‘I’m sorry, what did you say?’
‘Was left to me originally, but you have to wait your turn. Couldn’t exactly turf her out.’
‘Well, everything comes, as they say,’ says Henry, shaking his sleeve.
Lachlan thrusts his tongue into his cheek. ‘That’s word for word what the old boy told me on his deathbed thirty years ago,’ he says, as though it’s Henry’s fault he’s had to wait.
We’re all still battling the dead, Henry thinks, closing the doors to the mansion block behind him. He tests, then tests again the security locks, listening for them to click, then pushing at them with his shoulder. The wrong sort of people have been seen in the building recently, going from apartment to apartment, selling duff electricity, syphoning it out of one person’s supply and into another’s, making veiled threats to the elderly, of whom Henry, on his next birthday, will officially be accounted one. No one admits to letting them in. It’s possible they just strolled in, a stride or two behind a bona fide keyholder, too old to notice or too frightened to ask questions. That’s how it is with buildings occupied by the aged: you might as well go to sea in a sieve. So Henry is double-checking the security locks, then double-checking his checking, by subjecting them to his weight, not a negligible force these days, for Henry is growing portly. If he does this every time he goes out he will seriously weaken the locks, then the second-hand electricity salesmen will be able to stroll back in again.
What the block needs is a doorman. There’s on-site porterage, as you would expect of apartments of this quality, but you have to ring a bell for anyone to answer and by the time anyone does you can have bled to death. A person on guard twenty-four hours a day is what you want. Armed to the teeth, preferably. Henry doesn’t know about the arms but he has reason to believe a doorman did patrol here once. What is more, Henry believes he has met him . . .
Henry has a theory that the apartment has come to him courtesy of a wealthy mistress of his father’s. The apartment was his father’s secret love nest, Henry’s theory goes; a long way from home, admittedly, too far to nip around to on a bicycle between meals, but his father was always on the road, often having to travel to conferences and conventions on the black arts, and he could easily have kept a second marriage going concurrently with his first. By easily, Henry does not mean financially – he doubts his father could have afforded to feed the chandelier the bulbs it consumes in a week – but easily in the sense that such a thing would have fallen effortlessly within the compass of his father’s tractable nature. Someone lays Henry’s father down upon a feather bed, Henry’s father does not know how to explain he already has a place to sleep. A manners thing as much as anything else. Henry’s father does not like to cause anyone offence. Sorrow of sorrows, Henry’s mother is then killed in the front seat of a coach with bad brakes travelling to London (no doubt on a failed mission to find the truth), Henry’s father no sooner being apprised of the tragedy than he is off south to retrieve the body (in what state Henry cannot begin to imagine – his father and the body) and no sooner seeing it than he suffers a fatal double heart attack – grief and guilt, guilt and grief – leaving the pair more united in death, Henry likes to think, than for a long time they had been in life; holding hands, Henry dares to hope, if hands there are in heaven, and who knows, maybe even canoodling again. Whereupon, for year after year, the distraught mistress maintains the apartment as a shrine until she too dies, lonely and contrite, bequeathing the apartment without presumption of ownership, via Shapira and Mankowicz, to Henry, only child of the man she loved. And of the woman, not to put too fine a point on it, she killed.
What inclines Henry to this theory, as well as to the belief that the mansion block once enjoyed the services of a doorman, is a recollection he has of being accosted at his parents’ funeral by a weeping red-faced man in a square black coat, much like a town crier or a bailiff in appearance, who asked Henry if he would be kind enough to step aside with him a moment. Were it not for the weeping, Henry would have taken him to be some sort of underworld enforcement agent. Unlikely that his father had gambling debts or was mixed up in a protection racket, but then everything about his father had been unlikely. The weeping, though, spoke against it. Henry had never heard of people who came to beat money out of you weeping as they did it. The man was not family, however distant, that much Henry knew. He had taken his hat off when he should have kept it on, and he hadn’t, as was customary, wished Henry ‘long life’.
As a matter of religious protocol, ought Henry even to have accepted the hand held out to him? Was a chief mourner permitted to touch or be touched by another person? Was a man who was burying both his parents permitted to look another living soul in the eye, on that day or indeed on any day thereafter? At home the mirrors were all covered. Was that to cut out vanity or to recommend blindness? There was a propriety in not knowing. It behoved Henry, Henry thought, to blunder. A man shouldn’t be in control of himself on the day of his parents’ interment. So why not let the weeping bailiff, or whatever he was, force open his hand, place inside something which felt like a bag of bizarre copper currency – Azerbaijani shillings, were they? – and then close Henry’s ice-cold fingers over it one by one, like a baby’s. ‘In all the years I stood there in the wind and rain,’ he told Henry, pausing between words to wipe his nose on the sleeve of his coat, ‘I was never once treated with anything but courtesy. Remember that when other things are said. Not a single discourtesy, not once. But mine is not the only broken heart that’s left behind, Mr Nagel. Not by a long chalk. And if you can find it in yourself to make a home here’ – tapping at Henry’s obedient fist – ‘you would be doing a kindness by the living and the dead. That’s the message it is my sad responsibility to bring you. You would be doing a kindness. Feel free. You are loved for who you are the son of, Mr Nagel. Feel free.’ With which he bit hard on his lip, lowered his shaven head, and returned in the direction of the fresh mounds of earth under which Henry’s mangled parents lay, for all the world as though he meant to hurl himself upon them. What Henry found when he finally remembered to open his hand was a set of keys, but to what property he had no idea. He knew his father had spilled out of the house and rented garages and disused railway arches in which to store his bits and pieces all over Manchester, so he assumed it was just another one of those. As for the unknown man, well, his father collected such people by the dozen: the demented strays of his rapacious philanthropy, fans of a kind, enthusiasts of his work. Only now, in line with his new theory of events, is Henry able to work out that those long-lost and long-forgotten keys must have been to this apartment, shrine to a forbidden love, and that the broken-hearted bearer of them, acting on behalf of the even more broken-hearted mistress – who had the tact, at least, to stay away – must have been its doorman.
Those were the days, Henry thinks – practising thinking like the old man he is soon to be – when self was not the enemy of duty, when a man could be sentimentally attached, without resentment, to his job. Try finding a doorman who will weep over a resident now. Try finding a doorman full stop. Upstairs an old lady has just been turned off, and there is no one to notify the inhabitants of the building – you smell her or you don’t – let alone shed a tear for her.
And that is how it will be for me, Henry reminds himself. He knows what’s waiting. He will hobble homewards one ordinary madhouse afternoon, he will feel a stabbing in his heart, and he will beshit himself. Not very medically precise, but then Henry never has understood much about his own body. Too delicate. Too squeamish ever to find out. But what’s waiting is what’s waiting, whether you live in ignorance or you don’t. He will beshit himself in a public place. He will come out of himself, his own entrails the waste matter of his life and being. See that mess? That’s Henry. And all the delicacy, all the careful watching, all the aloof approximations, will have been for nothing.
Better not to go out. Better to be found, like the old lady, in your bed. But he likes the sensation of coming back hom
e, and he can’t have that unless he’s been out. He walks for forty minutes, surviving attacks by traffic twice, the first time trying to enter Regent’s Park, the second time trying to leave it, then he catches the bus to Marks & Spencer in Oxford Street where he has taken to watching people more senior than himself raiding the café – Café Revive it’s called, ha! – making provision for what’s left of their lives, pocketing free sachets of sugar, free milk, free serviettes, some brazenly, some furtive as squirrels. How long before he’s doing this? He feels the depths of his pockets. Now? Should he start now? Two elderly women at a table next to his are reading UFO magazines. They are identically infirm, each with an arm in a sling, each with purple bruising below the left eye, each with a stick hooked on to the back of her chair. Have they been carted away in a spaceship, both of them? Henry wonders. Have they grown demented trying to get people to believe their stories? He knows how they feel. He too has been sequestered among aliens for most of his adult life. He too has never been believed.
He slips three plastic containers of milk into his pocket as he leaves, then thinks better of it and returns them, in his confusion dropping two on the floor. The women from the spaceship, following him, tread on one and spear the other with their sticks. Was that deliberate? Henry wonders. Is this what they’ve been programmed to do? To spill humans’ milk? He quits the café, flustered, conscious that compunctions cause more trouble than criminality. Something the old know, and is time Henry learned: businesses would rather you stole from them than made a fuss.
He’d dodge his bus fare if he dared, but daren’t. Back at his apartment block he pushes at the lock to make sure nobody has tampered with it or left it open for the traffickers in contraband electricity while he’s been gone. Then he has to frisk himself to find his key. Lost, is it? No, yes, no. How long, how long now before the beshitting starts?
Going up, he runs into Lachlan coming down. If Henry is not mistaken the old woman’s chief mourner is looking more cheerful now than earlier in the day. Though it’s warm and dry he is wearing a green knee-length oilskin, the pockets of which are bulging, Henry notices, and he is carrying a small portrait of somebody or other in oils. He holds it up, as though at auction, for Henry to inspect. ‘Robert Louis, the old ancestor. Staring out to sea on board the yacht Casco, bound for Tahiti, the lucky blighter. What do you think? Looks as though he could do with a square meal, but then none of our family ever enjoyed foreign food much. But otherwise, not bad, eh? Especially the frame. Worth a few, the frame. As you said, everything comes. And she won’t be needing him to look at where she’s going.’
‘Why, where’s she going?’ Henry asks, inattentively. Tahiti, is it?
An alarmed expression crosses Lachlan’s face. ‘You know . . . A better place.’
‘Oh yes, there,’ Henry remembers. ‘When’s the funeral?’
‘Not sure. Crematorium’s getting back to me. You don’t mind her up there for another day or so?’
‘No,’ Henry assures him. ‘No, not at all.’
‘Hardly a nuisance, eh?’
‘Certainly not that,’ Henry says.
What’s one more, when all’s said and done? And better to be with the dead inside – remonstrating, remonstrating – than with the living in the madhouse which is out.
Henry Nagel, aged nine, proud to be entrusted with the shopping – saveloys and plaited bread and hot red horseradish which his father likes to spoon into his mouth directly from the jar – forgets to bring home the change.
Forgets? Or fails?
Only threepence, but these distinctions matter.
He can see the threepenny bit, the colour of fool’s gold, where it lies on the counter, between the till and the sheets of newspaper used for wrapping vegetables and soap powder. How it got there it would take him what’s left of his childhood to explain, but it has to do with awkwardness, his fingers not connecting as they should with Elliot Yoffey’s fingers. Elliot the grocer’s son, pale and tapered like a candle, a young man, not a boy like Henry, but another casualty of the shame plague which is rife wherever Henry goes. Humiliated to be buying meets humiliated to be serving, with the result that the threepenny bit rolls like a hand grenade into no man’s land, where Henry can’t quite reach it, and Elliot dare not lean over his side of the crowded counter to push it, and Henry would rather go home without than risk compounding shame with more shame by asking.
Who cares about a threepenny bit anyway, even in 1950s Heaton Park where there are trees but money doesn’t grow on them. Not Henry’s parents. Threepence? We pish on threepence! They aren’t rich, the Nagels in the little sunshine semi from which, if you stand on Henry’s bed when the sky lifts, you can see the grey-green fringe of the Pennines – but they are bounteously charitable and forgiving. Except that today they aren’t. Explain that. By what law must the mortified always be mortified a second time? Let some little muscled Philistine, member of the Hitler Youth, nephew of Attila the Hun, come swaggering home threepence-shy and no one says a word. Threepence? Ha! We pish on your threepence. But because it’s heart-stop Henry, the world falls in. Go back, Henry, and explain. Go back and take what’s yours.
Which he cannot do.
Go back, Henry, taking the bread and the saveloys and the horseradish with you, show them your bill, tell them how much you gave them, and then ask for your threepence change.
Which he cannot do.
He shakes his head. Tears rip his eyes like torn paper.
The door. There’s the front door, Henry. Now go. And if you are not able to come back with the threepence, do not bother to come back at all.
As though at nine he has alternative accommodation.
Henry’s father, the late Izzi Nagel, sits on the edge of his armchair, never comfortable, never at home – hard to imagine him at home here, of all places – and shakes his head. You want to know why no one says a word to the nephew of Attila the Hun? Do you? It’s because he doesn’t come back from the shop without the threepence.
No, he just burns the shop down.
His father shrugs. In a harsh world you have to do what you have to do.
So you would rather, Henry says, that you’d had a Nazi storm trooper for a son?
His father shifts his bulk and sighs – a poor ghost driven to extremity by an extremist son. If that’s my only choice – a Nazi storm trooper or a crybaby, maybe I’d have preferred the Nazi, yes. Then immediately takes it back, wiping the slate clean with his sleight of hands. UNCLE IZZI – ILLUSIONIST, FIRE-EATER AND ORIGAMIST, his card says. Herzschmertz Henry still carries one in his wallet. Queer to have had a father who always wanted to be called uncle. Almost as queer as to have had a father who always wanted to be called an illusionist and all the rest of it. Not a very good illusionist, fire-eater or origamist – but then you couldn’t expect his card to say that. And he did what he could, Henry concedes, with the hands God gave him.
He opens them now, palms towards himself, holding back the tide of his old exasperation with his son. For your own good, Henry, we sent you back to Yo fey’s. We pished on the threepence, but we couldn’t allow the world to pish on you.
So all this you did for love of me?
All this we did for love of you. To make you strong.
And you don’t think you might have loved me more – and made me stronger – by leaving me alone?
Parents can’t leave children alone, Henry. You bring a child up, you don’t leave it alone.
You could have been a little more sensitive to the particular child I was.
You weren’t short of sensitivity. You were dying of sensitivity.
Dying of my mother, you mean.
Dying of your mother’s way, yes.
Except that you wouldn’t let her have her way.
Ha! You think I was able to stop her? You think you are not your mother’s son? Who taught you to shrink from everything? Who taught you not to put a hand out and take what was rightfully yours.
More difficult than yo
u think, Dad, knowing what’s yours and what isn’t.
Never stopped you, Henry, taking what wasn’t.
That I got from you.
That you got from her, God rest her soul. It’s when you don’t know what’s yours that you start taking other people’s.
I never took, Dad, I borrowed.
And that makes it better?
No, that makes it worse.
Exactly. Thank you. That’s what they did to you. They patshkied around with your sense of ownership.
They?
They, she. Same difference. She was theirs, you’re hers. Take my word for it – she spat you out, Henry.
And?
And look at you, his father refrains from saying.
Henry isn’t listening anyway. His father wants it done and dusted. Henry the mother’s boy, end of argument. Henry his mother’s will on legs. But Henry has not yet decided whose boy he is. Where’s the hurry? Maybe when he’s seventy or eighty. Maybe when he’s ninety-four, like his neighbour, all will become clear and he can expire. But for now he prefers to scratch his head over himself. Keeps him young.
Enough, that all this they did for love of him.
And now they’re dead.
And they’re not the only ones. He can count them off. Just get him started. Irina, Anastasia, Effie . . .
Nothing changes. Sitting out on the High Street the following afternoon, drawn by the sun – he must have sun, madhouse or no madhouse – Henry flirts with the East European waitress. Henry must have East European waitresses. Ah, the old country, he thinks, though the only old country Henry knows is this one. But Eastern Europe is in his bones – Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, Prague. And so are raddled women with too much rouge on their cheeks and too much gold on their fingers. Henry’s downfall, his love of raddled women. In Henry’s wild heart – the only part of him that was ever wild – it is always Vienna in the snow and the radiators on and the blinds drawn and the ‘Emperor Waltz’ playing on a faraway barrel organ and an Austro-Hungarian countess with twisted teeth waiting for him under the blankets. Hence St John’s Wood High Street, which is the nearest Henry will ever get to the Austro-Hungarian Empire now.
The Making of Henry Page 2