The Making of Henry

by Howard Jacobson

  He can just see the flags of the hotel. Somewhere there Moira is in her flatties, contorting her profile, rolling pastry. His heart is so touched by her, simply by the idea of her existence, by the abstract thought that she has being, that Henry is brought to tears. The breeze dries them on his cheek, where they sting as though some tiny summer creature has tried to bite him.

  It isn’t only Moira. Maybe the sea, too, upsets him after all, wiping out the horizon, bleaching the day.

  Moira, the sea, and something else. Henry screw up his eyes. What’s the something else? The becalmed yachts? The sound of shingle submitting to the sucking of the tide? The smell of seaweed? The warm air buzzing with insects, the odd wasp dying? No, none of those. Or maybe all of those but none of those in particular. Then he realises. It’s the benches.

  Henry doesn’t think he has ever seen so many memorial benches on a single walk. At the best of times he is a sucker for a bench with someone’s name on it. In memory of So-And-So who loved this coastline, loved this garden, loved this park. Inexpressibly sad, Henry finds it, remembering a person for what they loved, especially when what they loved was the coastline or the garden or the park in which you’re standing as you read about them. Disconcerting, such a perpetuation of sedentary innocence – a bench memorialising a person who loved a bench. At least a gravestone marks a difference. No ‘Here Lies So-And-So Who Loved This Grave’. What’s fine about the grave, if anything is fine about the grave, is its promise of release. After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well. It’s the next stage. A moving on. Whereas the bench, which does not acknowledge life as fever – not bench life anyway – continues where the dead left off.

  A single bench is normally adequate to Henry’s daily diet of melancholy. But here on the Eastbourne heights, where there is an infection of benches, where there’s barely room to drop a stone between one bench and the next, and where they are kept in tip-top order, varnished and revarnished, the colour of blood some of them, and occasionally reconsecrated with a sprig of heather, Henry gorges on morbidity. It’s not his fault. Blame whoever permitted this orgy of remembrance.

  Meticulously, as though he owes it to himself no less than to the dead, he reads every inscription. IN THANKS FOR THE LIFE OF IRENE H. JAFFREY. JOAN, WIDOW OF JACK, TOGETHER AGAIN SIDE BY SIDE. MICHAEL O’NEILL FOR THY SWEET LOVE REMEMBER’D SUCH WEALTH BRINGS, JE T’AIME – YOURS JANET. ALFRED BONE – MISSING ON THE SOMME. ERIC J. NEEDLE – AT PEACE WATCHING THE SEA. GP PETER JONES WHO SO LOVED THIS TOWN AND THIS SHORE. KITTY OCKENDER – COMMEMORATING MANY HAPPY TIMES SPENT IN EASTBOURNE. ROSEMARY SOUTHOUSE WHO LOVED LIFE AND LIVED IT TO THE FULL. Lived it to the full, Henry!

  He takes them all in, pausing, like a dutiful son, at each. Gladys Holman, Lucy and Will Dibb-Fuller, Dorothy Conway, Reg Vincent, Bolly Middlemiss, Arnold and Florence Billam, Frances May Clancy, Bernard Pasche, Don Wakeling, John Green, Fred Green, Daphne Skelton, Gladys Bamber, Bob and Maud Packham, Archie Parrish. Lillian E. Sale (‘a remarkable lady’), Joyce Worger, Ellen and Arthur Bew, Biddy Bradfield, Ena Palmer (hers under a stone shelter, doubly provided), Lt. Col. Norah Smythe, Albert de M. Fleury, Roma Romanowska, Ola Amos, Elsie Dove, Mattie Banks, Phyllis Sageman (MA), Jack Owlett, Constance Penney, Gwen Humphreys, Lil and Len Morris, Beatrice Grace Willsmer, Gladys Woods . . .

  All those Lils and Mauds, all those Freds and Regs, names gone, fallen out of fashion, like whatever the old wore before they were forced into trainers.

  He cannot decide who upset him the most – the Romas and Olas far from home, single it would seem in their exile, or the couples like Joan and Jack, together again, hand in hand, staring out to infinity. Unbearable either way, but Henry reckons it must help to have a friend.

  Variations on the same story, told again and again and again. The repetition is too much for Henry. He drops on to Harold and Agnes Lawrence who loved it here – they all loved it here – and hangs his head. He is aware that his lips are moving, that other walkers are observing him, an ageing man reduced to talking to himself. Doesn’t the poor bastard have someone he can text?

  How long does he sit, pushing letters of the alphabet about with his lips, making words he has no control over? Long enough to feel his back go. He rises, afraid that if he doesn’t he will set in this one position and become a monument himself. He is badly oiled, creaking, his lower back in spasm, giving him a stoop. What a sight I am, he thinks. He cannot decide whether to go back the way he is, and risk Moira seeing him, or to keep walking in the direction of Beachy Head in the hope of straightening himself up. Walking, walking he thinks is best, but with a little less attention to every bench. Maybe he should concentrate on what’s still growing here, rather than on what’s stopped. There are rockeries, he will tell Moira, full of things that don’t object to too much salt. Speedwell, catmint, torch lily, thrift. Thrift, thrift, Horatio. Sea campion, fleabane. Lichens, are they? Heather? What does he know. Botany was never Henry’s subject. He just reads the notices. Something to discuss when he gets back, how lovely, rather than how dead. On he goes, getting higher, the path sometimes opening out to small gardens, viewing areas, greens, where the benches proliferate more hysterically yet, and where even a seat made of planks on concrete blocks and a single backrest nailed into cliff bears someone’s name. It is fertile up here, the air drowsy with the dungy sweets of summer death. Stretching back into town, the groynes look ill-assorted, like pieces from a difficult jigsaw puzzle. Henry mops his brow and holds his back. Below him some sort of amphitheatre has appeared, a sign pointing to Holywell Retreat. Should he come to live here? Spend the rest of his days polishing benches and committing their messages to memory? He can’t stop reading the occasional brass plate, but others he lets go unrecorded. He will do his duty by them next time, when he takes up residence. Impossible to say what his principle of selection is, why he reads this inscription and not that, but a higher hand must be guiding him. Else why would he find himself, with his heart beating at the walls of his chest, before a bench dedicated to his mother?

  His mother!

  IN MEMORY OF EKATERINA NAGEL WHO FOUND PEACE HERE.

  Jesus Christ!

  His mother found peace here! In Eastbourne!

  Impossible. He closes his eyes and shakes his head. Must be some other Ekaterina Nagel. But he has only to entertain that thought for it to vanish. How many Ekaterina Nagels were there? How many in the whole world let alone in this country? And it has her dates right. 1919–1976.

  So when was this that she found peace in Eastbourne? And in what circumstances?

  Had she come specifically looking? And if she had, how was it that he knew nothing about her search?

  In which case, who did? Who sponsored this bench in her name?

  His father – that would be the natural supposition. His father the furniture-maker. Appropriate, as a gift from Izzi, a bench. Though it would have killed him not to be able to upholster it.

  But you cannot kill what’s dead already. Henry’s father was not left to mourn or think about memorials. Couldn’t face it. Couldn’t bear it. Couldn’t contemplate life without her. And no, there hadn’t been time for him to leave a bench to her in his will, even supposing he had wanted to, or knew where Eastbourne was, or understood the meaning of the word ‘peace’.

  Had they spent time here together, peaceful time, before there was such a person as Henry to noise their lives up for them? Had they wheeled him along this walk when he was too small to know about it? He’d have heard tell, surely. His parents were great historians of themselves, were always recalling in mirth or melancholy the mishaps associated with holidays and outings, and even if, for some reason or another, they had not verbalised Eastbourne to Henry, they were bound to have shown him photographs, curly-edged black-and-white age-of-innocence snapshots with the place and name and date written on the back in Ekaterina’s hand – her robust, round-bellied copperplate, the ink black even in the days when everybody else’s ink was blue. She had been painstaking about every photogr
aph and keepsake, ordering her memories, keeping tabs on the narrative of her life and loves, however disappointing. This had always upset Henry about his mother – the journal of the heart she kept, as conscientious as an archivist in a burning city, as though what wasn’t transcribed would fade away like smoke on a summer’s afternoon.

  But wait – just suppose that Eastbourne had been witness to some time of peace his mother and his father shared and wanted, for whatever reason, to keep secret, why then wasn’t the bench dedicated to his father too?

  It bewilders him, and hurts him more, his mother’s memory commemorated separately from his father’s. The bench asserts a rupture which wasn’t true to the facts. But a bench with a little plaque on it is a fact, insists for ever its version of events. How many thousands of people will now pass, have passed already, to whom the one great incontrovertibility of Ekaterina’s life – her love for Henry’s father – will remain unknown?

  It is as though, Henry thinks, my father has been wiped out of her life. It is as though this bench as much excludes him as it perpetuates her. A monument to the not-thereness of his father.

  Henry runs his fingers through his hair, halfway to distraction, wondering whether he should go the whole hog, and begin howling at what they’ve done – whoever they are – to his parents’ memory. It’s a decision, whether to go mad or not. He has always been sure of that. And it’s a decision, whether or not to go to pieces. You lose control or you don’t. It’s in your hands.

  In the end, he decides against. He doesn’t have good enough cause. Never properly paired himself, he has been a sentimentalist of pairs all his life. And that, surely, is all that’s operating in this instance. Sentimentality. Wanting to see his mother and father, who died apart, while one of them was on an errand of sorrow and suspicion, united in love for ever. Sentimentality, pure and simple. Which is not an adequate justification for going mad. A quiet tear would be more appropriate. Una furtiva lagrima. And a sprig of something – thrift, fleabane, herzschmertz – to tie to the backrest. So he plucks a little purple flower he finds growing between stones, and lacking any of the ways of nature, attaches it, just above his mother’s name, with one of his shoelaces. Not pretty, but nothing Henry does is pretty. ‘There,’ he says, ‘from me and Dad.’

  After which he is not fit to do anything but squat down on his haunches, whatever the stiffness in his back, and sob his heart out with grief, with strangeness, with everything he doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know.

  The furtiva lagrima become a raging torrent.

  Henry’s sky fallen in.

  Another of the reasons he loves her: she likes finding a solution to a problem. Uncertainty for Henry comes in swarms which he allows to buzz around his face. Moira’s tactic, on the other hand, is to take a swat to them.

  ‘Who is responsible?’ Henry has been saying all morning, as he was saying all the night before. ‘Who did it? Who put it there? And why?’

  ‘I’ll ring and find out.’

  ‘Who will you ring?’

  ‘The council.’

  ‘Which council?’

  ‘Eastbourne Council, Henry. Which council do you think?’

  ‘Will they know?’

  ‘I’m going to ring them and find out.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Now.’

  And she does. Without slowing her step – they are strolling along the promenade, in the direction of the pier; no more benches for Henry on this trip – she actually rings directory enquiries on her mobile, and then the council.

  Henry looks on in amazement. First of all, how does she know to ring the council; second, where does she find the resolution to ring the council? For these skills alone he’d marry her, assuming she’d want to marry him, which is by no means a foregone conclusion given that he has never had the first clue who to ring on any matter, nor the will to make the call when someone tells him.

  ‘Cleansing,’ she repeats. ‘OK, I’ll try them. Can you put me through?’ Then to Henry, in case he hasn’t heard, she mouths, ‘Cleansing.’

  When Cleansing answers, she hands the phone to Henry who fumbles it, as though afraid it has a poison bite. ‘I don’t suppose you can help me,’ he begins, at which Moira snatches the phone back from him. ‘Negative bastard,’ she says, then has to explain to the person in Cleansing that she doesn’t mean him.

  In fact Henry is right in his supposition. Cleansing isn’t able to help him. Not immediately, at any rate. You can’t just go around asking the authorities who donated such-and-such a bench on the cliffs at Eastbourne.

  ‘Why not?’ Moira wonders.

  Data protection.

  ‘Can you tell me whether the person who donated the bench specifically asked to be data-protected?’ she asks.

  No.

  ‘Why would that be?’

  Data protection.

  But they are prepared to countenance special circumstances. If Henry writes in to Cleansing, they tell her, and explains what he wants to know and why, they will consider his case on its merits.

  ‘Then I’ll write,’ Henry says.

  But Moira knows about the future tense when Henry uses it. Future never-never. She buys a postcard of the front at Eastbourne, sits Henry at a table in a café, wipes it expertly, passes him a pen from her furry handbag, and says, ‘Write!’

  ‘I can’t send a card of Eastbourne to Eastbourne council,’ he says.

  She takes no notice of his epistolary niceness. ‘Write!’ she orders him.

  No disrespect to Moira, but he needs Marghanita.

  What is all this, Marghanita? Was it you? Did you and she come here when she was fed up with Dad? Was that the peace she found in Eastbourne? Relief from him? Relief from thinking and worrying about him? Relief from the triviality? Relief from the insult of his restlessness?

  Actual peace, was it? Simply a cessation, for a while, of his demandingness? Forget the mistress or the mistresses – simply a holiday from the torches and the origami?

  It isn’t so much an answer that Henry wants – this is where Moira, with her love of solutions, gets it wrong – it is more the wallowing in the questions.

  And Marghanita was the best of all people to wallow with. Towards the end, when intimacy between them held no ambiguities, she was forever calling him over to her side to whisper another secret in his ear. For the most part he didn’t know the people she was divulging secrets to him about, the majority of whom had been dead and gone long before Henry had arrived on the scene, that’s if they had ever enjoyed independent being outside of Marghanita’s imagination at all. But that didn’t matter. What stirred him was the heat of the confessional, the animal warmth of a soul ridding itself of all it knew. Come, Henry, she would say, crooking a finger. Almost komm, kommst du, the Yiddish into which all Jews, even the least Jewish, even the most white like Marghanita, must eventually fade, as Henry himself will when the time comes, wenn es so weit ist. How comforted he felt when she beckoned him to her, like a small animal nuzzling into the heat, enjoying the warmth and the odour of the straw, absorbing the unutterable voluptuousness of family.

  She saved the best to last, Marghanita. When she was very ill, Henry stayed with her, sleeping on a couch she had ordered him to bring close to her bed, her hand in his, passively, like a child’s. Spurred on by morphine, demons crowded round about her in the dark, waking her suddenly with cries which she could not distinguish from her own. She fought them from her, picking them from the sleeves of her nightdress. ‘Don’t bother,’ she told Henry when he tried to help her, ‘they aren’t really there.’ So in the end, despite his doubts, she seemed to know the difference after all between her real assailants and the false. Which made him more disposed to believe her when she told him that her woes began earlier than he supposed, earlier than she’d ever told him, far earlier than her great disappointment in love. ‘My hopes weren’t so much dashed exactly, Henry, because strictly speaking I never had hopes. A better explanation is that things turned out as
they were bound to.’

  This was Henry’s greatest dread – hearing from a woman on her death bed, when it was too late for him to help, that her life had been a wasted tale, a blight foretold. But at least this time it wasn’t his fault. Or was it?

  He listened, not saying anything. Whenever he tried to speak she held his wrist. Just listen, Henry.

  Did he never wonder, she asked him rhetorically, at the vast age discrepancies in the family, she so much younger than the other Stern Girls, so much younger, especially, to choose a name at random – she smiled at him, her eyes still bright, though her cheekbones wasted – than Effie.

  Funny, Henry thinks, remembering, how much of what you don’t know, you do. Does that mean he knows more than he thinks he knows about his mother’s bench? Will someone one day say, ‘Did you never wonder, Henry . . . ?’ And he will recognise in a flash all it has been about?

  Maybe. But who is that someone likely to be, now they have all gone?

  He knew what Marghanita was going to tell him, anyway, knew immediately, as you know when someone comes hammering at your door at four o’clock in the morning, that everything was going to be different now; and yet not, because all the characters remained the same, only the plot had changed, and a plot is nothing more than the way things turn out, a mere arbitrary intrusion into the game of life, causing the pieces to be shifted right enough, and some even to be swept from the board altogether, but not affecting the overall shape of the contest, or the pleasure you take in playing. It is still chess, or snakes and ladders, or happy families.