So she takes him to the salt-beef bar for dinner. When all else fails, salt beef does it for Henry. Red meat, yellow mustard, green sweet-and-sour cucumbers. Primary colours. Make sure everything’s bright and keep the appeal simple, she’s discovered that.
She has her salt beef lean. ‘In which case,’ Henry requests, ‘can I have your fat?’
See? Already he’s cheering up.
Henry doesn’t tell her that a dead friend can affect you like that. One minute you’re down, the next . . . well, the next you’re not.
As it is, today he is half tempted to ask for ‘Hovis’ Belkin’s fat as well.
He is even teaching her a game they used to play in the salt-beef bars in Manchester when they were boys, he and ‘Hovis’. Spot the Wej. She’s Jewish. She’s Jewish. He’s Jewish. So’s he. That’s four points to me. Those two, however, aren’t, so that’s two points to you!
‘Not much of a game in this joint,’ she said. ‘Everyone’s Jewish who comes here. Except me.’
She is continuing to insist she isn’t Jewish, isn’t from the Danube or the Baltic.
‘You’re called Aultbach,’ he reminds her. ‘How can you not be Jewish?’
‘I’m only called Aultbach because I married Aultbach.’
‘And you’re telling me that a man called Aultbach would marry someone who isn’t Jewish?’
‘Aultbach’s barely Jewish himself.’
‘When it comes to being Jewish there is no barely,’ Henry explains.
‘Exactly,’ she says, ‘and I am not Jewish at all.’
It’s funny but he has never asked her maiden name. Maybe he doesn’t want to hear it. Moira Smith, Moira Pilkington, Moira Ainsworth – he’d find any of those hard. They wouldn’t stop him loving going up and down escalators with her, but they might dissuade him from doing it so often. It isn’t the Jewish bit he needs, it’s the foreign. He needs her to come from somewhere else.
Here has Henry in it. Somewhere else hasn’t. So come from somewhere else, I beg you, Moira.
He wants to play, anyway, whether she does or she doesn’t.
‘They are!’ he shouts. ‘That’s two more points to me.’
She wants to know how he knows. Still pretending that she needs guidance in Jewish and the opposite-to-Jewish ways.
So he goes along with her subterfuge, and explains. It’s to do with the manner in which the sandwich is addressed. True, all people temporarily assume a Jewish air when they enter a salt-beef bar, especially at the moment of examining the contents of their salt-beef sandwich. Indeed, you can almost say, if you are irreligious and given to the joys of stereotyping, that this is precisely wherein being Jewish lies – in choosing to order a salt-beef sandwich and then examining it minutely, either for too much or for too little, or for too fatty or for too lean, or for too dry or for too wet. But look more attentively and you discover that Gentiles also open up their sandwiches to count the pieces of salt beef. The difference being that when the Gentile has finished examining his sandwich he eats it – see him? a point to you! – whereas the Jew invariably calls the waiter.
‘I never call the waiter,’ she says. ‘Doesn’t that prove I’m not Jewish.’
‘No,’ he tells her. ‘The only reason you don’t call the waiter is that you wait yourself. It’s the freemasonry of the profession that stops you. But if you’re having trouble with Spot the Wej let’s go down market and play Dodge the Draught.’
In fact, you don’t so much play Dodge the Draught as watch other people playing it. Why? Because it can help in playing Spot the Wej, the easiest way of spotting Wejs being to notice whether or not they are prepared to sit in a draught. If they huddle together shivering and shouting for the manager, demanding that he find them a table where there is no draught, they are Jews. If, on the other hand, they are perfectly happy sitting in the draught, and what is more haven’t noticed any draught, because there is no draught – Henry laughs, expounding this – they are Gentile.
‘Oughtn’t you to have grown out of this by now, Henry?’ Moira asks him, folding her arms and looking at him evenly – which isn’t easy for her. ‘Aren’t you a bit old to be finding this amusing?’
He starts as though she has pinched him. ‘Aren’t you a bit old for this, Henry?’ His mother’s words, precisely. They were out together, taking tea – where were they? – some hotel, the Midland, yes, the Midland, scene of his father’s . . . but he doesn’t want to remember that, by the by all that, done and dusted, what he prefers to remember is taking tea, pouring tea, picking cucumber sandwiches from a silver platter, laughing with his mother, agreeing that the dinky oblong of white sandwich with its crusts removed is always the best thing about tea, better than the scones, better than the little cakes, or fancies as they called them in those days, but whether this was before or after she’d become a decorator of cakes herself, that he can’t remember, but it must have been after her Nietzsche period because there was something Nietzschean about her attitude, indeed long after, else she would not have been wondering whether he wasn’t a bit old for what he was doing, which was playing Spot the Wej.
‘It’s just a game, Mother.’
Funny, isn’t it, what happens to the status of the game between a mother and her son. If Henry, in spite of all his heaviness, liked a game when he could get one, to whom did he owe his love of games but Ekaterina? Ah . . . boo! – who taught him that? Who hid herself behind the chair? Who appeared again from behind another? Who made his dolls talk? Who put him, Henry, at the centre of Schubert’s Fifth Symphony? And then, when the boy has mastered play and become a man, who doesn’t find any of it funny any more? The greatest difference between the sexes – that men will play and play and play, and that the women who showed them play, won’t.
‘Just games have stolen half my life away, Henry.’
He hung his head. He didn’t like being stopped mid-play. It made him feel foolish. No one likes having to choke on their own enthusiasm, the shy – who don’t easily show enthusiasm in the first place – least of all. But he was his mother’s boy and had read his mother’s books. The greatest of all tragedies in Henry’s eyes – a woman whose life has been stolen half away.
She was wearing a lovely floaty dress made of flimsy materials, in a print of faded flowers, the flowers you associate with elderly ladies living on their own. The flowers of loneliness. Blow on her, Henry thought, and that was the other half of her life gone.
He wanted to know, though, if she’d have felt the same had he been playing Spot Somebody Else, Spot the Serbo-Croat, for example, or Spot the Irish Catholic.
She thought about it. Probably not.
‘So it’s the Jew thing.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s the self-conscious Jew thing. I think that’s childish, Henry. No one’s asking you to pretend you’re somebody other than you are. If anything, I like it that you’re not in flight from any of that. But it’s provincial to keep going on about it. And insecure. In my experience people who can’t stop making jokes about their identity aren’t easy with it. The man of the world accepts who he is and the influences which have made him, and then gets on with living in the world. The big world.’
He was stung. Provincial? Henry! Whose head no sooner hit the pillow every night than it was filled with dances from the Danube.
‘Isn’t it a Jewish speciality,’ he said, ‘to enjoy making jokes at our own expense? Hasn’t that been the saving of us, our comic self-awareness?’
‘Well, if you call that saving, Henry . . .’
‘You know what I mean. It’s our survival strategy.’
‘I call it rubbing at an itch. If you leave it, the itch will eventually go away of its own accord. But of course it feels like relief while you’re rubbing.’
She had the power, like no other woman, to shame him. Was that all he was doing, rubbing at himself? Was he no better than Warren Shukman who rubbed himself to death?
Was Henry’s Jewishness his dick?
Was Henry’s dick his Jewishness?
He reddened, having consciousness of dick at the table with his mother. ‘You think I’m a footler, I know,’ he challenged her, once he’d allowed his high colour to subside. ‘You think I’m a footler like Dad.’
Interesting. For a brief moment, although all he was really doing was bringing the conversation back to the point from which it started – capitulating to her, if anything – she flashed fire at him, refusing the alliance. Come the showdown, Henry, it might not be me and you against your father after all. You never know with lovers – and they had been lovers, Ekaterina and Izzi – even those closest to them, even the beloved boy-child, fruit of their union, even Henry never knew the depth of their loyalty to each other at any time.
‘At least your father,’ she said, ‘has never been hung up on Jews.’
‘Ma, I’m not hung up.’
She leaned across and patted his hand. Worried about him. But absent too, as though she had left him behind. Which is not meant to be the way of it. In a properly ordered family it is the son who leaves the mother behind.
‘Where are you?’ Moira asks him, waving her hand in front of his eyes. ‘Where have you been?’
‘Thinking that you’re right. I am a bit old for this silly game. But if I tell you in my own defence that “Hovis” and I used to play it in Manchester in the coffee bars nearly half a century ago, you will understand why it’s on my mind.’
‘Was he Jewish? I didn’t realise that. There was no mention of it in anything I read.’
Is she right? Henry casts his mind back. Maybe she is. No mention of the J word in anything he’d read either. As why would there be? A citizen of the world, Osmond Belkin. A player in that big world which Henry’s mother wanted Henry to inhabit.
But Henry, for no reason he would be able to argue successfully in a court of law, thinks every J should keep the J word somewhere about his person. It’s even possible he feels punitive about it. If it’s been good enough for me, it’s good enough for you! Suffer! This might account for the obduracy with which he persists in interesting Moira – who couldn’t be less interested – in continuing their game. ‘One point for you,’ he shouts, nodding in the direction of the door. ‘This one’s definitely Gentile. In fact two points for you, he’s got a dog with him.’
‘How do you know the dog’s not Jewish?’
‘In general because no dog is Jewish. But in this particular because it’s Angus.’
Moira looks up and waves at Lachlan.
Henry wonders whether Lachlan knew he was going to find them here – by them, he means Moira – because he is spruced up, his hair shining and cleanly parted, his moustache bristling, the whole person bathed and dewy, as though newborn. More and more, Henry has been noticing, Lachlan presents himself this way to Moira. Like a gift from God. Henry has been trying it himself, but is no match for Lachlan. He can do clean and eager but he cannot do the elderly male equivalent of Venus rising from the waves. There is some absurdity in it at last, Henry reckons, doing a cherub when at best you’re Bacchus; though no such squeamishness appears to inhibit Lachlan.
He is wearing a spotted red handkerchief about his throat, piratical. An identical handkerchief is tied around the throat of Angus.
‘Sweet,’ Moira says. ‘They look like a couple of bounders on the town.’
‘If I were a woman faced with those two,’ Henry mutters, ‘I’d choose Angus.’
‘Then we can have a foursome,’ Moira says out of the side of her mouth, still waving.
But Angus looks like missing out on his big chance. ‘Sorry,’ one of the young waiters apologises at the door, making extravagant wipe-out signals with his hands, ‘we do not allow dogs in the restaurant.’
Lachlan’s face goes from baby pink to ulcer purple in an instant.
‘Shame,’ Henry says to Moira, ‘he’ll have to eat somewhere else.’
Moira wonders if she ought to have a word with the manager.
‘Don’t waste your time,’ Henry tells her. ‘He knows his customers. Jews who won’t eat under a draught are hardly going to eat near a dog. Even the goyim won’t eat with dogs, and they sleep with them.’
Lachlan is blowing out his cheeks, threatening to complain to someone higher up. (Who? Henry wonders. Is there an ombudsman for salt-beef bars?) But if it’s a battle of attractions between Angus and Moira – Moira in a V-neck violet cardigan as spiky-haired as one of her bags (alpaca, is it?), loose and clingy all at once, the buttons of her nipples visible even from the street – Angus is doomed to be on the losing side. A minute later he is trussed to a parking meter, looking forlornly into the restaurant. Henry shifts his chair. He cannot eat a salt-beef sandwich with a dog envying his every bite, let alone gazing at him with forbidden love.
‘Have you ever heard such nonsense?!’ Lachlan says, joining them, out of breath.
Moira kicks Henry under the table. She doesn’t want him telling Lachlan that his dog is not kosher.
‘Poor Angus,’ she says. ‘Will he be all right?’
‘Well, he won’t be hungry, if that’s what you mean. He’s had his.’
‘And even if he hadn’t, he could always eat shit,’ Henry decides not to say, plumping instead for some inanity about loneliness being good for the character.
Moira looks at him. ‘Of a dog?’
Lachlan is trying to cool himself down. Hyperhidrotic Henry feels almost sorry for him. As a perspirative man himself he knows how dismaying it is to come out of your house as odoriferous as a daisy and have circumstances flood you back into a tropical rainforest of discomfort. But he had it coming. People with dogs have it coming.
Choosing to make a virtue of his condition, Lachlan unfastens his neckerchief and mops his moustache with it. ‘Whew!’ he says. ‘These petty Hitlers.’
Moira kicks Henry under the table again, lest he is thinking of reminding Lachlan that Hitler’s biggest crime wasn’t banning dogs from restaurants.
‘Anyway,’ she says. ‘How have you been?’
She is wearing her hair up, the way Henry has noticed that Lachlan particularly likes it, piled to one side, teetering. Henry likes it too, the uncertainty, the imminence of cascade, and of course the asymmetry. Once upon a time Lachlan’s liking it would have counted more than his own liking it – the old second opinion routine. But not any more. I am becoming a conventional man, Henry thinks. By the time I’m seventy I will be wanting a woman of my own and wanting her just for myself.
That’s if he gets to seventy. ‘Hovis’ Belkin, he reminds himself, barely got to sixty.
Henry feels his throat tighten. Grief, he hopes. Please God, make it grief.
There was never any serious woman competition with ‘Hovis’, Henry finds himself remembering, unless you count ‘Hovis’ having always somehow known the provenance of the women Henry took out. Certainly no borrowing any of Belkin’s wives, if only for the simple reason, all else aside, that Henry never got to clap an eye on any of Belkin’s wives. Always out of sight, they were, in another country, on another plane, unavailable to the contamination of Henry’s curiosity. And there were no problems the other way, either. It was pretty much the done thing, when Henry was at university, to have a crack at the female company your friends were keeping. Lawless times, the sixties, when sex overrode all other considerations. You gave your woman a piece of your mind when you found her in the arms of your several flatmates, but not your flatmates. The latter were exempt from criticism, driven by a natural force over which they had no control. The woman was different. The woman was meant to be a repository of decency and fidelity. The potential mother of your children, for Christ’s sake! But Henry never came home to find his girlfriend of the hour in ‘Hovis’ Belkin’s arms. Not once. Not ever. How strange was that?
Of all the ways there are of betraying your best friend, this, Henry reckons, is the hardest to forgive: not betraying him, sexually, at all.
Henry had his own suspicions as to why ‘Hovis’ was aloo
f, and those suspicions did not include ‘Hovis’ being honourable or gay. ‘Hovis’ kept his hands off Henry’s women because he didn’t rate them. Because he wasn’t tempted. Because they weren’t the business. It was terribly insulting, and Henry for a long time sought alternative explanations, but that was the truth of it: ‘Hovis’ was only ever Henry’s friend, and therefore only ever Henry’s rival, for as long as it took him to get away. For ‘Hovis’, real life was whatever happened afterwards. And in that afterwards everything that pertained to Henry vanished like a dream.
Of course, while they both remained above the ground you couldn’t discount the possibility that Henry would one day re-enter Belkin’s life, and that Belkin would one day re-enter Henry’s. Nothing’s over until it’s over. Who could say for sure that they wouldn’t meet somewhere – by the ancient yew in Totter Down graveyard, say, or outside the paper shop on St John’s Wood High Street, ‘Hovis’ grey-skinned, wasted, hobbling on a stick – and that the sight of healthful Henry with his hand on Moira’s clavicle wouldn’t force him to re-evaluate the pattern of their history? Would ‘Hovis’, in those circumstances, have cast a dying man’s lascivious eye on Moira, one part defunct desire, three parts envy? Or would he have found a way of communicating to Henry that in his view – for what it’s worth, old man – he had bombed again, come up with yet another undesirable, a mere nobody from here instead of one of the glittering somebodies from there?
Now Henry will never know.
It should be a liberation. Now I don’t need to wonder. Now I, Henry the Conqueror, sole possessor of the field, can get on with my life, uncriticised, undetracted, uncompared.
But old habits die hard.
And the dead are never vanquished.
About Lachlan, at least, Henry need have no fears. Lachlan’s heart belongs to Moira.
Henry watches him with a feeling akin to affection. Whatever else you outgrow, you remain duty-bound to be fond of a person who is fond of those of whom you are fond. Common humanity, Henry thinks, demands that I accept him, as ‘Hovis’ Belkin never accepted me, as a man made of the same stuff I am. He threw his bowler hat into the Thames and never had a happy day again, I threw myself into the Pennines and have not been able to look at myself in the mirror since. We are the same.
The Making of Henry Page 30