The Fowler Family Business. Jonathan Meades

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       Chapter Three

      It was going on fifty feet that Stanley Croney fell. It was a seventy-foot drop to the rain-glossed cinders beside the shiny tracks that stretched into oblivion. It was almost a hundred feet high, that rusty old girder bridge. The representatives of the emergency services casually disagreed about how far the tragic lad had fallen – but who, naked eyed, can estimate height or distance with anything more than a well-meant guess when a young life has been lost and there are procedures to follow and the dense nettles on the embankment sting through uniform trousers and speed is vital because all train services have been halted. It was high, that rusty old girder bridge.

      The coroner noted but did not question the disparities. He scratched at his eczematous wrists that cuffs couldn’t quite hide and listened with sterling patience to the policeman, to the ambulancemen, to the doctor, to the firemen who had surely overestimated the distance because of the duration and difficulty of their haul of the unbruised, uncut body up the steep embankment. And he had heard evidence from PC 1078 Grady in two previous cases and considered him to be a cocky smart alec and careless of details.

      Thus he assumed (wrongly, as it happens) that the bridge was seventy feet above the tracks. He heard evidence from Henry Fowler; from the hairdresser Jimmy Scirea whose salon Giovanni of Mayfair Henry Fowler had run into, ‘all agitated’, asking to use the phone; from Janet Cherry who had talked to the two youths before they turned on to the bridge and who described Stanley as being ‘in a definitely frisky mood, you know, sort of excitable … show-offy – he was often like that. He was a character.’ He had performed ‘this funny bow, old-fashioned, sort of like in the olden days if you follow my meaning’. His friend, whom she knew only by sight, had merely nodded curtly and looked ostentatiously at his watch whilst she talked briefly to Stanley about a party they might both attend that night. She had been surprised not to see Stanley there because he had asked twice whether Melodie Jones would be going. ‘He was very direct. He wasn’t shy.’

      Of course he wasn’t. He was a one, a daredevil, a cheeky monkey. This wasn’t the first time. Everyone can remember the early hours of New Year’s Day 1960 when after being ejected from the Man Friday Club (under age, over the limit, we’ve our licence to think of sonny) he had run up a drainpipe and had scaled a roof of the Stanley Halls and had stood silhouetted against the full-scale map of the heavens shouting to the stumbling revellers in the street below: ‘I am Stanley and this is my hall.’

      He had offered variations on that boast to Henry for so long as Henry could recall. Henry’s memories of it were in his ribs. That’s where Stanley would elbow him when they walked past the Stanley Halls and Stanley Technical Trade Schools. They walked past so often that Henry suffered costal bruising from his quasi-brother’s joshing prods and proud jabs. Stanley’s identification with W.R.F. Stanley might have been founded in nothing more than the coincidence of a common name but it had grown from that frail beginning into heroic idolatry. W.R.F. was the odd one out in Stanley’s personal pantheon of sideburned rock and rollers, quiffed balladeers, d.a.’d teen idols, bostoned film actors, Brylcreemed footballers. W.R.F. was old, dead, from long ago when they wore the wrong haircuts. But, as Stanley persistently reminded Henry, he was his own creation: he had had no family business to enter, he had started from nothing and had gone so far that he had been able to buy the land and to design and build the loud structures at the bottom of South Norwood Hill. That his philanthropy was boastful is unquestionable – why else make buildings of such striking gracelessness and coarse materials if not to clamour for attention for oneself and one’s inventions.

      The most celebrated of W.R.F.’s inventions was the Stanley Knife, the sine qua non of a particular sort of South London conversation. Although the plump bulk of the handle militated against the achievement of the bella figura that Stanley Croney was keen to exhibit, he invariably carried a Stanley Knife: a natty dresser needs protection against the sartorial hun. His knife was his daily link to W.R.F., to the self-made man Stanley longed to be. Stanley Croney was going to emulate him. He too would have a house like Stanleybury, he too would endow a clock tower in his native suburb to commemorate his wedding, he too was on the way to being his own man, and that meant having a way with what Mr Croney called ‘the ladies’. Henry despised Stanley’s ingratiating charm, his flimsy slimy stratagems.

      He knew Janet Cherry by her loose reputation. And he despised her, and her kind, for their susceptibility to Stanley who was never at a loss for a quip. How could they fail to see through his corny ploys? How could they like someone who had no respect for them as people? Did they not realise that he was an apprentice wolf, preying? Stanley greeted her with lavish rolls of his right hand and a balletically extended leg as though he were a peruked fop, Sir Grossly Flatterwell making the first step in the immemorial dance which culminates horizontally. They had, Stanley hinted when he had observed Henry pointing to his watch and she had gone her stilettoed beehived way, already culminated. That anyway was how the virgin Henry interpreted Stanley’s ‘It’ll have to be another bite at the cherry if Melodie J doesn’t come across. Not that she won’t – she’s just rampant for it.’ It was a foreign country, yet unvisited by Henry who’d never been on a Continental holiday either.

      ‘And,’ Stanley went on, confidential, man of the world to a mere boy, ‘they say she gobbles.’

      Henry, morose, didn’t know what Stanley meant. He was ashamed that he had not entered the carnal world of which Stanley was now a citizen. Stanley was less than six months his senior: he told himself, without conviction, that six months hence he, too, might … might what? Do wrong, that’s what he knew it to be. Premarital intercourse, as it was then known, was as wicked as electric guitars and didn’t happen to nice people, to responsible people, to people called Fowler who attended church. It was for gravediggers, not for funeral directors. It was not for those who respected their mothers, their mothers’ sex, the primacy of Christian marriage, the sanctity of the family, the notion of true love as explained by Tab Hunter who wore neither hair cream nor sideburns: ‘They say for every girl and boy in this whole world there’s just one love …’Just one love. Wait till she comes along. You’ll know it’s her. And it is invariably attended by God’s revenges of pregnancy, gonorrhoea, syphilis, gonorrhoea and syphilis (‘a royal flush’ according to sailors, and they know), social disgrace: ‘She’s had to go away’ was what Mrs Fowler said of more than one office help. If the fallen one was a cleaner who couldn’t type and wasn’t allowed to answer the phone because of her common accent she eschewed euphemism: ‘She’s gone to have an illegit. No one’ll want her now.’

      This carnal world was fraught with such dangers – social, moral, irreligious, medical – that Henry Fowler was not sure he wished to enter it. Yet he was achingly jealous of Stanley who was so confident in his new knowledge, so easy with it. And he broached the subject of that evening with trepidation and with a resentment at what he knew would be Stanley’s response.

      ‘You … you’re going to a party then?’

      ‘Dave Kesteven’s sister, Sheila. Parents are away so …’

      ‘I thought we were going to the flicks.’

      ‘Yeah СКАЧАТЬ