a funeral with Naomi.

He had lived to that day in complacent ignorance of what sort of mourner-profile she would possess, of how such an occasion might affect her. And despite her turning away with Ben and Lennie knotted to her, despite his humiliation in witnessing his adored family stumble like one misbegotten sexiped across the blowy yard so that Naomi might express her grief to another group, he was uxoriously proud of how touched she was, of how wholeheartedly she had entered into the spirit of the event, of how she had responded the way any funeral director would have wished. Verdon was doing something right, then. Henry was jealous.

‘Henry. This is Lavender,’ Curly said. His hand tentatively contacted the buxom Titian’s lower back. ‘Lavender. Beard, Henry Fowler.’

Henry nodded offhandedly at the woman whilst watching Naomi hugging strangers and dabbing her streaked eyes and stroking Lennie’s bob and gesturing. Lavender Beard followed his eyes to demonstrate her sympathy for him and to forgive his brusqueness: ‘They’re never easy, these partings … The English way of death … The embarrassment of it all … Are we allowed to cry … I sometimes wonder if anyone even knows how to cry. Good for her.’

Portings, dearth.
Her accent was New England aping the old English of black-and-white films.

‘Naomi’s Jewish – they’ve got a different … uh. It’s a …’

‘Let’s say they’re not bound by a Protestant strait-jacket.’

‘Something like that,’ Henry agreed.

‘It’s the real English disease,’ said Lavender, ‘inhibition. It’s a cultural … it’s a behavioural virus.’

‘Didn’t appear to affect Freddie,’ Curly observed.

‘Well if he was as much of a nelly as you make out …’

‘Didn’t you know him then?’ Henry asked, surprised.

Lavender Beard smiled and whispered: ‘I’m a gatecrasher. Promise not to tell.’

‘We’re going straight on after. It’d have been logistical mayhem if Lavender hadn’t come,’ Curly explained.

‘And I’ve got this thing about widow’s weeds,’ she trilled. She was wearing a tightly cut black grosgrain suit with a peplum and a hobble skirt, a sort of black boater with a veil, high black courts, a jet choker above a thick lardy roll of cleavage.

‘Ah … Where you off to?’

‘Newhaven … Going over to Rouen for a couple of nights.’

Henry gaped, unwittingly. Curly noticed. He grinned slyly, like a child who has behaved with unprecedented self-determination. Curly … Rouen … With a vamp, a size 16 vamp maybe – but what a piece of homework, what a piece of liquid engineering, her lips were the colour of the plums on Her Majesty. From the same mould as Jane Russell. Curly … How had this happened?

The only holidays Curly took were with Henry and Naomi, Ben and Lennie: he’d join them for a seaside week at Wimereux or Sables d’Olonne, at De Panne or Plougastel – he loved to build model roads in the sand. Otherwise his travel was restricted to traffic-light conferences in Essen, pedestrianisation fests in Chemnitz, hard-shoulder binges in the suburbs of unpronounceable towns in week-old republics: postcard from Brno.

‘Rouen? Great!’ Henry Fowler had a ready gift for bogus enthusiasm. ‘Don’t tell me: medieval cathedral.’

‘That’s the one,’ said Curly.

‘Lots of scoff and lots of boff.
That’s
the one,’ Lavender purred.

When an Englishman dies what happens to his personal pewter tankard that has always hung above the bar in his local? Is it reclaimed by his estate? Is it kept as a memorial to him
in situ,
in the place where, so his drinking pals would claim, he had spent the best years of his life? Is it used to toast him on the anniversary of his death so that his name will live for ever more? Does it merely become part of the common store of jugs which mine host jovially fills with a short measure of watered ale for passing trade?