Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

But when that didn’t work, or when it rained, he called a taxi and snuck away, scarfed-up and companioned, in that. Lunch in a quiet pub, not a poly pub — yes, it was a poly now — on the Yorkshire side. Love over pie and ale. And sometimes a room.

Lying under wordwormed beams, Lia Spivack (Henshell Spivack’s wife) had a go at getting him to roar like a tiger. Grrrrr, Henry. She clawed his chest. Bit his neck. Grrrr, Henry, grrrr. He couldn’t do it. Stiff bastard.

‘I’m no good at animals,’ he told her.

‘Not even a snake in the grass?’ she said, not yet retracting her claws.

He knows when he’s upset a person, Henry. But he also knows when someone has upset him. ‘A snake’s a reptile not an animal,’ he explained in a quiet voice, lighting them both a cigarette. In those days cigarettes were intrinsic to sex, regardless of how successful or unsuccessful the sex had been, no matter whether animal or human. Henry was so addicted to the combination he had to light himself a cigarette even after he’d finished merely thinking about sex. ‘But look,’ he added reasonably, ‘if you want to rip me apart you can, it’s just that I’m too self-conscious to make the noise. It could be a faith thing. I have a feeling we are prohibited from imitating whatsoever flyeth in the air and whatsoever creepeth on all fours, which must include tigers. It’s one of the ways we knew we had put totemism behind us.’

‘Bullshit, Henry. I’m from the same faith you are. I’ve got an uncle who’s a rabbi. He did rabbit imitations for us when we were kids.’

‘A rabbi who did rabbits? Well, a rabbit I am prepared to do.’

‘Go on, then.’

So Henry, cute as a button, twitched his nose. But even that not convincingly.

‘Considering how difficult you find it to shed your inhibitions,’ Lia mused, blowing smoke into the rafters, ‘don’t you think it’s surprising how easily you shed your trousers?’

Henry wants to say that sex has always been his only chance, the one area, for some reason he can’t explain, where he can find a little ease. It’s his theory that many men who have been thought of as predatory sexually have wanted peace, that’s all, a period of relief, not from sexual tension, but from reserve. Did they all start out as blushers, Bluebeard, Don Juan, Casanova, Byron, did they all pink up the moment someone spoke to them? ‘You girl, Casanova!’ Did some eighteenth-century Venetian ‘Hovis’ Belkin set that whole shooting match in motion with a careless remark of that kind? ‘You pansy, Giacomo!’ After which no maiden on the Adriatic could count her virginity secure.

But to Lia, Henshell’s wife — Henshell his second-best school friend after ‘Hovis’ — Henry wants to make a more simply factual rebuttal of her charge.

‘I don’t easily shed anything, Lia,’ he says. ‘It isn’t true. And I am not a snake. If I did, if I were, if you knew me to be, why would you be here?’

She smiles at him. He has known her for years. Henshell’s bird. Henshell was still in the sixth form when he started taking Lia out. The first of them to have a regular girlfriend. They teased him about it. Fancy going steady, fancy talking about engagement rings at his age. Bought the pram yet, Henshell? Opened an account at Mothercare? Got your pension plan sorted out? But secretly they envied him. He wasn’t having to go out on the prowl every Friday and Saturday night. He had in regular supply what they found it difficult to get their hands on even intermittently. And Lia herself — forgetting the impersonality of the supply idea — was a treat for all their eyes, all except ‘Hovis’ Belkin’s that is, for Belkin measured by a different standard, was already out of there in his imagination, gazing beyond far horizons, and set no store by local beauty. A beauty she was, though, Rubensesque, as undulant as water when she walked, always animated, black-eyed, with bright red swollen lips and bright red swollen tonsils to match, they joked, in allusion to the way she threw her head back when she laughed, and with a mind, of course, to whatever other use she put her throat to for lucky Henshell.

She smiles at him. Funny fellow, Henry. More serious than Henshell’s other friends, she remembers, more hot and bothered, the least likely, had she been asked to prognosticate, to turn into her lover. But then she hadn’t expected she would make a lover of any of them. Henshell was plenty, Henshell was enough for her, Henshell always would be enough for her, she thought, not imagining when she crept into his digs at Brighton and talked politics late into the night that she would one day be the wife of someone who owned six pharmacies and thought of nothing but the seventh. ‘You were a biomolecular scientist with a heart once, Henshell, you were going to make a significant pharmaceutical intervention into the Third World, now you sell shampoo.’

‘And house you in undreamed-of luxury,’ Henshell reminded her.

She smiles at Henshell’s one-time friend. ‘I’m bored, Henry,’ she says. ‘I’d be here, whether you were a snake in the grass or not. You could just as easily say that I’m the low one. I wouldn’t fight you. We’ve all grown up to be not nice.’

‘Not nice is another thing again. I resent the suggestion that this is what I do — serially.’

‘That’s your reputation, Henry.’

‘Where?’

Her smile turns into a laugh. Not the old swollen tonsil laugh. Long gone, all that. ‘Where’s where?’ She makes a flamboyant gesture with her arms, all breasts, like a heroine of the French Revolution on the barricades, taking in this little everywhere. ‘Wherever you are talked about.’

Tough one, for Henry. Wherever you are talked about . It almost doesn’t matter what they say, does it, so long as you are talked about as universally as wherever you are talked about sounds as though you’re talked about. From the mountains to the sea, wherever men and women gather to talk about Henry. . Choke on that, ‘Hovis’ fat-head Belkin.

But no, in the end it does matter if all they’re saying is that Henry is a dope who drops his pants — what was her expression? — sheds his trousers — without compunction. Not nice for his parents to get wind of. Not nice for his mother particularly. Not nice for his grandmother who thought she’d slain the curse of North Manchester man which had been laid upon her family. Not nice for Marghanita, who wouldn’t want to think that what she nipped in the bud the night he carried her cocktail shoes in Wilmslow was nothing but serial endeavour.

‘No,’ he tells her, ‘no. I don’t believe it. I don’t have a reputation.’

‘Ask your students.’

Lia has become one of his students. Part of that mature intake which the poly, having become a poly, is suddenly indecently eager to attract. Bring out your old! Someone’s done a paper. Discovered that there’s gold in them thar hills, old gold, any number of the hard of hearing and the all but past it, languishing in Pennine towns and villages, who would jump at studying Drama and Movement, or the Torment of Sylvia Plath, or even Literature’s For Life with Henry, if they were only given the chance. Now in they stream, tapping their sticks, as though into a hospice for the terminally curious. Perfect for Henry. All attached, all older than he is. Not Lia. Lia is attached and the same age. But one out of two will do for Henry. This is how he has come to meet her again, anyway, after all these years. Eight, is it? Ten? He lost interest in Henshell, needless to say. Lost track of what their friendship was for. Now he remembers. It was for Lia.

‘And what will my students tell me?’ Henry asks. ‘That I seduce them in return for good grades?’

‘No. I have heard no mention of your giving good grades.’