But though he was spatially impeccable, judgementally he wasn’t. He went where he should not have gone. He judged.
Ask Henry for a reference or a letter of recommendation and you took your life into your hands. Every student knew this. Henry warned them in advance. I don’t like writing references, he explained, and the only way I am able to reconcile myself to the chore is by treating them as art. My model is the character sketch of the seventeenth century. Clarendon, Halifax, Sir Philip Warwick, none of them writers of whom you’ll have heard. Judicious, dramatic, unflattering, starting from the centre and working out. If you do not choose to trust your character to my pen, then don’t ask me for a reference. Otherwise, take your chance, hope that I have seen what value lies within your nature, that I have truly measured your accomplishments, and all might yet be well. Someone might be persuaded to employ you. Then again someone might not. My only obligation is to the truth.
For a while it was possible to get away with this. A reference was a reference. A considered verdict delivered by an expert. Even if the expert happened to be a pompous prick like Henry. But little by little the times they changed around him. First, the authority of the teacher was called into question. Who was Henry, who were any of them, to suppose their opinion was qualitatively better or truer than anyone else’s? Then came human rights, the expectation enjoyed by every student to be well-spoken-of, to be free of anyone’s opinion of him or her should that opinion happen to be unwelcome, the right never to be the object of comment that could be construed as negative. And following hard upon the heels of both, news from the United States of America that students at the sharp end of a bad reference, regardless of its justice, were successfully suing the institutions on whose notepaper the reference had been written.
‘Here are the new Guidelines for Writing References,’ Catherine said, dropping them on Henry’s desk. ‘I particularly draw your attention to page 9, paragraph 14 – “Please ensure that you provide only factual information as opposed to personal opinion.”’
‘I don’t know the difference between factual information and personal opinion,’ Henry complained. ‘They write an essay, everything they say in it is shit. Is that a fact or my opinion? I say it’s both. My opinion has to count as fact. That’s why I am trusted to teach.’
‘I didn’t write these,’ Catherine reminded him. ‘And by the way, how are you?’
Seeing Catherine’s concerned expression, Henry went into immediate decline.
As for references, the only safe course now was to give up writing them altogether. Or failing that, to get students to sign a waiver in advance, indemnifying the referee from prosecution.
A third, unspoken option, the anodyne option, in which you unearthed something complimentary to say of every student – how kind to animals they were, how punctually they handed in the shit they wrote, how innovatively they tied their shoelaces – was closed to Henry who found it hard enough to speak well of someone who deserved to be spoken well of.
Page 10, paragraph 6, settled it for Henry. ‘If you aren’t certain, DON’T WRITE THE LETTER.’
Music to his ears: fair enough: he wouldn’t.
So what on earth suddenly made him let his guard down and ignore the guidelines, not only denying a student the words of enthusiastic commendation to which she’d been born entitled, but offering it as his judgement that she had a poor mind and an even poorer attitude – slovenly was the word he used, a slovenly intelligence – thereby abusing her human rights, defaming her character, exposing himself to the charge of negligent misrepresentation and the University of the Pennine Way to the possibility of a damaging lawsuit, and thus bringing his illustrious career to an ignominious end?
How come, Henry?
Explain yourself.
Who was she? What had she done to deafen you to that exquisite music – DON’T WRITE THE LETTER – and make you depart from your usual precautions? And what would have led her to believe, if you had so low an opinion of her, that she could count on you to speak up on her behalf? Was she someone to whom you owed an obligation of some sort? Was she otherwise known to you? And if so, should you not, in common decency, have advised her to look elsewhere for the recommendation she sought?
He isn’t sure he can go ahead with this line of self-interrogation. He turns on to his side, being careful not to wake Moira. Her snoring soothes him. If you can make a sound when you are not awake, then there is life beyond the pains of consciousness. That’s where Henry would like to be: somewhere else, somewhere he can fall into ignorance of himself without ceasing to be altogether. A halfway house. Not quite death, not quite life.
Sleep does it for some people. But sleep isn’t quite what Henry means. The state Henry craves hasn’t yet been discovered.
Besides, Henry can’t sleep tonight. Too many people in his head tonight who do not think as they ought on serious subjects.
So he lies there, straining his ears for the sound of traffic, the outside welcome tonight, more welcome than the inside at least. The disgrace of it, he thinks. The disgrace of it! Nothing specific. Just the disgrace of life before and – whether he falls into blessed ignorance of himself or not – the disgrace of life hereafter.
TEN
‘Guess what?’ Lachlan says, looking from one to the other. ‘She kept diaries.’
‘Really,’ Henry says.
Moira kicks him under the table. ‘What?’ his eyes ask. ‘What have I done?’ But he knows what he’s done. He hasn’t shown sufficient interest. He’s off and away, somewhere else. ‘Sorry,’ he says, bringing himself back, attending to Lachlan properly this time. ‘Who kept diaries?’
‘The old biddy.’
‘Really,’ Henry says. Moira again kicks him under the table. This is the trouble with having a woman friend. If you have a woman friend she likes to know where you are, even when you’re with her, and that means having to come back from the dark backward of abysmal time, where most of what is interesting to you, if you’re Henry, is to be found.
They are in Henry’s favourite restaurant, the Tallin Palace, to which Moira has only recently introduced him but which fits the bill for Henry, exactly. What a restaurant should be. Pink tablecloths, arched entrances from room to room, arched alcoves, arched mirrors, an air of anxious plenty, as though those who eat here are not beyond imagining a time when they may never eat again, but in the meantime every sort of meat and fish – though only the meat is important to Henry – served by men, not impossibly Cypriots, in wigs and black bolero waistcoats. And where a restaurant should be, too, attached to a mansion block, almost the mansion-block canteen, invisible to the eye of mere passers-by, but just a five-minute walk from the High Street.
‘Why don’t we have all our meals here?’ Henry had suggested, after his first visit.
‘Because I’d be twenty stone in a month,’ Moira told him.
But she was pleased he liked the place. She is enjoying being his Virgil through the underworld which is St John’s Wood. Though Henry offers to be jaded, he marvels easily. He vanishes from her side sometimes, floats away like the shade of a dear-departed, but a new restaurant always brings him back. In time she’ll be out of restaurants, she knows that. She’ll have taken him to every one there is. And then, the chances are, she’ll lose him. It’s like waiting for the dawn to come and the first cock of the morning to crow – signal for ghosts to start like guilty things upon a summons, and be gone. She feels she’s borrowing him from something or from someone, she just doesn’t know from what or whom.
Tonight there are three small parties in progress at the Tallin Palace. Intermittently, with well-calculated consideration for those who are not celebrating a birthday or an anniversary, the lights are dimmed and one of the waiters comes in with a cake. Next to Henry’s table a dozen people are gathered for a golden wedding. The wife is birdlike and triumphant: fifty years ago they said it wouldn’t last. The husband is mottled on his hands and face with the brown stains of death. Little by little, s
tarting from the inside, it’s seeping through his flesh. He is so decrepit – though there’s been nothing wrong with his appetite, Henry’s noticed – he does not have the breath to blow out a single candle. At the other end of the table a great-niece, maybe a great-great-niece, stands up, rolls out her chest and extinguishes it for him. Everyone applauds. Only the wife is displeased. ‘We should see you more,’ she tells the great-great-niece.
‘Families,’ Henry says, thinking about the cake. ‘But you were saying’ – to Lachlan – ‘your stepmother kept a diary.’
‘Not a diary – dozens of diaries. Going back to the twenties as far as I can tell, and only finishing when she did. Do you know there’s even an entry for the morning she passed away.’
‘What does it say?’ Moira wants to know.
‘“Not feeling well.”’
Henry laughs. Moira kicks him under the table.
‘That’s upsetting,’ Moira says.
Lachlan bangs his chest. He is not the best person to be out eating with. Every morsel of food has to be chased down his oesophagus, a punch more or less wherever there’s a button on his shirt, every six or seven seconds. Then air has to be coaxed back up, at similar intervals.
It’s only a pity, Henry thinks, looking away, that my father isn’t here to pick his teeth behind his hand. We could leave them to enjoy each other’s company.
Why Lachlan is eating with them at all, Henry isn’t sure. Moira’s doing. She is sorry for him. She thinks he’s lonely. And since she and Henry are not in the slightest bit lonely now they have each other, there is no reason not to make the occasional gift of themselves – a proof of their superabundance – to their friends. Friends? All right, neighbours then. Henry suspects her interest in Lachlan goes beyond pity. He is a mystery to her. She has already remarked several times how much she admires the way he wears his clothes. Not necessarily the clothes themselves, which have nothing of St John’s Wood Italianate about them, aren’t tight about the hips, or open at the throat, but the way he carries them. They look as though they belong to him, as though he’s grown them, she said. Observe him when he sits down in his suit, she ordered Henry, he looks like an old bear enjoying the slackness of his skin. She also likes the smell of them. (The countryside, she said. Angus, Henry corrected her.) And she is intrigued by the gold pocket watch he carries on a chain, fastened by a fob chain to a buttonhole in his waistcoat. She thinks he’s aristocratic, a laird or Highland chieftain. Though she doesn’t admit to being a foreigner herself, laughing off Henry’s conviction that she is Viennese or Czech, insisting she was born in Borehamwood or somewhere like, this to Henry proves conclusively she’s from somewhere else. Only a foreigner would be intrigued by Lachlan, or think him aristocratic. He is like beefeaters and Chelsea pensioners and the changing of the guard – picturesque only to the eyes of a tourist.
Lachlan himself is less upset than Moira is by his stepmother’s diaries. ‘Dear old thing . . .’ he says, comical in the pause, ‘ . . . I don’t think.’
Henry is anxious not to have his meal ruined by another Lachlan monologue on the subject of his stepmother.
‘Find something nice to say about her,’ he says. ‘It’s better for your heart. Speak well of people and you’ll live longer. Speak well of the dead and they’ll watch out for you.’
‘That’s very positive, from you,’ Moira says.
‘I’m practising.’
Lachlan says, ‘You’re sounding like her. Every day she tried to write down something in her diary that would cheer her up. I thought seeing me without a penny did that, but apparently not.’
‘So share with us some of her wisdom.’
‘Oh, lor,’ Lachlan says, closing his eyes. ‘Well, there is one I remember, probably because the old feller used to recite it, though I can’t say I know whose it was first. “If you would be happy for a week take a wife; if you would be happy for a month kill a pig; but if you would be happy all your life plant a garden.”’
‘Funny,’ Henry puts in, ‘that was one of my mother’s favourites too.’
‘Lot of nonsense, if you ask me,’ Lachlan says, ‘Should read, “If you would be miserable for a week take a wife; if you would be happy all your life bury her in the garden.”’
Moira slaps his hand across the table. ‘That’s not very nice,’ she tells him.
‘Strange,’ Henry says, ignoring the pantomime. ‘I could never understand what any part of that meant to my mother.’
‘Ah,’ says Moira, ‘Ekaterina the cake builder and decorator.’
‘Leave her alone,’ Henry says. ‘She isn’t here to defend herself.’
Moira ruches her lips at him. For a moment Henry thinks she’s going to show him a mouthful of food. Or bring a breast out. ‘I only say it,’ she says, ‘to annoy you.’
‘Don’t annoy me.’
‘I only annoy you because I love you. Has no one ever told you how handsome you become when you’re annoyed?’
‘Who’s Ekaterina?’ Lachlan wants to know.
‘Henry’s mother. She was a maker of architectural cakes. Henry doesn’t like me joking about her.’
‘Quite right. Nothing funny about a mother. Nothing funny about a stepmother either, but there you are. Nice name, Ekaterina. Russian, was she?’
Henry nods. Let’s not get into that. Given the amount of drink that’s going down, Lachlan will be talking Jewesses soon.
‘So go on,’ Moira says, quickly, ‘why could you never understand what any part of it meant to your mother?’
‘Part of what?’ Lachlan wants to know.
Angus would be better company, Henry thinks. ‘Part of what we’ve just been talking about. What interested her about it. She was never going to take a wife, she never saw a pig, and she never went into the garden.’
‘Maybe she was aiming it at you,’ Moira says.
‘Wife bit, yes, you could be right, though she universally warned me off women. And planting a garden was something we talked about. I used to tell her I couldn’t bear the idea of being buried, and she said I needed to learn to love the earth. Rich, coming from her, but there you are. The pig, however . . .’
‘The pig’s me,’ Lachlan says. ‘The pig-food salesman.’
‘So how does that work? I’ll be happy for a month if I kill you?’
‘Not for me to say, old man. Do you recognise any such inclination in yourself?’
‘None that I would admit to.’
‘Then I’d better watch out.’
‘Your dog, however –’
‘Poor Angus. I don’t know what you did to him.’
‘It’s what he did to me.’
‘He came home –’ Lachlan says to Moira, enlisting her sympathy.
‘Is this Henry or the dog?’
‘The dog, the dog. I can’t speak for Henry. He came home, went straight into his basket, and didn’t leave it again for a week.’
‘Canine shame,’ Henry explains. ‘He knows I have his number. Piss-sniffer, ball-licker, shit-eater.’
‘Would you mind!’ the woman at the next table says to him. ‘This is my golden wedding.’
‘So sorry,’ Moira says for him.
‘I’m not sorry,’ Henry says, but not loudly. ‘If people don’t want to hear about dogs . . .’
‘They should what?’ Moira wants to know.
‘They should . . . I don’t know . . . Stay in.’
‘It’s actually my dog he’s talking about,’ Lachlan leans across to explain. ‘So I’m the one who should be upset.’
‘My golden wedding,’ the woman says, ‘and you’re the one who thinks he should be upset.’
This is why Henry likes it here. It’s almost a club. Everyone has something in common. If it’s only that they are all dying.
A club for the mordant.
And actually, Henry realises, it’s more than that. Everyone here is not only dying, but finds the idea of death disgraceful. There’s no letting on, of course, and Henry would be har
d pressed to prove this, but here, among his people, among this particular manifestation of his people, the St John’s Wood branch, so to speak, where expectations have been less pinched than in the north, there is a shared apprehension of the disgrace which death brings. As though not to have beaten it yet, not to have found a way round it, not to have exceeded the common in precisely the sphere of operation where the common is so indiscriminating, is to have failed, in the end, failed disgracefully at the only worthwhile task that’s been set you.
And so they sit eating red meat while blackly joking, a community of separated souls, each consumed with self-reproach.
When Henry floats back to the table, he finds that Moira and Lachlan have resumed their conversation about the old lady’s diaries. Moira has been asking whether they are newsy and informative, whether they are publishable even, since there is a great interest in those whose lives coincided, more or less, with the beginning and the end of the twentieth century.
‘Oh, she doesn’t talk about politics much,’ Lachlan is quick to explain, ‘not in the ones I’ve looked at so far, anyway. It’s more people.’
‘People are what people like,’ Moira says.
‘Are they?’ Lachlan is looking disconsolate now. Once the food has been thumped down the oesophagus and settled into his stomach, the sadness follows. Henry understands this. Like friends, food. After the initial excitement it all seems pointless.
‘You couldn’t round us off with another of your stepmother’s positive proverbs?’ Henry asks. ‘Something to raise our spirits before we leave?’
The Making of Henry Page 22