The Fowler Family Business by Jonathan Meades Read Free Book Online

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 CH 2 0 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