Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

Mindful in disaster, he didn’t slam on his brakes, not with oil and water on the road — oh no, not Henry’s father — but slid gently into the verge. That’s the way to do it, Henry. Suit the driving to the conditions, even in an emergency — correction, especially in an emergency. Then he was off, across the road almost before he’d stopped, his paper-magician’s jacket with its big patched pockets flying behind him. And he was strong. If need be he would right the upturned vehicle with his own hands, then peel it open like a sardine tin. He was wrenching at a door and all but had it off by the time Henry was out of his seat. Henry not one of those in whom catastrophe finds a hero. Henry more circumspect, weighing up the pros and the cons, not wanting to make a bad business worse.

Cometh the hour, cometh not Henry.

Your fault, Dad, you were always there before me.

If we waited for you, Henry. .

Don’t rationalise it. You were always there before me because you wanted to be there before me. Had I run you’d have raced me.

There were people dying, Henry .

There were always people dying. And you were always the first to find them.

You think I should have left it to you find them? You were just a boy.

So how was I ever to learn to be a man?

Not by seeing people decapitated in their cars.

Ah, that! Thanks, Dad. At least no one can say you never called a spade a spade.

Henry only got to hear about people with their heads missing at the inquest where, red and incoherent, he had been subject to cross-examination — asked questions anyway, which was tantamount to a cross-examination as far as Henry was concerned — in the matter of what he’d witnessed. To which his answer, probe him as they might, was precisely nothing. In our family, Henry tried to explain, it is my father who does the witnessing.

For the moment he had joined his father at the ruined car, its wheel spinning, smoking in the night, his father had clapped a heavy hand across Henry’s eyes and twisted his head from the scene. Not for you, Henry. Not for you to behold what’s happened here.

‘Wave a car down,’ he’d said, ‘quickly, go on, now!’ His voice urgent, in command, but from the immeasurable depths of adult sorrow. Henry knew the sound. Keep the sight of death from the kid — that sound. Used on Henry before, first when poor Anastasia decided to give up the ghost while they were visiting her mob-handed in hospital, suddenly, as though that was the only way to get rid of them, the grey creeping across her face like the afternoon light passing from the Pennines; and then again when a neighbour popped in to get his breath and without a word of explanation collapsed on their living-room carpet, his lips fluttering as though in final indecision. On both those occasions, and with a tenderness which surprised and doubly saddened Henry, his father had covered his eyes and led him away.

Never the women who did it, never his mother, always his father.

In this way Henry had got to thirteen with death all around him, with death nudging into the peripheries of his vision, but without ever having actually seen — actually been allowed to rest his eyes on — a dead person. And now here he was again on the East Lancashire Road, denied another golden opportunity.

He was grateful at the time. He consented. He let his head be turned away. He wasn’t sure he could have coped with anything horrible anyway. And someone had to flag down a car. Because that too was being grown up — standing in the road and flagging down a car.

But there has to be a first time, doesn’t there? You can’t go on being protected from mortality for ever. And yet that seemed to be his father’s intention — to keep him out of the club.

Until when? Until exactly when, Dad?

Until you were old enough .

And you were the one who said I was tied to my mother’s apron strings.

Not the same thing. You’d be dealing with the dead in good time. There was no reason to hurry it .

Wasn’t there? Do you know what it felt like? It felt as though you wanted the big stuff all to yourself. I couldn’t get near. You wouldn’t let me near.

Trust me, Henry, it wasn’t a competition. I’d have been only too glad for you to have taken over, gezunterheit, but you were too young. I found my sister dead in bed when I was six years old. My grandmother, God rest her soul, died with her arms round me when I was ten. She died in my face, Henry. I swallowed her last breath. I couldn’t have wished any of that on you. But I didn’t want more for myself, I can promise you that. I’d had my fair share. More than my fair share.

Maybe those events were the making of you.

They weren’t .

How do you know?

I know .

You’d have been a better man without?

I’d have been another man without .

Dad, you might not have been a man at all. You might have ended up like me.

No. You’re the Stern Gang’s doing.

And then, the day Henry leaves home to go to university, it happens again.

Both his parents are intending to take him to the station to see him off — along with his grandmother Irina, and his surviving great-aunts Marghanita and Effie. But that’s too many. It will embarrass the boy, the Girls see that. So it’s down to just his mother and his father and then, at the very last minute, his mother cries off.

‘It will upset me too much.’

Izzi Nagel open his arms to the heavens. ‘Why should it upset you seeing your son off to university? It’s what you’ve always wanted.’

‘That’s why it will upset me.’

‘How can getting what you’ve always wanted upset you?’

Ekaterina exchanges looks with her son. What a husband! You marry a man from North Manchester and this is the subtlety you have to live with. He eats fire and thinks getting what you want must make you happy.

‘You take him. Just see he gets a nice seat in a comfortable compartment.’

‘Look,’ Henry says, ‘I don’t want any of this. Let Dad drop me at the station. That’ll be fine.’

On the way out of the house he hears his mother whispering to his father. ‘Don’t dare drop him at the station. Go through with him. Make sure he’s got his ticket and settle him on the train.’

He hugs his mother. These are not yet kissie-kissie times. Love you, Mom / Love you, son has not yet been imported from the United States of Schmaltz. In matters of human relations the English are still clinging on to dignity, the Nagels more tightly than most. ‘Enjoy yourself,’ she says, patting his cheek. ‘And don’t forget you are as good as anybody.’

‘I will. I won’t.’

‘But don’t be too much of a snob either. Try to value other people’s talents.’

‘I won’t. I will.’

‘And write.’

‘No choice, it’s an essay a week.’

‘No, you fool, I mean write to me.’

Henry wishes, though he knows she means nothing by it, that his mother hadn’t called him a fool on the day he leaves home to go to university. Fool . Does he want that to be the last word he hears her say? But then he is upset, wavering, his insides rattling around in his body, his voice not firm. This will be further from her than he has ever been. Love you, Mom.

More matter-of-fact, being seen off by his Dad. No word problems, because between his father and himself there are no words. Words will come later.

‘You got everything?’

‘Yep.’

‘Ticket?’

‘Yep.’

‘And you know where you’re getting off?’

‘Yep.’

Goodbye then, handshake, wink, maybe a bit of rough stuff around the shoulders — that should have been it. But his father decides to see him on to the train. Mr Busy. ‘Here,’ he says, motioning to Henry’s bags, ‘let me take those.’