The Fowler Family Business (3 page)

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 would 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 …’

And she heard her father-in-law: ‘Even if he had been this Bob, Bobby … What sort of name’s that? Camino.’

‘Not his
real
name, Dad – Doug Truss s’matter of—’

‘I don’t care if he’s calling himself Dr Crippen and Ethel le Neve.’

‘Dad. You used to hum along to it. “Teresa, Tayrasor, Trasor, Tayrayayaysoar.” You used to sing along with me. I still got it – Top Rank.’

‘What? Henry – you’ve got to take control. He gave me his card. Norman Idmiston.’

‘It’s b’cause he was a one-hit wonder – he’s changed his name. Again.’

‘He’s a barrister. LLB, MA Oxon. Rope Court, Middle Temple.’

She heard nothing. Henry did not reply. He must have stood there with his mouth open.

‘We reflect society,’ Mr Fowler told him. ‘And I’m afraid my boy that the only section of society your behaviour this afternoon reflected was our friends the unwashed jackanapes, the great unwashed, the ingrates. The United States is our ally. You don’t burn your ally’s flag. We’d be speaking Germ—what I mean is we’ve got a lot to thank Uncle Sam for.’

‘I couldn’t agree more Dad.’

‘You’re not there as Henry Fowler, Henry. You’re there in a ritual role. Like the Queen … We have to preserve our mystery. That’ll be what shocked Mr Idmiston – not that you’d got him mixed up with this Bobby chap but that you broke the spell. That’s what it is – I’ve thought long and deep about our calling as you know Henry. And the one thing you cannot do under any circumstances is reveal what I like to call the human beneath the hat. If you were anyone else Henry you’d be looking at probation. And I’d dock your wages if you weren’t a newly married man. It’s not just Fowler & Son, it’s the whole profession – we’re butlers to the dead, we’re a caste and we stand together, abide by the caste’s code.’

‘It was wishful thinking – you know, I let it get the better of me. I suppose I must have wanted him to be Bobby Camino.’

‘You haven’t been listening have you Henry. What I’m saying is, even if this Bobby Camino does attend a funeral where you’re there in an official capacity you do not on any account go running after him asking for his autograph. Not if it’s Warren Mitchell or Dick Emery or Gerald Harper or Ted Moult you do not even if you are right about who it is. Do you read me? There’s no place for Mateys in Fowler & Son, no place whatsoever.’

‘Yeah, of course – but I wouldn’t with them anyway – it’s just that “Teresa” … It’s about Stanley. That’s what it’s about.’ And Henry Fowler hangs his head.

‘Teresa’, written by Doug Truss, Joe Meek and Mike Penny, was recorded by Joe Meek at his makeshift studio above Messrs Kaplan’s handbag-and-suitcase shop at 417 Holloway Road N7 in June 1961. Roger Laverne (né Jackson) and Heinz (Burt) played organ and bass. The record’s release on the Top Rank label was delayed because of Truss’s (Bobby Camino’s) contractual obligations to Pye.