Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

‘The old biddy.’

‘Really,’ Henry says. Moira again kicks him under the table. This is the trouble with having a woman friend. If you have a woman friend she likes to know where you are, even when you’re with her, and that means having to come back from the dark backward of abysmal time, where most of what is interesting to you, if you’re Henry, is to be found.

They are in Henry’s favourite restaurant, the Tallin Palace, to which Moira has only recently introduced him but which fits the bill for Henry, exactly. What a restaurant should be. Pink tablecloths, arched entrances from room to room, arched alcoves, arched mirrors, an air of anxious plenty, as though those who eat here are not beyond imagining a time when they may never eat again, but in the meantime every sort of meat and fish — though only the meat is important to Henry — served by men, not impossibly Cypriots, in wigs and black bolero waistcoats. And where a restaurant should be, too, attached to a mansion block, almost the mansion-block canteen, invisible to the eye of mere passers-by, but just a five-minute walk from the High Street.

‘Why don’t we have all our meals here?’ Henry had suggested, after his first visit.

‘Because I’d be twenty stone in a month,’ Moira told him.

But she was pleased he liked the place. She is enjoying being his Virgil through the underworld which is St John’s Wood. Though Henry offers to be jaded, he marvels easily. He vanishes from her side sometimes, floats away like the shade of a dear-departed, but a new restaurant always brings him back. In time she’ll be out of restaurants, she knows that. She’ll have taken him to every one there is. And then, the chances are, she’ll lose him. It’s like waiting for the dawn to come and the first cock of the morning to crow — signal for ghosts to start like guilty things upon a summons, and be gone. She feels she’s borrowing him from something or from someone, she just doesn’t know from what or whom.

Tonight there are three small parties in progress at the Tallin Palace. Intermittently, with well-calculated consideration for those who are not celebrating a birthday or an anniversary, the lights are dimmed and one of the waiters comes in with a cake. Next to Henry’s table a dozen people are gathered for a golden wedding. The wife is birdlike and triumphant: fifty years ago they said it wouldn’t last. The husband is mottled on his hands and face with the brown stains of death. Little by little, starting from the inside, it’s seeping through his flesh. He is so decrepit — though there’s been nothing wrong with his appetite, Henry’s noticed — he does not have the breath to blow out a single candle. At the other end of the table a great-niece, maybe a great-great-niece, stands up, rolls out her chest and extinguishes it for him. Everyone applauds. Only the wife is displeased. ‘We should see you more,’ she tells the great-great-niece.

‘Families,’ Henry says, thinking about the cake. ‘But you were saying’ — to Lachlan — ‘your stepmother kept a diary.’

‘Not a diary — dozens of diaries. Going back to the twenties as far as I can tell, and only finishing when she did. Do you know there’s even an entry for the morning she passed away.’

‘What does it say?’ Moira wants to know.

‘“Not feeling well.”’

Henry laughs. Moira kicks him under the table.

‘That’s upsetting,’ Moira says.

Lachlan bangs his chest. He is not the best person to be out eating with. Every morsel of food has to be chased down his oesophagus, a punch more or less wherever there’s a button on his shirt, every six or seven seconds. Then air has to be coaxed back up, at similar intervals.

It’s only a pity, Henry thinks, looking away, that my father isn’t here to pick his teeth behind his hand. We could leave them to enjoy each other’s company.

Why Lachlan is eating with them at all, Henry isn’t sure. Moira’s doing. She is sorry for him. She thinks he’s lonely. And since she and Henry are not in the slightest bit lonely now they have each other, there is no reason not to make the occasional gift of themselves — a proof of their superabundance — to their friends. Friends? All right, neighbours then. Henry suspects her interest in Lachlan goes beyond pity. He is a mystery to her. She has already remarked several times how much she admires the way he wears his clothes. Not necessarily the clothes themselves, which have nothing of St John’s Wood Italianate about them, aren’t tight about the hips, or open at the throat, but the way he carries them. They look as though they belong to him, as though he’s grown them, she said. Observe him when he sits down in his suit, she ordered Henry, he looks like an old bear enjoying the slackness of his skin. She also likes the smell of them. (The countryside, she said. Angus, Henry corrected her.) And she is intrigued by the gold pocket watch he carries on a chain, fastened by a fob chain to a buttonhole in his waistcoat. She thinks he’s aristocratic, a laird or Highland chieftain. Though she doesn’t admit to being a foreigner herself, laughing off Henry’s conviction that she is Viennese or Czech, insisting she was born in Borehamwood or somewhere like, this to Henry proves conclusively she’s from somewhere else. Only a foreigner would be intrigued by Lachlan, or think him aristocratic. He is like beefeaters and Chelsea pensioners and the changing of the guard — picturesque only to the eyes of a tourist.

Lachlan himself is less upset than Moira is by his stepmother’s diaries. ‘Dear old thing. .’ he says, comical in the pause, ‘. . I don’t think.’

Henry is anxious not to have his meal ruined by another Lachlan monologue on the subject of his stepmother.

‘Find something nice to say about her,’ he says. ‘It’s better for your heart. Speak well of people and you’ll live longer. Speak well of the dead and they’ll watch out for you.’

‘That’s very positive, from you,’ Moira says.

‘I’m practising.’

Lachlan says, ‘You’re sounding like her. Every day she tried to write down something in her diary that would cheer her up. I thought seeing me without a penny did that, but apparently not.’

‘So share with us some of her wisdom.’

‘Oh, lor,’ Lachlan says, closing his eyes. ‘Well, there is one I remember, probably because the old feller used to recite it, though I can’t say I know whose it was first. “If you would be happy for a week take a wife; if you would be happy for a month kill a pig; but if you would be happy all your life plant a garden.”’

‘Funny,’ Henry puts in, ‘that was one of my mother’s favourites too.’

‘Lot of nonsense, if you ask me,’ Lachlan says, ‘Should read, “If you would be miserable for a week take a wife; if you would be happy all your life bury her in the garden.”’

Moira slaps his hand across the table. ‘That’s not very nice,’ she tells him.

‘Strange,’ Henry says, ignoring the pantomime. ‘I could never understand what any part of that meant to my mother.’

‘Ah,’ says Moira, ‘Ekaterina the cake builder and decorator.’

‘Leave her alone,’ Henry says. ‘She isn’t here to defend herself.’

Moira ruches her lips at him. For a moment Henry thinks she’s going to show him a mouthful of food. Or bring a breast out. ‘I only say it,’ she says, ‘to annoy you.’

‘Don’t annoy me.’

‘I only annoy you because I love you. Has no one ever told you how handsome you become when you’re annoyed?’

‘Who’s Ekaterina?’ Lachlan wants to know.

‘Henry’s mother. She was a maker of architectural cakes. Henry doesn’t like me joking about her.’

‘Quite right. Nothing funny about a mother. Nothing funny about a stepmother either, but there you are. Nice name, Ekaterina. Russian, was she?’