Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

Against Angus’s wishes, Henry slows at a hole in the wall of a bank. A couple of Americans, presumably from the American University around the corner, are discussing world politics while waiting for their money.

‘Rule one, always plan your exit,’ the older of the two explains.

‘Yeah, but exit to where?’ the other asks.

‘Doesn’t matter. Just be ready. That’s why I never pass one of these without making a withdrawal.’

Good thinking, Henry thinks, fishing for his card. In these dangerous times you cannot have too much money about your person.

Angus pulls at the lead and whimpers.

‘Yes, yes, just wait,’ Henry tells him. ‘I have to plan my exit.’

Outside Bar One, the man of Mediterranean appearance is still on his mobile phone. Angus recognises him and stops. Again, he looks pleadingly at Henry. Does he want him to say something to the man? Apologise? Twit him a second time? ‘No, Angus,’ Henry says. ‘We’ve done here.’

But Angus hasn’t. Unable to contain himself any longer, he squats on the pavement and defecates.

It is only when he hears the man shouting, ‘Now that you will do something about, you filthy pig!’ that Henry finally realises how good a joke on him his life has been.

‘I’ve looked you up,’ Moira tells him, ‘on the Internet.’

‘In which case,’ Henry says, ‘you don’t have enough to do with yourself.’

‘That’s a laugh,’ she says, putting her flattied feet up on his knees. ‘I’ve been running all day.’

They are in his apartment, at home, as he likes to think of it, lolling. Henry has never lolled, but Moira is teaching him. ‘You want to lighten up,’ she has been telling him. ‘You’re coiled as if waiting for something to happen. Look at your shoulders. And why are you always in a jacket? What are you expecting?’

‘Nothing,’ had been his answer. Which was a lie. Like Mr Micawber, Henry is always expecting something. The difference being that Henry is expecting a blow, not a windfall.

‘Then relax,’ she’d said, helping him out of his jacket, undoing his tie, and putting her feet up on him.

So he’s trying. But he’d rather not be reminded that there is an index of achievement called an Internet out there which contains not a mention of him.

‘Oh but it does,’ she informs him. ‘“Western wind, when will thou blow?”’

‘That’s not by me.’

‘I didn’t say it was by you. It’s a favourite poem of yours, though. I know that much.’

‘It says that on the Internet? You look up my name and it tells you my favourite poetry? Just like that?’

‘No, not just like that. I looked up your name and that took me to the site of the University of the Pennine Way, and that gives the name of academic staff and their specialities.’

‘I’m not a member of their academic staff any more.’

‘It’ll be out of date. Everything on the Internet is out of date. I’m down as offering courses every Monday and Thursday. I haven’t done a Thursday for three years. But why haven’t you read me “Western wind, when will thou blow” if it’s your favourite poem?’

‘It isn’t. It’s just the shortest.’

‘Recite it to me, then.’

‘You’ve already recited it.’

‘Is that all there is?’

‘No. There’s a bit more.’

‘So. . ’

So, not to be a niggard, Henry recites it.

Western wind, when will thou blow,

The small rain down can rain?

Crist, if my love were in my arms,

And I in my bed again!

‘That’s beautiful.’

‘Yes. And short. Poems should be short.’

‘It’s more nautical than I’d have expected of you. He is a sailor, isn’t he?’

‘Or a soldier. A traveller, at least. To be honest with you I’ve never worried about that aspect of it — I just always associated the wind and the rain with the Pennines. “Western wind, when will thou stop,” was how I read it.’

‘Wouldn’t that change the meaning?’

‘Not at all. It was still about being somewhere you didn’t want to be. And wishing you were home.’

‘So where was home? Where was the bed you wanted to be back in?’

Henry looks up at dimmed lights of the chandelier. ‘Ah,’ he says, ‘you have me there.’

‘And who was “the love”?’

‘And there,’ he says, ‘you have me again.’

She wriggles her feet on him. ‘Come on, tell me. Who were you missing when you made it your favourite poem?’

‘If you really want to know, I was missing men.’

‘“Crist, if my love were in my arms” — a man!’

‘No. I was missing men to whom I could talk about how much I was missing women.’

‘Why couldn’t you just tell the women?’

‘They were the wrong sort of women. Maybe all women are the wrong sort. You need men to discuss longing with. That was why I put it in on my Literature’s For Life course. A subsidiary module on longing — Angst and the Man. Hoping it would attract the boys. But it didn’t. It just attracted more of the girls, on whom, of course, it was wasted.’

She throws him one of her twisted looks. ‘My sex does not understand longing?’

‘Well, it didn’t understand this version of it. They kept wanting to talk about it from the woman’s point of view. How she felt.’

‘And you weren’t interested in that?’

Henry is very tired suddenly. Some battles he no longer has the stomach for. He has just made a joke. Or maybe it was life that made the joke. It doesn’t matter. But in relation to four brief lines of unbearably exquisite male yearning, the idea of a woman’s point of view is lunatic. How she felt . Laugh, Moira!

He shouldn’t have been inveigled into reciting it to her. It is a deceptively treacherous piece of verse. Read it with your arms around a woman you love, and you cannot avoid remembering wrapping your arms around another woman you loved. It is a corridor of mirrors, infinitely receding, each enactment of the thing you longed for issuing in remembrance, and each remembrance leaving you longing for the longing before.

Or it could be that it isn’t the poem which is deceptively treacherous, only Henry.

Laugh, Moira!

Henry, full of grief for what was and what was not, remembers Marghanita. Crist, if my love were in my arms. She never was, though, and that’s the truth of it. Never was and never should have been. But does that make the subjunctive memory the less or the more painful? Crist, if only she had been!

And now it’s clear to him why he is thinking of Marghanita. Laugh, Moira. Laugh, as Marghanita had laughed, at the very idea, with the Western wind not blowing and the small rain down not raining, of seeing it from the woman’s point of view. She had visited him at the institute, as it must still have been called then. Henry is not master of the chronology, but he is fairly sure she had stopped calling on him by the time it was a polytechnic, and was dead before it became a university. So does Henry measure out his sorrows. Not her first visit, the one he is thinking of, nor her last, but vivid to him perhaps because of the poem. She had sat in on one of his classes. She liked doing that. His students would not have known what to make of this elegant elderly lady with the tragic expression, whom Henry passed off on them as an inspector, as though any inspector would have turned up in the Pennines, however freezing, with a fox around her throat.

She sat at the back, smiling her elegiac White Russian smile, her head not as high as it had been, just a touch shaky now, but that perhaps only visible to Henry who scrutinised mercilessly those he loved. Better not to be loved by Henry, that’s the lesson. And many had learned it. But Marghanita was family, flesh and blood, so there was no question of not being loved by him, or of not loving him in return — Henry, the marvellous boy, in whom so many of her ambitions, and the ambitions of her waning sisters, were realised.