‘But why would I ask her to?’
‘Because you haven’t had it.’
‘But why would I want it, Warren?’
For a moment the question seemed to floor even him. ‘I don’t know. Because it’s like Everest, I suppose. Because it’s there.’
‘Yeah, but only because you put it there,’ Henry said, resentful that henceforth he was going to be troubled by a desire for something which until now he hadn’t even known existed.
In the time that has elapsed since Warren’s death, Henry has never again heard of a hum job and must reasonably assume, therefore, that Warren invented it. But whether he had heard of the practice and taught somebody to do it, or whether it was an invention from top to bottom – the performance and the practice – Henry doesn’t know and will never now find out.
Was it all a lie? Catching the bus to town on a Saturday morning to go buying second-hand records, Warren showed Henry the hotel to which he boasted he took married women. Tonight, for example, he was taking two.
‘How can you afford two rooms?’ Henry asked.
‘One room, shmuck. And anyway, they pay.’
‘They pay?’
‘Sure they pay. They love it.’
Married women would pay to go to a hotel with Warren Shukman, aged fourteen! Two at a time!!
And what is more to a kosher hotel!
It was beyond Henry.
But a rumour began to circulate that while Warren did indeed go to hotels, he went on his own, signed in as Mr Smith, and spent the night tossing off. ‘Hovis’ Belkin was the chief instigator of this rumour. ‘One of my uncles has just removed the gall bladder from the father of the hotel clerk’s girlfriend,’ ‘Hovis’ told him, ‘and he swears –’
‘Hang on, who swears?’
‘The hotel clerk. He swears that Shukman comes in on his own and goes out on his own. It’s the God’s honest truth.’
‘How can this clerk be sure that the birds don’t come along later and leave earlier?’
‘Because he does the night shift. And on some nights the hotel is completely empty – but for Shukman.’
‘He’s the only person staying?’
‘The only one.’
‘So why would he sign in as Mr Smith?’
‘Because he doesn’t want anyone to know who he is.’
‘Why not, if he’s there on his own?’
‘Why do you think! Because he doesn’t want it to be widely known that he goes there for a J. Arthur Rank.’
‘Can’t he have one of those at home?’
‘Hovis’ didn’t even bother to think about it. ‘Not in a clean bed he can’t, and not as Mr Smith he can’t, no.’
‘And you reckon he needs to change his name to masturbate?’
‘You tell me.’
Hum-jobless Henry scratched his head. What did he know? Except that it was beyond him.
A month later, Warren Shukman, alias Mr Smith, was dead of a heart attack. Discovered, the rumour mill had it, on the floor of Birnbaum’s kosher hotel on Cheetham Hill Road.
‘Proves it,’ ‘Hovis’ said. ‘He wanked himself to death.’
‘You can’t be sure of that,’ Henry said.
‘Yes, I can. There’s no other explanation.’
‘That’s crap. There are a million explanations for a heart attack.’
‘At our age?!’
‘What are you telling me? – that at our age only wanking kills!’
‘Wanking and depression, yes.’
‘So how do you know it wasn’t depression?’
‘It might have been.’
‘There you are, then.’
‘No, there you are, then. You tell me why Shukman should have been depressed.’
‘I don’t know. Because he was a shithead.’
‘A good reason, I grant you. The only trouble is that Shukman didn’t know he was a shithead. Give me a better reason.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Yes, you can. Why do you get depressed?’
‘I don’t get depressed.’
‘Bollocks. I know you get depressed. You’ve admitted it.’
‘Only after wanking.’
‘Hovis’ Belkin threw his arms in the air in triumph. ‘My point precisely!’
When the headmaster addressed the shocked school with the news, ‘Hovis’ Belkin winked at Henry and made the sign of Onan with his hand, shaking it and rolling his eyes like a lobotomised cocktail waiter.
Finding mirth easier to deal with than grief, Henry decided to go along with ‘Hovis’s’ explanation, fully expecting to see an obituary in the local paper – Shukman, Warren. Passed peacefully away 17 March, while playing with his dick. Will be for ever missed by his disgusted parents and nauseated friends.
Later, Henry learned that Warren had been born with a hole in his heart and must have known he was on borrowed time. Hence the rush.
All the same, he accepted that Warren could have chosen another way to make the best of whatever life was left to him.
As Henry now intends to do.
TWELVE
A week passes, and then another, but there is still no call from ‘Hovis’ Belkin.
He could, of course, be too ill to call.
Or he could be too well. Well, ‘Hovis’ has managed fine without calling Henry for decades. And has no reason to call now.
Or, all questions of health apart, he could be too angry with Henry to ring, having read and not forgotten, or even read and long forgotten Henry’s article, forgetting not being the same as forgiving.
Or the son could have failed to pass on the message.
Or ‘Hovis’ could be both ill and well, could be ignorant of Henry’s article, could know that his son had encountered Henry underneath an ancient yew, could know that Henry had expressed concern about his health, and still could be indifferent.
Or, or, or . . .
Or ‘Hovis’ could hate him for the hateful reference he wrote his brother’s cousin’s nephew’s niece or whoever the hell she was, the girl with the slovenly mind who put Henry’s career that never was to bed at last. The which being the case, it was Henry, surely, who ought to have been aggrieved, not ‘Hovis’ – but there you are, there never has been nor ever will be justice when it comes to families, or favoured girls, especially when the family’s name, and the favoured girl’s, is Belkin.
He had never liked her. Too gamine for Henry’s taste, too compact in her ruthlessness, altogether too well aimed and smart a bomb. They are all ruthlessly ambitious now, to Henry’s eye, but at least some of them have the decency to spill, to show a little uncontrol, whereas this one came all tied up and packaged, slovenly of mind but neat of purpose. What she was doing in the Pennines, a Belkin, Henry could not imagine. Maybe she was the first crocus of the spring, the sign that the season was changing. Chic, all of a sudden, to get your education at one of those institutions your uncles would never have been seen dead in. Proof of authenticity. There she suddenly was, anyway, gleaming like a silver bullet, marching to the top of her class, a friend and confidante in no time of Drs Delahunty and Grynszpan, eyeing Henry archly, saying nothing, until at last he stopped her in the corridor and commented on her name. Yes. Osmond Belkin, yes. Her father’s uncle’s brother’s whatever it was. She narrowed her coal-black eyes. You knew him, didn’t you, at school, my father’s uncle’s brother’s . . . Yes, she’d heard that. And poor Henry, still blushing at the end of his life, blushed then to think that ‘Hovis’ had mentioned, maybe even recommended him. (‘Go to Henry Nagel, my dear, if it is wisdom you want.’) Then blushed again in shame for blushing, recalling the inequality of that friendship and how grovelling, till kingdom come, his gratitude.
Not that she had ‘gone to him’. Not for Nancy, on arrival, Henry’s Look at the Lits on That. Not when she had Delahunty and Grynszpan to beef up her credentials.
So why, against the grain and out of the blue, did she show up in the front row of his lectures on Pamela and Clarissa, a
nd the following term roll along to his classes on appetence and yearning? Why did she start writing him eager essays though he wasn’t at all sure she had even officially enrolled for his course or had any appetite let alone aptitude for the subject as taught by him? (Longing? Nancy Belkin? Don’t make him laugh!) And why did she then ask him for a reference?
Was it a test?
Of his loyalty to a friend as against his loyalty to an academic subject?
Or was it a test of her? She must have known he didn’t like her. People not liked by Henry always knew it. So did she want to show that she could turn him? Demonstrate that even he, the last man of principle standing in the Pennines, was no more principled than a porcupine? One smile from a determined girl with coal-black eyes and a little bottom, Henry, and you’re putty.
Except that he wasn’t. Nothing puttyish about him at all when push came to shove. Quite the contrary. Adamantine, if anything. Henry, Man of Stone.
Henry’s motto: A man must stand for what a man must stand. And while Henry didn’t stand for much, he did stand for not capitulating to the calculations of a minx with a taste for theory.
Unless the real reason he held out against her was that she was a Belkin, and that Henry still had things to prove with Belkins.
In which case, principle was not the word for what had motivated him at all. Oh no. In that case, principle was the last word. Even if he did, in a hail of high-mindedness, put his job on the line for it. But then it isn’t entirely unknown for people to put their jobs on the line for spite, is it? Evil impulses are no less destructive of their owners than virtuous ones. Not unlike Henry, not exactly alien to his character, to have spited himself out of work.
Or, or, or . . .
Be sorry for Henry. He only wants to know why he hasn’t heard from his best and oldest friend.
Moira would like him to go with her to Eastbourne. She is teaching a weekend course at the Grand and would appreciate his company.
‘Actually on the course?’
‘Well, you’re welcome, if you have a pinny to wear and five hundred pounds to cough up. But I was thinking just to be there when I finish in the evenings. To smell the sea with me and accompany me along the promenade.’
‘Will you take your highest heels?’
‘Not for walking along the promenade, Henry.’
‘I meant for bed.’
‘I’ll take whatever you want me to take.’
‘Will you wear no underwear?’
‘Not for teaching pastry-making, Henry.’
‘I meant for walking along the promenade.’
‘Whatever you want.’
Is she real? Sometimes Henry has to pinch himself to make sure he’s still among the living. In Henry’s world women do not say ‘Whatever you want’. No woman that Henry has known personally in the last twenty-five years, or that Henry has heard tell of in that time – no fabled woman about whom men whisper to one another over drinks, no ignis fatuus of any realistic man’s imagination – is accommodating in the way that Moira is. Not that she is yielding, or subservient – quite the opposite. The policy of taking Henry in hand, which she instituted from their very first evening out together, remains in strict force. There is work to be done on Henry, alterations to be made, they both know that. And who’s to say that Henry isn’t already a nicer, sweeter, happier person than he was? But the wonderful thing about Moira is that she does not believe that change always has to be painful. If Henry enjoys himself in the process of becoming a different man, that’s fine by Moira. It’s like bringing up a child. You give a bit to get a bit. Which is fine by Henry too. She wears her highest heels and no underwear, and he does what he’s told.
On her part – this is how Henry understands it – it’s an act of material intelligence. Call it bourgeois, call it Viennese, call it Moira’s genetic inheritance, call it what you like: what Moira understands is that there’s no satisfying the inner man until you’ve soothed away the frustrations of the outer. There is no hierarchy here, no higher being and no lower. The tactile pleasures of the world need no apologising for.
It might also be her calculation that if Henry is ghostly half the time, giving her the impression that she’s only borrowing him from someone else, that soon he’ll be on his way again, drifting, drifting from her, then anchoring him in the material things he loves is wise all round.
Is no underwear a material thing? Perversely, yes. It is.
Material enough to get Henry to agree to accompany her to Eastbourne anyway; the thought of Moira naked underneath her clothes in an unaccustomed place, her skirts in a losing tussle with the salt winds, all the persuasion he needs, though he is otherwise happy where he is in St John’s Wood and doesn’t feel in want of a holiday. After the Pennines, St John’s Wood is a holiday.
‘One other thing that occurs to me,’ she says, the day before they go away, ‘do you think it would be fun to take Angus?’
‘No,’ Henry says. He is already packing his case. Or rather, because he did most of his packing yesterday, he is repacking. He likes to look ahead, Henry. He likes to go to sleep knowing that everything is taken care of. Come the call, Henry will be ready.
‘That it? Just no?’
‘When you say Angus do you really mean Angus or is Angus a euphemism for Angus and Lachlan? Because I definitely do not want to go to Eastbourne with Lachlan.’
‘Of course I don’t mean Lachlan.’
‘Good.’
‘So are you all right about the dog?’
‘No. I definitely do not want to go to Eastbourne with Angus either.’
‘It would be nice for you, you could walk him while I’m teaching.’
‘Moira, the last time we took Angus anywhere he lay in the back of the car whimpering and being sick.’
‘That was because you’d locked him in the boot.’
‘Only because he’d been lying on the back seat whimpering and being sick.’
‘He isn’t used to travelling, the poor thing.’
‘Yes he is. Lachlan takes him everywhere. What he isn’t used to is travelling at 140 miles per hour in built-up areas.’
‘I’ll go slower.’
‘You won’t. It is not in your power to go slower. Nor would I want to travel with Angus even if it were. A car is too confined a space for me and a dog, and I do not want to walk behind him in Eastbourne, picking up his shit every hundred yards. I don’t pick up dog’s shit, Moira. That was never in God’s plan for me. No adult human should stoop to pick up a dog’s shit. Some get a buzz out of it, I know that. Homosexuals and the like. In another era they’d have licked lepers’ sores and been called saints. Now they pick up dog shit. But Leviticus prohibits it. Whosoever stoopeth to pick up dog shit, yea even with a plastic spoon, shall be stoned; it is an abomination.’
‘So that’s a no, then?’
Henry goes on with his packing, repacking what he packed yesterday, and re-repacking what he’d repacked this morning. He doesn’t say what he is thinking, that Eastbourne is an opportunity to go looking at some new graveyards – plots where the dead may sniff the sea – and that he doesn’t want a dog tailing after him between the graves, digging up bones.
Boring into his back, Moira’s eyes signal a terrible promise. She will have him picking up dog shit, and loving it, before she’s through with him.
He has never been to Eastbourne. He knows it by repute, for some reason or other, but he can’t remember why. Did a person of his close acquaintance come from Eastbourne? Has someone dear to him retired to it? Or school friends – was there a summer school in Eastbourne, one of those camps to which Henry was never invited and where everybody else laid down those intimacies from which he was thereafter excluded? Eastbourne, Eastbourne . . . It rings bells. Unless he knows it only from Henry James, as a place where adulterers more twisted than Henry Nagel bought golden bowls or brazened it, arm in arm, at country-house weekends. Except that James liked to send his adulterers to cathedral cities, and Henry doubts t
here is a cathedral in Eastbourne.
Moira busy in the hotel conference centre, miked like an airline pilot and kneading dough, Henry ventures out. Of the same mind, the doughty old. Not knowing what to wear any more, confused by what is and isn’t in the shops, denied their sensible flat caps and stout shoes, they are reduced to baseball hats and trainers. Only the sticks remain the same, and the swollen ankles, and the prevalence of widowhood – a dozen blue-bobbed hobbling dames to every rheumy gent. No more adulteries for this lot. You whiff the sea and if you’re lucky you remember. And that’s that.
Henry watches a survivor – one of the eligible, own limbs, own car keys, own car even – negotiating himself into his vehicle. Gingerly, first the left leg, testing, testing for unfamiliar obstacles, testing for distance to the pedals, testing that the car still has a bottom, then, no less gingerly, the right, as though entering foreign space, a lift shaft maybe, afraid that the lift has long gone, and there is only darkness and a long drop now. Braver than Henry, anyhow, who was frightened of cars at eighteen, never mind eighty.
The world’s your oyster, old boy, Henry thinks, watching him pull out into the traffic, all his lights on, his indicators flashing, his window wound down, for him, too, one more whiff of the sea.
Henry isn’t sure what he thinks of the sea hereabouts. Not worth looking at from this part of England, the sea. It holds no promises, wafts on its currents no aromatic seductions from far away. It’s only France out there. Or Belgium. Politics apart, the Eastbourne sea – the Channel, is it? – might just as well have been concreted over, so little of what you want a sea to do for you does this sea do. But he likes having it at his shoulder, a drop into nothingness, as he ambles in the direction of Beachy Head, the promenade gradually turning into cliff, the vegetation becoming saltier, stranger and more tenacious, on edge, like a hermit’s garden.
By Henry’s standards the walk is quickly turning into a climb. He stops to inhale the salt air, and almost faints. In his Pennine days air was not a problem to him. Sometimes he stood outside his cottage for no other reason than to breathe it in. I am, after all, a man like other men, he would tell himself. I live on air. But that was then. Now, after however many months away, his lungs have grown accustomed to the BMW fumes of St John’s Wood. He steadies himself against a bench, not wanting to sit down, because if he sits he probably won’t want to rise, and looks back the way he’s come, back over the groyny beach, the bandstand and the pier. It isn’t pretty, except in the sense that all signs of life are pretty when viewed from a distance. This must prove, Henry reckons, that God, if there is one, is benign. You cannot take the distant view of humanity and not be touched by it. Ask those who walked upon the moon.
The Making of Henry Page 26