The Fowler Family Business - Jonathan Meades

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in his head. Friendship was suspended, blotted out. He felt a momentary resistance to his hand, he walked on, not noticing the depth of the puddles, aware of a bronze streak across the perimeter of his sinistral vision like a light flaw, deaf to the mortal howl because of the thudding clamour in his head. At the end of that moment he became aware of the absence of Stanley’s feet a few inches above him. He had gone from A (the bridge’s mid-point) to, say, D (the worn metal steps at its end) and arriving there had realised that he had no memory of B and C.

      That’s when he ran, with his coat inflated by the wind. He ran to the parade of single-storey shops. He noticed how the pediment above the middle shop had lost some of its dirty white tiles, how it was an incomplete puzzle. That shop was a florist’s. There was a queue of macs and handbags which turned in unison to gesturing Henry. He stepped out as soon as he had stepped in, his nostrils gorged by funeral perfumes.

      The next shop was all dead men’s clothes and their repulsive cracked shoes – you can never get the sweat out of leather, that’s undertaker lore, family wisdom. Closed, anyway, gone early for lunch, said a note taped to the door’s condensing glass. Which is why he hustled past two new hairdos with jowly flicks coming out the door of Giovanni of Mayfair and slithered down the chequered corridor flanked by the stunted cones on the heads of women who would be visitors from the Planet Kwuf. ‘Jimmy, Jimmy,’ he panted: Henry knew Jimmy Scirea because Jimmy advised the family business on dead hair and how to dress it.

      Henry was all agitated. Jimmy had never seen him even mildly agitated, had always considered him a calm boy, so this was unusual. Even so Henry controlled himself enough to act with what his father counselled, with all due decorum: no ears were sheared by the sharpened scissors of the high-haired apprentices who augmented the numbers every Saturday.

      They were not privy to Henry’s brief conversation with Jimmy, and Carolle the receptionist was used to Jimmy mouthing ‘Say goodbye’ and making a gesture with a flat hand across his throat when he needed the phone. There was no panic. She told her new love Salvador that she had to go and handed the apparatus to Jimmy and to the pimply boy whom she had thought at first must be the son of one of the ladies under the driers. She couldn’t help but hear the name of Stanley Croney, the beautiful boy, the cynosure of every hairdresser’s receptionist’s eyes.

      Henry’s face was puffy, sweaty, tearful. There was a film of salty moisture all over its manifold eruptions, there were greasy rivulets between them like the beginnings of brooks just sprung from the earth. He rapped impatiently on the phone’s ivory-coloured handset and glared at it as though it might be faulty. He took against a fancifully framed, pertly coloured photograph of a hairdo like a chrysanthemum. He spoke, at last, in urgent bursts as though his breathing was asthmatically impaired. There was a flawed bellows in his chest.

      He declined the receptionist’s offer of water. He detailed the circumstances with cursory precision. He listened intently, told the ambulance how to get to the bridge. He was calmer when he made his next call, to the police. He used the words ‘larking about, having a bit of a laugh’. He rather impertinently added: ‘Remember the traffic lights are out by the station there.’ He put down the phone, sighed, wiped his face with a paisley handkerchief, thanked the receptionist for the use of the phone and thanked Jimmy Scirea who was putting on an overcoat. Henry seemed surprised that the hairdresser should follow him from the salon. The hairdreser was in turn surprised that Henry, instead of hurrying back to the site of the accident, should amble across the road to Peattie’s bakery to buy a bag of greasy doughnuts which he began to eat with absorption as he made his way back to the bridge. He covered his face with sugar. He inspected the dense white paste. He thrust his tongue into the jammy centre. He ate as if for solace or distraction just as a smoker might draw extra keenly on a cigarette. When they reached the bridge Jimmy Scirea hauled himself on to the top of the side to look down at the body below. Then he tried to loosen a cracked fence pale to gain access to the embankment. Henry shook his head and said, with his mouth full, extruding dough, ‘Don’ rye it. Don’ bother. Bleave it to them. Too steep.’ He stuck a hand in his mouth to release his tongue from his palate. ‘Ooph – bit like having glue in your mouth but they’re very tasty. Think I’ll get some more later. Yeah definitely.’

       Chapter Four

      When Henry Fowler married Naomi Lewis his best man was Stanley Croney’s brother.

      No, Curly didn’t forget the ring though for a moment he searched his pockets in the pretence that he had!

      No, he didn’t embarrass the guests by telling off-colour gags – though he suggested that he was about to do so by talking about the day that Henry hid the salami! This, however, was merely the introduction to an anecdote about Henry removing a pork product from the table on one of Naomi’s early visits, before he realised that her family’s assimilation was such that they ignored dietary proscriptions.

      ‘My dad’s motto,’ Naomi never tired of explaining, ‘is – the best of both worlds, salt beef and bacon, Jewish when it suits!’ Not all of Naomi’s family and friends were as blithely indifferent to observances as she and her father were. Curly Croney was, even then, at the age of eighteen, canny enough not to stir things between the bride’s two factions. Having felt the coolness with which that allusion to the Lewises’ casual apostasy was received he made no further mention of it.

      He spoke instead, with the persuasive humility which was to stand him in such favourable stead in his professional life, about his debt to his friend, the bridegroom Henry Fowler, his brother and comforter Henry Fowler, who had taken the place of his real brother Stanley. Irreplaceable Stanley – save that Henry had replaced him, as much as anyone ever could.

      It was Henry who despite the almost five years’ difference in their ages had guided him through the bewilderment and grief that they had both suffered. It was Henry who had been his guiding light and mentor; he had become, as a result of a silly accident, an only child in a shattered family. And it was through Henry’s belief in the integrity and sanctity of family that the Croney family had been able to repair itself. (At this juncture Curly smiled with radiant gratitude towards the grey mutton-chop sideburns covering his father’s face and to the white miniskirt exposing his mother’s blue-veined thighs.) Henry, not least because of his own parents’ example, understood the strength of family and the importance of its perpetuation whatever losses it might suffer: a strong family is an entity which can recover from anything, and Henry had shown the way.

      Curly didn’t know that Naomi’s mother had only returned to the family home in Hatch End fourteen months previously after a three-year liaison with a wallpaper salesman in Cape Town which ended when Louis died in the bedroom of a client’s house during a demonstration of new gingham prints and Louis’s daughters brought an action to remove Naomi’s mother from the green-pantiled Constantia bungalow which was now theirs. Nor did he know that fourteen of Naomi’s mother’s aunts, uncles and first cousins had died at Sobibor and Treblinka and that there is no familial recovery from such thorough murder.

      But those in the Classic Rooms of the Harrow Weald Hotel that squally afternoon of 25 August 1968 who had evaded or who had survived industrial genocide were in no mood to oppose the patently decent, patently grateful young man and were inclined, too, to conjoin with him in his celebration of the tanned blond undertaker whom Naomi so obviously loved and had chosen to make her own family with far away, on the corresponding south-eastern heights of the Thames Basin – there, see them there, through the rolls of weather, places we’ve never been to, goyland, where the JC means Jesus Christ, where yarmulkes are rarely seen, where it may not even be safe to practise psychiatry, where a vocabulary of hateful epithets is nonchalantly spoken, unreproached, in the salons and golf clubs. There are sixty-five synagogues north of the Thames; there are five south of it, and about as many delis. No ritual circumcisers, either – a lack which had not even occurred to Curly Croney, which duly went unmentioned although in later years Naomi’s father, Jack Lewis, would sometimes jocularly greet Henry as ‘the man the mohel missed’. Henry took this in good spirit and was unfazed by the overintimate coarseness, because it was so obviously

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