The Fowler Family Business (22 page)

It was one o’clock when he called a bemused, drowsy Curly.

Henry could sense him trying to extricate himself from sleep’s trammel, wriggling this way and that, wiping his eyes with one hand whilst listening guiltily with the other.

Henry whispered the word again: ‘Murderer … Murderer. You killed my parents. It was all for vanity wasn’t it. To satisfy your own precious—’

‘I told you never to get in touch with us.’ And Curly put down his bedside phone.

Henry tardily rejoined: ‘Get you dux!’

That was the first of the nights that he wandered through the house, listening to it, trying to fit it to him now it was his, trying it on for size as he never would his diminutive father’s suits. He stroked the handles his parents had grasped, he ran his knuckles across the rough and the smooth of their lifetime’s accumulated dressing-gowns which hung as a headless humpback from their bedroom door. Had there ever been a time when he didn’t succumb to the reassurances of candlewick and quilting? His parents belonged to a generation which lay under eiderdowns separated by an arm’s contraceptive length. When did they make love? Where? Who visited whose snug estate? In which of these two suddenly redundant beds had the procreative act occurred?

Every bed is a coffin in waiting. Henry slumped on his mother’s. It was like throwing himself into the grave beside her. He hugged the pillow. He suffused himself in the smell of her oldness, the smell of exhaustion, bone fatigue, systems winding down. He wondered how much longer she would have kept going. How long he would have had to prepare himself for the embalming job of a lifetime, how long he would have had to watch as all dignity left her and she became a machine for processing soup into diarrhoea. It might be painful watching them turn into veg, decline into insentient senescence before our eyes but at least it’s a process that acquaints us with loss gradually.

He was touched and surprised by his staff’s solicitude. Mrs Grusting manifested near-human emotions for the first time in her twenty-three years’ service and attempted, despite being his senior by only a month, to position herself
in loco parentis
. She offered cooking, sewing and a shoulder to cry on whilst persisting in addressing him as Mr Henry. Few other employees were left from his father’s era. They were, however, familiar with the old man, they knew to doff their hats with due respect. But it was him, Henry, they felt for.

He had never realised that he was held in such affection. All this on top of his recently changed domestic arrangements, which although he had never even mentioned them, were whispered about, which were the reason, it was reckoned, why Miss Royston was taking that much more trouble with her shaving and personal hygiene.

By day he embalmed his parents, rendered them more like themselves than they had ever been. He glossed their cheeks and blancoed their teeth, teased their hair and clipped their nails (he painted Mother’s the lovely shade of violet he remembered her wearing on holiday in Bonchurch, the superior part of Ventnor IOW).

He did away with the wounds Curly had inflicted on his father.

It was a time of ecstatic concentration, of joy at a craft practised with a purpose that it had never previously attained. Only in such extremis does a craftsman become an artist, only then is his work infected by a meaning that is more than a sum of its techniques. Henry remembered the young carpenter who had carved for his four-month-old baby girl a coffin which represented the cot she had died in – every fold of the sheets and the asphyxiating blanket was hewn from a beech block.

Whilst Henry laboured, Mrs Grusting and Miss Royston phoned the nation’s most distinguished funeral directors with the double funeral’s date, time, location.

They sought and received Henry’s permission to hire a temp to help arrange the function rooms, the catering, the horses, the countless little details that would make the big day one to remember, one that would set the standard for funeral directors’ funerals for the foreseeable future.

They didn’t expect the agency to send someone like Miss Sullivan.

‘Mr ’enry,’ simpered Mrs Grusting, hurrying to him as he wriggled from his car in the yard, ‘it’s ever so embarrassin’ but Ai’m not quaite sure that this new girl has the skills concomitant to ’er position. I wonder if you’d be so kaind as to …’

Henry had several of his mother’s mothballed dresses laid deep across his forearms. He believed that the one on top, an amethyst grosgrain ballgown, her life’s one ballgown, would best suit her. But he carried options: her elaborately bodiced, rustily watermarked wedding dress; a floral suit as garish as a senior royal’s; a little black number for the cocktail parties she never attended. Laden, he grudgingly went with Mrs Grusting through the side entrance into the office. He put his head round the door. Miss Royston’s smile was a Chevrolet radiator.

Miss Sullivan sat with her big buxom back to him at the desk his mother had used. She was talking indignantly on the phone. Her hair was a chaos of combs and grips, tussocks and wisps, faded stains – it was a history of failed chromatic indulgence. She was an ample size 16 squeezed into a size-10’s day-release clothes which corrugated her flesh. She wore a turquoise cardigan that had turned to felt, a bursting
and
seated ochre skirt, old woman’s man-tan tights so abundantly laddered they might have been woven in obeisance to a forgotten fashion, a pansy vandal’s pink patent Doc Martens.

Henry glanced at Mrs Grusting with for-the-life-of-me eyebrows.

Miss Sullivan was on the point of turning when she heard them come in but was irked into throwing out her phoneless hand in exasperation. Her speech was childish, impeded – and, at that moment, indignant, as though she had just suffered an insult: ‘That ith
bot
what we’re athking for. If you doan wob to do it pleath juth tell me and I’ll get ob to thumwub elth. Fowler & Thub have give you trade for fifteen yearth – the very leath you cab do …’

‘Blimey O’Reilly,’ Henry whispered to Mrs Grusting as she followed him across the yard to the Body Block where he was working on his parents. ‘Poor girl … You got to thympathise though eh?’ he laughed. ‘Still no slouch is she … sounds like she’s getting on with it.’ Then he halted and asked: ‘Any other problem is there? Apart from her dress sense, that is?’

Mrs Grusting shook her head at the child Henry. ‘Didn’t you see?’

‘What you …? See what?’

‘Didn’t you really? She’s, uhmm, she’s blind.’ Mrs Grusting, to whom euphemism was second nature, could hardly bring herself to enunciate the word.

‘Blind?’

‘You know. Blind. Her
eyes
? She can’t see.’

‘Oof. You sure? Oh God that’s all we need. Christ … Where’d
we get her from?’

This, Mrs Grusting pronounced, is the last time Fowler & Son would ever hire from or pay a commission to Hang-On-A-Sec (Upper Norwood) Ltd.

‘Gor – that’s the last … Isn’t it just eh? Gee-suss! Oh well – grin and bear it, have to.’ Henry sighed. ‘No choice … Not on, in this day and age, is it, letting people go for being blind. Protected species. Like the Yids …
The unsighted
. It’s the way they always bump into you: that’s what gets me. Remember that … Clock House – oh what was he called? Dry cleaner he’d been. Daughter was an ugly little miss.’

‘Mr Root?’ suggested Mrs Grusting.

‘That’s the one. Spare me. Still this Miss Whatsit …’

‘Sullivan.’

‘Yeah this Miss Sullivan – sounds like she’s getting on with it … And it’s only a week.’

‘Two, I’m afraid, two weeks’ engagement,’ corrected Mrs Grusting through guilty teeth. She added, conspiratorially: ‘Of course – she may prove to be unsuitable for reasons not regarding her infirmity.’

By night Henry prowled the house which would never be his.

He might own it, it might be his to sleep and eat in, his to live and die in – but it would never belong to him save by the letter of probate. He was at best a steward, at worst an unwitting usurper.

It was no longer Home.

That state had been conditional upon his parents’ presence, upon his being their son whom they had not noticed turn into a man.

Now they were gone it pained him to realise how little he had impinged on the place’s fabric. He had lived there all those years, he had been back all these months – and it remained their domain, their bespoke shelter.

It was a sloughed skin, a doffed overcoat, a voided carapace.

He grew used to its echoing emptiness. It’s not till they’re not there that you realise what a noise they made, busying themselves, backchatting, talking at the wireless, opening doors and cans, oiling locks, hoovering, blowtorching ancient paint, slapping the newspaper on the table, grunting when the milk boiled over. Their absence fomented an inchoate guilt which he ascribed to his appropriation of their property, to his inadequacy as a son, to his failure to succeed his father as the Undertaker’s Undertaker (which he aimed to rectify, in pomp, in style, with his father’s funeral).

It calmed him to loiter in the house with undrawn curtains and extinguished lights, to move through it like a burglar reliant on the moon and street lamps. When caught in the searchlight sweep of passing cars he cast leaping shadows which morphed up the stairs, slipped across the landing’s ceiling, glided round the cornice to oblivion. It had never been like this before. The house had forever been bright lit because his mother feared the dark and slept with the door ajar. It had been headachingly hot because she feared the cold. If it couldn’t be his house it could be an eerily unfamiliar one, it could be rendered strange. He suppressed the heating too.

There were the objects which had surrounded him whilst he grew up, which had once been special because they belonged to Home, because they had been chosen by his parents. They were his early life’s inanimate familiars, invested with a greater authority than toys. Even though he could discern only their dim outlines and momentary reflections he had them off by rote, he knew where each one was, in its immutable place:

An amber-eyed brass owl money box whose head turned to reveal a slot for pennies.

Seven beersteins with hinged lead lids and low-relief representations (bucolic carousers, hop-bines, lusty
Mädchen
, pointy hats, etc) – souvenirs of the Black Forest and Freiburg holiday, summer ’37.

A statuette of a jolly, bald friar in a habit the colour of polished liver which was, perhaps, another souvenir of that momentous holiday.

An electric repro Georgian lantern clock smelling of metal polish.

A kukri in a scabbard of leather so thick it might be wood.

A Widdicombe Fair musical box in the form of a tankard illumined by a representation of the seven revellers on Tom Pearce’s grey mare and inscribed with the song’s verses and chorus: ‘Bill Brewer, Jan Stewer, Peter Gurney …’

A porcelain caricature of a fish, probably a John Dory.

A framed and glazed print of chalky downs, plough horses, seagulls, windmill.

A framed and glazed print of a wintry track, leafless hedges, skeletal elms, rookeries.

Each of them was chipped or tarnished, faded or cracked – done for, one way or another. And without the eyes which had selected them and the hands which had received them as gifts, without the sentimental pride that had patinated them and had lent them value their purpose was gone.

Had they been some other dead people’s cast-offs on a totter’s barrow Henry knew that he would have looked at them with contempt. All those years of Naomi’s sniping at his parents’ taste had affected him, and these objects were measures of the change. It was as if he was seeing them naked, deflated. They were correlatives of self-satisfied paltriness and aesthetic nullity-which he had refused to acknowledge whilst his parents were alive and which he was ashamed to discern now they were dead. He was as repulsed by his disloyalty as by the threadbare gewgaws. It was an illness, it was invasive and disfiguring. Nonetheless, in the dead hours of night, when few vehicles passed by, when the world was silent save for the aubades of birds with bad timing, he found himself gathering objects from shelves, stripping them of their half-century of familially acquired preciousness. He shoved them into cardboard boxes which he piled in the middle of the room.

In the morning he loaded the boxes of what was henceforth deemed junk on to the car’s back seat.

They lay in adjacent drawers of the fridge in the Body Block. They were dressed, crimped, tweezered, rouged, powdered, plugged.

Henry sat slumped close by them at the long chemical-stained table. He had completed the first stage of his professional and filial obsequies. His eyes were shut in perfunctory self-congratulation. He exhaustedly contemplated tomorrow’s tasks. He acknowledged that they were a welcome distraction. To how many is it given to grieve through deed – that was a perk of the trade. How privileged he was to be a Fowler, preoccupied by an exigent craft which by day allowed no time for reflection on the void, the mapless void. Sooner or later, he realised, he would, as we all must, turn cartographer of parental loss. He feared for himself, he feared how civilian grief might strike. He was grateful for its postponement. The greater the welter of tasks he set himself the longer it would be before he was forced to contemplate it. He feared it. Even the contemplation of contemplation caused him to scratch at the exematous crust on his crown till it bled and deposited ruddily flecked grease beneath his fingernails. He dissolved a granular quoit of ultramint beneath his tongue. He sought to relieve its anaesthetic sting with a swig of tea. This was cold and bag-in tannic.