Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

‘And I of your whereabouts on the Internet,’ she teases. ‘The second thing I found out about you that I didn’t know is that you’re a film critic.’

He looks bemused. ‘I’m not. I just don’t like films.’

‘Not any?’

‘Not many.’ He is breathing in the odours of her neck, just below her ear, where she is mentholated.

‘I cry a lot in films,’ she tells him.

‘Me too,’ he says. Not adding that these days he cries a lot everywhere.

‘Well then?’ she says

‘Well then what?’

‘Well then why don’t you like them?’

‘What’s crying got to do with anything? Anyone can make anyone cry at the drop of a hat. We all go around carrying our tears in our pockets like loose change. The merest reference to our fragility sets us off. Say mummy, daddy, baby, love-you, dead, goodbye — and that’s it, you’ve got the whole auditorium snivelling. And this is before you throw in the amplified music and the widescreen Technicolor grave, ten times the capacity of your house. To me, going to the pictures is like lying down in front of a pantechnicon and marvelling that you’ve been moved.’

‘So what were you doing,’ she asks, ‘writing for Movie Tones ?’

Henry turns cold. If we’re to be scientific about it, his actual temperature has soared — nought to a hundred before the clock starts — but he feels cold, clammy cold, the perspiration freezing on his back.

‘That’s on the Internet?’

‘Not what you actually wrote. Not the words. But it’s mentioned. And why are you so hot?’

‘Does it say what it’s about?’

‘Some English director. Why are you so hot?’

‘Does it name him?’

‘It must do. But I can’t remember, I’m sorry. Henry, why are you burning up?’

‘Shame,’ Henry says. ‘I am oversupplied with eccrine glands which can pick up and process shame before I even know I’m feeling it. I like to think this proves how far evolved I am. Civilisation equals shame — have I told you my theory? The end of civilisation will come, if I’m right, when we’re all too hot to touch. I advise you to remove yourself soon to your own side of the bed.’

‘I have my own side now? That’s good.’

She has swivelled girlishly on to one elbow, treating him to the best of her profile, her neck taut, its veins like blue striations in rock, the angles of her face sharp and askew. She is a lovely colour, icy gold. What Henry wouldn’t give to have ice in his blood!

‘I am to take it,’ she goes on, pretending to warm her hands on the heat radiating from him, ‘that you are not proud of your film criticism.’

‘No, I am not,’ he tells her. But that is all he tells her.

He wakes in the night, relieved to find she is still with him. No one in London’s sleeping well, but that’s not Henry’s worry. It’s history that’s got the rest of them in a state, fear of a plane dropping out of the sky, or someone squirting smallpox through their letter box. There are rumours that there are Japanese people on the floor below Henry’s who will not leave the building, who have built up food reserves sufficient to keep them alive for five years and who wear biological suits fitted with oxygen masks at all times. Some days, Henry thinks he can hear them rattling about in their foil clothing, unless what he’s hearing is the sound of them counting their cans. Henry has not bothered to stock up. The threats to Henry’s life are not of a sort you can take precautions against. Besides, Henry reasons, the nearby mosque must surely act as a deterrent to any attack, despite the otherwise rich pickings of NW8.

Moira has taken his advice and rolled over as far as she can to her side of the bed without falling out of it. It’s a miracle he hasn’t drowned where he is. This is how it has always been for Henry. He sleeps in pools of perspiration of his own making, one recollection of ignominy succeeding another. Tell him death will be dry and he’ll feel a lot better about going there.

He would like to get up and wring out his pillows but he is afraid of waking her. He likes listening to a woman sleep. Tell him death will be dry and there’ll be a woman sleeping beside him, and he’ll give up the ghost tomorrow.

Tell him this woman will be sleeping beside him and he’ll give it up tonight.

Moira snores the way Henry imagines a young boy snores. Sudden gasps, like implorations, as though the day has been physically hard and the body is replenishing itself, succeeded by an even, insect hum, testifying to the innocence of the labours if not the sweetness of the dreams. Snails, earthworms, pollen hanging from the stamen of a flower. Had he been a father, he would have liked to hear his children snore. Lying still, determined not to wake her, he gives in to fatherly feelings for Moira. She has not given him permission for this, he knows. She hasn’t intimated she needs looking after. And he hasn’t listed fatherliness among his needs. Twist my heart and in return I’ll try to be good company, that’s the deal. She looks askance when he tells her that he sees the Danube dancing in her eyes. It’s a lot for one woman to provide — and she only a pastry chef — all the corruptions of a vanished empire. But she gets the rest — that he wishes to be hurt, however she chooses to hurt him, by her past; that he wishes to be agitated, however she chooses to agitate him, by the future; and that he would like her to be conventionally nice to him in between. Now she has to be his daughter, all of a sudden. Typical of Henry, just when he’s getting what he wants, to start fiddling with the agenda.

But he’s sore tonight. No fault of hers. She wasn’t to know what looking him up on the Internet would stir up. Any more than she was to know that his article for Movie Tones was his darkest hour, his deepest shame, his lowest moment.

Maybe it would have made him feel better had he come clean with her at once. My love, my little one — that article you unearthed, my single essay at film criticism, my sole publication, the one thing I would not wish to be remembered by, but now, you tell me, the only thing I will be remembered by, I have to confess to you was pure vendetta.

How would that have sounded? Kissed him better, would she? Wrapped her arms around him? Absolved him? Who’s to say not. And who’s to say a better sleep would not have been his reward for honesty. A woman’s forgiveness can do wonders for a man.

Should he wake her now and tell her?

Do you hear me? Pure vendetta — conceived in hatred, motivated by malice, driven by envy, and couched in primness. Not even my own primness, at that. ‘I am persuaded,’ I wrote, ‘that this director does not think as he ought on serious subjects.’ Pick up the allusion? Fanny Price, Mansfield Park. What’s Fanny Price doing in a piece of twentieth-century film criticism? Good question. But there you are. That’s what happens to you when you give your life to teaching the literary history of girls. You become one. In fact, I am by no means the first to have written criticism in that spirit. There have been worse than me. But my particular sin is this: the English film director, now living in Hollywood, the recipient of innumerable awards, whose reputation, as I maintained, was grossly overblown, whose films were claptrap, stage-bound, artificial, unctuous and self-pleasing, and who did not think as he ought on serious subjects — but I won’t rehearse my arguments again, not tonight, not to you, not here — does happen, did happen, to have been my best friend. Not Alfred Hitchcock, no. Christ, Moira, how old do you think I am? No, and not David Lean, either. Osmond Belkin, I’m talking about. Belkin . I’m glad you haven’t heard of him. But that doesn’t alter the offence. I have been guilty, though it was twenty years ago or more, of dishonesty and small-mindedness and, most unforgivably of all, pique. Do you, can you, still love me?