Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

He doesn’t wake her. She is sleeping too peacefully, her breathing steady, like a high-speed train, from time to time falling quiet altogether as though she is going through a tunnel.

I have done some good things in my life, Henry thinks, and not waking her is one of them. Another is to have tried to forget the words I wrote about ‘Hovis’. If you really don’t wish a thing to have been, whether it’s a lie or an adultery or a betrayal, if you wipe it from the slate of your memory, then that’s almost the same — isn’t it? — as its never having happened. You can’t will away a misdeed, Henry accepts that, but if you will it away hard enough you almost can. Like the dot into which your picture used to disappear when you turned off your old cathode ray tube television: always there somewhere, you felt, receding into infinity, but to all intents and purposes — provided you are not a meta-physician — gone.

Of the compunctions he suffered at the time of writing the article, most were suppressed beneath the conviction that Osmond had better things to do with his time than read Movie Tones , or to care, even if he did happen to fall upon the relevant edition of that high-minded journal, what a long-forgotten failure of a shmuck of a friend, buried brain downwards in an obscure teaching institution in the Pennines, had to say about him. Later regrets Henry dealt with by reasoning that the article was of its time, in the spirit of what people did then, and contained arguments which — again bearing in mind contemporary expectations — needed to be heard. Like bear-baiting, Henry’s indiscretion had to be put down to the prevailing barbarism of the period. Anachronistic to criticise him. Like accusing Moses of Zionism, or Medea of bad parenting, or Prometheus of violating fire-safety regulations, like that other anachronism, Uncle Izzi.

Thus, over time, Henry’s delinquency — going, going, going, going. .

Not his fault that the fucking Internet has suddenly to pop up and revive it all.

Hot in his bed — in his father’s bed, it helps him to remember, spreading the blame, sins of the fathers and all that — Henry wonders if it would aid his cause to come clean about other offences while he’s at it. Have them taken into consideration, as they say, and — who knows? — thereby get his sentence reduced.

The women, does he mean? The friends? The wives of friends?

No, not the women, not the wives. And not the friends. He’s done friends. Hand on heart, he’s told the court all about ‘Hovis’ Belkin.

Unless there’s more, just one eensy-weensy little detail more. .

When was it that Catherine Grigson, the departmental secretary, knocked on Henry’s door with the first of the xeroxed Guidelines governing relations between staff and students — 1973, 1974? What and what not to say on a student’s essay. What and what not to say when disagreeing with a student on a matter of critical judgement in a public place. How to recommend a particular course of reading to a student without thereby compromising his or her intellectual liberty. How to behave when faced with a verbally aggressive student — don’t back him or her into a corner, for example, don’t punch him or her in the face, don’t tie him or her up or otherwise imprison him or her in your room (especially yours, Henry), don’t make promises you can’t keep.

Henry liked Catherine. Liked the pale skin flecked with red, and her bronze hair in which, if you were so minded, you could see your own reflection. Effortlessly overweight, a mere half-stone or so, and always flushed, as though caught out that very second in a minor misdemeanour, she belonged to another age and idea of women, a major’s daughter or something like that, raised to look after men, to bring them tea and take their boots off and otherwise ease their passage through a world made brutal by war and insurrection. Catherine wore too many clothes, all of them too long for her and too loose, so that in between dispensing guidelines she was forever reaching for straps which turned out to be the wrong straps, struggling to put back jackets whose fallen shoulder pads she had first to punch back into shape, tucking away undergarments to which Henry could neither give a name nor ascribe a use. That this chaos of too-muchness around her wardrobe was meant to make life pleasanter for brothers, fathers, uncles, persuading them of their own compactness and efficiency, and preparing them, if necessary, for the rigours of colonial conquest, Henry did not for a moment doubt. But seeing the ruse did not make it a jot less efficacious. The hottest and most ineffective of men, Henry cooled and became competent the moment he was in Catherine’s company. If he had a complaint about her it was only this: that she enquired after his well-being with so much concern etched on her face and so much sorrow in her voice — ‘Are you OK, Henry?’ or ‘Is everything all right with you today, Henry?’ — that she made his eyes water. ‘I’m well, I’m fine, I’m great,’ Henry would reply, knowing that he couldn’t possibly have been any of those things, else she wouldn’t have asked the way she did. ‘I’m terrific, I’m fantastic, I’m off the planet,’ he went on in desperation, wilting under her consideration.

Sweet. Sweet that someone cared.

Over the years he discovered that she had the same effect on everyone. As soon as she asked people how they were, they felt terrible.

The day she brought in the Code of Spatial Practice document, she made Henry feel it had been written specifically with him in mind. Normally she just dumped the updated weekly Guidelines on his desk, asked him how he was, and left. This time she sat down in a billow of slipped straps and fallen petticoats and took him through the most salient provisions. Do acknowledge students’ individuality and right to their views, she read — as though there were some danger he wouldn’t. Don’t communicate, either directly or indirectly, in a way that maligns others — as though there were some danger he would.

He shrugged, checking himself out in her hair. Fair enough.

Do , she went on, frame your responses in a considered and magnanimous manner. Don’t initiate rumours, whether to students or to your colleagues, which may be damaging to the reputation of either.

Aha, Henry said. Fine. Fine.

And don’t , Catherine continued, raising her flushed eyes to meet his, arrange to meet students alone, whether on the campus or off it. Don’t instigate relations which may be deemed intimate or in any other way inappropriate or misleading. Don’t show or express favouritism for one student over another. Don’t touch the student or crowd his or her personal space. A gesture which seems to you encouraging or consolatory can easily be misinterpreted. If a tutorial situation necessitates your seeing a student alone, do send a memo to the head of department in advance, explaining the situation, and do , in those circumstances, contrive to keep a distance of approximately one metre between you and the student throughout.

‘Catherine, stop,’ Henry said. ‘I’ll read all this in my own time. But you have nothing to worry about. I’m in my thirties, pushing forty. And when you’re pushing forty you’re pushing fifty. People are taking early retirement at my age. In my head I’m working an allotment — in slippers. I’m no threat, believe me. I’m past invading space.’

And he was. Let the no-touchies rulings of the middle seventies proliferate all they liked, nothing could have been easier for Henry to comply with, because by that time there was no one Henry wanted to touch.

One metre! I have to get to within one metre! Too close, Catherine. Too close by a door, a corridor, an institution and a county. Too close by however you measure the distance between life and death.