The Fowler Family Business. Jonathan Meades
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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 true – no one would expect a strapping, big-boned blond with almost Scandinavian features to have been circumcised, and, besides, his exaggerated respect for his parents extended to his parents-in-law. It was a respect which Curly illustrated by referring to an incident Naomi had mentioned to him.
On their third date, one Sunday in May, Henry had called for Naomi in his sports car and had driven her first to the Air Forces Memorial at Runnymede to admire ‘a properly tended garden of remembrance – tidiness equals respect’, then to see the brash rhododendron cliffs at Virginia Water, and on to a riverside restaurant where they ate a chateaubriand steak because it was to share and by such gestures would they unite themselves. They gazed at each other oblivious to river, weir, swans, pleasure craft, laburnums, magnolias (past their best in any case). Henry was explaining the massage procedure that must be applied to a body to alleviate rigor mortis in order to make it pliable for embalming. Naomi leaned across the table, clasped his hands and asked, poutingly, ‘Who’s your ideal woman?’
Henry was puzzled by this question. And whilst Naomi’s pose – eyes fluttering and index finger tracing the line of her lips – might have encouraged most young men to achieve the correct answer Henry contorted his face in effortful recall as though the quarry were some irrefutable slug of information like the chemical formula for formaldehyde CH20 rather than a softly smiling ‘You’ or ‘You are’. If Henry realised that he was being asked to provide proof of the compact between them he was too shy to acknowledge it.
Suddenly his face cleared. He’s got it, she thought to herself, warm with the anticipation of an exclusive compliment. He reached inside his jacket, withdrew his wallet and removed from it a photograph which he handed to her. It showed a middle-aged woman, her face partly obscured by the hair blown across it by a gust. Naomi looked at it, as though this was some sort of trick. Then she waited for the clever pay-off.
‘That’s my mother,’ said Henry. ‘My ideal woman.’
Curly, whom Naomi regarded as a child, was blind to Naomi’s hurt when she told him of that day. He supposed that this vignette was an affirmation of her pride in her future husband’s filial loyalty and he recounted it thus, causing his audience to wonder why he should wish to slight the bride at the expense of her mother-in-law. Was he trying to ingratiate himself, in the belief that to be Jewish is to be mother fixated? Was this an expression of covert anti-Semitism? No, it was just gaucheness tempered with Curly’s steadfast idolatry of Henry. Do you know what Henry did the day after they got engaged?
The guests awaited the revelation of a passionate gesture, of some act characterised by irrationality and violins. With his father’s permission, since it was his father who had bought it for him on his twenty-first birthday, Henry traded in his two-seater, open-topped, wire-wheeled MGB for a four-seater Rover 2000 saloon ‘because we’re going to be a family and a sports car’s not suitable. Not safe either.’
‘I really liked the MG, Henry,’ murmured the bride, nuzzling her husband of an hour’s neck, ‘all that fresh air can get a girl quite excited.’
‘The Rover’s got a sun-roof,’ he replied, tersely. ‘All you’ve got to do is wind it.’
Henry had, anyway, made the right car choice in the opinion of Curly’s audience. Every one of them was beaming at him. He might not have made a theatrically romantic gesture but he had expressed a long-term commitment by buying, by investing in, a vehicle renowned for its craftsmanship and reliability, a vehicle with two extra seats to fill, in time and with God’s blessing, two extra seats which seemed to predict a nursery gurgling.
Curly finished his speech with the wish that: ‘Next time I offer a toast to these two I hope it will actually be to these three – but, for the moment, I give you Naomi and Henry.’ Naomi and Henry – their names were multiplied in the gaily decorated Classic Rooms. Curly sat down and Henry gripped him around the arm, patting his shoulder, nodding in satisfaction, a trainer whose dog has had its day. That speech had cemented their brotherhood. Naomi’s mother said what others must have thought when she muttered: ‘Who’s getting married here I want to know? Henry, ob-vi-ous-ly,