The Making of Henry

by Howard Jacobson

  A funny thing: when Henry thinks of Osmond he catches himself thinking of his father. Not Osmond’s father, Henry’s. Most people come associated, he knows that. You remember them in strings. Further proof that after a certain age you might as well kick up your heels, since nothing new is going to befall you; the patterns and prototypes are set in childhood and the same characters, or at least the same stories, go on recurring. Osmond Belkin, Lachlan Louis Stevenson – different men, same narrative. So what unites Osmond Belkin and Henry’s father, who on the face of it had not a quality in common? Lying on the sumptuously quilted bed it is hard to believe was once his father’s bed, Henry keys the fine steel nets to close and the drapes to remain infinitesimally parted. The technology allows for that. If Henry only understood the technology. One wrong button and the bed tilts and the chandeliers go on. That how his father liked it? In the end he settles for total blackout. With which the answer to his question presents itself. Himself. What Osmond Belkin and his father had in common was him, Henry. Say their names, say Dad, say Osmond, and Henry feels the same pain in the same organ, that’s if there actually is an organ where Henry feels it. Is there a part of the body where shame resides? That’s where they separately struck at him, anyway, in the organ of ignominy. Of course he knows he can’t be trusted when it comes to mortification. His skin’s too thin. And he’s read too much Jane Eyre. Blows rain on Henry that were never intended to be blows at all. A badly aimed compliment can put Henry’s eye out. Nonetheless, if you’re mortified you’re mortified. No point telling the wounded body that the cut it feels is not a cut at all.

  And what exactly was it that Osmond Belkin and Henry’s father did to Henry, that shames him now, so long after the events, even where no one can see him, in the enclosing all-consoling blackness of St John’s Wood?

  They devitalised him. They impugned his masculinity.

  They called him a girl.

  It is Henry’s first day at grammar school, and he doesn’t know how anything works. ‘Are we allowed to go to the toilet?’ he asks the boy next to him. ‘Do you have to put your hand up?’ ‘What time is break?’ ‘Where are the toilets?’ ‘Are you supposed to write your name on the top of the page?’

  The boy next to him is Osmond Belkin. ‘How do I know!’ he hisses the first time. The second time he kicks Henry under the desk. The third time he says ‘Stop asking me dumb questions – you girl!’

  Henry turns the colour of damson jam. In his satchel, football boots, a penknife with his initials on it – gifted to him by his grandmother – a box of pencils, razor-sharp, and rare cigarette packets for trading in the playground – the proofs of his little manliness. A new day for Henry. A new start. The world not pishing on him any more. Then slap – you girl!

  Could anything be worse for Henry? Silly question. Something can always be worse for Henry. On this occasion, teacher-worse. Catching Henry with his hands clawing at his carmine face, and thinking him to be hiding mirth not misery, Mr Frister – ‘Fister’ Frister – as hair trigger as Henry himself, pulls Henry’s ear – ‘Something funny, sonny? Something you would like to tell the class about? No, never is, is there? That’s what’s funny, that nothing ever is.’

  At which injustice and misprision the tears spring like miracles out of Henry’s eyes. Unseen, unheard, he hopes. But not. Give up all hope, Henry, today. Seen they are by Osmond Belkin, who has girled him once, and who girls him now a second time by passing across the desk a hanky for Henry’s fountain eyes.

  Asthmatic, half-blind and top-heavy, with a loaf-shaped head (hence ‘Hovis’) and from a family in which experience of professional or personal failure was entirely unknown – or if known, never alluded to, the failure being sent overseas or thrown into a mental home – Osmond Belkin had his own social pressures to contend with. But by girling Henry when he did, he established an ascendancy over him which persisted throughout their school years and, more importantly for Osmond, won him the respect of other boys. Something schoolboys feel in their bones, power. Tyranny and cringing – that’s what little boys are made of. Not that theirs was the sort of school that institutionalised cruelty. Henry did not become Osmond’s fag, or otherwise make homo-erotic virtue of his defeat. No, on the surface they appeared equals, grew to be friends and rivals, bunked off from games together, smoked when they should have been running cross-country, fought for academic honours – the only ones they valued – and came out, by the usual measures, all square. But the early damage never healed. Henry felt judged by Osmond, under an unflattering scrutiny which, with the pitiless clarity of the too easily hurt, he knew was never to be lifted unless it should turn out to be Henry who made the splash and not Osmond. Assuming it were to go the other way – as it now seems to Henry it was written in the stars it would – Osmond’s early verdict would be vindicated. Henry was a girl – no disrespect intended to the other sex – Henry was a softie, Henry was a nothing.

  Was it in the company of Osmond that Henry first began to formulate his theory of anterior social space, where everybody except him laid down the friendships and liaisons they would pick up again in the course of life proper? Probably not. The likelihood is that Henry was born feeling left out of it. This can happen when your name’s down for the Baby Jesus crib and your mother holds you back. But Osmond certainly intensified Henry’s conviction of exclusion, by virtue of his own genius for whatever is the opposite. Think of the word, Henry. Connectedness? Incorporation? Membership? Charm? Poor Henry – how do you call what you’ve never had?

  They were prefects, fifteen, sixteen years of age, boys on the town if you can call being on the town wearing your school blazer with the lapels turned in and having your cap folded up in your trouser pocket like a torpedo. They were allowed into the centre of Manchester a couple of afternoons a week for research purposes, that’s to say for going to the Central Reference Library where they snorted at each other across the silent desks, enraging the genealogists and destitutes tracing the whereabouts of their rightful inheritances – where has it got to, where has it gone, my future, my fortune, my happiness? – after being thrown out for which they thought they might just as well slip across to the Ceylon Tea House on Oxford Road for a smoke and a plate of yellow curry. Waiting for a table, Henry marvelled at Osmond’s assumption of autocratic disdain, the easy contemptuousness with which he stood immovable in the path of leaving customers, making it difficult for the waitresses to move around him, and yet knowing that they’d give him a good table and serve him promptly despite, or was it because of, that. Henry watched and watched and couldn’t work it out. Certainly Osmond had grown tall since he’d cooked Henry’s goose for ever on their first day at school together, but he was still a loaf-headed boy with a fat neck and a bad cough. Is it presence? Henry wondered. Is it money, can they smell money on him? Osmond came from a dynasty of surgeons. The least eminent of Osmond’s uncles and cousins, the black sheep of the family, had an OBE – so was it that? Did people subordinate themselves to Osmond Belkin, a schoolboy in a blazer, in case they one day ended up beneath his knife? Or was it just the way he wore that blazer? Still Henry watched and watched. On Osmond the maroon blazer with naff blue braiding was somehow transformed into a smoking jacket, he could have matched it with a cravat and got into anybody’s tent at Henley. Why couldn’t Henry make his blazer look like that? Why did Osmond’s blazer give Osmond the appearance of a world-weary, twenty-five-year-old aesthete, while Henry’s blazer made Henry look like an under-age biscuit-maker from Oldham? And why, although Henry was in truth the better chatter-up of waitresses, had been given lessons in it by his great-aunt Marghanita, shown how to make a virtue of his delicacy and shyness, like Jane Eyre, and knew how to lower his eyes and let his lashes flutter, why, despite all that, did Osmond who was altogether more boorish in his dealings with them, not even bothering to blow his smoke the other way when they came to ask him for his order, changing his mind without apology, being short with them over the state of the ashtrays though it was
he who’d filled them – why, explain to Henry why, when it came to an out-and-out contest, he versus Osmond for the hand of any waitress in the restaurant, Osmond would either win it or make sure that Henry didn’t?

  ‘She likes you,’ Osmond said to Henry, motioning at the girl who poured the tea, a willowy Sinhalese with long brown legs and eyes bigger than dates, at present pouring someone else’s, but definitely looking their way.

  ‘Shush!’ Henry said, ‘you’ll embarrass her.’

  ‘Embarrass you more like.’

  ‘All right, shush you’ll embarrass me.’ Making a virtue of his debility, Henry allowed the lovely Sinhalese girl to see the colour play beneath the thinness of his skin. ‘A woman appreciates it’ – Marghanita’s words – ‘when a man comes apart for her.’ So Henry came apart for her.

  ‘More hot water for my friend,’ Osmond called. ‘And a cold towel.’

  The girl approached their table and bent in places Henry did not know were bendable, and smiled at him. Him, not Osmond. ‘Ceylon tea makes you hot,’ she said. ‘It cleans the pores.’ Cleans his pores, not Osmond’s.

  ‘It’s not the tea,’ Henry dared to say.

  And now she lets him see the colours which swim beneath the fineness of her skin.

  ‘My friend would like to know . . . ’ Osmond began.

  ‘His friend would not like to know anything,’ Henry interrupted, ‘which he cannot ask for by himself.’

  ‘So go on,’ Osmond urged him. Grinning. Smoking. Blowing grinning smoke rings.

  ‘So what’s your name?’

  The girl took longer than was necessary to rearrange their tea things. ‘Yours first,’ she said.

  ‘Henry.’

  ‘OK, I’m Sandra.’

  ‘Shandra?’

  ‘No, Sandra.’

  ‘Sandra? You don’t look like a Sandra.’

  ‘Don’t I? Well, that’s my name. Sandra Weinglass.’

  ‘Sandra Weinglass? From Ceylon?’

  She laughed. ‘Who said anything about Ceylon? I’m from Didsbury.’

  ‘Wej,’ Osmond whispered through his smoke. Back slang. Wej, Jew. Jew, Wej. Back slang and putdown. Because Osmond knows what Henry doesn’t. ‘She’s Wej, you shmuck.’

  One Wej is meant to recognise another Wej. It’s in the genes. It’s to help in the mayhem after the Cossacks have been through. Let me assist you, Wej to Wej, because no one else will. And then at last the obligation becomes a pleasure. Hi, you’re Wej, I’m Wej. Let’s dance, let’s marry, let’s have Wej babies. That’s how it’s supposed to work. Unless you’re a shmuck. Unless you’re a girl. You girl, Henry. And now Henry is so much of a girl – because you’re not meant to confuse Didsbury with Colombo either – that, all Marghanita’s efforts notwithstanding, he is unable to proceed with his suit.

  ‘You’re blushing,’ Osmond observes, laughing. ‘You’ve gone all pink.’

  Pink.

  Why don’t you just stick pink ribbons in his hair and have done?

  Henry does not grow up to be a freedom fighter. He lets prisoners of conscience languish in foreign jails. He doesn’t save the children, or the elephant, or the planet. But he is on the front line of the war against animadversions on another person’s blushes. The beginning and the end of Henry’s political system, his Social Contract: you don’t tell a person he’s gone pink, you don’t make a person go pinker than he already is, if you have an ounce of humanity in you, you look the other way, be glad it isn’t you, and shut your fucking mouth.

  But that is not the end of it. Nothing is ever the end of it for Henry. A week later he turns up at a party at Osmond’s house and is let in by the waitress. Sandra. Not waitressing tonight, oh no, but hostessing, at home, a helpmeet, a familiar, and God knows what else to Osmond.

  ‘Hi, Henry.’

  And Henry is so astounded, so confused, so put out, so utterly disarranged, that he never does find a way of asking whether Osmond had been back to ask her out, or had done it there and then, under Henry’s burning nose, or had known her all along, known her well, known her intimately, even while he was encouraging Henry to make a girl of himself at the Ceylon Tea House.

  Henry hasn’t seen Osmond for thirty years, but if he were to pass him in the street today, on St John’s Wood High Street say, or strolling by the boating lake in Regent’s Park, Henry knows in the pit of his stomach that he would feel all the old inferiorities. Though Osmond Belkin has lived in Los Angeles for the whole time Henry hasn’t seen him, on Mulholland Drive itself for all Henry knows, the eventuality of such a meeting is not as unlikely as it sounds. Like Henry, Osmond Belkin has quietened down – though where Henry has gone from scarce to invisible, Osmond has gone from extremely prominent to just a little less so. A film man, Osmond Belkin, as he always promised he would be. Producer, director – don’t ask Henry, what’s the career of ‘Hovis’ Belkin to Henry Nagel? But his health is not the best, and he has grandchildren he wants to see. Lots of grandchildren. Grandchildren, as Henry puts it to himself, coming out of his fundament.

  Cruel, that Belkin should have beaten Henry at having families as well. But that’s what happens when you get in first with the insult. Had Osmond Belkin not seized the advantage and established Henry as the failure of the two, would he ever have made it as a film-maker? Suppose Henry had thrown the first stone, calling Osmond ‘fat boy’ or ‘loaf head’ or, best of all, ‘fatty four-eyes who can’t breathe properly’ – would it then have been he, Henry, who ended up with the three-swimming-pooled mansion and succession of beautiful wives to go with it, while Osmond languished teaching media studies at the University of the Pennine Way? Such are the eternal questions, centring on the arbitrariness of destiny, a man revolves in his head when the better part of his life is behind him and has amounted to nothing. But they are not now, and probably never were, germane to anything. What matters is that Osmond Belkin is known to be back in England, or known to be thinking of coming back to England, to see his children and his grandchildren among other reasons, and that his children and his grandchildren, some of them anyway, are bound by demographic likelihood to live in or around St John’s Wood. Which means that any day Henry could run into him, walking his offspring, wheeling a pram or just jogging in the park with one, or maybe all, of his beautiful wives, and American spring-loaded trainers on his feet.

  You liked him, though, didn’t you, Dad?

  Did I? You’ll have to remind me which one he was.

  The fat one with the loaf head. You liked him because he egged you on. You blew fire for him in the garden.

  I entertained a lot of your friends.

  No, but for ‘Hovis’ you went that little bit further. You bent nails for him too. And for him you tore the Manchester telephone directory into a hundred dancing girls.

  He must have been an appreciative audience.

  Oh, he was. He roared with laughter.

  Well then.

  Dad, he was taking the piss.

  Yeah, out of you!

  You bet out of me. Out of me for having a father who did what you did.

  I thought you said he enjoyed what I did.

  Think of it, Dad. His father was a surgeon. He had another idea of fathers. When I went to his house his father put on Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet.

  So maybe he was envious of yours.

  Think that if you like. It hardly matters now anyway. But you played the fool for him. He paid, you jigged.

  You always had a queer way of explaining a good time, Henry. We had some fun together.

  So now you remember him.

  What I remember is the warped construction you put on everything. I can’t explain. You’re the intellectual. But it looked like jealousy to me. Maybe you were just jealous of everybody, Henry. Maybe you were jealous of your friend whatever his name was because he amused me. Maybe you were jealous of me because I amused him. What I don’t understand is why you were so jealous of people who liked to enjoy themselves, considering how little value you a
ttached to enjoyment. You explain that to me.

  He diminished you, Dad.

  You mean he diminished you.

  Same thing.

  Since there’s no knowing for sure what’s happening between them, Henry has decided to proceed as though nothing is.

  They’re all on the lonely side, all three of them, that’s sufficient explanation for everything. Not nice, not easy to swallow – Henry no more likes the idea of sharing his humanity with other people than he likes the idea of sharing the European waitress – but at least he can do something about the waitress: he can ask her out before Lachlan does, or before Lachlan does again.

  And now Henry is in love.

  He can’t eat. There is an obstruction where the food should pass. He can’t drink either, all fluids gathering in a dam halfway down his oesophagus. Intermittently the dam bursts, leaking acids into Henry’s system. This is how you know you’re in love when you’re Henry’s age. It feels like indigestion. So anyone observing Henry and Lachlan when they meet on the stairs would guess they were competing to see who could hit his own chest harder. Some mornings they do no more than burp at each other as they pass.

  When Lachlan has Angus with him, the dog folds himself even tighter around Henry’s leg, waiting for the aftershock of the convulsions which shake Henry’s frame. For Angus, too, associates bad digestion with love.

  But it’s not Angus with whom Henry is in love. Tough on the dog, but love’s cruel that way. More than ever Henry doesn’t want Angus’s hairs on him. He’s got new clothes. He thought he had his dressing right before he came to live in St John’s Wood. He was dressing into his age, he thought. Big loose cardigans, voluminous corduroys, though not of the farmer’s sort, russet colours – greens, browns, ochres – becoming the autumn of his life and the profession he no longer enjoyed. But that’s not how a man is supposed to look down here. In the shops on St John’s Wood High Street Henry finds clothes that defy age. Not the tennis shorts, he hasn’t gone that far. Italian shirts with deep collars suit him though, worn open to show a lot of sternum, to establish that his chest hairs haven’t yet turned completely white, though that doesn’t deter them in St John’s Wood either. And he’s in Valentino jeans – he, Henry, a man who has scorned denim all his life. And soft ankle boots with square toes. This, of course, for the daytime. For nightwear it’s Armani, no questions asked. Midnight black, made of crêpy materials which flatter his bulk, the shirts creamy with high collars that make his head look as though it’s buried in his shoulders, like his autochthonous neighbours in the Pennines – but that’s the fashion. The shoulder bag he’s still thinking about. It’s a bit of a jump, the shoulder bag, for the son of a northern fire-eater. But he knows, watching men in their seventies and eighties even, parading arm in arm, braceleted and medallioned and shoulder-bagged – and these are the straight men, these are the husbands and fathers – that it’s only a matter of time. Sad? Well, who can say. It’s sad that a man has to lose his shape, that his abdomen has to thicken and that his joints must grow stiff. But you have to wrap it all up in something. And what’s the alternative now that at sixty you are still up and about, however precariously? How are you supposed to look? There’s need of a new couture, without doubt, to meet the new demand for geriatric chic, but until it comes along Henry has to settle for looking like one of the grandfathers of the Mafia.