Howard Jacobson: The Making of Henry

Parents can’t leave children alone, Henry. You bring a child up, you don’t leave it alone .

You could have been a little more sensitive to the particular child I was.

You weren’t short of sensitivity. You were dying of sensitivity.

Dying of my mother, you mean.

Dying of your mother’s way, yes.

Except that you wouldn’t let her have her way.

Ha! You think I was able to stop her? You think you are not your mother’s son? Who taught you to shrink from everything? Who taught you not to put a hand out and take what was rightfully yours .

More difficult than you think, Dad, knowing what’s yours and what isn’t.

Never stopped you, Henry, taking what wasn’t.

That I got from you.

That you got from her, God rest her soul. It’s when you don’t know what’s yours that you start taking other people’s.

I never took, Dad, I borrowed.

And that makes it better?

No, that makes it worse.

Exactly. Thank you. That’s what they did to you. They patshkied around with your sense of ownership.

They?

They, she. Same difference. She was theirs, you’re hers. Take my word for it — she spat you out, Henry .

And?

And look at you , his father refrains from saying.

Henry isn’t listening anyway. His father wants it done and dusted. Henry the mother’s boy, end of argument. Henry his mother’s will on legs. But Henry has not yet decided whose boy he is. Where’s the hurry? Maybe when he’s seventy or eighty. Maybe when he’s ninety-four, like his neighbour, all will become clear and he can expire. But for now he prefers to scratch his head over himself. Keeps him young.

Enough, that all this they did for love of him.

And now they’re dead.

And they’re not the only ones. He can count them off. Just get him started. Irina, Anastasia, Effie. .

Nothing changes. Sitting out on the High Street the following afternoon, drawn by the sun — he must have sun, madhouse or no madhouse — Henry flirts with the East European waitress. Henry must have East European waitresses. Ah, the old country, he thinks, though the only old country Henry knows is this one. But Eastern Europe is in his bones — Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, Prague. And so are raddled women with too much rouge on their cheeks and too much gold on their fingers. Henry’s downfall, his love of raddled women. In Henry’s wild heart — the only part of him that was ever wild — it is always Vienna in the snow and the radiators on and the blinds drawn and the ‘Emperor Waltz’ playing on a faraway barrel organ and an Austro-Hungarian countess with twisted teeth waiting for him under the blankets. Hence St John’s Wood High Street, which is the nearest Henry will ever get to the Austro-Hungarian Empire now.

Nothing changes. How to retrieve the threepenny bit, how to get his change from the East European waitress. ‘Here,’ he’d said, handing her a five-pound note when she brought him out his Viennese coffee, not waiting for a bill, ‘save your feet.’ Showing that he’d noticed her feet, dainty like the feet of all East European waitresses, in maid-of-all-work flatties. Henry likes that look. A meteorologist of women, Henry knows what it portends. Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight; flatties by day, stilettoes for play. She’d smiled at him as she turned, hooking a stray curl of yellow hair back over her ear. Hair the colour of custard. Her smile an inbred Habsburg smile, the lips pendulous and just a little crooked. Hair the colour of curdled custard, now he comes to look again, and the crooked mouth wary. Like him, she’s too old to be doing this. But wariness, too, is a detail Henry likes. The wary, he remembers, bite. Thus has Henry missed out on history, not noticed the twentieth century or its passing — war, famine, communism, capitalism, the birth and death of nations, genocide — so engrossed has he been in women.

Unless, of course, he chose to be engrossed in women in order to miss out on history.

Don’t look, Henry — who told him that? Try not to see . Which one of them told him that?

She hasn’t returned with his change, the European waitress, though he has been out on the street with his coffee, taking up a table in the madhouse and enjoying the sun, for thirty minutes. Forgotten, that’s all. Forgotten his three pounds, of which he would have given her one anyway. So who cares? What’s three pounds in St John’s Wood High Street? Get up, leave, and let her have the three pounds. Let her even think he always meant her to have the three pounds, for he has a lordly air, Henry, born of not noticing what’s going on around him. But what if this is not lordliness after all, but cowardice? Afraid to ask, afraid to cause a fuss, afraid to be thought small-minded, afraid to look Elliot Yoffey in the face, is his insouciance in the matter of three pounds (minus one for the tip) just absence of ordinary adult competence? Fifty years on, is Henry still allowing the world to pish on him?

Back home, on the edge of his armchair, his father will be waiting. Go back and ask for the money, Henry. Learn to take what’s yours. There’s the door. Be a man.

And what will Henry do then?

Wrong to have said that at nine Henry has no alternative accommodation. He has his grandmother’s mock-Tudor gingerbread house, which feels and smells like the country though it is only round the corner, left out of his sunshine semi then up the lane, opposite the entrance to the park, in what is known as Jews Row. Widowed, Henry’s mother’s mother lives with her three straight-backed widowed sisters. In truth, the oldest, much the oldest — Effie — has never had a husband, Anastasia still has a husband somewhere, and the youngest, much the youngest — Marghanita — never quite brought hers to the point of marriage, but ‘widowed’ is what they have settled on all round. Girls, they are known as. The Stern Girls. Not to be confused with the Stern Gang, though they are all ‘widowed’ suspiciously early. Widowed and returned to their maiden names.

They are at home when Henry arrives with his satchel packed. Effie is playing Schumann on a small upright piano, Anastasia is sewing, Marghanita is reading Scott Fitzgerald, and Irina, his grandmother, is staring out of the window, as though waiting for Sir Lancelot. Tirra lirra, Henry should be singing, given how much he adores his grandmother, but he has just been told to get the threepence back or never return home, so he is not in a chivalric mood.

‘They’ve chucked me out,’ he tells the Stern Girls.

‘Who’s chucked you out?’ they ask in chorus.

‘My mother and my father.’

They know what that means. His father has chucked him out. His mother is one of theirs, therefore she would never chuck Henry out. Husbands you chuck, boy children you don’t. But Henry’s father has his own way of doing things. Not that they believe his father has chucked Henry out either.

When they have listened to his story they each produce a threepenny bit from their purses. ‘Keep three and give one to your father,’ his grandmother tells him, pinching his cheek.

Henry shakes his head. He can’t do that. Lie? I cannot tell a lie. But whether that’s because he is made of honesty or because he is afraid he will be found out he doesn’t know. He suspects the latter. Henry is thin-skinned — he has heard his mother talk about it as an established medical fact: ‘Henry has thin skin, you know, not like his father who has the hide of an elephant’ — which means he feels everything even before it’s happened, and has no protection against consequences. If he lies about the threepenny bit his lie will show through him, and there is no knowing where it will end except for knowing it will end badly.