Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

‘Feel my forehead.’

‘And?’ she asks.

‘What temperature is it?’

‘Hot.’

‘See.’

‘Henry, your forehead is always hot. You’re a hot-headed person.’

‘That’s because I’ve got flu all the time.’

No, she could say, but doesn’t, that’s because you’re jealous all the time. Yes, she has noticed it. They have been going out for three or four weeks, no more, but already he is jealous of his own shadow. When they pass a shop window which offers them their reflection he pauses so that he can admire them together. Henry in his dotage and a woman young enough, almost, to be his daughter. That’s when she observes that he is jealous of himself for being with her.

He has an antique tray which moves up and down his bed on oiled brass tracks. The opulence of this place! On this tray, Moira lays out strudel for him and strong tea. And of course aspirin.

‘You take too many of those,’ she tells him.

‘A man of my age can’t take too many aspirin. It prevents the blood clotting. The only reason I am not having a heart attack now is aspirin.’

‘Fine, Henry, so long as you don’t prick your finger.’

‘Why, what will happen if I prick my finger?’

‘You’ll bleed.’

‘Of course I’ll bleed. If you prick me do I not bleed?’

‘To death , Henry! Think how thin your blood must be by now. It’ll drain out of your finger in seconds.’

‘All of it?’

‘Every last drop.’

He thinks about it. ‘I can’t stop taking aspirin,’ he says at last, cutting into the strudel, ‘I need them for my migraines.’ Then he tells her about the spider, the daddy-long-legs which sat on his brain while his mother laboured to hold him back from a disgusting world.

‘And you’ve had migraines ever since?’

‘On and off.’

She is sitting by his bed in a tasselled chair which must have intrigued and baffled Henry’s father, so dainty is it, so unlike anything that ever came from his workshop. ‘What is this?’ Henry imagines his father saying when he first saw it. ‘A sofa for fairies?’

Moira is no fairy, which might be why she appears uncomfortable in it, on the edge, fiddling with her earrings.

She shakes her head at Henry. ‘I seem to have spent my life,’ she says, ‘undoing what mothers have done to their sons.’

‘Well, one must suppose you wouldn’t accept the job if you didn’t like it.’

‘Who said I’ve accepted it?’

‘You’re turning me down?’

‘Don’t personalise everything. When it comes to remothering I’m turning you all down, I’ve had enough of it.’

‘Who’s “all”?’

Their eyes meet. Hers very Baltic this morning, Henry’s rheumy, the colour of strudel. Then she turns her face from him and gets up, going to the window, where the world of men undone by mothers stretches further than the eye can see.

‘For a start, Aultbach has suddenly developed a limp,’ she says.

‘I thought the strudel wasn’t quite perfect today,’ Henry says. ‘But what’s that got to do with his mother?’

‘It’s got to do with me, it’s got to do with me having to mother him.’

‘I thought he had a girlfriend.’

‘He has, but she doesn’t mother. Then there’s Lachlan, then there’s you. .’

‘Lachlan? What’s Lachlan been asking you to do?’

‘Same as you. Tuck him up in bed. Spoon him cake and give him aspirin.’

‘Tuck him up in bed? You visit Lachlan’s bed?’

She remains at the window, her head averted. He loves the back of her. The front of her too, but the back of any woman Henry cares about is more poignant and therefore more sensual to him. When you’ve got jealous flu the receding parts of a woman are what you want to look at.

She is wearing a cream suit, well tailored, the waist nipped in, the skirt straight with an insolent slit at the back, not just a parting in the material but a wilful slash, a touch of tartiness which the elegance of the cut otherwise belies. The way Henry likes it. On her feet high-heeled summer shoes, a lattice of fine straps, her painted toenails showing. Her weight is on her left foot, unbalancing her, giving her an impatient look, as though she would rather be somewhere else. But she must also know that when she stands like that her skirt tautens across her buttocks, and therefore she cannot want Henry to want her to go.

‘You’re all ill, you men,’ she says at last. ‘It’s a beautiful summer’s day out there and you’ve all got something wrong with you.’

‘That’s because we’re all old,’ Henry says. ‘But there’s no reason to be irritable with me just because you’ve been visiting Lachlan’s bed.’

‘I haven’t been “visiting his bed”. He isn’t well, you’re all not well, and he asked me to bring him round some patisseries.’

‘The way you used to do with his stepmother? Is he planning to resurrect the tradition? Including cremation?’

‘I don’t know what he’s planning.’

‘But you took him some.’

‘How could I refuse? He’s recently bereaved. He’s a customer. And I was coming to see you anyway.’

‘You mean you delivered him patisseries this morning, on the way to me? You’re telling me you’ve already been there? You’ve done him first?’

‘It’s not a crime, Henry.’

‘That depends on how long you stayed —’

‘I didn’t stay.’

‘— and on whether he got fresher strudel than I did.’

‘Well, you’ve nothing to worry about on that score — he doesn’t like strudel.’

‘So on what score do I have something to worry about? Croissants? Or do millefeuilles run in the family? Let me see if I can guess how he likes them — confectioner’s cream, I’d say, I doubt he’s a custard man. . yes, confectioner’s cream. Which just leaves the method of delivery to be determined. . By tongue, I’d say. Am I getting warm?’

She turns to face him, denying him her back. In anger, her face loses its lopsidedness, as though it is contentment which makes her crooked. ‘Grow up, Henry,’ she says.

But how can Henry grow up, given the eye of the storm of her skirt, its still point, where the horizontal tension meets the vertical, that eloquent square of fraught silence which only an engineer or a philosopher of space possesses the science to explain? Let Hell freeze over while Henry’s standing in it, discoursing with the Devil, and let a woman scurry through the icy flames with that square of silence screaming from her skirt — Henry knows which phenomenon will engross him more.

‘Come here,’ he says, reaching out for her, bravely, despite his fevered state.

But before he can touch her she has quit the room — skewering his carpet with her high heels, her hair tossing like a pony’s, the slit of her skirt gaping more lewdly than Henry in his influenza can bear — leaving him trapped under his antique tray, the crumbs and the cold tea. ‘Call me when you’re feeling better,’ she shouts as she opens the door. ‘And you should know that we don’t use confectioner’s cream at Aultbach’s. That would have been your mother.’

Aultbach’s — t,t,t. Her lapping of the t his final torment.

His poor mother.

Not enough she used confectioner’s cream, but now, in death, where she cannot defend herself, she must be derided for it. What’s Henry’s duty here? He has never known. Stand up for your mother every time another woman speaks slightingly of her and the truth of it is you have no women left.

She’d warned him how it would be. ‘They’ll make mincemeat of you,’ she’d prophesied. ‘You won’t know how to resist. They’ll twist you round their little finger. They’ll get you to cut my heart out to prove how much you love them, and you’ll do it.’