‘Me too,’ she says. ‘It’s all so sad. But listen, when you think you can safely leave Lachlan you could pop across the hall and start to run me a slow hot bath. And you could see if you can dig out some massage oils. I’m half dead. I’ll be needing you to revive me.’
‘Righto,’ he says. He doesn’t want to get off the phone. He wants her to go on talking. Put the phone down and she’ll be gone. ‘And yes, you’re right – it has been sad.’
She will die on him, that’s what he knows. If he doesn’t die on her, she will die on him. Her voice will stop. Impossible to imagine, but he must imagine it. In the meantime . . . well, he will massage her. Keep the blood in circulation. Keep her in circulation.
Lachlan pours him another Scotch. He is beginning to look at Henry the way Angus used to. What you get when you go around kissing people on the head, Henry acknowledges. Or accepting them into your nostrils. God and Adam must have looked at each other this way, too, for a day or more. Until Eve.
‘I suppose you’d think I was being morbid,’ Lachlan says, ‘if I sat here with him on my lap.’
No, Henry doesn’t think that’s morbid. No. And anyway, what if it were. To be truthful he would like it himself, to linger here a little longer on this elderly St John’s Wood afternoon, a Scotch in his hand and the curtains closed, thwarting the encroachment of the cruel light, seeing Lachlan with Angus warm for the last time on his knees, trying to remember what the dog was like, which is becoming difficult already, thinking about running a bath for Moira, waiting for her to come home – home, her word – waiting for her to die, oiling her shoulders, reviving her.
It’s like a vision of his future. An old fart, a dead dog, and a woman he can’t trust not to leave him, one way or another.
Could be hell, Henry thinks.
Then again, could be the making of me.
HOWARD JACOBSON
The Making of Henry
Howard Jacobson is the author of four works of nonfiction and eight novels, including The Mighty Walzer, which won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Award for comic writing, and Who’s Sorry Now?, which was long-listed for the Booker Prize. He has a weekly column for The Independent and regularly reviews and writes for The Guardian, The Times, and the Evening Standard. Jacobson has also done several specials for British television. He lives in London.
ALSO BY HOWARD JACOBSON
Fiction
Coming From Behind
Peeping Tom
Redback
The Very Model of a Man
No More Mister Nice Guy
The Mighty Walzer
Who’s Sorry Now?
Nonfiction
Shakespeare’s Magnanimity (with Wilbur Sanders)
In the Land of Oz
Roots Schmoots: Journeys Among Jews
Seriously Funny: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2004
Copyright © 2004 by Howard Jacobson
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jacobson, Howard.
The making of Henry / Howard Jacobson.
p. cm.
1. Inheritance and succession—Fiction. 2. Manchester (England)—Fiction.
3. Apartment buildings—Fiction. 4. Life change events—Fiction.
5. London (England)—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6060.A32 M34 2004
823’.914—dc22
2004046375
www.anchorbooks.com
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-42896-7
v3.0
The Making of Henry Page 35