Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

‘Those,’ says his father, ‘are your footprints.’

Without appearing to change their expressions, the Arab boys look long and hard at Sammi’s footprints.

Henry orders more Russian tea. It’s a good sign, he reckons, that the waitress is not losing patience with him, hogging a table and her time when so many people want serving. The Israelis are just leaving. A Muslim family is waiting to take their place. When the Arab boys move on, a bunch of Jewish kids will sit down.

‘This is like the Middle East,’ Henry mutters to her as she takes his dirty cup away.

‘It’s quieter in the Middle East,’ she mutters back.

If she has an accent to match her appearance, Henry has yet to detect it. There is a slight labial flattening out of her ‘t’s which Henry finds attractive, like watching someone pretty slide on ice, otherwise there is nothing to say she is Austro-Hungarian. But what Henry knows, he knows.

Sensing a dog snuffling about his feet, Henry is about to kick out. Another crazy hoping to touch Henry into giving him money? Unusual to get them this far north, but there you are, the madhouse is on the move. What stops him is firstly the possibility that the dog belongs to one of the waitress’s children — the one living rough in Soho — and secondly the realisation that although the dog is indeed on a piece of string, it is not some beggar carrying his cardboard home around who is on the other end of it, but Lachlan Louis Stevenson.

‘Mind if I join you?’ He is carrying what looks like a pair of figurines — Philemon and Baucis or similar — loosely wrapped in kitchen paper towel. And a pair of brass fire tongs in a plastic bag.

Henry repeats his easy-come easy-go shrug.

‘Selling off the family heirlooms already?’ he asks, since Lachlan has the bad taste to lay them out on the table.

‘Readies, that’s all. You need readies when you’ve been waiting for what’s yours for half your life. Down, Angus! Angus, stop that!’

Henry feels under the table for what’s licking him. He finds a long velvet ear and then the wet spongy innards of Angus’s mouth, purple to the touch. It is like putting his hand into warm trifle.

‘Don’t know if you’re planning to move him in with you,’ Henry says, cantankerous as befits his years, ‘but there’s something you need to know about your stepmother’s block — it operates a no pets bigger than a goldfish policy.’

‘Not a pet,’ Lachlan says, swallowing air and banging his chest. ‘Sorry, indigestion. He’s a friend, this one — aren’t you, Angus? I don’t imagine they operate a no friend smaller than a wolfhound policy. And you’re not going to mind, are you?’

Unable to reply directly, unable to ask a mute for his change or to tell a man with a dog that dogs are definitely not to his taste, Henry steals another look at Angus. The dog rolls his liquid eyes upwards, as though they have never before alighted on anything so wonderful as Henry. Like me at seventeen, Henry thinks. In love with whatever crosses his field of vision. ‘Is he noisy?’ Henry asks.

‘Angus, are you noisy?’ Angus twitches a balaclava ear, then scratches himself. ‘There you are, not a peep.’

‘What is he?’

‘What is he! What does he look like? Red setter.’

‘Is that good?’

‘I’m not sure I understand your question.’

‘Is that a good breed. . a red setter?’

‘A good breed?’

‘I don’t know dogs,’ Henry has to explain. ‘I never had a dog. I’m just wondering if a red setter is a good one to have.’

‘Depends what you want him for. They’re excellent gun dogs, but I doubt’ — looking at Henry’s unweathered complexion — ‘that it would be a gun dog you’re after.’

‘Oh, I’m not after one,’ Henry says, wishing he’d never got into this. ‘I’m just’ — what is he? — ‘curious.’ Which he isn’t.

‘Well, I’ll tell you what,’ Lachlan says, leaning into Henry and inconsiderately bringing up the air he swallowed earlier, ‘you can “doubleyou ay ell kay” Angus any night you fancy, and get a feel for him.’

Henry is suddenly vouchsafed a vision of his future. I am to become a dog doubleyou ay ell kayer. I am to become an old codger who doubleyou ay ell kays dogs for another old codger who’s got ulcers.

‘Is he trained?’ he asks.

‘Of course he’s trained. That’s what he’s trained for — to wait for his walk. Oh Lord, that’s torn it. Now he’s heard walk he’s going to want one.’

And right on cue, Angus makes a little whining noise, stretches his shoulders and sniffs something on the wind being blown in from the Canaries. ‘See,’ Lachlan says, doing the same. ‘Come on then, boy. Off we go.’ He tucks the figurines under one arm and the brass fire tongs under the other. ‘Oh, by the way,’ he remembers, ‘you aren’t free to come along to the service, are you?’

‘The dog’s having a service?’

‘No, the old woman’s. Day after tomorrow. If you could, I’d appreciate it. No one else, you see. Just me. It would be nice if we could muster something a bit more like a congregation. You won’t have to do anything. Just clap.’

‘Clap?’

‘It’s what she wanted. No flowers. No memorials. Just applause. She worked the halls in her younger days. That’s her story anyway. “And we all went up up up up up the mou-ow-ow-ow-ountain” — remember that? — “then we all came dow-ow-ow-ow-own again.” That’s how she got my father, singing him that rubbish. She was past it by then but he couldn’t tell the difference. “The higher up the mountain, the greener is the grass. We met a silly billy goat who wouldn’t let us pass.” That was him — the billy goat. No fool like an old fool. Come on, Angus.’

‘And nobody’s clapped her since?’

‘Lord, no. So I promised I’d arrange it. When the coffin goes through the curtain, a brief hands-together. That’s all. No encore. I’ll pop a card with the time and place on it under your door. You can come in the hearse with me, if you like. Arrive in style.’

So who’ll clap me when the curtain closes, solipsistic Henry wonders. And for what?

Henry knows better, at last, than to go through the list of his achievements. But that’s only because he has progressed, in recent times, to counting his mourners. Same sum. Same total.

Does Henry feel, then, that his has been a disappointing life? No. Henry feels his has not been a life. If Henry had lived a life he would not be able to remember his childhood so vividly; too many other things would have intervened and misted his childhood over. But nothing has intervened. The people he thinks about and whose names he hasn’t misplaced are all from then . No one else has stuck. Who are they, the people of just the other day? What do they look like? What are they for? Go on, Henry says, impinge! But they won’t. The surface of his middle years, rapidly becoming his late years, has grown too slippery. Nothing adheres. There was his childhood — say from zero to twenty-one; all right, say from zero to thirty — then whoosh! (he teaches, he is borrowed by his friends’ wives, he resigns, he moves to St John’s Wood, he meets a dog) and suddenly it’s now.

This is something he would like to talk to his father about. His father managed to extend his childhood from zero to fifty-five, Uncle Izzi, illusionist, fire-eater and origamist, turning up at parties with a stack of newsprint and a travel bag of paraffin-smelling torches, more excited than the infants he was performing for, so that when he died he died, in Henry’s eyes, a child — ‘Jesus came down to gather flowers / And on the way he gathered ours’ — as cruel an instance of infant mortality as any Henry had read about in any Victorian novel. Yet the world mourned him as a man. Such a man! What a man! Some man, Henry, your father!