The Fowler Family Business by Jonathan Meades

Author:Jonathan Meades [Meades, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007396924
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2002-09-25T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

Month after month after month she bled, and because she bled she wept. Lavender Beard Croney’s menstrual pattern attained the uncanny invariability which she had yearned for when young and single, when she had occasionally been careless of contraception, when her diaries were pocked with red runic devices, underlinings and marginalia executed with such anxious intensity that their imprint carried through the page from one Sunday till the next. The memory of those prodigal years and their lost children reproached her now.

Every month her breasts grew heavy on her and weighed dully with a pain that increased as she grew older. This was her body’s harsh means of telling her what she knew so well – that it was not fulfilling its function as an apparatus of reproduction, that she was not allowing it to fulfil that function, that she was fighting the instincts she was imprinted with. Her body had it wrong. She wanted what it wanted. She longed to be filled with a version of herself, with a being who would be their child, who would belong to her and to Curly, even if he did deprecate himself as the non-playing captain and as the loving nurse who almost thinks the child her own. He referred to their putative son as Blenheim and to their trinitarian enterprise as Operation Blenheim. It was a coinage which did not amuse Lavender. Anything which made light of their predicament combined with her frustration at her inability to stem her menstruation to render her fractious, snappy, ratty.

Henry irritated her in many ways. When, as he entered the kitchen one night, he heard Curly say Blenheim he asked: ‘Is that Blenheim as in Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, Malplaquet? Or Blenheim as in Blenheim, Lancaster, Wellington?’

‘Neither – it’s as in Blenheim, Seaton Delaval, Grimsthorpe, Eastbury.’

‘Ah,’ Henry grunted, puzzled, and stuffed a chilli-red merguez in his mouth, retched but didn’t fetch, quite.

‘Why d’you say that in front of him?’ Lavender complained when he’d left. ‘It’s our secret. It belongs to us. Us. Why do we have to share everything? Isn’t it enough – me having to fuck Henry without letting him into every last cranny of our life? Christ, Curly – it’s not me, it’s not me, it’s not my being, it’s not my, my, self that he’s … It’s only my reproductive organs he’s meant to be … attending to. My ovaries. Not that he’s making much of a job of it. Is he?’

‘How – uh, how many …’

‘How many free fucking fucks has he had without delivering do you mean darling? Weell … By my reckoning – and I was there, remember – that makes, ooh,’ and she sighed with a profound weariness, unable to sustain her anger, ‘fourteen … fourteen times. It is never going to happen is it …’

Curly scraped couscous, leek, smeared turnip and gamboge, harissa-stained lamb fat from a plate into the kitchen bin. He felt like scraping himself too into that bin (stainless steel, domed, overpriced). His life was now defined by his generative nullity.

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