Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

‘She likes you,’ Osmond said to Henry, motioning at the girl who poured the tea, a willowy Sinhalese with long brown legs and eyes bigger than dates, at present pouring someone else’s, but definitely looking their way.

‘Shush!’ Henry said, ‘you’ll embarrass her.’

‘Embarrass you more like.’

‘All right, shush you’ll embarrass me.’ Making a virtue of his debility, Henry allowed the lovely Sinhalese girl to see the colour play beneath the thinness of his skin. ‘A woman appreciates it’ — Marghanita’s words — ‘when a man comes apart for her.’ So Henry came apart for her.

‘More hot water for my friend,’ Osmond called. ‘And a cold towel.’

The girl approached their table and bent in places Henry did not know were bendable, and smiled at him. Him, not Osmond. ‘Ceylon tea makes you hot,’ she said. ‘It cleans the pores.’ Cleans his pores, not Osmond’s.

‘It’s not the tea,’ Henry dared to say.

And now she lets him see the colours which swim beneath the fineness of her skin.

‘My friend would like to know. . ’ Osmond began.

‘His friend would not like to know anything,’ Henry interrupted, ‘which he cannot ask for by himself.’

‘So go on,’ Osmond urged him. Grinning. Smoking. Blowing grinning smoke rings.

‘So what’s your name?’

The girl took longer than was necessary to rearrange their tea things. ‘Yours first,’ she said.

‘Henry.’

‘OK, I’m Sandra.’

‘Shandra?’

‘No, Sandra.’

‘Sandra? You don’t look like a Sandra.’

‘Don’t I? Well, that’s my name. Sandra Weinglass.’

‘Sandra Weinglass? From Ceylon?’

She laughed. ‘Who said anything about Ceylon? I’m from Didsbury.’

‘Wej,’ Osmond whispered through his smoke. Back slang. Wej, Jew. Jew, Wej. Back slang and putdown. Because Osmond knows what Henry doesn’t. ‘She’s Wej, you shmuck.’

One Wej is meant to recognise another Wej. It’s in the genes. It’s to help in the mayhem after the Cossacks have been through. Let me assist you, Wej to Wej, because no one else will. And then at last the obligation becomes a pleasure. Hi, you’re Wej, I’m Wej. Let’s dance, let’s marry, let’s have Wej babies. That’s how it’s supposed to work. Unless you’re a shmuck. Unless you’re a girl. You girl, Henry. And now Henry is so much of a girl — because you’re not meant to confuse Didsbury with Colombo either — that, all Marghanita’s efforts notwithstanding, he is unable to proceed with his suit.

‘You’re blushing,’ Osmond observes, laughing. ‘You’ve gone all pink.’

Pink.

Why don’t you just stick pink ribbons in his hair and have done?

Henry does not grow up to be a freedom fighter. He lets prisoners of conscience languish in foreign jails. He doesn’t save the children, or the elephant, or the planet. But he is on the front line of the war against animadversions on another person’s blushes. The beginning and the end of Henry’s political system, his Social Contract: you don’t tell a person he’s gone pink, you don’t make a person go pinker than he already is, if you have an ounce of humanity in you, you look the other way, be glad it isn’t you, and shut your fucking mouth.

But that is not the end of it. Nothing is ever the end of it for Henry. A week later he turns up at a party at Osmond’s house and is let in by the waitress. Sandra. Not waitressing tonight, oh no, but hostessing, at home, a helpmeet, a familiar, and God knows what else to Osmond.

‘Hi, Henry.’

And Henry is so astounded, so confused, so put out, so utterly disarranged, that he never does find a way of asking whether Osmond had been back to ask her out, or had done it there and then, under Henry’s burning nose, or had known her all along, known her well, known her intimately, even while he was encouraging Henry to make a girl of himself at the Ceylon Tea House.

Henry hasn’t seen Osmond for thirty years, but if he were to pass him in the street today, on St John’s Wood High Street say, or strolling by the boating lake in Regent’s Park, Henry knows in the pit of his stomach that he would feel all the old inferiorities. Though Osmond Belkin has lived in Los Angeles for the whole time Henry hasn’t seen him, on Mulholland Drive itself for all Henry knows, the eventuality of such a meeting is not as unlikely as it sounds. Like Henry, Osmond Belkin has quietened down — though where Henry has gone from scarce to invisible, Osmond has gone from extremely prominent to just a little less so. A film man, Osmond Belkin, as he always promised he would be. Producer, director — don’t ask Henry, what’s the career of ‘Hovis’ Belkin to Henry Nagel? But his health is not the best, and he has grandchildren he wants to see. Lots of grandchildren. Grandchildren, as Henry puts it to himself, coming out of his fundament.

Cruel, that Belkin should have beaten Henry at having families as well. But that’s what happens when you get in first with the insult. Had Osmond Belkin not seized the advantage and established Henry as the failure of the two, would he ever have made it as a film-maker? Suppose Henry had thrown the first stone, calling Osmond ‘fat boy’ or ‘loaf head’ or, best of all, ‘fatty four-eyes who can’t breathe properly’ — would it then have been he, Henry, who ended up with the three-swimming-pooled mansion and succession of beautiful wives to go with it, while Osmond languished teaching media studies at the University of the Pennine Way? Such are the eternal questions, centring on the arbitrariness of destiny, a man revolves in his head when the better part of his life is behind him and has amounted to nothing. But they are not now, and probably never were, germane to anything. What matters is that Osmond Belkin is known to be back in England, or known to be thinking of coming back to England, to see his children and his grandchildren among other reasons, and that his children and his grandchildren, some of them anyway, are bound by demographic likelihood to live in or around St John’s Wood. Which means that any day Henry could run into him, walking his offspring, wheeling a pram or just jogging in the park with one, or maybe all, of his beautiful wives, and American spring-loaded trainers on his feet.

You liked him, though, didn’t you, Dad?

Did I? You’ll have to remind me which one he was .

The fat one with the loaf head. You liked him because he egged you on. You blew fire for him in the garden.

I entertained a lot of your friends.

No, but for ‘Hovis’ you went that little bit further. You bent nails for him too. And for him you tore the Manchester telephone directory into a hundred dancing girls.

He must have been an appreciative audience .

Oh, he was. He roared with laughter.

Well then .

Dad, he was taking the piss.

Yeah, out of you!

You bet out of me. Out of me for having a father who did what you did.

I thought you said he enjoyed what I did .

Think of it, Dad. His father was a surgeon. He had another idea of fathers. When I went to his house his father put on Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet.

So maybe he was envious of yours.

Think that if you like. It hardly matters now anyway. But you played the fool for him. He paid, you jigged.

You always had a queer way of explaining a good time, Henry. We had some fun together.

So now you remember him.

What I remember is the warped construction you put on everything. I can’t explain. You’re the intellectual. But it looked like jealousy to me. Maybe you were just jealous of everybody, Henry. Maybe you were jealous of your friend whatever his name was because he amused me. Maybe you were jealous of me because I amused him. What I don’t understand is why you were so jealous of people who liked to enjoy themselves, considering how little value you attached to enjoyment. You explain that to me .