The Fowler Family Business (20 page)

The next night was even worse.

Curly was green from drinking. He was red from crying. He had his chin in his hands at the kitchen table. A bowl of melting ice-cubes stood beside an almost empty bottle of pastis.

Lavender, a ziggurat of supermarket bags, gaped in alarm.

‘What … Whatever’s the matter? What’s happened?’

Curly shook his head.

‘Darling!’

She dropped the bags and kneeled beside him.

‘What is it?’

He put his hands on her shoulders. He wore the expression of a wronged pet. He persisted in shaking his head: ‘I can’t … I can’t believe it. Oh …’ ‘It’s OK. Just …’

‘I’ve never felt so fucking betrayed in all my life.’

A skein of wool filled her throat. Her heart capsized.

How did he know? What had she done to give herself away? Had she spoken in her sleep? Are there no secrets?

She flung herself against him, hugged him, beseeching forgiveness.

She pleaded: ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry – I never meant …’

Curly wasn’t listening. He sobbed. His speech was snuffly with thick vibrato: ‘How how could he? How could he do it? He knew … It’s the most … most grotesque abuse. It’s me. It’s my fault. I should never … God, darling please forgive me, please … I must have been mad … dream up an idea like that. And him just take fucking advantage …’

A shiny squeezer in the open dishwasher glared accusingly at her.

‘Darling it’s not your fault,’ she said. She stroked his cheek. His face was tear blotched. ‘It’s mine.’

‘All you wanted was a child … God what a …’ Curly’s hands suddenly frisked his body questingly. He looked around him, as though dislocated, as though intoxication had so amended his perception that his everyday surroundings were alien when they were merely askew. He stumblingly rose from his chair, tripped on a disgorging polythene bag, crushed a tub of double cream without realising he’d done so and steadied himself on the chair where his jacket was slung with a sleeve inside out escaping from itself. He struggled with the writhing garment. He eventually extricated a quartered sheet of writing paper which he thrust at Lavender at the second attempt. He was bustled backwards as if a burly gust of gale had struck him. From his position buttressed by the wall he gestured and exhorted: ‘Look at that. Look at it.’

She hesitated. Whose poison pen? Was Henry so consumed by guilt that he must confess? Still kneeling, she winced at Curly, an imploring ‘Must I?’ which also hinted at her helplessness. She unfolded the paper.

The name William Savage-Smith was printed in Baskerville at the top. She did not immediately recognise it. She read the slightly smeared script – trust a pompous doctor to use a fountain pen she thought.

Dear Mr Croney,

I should be grateful if you would telephone me in a matter of the utmost confidentiality.

Yours sincerely,

William Savage-Smith

6
^th
November

This man apparently had a role to play in their life. He had already been a harbinger of ill tidings. Now he was a scarlet-letter man, a whisperer. She sensed his shadow over what was left of their marriage. This is the end she told herself. And all for what? How cheaply we sell what’s precious. How biddable we are. How …

What was that date? That was last week. That was nine days before last night.

‘Went to see him. Know what he told me. Didn’t actually tell me. No, no, no, no. Oh no. Far too discreet. Hippocratic … the privacy, all that. He sort of left me to discover – uh, obliquely. We, you and me, are not going to have a baby. No mewling, no … no nappies – look on the bright side, eh? D’you know why? Because Henry is infertile. We’re two of a kind. No baby juice. He’s betrayed me, he’s betrayed us, worst of all he’s betrayed you. And it’s all down to my fucking stupid … Never going to let him in this house again. Next time he calls … I never want to see him again … I never thought I’d say that of anyone.’

The table edge moved in and out of focus before Lavender’s eyes. She was buffeted by a rush of indignation, by all-consuming anger, by massive relief. She was sorrier than ever for her sullied self. She could see a way to hating Henry. Traitorous Henry. Contemptible Henry. Infertile Henry.

She rejoiced that Curly had no idea that she had deceived him with her lubricious abandon. He didn’t know that she had adulterated the marriage which meant the world to her: he was ignorant of last night’s transgression. It was better for both of them that way.

She flung herself across the spilled bags and through the smeared puddle of cream and clutched him and repeated: ‘You’re my love. You’re my love. You’re my love. Darling so long as I’ve got you …’

Curly recounted as much of his day as he could recall whilst Lavender mashed potatoes and grilled mackerel fillets for his stress and heart.

Mr Savage-Smith had haltingly small-talked for an embarrassed while. Then he mentioned ‘the fellow you sent along to me: your friend?’.

He pointedly avoided using Henry’s name.

He spoke of ‘the extraordinary coincidence of a shared condition – not only shared, but unprecedented in my experience’.

He asked Curly what diseases they had suffered in common. Curly shrugged, shook his head, rubbed his jaw as though it were the site of memory and might be urged to yield up some fragment which, like a photograph developed but never printed, had failed to find a place in the album of his life.

‘Did you ever, ah, go abroad together?’ winced Savage-Smith: he was, morally, a member of a far-off generation which was disgustedly fascinated by Port Said’s dirty postcards, which considered French to be a synonym for gross licence complemented by retributive disease.

Curly wondered if he had asked this because he was too inhibited to ask if they had ever had sex together.

‘France a number of times. You know there’s one thing … we both got poisoned, when I was ooh fifteen, fifteen I guess, something like that. Contaminated water – we were camping. We drank from this stream and next morning – ’cause we drank out of it at night and couldn’t see – next morning we found it was full of dead fish and it was this sort of, uhm, bluey green, very opaque.’

‘And what reactions did you have to it?’

‘This was years ago … Delirium, fever … We vomited a lot. Cramps. Terrible cramps. And I had headaches for weeks after, maybe months.’

‘What treatment did you receive?’

‘Spent a night – two nights? can’t remember – in some sort of backwoods hospital.’

‘Uh-huh. Where was this? There may be records still. I have no idea whether the French keep records as diligent …’

‘Wasn’t France. Sorry I… No. No. It was Cornwall. Bodmin Moor. The doctor, the one at the hospital, he thought it might have something to do with some tin workings, tin mine.’

‘Tin! Oh fuck!’ exclaimed Mr Savage-Smith in a most unladylike way.

The next day Curly sat in his office, dehydrated, with a mouthful of felt, composing a letter to Henry. He wrote and deleted for going on an hour:

Dear Henry,

I think I understand why you did what you did …

Too placatory.

Dear Henry,

I cannot tell you how hurt I am by …

Too polite and long-suffering.

Dear Henry,

Friendship involves and depends on companionship, compatibility, mutual appreciation, trust, tolerance, indulgence. But there are limits and I fear that you have perhaps overstepped them …

Too understanding, too reasonable, too qualified: this should be hate mail proclaiming a severance, not a disquisition on the nature of camaraderie. And why address him as ‘dear’?

At 11.40 he wrote:

You have abused our trust. You have abused my wife. You have treated her like a prostitute. You have exploited our vulnerability and our longing for a child. Your deceit is unforgivable. We entered into a contract which you have dishonoured. You have forfeited our friendship. We do not want to see you again. Do not attempt to contact us. Curly.

He stared at the screen, astonished by his directness and hostility. It was as though someone else had written it. He pressed Ctrl+P. He watched transfixed as the page emerged from the printer. He didn’t sign it in his hand, reckoning that its authority would be mitigated by that gesture. He typed an envelope in Reception.

He attached a stamp. He didn’t want it franked with his company’s name. This was personal.

It was whilst he was sauntering back from the post box that the matter of Ben and Lennie’s paternity occurred to him. He stopped, pondered a moment then laughed so violently that an approaching aggressive beggar started and gave him a miss.

It was a boy of Ben’s age that had just been buried in the sluicing rain. Mr and Mrs Legge, the parents, hadn’t got beyond the stage of numb bewilderment.

Rudolph had been trouble in life. Rudolph was grief in death. He had self-mutilated since he was twelve, punishing his body for its pubescence. Then he had taught himself to hide in the boots of cars parked at supermarkets. He’d sidle down the ranks till he found an unlocked one.

When Mrs A—and her two daughters returned to their family Fiat with a laden Tesco trolley they opened the boot and screamed at the blood-smeared moaning boy inside. He wasn’t fussy. Asda, B&Q, Safeway, Sainsbury, Comet … so long as there were cars he could pursue his obsession. He was never more excited than when anticipating his discovery, during those moments when the footfalls ceased and he could hear the voices, the puffing, the click of the trolley, the struggle for keys and, in the final second, the mutual blaming when it was realised that the car and boot were unlocked. The subsequent shriek caused him to ejaculate then to enter a profound comatose sleep.

Rudolph Legge died unrequited in the boot of an old Escort which had been joyridden and abandoned. No one remarked on the long-stay banger in a far corner of the Dog Kennel Hill car park where rust-coloured weeds erupted through the tarmac and dog roses climbed the thick wire fence and polythene bags blew like wind-socks in the bare boughs.

He had chosen badly. No one came to proffer his release. He was missing for sixteen days.

Mr Legge’s moustache was a decomposing roll-up. Henry watched the bedraggled couple whose hair was tight to the crown. Their stoop-shouldered clothes shone dark with rain. They weighed like ill-fitting pelts. He wondered whether their grief was tempered by the relief that they were no longer parents to an aberrant son and by the knowledge that he had perished doing the thing he loved. Henry saw the very lack of release from the boot of JWW 583S as a greater release – from a consuming possession, from a cupboard demon which could never be sated.

Mr and Mrs Legge were spared. They might have been victims of fate, of minor crime, of a car-park attendant’s lack of vigilance and curiosity. But they were also beneficiaries. They would no longer be dogged by Rudolph’s behaviour. They would no longer inhabit a world of perpetual anxiety. Blessing in disguise thought Henry, yes, blessing in disguise. Best thing that could have happened to them – and to Rudolph too: what sort of life was his? Where’s the quality of life in a life like that? There
are
lives that aren’t worth living.

There are people whom we can learn not to love even though the consequent void hurts and the loss makes us pine. Henry wished he had not exhumed Naomi’s secret. He had been so steady, so modestly content in his ignorance. His heart ached. He was working on learning not to love. There was no one to show him how. To how many parents is it vouchsafed that they are not parents? How many men have fatherhood torn from them? The very rarity of Henry’s predicament militated against its alleviation. There was no form to follow, no etiquette to ape. The erasure of paternal love is not among the practices and customs which comprise the common store of moral gambits. Henry had to teach himself, had to find his own way and finding his own way had not hitherto been Henry’s way. He was a man who went by the book. But this book was unwritten.

He sought, then, lessons from life. He was eagerly on the lookout for families more rent than his own. The Legges fitted the bill. He was proud to grief-manage such people. And he hoped that he might learn from observation and understanding of them. He was looking for other parents whose presumed equivocation about their children (live, dead or imposturous) would sanction his own. He sought to legitimise his willed antipathy to Ben and Lennie. He wanted to hear that the unconditional love of parent for child was a sentimental invention, not a law of nature. Henry wanted to persuade himself that his indulgence of Ben and Lennie was more than adherence to generational orthodoxy. He told himself that his paternal laxity was an expression of his indifference to them and to their well-being, that it was neglect by deep wallet.

The last of the seven drenched mourners had shaken hands with the bereaved parents.

The car that would take them to their childless home drew up beside a threadbare cypress. The wipers groaned against the rain’s tide. The driver’s condensed breath obscured his face. Droplets posing as mercury slipped across the profound black enamel.