Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

‘That I seduce them in return for bad grades, then?’

Grrrr, Henry! Why doesn’t she ask him to be a tiger now?

‘No,’ she says, ‘I wouldn’t swear I have even heard the word seduce. They’re more interested in the fact that everyone you sleep with is older than you, married or going out with someone else. The psychology of that arrests them. They’re not stupid, Henry. They’re curious as to why this is. Why, for example, you never seem to have a girlfriend of your own — not just of your own age but simply of your own, for you only. Why you’re always scavenging round the edges of other people’s relationships, as though for leftovers. .’

‘Like yours, I suppose? Do you see yourself as a leftover.’

‘Like mine, yes. Definitely like mine. And do I see myself as a leftover? Yes. Yes, I do a bit.’

‘A bit?’

‘Don’t be smart with me, Henry. I’m not complaining. I know the score. Something on the side suits me as much as it suits you. But everything you have is on the side. Which prompts some of us to wonder why you don’t want anything that’s — what? — in the middle, at the centre, a main course in itself.’

‘And the fact that I appear not to explains why I am always shedding my trousers?’

‘Maybe. Because it’s as though you’ve finished before you’ve started. As though you know you’re not going to get what you want the minute you embark, so the next one is a necessity, a foregone conclusion. If you could invert time, Henry, you’d have the next one before you had the last.’

‘And that would help me to keep my trousers on?’

She sighed. ‘Nothing will help you to keep your trousers on, is that what you want to hear me say? I don’t know. Maybe nothing will. It’s not for me to judge. I’m just your student. And your old friend’s wife. Though no doubt. .’ She trailed away.

‘No doubt what? No doubt that’s what I’m in it for? Because you’re married to Henshell?’

She began to put her clothes back on. Growing weary, like the light. ‘Well, I’m not going to say that’s not an element, Henry. I’d be a fool not to think about it at least. But I’m not accusing you of spite or anything like that. I’m sure you don’t mean to do Henshell down. That’s probably more my motive than it’s yours. But this is new to me. You’ve been here before, Henry. By your own admission this is your thing.’

Henry hated these Pennine afternoons. The light not so much withdrawn as swept away, as though a smudgy hand had reached out and in one motion wiped a blackboard clean. Listen and that was what you heard, the blackness drying over the white, obliterating all trace, all remembrance even. Look out and nothing beckoned. As a boy Henry had kept the moors in the corner of his eye, a promise not of glamour exactly, not of Belkin’s Hollywood or Bel Air, but of some glimmering Englishness whose quietude was strange to him, and which one day he would try to penetrate. Now he was on them, everything they’d promised, the glimmer and the quiet — the quiet as a property of the soul, he meant — was gone. What he’d seen was an illusion. He is standing on what was never there.

He didn’t want Lia to go yet. She probably had it right, he was ready for the next one, but he still didn’t want her to leave. ‘The mistake people make about me,’ he said, ‘is to think I see myself as a lover.’

‘And you don’t?’

‘No, I don’t. Not a lover in the heroic sense, anyway. I don’t have that much interest in the grand scope and narrative of erotic love, I don’t have the confident brush strokes. I’m more a miniaturist. If Don Juan is Rubens or Titian, then I’m Vermeer.’

‘You do interiors, is that what you’re saying? You don’t like going out?’

‘Correct, I don’t like going out. But I mean something else as well.’ He was sitting by her on the bed, stroking her arms, absently pulling hairs from her sweater, thinking about what he was. ‘I think I’d like to say,’ he said, ‘that I’m an intimate proximist. Taking an intimist to be someone who has a preference for the smaller, nearer view, as against the broad sweep of the panoramic, then I’m one stage closer in. I’m besotted with the proximate. You remember “Hovis” Belkin — of course you do, Henshell hated him — well, he was the very opposite. “Hovis” was only interested in what was remote.’

‘He was never particulary nice to me, if that’s what you mean.’

‘No, he wouldn’t have been. You were altogether too familiar to him.’

‘But you always seemed distant yourself, Henry. None of us thought of you — don’t be offended — as a warm friend. You were never really in the hutch with us.’

He’s hurt. Not even in the hutch with Henshell, his second-best friend?

But he doesn’t want her to see he’s hurt. ‘No,’ he says, as though the charge is a familiar one to him. ‘But that’s only because I didn’t know how to do it. The haughty are always people who just lack the trick of intimacy. Invite them to your homes and make them cocoa and they’re pussy cats.’

He does a pussy cat for her. The nearest Henry gets to tigers.

‘So if Henshell had made you cocoa you wouldn’t now be here fucking his wife?’

He laughed. What else was there to do? ‘I think it started earlier than Henshell,’ he said.

‘Oh no, not your parents.’

‘Afraid so.’

‘They didn’t love you. .’

‘Or they loved me too much. Mothers, for their own reasons, keep you in thrall to the proximate, fathers are meant to push you out into the world.’

‘And yours didn’t?’

‘Well, he tried. But maybe he was too influenced by my mother in the end, maybe she kept him in thrall as well. Who knows? Take bloody “Hovis” — he wasn’t afraid of what was out there and his Dad was so aloof he only spoke on Yom Kippur, and that was to remind “Hovis” of his sins. To all intents and purposes he had no Dad. Half the time he coveted mine. Yet this didn’t stop him going for distance. So where does family psychology get you? I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten how we got into this.’

‘We? You got into it by way of explaining why you can’t play tigers.’

‘Ah yes, and why tigers notwithstanding I can’t keep my pants on. I hope I am no longer a disturbing mystery to you.’

She was muffling up, afghan coat, suede boots, woolly gloves, two scarves, what you need to brave a Pennine winter. She was shaking her head over him. ‘Why are you so frightened of leaving things to chance, Henry? Why do you feel you must make your version of yourself prevail? You should trust other people more. You should risk their opinion of you.’

‘Other people?’

‘Yes. Me, for instance. About whom you haven’t asked a question all afternoon. Not even how are you, Lia. It’s a bit rich, Henry, all that loving what’s close, all that intimate proximist stuff, when you wouldn’t notice another person if she was sitting on your face.’

‘Try me,’ he suggested.

But she couldn’t be bothered taking all those clothes off again.

It didn’t last. Mia, Jane, whoever. Nothing ever lasted. In so far as that had anything to do with Henry — and it didn’t always — the reason wasn’t callousness or cold feet. Order, that was the problem. ‘Save me from chaos,’ Henry pleaded with every older someone-else’s woman he met. Without a woman in his life, Henry was like the world before God created it. Nothing but flying fragments. At the mercy of hunger, boredom and his dick — when he could tell the difference — not understanding where he ended or the void began, unless he was the void. Then, if he was lucky, the woman came, parted the dry land from the sea, stuck up a firmament, blew light upon him, and arranged him into order. Trouble was — order is death. Chaos life, order death. This had nothing to do with Henry wanting to throw his socks about the bedroom floor. In fact, Henry had always been a neat person with a side parting, who kept his clothes in drawers and his papers in a filing cabinet. So there was nothing hippyish about his pronouncement that order was death. What he meant was that the moment women did what he needed them to do, they set in motion the process of deterioration. There was this to be said for the world before God created it: there was no death in it. That which is not created cannot die. Chaotic, Henry could have lived for ever. Ordered, as he longed to be, he could smell his flesh rot.