Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

‘In which latter course!’

‘I was an academic. Not your sort of teacher. Nothing useful. That’s how we used to speak. In which latter course she succeeded to such effect, in her view, that it looked a damn sight better when she’d finished with it — the cake, I’m still talking about — than when she’d bought it. It was like a blinding light. Suddenly she wasn’t frightened of food. The next day she enrolled in a class and what seemed like a week later she became a teacher.’

Moira points her face. ‘It takes longer than that to train as a pastry chef,’ she would have Henry know. ‘Almost as long as it takes you to finish a sentence.’

Henry rides with the compliment. ‘I’m sure it does. But my mother was in a hurry. My father was leaving her alone a lot and she needed an interest.’

‘What was he doing?’

Always hard for Henry, this. ‘Well, he began life as an upholsterer. Then someone burnt his workshop down and he became a fire-eater.’

‘He didn’t!’

‘He did.’

‘Professionally?’

‘Well, in the sense that he called it his profession. But not in the sense that he earned a living from it. And don’t ask whether it was he who burnt his workshop down. The police looked into that. It wasn’t. His bookkeeper burnt the workshop down. A coincidence, though, I grant you. But then life is coincidence. Look at you and my mother.’

She does, falling silent for a moment, apparently not certain what she thinks about coincidence in this particular.

They are in a dark panelled booth in a Hungarian restaurant in Soho, eating dumplings. A heavy ancien régime meal had seemed just the ticket to Henry. He wanted to nail her down. Eat a light meal with a woman on your first date, and she’ll be polishing off seconds with someone else before the night’s over. Toast her in ox blood, bog her in goulash and dumplings, and chances are — if she lives — she’s yours for ever.

‘So you were telling me about your life,’ Henry says, trying to call her back from wherever unwelcome synchronicity has taken her.

‘Was I?’ She is rooting in her furry bag for a handkerchief. She must have a collection of furry bags, Henry thinks, for this one seems unfamiliar to her, a thing of depths she has never previously plumbed, full of objects she appears not to recognise. Henry too believes the hairs to be longer and more quilled than on the one she carried at the crematorium. Anteater? Aardvark? Or is he confusing the bag with the way she is snuffling through it?

‘You were telling me what happened when you fell in love with your student.’

‘With Aultbach?’

‘No, the other one.’

She dabs her nose, as though she is staunching a wound, with the little handkerchief she has finally found but which she gives the impression of never having seen before. ‘Which other one?’

‘Ah,’ Henry sighs. So there’s a list! He feels fluttery in the stomach suddenly, as though his insides have fallen away. Which is extraordinary, considering how much he’s eaten. But retrospective jealousy — a list without him on it — does this to him. ‘Well, let’s just stay for the moment,’ he says, offering to be urbane, ‘with the one who caused Aultbach to stop being a good husband.’

‘Michael. He was Greek. Very beautiful. But very dependent. He wanted a mother more than he wanted a lover.’

‘And you?’

Another dab, pitched somewhere between nostalgia and provocation. ‘I just wanted Michael.’

‘Hence Aultbach’s. .’

‘No, Aultbach didn’t mind. He has very modern views, Aultbach. He would sell me into slavery for a night and not bother as long as I’m there to open the patisserie in the morning.’

‘You call that modern?’

‘He isn’t possessive.’

‘So what happened?’

‘I crashed his car.’

I knew it, Henry thinks. I knew I should have called for that taxi. ‘I see,’ he says. ‘Presumably you were going to see Michael at the time.’

‘No. I had Michael with me. But Michael wasn’t the problem. The problem was the car. Aultbach had just bought it. A brand-new lemon Porsche with personalised number plates. He cried like a baby when he saw what I’d done to it.’

‘And Michael?’

‘He also cried. I broke both his legs. Did I tell you he was a footballer?’

Henry opens wide his eyes in alarm. ‘Stop,’ he says. ‘I’m not sure that I’m in the right league for you. I don’t do cars. I don’t do football. I don’t do personalised number plates. I don’t do slavery. I don’t even do pastry. In a few months I will be eligible for a senior railcard. All I can offer are cut-price trips to the seaside. Shall we call a halt to it now, before pity enters?’

She twists a smile at him and puts a hand on his wrist — part placatory, part flammable. Henry likes and fears the size of her hand, half as big again as his own; he also likes and fears the weight of her jewellery: a gold bangle he hasn’t seen before, a huge silver watch with a third of its face scooped out moonily, not unlike hers, and a row of rings she presumably removes when she is waitressing. Though Henry loves a woman to have a past, sometimes a past can be too much for you. He’s too old. It had to happen, and now it has. Whatever the jingling weight of her jewelled hand on his wrist says to the contrary, he is past it.

‘What’s age?’ she asks.

‘Age is what kills you,’ Henry says. ‘That and your driving.’

She slaps his hand. Naughty boy.

And in that second Henry goes from wondering whether he is up to it to wondering whether he wants to be up to it.

The old faint Henry heart. There’s something wrong with his machinery. Always has been. His cogs slip. At any time in a friendship or an amour the reason for proceeding will suddenly escape him. Decency requires that you go on, he knows that. You can’t keep walking out in the middle of things. But then if he does go on, there will be that dire sensation of pointlessness afterwards, of spirit expended to no explicable purpose. Nothing to do specifically with sex, any of this. Henry is not a tristesse merchant. If anything, he understands better after sex why he has bothered than he does after almost any other activity. At least in sex there’s sex. But what is there in friendship again? What’s that for?

He is not his father’s son. You never know when you’ll need a friend, Henry .

Don’t you, Dad? I rather thought it was the other way round, that your friends always knew when they needed you — which was all the time. Who was that blind old bastard who got you to walk him half a mile to the Variety Home every morning for fifteen years, promising he’d leave you his ceremonial origamist’s robe, then made you pay a thousand quid for it on his deathbed?

Seven hundred and fifty .

And how come you stayed on good terms with the bookkeeper who burnt your workshop down?

Harris? He didn’t do it deliberately. He was upset .

And what about your Austin A40?

That he did burn deliberately .

But you stayed his friend.

He was still upset.

And Finkel?

What did Finkel do wrong?

He tried to steal your wife, Dad.

This from you?

I never stole. I borrowed.

Finkel too borrowed .

Yeah, your life savings.

Well, that’s better than your wife .

His mother, on the other hand, was like him. She tired of people. After a brief intimacy she couldn’t see the point of them. Company gave her migraines. It’s very likely, Henry thinks, that she couldn’t see the point of him in the end. Is that possible? Can a mother run out of interest in her child? Henry suspects it happens all the time. But that doesn’t mean he’s happy about it in his own case. If he became uninteresting to his mother, wasn’t that her fault? Hadn’t she made him uninteresting? Her Jane Eyre boy. Of course he bored her. Who wants a Jane Eyre boy? But she should have thought of that sooner.