My Father's Fortune Read online

  Where was she, I wonder now for the first time, while the rest of us were sitting howling on the bed? Downstairs in her own little room, presumably, howling alone. My father had forgotten that there was someone else in the house who had known her for even longer than he had.

  And my father, yes. Now I begin to imagine for the first time what it was like for him. His claim that he was the one who would miss her most, it seems to me now, even if he has forgotten her mother, is not so out of place. It’s twenty-six years since he marched up to her so cheekily at that party, when he was eighteen and she was fourteen. Since then it’s been Tommy and Vi. Tommy and Vi’s house. Tommy and Vi’s kids. Tommy and Vi’s holiday snaps, back garden, Sunday tea parties. He’s never known adult life without her.

  Now he wires himself up in his hearing aid in the empty bedroom, and comes down to the confusion in the kitchen, where Phyllis is coping heroically, only she doesn’t know where the special glass is that Jill drinks her milk out of, or what consistency Michael’s porridge has to be if it’s not going to make him sick, or how to keep the boiler in, or what to do about her mother sitting in her room weeping and saying it should have been her, or how she can keep her job if she’s late yet again.

  I suppose Tommy gives her a lift, and they sit side by side in silence until he drops her on the Northern Line at Colliers Wood or Balham. Then he drives on through the grey South London boroughs, alone with the grey samples on the back seat of the car, the grey photographs of asbestos warehouses and carriage-washing sheds. Turns left up some grey back street, left again up another. Everything greyer and shabbier than ever after five years of war … Switches his hearing aid on to hear the silence of all the colleagues who know what’s happened, but not what to say about it, the joshing of all the customers who don’t know, and who are smiling already at the cracks that old Tom Frayn always comes up with.

  Then, at the end of the day, back to the shabby house, with the green gates sagging on the rotten gate-posts. Back to my sister and me. We’re his biggest worry, of course. We seem quiet enough. What’s going on inside us, though? Should he try to say something to us, or will it just upset us? What could he possibly say? Perhaps we’ll broach the unbroachable subject ourselves. Mention her name. Ask about her – whether it hurt her when it happened, whether she’s in heaven. He almost wishes we would. The silence between us all is like a pall of grey dust in the house.

  Or he could pull us to him, one on either side of him, and put his arms around us, and push our heads into his chest. It would make us cry, of course. It would make him cry. He doesn’t want to upset us again.

  What’s it going to do to his lovely children, though, having this terrible thing in their lives? Twelve years old and eight years old … How can he ever begin to make things all right for them?

  He sits in his chair by the wireless, doing his reports, keeping an eye on us. I’m at the dining table with my homework spread out in front of me. My sister lies on the floor under the darts board, making a cat’s cradle, unmaking it, making it again. We seem to be keeping ourselves occupied. Perhaps we’ve already stopped thinking about what happened in this room. Perhaps we’re already beginning to get over it …

  A huge practical problem remains, though, and is getting more urgent by the day: how is he ever going to be able to look after us? He can’t give up work. He can’t expect Phyllis to go on coping for ever.

  It’s another of the tests he’s been set in life. Twelve years he had to wait to get married, while he supported his mother and his disabled sister. Then another dozen years keeping his parents-in-law afloat. At least he had someone to share all that with. But now …

  What on earth is he going to do?

  *

  But it’s the same story as the rusty chopper that hammers the nails in crooked, and the toy cricket bat that didn’t reach the ball. We don’t have a workbench, of course, or a vice. I saw away on the top of the Morrison shelter in the kitchen, struggling to hold the wood flat with my free hand. Patiently Uncle Sid removes my thumb from underneath the teeth of the saw – then snatches the saw as it bounces out of the groove towards where the thumb has taken refuge … Gradually he takes the work over, and I fall once again into the role of spectator.

  With therapeutic slowness and dullness the boat takes shape. Is sanded, undercoated, painted white on top and black below. Is tested in the bath. Is taken to the boating pond on the recreation ground in Epsom. Struggles slowly across it, flat and broad in the beam, among all the sleek ocean racers around it. The boat is the physical embodiment of my uncle’s imaginative kindness and sacrifice of his time. When I think about those weeks after my mother died this is what I see – the flat, broad-beamed little boat struggling slowly across the sunless waters of the boating pond, then being turned around, and struggling slowly back again.

  By this time, I suppose, Sid has been demobilised. He has done his bit towards slaughtering the civilian population of Germany and gone back to his old job at Carreras, making his modest contribution towards slaughtering the civilian population of Britain. He and Phyllis both. And both of them taking thought, and time out from their work, to help their brother-in-law and his children through their wretchedness. Have I ever done anything remotely as generous?

  Another of my unpaid debts.

  *

  The answer to our father’s problem emerges, I should imagine, because no one can think of anything else: our grandmother. Nanny’s going to look after us.

  It seems obvious enough at the time. There she is, in the house – has been, ever since we moved into it – is still, when Phyllis and Sid, after their noble work as emergency stopgaps, have to go back to North London. Now, though, as I for the first time really think about it, I see how desperate the plan is. She’s seventy-three – and seventy-three not in the way that people are now, but in the way that they were then. Even by those more modest standards she’s decidedly frail. She moves with some difficulty. In the last ten years she has not, so far as I know, walked further than the back garden. She seems perpetually short of breath. She’s always laying her hand to her breast, as if about to suffer the heart attack which should have killed her before. She hasn’t run a household since she moved in with my parents when they first got married, fourteen years earlier, or looked after children of our age since the First World War. I suppose she has helped my mother about the house, particularly with little cries of alarm and warnings of disaster, and no doubt with private prayers. But she has always expected to spend a lot of time each day in her room, resting and writing letters to her sister Lal.

  Now she has to start doing everything. Cooking and ironing. Making the beds. Washing and cleaning, with no machinery to help her apart from a second-hand Goblin vacuum cleaner which I doubt she ever has the courage to switch on. There’s a gas fire in the lounge, but we never use the lounge, and a single disintegrating electric fire, because why buy another one when you can move the broken bits of the one you’ve got from room to room? – but she has to carry the anthracite for the kitchen boiler, then get down on her knees to rake it out and cart the ashes. She has to carry the coal for the dining-room fire and hold a newspaper over the grate to make a draught while the fire catches, then hurriedly stuff the blazing newspaper up the chimney before it sets fire to her and the rest of the house.

  No doubt my father does what he can with the boilers and fires, at any rate, before he goes off to work and after he gets home. My sister and I probably sometimes get shamed into helping a bit. We don’t darn our socks, though, or turn our shirt cuffs and collars, or patch our sheets. Nanny does that in the evenings, after everything else, sitting at the dining-room table, peering close with her weak eyes in the light of the single overhead bulb. Socks are made of wool, and develop holes in the toe and heel about once a week. They’re never thrown away, and nor are worn-out shirts and sheets, because clothes are rationed.

  Yes, she has to cope with the ration books, for food as well as clothes. Almost everything ap
art from vegetables and bread is still rationed, and almost everything has to be queued for. And even before she starts queueing and sorting out the ration books she has to get to the shops.

  It’s at this point that not only my memory but my imagination fails. The shops are in Ewell Village, a mile away. She certainly doesn’t cycle there, as my mother did. Nor does she walk. What – a mile there, a mile back? There’s a bus – but Nanny wouldn’t get on a bus! Would she? And even the bus stop’s a quarter of a mile away. Can she walk a quarter of a mile? I just can’t bring an image before my mind of her even walking out of the front gate, let alone going a hundred yards to the corner, any more than I can see her flying to the Village on a broomstick. I think we still have the ducks at this point, so she’s boiling up kitchen scraps and taking them down to the mudheap at the end of the garden twice a day. But the balancer meal that has to be mixed with them? The fifty-pound sacks that have to be fetched from the village? I suppose my father and I help with the shopping and the balancer meal, though I can’t remember it.

  But then, worse than everything else put together, she has to cope with my sister and me. Up to now, I think, she has managed to preserve some illusions about us. She’s able to see us not only as the bespectacled, awkward, squabbling little lumps who sprawl about the house each day, and have to be shouted at to tidy our toy cupboard, but, on some higher plane accessible only to the inner eye of a fond grandmother, fallen angels trailing a last few shreds of innate glory. She’s devoted to us. She would make any sacrifices for us, and, now I come to think about it, is probably feeding us most of her rations. She must know, though, as she takes on her new role that bleak winter, what little devils we can be if we get half a chance.

  We have now got half a chance – and a good deal more than half. Little devils is what we promptly become.

  We’re rude and disobedient. Of course. But what we fasten on most mercilessly is her fearfulness, her readiness to clutch at her heart and get short of breath and foresee calamity. She has a particular fear of heights. Not on her own behalf, because she’d never dream of going near anything that might constitute a height. It’s the sight of us near the edge of anything more than a foot or two above ground level that makes her head spin. Heights, therefore, are what we’re irresistibly drawn to. It’s difficult to find any very convincingly dangerous heights around a two-storey house. We can’t get on to the roof now that the hole in it has been retiled, and we don’t (of course) possess a ladder. It’s impossible to climb very high in an elder or a buddleia. We do our best with what’s available, though. We dare each other, when we’re supposed to be in bed, not just down to the dining-room door, but out of the back bedroom window on to the narrow leads above the bay window in the dining room, or out of the front bedroom window to balance on the six-inch-wide ledge in front of it. We get up on to the roof of the coal shed, the felt over which has worn away to reveal the fragility of the boards beneath. We balance on the edge of the rotting barrel that collects rainwater, and inhale its stagnant green miasma as we haul ourselves up on to the fence behind it, and then work our way along the edge of the fence between our garage and Miss Hay’s. The wood is full of splinters, and is a foot or less from the garage on either side. One slip, and we’re going to end up with a leg wedged between fence and garage. Or with one leg down one side of the fence and one leg down the other, so that the edge of it is … But already we’re off the fence and crawling up the tiles to the crest of the garage roof.

  I discover that I’m now tall and brave enough – just – to follow my father’s route up into the loft. Bathroom stool – a few books on top of it to make up the difference between his height and mine – knees flexed twice – one foot on bedroom door handle – other foot on architrave – push trapdoor with head – wild grab for edge … From up here I discover that I’m looking down not just on the landing, and the tiny target of the bathroom stool which, if I ever want to get back, I will somehow have to find blind with my exploring foot as I hang from the trap – I hadn’t thought of this, or I should never have started! – but also the dizzying drop of the stairs.

  With Nanny running up them, clutching her heart and screaming at me to come down, most satisfactorily terrified. A lot of my memories of her from this period are as seen from above, having trouble with her breathing, her thin grey hair flying in the wind, ineffectually threatening me with what she’s going to tell my father when he gets home. Once, shouting hopelessly up at me as I gingerly work my way along those thin boards on the roof of the coal shed, she’s reduced to calling me a limb of Satan. Or so I have it recorded in my memory. I must have got this out of a book, though. Surely.

  In my most painfully sharp recollection of her, however, I’m at ground level, and so is my sister. We’re not frightening her – she’s frightening us. We’re standing in the lounge, where no one ever goes, except to telephone, and in our case to open our presents at Christmas. It’s not Christmas, though, nor is anyone telephoning. Nanny’s in her room, with my father and Dr Wilde, but the door must be open, because we can hear her. She’s uttering little cries of distress. They come at intervals of a few seconds, as regular and inhuman as if they were from a machine, and whatever’s happening to her must have been going on for a long time now, since my father has evidently had time to get the doctor. I can hear Dr Wilde’s soothing Irish voice, trying to reassure her. On and on that terrible noise goes, though, on and on.

  My sister and I are standing close to each other in the lounge, and we’re both crying. ‘She’s going to die as well, isn’t she,’ sobs my sister. ‘We’re not going to have anyone.’ There’s nothing I can say to comfort her. Nanny’s predictions have finally come true. She is going to die, and we shan’t have anyone – and it’s us who have killed her. The circumstances are so painful that we’ve even managed to allude obliquely, if only by implication, to our mother’s death.

  *

  Somehow, though, Nanny manages to postpone death once again. She recovers from whatever it was – no one explains anything to my sister or me, of course – and on she goes. Cooking, carrying the coals. Clutching her heart and screaming up at us in terror as we gaze mockingly down at her.

  Perhaps it’s the heart attack, or the panic attack, or whatever it was, that persuades my father we can’t go on like this. Somehow he finds a housekeeper.

  She’s called Olive, and she’s everything that Nanny’s not. Still, I would guess, in her thirties; strong, calm, intelligent, self-confident and capable. Used to dealing with children – she has a daughter of about my sister’s age. Unshakeably reasonable. Reads the New Statesman, and sends her daughter as a weekly boarder to a famous progressive school in Epsom. Unlikely to be impressed by our exploits ten or twenty feet above ground level, if only because she’s the widow of an RAF squadron leader. And, in social class, way above the heads of all of us. I see now how desperate my father is. But I also see how much more desperate Olive must be to have to move into someone else’s house – and our run-down house at that. To have to accustom herself to the kind of furniture and appliances that we have – the Bentalls suite, the blunt chopper, all the things made out of asbestos samples. How has she come to this? A squadron leader’s pension must surely enable her to keep her head above water. Is it her daughter’s school fees? Loneliness? Altruism? Perhaps altruism comes into it. We’re her charity cases. I hope so. It’s too painful to think of an educated woman with a life of her own being reduced to this. A terrible picture of her comes to me, sharing my sister’s bedroom, sleeping in the bed I used to sleep in, while I move to a camp bed in my father’s room … But this must be false. The camp bed in my father’s room was later, surely. She would have taken over Nanny’s room downstairs when Nanny moved out. She would at least have had her own room! Wouldn’t she?

  I find it very difficult now to sort out the chronology and exact arrangements of those bleak years. One bizarre detail, though, has stuck in my memory – something that got us off to an unfortunate start. It
’s a Saturday afternoon, and Olive and her daughter Angela have just arrived. They’re sitting on the three-piece suite in the dining room; their suitcases are in the lounge. Olive’s drinking tea and making pleasant, measured, middle-class conversation to my father, of a sort with which I became entirely familiar later in life, but which has never been heard before in our house. My father has his hearing aid switched on and his ear cupped, but he still evidently can’t hear much of what she’s saying in her agreeably modulated tones. Angela, a white-faced, unsociable child (spoilt, as we come to think, by her progressive education), is sprawling on the settee reading a comic, pointedly ignoring my sister and me. My sister and I (spoilt, as I imagine Olive already thinks, by our conventional upbringing) are sitting up stiffly, speaking when spoken to, pointedly ignoring Angela. Angela has already decided that she doesn’t like us. We have already decided that we don’t like her. Our mutual feelings are not going to change.

  Nanny, meanwhile, is moving out. Which is to say that she’s fluttering blindly about the house, hand to heart, dabbing at her eyes with a lavender-scented lace handkerchief, unable through her tears to find anything she’s looking for or to know where to pack it. Every tear, every sigh, every silence make clear that she is with the utmost reluctance and certainty of disaster surrendering her two little innocents to someone who has probably learnt her trade working in a concentration camp.

  At last she’s as ready as she’s ever going to be. I suppose my father’s about to drive her, together with her scarves, shepherdesses and silver-framed photographs, over to Hendon, where Phyllis and Sid, now married, are lodgers in a semi-detached house on the main road to Edgware. She must have made a final trip to the lavatory before the journey – and now the social awkwardness of this painful occasion leaps to a new level altogether. Suddenly she’s rushing back into the dining room in the middle of some kind of hysterical breakdown. It’s almost as bad as her earlier attack, and almost as difficult to understand what’s going on.