Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

‘I don’t know about large. Futile more like.’

‘So why did you hit her with a fish?’

‘Years of ill treatment. She spoke ill of me and ill to me. Couldn’t forgive the molasses. Couldn’t pass a tin of syrup without abusing me. Sometimes you just snap. It was a kipper actually. I think that made it worse, that it was a breakfast fish.’

‘You like to make your runs for freedom in the morning?’

‘I hadn’t thought of that. But yes, you’re right. I believe I can change things in the morning. Or I did. And it was a bit like the bowler, the kipper. I felt the same lightness afterwards, for ten minutes.’

‘And your mother? Had you stayed in touch with her?’

‘We wrote. But she was disappointed in me. I imagined she’d see my point of view, you expect that of mothers — fathers equal business, mothers equal the heart, all that nonsense — but she thought I’d been an ass, walking out and marrying a secretary who wouldn’t talk to me. She had a point, too. In the end it was my father who came round, though by that time my mother had passed on — cursing, I was told, cursing all of us on her death bed — and Louis Stevenson molasses were suffering in the City. Tanker problems — there’s a joke! The old boy was ready to make a gesture of his own, you see, and saw me as an ally. I’d thrown my hat in the Thames, he was about to throw away his life, or what was left of it, on a woman who’d sung in the music halls. Funny the way it turned out — he made a better job of being flamboyant than I did.’

‘Oh, I don’t think you should see it like that,’ Henry says, gesturing to the room, to the idea of St John’s Wood beyond, to the principle of London with all its bleak emancipations and amenities. It was something he’d always imagined for himself, being washed up and cynical at sixty, a free and bitter spirit, proof that nothing pays or matters, that you can persist beyond happiness. In this way they are bedfellows — he born into spiders, wee Lachie born into molasses — the fellow-fallen, but each with a nice apartment.

So Oh, I don’t think you should see it like that is on behalf of both of them.

Lost on Lachie, though. ‘I’ll tell you what sticks in the craw,’ he says, redundantly Henry thinks, since everything sticks in his craw — ‘the fact that I’ve come full circle, still dependent on molasses money, what’s left of it, and still selling the stuff.’

‘I thought you were in pigswill,’ Henry says.

‘Animal feeds. As it happens the pigs don’t care for sweeteners, but sheep and cattle love it. It’s an important source of good-quality carbohydrate. Easily digested, not too high in nitrogen content, and cheap to produce. I should know.’

‘Then that’s all right,’ Henry says, not being a conversationalist in the matter of animal feeds, and not wanting to stir Angus from his sweet sleep with talk of din-dins.

‘Not all right with me. If I’d thought I was going to end up selling molasses, I’d have stayed, wouldn’t I? Kept my hat on. As it effing is, pardon my French, it’s all been for nothing.’

Hmm. Time to go, harumphing Henry thinks, refusing another drink. Time to return to his own disappointments. But not before it has crossed his mind that they have something in common, Lachlan and Moira — she the pastry chef, he caramelised in history and grief. Sweeteners.

Henry has been alive a long time; he knows how much small things count, what tiny fibres of like-mindedness bind the lonely. He himself is merely a failed teacher, arid, an amateur cake decorator’s son, with at best confectioner’s cream in his veins. Between Moira and Lachlan flows, whether or not they yet know it, molasses.

He should let Lachlan have her. Give something back. He’s borrowed from other men all his life, now’s the time to make some recompense. Moira isn’t his to give, he knows that, but if she were he should part with her. Give someone else a chance.

‘Before you go, old man,’ Lachlan says at the door, not quite putting his arm round Henry’s shoulder, but nearly, disconcertingly nearly , ‘do you use whores?’

Henry’s jaw drops. Actually slides out of his possession. He is aware that he has reddened. ‘Not exactly,’ is the best he can think of saying, ‘though I suppose there have been times when they’ve used me.’

They laugh at that, together, if you can call the noise they make a laugh.

Yes, Henry decides, he should definitely let Lachlan have her. Lachlan’s need being by far the greater. And by that token, his capacity to love and cherish being the greater too. It would be a kindness all round. If nothing else, that would at least leave Henry with the eminence he once enjoyed, as the most miserable person in the building.

But he loves her. And you don’t give away what you love. That much he has learned. So there you are.

‘I’ve cocked up my life,’ Henry told himself, early on the first day of his first term as an assistant lecturer at the Pennine Way College of Rural Technology. That was not simply a description of what had happened, it was also a statement of intent. Henry conjugated verbs differently from other men. ‘I’ve cocked up my life’, as Henry inflected it, also contained the meanings ‘I will cock up my life’, ‘I will have cocked up my life’, and ‘There was never a time when I wasn’t going to have cocked up my life’.

A future imperative, past determinative tense, all Henry’s own, perfect, unconditional and punitive.

So who was Henry punishing? Ah, if Henry only knew the answer to that!

As for why he was punishing whoever he was punishing, that is much easier. Henry couldn’t forgive him/her/them for making him so frightened of life that all he could do was teach it. In the abstract Henry admired teachers and didn’t hold with the smug wisdom which said that those who could did, and those who couldn’t taught. Teaching was as much doing as most things, Henry thought, and in many cases more. Those who really could were proud to pass on the trick of it — for pedagogy was a species of philanthropy — while those who couldn’t clothed their incompetence in selfishness and went into banking or politics. The parasitic professions. That being the case, Henry should have been proud to be a teacher. But he wasn’t.

This was partly the fault of the profession itself. Or at least the fault of the profession at the time Henry as a pupil encountered it. By believing it could effect wonders as an influence for social change, not just enlighten but liberate, teaching became the architect of its own demise. It educated boys like Henry into inordinate ambitions for themselves, created the most grandiose expectations, of which the least was staying where you were and passing on the baton of learning.

When it came to mapping out their futures, Henry and his school friends, not excepting the stellar ‘Hovis’ Belkin, had all been unthreateningly vague, wanting to do well, hoping to make a name, meaning to be of use, expecting, at the very least, to be creative. Beyond that it was felt to be crass to declare your career path. The only people who knew what they wanted to be wanted to be train drivers. The world was all before them, that was how they felt about it; they were educated to believe they could be and do anything. Anything but teachers. That was their single specificity. Whatever other choices we may make, we will none of us choose teaching. It was almost a blood oath. An obligation to their collective idea of themselves, past and future, sacredly binding each to each. We will make the world sit up or we will not, but we will never so help us God be stuck stuttering in front of a class of boys like ‘Fister’ Frister, or go quietly to the funny farm like ‘Fat Frieda’, or break down and weep like ‘Bunny’ Hensher, in commemoration of whose congenital rabbit twitch Henry’s classmates sat a carrot on their desks at the beginning of every lesson.