The Making of Henry

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘Then maybe he was going along to discuss a party, checking one of the reception rooms out or something. Are you sure he wasn’t there to do a party?’

  ‘Certain. He didn’t have his tricks or his torches with him. Nor was it the right time of day. Who throws a children’s party at the Midland at eleven on a Monday morning? What is more he was wearing his suit. He never does parties in a suit. For parties, as you know, my husband – may God forgive me for ever choosing such a clown of a man – wears a top hat and a red nose. For seeing other women he wears a suit. And I’ll tell you something else, Henry – he was wearing odd socks!’

  ‘How could you tell that?’

  ‘I was six inches behind him. I could have trodden on his heels. One red, one black.’

  ‘There you are, then. That proves he wasn’t on an assignation. When a man goes to a hotel with another woman he checks his socks.’

  ‘Not your father. He wore odd socks the first time he took me to a hotel. That’s when he gets forgetful – when he’s excited.’

  Henry hears himself laughing again. (Safeguarding himself against too much feeling, is he?) ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘I just can’t treat this with the sort of seriousness you think it merits.’

  ‘You think I’m making it up.’

  ‘No. But I think you should be playing it down. What if you’re right – how much does it matter? It’s just a morning off.’

  ‘Henry, you don’t take mornings off marriages. But then you’re a man – what would you understand.’ For a moment Henry thinks she is going to hang up on him, then: ‘Anyway,’ she continues, ‘it’s worse than I’ve told you.’

  ‘He hasn’t run off?’

  ‘Of course he hasn’t run off. Your father doesn’t run off. He knows too well which side his bread’s buttered. He was back here at three the same day, back before I was, asleep on the sofa.’

  ‘Still in his odd socks?’

  ‘Yes, but not on the same feet.’

  ‘Back, though.’

  ‘Oh yes, back and snoring. With that guileless expression on his face. As though he’s dreaming of steam engines.’

  ‘Well then . . .’

  ‘Well then what? Henry, I saw him going into the hotel and I saw the woman he was with.’

  Sometimes, however urgent the matter, the rhythm of a conversation can make you flippant. ‘Anyone you know?’ Henry no sooner asks than he wishes he hadn’t.

  ‘Of course it’s someone I know.’

  ‘Ah,’ Henry says. The best friend syndrome, of course. His father would be capable of that. Keeping it in the circle of acquaintance. Kith and kin. Mentally, Henry goes through the possibles. His mother’s schoolfriends, the dim girls she tutors privately in G.C.E. English, her hairdresser, the cleaning lady, his mother’s cousins, his mother’s aunties . . . no, not those, not his father, it is only Henry with whom no member of the family is safe. ‘So who?’ he asks.

  She takes a deep breath, as though trying to suffocate something inside herself. The name, when she delivers it, is stillborn. ‘Rivka Yoffey.’

  ‘Old man Yoffey’s wife? You’re joking.’

  ‘Someone might be joking, Henry. But it isn’t me.’

  ‘Isn’t Rivka Yoffey Orthodox?’

  ‘Exactly. But the Orthodox, as you know, give themselves latitude. She is also without looks. And without any hair to speak of.’

  ‘Isn’t that because Yoffey keeps pulling it out.’

  ‘I would like to think so. But I suspect it’s because she’s been wearing a wig since she was seventeen. Her head has never seen the light of day. I doubt if much else has either. Until last Monday, that is. But I am not concerned with the whys and wherefores, Henry. I am concerned that your father should take such a plain woman to the Midland Hotel.’

  ‘You think he should have taken her somewhere cheaper?’

  ‘I think he should not make love to women just because they’re to hand. I think that if he must be unfaithful to me he should at the very least work hard to find someone worth being unfaithful with.’

  Henry puts this very argument to his father in his St John’s Wood home from home, where he sits, a bag of dust and bones, on the edge of his old armchair.

  Rivka Yoffey, Dad, he says. Rivka Yoffey!

  What about her?

  How could you?

  How could I what?

  What’s the appropriate language, son to father? They were always formal with each other. Protectives, Izzi Nagel once advised Henry to be well provided with at all times. Their one and only discussion of the sexual life. Be amply stocked with protectives, Henry. Followed by his blessing. Go forth and don’t multiply. Not condoms, not rubbers, not johnnies even, but protectives. So Henry can’t say how could you have fucked Rivka Yoffey, Dad? How could you have fucked that poor, sad, ugly, Torahreading woman?

  How could you have taken her to the Midland Hotel, is what he decides to ask instead.

  You’d prefer that I’d taken her somewhere cheaper?

  Funny, Henry remembers, that’s the very question I put to Mum.

  I know you did.

  She told you?

  Of course she told me. That’s how it is between man and wife – though you wouldn’t know that – they tell each other everything. She said you were sarcastic about the whole thing.

  I wasn’t sarcastic. I was just amused.

  OK, amused. I have to get the word right, don’t I?

  I think it helps. It made me laugh, that was all.

  Yes, she told me that. Some son, she said. I tell him his father is with another woman and he laughs.

  I wouldn’t have laughed had I known about here.

  Where’s ‘here’?

  Come on, Dad. Rivka Yoffey for a morning is one thing . . .

  Exactly what I told your mother. What’s a couple of hours with Rivka Yo fey between people who love each other? That was why you were able to find it funny. You knew it didn’t matter. And don’t say if I knew it didn’t matter why did I do it. That’s why I did it . Because it didn’t matter. A big inducement – a thing not mattering. It removes the barrier of a thing mattering. Though of course you wouldn’t know about that when it affected you personally. To you, personally, everything mattered.

  We see things our own way, Dad.

  Dead right we do, Henry. And we do things our own way too.

  Did.

  Did, does . . . You are, you were, no saint, Henry. Letting everything matter to you didn’t make you a saint. Any more than it made your mother.

  Leave my mother out of it.

  OK. Just you then. It never made you a saint.

  I never had a second wife.

  Second ‘wife’? – nor did I. But then you never had a first wife. Not of your own.

  I never ran a second home, Dad.

  Taugetz.

  Taugetz, otherwise fine, Henry, fine, whatever you say, I’m not going to argue with you. Izzi Nagel’s favourite word, often used in pairs – taugetz, taugetz – for bringing a conversation to an abrupt but not ill-tempered end. Taugetz, from the intransitive German verb taugen, pedantic Henry surmises, which in its negative form means not to be of very much use. Whatever you say, Henry. Whadever! – only who needs ‘whadever’ when you’ve got taugetz, smuggled, whenever, in some migrant’s luggage to North Manchester, all the way from Berlin via Podolia and the Volga?

  Not only Henry’s mother who personalised music for Henry’s delight. His unmusical father, too, likes to write his own lyrics. Driving back from an engagement, with Henry on the front seat beside him, still blazing with the shame of being seen to be a fire-eater and origamist’s son, Uncle Izzi fits his favourite word to the tune of ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do’. Henry remembers it well and can sing it to this day. ‘Taugetz, taugetz, taugetz and taugetz taug / Taugetz, taugetz, taugetz and taugetz taug . . .’

  Not Schubert, but it isn’t only lyric genius that makes hapless Henry weep.

  Rather than travel with the bo
dy of a dead woman he never knew and have people looking sorrowfully at him from the pavement – Henry hates being the object of pity, even when it’s undeserved – he makes his own way to the crematorium. He takes a taxi, not trusting himself to the lottery of a bus lane or the discomfort and importunings of the Underground – though cosmopolitan in his soul, Henry is too much of a provincial by habit ever to have mastered the tube, and what is more does not like the idea of being gassed in a tunnel and buried alive, which is what they’re all afraid of now – and arrives an hour early. The crematorium is on a hill in north London, looking back towards the city. Henry sits on a bench and enjoys the prospect. Would this do? Could he be happy here? Where best to be dead has been a question for Henry for as long as he can remember, but it is less rhetorical today than it once was. It is getting time he made up his mind. The advantage of this position is its elevation, a fresh breeze keeps the damp away, and the view ensures you would never feel entirely disconnected from the living. Not having damp in his bones is an important consideration. Fear of chilled joints is what has turned Henry off many an otherwise idyllic churchyard. But then this isn’t a joint joint, Henry remembers, reminding himself he is in an ash garden and that the bodiless dead seep away like wine here, dust in the wind, dirt in his nostrils. So not for him, then, this pleasing view. Not an available option to Henry, ashes. The Book says you must be ready to meet your Maker pretty much as He made you, nothing added or taken away, and though Henry doesn’t in a general way set much store by what’s written in the Book, when it comes to death he doesn’t cavil. Better to be safe than sorry.

  He wouldn’t mind having a tree dedicated to his memory, though. Or a shrub. Something light and green and ornamental. A miniature Bridge of Sighs arching over a lily pond, bullrushes at the edges. What about a bridge? Something serviceable. More and more, Henry wonders if death might not be his opportunity to do some of the things he has failed to do in life. Be easy on the eye. Be noticeable. Be of use.

  He likes it here. He likes the kitsch. It is like a New Town. A Milton Keynes for the dead. In the past, Henry has thought he would prefer to die antiquely. Suddenly, he is pricked by the deathful possibilities of the present.

  A gong sounds, more like a school dinner than a church bell, the signal for the previous mourners to leave the chapel. Henry watches them troop out, bereft of ritual, a steel-haired family group at a loss what to do with their extremities. Grandpa was easy, they could burn him. Knowing where to put your own heads and hands is the hard part. The younger relations just stand on the gravel looking down, as though the gravel might explain it all to them. A few of the older ones take a stroll in the garden, crossing Henry’s Bridge, pausing to look at Henry’s Ornamental Shrub – Henrix herbacea. These would be my visitors, Henry thinks. My admirers. No one looks long or sadly. No one wears a ravaged air. They have burnt to nothing a person they loved once, but no awfulness prevails. In Charnel House New Town this is just another day. After ten minutes they are back at their cars, exchanging directions, and then gone. And now it’s Henry’s turn. He doesn’t want to be hanging about when the hearse bringing his neighbour arrives, so he makes his way into the chapel. But he has to leave and let the coffin proceed before him. Protocol. When he returns, an electronic organ is playing Handel favourites. The coffin is on the conveyor belt, Lachlan is in his seat and a secular officiant with an unlined face – smooth, like the face of a pottery moon – is pacing up and down, consulting his watch. ‘Will these be all the mourners?’ Henry hears him ask of Lachlan. ‘More or less,’ Lachlan says, looking round. ‘I’d start anyway.’

  Henry thinks about sitting at the back, but on a sign from Lachlan shuffles in next to him. ‘Fan out,’ Lachlan whispers. So Henry tiptoes to the other side of the chapel, a teak vault resembling the inside of a coffin itself, and tries to look like more than one person.

  ‘Norma Jean Louis Stevenson,’ the officiant begins, ‘was one of those women . . .’

  Henry’s mind wanders off. Norma Jean . . . who’d have thought it? Did she change her name in accordance with her show-business ambitions, or was she always Norma Jean, in which case what did she think of the other one? The officiant reads from Shakespeare. Fear no more the heat o’ the sun. Then puts on a record of the ‘Warsaw Concerto’. This is not what Henry wants for himself, to go up in smoke to his favourite tunes. Henry wants a man of God to see him off, commending his soul on its final journey, never mind whether it’s the hosts of heaven that await him or all the devils of hell. At least make it a journey of dread solemnity – for what else is it, this howling passage from animal to some other form of being we can only guess at, what else, Henry wants to know, if not a passage of the utmost terror and, if we’re lucky, if we make it so, if we insist on it, of grandeur?

  Disturbed from these anticipations of his own passing by a pssst from Lachlan, Henry realises that ‘We all went up up up up up the mou-ow-ow-ow-ountain’ is playing and that the conveyor belt is on the move. He begins to clap. Lachlan, too, is putting his hands together. Henry wonders if he oughtn’t to toss in a ‘bravo!’ Shouldn’t someone have brought a bouquet to throw in after the old girl, a final tribute from the orchestra stalls? As the coffin arcs horizontally into the fires – Henry hears their roar whether or not they’re lit yet – the curtains begin to follow it, closing with a juddery computerised hiss which Henry recognises. This is the sound his St John’s Wood drapes make when he presses his keypad. Maybe the old lady had the same. Home from home for her then, this. The coffin has not vanished yet, nor has the final chorus of the song, when Henry’s ears prick, surely, to more clapping than there was before. A third person has arrived, adding weight to the applause, though Lachlan said there would be no third person. Henry does not look round. He owes it to the deceased to see her turn the corner in her entirety. Sentimental about women, Henry. He has always liked to wave them off. But when it is all over and he can look about him, he sees a woman with the lopsided look he admires, wearing the sort of clothes he goes for too, mourning black with a shorter skirt than is appropriate, slit discreetly, and high merry-widow heels, patent, with scalloped backs.

  It tells you something about Henry that he should have taken in every detail of the woman’s wardrobe and coiffure – grasshopper brooch on her jacket, demure pearl earrings, inappropriate furry handbag, yak or some such, hair groomed to fall over one shoulder in the manner of Veronica Lake (that dates him), though not quite long enough to be vampish – before processing the much more salient information which is that he knows her. Don’t ask him how, don’t ask him why, but there, standing very close to Lachlan, close enough to be his intimate, and still absently clapping her bejewelled hands to the memory of the music-hall tune, is the waitress from his patisserie. The one who only a day or two ago owed him three pounds, and now must owe him about three hundred. The one he has been beginning to think about romantically. But who it seems is now, or perhaps always was, associated in some significant way with Lachlan.

  THREE

  Here we go again, Henry thinks. He has been had like this before.

  ‘Hovis’ Belkin. Osmond ‘Hovis’ Belkin, his best friend from school, did him identically half a lifetime ago, also, as chance would have it – if there is such a thing as chance – with a waitress. Is the lesson for Henry that he should stay away from waitresses? Or that he should stay away from friends?

  They stay away from him, whatever he decides. Or rather, because Henry wishes to be precise about this, and to avoid self-pity, they inhabit space which doesn’t have him in it.

  Is that barbed wire that surrounds Lachlan and the waitress? Why not hang a sign – PISS OFF, HENRY!

  Something that has tormented Henry all his life, something he felt at school, at university, still feels today when he goes to a party, a conference, a concert, the theatre even: how well acquainted everybody but Henry is with everybody else. Leave aside coincidences of sympathy or interest, where do they actually meet, at what Henry-free time and in wh
at Henry-free dimension do they make contact, dock, establish intimacy, and agree, without so much as mentioning Henry’s name, to exclude him? Let Henry be the first person in a room, it will transpire as soon as the room fills that every single person there except Henry is on close terms with every other. Does it happen when he goes to get himself a drink? Does it happen when he blinks? Or, as seems much more likely, was it all laid down long ago in anterior time? Was there another world before this one, a sort of metaphysical prep school, a preliminary universe, to which someone forgot to send Henry?

  It would explain, anyway, much of Henry’s strange behaviour towards his friends. I know, he must have thought, aspiring to those intimacies which were such a mystery and such an agony to him – I know, I know how to insinuate myself into their charmed circle and show that I am essentially the same as they are, no less approachable, no less amenable to intimacy, every bit as nice – I’ll fuck their wives.

  Not that he fucked anyone attached to ‘Hovis’ Belkin. In so far as there was any fucking between ‘Hovis’ and Henry, it was ‘Hovis’ who fucked him.

  Unwelcome, this memory. Highly unwelcome. Besides which, Henry hasn’t got time to think about the past now, least of all his Belkin-tarnished past. He puts him away, puts him back where he’s been hiding him since they were students together thirty years ago and more. Henry’s excruciation-span is shrinking and he has reached the age where he can take his humiliations only one at a time.

  ‘Well then,’ he says to Lachlan, as they’re being harried out of the chapel of rest to make room for the next lot of griefless grievers, ‘you happy with the service?’

  Lachlan wipes his moustache on the back of his hand. ‘So-so,’ he says. ‘But then anything’s more than she deserved. She wouldn’t have done it for me. She told me so. She said, “If you go first, Lachie, don’t be expecting me to organise you a wake. You’ll have to get yourself to the cemetery.”’

  Henry can’t think of anything to say to this, unless it’s along the lines of she must have loved you really, Lachie. And Henry finds it altogether too easy to believe she didn’t.