The Fowler Family Business (15 page)

He admitted as much when he suggested, in a calculated aside, that it would not be necessary to tell Naomi, that indeed everything might be easier, ‘less pressurised’, were she not privy to this compact between the three of them, this bond of blood and trust, this clandestine rendezvous of secret seed and discreet egg. But, of course, it was up to Henry and if he reckoned that his marriage vows decreed …

No. Mum was, aptly enough, the word. Whatever he decided his lips would be sealed.

‘It’s between us,’ Henry agreed, digging himself in deeper. ‘Us three.’

Curly smiled and started the car.

‘I could,’ Henry suggested modestly, ‘fill a jar – you know …’

‘You wouldn’t enjoy it. You don’t want to be a sad wanker. That’s the
very
point.’

Curly posited his and Lavender’s theory of surrogacy which included the paradox of proxy paternity: that a man who has engendered a child by artificial means, without carnal knowledge of the mother, will, even if he knows the identity of the child, suffer a greater and more abiding sense of loss than one who has fomented conception by the usual means and he will attempt to overcome that loss by seeking the child whom he regards as ‘his own’ and taking possession of him/her. This is because his emissive gesture, which might not otherwise have been made, had a specifically procreative intent. There existed a willed link between cause and effect. A man who has, on the other hand, impregnated a woman as a result of enjoyable, recreational and apparently irresponsible concupiscence will regard the gratification achieved in the prosecution of that act as an end in itself and will not expect or desire to extend the relationship to one of joint parenting: the history of the world and of the Child Protection Agency suggest that man is an animal who is as likely to scarper as to nurture. Surrogacy is thus best undertaken in circumstances in which causal sex and casual sex are as close as the adjectives which describe them.

Curly relished that juxtaposition, those scrambled letters. He repeated: ‘Causal, casual, causal, casual – Christ!’ He stamped on the brake to avoid a teenage girl who had stepped in front of the car. She hurried gauchely back on to the pavement and into gaping blimey denimed arms. ‘Look at her – look. They always do that … avoid mutilation by a hundredth of a second then have a giggle with their mates about it. Amazing. It’s genetic. Must be.’

Month after month after month she bled, and because she bled she wept. Lavender Beard Croney’s menstrual pattern attained the uncanny invariability which she had yearned for when young and single, when she had occasionally been careless of contraception, when her diaries were pocked with red runic devices, underlinings and marginalia executed with such anxious intensity that their imprint carried through the page from one Sunday till the next. The memory of those prodigal years and their lost children reproached her now.

Every month her breasts grew heavy on her and weighed dully with a pain that increased as she grew older. This was her body’s harsh means of telling her what she knew so well – that it was not fulfilling its function as an apparatus of reproduction, that she was not allowing it to fulfil that function, that she was fighting the instincts she was imprinted with. Her body had it wrong. She wanted what it wanted. She longed to be filled with a version of herself, with a being who would be
their
child, who would belong to her and to Curly, even if he did deprecate himself as the non-playing captain and as the loving nurse who almost thinks the child her own. He referred to their putative son as Blenheim and to their trinitarian enterprise as Operation Blenheim. It was a coinage which did not amuse Lavender. Anything which made light of their predicament combined with her frustration at her inability to stem her menstruation to render her fractious, snappy, ratty.

Henry irritated her in many ways. When, as he entered the kitchen one night, he heard Curly say Blenheim he asked: ‘Is that Blenheim as in Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, Malplaquet? Or Blenheim as in Blenheim, Lancaster, Wellington?’

‘Neither – it’s as in Blenheim, Seaton Delaval, Grimsthorpe, Eastbury.’

‘Ah,’ Henry grunted, puzzled, and stuffed a chilli-red merguez in his mouth, retched but didn’t fetch, quite.

‘Why d’you say that in front of him?’ Lavender complained when he’d left. ‘It’s our secret. It belongs to us. Us. Why do we have to share everything? Isn’t it enough – me having to fuck Henry without letting him into every last cranny of our life? Christ, Curly – it’s not me, it’s not me, it’s not my being, it’s not my, my,
self
that he’s … It’s only my reproductive organs he’s meant to be … attending to. My ovaries. Not that he’s making much of a job of it. Is he?’

‘How – uh, how many …’

‘How many free fucking fucks has he had without delivering do you mean darling? Weell … By my reckoning – and
I was there,
remember – that makes, ooh,’ and she sighed with a profound weariness, unable to sustain her anger, ‘fourteen … fourteen times. It is never going to happen is it …’

Curly scraped couscous, leek, smeared turnip and gamboge, harissa-stained lamb fat from a plate into the kitchen bin. He felt like scraping himself too into that bin (stainless steel, domed, overpriced). His life was now defined by his generative nullity. And it was measured by the very mark of Lavender’s fertility, her periods. He was, he told her, beginning to get the hang of what it was to be a woman. The two days each month when she ovulated and the day before them and the day after were like holy days, feast days, days when oblations were made to Henry, the harbinger of fecundity, in the form of post-coital slap-ups: souvlaki, paella, sauerkraut which Curly insisted on calling choucroute and which was Henry’s favourite: ‘A splendid reward for a task assiduously prosecuted,’ Henry pronounced tactlessly, pompously, whilst dog-sniffing the wine chosen by Curly to complement the fermented cabbage and smoked pork and cured sausages and junipers. ‘Umm, yes, that, as … as what’s-his-face, you know, on the telly, would call dry as a nun’s minge. Well he wouldn’t, actually – not on the telly so to speak …’ Lavender glared at the ceiling and the low-voltage lights. Curly bit his lip.

Henry irritated her in many ways. She didn’t want her-little Blenheim or little Eastbury (a girl’s name) to talk like his or her birth father who blithely referred to couscous as tar-brush grub, and who cracked tiresomely unfunny gags like: What do you call an Arab with a suitcase? A terrorist. What do you call an Arab without a suitcase? A terrorist on a budget. It wasn’t so much the ugly sentiments that she objected to as the coarseness of their expression. And what if this was not learned, not culturally acquired, but a genetic trait that might be passed on, might prove uncorrectable – like gesture or handwriting or voice?

She was vexed too by the self-righteousness and piety of Henry’s philo-Semitism. Years of marriage to Naomi had turned him into a doggedly intransigent supporter of Israel (which he had visited once, pronounced ‘heaven on earth’, and had never returned to). Any act of belligerence or state-sanctioned terrorism perpetrated by that country met with his enthusiastic approval. Any action which threatened what he perceived as its interests would be characterised as Fascist and appended with the observation that Syria shelters Nazi war criminals. He was ostentatiously sensitive to real and imagined slights on his children’s maternal heritage. He was eager to take demonstrative offence on their behalf.

It would have been insolent and ignominious to fault him. He was proudly loyal, paternally protective. Although he had never considered converting he had grown into the cliché of the zealous convert. Yet Lavender recognised a strain of sententiousness, of smugness, of moral aggrandisement through his very proxiness. He seemed to presume that his not belonging to that faith and race rendered his championship of Jewry and Zionism (which he didn’t differentiate) all the more laudable, all the more deficient in self-interest. It was as though Jews were ‘his’ tribe – which he had elected to support as someone else might choose to support a soccer team.

If only he would impregnate her! If only she could be full with him! She could then be shot of him. She realised how contrary to her sex’s immemorial wish this sentiment was. But these were singular circumstances. What had been audacious in its conception was in practice trite and frustrating. ‘I do not,’ she told Curly as she lay beside him watching cars thrown across the ceiling by the camera obscura of a gap in the blinds, ‘enjoy getting banged by other people. For whatever reason. And nothing’s happening, is it?’

He didn’t reply. She repeated: ‘I said
nothing is happening.’

‘I heard. I was thinking, perhaps we should try someone else.’

‘Please … We’ve been here before.
Who
else?’

Curly sat up and switched on the light. ‘I mean, maybe we ought to get Henry to see someone? One of the quacks I went to. Give him a boost. Shot of something.’

Lavender’s cackling laugh ascended the scale. She bit his ear and exclaimed: ‘Darleenk, you is a gen-ee-us!’

‘Never know – might do the trick.’

Henry Fowler’s worst day yet was a bright blinding day.

It was the hottest day of August – temperature: 31 degrees, humidity: 82 per cent.

There was a look of murder on cabbies’ faces and a hose-pipe ban in the offing. The air was thick with particulates, with emitted grist, with gaseous suspensions which curried eyes and mucous membranes. The flies were the size of bees. In central London Henry felt like a foreigner.

Who were all these bounteous girls with so few clothes on? With bottoms that had been poured into dangerous skirts. Oh there was so much skin, from tender biscuit to cooked crazed leather, from cleft chest to painted toe, from bra to mule. It was skin to devour. Henry wanted to be at the feast. No matter that his face was shinily self-basting. No matter that there were saline deposits describing arcs beneath his oxters and fretting his collar and spangling the chest of his royal-blue shirt. No matter – for this was Henry of the soon-to-be-reawakened appetite. He strode through the jellied air with inappropriate friskiness towards his second appointment with Mr William Savage-Smith.

One professional to another – that’s how he conceived of his relationship with this consultant whose sobriety and respectability were such that he must have
something
to hide, some grubby buried vice, probably inherited from his father and practised in anonymous apartments at signal expense. He was so proper and, Henry reckoned, fee-greedy that he would not prescribe Henry the miracle drug Cocksure (not its real name, merely a ribald sobriquet) without Henry submitting to the test which had humiliated Curly, which had indirectly caused Henry, after years of near abstinence and meagre rations, once again to consider himself a sexual being.

During their recent holiday in the northern Auvergne Henry had twice persuaded Naomi to agree that they should make love and the fact that at the last moment it hadn’t happened was due to the advice given to her by the thalassotherapist at the spa in Vichy rather than to her own unwillingness. Henry thought this promising. His brief disappointment was lifted by his delight in the verdant grandeur of the primitive post-volcanic landscape – it was as though the breasts of buried Amazons had been painted by a megalomaniac called Greenfinger. And there was solace to be had, too, in his anticipation of an appointment with Lavender the day after they returned to South London.

He had, as Curly cannily believed he would, begun to forget the real purpose of the monthly trysts – the child, so far as Henry was concerned, would merely be the unfortunate by-product of the exercise of his lust, of the permitted adulteration of the Beard-Croney marriage: Henry would feel no more attachment to little Blenheim than a carefree rover would to a wild oat germinated far, far away over distant hills in a passing womb to which he could no longer fit a face or name.

Henry sweated in Mr William Savage-Smith’s waiting-room. He had been disappointed on his previous visit to discover that the photographic assistance which Curly had incredulously reported was not provided here. It was, a nurse had told him, the ‘signature speciality’ of Mr Gervaise Bassett (currently holidaying at his villa near Urbino and so unavailable to see Mr Fowler). It was a speciality eschewed by Mr Savage-Smith not because it might be considered offensive to his all-female staff (their sensibilities were, anyway, perennially ignored) but because he was anxious not to be accused of plagiarising Mr Bassett, a man jealous of his reputation as a pioneer and innovator.

‘It’s very small, the genito-urinary world,’ the nurse had explained. ‘I mean, everyone knows everyone else’s business.’

On this boiling day she brought Henry a cup of sweet tea. ‘There – that’ll cheer you up.’

Henry shrugged quizzically as she left the room. He hoped that his demeanour was already cheerful. He was indignant that his cheerfulness had not been recognised. He had beamed at her with what he considered an appropriate interest – appreciative, certainly, but far from leering, well this side of lupine. Yes, with a smile that said ‘all’s well in the world of which we are equal (and only incidentally sexual) citizens’, with, indeed, a smile composed of good cheer and zealously tended teeth.

Mr Savage-Smith hardly looked up. He mumbled a greeting. He shuffled in his chair – a gesture towards a gesture at standing. He continued reading a printout. He kneaded an ear lobe. Mr Savage-Smith’s professionalism impressed and enervated Henry. All this show to convince his patients (and himself) that he was more than a mere pill pusher. He was a past master at being an eminent consultant: his voluminous gamut of tics and his stagey business with his bifocals advertised the gulf between his side of the desk where an initiate of a profession’s arcana sits and the other side. Exclusion, Henry recognised, was what defined every profession. He practised it himself. It was what differentiated him from civilians. Without exclusion and the stamp of expertise it brought … well, the unthinkable might occur: the bereaved might realise that they could do it themselves, take the law into their own hands. They’d conduct backyard cremations. They’d dig graves in their gardens as though burying the family pet.