Howard Jacobson: The Making of Henry

‘Well, everything comes, as they say,’ says Henry, shaking his sleeve.

Lachlan thrusts his tongue into his cheek. ‘That’s word for word what the old boy told me on his deathbed thirty years ago,’ he says, as though it’s Henry’s fault he’s had to wait.

We’re all still battling the dead, Henry thinks, closing the doors to the mansion block behind him. He tests, then tests again the security locks, listening for them to click, then pushing at them with his shoulder. The wrong sort of people have been seen in the building recently, going from apartment to apartment, selling duff electricity, syphoning it out of one person’s supply and into another’s, making veiled threats to the elderly, of whom Henry, on his next birthday, will officially be accounted one. No one admits to letting them in. It’s possible they just strolled in, a stride or two behind a bona fide keyholder, too old to notice or too frightened to ask questions. That’s how it is with buildings occupied by the aged: you might as well go to sea in a sieve. So Henry is double-checking the security locks, then double-checking his checking, by subjecting them to his weight, not a negligible force these days, for Henry is growing portly. If he does this every time he goes out he will seriously weaken the locks, then the second-hand electricity salesmen will be able to stroll back in again.

What the block needs is a doorman. There’s on-site porterage, as you would expect of apartments of this quality, but you have to ring a bell for anyone to answer and by the time anyone does you can have bled to death. A person on guard twenty-four hours a day is what you want. Armed to the teeth, preferably. Henry doesn’t know about the arms but he has reason to believe a doorman did patrol here once. What is more, Henry believes he has met him. .

Henry has a theory that the apartment has come to him courtesy of a wealthy mistress of his father’s. The apartment was his father’s secret love nest, Henry’s theory goes; a long way from home, admittedly, too far to nip around to on a bicycle between meals, but his father was always on the road, often having to travel to conferences and conventions on the black arts, and he could easily have kept a second marriage going concurrently with his first. By easily, Henry does not mean financially — he doubts his father could have afforded to feed the chandelier the bulbs it consumes in a week — but easily in the sense that such a thing would have fallen effortlessly within the compass of his father’s tractable nature. Someone lays Henry’s father down upon a feather bed, Henry’s father does not know how to explain he already has a place to sleep. A manners thing as much as anything else. Henry’s father does not like to cause anyone offence. Sorrow of sorrows, Henry’s mother is then killed in the front seat of a coach with bad brakes travelling to London (no doubt on a failed mission to find the truth), Henry’s father no sooner being apprised of the tragedy than he is off south to retrieve the body (in what state Henry cannot begin to imagine — his father and the body) and no sooner seeing it than he suffers a fatal double heart attack — grief and guilt, guilt and grief — leaving the pair more united in death, Henry likes to think, than for a long time they had been in life; holding hands, Henry dares to hope, if hands there are in heaven, and who knows, maybe even canoodling again. Whereupon, for year after year, the distraught mistress maintains the apartment as a shrine until she too dies, lonely and contrite, bequeathing the apartment without presumption of ownership, via Shapira and Mankowicz, to Henry, only child of the man she loved. And of the woman, not to put too fine a point on it, she killed.

What inclines Henry to this theory, as well as to the belief that the mansion block once enjoyed the services of a doorman, is a recollection he has of being accosted at his parents’ funeral by a weeping red-faced man in a square black coat, much like a town crier or a bailiff in appearance, who asked Henry if he would be kind enough to step aside with him a moment. Were it not for the weeping, Henry would have taken him to be some sort of underworld enforcement agent. Unlikely that his father had gambling debts or was mixed up in a protection racket, but then everything about his father had been unlikely. The weeping, though, spoke against it. Henry had never heard of people who came to beat money out of you weeping as they did it. The man was not family, however distant, that much Henry knew. He had taken his hat off when he should have kept it on, and he hadn’t, as was customary, wished Henry ‘long life’.

As a matter of religious protocol, ought Henry even to have accepted the hand held out to him? Was a chief mourner permitted to touch or be touched by another person? Was a man who was burying both his parents permitted to look another living soul in the eye, on that day or indeed on any day thereafter? At home the mirrors were all covered. Was that to cut out vanity or to recommend blindness? There was a propriety in not knowing. It behoved Henry, Henry thought, to blunder. A man shouldn’t be in control of himself on the day of his parents’ interment. So why not let the weeping bailiff, or whatever he was, force open his hand, place inside something which felt like a bag of bizarre copper currency — Azerbaijani shillings, were they? — and then close Henry’s ice-cold fingers over it one by one, like a baby’s. ‘In all the years I stood there in the wind and rain,’ he told Henry, pausing between words to wipe his nose on the sleeve of his coat, ‘I was never once treated with anything but courtesy. Remember that when other things are said. Not a single discourtesy, not once. But mine is not the only broken heart that’s left behind, Mr Nagel. Not by a long chalk. And if you can find it in yourself to make a home here’ — tapping at Henry’s obedient fist — ‘you would be doing a kindness by the living and the dead. That’s the message it is my sad responsibility to bring you. You would be doing a kindness. Feel free. You are loved for who you are the son of, Mr Nagel. Feel free.’ With which he bit hard on his lip, lowered his shaven head, and returned in the direction of the fresh mounds of earth under which Henry’s mangled parents lay, for all the world as though he meant to hurl himself upon them. What Henry found when he finally remembered to open his hand was a set of keys, but to what property he had no idea. He knew his father had spilled out of the house and rented garages and disused railway arches in which to store his bits and pieces all over Manchester, so he assumed it was just another one of those. As for the unknown man, well, his father collected such people by the dozen: the demented strays of his rapacious philanthropy, fans of a kind, enthusiasts of his work. Only now, in line with his new theory of events, is Henry able to work out that those long-lost and long-forgotten keys must have been to this apartment, shrine to a forbidden love, and that the broken-hearted bearer of them, acting on behalf of the even more broken-hearted mistress — who had the tact, at least, to stay away — must have been its doorman.

Those were the days, Henry thinks — practising thinking like the old man he is soon to be — when self was not the enemy of duty, when a man could be sentimentally attached, without resentment, to his job. Try finding a doorman who will weep over a resident now. Try finding a doorman full stop. Upstairs an old lady has just been turned off, and there is no one to notify the inhabitants of the building — you smell her or you don’t — let alone shed a tear for her.

And that is how it will be for me, Henry reminds himself. He knows what’s waiting. He will hobble homewards one ordinary madhouse afternoon, he will feel a stabbing in his heart, and he will beshit himself. Not very medically precise, but then Henry never has understood much about his own body. Too delicate. Too squeamish ever to find out. But what’s waiting is what’s waiting, whether you live in ignorance or you don’t. He will beshit himself in a public place. He will come out of himself, his own entrails the waste matter of his life and being. See that mess? That’s Henry. And all the delicacy, all the careful watching, all the aloof approximations, will have been for nothing.