The Fowler Family Business (9 page)

It was the view that was the problem for Henry. The megalopolis was spread beneath him. From the house on Ringmore Rise he could look right across the London Basin. It was – and everyone agreed – awesome, magnificent. People’d kill for a view like this, he thought.

That’s the Sally Army college on Champion Park – you know, by KCH. Oh and isn’t the Barbican tiny. Look at the Nat West Tower – are they ever going to finish the top? Hampstead. Highgate. Holloway. It’s like being in an aeroplane. Those vapour trails! That sunset! Sunsets like that are almost edible – they’re cassata. The terracotta tower of Imperial College signalled Curly’s whereabouts on Thursday afternoons, which was when he lectured. You could sit here all day and just watch the weather. Far far away, far beyond the lucent scum of particulates and emissions which flop across the city, rises Harrow Weald, the woody horizon at the extremity of this scene. Harrow Weald, where they had had their wedding reception. In memory of that day Henry Fowler calls it the Golan Heights.

It was the twin ziggurats of Dawson’s Heights which dominated the foreground. Henry was convinced that their inhabitants were work shy if not actively criminal. It was not however the proximity, on the next knoll, of this social housing project which caused him to experience an inchoate unease. It was the fact that the house on Ringmore Rise was linked to London’s immensity. Clean Air Acts and kindred legislation had done for smog and London Peculiars. The views were longer, clearer. Petrol haze couldn’t begin to match the good old pollutants’ toxic gauze – the blanket it spread was mere froth beside the rich head conjured from chimneys’ belching ooze. When they used to cycle up here as boys Stanley’s promised land of Up West was buried, invisible. Which, so far as Henry was concerned, it could remain.

‘You’d never,’ pronounced Curly, ‘get impressionism nowadays. Would you? No cause for it. You could say, only
could,
mind you … you could say that it was painting’s coming to terms with industrialisation’s environmental consequences. The artist’s response to filthy air … Looking at the world through a sort of smeared screen.’

‘Could just have been that they had bad eyesight,’ said Henry, who had recently buried a painter with cataracts.

‘Henry! That’s Nazi,’ Curly reproved him. ‘Degenerate art and all that. You know – product of malformed eyes … diseased minds. Perfidious bollocks. You need a photorealist for it now – it’s so incredibly
sharp
.’

Henry didn’t want to look at it. Not simply out of incuriosity but because despite being in the reassuring postal district of SE23 Ringmore Rise was insufficiently hermetic. Indeed it wasn’t hermetic at all. Henry abhorred the sheer quantity of light and sky. There was so much of everything.

He thought of himself severally – as father, husband, bearer of the familial tradition, loving son, reputable undertaker, loyal subject of his sovereign, reliable friend in a crisis, member of Dulwich and Sydenham Golf Club, member of Sundridge Park Golf Club, a safe driver (one of his little jokes – he’s talking cars, not golf), a sympathetic listener, environmentally responsible, intolerant only of intolerance, etc. He never thought of himself as a Londoner.

That was because he thought of himself as a
South
Londoner, a South-east Londoner. His London stretched across the hills from Honor Oak to South Norwood, it was bounded by Dulwich and Penge. It undulated relentlessly, up and over. Its roads followed the paths of ancient lanes, twisting through woods and across commons. They were yeoman’s roads which headed for the promised land of the Garden of England which was also the Garden of Eden (that fecundity, those abundant hop yards, those bulging orchards). These roads were natural. He believed that, and he would say so to rile Curly who dismissed them as pre-Euclidian and who argued that England would remain a backward country so long as it refused to adopt a grid system for its cities’ streets. Henry associated grids with central London, with the rectilinear maze of Marylebone and Bloomsbury. Grids were not a feature of provincial life, and it was a provincial life he led among the brick-covered hills which had once been westernmost Kent. We’re South Londoners so we wear brick next to the skin: Mr Fowler had instructed him thus when he was just a nipper and it was a dictum which he passed down to Ben and Lennie.

South Londoners are not Londoners. South Londoners are
South
Londoners. They turn their back on the Smoke. When they prosper they buy swank houses in Chiselhurst, Downe, Woodcote Village, Godstone, Brasted Chart, places with plenty of trees, tile hanging and white wicket fences. The Smoke is what is attached to South London, not vice versa. Henry knew that such an assertion ignored the metropolitan bent to centrifugence, that it took no account of chronology, sequence, cause, rail spread. He knew too that he was sentimentally right.

It was with defiant pride that he would look up from his diary to tell Naomi that he hadn’t been to the West End for ten months. Naomi was different. She had her shopping, her friends. Their joke was that she would pass on in a boutique’s fitting room and that he would go during a service in a chapel of remembrance. Henry Fowler expected to live all his life in South London. He expected too that his children would follow that example. He considered himself blessed in the presence of the trees, the bricks, the slopes, the spires. This was his enchanted garden.

The familiar never ceased to surprise him: the glimpses of the estuary from between the houses on Honor Oak Road; the palaces of the men who invented beef extract and chocolate biscuits, metal polishes and lithographic processes; the quaint toll-gate on the common; the escarpment of Sydenham Hill and the houses piled on top of each other over its slopes; the ever-tanned Bavarian whose stock-brick villa on Dulwich Wood Avenue had metal spikes along its roof ridge like those which had once protruded from his compatriots’ helmets; the railway station buried in a wild wooded gulley; the Horniman Museum’s shrunken heads which he had never noticed till the boiling summer night the Tetouan Conservatory Orchestra played there and Curly, then in his Moroccan phase, insisted they all go and watch the musicians with carious smiles and fezzes; the white pigeon lofts beside the allotments off Hamlet Road; the Gothic house which smelled of gas from the old dentist who had lived there all his life – the show hydrangeas around it feasted on the pulp of fifty years’ diseased molars in the flower-beds; the forlorn arches which had once supported the viaduct of the High Level Railway, a tardy casualty of the Crystal Palace’s destruction, commemorated by High Level Drive from which ran a cul-de-sac called Vigilant Close; the television transmitters at Crystal Palace, Beaulieu Heights and Rocombe Crescent just behind the house on Ringmore Rise, the Eiffel Towers of South London, Henry called them, and we’ve got three of them. Who needs Paris, eh?

And there was always something he hadn’t seen before. Not something new. No, a chipped plaster gargoyle above a window or a weeping tree or a path between garden walls or a railway carriage made into a summer-house exposed by a freshly cropped hedge. There were routes he had taken countless times, whose details were fixed in his memory but which were never entirely known, nooks which had previously gone unremarked. ‘Can’t remember seeing that before’ was so common a cry that Ben and Lennie would mimic it. Likewise: ‘There used to be a garage/corner shop/dressmaker just here – didn’t notice that it’d gone.’ It was like a marriage. The more you know someone the more there is to know, and it’s the anticipation of tiny, everyday discoveries that whets our appetite for each other: that, in Henry’s opinion, was love’s crux, that perennial willingness and need to dig deep, deeper into another soul.

Henry’s love for his London, for that London which was the only place he had ever known, was so intense, so normal and of such endurance that he believed that it was reciprocated. He believed that the bond was mutual, that his link to the land beneath the bricks, the lawns, the paving slabs, the hardcore, the shrubs, the pipes, the sheaths of cables, the ragstone, the henges of headstones was acknowledged by the land itself which spoke to him because it was connected to him by paternal and grandpaternal election. This was the land that immemorial Fowlers had chosen, and it spoke to Henry in gratitude for that patronage. It sent him, by means which he could not discern, messages of oneness and fidelity. It acknowledged his loyalty to it.

Henry grew old with his land, he accepted its blemishes. Even changes alleged to be for the better – the filling in of potholes, the clearing of condom sites overgrown with ground elder and buddleia and webbed with torn tights, the renovation of arsoned houses, the removal of the benches where sex offenders sat and masturbated beneath dripping chestnuts, the replacement of the corrugated-iron bus shelter on Gypsy Hill by a glass one which made it difficult for Maddy the Mad Mick to give ten-bob blow-jobs in relative privacy – were blemishes. They were blemishes not because Henry approved of these places and the activities which they had formerly been used for but because they maculated the pure land of his earliest memories, some of which were not actually his memories but syntheses of his infantile remembrances and of his father’s, honed by usage and already being passed down to Ben and Lennie. Their mnemonic vaults were filled with matter whose provenance was familial rather than personal.

We delude ourselves when we assume that our memories are exclusively our own: they belong to a common store that we share at different times of our life with parents, guardians, lovers, spouses, children, especially children. They are transmitted by repetition, anecdotally, accidentally: we all remember people we have never met, have never even seen in photographs, who died before we were born, before we were sentient. Henry did meet his Great-Uncle Arth once, shortly before his fourth birthday, at the Star and Garter Home on Richmond Hill where the old man was a tallow head poking from a pile of rugs with wheels beneath them. It was a head which had suffered multiple misfortunes and which bore the scar of every one of them. It frightened Henry who never forgot the way its milky eyes fixed on him and its mouth’s working corner articulated the words ‘the Boche … the Boche’ before it got back to its task of dribbling.

Those were the words which Henry thought it had spoken but his parents’ memory, when he mentioned the matter at the time of Arth’s death in 1958, was different. They were adamant that Henry had misheard: why would Arth have been talking about the Boche when he was a victim of the Boer War? It was at Magersfontein that he had left the back of his head, not Ypres. Henry was mistaken. Furthermore, he was insulting Arth’s memory by suggesting that he had even mentioned the Boche.

There was another Arth whom Henry’s memory would dredge up, a gay and sprightly Arth who bore his wounds lightly, whose wheelchair was decorated with hop-bines, whose party trick was to spit plum stones the length of a room. He loved to goose the ladies, this Arth did, he always had his good hand up someone’s skirt, he was such a so-and-so. Henry could picture him with sureness – there was Arth, with his head on one side, with a basket of plums beside him on a shady veranda smiling mischievously at a woman who had turned to slap him but whose ire melted when she saw his face. This Arth brought out the pity in people. Henry had never met him. But he had known him all his life. And Naomi knew him too though she fancied he was a grubby old bore: Naomi’s Arth had a different face from Henry’s Arth. Ben and Lennie wondered when they were going to meet Arth who sounded silly and was dead.

And when were they going to the Norfolk Broads where Grandma and Grandpa went on a motor boat two years before the war and which Daddy told them such stories about? And what was the
war
? It was, Ben told Lennie, like work, it sounded a bit like work, or maybe it was like lunch – things happened before the war like they happened before work, people were different after lunch. Breakfast? Yes, Lennie darling, war must be like breakfast. Hickling, Horning, where? Where was it that Grandpa and his friend Cyril got the ducking in the weedy water that made them panic and think they’d die? Why does the water look higher than the land? What’s the name of the house where the black-face sheep live? I thought you’d seen them Daddy. Why weren’t you there Daddy? It was
before
the war. Weren’t you born before the war? Those black fissured bones pushing out of the flat water are broken jetties. You
must
have been there, you’ve told us so much about it. Please tell us why you aren’t in the photos, and why do they have crinkly edges.

There is nothing like black and white for fixing the way a place should be for ever. So much of the South London which Henry wished Ben and Lennie to learn to love and to respect as their familial heritage was now to be found only in black and white, in old leather albums. They were so inculcated with that past that when they drove alongside Peckham Rye Common they wondered where the horse fair was and they berated the wicked gypsies who mistreated their animals and never washed their greasy black hair. They didn’t know what
go to the dogs at Catford
actually meant. Something to do with raining cats and dogs? But they chorused the phrase whenever that suburb was mentioned or broached. When Mr and Mrs Fowler had taken the infant Henry to Herne Hill to see their resentful, childless friends Dorry and Bill they would push him in his pram to Ruskin Park where Henry liked nothing better than to watch old people playing bowls. More than thirty years later with Dorry and Bill no longer friends of the Fowlers Henry would drive his children to the road where they had lived (and might still live), put his children in their double buggy and make his way across the park to the bowling green where he would long for an epiphanic souvenir of the child he had been. He hoped too that Ben and Lennie would share the fascination he had once had for the old people’s ritual movements, demure uniforms, stooped scampering. He imagined that one day he might play this covertly vicious, emotionally costive game and that years later, in their dotage which he would never see, Ben and Lennie would take it up watched by their children and grandchildren. He anticipated that prospect with a pleasure which was alloyed only by his worry about what Lennie’s married name might be. It wasn’t a matter over which, he acknowledged, he could realistically expect to have total control: it wasn’t every surname that would sit as well with Leonora as Fowler did. What if she were to marry Tim Prosser’s nipper who was just a few months older? Or one of the O’Rourkes’ ever-increasing brood? Leonora O’Rourke … it’s too much of a mouthful. Naomi’s incredulous indifference to this problem disappointed Henry just as much as her mockery of him for his insistence to the children that they should, on their Sunday walks, go down the street of collegiate diapered houses called Jews Walk – a diversion they tolerated because it took them by Freddie Glade’s house and the lonicera hedge sheared with formidable precision into the shape of a poodle.