Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

Why did you come, Dad?

‘So what’s a radical feminist?’ he asked at last, not interested.

And equally not interested, Henry told him. Though the description was unlikely to have been one any radical feminist would have recognised.

‘You should be at home here, then,’ his father said.

Henry took it. Tit for tat. ‘You’d think, wouldn’t you.’

So why have you come, Dad?

They made small talk, driving themselves deeper and deeper into the unbearable inconsequence of family. He breaks my heart, but I can’t think of anything to say to him, Henry thought.

Who knows what his father thought.

Just before he left, he told Henry that he had hoped to have a conversation with him about his mother, but another time maybe.

‘Nothing’s wrong, is there?’

‘No, no, nothing.’

‘Her health’s OK?’

‘Absolutely. There’s nothing to worry about, I promise you.’

‘She still decorating her cakes?’

‘Well, you know that, you saw her last week.’

What Henry wanted to say was that though he was bound to his mother, migraine to migraine, with filaments of steel, and would have known had anything been the matter with her, because it would immediately have been the matter with him, talking about her to his father made her seem a million miles away.

You render remote my mother, Dad — I could hardly have said that to you, could I?

You could have tried it. And with the words in their more familiar order, who knows, it might have helped .

Helped what?

Helped make you a little less remote .

What Henry did say, and this too sounded strange, was ‘You two all right?’

‘Yes, we’re all right.’

Was there a hesitation?

‘Sure?’

‘Yes, sure. Look, I’ll talk to you next time.’

But of course there wasn’t one.

Amazing, Henry thought, how a single mistake can claim you and that’s your life over. The mistake of his becoming a teacher, he meant, not his father’s visit in broad daylight to the Midland Hotel.

He didn’t just think it, either; he observed it, sat in his cellar and watched his life running through his fingers the way a child wanting to make a fist of sand watches it seep from his grasp.

That face you make when you are in a lift with people you don’t know and don’t want to know, that face which is in fact the disappearance of a face — Henry learned how to make it in his first years on the Pennine Way and never learned to make another.

Unable to conceive of anything else to do, and seized by the irresistibly self-perpetuating logic of inertia — why bother when you can effect no change, how can you effect change when you lack the force to bother — Henry sank into middle age, a disgrace to himself, a shame to the collective idea of success he had shared with his friends, the longest-serving and least-published member of an institution he despised. Many a time it seemed that they would sack him, for learned publications, not teaching and invigorating, were the measure, though God knows they could have sacked him for the latter as well, so lacklustre had his seminars and lectures become. His own joke against himself, that he slept on his feet while lecturing some days, slept and snored and kept on talking, while his students, faithful as always to the letter, wrote ‘Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz’ in their notebooks. But though Mona Khartoum called him in a couple of times during her tenure, puckered up her O for Henry to salute, cautioned him against overuse of the concept genius and wondered if he wanted her to suggest a research topic, or introduce him to an editor, for a salaried academic couldn’t expect to do nothing with his professional life except read and reread Jane Eyre and yet never publish a syllable about it, no step was ever taken to remove him. Perhaps they liked having him there as a warning and a specimen, like the mock-up of the woolly mammoth or the mastodon you find in the entrance halls to provincial museums, evidence of the life that once roamed the planet but which, due to some fault of character or design, some incorrigible predisposition to male-centred humanism, some congenital incapacity to publish, is now extinct. Tyrannosaurus Henrix.

Which could also have explained how come he was permitted to live a semblance of a man’s life at the poly or the uni or whatever the fucking place was called, throwing himself on the mercies of friends’ wives when they happened to turn up as mature students, and otherwise, in his early years there at least, putting it freely, if disconsolately, about. See how pathetic — was that it? See how harmless when not allowed to roam in packs?

Look on this work, ye Mighty, and despair.

He has agreed to w-a-l-k Angus.

It seems to Henry that if he is not prepared to r-e-l-i-n-q-u-is-h Moira, w-a-l-k-i-n-g Angus is the least he can do.

Lachlan comes knocking, only hours after their conversation, begging Henry to get him out of a hole. His pretext is an aspirin. Does Henry have? Of course Henry has. Henry has half of Western Europe’s stock of aspirin. As Lachlan must have known, because Moira must have told him. But the real reason is the dog’s exercise. Lachlan isn’t up to it, doesn’t know what the matter is, a virus of some sort, and poor old Angus who’s been in all day is getting desperate. It’s your fault, that’s what Henry takes him to mean. It’s your fault for getting me to tell you my life story and upsetting myself. The other implication is that it’s Henry’s fault for engrossing the dog and keeping him indoors.

‘Bless you,’ Lachlan says when Henry agrees. ‘I’ll fetch him.’

But Henry doesn’t want Angus in his apartment. There are ghosts where Henry lives and he doesn’t want the dog frightening them, or vice versa. So the handing over takes place, huggermugger, on the landing between them.

‘Just the dog,’ Henry says, when Lachlan starts to explain the contents of the little tartan bag that goes with him. ‘Nothing else.’

‘Yes, but you’ll need some of these if —’

‘Just the dog,’ Henry says.

‘Suit yourself,’ Lachlan says. ‘But he can’t go out without a lead. Do you want me to attach it to the collar now or will you do it when you get him down?’

Henry looks startled. ‘What does getting him down mean? Do I have to wrestle him or something?’

‘No, just down the stairs. He doesn’t like the lift. Afraid of it, the silly sod.’

‘Do it now,’ Henry says, looking away. ‘You do it, here, now.’

The dog’s tongue is making a lapping noise which Henry doesn’t like. He has a triumphant air. He may love Henry but he also has his measure. He knows that there is a battle of wills afoot and that he is winning it. He meekly offers his throat to Lachlan, in parody of obedience. See this, Henry? Well, you won’t be seeing this quality again for a while.

‘What you’ve got to watch with this clip —’ Lachlan begins to say.

But Henry stops him. ‘You just sort it,’ he says. ‘I won’t be touching any mechanisms.’

‘No, but you’ll need to know how to unclip it when you let him off.’

‘I won’t be letting him off.’

The dog pants, eyeing Henry with consternation. Unless its ironic consternation.

‘He needs an r-u-n,’ Lachlan explains. ‘He’s an old dog, but he needs his r-u-n.’

‘How old is he?’

‘How old are you, Angus? Twelve, I’d say, at a pinch.’

‘How old’s that in human terms?’

‘Seventy-two, maybe seventy-five.’

‘Then I’ll r-u-n with him,’ Henry says.

What he doesn’t say is that he has never w-a-l-k-e-d a dog in his life. Let alone r-u-n with one.