The Fowler Family Business Read online

  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.

  Chapter Two

  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.’

  That was the Thursday.

  The Sunday, Henry did his potting – black tulips (a family tradition), narcissi, three sorts of daffodil. Naomi spent the day inside acting on the precepts laid down by Consultant Jilly Morgan in an article called ‘An End To Maquillage Monotony’. When they snuggled up together on their tufty fabric sofa she was wearing oyster-pink lip gloss and Qite-A-Nite mascara. The news was cast by his favourite, though not hers, Corbett Woodall: ‘More than forty police officers, including five mounted …’

  They gaped at the scenes of Grosvenor Square. There were longhairs, moustaches, police macs, police truncheons, police horses, wobbly film frames, inchoate grunts, faces of terror and hatred.

  ‘Vandals,’ said Henry.

  ‘Goths and vandals,’ said Naomi.

  They agreed that should any of the Vietcong who had thrown themselves beneath the ironclad hooves of Emperor, Berty, Throckmorton, Monty and Rex II die in a South London hospital Fowler & Son would not undertake to undertake. They laughed, two as one. And that’s how undertake to undertake became a catch-phrase in their family: they were to teach it to the children, when they came along. They cuddled and they thanked each other for each other’s love and blessed presence which woul
d endure till one of them was undertaken with due ceremony by their first-born boy, one far-off day at the other end of a fulfilling half century – at least.

  Henry Fowler waited patiently as the gatehouse attendant at West Norwood Crematorium Mr Scrivenson listened agitatedly to the phone’s earpiece and plaited his nostril hair and gurned and pointed with a Capstan-strength forefinger to the handset and repeated: ‘If that’s the best ETA … if that’s the best you can do … if that’s your ETA we’re looking at a log-jam – it’s going to be Piccadi—they what? … Right you are then … Okey-dokey.’

  He put down the phone, flicked at his collar and its icing of seborrhoea, the dandruff with the larger flake, rubbed his hands to say chilly, twirled a tuft of hair protruding from his phone ear, dimped a butt from his great wheel of an ashtray and said: ‘No disrespect to your dad Henry – but … Beulah Hill, I mean to say …’

  ‘That’s what they wanted, insisted on. Nothing to do with Dad Mr Scrivenson. Me – me. Mrs Ross has got this idea – you know, it’s a road he loved.’

  ‘Henry. Henry. You’re a funeral director. You direct the funeral. I dunno. Your grandad wouldn’t have stood for it. Even the best of times you got problems along Beulah Hill – there’s mineral wells there. Tarmacadam’s worst enemy. It’s why it’s always erupting. And all that subsidence in them twinky-dinky new houses. You got to learn to put your foot down – A Generation Out of Control.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what it said in the paper this morning. That’s you lot. My God.’ Mr Scrivenson stood and gaped through the dust-blasted panes. ‘You got a crow. Who’s this feller?’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘The deceased.’

  ‘Mr Cyril Ross he was called. Lived in—’

  ‘What line?’ Mr Scrivenson looked at Henry looking blank against the dun wall of this tiny home-from-home. ‘What did he do?’

  ‘Some sort of show business. Agent, you know … produ—’

  ‘Could have told you. It’s only the theatre and the military you get crows with nowadays.’

  Crow was old funerary trade slang for a mourner who dressed the part, who outdid the funeral directors in their bespokes from Kidderminster, who turned mourning into black dandyism. The blacker the garb the deeper the feeling – it’s like the paint on a Sheerline. A score of coats of jet enamel signals solemnity. Black – figurative and ceremonial uses of. That’s an area of Henry’s expertise. Henry hurried out of Scrivenson’s fug to warn the crow of the delay, inform him of its cause, apologise: ‘Excuse me sir,’ he called to the man who had his back to Henry and was scrutinising an art-nouveau headstone in the form of an escutcheon. He half turned, raising his toppered head. The crow’s garb – black barathea, black satin facings, black frogging, black moiré jabot – subjugated all individuality in the cause of ostentatious or, as Mr Fowler would have it, boastful grief. Henry was addressing a man playing a role, a machine for mourning who thanked him for the information with a nod and a tight-lipped smile. Henry turned back towards Scrivenson’s lodge. He had walked a couple of steps before he realised whom he had been talking to. Henry hurried after the crow who was alarmed by the heavy footfalls on the metalled drive.

  ‘I just wanted,’ Henry panted, ‘to say, if I might, how much “Teresa” meant to me you know. Well, still means to me. It’s difficult to explain – my great mucker was called Stanley.’

  The crow looked even more alarmed, as though he feared Henry might assault him. ‘Stanley?’

  ‘Yes,’ confirmed Henry, ‘it was today he died.’

  ‘Today,’ echoed the crow.

  ‘Well, not today, today.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘See – I always think of you when I think of Stanley because of “Teresa”. And Jesse-Hughes.’

  The crow surveyed Henry with appalled distaste: ‘Jesse-Hughes? The murderer?’

  ‘Oh I thought you’d have known … His last request – you must have known. I knew because of my dad but it was in the papers. Someone must have told you.’

  A shake of the toppered head, a black gloved hand raised as if to silence Henry: ‘I’m sorry – I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.’ He tried to put a laugh in his voice.

  Henry grinned come off it, mock reproachfully, wagged a conspiratorial finger. He failed to recognise that the crow regarded him as a nuisance, or worse.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Henry assured him, ‘it’s just we don’t get so many celebrities here – it’s not Golders Green or Putney Vale.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘I just wanted to tell you, when I saw you, tell you to your face how important “Teresa” has been in my life …’

  The trade never reckoned crows to be anything more than vanity and fancy cuffs. Crows were not considered to be thoughtful mourners. Nor were they reckoned passionate. No tears, no throwing themselves into the oblong hole, lest they muddy their precious clothes (not hired).

  The fourth time Henry mentioned “Teresa” this one, all cold corvine politesse, turned sibilant. Every S was a venomous dart. ‘This Teresa, this woman, who is this woman?’

  Henry enjoyed a spot of the old joshing. Taking the Michael (thus) was the family way. It was the lime in the mortar that bound the Fowlers. Henry would normally have reckoned the crow to be a misogynist queen because of the way he uttered woman, with contempt. But Henry knew a piss-taking joker when he met one, and he respected the ruseful stratagem, admired the implicit knowledge of the game’s rules, warmed to the deadpan performance, resolved to play along with it but could not stem his giggling as he mocked: ‘So you don’t know the handbag shop on Holloway Road then?’

  The crow’s jaw plummeted on puppeteer’s wires.

  ‘Erherch – you didn’t know I knew about it did you urchaf? Go on – tell me that Heinz is fifty-seven varieties.’

  ‘Heinz? Heinz … Holloway Road … hand, handbags?’

  ‘That’s you,’ Henry winked, archly.

  ‘That’s me?’ He grimaced, a first try at a grin.

  Henry was getting through. He twinkled.

  But the crow shook his head in pitiful incomprehension. He turned and strode with his metal heels clicking towards the cemetery chapel.

  Henry caught up with him, grasped him by the upper arm: ‘Fair’s fair, I only wanted …’

  The crow jerked his arm to secure its release. And then, in an eliding gesture, he briskly flicked at Henry’s face. Henry had not been slapped since haughty Miss Gordon had grown exasperated with his inability to memorise his three-times table when he was three times three, equals nine. The crow’s black glove stung. Henry clung to his hot jowl, gaped at his antagonist like a hurt animal.

  After the ceremony whilst the mourners queued in the foggy late afternoon to shake the hands of the immediately bereaved, to kiss and hug them, Mr Fowler growled from a miserly slit at one end of his mouth: ‘I want to talk to you Henry. Later.’

  Henry watched dusk crêpe the headstones and the balding branches. He looked out for the crow but didn’t see him among the people who by the time they reached the two weeping ashes had ceased to be mourners and were themselves again, free once more to exclude death from their quotidian routine, a freedom which Henry rarely enjoyed, he was born to death, it was his crust. It was death that paid for the ruggedly chunky gold earrings Naomi was wearing when she said: ‘You shouldn’t put up with him Henry. Why do you put up with him?’

  Mr Fowler had just left.

  ‘He’s my father.’

  ‘So what. That doesn’t mean he can just talk to you like …’

  Henry looked at her so angrily. She’d never seen that before, in all their months of marriage. Henry had never tried to make her cry and now here he was, doing it with his eyes and his tight jaw when all she wanted to do was to comfort him, cuddle him better after the protracted rebukes he had received. She’d heard every word through the thin walls of their first home where there were no secrets. They lived as one. They had lived
as one till he made that face at her, till he told her it was none of her business, till he accused her of eavesdropping, of spying, of covert intrusion into a private matter. It was family business.

  ‘I am your family too.’

  That is going too far, thought Henry. That is above and beyond. ‘In a different sense,’ he sneered.

  Naomi sobbed. She spoke his name, lengthened it imploringly. ‘I’m your wife Henry – that’s family.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘And when someone speaks to you like that …’

  ‘Someone? Someone? You call my father someone … like, like he’d wandered in off the street. God.’

  ‘Henry you’re not a child. They may treat you like you’re still ten …’

  ‘He was right. That’s all there is to it. Nothing to do with being treated like a child. He was right. I fucked up. I am his son, and Fowler & Son does not fuck up. I was out of line. No question. He was right. So he gives me a bollocking and that’s that. I can take it. No big deal,’ he lied, stretching to save lost face with front rather than conviction. She had heard them. She had heard her husband repeat: ‘Bobby Camino … Bobby Camino … Bobby Camino …’