The Making of Henry

by Howard Jacobson

  They also know the fierce loyalty of which their uncouth in-law is capable. Banishing your own son from his own house in order to make a man of him is one thing. Having someone else banishing your son from a grocery shop for life is another. Outraged in his affections, Izzi Nagel is off to war, codeword ‘Okey-dokey’.

  ‘If we open the windows,’ Marghanita says, ‘I bet we will be able to hear what happens.’

  Henry looks alarmed. The sound of broken glass and breaking bones – is that what his failure to pick up the threepenny bit is going to lead to next? Old man Yoffey dead on his sacks of potatoes, Elliot Yoffey struck dumb, that’s to say even dumber than usual, Mrs Yoffey a widow, and Henry’s dad on death row? Seeing his trepidation, Marghanita, laughing, puts her hands on Henry’s ears. Warm on his neck her laughter. If he turns round will Marghanita bury his eyes in her chest? Henry turns, and yes, Marghanita will.

  Warm in his eyes, her chest.

  As for the Yoffeys, that’s soon settled. Leave things to the men, the men will sort them. Threepence? We’re going to fight – two grown men, two pillars of our community – over threepence?! From behind the storeroom curtains Mrs Yoffey watches her husband pour a couple of small glasses of sweet red Middle Eastern wine. Here’s to you, Mr Nagel – call me Izzi. And to you Mr Yoffey – call me Leo. Thirty minutes and a phone call later Leo and Izzi are getting Henry and Elliot to shake hands. This is the first time that Henry realises Elliot is not just mute with him but mute with everybody. Mute by nature, mute in the medical sense, just as Henry is thin-skinned. Henry’s father, Uncle Izzi the illusionist, makes a threepenny piece appear from behind Elliot’s neck and magics it into Henry’s pocket. Henry who has seen this done a hundred times forces a weak smile; Elliot, for whom every instance of everything is the first, breaks into an idiot grin. Later that evening, while Henry is being tucked into bed by the Stern Girls – ‘All right, you can have him for one night,’ concedes Henry’s father, flushed with syrupy red wine and that consciousness of success which only a conciliator can know, ‘but don’t spoil him’ – Rivka Yoffey is being thrown over her garden wall.

  Henry is twenty and very drunk on syrupy red wine himself when it occurs to him to put his arms around Marghanita and kiss her mouth. How old is Marghanita? Fifty? Fifty-five? Sixty? You can’t tell when you’re twenty. But what Henry can calculate is that when she’s a hundred, Henry will be sixty himself, give or take. Too far gone to worry, in other words. Not that he’s thinking of proposing marriage to her anyway. All Henry wants is to kiss her mouth and feel her breasts.

  They are at a family wedding in the deep South of Manchester, which is Henry’s excuse. South Manchester has always made him light-headed. Perhaps because between bombs and spiders he was born there. It is a warm night, the air silky, the trees still steaming after a summerload of rain. It was Marghanita who suggested they walk on the lawn, offering Henry her shoes to carry because the heels are high and she does not want to sink into the soft earth. He takes her elbow just the same, to be on the safe side. And is surprised by how not old it is.

  ‘So your studies are going well?’ she asks.

  How long has Henry been waiting for this night? Sometimes it seems to him that he studies only to impress women, that he cannot at the last tell the difference between literature and love-making. Certainly when he finishes reading a long novel or an epic poem, Henry believes he should be rewarded with female favours. No act of the critical intelligence is over and done with for Henry until it has been completed in sex. What is it that stops him skipping tedious chapters but a sort of erotic conscientiousness, eking out the hours, paying for his pleasures in advance, remembering his manners? Careful reading as considerate fore-play. Things would be in their right conjunction for Henry tonight, therefore, whoever the barefoot woman quizzing him on his studies. But Marghanita is special to him and already entwined around his idea of himself as a boy of letters. Of all the Stern Girls, Marghanita was the reader. His mother, too, but his mother’s influence was direct, not misty like Marghanita’s. And besides, boys are not supposed to fall in love with their mothers. Henry’s heart might be extravagant and score Cs but it is not indecent.

  It was Marghanita who persuaded Henry to specialise, if he could, in American literature. ‘Nothing happens here,’ she told him on the eve of his going off to university, ‘nothing big. All we do here is shelter. The grand themes are all American now.’

  He remembers thinking there must have been some sadness in her, for her to have said that. And she had a face that easily expressed sadness; rather heavy features, like her sisters, with a broad nose and fleshy lips, but her cheekbones were finer cut than theirs, and her eyes more nervous in their movements and with more moisture in them. Marghanita is the White Russian of the family, he used to think. Of course, by comparison with his father’s relatives, or with just about anybody else living in North Manchester come to that – the hordes, the Mongols, the Bolsheviks – the Stern Girls are all White Russians. Aloof, they wrap their furs around their pale skins and sniff the cherries in their distant orchard. But Marghanita is whiter even than her sisters. She’s the disinherited one.

  So he feels he owes it to her, no less than to himself, not to be another of her disappointments. Maybe he can go further and actually make it all right for her again, help her to repossess the world. He is already doing that for his mother, carrying her colours into battle. So why not Marghanita’s colours as well? Henry, knight of the thin skin, redeeming the lost dreams of older women.

  ‘Studies are going OK, thanks largely to you,’ he says, steering her further from the lights of the party, unless she’s steering him. ‘I must say that when I see those other poor buggers sweating over Beowulf and Sir Philip Sidney I’m not half glad I took your advice.’

  ‘The Americans aren’t disappointing you?’

  ‘Not at all. Though I don’t think I’m ever going to be a Melville and Hawthorne fan.’

  ‘Who’s your favourite writer these days, then?’

  ‘You make it sound as though I am always changing him.’

  ‘Or her . . .’

  ‘Or her. But it isn’t a her at present.’

  ‘Ah, it’s someone very “he”, is it? Let me guess. Hemingway?’

  ‘No, Hemingway is a bit too outdoors for my liking. And his sentences are too short. I’m more of a Henry James man.’

  He can hear, through her elbow, that Marghanita doesn’t know her way well through Henry James. ‘The Turn of the Screw,’ she says.

  ‘Yes,’ says Henry, not telling her that at his university The Turn of the Screw is considered to be very un-Jamesian James, ‘and Washington Square and What Maisie Knew and The Awkward Age.’

  ‘What’s The Awkward Age about?’

  ‘Young girls, on the face of it. But in fact, the sacred terror. The irresistibility of some people, even when you know they aren’t suitable.’

  ‘The irresistibility of unsuitable persons to young girls?’

  Henry stops them by a fountain. A decorative swan is curled around itself, stretching its neck, as though fearful of the jet of water. From a distance he had hoped it was Leda and the swan – that monstrous coupling – but it is only a swan. The hall looks a long way away, its lights appearing to tremble in the hot damp of the night.

  ‘Their irresistibility to anyone,’ he says. ‘I’m not all that interested in the young girls.’

  He has been carrying her shoes, diamantés on brocade, wedding shoes, light, witty, the heels precarious, not as high as Henry likes, not stilts, but concise and pointed, sharp as daggers. It is somehow wonderful to be carrying a grown woman’s shoes. But to face her and hold her as he wants he must put them down. He tries the ledge of the fountain.

  ‘Not there,’ she says, ‘they’ll fall in.’

  ‘If they do I’ll dive after them.’

  ‘You’re one of us,’ she laughs. ‘I bet you can’t swim.’

  ‘I’ll take my chance.’

&nbs
p; His mouth is on hers. Will the lips taste old? he wonders. Will they be cracked? Will they close tight, forbidding him, or will they have too much give in them, will they yield with old person’s gratitude? No one tells you; no one prepares you for this.

  A miracle, but her lips are not different from the lips of young women studying American literature at his university. Neither softer nor harder. But she isn’t kissing him back. Simply letting him kiss her. He puts his hands up to her breasts, in that case, and for a moment or two she lets him do that as well, almost as though it is part of his education that he should know what a sixty-year-old woman’s breasts feel like. And here is another miracle: they too are as unbearably round, as unimaginably firm – as undespairing and as ungrateful – as any woman’s a third her age.

  Cool, like green apples they are. Granny Smith’s? Yes, exactly those, but forget the granny.

  She isn’t forlorn in body, Henry exults – suddenly it’s a family matter for him again – therefore she cannot be forlorn in mind! He could cry now, except that she might not understand what he is crying for. How to tell her that he is crying for the cool apple-green resilence of her flesh?

  But that is all of it he is going to be allowed to touch. ‘Not such a good idea,’ she says, pushing him gently away. Not such a good idea, Henry, being kidnapped by your great-aunts.

  ‘The sacred terror?’

  She laughs, touching her face, checking that her mouth is where it should be. ‘No,’ she says. ‘You.’

  Not such a good idea, Dad.

  Nearly Marghanita’s age himself now, though nothing like so apple green and undespairing, Henry upbraids his late father. Not such a good idea, setting up this cosy keypad love nest with your mistress, enjoying a second life before you had finished with your first.

  Don’t know what you’re talking about, Henry, but are you in any position to pass judgement?

  I’m your son. A son passes judgement. Besides which, you are hardly in any better position to pass judgement on me – you always said you wanted me to enjoy myself.

  I did. So why didn’t you?

  I enjoyed myself in my own way, Dad.

  No you didn’t. You never enjoyed yourself, not even when you were shtupping your best friends’ wives. ‘No pleasure without pain,’ you used to tell me, ‘and for the moment I’m concentrating on the pain part – it’s called existentialism.’ So when came the pleasure, Henry?

  I’m waiting for it.

  You’re too late, Henry.

  Maybe I am. But at least I wasn’t so deluded as to suppose I could come by it by looking in two places at the same time.

  A pity you weren’t. A pity you didn’t have the decency to try a little secrecy. You could never keep out of your own backyard.

  It was the only yard I knew.

  That was your fault. I tried to get you out.

  The way you got out?

  A man has one life. He has to see the world.

  So you’re admitting this was your home from home.

  This? I’ve never seen the place before.

  But then you wouldn’t tell me if you had.

  Of course I wouldn’t. Every heart must have its secrets, Henry – T. E. Lawrence. I learned that from you.

  D. H. Lawrence.

  Whoever.

  TWO

  These warm days!

  The old woman’s corpse isn’t of course rotting, not after only twenty-four hours, but Henry isn’t able to stay indoors. Opposite where he lives is a small park which abuts a church. The Little Park, locals call it, by way of distinguishing it from its big brother, Regent’s Park. Once the park was the graveyard for the church, now it’s a place for sitting and wheeling and watching your children. But it’s Thistle Meadow Henry likes best, the part still given over to the dead, a tumble of long-neglected head-stones, barely one of them upright, the names of those they were erected to commemorate eaten away by time and the poisons of the city. Tautology, Henry. Time is the poison of the city.

  If this were still a place of burial, Henry would think of bringing his parents’ bodies down to be closer to him. Get them out of the horror of North Manchester. Give them some of the warm south. In the case of his mother, give her some of the warm south back!

  But it would be tactless, wouldn’t it, questions of faith and practicability apart, to remove them as a pair to this place of betrayal. Stand among the stones and you enjoy good views of the love-nest mansion block; narrow your eyes and the building looks striped from here, pink and vanilla, like Neapolitan ice cream. A pink mist.

  Did his father come here, he wonders, and narrow his eyes so that a pink mist was all he saw? Doubtful. His father was not a wanderer among graves the way his son is. Didn’t like getting his feet wet, his father, and the earth is always damp between gravestones.

  Nonetheless, pink was what drew his father, no doubt about that. Henry doesn’t know why, but pink is the colour he has decided to give his father’s mistress. Blancmange pink. He imagines her as a cushion. That’s why his father couldn’t say no to her. She was of another hue, another substance, of another sort of comfort, to his mother.

  Henry is here often for a newcomer to the area. The squirrels recognise him and know not to bother him for food. Another regular visitor supplies those wants, a man with holes in his beard who keeps his breadcrumbs in a plastic bag and clicks his tongue to make the squirrels come to him. Freak! Henry is a non-feeder of animals. He wants the squirrels, and any other of God’s creatures come to that, to know just by looking at him that he is on some other errand. That he is above their squalid concerns – eat, shit, eat, shit. He wants there to be no mistake about that. And there isn’t. The squirrels do not even start at his footfall. And the birds stay in the trees.

  In truth Henry no more cares for getting his feet wet than his father did; but he has things to think about that require the presence of the dead. Walking between the gravestones, Henry believes he has the dead on his shoes.

  Anyone watching him crossing and recrossing the high street, going out of his apartment block into the park, then out of the park back into his apartment block, flinging himself against the locks each time, would quickly see what the trouble is. Retirement. You don’t have enough to do, old man. What you need is a hobby. Stamps. Grandchildren. An allotment.

  Not that Henry is retired. He isn’t gainfully employed, but between gainful employment and retirement there is a world of occupation. If Henry were an actor he would say that he is resting. In actuality Henry is in suspense, consequent upon his having handed in his resignation. But that’s still not to say he has retired. To all intents and purposes Henry continues to do what he has always done, only without a place of work, without a job description, without students, and without pay.

  In which case why did Henry offer to go? A ticklish question, to which the approximate answer is that they made him.

  But at least the waitress has woken up to his presence. It’s taken six visits in two days – would have been more had the tables not been occupied on some of his essays on her attention – and any number of large tips, since Henry reckons that once you’ve waded in big to get someone’s attention you’ve got to keep upping your stake. So yes, at eight pounds a Russian tea and a tenner per cup of Viennese coffee she’s noticing him now. ‘Save your feet,’ he has to say every time he orders, handing her a note and making that easy-come easy-go expression with his shoulders which he imagines to be native to people from the old country. It’s become a little joke between them – ‘Save your feet’ – touching on questions of energy and age, and establishing Henry’s interest in her person. ‘That’s if I have any feet to save,’ she has said to him this afternoon, signalling with her eyebrows how much she has to do, what with a cricket match at Lord’s finishing early, and everybody wanting cold drinks and ice-cream sundaes.

  She is wearing white lipstick, unless it’s lipsalve, which either way Henry for some reason likes, and her custard hair is tied in an asymmetric left-leaning
brush, making her face look lopsided, which Henry also for some reason likes. Scientists of the face say that lopsidedness denotes dishonesty or double-dealing, so that would explain it. Henry prefers women who have secrets. He has a feeling she has been unhappily married, probably more than once, and has teenage children who have left home, either to join the Cirque du Soleil or to beg on the streets in Soho. Her first husband will have been an artist from Budapest who beat her, maybe a failed opera singer, the second a house painter from Norwood, someone she met on the tube, a crackhead. You can tell Henry hasn’t lived in London long: he has a lurid idea of what happens in the place.

  As, for example, that there is a war of nerves in progress on the streets of St John’s Wood between the Muslim and the Jewish communities. Henry enjoys the prospect of the Central London Mosque’s stringy minaret at the south end of the High Street, but he wonders if it’s a provocation to those who come here to buy bagels and chopped liver. Was it built as a provocation, or were the bagel shops opened as a provocation to it?

  To Henry’s left, two Arab boys in crêpe de Chine shirts sit drinking coffee and discussing films. They regard each other under soft long lashes, exchanging dark points of light. Henry tries to remember when last anybody looked at him like that. Never. Not ever. He has missed out on beautiful boys, missed out on being one, missed out on knowing one. To Henry’s right an Israeli family are fussing over their oldest child. Sammi. Sammi too is dark and beautiful, but he doesn’t have the gift of yielding his attention to another person. Sammi might one day win a Nobel Prize, but it won’t be for quietude or empathy. Although the sun has shone for days, Sammi has found puddles on the pavement. Henry cannot remember whether it rained last night. In his apartment you don’t hear rain. Or see it: the windows of Henry’s apartment repel rain. Sammi jumps in and out of the puddles, then marvels at the marks his shoes make on the pavement. ‘Abba, look!’