The Fowler Family Business (14 page)

Henry Fowler has never taken to it. He considers the style called functional to be dysfunctional, contemptuous of comfort, ignorant of domestic niceties. He believes that this house is, above all, a defensive boast about childlessness, about guaranteed freedom from jam patches and crayon trails. Henry Fowler is a family man and a family fan, as he describes himself, a sculptor of futures, as he also describes himself. This man/fan has lived all his adult life with the lives he has created, with the disorder, noise, tantrums, illnesses, sloth and gaucheness of dependent beings. This monument to tidiness seems like a denial of life, of his life specifically, of the possibility of future lives within its walls.

He is contemptuous of the framed fetishes and mounted trophies. There are prototype traffic lights (unlit) in a perspex display case. There is a traffic cone on a tufa plinth, shown off as though it were a real sculpture. He really wonders sometimes about the way that Curly has made this house a museum of his work. Henry Fowler is all too aware of what his Naomi would say if he made their house a gallery of his professional achievements and he really wonders sometimes how Lavender puts up with, say, the accretion of wall-mounted cat’s-eyes and the dado-level frieze of alternating cul-de-sac and no-entry signs. But it’s not something he has ever been discourteous enough to mention: an Englishman’s house is his archive. And when he and Lavender conga beneath an RSJ into the cook/eat/talk space where the Greek cheese salad and olives and thematically apt bottles of cold resined wines are laid out on a blond-wood table he keeps his perpetual counsel, stays mum as ever. Rather, he picks up a glass, fills it, hands it to Lavender. He picks up another, fills it, swigs, goes
ah!
‘Top-up, Curl?’

He looks over to the grand, vast, stainless-steel stove where Curly Croney is occupied taking slices of
halloumi
from a bath of bubbling olive oil with tongs and laying them on three layers of double-ply kitchen roll.

‘If you bear with us a nanosecond,’ says Curly, concentrating. ‘There …’ He lifts the last slice, switches off the burner, picks up his glass, offers it to Henry Fowler for a refill, looks at his best friend and at his wife, leans back against a worktop in his apron with the legend CURLY across the breast, in his white T-shirt and his worn Levi’s, raises the glass and says: ‘To the four of us then … How was it?’

‘Daaad!’

‘Henry! No … Really.’

‘Imo’s coming over,’ said Ben. ‘I’d come otherwise.’

‘I wouldn’t,’ said Lennie. ‘I’m not. I mean –
a roundabout.
Cool. Or what?’

‘It’s not just a—That’s not the point. It’s Curly’s. And it’s not like ordinary roundabouts. It’s, it’s … a special roundabout.’

Lennie mimed stifling a yawn.

‘Finished?’ Naomi, stacking the dishwasher, asked Ben. ‘Yeah.

It’s a bit salt.’

‘And it’s all pus, all that white,’ added Lennie.

‘Tell me where you can get proper bacon and I’ll get it,’ said Henry, hurt.

‘I don’t know,’ said Lennie, ‘why we can’t have croissants and—everyone else has pain au chocolat, Danish …’

‘It’s because I am an ogre. And my mission on this planet is to clog young arteries with animal fat. And also I
like
fry-ups. And – we live in South London not South Paris.’

‘D’you want a daughter with huge white spots like maggots?’

‘Of course I do.’ Henry tried to hug Lennie as she got up from the refectory-style kitchen table but she wriggled out of his grasp.

‘Lay off – or I’ll ring Child Line.’

‘What did I do to deserve it?’

Naomi looked at him pityingly.

‘What did I do to deserve it?’ he asked Curly half an hour later, his tone no longer jocular but anxious. ‘They’re just so … unresponsive. I really wanted them to come. I’m sorry.’

‘I’m quite glad in a way they didn’t actu—Oh Christ look at this!’ Curly banged persistently on the horn to alert the elderly driver in front of him that the lights had changed at a pedestrian crossing between Kent House and Clock House Stations: ‘God they’ve got to get these oldsters off the road … They’re flashing, dear – you can go now, dear … They never get the hang of anything – how long have we had lights like these … Mandatory re-testing every year, crippling premiums … That’s what’s needed. They’re a danger to themselves. Get on, you old boot!’

The experimental mini-roundabout cluster at Eden Park, the first of four such projected complexes, was commissioned by the London Borough of Bromley from Larsen Müller Jago (consultant engineer Roger Croney). It replaced traffic lights at a junction of six roads, one of them dual carriage of the 1930s with a rockery along the middle. The junction’s problems were further exacerbated by:

a)An inconstant circulatory balance – flow and volume sampled over a three-month period showed no constant pattern save between
c.
07.00 and 09.40 on weekdays. There was no complementary late-afternoon consistency.

b)Two (half-timbered) shopping parades, each with a slip road of its own.

c)A petrol station, which offered two means of ingress and one exit.

d)A listed cedar of Lebanon, the only remaining vestige of the late-Georgian arboretum planted by the antiquary and amateur architect Holland Gibson. Its lower boughs had obfuscated the traffic lights and were reckoned to have been directly or indirectly responsible for more than twenty per cent of the accidents which occurred at the junction.

In June 1990 there had been no fewer than seven accidents which the police had classified as ‘serious’, including two fatalities (‘very serious’).

In the first three months of Curly’s scheme’s existence the number of accidents had risen from a weekly average, during the same period of the previous year, of 0.96 to 1.48. But not one of these had been classified as ‘serious’ and unofficial police opinion was that the majority, which occurred at low speeds, were ascribable to drivers’ unfamiliarity with what the designer himself, quoted in
Girder
, called the ‘quasi-molecular stratagem of the guideblocks’ disposition’ and with the introduction of ‘ambient riverflow’ (i.e. one-way traffic) to all the intersecting roads and, further, to the roads between them.

The
Beckenham, Bickley and Bromley Globe
headlined its report of residents’ complaints: B
EDLAM
C
OMES TO
E
DEN
P
ARK
– A
GAIN
! – a reference to the Bethlem Royal Hospital which had removed from Lambeth to its Monks Orchard site, south of Eden Park Station, in 1926 and which had been an object of neighbourly resentment ever since. Interviewed by
Globe
reporter Gavin Stove, ‘Jack Bunce, 78, a retired soft-drinks executive of Orchardleigh Avenue, quipped: “We have to go all round the houses to get to our houses now. It’s bad enough having all the poor unfortunates lurking on the other side of the fence over there but letting them out so they can re-route the traffic at a notorious black spot – it’s like Arnhem all over again.’” Mr Stove concluded his report: ‘There’s no paradise in this Eden. Just a snake of unwanted lorries in residential roads built for yesteryear.’

Curly parked on a pavement. Henry scrutinised the purple-and-orange lines painted diagonally across the roads at intervals which diminished as they neared the intersection. He pondered the curvaceous tumuli, the ‘guideblocks’, whose differing ground plans were markedly irregular and whose relationships to each other seemed to him to have been randomly determined. He followed Curly across one road after another, looking left, right and left again, and again, unable to get the hang of the layout, fearful that a vehicle coming from a direction he had not considered might wing him or worse.

‘What do you reckon?’ asked Curly with evident authorial pride, clapping his hands, smiling.

‘Yes … yes it’s interesting … very different.’

‘I’ll say. There’s nothing like it in Britain.’

Henry nodded: ‘It’s certainly unusual.’

‘Sculptural engineering starts here.’

‘Uh-huh – it’s, urm, a whatchamacallit then? A you know …’

‘Installation?’ Curly near sang the word.

‘Yes. Installation … sorry, I’m not really up on all—’

‘Spot on. It
is
an installation. It’s a made object. We apply art to cars and to buildings and to furniture, to … to what have you – so, why not to roads? Eh?’

Curly was not saying this for the first time. Henry had heard it all before. Bridges, hard shoulders, ramps, railings, crash barriers … Curly’s vainglorious mission was to make art out of the least-noticed public objects.

‘The flowers. What are they? They’re nice.’ Henry assessed them with a professional eye to future use: they possessed funereal potential. He hadn’t seen these before, hadn’t been shown them. But that’s florists for you: always letting you down.

‘They insisted on having something,’ Curly sighed, exasperated. ‘A design’s integrity … not a notion they understand. They’re canna lilies – they use them in France. Lavender’s idea.’

They were standing outside a children’s clothes shop at the end of one of the half-timbered shopping parades. They both clasped Styrofoam coffee cups. Curly watched vehicles negotiate the junction. He concentrated with the tense application of a trainer or coach, now biting his lips as he willed on a speeding van, now tutting exasperatedly and clawing the thick suburban air as a Triumph Toledo with four blue rinses came to a perplexed halt among the guideblocks. He turned away, shaking his head. Then, all embarrassment and shyness, he mumbled over the shriek of an accelerating motorcycle: ‘I’m infertile Henry.’

Henry was preoccupied by the ostentatious slink of a Chiselhurst wife from her metallic pink Shogun to the premises of Wax’n’Tan With Max’n’Fran. He marvelled at her ability to be simultaneously overdressed and underdressed. ‘Gosh! Look at that. D’you think she has to have a licence to wear one of those?’ He turned to Curly: ‘If you’re creative – it sort of goes with the territory … The child in the man. All that. Part of you’s bound to be.’

‘Wha …? What do you mean? Part.’

‘Well, you know, ah, Picasso – or was it … Thing – the one you lent me the book about. Always on about genius being infantile.’

Curly smiled pathetically: ‘No! No! I said, I said: I’m
infertile,
Henry. In-fertile?’

Henry’s brain went immediately to work to decode the syllables which it believed it had misheard. Curly could see his molar fillings, his tongue, and the elastic saliva strands extending from top lip to bottom on the point of snapping but just holding. Curly spoke with the jittery gabble of a tiro paying court with rehearsed words: ‘I’ve been talking this through with Lavender. In fact we haven’t been talking about much else …’

Curly continued while Henry fixed on a carved neo-Tudor bressummer. The wood was faded, flaking. It could do with a tosh of paint pretty sharp. And that herring-bone brickwork really did need repointing a.s.a.p. The eyes of a child mannequin in the shop window fixed on his. They were lavishly lashed, liquid brown, pleading: they begged him to bring her to life, so she might go to the ball for which she was dressed in a sequinned bodice and satin puff sleeves with a velvet bow in her verisimilar Titian tresses. She would do anything to be brought to life, would pay whatever price he named.

Curly stopped speaking.

Henry knew this time that he had not misheard. He was startled, incredulous. He half-expected Curly to signal that he was being invited to participate in an elaborately perverse and circular practical joke whose primary victim was its author. But Curly was unquestionably in earnest. It was like being asked to assist in a suicide. But that, Henry told himself, is an end and this is a beginning. In his shock Henry was capable of realising that the ramifications would be manifold, knock-on, domino. The first domino had fallen with Curly’s extraordinary request. He tried to unpick the matted compress of the love called friendship, uxorious trust, charity, duty, favour, loyalty. But all Henry could actually think was: Is this the way that Curly should have approached him? Is this the correct way, the socially sanctioned way? Is there an approved form of etiquette for asking your oldest friend to impregnate your wife or is it nowadays like, say, what to wear when it says smart casual or addressing strangers by their Christian name – a free-for-all where anything goes?

Curly took him by the arm. They walked away from Bedlam Corner as it would come to be known, past the pink Shogun and the copulating rhinoceroses on its spare-wheel cover, by a circuitous route of roads whose gardens were gay with rose trellises and smiling gerbera and flowering lavender and lawns so green they seemed dyed, back to Curly’s car.

When he saw a metalled surface whose aggregate was composed of ginger pebbles Henry could not but think of the Start-rite mites setting out hand in hand along life’s highway in the old advertisement. They’d be getting their bus passes soon. Had their journey fulfilled its promise of happiness and safety and chiropody-free radiance?

His had – he could put hand on heart and swear to that.

There had been setbacks, sure, messy blots here and there, an ingrown big toenail in ’77 and the same one again in ’82 since when he had followed Mr Scalby’s advice to abjure toecapped Oxfords no matter what the trade might say. But these had been the exceptions. Yes, the far side of his horizon was always going to be as unknown as that which the mites had approached all those years ago. Yes, it was always going to spring surprises. The trick was to make sure they were nice ones. That was an important part of Henry’s philosophy. It was always other people who got divorced, who had Down’s kiddies, who got into financial scrapes. It was other people who had the skeletons – the embezzler grandad in choky, the jabbering aunt in the bin, the schoolgirl daughter in the club. And Henry had sought to keep it that way. Such problems, conditions and fates were for other people. He didn’t want his life polluted by the grubby disgraces that other people were so prone to and which they increasingly failed to recognise as disgraces. Curly was proposing a future of conspiracy.