Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

‘You think that’s horrible,’ Lachlan goes on. ‘I’ll tell you something more horrible. She didn’t even want to be burned. Hated the idea. Always fancied a quiet corner of the Actors’ Church in Covent Garden, or failing that Berkshire.’

Moira puts one hand to her mouth, stifling another little European cry. Henry catches her eye in the driving mirror. You’ve taken up with an animal, Henry’s eye says. Happy now?

To Lachlan he says, just to be clear, ‘I didn’t know you could cremate a person who didn’t want to be cremated.’

‘If you’re the only kin you can do what you like,’ Lachlan tells him. ‘Unless there’s something written to the contrary. And she was too busy spending my money to put pen to paper. Assumed I’d carry out her wishes. A big mistake, in that case, to tell me she had no intention of carrying out mine.’

‘Then you have your revenge.’

Lachlan is still looking out of the window, following the plume of smoke. ‘I’ll never have my revenge,’ he says.

The windows mist over with Lachlan’s bile. It’s like having a ham Malvolio in the car, Henry thinks. It’s not the old woman who should be lying in the Actors’ Church, Covent Garden, it’s Lachlan.

Moira drives for a while in silence, her face pushed forward squintily as though she is negotiating fog. If it looks like fog to her out there, Henry thinks, then why isn’t she driving more slowly. Henry hates speed. He is frightened of it. Alarmed by everything, Henry is particularly alarmed by motor cars, wheels, motorways, accelerator pedals, brakes that don’t work. This is why he has never owned a car himself. ‘You a faggot?’ a colleague’s wife once asked him, back in his University of the Pennine Way days. It was her theory that only faggots didn’t drive. Well, make that only faggots and Henry. All else aside, Henry’s ideal ride would be in a battery-powered bath chair driven by Lachlan’s stepmother, alive or dead. Crawling pace is fast enough for Henry. What’s the hurry? Where’s everybody rushing?

Crash me, Moira, is something else entirely. Crash me, crash me, Moira, while both our imaginations are concentrated on your thighs, is purely mental play, as abstract as a death wish, and has no bearing on his hatred of being thrown around in a tin-and-glass bubble travelling at the speed of light.

‘Are you all right?’ Moira asks him. She can feel him burning up behind her.

‘I’m fine,’ he says. ‘I get a little car sick, that’s all.’

‘You should have travelled in the front.’

He searches for her in the mirror. ‘I prefer it here,’ he says. He wants to lock her gaze into his, on the other hand he doesn’t want her taking her eyes off the road. ‘Anyway, Lachlan’s the one that needs looking after. He’s had the harrowing day.’

‘Oh, you needn’t have worried about me,’ Lachlan says. ‘I’d have been happy in the boot. The open road holds no terrors for me.’

‘Nor for me,’ Henry lies.

Lachlan turns round to examine him. ‘Then why are you holding on to the back of the seat, old man?’

‘Would you like to take over the driving?’ Moira asks him.

‘No, no, I’m fine, honestly,’ Henry assures her. He isn’t going to tell her he doesn’t drive. Enough that she now knows he’s terrified. He doesn’t need her to think he’s a faggot as well.

‘You’re a keen driver yourself, then?’ he asks Lachlan, getting the subject off himself.

‘Was. Used to love it in the old helmet-and-goggle days. Even did a bit of rallying in my time. Now it’s just up and down, up and down.’

‘From where to where?’ Moira asks. Funny, Henry thinks, that she doesn’t already know. Unless she’s feigning ignorance. But then why would she do that?

‘To hell and back,’ Lachlan says.

‘Doing what?’ Henry asks. Funny that he too doesn’t know and hasn’t bothered to find out. Has Henry reached that age where he assumes everybody is like him, no longer with a place of work? Or does Lachlan simply give off the air of being too well connected to need regular employment, outside of flogging the family heirlooms.

‘Hogwash.’

‘Are you answering my question,’ Henry asks, ‘or telling me what you think of it?’

‘That’s what I’m in.’

‘You make hogwash?’

‘Don’t make it, sell it. To farmers. That and other animal feeds.’

‘So you drive a big truck?’ Moira wonders.

‘No fear. I don’t deliver the actual feed. Never seen the stuff, wouldn’t know it if I walked into a trough of it. I sell them the chemicals. And I’ve never seen those either. They buy out of a catalogue.’

‘Like mail order,’ Moira says.

‘You’ve hit the nail on the head there. Soon will be mail order. Then that’s me finished. Last of a dying breed. Ask yourself how many animal-feed salesmen you know.’

The car falls quiet while they think about it. Then Henry says, ‘I don’t know why but I’d have picked you for an antiques man myself.’

‘Huh!’ Lachlan says angrily. ‘Shows, does it? Not surprised. I always did love beautiful things, but you don’t always get the chance to live by what you love, do you?’

‘You can say that again,’ Henry says.

‘You have to make do,’ Lachlan says, chop-fallen, ‘with the cards you’re dealt. Antiques are my passion, I suppose because I was brought up with them, pigswill’s my penance.’

‘Penance for doing what?’

‘Ah, that’s another story. For being born, I suppose.’

The car falls silent again.

No, they’re not close. Henry’s impression, studying Moira in the mirror, is that they aren’t a pair, not even a potential pair, else she would surely feel herself to be implicated in this last remark, shut out and made desolate by it, at the very least challenged by it into promising to make Lachlan’s miserable penitential life better from this moment on. Granted, she’s going too fast and changing too many lanes to kiss him, but a squeeze of his hand wouldn’t be out of the question, or one of her slithery sideways glances. But Henry discerns nothing, hears not a heartbeat, sees not a flicker. They’re not a pair, unless she’s cleverer, unless they’re both cleverer, than he takes them to be.

It’s only when Moira drops them at their apartment block — for it’s Lachlan’s apartment block too, now — that Henry notices he’s been in a BMW. Henry knows nothing about cars, and what he does know he wishes he didn’t, but BMWs he recognises because that’s all anyone drives around here. Anyone except a waitress, that is. A dented silver Datsun, such as you get when you call a minicab, one of those pitted vehicles that look as though they’ve driven through an ambush in the Balkans, that’s what he thought he’d been in. What he can’t decide is whether he’d have been more frightened had he known he’d been in a BMW.

There are two other things he can’t decide. Whether Moira and Lachlan are a pair after all, so much not a pair do they seem determined to appear — barely a thank-you from Lachlan, who’s a hand-kisser, surely, who you’d expect to slobber over any woman’s hand given half a chance, let alone one who’s sacrificed her day to the cremation of his stepmother. So how come not?

And what’s the other thing he can’t decide? Oh, yes. Whether the waitress could have bought the BMW out of the tips he’s been leaving her.

‘Hovis’ Belkin! Christ!

Henry isn’t left immediately to his own devices. First he has to decline Lachlan’s offer of a dry sherry in the old lady’s apartment. ‘Hair of the dog?’ Lachlan suggests while they’re waiting for the lift, which strikes Henry as meaningless since they haven’t had a drop yet, unless setting fire to somebody in the sticks whose express wish was to be buried whole in Covent Garden can be considered an intoxicant. Not to Henry, though. Henry is stone cold sober. And wants to lie on his bed with a cold compress pressed to his forehead — you can be sober and still have throbbing temples — and think about the waitress. Moira, yes he knows her name, but he still prefers the anonymity of waitress. Altogether, he wishes he hadn’t encountered her in Lachlan’s company today, whichever way one reads it. Nothing personal, but he could have done without the contamination of another party. He liked having her to himself. He was enjoying the evolution of the romance at his pace. Over tea and tips. He isn’t ready yet to know her name.