Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

Henry thinks about sitting at the back, but on a sign from Lachlan shuffles in next to him. ‘Fan out,’ Lachlan whispers. So Henry tiptoes to the other side of the chapel, a teak vault resembling the inside of a coffin itself, and tries to look like more than one person.

‘Norma Jean Louis Stevenson,’ the officiant begins, ‘was one of those women. .’

Henry’s mind wanders off. Norma Jean. . who’d have thought it? Did she change her name in accordance with her show-business ambitions, or was she always Norma Jean, in which case what did she think of the other one? The officiant reads from Shakespeare. Fear no more the heat o’ the sun . Then puts on a record of the ‘Warsaw Concerto’. This is not what Henry wants for himself, to go up in smoke to his favourite tunes. Henry wants a man of God to see him off, commending his soul on its final journey, never mind whether it’s the hosts of heaven that await him or all the devils of hell. At least make it a journey of dread solemnity — for what else is it, this howling passage from animal to some other form of being we can only guess at, what else, Henry wants to know, if not a passage of the utmost terror and, if we’re lucky, if we make it so, if we insist on it, of grandeur?

Disturbed from these anticipations of his own passing by a pssst from Lachlan, Henry realises that ‘We all went up up up up up the mou-ow-ow-ow-ountain’ is playing and that the conveyor belt is on the move. He begins to clap. Lachlan, too, is putting his hands together. Henry wonders if he oughtn’t to toss in a ‘bravo!’ Shouldn’t someone have brought a bouquet to throw in after the old girl, a final tribute from the orchestra stalls? As the coffin arcs horizontally into the fires — Henry hears their roar whether or not they’re lit yet — the curtains begin to follow it, closing with a juddery computerised hiss which Henry recognises. This is the sound his St John’s Wood drapes make when he presses his keypad. Maybe the old lady had the same. Home from home for her then, this. The coffin has not vanished yet, nor has the final chorus of the song, when Henry’s ears prick, surely, to more clapping than there was before. A third person has arrived, adding weight to the applause, though Lachlan said there would be no third person. Henry does not look round. He owes it to the deceased to see her turn the corner in her entirety. Sentimental about women, Henry. He has always liked to wave them off. But when it is all over and he can look about him, he sees a woman with the lopsided look he admires, wearing the sort of clothes he goes for too, mourning black with a shorter skirt than is appropriate, slit discreetly, and high merry-widow heels, patent, with scalloped backs.

It tells you something about Henry that he should have taken in every detail of the woman’s wardrobe and coiffure — grasshopper brooch on her jacket, demure pearl earrings, inappropriate furry handbag, yak or some such, hair groomed to fall over one shoulder in the manner of Veronica Lake (that dates him), though not quite long enough to be vampish — before processing the much more salient information which is that he knows her. Don’t ask him how, don’t ask him why, but there, standing very close to Lachlan, close enough to be his intimate, and still absently clapping her bejewelled hands to the memory of the music-hall tune, is the waitress from his patisserie. The one who only a day or two ago owed him three pounds, and now must owe him about three hundred. The one he has been beginning to think about romantically. But who it seems is now, or perhaps always was, associated in some significant way with Lachlan.

Here we go again, Henry thinks. He has been had like this before.

‘Hovis’ Belkin. Osmond ‘Hovis’ Belkin, his best friend from school, did him identically half a lifetime ago, also, as chance would have it — if there is such a thing as chance — with a waitress. Is the lesson for Henry that he should stay away from waitresses? Or that he should stay away from friends?

They stay away from him, whatever he decides. Or rather, because Henry wishes to be precise about this, and to avoid self-pity, they inhabit space which doesn’t have him in it.

Is that barbed wire that surrounds Lachlan and the waitress? Why not hang a sign — PISS OFF, HENRY!

Something that has tormented Henry all his life, something he felt at school, at university, still feels today when he goes to a party, a conference, a concert, the theatre even: how well acquainted everybody but Henry is with everybody else. Leave aside coincidences of sympathy or interest, where do they actually meet , at what Henry-free time and in what Henry-free dimension do they make contact, dock, establish intimacy, and agree, without so much as mentioning Henry’s name, to exclude him? Let Henry be the first person in a room, it will transpire as soon as the room fills that every single person there except Henry is on close terms with every other. Does it happen when he goes to get himself a drink? Does it happen when he blinks? Or, as seems much more likely, was it all laid down long ago in anterior time? Was there another world before this one, a sort of metaphysical prep school, a preliminary universe, to which someone forgot to send Henry?

It would explain, anyway, much of Henry’s strange behaviour towards his friends. I know, he must have thought, aspiring to those intimacies which were such a mystery and such an agony to him — I know, I know how to insinuate myself into their charmed circle and show that I am essentially the same as they are, no less approachable, no less amenable to intimacy, every bit as nice — I’ll fuck their wives.

Not that he fucked anyone attached to ‘Hovis’ Belkin. In so far as there was any fucking between ‘Hovis’ and Henry, it was ‘Hovis’ who fucked him.

Unwelcome, this memory. Highly unwelcome. Besides which, Henry hasn’t got time to think about the past now, least of all his Belkin-tarnished past. He puts him away, puts him back where he’s been hiding him since they were students together thirty years ago and more. Henry’s excruciation-span is shrinking and he has reached the age where he can take his humiliations only one at a time.

‘Well then,’ he says to Lachlan, as they’re being harried out of the chapel of rest to make room for the next lot of griefless grievers, ‘you happy with the service?’

Lachlan wipes his moustache on the back of his hand. ‘So-so,’ he says. ‘But then anything’s more than she deserved. She wouldn’t have done it for me. She told me so. She said, “If you go first, Lachie, don’t be expecting me to organise you a wake. You’ll have to get yourself to the cemetery.”’

Henry can’t think of anything to say to this, unless it’s along the lines of she must have loved you really, Lachie. And Henry finds it altogether too easy to believe she didn’t.

‘Anyway,’ Lachlan goes on, rubbing something from his moustache between his hands, and stamping his feet as though it’s cold in the sun, ‘that’s my duty done.’

And mine, Henry thinks.

And the European waitress’s.

He is waiting for Lachlan to say something, perhaps to effect an introduction. Or for the waitress to fill in a few of the blanks

— I’m an old friend of the family. . Lachlan and I go way back. . I just couldn’t help myself. . He turns my insides to jelly . . He knows he only has to ask, he knows he only has to snap his fingers and I’ll come running. . Not that she owes Henry an explanation, Henry accepts that. It isn’t as though they are affianced or anything. It isn’t as though he has even asked her out. He doesn’t know her name, for God’s sake. Nonetheless, it was his sense that they had been agitating each other’s electric fields, that there were a thousand tiny crackling unspoken anticipations between them, and that she has therefore misled him. Not breach of promise exactly, more breach of expectation, more a violation of velleity.