The Fowler Family Business (12 page)

He didn’t say ‘You correspond precisely to your photo in the conference programme, the only difference being that I did not fall in love with that photo.’ He didn’t say that because there is a gap between seeing lightning and hearing a
coup de foudre.
And even had the transmission of sensation from eye through brain to tongue been faster he would have observed the taboo on opening one’s heart (that too) to a stranger when that stranger is the object of the heart’s desire. He did say: ‘I’m coming to your lecture.’

‘Knights of the Road: Codes of Gestural Chivalry’ was a captious panegyric of the car as agent and promoter of courtesy, fellowship, good manners, goodwill, well-being and social responsibility. Lavender Beard spoke of the car as a domain of individual responsibility and self-determination. For every instance of a driver who believes that he has been wronged, cut up, impeded and who follows his alleged aggressor, forcing him off the road and beating his head to a pulp with a lump of old camshaft, there are tens of thousands of instances of drivers pulling in between parked cars to make way for vehicles coming from the opposite direction whose drivers will acknowledge that routine act of selflessness with an open-palmed salute, a salute that will very likely be reciprocated. This, Lavender contended, is peculiar to England – it is akin to holding open doors for strangers, to giving up one’s seat on the underground to the elderly, the pregnant, the infirm
without
an injunction to do so. Which makes the English behaviourally superior to the French who, left to their own devices, would obviously relegate the war wounded and quadriplegics to a heap on the carriage floor.

As she spoke she couldn’t help but direct herself towards Curly Croney whose gaze was so concentrated that she felt she was being consumed. He was trying to take possession of her – was that what it was? His fixation with her was so patent that she wondered if he was sick. (He was – he was lovesick, he was the fevered protagonist of any one of a thousand popular songs.) He appeared not to be listening: he certainly failed to laugh when he was meant to and didn’t do so until he realised that the rest of the audience was displaying a courteously amused recognition of her after-dinnerish observations on A A patrolmen (‘They salute you even if they’ve just raped you’) and VW Beetle drivers (‘They shouldn’t give each other peace signs, they should give each other a Nazi salute’). He was also the only man in the packed lecture hall who was not the victim of multiple tailoring. She admired his clothes’ assertive understatement: bespoke charcoal suit, heavy white Oxford shirt, black-and-grey tie, black brogues.

She would come in time to admire the way he neglected to fold his clothes and slung them casually across the Citterio sofa in his austere bedroom which became their bedroom in such a way that they appeared to have been arranged. He has
to actually try
, she boasted, if he’s not to be elegant in everything he does and makes, in everything he thinks and designs. She boasted too that they were never apart from the day they met. She didn’t even bother to cash in the return half of her rail ticket. He drove her back to London in his lhd DS
décapotable
that early summer evening when the rain held off and the wind volumised her hair and they knew the very moment that the one was again feasting on the other with pride and beatific wonderment.

The early morning of the following day Lavender woke beside this man whose scent she already adored, whose breath was balm on her collar, whose emissions matted her glossy hair and her lavish bush, whose lack of sexual inhibition delighted her, whose monkish house she wished to remake in her image, whose child she longed to bear.

Curly stirred, nuzzled her neck, blearily rolled on to his back and, as he slipped back into sleep, murmured drowsily: ‘Are you going to shave here or wait till you get back to barracks?’

She never told him he had said that. Should she have told him? That was the ghost of his past, a distant past maybe, nothing more. And she was a grown woman, she was a worldling with a tolerance of such eccentricities. Had her father not addressed her mother, whose name was Virginia, as Johnny? Had he not addressed his Princeton friend Harold Van Hage, with whom he holidayed in Europe each summer, as Harriet?

Nor did she tell Curly that the stifled whimper he had enthusiastically mistaken last night for a gasp of pleasure was actually a wince of unalloyed pain caused by his touching a graze in the mucous membrane of her rectum made by Mike the Bike’s serrated fingernails. Curly was so pleased that she was excited by this particular exploration that he persisted in making it even when his middle finger, the only one long enough for the job, started to ache with what he imagined to be the onset of repetitive strain injury.

Should she have told him? Of course not. That was her past. That was pre-confluence.

This was already the Second Day of the Rest of Their Life. They went to the races at Kempton.

The sixth summer of the Croneys’ marriage was the summer of brass name-plates, of stately stone stairwells, of discreet waiting-rooms hung with mirthless cartoons, of doctors who style themselves Mister to elevate themselves above doctors who answer to Doctor, of detached-collar cupidity, of bogus gentility, of effortful levity (’What does an Irish skin specialist call himself?’ ‘A Dermotologist!’), of the pained, priestly grimace that portends the bad news. It was a grimace whose many variations they came to know and fear.

Every time she found herself in the pedagogic Mecca of Dulwich, Lavender rued her failure to conceive. Here there were girls of James Allen’s School, women already, squeezed into the uniform that they would customise by shortening and tightening for the delectation of the local rough. But none of these flirty things was hers to chide and warn and hug.

Posing as a prospective parent (which she was) she would occupy a deck-chair beneath a chestnut to watch cricket matches played in the verdant grounds of the boys’ school. Here there were pretend men in cricket whites – private education delays puberty. They wore white like virgins, they were as cross-dressed as molly dancers. They protected their wicket, a hymenal gate, with a bat, a primal shield, against its assault by a groin-polished ball. She made notes for a paper (which she would never complete) on the paramountcy of the game’s rites; on the infection of quotidian speech by its jargon, an infection which acknowledges the game’s metaphorical potency and variety – it can stand for anything, it can be made to mean anything, it is protean, tirelessly equivocal, endlessly elusive, as evasive as a politician; on its inability to flourish in countries other than those formerly colonised by Britain or formerly as Protestant as Britain (Holland); on its soporific dullness. Her title was to have been
Cricket Stands for Britain.
She dreamed of its becoming a book. But not so much as she dreamed that the little boy who cried when he dropped a catch was her little boy. Even Curly who hated cricket and calumnised it as ‘another English disease’ would surely come to love it if it was his child who scored the winning run and modestly raised his bat, a primal weapon, in acknowledgement of his feat. If it was his child … But it wasn’t. And she feared it never would be.

She astonished herself by being sullenly jealous when Henry and Ben Fowler successfully auditioned for the pilot show of a television quiz called
Know Thy Father Know Thy Son.
Of the four sons chosen to participate only Ben was able to identify his father from a childhood photograph, only Ben knew the name of his father’s best friend at school, none of them knew their father’s birthplace. And the fathers were kindredly ignorant, forgetting their son’s first spoken word, and whether their first infantile disease had been rubella or chickenpox or measles, and incidents of nappy hilarity, and examples of supposed precocity; none of them displayed any recognition of ‘Famous Family Booboos’ (child-eats-firelighter-has-stomach-pumped, that sort of thing). The show was deemed by LWT executives to be ground breaking and courageous but no series was commissioned and the pilot was not transmitted.

Nonetheless Lavender was resentful that Curly should be denied the opportunity even to apply to participate in such familial endeavours, no matter how he despised them. She hated herself for not providing him with the passport to normality.

Month after month after month she bled, and because she bled she wept. She wept anywhere – in her car, at the movies, during a lecture she was delivering on cross-border barter in Pyrenean communities. Her face twisted like that of a newborn whose very absence was the fount of her woe.

It was Mr Lancaster Dovell who, massaging his frontal sinuses with thumb and index fingers, suggested to Lavender that: ‘We ought I think perhaps to have a peek at your husband’s waterworks. Yah? I’ll arrange for him to see Mr Bassett – good man.’

So it was that Curly sat on the edge of a paper-covered couch in a partitioned room above Welbeck Street. Spermatic motes slomoed through the wedge of beam admitted by the clear glass at the top of the sash. A crew-cut nurse with a boxer’s face handed him a specimen jar and indicated a bell press: ‘Should you require any assistance …’

‘When you’re paying this sort of money – I thought assistance would be included.’

‘Mr Croney!’ She reproved him with the weary smile of one who’s heard it all before, often.

‘If you do need some, ah, encouragement …’ She gestured invitingly to a pile of tooled-leather folders and patted them. ‘Ten minutes all right with you? Oh and I know it’s a little close in here but don’t open it will you, the window. We had a bit of an incident a couple of weeks back.’

(Patient D had been experiencing especial difficulty in obtaining his sample yield. A difficulty he ascribed to the room’s airlessness. He managed to force open the opaque lower half of the window. He returned to his solitary endeavour with renewed and frenzied enthusiasm.

Delphine Agah, the new tenant of Flat 71, on the seventh floor of Teck Court, a service block on New Cavendish Street, was busily deadheading the marigolds in a window-box neglected by her predecessor. She glanced down through the grid of the adjacent fire escape’s treads and rails, across a white-tiled area, past knots of elephantine telescopic ducts, over a craggy fortress of air-conditioning plant, over the roof lights and lanterns of cramped extensions and into the rear of Mr Gervaise Bassett’s consulting rooms.

She dropped her kitchen scissors. She ran to the phone. She dialled 999 and asked for the ambulance service. She was unable to give the precise address in Welbeck Street, just around the corner but she would wait outside the house when she had worked out which one it was. Yes, she was certain. She had nursing experience. She had indeed met her husband when she was a nurse and he was a liposuction patient. She knew an epileptic fit when she saw one.)

Curly had never previously seen magazines such as
Ring, Lustsluts, Beaverbrook
and
Cockhound
placed in the sort of genteel leather folder which his parents had wrapped round
Radio Times
when he was a child. He wondered whether Mr Gervaise Bassett, if prosecuted for possession of illicit publications, could plead that they were legitimate medical aids. And would the BMA be behind him? He masturbated strenuously whilst scrutinising photographs with helpful captions like: ‘Eva loves the taste of Freddi’s big mauve lollipop.’ He ejaculated into the jar as surely as Freddi did on to eager Eva’s face (p. 11).

Mr Gervaise Bassett’s mahogany desk betokened his eminence and dwarfed his body. He sat on a castored chair propelling his shoulders and his disproportionately large, smoothly brilliantined head from one side of the desk to the other, like a target in a shooting gallery. The worse the prognosis the faster the target moved. Curly didn’t know this. He was transfixed by the speed and regularity of the eminent consultant’s cycle. So although he heard what was being told to him he hardly took it in. His distraction was such that he failed to acknowledge its import; it seemed remote from him, notional. Curly surprised Mr Bassett by smiling. Mr Bassett had rarely witnessed a more evident instance of a patient’s denial and as he bowled along the three-metre length of his track he observed Mr Croney with unusual interest – the dreamy grin, and the oscillating head as though watching a tennis match, and the disinclination to ask questions: Mr Croney behaved like someone other than the subject of a consultant’s tactfully wrapped but definitively gloomy observations, he behaved like a third person, a disinterested party. Mr Bassett, never having treated one before, pondered the case that traffic engineers might be generically dull and backward, the sort of people who, at his distinguished Alma Mater, studied technical drawing for want of academic aptitude. Perhaps best then to spell it out with brusque candour.

‘In summation then. What we’re looking at here is infertility full stop. Irremediable. That’s not just opinion. That’s brass tacks, I’m afraid. I’d like to be able to offer some crumb of comfort – but …’

‘Well you want to know the brass tacks eh?
Brass tacks
– he kept saying
brass tacks,’
said Curly to Lavender mimicking Mr Gervaise Bassett’s studiously pompous delivery. They sat at a table outside a pub near the Institute. Curly was framed by geraniums in hanging baskets. Lavender held his hand. Their grief was shared.

He repeated Mr Gervaise Bassett’s little joke: ‘It can hardly be genetic can it? It’s one condition that can’t be passed on. Ha! Either it was a fluke of birth he says … Or because of some infection I may not even have known about.’

Lavender winced. ‘Second opinion,’ she said. ‘No harm in trying, darling. We owe it to ourselves.’