Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

The big question for Henry: did she make him afraid of life, or did he make her?

And then, with a sort of blithe impertinence, as when the sky suddenly clears after a wild storm — bad weather? what bad weather? — she would irradiate him with happiness again, dancing him on her knee, serenading him with songs popular on the radio. He adored her singing. ‘Whistle While You Work’ especially, with the inexpert whistling thrown in — more humming through the lips than whistling — while she busied herself at the stove, boiling cans of food for him. She had no cooking skills. No Stern Girl cooked. They just boiled cans. Beans. Macaroni. Stews. Vegetables. Soups. If a chicken dinner had come in a can they’d have boiled that. And without ever emptying the can into a pan, for that too would have been esteemed cooking, a concession to the men who were never there. It was the one domestic skill the Stern women passed down the line — dropping cans into boiling water and then forgetting about them until the water boiled away and the kitchen filled with the smell of roasting metal. Eventually the cans exploded — that was how you knew the meal was ready. Sometimes, when his father came home late asking for his tea, Ekaterina would point to the kitchen ceiling. ‘It’s there,’ she’d say.

Then Henry’s father would go out into the garden, fill his mouth with paraffin, and burn down more trees.

I have pyromaniacal parents, Henry thought later. They lay waste to everything. But what he still can’t decide is whether they had laid waste to him as well, or whether he had done that to himself.

‘Whistle While You Work’ wasn’t her only song. She also did ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’ and ‘Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life’, and on mercifully migraine-free days, when she wore a turban to keep the odour of molten aluminium out of her hair, ‘The Desert Song’, performed in the mode of Myrna Loy but with the voice of Jeanette MacDonald. Henry loved nothing more than this, especially when he was feverish and bedridden, watching the patterns on the wallpaper throb and mouth at him — the house alive with the sound of his mother, the cans dry-rattling in their pans, and the whole world safe. Ask Henry, between the age of three and thirteen, what heaven is and he will tell you heaven is his mother at home, singing, burning his dinner.

‘How lovely you are,’ she would lullaby him in the afternoon, as the Pennine-frilled northern darkness closed in on them, tapping out the tune on his knees, matching the words to the ethereal second movement of Schubert’s heaven-sent Fifth Symphony, a piece of music they had listened to together on the Third Programme — Henry’s first piece of real music — and which they had made their most favourite piece of music of all time.

‘How lovely you are, how lovely-ey-ey you are, how lovely you are, how how how lovely you are.’ Set any Schubert loose on Henry now and he will not be responsible for his tears. But he knows that if by accident he gets to hear Schubert’s Fifth Symphony, he will not survive it.

You can have too much feeling.

Henry explains many of the strange things he has done in his life this way: he has safeguarded himself against too much feeling. Of course, you can have too little feeling, also. But Henry is not aware he has ever safeguarded himself against that. You can only battle with the nature you have, and Henry’s is pap.

Something Henry remembers, from long after the Schubert days when nobody was lovelier than he was: his mother ringing him in his university digs at an odd hour of the night, her voice high and dangerous, to say she would like him to sit down and compose himself (if there is anywhere to sit down and be composed by the communal phone), because she has matter of grave and strange importance to impart, no, no one has died, not exactly, but she has caught his father out, actually seen him with her own eyes — with my own eyes , Henry! — going into the Midland Hotel in the company of a woman. ‘In broad daylight, that’s what I can’t forgive, the stupidity of the man. At least he owes it to me not to be seen, not to be caught, especially by me !’

Henry is surprised to hear himself laughing. ‘Mother, what were you doing outside the Midland Hotel?’

‘What bearing does that have on the matter?’

‘It just makes it the more farcical.’

‘I don’t know what it is that strikes you as funny. You think this is a farce I’m describing? Well, you’re right in one regard. Our marriage is a farce.’

‘I didn’t mean that. I meant that the coincidence of your both being at the Midland Hotel at the same time is comical. Synchronicity is always ludicrous. Did he see you?’

‘Henry, I haven’t rung so that you can lecture me on the nature of farce. And no, he didn’t see me. But I saw him. So what am I supposed to do now?’

‘Nothing. He might only have been going in for afternoon tea.’

‘It was the morning, and your father doesn’t have afternoon tea.’

‘Then maybe he was going along to discuss a party, checking one of the reception rooms out or something. Are you sure he wasn’t there to do a party?’

‘Certain. He didn’t have his tricks or his torches with him. Nor was it the right time of day. Who throws a children’s party at the Midland at eleven on a Monday morning? What is more he was wearing his suit. He never does parties in a suit. For parties, as you know, my husband — may God forgive me for ever choosing such a clown of a man — wears a top hat and a red nose. For seeing other women he wears a suit. And I’ll tell you something else, Henry — he was wearing odd socks !’

‘How could you tell that?’

‘I was six inches behind him. I could have trodden on his heels. One red, one black.’

‘There you are, then. That proves he wasn’t on an assignation. When a man goes to a hotel with another woman he checks his socks.’

‘Not your father. He wore odd socks the first time he took me to a hotel. That’s when he gets forgetful — when he’s excited.’

Henry hears himself laughing again. (Safeguarding himself against too much feeling, is he?) ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘I just can’t treat this with the sort of seriousness you think it merits.’

‘You think I’m making it up.’

‘No. But I think you should be playing it down. What if you’re right — how much does it matter? It’s just a morning off.’

‘Henry, you don’t take mornings off marriages. But then you’re a man — what would you understand.’ For a moment Henry thinks she is going to hang up on him, then: ‘Anyway,’ she continues, ‘it’s worse than I’ve told you.’

‘He hasn’t run off?’

‘Of course he hasn’t run off. Your father doesn’t run off. He knows too well which side his bread’s buttered. He was back here at three the same day, back before I was, asleep on the sofa.’

‘Still in his odd socks?’

‘Yes, but not on the same feet.’

‘Back, though.’

‘Oh yes, back and snoring. With that guileless expression on his face. As though he’s dreaming of steam engines.’

‘Well then. .’

‘Well then what? Henry, I saw him going into the hotel and I saw the woman he was with.’

Sometimes, however urgent the matter, the rhythm of a conversation can make you flippant. ‘Anyone you know?’ Henry no sooner asks than he wishes he hadn’t.

‘Of course it’s someone I know.’

‘Ah,’ Henry says. The best friend syndrome, of course. His father would be capable of that. Keeping it in the circle of acquaintance. Kith and kin. Mentally, Henry goes through the possibles. His mother’s schoolfriends, the dim girls she tutors privately in G.C.E. English, her hairdresser, the cleaning lady, his mother’s cousins, his mother’s aunties. . no, not those, not his father, it is only Henry with whom no member of the family is safe. ‘So who?’ he asks.