The Making of Henry

by Howard Jacobson

  Nothing changes. How to retrieve the threepenny bit, how to get his change from the East European waitress. ‘Here,’ he’d said, handing her a five-pound note when she brought him out his Viennese coffee, not waiting for a bill, ‘save your feet.’ Showing that he’d noticed her feet, dainty like the feet of all East European waitresses, in maid-of-all-work flatties. Henry likes that look. A meteorologist of women, Henry knows what it portends. Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight; flatties by day, stilettoes for play. She’d smiled at him as she turned, hooking a stray curl of yellow hair back over her ear. Hair the colour of custard. Her smile an inbred Habsburg smile, the lips pendulous and just a little crooked. Hair the colour of curdled custard, now he comes to look again, and the crooked mouth wary. Like him, she’s too old to be doing this. But wariness, too, is a detail Henry likes. The wary, he remembers, bite. Thus has Henry missed out on history, not noticed the twentieth century or its passing – war, famine, communism, capitalism, the birth and death of nations, genocide – so engrossed has he been in women.

  Unless, of course, he chose to be engrossed in women in order to miss out on history.

  Don’t look, Henry – who told him that? Try not to see. Which one of them told him that?

  She hasn’t returned with his change, the European waitress, though he has been out on the street with his coffee, taking up a table in the madhouse and enjoying the sun, for thirty minutes. Forgotten, that’s all. Forgotten his three pounds, of which he would have given her one anyway. So who cares? What’s three pounds in St John’s Wood High Street? Get up, leave, and let her have the three pounds. Let her even think he always meant her to have the three pounds, for he has a lordly air, Henry, born of not noticing what’s going on around him. But what if this is not lordliness after all, but cowardice? Afraid to ask, afraid to cause a fuss, afraid to be thought small-minded, afraid to look Elliot Yoffey in the face, is his insouciance in the matter of three pounds (minus one for the tip) just absence of ordinary adult competence? Fifty years on, is Henry still allowing the world to pish on him?

  Back home, on the edge of his armchair, his father will be waiting. Go back and ask for the money, Henry. Learn to take what’s yours. There’s the door. Be a man.

  And what will Henry do then?

  Wrong to have said that at nine Henry has no alternative accommodation. He has his grandmother’s mock-Tudor gingerbread house, which feels and smells like the country though it is only round the corner, left out of his sunshine semi then up the lane, opposite the entrance to the park, in what is known as Jews Row. Widowed, Henry’s mother’s mother lives with her three straight-backed widowed sisters. In truth, the oldest, much the oldest – Effie – has never had a husband, Anastasia still has a husband somewhere, and the youngest, much the youngest – Marghanita – never quite brought hers to the point of marriage, but ‘widowed’ is what they have settled on all round. Girls, they are known as. The Stern Girls. Not to be confused with the Stern Gang, though they are all ‘widowed’ suspiciously early. Widowed and returned to their maiden names.

  They are at home when Henry arrives with his satchel packed. Effie is playing Schumann on a small upright piano, Anastasia is sewing, Marghanita is reading Scott Fitzgerald, and Irina, his grandmother, is staring out of the window, as though waiting for Sir Lancelot. Tirra lirra, Henry should be singing, given how much he adores his grandmother, but he has just been told to get the threepence back or never return home, so he is not in a chivalric mood.

  ‘They’ve chucked me out,’ he tells the Stern Girls.

  ‘Who’s chucked you out?’ they ask in chorus.

  ‘My mother and my father.’

  They know what that means. His father has chucked him out. His mother is one of theirs, therefore she would never chuck Henry out. Husbands you chuck, boy children you don’t. But Henry’s father has his own way of doing things. Not that they believe his father has chucked Henry out either.

  When they have listened to his story they each produce a threepenny bit from their purses. ‘Keep three and give one to your father,’ his grandmother tells him, pinching his cheek.

  Henry shakes his head. He can’t do that. Lie? I cannot tell a lie. But whether that’s because he is made of honesty or because he is afraid he will be found out he doesn’t know. He suspects the latter. Henry is thin-skinned – he has heard his mother talk about it as an established medical fact: ‘Henry has thin skin, you know, not like his father who has the hide of an elephant’ – which means he feels everything even before it’s happened, and has no protection against consequences. If he lies about the threepenny bit his lie will show through him, and there is no knowing where it will end except for knowing it will end badly.

  ‘In that case,’ his grandmother says, throwing on a fur jacket, ‘we will come with you.’

  ‘Don’t take me home,’ Henry cries. ‘I am never going home again.’

  But home isn’t where they are taking him. All in their furs now, like women from another country, like a family of bears strayed into town, they file out of the house, turn right into the lane, and right again, after a quarter of a mile, on to the main road which they cross, imperious as to traffic – Anastasia halting buses with a wave of her fox’s tail – until they get to Yoffey’s, where, to Henry’s unutterable confusion, they march directly to the counter, a foreign invasion – the bears, the bears are here! – and give the reason for their errand.

  ‘For threepence!’ old man Yoffey exclaims. ‘A family delegation for threepence!’

  ‘Not threepence, principle,’ Irina says.

  What Henry loves about his grandmother is that she uses punctuation when she speaks. Not threepence comma principle full stop. It is from his grandmother that Henry learns that punctuation can be a weapon. With a comma you can hurt someone. And as a person who is always being hurt himself comma Henry hankers after hurting back full stop.

  The other thing Henry loves about his grandmother is how upright and fresh-smelling she is. Most of Henry’s friends’ grandmothers are as hooped and vinegary as cucumber barrels. Not Irina. She stands tall and breathes a sort of floral dignity the way a dragon breathes fire. All the Stern Girls do. Henry thinks this is why they are called girls still: they have never collapsed into the shape of women. It is also, he knows, a condition of their being from South Manchester. South Manchester is long-stemmed and uses haughty punctuation, North Manchester is tuberous, like a potato, and mispronounces everything – buzz, for example instead of bus, botcher instead of butcher, and grass, to rhyme with mass, instead of gr-ah!-ssss, the stuff of stately garden parties where no two people are the same. Henry’s mother is from the South, his father is from the North. Hence the commonly voiced opinion that their marriage will not last. All the Stern Girls took ‘husbands’ from North Manchester, and look where that’s landed them exclamation mark!

  Old man Yoffey’s own marriage is strong but unconventional. Though he is venerably white and wispy-haired, with small watchful red-yellow eyes like a crow’s and little bones which you can see poking through his shirt, old man Yoffey intermittently raises his hand to his wife – a woman half his age and twice his size – and on occasions even brings it down. Adjoining Yoffey’s corner shop is a bay-windowed two-storey house with a small front garden, overgrown as to lawn (grass) but with carefully tended borders, pinks to one side, burgundy pansies with amazed expressions to the other; a four-foot wall of white brick encrusted with seashells protects the garden from the curiosity of the outside world, and it is over this that old man Yoffey sometimes throws his wife. Because Yoffey is a devout man whose services to the community extend beyond the provision of saveloys and plaited bread, the finger of suspicion inevitably points at drink. Ceremonially – this is the worst that can be said of him – old man Yoffey downs a thimbleful or two of sweet red Middle Eastern wine. Not much, but for some men a thimbleful is all it takes. A model husband the rest of the time, old man Yoffey turns into a wild animal whenever there is a festival or ho
ly day. Pity poor Mrs Yoffey, then, who goes in fear at the very time everybody else in the neighbourhood is polishing silver and celebrating.

  Henry knows what the Stern Girls have to say on the subject of alcohol and he has heard tell of an occasion – or ‘incident’ as it is anecdotally referred to in the family – when his grandmother was passing just as Mrs Yoffey was coming over the wall. Henry likes to think that the incident consisted of his grandmother throwing Mrs Yoffey back, but apparently all that happened was that she had words with Mr Yoffey, that Mr Yoffey had words with her, and that Mrs Yoffey (in Henry’s imagination still on her back) took her husband’s side. Following which, Henry’s grandmother delivered herself of the opinion that the Yoffeys were a disgrace to everybody but each other, whom they richly deserved. And walked on.

  That there is no love lost, then, between the grocer and the Stern Girls, Henry can easily understand. But he is still not prepared for the violence of old man Yoffey’s reaction to their peaceful deputation.

  ‘So for threepenceworth of principle,’ he exclaims, every one of his white wisps of hair on end now, as though he is halfway through being electrocuted, ‘you invade my shop.’

  ‘Hardly invade,’ Anastasia replies.

  No one in North Manchester repeats what another person has said like that, allowing it to hang in the air, to echo for ever with its own absurdity. And it goes without saying that no one in North Manchester employs the word ‘hardly’. Even Henry feels the condescension.

  ‘Then what would you call it?’ old man Yoffey wants to know. ‘A social visit? Have you come to see my wife perhaps? Are you here for tea and hamentash?’

  Henry has tasted hamentash and doesn’t like it much. But he has been told in Bible class that it has symbolic significance. A hamentash is a three-sided pastry, resembling the hat which the arch-villain Haman, chief adviser to King Ahasuerus, and a prototype Nazi in his own right, wore in the Book of Esther. Those who eat it, Henry grasps, are laughing at their enemies. So does old man Yoffey mean to imply that the Stern Girls have come to laugh at him, or is it Henry who is as bad as Haman?

  He is shaking from head to foot whatever he thinks, old man Yoffey, the stiff detached collar he customarily wears becoming separated from its gold stud, and he is gathering up, Henry notices, all the threepenny bits in his wooden till, preparatory, Henry wouldn’t be at all surprised, to throwing them at the Stern Girls. That would be a good end to all this, would it not, his grandmother or one of her sisters being blinded by the very threepenny bit Henry did not have the courage to claim as his.

  Could he stop this now? Could he appeal to Elliot who has neither moved nor looked up the whole time from the block of cheese he has been garotting with a piece of wire ever since Henry and his reinforcements entered the shop? ‘Elliot, I need hardly tell you why I’m here. My change, remember? You dropped it on the counter. I was too diffident to explain I couldn’t reach it and you were too engaged to notice. Sorry to put you to this bother.’ Would that be so difficult? With someone’s eyesight at risk, was that beyond him?

  Henry never finds out what is or is not beyond him. Rather than throw coins at women, which he knows he should not do, no feast day being in the offing and no wine, therefore, having passed his lips, old man Yoffey closes his shop. ‘Get out, get out,’ he screams, ‘all of you. And as for you’ – pointing at Henry – ‘you’re banned for life.’

  If he were to get up and go into the patisserie and coffee shop on St John’s Wood High Street and ask the East European waitress for his change, would he be banned for life? Henry wonders. And would it matter anyway, there being a lot less life left now for him to be banned for?

  Morbid again? If only he were. Or if only he were consistently one thing or the other. The problem with ageing, as Henry sees it today – warmed by the sun and fired by the European waitress – is that you don’t. At least not where you should – in the soul. At sixty minus a few months Henry doesn’t feel a jot less verdant in the soul than he did at sixteen. True, he didn’t feel all that verdant at sixteen, but that’s not his point. His point is that he’s not prepared. Yes, yes, he will beshit himself blah blah, but that’s just the body talking. Henry is not prepared metaphysically for what’s coming. In some part of himself Henry still thinks that something might just happen, a miraculous advance in medical science or a supernatural intervention, which will make Henry an exception to the grinding determinism of mortality. ‘Here,’ Aubrey Goldman, his foul-breathed doctor for the last forty years, will whisper, slipping Henry powder in a plain brown paper bag. ‘Swallow with malt whisky and enjoy, but don’t tell anyone where you got it.’ Failing which, God Himself, showing up in the nick of time, parting clouds like opera curtains, crying ‘Hold! – enough of all this senseless killing’, and pointing at Henry, much as old man Yoffey did – ‘You, yes, you!’ – will ban him from death for life.

  Totally absurd, given that after its failure to resuscitate either his father or his mother, Henry doesn’t have any faith in medicine, especially as practised by Aubrey Goldman, who omitted to warn his mother of the dangers of sitting in the front seat of a bus, and his father of the risks of taking mistresses; doesn’t hold with happy endings; and in God doesn’t believe at all. But exemption is his only theological answer to extinction. No life afterwards for Henry otherwise, no scholarship to a heavenly university, no transmigration of himself into the universe, no celestial essence of Henry insinuating itself into matter. It’s exemption or it’s nothing.

  In order that he should enjoy what? More of the same? If anyone is going to be exempted, shouldn’t it be the joyous, the kind-hearted, the exuberantly fleshly even? To those who have loved life shall more life be given. By which law Henry ought to have been dead and buried forty years ago.

  This, of course, is where the waitress comes in. Not only is she hanging on to Henry’s change, she holds in the palm of her hand Henry’s right to an eternal life. For his interest in her is proof that he is a deserving case. One of the exuberantly fleshly.

  Sitting in a hospital waiting room once, in the days when he had loved ones to worry about and wait for, Henry filled out a questionnaire in a women’s magazine. Did he in a general way love wisely or too well – that, if not in so many words, was the test. When he met someone who attracted him did he A) think about her a bit (it was think about ‘him’ actually, but Henry could transcribe); B) think about her most of the time; or C) think about her ceaselessly to the detriment of everything else in his life. Furthermore, when he met someone who attracted him did he A) worry about whether she was suitable; B) move carefully initially, checking up on her and taking other people’s advice about her suitability; or C) throw all caution to the wind and to hell with whether she was suitable or not.

  C – Henry answered C to every question, making him, when he came to check his score, an incorrigible romantic, great fun to be with, but not, as yet, a sound marital bet. He was also, he was warned, in danger of being hurt, getting pregnant and contracting HIV.

  Does loving your grandmother erotically make you an incorrigible romantic? One of the exuberantly fleshly? No opinions as to that in Teenage Harlot. Henry knows the answer, anyway. You cannot love your grandmother erotically. Nature makes provision against such things. Age difference, for example. And a slap from your grandmother. But when a man loves his grandmother in a younger version of herself – in her baby sister say, in the body of Marghanita to be precise – where’s the harm? There is, as far as Henry is aware, no canon fixed specifically against loving your great-aunt erotically.

  Back from Yoffey’s, the Stern Girls make him tea and give him biscuits and ask him what he is going to do now. Though Henry has declared he will never again return to his home, having in effect been expelled from it – the first of two expulsions in one dramatic day – his grandmother and her sisters explain it is not such a good idea for him to go missing, or for them to provide him with asylum until they have informed his parents. ‘Otherwise it would be k
idnap, Henry,’ Marghanita explains.

  ‘Then kidnap me,’ Henry pleads.

  One by one they take him to their bosom. ‘If only,’ Effie says. ‘Don’t think it hasn’t occurred to us,’ says Anastasia. ‘One day, one day,’ Marghanita promises him. ‘We don’t need to,’ his grandmother says, pressing the flats of her cool hands to his temples. ‘You already belong to us. You are our hope.’ But it is she who rings his parents.

  Henry overhears the telephone conversation and knows his father, seconded by his mother, is putting obstacles in the way of Henry’s changing his address. There’s his tea. The Girls will make it for him. There’s school in the morning. Henry has his satchel. There’s the small disciplinary matter of the threepence change: Henry has been told what Henry must do. Yes, but Henry has tried asking for it, honestly he’s tried, the Stern Girls can vouch for that. And? And? Henry can detect his grandmother trying to find a way of turning what has happened to Henry’s advantage. But what has happened is what happened. Henry has been banned from the shop which stocks Henry’s father’s favourite horseradish.

  ‘Banned?’

  ‘Banned.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘I think the term was life, Izzi. But you know how these people use language – life doesn’t always mean life for them.’

  Silence at the other end of the phone. At last, though he is nowhere near the phone himself, Henry hears his father saying ‘Okey-dokey’, and the receiver going down.

  ‘Trouble,’ Irina says.

  ‘We could lock the doors,’ Henry suggests.

  But it isn’t trouble here his grandmother is afraid of. It’s trouble at the Yoffeys’. The Stern Girls have all taken ‘husbands’ from North Manchester and know what rough resolution an okey-dokey portends. An unwillingness to be okey-dokeyed is why none of them have husbands from North Manchester any longer.