My Father's Fortune Page 18

  And I slide the other way, out of the pew and out of the church, to hide my shame in the darkness of the winter night. I have failed the challenge. And God knows it, even if the vicar doesn’t. When the day of the confirmation comes, and the bishop places his hand on my head, there will be a sound as of a mighty rushing wind, the veil of the temple will be rent, and a thunderbolt from heaven will fall upon me harder than even the biggest and best of the Reverend J. B. Lawton’s canes.

  *

  My earthly father, though, somehow manages to remain fatherly, in spite of all my tediousness. Every now and then we listen to a concert on the radio together, even if some of the composers fail to meet my critical standards. On Sundays we often do the easier of the two crosswords in the Observer. (‘Where the vicar and the butler keep their underclothes. 2 words: 6, 6’ – ‘Vestry, pantry.’) When I’m away at the Boy Scouts’ annual summer camp, suffering torments of homesickness in a waterlogged field in the Isle of Wight, he drives all the way down with my sister to pay me an unannounced visit.

  His car is, as ever, one of the bonds between us. In the school holidays he drives me up to town with him in the morning so that I can spend the day gazing impotently into shop windows full of Leicas and Contaxes. A little later some of the trips are to Harley Street, to an ear, nose and throat specialist who hammers a punch through the bone inside my nose to drain my sinuses and stop the catarrh that is thought to be causing me infections – almost as crude a procedure as our work with chopper and screwdriver on the asbestos boxes, though rather more disagreeable – and rather more expensive, I imagine, for my father. I’m just beginning to discover art by this time. My first experience of Van Gogh and Turner in the Tate is indissolubly connected with the sensation of blood filling the handkerchief I’m holding over my nose, and of the gathering pain in my face as the novocaine wears off. Then I go to Southwark and, handkerchief still to face, join my father and Mr Kerry for lunch in a pub called the Coal Hole.

  I come out of school one hot summer’s afternoon – and there in the dreary dust and noise of the London Road is the hat, and beneath the hat the smile. I’m caught off-guard. I feel a surge of helpless joy. He just happened to be in Kingston, or within half a dozen miles of it, and he has the car waiting. We’re going swimming in the river at Thames Ditton. The smile’s always turning up like that, unannounced, disarmingly familiar in unlikely surroundings. Sometimes for a perfectly prosaic purpose, to take me to get new shoes, say. I suppose he’s lonely – lonelier than me. The sight of the joy in my face must give him some joy in return. We’re growing closer even as I become more difficult.

  *

  That smile of his. It’s what everyone always remembered about him. It emerged from the depths of him. When he smiled the smile became him; he became the smile. He wasn’t always smiling, of course. I can remember him angry, in pain, unhappy. Absorbed, blank. His mouth could also twitch not with humour but with impatience and irritation. In any case everyone smiles, and for many different reasons. You can smile with conscious intent – to charm and ingratiate yourself, for example – and as a salesman my father, I’m sure, did both. To demonstrate superiority and condescension, and there was sometimes a touch of this in his impatience with me. To conceal distress or incomprehension; and my father certainly did it sometimes for both those reasons. Particularly the latter; his smile was an adjunct to his hearing aid. Then again you can smile without conscious purpose, out of amusement, out of love, out of simple happiness; and when my father’s smile came round the door, or stood waiting for me outside the school that dusty summer’s day, I think there was a bit of all three in it.

  Only once does his imagination fail him. I’ve bought an old cigarette case in the Cattle Market, filled it with the snapshots I’ve taken – and lost it at the bathing place in Thames Ditton. He finds me lying on my bed weeping. All his worries about the effects produced on my character by failing to catch cricket balls and running round in the twilight with girls overwhelm his judgement, and I get another lecture about manliness. I suppose it hasn’t occurred to him, any more than it has consciously to me, that it might be more than an old cigarette case and a dozen grey prints that I’m weeping for.

  I’m still sleeping at this point in the folding camp bed that has been set up for me next to his in the back bedroom. It must be very shortly after this that my grandmother, also repaying good for ill, insists on moving out of her little room on the ground floor and in with my sister upstairs, so that I can at last have a room of my own. When I think what it must have cost her to give up this final remaining foothold in privacy and independence I’m humbled. She has transcended herself. Another of my unpaid debts, another of the generosities that I have benefited from, and have never either repaid or matched. Her motive may have been not just to improve my life but actually to save it. I’ve set up my darkroom in the little windowless cupboard under the stairs, where the violins are kept and where my parents were sheltering on the night of the doodlebug. The covers on the fuses are still missing. There’s no room to stand, so I have to squat or kneel on the floor amongst the pools of splashed developer and fixer, through which pass the frayed leads to my red lamp and enlarger, both home-made (of course) out of biscuit tins wrapped in old blackout curtains, and ancient brass electrics purchased in the Cattle Market. Several times a bolt of black lightning has leapt out of the darkness somewhere and shot up my arm, in a remarkably unpleasant manner.

  Now the chiffoniers and étagères in Nanny’s room are stripped of all her accumulated possessions, and my muddled books and homework and photographic apparatus take their place. Where have all the pomanders and lavender bags gone? All the scarves and shawls, all the shepherdesses and silver-framed photographs? Are the contents of 1 Gatcombe Road now crammed into one half of my sister’s small dressing table? My poor grandmother. My poor sister. My lucky father, though, to have a room to himself again. And even luckier me, to have not just a room but one large enough to stand up in, with some hope of separating live wires from the pools of chemicals already accumulating on the floor. One hot summer night, in an ecstasy of freedom and unfocused erotic yearning, I climb out of my window and run round the garden in the darkness stark naked.

  A year or two later it’s my father’s turn to make a generous gesture. When I leave school, he says, he thinks he might be able to get me into Turners Asbestos to train as a rep. Fatherly love and pride have evidently quite overwhelmed his usual sober assessment of my potentialities. But by this time I have privately decided to become a romantic poet, and with wounding loftiness I brush the suggestion aside. On one of our trips in the car, though, he may have planted a seed which really did take root in my imagination, just like his offhand suggestion when I was seven or eight of becoming a journalist. I think I’m probably fourteen by this time. He’s taking my sister and me for our annual summer holiday, and this year we’re going to Norfolk. On the way we stop for an hour or two in Cambridge. My father impresses on us his respect for the place. ‘Not a bad university, you know, Cambridge.’ Wink, twitch of the head, click of the tongue. Of what we see as we walk reverently round the colleges I can remember only a single detail: a honey-brown stone doorway off the busy street opening on to a glimpse of sunlit emerald lawn.

  I don’t know which college it is. Caius, perhaps, or Christ’s. That glimpse of a quiet and secluded front court, though, remains with me; and slowly over the next few years, in the recesses of my heart, as the intensity of what I have lost gradually fades, comes to stand for everything that I might one day find.

  3

  Skylark

  It’s the autumn of 1948, and three years have gone by since my mother’s death. The grey light has softened a little. There’s a gleam of watery sunshine in the air.

  Two things have begun to change my life. For a start I have found a friend at school, with whom over the next three or four years I shall begin to discover the passionate intensities of music and literature, of intellectual companionship and ro
mantic rebellion. Together we shall set out on the journey everyone takes, in one way or another, away from home and childhood. I shall get ever less like my father, and ever more remote from him.

  I remember the precise moment it began, back in the summer term. I leaned forward in class to whisper a sardonic remark about the teacher to the boy sitting in front of me, whom I scarcely knew. He had thick black hair, an olive complexion and heroically sharp features with a touch of the demonic about them, and as he half-turned his head to hear I could see that he was smiling. And that was that. Was it the hair that did it? The dark eyes, the sculpted jaw? The smile? It was all of this and none of it. I loved him for the same reason that Montaigne loved his friend Etienne de la Boétie: ‘Parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi.’ His name rhymes with mine: Lane. He plays chess, so I take it up, too – become obsessed with it, to the point where people in the street seem to be checking, covering, forking and pinning each other. He has listened to a lot of Beethoven, I have listened to a little Tchaikovsky; I surrender Tchaikovsky, after a short but feeble struggle, and immerse myself in Beethoven. Beethoven’s harmony and counterpoint meet my critical standards. In that first year of our friendship I hear all the Beethoven symphonies on the radio – the Eighth so many times that I can conduct my own solo but fully orchestrated performance of it inside my head more or less from beginning to end. Everyone at school knows by then that we come as a kind of corporate rhyming entity with more or less interchangeable components, simply Frayn and Lane, or Lane and Frayn. We’re also both Michael, but no one at school uses first names. Not even us, now I come to think about it. ‘Dear Frayn,’ begin all the other Michael’s many letters to me. ‘Your sincere friend,’ they finish, or ‘your most devoted critic’. Signed: ‘M Lane.’ Or ‘Michael Lane’. Or, often, simply ‘Lane’.

  The second step in my transformation is brought about by a teacher. Mr Brady is a small, quietly pugnacious Irishman who wears tinted spectacles and no gown – I suspect because he has no degree, and probably no formal qualifications of any sort. He teaches us English; or at any rate he teaches us during the periods marked ‘English’ on the timetable. His lessons have no formal content. He maintains a soft flow of improvised yarning about whatever comes into his head, a lot of it from an Irish perspective and intended to provoke us into argument, and he recalls us to order, when the outrage or mockery he has aroused become too noisy, by tapping unhurriedly on the desk with the hockey stick that he always carries. Brady: ‘Throughout history the English army has always been the scum of the earth.’ Bristow, from the back of the class: ‘But the scum always comes out on top, sir!’ Laughter and cheering. Patient gavelling with the hockey stick. Slight satisfied smile on Brady’s face. I’m already in his debt because he kept me afloat, just, in the darkest days of the previous year, when I was coming bottom of the class or close to it in every other subject, by marking my essays thirty out of thirty (his own private scale – everyone else uses letters, A to D, or occasionally α to δ, modified by + or –) and reading them aloud to the class. He did much the same for Mumby, but Mumby has slipped out of the lifebelt even so, and sunk away into the B stream. Now, in the autumn of 1948, he starts to read us poetry. It’s rather more gripping than the essays. ‘I will arise and go now,’ he begins quietly, in his soft, unhurried voice with the Irish lilt – and the whole class falls silent to listen. By the time he reaches the end we all hear the lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore, we all stand with Yeats on the roadway, or on the pavement grey, and hear it in the deep heart’s core.

  For some reason the poem that transforms the world for me is Shelley’s ‘Ode to a Skylark’. The splintered desks and the dusty floors of the classroom dissolve around me as Mr Brady softly reads, and all at once I’m beneath the high blue vault of heaven as the sun sets, with that amazing bird above me pouring down its cascading abundance of language:

  Higher still and higher

  From the earth thou springest

  Like a cloud of fire:

  The blue deep thou wingest,

  And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

  The second stanza, and already I know that the world is incomparably vaster and more beautiful than I have ever dreamed. Every phrase sends me reeling – the golden lightning of the sunken sun, the unbodied joy whose race has just begun …

  As, when night is bare,

  From one lonely cloud

  The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflowed …

  Every simile opens a fresh jewel box. ‘Like a Poet hidden/In the light of thought …’ ‘Like a glow-worm golden/In a dell of dew …’ ‘Like a rose embowered/ In its own green leaves …’ And:

  Like a high-born maiden

  In a palace-tower,

  Soothing her love-laden

  Soul in secret hour

  With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower …

  What can this possibly mean to me? What do I know of highborn maidens, or palace-towers, or love-laden souls? And yet I do! Now I do!

  Twenty stanzas. Twenty revelations running. I’ve fallen in love again, as with Stella in Chicago and Franklin Delano Roosevelt – only more suddenly and more violently.

  Already Mr Brady’s on to the twenty-first and final one:

  Teach me half the gladness

  That thy brain must know,

  Such harmonious madness

  From my lips would flow

  The world should listen then – as I am listening now.

  Yes! It should – it shall! Now we are to write an ode of our own, says Mr Brady. I fall upon my exercise book like one possessed. And out the harmonious madness pours, page after page of it. Another singing bird, species undetermined, up a tree this time. Another sunset in the background. No imagination, no invention. No time to break it up into lines, either, much less bother about rhyme. It’s a prose ode … Thirty out of thirty, once again. And read aloud to the class in that soft Irish voice, it sounds wonderful. To me, at any rate. My course in life is set. I’m going to be a poet hidden in the light of thought. I shall even break up the lines, though it will be another year or more before I discover the existence of metre. Frayn’s private epiphany swiftly becomes FraynandLane’s. He has got me into Beethoven; I get him into Shelley. We’re both going to be poets. We both are poets already. By the following summer we have moved on from short odes to works that attempt the scale of The Triumph of Life or Prometheus Unbound. We elide our literary and musical passions by giving the poems opus numbers and dividing them into movements, then sit in the fork of an ancient oak tree next to the fairway on Surbiton Golf Course, just off the Kingston bypass, reading them aloud to each other. In terms of sheer volume Lane turns out to have a talent which I find difficult to match, though I try. In terms of pomposity and sententiousness, though, I have the edge, but then I have had some previous practice in my brief attempt at a diary. My Opus 10, The Creation, an improved version of Genesis in eight movements, is ‘dedicated to M Lane, who showed me the way to Beethoven’, and is 460 lines long. God’s glory, I write, somewhere around line 400, shines through his work ‘as doth the hidden sun rain down its light/Through a diaphonous [sic] veil of ethereal cloud,/Making the icèd haze a shining cloak,/A translucent mantle of the sun.’

  Diaphanous veils of ethereal cloud float around many of these poems. My Opus 14, The Death of a Poet, ‘dedicated to M Lane, friend and fellow-poet’, begins with a disclaimer:

  If this work bears any resemblance in some places to the latest creation (the Pastoral) of my fellow-poet, Lane, it is not due to any complicity or to mere reproduction of each other’s works, but because Shelley is our mutual inspiration. My poetry is honoured to have been created from the same spring as that of Lane, to whose latest work I bow in unfeigned admiration.

  The work that follows, only too plainly inspired by Adonais, Shelley’s elegy on the death of Keats, is relatively terse, a mere 216 lines, but its general diaphanousness makes it difficult to
know whether it’s Frayn or Lane who’s dead, or what it is he’s died of. Unless it’s Keats again. Or Shelley. Or, most likely, I suppose, some emblematic figure combining the identities of all four of us. ‘Dead, dead, I say, dead …’ Leaving aside the question of which of us has got so thoroughly dead – who is the pompous idiot saying all this? No one I know, surely?

  No, you’ve got start somewhere in life, and those veils of ethereal cloud parted eventually to reveal (for me, at any rate) the beginnings of a profession that has turned out to be a lot more secure than the asbestos industry. ‘The chiaroscuro that was he/Blended into one harmonious whole …’ And so it did, in its way, so it did. ‘For I must win to the hills and sky,/And strive with the journey yet ahead …’ Enough, though, enough. Let him strive away in peace, whoever he is. I only once again ever dedicated anything I had written to anyone. This was many years later, with my very first published book, a collection of humorous columns. The dedication was to Mr Brady, who had done so much to rescue me and determine my path in life. It was just as sincere as the dedication to my fellow poet, but not quite so sententious. I discovered where Mr Brady was living in his retirement, and took him a copy. He and his wife received me and my wife amiably and gave us tea, but he didn’t seem very interested in my offering, and he plainly couldn’t remember either me or his kindness to me.