Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

Looking back, Henry can’t imagine how he could have organised this aspect of his moral history differently. Maybe had he not stayed teaching in the Pennines so long, he would have outgrown his morbidity. ‘What are you doing burying yourself up there?’ friends in fairer places used to ask him. ‘You’re supposed to be a life man.’ This an ironic reference to the course entitled Literature’s For Life which Henry obdurately ran while his colleagues in Liberal Studies and then Media Studies and then Women’s Studies were shedding the lot, both Literature and Life, in favour of the frost of theory. ‘We all do death our own way,’ was Henry’s reply. ‘They teach it; I only live it.’ But the real answer to the question — ‘What are you doing burying yourself up there?’ — was ‘Rehearsing’. He had, after all, to get reconciled to being buried somewhere. Face burial, and you can face death. So yes, he was running through his lines.

‘No motion has she now, no force / She neither hears nor sees / Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course / With rocks and stones and trees’ — those were the lines he was running through.

And of course, ‘The rest is silence.’

Not by nature a nature man, Henry: he feared what he had in common with rocks and stones and trees no less than he feared the humanity he shared with text-messagers and honkers. No motion have they now, no force — fine if you’re a rock, but if you’re Henry the thought of possessing neither force nor motion (notwithstanding that he has forced nothing of more moment than the lock on his briefcase, and moves, when he moves at all, only very slowly) freezes the little blood you still have. Getting away, coming south earlier, would only have been a postponement of the problem. Whereas so long as he stayed, who knows — perhaps he would learn to love the forceless rock he was destined to become. So he watched the seasons change, impatient with the summer because that was easy, feeling the earth warm beneath him, standing outside his plain-faced pittance cottage like a fields-man in the early evening, enjoying the sun sinking into the Pennine embrace, cosying into the valleys, making even shadows things of hope. Lovely while it lasted — children’s singing coming from the next village, skipping from hill to hill, a radiance of sound no less than light — but no help with death, no preparation, not for Henry. Whereas the winter, which came soon enough, God knows, and hung on twice as long as any winter anywhere, smashed every illusion of happy perpetuity. Better to be in town, drowned by traffic, pestered by the poor, than to have these vistas of nothingness, rolling moorlands which mock time because time has made no impression, unless you call a chimney or a shoe factory an impression. Now if Henry could make a friend of this , Henry would be saved; and so could take himself a woman his own age, with no strings attached, and promise to look after her until death took them both away. And lie with her, thereafter, like two pencils in a pencil box, for ever and ever and ever.

Until the Resurrection, when Henry would rise again.

The thing about older women once you’ve reached Henry’s age is that there aren’t any.

What happens, Henry has discovered, is that you go on thinking of women of a certain age as ‘older’, go on entertaining the idea of an ‘older’ look — nice little collection of shrewd lines beneath the eyes, wonderful resolution of the mouth despite some wobbling of the chin, long teeth, sad neck, striated bosom — regardless of how old you are yourself. A wonderful provision of nature, this, for bamboozling lovers of mature women such as Henry — who would otherwise be in despair — into believing that nothing has changed.

What you do have to be careful of, though, as a man of almost sixty, is mentioning your preference for older women while looking into the eyes of a woman of forty-five.

Henry is pleased with himself for not making any such blunder with Moira.

And yet it’s true. She is the older woman. He looks at her sitting, with her legs crossed and her mouth skewed, on the edge of what he thinks is meant by an ottoman — fancy his father having knelt at the feet of a woman who owned an ottoman! — and for all the world he’s the baby of the two. It’s as she said to him over goulash at the Happy Hungarian, ‘What’s age? You’re as old as you feel, Henry,’ and Henry feels he hasn’t been born yet.

He would like to lick her face. She is the colour of banana and limes. A glacial yellow, like the Baltic Sea in spring, he fancies, though he has never been there. Her profile like a ski slope, a smooth gently sloping ride but for the two camel bumps in her nose. He hasn’t asked her where precisely she’s from yet. You don’t do that with people who speak perfectly good English and aren’t carrying baskets of yams on their head. He never liked it at school. So where did your parents originate, Nagel? Poland? The Ukraine? Stetlsburg? St Anne’s Pier? But he knows she’s from the old country. The two are almost synonymous for Henry — older and from the old country. Some people will only look forward. It’s recommended, particularly after the twentieth century. Not Henry. Henry doesn’t like what he sees forward. Backward is better. Backward has happened. And the old and the old country are the proof of it.

She’s going to sort him out. He can tell from the way she has started to edge a look at him, giving him the three-quarters profile of her bumpy nose. As though she knows it’s not going to be easy, but considers herself the woman for the job.

‘You were quite strange with Lachlan coming back from the crematorium,’ she tells him.

He is pacing the Persian carpet. Like a cat with sticky pads. A step at a time, not bringing down his full weight, hoping she’ll take the hint and keep her voice low. Lachlan is next door. The walls are thick, but what if Lachlan’s got his ear to a glass? It was a risk bringing her here. His fingers had fumbled the keys in the locks. Nerves. He hadn’t wanted Lachlan coming out on to the corridor and seeing them. Inviting them in for a snifter.

‘Was I? Strange how?’

‘You don’t seem to like him, yet you went to the crematorium.’

‘He asked me. He said there was not a soul on earth but him to applaud her into the flames. I could hardly refuse an appeal like that. There won’t be a soul on earth to applaud me. Then you turned up. I thought that was strange.’

‘How could I not turn up? I knew her.’

Ah. She knew her. Nothing to do with Lachlan. It was the old lady she knew. Why hadn’t he thought of that? Would have saved him heartache. But then again. .

‘So if Lachlan knew you knew her, how come he asked me?’

‘He didn’t know I knew her. Just as I didn’t know about him. She’d always told me she had no one.’

‘Ha! Well, you can see what she meant.’

She narrows her eyes at him.

Henry narrows his back. ‘So you met him for the first time at the crematorium?’ he continues.

‘No. At her apartment. I went round, as usual, to deliver her pastries, and discovered that the poor woman had died.’

‘You deliver pastries?’

‘Only to her. She used to have tea every morning at the patisserie. Then she wasn’t able to make it across the road any more. Her hips went. We were fond of her. She behaved like an aristocrat. She had a rude word for everybody in the neighbourhood. And she loved our cakes. So once she couldn’t come to us we took our cakes to her. Lemon tart every Tuesday. Millefeuille for the weekend. She had a millefeuille only the day before she died.’

‘You’re telling me that the sensual pleasures go on until the end? I can’t decide if it helps me to know that. I’d always imagined they fell away, bit by bit, so that you didn’t mind or didn’t notice you were going. Just think — she’s probably lying there, dry-mouthed, missing millefeuille even as we speak.’