My Father's Fortune Read online

  While I’m clearing my desk on the last day of term my left ear’s suddenly most painfully seized and twisted, as if by the claw of a giant predatory bird. I find my head turned and tilted to look up into a grinning skull-like face wandering uncertainly about above me on top of a long, cadaverous, tottering body. It’s Dr Nichols, the only master in the school with a PhD, and one of the most extraordinary human beings I shall ever meet.

  He’s holding my ear so painfully because he can’t fully control his hand movements. He can’t fully control any of his bodily movements. He wobbles rather than walks – he wobbles even when he’s standing still. He can write, on paper or on the blackboard, only in a series of wild approximate jabs, and speak only in much the same way. The legend in the school is that he was injured in the First World War, just as Mr Forge, the geography master, clicks at each step because he has a tin leg, and Mr Sanders, the senior English master, speaks in a high, thin wheeze because he was gassed. With hindsight, though, I’m fairly certain that Dr Nichols was born with his condition – that he suffers from cerebral palsy; he’s what was then called (without pejorative implications) spastic.

  He’s known to the school as Gobbo, presumably because his efforts to speak involve the violent projection of a good deal of saliva. He’s proposing himself as my form master for the coming year; I’m being tapped for the Language Sixth. What he’s trying to tell me, in his spasmodic and unco-ordinated staccato of spit and random grunts, is that for the next two years he’s proposing to teach me to speak French and German. He has read my mind. I do want to go on with French. And I do want to learn German, the language of Beethoven and Schubert, of the German romantic poets. Another twist to my life is being applied through the lobe of my ear by those bony fingers.

  And the necessity to smarten myself up and earn a living is being postponed for another couple of years.

  *

  I sometimes wonder what would have become of me if my mother hadn’t died. If my father hadn’t had to extract me from the Reverend J. B. Lawton’s corrugated-iron academy and get me into Kingston Grammar School. If Mr Brady, therefore, had never read me the ‘Ode to a Skylark’. If Michael Lane had never half-turned his head to hear my whispered witticism. Does my father, looking disconsolately across the supper table at the increasingly alien creature that he seems to have begotten, ever realise quite how much of a role he has continued to play in making me what I am?

  I suppose, if my mother had lived, I should have gone on trying to earn her sixpences for coming top of the class. I should have been less obnoxious. And perhaps I should still somehow have discovered Shelley and Beethoven. Still have climbed mountains and seen the landscape opening broader and broader around me. Still in the end have found my way through that doorway to the sunlit lawn beyond.

  Or perhaps it would all have turned out quite differently. According to multiple universe theory, there’s a profusion of other universes in some of which this different and more presentable version of myself joins the local tennis club and the Young Conservatives, as my sister did later in this universe, where he accepts his father’s offer to join Turners Asbestos and train as a rep …

  Then I think of those two faces in the photographs, my father’s and mine … Even without the sneer, even if I’d borrowed his pair of monogrammed and ferociously bristled hairbrushes and pounded away with them as he does until my hair was as cowed as his, I couldn’t have done it. He had something, young Tommy – a dash, a cheek, a cockiness – that no version of his son could ever have imitated. Those other universes collapse before my eyes. So does this one. If my mother hadn’t died I shouldn’t have gone to university, I know. I shouldn’t have followed the career that I did follow. Shouldn’t have made the friends I made. Shouldn’t have met my first wife or my second. My children wouldn’t exist, or my grandchildren either … Even to think about this possibility is to feel the world around me dissolving into black nothingness, to be seized by existential terror.

  As it was, my infantile politics wore off, for better or for worse, and so did the rest of the cloudy romanticism. Some things from that intense and ridiculous time have remained, though. The passion for music and literature, certainly – and they have informed my whole life. As I think they have Lane’s. My expression, though, has softened a bit. What I sometimes feel on my face now, from inside, is not that old rictus of superiority, but one of my father’s smiles.

  4

  Chez Nous

  By this time the grey cloud has begun to lift a little for my father, too. He’s become aware of the shabbiness of our surroundings. All houses with children growing up in them show signs of the battering they’ve had, and ours has also been neglected for the past decade because of first the war and then the despondency that followed it. The time has come, my father decides, to redecorate.

  He does not, of course, get a professional decorator to do the job. Even if he could afford to, such a straightforward manner of going about things is simply not his style – and the rare exception he made for the navvies who built the air-raid shelter isn’t encouraging. So far as I can recall, the phrase ‘do it yourself’ hasn’t yet been introduced into the language, but this is what he’s now proposing – to do it himself, with the assistance of my sister and me.

  From somewhere, perhaps off a barrow in the New Cut, like the gross of blunt razor blades, he acquires a supply of paint and three rollers. This is curious, because it’s still only 1949 and I don’t think emulsion paint has been invented yet. How can we be using rollers instead of brushes? All I remember for certain is the colour, which is pink. Strawberry pink. He also buys a tin of gold paint, and a rectangular plastic sponge, into which he cuts a pattern with a razor blade (probably one of the New Cut gross, which are perhaps just about sharp enough to inflict some damage on a plastic sponge). We’re not merely going to paint the walls, and paint them strawberry pink – we’re going to stipple them in gold. We’re really going to brighten our lives up. Where my father has learned about this technique – or this choice of colours – I don’t know. There are no DIY manuals to consult, only, as a general guide, an Edwardian music-hall song that my father sometimes sings, When Father Papered the Parlour. Gradually, very gradually, the house begins to turn strawberry pink. Not just the walls – in fact not so much the walls, because there the pinkness of the pink is muted by the colours and patterns of the old wallpaper underneath – but the floors, the edges of the ceiling, the doors, the furniture, the bath, the basin, my father, my sister and myself. Then we add the gold stippling …

  All this, I think, is happening in the year before the full flowering of my political and religious rebellion, otherwise I might not have condescended to join in – and anyway, if he’d seen the look on my face my father might not have condescended to ask me. The differences between my father and sister on the one hand, and myself on the other, are already quite marked, but are considerably less noticeable when we’re all three coloured pink with a gold stipple. It’s a bonding experience.

  I don’t know whether my father’s original intention was to turn the entire house gold-stippled pink, but in the event, after we’ve done the back bedroom and the lounge we never use, he evidently feels that our life is now brightened up enough and calls it a day. In the lounge, in place of A Bit of Old London and St Gall, Switzerland, my father hangs a few of the photographs I’ve been taking. Some of them are noticeably out of focus, some not just black and white, or grey and grey, but beginning to go brown because I haven’t washed the prints long enough to get rid of the fixer. It’s generous and imaginative of my father to encourage me in this way – and if I remember rightly he even pays me for them, I think thirty shillings each. Whether they enhance the general decorative effect I’m not sure. The brown and the pink don’t go very well together for a start. It’s not only the house that has become more colourful – so has my father’s social life. For the last few years it has been very restricted. He has been wrapped up in his deafness and his various illness
es. Barlow has moved, and been replaced by a self-employed long-distance lorry driver who seems to offer little opportunity for comic exaggeration. I don’t know what’s happened to George Davis. Perhaps in peacetime public interest in the intestines of warships and bombers has waned. Now, though, my father begins to adventure a little further afield. While I’ve been writing Caligula and sitting up the oak tree with Lane, he has taken up bridge. His hosts are the Laverses, at No. 6, now returned from wherever they’d hidden themselves during the war. They’re a good-hearted couple, and they must have worked hard to tempt my father out of the shell into which he’d retired. They’re also remarkably dull, and they make a good foil to my father, now suddenly restored to all his old jokes and high spirits, his hotchamachachas and his turnups for the book; and a good foil, too, to the fourth regular bridge partner they’ve found, Mrs Smith, a widow who lives just round the corner in Queensmead Avenue.

  Mrs Smith is a tiny bouncing bean of a woman who loves to laugh and gossip and be teased. She’s no more a card-player than I am a cricketer. She’s as short-sighted as me, but she won’t wear spectacles because she doesn’t believe in them, or in anything else associated with doctors and specialists. Who needs spectacles, when you can just screw up your eyes? However tightly she screws up hers, though, she often simply misreads the cards, or drops them. I don’t think my father knows much about bridge, either, but he can certainly keep a firm hold on his cards, and count the spots on them, and mock anyone who can’t. Mrs Smith is spirited enough to return his fire, though, with similar joshing aggression – and extravert enough not to mind shouting, so my father can often hear what she says.

  If you stand outside the dining room, when they’re playing at our house, as they occasionally do, you can hear a kind of moo-ing ground-bass from Mr and Mrs Lavers and often, over it, a humorously challenging rally between my father and Mrs Smith.

  ‘Hotchamachacha!’

  ‘Now what, Mr Cleversocks?’

  ‘It’s our trick, madam! Why are you trumping it?’

  ‘I’m not trumping it! Oh, is that a spade? I thought it was a club … Anyway, spades are all I’ve got.’

  ‘You’ve got a club.’

  ‘You don’t know what cards I’ve got!’

  ‘I know you’ve got the four of clubs …’

  ‘You think you know everything, don’t you? But let me tell you, old boy – there are a lot of things you don’t know!’

  ‘… because I can see it lying on the floor there.’

  ‘Oh, that’s where it’s got to … So now of course you think you really are the great punjandrum.’

  ‘Cleversocks.’ ‘Punjandrum.’ ‘Chickens coming home to roast.’ ‘I take that with a big dose of salts …’ Mrs Smith – Elsie, as we soon come to call her – has only a rather approximate acquaintance with ordinary words and phrases, as if she has originally heard them all through screwed-up ears. She’s a good dancer, though – light on her feet, responsive to the rhythm, and bubbling with energy and excitement – and soon my father’s rediscovering his own dancing days. She also has a cocker spaniel – no great recommendation to me, since I’m frightened of dogs, but a considerable one to my sister, whose ambition in life is to work as a kennel maid at Hackbridge Boarding Kennels. She has a jolly sister and brother-in-law, and a jolly niece from rural Nova Scotia who is staying with her over the summer. Soon we’re all going on picnics and expeditions together, and by the end of the summer I’m composing Lines Written for a Homeward-bound Canadian (Opus 17).

  One evening my father tells my sister and me that he wants to have a little talk with us. Odd – he’s never proposed having a little talk before. He summons Nanny as well, and leads us all into the lounge. Odder still. Particularly now the walls are strawberry pink, stippled with gold and hung with fuzzy views of Surrey valleys and Welsh mountains. ‘Sit down,’ he says. My sister sits on one of the Bentalls armchairs that no one ever sits on, I sit on the other. My father sits on the Bentalls sofa. Nanny, who evidently knows what’s coming, stands nervously behind him.

  ‘Supposing I were to tell you,’ says my father carefully, ‘that I was thinking of getting married again?’ I can’t remember now how we respond to this, or whether we respond at all. I can’t even remember whether it’s a surprise to us, or whether we’d seen it coming. I think he tells us that Mrs Smith – Elsie – having no children of her own, is particularly pleased at the prospect of acquiring two. We shall apparently be moving into her house in Queensmead Avenue. All that strawberry paint has been applied in vain. My father’s recommendation of the new house and its various advantages is the only part of his announcement that I can remember for sure.

  ‘You’ll have a much broader perspective on life there,’ he says. ‘There’s a television set, for a start.’

  This certainly makes Elsie seem quite a catch. In 1949 neither we nor anyone else we know has a television set. I think he reminds my sister about the dog. Then, for me: ‘There’s a bookcase in the hall, full of books. And there’s a radiogram.’

  It’s the radiogram that clinches it for me. I have never dreamed that we might one day have a machine for playing records on. It’s access to this that’s going to set me and Lane on our trips to the second-hand trays in Foyles.

  Though I suppose I might have guessed that if we ever were to acquire one my father would find some curiously oblique way of doing it.

  *

  They marry in Epsom Register Office that October. My father’s age is given on the marriage certificate as forty-nine, though he’s in fact a year younger – but then he was always bit vague about ages and birthdays – and Elsie’s as fifty-three. Their witnesses are the Laverses, who have engineered the whole event. Phyllis was evidently present, because she told her daughter Jean that she’d never seen Tommy looking more miserable. This I discovered only when Jean read the draft of this book, as I did my father’s appalling aside to Phyllis: ‘This is the worst day of my life.’ My sister and I are not invited to the wedding, nor to the reception afterwards, if there is one, any more than we were to our mother’s funeral. Once again, I suppose, the intention is for us not to be upset.

  Are we upset? Am I upset? Or am I pleased, if only about the radiogram? Or just indifferent? I don’t know. I can’t remember.

  This is the funny thing about the whole episode, which after all marks a considerable epoch in my life. I’m sixteen – quite old enough to remember things. It’s the beginning of my School Certificate year, when I’m renouncing religion and discovering metre, listening to music and construing Virgil. Of all that I can remember quite a lot. But even of the physical details of the move round the corner, from 3 Hillside Road to 6 Queensmead Avenue, I can recall nothing. We’re leaving the house where I’ve spent all my conscious life, where we were all almost killed by the flying bomb, where my sister was born and our mother died – and I can’t even remember how we move our belongings. In the car? In a van? Or do we borrow a wheelbarrow? We shouldn’t need a very big vehicle, I’m sure of that. Apart from our clothes and toothbrushes, my photographic stuff and my sister’s knick-knacks, we’ve abandoned everything. Walked out on our lives.

  Nanny’s packed off once again to Phyllis and Sid’s, where she’s to spend whatever few years or months remain to her. The house itself was only ever rented, of course. But what happens to the dining table and the sideboard, the feasting cardinals and the Bentalls suite? I suppose they’re taken by one of those firms that do house clearances, who sell the best of it off in places like the second-hand stalls in Kingston Cattle Market and throw the rest on the town dump.

  All I know is that it vanishes behind us – mock-leather furniture, aluminium saucepans, brass candlesticks. Everything except (as I discover sixty years later) A Bit of Old London and St Gall, Switzerland.

  *

  It’s large and solidly built. The woodwork’s gleaming white, the wallpapers are in various respectable shades of brown, not stippled strawberry. The furniture and fittings ar
e of good quality, and have obviously been obtained by handing over money – probably quite large amounts of it – to shops and tradesmen, not thrown out by the neighbours or won in cigarette promotions. The tables and chairs are highly polished, by a cleaner who has been in service with Elsie for years, Mrs Tunner (or Tanner, as she’s probably known to herself and everyone else except Elsie). The armchairs are real hide. The leather-inlaid desk once belonged to Sidney Horler, a still slightly famous local thriller-writer. The toilet roll in the lavatory plays The Bluebells of Scotland when you take the paper. If you want to get into the loft there’s a stepladder to hand.

  We three newcomers tiptoe respectfully through the deep pile of the carpets and squeeze cautiously between the close-packed islands of scratchable cabinetwork. One slight oddity about all this, I realise, is that our move into this world of solid bourgeois comfort coincides with my growing belief that happiness can be achieved only by living in blocks of high-rise workers’ flats. Do I make any connection between my new convictions and my new surroundings? None that has remained in my mind. I seem to be living in two overlapping but largely unconnected worlds. I must surely have attempted to preserve my integrity with a little private sneer or two, but this time I’ve no photographic record of it. In the hallway (a proper hallway, not a lounge doubling up, though it’s almost as big as one) stands the promised bookcase, glass-fronted, and full of randomly arranged popular fiction – Sidney Horler, of course, Mazo de la Roche, Rafael Sabatini – all of it I think unread; but also for some reason War and Peace and Boswell’s London Journal, both certainly unread until I get my hands on them. In the front room is the television set, the size and shape of a cocktail cabinet, bashfully concealing its polished walnut face and its small blue eye behind one of the hide armchairs, like a child sent to stand in the corner; if you want to watch anything the armchair has to be pushed back against the dining table, and then you have to look at the little picture sideways over your right shoulder. Net drapes at the windows, keeping the world out by day, and by night heavy dark plush curtains, from ceiling to floor, that absorb all the light and the sound in the house. In a basket in the breakfast room (a breakfast room!) is the black cocker spaniel, Rex. At the back of the house is the lounge – a proper lounge for lounging in, furnished with flowered chintz and china figures, together with a boudoir grand piano that nobody can play – and the radiogram, as specified, twice as big as the television set, with built-in cupboards for the records. In the cupboards, I discover to my pleasure, are two classical records – the background music from a wartime film, and the first half of the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto.