Lachlan rubs his fists in his eyes. No doubt, Henry thinks, Moira finds this gesture of helplessness aristocratic.
But then he remembers one. ‘I might not have this right,’ he says. ‘But it’s something like, “We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.” Neetzer, I think.’
‘Nietzsche,’ Henry says.
‘I approve of that, yes,’ Moira says. ‘We haven’t danced today, Henry.’
‘Then that’s another day lost,’ Henry says.
But he isn’t thinking what he says. He’s away. Floating. If you would be happy all your life, plant a garden. Funny. He can hear his mother saying it, her delivery mischievous, as though she knows she is mouthing advice she has no right to give. And yet the memory of it conjures up a garden. The garden she didn’t care about. The garden which his father laid waste with his torches, giving the ornamental goldfish heart attacks, after which the sandpit that they hoped would miraculously turn Henry into a little boy like other little boys. The sunlit, Schubertian garden of his childhood, where it was never cold, and never dark, and he was never anything but happy. So she was right. It works. If you would be happy, plant a garden. And for a moment or two he does, and is.
Funny how youthfully he remembers her, whistling while she worked. He can see her things, the most inconsequential of them, the round straw box in which she kept her thread and needles, though she was the world’s worst sewer; the blue airmail writing pads she liked to use, with faint grey lines across the page; the pile of books she kept on her bedside table, all with folded pieces of paper sticking out, marking passages she wanted to read aloud to him; her Pocket Oxford Dictionary, of which on her account Henry was always a little bit ashamed, because it implied limits to her curiosity.
And now Nietzsche.
The following day, he goes looking for somewhere to be buried. He has an A to Z in his pocket. The burial places circled with a red marker. He’d like Moira to go with him. A day out in the country, is how he puts it. But she’s busy. Has to be at the patisserie in the morning, and has a class to give in the evening. Life, Henry. Life. So he goes on his own.
Nowhere special. He has no plans. Which must mean he isn’t looking for an exact place to be buried yet, isn’t expecting to come to any definite decision, more trying to get ideas. Like slipping along to an Ideal Home Exhibition when you’re wondering what to do with your kitchen. An Ideal Burial Exhibition. The death you’ve always dreamed of. Earls Court, 22 Dec, the year’s midnight, for one day only – all you need to plan your own extinction. I could open it, Henry thinks. Henry Nagel, renowned author of the previously buried critique of the films of ‘Hovis’ Belkin, will be in attendance.
Almost-country churchyards are what he’s thinking about today, nothing civic, not cemeteries but church-sheltered semi-rural plots, all within a bus ride or two from St John’s Wood. He’s read that there’s an ancient yew in Downe in Kent. He likes yews. He isn’t always sure he could pick you one out, if other trees were present, but he likes the idea of them, and indeed likes the thing once another person has identified it for him. ‘There is a yew tree ’ – William Wordsworth. Reminiscent of ‘There is a willow’ – William Shakespeare. The matter-of-fact topography of anguish. Where trees are, human trouble is. If someone enters a room with the words ‘There is an oak’, or ‘There is a laburnum’, start running.
Not running anywhere, Henry has always had a soft spot for Wordsworth’s yew tree, standing ‘single, in the midst of its own darkness’. It is like an epitaph in itself. HERE LIES HENRY – SINGLE IN THE MIDST OF HIS OWN DARKNESS. He’ll settle for that. Not as good as HERE LIES HENRY – WHO NEEDS NO INTRODUCTION, but then what man is remembered the way he’d like to be?
The yew, Henry recalls learning at school – was it from ‘Fat Frieda’ he learned it? – was a favoured churchyard tree because of the superstition that its roots grew into dead men’s eyes. That frightened him at the time. By rights it should frighten him more now, the closer he gets to finding out for himself, but accommodations crowd in when you least expect them. Why not be blinded by the yew? If your eyeballs feed the roots, does that not mean your seeing will live on in the tree’s branches? Not according to the superstition it doesn’t. The reason you wanted the dead blinded was so that they couldn’t see and covet the world of the living, and then be tempted to return as spirits. More effectively than the stone lid to your grave, the yew finished you off and kept you in your place. But that’s only the superstition; there’s no saying it works. And no saying that the dead aren’t watching from every dark green leaf . . .
Such a consciousness junkie, Henry. Wanting to live for ever, wanting to watch for ever, unable to bear missing out on anything. So characteristic of a man, he remembers Esmé Papping, his friend Lawrence Papping’s missus, telling him soon after he’d told her he loved her and could not contemplate the idea of her so much as drawing breath where he was not – so untrusting of the flux, Henry, so controlling. Esmé’s favourite yew, of course, was Sylvia Plath’s –
And the message of the yew tree is blackness –
blackness and silence.
After her, after Sylvia, the deluge.
Let it go, Henry. Let it finish.
Sweet Esmé, another one putting him right. Another one who failed, for Henry is still here, not letting it go, not letting it finish.
But the Downe yew is too distant. Kent, for Christ’s sake! He wants Moira to be able to come and visit him on a whim. Maybe bring a flower. Maybe bring Lachlan. Have Angus piss on his grave.
He catches the number 13 bus from Finchley Road, heading north, meaning to go as far as it will take him, then catch another if he has to, according to the red circles in his A to Z. But the 13 only goes as far as Golders Green, in which case he might as well stroll up to Hoop Lane and take in the great crematorium, where the burning started in earnest for Londoners. It looks vaguely like a monastery, with red-brick Tuscan chapels and cloisters, memorial plaques on every inch of wall, and, behind, a wedge-shaped garden, a meadow he guesses it should be called, on which sheep would not be out of place, though the grazing wouldn’t be of the best, this being what a discreet notice describes as the Dispersal Area. How many have been shaken out here? Henry wonders – the body and soul of man reduced to the contents of a pepper pot.
He is quickly tearful. Tears creaking in his forehead, at the apostrophes of his eyes. The creak of tears – where does that come from? A poem? A woman’s novel? Not his phrase, he is sure of that. One he’d needed to appropriate. Too apposite to be without. The skull like an old unsteady boat, at sea, tear-drenched, and the timbers creaking.
I’ll have that, Henry had decided.
Not for himself, the creaking tears, but for everybody. Every body. He reads a memorial stone to Shirley – he knew a Shirley once – Addio mia sposa brava. Though he has never had a wife, goodbyes to wives have always struck Henry as too sad to bear. Second in unbearableness only to goodbyes to children. And second not even to those if you are the erotic sentimentalist Henry is.
Sposa brava. Wherein the bravery? he wonders. In Bunhill Fields, another of Henry’s favourite gardens of interment, there is a memorial to Dame Mary Page, relict of Sir Gregory Page, Bart, who ‘in 67 months was tapd 66 times, had taken away 240 gallons of water, without ever repining at her case’. Was Shirley, too, a non-repiner? Sposa brava. Hard for Henry, in the exquisite abstract, the suffering of women. Man is different. Man is born to suffer and not repine. Henry himself a case in point. But wives in pain – the soft liquidity of mia sposa brava, like water over pebbles, its dying fall, its too too tender salutation, says all there is to say about the unnatural cruelty of such things.
Is it going to happen to some woman Henry knows? Is this why he has been preparing for it in his imagination for so long? And oughtn’t he, if that is the case, to let Moira go now, while she is still safe? Mulling i
t over, Henry gets to enjoy the anticipatory frisson of parting, at no cost, gets to mourn freely in his mind her brave passing, the schmaltz merchant that he is.
Some couples are ‘Reunited at last’ in a rose bush. Would he like that? He and Moira feeding the roots of a rose? ‘After a short time apart, together again.’
Together again, together for ever – Henry has no resistance to the banal poetry of for everness, and has to go and sit on a little bench by a little wall and put his fingers to his forehead where the creaking has started up again.
Ah, yes. He remembers now. Henshell Spivack, Lia’s husband. Once Henry’s second-best friend. Hensh the Mensch. That’s whose tears creaked. Until they stopped altogether. Nothing to do with Henry. By no means was it because Lia lay with him in the Pennines that her husband Henshell, who’d taken up angling all of a sudden, walked with purpose into the reservoir where he fished. They weren’t even any longer a pair, Hensh and Lia. He had been married to another woman for a decade. So why? Henry thought it was to stop the creaking. Lia, less fancifully, said it was a combination of business failure and the fact of his ever having gone into business at all, he who’d meant to make the world a better place – literally better, better in the druggist’s sense. She’d written to Henry, all those years after he’d failed to be a tiger for her, first to tell him about Henshell, and then, another year or so after that, to ask if he’d like to meet her at Heaton Park, where Henry and Henshell had horsed around as kids – rowing on the boating lake, winning toffee apples at summer fairs, rolling down grassy banks together – to help her dispose of her half of the ashes. A surprise to Henry, a sort of impiety, he thought, that Henshell had stipulated cremation. (What sort of a Jew was he – first angling and now burning?) And a bigger surprise still that the women had divvied up his remains. Civilised, he supposed, honouring the variousness of the dead’s affections. So why no smidgen of ash for him, Henry, Henshell’s erstwhile pal? Well, that was Lia’s point. Let’s scatter what we’ve got together. Not in bad taste, Henry wondered, given everything, given Henry’s habitual borrowing and the like? No, taken all round, she thought not. So they’d met and hired a rowing boat, and Henry had done the rowing, and she’d emptied the grey matter over the side, like fish food, and then they’d sat there in silence, moored to the little island, listening to the ducks, and the cries of the living, and the creaking timbers. And Henry had not been able to think of a single thing to say.
‘That’s that, then’ – Lia’s words, at last. ‘Gone for ever.’
And Henry had put a hand out to touch her, then thought better of it and touched himself instead – two fingers to his temple, where the pain was.
Too big an idea for Henry the borrower – for ever.
Always was, always will be.
Enough. He can’t stay here. Burning is too final. He will not be piped into a furnace and dispersed. Not in a meadow, not on a lake. He wishes, Henry, if he can, to keep himself to himself. On the way out he sees that Bud Flanagan has been burned here, and Tubby Hayes and Ronnie Scott and Bernie Winters and Nellie Wallace and Marc Bolan, whoever Marc Bolan is, and Hughie Green – ‘You were the star that made opportunity knock.’ Several generations of popular entertainment up in flames. Addio. No place for Henry.
Across the road – despite himself – the Jewish cemetery, Spanish and Portuguese to the right, Ashkenazim to the left. The Ashkenazim prefer their gravestones upright, like mantelpieces, whereas the Sephardic dead are remembered horizontally, in sarcophagi above ground. Mizrahi, Benezra, Benosiglio, Saady, Sassoon, Dellai – who are these people? A mystery to Henry, these lilting Jews from sunny places who don’t have the dour music of Eastern Europe in their blood. ‘Geliebt und unvergessen’ it says on the first Ashkenazi stone Henry bends his attention to, and lo! the magic still works. The native language of Jewish grief. Fucking German! The cruellest of all ironies to befall an ironic people. Falling in love with fucking German. Different if you’re a Benzecry or a Saatchi. More restless in their white stone coffins they are, too, uneven, turgid and confused, as though the earth is stirring with them. Expectant, are they? Impatient to be off, to be up and gone to where the sun shines on burning desert, the moment they hear the bugle call? Half close an eye and Henry reckons there is definitely movement on their side of the cemetery. As turbulent as the lurching sea they look to Henry. Alive still, as near as damn it. Unreconciled. One thing for sure: a messiah in a hurry would wake these before trying for some response from Henry’s lot, succumbed to cold, long given up the ghost, buried deep, in front of their silent mantelpieces.
Jewish burial! Not what Henry wants. Not the Polack way nor the Portuguese. Why can’t it come down on one side or another? Serene or clamorous. Either return me to the quietude of earth, or kick up a racket for me. Why are there no angels here? Why no declamations of defiance? If a garden isn’t really what you want, if the trees are merely incidental, and the grass there only because something must separate one plot from another, why not more gesticulating marble?
He remembers unveiling the stone to his parents, a year after he had put them in the ground, his anger overtaking his distress, so mute the ceremony, so bare the symbolism.
Of the close family, only Marghanita was with him. They leaned on each other, weeping.
‘We should have done better,’ Henry said.
‘There is no better,’ she told him. ‘The better is in your heart.’
He shook his head. ‘Not good enough. My heart will die. There should be better here, where it can be seen.’
He knew the arguments. Admired them even. They threw the myth of Jewish showiness and materialism back in the teeth of those who hated Jews. In quietness we pass away. Decorum in obsequies and entombment denies the privileged their last advantage. In death, everyone is equal. The poor man as geliebt und unvergessen as the rest. Great democrats, the Jews, as Nietzsche had observed – though from Nietzsche that wasn’t unadulterated praise.
As it wasn’t, always, praise from Henry either. The pursuit of democracy was an attempt to improve on the inequities of nature. Everything the Jews did was an attempt to better nature. Subdue the natural man, encode him into obedience, and you have civilisation. Well and good. Henry was all for that, as how could he not be, all trace of natural man having been squeezed from him in the womb. But it left you high and dry, he reckoned, when it came to death. The only way to make sense of dying was to see it as a return, but once you’ve turned your back on nature, there is nowhere to return to.
‘It’s not the seeing,’ Marghanita said, ‘it’s the feeling. They are remembered by how we feel about them.’
‘Yes, but look how banal the feelings,’ Henry said, reading from the nearby stones. ‘Sadly missed. For ever in our thoughts. To know her was to love her. Trivial. If all you are is sadly missed you might as well not have lived.’
‘You can’t blame people for not being poets.’
‘Can’t you? I think you can. I think there is an obligation on us to be poets when the occasion calls for poetry and nothing less. It’s laziness of the heart, or maybe I mean cowardice of the heart – faint-heartedness – that stops us. We’d rather be commonplace. It takes less out of us.’
‘Henry, people find comfort in the commonplace. You know what they say about a sorrow shared. What we all feel the same about is easier to bear.’
‘Is it?’
And it was true, in so far as he and Marghanita felt the same about Ekaterina and Izzi. They sobbed plainly in each other’s arms. And it was easier to bear.
But when his turn came and somebody supervised the carving of For ever in our thoughts on his tomb, supposing there was anyone willing to supervise anything, what would he think and feel then? That death was comprehensible because he lived on as a sort of afterthought in some unpoetic person’s thoughts? Better a marble vault.
He jumps on another bus. And immediately falls to thinking about his father. It was after the unveiling that Marghanita made her point by pla
nting a story in Henry’s mind which he would never forget, and which would indeed serve as his father’s memorial. And his mother’s too, because it was from his mother, Marghanita explained, that she had originally heard the story. And his mother had wept when she told it. ‘It makes me want to forgive him everything,’ she had said to Marghanita, ‘except that I can’t.’
Mia mama brava.
It was a Passover story. Not one of the usual ones. Nothing to do with Moses and Pharaoh. There are people who think everything is to do with everything – Henry spent a lifetime teaching in the spaces they allowed him – but this is not an allowable assumption in the context of Passover, for during Passover, of all festivals, nothing is as it usually is or resembles anything else. ‘Why is this night different from all other nights?’ asks the youngest child. Henry had asked that question in his time, though he has long forgotten the answer. Izzi too, when he was the youngest, asked it. Hard for Henry to imagine that. He must squeeze his eyes to do it. And even then he only sees himself.
Difference was of the essence, anyway. Passover is a night unlike all other nights. A boy will understand that as he may. For Izzi the reason was clear. This night was different from all other nights because it was his birthday. That’s what they told him anyway. They messed his hair and pinched his cheeks and muttered Yiddish over him. Vos draistu mir a kop? What are you twisting our heads with all these questions for? On this night, Got tsu danken, you came into the world. Mazeltov! Now eat your egg in salt water. Only a moderate lie, as Marghanita pointed out. It was your father’s luck – who’s to say whether it was his good luck or his bad luck? – to have been born within a few days of the period in which Passover usually falls. Your grandparents, as you know, were poor as mice. They had no money for birthday celebrations. A Pesach dinner, however, you have whether you can afford it or not. No Jew goes without Pesach. Was it such a crime, then, to allow Izzi to believe that Passover was for him, that the dinner was his birthday party, and that everyone was gathered in their best clothes to celebrate it in his name?
The Making of Henry Page 23
