The Making of Henry

by Howard Jacobson

  Henry gives the pound coin he’s been holding to the bus conductor, who has to juggle it in his hands, so hot is it. ‘Where have you had this, mister?’ the conductor asks.

  ‘In the fires of Hell,’ Henry says.

  Credit where credit’s due, Miss Rawlins. This could be the only play I ever wreck. Have a heart.

  ‘Pisses me off,’ Henry had said to Brendan O’Connor after the line-up.

  ‘What she did to Belkin?’

  ‘I’ll say!’

  ‘You’re a good friend,’ Brendan told him. ‘When she said “Of those who should have known better” I was certain she was going to point to me. And then when she didn’t all I could feel was relief. And there you were not thinking about yourself at all, but worrying for Belkin. You’ve taught me a lesson in humility.’

  They shook hands. It would have taken Henry too long to disillusion him. And anyway, he liked being bathed in Brendan O’Connor’s liquid stare. The pools of black that were his eyes, the extraordinary lashes. If he does become a priest, Henry thought, I’ll confess to him like a shot. Just not today.

  Since she was going to find out about the fracas anyway, Allswell having warned the boys he was writing to their parents, Henry took his mother into his confidence.

  ‘Well, I won’t tell your father about it,’ she said, ‘but it’s possible you were nothing like as naughty as you thought you were.’

  ‘I wasn’t naughty, Ma, I was bad. I ruined the first night of that play. Half the girls left the stage in tears. Some of them will never act again.’

  She made him tea directly from the strainer. Hot water over a cold wodge of tea leaves. Sometimes the same tea leaves sat in the strainer for a week. ‘I understand what you’re telling me,’ she said. ‘But I know what you’re like. You shouldn’t have done what you did, that goes without saying, but you shouldn’t take all the responsibility either. I know how susceptible to outside influence you are. You’ve always been easily led, Henry. That’s why I worry about you. The first girl that comes along –’

  ‘Ma, listen to me. Nobody led me, I led them. That’s what I find so unjust. I do the work, “Hovis” gets the credit.’

  ‘It’s hardly credit, Henry. It sounds more like blame to me.’

  ‘That’s my point. I’m the bad one and he gets the credit for the blame.’

  She smiled at him. ‘“The credit for the blame” – that’s good, Henry.’

  ‘Ma, I get cheated out of everything. Is that because no one notices I’m there?’

  ‘It’s the best way to be, Henry.’

  ‘What if no one ever notices I’m there?’

  ‘Then you’ll live a happy life and die a happy man.’

  In the end, he’d have been better off talking to his father. Though his father would have belted him for getting into trouble, then stormed off to the school to get justice for him. And who knows, might have ended up running off with Miss Rawlins. Would have eclipsed Henry, anyway, whatever he’d have done.

  To make things worse, Osmond Belkin took him aside the next day and said, ‘Coward!’

  ‘Me, coward? Who wrecked the fucking play?’

  ‘You didn’t say that though, did you? You didn’t stand up for me, when the fat cow pointed her finger.’

  ‘You were enjoying it, that’s why.’

  ‘And why do you think that was?’

  ‘Because you’re a greedy turd who likes stealing the limelight.’

  ‘And you’re a coward.’

  ‘No I’m not. I’m your friend. That’s the difference between us. I didn’t want to steal your glory.’

  ‘I’d like to see you try.’

  Henry threw his hands to heaven. ‘Which way do you want to play this, “Hovis”?’

  ‘All ways.’

  And he did.

  One week later, pressed and polished in their best shirts, Henry, ‘Hovis’ and all the other offending fifth-formers turned up to see Miss Rawlins, each carrying a bunch of bluebells. Henry’s idea. He had read that bluebells connoted sorrowful regret. ‘Hovis’ had wanted orchids. Too sensual, Henry had argued. We aren’t here to flirt. You might not be, ‘Hovis’ said. But if it was Henry who carried the day – mainly on account of bluebells being cheaper – it was ‘Hovis’ who delivered the sorrowing address. ‘What we would also appreciate,’ he said, rubbing his nose in patent duplicity, though no one but Henry seemed to see it, ‘is the opportunity to appear before the whole school so that we can apologise personally to all the girls we upset.’

  What Henry had not read was that bluebells wilt soon after they are taken out of the ground. ‘Hovis’ made the best of this, bearing his drooping posy as though it were a clue to the condition not only of his wallet but also of his heart. A poor boy spending the last of his pocket money on his conscience. A waif of remorse.

  It was ‘Hovis’ who delivered the apology to the girls’ school as well, a masterpiece of abjection in the manner of Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock, of whom all the boys could do passable imitations, though it was a toss-up whether ‘Hovis’ or Henry did him best. But today ‘Hovis’ had the stage. Henry remembers the ovation his friend received. And the invisible kiss, blown like a smoke ring, from Miss Rawlins.

  Hidden among the others, Henry felt his soul shrivel to the size of a peanut.

  And thus, says Henry aloud to himself on the bus, did Osmond Belkin steal the credit for the credit as well as the credit for the blame.

  ‘So how was your day?’

  Moira is waiting for him when he gets home, a bottle of wine open, olives in a bowl, squares of cheese.

  ‘I thought you were teaching tonight,’ he says.

  ‘I was. I’ve finished. Now I can concentrate on you.’

  Henry looks at his watch. It is later than he thought. How long they extend, these days of summer, when ghosts get hold of them.

  ‘When you’re not concentrating on me,’ Henry asks, ‘are you aware of me?’

  ‘Do you mean am I thinking of you?’

  ‘Yes. Am I there, a constant, or do I go when I’m gone in person and you have other things to occupy you?’

  She thinks about it. She is dressed, the way he likes her, for going out. Heels, skirt with a taut quiver, hair up so he can see her neck. They have agreed that she should keep a housecoat here, or a kimono that matches Henry’s, but Henry feels not yet. This is not domestic caution. Henry is not fussy about personal space. He simply isn’t ready to dispense with the image he has of her, as a person of the city. The inside he can do himself; Moira’s role is to carry the hum of the streets about her person.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I am aware of you. I might not be thinking of you, but you’re there like background music.’

  ‘Muzak, you mean? As in a lift or a supermarket.’

  ‘No, not Muzak. More like, I don’t know – a distant waltz.’

  There you are, Henry thinks. She is Viennese.

  He smiles at her. ‘Thank you,’ he says. Coyly for him. He likes being a distant waltz.

  ‘And me?’ Moira asks. ‘When I’m not there . . .’

  ‘My dear, you’re always there.’

  ‘No, come on. I answered you fairly. Now you me.’

  He paces the carpet. Has she been there with him today? At the gravesides, yes. A figure weeping over his remains. Bent, clearing away weeds, scraping moss from his stone, so that his name can still be read. And not simply as a spectator either. She has been dead alongside him also, plant food, reunited at last in the roots of a rose bush. But in the way he wishes to be told she thinks of him, a vibrant presence, no, it hasn’t been her best day. Belkin’s fault. Belkin empties his mind. Always has. And more, Belkin turns him against his own. If he is to be honest with himself he must admit to a faint sense of relief, no more than that, that Moira didn’t accompany him today to Totter Down. Why is that? Because he doesn’t want to be judged and reported as an engaged man by Belkin’s son? Because he doesn’t want Mel Belkin to meet Moira and form an op
inion of her? Strange. Can he really have allowed the negative influence possessed by Osmond Belkin to be passed on automatically to his son, a person Henry has never met until this day and has no reason to respect for his judgement about anything? And more than that, what’s so wrong with Moira that Henry should be reluctant for a Belkin to see her?

  I fear cynicism, Henry has often admitted to himself. I fear cynicism more than I fear anything. I fear the judgement of one who thinks the world amounts to nothing. More specifically, I fear the judgement of one who thinks I amount to even less. He knows what he has done with Belkin. He has invested him with that power of cynicism, chosen him, rightly or wrongly, to be the one who sees through everything. In Belkin’s eyes, Henry Nagel ceases to be. But it is always possible, he accepts, that Belkin neither wants this part nor fits it. And that the cynicism Henry dreads is his own.

  So is it he, Henry, who is obscurely ashamed of Moira, for no other reason than that it is he, Henry who is nothing, who has chosen her?

  ‘You are taking one hell of a time to answer,’ she tells him.

  ‘Am I?’

  He can see that she is momentarily frightened. Whereupon, flooded with the most intense love for her, he folds her in his arms.

  But they both know that isn’t an adequate response to her question.

  ‘Has anybody called?’ he asks her in the morning.

  ‘You’re here. You’d know.’

  ‘No, I mean last night, before I got in.’

  She shakes her head. But is curious to be told, her face a question mark, whom he is expecting a call from.

  Another woman? Even when it’s not spoken, the question angers him. Always the same, always their first thought.

  She feels the irritation stiffen his body. She knows what he thinks he knows she’s thinking. ‘Don’t blame me,’ she says. ‘It’s your doing. It’s what you do. You create foreboding.’

  ‘I make you feel I’m waiting for a secret phone call? If it were secret why would I ask about it?’

  ‘You’re shifty,’ she says. ‘There’s always a bend in your transactions.’

  Interesting. He thinks there is always a bend in hers. She has a bent face. It’s what he loves her for. So do they love the same in each other?

  ‘I’m waiting to hear from an old friend,’ he tells her.

  She waits for more. Which old friend? Why are you waiting? What has occurred?

  But he is not going to tell her that it’s the old friend she’d found on the Internet, the one he’d denounced in print. He’s too bent to get into all that.

  She makes him coffee. He has tried to interest her in tea from his samovar but she doesn’t find the ceremony as cute as Henry does. ‘This tea’s as weak as piss,’ she told him. Fine. Henry lets her make coffee. He has always been like this. He will change his habits for anyone. They are only borrowed anyway. Such accommodatingness makes him easy to live with, he believes. But also, as Moira has explained, frightening. The man who is accommodating to you will be accommodating to someone else. ‘I like a man to be rooted,’ she told him.

  ‘Then root me,’ he said.

  She has to be off. Her stint at Aultbach’s . . . t,t,t.

  He kisses her, trying to apprehend her tongue with his teeth. ‘Don’t Ault – t,t,t – me,’ he says. So she does.

  Queer, being so in love. It is not unknown to him, quite the opposite, but being in love again is strange, stranger each time, because each time is necessarily new territory – he has never been in love this many times before, and of course never at so advanced an age.

  So how not well is ‘Hovis’?

  Sex and death. Brutally obvious, but there is nothing Henry can do to fight it. The more in love he feels, the more his thoughts tend to ‘Hovis’ Belkin, and the more he thinks of ‘Hovis’ not well, not well at all, he gathered, the more intensely alive because in love he feels.

  So how not well is ‘Hovis’? And how not well would Henry want him to be?

  After coffee, Henry needs his samovar after all. Piss-weak tea, a morning of it. Tangy – pissy, she is right – on the teeth. Awash with the past, as tea famously always is.

  You liked him, Dad.

  Which one is he, again?

  Oh, enough of that. You liked him, that’ll do. And now he isn’t well. You know, really isn’t well.

  How old is he?

  My age?

  So older than I was.

  Dad, most people are. They cheated you. But ‘Hovis’ will no doubt be thinking they’re cheating him. No one gets enough.

  Well, you look well, Henry.

  And feeling it. But what ought I to do, what ought I to feel about my friend?

  If you don’t know, he isn’t your friend.

  Henry thinks about that.

  Well, we had our differences. But I still don’t like it that he’s ill.

  For him or for you?

  For him. For me it could be OK, that’s part of what I don’t like. The growing callousness.

  Growing? Henry, you were always the same. Who was that other one?

  That other one who what?

  You know . . .

  I don’t.

  Snu fed it.

  There have been several.

  No, the one who snu fed it while you were still at school. Werner somebody, was it?

  Warren.

  That’s him.

  Warren Shukman. I’d forgotten Warren.

  There you are.

  Dad, Warren died forty-five years ago.

  Yes, but that’s not the time it’s taken you to forget him. You forgot him in a month, you said so. You cried and said you had no feelings.

  We weren’t that close.

  So why were you crying?

  Because I had no feelings.

  Henry hears his father’s laughter. He loved making his father laugh. It was such a surprise to both of them. When Henry made his father laugh it was as though his father had just found a ten-pound note in an old pair of trousers.

  So do the dead laugh at the hard-heartedness of the living? Better that than lying there weeping for yourself. Hardness is all – will that be the lesson? Someone, make me hard, Henry thinks. Make thick my blood. Though with Warren, when hardness came easy, he’d asked that someone make him soft.

  They hadn’t been close, that was how Henry had explained it to himself. Nowhere near as close, say, as he’d been with ‘Hovis’. Though the fact of Warren’s hating ‘Hovis’ and once attempting to strangle him in the playground made for a closeness of its own. ‘You’ll end up naked in the gutter, a no one, an arsehole, swallowing your own sick,’ Warren had foretold of ‘Hovis’ after they’d finally been pulled apart, ‘and you won’t have anyone to help you then, because you’ll be too disgusting to touch, even more than you are now.’

  ‘We’ll all end up in the gutter,’ ‘Hovis’ had replied, rubbing at his neck, ‘but at least I’ll be looking at the stars.’

  ‘Meaning I’ll be looking at what?’

  ‘Meaning you’ll be looking at your own shit.’

  ‘Well, I’d rather look at mine than yours.’

  ‘Good, because you’ll be eating mine.’

  Which only encouraged Warren to start strangling him again.

  Henry reckoned ‘Hovis’ had a point about Warren Shukman and shit. Morally, Warren was the filthiest boy in school. It was Warren who introduced Henry’s class to onanism, getting a self-help group together, a good year before there was any reason for any of them to go public on the matter. It was Warren who told them about fellatio, which Henry found it difficult to credit, and cunnilingus, which ‘Hovis’ refused to countenance, though Henry was easier with that, suspecting he’d been doing it spiritually all his life anyway. And it was Warren who, at the age of thirteen, came to school swinging a full Durex. A sight which remained with Henry for many years, troubling his mind’s eye not only on those occasions his father brought up the subject of protectives, but also on the afternoon he stood head bowed with hi
s classmates, watching Warren’s coffin being lowered into the ground while his father and his uncles wailed.

  Extruded rather than tall, unclean in that way of the obsessionally clean, as though there’s unstoppable seepage from the mind into the body, with a pernickety person’s jaw and Adam’s apple and a translucent nose in a permanent wrinkle of disapproval (you actually could see orange light through his nostrils), Warren Shukman gave off such an air of sexual distaste that it was mysterious to Henry why he should have chosen to experiment sexually at all, let alone so widely and so soon. His ascetic profile reminded Henry of a rabbi’s, and indeed there were rabbis in Warren’s family, not to mention, somehow or other, a couple of turncoat charismatics and a Roman Catholic priest who wrote books settling the problem of pain which Brendan O’Connor read. Later, when he read Dostoevsky, Henry came to understand the connection between fastidiousness and lubricity, and even tried to introduce a module on the subject at the University of the Pennine Way, though that failed at the hurdle which was Mona Khartoum. (‘Honestly, Henry, there should be a law against you!’) But at the time, Warren baffled him.

  ‘Tell me when you need me to fix you up with a hum job, Henry,’ he remembers Warren offering, twitching his nose as though his own last hum job was something he would rather forget.

  ‘Yeah, all right, but I’m not rushing,’ Henry had replied.

  ‘Oh, so you do know what a hum job is?’

  ‘Sort of,’ said Henry.

  ‘Bet you don’t.’

  ‘It’s when you do it with the radio on.’

  ‘Bollocks!’

  ‘It’s when you do it with the radio on but very low.’

  ‘Double bollocks. You haven’t got a clue.’

  ‘All right, I haven’t.’

  Warren Shukman advanced his mouth to Henry’s ear. ‘A hum job is when a bird puts your balls in her mouth and hums while she’s chewing them.’

  Henry felt as though the Devil himself were whispering vilenesses to him. ‘Why would she do that?’

  ‘Which part of that?’

  ‘Any part.’

  ‘Because you ask her to, you moron.’