‘It’s not a crime, Henry.’
‘That depends on how long you stayed –’
‘I didn’t stay.’
‘– and on whether he got fresher strudel than I did.’
‘Well, you’ve nothing to worry about on that score – he doesn’t like strudel.’
‘So on what score do I have something to worry about? Croissants? Or do millefeuilles run in the family? Let me see if I can guess how he likes them – confectioner’s cream, I’d say, I doubt he’s a custard man . . . yes, confectioner’s cream. Which just leaves the method of delivery to be determined . . . By tongue, I’d say. Am I getting warm?’
She turns to face him, denying him her back. In anger, her face loses its lopsidedness, as though it is contentment which makes her crooked. ‘Grow up, Henry,’ she says.
But how can Henry grow up, given the eye of the storm of her skirt, its still point, where the horizontal tension meets the vertical, that eloquent square of fraught silence which only an engineer or a philosopher of space possesses the science to explain? Let Hell freeze over while Henry’s standing in it, discoursing with the Devil, and let a woman scurry through the icy flames with that square of silence screaming from her skirt – Henry knows which phenomenon will engross him more.
‘Come here,’ he says, reaching out for her, bravely, despite his fevered state.
But before he can touch her she has quit the room – skewering his carpet with her high heels, her hair tossing like a pony’s, the slit of her skirt gaping more lewdly than Henry in his influenza can bear – leaving him trapped under his antique tray, the crumbs and the cold tea. ‘Call me when you’re feeling better,’ she shouts as she opens the door. ‘And you should know that we don’t use confectioner’s cream at Aultbach’s. That would have been your mother.’
Aultbach’s – t,t,t. Her lapping of the t his final torment.
His poor mother.
Not enough she used confectioner’s cream, but now, in death, where she cannot defend herself, she must be derided for it. What’s Henry’s duty here? He has never known. Stand up for your mother every time another woman speaks slightingly of her and the truth of it is you have no women left.
She’d warned him how it would be. ‘They’ll make mincemeat of you,’ she’d prophesied. ‘You won’t know how to resist. They’ll twist you round their little finger. They’ll get you to cut my heart out to prove how much you love them, and you’ll do it.’
And she was right. How could she be otherwise? Who knows women better than a mother? And who better knows her son? First chance he gets, Henry is fist-deep in his mother’s innards, scalpelling out her ventricles and whatever else they fancy while he’s in there. Aorta, anyone? Small intestine? Pancreas? And then he’s off, running, running, dispensing maternal organs like a second Mother Teresa let loose among the bloodsuckers. Whereupon he stumbles, whereupon the heart falls from his slippy grasp, whereupon, of course, of course, the heart cries, ‘Are you hurt, my son?’
Christ! These mothers!
And what does Henry, in the dirt, do then?
Attacks the pulp of pumping muscle, that’s what, throttles it, berates it, cries ‘Will you shut the fuck up, Ma!’, then remembers himself, his task, his sacred duty, and resumes running to the woman, the women, just as his mother said he would.
The women who don’t give a shit how hurt Henry is.
Was that another reason, yet another among hundreds, she held him back from the world, kept him inside her as long as she decently could, and then bound him in ribbons to her side, reading to him of callous men and girls with skin as fine as angels’ wings – because she knew he would have no choice but to knife her once she let him go?
It would help if he knew more men. He could ask them. Is this what you did too, is this what we all do? Is this what we essentially are?
But he’s got rid of all the men he knew. Friends. What do you do with friends? Hang on to your friends, someone should have told him – maybe the wife or girlfriend of one of the friends in question – hang on tight to your friends, Henry, you’ll need them when you’re old. But then he’d have fallen for her, wouldn’t he, loved her for her foresight and intelligence, worshipped her for her wisdom and acuity, and asked her to have dinner with him – and bang would have gone another chum.
His father’s no use. His father was a brute, crashed like a herd of elephants through the fine web of undergrowth which bound Henry to his mother and then, when he was finally called upon to feel his way gently, felt too much – felt too much too suddenly – and let his own heart give out. What sort of example was that?
Henry’s heart could give out, too, remembering the desertion of his mother. It’s cake talk that does it. Confectioner’s cream. He sees it as a measure of her loneliness, the extent to which he and his father had abandoned her, that she should have been reduced to that. She could talk of nothing else the weekend he nipped across from the Pennines to see her and found her in the kitchen – a room in the house she had once upon a time claimed she needed a guide dog to help her to locate – up to her ears in piping nozzles and spatulas. ‘What are you doing?’ he had asked, afraid her sensitivity had finally tipped her over the edge. ‘I’m scrolling, Henry,’ she told him. ‘Look – it’s like decorating a church. It’s like sculpting. I love doing it. You’ve no idea. It’s like a whole new world. I just love it.’ She seemed possessed, inordinate. ‘Did you actually bake that thing?’ Henry asked, seriously frightened for her now. ‘Don’t be ridiculous! When did I ever bake a cake?’ ‘When did you ever scroll, Ma?’ She kissed him, pulled him to her so he could smell the marzipan in her hair. ‘The cakes, I buy,’ she said. ‘Dead plain. Nothing on them. The rest I do. See this? It’s called a crimping knife. Guess what I do with it.’ ‘You crimp?’ ‘Exactly. I crimp, Henry! I flute, I pipe, I letter, I emboss. Aren’t you proud of me?’ What could he say? That he would have been had there been less hysteria in the enthusiasm? That it had always been understood between them that they were too civilised ever to embrace a craze, that they were professional sufferers and bleeders, nothing else, and that they had only to look at her husband, his father, if they needed to be reminded what a hobby did to you?
It was the undividedness of her zealotry that betrayed her. The wild bacchante look in her eyes, the almost proselytising fervour. How long, he wondered, before she’d be buying him a little set of icing scrollers and extruders of his own? This was not his mother. This was not how she operated when she was herself. Yes, her vocabulary had always been extreme, but when she was truly engaged she was vaguer, less upfront, more ambiguous. Henry recalls the time she discovered Nietzsche. He had gone to Paris on a school trip and returned to find her sitting up in bed in a nightgown and wearing reading glasses he had never seen before, with The Genealogy of Morals held out before her as though in some soft-porn parody of a sex-starved teacher enticing her students with German philosophy. He stood at the foot of her bed, waiting for her to ask him about his holiday. She peered at him over her lenses. ‘Have you read this?’ she asked. He shook his head. ‘Probably best you don’t,’ she said. ‘Not yet. But then again, maybe you’re old enough. I don’t know. He’s a profound thinker. Rabid, someone called him, morally contagious, maybe too contagious for someone your age. But no Jew should go through life without reading him sometime. With a pinch of salt, I grant you. But with an open mind as well. Anyway, how was Paris?’
It was the idea of there having been a slave revolt in morals which interested her. According to Nietzsche this was a Jewish revolt, the Jews, a priestly people, having hacked away at the aristocratic edifice of those manly virtues of war and chase and gaiety, and ushered in an era, in which we still live impoverished today, of equality and democracy. Those whom the gods had loved for their daring were henceforth damned; only the unfit were blessed. In the place of power, beauty and nobility, were now enthroned poverty, ugliness, intellection and suffering. A change in our entire system of valuation effected by the
terrible potency of envy.
Henry, tired with travel, wondered whether his mother was thinking of what her husband had done to her, the vulgar demos of North Manchester pulling down the aristocratic gaiety of the South. But that interpretation failed when he tried imagining his father as a priest.
Or as potent in his envy.
‘Is that why we all wear glasses?’ he speculated instead.
She looked at him strangely. ‘We don’t all wear glasses,’ she said. ‘You don’t, your father doesn’t, and I have only just started wearing these to read philosophy.’
‘No, but you know . . . I might not wear glasses but I wear a scarf. We all wear glasses or scarves.’
‘Henry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘We put something between ourselves and the world. Is that what Nietzsche means, that we have removed ourselves from nature?’
Ekaterina took off her glasses and called her son to her. ‘We don’t do anything,’ she said, patting his hand. ‘There is no we. And if there were it wouldn’t include us. Now I’d like you to forget everything I’ve told you. I warned you it was contagious. I won’t mention the subject again.’
The trouble was she had mentioned it far and wide already, not least to her mother and her mother’s sisters. Over Friday dinner at their place – tinned chicken soup, tinned chicken, tinned syrup sponge – the Stern Girls, by then depleted by one, and only to that degree less indomitable, quizzed him about it.
‘How long has your mother been reading this person?’ his grandmother wanted to know.
‘Nietzsche,’ Marghanita corrected her, with a quick, precise stare at Henry.
How did she do that, Henry wanted to know, how was she able to make even a dead German philosopher sound like an adventure between them? OK, Nietzsche’s name had a buried z in it, but she could embroil him no less successfully in secrets with Hawthorne or Melville, or Emerson even. Was it her? Or was it him, simply what happened to him when he heard the names of writers?
He shrugged. ‘I can’t remember seeing her with anything but Jane Eyre in her hand,’ he told his grandmother. ‘Always a novel, anyway. This philosophy business seems to have come out of the blue.’
‘It’s not one of your books?’
‘No,’ Henry said.
‘You haven’t been told to read him at school?’
‘No. Look, this hasn’t come from me. But I have to say it sounds interesting enough.’
‘Interesting!’ Effie exploded. ‘Do you know your mother’s reading Hitler’s favourite writer?’
Henry wondered where it would have left them had Hitler’s favourite writer been Charlotte Brontë, as for all he knew it was. ‘She doesn’t believe every word of it, you know,’ he said, as much in his own defence as his mother’s. ‘I think she’s just toying with it.’
‘You don’t toy with fire,’ his grandmother reminded him.
Henry shrugged again. ‘My father does,’ he reminded her.
‘Yes, well, that’s what we are wondering,’ Effie broke in. ‘Could it be that there’s a problem between them?’
‘Do you mean is she reading Nietzsche because Dad’s away a lot? I suppose that’s possible. But then you could argue there are worse things to do when your husband’s out.’
Always supposing you can keep a husband, was the implied slight which Henry intended them to hear in that. He was annoyed with them. On his mother’s behalf largely, but also because he hated the way they would suddenly close ranks and close their minds – even Marghanita – the moment the world beyond threatened to impinge upon their privacy, and thus destabilise, as they saw it, their meticulously contrived anonymity. They read books and played music and looked at paintings, they embraced the arts of civilisation, they loved to talk, they cultivated feeling, yet at the same time they cultivated ignorance. Why does no one ever try to interest me, Henry wondered, in what is happening at this moment? Not to him, not to them, not to the family, and not even to the tribe, but out there, in the world, to the world. He didn’t mean politics, specifically. He didn’t quite know what he meant, since he was describing the absence of a presence for which he had never been given the word. That was his beef. That he hadn’t been kept informed. That he didn’t know what he was missing, only that he was missing something. The way things worked, was that it? The operations of the universe? The physics of being?
But the physics of being as recently understood. Not as decreed on a mountain top on Sinai five thousand years ago.
His father was his father. Uncle Izzi, children’s entertainer. And Henry wasn’t going to look to a children’s entertainer for enlightenment. His father lived out of time, not in the past but on some other plane where there was neither past nor future. His father’s parents had barely learned to speak a word of English though they’d been born in Manchester and lived there all their lives. Yiddish did them. Yiddish sufficed. In Yiddish they thought they were invisible to their enemies. Like the ostrich. Which certainly made them invisible to Henry, at whom they stared in deep anxiety, the few times they saw him, as though he might be about to report them to the authorities, and as though the penny they gave him, pinching his cheek, would buy him off. But his mother and the Stern Girls were different. They weren’t in hiding. They weren’t afraid. So why didn’t the times pulse audibly in their veins? Wherefore, at the last, were they bemused?
Sometimes Henry wondered whether it was all an effect of being in the north. Too cold up there, too dark, too backward, for anything but your own immediate wants to engross you. But always he would come back to believing that the fault – if fault it was – lay more particularly with his own people. They had come north in order not to know or notice; they were up here precisely because it was like being nowhere.
Was this why Marghanita pressed American literature on him? In America the Jews had taken on a version of the national identity, had made the American cause their own, had even shaped it, sometimes dangerously – tempting fate, risking a backlash – in their own image. Not in England, not in Manchester, not on the Pennines. Yes, they were dutiful citizens; they paid their taxes, fought in wars, performed charitable deeds, gave service to the community – but only for the right, at last, to be left alone to notice nothing. And not be noticed noticing it.
The catch for Henry was that he, too, found this half-absence from the world alluring. By Henry’s lights, if anything was civilised, this was – knowing nothing of event, forswearing effect, attending only to the still sad humanity of your own heart. ‘You and your ivory tower version of civilisation,’ his Gentile schoolfriends used to twit him, Geoff the geographer who understood the economic underpinnings of Henry’s street, Ned who could compute the distance of a star from how bright it was, Dick who debated capitalism versus socialism with numbers – how many privileged, how many deprived, how many slaughtered or gone missing, how many enriched – all stuff Henry knew absolutely nothing about. But that’s my point,’ was Henry’s invariable reply, ‘civilisation is an ivory tower.’
Except that it didn’t look so civilised on days like today, with the Stern Girls manning every exit, and his grandmother in the forecourt with her torch, reminding him why it was necessary, on occasions, to round up stragglers and turn the key.
‘Yes, there are worse things to do when your husband’s out, Henry,’ she said, ‘though not very many. You know we don’t go in for old world superstition or fanaticism here. We are free thinkers. But if there’s one freedom of thought we don’t need just at this very moment it’s the freedom to accuse the Jewish people of poisoning civilisation. That we can think about again a hundred years from now.’
Ah well, Henry supposed he agreed with that. Or if he didn’t, couldn’t remember why he didn’t. Jew talk embarrassed him. At school it was frowned on by Jewish and non-Jewish boys alike. It felt old hat. Wej talk was different. Back slang the fact of your being a Jew and you did something witty with it. Joking was fine. Otherwise leave it. As for Nietzsche, he was old
hat too. The world he’d set alight was no longer even smouldering. The most interesting part of it all, for Henry, was seeing his mother fired with intellectual passion, reading without migraines, not merely to rub at the itch of her sensitivity – could that have been the reason for the migraines? – but seeking for truth in that penetralium of mystery, philosophy. It made him proud of her. My mother understands philosophy, what does your mother understand? But he also suspected it would pass. He was confident of the soundness of her mind. She was too sensible to be a fanatic.
And at length, of course, it did pass. One day she was talking about ‘slave ethics’, the next she wasn’t. Just like that. Possible that the Stern Girls had put the screws on her, but he doubted it. Much more likely to have been the firmness of her character. The sane are fickle. When it came to cake decorating, though, he could see that something had changed. Her natural soundness had been undermined. She couldn’t stop doing it. Couldn’t stop reading about it, couldn’t stop showing him her sugar pastes and wire flowers, couldn’t stop going on courses, couldn’t stop giving lectures and demonstrations. Once, he walked into Lewis’s in Leeds (never mind why he was in Leeds) and saw her with a semi-circle of women around her, doing something with royal icing. He was relieved he was on his own. Not because he was ashamed of her, no, if anything he was thrilled to see how smart and assured she looked, how well she held her audience, how roundly she rang her voice. Sometimes you need to observe your mother in a public place, at the centre of a world which excludes you, to grasp her separateness. At least Henry did. So that was his mother! So that was what she actually looked like! Amazing. But upsetting too. His mother become a kitchen person. His mother in an apron. She who had sat him on her knee and got him to read to her from The Awkward Age. She who had put her mind to Nietzsche and the idea that there was once, in some city of the mind, a slave revolt, not in marzipan but in morals. Demeaned. Diminished. And all because the men in her house had left her to her own devices, marooned her at home where at last she had grown homey.
The Making of Henry Page 15