Moira thinks not.
Moira is another one who shleps her kishkes out spending time with Henry. And she has already made it clear she doesn’t want those words on her bench either.
She is out, delivering. Honk, honk. Henry can hear her all over NW8. He is out, walking, but his nerves are on edge. If you pass between two lovers text-messaging each other from opposite corners of the street, will radiation pass through your body? Will they open you up and find the message burnt into your heart? Miss you. Hate you. Meet you in an hour. Drop dead.
If you cross the road at your own pace and a demented motorist honks at you, are you within your rights to pull him (or her) out of his car and beat him to a pulp?
It’s not beyond him to do that. He is still just strong enough, provided the motorist doesn’t resist.
Better to be sitting. He buys papers, which is always a mistake, and finds a table at Aultbach’s. He orders a plunger of coffee for no other reason than that he wants to hear himself say plunge, and allows the papers to swallow him up. Bad news. What other sort is there? You open the page and tumble headlong into it. Today, just Henry’s luck, a report of Osmond Belkin’s memorial. Held at the British Film Institute. Fear no more the heat of the sun, a recorded extract of The Blood Donor, clips from Osmond’s best movies, all that. No mention of Henry’s article. No ironic reference to that great, resonating misjudgement – ‘I am persuaded he does not think as he ought on serious subjects.’ And no reference to the man who made it. No, no Henry. Nor any whisper of Henry. Henry not invited, as he had not been invited to the funeral, though Mel Belkin knew well enough, had he kept the torn-off corner of Henry’s A to Z, where to find him.
Well, what did he expect? What right to be invited did he have? He had thought ill, written ill, spoken ill of his old friend. He isn’t even sure that he is sorry ‘Hovis’ is dead. How do you tell? Had he been seeing ‘Hovis’ on a regular basis he would presumably be feeling the lack of him. The clocks stopped, the stars not in their places, the sun blotted out of the heavens, all that. But he’s been getting by ‘Hovis’-less for half a lifetime. So how to measure the difference? Wordsworth castigated himself for forgetting, in a surprise of joy, that a beloved person was no longer there, turning to share the transport with her when he ought to have remembered, when he ought never not to have remembered, not for the least of a division of an hour – Henry loves that ‘least division’ – that she was gone. There’s scrupulousness of conscience for you, since for less particular men there can be no greater love than to imagine the dead among the living, to feel them by you so vividly that it is as though they have never left you. So can it work the other way, that you remember to forget rather than forget to remember? In which case Henry, too, is a marvel of sensibility in that he seems to be remembering to forget ‘Hovis’ more and more with every hour that passes. Let Henry be surprised by joy and he won’t be turning to share its transports with ‘Hovis’.
‘Hovis’? Who’s ‘Hovis’?
But Henry knows himself. Or maybe he knows ‘Hovis’. His friend will be waiting for him one of these nights, no doubt about it. He will come for Henry in the darkness and bite his heart out. Henry just wishes it would happen soon. The waiting to feel something is killing him.
‘Mind if I leave him with you?’
Henry jumps. He has not been in the land of the living. And now here are Lachlan and Angus, man and dog, breathing bad digestive systems into his face, Lachlan’s marginally the worse.
As though reading his mind, Angus shows Henry his tongue. Aaaah! Nothing wrong with my insides. Just the smell of curried dog biscuits.
‘Depends how long you’re going to be,’ Henry says.
Lachlan is wearing a suit that seems to Henry to be in about seven pieces, though when he counts he sees it’s only trousers, jacket and waistcoat. It’s the number of pockets in the waistcoat that does it, and the amount of stuff Lachlan has spilling out of them. Watch chains, handkerchiefs, dog lead, heirlooms. He nods in the direction of the antique shop across the road, man to man, incorrigible, the way some men want you to know that they can’t stay out of betting shops or public houses.
‘Turns out you were right,’ he says, producing from somewhere on his person – Henry’s father would have been proud of such legerdemain – the framed photograph of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Samoan grave. ‘Not his signature. I’ve had it checked.’
The words bury themselves in his chest, like daggers, making Henry feel it’s all his fault.
‘Well, it stood to reason,’ Henry says. Not exactly an apology, but it’s the best he can manage.
Lachlan bangs wind out of his oesophagus. ‘Not to mine it didn’t,’ he says. ‘But there’s just a chance they won’t spot it over there. Be back in a couple of shakes.’
Henry watches him go. Purposeful, but with a weary roll of the shoulders. The air slowly leaking out of him. Is there enough left, Henry wonders – enough air and enough heirloom – to keep him going through his old age? Or will he have to sell the apartment soon, as well, and then be reduced to waiting and gigoloing once more in Eastbourne or Torquay or whatever it was. He has that look. A man forever in the process of drowning, like his hat.
Is that what Angus knows? Is that what he sees as well, and is that what this is all about – the dog aware he has to find a new master quick, quick, while he too still has his looks?
Henry pats him, just for the hell of it. Angus, still roguishly neckerchiefed – does Lachlan make him sleep in that thing, Henry wonders – turns up his eyes in return, not pools of love but lakes of it, oceans of brown devotion.
Cynical bastard, Henry thinks, going on patting.
Then suddenly the dog is wriggling from under him, sniffing the air, wagging his tail frantically, seeing his old master on the other side of the street.
‘He only went five minutes ago,’ Henry says. ‘What’s the excitement?’
But who can say how long five minutes feels to a dog. Especially to a dog who’s desperate.
He is at the kerb, trying to remember all he’s been taught. Looking left, looking left again, nosing piss, smelling shit, confusing smell with traffic.
‘Heel!’ Lachlan shouts. ‘Stay there, boy!’
Henry reaches out to grab his collar or his neckerchief, but Lachlan has done his own looking left and then left again, and is giving the dog the OK. ‘Come on, Angus.’ Crouching and clapping his hands. ‘Come on, boy.’
And Angus is off, ears back, tail going, into a tumult of horns. What happens next Henry doesn’t know. What happens next has never been Henry’s strong point. Next was what his father always took care of. ‘You stupid old fool!’ he hears himself say, but the words are no sooner uttered than they seem to belong to another time, another life even. How many cars have slithered into one another – not crashed, it’s all too sedate and balletic to be called a crash – that, too, Henry doesn’t know. No screeches of brakes, no crunch of metal, for all that the implicated vehicles are four-wheel drives, Armageddon trucks strong enough to take out a buffalo. Behind his eyes Henry sees a wheel spinning in yellow moonlight. Immobile, he watches it, though no car is on its back and the sun is shining. What is more, the car’s wheel spins in eerie silence, whereas this is St John’s Wood High Street, and with the volume inexplicably turned up – expostulation, recrimination, astonishment (though such things happen every day): voices yelling into mobile phones, the sound of texting, hooting, honking. The madhouse.
‘What the fuck is honking going to solve?’ Henry wants to shout.
But then what the fuck is Henry shouting going to solve?
Or Henry’s doing anything? It’s written across his face – I’m better staying put, leaving it to others, those with presence of mind, the quick-witted, the capable, the brave. Those who are living at this moment, and in this place.
How long does it take him to recognise the middle vehicle, the one that slid into the one trying to miss Angus, the one that has rotated gently in the
middle of the road as though on a turntable in a showroom window, and is now pointing back to front? Not good at cars, Henry. All look the same to him. Even when they’re jeeps. But something rings a bell, number plate maybe, or alpaca cardigan visible from the rear window. Moira! Jesus Christ! Moira’s in the middle of all this! He is only a few yards away but in the time it takes him to get to where she is he has given up on her. What if she is cut? Henry cannot help a woman who has cut herself. What if she is badly hurt? What can Henry do for a woman who is badly hurt but feel her pain, howl for her, suffer in the same place she suffers. He is not a nurse, Henry. He is a man who understands the agony of women. He is their spiritual alter ego, which is not much use to them in a car crash. And because he cannot help them he can only give up on them. Their fault for not being immortal. Her fault for being just like other women in the end. Nausea, is it? Disgust? Ashamed of her for bringing the disgrace of death upon them both? Be all right, he says. Please be all right. But even if she is all right this time she can’t be all right for ever, can she? Not the way she drives. Postponement is the best he can hope for. Already he can see her as a ghost, fading, leaving him, gone.
In which case isn’t it time he was gone as well?
She is all right. Unhurt. Calm even. Certainly calmer than he is, or indeed than the other motorists, parked or otherwise, who want her details. The first thing anybody thinks of here if a match-stick lands upon their bonnet: is the car scratched, who threw the match, and what is the name of their insurance. Anything lying whimpering beneath their wheels can wait.
He runs to take her into his arms but somehow ends up in hers.
‘Are you all right?’
Who said that? It should be him speaking, but he is shocked to discover it is her.
He kisses her face. I’m all right because you are, that’s what he wants her to understand, whether or not the truth is that she has shown him the shadow of her destructibility and filled him with distaste.
Does he see a man getting quickly out of her passenger seat? Impossible to be sure. There seems to be a man, or to have been a man, dark, Greek-looking, Michael the footballer maybe. But he might have been a passenger in another car, might just as easily have been a passer-by, no more. Would have been mad of her, wouldn’t it, to be ferrying a lover up and down the very street where Henry is known to sit out and poison his mind with newspapers. Dare he ask her? Dare he ask her in this mêlée of short tempers and bruised metal, when all he should be concerned about is her safety, whether she is having an affair?
The disgrace of it all. The disgrace of his horror of disgrace, the disgrace of the impermanence of everything that comes contained in flesh. He feels himself giving up on her. Watches her recede into a coldness of his own making.
I don’t want this, he tells himself. I don’t welcome it. I will it to be gone. I abjure it.
What was it that touched him so deeply the other night? Have a heart, Henry. Have a heart.
Again he kisses her face, her neck, her ear – whatever’s warm.
‘Tell me that wasn’t Angus,’ she says.
He sets his mouth. ‘I can’t, Moira.’
‘Ah!’ she says. ‘Is Lachlan with him? How is he?’
‘I don’t know,’ Henry says. ‘I came straight to you.’
She shrugs him off her, irritated that he is standing here, stroking her hair, pulling valedictory faces. ‘For God’s sake, go and help him, Henry. Don’t worry about me. I’m all right.’
He does as he is told. Best this way. Wind Henry up and point him in the right direction.
Go and help whom, though – Lachlan or the dog? Please God let it be Lachlan, Henry prays, because he knows he will not be able to help a whimpering or wounded dog.
No need. Others have already moved Angus on to the pavement. Few spectacles are more interesting to people than that of car owners bickering about paintwork, but poor Angus also commands a little crowd, a semicircle staring down at him and shaking their heads, as though the funeral is over and there is nothing to do now but shovel dirt on him and be gone. Lachlan is on the kerb, a bag of old bones in his seven-piece suit, standing exactly where he was when he’d called Angus out into the traffic. He is opening and closing his fists in a gesture of impotence which Henry recognises at once, though he has never seen it before. Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life? – that sort of gesture. Only in this case the dog does not have life.
‘I’m good for nothing,’ he says, seeing Henry. ‘I’ve been good for nothing all my life. I’m not even fit to own a dog.’
True, Henry thinks. I cannot argue with a word of that. You’re a dog-murdering fucking moron. Except that this is not what Moira has sent him over to say. ‘For God’s sake, go and help him, Henry,’ were her instructions. So Henry does what it is not in his nature to do, and puts his arms around Lachlan, exactly as, a moment before, Moira enfolded him in hers. ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Henry says. ‘The car came from nowhere. You couldn’t have done other than you did. It was an accident. You mustn’t blame yourself. These things happen.’
And though the words sound hollow and without warmth to Henry, miracle of miracles they do not sound that way to Lachlan, who buries himself in Henry’s shoulder and lets the accumulated sorrows out of his chest at last, wave after wave of them, as though Henry is a medicine man and the patient’s grief the troop of evil spirits Henry has miraculously released.
He is wet, wet from the bone out, and smells of wretchedness and shock. All the more reason, Henry thinks, that I must hold on to him. Don’t ask him why, but Henry does something quite unexpected, for him, and very strange. He kisses the top of Lachlan’s head, where the hair is thinnest, and breathes him in. God breathed the breath of life into Adam’s dust-dry nostrils, Henry thinks, and now I know how Adam must have felt.
Light-headed. And not a little amazed.
And then because he knows Moira would expect no less of him – would want no less of him, put it that way, would hope that he could find such resolution in himself – he bends to scoop up Angus, that thing of piss and shit and undiscriminating love, and carries him half the length of the High Street back to Lachlan’s apartment. Henry’s first corpse. Done it. Done it at last. Not heavy as he’d expected. Not the cold dead weight he’d always feared. So warm and soft, in fact, that for a moment he believes the dog is not dead at all, that he can feel the bruised heart trying to beat again. But it is only Henry’s own pulse, quickening the dog’s pelt.
He is dignified in death, Angus. No lolling tongue. No foul exudations or protruding kishkes of the sort Henry knows will signal his own demise. Quiet he lies, rather youthful-looking, his scarf tied raffishly at his broken neck – for no one has thought to loosen it – his ears flat like sealed envelopes, his open eyes signalling neither anger nor regret. Not even resignation. Just the uncritical cessation of sight.
Back in Lachlan’s apartment, Henry rather reluctant to put him down, they lie him on his tartan rug, tuck it around him, then drink to his memory.
‘To Angus,’ Henry says.
‘The best friend a man ever had,’ Lachlan says, closing the curtains. ‘The best I ever did, anyway. I can’t imagine my life without him.’
Henry muses, looking at the space on Lachlan’s wall where the signed photograph of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Samoan sepulchre once hung. How much did Lachlan get for it, he wonders.
‘I know what you mean,’ he says.
He has to sit down to rest his back. It hurts, carrying a dead dog a quarter of a mile, however light the creature makes itself, evacuated of blood and breath and memory and hope.
Lachlan’s phone rings. It is Moira for Henry, but wanting first to speak to Lachlan. So sorry, so terribly, terribly sorry. Poor Angus. Poor you, Lachlan. Not such a good medicine man, Henry, for Lachlan still, it seems, has grief he must expel. Henry puts his head between his knees and tries not to listen. Let the poor bastard weep and weep and weep if he must. But whether he wishes to or not he hears
Lachlan commend his consideration – his, Henry’s, Henry the hitherto uncommendable. ‘Yes, carried him all the way. And all the way up the stairs. No, he remembered Angus never liked the lift. But then I always suspected he was fonder of Angus than he made out.’
Was I, Henry wonders. Could they in honesty write that on my stone? – FONDER THAN HE MADE OUT.
When it’s his turn on the phone he finds that he too has upset to express. Tears creak behind his cheeks. Must be something in Moira’s voice. ‘Ah, dear!’ he says, gaining control. ‘I’ve been going through hell worrying about you.’
Has he? Well, he has if he says he has.
‘Shush,’ she tells him.
‘Ah, dear!’ he says again.
‘Look,’ she says, ‘I’m going to be a little while longer exchanging addresses with these idiots. The police are here as well. It’s ridiculous, it’s not as though anyone’s hurt, or anyone’s to blame. Except, I suppose, poor Angus. And they won’t be charging him. So I’ll be home when I’m home. It shouldn’t be too long.’
Home? She has never called it home before.
‘I’ll come out and help you.’
‘No, don’t. You stay with Lachlan. Be nice to him.’
‘I have.’
‘I know.’
‘I really have.’
‘I know, I know. Don’t stop.’
‘I miss you,’ he says. Not his usual locution. Not a notion he is accustomed to trusting himself with – missing. Start telling people you’ll miss them and it’s like inviting the earth to crack open its foundations around you. Of course you’ll miss them, that’s what they’re for, for you to miss through eternity.
The Making of Henry Page 34
