The Making of Henry

by Howard Jacobson

  But Henry doesn’t want, today, tonight, to think about Marghanita smote flat, unprotrusive on her bed.

  ‘The second thing I found out about you that I didn’t know . . .’ Moira says, slithery like tofu in his arms, but he won’t let her finish.

  ‘I’d rather find out about you,’ he says. ‘Tell me what you hated most at school.’

  She doesn’t hesitate. ‘Hockey.’

  ‘What didn’t you like?’

  ‘The cold. I was always on the fucking wing.’

  ‘I didn’t realise it was colder on the wing.’

  ‘Well, it didn’t have to be. But no one passed to me. So I just stood around with my feet getting more and more numb.’

  ‘You could have run about anyway.’

  ‘I was too cold to run about.’

  Her kisses her hair. Smells school playing field in it. ‘Fancy you being a winger.’

  ‘Why, don’t I look like a winger?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just fancy you being anything. Just fancy you having been a girl.’

  He was delighted. He loved hearing about the girlhood of girls. Infinitely touching, in the woman, the evidence of girl. Especially before sleep. Better than counting sheep for Henry, the traces of girl in a borrowed woman.

  ‘And remind me again,’ he says, after a moment of reflection, ‘this was school in Prague?’

  She aims an imaginary blow at him. ‘Hemel Hempstead,’ she says, ‘as you know full well.’

  But Henry doesn’t know anything full well. ‘I am in charge of the whereabouts of your childhood,’ he says.

  ‘And I of your whereabouts on the Internet,’ she teases. ‘The second thing I found out about you that I didn’t know is that you’re a film critic.’

  He looks bemused. ‘I’m not. I just don’t like films.’

  ‘Not any?’

  ‘Not many.’ He is breathing in the odours of her neck, just below her ear, where she is mentholated.

  ‘I cry a lot in films,’ she tells him.

  ‘Me too,’ he says. Not adding that these days he cries a lot everywhere.

  ‘Well then?’ she says

  ‘Well then what?’

  ‘Well then why don’t you like them?’

  ‘What’s crying got to do with anything? Anyone can make anyone cry at the drop of a hat. We all go around carrying our tears in our pockets like loose change. The merest reference to our fragility sets us off. Say mummy, daddy, baby, love-you, dead, goodbye – and that’s it, you’ve got the whole auditorium snivelling. And this is before you throw in the amplified music and the widescreen Technicolor grave, ten times the capacity of your house. To me, going to the pictures is like lying down in front of a pantechnicon and marvelling that you’ve been moved.’

  ‘So what were you doing,’ she asks, ‘writing for Movie Tones ?’

  Henry turns cold. If we’re to be scientific about it, his actual temperature has soared – nought to a hundred before the clock starts – but he feels cold, clammy cold, the perspiration freezing on his back.

  ‘That’s on the Internet?’

  ‘Not what you actually wrote. Not the words. But it’s mentioned. And why are you so hot?’

  ‘Does it say what it’s about?’

  ‘Some English director. Why are you so hot?’

  ‘Does it name him?’

  ‘It must do. But I can’t remember, I’m sorry. Henry, why are you burning up?’

  ‘Shame,’ Henry says. ‘I am oversupplied with eccrine glands which can pick up and process shame before I even know I’m feeling it. I like to think this proves how far evolved I am. Civilisation equals shame – have I told you my theory? The end of civilisation will come, if I’m right, when we’re all too hot to touch. I advise you to remove yourself soon to your own side of the bed.’

  ‘I have my own side now? That’s good.’

  She has swivelled girlishly on to one elbow, treating him to the best of her profile, her neck taut, its veins like blue striations in rock, the angles of her face sharp and askew. She is a lovely colour, icy gold. What Henry wouldn’t give to have ice in his blood!

  ‘I am to take it,’ she goes on, pretending to warm her hands on the heat radiating from him, ‘that you are not proud of your film criticism.’

  ‘No, I am not,’ he tells her. But that is all he tells her.

  He wakes in the night, relieved to find she is still with him. No one in London’s sleeping well, but that’s not Henry’s worry. It’s history that’s got the rest of them in a state, fear of a plane dropping out of the sky, or someone squirting smallpox through their letter box. There are rumours that there are Japanese people on the floor below Henry’s who will not leave the building, who have built up food reserves sufficient to keep them alive for five years and who wear biological suits fitted with oxygen masks at all times. Some days, Henry thinks he can hear them rattling about in their foil clothing, unless what he’s hearing is the sound of them counting their cans. Henry has not bothered to stock up. The threats to Henry’s life are not of a sort you can take precautions against. Besides, Henry reasons, the nearby mosque must surely act as a deterrent to any attack, despite the otherwise rich pickings of NW8.

  Moira has taken his advice and rolled over as far as she can to her side of the bed without falling out of it. It’s a miracle he hasn’t drowned where he is. This is how it has always been for Henry. He sleeps in pools of perspiration of his own making, one recollection of ignominy succeeding another. Tell him death will be dry and he’ll feel a lot better about going there.

  He would like to get up and wring out his pillows but he is afraid of waking her. He likes listening to a woman sleep. Tell him death will be dry and there’ll be a woman sleeping beside him, and he’ll give up the ghost tomorrow.

  Tell him this woman will be sleeping beside him and he’ll give it up tonight.

  Moira snores the way Henry imagines a young boy snores. Sudden gasps, like implorations, as though the day has been physically hard and the body is replenishing itself, succeeded by an even, insect hum, testifying to the innocence of the labours if not the sweetness of the dreams. Snails, earthworms, pollen hanging from the stamen of a flower. Had he been a father, he would have liked to hear his children snore. Lying still, determined not to wake her, he gives in to fatherly feelings for Moira. She has not given him permission for this, he knows. She hasn’t intimated she needs looking after. And he hasn’t listed fatherliness among his needs. Twist my heart and in return I’ll try to be good company, that’s the deal. She looks askance when he tells her that he sees the Danube dancing in her eyes. It’s a lot for one woman to provide – and she only a pastry chef – all the corruptions of a vanished empire. But she gets the rest – that he wishes to be hurt, however she chooses to hurt him, by her past; that he wishes to be agitated, however she chooses to agitate him, by the future; and that he would like her to be conventionally nice to him in between. Now she has to be his daughter, all of a sudden. Typical of Henry, just when he’s getting what he wants, to start fiddling with the agenda.

  But he’s sore tonight. No fault of hers. She wasn’t to know what looking him up on the Internet would stir up. Any more than she was to know that his article for Movie Tones was his darkest hour, his deepest shame, his lowest moment.

  Maybe it would have made him feel better had he come clean with her at once. My love, my little one – that article you unearthed, my single essay at film criticism, my sole publication, the one thing I would not wish to be remembered by, but now, you tell me, the only thing I will be remembered by, I have to confess to you was pure vendetta.

  How would that have sounded? Kissed him better, would she? Wrapped her arms around him? Absolved him? Who’s to say not. And who’s to say a better sleep would not have been his reward for honesty. A woman’s forgiveness can do wonders for a man.

  Should he wake her now and tell her?

  Do you hear me? Pure vendetta – conceived in hatred, motivated by malice, driven by
envy, and couched in primness. Not even my own primness, at that. ‘I am persuaded,’ I wrote, ‘that this director does not think as he ought on serious subjects.’ Pick up the allusion? Fanny Price, Mansfield Park. What’s Fanny Price doing in a piece of twentieth-century film criticism? Good question. But there you are. That’s what happens to you when you give your life to teaching the literary history of girls. You become one. In fact, I am by no means the first to have written criticism in that spirit. There have been worse than me. But my particular sin is this: the English film director, now living in Hollywood, the recipient of innumerable awards, whose reputation, as I maintained, was grossly overblown, whose films were claptrap, stage-bound, artificial, unctuous and self-pleasing, and who did not think as he ought on serious subjects – but I won’t rehearse my arguments again, not tonight, not to you, not here – does happen, did happen, to have been my best friend. Not Alfred Hitchcock, no. Christ, Moira, how old do you think I am? No, and not David Lean, either. Osmond Belkin, I’m talking about. Belkin. I’m glad you haven’t heard of him. But that doesn’t alter the offence. I have been guilty, though it was twenty years ago or more, of dishonesty and small-mindedness and, most unforgivably of all, pique. Do you, can you, still love me?

  He doesn’t wake her. She is sleeping too peacefully, her breathing steady, like a high-speed train, from time to time falling quiet altogether as though she is going through a tunnel.

  I have done some good things in my life, Henry thinks, and not waking her is one of them. Another is to have tried to forget the words I wrote about ‘Hovis’. If you really don’t wish a thing to have been, whether it’s a lie or an adultery or a betrayal, if you wipe it from the slate of your memory, then that’s almost the same – isn’t it? – as its never having happened. You can’t will away a misdeed, Henry accepts that, but if you will it away hard enough you almost can. Like the dot into which your picture used to disappear when you turned off your old cathode ray tube television: always there somewhere, you felt, receding into infinity, but to all intents and purposes – provided you are not a meta-physician – gone.

  Of the compunctions he suffered at the time of writing the article, most were suppressed beneath the conviction that Osmond had better things to do with his time than read Movie Tones, or to care, even if he did happen to fall upon the relevant edition of that high-minded journal, what a long-forgotten failure of a shmuck of a friend, buried brain downwards in an obscure teaching institution in the Pennines, had to say about him. Later regrets Henry dealt with by reasoning that the article was of its time, in the spirit of what people did then, and contained arguments which – again bearing in mind contemporary expectations – needed to be heard. Like bear-baiting, Henry’s indiscretion had to be put down to the prevailing barbarism of the period. Anachronistic to criticise him. Like accusing Moses of Zionism, or Medea of bad parenting, or Prometheus of violating fire-safety regulations, like that other anachronism, Uncle Izzi.

  Thus, over time, Henry’s delinquency – going, going, going, going . . .

  Not his fault that the fucking Internet has suddenly to pop up and revive it all.

  Hot in his bed – in his father’s bed, it helps him to remember, spreading the blame, sins of the fathers and all that – Henry wonders if it would aid his cause to come clean about other offences while he’s at it. Have them taken into consideration, as they say, and – who knows? – thereby get his sentence reduced.

  The women, does he mean? The friends? The wives of friends?

  No, not the women, not the wives. And not the friends. He’s done friends. Hand on heart, he’s told the court all about ‘Hovis’ Belkin.

  Unless there’s more, just one eensy-weensy little detail more . . .

  When was it that Catherine Grigson, the departmental secretary, knocked on Henry’s door with the first of the xeroxed Guidelines governing relations between staff and students – 1973, 1974? What and what not to say on a student’s essay. What and what not to say when disagreeing with a student on a matter of critical judgement in a public place. How to recommend a particular course of reading to a student without thereby compromising his or her intellectual liberty. How to behave when faced with a verbally aggressive student – don’t back him or her into a corner, for example, don’t punch him or her in the face, don’t tie him or her up or otherwise imprison him or her in your room (especially yours, Henry), don’t make promises you can’t keep.

  Henry liked Catherine. Liked the pale skin flecked with red, and her bronze hair in which, if you were so minded, you could see your own reflection. Effortlessly overweight, a mere half-stone or so, and always flushed, as though caught out that very second in a minor misdemeanour, she belonged to another age and idea of women, a major’s daughter or something like that, raised to look after men, to bring them tea and take their boots off and otherwise ease their passage through a world made brutal by war and insurrection. Catherine wore too many clothes, all of them too long for her and too loose, so that in between dispensing guidelines she was forever reaching for straps which turned out to be the wrong straps, struggling to put back jackets whose fallen shoulder pads she had first to punch back into shape, tucking away undergarments to which Henry could neither give a name nor ascribe a use. That this chaos of too-muchness around her wardrobe was meant to make life pleasanter for brothers, fathers, uncles, persuading them of their own compactness and efficiency, and preparing them, if necessary, for the rigours of colonial conquest, Henry did not for a moment doubt. But seeing the ruse did not make it a jot less efficacious. The hottest and most ineffective of men, Henry cooled and became competent the moment he was in Catherine’s company. If he had a complaint about her it was only this: that she enquired after his well-being with so much concern etched on her face and so much sorrow in her voice – ‘Are you OK, Henry?’ or ‘Is everything all right with you today, Henry?’ – that she made his eyes water. ‘I’m well, I’m fine, I’m great,’ Henry would reply, knowing that he couldn’t possibly have been any of those things, else she wouldn’t have asked the way she did. ‘I’m terrific, I’m fantastic, I’m off the planet,’ he went on in desperation, wilting under her consideration.

  Sweet. Sweet that someone cared.

  Over the years he discovered that she had the same effect on everyone. As soon as she asked people how they were, they felt terrible.

  The day she brought in the Code of Spatial Practice document, she made Henry feel it had been written specifically with him in mind. Normally she just dumped the updated weekly Guidelines on his desk, asked him how he was, and left. This time she sat down in a billow of slipped straps and fallen petticoats and took him through the most salient provisions. Do acknowledge students’ individuality and right to their views, she read – as though there were some danger he wouldn’t. Don’t communicate, either directly or indirectly, in a way that maligns others – as though there were some danger he would.

  He shrugged, checking himself out in her hair. Fair enough.

  Do, she went on, frame your responses in a considered and magnanimous manner. Don’t initiate rumours, whether to students or to your colleagues, which may be damaging to the reputation of either.

  Aha, Henry said. Fine. Fine.

  And don’t, Catherine continued, raising her flushed eyes to meet his, arrange to meet students alone, whether on the campus or off it. Don’t instigate relations which may be deemed intimate or in any other way inappropriate or misleading. Don’t show or express favouritism for one student over another. Don’t touch the student or crowd his or her personal space. A gesture which seems to you encouraging or consolatory can easily be misinterpreted. If a tutorial situation necessitates your seeing a student alone, do send a memo to the head of department in advance, explaining the situation, and do, in those circumstances, contrive to keep a distance of approximately one metre between you and the student throughout.

  ‘Catherine, stop,’ Henry said. ‘I’ll read all this in my own time. But you have nothing to wor
ry about. I’m in my thirties, pushing forty. And when you’re pushing forty you’re pushing fifty. People are taking early retirement at my age. In my head I’m working an allotment – in slippers. I’m no threat, believe me. I’m past invading space.’

  And he was. Let the no-touchies rulings of the middle seventies proliferate all they liked, nothing could have been easier for Henry to comply with, because by that time there was no one Henry wanted to touch.

  One metre! I have to get to within one metre! Too close, Catherine. Too close by a door, a corridor, an institution and a county. Too close by however you measure the distance between life and death.

  It had been different when he was twenty-five, or thirty, but now that he had begun his headlong decline into the second half of his life he was no longer attracted to the young of any species, least of all his own. He never had been much, now he wasn’t at all. He didn’t like their wet mouths, their casualness, their trainers, the pride they took in everything they didn’t know, their assumption that the old were interested in, or envious of them, the way they glottal-stopped, the way they said ‘gid’ for good, their failure to understand that education was an escape from popular culture not a platform for it, the tuneless head-banging songs they hummed – Hit me with your rhythm stick, hit me, hit me, no Charlie Parker riffs of the sort favoured by his pals at school, doodleoodleooodleoo, no Gigli either, no Fischer-Dieskau, no Schubert, and whoever lives without Schubert does not live at all – and most of all he didn’t like their slack sexualism, born of the pill, a loss of shame, the decline of Christianity, and an insufficiency of that bodily fastidiousness without which sex isn’t worth performing. Sooner than reach out to touch or tap a student, sooner than put his arm around a student, whether as a gesture of encouragement or consolation, Henry would have snuck into a nest of vipers. Indeed, he did from time to time wonder whether his bodily revulsion from those whose intelligences he was paid to sharpen wasn’t itself a more serious breach of the new codes of conduct than intimacy of trespass. Staff are not expected physically to loathe their students, nor to start from them as from a leper, so don’t throw up on their essays or otherwise manifest nausea without a third party being present – there’d have been more sense in Catherine getting him to take on board that injunction, than worrying him, had-it Henry, with warnings of inviolable space which he had not the slightest urge to violate.