‘Bravo! Now Chapter One. “Save when it happened to rain Vanderbank always walked home, but he usually took a hansom . . .” What’s a hansom, Henry?’
‘A two-wheeled cabriolet, Mummy.’
‘Bravissimo! Now you continue.’
‘“But he usually took a hansom when the rain was moderate and adopted the preference of the philosopher when it was heavy.”’
‘Excellent, Henry. So what do you suppose that philosophic preference would be?’
‘Staying in?’
‘Good boy. Now let’s hurry up and finish this and then we can start on The Ivory Tower . . .’
. . . Well, every man who is unhappy idealises his childhood. Henry can’t put a name to what he first read with his mother but he is sure it had nothing to do with those ghosts and wizards reputed to be dear to the imaginations of children. Enough that Ekaterina was married to a wizard, and that they would all be ghosts soon enough.
The literature of excruciation, that was Ekaterina Nagel’s gift to Henry. The poetry of alarms and perturbations. Strange, because on her own account Ekaterina was not a timid woman. She had grown up without too many men around, her mother and her mother’s sisters sardonically shedding or mislaying them in an early trial run of the century’s later phallophobia – nothing neurasthenic about it in their case, simply a contempt borne out by experience, what happened when you met a man from North Manchester, and you always did meet a man from North Manchester. Being a girl in these liberated circumstances, where there was money enough to help you hold your head high, men or no men, was exhilarating for Ekaterina. Tall and straight with green eyes and good diction – ‘gr-ah!-ssss’ and ‘rather’ – Ekaterina Stern was expected to pursue the logic of her mother’s and her mother’s sisters’ independent braininess, put into practice all their ambitions, and be the first of them to go to university. Professor Ekaterina Stern! It had such a ring that her mother didn’t understand why they couldn’t skip the qualifications part and just give her the job. Then Ekaterina met a communist, lost her head, maybe lost even more than that, and was sent to cool down with family in the old country just as the old country was facing facts – yes, the Nazis did mean what they said they meant: who’d have thought it? – and packing to go somewhere else. She lasted three weeks, just three weeks fewer than the old country, but long enough for the communist at home to have disappeared. Not that that mattered: on the boat back she had struck up a conversation with a dashing young man, also hot-footing it from a badly timed visit to doomed relatives, who told her his ambition was to be a fire-eater, which she, on account of his coarse North Manchester accent, had misheard as firefighter. By the time she realised her mistake they were already in love. ‘Another one!’ Irina Stern groaned, shaking her head. But destiny is destiny. Falling for men from North Manchester was what the Stern Girls did, no matter where you sent them.
War stopped Ekaterina finding out at once what being married to a fire-eater would be like. Izzi was soon away, another in the long line of absent men, leaving it to little Henry to hold the fort. By the time he was three, happy Henry was the longest-serving male family member any of the Stern Girls had ever known. Small wonder that they loved him as they did.
As for Ekaterina, the conviction which had assailed her during labour, that she was doing a wicked thing ushering a vulnerable life into a disgusting and terrifying universe, remained with her long afterwards, affecting the literature she encouraged Henry to read. At another time she could have taken the macabre route, allowing the horror of the spider which had crawled across her belly to lead her and Henry into Poe or Kafka. But no one cared for Poe or knew of Kafka and his cockroach then. Instead she went in the direction of Jane Eyre. Henry cannot remember how old he was before it dawned on him that Jane Eyre was the only book he had ever read. But it couldn’t have been all that long ago. Jane Eyre , Jane Eyre, and nothing but Jane Eyre. Even when the work of literature was called something else, it was still, in all its essentials, Jane Eyre.
Looking back, Henry is philosophical about it. In the end what other story is there? Reclusive girl suffers agonies because her skin is thin, but finally gets to fuck the hero. Moral: the thinner the skin, the better the fuck.
Wasn’t that, give or take, his shrinking story too? Without the bravado – all so much wind, Henry’s wife-borrowing talk, all hot air to blow away the evidence of how hard he found everything. And of course without the happy ending.
As for what Ekaterina intended, pushing him in the direction of girlish fragility – who knows? Did she wish Henry had been a girl, was that it? Henrietta Nagel. Alice Harriet Henrietta Nagel ...Was that why Ekaterina had held him back on Christmas Day, in the hope that the waiting and the disappointment would teach him what it was like to suffer as a girl and maybe turn him into one? Another Stern Girl to add to the collection, except that not one of those girls could hold a candle to little Henry in the fragile-flower department. Home from war, Izzi gasped at what they’d done to his rosebud boy. ‘This lipstick?’ he asked, rubbing at Henry’s pouting mouth. Pampering he’d expected: ‘All my love to you, my darling, and to the spoilt one,’ he’d written from the front, or at least from Basingstoke which was as near to the front as they’d send a man who had so much of the child in him. But spoiling was not effemination. ‘Why don’t you shove him in a frilly frock,’ he asked his wife, ‘stick pink ribbons in his hair and have done?’ But all that did was to make Henry more quivery still, and to plant a confirmation in his mind for later, that the world was full of Mr Brocklehursts, brutes to those whose fine-sprung clockwork showed through their lucent skins.
He suffered migraines as a boy. They suffered them together, Henry and Ekaterina. First she got hers – coronas of pain which lit up her pillows and hurt Henry’s eyes – then he got his. Then she called him into her bed.
‘If it wasn’t for worrying what would happen to you,’ she sometimes told him, ‘I’d end it all now.’
He stroked her hair. ‘Careful,’ she said. ‘Don’t press so hard.’
What caused these migraines? He knew what caused his – the daddy-long-legs ambling across his brain when he lay defenceless in his mother’s tummy caused his, she’d told him that, warned him of his terrible beginnings, the psychic indignity, the disgustingness – but what caused hers? And why did she want to end it all?
Was it his father? Henry knew there was a problem of some sort with his father. ‘Per se, he’s a wonderful man,’ he’d heard Ekaterina say about him. Henry thought he understood what she meant by per se. She meant the animal man as opposed to anything the animal man said or did, the husband and the father whose nature was enthusiastic and hopeful, whose face glowed with the adventure of being alive, who had only to enter a room for everything oppressive in it, even the darkness that would otherwise have lingered in the corners, to be dispelled. He made light, Izzi Nagel, even Henry, reluctantly pursing his lips for his father to wipe away the imaginary lipstick, conceded that. Not his mother’s sort of light, which went straight to your brain cells and illuminated their ache, but an altogether lighter form of light, weightless light, which made you forget on the spot what it had ever been like to feel heavy.
Midway between his father per se and his father per accidens was his father the willing but inadequate provider, the upholsterer who made everything too big and charged too little for it. For his part, Henry looked forward to his visits to his father’s workshop with its smell of glue and horsehair, its half-finished chairs spilling springs, its huge cards of piping cord – Izzi Nagel was a great piper of furniture, an over-piper if the truth be told – and its view of the Pennines. It suited his father, Henry thought, to be stuffing cushions, carrying bales of Rexine from one part of the workshop to another, humming tunelessly with a mouth full of tacks. It became him to hammer, to be absorbed, careless of what anybody thought of him. How a man should be, Henry decided, secretly selling his mother down the river, relishing the apostasy. But he also knew that not everybody val
ued his father’s upholstery as much as he did. ‘It’s a great settee lengthwise, Izzi,’ Henry remembers a client telling his father in the street. ‘The only trouble is it takes up two rooms and the cushions are so high you need a ladder to climb on to them.’ ‘That’s only because the springs are new,’ Henry’s father explained. ‘They’ll wear in.’ But Henry knew bluster when he heard it. Izzi’s armchairs and sofas never wore in. They were built on too grand a scale. Somewhere in his soul Izzi Nagel was upholstering furniture for a tsar.
What most definitely was not comprised by Henry’s mother’s per se, though, was Izzi Nagel the performer, what she (if not he) thought of as the entirely accidental man – the part-time fire-eater, origamist and illusionist. But in particular the fire-eater. At first she had worried about the damage he might do himself. Then she had worried about the damage he might do her. Now she worried about Henry. ‘It’s just a trick,’ he had tried to explain to her at every stage. ‘You could do it. Your mother could do it. Let me just show you how cold the flame is.’
‘Don’t come near me with any of that,’ she had warned him. ‘Come near me with flame and I’m leaving you.’
‘It’s as safe as houses,’ he’d assured her. ‘It’s no different from snuffing out a candle, I swear to you.’
‘With your mouth, Izzi!’
‘But nothing really goes into my mouth. No flame. I’m blowing out. It only looks as though I’m swallowing.’
‘We have a child to bring up, Izzi,’ she told him. ‘You’re supposed to blow bubbles at a baby, not flames.’
‘He’s not a baby. He’s a boy – or haven’t you noticed?’
‘Izzi, no one wants you breathing fire over their children. When were you last asked to fire-eat at a children’s party?’
He thought about it. ‘So far, never,’ he conceded. ‘But it just needs one to set the ball rolling. The word has to get out.’
She sat him down and took his hands in hers. ‘Izzi,’ she said, ‘the word’s got out. People have seen our garden. They’ve seen what you’ve reduced it to. Nothing grows there any more. Nothing ever will grow there again for another thousand years. People don’t want you doing that to their gardens. They won’t pay you to torch their homes. They want you to come along in a funny hat and a bendy wand, and they want you to fold serviettes. The two things don’t go together, Izzi. You can’t work in paper and fire. Surely you can see that.’ She pleaded with him. ‘Please? Tell me you can see that. Please?’
He hung his head. He was a good man. When a woman begged, he gave. Yes, he could see it. But she knew that in his heart he wasn’t convinced. If you couldn’t work with paper and fire that was paper’s fault. She knew what he was thinking. That he would have to find or invent paper which didn’t burn.
Otherwise, though, as a couple per se, they appeared happy and well matched. He loved her for her haughty beauty and her elocution, and she loved him for his triviality. It wouldn’t be quite true to say that he entertained her, for what astonished her initially about his fire-eating, like his paper-folding, was not that he could do it but that he wanted to, a grown man; but without doubt he made the world a toy to her; made a toy of her some days, too – she the top, he the whip – dancing and whirling her out of herself. Away from the mothering of Henry, she cut a confident and rousing figure. How could she not? She was a Stern Girl. An exceptional Stern Girl in that she had a man who loved her. On occasions, seeing her abroad, walking briskly, throwing her head back in conversation, shaking her hair, glittering with laughter – light! – Henry felt she had betrayed him. Where were the migraines now?
So was it his – heavy Henry’s – fault? If it wasn’t for him she would end it, she had said, but was she saying what she didn’t mean? Was existence a fearful thing to her, to be endured only for his sake, only when she was with him. Was that it? Did he draw all lightness out of her? The opposite of his father, was he? The one dispelling all oppression from a room, the other taking it everywhere he went? Certainly when Ekaterina described to Henry some event he had seen with his own eyes, or had heard about from someone else, she made it, as though for his behoof – as though that was the obligation she felt to his oppressive nature – more shocking, more humiliating or depressing, more negatively melodramatic, than it had actually been. She grew physically heavier in the telling it as well. Extremity of expression hung in jowls from her face, inordinacy of vocabulary thickened her neck. ‘I thought I’d die, Henry,’ she would say, gathering him into her offended bulk, actually underlining words with her fingers as she spoke, ‘I thought it was the end of me. Where this leaves me now, I have no idea, none. Maybe something will change the situation. But as God is my witness, darling, I will never get over it, never.’ Ask Henry to name what exactly it was she would never get over, whether it was an event he had seen with his own eyes or not, and he would have been at a loss. Hiroshima? Someone turning up at an engagement party in the same dress as hers? Fog? In the face of her extravagant alarms, the objective world gave up the ghost. Nothing was but as his mother told it, a great halo of migraine encircling everything.
The big question for Henry: did she make him afraid of life, or did he make her?
And then, with a sort of blithe impertinence, as when the sky suddenly clears after a wild storm – bad weather? what bad weather? – she would irradiate him with happiness again, dancing him on her knee, serenading him with songs popular on the radio. He adored her singing. ‘Whistle While You Work’ especially, with the inexpert whistling thrown in – more humming through the lips than whistling – while she busied herself at the stove, boiling cans of food for him. She had no cooking skills. No Stern Girl cooked. They just boiled cans. Beans. Macaroni. Stews. Vegetables. Soups. If a chicken dinner had come in a can they’d have boiled that. And without ever emptying the can into a pan, for that too would have been esteemed cooking, a concession to the men who were never there. It was the one domestic skill the Stern women passed down the line – dropping cans into boiling water and then forgetting about them until the water boiled away and the kitchen filled with the smell of roasting metal. Eventually the cans exploded – that was how you knew the meal was ready. Sometimes, when his father came home late asking for his tea, Ekaterina would point to the kitchen ceiling. ‘It’s there,’ she’d say.
Then Henry’s father would go out into the garden, fill his mouth with paraffin, and burn down more trees.
I have pyromaniacal parents, Henry thought later. They lay waste to everything. But what he still can’t decide is whether they had laid waste to him as well, or whether he had done that to himself.
‘Whistle While You Work’ wasn’t her only song. She also did ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’ and ‘Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life’, and on mercifully migraine-free days, when she wore a turban to keep the odour of molten aluminium out of her hair, ‘The Desert Song’, performed in the mode of Myrna Loy but with the voice of Jeanette MacDonald. Henry loved nothing more than this, especially when he was feverish and bedridden, watching the patterns on the wallpaper throb and mouth at him – the house alive with the sound of his mother, the cans dry-rattling in their pans, and the whole world safe. Ask Henry, between the age of three and thirteen, what heaven is and he will tell you heaven is his mother at home, singing, burning his dinner.
‘How lovely you are,’ she would lullaby him in the afternoon, as the Pennine-frilled northern darkness closed in on them, tapping out the tune on his knees, matching the words to the ethereal second movement of Schubert’s heaven-sent Fifth Symphony, a piece of music they had listened to together on the Third Programme – Henry’s first piece of real music – and which they had made their most favourite piece of music of all time.
‘How lovely you are, how lovely-ey-ey you are, how lovely you are, how how how lovely you are.’ Set any Schubert loose on Henry now and he will not be responsible for his tears. But he knows that if by accident he gets to hear Schubert’s Fifth Symphony, he will not survive it.
You can have too much feeling.
Henry explains many of the strange things he has done in his life this way: he has safeguarded himself against too much feeling. Of course, you can have too little feeling, also. But Henry is not aware he has ever safeguarded himself against that. You can only battle with the nature you have, and Henry’s is pap.
Something Henry remembers, from long after the Schubert days when nobody was lovelier than he was: his mother ringing him in his university digs at an odd hour of the night, her voice high and dangerous, to say she would like him to sit down and compose himself (if there is anywhere to sit down and be composed by the communal phone), because she has matter of grave and strange importance to impart, no, no one has died, not exactly, but she has caught his father out, actually seen him with her own eyes – with my own eyes, Henry! – going into the Midland Hotel in the company of a woman. ‘In broad daylight, that’s what I can’t forgive, the stupidity of the man. At least he owes it to me not to be seen, not to be caught, especially by me!’
Henry is surprised to hear himself laughing. ‘Mother, what were you doing outside the Midland Hotel?’
‘What bearing does that have on the matter?’
‘It just makes it the more farcical.’
‘I don’t know what it is that strikes you as funny. You think this is a farce I’m describing? Well, you’re right in one regard. Our marriage is a farce.’
‘I didn’t mean that. I meant that the coincidence of your both being at the Midland Hotel at the same time is comical. Synchronicity is always ludicrous. Did he see you?’
‘Henry, I haven’t rung so that you can lecture me on the nature of farce. And no, he didn’t see me. But I saw him. So what am I supposed to do now?’
‘Nothing. He might only have been going in for afternoon tea.’
‘It was the morning, and your father doesn’t have afternoon tea.’
The Making of Henry Page 6