The Fowler Family Business (18 page)

Henry ran his hand over the front of the fridge where magnetised sheep, cows, trees and fences had once been ranked. Those attachments had constituted the children’s rustic world. He had used them to teach Ben and Lennie about the countryside which they seldom visited because of Naomi’s antipathy to the smells and her appraisal of mud as inconvenient and her fear of quadrupeds unless they were tinned or in a packet. He could list all her foibles, all her whimsies, all her enthusiasms: he had lived with them half a lifetime.

And nothing could dissuade him from being charmed by them, vain and trivial as they were – nothing. Not even this epic betrayal which Henry Fowler knew to be the stuff of the old Greek myths and on which shrinks had founded their trade: ‘Their fraudulent trade. You might even call it freudulent! They’ll still be at it come the millennium. They give a different meaning to Grecian 2000.’

That was one of the gags he had made in his address, ‘Special Concerns Prompted by Filial Grief for a Mother’, to the Lowestoft conference the previous autumn. It won him two big laughs and a round of applause which he reckoned to be genuinely felt, well deserved.

It would have been his absence at conference all those years ago that had allowed Naomi the opportunity to conceive and gestate the two insults in the garden.

He hadn’t always wanted to go but it was duty, it was family tradition. What was conference without a Fowler?

No wonder Ben lacked an appetite for funeral direction. No wonder when he had spent a week in the office during his Easter holiday to get a feel for his future he had moped and had treated the staff with an offhand indifference as though the very notion of contact with the business was beneath him – the very business which was starting its tenth decade, which had provided him with all that he had ever asked for, which bore his name. No wonder – it wasn’t in his blood; the boy lacked the genetic pattern which had made generation upon generation of Fowler supreme in his field between Streatham and Beckenham. Henry had instructed him that his hauteur was despicable, that Fowler & Son would be around long after they were both dead, that the family business was bigger than any single Fowler. But then, Henry told himself, at Easter Ben had been a Fowler. Now he wasn’t. That was his problem. That was the burden he was going to have to bear throughout life. Henry had spent hours deliberating about how he should break the news.

You are not you.

No. No. How could he hurt them thus. They were his children.

Even when concentrating on the very matter of how to tell them that they were not his children he would forget that they were not his children. He was so much a prisoner of paternal habit. He had defined himself as a father above all else. And now he was an ex-father, a father who had never been a father, a delusory father. He was a cuckold duped into caring for a family of cuckoos. He was no bodily part of the family which had been his family, his life, for seventeen years; it was more than eighteen since Naomi had told him with a sly, proud smile that she was pregnant.

Had she believed he was the father? She must have known.

The day of Ben’s birth had been the most thrilling of his life. He had himself felt reborn. He had been granted a further identity. He was no longer just the son who had become a husband. His accretion of roles had further swollen: he had driven excitedly, but observing the speed limit, from graveside to bedside, from a finished life in Hither Green to a fresh one in Denmark Hill.

He feared that he might cause confusion at the hospital. He didn’t want this special day adulterated by presumptuous hospital staff directing him towards the mortuary. So he stripped off his jacket and waistcoat and tie at successive traffic lights, folding them with exhilarated abandon so as not to crease them and stacking them neatly on the passenger seat beside him. He was smiling rapturously, humming a tune, a soaring, hymnal tune whose name he had never known. He told himself I am a father now, I am a father now.

I am not a father now.

And he couldn’t remember the way the tune went.

He wanted to hum it again to recover what he’d lost – that day zero of the most beautiful baby he had seen, his baby, coated in silky hair leeching the narcotic breast milk of the wife whom motherhood had transformed into a serene mammal. Mother and child formed an exclusive pair amongst the abundant flowers in baskets and vases and bouquets and cellophane which filled the small room. They were tied to each other. Naomi smiled at him from within a far state of dreamy detachment. Her absorption in the child was entire.

Henry took the boy when he was sated. His eyes filled with terror. His face contorted like an inbred dog’s. He screamed. He wriggled. But Henry got the newborn’s rhythm – of course he did, they worked to the same blood clock, father and son – and the boy calmed. Henry claims he smiled. Then Henry began to sneeze with rhinitic spasms, shuddering uncontrollably.

‘You’re allergic to him,’ announced Naomi with proprietorial satisfaction.

Henry passed his son to Naomi and struggled to pull a handkerchief from his trouser pocket.

‘’Snot
him
,’ he insisted. ‘It’s all these flowers. Like a florist’s in here it is.’

He stepped back from the bed and tripped on a plastic bucket of exotics, breaking the stems of two parrot-beaked heliconia and making a puddle which he stooped to mop with clumsy paper towels.

Naomi sighed and spoke to the baby: ‘He’s spoiling our lovely flowers.’

The miracle of life. That baby could now bring a carbon-fibre racket into contact with a rubber ball travelling at 90 m.p.h. in such a way that the ball’s speed would be so reduced that when it touched the front wall of the court it would plummet vertically to the floor. That was a miracle. And so was the human ingenuity which made the connection between that ball’s terminal trajectory and a dead bird and advertised that ingenuity by the use of the figurative construction ‘to kill a ball’. Telephones, butterfly stroke, nylon-tip pens, the emotive capability of music, the way some people are blond and some are left-handed, the shapes of faces in clouds, water’s inability to flow uphill, the tastiness of animals’ flesh, pain, bustles, reptiles’ poison sacs, sinus drainage, cantilevering, DNA testing – miracles of life, all of them.

Henry was in an ontological slump with his feet up, the curtains drawn and a cup of tepid tea when he heard Naomi return home.

‘What you up to?’ she asked through the gloom. She put down the shiny boutique bags she was carrying. ‘You got a headache or something?’

Henry didn’t speak. He shook his head, stood and reached for his jacket, draped over a coffee table. He withdrew his wallet from an inner pocket.

This was it. The moment he most feared. The moment whose anticipation had nagged at him fretfully. It was the moment that he couldn’t stop himself trying to foresee, trying to call.

It wasn’t too late to pull back. He could continue to lead this life of lies that he had led for eighteen years. He hadn’t of course known the nature of the life he had been leading: thus it hadn’t been a life of lies. But once a dupe knows he’s a dupe he ceases to be a dupe. And if he doesn’t reveal his knowledge of the bad faith he has been subjected to and mutely plays along he colludes in his own betrayal. He blesses the hand that grips the hilt.

Henry silently handed Naomi Shaun Memory’s memo and the attached test results.

She peered at it in the half-light. ‘What’s … Someone Else’s …’

She walked across the room, drew a curtain. She stood to read in the window bay. When she had finished she held the paper by her side and stared through the window. She scratched at a spot on a pane.

She turned and spoke with wistful candour: ‘I’d almost forgotten … So you
didn’t
know … It’s funny – I often … I often used to tell myself that you knew, that you’d guessed and you didn’t say anything because you didn’t want to upset the apple-cart.’

‘What!’

‘Well, they don’t look like you do they? You might have guessed. You probably
should
have.’

‘Lots of kids don’t look like their parents. I don’t look like
my
parents. Doesn’t mean to say that my mother was off with all and sundry getting knocked up.’

‘Henry! Don’t be coarse.’

‘That’s ripe. This, this is incredible.’ Henry hadn’t known what to expect but he had certainly not expected Naomi’s blithe and guiltless admission of her infidelity. But then Naomi had lived for years with the two consequences of that infidelity: she was aquainted with her mores – he didn’t doubt her protestation of near-forgetfulness. He had only the other day watched a telly programme about unsolved crimes in which a psychologist had claimed that the majority of murderers who go undiscovered forget their crime after the passage of years. Murder, though, does not generate lives.

Henry wondered at her shamelessness.

Sometime as that day worn on and vapour trails were scrawled across the blush in the West and the window-cleaner’s neligence became ever more apparent Naomi asked him brusquely: ‘What do you want to do?’

‘I don’t think we can go on like this.’

‘We have for years – gone on like this.’

‘You have.
You
have. I haven’t. Not me.’

‘What are you going to say to Ben and Lennie?’ she asked.

‘What am
I
…? That’s up to you isn’t it – they’re your kids. I don’t feel inclined to say anything.’

‘Henry. Henry. Don’t be so … old-fashioned. You’re being like some sort of Victorian whatsit.’

Henry remembered the print of Augustus Egg’s triptych
Past and Present
in his parents’ dining-room. A stern Victorian husband, despite her pleas for mercy, casts out his adulterous wife to live rough with her illegitimate child, rendering his own children by her motherless and bereft.

‘What are you smiling about?’ Naomi accused him.

Henry shook his head. It was too complicated to explain. She would misunderstand. How times had changed.

‘Henry. How else did you expect to have kids?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘What do you mean
?’ she parrotted. ‘I mean I couldn’t get pregnant by you … Seven years. Not on the pill. Seven years it was, Henry, seven years we were trying. I wanted children. I longed for children.’

She comes now to as near tearfulness as she will get.

He made stumblingly towards her.

‘Henry – I don’t need these … things.’ She waved the analysis strips. ‘You don’t need to give them to me. If that’s what they’re saying … It’s infertility isn’t it?’

‘That’s not what they’re for. You’ve just read it. They’re DNA matches.’

‘But you are. Aren’t you? Infertile.’

He stood still, he cast his eyes down, he nodded.

Naomi stretched out a hand to him. It rested on his forearm.

‘I think I’ve known for years,’ she said.

‘I don’t understand how you could do this.’ He flapped his arm to push her hand away.

‘They’re
your
children – just like if you’d adopted them … or I’d been married before or something.’

‘What! Oh don’t insult me. Please.
My
children.
My
children.

My children don’t exist. I don’t have any children.’ Henry looked out into the garden where Ben straddled prone Nolan Oates and was anointing him with Tanfastic-Lite, rubbing the lotion into his fellow prodigy’s abdomen.

‘Whose children are they, matter of fact?’ Henry tried to sound indifferent, unconcerned.

‘Henry – don’t.’ She mistook her cue, simpered sweetly: ‘Don’t be like that. They’re
our
children. You’re just—’

‘Stop being so fucking cute. You know what I’m talking about.’

Naomi walked across the room. She tapped the corks and screwtops of several bottles before pouring herself a kümmel.

‘Do you want anything?’ She put on a little girl’s voice.

‘Just tell me,’ he replied brusquely.

‘The …
their
natural father—’

‘Cut the crap. Their
father.
Without the bleeding euphemism. Their
father
, all right.’

‘I was just going to say. Their
birth
father … is dead.’

‘Have a name? Did he have a name? This
birth
father.’

‘Oh Henry you were always so naive. I mean it’s not the sort of thing you discuss—’

He hit her.

That was the first and only time he thus contaminated their union. He smote with an articulate open palm, he stung with his wedding ring. She staggered back dropping her kümmel glass.

She enquired incredulously: ‘Henry?’

She could not believe what he had done to her. Nor could he.

But his appetite was aroused. His big scrubbed pink hands grasped her by the neck.

‘Don’t!’ she yelped.

She had never before seen the veins that rose like subcutaneous roots in his forehead. She had never before seen bedlam in his eyes.

‘OK. OK,’ she gasped.

Henry relaxed his grip. She might have tricked him with her womb but he knew now that he could better her with his limbs. There was potency in his infertile body.