The Fowler Family Business (7 page)

The dogs arrived just after dusk, galloping across the scrubby plateau, their pelts bouncing with belligerent ire, their tongues like horizontal pink standards, barking war cries and followed by Dennis Jacka’s cousin Ted Nancecarrow who had no teeth but made up for that lack with a string of convictions for assault, ABH, GBH, affray, etc. He couldn’t remember the number of foreigners he had fought for Cornwall and he never allowed anyone on his land. He carried a torch like a cosh, his stick quivered as though the hand holding it was in the throes of a fit. Henry and Curly used the crossbar of a bicycle as a ladder to the boughs of a sycamore. Curly was sore. He’d have been sorer still had the dogs known how to climb but they didn’t because they were dogs. Ted Nancecarrow struck the tree with his stick, he referred to the dogs as ‘my wolfs’. He struck them too. ‘My wolfs is hungry,’ he repeated. The torch’s beam picked out a leaf, a grimace, a wrist, a sappy twig broken in the rush to escape the slavering fangs. ‘Don’t like strangers on my land … don’t like strangers at all.’

He walked around the tent, prodding the canvas. He tried and failed to pull up a peg with his mud-crusted clumsy boot. He kicked over a jerrycan spilling all the water they had. He picked up a pack of sausages from beside the Primus stove and threw it to the dogs at the foot of the tree. They demonstrated their teeth, their greed, their ingestive urgency.

‘They like their scran: don’t you my wolfs? They’re not too fussy about it neither. Eat anything, they would.’

‘We didn’t know,’ said Henry. ‘Please …’

Ted Nancecarrow toyed with the fearful rictus in the boughs. He took pleasure in the pleading whine – it meant that he had stripped the foreign trespassers of their dignity and English pride. They were almost as humiliated as victims with bleeding eyes and hairline fractures begging him to put down the adze. He took pity on himself: he couldn’t chance it – another offence and he’d go down again, even if he was justifiably exercising a landowner’s right. His most recent suspended sentence had fourteen months to run. What would his wolfs do without him? They might attack the wrong people – they had a taste for Meriel Spargo, had to be held back, and they always went for old Bob Nankivell because he’d never washed beneath his foreskin for forty or more years ‘tis said. They might even be put to sleep.

‘You two. You got ten minutes. I’ll be back in ten minutes. And if you’re still here … You want to learn to keep off of other people’s land. Ten minutes I say.’ He had saved face. He could live with himself. He clapped his hands and the dogs followed him out of Henry’s and Curly’s lives.

They cycled through the night, not knowing where they were going, ignoring maps, signposts, stars, anxious only to be far from that flat scrubland. Fear fuelled their tendons, pushed the pedals hard. They were oblivious to the sycamore’s grazes and to the stiff hills. Their tyres purred. They passed hamlets, silos, byres, kennels, the illumined windows of hostile hearths. The swarthy bulk of a moor’s escarpment slumped against the sky, a beast best left to lie. The world was every shade of black: slave, sump, crow, char. Clumsy clouds lumbered into each other, blind, bloated, slomo, piling up in a piggyback of obese buggers over the terrible trees. The night was loud with the shrieks and moans of creatures berating their fate and their want of shelter. When the rain came it was from a sluice that stretched from one horizon to the next. The road became a tide against them.

It was Henry who took the decision to turn back, to follow a lane beside a bridge across a swelling stream. Their clothes were soaked. The stony surface was no impediment however in the quest for shelter. They stood to pedal. Where the lane diverged uphill from the stream there were grouped trees high above the western bank. Up on the knoll which the lane led to there stood the intact chimney and ruined buildings of a former tin mine’s engine house. Along the same contour, 400 metres away there were more buildings, unlit, discernible by the orthogonal pitch of their roofs, by their comforting straight lines. The rain made tympanic mayhem in the leaves above them but the trunks cut the wind. And no stream could rise, they reckoned, by a man’s height overnight to flood the tent in a demi-glade. The were right about that.

Curly scrambled down the bank to fill the jerrycan Ted Nancecarrow had dented with his foot. They ate emergency chocolate, failed to tune into Radio Luxembourg because the rain had got to the batteries, cleaned their teeth of the cloying chocolate (at Henry’s instruction). While the rain played pingpong on the canvas Henry reminisced about all the times he and Stanley had got soaked to the bone – great old times. When Curly started snoring Henry hardly noticed even though this was not the boy’s habit. He fell asleep and dreamed of rushing clouds, bicycles, coffins, trousers.

It was barely light when Curly howled. He twisted within his quilted blue nylon sleeping-bag. He drew it around him. He cried and apologised for crying. He managed to get outside before he vomited a streak of bile marbled with chocolate. Henry stood over him, tentative arm round the shoulder as he repetitively retched. Soon there was nothing left to express, but his stomach and gorge didn’t know that and he jerked forth spasmodically. He ate grass like a dog. By the time that the sun rose over the hill beyond the stream Henry, too, was on all fours shitting from his mouth, writhing, blaming God and Cornwall. He crawled, he moaned as he spewed. When he got as far as the steaming bank of the stream he saw the leucous opacity of the water. It burbled and tumbled like blue-tinted milk, liquid Stilton. He stared at it wondering what had coloured it. He groaned as a ratchet was tightened in his belly. Sweat oozed from him, he was as wet as he would have been from total immersion. There was a hiatus between his seeing the clouded water and his realisation that this was the source of their sickness. Then he spied a dead minnow bobbing. He cursed the stream, he cursed the bully who had caused them to drink from it. When he spoke to say ‘We’ve been poisoned Curly – look at this’ his voice was hoarse, his throat was inflamed.

All that day they lay in the sun as pain played with them, now dull, now sharp, now in their joints, now in their innermost organs. There had been nothing in the water’s flavour to indicate that it was contaminated – which was a solace of a sort. If it was tasteless then it couldn’t be that bad, could it? He didn’t want Curly’s illness on his conscience, he didn’t want the second brother haunting him, too. They hadn’t the will or strength to swat the corpulent flies which leeched their blood. They resigned themselves to files of ants passing over their damaged bodies. It was Henry who suffered hallucinations; he’d drunk that much more water the night before. The trees mutated into jagged webs of metal and wire. Their leaves were oxidised blades and the sibilance of the breeze in those blades was deafening, a sussurant din as though conches were glued to his ears and he were being force-fed a Eustachian diet of sea, sea, sea. Each blade of glass owned a hue different to all others. There was a smell of scorched flesh in his sinuses. The soldiers who found them, foetally curved and twitching, were actually two schoolboys dressed in camouflage fatigues skiving from a CCF exercise to smoke Consulates (pure as a mountain stream) and drink scrumpy. Their inebriation and fear of being caught AWOL combined to make it two hours before they called an ambulance, which delivered Henry and Curly to the cottage hospital at Bodmin, whence they were released the next day by Dr Tarpley who advised them to boil water before drinking it. Their bicycles and tent had been stolen. They ran up whopping taxi debts.

Going on twelve years later Henry, a father of two with a throbbing molar, flipped through a glossy magazine in his dentist’s waiting-room. In a drink supplement he found an ill-wrought article titled ‘The Scrumpy Bar Kid’. The writer reminisced about bunking off from CCF field-days to drink coarse cider poured from the barrel into a jerrycan, about cycling from one scrumpy bothy to the next on a Raleigh Spacerider. That was the marque and model of bicycle that Henry had lost. Henry ripped out the article, pocketed it. That would be a man to hunt down, to trace. He liked the idea of such detective work, of a quest with a cause.

Clotted cream. Devonport Dockyard (proposed closure of).
Lorna Doone
on telly – ‘and did you know Lorna was a made-up name?’ Naomi reminiscing about a school trip to Appledore or her dad’s friend Nat’s Austin Somerset or her protestation that ‘you don’t have to be Jewish to stay at the Imperial but it helps’. The wreck of the
Torrey Canyon.
Harold and Mary Wilson’s Scilly Isles bungalow.
The Boyhood of Raleigh.
Artistic potters. Prisons. Paddington Bear. Messy abstracts.

At any mention of the West of England Henry and Curly would mime ralphing, retching and reaching. No matter how obliquely it was alluded to it was enough to set them off. That holiday was a weld in their fraternal bond. They’d been through it together. They’d survived where minnows hadn’t. Ben and Leonora, a.k.a. Lennie, grew up listening to their father and their Uncle Curly making the noises that they had just grown out of, baby noises and bad gurgles.

‘I don’t know,’ said Mr, Fowler, looking over his spectacles from the abridged
Treasure Island
he was reading to Ben and Lennie, ‘I don’t know, a varsity man and all. I think your uncle’s soft in the head I do.’ Curly made a wailing bark and stumbled round the room clutching his tummy. Ben laughed and pointed. Curly picked him and swung him to and fro.

‘Uncle Curly, Uncle Curly,’ Lennie cried. She wanted to be lifted through the air too.

Mr Fowler looked on fondly, proudly. ‘You’d have made such a funeral director Curly – you got a way with people. You’re a people person.’

‘What’s a people person?’ asked Lennie.

‘I’m more a car person,’ said Curly.

‘People drive cars,’ Mr Fowler pointed out.

‘I got two cars,’ said Ben, holding up three electric model hearses.

‘You’ve got three,’ said Curly. ‘And what have I got?’

‘You got a real Sitran.’

‘Citro-ën,’ corrected Curly, fussily. His CX GTI Turbo was parked outside. His DS21 was in his garage at home, less than a mile away.

‘Two Citroëns, he’s got. And they’re both black. They use them as hearses in France,’ claimed Mr Fowler.

‘Ambulances,’ said Curly.

‘Close enough,’ grinned Mr Fowler.

‘Nee-nor, nee-nor, nee-nor, nee-nor,’ repeated Ben the Ambulance.

Naomi poked her head through the serving hatch and told him to be quiet, to come and wash his hands before lunch.

The
Sunday Express
in the corner armchair was lowered and Henry asked, ‘We ready then, I’m extra peckish.’

‘Is Daddy going to eat all the crackling?’ asked Ben.

‘’Slamb. No crackling on lamb. Come on!’ insisted Naomi.

‘Why no crackling on lamb?’

‘Cause there isn’t,’ Henry told him.

‘Why?’

‘Because.’

‘Because what?’

‘Because … because. Because God gave lambs wool instead of crackling.’

‘Can’t eat wool – urgh.’

Mrs Fowler sieved flour into the roasting pan and scraped it with a wooden spoon. The noise made Curly shiver. He clenched his teeth and fists. Naomi drained the carrots: ‘Butter them would you Curl.’

His knife bounced off the frozen half pound. He emitted an exasperated petulant tush. He flapped the fumous kitchen air with the knife. He inspected it. ‘Hasn’t seen a steel in years,’ he told Naomi, reproachfully.

‘Ooh dear,’ she said with parodic emphasis.

Curly looked hurt. ‘It is, paradoxically, blunt knives which are dangerous. It’s like keeping your body in trim. If you’re fit you’re not so likely to get injured. Tools need to be kept in trim too.’

‘Well sharpen it then,’ she said brusquely, sensitive to her failure to recover her figure after the birth of the children within a year of each other.

For four and a half years since Lennie was born she had dieted, subscribed to fads and partworks, adhered to the principle that if one calorie-free rusk is good for you then two calorie-free rusks must be better. But it hadn’t made any difference to her tennis, and her golf had definitely improved – her handicap was down to seventeen, which was partly ascribable to the improved coaching of the new club pro Denny Groebe and partly, as her tactless partner Jill Tann too often joked, to her having ‘more meat to put into the drive’.

‘These,’ said Curly, holding up an electric knife sharpener he’d found at the back of a drawer, ‘do more harm than good – they hack at the blade, they leave it sort of serrated.’

‘Curly!’

In the afternoon the children and their grandparents got into Curly’s bouncy CX, and Henry and Naomi followed in the Jaguar. They were off to Crystal Palace Park which despite the fire at the end of November 1936 which had consumed the great glass pavilion Mr Fowler regarded as the heart of ‘his’ London, a site Henry accepted with filial faith. He was keeping Curly’s car in view and taking bets with himself on how long it would be before his father gave his eyewitness account of that fire when Naomi, hitherto unusually mute, asked: ‘D’you think Curly’s all right?’

He was tempted to answer ‘Of course he’s all right, he’s my best mate’ but Naomi’s tone militated against a pat response.

He asked: ‘What do you mean all right?’

‘Well, you know, he’s always over every Sunday …’

‘The wine he brings is usually worth more than the entire meal.’