The Thing Itself

TWENTY-EIGHT

George Watts, Bob’s brother, came from Australia for the funeral. George was an accountant. Quite successful. The two brothers didn’t have much in common — didn’t even look alike — but Watts took him down to their father’s local to talk about this and that, looking over the river Thames, then went back to the house and talked some more until both made their excuses and went to bed.

Watts put his brother in his father’s room at the front of the house. Whilst staying at Barnes Bridge, he hadn’t been able to sleep in his father’s double bed in the large front bedroom. The room in which, if the obits were to be believed, his father had bedded the world-famous ballet dancer.

Instead, he slept in the poky box-bedroom at the back of the house, overlooking his father’s pleasant courtyard garden. It had been used by the live-in Polish housekeeper, but Watts had given her a month’s paid leave whilst he decided what to do with the house. She had gone home to see her family in Kielce.

There were only three mourners at the graveside. George decided it was because his father had outlived everybody. Watts wasn’t so sure — and was stupidly disappointed that the enigmatic woman had not turned up and solved her mystery for him. Watts’s sister, Alicia, could have come over from Canada but had refused. She had sided with her mother after the divorce and had refused to have anything to do with her father. According to Molly, Alicia took a dim view of her brother’s ‘shenanigans’ too.

The funeral was a dank affair in the chapel in Mortlake cemetery, then the three men went over to stand around the tree planted in Kew Gardens in memory of Donald Watts. They stood in the driving rain, Daubney and George sheltering under Daubney’s incongruously gaudy golf umbrella. Watts’s black umbrella turned inside out so he abandoned it and stood, rain-bedraggled, contemplating the sapling shaking in the wind, feeling stupid.

After, they had a desultory lunch in a small restaurant beside Kew station. Daubney, a trencherman all his life, attempted to liven things up by telling stories of the celebrated fellow residents of The Albany, his home off Piccadilly for the past fifty years. George remained taciturn.

‘So who was the ballet dancer?’ Watts said after a solemn toast to Donald Watts aka Victor Tempest.

‘Bob, I hardly think that’s appropriate at such a time,’ George said, his Aussie accent grating on Watts. ‘We’re remembering our mother too.’

Daubney winked at Watts.

‘You know, of course, how he came to adopt the name Victor Tempest?’

Watts and his brother shook their heads.

‘It was suggested to him by a crime writer he met in the early thirties. Peter Cheyney. Heard of him? No? Well, Cheyney was a best-seller in England, though he never did very well in the United States, where he set most of his books. Perhaps because his fervid attempts at American slang came out as cockney. He was a supporter of Oswald Mosley’s National Party — its secretary, in fact, though I don’t think he was in its successor, the British Union of Fascists, for very long.’

Daubney paused to take a sip of his wine.

‘Don — your father — was a serving policeman at the time so had to join the Blackshirts under another name. He’d told Cheyney that he intended to be a writer and Cheyney thought Victor Tempest sounded good, both as nom de guerre and nom de plume.’

‘Whoah — back up there, Oliver,’ Watts said, putting down his own wine glass. ‘You’re saying Dad was a fascist?’

George shook his head wearily.

‘Our father was an anti-Semite too? That’s the last bloody nail in the coffin.’

Watts and Daubney looked at each other. Daubney cleared his throat.

‘Apt words on such a day as this,’ he said.

George looked from Daubney to Watts, then all three men burst out laughing.

‘But it’s not funny,’ George said. ‘I don’t have time for prejudice of any sort.’

Daubney nodded.

‘Your father was one of Mosley’s biff-boys for a while. But when Don joined, it was a youthful passion and there was no hint of anti-Semitism. Mosley was regarded as more of a radical than a fascist. The moment the Nazi anti-Semitism came in, Don went out.’

George raised his glass and the others followed suit.

‘To Dad, then — the complicated old bastard.’

They chinked glasses.

Watts turned to Daubney.

‘There was this beautiful woman once, came to the house — George doesn’t remember. .’

‘Here we go again,’ George said with a sigh and a smile. ‘He tried this on me last night.’

Daubney leaned over and squeezed Watts’s arm.

‘Families are secrets, Bob. And some never get revealed. Others just lead to yet more secrets. You can’t know everything. So many things you wished you’d asked at the time. So many things you just have to let go.’ He picked up his glass again. ‘Some things never will make sense — you just have to accept that.’

After lunch Watts walked his brother and Daubney into the foyer of the tube station. George had his overnight bag with him. He was staying with his wife up in central London — she had declined the invitation to come to the funeral — before they set off for a tour of Scotland. Daubney was going back to The Albany.

Watts dawdled until they’d gone, then wandered into the pub next to the platform, relieved to be alone. The last time he’d been with his father was in this pub. Nursing his drink, he stared blankly at the trains arriving and departing.