His father disliked Trelawny Gables with a calm but fierce intensity, Ingram knew, but he endured its customs and rituals with amused pragmatism. He didn’t blame his son that he had ended up here — at least Ingram hoped not as he now saw his father from a distance, spraying insecticide on rose bushes in a small arbour by the perimeter wall. He was a tall, lean, grey-haired man wearing an olive-green sleeveless fleece, a shirt and tie and neatly pressed blue jeans. Ingram had foresworn jeans at the age of forty — no mature or middle-aged man should be seen dead in them, he reasoned, but he had to admit they rather suited his father, now eighty-seven years old. Perhaps jeans were to be taken up again in one’s eighties…
“Hello, Pa,” he said, kissing him on both cheeks. “Looking well.”
Colonel Gregor Fryzer looked at his son closely — scrutinising me, Ingram thought, as if I were on parade. Ingram smiled at this old man’s foible but then worried — absurdly, he knew — that some scent of Phyllis was emanating from him, some odour of sex that only octogenarians could sniff out.
“You seem a bit nervous, Ingram. Bit edgy.”
“Not in the least.”
“I’ve always thought there was something a little fourbe about you.”
“What does ‘fourbe’ mean?”
“Look it up when you get home.”
They walked back to his small ground-floor flat — one bedroom with a sitting room, bathroom and kitchenette. The walls were covered with his father’s watercolours — still lifes in the main. His father’s pastimes were tying flies for fishing — that he sold — and painting.
The Colonel went into the kitchen and returned with two gins and tonic, one ice cube in each, no slice of lemon. He handed one to Ingram and sat down and fitted a cigarette into a holder and lit it.
“What can I do for you, Ingram?”
“I just came to say hello — see how you were getting along. You know I pop up on a Saturday.”
“You haven’t been here for two months. Thank god for Forty.”
“Has Forty been here?”
“He comes up twice a week. He’s got some kind of a contract for the gardens.”
“Oh yes, of course.” This was news to Ingram. Forty was his youngest son. “We’ve been very busy,” he said, changing the subject. “Will you come to supper tonight? The whole family will be there. I thought it might—”
“No thanks.”
“I’ll send a car, there and back.”
“No thanks — there’s a documentary on Channel 4 I want to watch.”
Ingram nodded — at least he’d asked. Meredith would have had a seizure if the Colonel had accepted. He felt the usual cocktail of emotions when confronted by his father: admiration, irritation, affection, frustration, pride, distaste. It astonished him, more often than not, to think this difficult old bastard had sired him. But sometimes all he wanted from his father was a sign of affection — a squeeze of his shoulder, a genuine smile. They sat there sipping their warmish gins and tonic like two strangers in a waiting room, bound only by their blood-line. He thought of his long-dead mother: time had transformed her — a diffident, neurotic woman — into something close to myth, a domestic saint. How he missed her.
“Actually, I wanted to ask your design,” Ingram began, carefully.
“Ask my design?”
“Sorry — advice.”
“Oh, yes?” The Colonel sounded surprised.
“Yes. I think I may be…” Ingram paused — suddenly having to articulate this intuition made it seem all the more real. “I think I may be about to be the victim of a boardroom putsch. I think it’ll look like I’m in charge, but I won’t be.”
“I don’t understand your nasty little world, Ingram — finance, banking, pharmaceuticals. Who are these people plotting against you? Get rid of them. Cut out the cancer.”
“I can’t do that, unfortunately.”
“Then be cleverer than they are: second-guess them, pre-empt them, frustrate them.” The Colonel removed his smoked cigarette from his holder and lit up another. “Get something on them, Ingram. Find a way of hurting them. Get some ammunition.”
Not a bad idea, Ingram thought, wondering if this were possible, if he had enough time…Perhaps there were things he could do…
“Thanks, Pa. I’d better be running along.”
“Finish your gin before you go.”
Ingram drank it down. Sometimes he disliked gin — he thought it made him depressed.
♦
When Ingram arrived home he took down the French dictionary from its shelf in the library and looked up the word ‘fourbe’. Sly, shifty and crafty were the synonyms on offer. Ingram felt a little hurt, for a second or two — who did his father think was paying for Trelawny Gables? His army pension? — and then decided that it must have been the after-effects of his encounter with Rilke that had made him seem preoccupied and thoughtful. True, his brain had been working hard, his words of affection to his father had been token, insincere. Whatever quantities of guile he possessed were being summoned into action, like troops in reserve being called up, expelling his usual cultured, focussed politesse: typical of the Colonel to have sensed this.
He poured himself a large Scotch in his dressing room and drank it before coming downstairs to his birthday party. His three children were already present — Guy, Araminta and Fortunatus — and a stranger, he noticed, someone quickly introduced as Forty’s boyfriend, Rodinaldo.
“Have you met him before?” he whispered to Meredith when he had a discreet moment.
“A few times.”
“He seems incredibly young.”
“He’s the same age as Forty. They work together.”
Maria-Rosa served his favourite supper: cheese souffle, lamb shank with pommes dauphinoises, strawberries with champagne sorbet. The conversation around the table was banal, light-hearted, forgettable. Ingram looked closely at his children, rather in the way his father had looked at him: Guy, thirty years old, handsome, talentless; Araminta, starveling-thin and, to his eyes, almost visibly twitching with nerves. Perhaps his father’s ruthless objectivity was infecting him, but he realised anew, with no particular shock or guilt, that he didn’t much like Guy and Minty — he cared for them, but he didn’t much like them, to be honest, nor was he much interested in them. Only Fortunatus interested him — squat, muscley Forty, already seriously bald in his early twenties — gay, of all improbable things, the only one of his children who never asked him for anything, the only one he loved and the one who would not return it.
“I saw Gramps today,” Ingram said to him. “You’re working at Trelawny Gables, he said. What a coincidence.”
“He got us the job,” Forty said.
“Really?…” This required further thought. “So, Forty, how’s business?”
“Dad, please, it’s Nate.”
“I can’t call a child of mine ‘Nate’, I’m sorry to say.”
“Then you shouldn’t have called me Fortunatus.”
“‘Fortunatus Fryzer’,” Meredith said, “it’s a wonderful name.”
“It sounds like a medieval alchemist,” Forty⁄Nate said.
“You know why we called you that, darling,” Meredith continued, quietly.