The Making of Henry

by Howard Jacobson

  Is he to allow Moira, a mere pastry chef who as like as not has never opened Nietzsche in her life, to demean the memory of his mother further? Does being with a woman who fishes for his member on a motorway matter that much to him that he would cut his mother’s heart out on her say-so?

  Well, does it?

  Well?

  What Henry needs is a man to talk to. Is this what you do? Is this what we all do?

  Then it occurs to him that Lachlan is only next door.

  ‘I’ve still not entirely got rid of the witch,’ he tells Henry, pouring port. He is in a pink candlewick dressing gown, presumably hers. Around his throat a Highland scarf, worn like a cravat. His legs, Henry notices, are badly veined. Like many men his age, he will soon be able to pass for an old woman. And in me, too, Henry wonders, is the old woman in me too beginning to show?

  As for the persistence of the other old woman, Henry is in no position to have an opinion. ‘I’ve never been in here before so I wouldn’t know,’ he says.

  Lachlan wafts the air. ‘Can’t tell if it’s death I can smell or her thirty years of illegal occupation.’

  Henry doesn’t have the heart to tell him it’s the dressing gown.

  He looks around the room. The apartment is the mirror image of his own. If Henry understood more about the architecture of mansion blocks he would realise that the two flats were once one, extending the full depth of the building. But other than in shape and proportion, they do not resemble each other. The old lady’s place is all heirlooms, heavy, dark, patina’d with the mustiness of a long invalidism. Pictures of flowers on the walls, a bad painting of an elderly gentleman looking stern (Lachlan’s father, Henry presumes, before Norma Jean got her playful hands on him), and a small amount of Robert Louis Stevenson memorabilia: ‘Requiem’ in a chipped brown frame –

  Under the wide and starry sky,

  Dig the grave and let me lie.

  Glad did I live and gladly die,

  And I laid me down with a will.

  – and a photograph of the grave itself, the famous sepulchre built, as the author had requested, atop Mount Vaea, in a jungle of flame trees and banyans, and snapped so that you can see down to the blue waters of Samoa. On a bronze plate, the poem. Here he lies where he longed to be; / Home is the sailor, home from sea . . .

  Sad, bardic Henry sighs. He has a soft spot for the graves of writers. Words and death, there’s no beating the combination.

  ‘Signed by him,’ Lachlan says, noting Henry’s interest.

  ‘Signed by whom?’

  ‘The old boy himself.’

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘No, not my father, of course not my father – what would that be worth? – by RLS.’

  Henry peers at the signature. Illegible. Then realises it’s nonsense. ‘How could he have signed a photograph of his own tomb?’

  Lachlan makes a noise in his stomach. Umbrage. ‘That’s his signature,’ he says. ‘Know it anywhere. We’ve got letters from him. See that S, see that funny L, leaning backwards – his without question.’

  ‘Spirit writing, you’re saying?’

  ‘They buried him according to his wishes, who’s to say he didn’t design the tomb before he died. Brain haemorrhage, you know. Terrible thing.’

  Very likely, Henry thinks. Designed the tomb, erected it on the top of a mountain, pointed the camera, wrote ‘wish you were here’ across the print, and haemorrhaged in his servant’s arms. Though he has never been to Samoa, Henry can see it all in his mind’s eye. Who needs to travel when you have a lively imagination.

  He shifts his attention to the marks on the walls, handprints almost, trails, anyway, leading from one doorway to the next and stopping at light switches, where the old lady must have paused to get her breath and see her way.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Lachlan says. ‘Sad, the poor old girl, living on her own, having to save on heating and lighting. Don’t let that fool you. She slept with the heaters on in summer. See these?’ He shows Henry the blackened linings of the curtains. ‘Scalded from the heat. And she never turned off a light. There are light bulbs here that are welded into the sockets, they’ve been on so long. I’m still waiting for some of them to cool down. She didn’t need to worry, you see. It wasn’t her money she was burning.’

  Henry would like to sit down, but he has spotted Angus curled like a cobra in love in his wicker basket. He eyes the dog. The dog eyes him back, lost in the melancholy of sexual desire. Only reduce yourself, the dog says, only meet me halfway, on the couch if not the floor, and I will give myself to you.

  ‘Maybe she didn’t realise what she was doing,’ Henry says.

  ‘Didn’t realise! I think you realise when you’re going through someone’s inheritance.’

  ‘I mean maybe she didn’t realise how you felt about it.’ Henry wants to say maybe she didn’t realise your desperation, but there are some liberties you can’t take in the matter of another person’s fortune, however indiscreet that other person is himself. The other thing Henry wants to say is what the fuck does any of this have to do with me.

  ‘Oh, she realised how I felt about it,’ Lachlan assures him. ‘She made me check the balance of her account every day and then ring her up and read it out to her, so she could hear how I felt about it. Think of that – every single day of the week. The only time she let me miss was a bank holiday. When I came up to visit she insisted we go to the bank together so she could see how I felt about it. She wanted me to count it dripping away, penny by penny. And she wanted to be there while I counted. There’s a word for that.’

  ‘Sadism,’ Henry ventures.

  ‘Sadism. Thank you.’ He secretes bile. Henry can smell it. Hear it. Like the central heating switching on. ‘Sadism. Yes.’

  Henry shakes his head. It’s difficult for him, in Lachlan’s presence, remembering how to make his face show sympathy, so he just shakes it to be on the safe side.

  ‘Have I told you about her suite in the Imperial in Torquay?’ Lachlan asks.

  ‘Not that I remember,’ Henry says.

  ‘Ten years she had it. Concurrently with this place. How do you like that? Two homes while I had none. Best view in that building as well. She used to invite me up for tea, to show me the sea and make me eat what was owing to me in scones and cream. “Have more, Lachie,” she’d say. “Don’t deny yourself. Your father wouldn’t have wanted you to go without. I’ll ring up for more cream.” I was so down on my uppers I used to have to work there myself in high season.’

  ‘Nice place to work though, isn’t it, Torquay?’

  ‘Might be if you’re collecting deckchairs, but I’m talking about the hotel.’

  Henry tries to imagine Lachlan working in a hotel. Guest relations? Baggage? The kitchens? ‘As what?’ As a waiter, Henry decides even as he asks. He must have been a waiter. One of those who never lets you catch his eye, unlike Angus who lives for nothing else.

  ‘As a gigolo.’

  Henry’s mouth falls open. At least he hasn’t forgotten how to do surprise. ‘You were a gigolo?’

  ‘I was better looking in those days.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. It’s just that I’ve never met a man who has actually slept with women for money.’

  ‘Slept? Chance would be a fine thing.’

  ‘So what did you do if you didn’t sleep with them?’

  ‘Waltzed with them.’

  Henry is disappointed. ‘But after the waltz,’ he says. ‘Presumably there were occasions . . .’

  Now it’s Lachlan’s turn to shake his head. ‘Never. Too old, most of them. It was hard enough work just getting them back into their chairs.’

  ‘You’re a good dancer, then?’

  ‘Was. All the Louis Stevenson men danced. “Can’t call yourself a complete man if you haven’t got twinkle toes,” the old boy used to say.’

  ‘Robert Louis Stevenson said that?’

  ‘No, my father did. And look where that motto got hi
m.’

  ‘But if you didn’t sleep with them,’ Henry goes on, ‘how did you get your money? Did they pay you per dance?’

  ‘Good God, no. What do you think I was – a prostitute? The hotel paid me. But since the old woman was keeping the hotel afloat anyway, I was just getting my own money back. Makes you bitter, you know, dancing your life away with old bats for nothing.’

  Oh, I don’t know, Henry thinks.

  Normally, he would like to be off now. By his standards this is a preternaturally lengthy conversation. But he is gripped by the spectacle of a man more disgusted with his life than he is himself. When Lachlan talks he appears to be staring into an abyss. Henry is curious to see whether he intends to fall into it this afternoon.

  He notices that Angus has gone to sleep. ‘May I sit down?’ he asks.

  ‘Of course,’ Lachlan tries to say, making a sign of apology. He is temporarily unable to talk for something lodged in his oesophagus. His life. He is choking on his life, Henry thinks.

  ‘You never talk about your mother, your real mother,’ Henry says, once Lachlan has cleared his passages.

  Lachlan’s eyes water like Angus’s. ‘Too long ago,’ he says.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Henry says. He doesn’t want another of them falling in love with him out of loneliness. ‘It’s just that I am thinking a lot about my mother at present.’

  ‘She alive?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Dreadful business, I know,’ Lachlan says. But what does he know? Nothing. He is not listening, not concentrating, gone somewhere else. London Bridge, circa 1958. The time he threw his bowler hat in the Thames. Kicked the dust of his family off his heels. Watched the hat float away on the tide, then strode off, free, into the future. Except that there was no future. He tries to collect himself. Then tells Henry all about it.

  They were in sugar. In molasses, to be exact. In molasses big. Does Henry know anything about molasses? No. Few people do. And those that did would not have known what Lachlan knew. Lachlan was born into molasses. Louis Stevenson – did the name not mean anything to Henry? Treasure Island, obviously. But to some the name was even more synonymous with molasses. Louis Stevenson treacle . . . No? In a sense, the island that provided Lachlan’s branch of the Louis Stevensons was even more of a treasure island than Long John Silver’s. Treasures poured, anyway, however fanciful the comparison, into the pockets of Lachlan’s great-great-grandsires, as it was meant to pour, when his time came, into Lachlan’s. He had been prepared for nothing less since his earliest age. Taught the trade. Taught the history. Taught the geography. Taught the chemistry. Taught the economics. Taught the shipping. High-masted schooners which brought molasses back from the Indies bore the names of Lachlan’s great-aunts, and one day would bear the name of Lachlan’s wife. Except that by Lachlan’s fifteenth birthday his father and his grandfather were employing tankers to transport their molasses, which meant that Lachlan’s wife, whoever she was destined to be, would have to make do with having her name on one of those. Less romantic, Lachlan thought, but as his father told him, progress was progress and no one with a sweet tooth would ever know the difference. Make no mistake, Lachlan was proud to be the heir of Louis Stevenson syrup and treacle and however many dozens of other products besides. He loved enumerating to his friends at public school the sweets and chocolates which would never have been what they were had his family not had an input into them. But for the plummeting of the price of sugar after the First World War, he told them, they wouldn’t have been able to suck on anything that he wasn’t in a manner of speaking responsible for. But for colonial exploitation you wouldn’t be at this school, some of the smartest of them retorted. Which hurt a bit, though he was versed in the arguments to refute that sort of sentimentality. No molasses, no jobs. No jobs, no money. No money, no self-respect – so up yours, Engels Minor. What hurt more were the prosaic tankers, and the storage terminals which had been built to receive them. Lachlan thought he remembered barrels. Maybe he’d only seen photographs of barrels, or heard talk of barrels, nevertheless the idea of barrels was part of the heritage of his imagination. One day he would go over to the islands, share a rum with the natives on his plantation, and sail home, in a boat named after his beloved wife, with the molasses slurping about in barrels. Some who couldn’t wait to have their molasses tinned and bottled and sold to them in the normal way would be standing on the quay expectantly, their jugs in their hands, their lips moist, knowing they could draw from the barrels the moment the ship was still. That was how he had always pictured it. Hand to mouth. Now, there were thousands of feet of pipeline enabling the molasses to be pumped directly from the ship. Suddenly it had become an industry. And just as suddenly, Lachlan had become a City man, no trips to Jamaica or the Antilles yet, but only shipping routes to get to know, warehousing, tank sizes, pumping velocities, mere ledger work no matter how it was bedecked in the language of high finance. ‘Not what I want,’ he told his father. ‘But then what you want might not be what I want,’ his father told him in return. ‘I’m all unexpended energy, Dad,’ he said. ‘Then go on unexpending it,’ his dad told him, ‘you’ll need it one day.’ ‘I’m not a bank, Dad.’ ‘Oh yes you are.’ Hence Lachlan, one bright metropolitan morning, striding along London Bridge in his pinstripe suit – no pirate shirt, no pantaloons – reaching a decision which would affect the whole of his life. Enough. He’d had enough measuring and counting and pen-pushing. He was twenty-three, a young man, not a bank, the white sun-tipped town humming about his ears, the great brown river of promise rolling beneath him. So off with his hat, off with it, a gesture of such liberating boldness that he remembers himself singing as he performed it – ‘Burlington Bertie’ or ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’, something like that, though it’s also possible he didn’t sing at all, so contracted was his heart with fear. Away went the hat anyway, in a lovely fearful parabola of freedom, up and away like a black balloon, tumbling and spinning and almost, almost floating, until it landed brim down in the river and sailed away, a little boat with Lachlan’s prospects in it.

  In his sleep, Angus cries a lovelorn cry.

  ‘And?’ Henry wants to know.

  ‘Oh, there’s no “and”,’ Lachlan says.

  ‘You didn’t get to the Antilles?’

  ‘Never tried. Got myself entangled with a woman instead. Took a job as a clerk in an antique auction house for the time being – it’s always for the time being, have you noticed? – fell for the secretary and married her. Dreadful mistake. She thought I was moneyed. I have the look, you see. Or at least I had it then. She thought I was idling until I came into my fortune. After I told her I’d thrown my fortune off London Bridge she didn’t talk to me for three years.’

  ‘But you married for all that?’

  ‘We already were married. It was our wedding night when I told her. Damned silly, I suppose.’

  ‘You still married?’

  ‘Officially, but we don’t communicate. I hit her with a fish and that was that.’

  ‘Your life seems to be marked by large gestures,’ Henry notices.

  ‘I don’t know about large. Futile more like.’

  ‘So why did you hit her with a fish?’

  ‘Years of ill treatment. She spoke ill of me and ill to me. Couldn’t forgive the molasses. Couldn’t pass a tin of syrup without abusing me. Sometimes you just snap. It was a kipper actually. I think that made it worse, that it was a breakfast fish.’

  ‘You like to make your runs for freedom in the morning?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that. But yes, you’re right. I believe I can change things in the morning. Or I did. And it was a bit like the bowler, the kipper. I felt the same lightness afterwards, for ten minutes.’

  ‘And your mother? Had you stayed in touch with her?’

  ‘We wrote. But she was disappointed in me. I imagined she’d see my point of view, you expect that of mothers – fathers equal business, mothers equal the heart, all that nonsense – but
she thought I’d been an ass, walking out and marrying a secretary who wouldn’t talk to me. She had a point, too. In the end it was my father who came round, though by that time my mother had passed on – cursing, I was told, cursing all of us on her death bed – and Louis Stevenson molasses were suffering in the City. Tanker problems – there’s a joke! The old boy was ready to make a gesture of his own, you see, and saw me as an ally. I’d thrown my hat in the Thames, he was about to throw away his life, or what was left of it, on a woman who’d sung in the music halls. Funny the way it turned out – he made a better job of being flamboyant than I did.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think you should see it like that,’ Henry says, gesturing to the room, to the idea of St John’s Wood beyond, to the principle of London with all its bleak emancipations and amenities. It was something he’d always imagined for himself, being washed up and cynical at sixty, a free and bitter spirit, proof that nothing pays or matters, that you can persist beyond happiness. In this way they are bedfellows – he born into spiders, wee Lachie born into molasses – the fellow-fallen, but each with a nice apartment.

  So Oh, I don’t think you should see it like that is on behalf of both of them.

  Lost on Lachie, though. ‘I’ll tell you what sticks in the craw,’ he says, redundantly Henry thinks, since everything sticks in his craw – ‘the fact that I’ve come full circle, still dependent on molasses money, what’s left of it, and still selling the stuff.’

  ‘I thought you were in pigswill,’ Henry says.

  ‘Animal feeds. As it happens the pigs don’t care for sweeteners, but sheep and cattle love it. It’s an important source of good-quality carbohydrate. Easily digested, not too high in nitrogen content, and cheap to produce. I should know.’

  ‘Then that’s all right,’ Henry says, not being a conversationalist in the matter of animal feeds, and not wanting to stir Angus from his sweet sleep with talk of din-dins.