Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

‘So how come. .?’ he turns to ask her, making a gesture with his hands which takes in everything, the whole situation, life, death, him, her, Lachlan’s stepmother, Lachlan. Unsophisticated, he accepts, like asking someone at a party how he knows the host. But he’s past prolonging agonies. What he needs to know, he needs to know at once.

She has a way of darting her eyes sideways from under her hair, which both repels and attracts him. Looking about her, checking to see whether it’s safe to come out, like some frightened creature of the forest. Except that she isn’t frightened. I’ll never get a straight answer from this woman, Henry thinks. She’ll alway be trying to work out what I want to hear. Which is what repels him. What attracts him is more or less the same. With the added attraction that he is repelled by it.

‘I came to show my respects,’ she says at last, giving her hair a sideways toss, ‘and as a favour to Lachlan — the same as you did.’

To Lachlan. A favour to Lachlan. And what’s my name, Henry wants to ask her. I’ve been tipping you for days, you owe me a small fortune, what’s my fucking name?

But at least — Henry clutching at straws — she didn’t call him Lachie!

He steals a look at him to see if he can make out the lineaments of triumph, but Lachlan is preoccupied with his digestive system, rapping at his chest as though he has an urgent message to deliver to himself, and rolling silent ripples of wind up from his belly. You’re welcome to him, Henry thinks, while at the same time refusing to believe she’d want him. She couldn’t. Surely she couldn’t. Henry’s old problem — he esteems himself lower than a snake, but esteems every other man lower still.

A family of mourners, celebrants of the mysteries, attend a coffin on its august passage from the illusory world of the living to the dread solemnity of the dead. Two or three of the younger ones are wearing discoloured trainers. Already a dyspeptic red, Lachlan’s face contorts with disgust. ‘Common as muck,’ he mutters into his chest.

For the first time Henry, though he is in formal black from head to foot himself, sees the virtue of trainers.

A feeling of completion, akin to embarrassment, descends upon their little party. Henry knows he should go and leave them to it. He looks at his watch. From under her hair, the waitress slithers her eyes at him. ‘Do you have a car here?’ she asks.

‘No, I came by taxi. Presumably you’ll go back in the hearse,’ he says, looking at Lachlan.

Whether because of the trainers, or because he can’t forget that his stepmother had told him he would have to bury himself, Lachlan is still livid. ‘No fear,’ he says. ‘They bring you here, but they don’t take you back.’

‘Well, I suppose that’s appropriate,’ Henry says.

‘What?’

Henry shrugs. ‘So shall I call for a taxi for all of us?’ he wonders.

‘I’ve got my car here,’ the waitress says.

Though he still believes he should call a taxi for himself, Henry doesn’t. He wants to go through the awkwardness of seeing who’ll sit in the front seat next to her. He also wants to know whether she is one of those women who hitch their skirts up when they drive. He loves that action — the infinitesimal raising of the behind, like a deer at a waterhole, and then the dextrous tug on either side of the skirt, a gesture reminiscent of the tea table to Henry, of tablecloths being changed and smoothed, of doilies being laid, of little fingers extended to lift bone-china teacups. And is she a woman who will be content for however much thigh shows to go on showing, or will she, at traffic lights and roundabouts, be worrying her skirt back down again? Hair-raising, being driven by a woman who is conscious of her skirts. For his part, Henry can’t get enough of it. Being driven by a woman full stop, but also being driven by a woman who is thinking more about her body than the road. Crash me, Henry thinks. Crash me at the moment that we are both concentrating on your thighs. And what about her high heels? Is she a woman who drives in high heels, who loves the recklessness of spiking the pedals, or will she keep flatties in her car? A stiletto and a flattie man, Henry goes both ways on this. It all depends on how the feet move. It all depends on whether they retain the memory and the promise of spikes.

Nothing in his life has interested Henry more than this. Woman. Never mind the phenomenology or metaphysics of woman, just woman. Just the aesthetic of her. Just the prospect . God and all His host could clear the sky and descend from it this very moment, could land in golden parachutes on the memorial lawn of this north London crematorium, could call his name — Henry! Henry! — could offer him that immunity from mortality he craves, yet still Henry would not be able to draw his mind away from the picture that is forming of the waitress hitching up her skirt and depressing the pedals of her car — either with her heels or in flatties, Henry doesn’t care which. And what would immortality be worth, anyway, if he couldn’t devote the better part of it to attending, intellectually, to such stimuli?

This isn’t desire. Henry isn’t even sure it has an erotic component, though it would have had, once upon a time. Now it’s more what Henry would call pictorial curiosity.

The best reason Henry can think of not to die — that he will miss the female ceremonial.

And this they called hiding from the world!

So what’s his motive for refusing the passenger seat when it’s offered him, and for giving it to Lachlan? Does he feel he is in the way enough, just being in the car at all? Does he want to grab a better look at them together? Or does he want to postpone the pleasure of seeing her at the controls of her car at close quarters, savouring the question marks, saving it all up for a future time? Dangerous, Henry, doing that at your age. At your age you never put off until tomorrow what you can do today, given that today might very well be your last.

To be truthful, his deferring to Lachlan is neither altruism nor perversion. He means to catch the waitress’s eye, and hold it, in her driving mirror. As someone long schooled in the subtleties of third-person sex — doing the best by the fact of your exclusion — Henry knows what can be achieved in the back seat, through a driving mirror.

‘Moira,’ the waitress says, turning and extending her hand to Henry. Significant, Henry reckons, that she waits until they’re in the car, the doors are closed and he’s behind her.

‘Henry,’ he responds, laughing, leaning forward. Not sure he cares for Moira much as a name — not Habsburg enough for him, he was hoping for something more along the lines of Maria Theresa or Yolande or Margarita of Savoy — but he likes the texture of her hand, warm like a baby mouse in his. He can feel her heart beat through her fingers. He holds them a second longer than he should, squat fingers with red nails, damaged by waitressing, scuffed from scrambling up the egregious tips he leaves, the skin just beginning to come loose on the bone, not promiscuously elastic like a young person’s, leaping slavishly to meet every touch, but with some of the give, still, of youth. Always feeling for the life under the skin, Henry. As though dreading the day he won’t find it.

What he can’t tell is whether she’s taken her heels off.

‘We ready?’ she asks. It’s like a big adventure. Three Go Home Through Friern Barnet.

‘Not yet,’ Lachlan says, belting himself in. ‘Let me take one more gander at this place before we leave it. You see that smoke? Do you think that’s her?’

Moira gives a little European cry. It makes Henry’s heart jump. Straight out of Fledermaus. ‘That’s horrible,’ she says.