The Fowler Family Business (2 page)

Henry’s foreseeable future was already mapped out within a three-mile radius of the old Crystal Palace which his father had watched burn down in 1936, ‘a tragic night for Sydenham, son.’ But then Stanley had no family business to take over, so had to make amends. Besides, for Henry America was the country of the past, of Custer and Wyatt Earp and Jesse James and William Bonney whose head he had cut off more than a dozen times and whose photograph – was he left-handed or had the print been made back to front? – he had shown to his father who told him: ‘That’s an Irish face. A bad Irish face, a wicked face. Never trust that sort of face, Henry – bad blood, bad genes.’

When Mr Croney came out of the pub he smelled of whisky. His friend Maureen smelled of perfume made from boiled sweets.

‘I’m more of a Mo than a Maureen.’ She squeezed on to the front bench seat between Stanley and Mr Croney. She smiled at Henry. She was no oil painting, more a distemper job. She had a puffy pub-diet complexion but was thin with it. There were the ghosts of bruises round her eyes. Her lipstick didn’t confine itself to her lips.

‘Just giving Maureen a lift home, fellers. Her mum’s come over bad.’

‘Mo.’

Henry watched her gnawed, knotted fur collar ride high over the seat back as she twisted to touch Mr Croney’s thigh. Stanley turned to Henry and winked. Mr Croney reciprocated her gesture, close to where the gear lever would have been had it not been on the steering column. Mo giggled. Henry had her straight off as a disrespectful daughter, out cavorting whilst her mother suffered stomach cramps or whatever, whilst the old lady hawked and spluttered and gasped for breath. The car crunched gravel. They were off on their mercy mission.

Mo’s way of showing proper concern for her mother seemed inappropriate to Henry. He considered that it lacked decorum. She sang. She knew all the songs. Her songbook memory stretched back to Henry’s earliest memory of what Mr Fowler called the Light Pogrom. Her voice was true, fluid, banal. She could do husky too. She loved a big, powerful, meaningful ballad. She was more herself when she was Denis Lotis or Lisa Rosa or David Whitfield than when she was Maureen nicknamed Mo.

When she was Mo she was a pub belter, so loud that Mr Croney told her to go easy for the sake of their eardrums, whereupon 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 that should the day come when bodies were piled into limeless pits or left by roadsides it would be a mark of society’s decomposition and anarchy’s abominable triumph rather than a mark of the trade’s failure to resolve industrial disputes or to attract the right quality of digger. Henry didn’t know then that every trade flatters itself thus; engineers, shopkeepers, bricklayers, quantity surveyors – the state of Denmark is reflected in the state of Danish quantity surveying, now.

On Monday 28 October 1968 Henry Fowler, just twenty-three, twice a runner-up in the Oil Fuels Guild-sponsored Young Funeral Director of the Year competition and recently the proud bridegroom of Naomi Lewis, stood beside a Greek revival mausoleum close by the entrance to West Norwood Cemetery sniffing autumn in a pseudoacacia’s yellow leaves, musing on the greenhouse potential of the seeds in its leathery pods, never forgetting to remember that this was the eighth anniversary of Stanley Croney’s death, reflecting thereon, whistling beneath his breath a tune of his far-off teenage when he had been immature, and knew it.

Now he was a married man with hopes of fatherhood, a house with underfloor heating and a picture window which framed the gables and cupolas of houses whose inhabitants his grandfather had buried and beyond them the ordered Kentish fields where his grandfather’s father had picked hops and pears before the creation of the family business and liberation from such seasonal slavery.

Henry stood there waiting to direct a procession of Fowler & Son’s (he wasn’t the initial son in that name, that was his father, when he’d been the son – but it had passed down, and when he, Henry, had a son and his father had retired, he would be the father and so it would remain in mutating constancy). The procession of vehicles, of Rolls-Royces and Austin Sheerlines, was held up because of a traffic fatality on Beulah Hill. The deceased – the one in the coffin, not the headless motorcyclist – had been something in show business. A manager or agent or promoter – it wasn’t a world Henry Fowler was acquainted with. Though when he had visited the bereaved and the brittle bespectacled daughter who was attending her at the big house on Auckland Road he had been impressed by the number of photographs signed by stars he recognised. Charlie Drake was there, and Maureen Swanson who’d married a toff, and Al Bowlly whose death in the Blitz while Mr Fowler was stationed on the Isle of Wight denied him the opportunity of posthumously brilliantining the only crooner he’d ever met.

Henry considered mentioning this to the bereaved but the daughter would keep butting in, talking for her and, anyway, he was not certain where he stood in the debate between formality and friendliness that had riven his trade, the two sides denouncing each other as Robots and Mateys. He knew that with his blond hair, black suit and martial bearing he looked like a Robot but that his gravely worn concern for the grieving might mark him as a Matey. He kept quiet rather than risk what might be considered an unseemly disclosure.

He did suggest, however, that the cortège leaving Auckland Road should best process by way of Annerley Hill, Westow Hill and Central Hill because of the long-term roadworks and temporary traffic lights on Beulah Hill (it was these which were thought to have caused the fatal accident). But the bereaved had insisted on Beulah Hill: ‘Cyril loved it. He just loved it. He used to stand there you know and look out across Thornton Heath and Croydon and say thank God I don’t live there. You can see all the way to the downs. No, he wants to go along Beulah Hill.’