The Fowler Family Business (11 page)

Such questions preoccupied Lavender Beard Croney whose retention of her name was mocked by Naomi Fowler as ‘token feminism’, as ‘having her cake and eating it’, as ‘precious’. Naomi was also fiercely derisive of:

a)Her so-called profession of social-bloody-anthropologist and her use of the title
Doctor
: she doesn’t go so far as to introduce herself thus, but it’s there on the business card.

b)Her pointless wanky jobs teaching bollocks at the LSE and UCL and doing research, whatever that means, at somewhere called the Institute which is probably one and a half dismal rooms in Euston (it was).

c)Her piddling preoccupation with the Pewter Tankard question, and with countless others like it. She
gnawed
at them, wouldn’t ever let go. Talk about curiosity killed the cat – but it didn’t, of course. Didn’t kill her. The cow’s got a constitution like an ox and at least nine lives.

d)Her casual boastfulness about her ‘cultivated’ background, her parents’ taste, her idyllic WASP childhood, her wonderful years at Brandeis, her familiarity with select country clubs – all of which might be interpreted as covert anti-Semitism.

e)Her patronisation of everyone, but everyone, as a case study like we’ve got saucers deforming our mouths and human bones dangling from our ears and we run around in the buff apart from parrot feathers and lion intestines and have three tits and belong to some tribe for God’s sake.

Cf:

f)Her Anglophilia, and her wanting to be more English than the English, to be terminally English – just listen to her accent. She can’t
quite
get it right but does she try! She is a walking inventory of castles and moated manors. When she drops names it’s like an avalanche. She has memorised Debrett’s. Lords, she loves them. But maybe that love is not reciprocated. For, six years after arriving in England as some kind of research student, she has settled for Curly who is indeed a younger son but not in the sense that Lavender uses it. Why is it that when a certain sort of English queer gets married he always gets married to an Anglophiliac American? Don’t these women know, or is it that in their anxiety to land a mate they are prepared to overlook the matter of contrary sexual preference? And their wedding! She drove round for weeks looking for the perfect church, like something off a greetings card, and when she found it she dreamed up a lie about her ancestors’ links with that part of Kent – or is it Sussex? Near Ashdown Forest and Frant, round there. She even serves you warm white wine because she read that that’s what the fridgeless aristocratic English do.

g) Her energetically faked, deafeningly protracted orgasms – which caused the precocious, mock-innocent Lennie to ask at breakfast in the thin-walled holiday bungalow on Noirmoutier whether the previous evening’s molluscs and crustacea had disagreed with her.

Forsaking her self-tutored Englishness, evasiveness, discretion and periphrasis she replied, ‘Curly – sorry,
Uncle
Curly, is tireless, sweetheart, he likes to keep a girl awake all night. And I’m the lucky girl.’

Henry Fowler, reading a two-day-old
Daily Mail
and dunking a croissant in a cup of British Working Man’s tea as his concession to France, raised his eyebrows to Naomi, who wasn’t taken in for a moment. She was in no doubt that Lavender’s bed opera was occasioned by the presence of an audience, which included, of course, Henry – just as her bulging bikini top and tiny thong with its russet fringe of vermicular hairs were worn for the entire beach.

She and Curly would condescend to join the Fowlers after a punishing daily round of churches, châteaux, galleries, tumuli, salt pans, windmills, canal systems, U-boat pens, bookshops, stationery shops, charcuteries, antiques warehouses. And as for Lavender’s French! Naomi was convinced by the courteous bewilderment of waiters and garage staff and by the helpless grimaces of the appliqué-pullovered, silver-nailed, platinumblonde crone from the letting agency that Lavender spoke the language as a boast, as a means to impress the monoglot Fowlers rather than as a medium of international communication – which it evidently wasn’t. Lavender was blithely unembarrassed by the incomprehension which met her most elementary requests and greetings. She ascribed it to the unfamiliarity of south Breton tradesfolk with her Parisian accent. When her telephonic order of,
inter alia
, 2 kilos of onions had resulted in the delivery of 2 kilos of kidneys (and a change of menu) she poured herself a late-morning pastis and with a forbearing smile asked Naomi, standing outside the window with Ben’s surfboard: ‘What can you expect of people who don’t even know the subjunctive?’ Naomi couldn’t remember what the subjunctive was, and didn’t care that she couldn’t remember. It wouldn’t have surprised her, however, if Lavender was merely parroting a specious polemic in a news magazine headlined
‘Les Jeunes: pourquoi suppriment-ils le subjonctif?’

Both women knew that this first joint holiday, already long postponed, would also be the last. Not that it had been without its successes. They had enjoyed two high tides together sitting with a bottle on the slope at the end of the causeway from Beauvoir-sur-Mer watching as drivers stranded by the surging ocean abandoned their cars to run for the structures like high-diving boards which punctuated the road every 200 metres and offered refuge if not solace as those cars were inundated.

Another day they were in a tailback caused by the fatal collision of two vans and a lorry on a shimmering black road lined with hypermarkets and furniture megastores in the outskirts of La Roche-sur-Yon when Curly uttered a triumphal ‘Yes!’, scrambled blindly from the driver’s seat, causing a screeching ambulance to swerve and its crew of paramedics to wish him dead, and ran across the forecourt of Tiffauges S.A., through the ranks of primary-coloured, factory-fresh tractors, autoharrows and combines and into the showroom where, surrounded by dummies kitted for pest control (apple-green protective clothing, breathing apparatus, sprays, dorsal canisters), generators, pumps, sample fences, cow prods, was displayed a metallic-green Citroën SM,
c
. 1972.

He stroked it, contorted himself to squint at it, was so rapt by it that he started when a mottled nose with moustache attached greeted him.

‘He’s got a real thing about those,’ rued Lavender, watching anxiously as Curly nodded to the loquacious salesman. ‘He bid for one at Bonham’s – I had to stop him when he got to 12,000.’

Naomi wasn’t sure whether this was a pecuniary boast, another of Lavender’s fantasies.

‘
How
many Citroëns has he got? At the most recent count?’

Lavender, distracted, shook her head: ‘Eight? Ten? I don’t know – there are some I’ve never seen.’

‘I always,’ said Naomi with gauged nonchalance, ‘think of them as his children.’

Lavender turned sharply towards where she sat on the back seat and fixed her with angry eyes. They were also vulnerable eyes, hurt eyes.

‘His
children
? What do you mean – his children? They’re his … They’re cars. Which he happens to believe are works of art. And collects. Like other people collect … Coalport – or netsuke.’

‘I know they are cars.’ Naomi emphasised each word. ‘Doesn’t stop them being child
substitutes
though does it?’

‘I guess we’ll have to wait till we have children to find out,’ Lavender replied. ‘If he sells them then we’ll know you were right.’ And she turned to monitor Curly as two police cars screeched past.

He bought the Citroën SM. It’s in a lock-up off Gypsy Hill. He drives it a couple of times a month. He hasn’t sold his collection; indeed he goes on adding to it. His latest acquisition is a van with corrugated-metal sides which Lavender has nicknamed Ted’s Fort after a shack on the Maberley Road allotments of the same material.

He hasn’t sold the collection. Curly and Lavender have no children, so the matter of child substitutes has not been put to the test. Why do they have no children when both so want them? When they both so yearn for their life’s orderly straits to be breached by noise and egg stains? They have
tried
for children, how they’ve tried. They have paid rapt attention to Lavender’s calendar and diet.

Secretly she rocks old cradles in museums. She’ll always offer to tend a buggy for a mother whose baby is making its first steps – such displays of selflessness are treated with wariness by teen slatterns with their white stilettos, stonewashed jeans and blue-veined, maggot-white skin. They clutch their three packs of Raffles and gape at her with victim eyes. She extends the superstition of the empty pram to supermarket trolleys with seat and harness, she wheels them dreamily for hours, an indecisive shopper, talking under her breath, attracting CCTV’s attention before she makes her first purchase. She despises her behaviour. She despises herself for brushing against pregnant women in trains, for patting the distended bellies of strangers at parties – she feels an impudent fool when they turn out merely to be fat. She cooks only odd numbers of eggs. She drew the line at vaginal pessaries steeped in the first faeces excreted by a newborn baby, and there are no hayricks to sleep on in South London. She avoids lettuce and parsley, picking the one from mixed salads, scraping the other from potatoes, fish, whatever surface it speckles. She ingests proprietary preparations of ginseng, deeming it to be a form of mandrake.

Covertly, she pores over herbals, encyclopedias of folk remedies, dictionaries of superstitions, collections of old wives’ tales, accounts of fertility rites the world over. She debases works of scholarship, transforms them into instructive inventories of quack tips and dubious advice. She gives shameful credence to prescriptions and procedures which she knows to be worthless, which she condemns as founded in ignorance, occlusion, irreason.

The entirety of her life with Curly has been infected by this hysterical want. It’s been an invariable condition of her being since she met him. It was occasioned by him. She acknowledges the preposterousness of the programmed conviction that one’s own child or children (but let’s take it one at a time) will be unlike other people’s children. Who are hell. She does not except sullen Ben and the Wisenheimer Lennie. They are the quintessence of other people’s children, sibling distillates of hell. She puts up with them for Curly’s sake, and for Henry’s. And she knows that no child of hers and Curly’s could ever display such incipient sociopathy as those two, for their child (Rowan or Robin) would be born of love, raised with love in a house where love’s levels were always kept topped up and there were books and Beethoven.

She had watched Curly fall in love with her before her very eyes. The immense flattery thrilled her. They met late one May morning in 1986 during the conference ‘Car – Slave or Master?’ at Birmingham University. Curly was standing in a drift of cherry blossom, head back, lost in his delight at rushing rolling clouds. Lavender Beard was hurrying across a shower-shined car park to a tower whose all-over glazing swallowed those clouds. She had just arrived in a cab from New Street Station. The driver hadn’t known his way around the park-like campus. He had spoken in an accent she couldn’t understand – and, she presumed, was unable to understand hers. He had certainly failed to appreciate that she had a very important paper to deliver, that she needed time to settle herself, fix her make-up, prepare her slides, dose herself with codeine, gargle. And pee: she had drunk two litres of water on the train trying unsuccessfully to overcome a hangover incurred by trying unsuccessfully to drink away the memory of Mike the Bike, the courier who had at 17.41 the previous evening delivered a copy of Ariel Quantrill’s
The Future of Futurology
which she was to review for the Institute’s cracking quarterly
Journal of Mores and Customs
and who at 18.52 began to prosecute a diligent if slobbering act of cunnilingus on her. He brought his head up only once, to apologise for the crackle of his walkie-talkie: ‘We’re not allowed to turn them off see.’ At 19.13, after less than three minutes’ coupling he achieved orgasm with a cry of: ‘Got the number of the nearest Domino’s Pizza love?’ She told him she was busy. He said he’d got another delivery to do anyway and, never mind, he’d pick up a pizza en route, a Marinara, probably, but maybe an American Hot, what did she think? She hated herself. She bathed then she showered. She drank a bottle of Jack Daniels.

When she woke at 05.36 she had wiped the previous evening – but only after about 20.30. She had no memory whatsoever of even having watched the TV movie
The Marlin Gambit
starring Ben Jess Tyte and Lincoln Teme, nor of the chat show O’Biggie & Co. Her recall of Mike the Bike was, however, horribly unimpaired. Oh God! She couldn’t forget that his real name was Les: ‘But I don’t want to be taken for a diesel – eh?’ She couldn’t forget the tattoo beneath his belly button:

She took inordinate comfort from her sure memory that she hadn’t fellated him.

‘That was tasty, that was a nice one love.’

His gauche farewell was still playing inside her viced head, still fuelling her ignominy when she first saw the man she would marry. Not that she knew it at that moment. But she did within the hour. And she thought she had given up men for ever.

It began to spit with rain again. She asked Curly the way to the Porter Hobbs Hall because there was no one else to ask. Lost in clouds, he turned dreamily to her: ‘It’s round the side of …’ He smiled – a sort of rapturous recognition. ‘Lavender Beard?’ he said.

‘Yesss?’ She wondered how this man whom she had never seen before could know who she was – the possibility of an earlier and more complete instance of alcoholic amnesia occurred to her. Oh God!