Gentleman's Relish (16 page)

In his more desolate periods, Frank told himself the boys had grown up without him. He saw them on Sundays if they had no other plans and on holidays but otherwise his sons were shadowy presences in his life. They were largely represented to him by things: clothes discarded on chair backs, boots tumbled on the doormat, the detritus of midnight snacks encountered as he snatched his breakfast.

On weekdays he left the house before they appeared, so as to catch an early commuter train into town to his job in the City. When they were younger he used to walk around the bedrooms waking them before he left. He had treasured this brief, one-sided contact, the glimpses of them still capable of childish vulnerability in sleep. However
a casually cruel hint was dropped that a clock radio was a less startling way to start the day so now he made do with taking his wife up her breakfast tray, deprived of precious contact with the others.

The eldest was at university now, the middle one, the rebel, had left school early to take a well-paid, unsuitable job and had developed a mysterious social life and with it, an aversion to eating any meal with his parents. The youngest, at fourteen, was effectively a bed and breakfast guest, for he ate his supper with the boarders at school. He was required to stay on there for prep, which took until nine, and often elected to stay on longer to play with his house string quartet. He was rarely home before ten-thirty, by which time Frank had invariably fallen asleep in front of the television, so missed him.

The weekends were thus a rare chance to encounter one another. Conditioned as he was to waking early, it was small hardship to take only one extra hour in bed so as to come downstairs in time to see a bit of his youngest over breakfast.

An only child of a widowed father, Frank had been raised by people paid to raise him. Looking about him as a teenager he had been led to assume that marriage was life's great pleasure, fatherhood its dutiful cost and so was overwhelmed to find that in reality the emphases were reversed. He loved his wife well enough but it was his children he adored. Bathing them, playing with them, teaching
them to read, catch a ball, build a sandcastle, gave him more pleasure than a man was expected to reveal. In the long hours in which he was forced out of his sons' company, he worried about them and dreamed of the simple, physical pleasure of their presence with the mind-addling intensity of new love.

It was a shock to realize that with each boy in turn, the cruel necessity of Frank's day-long absences in town weighed against their mother's constant surveillance to make him almost a stranger to them, an orderly intruder on their raucous nursery joys. Made to feel shy among his own, he found he could show less and less of what he felt.

The onset of puberty rendered each boy in turn a stranger to his father. The first two morphed from child to young adult in a kind of frenzy of bad temper, worse skin and withering – if inarticulate – contempt. The youngest should by now have embarked on this necessarily painful phase, burning off his sweetness to acquire strength, but seemed to be holding the process at bay. His voice had broken and he was shaving occasionally: there was nothing wrong hormonally. As the family's Benjamin he was the one they least wanted to see leave boyhood behind. At times he seemed to share this reluctance. At others it was as though the habitual dreaminess of his childhood had subtly turned to a sly watchfulness. Thanks to his brothers he had
twice watched at first hand the process by which boy turned man; he was an expert.

They didn't talk much at these Saturday breakfasts. Like his mother, the boy usually ate with his nose in a book. Frank refused to be put off, however, and would make a point of asking him how he was progressing at school, how the house teams were doing, that sort of thing. An inoffensive line of enquiry. He would like to have heard answers to real questions, of course.
Are you as happy as you seem? Do you think about sex all the time? Or love, even? Is anything worrying you?
All the questions his own father never asked him. But to get such answers one had to elicit them and precisely because his father had never asked him such things he had neither language nor courage to ask them of the boy. So they would speak instead in the traditional coded idiom of fathers and sons wherein safe questions of sport and work stood in for more risky ones of happiness and affection.

Once she was up and dressed, his wife talked almost incessantly, maintaining the sort of amiable flow she had been raised to believe was required of women to fill the awkward silences left by males. When she was present, all conversation passed through her as though she alone could bridge the linguistic gulfs between man and man or generation and generation. But all they heard of her on these early Saturday mornings were the murmur of
her bedside radio and the occasional clink of her breakfast china.

Today was not as other Saturdays. Today Frank would have to speak to the boy without code because yesterday he had received a rare phone call at the office from his housemaster. Startled from the pleasant afternoon trance brought on by crossword defeat, an excess of dull memos, and a fulsome retirement lunch in the boardroom, Frank's immediate reaction was nauseous fear. The only possible reason for such a call was a clumsy, accidental death. In the seconds it took his secretary to put the call through, he had pictured the boy with his neck broken on the gym's parquet floor or floating in a crimson bloom beneath a diving board. Then he heard embarrassment rather than fear in the other man's tone and relaxed a little. The crisis was of a stealthier kind than he had first imagined.

With similar backgrounds – Classics, army, early motherlessness – the two men shared a difficulty in approaching emotive subjects head on but, with a few minutes of coughing, nervous chuckles and sucking on pipes, had established that the boy had written an inappropriate communication to one of the younger French teachers who, luckily, had panicked and passed it on to the housemaster. The words
love letter
had not been spoken but Frank had deciphered them in the man's pained, unfinished sentences and slightly wild references to
hothouse
emotions
and the need to encourage more healthy interaction with the local girls' school. There was talk of a mixed-sex debating society or drama club.

‘Of course, it's entirely up to you,' the housemaster had said. ‘If you'd rather we left this in your hands we can. Or I can pass it on to the chaplain. Good man. Experienced at dealing with this sort of thing. Discreet. Queerly enough, he has a background in industrial relations.'

Ashamed that it should be assumed he would pass the buck at once, Frank startled himself by saying that no, he would handle the matter himself and attempt a fatherly conversation. The thought of this had stayed with him through the afternoon, as insistent as indigestion. The need for honourable secrecy had introduced an unpleasant whiff of deceit to the evening's conversation with his wife. The air needed clearing.

‘Morning.'

‘Morning, Dad.'

The boy was eating muesli and chopped banana, nose deep in a small book of French poetry. It took Frank a while to fetch his habitual breakfast things from kitchen to breakfast room. He half hoped he would take too long over it and let the boy slip away.

‘Coffee?' he called through.

‘It's okay, Dad. I've got a cup. Thanks.'

During the week, Frank knew, the boy and the middle brother had established a touchingly manly routine whereby they took their breakfast on either
side of the wall, one at the breakfast room table, one in the kitchen, so that, while forced to rise at the same hour, neither needed actually to speak.

At last he sat across from him, a reassuring library thriller wedged open beside him with a pot of Gentleman's Relish, and began to butter toast. The boy sighed and turned a page. His nails were too neat and too clean, as was his hair. This was a different breed of rebelliousness to the more usual sort shown by his brothers at this age and correspondingly harder to meet with equanimity. Frank suffered vivid nightmares sometimes, in which the boy developed a bright-eyed religious mania and took to paying evangelical calls on all their friends in a suit and tie or took to entertaining middle-aged women to tea and petits fours. Lank hair or a filthy leather jacket would have been almost reassuring.

At moments like this, aware that he was imposing himself on the periphery of the boy's small circle of wordless restraint, Frank remembered the profound physical disgust his own father engendered in him at this age, particularly in the queasy early hours of the day. The muffled clicking of his false teeth as he chewed bacon, the sickly spiced smell of the lotion on his hair or merely the inoffensive sound of him folding his newspaper had made Frank want to flee the room to an untainted atmosphere. Usually he recalled this at the worst moments, as he was crunching cold toast or gulping
coffee and nearly choked in his effort to be as unrepulsive as possible. Even as he checked himself, he knew it was hopeless; the werewolf-sharp senses of adolescence would pick out a patch of bristles his razor had missed or latch on with revulsion to the pinging sound his teaspoon made on his mug.

‘Heavy day today?' he asked, refusing to let the slim volume of Rimbaud put him off.

The boy sighed again, pushed aside his cereal bowl and tore into a tangerine. His eyes retained their sleepy focus on the pages of his book. ‘Not really. The usual. Double Latin with a prose. French. History.'

‘But it's a half day, yes?'

‘Saturdays always are, Dad.'

‘Of course.'

‘Fives match this afternoon, then
Elijah
at Glee Club then supper then prep then Compline then home.' The boy was humouring him as one might a tedious aunt.

A small, feminine cough came from upstairs. It was as though, even at long range, his wife could tell their conversation lacked sparkle.

‘No cello tonight, then? No quartet?'

‘Not on a Saturday.'

Desperate, Frank glanced at his son's book for a cue and asked without thinking, ‘So who's your French master this year?'

‘Mr Lawrence. Tony Lawrence.' The boy cleared his throat and fiddled with the tangerine peel.
He shut the book, dared to meet his father's eye. ‘He's just come down from Oxford. I think he's only passing through. The other boys tease him a bit.' Running out of words to mumble, he blushed intensely and dropped his gaze back to the book.

Frank was appalled. He had not meant to be so direct. He had planned a circuitous approach with questions about friends in general and then on to friendly teachers and the folly of favouritism. ‘But you get on with French, don't you?' he asked. ‘You want to carry on with it for your As, your mother said.'

‘Yeah, Dad. Look. I should go and brush my teeth.'

He slipped away, leaving the poetry book behind in his confusion. Rimbaud's photograph stared out from the cover. He looked petulant, probably unwashed, full of churning, filthy thoughts epigrammatically expressed; a toxic Peter Pan.

Frank stared back as he ate his toast. Out of the blue he remembered the fuss when his father caught him reading the charlady's copy of
Forever Amber
. Confirmation classes had been brought forward by several months and there had been a sequence of enforced excursions with hearty boys who were not quite friends.

He heard taps turned on and off, a lavatory flush. There was a brief flurry of easy chat as the boy called in to sit at the foot of his mother's bed then the thunder of his feet on the stairs.

‘You forgot this,' Frank called out.

The boy glanced into the breakfast room, his pallor restored, bringing with him a faint whiff of the blue chemical he used to keep spots at bay. He glanced at the book carelessly.

‘Oh, that. I'm just reading that for fun. Have a good day. See you later.'

‘Bye.'

And he was gone. There came a crunch of cycle wheels on gravel, the desolate clang of the iron garden gate.

Frank rang the housemaster quickly, closing an intervening door so his wife should not hear.

‘I think, on reflection, perhaps a chat with the chaplain's our best option,' he told him. ‘Unless you think…?'

‘Er no. Quite,' the housemaster said. ‘I'll have a word this morning. He's a good man.'

‘Discreet, you said. Not sure my wife should…'

‘Absolutely.'

Hanging up, he felt the relief of a burden lifted and soon after, the less familiar sensation of guilt at a responsibility shirked.

He washed the last traces of Gentleman's Relish off his knife then climbed the stairs to fetch his wife's tray. He would spend the morning sterilizing seed trays and scrubbing flower pots in icy water as a penance.