Sweet Sorrow(55)

Respectability called. Five days a week, plus every other Saturday, serving and cashing up, meeting reps, sorting out the payroll – would it really be so bad? He could still pursue the thing he loved, but at weekends and in the evenings. And it wouldn’t be forever; once the business was on its feet again, he could take a step back, employ managers and return to playing. Mum was more hesitant, wary of how easily the temporary becomes permanent. She’d never got along with her in-laws, felt that they bullied and smothered their only child, and to be under an obligation … the walls of our rented rooms were thin enough to hear both sides.

But Mum relented, and so we moved back to the town where my father had grown up, into the big house with the solid walls and the stained-glass sunrise. My grandparents retired to a holiday home on the South Wales coast, a bungalow with two reclining chairs and a sea-view picture window. Thirteen at the time, I was now cynical enough to picture Nan and Grandad Lewis cackling all the way down the M4, used-car salesmen who had finally unloaded some famous wreck. Or perhaps they had our best interests at heart. Either way, my father found himself, in his mid-thirties, the managing director of a business he was singularly ill equipped to run.

He took over with a reformer’s zeal, pulling us along with him so that it became the Lewis family project. He’d always despaired of the shops’ fusty, scrappy atmosphere, the desolate window displays, the aggressive strip lighting that illuminated the stained carpet tiles, the tacky promotional material. A life-size James Last had stood guard over the till for as long as anyone could remember, and he would be the first to go, along with the dull stock of middle-of-the-road crooners and ancient novelty records that no amount of discounting could ever hope to shift. Most urgently of all, he longed to take control of his parents’ ‘Jazz Section’, where brass bands and the soundtracks of forgotten movies were filed alongside music made by anyone who was not white: Ella Fitzgerald, Bob Marley, the soundtrack to Neil Diamond’s The Jazz Singer.

Specialisation, that was the future. Yes, there’d still be pop and rock and chart hits in the shops but from now on the emphasis would be on the music that Dad loved. For one hair-raising month, all three branches were ‘closed for refurbishment’. Flush with a large bank loan, the stock was refreshed with CDs and collectors’ vinyl, all to be displayed in handsome bespoke pine racks. We took a Friday off school and over the weekend travelled from shop to shop, alphabetising against the clock. A credit card had paid for top-of-the-range stereo equipment – it was important that customers heard the music at its best – and we cooed obediently at the dynamics and definition as we played Miles and Monk, Mingus and Coltrane. ‘Listen to this one, kids,’ he’d say, lowering the stylus with a watchmaker’s precision, and there’d be that familiar wash of cymbals and the squall of horns, as incomprehensible in its appeal as coffee or olives. Like coffee, like olives, we’d grow into jazz and in the meantime, he’d intersperse hard bebop with the Beatles for us, Bowie for Mum, and we unpacked the boxes to this soundtrack as happily as if they were presents on Christmas morning, the sealed CDs as crisp and immaculate as surgical supplies, the vinyl heavy, old-fashioned and luxurious; rare Japanese 180g pressings and leather-bound box sets of studio out-takes. If I suspected that Dad had bought these things for himself, rather than for the general public, then it was worth it to see how happy he was, and Mum too. After all, the saxophone was a growling, disreputable, sexual thing born of late nights and seedy clubs; it could never thrive in the high streets and business parks of the Surrey/Sussex borders. Instead he would evangelise, sell something with passion and fulfil a need the customers didn’t yet know they had. On Sunday we arrived at our home branch and, fuelled by fizzy drinks and takeaway, worked for fourteen hours. When we were finally finished he made us lie on the floor between the aisles, our heads touching in the centre, and placed one last record on the turntable.

‘This is ridiculous,’ said Mum.

‘Just listen!’

‘I can hear just as well standing up, Brian.’

‘Shh. Close your eyes.’ He lowered the needle and joined us on the carpet.

‘In a Sentimental Mood’, the John Coltrane/Duke Ellington version. I liked this one, the jangle of the old piano, the soft warm sound of the saxophone against the patter of the drums. It had a melody and it didn’t last too long, though still long enough for my sister to fall asleep snuggled into Dad’s arms. Without saying as much, the music was intended as a blessing for our new endeavour and when it was finished we stood silently, locked the shop door and walked into a new era.

But it’s hard to imagine a time less primed for a bebop revival than the mid-nineties, when the only piano to be heard was in those choppy house-music chords, the only saxophone a synthesised sample. Treacherously, I was listening to the chug of guitars when Fran Fisher was buying that Boyzone CD and making my father’s face fall. But the economics of the independent retailer did not allow for snobbery, and so he’d bite his tongue and sell that too and edge the volume up on The Modern Jazz Quartet.

And for a while it seemed to be working. People liked my father, and I saw this and relished it. He had a swagger at that time, and a work ethic that we’d not seen when he was still struggling to be a musician. His optimism was contagious, and we were infected by his confidence. This was the beginning of our family’s golden years, and if I could select a moment when my parents were most essentially themselves, the parents I’d choose to remember, it would be about this time.