The Making of Henry

by Howard Jacobson

  Jesus Christ!

  For someone who is only discovering what he knew already, Henry has turned a fearful colour. He feels his cheeks – as cold as death (not that he’d know). ‘Are you all right?’ Moira asks from across the room. Lachlan is showing her how to tape a window against germ warfare. The miracle, so engrossed are they, is that either has even noticed Henry. It must have been the noise his blood made when it left his body. He raises an unsteady hand to her. Of course he’s all right. And he is. Or at least he will be. One day.

  There is a little Hamleting he needs to get out of his system. Nothing too gross. No imaginings of acts ‘that blur the grace and blush of modesty’. No ‘shame, where is thy blush’. Always been a matter of pride for Henry that he is not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be. Not that sort of man, Henry. But he could do with a long soak in a bath. The filial part of any man is vexed, rubbed sore by the idea of father, let alone lover, however sound of mind he is. A good mother lets her son understand that she would have chosen him over her husband had she only met him first, and that should be the end of it. But Henry was a touch closer to his mother than many sons. And it seems reasonable to assume that in this instance, leave the father out of it, she had met the lover some time after she had met the son. Fouad Yafi represented a double betrayal therefore – of his father and of him – and Henry wouldn’t be of flesh born if he didn’t feel the betrayal, keenly, twice. It is almost the same, being jealous of your mother on your own account and on your father’s, but not quite: there is more sexual excruciation, at least that you can admit to, when you feel it for your dad. Hence the Hamleting. Have you eyes? / Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed / And batten on this moor? Ha! Have you eyes? A wasted pun, Henry has always thought, mountains and moors. The line would have been better employed in Othello. But then, with a name like his, Fouad Yafi must have had – must still have if he lives – a touch of the Moor about him. Hence – of course hence! – the Moorish bathroom. Fouad Yafi. An Arab. Ha! Have you eyes? Not the right play suddenly. Even now, now, very now, an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe, more like. Except that it goes against the grain with Henry, to animalise his mother. He will not make a white ewe of her, and therefore cannot make a black ram of her lover. Look away, Henry. Look away, as your father taught you. A lesson well taught and even better learned. What you don’t see won’t hurt you, nor what you don’t imagine. But he doesn’t need his father’s blinding hand. He is quite composed, Henry, for him. No sensuality or body’s greed or other horrors of that sort assail him. The prohibitions which it would now seem that his mother took it on herself to flout are of another order. Not ethno-biblical. They came and went, the Hebrews and the Hittites and the Jebusites and whoever, in and out of one another’s tents, their jewellery clanking. Didn’t Moses himself take first a Midianite, Zipporah, and then an Ethiopian woman to wife? And what was good enough for Moses, surely, is good enough for Henry’s mother. So no, it isn’t an ancient antipathy that stirs in Henry, if it’s an antipathy at all. More a sense of what is appropriate and seemly in the circumstances. My mother and an Arab! Of no consequence a couple of thousand years ago. And maybe of no consequence in a couple of thousand years from now. (Henry would like to be around to judge.) But his mother and an Arab – an Ekaterina and a Fouad, a Nagel and a Yafi – with things the way they are! And in sight of a mosque! Does that mean she’d converted in her heart? he wonders. Was that what reading Nietzsche was always bound to lead to? Had his grandmother and the Stern Girls been right? And whether they’d been right or not, doesn’t he owe it to their memory, since that’s all of them that’s left, to feel about it as they’d have felt? If that’s nationalism, Henry doesn’t mind. You have to fly the flag. It doesn’t all begin and end with you. You have to allow the dead their say. And he knows what they’d have said. They’d have said go home to your husband, Ekaterina. With all his North Manchester imperfections, at least he’s your own. You’ve made your point, you’ve stuck your neck out, now go home to your husband. And let this other person – and no, we do not want to hear his name or see his photograph – go home to his wife, or is it wives?

  His poor grandmother. Denied, by the mere politics of the times she lived in, the cosmopolitan insouciance which was her birthright. So what chance for Henry, whose birthright was horror and spiders, and who wouldn’t have known insouciance had it curled up beside him in his pram? My mother and an Arab! And yet, though it isn’t, wasn’t, in the circumstances seemly, he cannot find the anger – the revulsion, is it? – he is looking for. Or at least he cannot find it in the detail of Fouad Yafi being Fouad Yafi. My mother and an Arab – so what! Too many revelations for one day, maybe. Mothers and Arabs, who cares? They’re all family. Rivka Yoffey, Fouad Yafi, where’s the difference?

  As long as she was happy. He must take it as read that she was happy, whatever face she wore for meeting Norma Jean on the steps or in the High Street. Henry has no idea how long it lasted, but for Yafi or the family of Yafi to have installed Henry in their bower, it must have been of some duration and must have given happiness – palpable happiness – to him as well.

  Gai gezunterheit, the pair of them.

  Everything is changed now, no use pretending otherwise, but in many ways the change is for the better. His mother had not suffered as he thought she had; not in the way he thought she had, anyway, not as a wronged and loveless wife. If it weren’t for what that changes for his father, he would be invigorated for her. And even looking at it from his father’s point of view, it is a liberation. Henry does not have to go on reprimanding him any longer. He can let him alone, set him free, now he has no major misdemeanour of the heart to reproach him with. Which is queer logic, since if it was all right for the gander . . . But that’s not the way you’re meant to look at it. The way to look at it, as they tried to teach him at the Pennines enough times, is that you cheer the woman in any wrongdoing and you boo the man. It’s not a matter of fairness, it’s a matter of evening things out. You take the long view. For sins committed by the patriarchs five thousand years ago, the mini-patriarch of today has to bow his head and take what’s owing. It’s the woman’s turn. And Henry accepts and even welcomes that. It was his mother’s turn.

  Hers and Fouad Yafi’s. Funny how there’s always another man in the vicinity, another beneficiary of patriarchy, to benefit a second time. But still, yes, her turn. What goes around comes around.

  Which being the case, you would think Henry would sleep soundly that night. But he doesn’t. Twice Moira has to wake him, so disturbing to her sleep are his dreams. And when he opens his eyes, he is struck with mortal horror. ‘My mother had a lover,’ he tells her.

  He has already told her that. Told her no sooner than they’d left Lachlan’s. ‘Well, good for her,’ she replied the first time. But she sees that that is not the appropriate response tonight.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she says, stroking his cheek. ‘It isn’t for you to judge her.’

  ‘It isn’t all right,’ he says. ‘Everybody is dying and we are sleeping in the bed my mother slept in with her lover.’

  ‘Is that so terrible? You didn’t think it was terrible when you thought it was your father’s bed.’

  ‘I did, sometimes. Some nights I thought it was a great wrong. But this is different. Whatever they say, it’s different.’

  ‘Do you want to come to my bed?’

  He looks at her. In the dark he can just make out the grey pinpricks of her eyes. A faint custard glow, like that of street lights, comes yellowing off her hair. This is the first time she has offered them her bed. Though there has been no need of the bed, he has noticed the omission. Henry doesn’t have thin skin for nothing. He knows what isn’t offered, whether there is need of it or not. What’s downright refused, Henry logs under Miscellaneous Insults; what merely isn’t offered, he files under Sundry Hurts. That she hasn’t offered he has taken to be delicacy on her part. The woman preserves the memory of her bed, the history of its associa
tions and fidelities. Whereas the man behaves like a pig. Jump in. Sure, I did once share this with my wife, but a new day’s a new day! And if you really want me to I will launder the sheets. Henry had no wife. Not of his own. So it was his father’s memory he besmirched – correction, his mother’s. But now Moira has compromised her delicacy to save his. Henry takes the full measure of this. It is like a proposal of marriage. In the dark he gathers her into his arms and kisses her.

  But there is no reason to move out. He isn’t feeling fastidious. He presses the part of himself where qualms gather and finds no softness. Tries to imagine his mother and Mr Yafi lying here, but no picture will form. Good. Tries to imagine their imagining him, but no picture will form of that either. Good again. Even when he puts on Schubert’s Fifth Symphony – ‘How lovely you are, how lovely-ey-ey you are’ – and tries imagining her singing it to her lover, the Moor, he is unable to locate anguish of the Hamlet kind. A cistern of tears when he thinks of his mother normally, suddenly Henry is dry. What, not even some creaking at the temples? He listens. Nothing. Behind the cheekbones, though, he can make out distant pain. Like needles going in, and a sound like splintering. And that too is good. He wants to be upset.

  For what has happened is upsetting – both the fact of it and its coming into his possession – but it is upsetting in the way everything that bears on change and forgetfulness is upsetting . . . and that’s the end of it.