On Monday 28 October 1968 Henry Fowler, just twenty-three, twice a runner-up in the Oil Fuels Guild-sponsored Young Funeral Director of the Year competition and recently the proud bridegroom of Naomi Lewis, stood beside a Greek revival mausoleum close by the entrance to West Norwood Cemetery sniffing autumn in a pseudoacacia’s yellow leaves, musing on the greenhouse potential of the seeds in its leathery pods, never forgetting to remember that this was the eighth anniversary of Stanley Croney’s death, reflecting thereon, whistling beneath his breath a tune of his far-off teenage when he had been immature, and knew it.
Now he was a married man with hopes of fatherhood, a house with underfloor heating and a picture window which framed the gables and cupolas of houses whose inhabitants his grandfather had buried and beyond them the ordered Kentish fields where his grandfather’s father had picked hops and pears before the creation of the family business and liberation from such seasonal slavery.
Henry stood there waiting to direct a procession of Fowler & Son’s (he wasn’t the initial son in that name, that was his father, when he’d been the son – but it had passed down, and when he, Henry, had a son and his father had retired, he would be the father and so it would remain in mutating constancy). The procession of vehicles, of Rolls-Royces and Austin Sheerlines, was held up because of a traffic fatality on Beulah Hill. The deceased – the one in the coffin, not the headless motorcyclist – had been something in show business. A manager or agent or promoter – it wasn’t a world Henry Fowler was acquainted with. Though when he had visited the bereaved and the brittle bespectacled daughter who was attending her at the big house on Auckland Road he had been impressed by the number of photographs signed by stars he recognised. Charlie Drake was there, and Maureen Swanson who’d married a toff, and Al Bowlly whose death in the Blitz while Mr Fowler was stationed on the Isle of Wight denied him the opportunity of posthumously brilliantining the only crooner he’d ever met.
Henry considered mentioning this to the bereaved but the daughter would keep butting in, talking for her and, anyway, he was not certain where he stood in the debate between formality and friendliness that had riven his trade, the two sides denouncing each other as Robots and Mateys. He knew that with his blond hair, black suit and martial bearing he looked like a Robot but that his gravely worn concern for the grieving might mark him as a Matey. He kept quiet rather than risk what might be considered an unseemly disclosure.
He did suggest, however, that the cortège leaving Auckland Road should best process by way of Annerley Hill, Westow Hill and Central Hill because of the long-term roadworks and temporary traffic lights on Beulah Hill (it was these which were thought to have caused the fatal accident). But the bereaved had insisted on Beulah Hill: ‘Cyril loved it. He just loved it. He used to stand there you know and look out across Thornton Heath and Croydon and say thank God I don’t live there. You can see all the way to the downs. No, he wants to go along Beulah Hill.’
That was the Thursday.
The Sunday, Henry did his potting – black tulips (a family tradition), narcissi, three sorts of daffodil. Naomi spent the day inside acting on the precepts laid down by Consultant Jilly Morgan in an article called ‘An End To Maquillage Monotony’. When they snuggled up together on their tufty fabric sofa she was wearing oyster-pink lip gloss and Qite-A-Nite mascara. The news was cast by his favourite, though not hers, Corbett Woodall: ‘More than forty police officers, including five mounted …’
They gaped at the scenes of Grosvenor Square. There were longhairs, moustaches, police macs, police truncheons, police horses, wobbly film frames, inchoate grunts, faces of terror and hatred.
‘Vandals,’ said Henry.
‘Goths and vandals,’ said Naomi.
They agreed that should any of the Vietcong who had thrown themselves beneath the ironclad hooves of Emperor, Berty, Throckmorton, Monty and Rex II die in a South London hospital Fowler & Son would not undertake to undertake. They laughed, two as one. And that’s how undertake to undertake became a catch-phrase in their family: they were to teach it to the children, when they came along. They cuddled and they thanked each other for each other’s love and blessed presence which would endure till one of them was undertaken with due ceremony by their first-born boy, one far-off day at the other end of a fulfilling half century – at least.
Henry Fowler waited patiently as the gatehouse attendant at West Norwood Crematorium Mr Scrivenson listened agitatedly to the phone’s earpiece and plaited his nostril hair and gurned and pointed with a Capstan-strength forefinger to the handset and repeated: ‘If that’s the best ETA … if that’s the best you can do … if that’s your ETA we’re looking at a log-jam – it’s going to be Piccadi—they what? … Right you are then … Okey-dokey.’
He put down the phone, flicked at his collar and its icing of seborrhoea, the dandruff with the larger flake, rubbed his hands to say chilly, twirled a tuft of hair protruding from his phone ear, dimped a butt from his great wheel of an ashtray and said: ‘No disrespect to your dad Henry – but … Beulah Hill, I mean to say …’
‘That’s what they wanted, insisted on. Nothing to do with Dad Mr Scrivenson. Me – me. Mrs Ross has got this idea – you know, it’s a road he loved.’
‘Henry. Henry. You’re a funeral director. You direct the funeral. I dunno. Your grandad wouldn’t have stood for it. Even the best of times you got problems along Beulah Hill – there’s mineral wells there. Tarmacadam’s worst enemy. It’s why it’s always erupting. And all that subsidence in them twinky-dinky new houses. You got to learn to put your foot down – A Generation Out of Control.’
‘What?’
‘That’s what it said in the paper this morning. That’s you lot. My God.’ Mr Scrivenson stood and gaped through the dust-blasted panes. ‘You got a crow. Who’s this feller?’
‘Uh?’
‘The deceased.’
‘Mr Cyril Ross he was called. Lived in—’
‘What line?’ Mr Scrivenson looked at Henry looking blank against the dun wall of this tiny home-from-home. ‘What did he do?’
‘Some sort of show business. Agent, you know … produ—’
‘Could have told you. It’s only the theatre and the military you get crows with nowadays.’
Crow was old funerary trade slang for a mourner who dressed the part, who outdid the funeral directors in their bespokes from Kidderminster, who turned mourning into black dandyism. The blacker the garb the deeper the feeling – it’s like the paint on a Sheerline. A score of coats of jet enamel signals solemnity. Black – figurative and ceremonial uses of. That’s an area of Henry’s expertise. Henry hurried out of Scrivenson’s fug to warn the crow of the delay, inform him of its cause, apologise: ‘Excuse me sir,’ he called to the man who had his back to Henry and was scrutinising an art-nouveau headstone in the form of an escutcheon. He half turned, raising his toppered head. The crow’s garb – black barathea, black satin facings, black frogging, black moiré jabot – subjugated all individuality in the cause of ostentatious or, as Mr Fowler would have it, boastful grief. Henry was addressing a man playing a role, a machine for mourning who thanked him for the information with a nod and a tight-lipped smile. Henry turned back towards Scrivenson’s lodge. He had walked a couple of steps before he realised whom he had been talking to. Henry hurried after the crow who was alarmed by the heavy footfalls on the metalled drive.
‘I just wanted,’ Henry panted, ‘to say, if I might, how much “Teresa” meant to me you know. Well, still means to me. It’s difficult to explain – my great mucker was