Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

Henry nods. Let’s not get into that. Given the amount of drink that’s going down, Lachlan will be talking Jewesses soon.

‘So go on,’ Moira says, quickly, ‘why could you never understand what any part of it meant to your mother?’

‘Part of what?’ Lachlan wants to know.

Angus would be better company, Henry thinks. ‘Part of what we’ve just been talking about. What interested her about it. She was never going to take a wife, she never saw a pig, and she never went into the garden.’

‘Maybe she was aiming it at you,’ Moira says.

‘Wife bit, yes, you could be right, though she universally warned me off women. And planting a garden was something we talked about. I used to tell her I couldn’t bear the idea of being buried, and she said I needed to learn to love the earth. Rich, coming from her, but there you are. The pig, however. .’

‘The pig’s me,’ Lachlan says. ‘The pig-food salesman.’

‘So how does that work? I’ll be happy for a month if I kill you?’

‘Not for me to say, old man. Do you recognise any such inclination in yourself?’

‘None that I would admit to.’

‘Then I’d better watch out.’

‘Your dog, however —’

‘Poor Angus. I don’t know what you did to him.’

‘It’s what he did to me.’

‘He came home —’ Lachlan says to Moira, enlisting her sympathy.

‘Is this Henry or the dog?’

‘The dog, the dog. I can’t speak for Henry. He came home, went straight into his basket, and didn’t leave it again for a week.’

‘Canine shame,’ Henry explains. ‘He knows I have his number. Piss-sniffer, ball-licker, shit-eater.’

‘Would you mind!’ the woman at the next table says to him. ‘This is my golden wedding.’

‘So sorry,’ Moira says for him.

‘I’m not sorry,’ Henry says, but not loudly. ‘If people don’t want to hear about dogs. .’

‘They should what?’ Moira wants to know.

‘They should. . I don’t know. . Stay in.’

‘It’s actually my dog he’s talking about,’ Lachlan leans across to explain. ‘So I’m the one who should be upset.’

‘My golden wedding,’ the woman says, ‘and you’re the one who thinks he should be upset.’

This is why Henry likes it here. It’s almost a club. Everyone has something in common. If it’s only that they are all dying.

A club for the mordant.

And actually, Henry realises, it’s more than that. Everyone here is not only dying, but finds the idea of death disgraceful. There’s no letting on, of course, and Henry would be hard pressed to prove this, but here, among his people, among this particular manifestation of his people, the St John’s Wood branch, so to speak, where expectations have been less pinched than in the north, there is a shared apprehension of the disgrace which death brings. As though not to have beaten it yet, not to have found a way round it, not to have exceeded the common in precisely the sphere of operation where the common is so indiscriminating, is to have failed, in the end, failed disgracefully at the only worthwhile task that’s been set you.

And so they sit eating red meat while blackly joking, a community of separated souls, each consumed with self-reproach.

When Henry floats back to the table, he finds that Moira and Lachlan have resumed their conversation about the old lady’s diaries. Moira has been asking whether they are newsy and informative, whether they are publishable even, since there is a great interest in those whose lives coincided, more or less, with the beginning and the end of the twentieth century.

‘Oh, she doesn’t talk about politics much,’ Lachlan is quick to explain, ‘not in the ones I’ve looked at so far, anyway. It’s more people.’

‘People are what people like,’ Moira says.

‘Are they?’ Lachlan is looking disconsolate now. Once the food has been thumped down the oesophagus and settled into his stomach, the sadness follows. Henry understands this. Like friends, food. After the initial excitement it all seems pointless.

‘You couldn’t round us off with another of your stepmother’s positive proverbs?’ Henry asks. ‘Something to raise our spirits before we leave?’

Lachlan rubs his fists in his eyes. No doubt, Henry thinks, Moira finds this gesture of helplessness aristocratic.

But then he remembers one. ‘I might not have this right,’ he says. ‘But it’s something like, “We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.” Neetzer, I think.’

‘Nietzsche,’ Henry says.

‘I approve of that, yes,’ Moira says. ‘We haven’t danced today, Henry.’

‘Then that’s another day lost,’ Henry says.

But he isn’t thinking what he says. He’s away. Floating. If you would be happy all your life, plant a garden . Funny. He can hear his mother saying it, her delivery mischievous, as though she knows she is mouthing advice she has no right to give. And yet the memory of it conjures up a garden. The garden she didn’t care about. The garden which his father laid waste with his torches, giving the ornamental goldfish heart attacks, after which the sandpit that they hoped would miraculously turn Henry into a little boy like other little boys. The sunlit, Schubertian garden of his childhood, where it was never cold, and never dark, and he was never anything but happy. So she was right. It works. If you would be happy, plant a garden. And for a moment or two he does, and is.

Funny how youthfully he remembers her, whistling while she worked. He can see her things, the most inconsequential of them, the round straw box in which she kept her thread and needles, though she was the world’s worst sewer; the blue airmail writing pads she liked to use, with faint grey lines across the page; the pile of books she kept on her bedside table, all with folded pieces of paper sticking out, marking passages she wanted to read aloud to him; her Pocket Oxford Dictionary , of which on her account Henry was always a little bit ashamed, because it implied limits to her curiosity.

And now Nietzsche.

The following day, he goes looking for somewhere to be buried. He has an A to Z in his pocket. The burial places circled with a red marker. He’d like Moira to go with him. A day out in the country, is how he puts it. But she’s busy. Has to be at the patisserie in the morning, and has a class to give in the evening. Life, Henry. Life. So he goes on his own.

Nowhere special. He has no plans. Which must mean he isn’t looking for an exact place to be buried yet, isn’t expecting to come to any definite decision, more trying to get ideas. Like slipping along to an Ideal Home Exhibition when you’re wondering what to do with your kitchen. An Ideal Burial Exhibition. The death you’ve always dreamed of. Earls Court, 22 Dec, the year’s midnight, for one day only — all you need to plan your own extinction. I could open it, Henry thinks. Henry Nagel, renowned author of the previously buried critique of the films of ‘Hovis’ Belkin, will be in attendance.

Almost-country churchyards are what he’s thinking about today, nothing civic, not cemeteries but church-sheltered semi-rural plots, all within a bus ride or two from St John’s Wood. He’s read that there’s an ancient yew in Downe in Kent. He likes yews. He isn’t always sure he could pick you one out, if other trees were present, but he likes the idea of them, and indeed likes the thing once another person has identified it for him. ‘There is a yew tree ’ — William Wordsworth. Reminiscent of ‘There is a willow’ — William Shakespeare. The matter-of-fact topography of anguish. Where trees are, human trouble is. If someone enters a room with the words ‘There is an oak’, or ‘There is a laburnum’, start running.