The Making of Henry

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘I am a Jew in a Bloomsbury novel.’

  She peers at him in the dark. ‘All the more reason.’

  ‘Don’t call me anything in that case.’

  He puts his arms round her and kisses her ear. She gives a little shudder. ‘I don’t like that,’ she says. She has long breasts. Not full, but elongated.

  ‘You feel lovely,’ Henry whispers.

  ‘I see,’ she says. ‘So this is to be one of those straight-to-business nameless fucks, is it?’

  ‘Well, it won’t be if you tell me your name,’ Henry says.

  ‘Jane.’

  Henry feels for her in the dark. ‘You have exquisite breasts, Jane,’ he says.

  ‘Oh God, no,’ she says, fending him off. ‘I can’t have you calling me Jane, not while you’re weighing my breasts. Henry does that.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘Which breast?’

  ‘No, which don’t you want me to do – weigh your breasts or call you Jane? Which is it your husband does?’

  ‘I think that’s strictly between me and Henry, Henry, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course it is,’ Henry agrees, remembering the marriage vows. Let no man put asunder. ‘Absolutely is. I’m just trying to ascertain, between us, whether it’s the Jane or the weighing of the breasts that’s the problem.’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘So neither would be permissible even without the other?’

  ‘That’s too long a sentence and too complicated an idea. Why don’t you just try me, Mr Nagel?’

  He weighs her breasts.

  ‘Stop,’ she says, pulling herself free of him. ‘Please stop that.’

  ‘Sorry, Jane,’ he says.

  ‘Stop,’ she says, ‘I’d much rather you didn’t call me that. What I think would be best is for you to have your way with me quickly and in silence and then to drive me home.’

  Henry hasn’t the heart to tell her that he doesn’t have a car.

  Older women, Henry. Older women, invariably attached. Invariably having to go home to another man. Borrowed older women. Explain that.

  He can. He doesn’t want the responsibility. ‘Want’ might not be the best word. He can’t handle the responsibility. And he isn’t certain of his own judgement. If they’re older that means they have the wherewithal to make an informed choice and to take that burden away from him. It must also mean, ipso facto, that they are durable. And if they’re attached that means someone other than him desires or has desired them, which confirms and vindicates, or at least seconds, his interest in them.

  Not very courageous, as Henry is the first to accept. And in practice not very nice. But the diffident never are very nice. He’d have been a sweeter man altogether, Henry, kinder, more pleasant to be with, more generous in the aftermath, had he known what he wanted and grabbed it single-mindedly. Like his father, with a second wife in St John’s Wood, and possibly a third and fourth, for all Henry knows to the contrary, somewhere else. So certain was his father of himself, so indifferent to what anybody else thought of his preferences, he was prepared to be seen taking Rivka Yoffey to the Midland in broad daylight, a woman with a dress down to the ground and a wig that looked as if it had been ripped off a drunk. Would Henry have risked being espied squiring Rivka Yoffey, who met two of his essential stipulations, after all, in that she was both durable and otherwise accounted for? He feared not. Particularly if there was the remotest chance of Osmond Belkin – the fly in Henry’s ointment from way back – being the espier.

  But it wasn’t only because he lacked certainty in all matters pertaining to the heart that Henry needed a pre-existing second opinion about a woman. It was also because he doubted his capacity to look after anybody, to be ‘there for her’, in contemporary parlance, to bear the burden of making her happy until death did them . . . Death being the hardest part. Though even in the matter of helping out should she cut her finger or get something in her eye Henry knew himself to be unreliable. Too squeamish. Unfitted to be of use to anybody in discomfort, let alone in pain. If another man were on the case then the other man could take care of the problem – the wound, the fly, death; for they were all on the same continuum. Take care of it practically and emotionally. Face it. Henry sometimes thought that if he could only reconcile himself to death, as a fact of his life, then he would be better able to accept it as a fact of someone else’s. Until then, he was in no position to commit. Only to borrow. Women died, therefore Henry could do nothing for them.

  Looking back, Henry can’t imagine how he could have organised this aspect of his moral history differently. Maybe had he not stayed teaching in the Pennines so long, he would have outgrown his morbidity. ‘What are you doing burying yourself up there?’ friends in fairer places used to ask him. ‘You’re supposed to be a life man.’ This an ironic reference to the course entitled Literature’s For Life which Henry obdurately ran while his colleagues in Liberal Studies and then Media Studies and then Women’s Studies were shedding the lot, both Literature and Life, in favour of the frost of theory. ‘We all do death our own way,’ was Henry’s reply. ‘They teach it; I only live it.’ But the real answer to the question – ‘What are you doing burying yourself up there?’ – was ‘Rehearsing’. He had, after all, to get reconciled to being buried somewhere. Face burial, and you can face death. So yes, he was running through his lines.

  ‘No motion has she now, no force / She neither hears nor sees / Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course / With rocks and stones and trees’ – those were the lines he was running through.

  And of course, ‘The rest is silence.’

  Not by nature a nature man, Henry: he feared what he had in common with rocks and stones and trees no less than he feared the humanity he shared with text-messagers and honkers. No motion have they now, no force – fine if you’re a rock, but if you’re Henry the thought of possessing neither force nor motion (notwithstanding that he has forced nothing of more moment than the lock on his briefcase, and moves, when he moves at all, only very slowly) freezes the little blood you still have. Getting away, coming south earlier, would only have been a postponement of the problem. Whereas so long as he stayed, who knows – perhaps he would learn to love the forceless rock he was destined to become. So he watched the seasons change, impatient with the summer because that was easy, feeling the earth warm beneath him, standing outside his plain-faced pittance cottage like a fields-man in the early evening, enjoying the sun sinking into the Pennine embrace, cosying into the valleys, making even shadows things of hope. Lovely while it lasted – children’s singing coming from the next village, skipping from hill to hill, a radiance of sound no less than light – but no help with death, no preparation, not for Henry. Whereas the winter, which came soon enough, God knows, and hung on twice as long as any winter anywhere, smashed every illusion of happy perpetuity. Better to be in town, drowned by traffic, pestered by the poor, than to have these vistas of nothingness, rolling moorlands which mock time because time has made no impression, unless you call a chimney or a shoe factory an impression. Now if Henry could make a friend of this, Henry would be saved; and so could take himself a woman his own age, with no strings attached, and promise to look after her until death took them both away. And lie with her, thereafter, like two pencils in a pencil box, for ever and ever and ever.

  Until the Resurrection, when Henry would rise again.

  The thing about older women once you’ve reached Henry’s age is that there aren’t any.

  What happens, Henry has discovered, is that you go on thinking of women of a certain age as ‘older’, go on entertaining the idea of an ‘older’ look – nice little collection of shrewd lines beneath the eyes, wonderful resolution of the mouth despite some wobbling of the chin, long teeth, sad neck, striated bosom – regardless of how old you are yourself. A wonderful provision of nature, this, for bamboozling lovers of mature women such as Henry – who would otherwise be in despair – into believing that nothing has changed.

  What you do have
to be careful of, though, as a man of almost sixty, is mentioning your preference for older women while looking into the eyes of a woman of forty-five.

  Henry is pleased with himself for not making any such blunder with Moira.

  And yet it’s true. She is the older woman. He looks at her sitting, with her legs crossed and her mouth skewed, on the edge of what he thinks is meant by an ottoman – fancy his father having knelt at the feet of a woman who owned an ottoman! – and for all the world he’s the baby of the two. It’s as she said to him over goulash at the Happy Hungarian, ‘What’s age? You’re as old as you feel, Henry,’ and Henry feels he hasn’t been born yet.

  He would like to lick her face. She is the colour of banana and limes. A glacial yellow, like the Baltic Sea in spring, he fancies, though he has never been there. Her profile like a ski slope, a smooth gently sloping ride but for the two camel bumps in her nose. He hasn’t asked her where precisely she’s from yet. You don’t do that with people who speak perfectly good English and aren’t carrying baskets of yams on their head. He never liked it at school. So where did your parents originate, Nagel? Poland? The Ukraine? Stetlsburg? St Anne’s Pier? But he knows she’s from the old country. The two are almost synonymous for Henry – older and from the old country. Some people will only look forward. It’s recommended, particularly after the twentieth century. Not Henry. Henry doesn’t like what he sees forward. Backward is better. Backward has happened. And the old and the old country are the proof of it.

  She’s going to sort him out. He can tell from the way she has started to edge a look at him, giving him the three-quarters profile of her bumpy nose. As though she knows it’s not going to be easy, but considers herself the woman for the job.

  ‘You were quite strange with Lachlan coming back from the crematorium,’ she tells him.

  He is pacing the Persian carpet. Like a cat with sticky pads. A step at a time, not bringing down his full weight, hoping she’ll take the hint and keep her voice low. Lachlan is next door. The walls are thick, but what if Lachlan’s got his ear to a glass? It was a risk bringing her here. His fingers had fumbled the keys in the locks. Nerves. He hadn’t wanted Lachlan coming out on to the corridor and seeing them. Inviting them in for a snifter.

  ‘Was I? Strange how?’

  ‘You don’t seem to like him, yet you went to the crematorium.’

  ‘He asked me. He said there was not a soul on earth but him to applaud her into the flames. I could hardly refuse an appeal like that. There won’t be a soul on earth to applaud me. Then you turned up. I thought that was strange.’

  ‘How could I not turn up? I knew her.’

  Ah. She knew her. Nothing to do with Lachlan. It was the old lady she knew. Why hadn’t he thought of that? Would have saved him heartache. But then again . . .

  ‘So if Lachlan knew you knew her, how come he asked me?’

  ‘He didn’t know I knew her. Just as I didn’t know about him. She’d always told me she had no one.’

  ‘Ha! Well, you can see what she meant.’

  She narrows her eyes at him.

  Henry narrows his back. ‘So you met him for the first time at the crematorium?’ he continues.

  ‘No. At her apartment. I went round, as usual, to deliver her pastries, and discovered that the poor woman had died.’

  ‘You deliver pastries?’

  ‘Only to her. She used to have tea every morning at the patisserie. Then she wasn’t able to make it across the road any more. Her hips went. We were fond of her. She behaved like an aristocrat. She had a rude word for everybody in the neighbourhood. And she loved our cakes. So once she couldn’t come to us we took our cakes to her. Lemon tart every Tuesday. Millefeuille for the weekend. She had a millefeuille only the day before she died.’

  ‘You’re telling me that the sensual pleasures go on until the end? I can’t decide if it helps me to know that. I’d always imagined they fell away, bit by bit, so that you didn’t mind or didn’t notice you were going. Just think – she’s probably lying there, dry-mouthed, missing millefeuille even as we speak.’

  She shakes her head. ‘Hardly. We burned her, remember. But what is it with you, Henry? What’s this death thing?’

  ‘An old lady has just died. My neighbour.’

  ‘I bet you’d barely spoken to her.’

  ‘How little is barely?’

  ‘Did you know her name?’

  He thinks about it. ‘Norma Jean.’

  ‘Did you know her name before the cremation?’

  ‘Do you have to know someone’s name to mourn them?’

  ‘You’re in mourning for her, are you?’

  ‘Yes. No. Listen, what is this? You think I’m affecting something I don’t feel?’

  ‘I think you’re wallowing, yes.’

  It’s a bit cheeky, he thinks. Never mind how well do you have to know someone before allowing her death to get to you, how long do you have to know someone before you allow her to accuse you of wallowing? Longer than this.

  She comes over to him and puts her face close to his. He expects her to give off a smell of limes and she does. He expects a slight Baltic chill to blow off her also, which it does. But he doesn’t expect her to put her hands up to his cheeks and then to take him by his ears. And that too she does.

  ‘You need a bit of straightening out, fellow-my-lad,’ she says.

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘You most certainly do, yes.’

  ‘And you reckon you know someone in the neighbourhood who can do it?’

  ‘I most certainly do, yes.’

  Whereupon Henry kisses her.

  Which Moira takes to be assent.

  But look, she’s also fun to be with. She shows him around St John’s Wood, even the parts he knows, telling him tittle-tattle, who owns that shop, who lives there, walking him into shop doorways where she feels him up, the minx, or getting him to ride the deep chaste escalators in St John’s Wood tube station with her, up and down like hooligans, except that hooligans don’t stop to admire the bronze lights and the arches and the echoing flagstones and the coats of arms – ‘Look, Henry, isn’t it beautiful in here, don’t you love it? it’s like being in a ship’ – making it an adventure for him, getting him to loosen up, to express enthusiasm, to love what’s close to him, what he can have rather than what he can’t. Sometimes, if they are out and Henry is being Henryish – huffy, heart-burned, mawkish, morbid – she opens her mouth and shows him that she hasn’t swallowed her food. Look, Henry! Like a child. Or like someone entertaining a child. She does it once when Henry is arguing with a waiter. And another time when he bumps into someone he vaguely knows from the building and takes too long getting rid of him. Behind the person’s back – Look, Henry! She likes revealing herself to him in this way, taking him by surprise, coming back from the ladies room looking elegant, for example, clip-clop in her stilettoes, and then showing him that her mouth is full of food. It is meant to make him laugh. To render him helpless with embarrassment and mirth. And sometimes it does. Just not always.

  One evening, at the theatre, she opens her jacket and shows him a breast. God knows who else sees. This gesture is more to rouse him than to make him laugh, but she isn’t afraid of blurring the distinctions. Coming down a staircase in a house to which they have been invited, as dinner guests, she raises her skirt and shows him she is wearing no underwear. A glacial blur. He gasps. Then she opens her mouth which is still full of food from dinner. She loves it that he is utterly confused, frightened of what she might do next. In Regent’s Park with him, she gets him to take a bench immediately opposite to hers. Then she opens her legs. By now he doesn’t expect her to be wearing pants.

  ‘My God, Moira,’ he cries, looking away. ‘There are children about!’

  ‘Yes, you,’ she says.

  He doesn’t know her. Never seen her in his life before. He quits the bench in what he takes to be a natural manner, walks towards the lake, engrosses himself in duck life. Swans, herons, Canada geese.
Fascinating. When he returns she flashes him again.

  She has coaxed him back into the car, promising not to go over thirty, even on the motorway. Hitting eighty she tries to fish his member out of his Valentino jeans. ‘These are too tight,’ she says.

  ‘They’re what’s fashionable,’ he tells her, ‘on older men.’

  ‘You’re not an older man. Look at that.’

  ‘Don’t you look at anything but the road,’ he says.

  ‘I can do both,’ she tells him. ‘I’m a woman. I’m multi-tasking.’

  ‘Then slow down and put my dick back.’

  ‘I’d rather go faster and take it out.’

  ‘It’s not worth the risk. Not for old sperm.’

  She sidewinds him a look. Who was talking about sperm. But she has to put him right about one thing. ‘Sperm doesn’t age, Henry. Sperm renews itself.’

  ‘Mine doesn’t. Mine’s old man’s sperm. Old wine in an old bottle. It’s tired. It even looks tired.’

  ‘This’ll perk it up,’ she says, accelerating.

  He searches for something to hold on to. But there is only his seat belt. ‘Moira, I beg you to slow down! Remember what you did to Michael.’

  ‘Michael? Who’s Michael?’

  ‘The Greek.’

  ‘I know no Greek.’

  And now his dick is out. Old and petrified, but out.

  See!

  She’s showing him. Things are not the way they conventionally seem. He’s been pushing, trying to get her to stay the night with him, trying to get her to commit, fall for him, become his mistress, all that sixties and seventies stuff; now, at eighty miles per hour on the M1, she is demonstrating that it isn’t always he who’s asking and she who’s saying no.

  ‘If you’re so frightened,’ she asks him, ‘why’s your cock like that?’

  ‘It’s how I show fear.’

  She swerves suddenly across three lanes, as though she’s got a puncture, and effects a controlled career into the hard shoulder. ‘Then let’s rid you of your fear,’ she says, turning off the engine and unbelting herself.