Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

‘You’re a good dancer, then?’

‘Was. All the Louis Stevenson men danced. “Can’t call yourself a complete man if you haven’t got twinkle toes,” the old boy used to say.’

‘Robert Louis Stevenson said that?’

‘No, my father did. And look where that motto got him.’

‘But if you didn’t sleep with them,’ Henry goes on, ‘how did you get your money? Did they pay you per dance?’

‘Good God, no. What do you think I was — a prostitute? The hotel paid me. But since the old woman was keeping the hotel afloat anyway, I was just getting my own money back. Makes you bitter, you know, dancing your life away with old bats for nothing.’

Oh, I don’t know, Henry thinks.

Normally, he would like to be off now. By his standards this is a preternaturally lengthy conversation. But he is gripped by the spectacle of a man more disgusted with his life than he is himself. When Lachlan talks he appears to be staring into an abyss. Henry is curious to see whether he intends to fall into it this afternoon.

He notices that Angus has gone to sleep. ‘May I sit down?’ he asks.

‘Of course,’ Lachlan tries to say, making a sign of apology. He is temporarily unable to talk for something lodged in his oesophagus. His life. He is choking on his life, Henry thinks.

‘You never talk about your mother, your real mother,’ Henry says, once Lachlan has cleared his passages.

Lachlan’s eyes water like Angus’s. ‘Too long ago,’ he says.

‘I’m sorry,’ Henry says. He doesn’t want another of them falling in love with him out of loneliness. ‘It’s just that I am thinking a lot about my mother at present.’

‘She alive?’

‘No.’

‘Dreadful business, I know,’ Lachlan says. But what does he know? Nothing. He is not listening, not concentrating, gone somewhere else. London Bridge, circa 1958. The time he threw his bowler hat in the Thames. Kicked the dust of his family off his heels. Watched the hat float away on the tide, then strode off, free, into the future. Except that there was no future. He tries to collect himself. Then tells Henry all about it.

They were in sugar. In molasses, to be exact. In molasses big. Does Henry know anything about molasses? No. Few people do. And those that did would not have known what Lachlan knew. Lachlan was born into molasses. Louis Stevenson — did the name not mean anything to Henry? Treasure Island , obviously. But to some the name was even more synonymous with molasses. Louis Stevenson treacle. . No? In a sense, the island that provided Lachlan’s branch of the Louis Stevensons was even more of a treasure island than Long John Silver’s. Treasures poured, anyway, however fanciful the comparison, into the pockets of Lachlan’s great-great-grandsires, as it was meant to pour, when his time came, into Lachlan’s. He had been prepared for nothing less since his earliest age. Taught the trade. Taught the history. Taught the geography. Taught the chemistry. Taught the economics. Taught the shipping. High-masted schooners which brought molasses back from the Indies bore the names of Lachlan’s great-aunts, and one day would bear the name of Lachlan’s wife. Except that by Lachlan’s fifteenth birthday his father and his grandfather were employing tankers to transport their molasses, which meant that Lachlan’s wife, whoever she was destined to be, would have to make do with having her name on one of those. Less romantic, Lachlan thought, but as his father told him, progress was progress and no one with a sweet tooth would ever know the difference. Make no mistake, Lachlan was proud to be the heir of Louis Stevenson syrup and treacle and however many dozens of other products besides. He loved enumerating to his friends at public school the sweets and chocolates which would never have been what they were had his family not had an input into them. But for the plummeting of the price of sugar after the First World War, he told them, they wouldn’t have been able to suck on anything that he wasn’t in a manner of speaking responsible for. But for colonial exploitation you wouldn’t be at this school, some of the smartest of them retorted. Which hurt a bit, though he was versed in the arguments to refute that sort of sentimentality. No molasses, no jobs. No jobs, no money. No money, no self-respect — so up yours, Engels Minor. What hurt more were the prosaic tankers, and the storage terminals which had been built to receive them. Lachlan thought he remembered barrels. Maybe he’d only seen photographs of barrels, or heard talk of barrels, nevertheless the idea of barrels was part of the heritage of his imagination. One day he would go over to the islands, share a rum with the natives on his plantation, and sail home, in a boat named after his beloved wife, with the molasses slurping about in barrels. Some who couldn’t wait to have their molasses tinned and bottled and sold to them in the normal way would be standing on the quay expectantly, their jugs in their hands, their lips moist, knowing they could draw from the barrels the moment the ship was still. That was how he had always pictured it. Hand to mouth. Now, there were thousands of feet of pipeline enabling the molasses to be pumped directly from the ship. Suddenly it had become an industry. And just as suddenly, Lachlan had become a City man, no trips to Jamaica or the Antilles yet, but only shipping routes to get to know, warehousing, tank sizes, pumping velocities, mere ledger work no matter how it was bedecked in the language of high finance. ‘Not what I want,’ he told his father. ‘But then what you want might not be what I want,’ his father told him in return. ‘I’m all unexpended energy, Dad,’ he said. ‘Then go on unexpending it,’ his dad told him, ‘you’ll need it one day.’ ‘I’m not a bank, Dad.’ ‘Oh yes you are.’ Hence Lachlan, one bright metropolitan morning, striding along London Bridge in his pinstripe suit — no pirate shirt, no pantaloons — reaching a decision which would affect the whole of his life. Enough. He’d had enough measuring and counting and pen-pushing. He was twenty-three, a young man, not a bank, the white sun-tipped town humming about his ears, the great brown river of promise rolling beneath him. So off with his hat, off with it, a gesture of such liberating boldness that he remembers himself singing as he performed it — ‘Burlington Bertie’ or ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’, something like that, though it’s also possible he didn’t sing at all, so contracted was his heart with fear. Away went the hat anyway, in a lovely fearful parabola of freedom, up and away like a black balloon, tumbling and spinning and almost, almost floating, until it landed brim down in the river and sailed away, a little boat with Lachlan’s prospects in it.

In his sleep, Angus cries a lovelorn cry.

‘And?’ Henry wants to know.

‘Oh, there’s no “and”,’ Lachlan says.

‘You didn’t get to the Antilles?’

‘Never tried. Got myself entangled with a woman instead. Took a job as a clerk in an antique auction house for the time being — it’s always for the time being, have you noticed? — fell for the secretary and married her. Dreadful mistake. She thought I was moneyed. I have the look, you see. Or at least I had it then. She thought I was idling until I came into my fortune. After I told her I’d thrown my fortune off London Bridge she didn’t talk to me for three years.’

‘But you married for all that?’

‘We already were married. It was our wedding night when I told her. Damned silly, I suppose.’

‘You still married?’

‘Officially, but we don’t communicate. I hit her with a fish and that was that.’

‘Your life seems to be marked by large gestures,’ Henry notices.