The Fowler Family Business (13 page)

Curly shrugged. She had never seen him look so defeated.

They sought a second opinion, from Mr William Savage-Smith (detachable collar, soft skin, razor rash, crinkle-cut High Tory hair with special fly-away effect over the ears). His opinion concurred with the first. And he too wondered about traffic engineers. What do they actually do? He asked Curly: ‘What sort of
chemicals
do you chaps in traffic engineering use?’

Curly gaped: ‘Chemicals?’

‘Chemicals. What sort of chemicals … You know – in, in your lab … In a traffic-engineering lab.’

Curly shook his head in perplexity: ‘Lab?’

‘Or, ah, when you’re building a road – if that’s what you do.’

‘I’m afraid I go on site once every six months, maybe. Probably less. And labs with chemicals … I can’t think of the last time …’

‘So you’ve never been routinely exposed to chemicals … Any sort of fallout? Radiation?’

Curly was proud of his profession and of his achievements in it. Lavender was dismayed that his indignation at being taken for a navvy or a labscout (his nonce-word) should apparently weigh so much more heavily on him than this confirmation of his incapacity to reproduce. His dismissal of his affliction was casual, cruelly offhand. She understood that this indifference was acquired, that it was a tactic for burying the truth, for refusing to acknowledge the enormity of his plight which was also her plight. But he was so swiftly inured to his sterility that she wondered if he had ever really wanted a child.

Third opinion. Further consultation. They can always fix these things in California. Amazing scientific advances. Makes Harley Street look neolithic.

Lavender was pale, distraught, desperate, pleading, and drunk though not as drunk as her husband. Curly’s bitterness was consumptive. And it was exacerbated by his having spent the seven hours between the end of his consultation and, thus, of his paternal aspirations drinking manhattans and whisky sours in a series of bars and clubs where he made several new best friends with people whose names he had forgotten when he stumbled out into the bright, baked evening to meet Lavender his love-bucket-honey-pie at La Cannelier where he arrived fifty minutes late.

‘California! You’re joking. They can’t even keep a six-lane freeway moving.’

Lavender gripped the linened edge of the restaurant table. She had never considered what it might be to hate him till then. Her spread, thumbless hands were claws. Curly thought of the beasts in Crystal Palace Park. He had cited them as a reason not to move to central London. He had denied her the postcode she craved. Now he was denying her a child.

‘Is all this,’ she asked him, ‘down to some social disease you once had?’

‘Look at this – they can’t even spell in English … B-E-A-F-S-T-A …’ He put down the menu: ‘No. As a matter of brass tacks it isn’t because I’ve never had one. OK? And I’m not having another fucking test because I’m pissed off with paying
£120
to wank into a jar then get patronised by some arsehole with a plum in his mouth.’

A gluttonous plutocrat three tables away stared testily at him over the top of half-moon glasses. Two German tourists turned to watch these volatile English. A con man dressed like a retired army officer adjusted his tie. The stream of conversation in the pretentious, tutti-Louis room was momentarily dammed. A trolley operative halted his vehicle. Throats were cleared. The restaurant manager M Bernard Bettlach, dressed as though for a wedding, glanced at the grave
sommelier
who should have been delighted that his overpriced, floridly annotated wares were performing their rough magic. The
sommelier
considered a moment then nodded, frowning. M Bettlach slid across the mock-Aubusson with a massive show of even teeth: ‘If everything’s not entirely to your satisfaction …’

‘It’s just dandy,’ replied Lavender. She swung her wineglass, an archive of lip prints.

‘Good, good. Good. Enjoy the rest of your dinner. Won’t you.’ And he sauntered towards the next table congratulating himself on not having had to do anything other than exert his presence.

Curly, suddenly lachrymose, shouted: ‘The long and the short of it, the bottom line, the ultimate brass tack is that you’re going to have to fuck someone else if you want to get up the duff.
Capiscie
, darling? Fuck someone else.’

That was the solution then. Many a true word is spoken in pain, in self-loathing, in self-abnegation, in full hearing of more than forty strangers. Neither of them yet knew that it was true.

‘Darling …’

‘Sir!’ M Bettlach had pirouetted. His nostrils flared. He stood over them.

‘It’s OK,’ said Lavender, distractedly. ‘Darling, darling you—’

‘I’m afraid it is not OK. I’m sorry but—’

‘Oh do leave us alone please can’t you see—’

‘Madame.
Your, ah … The gentleman. The gentleman is—’

‘The gentleman is my husband.’

‘He is disturbing my guests.’

‘Guests?’ Curly looked askew at him.

M Bettlach conjured a wintry smile: ‘Your fellow guests have the right to—’

‘Fellow? What are you talking about? Fellow … I don’t know them. They’re not my fellows.’ He fixed the eye of a curious matron: ‘Are you my fellow?’ he boomed.

‘I think it would be better if—’

‘And how did you get it into your little Switzer head that we are
guests?
We are not
guests.
We are parties to a commercial transaction. I am not your
guest.
Got it?’

‘Sir, I must insist that you leave.’

‘Must you?’

‘There will be no charge.’ At which point M Bettlach, wishing he’d never left his natal commune near La Chaux-de-Fonds where public drunkenness was met with such obloquy that it was virtually extinct, resolved to help Curly from his chair. He positioned himself to the left side of it and just behind it. Curly, distracted by his audience, six of whom he acknowledged with a grinning bow, was unaware of this gambit till he felt M Bettlach’s hand on the back of the chair. He scowled over his shoulder at the determined, anxious face. M Bettlach leaned forward with his arm poised above Curly’s shoulder as if he were comforting him.

‘It will be better for everyone if—’

‘Take your fucking hands off me.’

‘I will not be spoken to like that.’

‘Get you matey.’ And Curly dismissed him with a petulantly flapping hand.

‘Are you going to leave us alone – you officious little man?’ wondered Lavender with a sweet moue and a winsome eyebrow flutter.

‘I have no choice – I shall call the police.’

‘Nazi!’ shouted Curly as M Bettlach strode importantly across the room acknowledging his guests’ sympathetic repertoire of wan nods and pained smiles.

WPC 4721 Pratt had no sense of humour: that was her problem. That’s what the lads always ribbed her about in the canteen. She couldn’t take a rape joke or a kiddie-porn gag. The crackle of her radio reminded Lavender of Mike the Bike (dead three years now, Volvo and amphetamines – they switched off the life support). Curly rolled his eyes as WPC Pratt spoke, concluding with the words ‘so it’s up to you sir’.

Curly replied: ‘Tell me something. You’re a policewoman, right? So when you sit on a bloke’s face do you tell him to blow into the bag?’

Drunk and disorderly, obstructing the police in the prosecution of their duty. £100 and bound over by Westminster Magistrates Court in the sum of a further £100 to keep the peace for thirty days. He shared an overnight cell with a charming Cypriot who was charged with the theft of £12,000 worth of leather jackets, who wrote out for him the ‘ultimate’ taramasalata recipe, who advised against adoption: ‘Is like buying a car in auction. You don’t know what you’re getting. My brother he adopt a boy. He never regret anything so much in all his life. The lad’s a no-good. Always in trouble with the police. They give him everything and he turns out a thieving bastard. Don’t do it, captain. Anything but adopt.’

These two in the moonlit bedroom – conjoined at the groin and filling the air with sweat, mucus, groans and the lapping of muscle against membrane – are Henry Fowler and his best friend Curly Croney’s wife, Lavender with the double-F cup.

This is not the first time they have steeped themselves in each other’s slippery emissions in the Croneys’ marital bed. This is not the first time they have formed a seething machine like a cardiac bellows which expands and contracts. This is not the first time that the boughs which stroke the uncurtained window have taken their impassioned rhythm from the couple heaving like waves in accord with the ubiquitous, omnipotent moon. When Lavender Beard arches and shudders and croaks the knell of little death, Henry Fowler, mixing pleasure with duty, changes gear, grasps her buttocks’ buttocks and accelerates with the eagerness of a missionary who has espied heathens on a distant bluff. He makes the last mighty ascent and thuddingly casts himself into his mount’s core as though burying something for all time. Listen to his whoops of joy and self-congratulation. Listen to his grunts of effortful release. He slumps prone, pinning her to the sheet which has absorbed all that their open pores can give it. He waits for her signal – the urgent, earnest imprecation which he responds to by withdrawing, by standing on the bed, by bending to grasp her legs and lifting them so that her heels touch his chin and she is supported by him with only her shoulders and her hands, knitted to cradle her occiput, resting on the soaked sheet.

So they remain, mutely absorbed in the callisthenic ceremony, silhouetted against the moon – man with primitive wind instrument. He’s detumescent and shagged out. All he wants is to sprawl. He tries to tense his muscles against the tide of his afterglow. He clings to her ankles, he gazes at the benign orb suspended over the wooded heights of South London. It’s Lavender’s clock, that smiley moon, it tells her when, it told her that this Tuesday night in early May is
the
night. It told her that a Friday night in early April was
the
night too – but forget that. This night, she knows, is the one.

Henry Fowler relaxes his grasp in his post-coital, cigaretteless stupor.

‘Henry!’ she barks, officiously.

He wriggles, braces himself as well as he can on the supersensitive interior springing the better to maintain her in the counselled position for the counselled duration of two and a half minutes. He reckons it’s crazy but he knows the depths of her desperation, he understands her faith in folk remedies and in the lore of old mothers (who would know). He is grateful, nonetheless, when she begins to count aloud for that is the beginning of the end: ‘148, 149, 150 … You’re done, sweetheart.’

He lowers her legs gently. They lie side by side. He smokes. She strokes her belly, dreamily, dotingly. While he showers she strips the bed and bundles the sheets and pillowcases into a rattan chest. She lowers the blinds, switches on a bedside lamp. They dress, in silence, in the illumined room whose walls are hung with framed monochrome aerial photographs of flyovers, clover-leaf interchanges, mini-roundabout complexes. Lavender does her make-up in the mirror of a bulbous limed-oak dressing-table which Henry Fowler has known for more than three-quarters of his life – it’s a Croney family heirloom, a shrine of a sort, a sentimental incongruity. He can even remember the position of the concealed switch for the strip light above the mirror; he can remember the busily decorated peach bedroom not two miles away, and the electric fire in the shape of a Scottie dog, and the day when Stanley and he opened the drawers to acquaint themselves with the mysteries of smalls and stays, girdles and slips and pink elasticated fabric which flaked in his prepubescent fingers; he can remember the name of a perfume, Ma Griffe, but not its scent. That memory is buried, along with so much else. Atomiser technology has come along the while. So have names. It is L’Autre Femme that Lavender sprays from a cylindrical aerosol.

She flicks back her thick chestnut-red mane so that Henry Fowler, seated on the mattress edge, double knotting his laces, can sniff at her proffered neck. She stands, buxom in a taupe shift, buries his head (hair clasped at the root) in her tummy. ‘Strange, isn’t it Henry? Isn’t it strange what life brings … I’ve done feta salad – so it’s feta salad, special taramasalata made from a secret recipe, then pourgouri and – tarum, tarum, from the barby! – marinaded pork souvlaki.’

‘Don’t get that at home,’ repines Henry Fowler, all dressed in uniform black, standing to crisp the creases. ‘And it’s marin
ated
.’

‘Knew you’d say that. That’s why I said it. You old pedant. Come on.’ And she shimmies towards the door, her slink dissembling her size.

‘And that’s not all I don’t get at home,’ he mutters, fretful as a cuddly toy with a wound.

Lavender Beard swivels on her mules and glares: ‘That, Henry, is beside the issue. For God’s sake … That is … irrelevant.’ She flings arrows from her eyes. He can see that she is close to crying. He makes a big placatory shrug, all palms and hefty shoulders. She moves back across the room to the helpless man, touches the skin that protrudes from the black twill at the wrist, at the neck. She stretches to nuzzle his ear ‘This is different … Dear Henry …’

He descends the stairs in front of her. She lays her hands on his shoulders as if to conga, the fatuous jollity of which dance ill suits this sternly austere house with its hard edges and polished surfaces and several lacks: no wainscots, no cornices, no carpets, no colours. It is an inventory of eliminated walls, of subjugated ornament. It’s the stripped skeleton of the house it once was, that it might be again (bless this house with plenty, bless it with fecundity). Where once there was stained glass representing fructuous abundance now there is cold opaque glass. Where once the hall floor was polychromatically tiled now it is pitted tufa.