The Making of Henry

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘Anyway,’ Lachlan goes on, rubbing something from his moustache between his hands, and stamping his feet as though it’s cold in the sun, ‘that’s my duty done.’

  And mine, Henry thinks.

  And the European waitress’s.

  He is waiting for Lachlan to say something, perhaps to effect an introduction. Or for the waitress to fill in a few of the blanks

  – I’m an old friend of the family . . . Lachlan and I go way back . . . I just couldn’t help myself . . . He turns my insides to jelly . . . He knows he only has to ask, he knows he only has to snap his fingers and I’ll come running . . . Not that she owes Henry an explanation, Henry accepts that. It isn’t as though they are affianced or anything. It isn’t as though he has even asked her out. He doesn’t know her name, for God’s sake. Nonetheless, it was his sense that they had been agitating each other’s electric fields, that there were a thousand tiny crackling unspoken anticipations between them, and that she has therefore misled him. Not breach of promise exactly, more breach of expectation, more a violation of velleity.

  ‘So how come . . . ?’ he turns to ask her, making a gesture with his hands which takes in everything, the whole situation, life, death, him, her, Lachlan’s stepmother, Lachlan. Unsophisticated, he accepts, like asking someone at a party how he knows the host. But he’s past prolonging agonies. What he needs to know, he needs to know at once.

  She has a way of darting her eyes sideways from under her hair, which both repels and attracts him. Looking about her, checking to see whether it’s safe to come out, like some frightened creature of the forest. Except that she isn’t frightened. I’ll never get a straight answer from this woman, Henry thinks. She’ll alway be trying to work out what I want to hear. Which is what repels him. What attracts him is more or less the same. With the added attraction that he is repelled by it.

  ‘I came to show my respects,’ she says at last, giving her hair a sideways toss, ‘and as a favour to Lachlan – the same as you did.’

  To Lachlan. A favour to Lachlan. And what’s my name, Henry wants to ask her. I’ve been tipping you for days, you owe me a small fortune, what’s my fucking name?

  But at least – Henry clutching at straws – she didn’t call him Lachie!

  He steals a look at him to see if he can make out the lineaments of triumph, but Lachlan is preoccupied with his digestive system, rapping at his chest as though he has an urgent message to deliver to himself, and rolling silent ripples of wind up from his belly. You’re welcome to him, Henry thinks, while at the same time refusing to believe she’d want him. She couldn’t. Surely she couldn’t. Henry’s old problem – he esteems himself lower than a snake, but esteems every other man lower still.

  A family of mourners, celebrants of the mysteries, attend a coffin on its august passage from the illusory world of the living to the dread solemnity of the dead. Two or three of the younger ones are wearing discoloured trainers. Already a dyspeptic red, Lachlan’s face contorts with disgust. ‘Common as muck,’ he mutters into his chest.

  For the first time Henry, though he is in formal black from head to foot himself, sees the virtue of trainers.

  A feeling of completion, akin to embarrassment, descends upon their little party. Henry knows he should go and leave them to it. He looks at his watch. From under her hair, the waitress slithers her eyes at him. ‘Do you have a car here?’ she asks.

  ‘No, I came by taxi. Presumably you’ll go back in the hearse,’ he says, looking at Lachlan.

  Whether because of the trainers, or because he can’t forget that his stepmother had told him he would have to bury himself, Lachlan is still livid. ‘No fear,’ he says. ‘They bring you here, but they don’t take you back.’

  ‘Well, I suppose that’s appropriate,’ Henry says.

  ‘What?’

  Henry shrugs. ‘So shall I call for a taxi for all of us?’ he wonders.

  ‘I’ve got my car here,’ the waitress says.

  Though he still believes he should call a taxi for himself, Henry doesn’t. He wants to go through the awkwardness of seeing who’ll sit in the front seat next to her. He also wants to know whether she is one of those women who hitch their skirts up when they drive. He loves that action – the infinitesimal raising of the behind, like a deer at a waterhole, and then the dextrous tug on either side of the skirt, a gesture reminiscent of the tea table to Henry, of tablecloths being changed and smoothed, of doilies being laid, of little fingers extended to lift bone-china teacups. And is she a woman who will be content for however much thigh shows to go on showing, or will she, at traffic lights and roundabouts, be worrying her skirt back down again? Hair-raising, being driven by a woman who is conscious of her skirts. For his part, Henry can’t get enough of it. Being driven by a woman full stop, but also being driven by a woman who is thinking more about her body than the road. Crash me, Henry thinks. Crash me at the moment that we are both concentrating on your thighs. And what about her high heels? Is she a woman who drives in high heels, who loves the recklessness of spiking the pedals, or will she keep flatties in her car? A stiletto and a flattie man, Henry goes both ways on this. It all depends on how the feet move. It all depends on whether they retain the memory and the promise of spikes.

  Nothing in his life has interested Henry more than this. Woman. Never mind the phenomenology or metaphysics of woman, just woman. Just the aesthetic of her. Just the prospect. God and all His host could clear the sky and descend from it this very moment, could land in golden parachutes on the memorial lawn of this north London crematorium, could call his name – Henry! Henry! – could offer him that immunity from mortality he craves, yet still Henry would not be able to draw his mind away from the picture that is forming of the waitress hitching up her skirt and depressing the pedals of her car – either with her heels or in flatties, Henry doesn’t care which. And what would immortality be worth, anyway, if he couldn’t devote the better part of it to attending, intellectually, to such stimuli?

  This isn’t desire. Henry isn’t even sure it has an erotic component, though it would have had, once upon a time. Now it’s more what Henry would call pictorial curiosity.

  The best reason Henry can think of not to die – that he will miss the female ceremonial.

  And this they called hiding from the world!

  So what’s his motive for refusing the passenger seat when it’s offered him, and for giving it to Lachlan? Does he feel he is in the way enough, just being in the car at all? Does he want to grab a better look at them together? Or does he want to postpone the pleasure of seeing her at the controls of her car at close quarters, savouring the question marks, saving it all up for a future time? Dangerous, Henry, doing that at your age. At your age you never put off until tomorrow what you can do today, given that today might very well be your last.

  To be truthful, his deferring to Lachlan is neither altruism nor perversion. He means to catch the waitress’s eye, and hold it, in her driving mirror. As someone long schooled in the subtleties of third-person sex – doing the best by the fact of your exclusion – Henry knows what can be achieved in the back seat, through a driving mirror.

  ‘Moira,’ the waitress says, turning and extending her hand to Henry. Significant, Henry reckons, that she waits until they’re in the car, the doors are closed and he’s behind her.

  ‘Henry,’ he responds, laughing, leaning forward. Not sure he cares for Moira much as a name – not Habsburg enough for him, he was hoping for something more along the lines of Maria Theresa or Yolande or Margarita of Savoy – but he likes the texture of her hand, warm like a baby mouse in his. He can feel her heart beat through her fingers. He holds them a second longer than he should, squat fingers with red nails, damaged by waitressing, scuffed from scrambling up the egregious tips he leaves, the skin just beginning to come loose on the bone, not promiscuously elastic like a young person’s, leaping slavishly to meet every touch, but with some of the give, still, of youth. Always feeling for the life under the ski
n, Henry. As though dreading the day he won’t find it.

  What he can’t tell is whether she’s taken her heels off.

  ‘We ready?’ she asks. It’s like a big adventure. Three Go Home Through Friern Barnet.

  ‘Not yet,’ Lachlan says, belting himself in. ‘Let me take one more gander at this place before we leave it. You see that smoke? Do you think that’s her?’

  Moira gives a little European cry. It makes Henry’s heart jump. Straight out of Fledermaus. ‘That’s horrible,’ she says.

  ‘You think that’s horrible,’ Lachlan goes on. ‘I’ll tell you something more horrible. She didn’t even want to be burned. Hated the idea. Always fancied a quiet corner of the Actors’ Church in Covent Garden, or failing that Berkshire.’

  Moira puts one hand to her mouth, stifling another little European cry. Henry catches her eye in the driving mirror. You’ve taken up with an animal, Henry’s eye says. Happy now?

  To Lachlan he says, just to be clear, ‘I didn’t know you could cremate a person who didn’t want to be cremated.’

  ‘If you’re the only kin you can do what you like,’ Lachlan tells him. ‘Unless there’s something written to the contrary. And she was too busy spending my money to put pen to paper. Assumed I’d carry out her wishes. A big mistake, in that case, to tell me she had no intention of carrying out mine.’

  ‘Then you have your revenge.’

  Lachlan is still looking out of the window, following the plume of smoke. ‘I’ll never have my revenge,’ he says.

  The windows mist over with Lachlan’s bile. It’s like having a ham Malvolio in the car, Henry thinks. It’s not the old woman who should be lying in the Actors’ Church, Covent Garden, it’s Lachlan.

  Moira drives for a while in silence, her face pushed forward squintily as though she is negotiating fog. If it looks like fog to her out there, Henry thinks, then why isn’t she driving more slowly. Henry hates speed. He is frightened of it. Alarmed by everything, Henry is particularly alarmed by motor cars, wheels, motorways, accelerator pedals, brakes that don’t work. This is why he has never owned a car himself. ‘You a faggot?’ a colleague’s wife once asked him, back in his University of the Pennine Way days. It was her theory that only faggots didn’t drive. Well, make that only faggots and Henry. All else aside, Henry’s ideal ride would be in a battery-powered bath chair driven by Lachlan’s stepmother, alive or dead. Crawling pace is fast enough for Henry. What’s the hurry? Where’s everybody rushing?

  Crash me, Moira, is something else entirely. Crash me, crash me, Moira, while both our imaginations are concentrated on your thighs, is purely mental play, as abstract as a death wish, and has no bearing on his hatred of being thrown around in a tin-and-glass bubble travelling at the speed of light.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Moira asks him. She can feel him burning up behind her.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he says. ‘I get a little car sick, that’s all.’

  ‘You should have travelled in the front.’

  He searches for her in the mirror. ‘I prefer it here,’ he says. He wants to lock her gaze into his, on the other hand he doesn’t want her taking her eyes off the road. ‘Anyway, Lachlan’s the one that needs looking after. He’s had the harrowing day.’

  ‘Oh, you needn’t have worried about me,’ Lachlan says. ‘I’d have been happy in the boot. The open road holds no terrors for me.’

  ‘Nor for me,’ Henry lies.

  Lachlan turns round to examine him. ‘Then why are you holding on to the back of the seat, old man?’

  ‘Would you like to take over the driving?’ Moira asks him.

  ‘No, no, I’m fine, honestly,’ Henry assures her. He isn’t going to tell her he doesn’t drive. Enough that she now knows he’s terrified. He doesn’t need her to think he’s a faggot as well.

  ‘You’re a keen driver yourself, then?’ he asks Lachlan, getting the subject off himself.

  ‘Was. Used to love it in the old helmet-and-goggle days. Even did a bit of rallying in my time. Now it’s just up and down, up and down.’

  ‘From where to where?’ Moira asks. Funny, Henry thinks, that she doesn’t already know. Unless she’s feigning ignorance. But then why would she do that?

  ‘To hell and back,’ Lachlan says.

  ‘Doing what?’ Henry asks. Funny that he too doesn’t know and hasn’t bothered to find out. Has Henry reached that age where he assumes everybody is like him, no longer with a place of work? Or does Lachlan simply give off the air of being too well connected to need regular employment, outside of flogging the family heirlooms.

  ‘Hogwash.’

  ‘Are you answering my question,’ Henry asks, ‘or telling me what you think of it?’

  ‘That’s what I’m in.’

  ‘You make hogwash?’

  ‘Don’t make it, sell it. To farmers. That and other animal feeds.’

  ‘So you drive a big truck?’ Moira wonders.

  ‘No fear. I don’t deliver the actual feed. Never seen the stuff, wouldn’t know it if I walked into a trough of it. I sell them the chemicals. And I’ve never seen those either. They buy out of a catalogue.’

  ‘Like mail order,’ Moira says.

  ‘You’ve hit the nail on the head there. Soon will be mail order. Then that’s me finished. Last of a dying breed. Ask yourself how many animal-feed salesmen you know.’

  The car falls quiet while they think about it. Then Henry says, ‘I don’t know why but I’d have picked you for an antiques man myself.’

  ‘Huh!’ Lachlan says angrily. ‘Shows, does it? Not surprised. I always did love beautiful things, but you don’t always get the chance to live by what you love, do you?’

  ‘You can say that again,’ Henry says.

  ‘You have to make do,’ Lachlan says, chop-fallen, ‘with the cards you’re dealt. Antiques are my passion, I suppose because I was brought up with them, pigswill’s my penance.’

  ‘Penance for doing what?’

  ‘Ah, that’s another story. For being born, I suppose.’

  The car falls silent again.

  No, they’re not close. Henry’s impression, studying Moira in the mirror, is that they aren’t a pair, not even a potential pair, else she would surely feel herself to be implicated in this last remark, shut out and made desolate by it, at the very least challenged by it into promising to make Lachlan’s miserable penitential life better from this moment on. Granted, she’s going too fast and changing too many lanes to kiss him, but a squeeze of his hand wouldn’t be out of the question, or one of her slithery sideways glances. But Henry discerns nothing, hears not a heartbeat, sees not a flicker. They’re not a pair, unless she’s cleverer, unless they’re both cleverer, than he takes them to be.

  It’s only when Moira drops them at their apartment block – for it’s Lachlan’s apartment block too, now – that Henry notices he’s been in a BMW. Henry knows nothing about cars, and what he does know he wishes he didn’t, but BMWs he recognises because that’s all anyone drives around here. Anyone except a waitress, that is. A dented silver Datsun, such as you get when you call a minicab, one of those pitted vehicles that look as though they’ve driven through an ambush in the Balkans, that’s what he thought he’d been in. What he can’t decide is whether he’d have been more frightened had he known he’d been in a BMW.

  There are two other things he can’t decide. Whether Moira and Lachlan are a pair after all, so much not a pair do they seem determined to appear – barely a thank-you from Lachlan, who’s a hand-kisser, surely, who you’d expect to slobber over any woman’s hand given half a chance, let alone one who’s sacrificed her day to the cremation of his stepmother. So how come not?

  And what’s the other thing he can’t decide? Oh, yes. Whether the waitress could have bought the BMW out of the tips he’s been leaving her.

  ‘Hovis’ Belkin! Christ!

  Henry isn’t left immediately to his own devices. First he has to decline Lachlan’s offer of a dry sherry in the old lady’s apa
rtment. ‘Hair of the dog?’ Lachlan suggests while they’re waiting for the lift, which strikes Henry as meaningless since they haven’t had a drop yet, unless setting fire to somebody in the sticks whose express wish was to be buried whole in Covent Garden can be considered an intoxicant. Not to Henry, though. Henry is stone cold sober. And wants to lie on his bed with a cold compress pressed to his forehead – you can be sober and still have throbbing temples – and think about the waitress. Moira, yes he knows her name, but he still prefers the anonymity of waitress. Altogether, he wishes he hadn’t encountered her in Lachlan’s company today, whichever way one reads it. Nothing personal, but he could have done without the contamination of another party. He liked having her to himself. He was enjoying the evolution of the romance at his pace. Over tea and tips. He isn’t ready yet to know her name.

  And then that other name he would rather he didn’t know or remember comes back to him. Belkin. ‘Hovis’ Belkin.

  Henry has studiously avoided the memory of Osmond ‘Hovis’ Belkin since they shared a room at university, which hasn’t been easy given how often photographs and appraisals of Osmond (no mention of the ‘Hovis’ in latter years) have appeared in newspapers since. But you can know and not know about someone you would rather forget. There is a special chamber of the mind in which you can lock away those not conjunctive to your well-being. Occasionally, you hear them hammering to be let out, so you simply turn up the volume of everything else. Now, courtesy of Lachlan Louis Stevenson, ‘Hovis’ Belkin is at large again in Henry’s brain.

  Thanks, Lachlan. And thanks, Moira, come to that. Because it took the two of them, didn’t it. Always does. ‘Hovis’ Belkin and accomplice. But in fairness, is it all down to the swine-feed salesman and the waitress? Lying on his bed, fiddling with the keypad to the drapes – shaded light is what Henry needs, not day, not night – he admits there is a sense in which Osmond was already due for release. More than a sense. The truth is – and Henry cannot tell a lie – he has been having intimations of his old friend in recent times. Forced intimations.