Howard Jacobson: The Making of Henry

Not that Henry wants much more from the inside than he expects from the out. He doesn’t riot in the sunken bath, or go to sleep with the chandeliers ablaze. Mainly he potters about in a kimono (an affectation), makes tea in a samovar (another affectation — but then it’s all affectation in the twenty-first century, doing anything that isn’t slobbing about in running shoes with writing on them is affectation) and searches for peace in his heart. He likes it that he can see London from any of his windows, Regent’s Park, the Zoo, the Mosque, Lord’s Cricket Ground, the towers of the City. Better than the hills, all that. It means that life is out there if you want it, which Henry doesn’t, but he is grateful for being given the choice. You need life to be out there if you are going to find peace in your heart.

‘My husband reckons they’ll bomb the City first,’ his cleaning lady has observed, leaving it as read that Henry’s apartment will be a good place to watch it burn from. Henry even wonders if she’s fishing for an invitation to come round with her husband when it happens. But this isn’t the peace in your heart Henry is talking about. Henry is thinking about himself. He would just like to feel right, for once, vis-à-vis the rest of the world.

The other thing Henry wishes to stay in and do is take his father to task. Who am I? Who are you? Do you love me? Am I a disappointment to you? Don’t you want to know whether you’re a disappointment to me? Did you never care? Did you never feel bad? Do you ever feel bad now? About me? About Mum? About yourself?

All that.

Isn’t Henry a bit old for this routine? At his age, shouldn’t Henry be watching daytime television, or playing canasta with fellow irascibles, or doddering to the park with his grandchildren?

Probably yes. Probably very unhealthy doing what he’s doing. The trouble is, Henry has no children to give him grandchildren. And no friends disposed to lend him theirs. Henry has dishonoured his friendships, whether by disparaging his friends’ achievements, or by turning away from their society, or by borrowing their wives, and you know what friends are like when you start that.

So he has no one to play canasta with him either.

In fact, ‘borrowing their wives’ is at once rather too cute and rather too buccaneering a description of what Henry actually did, which was more in the nature of running himself down, looking soulful, and confessing to feelings of long-standing devotion which in truth he hadn’t known he’d felt until the moment of expressing them. Out of pity for which, or simply out of curiosity, yes, they on occasions borrowed him. Borrowed him, fucked him, and put him back. But as a man with reason to doubt his own ability to be at the active end of any verb, Henry glamorises the little devilishness of which, in his younger days, he was capable.

Either way, whoever borrowed whom, he still has no one to play canasta with him.

And, come to that, no father. Not living. But he had one once. Everyone who doesn’t have a father now must have had a father or heard tell of a father once. You can’t manage without the idea of a father. The idea of a father, especially the idea of rejecting a father, powers the modern world. And you can’t reject what you haven’t had.

For his part, Henry is just learning to talk to his.

Nothing fanciful. No ‘my father, methinks I see my father’, no crossing over, no table rapping. Elbows on the dark green banker’s desk which came with the apartment, chin in the chalice he makes for it with his too-tight hands, Henry silently delivers himself of his vexations while his father, dead for a decade, listens. It’s because he knows his father is only partially understanding — both in the sense of slow to comprehend and reluctant to sympathise — that Henry values his attention. He doesn’t want to be humoured. When they start humouring you it means you are headed for an early grave. Go on arguing and you might just live for ever.

That’s Henry’s father’s job — to see things differently and keep his son alive.

Always was . (Henry’s father, arguing the toss already.) Not something I was ever given credit for, but that always was my job. Who else was going to save the boy from drowning?

Drowning in what, Dad?

As though you don’t know. Drowning in women, drowning in books, drowning in sick notes, drowning in your own terrors. .

As for why Henry wants to live for ever when he’s got no friends, got no one to love, and thinks life’s a madhouse — you might well wonder. But it’s in the nature of the machine not to want ever to be turned off. Ask the ninety-four-year-old woman in the apartment next to his. Just don’t expect a reply.

She has one mourner. Henry no sooner leaves his apartment than he walks into him in the corridor, standing, as though he’s just been sent out of class, with his hat covering his genitals. Showing respect for the dead while the people who do what needs doing to a body do it. He is also, it seems to Henry, surveying the condition of the paintwork.

Henry nods. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he says. Trips off the tongue now. Someone dead? So sorry. Used to be Henry’s father always saying sorry to the bereaved. Now the responsibility has passed to Henry. Good morning, so sorry. .

The mourner is about Henry’s age, of an appearance which once — when older men were in vogue — would have been described as ‘dapper’. Fallen dapper. Gingery moustache, bounder’s eyebrows, jutting jaw, fag-stained teeth, bloodhound cheek pouches, apoplectic colouring. ‘Rotten luck,’ he makes Henry want to say.

‘Been expecting it some time,’ the mourner tells him.

‘Sorry, I didn’t realise,’ Henry says. ‘I knew she was elderly but I was under the impression she was hale.’

‘Hale enough to go on for another ninety years. But that doesn’t stop you expecting, does it?’

‘No, I don’t suppose it does,’ says Henry. Then, because more appears to be expected of him, he adds, ‘You the only child?’

‘Me? No fear. Just the stepson. My father’s folly, that one.’

Henry mishears. ‘Filly?’

‘Filly, folly, same difference. Could never see a woman, my old dad, without doing something stupid.’

Henry notices that the mourner has a way of letting his words die in his chest, as though everything is a damn cheek but there’s nothing to be done about it. Though whether that’s integral to the man or just a consequence of his bereavement, or a hurried breakfast, Henry has no idea. ‘My condolences anyway,’ Henry says, trying to hurry on.

The mourner offers his right hand, leaving the left holding the hat with which he covers his respectful genitals. ‘Lachlan,’ he says, spitting. ‘Lachlan Louis Stevenson.’

Tricky name to get your teeth round, but Henry thinks a man of Lachlan Louis Stevenson’s age should be able to speak his own name by now without spitting. But then you’d think Henry himself would have been spat at enough times in a long life not to be obsessed with the particle of food which has just landed on his sleeve. Hard, though, for Henry — always has been — to concentrate on anything a person who has just put food on his sleeve is saying. He stares, mesmerised, at it — the speck, the smut, the atom. Bad manners, but he has no choice. For the very reason that he shouldn’t be looking, look is all he can do.

Lachlan Louis Stevenson is telling him something about becoming a neighbour, about his plans to move directly into the old girl’s place, once she’s been removed. It’s his by right, apparently. Always has been.

‘I’m sorry, what did you say?’

‘Was left to me originally, but you have to wait your turn. Couldn’t exactly turf her out.’