Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

He diminished you, Dad.

You mean he diminished you .

Same thing.

Since there’s no knowing for sure what’s happening between them, Henry has decided to proceed as though nothing is.

They’re all on the lonely side, all three of them, that’s sufficient explanation for everything. Not nice, not easy to swallow — Henry no more likes the idea of sharing his humanity with other people than he likes the idea of sharing the European waitress — but at least he can do something about the waitress: he can ask her out before Lachlan does, or before Lachlan does again.

And now Henry is in love.

He can’t eat. There is an obstruction where the food should pass. He can’t drink either, all fluids gathering in a dam halfway down his oesophagus. Intermittently the dam bursts, leaking acids into Henry’s system. This is how you know you’re in love when you’re Henry’s age. It feels like indigestion. So anyone observing Henry and Lachlan when they meet on the stairs would guess they were competing to see who could hit his own chest harder. Some mornings they do no more than burp at each other as they pass.

When Lachlan has Angus with him, the dog folds himself even tighter around Henry’s leg, waiting for the aftershock of the convulsions which shake Henry’s frame. For Angus, too, associates bad digestion with love.

But it’s not Angus with whom Henry is in love. Tough on the dog, but love’s cruel that way. More than ever Henry doesn’t want Angus’s hairs on him. He’s got new clothes. He thought he had his dressing right before he came to live in St John’s Wood. He was dressing into his age, he thought. Big loose cardigans, voluminous corduroys, though not of the farmer’s sort, russet colours — greens, browns, ochres — becoming the autumn of his life and the profession he no longer enjoyed. But that’s not how a man is supposed to look down here. In the shops on St John’s Wood High Street Henry finds clothes that defy age. Not the tennis shorts, he hasn’t gone that far. Italian shirts with deep collars suit him though, worn open to show a lot of sternum, to establish that his chest hairs haven’t yet turned completely white, though that doesn’t deter them in St John’s Wood either. And he’s in Valentino jeans — he, Henry, a man who has scorned denim all his life. And soft ankle boots with square toes. This, of course, for the daytime. For nightwear it’s Armani, no questions asked. Midnight black, made of crêpy materials which flatter his bulk, the shirts creamy with high collars that make his head look as though it’s buried in his shoulders, like his autochthonous neighbours in the Pennines — but that’s the fashion. The shoulder bag he’s still thinking about. It’s a bit of a jump, the shoulder bag, for the son of a northern fire-eater. But he knows, watching men in their seventies and eighties even, parading arm in arm, braceleted and medallioned and shoulder-bagged — and these are the straight men, these are the husbands and fathers — that it’s only a matter of time. Sad? Well, who can say. It’s sad that a man has to lose his shape, that his abdomen has to thicken and that his joints must grow stiff. But you have to wrap it all up in something. And what’s the alternative now that at sixty you are still up and about, however precariously? How are you supposed to look? There’s need of a new couture, without doubt, to meet the new demand for geriatric chic, but until it comes along Henry has to settle for looking like one of the grandfathers of the Mafia.

And the waitress seems to like it.

Moira Aultbach, that’s her name. Sounds better when you run the two halves together. Still not Elisabeta-Adelheid of Saxe-Coburg, but an improvement on just Moira. She gives Henry her card when he puts the proposition to her at his favourite pavement table. Yes, she’ll go out with him, but he ought to have her number, just as she ought to have his, in case either needs to change the time. That’s good: she’s put flux on the table. Everything swirls in Henry’s head. She flushes, seeing him go morally at the knees, pulling at her lopsided hair as though she is trying to centre it. Henry hopes that doesn’t mean her overall crookedness was purely predatory and that she is going to straighten herself out for him now they’ve fixed a time and a date. Except that they might not have fixed a time and a date, which makes him feel heady again.

He isn’t sure how the etiquette of tipping is changed by what he’s done. Do you go on tipping a waitress you’re taking out? And if you do, oughtn’t you to tip her more? But how much more can Henry tip? A tenner for a Viennese coffee’s about the limit, isn’t it? Just this once, as a sort of foretaste of the munificence she can look forward to, he gives her twenty. ‘Save your legs,’ he says.

She smiles at him and shakes her head. ‘Take it back,’ she says. ‘Today the coffee is on me.’

Can a waitress do that? It’s only when he is across the road in Alfredo’s, trying on belts, that it occurs to Henry to recall that the patisserie is called Aultbach’s.

So he’s been tipping the proprietress. Is he a girl or what?

She’s still married.

‘I don’t know if that puts you off,’ she says.

‘Why should it?’ Henry asks.

‘Well, some people don’t want the baggage. Aultbach’s no problem. We get on fine, he’s got a girlfriend, and we both felt it would be a shame to break up a successful partnership.’

‘You mean the marriage?’

‘No, the patisserie.’

‘He still works there?’

‘He makes the patisseries.’

‘The strudel too?’

‘Everything.’

‘Well, it’s good strudel,’ Henry allows.

‘Everything Aultbach does is good,’ she tells him. ‘He even made a good husband for a while.’

Henry has never been sure about women who invoke their husbands by their surnames. He can’t quite put his finger on the offence. Cuteness? The dysfunctional family version of talking about yourself in the third person? But in this instance he is more forgiving. He likes the faint trace of a lisp with which Moira pronounces Aultbach, the rabbinic lapping of the t.

‘So what changed him?’ he asks.

‘I changed him. Or rather I changed me.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I fell in love with one of my students —’

‘Hang on,’ Henry says, feeling that she’s pinched his line, except that he didn’t exactly ‘fall in love’ with his students, not Henry, more, well, whatever it was he did. ‘Hang on, are you telling me you’re a teacher on top of everything else?’

He thinks he might be disappointed. He doesn’t want her to be a teacher. He’s done teachers.

‘What everything else?’

‘Well, waitressing and proprieting and looking beautiful and everything.’

She inclines her head. Why thank you, Henry. ‘Just pastry-making,’ she says. ‘I teach it a couple of nights a week at a college in Camden. That’s how I met Aultbach. He was a student too.’

Henry is relieved — she isn’t a teacherly teacher, then — but also astonished. ‘That’s amazing,’ he says. ‘My mother taught cakes.’

‘She was a pastry chef?’

‘God no. She wasn’t any kind of chef. She didn’t know how an oven worked. She just showed people how to decorate cakes.’

‘Ah,’ Moira says, letting Henry into a world of precise distinctions and hierarchies, ‘cake decoration is another thing again.’

‘I know,’ Henry says, quickly pulling an anti-grandiosity face on his mother’s behalf. ‘It was an entirely unconnected activity. Her skills began and ended with decoration.’

‘You’re saying she didn’t bake at all?’

‘Not so much as a biscuit. She had been brought up to stay out of the kitchen. Couldn’t even remember where it was most days. Then out of the blue she discovered she had this talent for armatures and icing. I had already left home so I’m not witness to what exactly happened, but family legend has it that she was expecting friends round for tea and dropped the cake she’d bought. As there was no time to go out and buy another, her range of choices was limited to doing without cake altogether or repairing the one she’d damaged, in which latter course —’