The Making of Henry

by Howard Jacobson

  Yarmulkas instead of party hats, matzo instead of cake, and more remembrance of plagues than games of pass the parcel – but still, a party’s a party.

  No, Henry thought, a party is not a party. A deceit is a deceit but a party is not a party. So, yes, since she asked, he believed it was a crime to let his father believe what wasn’t true.

  Marghanita, older, wiser, and in the unfamiliar role of apologist for her brother-in-law’s family, thought not. She quoted Graham Greene at him. ‘In human relations, Henry, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.’

  No, Henry said. That doesn’t apply. It wasn’t as though they were sparing him bad news. He didn’t have cancer. They weren’t going to sell him. And anyway, what’s with the Graham Greene? Are we Catholics suddenly?

  Oh yes, they were sparing him bad news, Marghanita believed. They were sparing him the news that they couldn’t otherwise afford to do a single thing for him. It was Pesach or Izzi, so they did what was intelligent and lied and made it both.

  And when he found out what sort of trick they’d played on him?

  He’d laugh. Or at least he’d be old enough by that time to understand and to forgive.

  Trouble was, he found out sooner than he was meant to. ‘Izzi, go next door and borrow some salt’ – that was what did it. They forgot that what he’d find next door, at Maxie Eisenklam’s house, was an identical party – same songs, same matzo, Maxie Eisenklam being made a fuss over for asking the same questions – and Izzi knew it wasn’t Maxie’s birthday. Though he asked, just to be on the safe side. ‘What, Maxie, is this your birthday party too?’

  ‘Not to be thought about,’ were Ekaterina’s words to her sister. ‘Unimaginable, their laughter. Unimaginable, what he must have felt.’

  But Henry can imagine it. Henry can hear it in his head, the shame being piled on shame. The conviction that there will never be a single day from now on when you do not think of this and burn up with the disgrace of it.

  Marghanita meant him to remember his father in this story, but he would have wished to remember him some other way. The sadness which once befell a parent is like no other. The humiliation of a parent when young is a historic pain a child should be spared all knowledge of.

  Who knows, it is possible that Ekaterina was more upset for Izzi than Izzi had been for himself, and that Marghanita was more upset for Ekaterina, and that Henry is even more upset for all of them.

  Is that what lives on longest, the sadness? The proof of our being weak, not the proof of our being strong?

  Is there such a place where Henry can be buried, where every grave commemorates a weakness or a shame? A graveyard of the humiliated? Here lies Henry who had thin skin. Sadly missed for being sad. To know him was to be embarrassed for him.

  He stays on the bus until it reaches its terminus, then does the same with whichever bus comes next, until he feels he’s far enough. Totter Down, he arrives at. ‘Is there a church here?’ he asks a girl with a stud in her navel. She shrugs her shoulders, showing more belly. ‘Dunno.’ A black street sweeper astride a giant vacuum cleaner points him in the right direction, past the golf course, past the other golf course, past the pub. ‘Does it have a graveyard?’ Henry asks, not wanting to labour, in the heat, for nothing. The street sweeper laughs. Maybe Henry has the air of a man intending to bury himself in Totter Down. ‘I think so,’ the street sweeper says. ‘You walking?’ Henry nods. ‘Then you’ll need it by the time you get there,’ followed by another laugh.

  Henry doesn’t like Totter Down. It’s for the motor car – not another soul, once he’s hit Totter Down Village Lane, out walking. The houses are expensive and gated. They have no natural way of looking. They are all approximating to some idea of somewhere else or some other time. He can smell bad money. Gangster money. Football money. Opportunity knocks money. You make your pile and then you barricade yourself against the world in a house that isn’t anywhere. So who’s the misanthropist here, Henry asks, me or them? At least I’m living in a mansion block that looks like a mansion block with a pigswill salesman for a neighbour. At least I’m keeping company with a waitress.

  The road arches and twists. The traffic roars past, honking at nothing. From behind the gates a dog snarls. Country life.

  It takes him half an hour to find the church. Just beyond a row of Spanish villas he sees the spire, and then, if he’s not very much mistaken – and no, no he isn’t – a yew. There’s a find! An old yew, too, he thinks. He has read – or was it ‘Fat Frieda’ who told the class? – that yews can live to a thousand years or more. He has no way of knowing if the Totter Down yew is as old as that, but it appears to be petrified with age, its bronzed bark twisted like Laocoön, pitted with barnacles as though it has been at sea for five hundred years, at its heart a whorled hollow, black and damp, resembling an entrance to the underworld. Abandon hope, it mutely warns, all ye who enter me. Henry walks round and round it. From no angle is it a comforting or companionable tree. It sucks in the light, just as Henry once feared he sucked away his mother’s lightness, converting it to gloom – not only single in its darkness, as Wordsworth saw, but single-minded, having no other will or purpose but to send down darkness, so there should be absolutely no mistake, not a glimmer of expectation, not a chink of lighted hope, to where the sightless dead lie. No eyes on these branches. No one watching. Not a soul. But at least there is no confusing death’s meaning here. Always in our hearts, be blowed. Gone, that’s what. Gone away, gone under, gone for ever.

  Henry takes a turn around the graveyard, not looking, his mind closed down.

  And then, just as he is leaving, a figure appears from behind the yew, for all the world a visitant from the nether regions come up through the lightless trapdoor in the tree. Harrowed with fear and wonder, Henry starts. Not because the figure is ghostly in the sense that he is vile and loathsome like Hamlet’s father, rotten, rotting, scabby from having dwelt among the dead, vengeful, jealous of the living, a disgrace. But because he is ghostly in the sense that he is Henry’s best and oldest friend, not seen for thirty years or more – Osmond Belkin, unless too many graves have robbed Henry of his wits . . . Osmond ‘Hovis’ Belkin to the very tips of his soft smoker’s fingers.

  ELEVEN

  Henry’s heart hammers in his chest. Is this happiness? Is hammering Henry happy suddenly?

  He throws open his arms. ‘“Hovis”! My God! What in hell’s name are you doing here?’

  The man steps back from Henry’s wild embrace.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘you have the wrong person.’

  Henry peers at him. Loaf head, well-kneaded flesh, squeezed sardonic eyes, top-heavy, but confident that the space he occupies in the world is his by right. ‘“Hovis’’,’ Henry repeats. It is almost an entreaty. ‘“Hovis”!’

  The man returns him a half-apologetic expression. Meaning, I would be if I could be. But also meaning, you are a bit of a girl, aren’t you, not knowing who you know and who you don’t.

  How long does it take Henry to realise what he has done? Five seconds, an hour, a year? Stay, illusion! But the illusion is time itself. The man before him cannot be more than twenty-five or thirty. Henry has forgotten that Osmond is sixty or thereabouts and will not look now as he did when Henry saw him last. No, it wasn’t, isn’t, happiness. A great depression seizes Henry. That nausea of returning consciousness, as after fainting. It is as though half his life has been taken from him in an instant, been peeled from him, during the few moments he has been asleep, like loose skin.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the man says again, seeing his distress.

  Henry looks him over. He is wearing linens, well pressed, a cardigan about his shoulders, good Italian casual shoes – if he is out walking, he is not intending to walk far – a large expensive watch, an unnecessarily sleek belt, and aftershave almost certainly by Georgio of Beverly Hills. Rodeo Drive clothes, unmistakably, but worn as Henry has seen their equivalent worn with similar swagger in earlier days in Manchester. He
is in no doubt now who he is talking to. And why the name ‘Hovis’ might not ring any bells with him. No man tells his family everything.

  ‘Me that should be sorry,’ Henry says, extending a hand. ‘I used to be a good friend of your father’s. You’re Osmond Belkin’s son, don’t even bother to tell me you’re not. I’m Henry Nagel.’

  The young man takes his hand. Not as warmly as Henry would have hoped, but a shake’s a shake. ‘I think I’ve heard of you,’ he says. ‘I’m Mel Belkin.’

  Henry is disappointed. What did he expect to hear? That Osmond had called his son Henry?

  I’d have settled, Henry thinks, trying to be grown up about it, for the boy’s at least knowing who I was. Henry? Not Henry Nagel? Not ‘the’ Henry Nagel? Come, let me embrace you. I’ve never heard my father speak of you with anything but love and admiration.

  ‘And what,’ Henry says, opening the palms of his hands, as though to measure the inappropriateness of Totter Down to their encounter, ‘you live in these parts?’

  ‘Dad’s taken a house up here.’

  ‘He’s in the country, then? I had no idea.’

  Mel Belkin bites his lip. He pulls a cigarette from his shirt pocket, not offering Henry. Osmond used to do the same. He lights it like his father too, virginally, as though it is his first and very probably his last. ‘Yes, he’s here,’ he says in a precautionary way. Meaning, if Henry understands him right, he’s here but doesn’t want that to be generally known. ‘And you,’ he asks, not without alarm, ‘do you live round here?’

  ‘No,’ Henry says, pointing back over his shoulder to where he thinks London is. ‘I’m in St John’s Wood. I’m just here’ – why is Henry here? – ‘to take the air.’

  ‘You’re a long way from home.’

  ‘Am I? Sometimes I jump on buses and see where they take me.’

  ‘Quite a coincidence, then.’

  ‘It certainly is. But I am very glad of it.’

  ‘And you like graveyards?’

  ‘I do, yes. Yourself?’

  ‘Yes. I’m working on a vampire script.’

  ‘I thought for a moment,’ Henry says, ‘that that was what you were.’

  ‘A scriptwriter?’

  Henry laughs.

  ‘Oh, sorry, you mean a vampire?’

  ‘Well, more a spook.’

  ‘Was that before or after you thought I was my father?’

  Henry laughs again, though he doesn’t know why. Unless it’s simply funny, meeting your best friend’s son for the first time, the dead spit of his father, and not liking him much. ‘We were very close in our time,’ Henry says. ‘I’d love to see him.’

  The young man stretches his jaw. ‘He isn’t well,’ he says.

  Henry looks into his eyes. ‘How not well?’

  Another pause, another pull at the cigarette. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘is there some way we can contact you? Do you have a card or something?’

  A card? Henry? Some joke. A man has a card when he knows who he is and what he does. And when he believes his future is worth investing in. Occasionally Henry has thought about getting himself a card, but what’s the point? He’ll have a thousand printed, use three, and the rest will be found in their little box by his executor. Not that he has an executor either.

  He frisks himself, anyway, for the form of it, at a loss to understand why, of his usual stack of cards, not one is about his person.

  ‘I’ll write my number down,’ he says, tearing a corner off the back page of his A to Z.

  The young man holds Henry’s number at a distance from his face. He seems faintly disgusted that this is the best Henry can come up with. It’s even possible – since he’s a Belkin – that he disapproves of the numerals.

  ‘And you,’ Henry says, ‘do you have a card?’

  But it is as if Henry has not spoken.

  ‘I’ll tell Dad I’ve seen you.’

  Henry looks down, not wanting to see the deadness in his friend’s son’s eyes. ‘How not well?’ he asks again.

  Mel Belkin taps the torn-off corner of the A to Z. Meaning – well, meaning whatever it means. He shakes Henry’s hand again, but with no more warmth than the first time. If anything, with less. ‘Sorry,’ he calls back after they have separated, ‘what name should I say it was again?’

  Riding the buses back, Henry remembers how he and Osmond were suspended from their junior prefects’ duties for a term, for wrecking a production of Twelfth Night mounted by their sister school. In fact, they had not really wrecked the play, merely masterminded a disturbance which brought it to an earlier conclusion than was usual, before all the mistakes of identity had been cleared up, before any nuptials had been entered into, and before Malvolio could make his chilling promise to be revenged upon the entire cast. In this way, Osmond argued to the headmaster, Olly Allswell, MA, they had been responsible for an entirely new reading of Shakespeare’s hackneyed comedy, one which was neither too conventionally happy nor too problematically black, but rather where irresolution and uncertainty were allowed to go on teasing and troubling the mind.

  ‘You are not yet too old or too big, Belkin,’ Allswell had retorted, ‘to be given six of the best.’

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ Osmond Belkin had said. ‘Just trying to put a decent gloss on our behaviour, sir.’

  But it was Henry who was unable to stop himself snorting with mirth, and it was Henry who ended up getting five strokes of the cane.

  ‘Thanks a lot, turd,’ Henry said as they left the headmaster’s office.

  ‘Don’t blame me,’ Osmond told him. ‘You were the meshuggener that laughed.’

  Causing Henry, still in the headmaster’s hearing, to burst out laughing all over again, remembering ‘Hovis’s’ justification for what they’d done.

  In fact, Henry had been more responsible for the disturbance at the girls’ school than Osmond. Together they had egged on their party – comprising everybody doing fifth-form English at the boys’ school, even Brendan O’Connor who was already contemplating the priesthood – to cheer when the scenery wobbled, to clap the moment someone forgot their lines, and to wolf-whistle as Viola, pretending to be a man, stroked her false beard and slapped her thighs. But it was Henry who made the more noise, shouting ‘Behind you!’ and ‘Oh, no you don’t!’ whenever the play descended into pantomime, which was most of the time, and ‘Not funny!’ whenever Feste (Fiona Shatzkes) shaped one of his laborious jokes, and ‘Pervert!’ whenever Olivia (Sally Rotblat) looked longingly into the eyes of a person doubly the same gender as her own. He was overexcited. He had never been inside a girls’ school before, never been surrounded on all sides by girls, and never seen so many girls in doublet and hose on one stage at one time. He couldn’t help himself. It was like discovering within him a person he had never known was there. He had been brought up to be retiring, to be considerate of the feelings of others and to appreciate Shakespeare, and here he was, all at once, being none of those things.

  ‘I am everything that’s bad,’ he told himself as it was happening, ‘and it is marvellous.’

  What made the liberation marvellous, of course, for a boy Henry’s age, was that it wasn’t a little bit sexual or even a lot sexual, but that it was completely sexual. At a bound Henry had gone from shrinking diffidence to exhibitionism, to libertinage, to violation, to ravishment, to ejaculatio praecox, to wanting to do it all over again. Had someone told Henry he hadn’t just fucked the play he had fucked the entire girls’ school, he would not have demurred. That, exactly, was how it felt.

  From henceforth, he told himself, I shall be a man.

  But at next morning’s assembly when the headmaster announced a black day in the history of the school, citing behaviour that would have been unacceptable at a prison for the criminally insane let alone at a direct-grant grammar, it was Henry who was the first to blush.

  ‘You’re giving yourself away, Henry,’ Osmond whispered into his ear. ‘You’re lighting up like a lamp-post.’

  Henry dug h
is knuckles into Osmond’s arm and twisted. But that only spurred his friend on. ‘He knows it’s you,’ he whispered. ‘He’s looking at you right this minute. You’re stuffed, you shmuck.’

  In fact, they were all stuffed. Later that morning everyone doing fifth-form English lined up for an identity parade in the gym, their heads down, their hands hanging like empty nooses by their side, waiting for Miss Rawlins, producer of the play, to come across from the girls’ school and pick out the guilty. She wasted no time. ‘All of them,’ she said. ‘But this one,’ extending a finger, ‘most guilty of them all.’

  The person at whom she pointed – and here was the surprising thing – being Osmond ‘Hovis’ Belkin.

  Changing buses, Henry is surprised to discover the power this recollection still has to upset him. Osmond, of course, protested his innocence vociferously. ‘What did I do?’ he wanted Miss Rawlins to tell him. ‘What did I do that was different from what we all did?’

  ‘That’s enough, Belkin,’ Allswell warned him.

  ‘I don’t mind answering that,’ Miss Rawlins said. She was a ripplingly voluptuous woman in her forties, large-breasted, pulled in at the waist, her hips rounded, only the heaviness of her legs stopping the boys falling in love with her – though when she pointed her painted finger and said ‘But this one’, who cared about the legs?

  Osmond Belkin, bred to be unafraid, looked at her evenly.

  ‘What this one is guilty of,’ she said, looking just as evenly back, no matter that she was addressing him in the third person, ‘is letting down his family. I know the Belkins. I know their standards. Of those who should have known better’ – and there is no mention of Henry here, no glance in his direction either – ‘Osmond Belkin should have known better than any.’

  And what could Henry say to this? What about me? Shouldn’t I too have known better? And didn’t I, though knowing better, as I most assuredly did, not only wreck your play but fuck your entire school? Credit where credit’s due, Miss Rawlins. It’s me you should be pointing at. I’m the ravisher.