Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

Heart-heavy with ox blood, goulash and self-reproach, Henry focuses on the positive aspects of the waitress. Her custard hair, her asymmetric looks, the something ironical about those demure pearl earrings, the way she laps the t in Aultbach, the fact of her still being married to Mr Aultbach, the feelings she had for Michael — ‘Michael, I wanted Michael’ — her red-and-gold hands, nicely aged, which he imagines gripping the wrists of the men she teaches in her kitchen — this is the way to beat a batter, not like that, like this — her spiked shoes, the thought that she might be carrying on with Lachlan. Then he invites her back to his place.

Still doing it. Senior railcard in the mail and he is still asking women back to his place.

Is he mad or what? Was he always mad?

At a sherry party at the closing of the first day of his new job, his first job, his only job, at the Pennine Way College of Rural Technology (later to be a polytechnic, later still to be a university, but always a tech in Henry’s heart), Henry asks the wife of his head of department (Liberal Studies — so why not?) to go back to his place. It’s only when she astonishes him by agreeing that he remembers he doesn’t have a place.

Maybe she knew that.

He escorts her out, under the Pennine moon, kisses her clumsily, then says, ‘Now what?’

‘You’re asking me?’

A difficult one for Henry. What’s worse — pretending to have lost desire, or admitting to not having a place? He does neither. He suggests they spend the night in nature.

‘Out here?’

‘Not out here exactly, more out there.’ He points to where the moors begin, just beyond the library. The advantage of a moor-land tech.

That’s when she astonishes him by agreeing again.

And that’s also when Henry first realises how utterly miserable everybody’s wife is.

‘How old are you?’ she asks him.

‘Twenty-four.’

‘Do you know how old I am?’

‘Thirty-four?’

‘Forty-four.’

‘You’d never think that,’ Henry says.

She spreads her jacket under her. ‘Thank you. When you’re my age, how old will I be?’

Henry thinks about it. ‘Sixty-four.’ Then feels he ought to add, ‘but I’ll be forty-four.’

‘And who will be sitting on my jacket with me then?’

‘Probably lots of people,’ Henry says.

‘People?’

‘Men. Lots of men.’

She begins to cry, or at least to do something that reminds him of crying. ‘So that’s what I’ve got to look forward to, then, is it? Being a whore in my sixties. A whore on a moor.’

‘Who said anything about being a whore?’ Henry says. ‘You don’t feel you’re being a whore now, do you?’

‘Of course I do. Isn’t that what you’ve brought me here for?’

‘No,’ Henry assures her.

‘You’ve brought me here because you respect me?’

‘Yes, actually.’ Something tells him not to add, and because I respect your husband.

‘It’s a funny way of showing respect, Mr Nagel. Sitting me in this damp.’

‘Call me Henry.’

‘I’m not sure if I can call you Henry.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Because my husband’s name is Henry.’

Of course it is! Henry wonders if he ought to have thought about this earlier. Tactless of him, making love to the wife of someone who shares his name. And it isn’t as though he didn’t know she was married to a Henry. He, the other Henry, was Henry’s tutor at university, some would have said his mentor, maybe even — though this might be stretching it — his friend. It’s thanks to the other Henry that Henry has landed this job.

Tonight is the first time, however, that he has met the other Henry’s wife. A nicety which, by the subtleties of Henry’s reasoning, removes all moral obstacles.

‘Then call me Mr Nagel, or just Nagel, if that makes you more comfortable,’ Henry says.

‘I can’t call you Nagel. Sounds like some Jew in a Bloomsbury novel.’

‘I am a Jew in a Bloomsbury novel.’

She peers at him in the dark. ‘All the more reason.’

‘Don’t call me anything in that case.’

He puts his arms round her and kisses her ear. She gives a little shudder. ‘I don’t like that,’ she says. She has long breasts. Not full, but elongated.

‘You feel lovely,’ Henry whispers.

‘I see,’ she says. ‘So this is to be one of those straight-to-business nameless fucks, is it?’

‘Well, it won’t be if you tell me your name,’ Henry says.

‘Jane.’

Henry feels for her in the dark. ‘You have exquisite breasts, Jane,’ he says.

‘Oh God, no,’ she says, fending him off. ‘I can’t have you calling me Jane, not while you’re weighing my breasts. Henry does that.’

‘Which?’

‘Which breast?’

‘No, which don’t you want me to do — weigh your breasts or call you Jane? Which is it your husband does?’

‘I think that’s strictly between me and Henry, Henry, don’t you?’

‘Of course it is,’ Henry agrees, remembering the marriage vows. Let no man put asunder. ‘Absolutely is. I’m just trying to ascertain, between us, whether it’s the Jane or the weighing of the breasts that’s the problem.’

‘Both.’

‘So neither would be permissible even without the other?’

‘That’s too long a sentence and too complicated an idea. Why don’t you just try me, Mr Nagel?’

He weighs her breasts.

‘Stop,’ she says, pulling herself free of him. ‘Please stop that.’

‘Sorry, Jane,’ he says.

‘Stop,’ she says, ‘I’d much rather you didn’t call me that. What I think would be best is for you to have your way with me quickly and in silence and then to drive me home.’

Henry hasn’t the heart to tell her that he doesn’t have a car.

Older women, Henry. Older women, invariably attached. Invariably having to go home to another man. Borrowed older women. Explain that.

He can. He doesn’t want the responsibility. ‘Want’ might not be the best word. He can’t handle the responsibility. And he isn’t certain of his own judgement. If they’re older that means they have the wherewithal to make an informed choice and to take that burden away from him. It must also mean, ipso facto , that they are durable. And if they’re attached that means someone other than him desires or has desired them, which confirms and vindicates, or at least seconds, his interest in them.

Not very courageous, as Henry is the first to accept. And in practice not very nice. But the diffident never are very nice. He’d have been a sweeter man altogether, Henry, kinder, more pleasant to be with, more generous in the aftermath, had he known what he wanted and grabbed it single-mindedly. Like his father, with a second wife in St John’s Wood, and possibly a third and fourth, for all Henry knows to the contrary, somewhere else. So certain was his father of himself, so indifferent to what anybody else thought of his preferences, he was prepared to be seen taking Rivka Yoffey to the Midland in broad daylight, a woman with a dress down to the ground and a wig that looked as if it had been ripped off a drunk. Would Henry have risked being espied squiring Rivka Yoffey, who met two of his essential stipulations, after all, in that she was both durable and otherwise accounted for? He feared not. Particularly if there was the remotest chance of Osmond Belkin — the fly in Henry’s ointment from way back — being the espier.

But it wasn’t only because he lacked certainty in all matters pertaining to the heart that Henry needed a pre-existing second opinion about a woman. It was also because he doubted his capacity to look after anybody, to be ‘there for her’, in contemporary parlance, to bear the burden of making her happy until death did them. . Death being the hardest part. Though even in the matter of helping out should she cut her finger or get something in her eye Henry knew himself to be unreliable. Too squeamish. Unfitted to be of use to anybody in discomfort, let alone in pain. If another man were on the case then the other man could take care of the problem — the wound, the fly, death; for they were all on the same continuum. Take care of it practically and emotionally. Face it. Henry sometimes thought that if he could only reconcile himself to death, as a fact of his life, then he would be better able to accept it as a fact of someone else’s. Until then, he was in no position to commit. Only to borrow. Women died, therefore Henry could do nothing for them.