‘Those,’ says his father, ‘are your footprints.’
Without appearing to change their expressions, the Arab boys look long and hard at Sammi’s footprints.
Henry orders more Russian tea. It’s a good sign, he reckons, that the waitress is not losing patience with him, hogging a table and her time when so many people want serving. The Israelis are just leaving. A Muslim family is waiting to take their place. When the Arab boys move on, a bunch of Jewish kids will sit down.
‘This is like the Middle East,’ Henry mutters to her as she takes his dirty cup away.
‘It’s quieter in the Middle East,’ she mutters back.
If she has an accent to match her appearance, Henry has yet to detect it. There is a slight labial flattening out of her ‘t’s which Henry finds attractive, like watching someone pretty slide on ice, otherwise there is nothing to say she is Austro-Hungarian. But what Henry knows, he knows.
Sensing a dog snuffling about his feet, Henry is about to kick out. Another crazy hoping to touch Henry into giving him money? Unusual to get them this far north, but there you are, the madhouse is on the move. What stops him is firstly the possibility that the dog belongs to one of the waitress’s children – the one living rough in Soho – and secondly the realisation that although the dog is indeed on a piece of string, it is not some beggar carrying his cardboard home around who is on the other end of it, but Lachlan Louis Stevenson.
‘Mind if I join you?’ He is carrying what looks like a pair of figurines – Philemon and Baucis or similar – loosely wrapped in kitchen paper towel. And a pair of brass fire tongs in a plastic bag.
Henry repeats his easy-come easy-go shrug.
‘Selling off the family heirlooms already?’ he asks, since Lachlan has the bad taste to lay them out on the table.
‘Readies, that’s all. You need readies when you’ve been waiting for what’s yours for half your life. Down, Angus! Angus, stop that!’
Henry feels under the table for what’s licking him. He finds a long velvet ear and then the wet spongy innards of Angus’s mouth, purple to the touch. It is like putting his hand into warm trifle.
‘Don’t know if you’re planning to move him in with you,’ Henry says, cantankerous as befits his years, ‘but there’s something you need to know about your stepmother’s block – it operates a no pets bigger than a goldfish policy.’
‘Not a pet,’ Lachlan says, swallowing air and banging his chest. ‘Sorry, indigestion. He’s a friend, this one – aren’t you, Angus? I don’t imagine they operate a no friend smaller than a wolfhound policy. And you’re not going to mind, are you?’
Unable to reply directly, unable to ask a mute for his change or to tell a man with a dog that dogs are definitely not to his taste, Henry steals another look at Angus. The dog rolls his liquid eyes upwards, as though they have never before alighted on anything so wonderful as Henry. Like me at seventeen, Henry thinks. In love with whatever crosses his field of vision. ‘Is he noisy?’ Henry asks.
‘Angus, are you noisy?’ Angus twitches a balaclava ear, then scratches himself. ‘There you are, not a peep.’
‘What is he?’
‘What is he! What does he look like? Red setter.’
‘Is that good?’
‘I’m not sure I understand your question.’
‘Is that a good breed . . . a red setter?’
‘A good breed?’
‘I don’t know dogs,’ Henry has to explain. ‘I never had a dog. I’m just wondering if a red setter is a good one to have.’
‘Depends what you want him for. They’re excellent gun dogs, but I doubt’ – looking at Henry’s unweathered complexion – ‘that it would be a gun dog you’re after.’
‘Oh, I’m not after one,’ Henry says, wishing he’d never got into this. ‘I’m just’ – what is he? – ‘curious.’ Which he isn’t.
‘Well, I’ll tell you what,’ Lachlan says, leaning into Henry and inconsiderately bringing up the air he swallowed earlier, ‘you can “doubleyou ay ell kay” Angus any night you fancy, and get a feel for him.’
Henry is suddenly vouchsafed a vision of his future. I am to become a dog doubleyou ay ell kayer. I am to become an old codger who doubleyou ay ell kays dogs for another old codger who’s got ulcers.
‘Is he trained?’ he asks.
‘Of course he’s trained. That’s what he’s trained for – to wait for his walk. Oh Lord, that’s torn it. Now he’s heard walk he’s going to want one.’
And right on cue, Angus makes a little whining noise, stretches his shoulders and sniffs something on the wind being blown in from the Canaries. ‘See,’ Lachlan says, doing the same. ‘Come on then, boy. Off we go.’ He tucks the figurines under one arm and the brass fire tongs under the other. ‘Oh, by the way,’ he remembers, ‘you aren’t free to come along to the service, are you?’
‘The dog’s having a service?’
‘No, the old woman’s. Day after tomorrow. If you could, I’d appreciate it. No one else, you see. Just me. It would be nice if we could muster something a bit more like a congregation. You won’t have to do anything. Just clap.’
‘Clap?’
‘It’s what she wanted. No flowers. No memorials. Just applause. She worked the halls in her younger days. That’s her story anyway. “And we all went up up up up up the mou-ow-ow-ow-ountain” – remember that? – “then we all came dow-ow-ow-ow-own again.” That’s how she got my father, singing him that rubbish. She was past it by then but he couldn’t tell the difference. “The higher up the mountain, the greener is the grass. We met a silly billy goat who wouldn’t let us pass.” That was him – the billy goat. No fool like an old fool. Come on, Angus.’
‘And nobody’s clapped her since?’
‘Lord, no. So I promised I’d arrange it. When the coffin goes through the curtain, a brief hands-together. That’s all. No encore. I’ll pop a card with the time and place on it under your door. You can come in the hearse with me, if you like. Arrive in style.’
So who’ll clap me when the curtain closes, solipsistic Henry wonders. And for what?
Henry knows better, at last, than to go through the list of his achievements. But that’s only because he has progressed, in recent times, to counting his mourners. Same sum. Same total.
Does Henry feel, then, that his has been a disappointing life? No. Henry feels his has not been a life. If Henry had lived a life he would not be able to remember his childhood so vividly; too many other things would have intervened and misted his childhood over. But nothing has intervened. The people he thinks about and whose names he hasn’t misplaced are all from then. No one else has stuck. Who are they, the people of just the other day? What do they look like? What are they for? Go on, Henry says, impinge! But they won’t. The surface of his middle years, rapidly becoming his late years, has grown too slippery. Nothing adheres. There was his childhood – say from zero to twenty-one; all right, say from zero to thirty – then whoosh! (he teaches, he is borrowed by his friends’ wives, he resigns, he moves to St John’s Wood, he meets a dog) and suddenly it’s now.
This is something he would like to talk to his father about. His father managed to extend his childhood from zero to fifty-five, Uncle Izzi, illusionist, fire-eater and origamist, turning up at parties with a stack of newsprint and a travel bag of paraffin-smelling torches, more excited than the infants he was performing for, so that when he died he died, in Henry’s eyes, a child – ‘Jesus came down to gather flowers / And on the way he gathered ours’ – as cruel an instance of infant mortality as any Henry had read about in any Victorian novel. Yet the world mourned him as a man. Such a man! What a man! Some man, Henry, your father!
No one said, ‘Some child, Henry, your old man!’
What Henry would like to know from his father, who has had a long time to think about it, is whether he believes he was cheated of a grown-up existence, denied the chance to find out what not being a child was like . . .
You mean like you
, Henry? A little old man from the moment you were born.
. . . or whether, if his father will allow him to finish, he believes he had the best of it, never growing up to know bitterness and defeat.
Because I was too busy, Henry, keeping consciousness of bitterness and defeat from you.
You can see why Henry doesn’t want to go home some days, however much he doesn’t want to be out. But you can’t take over someone else’s past and hope to escape a colloquium with ghosts.
So why isn’t Henry speaking to his lamented mother? He is, but she understands him too well. When Henry speaks, the sockets of her dry eyes fill with sadness. It’s the seduction it always was. If he allows her, she will pull him down with her into the blackness, where she can shield him from all harm. Keep the clanging world away from him. And have him in an early grave.
Was that what they fought over, Ekaterina and Izzi Nagel, was that really the trouble between them – the saving of Henry? Was she rehearsing her version of the truth when the coach crashed? Your son . . . And then bang!
Was he answering her, the fire-eater, when his heart gave out? My son? My son, you call him! And then oy gevalt!
To save Henry from the world, Ekaterina Nagel came as close as was within her power – short of jumping him from the summit of the pyramid of Cheops – to stop him being born at all. He should have been the Baby Jesus. As far as the nursing home was concerned he already was the Baby Jesus, that honour going to the first child to show its nose on Christmas Day, and little Henry being more than halfway there. Seeing as Henry’s nearest rivals were of Singaporean academic and Nigerian diplomatic parentage respectively, and in the Nigerian case were thought highly likely to come out twins, there was undoubtedly some faute de mieux favouritism in this. Whatever else there was to say on the subject, at least in Henry the Baby Jesus would be single, white and with a fifty-fifty chance of being male.
So why did Ekaterina hold back? Bombs and spiders. Given the situation vis-à-vis the aerial war with Germany, Irina Stern had insisted that South Manchester was the only place for her daughter’s confinement and to that end had found a nursing home not very many miles from Alderley Edge. Izzi was a young soldier stationed outside Basingstoke, waiting to be sent overseas to entertain other young soldiers with his sleights of hand, and he had no views on the matter other than that he wanted his wife to be safe and his son – though he had a feeling it went against the grain faithwise – to be the Baby Jesus. What no one had counted on was the inaccuracy, not to say the irreligious-ness, of German pilots, dropping bombs in the vicinity of Alderley Edge on Christmas Eve while aiming for Ellesmere Port. As soon as Ekaterina heard the explosions she reversed her labour, ignoring all exhortations to push for Christ’s sake. In the early hours of Christmas Day, with the prize still there for the taking and the sky clear, Ekaterina did begin to push, but went into reverse again on account of a spider with long sticky legs crawling across her belly. Talking about it later, with a shudder, Ekaterina multiplied the spiders which had taken advantage of her helplessness, increasing not only their number but their size. She wasn’t superstitious and didn’t hold with omens, she simply refused to bring a child of hers into a world which had such horrors in it. By mid-afternoon her fears had been almost stilled: this was rural England, the countryside, and in the country even the cleanest nursing home could not be one hundred per cent insectproof. As for the offending insect itself, it was just a daddy-long-legs left over from the summer, looking for somewhere warm to hide. ‘On my stomach!’ Ekaterina cried. ‘Shush,’ they told her. ‘Across my baby’s brain!’ ‘Shush,’ they told her. ‘Shush and push.’ And thus, at four o’clock on a dark December afternoon, the Saviour’s birthday, Henry Nagel was delivered, with a brief scream and a cough of blood, into an existence marred by bombs and spiders. But by that time he was too late to make it as the Baby Jesus. The honour of being the Redeemer for the day had fallen to Taiwo and Kehinde Mabogunje, sleeping soundly in a crib decorated with crêpe paper, silver cut-out moons and shepherds.
A family joke for years afterwards, beloved of his father. ‘How do you like that? A Yiddeler, two Schwartzes and a Chink. Some choice, eh?’
They brought it out the way you bring out old photographs. Henry remembers the tears of laughter, and maybe of sadness too – regret, horror, who can say? – streaming down his mother’s cheeks. Now the family would go to prison just for smiling inwardly at the comedy of colour.
Henry’s view is that there was more racial harmony when no one was trying to promote it. But then who of any importance cares what Henry’s views are, Henry no longer being in any position to influence events, even in the Pennines.
Take that ‘no longer’ with a pinch of salt, Henry feeling sorry for his present self – the truth is Henry never was in any position to influence events.
Ask what did for Henry professionally and you have to go a long way back. All the way to his not being the Baby Jesus, probably. Takes away from a boy’s outgoingness, that sort of thing. Accustoms him, as a matter of aesthetical necessity no less than manners, to holding back.
There are those who would say it was reclusiveness that did for Henry from the off: social reclusiveness in the sense of not wishing to appear too forward, or simply not wishing to appear at all, and political reclusiveness – a sort of intellectual absenteeism – in the sense of not liking the ideas which were being exchanged around him, and therefore not attending to them. A man out of sympathy with his age, eh, Henry? Like Lucretius in Matthew Arnold’s understanding of him, who, ‘overstrained, gloom-weighted, morbid’, turned from the varied and abundant spectacle of Roman life, and ‘with stern effort, with gloomy despair’, riveted his eyes on the ‘naked framework of the world’, looking for essences where other men sought appearances, and as a consequence retreating further and further into ‘disenchantment and annihilation’. Might sound tosh as applied to Henry, turning from the varied and abundant spectacle of life on the Pennine Way, and toshier still considering that the essences in which Henry sought consolation were the wives and girlfriends of other men, but we can only report on life as it feels to us, and that was how life felt to Henry. The world was a blank to him; he approved and noticed nothing unless he was in love with a woman. Then he approved and noticed nothing but her. It meant you got a good deal if you were the woman. It meant you got a lot of Henry. But of course that was only a good deal if a lot of Henry was what you wanted. And if by a lot you understood intensity rather than duration.
Not so much a little touch of Harry in the night: more a healthy dollop of Henry over the fortnight.
A refined and disenchanted reclusiveness, a principled absenteeism, what you might call a dandified old-fashionedness – modern but not adequate to modernity, was Arnold’s summation of Lucretius – and a subtly-fibred sympathy, breathed in from his mother, for women to whom life had been cruel: those were the qualities, anyway, for which Henry, not least as a teacher and exemplar to the young, wanted to be admired. In fact, his fellow teachers thought he was hoity-toity, ludicrous and ill-educated; up himself and as often as not up someone he had no business being up. If you wanted the authoritative account (without the Lucretius) of Henry’s academic fall from nowhere to somewhere even lower, then that was it: a pathetic figure without provenance or curiosity, who hoity-toitied and hanky-pankeyed himself out of professional contention, hoity-toitied and hanky-pankeyed himself out of promotion, and finally hoity-toitied and hanky-pankeyed himself out of a job.
Their right to think vulgarly if they so choose, but Henry sees what happened differently. Henry believes he isn’t teaching young persons how to think aloofly any more because young persons have finally cottoned on to the fact that he doesn’t like them. As far as Henry is concerned a conspiracy of the childish runs the world – a magic number of the world’s most influential children (‘We are the Bilderbergies, happy girls and boys’) meeting every Christmas and Easter in a secret candyfloss garden on an invisible lemon meringue island s
omewhere off the sugary coast of Never-Never Land. Irk them and you’ve had it. Henry engaged their baby wrath by writing one of their number a letter of recommendation without crayoning in a little house bathed in eternal sunshine. Henry forgot the golden rule and made it rain. Or maybe he didn’t forget, maybe he just wanted rain. He was getting pretty depressed, anyway, Henry, the oldest person teaching in an institution which was the mirror image of his soul – remote, unacknowledged, irrelevant, forgotten. A university they called it – the University of the Pennine Way – but before that it had been a polytechnic, and before that a college of technology, and before that a place for keeping hairdressers on day release off the streets, and before that a Spinners’ Institute, and before that Henry had no idea. A playschool for Bilderbergies? Change the name and you change how people feel about themselves, that’s the thinking. So by writing a poor student a poor reference, Henry effectively unravelled a century or more of cosmetic nomenclature, thereby adversely affecting not only the student’s self-esteem but everybody else’s not excluding his own. Especially his own. The place was Henry’s life. He had been teaching there before the vice-chancellor was born.
Put Henry into a trance and regress him and you’ll find that he’d been teaching at the Spinners’ Institute even before he was born himself.
Stuck-up, Henry?
Hardly.
Just stuck. Stuck in the Pennine mud.
And stuck in his mother. Stuck fast within her resistant womb, stuck fast between her milky breasts, stuck fast in her disapproving mind.
Open the door and let me out, Ma!
Except that Henry has always rather liked it in there.
‘Now we’re going to make you a professor,’ Henry’s mother tells him, sitting him on her knee and getting him to read the words she points to with her lovely slender-knuckled fingers. ‘First the title . . .’
Little Henry, aged three and a half, over the moon, puts his arm around his mother’s neck and bites his tongue. ‘The. Awkward. Age.’
The Making of Henry Page 5