And the waitress seems to like it.
Moira Aultbach, that’s her name. Sounds better when you run the two halves together. Still not Elisabeta-Adelheid of Saxe-Coburg, but an improvement on just Moira. She gives Henry her card when he puts the proposition to her at his favourite pavement table. Yes, she’ll go out with him, but he ought to have her number, just as she ought to have his, in case either needs to change the time. That’s good: she’s put flux on the table. Everything swirls in Henry’s head. She flushes, seeing him go morally at the knees, pulling at her lopsided hair as though she is trying to centre it. Henry hopes that doesn’t mean her overall crookedness was purely predatory and that she is going to straighten herself out for him now they’ve fixed a time and a date. Except that they might not have fixed a time and a date, which makes him feel heady again.
He isn’t sure how the etiquette of tipping is changed by what he’s done. Do you go on tipping a waitress you’re taking out? And if you do, oughtn’t you to tip her more? But how much more can Henry tip? A tenner for a Viennese coffee’s about the limit, isn’t it? Just this once, as a sort of foretaste of the munificence she can look forward to, he gives her twenty. ‘Save your legs,’ he says.
She smiles at him and shakes her head. ‘Take it back,’ she says. ‘Today the coffee is on me.’
Can a waitress do that? It’s only when he is across the road in Alfredo’s, trying on belts, that it occurs to Henry to recall that the patisserie is called Aultbach’s.
So he’s been tipping the proprietress. Is he a girl or what?
FOUR
She’s still married.
‘I don’t know if that puts you off,’ she says.
‘Why should it?’ Henry asks.
‘Well, some people don’t want the baggage. Aultbach’s no problem. We get on fine, he’s got a girlfriend, and we both felt it would be a shame to break up a successful partnership.’
‘You mean the marriage?’
‘No, the patisserie.’
‘He still works there?’
‘He makes the patisseries.’
‘The strudel too?’
‘Everything.’
‘Well, it’s good strudel,’ Henry allows.
‘Everything Aultbach does is good,’ she tells him. ‘He even made a good husband for a while.’
Henry has never been sure about women who invoke their husbands by their surnames. He can’t quite put his finger on the offence. Cuteness? The dysfunctional family version of talking about yourself in the third person? But in this instance he is more forgiving. He likes the faint trace of a lisp with which Moira pronounces Aultbach, the rabbinic lapping of the t.
‘So what changed him?’ he asks.
‘I changed him. Or rather I changed me.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I fell in love with one of my students –’
‘Hang on,’ Henry says, feeling that she’s pinched his line, except that he didn’t exactly ‘fall in love’ with his students, not Henry, more, well, whatever it was he did. ‘Hang on, are you telling me you’re a teacher on top of everything else?’
He thinks he might be disappointed. He doesn’t want her to be a teacher. He’s done teachers.
‘What everything else?’
‘Well, waitressing and proprieting and looking beautiful and everything.’
She inclines her head. Why thank you, Henry. ‘Just pastry-making,’ she says. ‘I teach it a couple of nights a week at a college in Camden. That’s how I met Aultbach. He was a student too.’
Henry is relieved – she isn’t a teacherly teacher, then – but also astonished. ‘That’s amazing,’ he says. ‘My mother taught cakes.’
‘She was a pastry chef?’
‘God no. She wasn’t any kind of chef. She didn’t know how an oven worked. She just showed people how to decorate cakes.’
‘Ah,’ Moira says, letting Henry into a world of precise distinctions and hierarchies, ‘cake decoration is another thing again.’
‘I know,’ Henry says, quickly pulling an anti-grandiosity face on his mother’s behalf. ‘It was an entirely unconnected activity. Her skills began and ended with decoration.’
‘You’re saying she didn’t bake at all?’
‘Not so much as a biscuit. She had been brought up to stay out of the kitchen. Couldn’t even remember where it was most days. Then out of the blue she discovered she had this talent for armatures and icing. I had already left home so I’m not witness to what exactly happened, but family legend has it that she was expecting friends round for tea and dropped the cake she’d bought. As there was no time to go out and buy another, her range of choices was limited to doing without cake altogether or repairing the one she’d damaged, in which latter course –’
‘In which latter course!’
‘I was an academic. Not your sort of teacher. Nothing useful. That’s how we used to speak. In which latter course she succeeded to such effect, in her view, that it looked a damn sight better when she’d finished with it – the cake, I’m still talking about – than when she’d bought it. It was like a blinding light. Suddenly she wasn’t frightened of food. The next day she enrolled in a class and what seemed like a week later she became a teacher.’
Moira points her face. ‘It takes longer than that to train as a pastry chef,’ she would have Henry know. ‘Almost as long as it takes you to finish a sentence.’
Henry rides with the compliment. ‘I’m sure it does. But my mother was in a hurry. My father was leaving her alone a lot and she needed an interest.’
‘What was he doing?’
Always hard for Henry, this. ‘Well, he began life as an upholsterer. Then someone burnt his workshop down and he became a fire-eater.’
‘He didn’t!’
‘He did.’
‘Professionally?’
‘Well, in the sense that he called it his profession. But not in the sense that he earned a living from it. And don’t ask whether it was he who burnt his workshop down. The police looked into that. It wasn’t. His bookkeeper burnt the workshop down. A coincidence, though, I grant you. But then life is coincidence. Look at you and my mother.’
She does, falling silent for a moment, apparently not certain what she thinks about coincidence in this particular.
They are in a dark panelled booth in a Hungarian restaurant in Soho, eating dumplings. A heavy ancien régime meal had seemed just the ticket to Henry. He wanted to nail her down. Eat a light meal with a woman on your first date, and she’ll be polishing off seconds with someone else before the night’s over. Toast her in ox blood, bog her in goulash and dumplings, and chances are – if she lives – she’s yours for ever.
‘So you were telling me about your life,’ Henry says, trying to call her back from wherever unwelcome synchronicity has taken her.
‘Was I?’ She is rooting in her furry bag for a handkerchief. She must have a collection of furry bags, Henry thinks, for this one seems unfamiliar to her, a thing of depths she has never previously plumbed, full of objects she appears not to recognise. Henry too believes the hairs to be longer and more quilled than on the one she carried at the crematorium. Anteater? Aardvark? Or is he confusing the bag with the way she is snuffling through it?
‘You were telling me what happened when you fell in love with your student.’
‘With Aultbach?’
‘No, the other one.’
She dabs her nose, as though she is staunching a wound, with the little handkerchief she has finally found but which she gives the impression of never having seen before. ‘Which other one?’
‘Ah,’ Henry sighs. So there’s a list! He feels fluttery in the stomach suddenly, as though his insides have fallen away. Which is extraordinary, considering how much he’s eaten. But retrospective jealousy – a list without him on it – does this to him. ‘Well, let’s just stay for the moment,’ he says, offering to be urbane, ‘with the one who caused Aultbach to stop being a good husband.’
&nb
sp; ‘Michael. He was Greek. Very beautiful. But very dependent. He wanted a mother more than he wanted a lover.’
‘And you?’
Another dab, pitched somewhere between nostalgia and provocation. ‘I just wanted Michael.’
‘Hence Aultbach’s . . .’
‘No, Aultbach didn’t mind. He has very modern views, Aultbach. He would sell me into slavery for a night and not bother as long as I’m there to open the patisserie in the morning.’
‘You call that modern?’
‘He isn’t possessive.’
‘So what happened?’
‘I crashed his car.’
I knew it, Henry thinks. I knew I should have called for that taxi. ‘I see,’ he says. ‘Presumably you were going to see Michael at the time.’
‘No. I had Michael with me. But Michael wasn’t the problem. The problem was the car. Aultbach had just bought it. A brand-new lemon Porsche with personalised number plates. He cried like a baby when he saw what I’d done to it.’
‘And Michael?’
‘He also cried. I broke both his legs. Did I tell you he was a footballer?’
Henry opens wide his eyes in alarm. ‘Stop,’ he says. ‘I’m not sure that I’m in the right league for you. I don’t do cars. I don’t do football. I don’t do personalised number plates. I don’t do slavery. I don’t even do pastry. In a few months I will be eligible for a senior railcard. All I can offer are cut-price trips to the seaside. Shall we call a halt to it now, before pity enters?’
She twists a smile at him and puts a hand on his wrist – part placatory, part flammable. Henry likes and fears the size of her hand, half as big again as his own; he also likes and fears the weight of her jewellery: a gold bangle he hasn’t seen before, a huge silver watch with a third of its face scooped out moonily, not unlike hers, and a row of rings she presumably removes when she is waitressing. Though Henry loves a woman to have a past, sometimes a past can be too much for you. He’s too old. It had to happen, and now it has. Whatever the jingling weight of her jewelled hand on his wrist says to the contrary, he is past it.
‘What’s age?’ she asks.
‘Age is what kills you,’ Henry says. ‘That and your driving.’
She slaps his hand. Naughty boy.
And in that second Henry goes from wondering whether he is up to it to wondering whether he wants to be up to it.
The old faint Henry heart. There’s something wrong with his machinery. Always has been. His cogs slip. At any time in a friendship or an amour the reason for proceeding will suddenly escape him. Decency requires that you go on, he knows that. You can’t keep walking out in the middle of things. But then if he does go on, there will be that dire sensation of pointlessness afterwards, of spirit expended to no explicable purpose. Nothing to do specifically with sex, any of this. Henry is not a tristesse merchant. If anything, he understands better after sex why he has bothered than he does after almost any other activity. At least in sex there’s sex. But what is there in friendship again? What’s that for?
He is not his father’s son. You never know when you’ll need a friend, Henry.
Don’t you, Dad? I rather thought it was the other way round, that your friends always knew when they needed you – which was all the time. Who was that blind old bastard who got you to walk him half a mile to the Variety Home every morning for fifteen years, promising he’d leave you his ceremonial origamist’s robe, then made you pay a thousand quid for it on his deathbed?
Seven hundred and fifty.
And how come you stayed on good terms with the bookkeeper who burnt your workshop down?
Harris? He didn’t do it deliberately. He was upset.
And what about your Austin A40?
That he did burn deliberately.
But you stayed his friend.
He was still upset.
And Finkel?
What did Finkel do wrong?
He tried to steal your wife, Dad.
This from you?
I never stole. I borrowed.
Finkel too borrowed.
Yeah, your life savings.
Well, that’s better than your wife.
His mother, on the other hand, was like him. She tired of people. After a brief intimacy she couldn’t see the point of them. Company gave her migraines. It’s very likely, Henry thinks, that she couldn’t see the point of him in the end. Is that possible? Can a mother run out of interest in her child? Henry suspects it happens all the time. But that doesn’t mean he’s happy about it in his own case. If he became uninteresting to his mother, wasn’t that her fault? Hadn’t she made him uninteresting? Her Jane Eyre boy. Of course he bored her. Who wants a Jane Eyre boy? But she should have thought of that sooner.
Heart-heavy with ox blood, goulash and self-reproach, Henry focuses on the positive aspects of the waitress. Her custard hair, her asymmetric looks, the something ironical about those demure pearl earrings, the way she laps the t in Aultbach, the fact of her still being married to Mr Aultbach, the feelings she had for Michael – ‘Michael, I wanted Michael’ – her red-and-gold hands, nicely aged, which he imagines gripping the wrists of the men she teaches in her kitchen – this is the way to beat a batter, not like that, like this – her spiked shoes, the thought that she might be carrying on with Lachlan. Then he invites her back to his place.
Still doing it. Senior railcard in the mail and he is still asking women back to his place.
Is he mad or what? Was he always mad?
At a sherry party at the closing of the first day of his new job, his first job, his only job, at the Pennine Way College of Rural Technology (later to be a polytechnic, later still to be a university, but always a tech in Henry’s heart), Henry asks the wife of his head of department (Liberal Studies – so why not?) to go back to his place. It’s only when she astonishes him by agreeing that he remembers he doesn’t have a place.
Maybe she knew that.
He escorts her out, under the Pennine moon, kisses her clumsily, then says, ‘Now what?’
‘You’re asking me?’
A difficult one for Henry. What’s worse – pretending to have lost desire, or admitting to not having a place? He does neither. He suggests they spend the night in nature.
‘Out here?’
‘Not out here exactly, more out there.’ He points to where the moors begin, just beyond the library. The advantage of a moor-land tech.
That’s when she astonishes him by agreeing again.
And that’s also when Henry first realises how utterly miserable everybody’s wife is.
‘How old are you?’ she asks him.
‘Twenty-four.’
‘Do you know how old I am?’
‘Thirty-four?’
‘Forty-four.’
‘You’d never think that,’ Henry says.
She spreads her jacket under her. ‘Thank you. When you’re my age, how old will I be?’
Henry thinks about it. ‘Sixty-four.’ Then feels he ought to add, ‘but I’ll be forty-four.’
‘And who will be sitting on my jacket with me then?’
‘Probably lots of people,’ Henry says.
‘People?’
‘Men. Lots of men.’
She begins to cry, or at least to do something that reminds him of crying. ‘So that’s what I’ve got to look forward to, then, is it? Being a whore in my sixties. A whore on a moor.’
‘Who said anything about being a whore?’ Henry says. ‘You don’t feel you’re being a whore now, do you?’
‘Of course I do. Isn’t that what you’ve brought me here for?’
‘No,’ Henry assures her.
‘You’ve brought me here because you respect me?’
‘Yes, actually.’ Something tells him not to add, and because I respect your husband.
‘It’s a funny way of showing respect, Mr Nagel. Sitting me in this damp.’
‘Call me Henry.’
‘I’m not sure if I can call you Henry.’
> ‘Why’s that?’
‘Because my husband’s name is Henry.’
Of course it is! Henry wonders if he ought to have thought about this earlier. Tactless of him, making love to the wife of someone who shares his name. And it isn’t as though he didn’t know she was married to a Henry. He, the other Henry, was Henry’s tutor at university, some would have said his mentor, maybe even – though this might be stretching it – his friend. It’s thanks to the other Henry that Henry has landed this job.
Tonight is the first time, however, that he has met the other Henry’s wife. A nicety which, by the subtleties of Henry’s reasoning, removes all moral obstacles.
‘Then call me Mr Nagel, or just Nagel, if that makes you more comfortable,’ Henry says.
‘I can’t call you Nagel. Sounds like some Jew in a Bloomsbury novel.’
The Making of Henry Page 10