The Making of Henry

by Howard Jacobson

  He doesn’t know whether to open or to close his eyes. ‘You can get arrested for just looking at a map here,’ he says. ‘God knows what sentence a blow job carries.’

  She sidewinds him that look again. ‘What makes you think you’re going to get a blow job?’

  The tease she is!

  He puffs out his cheeks. ‘Which are you trying to do, Moira,’ he says, ‘scare to me to death or disappoint me to death?’

  ‘Neither and both,’ she laughs. Both, the h almost silent, the t protrusive, tapping at his nerve endings.

  Then she’s off, out into the traffic again.

  Henry closes his eyes.

  But this is how she likes him – full of trepidation. Never knowing what she’s going to do, how she is going to shame or confound him, next. He is perfect for her. Heart-in-his-mouth Henry.

  ‘What are you so frightened of, Henry?’

  How many times has he heard that said in his long life? It was the way every relationship with a woman ended. ‘What is it you fear is going to happen to you, Henry?’ Though the woman, of course, would have told you the relationship was already ended. Hence the question, since it appeared to be Henry’s fear that always ended it.

  What was he supposed to say? Until I can face that I am earth and will be returned to earth – and you the same – I cannot continue to go out with you? I cannot risk your cutting your finger?

  It wasn’t as though he went out with them exactly anyway. Too risky, a man in his position, and the women married to someone else. He snuck, as they said in those American novels Marghanita had persuaded him to study, but which he isn’t quite so stuck on now – he snuck up, snuck off, snuck around, and then snuck home. The moors were good for this. Would have been better had he owned a car, but it added to the romance to walk a little. Eat sandwiches by a little brook. Seek shade in summer under a tree, if you could find a tree. Climb to a water tower inscribed to a local engineer, where you could kiss and have plenty of warning if anyone was coming. Quite a nature boy he became in his first years at the Pennine Way College of Rural Technology, or whatever it was then called, considering what a nature boy he wasn’t. Entwined as they were with the heart, with his heart anyway, he even grew to love the moors and to find a sort of consolation in their antique persistence. Nearly, nearly it made sense to live obscurely here and to die unremembered. Nearly there was nobility in it.

  But when that didn’t work, or when it rained, he called a taxi and snuck away, scarfed-up and companioned, in that. Lunch in a quiet pub, not a poly pub – yes, it was a poly now – on the Yorkshire side. Love over pie and ale. And sometimes a room.

  Lying under wordwormed beams, Lia Spivack (Henshell Spivack’s wife) had a go at getting him to roar like a tiger. Grrrrr, Henry. She clawed his chest. Bit his neck. Grrrr, Henry, grrrr. He couldn’t do it. Stiff bastard.

  ‘I’m no good at animals,’ he told her.

  ‘Not even a snake in the grass?’ she said, not yet retracting her claws.

  He knows when he’s upset a person, Henry. But he also knows when someone has upset him. ‘A snake’s a reptile not an animal,’ he explained in a quiet voice, lighting them both a cigarette. In those days cigarettes were intrinsic to sex, regardless of how successful or unsuccessful the sex had been, no matter whether animal or human. Henry was so addicted to the combination he had to light himself a cigarette even after he’d finished merely thinking about sex. ‘But look,’ he added reasonably, ‘if you want to rip me apart you can, it’s just that I’m too self-conscious to make the noise. It could be a faith thing. I have a feeling we are prohibited from imitating whatsoever flyeth in the air and whatsoever creepeth on all fours, which must include tigers. It’s one of the ways we knew we had put totemism behind us.’

  ‘Bullshit, Henry. I’m from the same faith you are. I’ve got an uncle who’s a rabbi. He did rabbit imitations for us when we were kids.’

  ‘A rabbi who did rabbits? Well, a rabbit I am prepared to do.’

  ‘Go on, then.’

  So Henry, cute as a button, twitched his nose. But even that not convincingly.

  ‘Considering how difficult you find it to shed your inhibitions,’ Lia mused, blowing smoke into the rafters, ‘don’t you think it’s surprising how easily you shed your trousers?’

  Henry wants to say that sex has always been his only chance, the one area, for some reason he can’t explain, where he can find a little ease. It’s his theory that many men who have been thought of as predatory sexually have wanted peace, that’s all, a period of relief, not from sexual tension, but from reserve. Did they all start out as blushers, Bluebeard, Don Juan, Casanova, Byron, did they all pink up the moment someone spoke to them? ‘You girl, Casanova!’ Did some eighteenth-century Venetian ‘Hovis’ Belkin set that whole shooting match in motion with a careless remark of that kind? ‘You pansy, Giacomo!’ After which no maiden on the Adriatic could count her virginity secure.

  But to Lia, Henshell’s wife – Henshell his second-best school friend after ‘Hovis’ – Henry wants to make a more simply factual rebuttal of her charge.

  ‘I don’t easily shed anything, Lia,’ he says. ‘It isn’t true. And I am not a snake. If I did, if I were, if you knew me to be, why would you be here?’

  She smiles at him. He has known her for years. Henshell’s bird. Henshell was still in the sixth form when he started taking Lia out. The first of them to have a regular girlfriend. They teased him about it. Fancy going steady, fancy talking about engagement rings at his age. Bought the pram yet, Henshell? Opened an account at Mothercare? Got your pension plan sorted out? But secretly they envied him. He wasn’t having to go out on the prowl every Friday and Saturday night. He had in regular supply what they found it difficult to get their hands on even intermittently. And Lia herself – forgetting the impersonality of the supply idea – was a treat for all their eyes, all except ‘Hovis’ Belkin’s that is, for Belkin measured by a different standard, was already out of there in his imagination, gazing beyond far horizons, and set no store by local beauty. A beauty she was, though, Rubensesque, as undulant as water when she walked, always animated, black-eyed, with bright red swollen lips and bright red swollen tonsils to match, they joked, in allusion to the way she threw her head back when she laughed, and with a mind, of course, to whatever other use she put her throat to for lucky Henshell.

  She smiles at him. Funny fellow, Henry. More serious than Henshell’s other friends, she remembers, more hot and bothered, the least likely, had she been asked to prognosticate, to turn into her lover. But then she hadn’t expected she would make a lover of any of them. Henshell was plenty, Henshell was enough for her, Henshell always would be enough for her, she thought, not imagining when she crept into his digs at Brighton and talked politics late into the night that she would one day be the wife of someone who owned six pharmacies and thought of nothing but the seventh. ‘You were a biomolecular scientist with a heart once, Henshell, you were going to make a significant pharmaceutical intervention into the Third World, now you sell shampoo.’

  ‘And house you in undreamed-of luxury,’ Henshell reminded her.

  She smiles at Henshell’s one-time friend. ‘I’m bored, Henry,’ she says. ‘I’d be here, whether you were a snake in the grass or not. You could just as easily say that I’m the low one. I wouldn’t fight you. We’ve all grown up to be not nice.’

  ‘Not nice is another thing again. I resent the suggestion that this is what I do – serially.’

  ‘That’s your reputation, Henry.’

  ‘Where?’

  Her smile turns into a laugh. Not the old swollen tonsil laugh. Long gone, all that. ‘Where’s where?’ She makes a flamboyant gesture with her arms, all breasts, like a heroine of the French Revolution on the barricades, taking in this little everywhere. ‘Wherever you are talked about.’

  Tough one, for Henry. Wherever you are talked about. It almost doesn’t matter what they say, does it, so long as you are talked about as universally
as wherever you are talked about sounds as though you’re talked about. From the mountains to the sea, wherever men and women gather to talk about Henry . . . Choke on that, ‘Hovis’ fat-head Belkin.

  But no, in the end it does matter if all they’re saying is that Henry is a dope who drops his pants – what was her expression? – sheds his trousers – without compunction. Not nice for his parents to get wind of. Not nice for his mother particularly. Not nice for his grandmother who thought she’d slain the curse of North Manchester man which had been laid upon her family. Not nice for Marghanita, who wouldn’t want to think that what she nipped in the bud the night he carried her cocktail shoes in Wilmslow was nothing but serial endeavour.

  ‘No,’ he tells her, ‘no. I don’t believe it. I don’t have a reputation.’

  ‘Ask your students.’

  Lia has become one of his students. Part of that mature intake which the poly, having become a poly, is suddenly indecently eager to attract. Bring out your old! Someone’s done a paper. Discovered that there’s gold in them thar hills, old gold, any number of the hard of hearing and the all but past it, languishing in Pennine towns and villages, who would jump at studying Drama and Movement, or the Torment of Sylvia Plath, or even Literature’s For Life with Henry, if they were only given the chance. Now in they stream, tapping their sticks, as though into a hospice for the terminally curious. Perfect for Henry. All attached, all older than he is. Not Lia. Lia is attached and the same age. But one out of two will do for Henry. This is how he has come to meet her again, anyway, after all these years. Eight, is it? Ten? He lost interest in Henshell, needless to say. Lost track of what their friendship was for. Now he remembers. It was for Lia.

  ‘And what will my students tell me?’ Henry asks. ‘That I seduce them in return for good grades?’

  ‘No. I have heard no mention of your giving good grades.’

  ‘That I seduce them in return for bad grades, then?’

  Grrrr, Henry! Why doesn’t she ask him to be a tiger now?

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘I wouldn’t swear I have even heard the word seduce. They’re more interested in the fact that everyone you sleep with is older than you, married or going out with someone else. The psychology of that arrests them. They’re not stupid, Henry. They’re curious as to why this is. Why, for example, you never seem to have a girlfriend of your own – not just of your own age but simply of your own, for you only. Why you’re always scavenging round the edges of other people’s relationships, as though for leftovers . . .’

  ‘Like yours, I suppose? Do you see yourself as a leftover.’

  ‘Like mine, yes. Definitely like mine. And do I see myself as a leftover? Yes. Yes, I do a bit.’

  ‘A bit?’

  ‘Don’t be smart with me, Henry. I’m not complaining. I know the score. Something on the side suits me as much as it suits you. But everything you have is on the side. Which prompts some of us to wonder why you don’t want anything that’s – what? – in the middle, at the centre, a main course in itself.’

  ‘And the fact that I appear not to explains why I am always shedding my trousers?’

  ‘Maybe. Because it’s as though you’ve finished before you’ve started. As though you know you’re not going to get what you want the minute you embark, so the next one is a necessity, a foregone conclusion. If you could invert time, Henry, you’d have the next one before you had the last.’

  ‘And that would help me to keep my trousers on?’

  She sighed. ‘Nothing will help you to keep your trousers on, is that what you want to hear me say? I don’t know. Maybe nothing will. It’s not for me to judge. I’m just your student. And your old friend’s wife. Though no doubt . . .’ She trailed away.

  ‘No doubt what? No doubt that’s what I’m in it for? Because you’re married to Henshell?’

  She began to put her clothes back on. Growing weary, like the light. ‘Well, I’m not going to say that’s not an element, Henry. I’d be a fool not to think about it at least. But I’m not accusing you of spite or anything like that. I’m sure you don’t mean to do Henshell down. That’s probably more my motive than it’s yours. But this is new to me. You’ve been here before, Henry. By your own admission this is your thing.’

  Henry hated these Pennine afternoons. The light not so much withdrawn as swept away, as though a smudgy hand had reached out and in one motion wiped a blackboard clean. Listen and that was what you heard, the blackness drying over the white, obliterating all trace, all remembrance even. Look out and nothing beckoned. As a boy Henry had kept the moors in the corner of his eye, a promise not of glamour exactly, not of Belkin’s Hollywood or Bel Air, but of some glimmering Englishness whose quietude was strange to him, and which one day he would try to penetrate. Now he was on them, everything they’d promised, the glimmer and the quiet – the quiet as a property of the soul, he meant – was gone. What he’d seen was an illusion. He is standing on what was never there.

  He didn’t want Lia to go yet. She probably had it right, he was ready for the next one, but he still didn’t want her to leave. ‘The mistake people make about me,’ he said, ‘is to think I see myself as a lover.’

  ‘And you don’t?’

  ‘No, I don’t. Not a lover in the heroic sense, anyway. I don’t have that much interest in the grand scope and narrative of erotic love, I don’t have the confident brush strokes. I’m more a miniaturist. If Don Juan is Rubens or Titian, then I’m Vermeer.’

  ‘You do interiors, is that what you’re saying? You don’t like going out?’

  ‘Correct, I don’t like going out. But I mean something else as well.’ He was sitting by her on the bed, stroking her arms, absently pulling hairs from her sweater, thinking about what he was. ‘I think I’d like to say,’ he said, ‘that I’m an intimate proximist. Taking an intimist to be someone who has a preference for the smaller, nearer view, as against the broad sweep of the panoramic, then I’m one stage closer in. I’m besotted with the proximate. You remember “Hovis” Belkin – of course you do, Henshell hated him – well, he was the very opposite. “Hovis” was only interested in what was remote.’

  ‘He was never particulary nice to me, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘No, he wouldn’t have been. You were altogether too familiar to him.’

  ‘But you always seemed distant yourself, Henry. None of us thought of you – don’t be offended – as a warm friend. You were never really in the hutch with us.’

  He’s hurt. Not even in the hutch with Henshell, his second-best friend?

  But he doesn’t want her to see he’s hurt. ‘No,’ he says, as though the charge is a familiar one to him. ‘But that’s only because I didn’t know how to do it. The haughty are always people who just lack the trick of intimacy. Invite them to your homes and make them cocoa and they’re pussy cats.’

  He does a pussy cat for her. The nearest Henry gets to tigers.

  ‘So if Henshell had made you cocoa you wouldn’t now be here fucking his wife?’

  He laughed. What else was there to do? ‘I think it started earlier than Henshell,’ he said.

  ‘Oh no, not your parents.’

  ‘Afraid so.’

  ‘They didn’t love you . . .’

  ‘Or they loved me too much. Mothers, for their own reasons, keep you in thrall to the proximate, fathers are meant to push you out into the world.’

  ‘And yours didn’t?’

  ‘Well, he tried. But maybe he was too influenced by my mother in the end, maybe she kept him in thrall as well. Who knows? Take bloody “Hovis” – he wasn’t afraid of what was out there and his Dad was so aloof he only spoke on Yom Kippur, and that was to remind “Hovis” of his sins. To all intents and purposes he had no Dad. Half the time he coveted mine. Yet this didn’t stop him going for distance. So where does family psychology get you? I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten how we got into this.’

  ‘We? You got into it by way of explaining why you can’t play tigers.’

 
; ‘Ah yes, and why tigers notwithstanding I can’t keep my pants on. I hope I am no longer a disturbing mystery to you.’

  She was muffling up, afghan coat, suede boots, woolly gloves, two scarves, what you need to brave a Pennine winter. She was shaking her head over him. ‘Why are you so frightened of leaving things to chance, Henry? Why do you feel you must make your version of yourself prevail? You should trust other people more. You should risk their opinion of you.’

  ‘Other people?’

  ‘Yes. Me, for instance. About whom you haven’t asked a question all afternoon. Not even how are you, Lia. It’s a bit rich, Henry, all that loving what’s close, all that intimate proximist stuff, when you wouldn’t notice another person if she was sitting on your face.’

  ‘Try me,’ he suggested.

  But she couldn’t be bothered taking all those clothes off again.

  It didn’t last. Mia, Jane, whoever. Nothing ever lasted. In so far as that had anything to do with Henry – and it didn’t always – the reason wasn’t callousness or cold feet. Order, that was the problem. ‘Save me from chaos,’ Henry pleaded with every older someone-else’s woman he met. Without a woman in his life, Henry was like the world before God created it. Nothing but flying fragments. At the mercy of hunger, boredom and his dick – when he could tell the difference – not understanding where he ended or the void began, unless he was the void. Then, if he was lucky, the woman came, parted the dry land from the sea, stuck up a firmament, blew light upon him, and arranged him into order. Trouble was – order is death. Chaos life, order death. This had nothing to do with Henry wanting to throw his socks about the bedroom floor. In fact, Henry had always been a neat person with a side parting, who kept his clothes in drawers and his papers in a filing cabinet. So there was nothing hippyish about his pronouncement that order was death. What he meant was that the moment women did what he needed them to do, they set in motion the process of deterioration. There was this to be said for the world before God created it: there was no death in it. That which is not created cannot die. Chaotic, Henry could have lived for ever. Ordered, as he longed to be, he could smell his flesh rot.