Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

Not running anywhere, Henry has always had a soft spot for Wordsworth’s yew tree, standing ‘single, in the midst of its own darkness’. It is like an epitaph in itself. HERE LIES HENRY — SINGLE IN THE MIDST OF HIS OWN DARKNESS. He’ll settle for that. Not as good as HERE LIES HENRY — WHO NEEDS NO INTRODUCTION, but then what man is remembered the way he’d like to be?

The yew, Henry recalls learning at school — was it from ‘Fat Frieda’ he learned it? — was a favoured churchyard tree because of the superstition that its roots grew into dead men’s eyes. That frightened him at the time. By rights it should frighten him more now, the closer he gets to finding out for himself, but accommodations crowd in when you least expect them. Why not be blinded by the yew? If your eyeballs feed the roots, does that not mean your seeing will live on in the tree’s branches? Not according to the superstition it doesn’t. The reason you wanted the dead blinded was so that they couldn’t see and covet the world of the living, and then be tempted to return as spirits. More effectively than the stone lid to your grave, the yew finished you off and kept you in your place. But that’s only the superstition; there’s no saying it works. And no saying that the dead aren’t watching from every dark green leaf. .

Such a consciousness junkie, Henry. Wanting to live for ever, wanting to watch for ever, unable to bear missing out on anything. So characteristic of a man, he remembers Esmé Papping, his friend Lawrence Papping’s missus, telling him soon after he’d told her he loved her and could not contemplate the idea of her so much as drawing breath where he was not — so untrusting of the flux, Henry, so controlling. Esmé’s favourite yew, of course, was Sylvia Plath’s –

And the message of the yew tree is blackness —

blackness and silence.

After her, after Sylvia, the deluge.

Let it go, Henry. Let it finish.

Sweet Esmé, another one putting him right. Another one who failed, for Henry is still here, not letting it go, not letting it finish.

But the Downe yew is too distant. Kent, for Christ’s sake! He wants Moira to be able to come and visit him on a whim. Maybe bring a flower. Maybe bring Lachlan. Have Angus piss on his grave.

He catches the number 13 bus from Finchley Road, heading north, meaning to go as far as it will take him, then catch another if he has to, according to the red circles in his A to Z. But the 13 only goes as far as Golders Green, in which case he might as well stroll up to Hoop Lane and take in the great crematorium, where the burning started in earnest for Londoners. It looks vaguely like a monastery, with red-brick Tuscan chapels and cloisters, memorial plaques on every inch of wall, and, behind, a wedge-shaped garden, a meadow he guesses it should be called, on which sheep would not be out of place, though the grazing wouldn’t be of the best, this being what a discreet notice describes as the Dispersal Area. How many have been shaken out here? Henry wonders — the body and soul of man reduced to the contents of a pepper pot.

He is quickly tearful. Tears creaking in his forehead, at the apostrophes of his eyes. The creak of tears — where does that come from? A poem? A woman’s novel? Not his phrase, he is sure of that. One he’d needed to appropriate. Too apposite to be without. The skull like an old unsteady boat, at sea, tear-drenched, and the timbers creaking.

I’ll have that, Henry had decided.

Not for himself, the creaking tears, but for everybody. Every body. He reads a memorial stone to Shirley — he knew a Shirley once — Addio mia sposa brava . Though he has never had a wife, goodbyes to wives have always struck Henry as too sad to bear. Second in unbearableness only to goodbyes to children. And second not even to those if you are the erotic sentimentalist Henry is.

Sposa brava . Wherein the bravery? he wonders. In Bunhill Fields, another of Henry’s favourite gardens of interment, there is a memorial to Dame Mary Page, relict of Sir Gregory Page, Bart, who ‘in 67 months was tapd 66 times, had taken away 240 gallons of water, without ever repining at her case’. Was Shirley, too, a non-repiner? Sposa brava . Hard for Henry, in the exquisite abstract, the suffering of women. Man is different. Man is born to suffer and not repine. Henry himself a case in point. But wives in pain — the soft liquidity of mia sposa brava , like water over pebbles, its dying fall, its too too tender salutation, says all there is to say about the unnatural cruelty of such things.

Is it going to happen to some woman Henry knows? Is this why he has been preparing for it in his imagination for so long? And oughtn’t he, if that is the case, to let Moira go now, while she is still safe? Mulling it over, Henry gets to enjoy the anticipatory frisson of parting, at no cost, gets to mourn freely in his mind her brave passing, the schmaltz merchant that he is.

Some couples are ‘Reunited at last’ in a rose bush. Would he like that? He and Moira feeding the roots of a rose? ‘After a short time apart, together again.’

Together again, together for ever — Henry has no resistance to the banal poetry of for everness, and has to go and sit on a little bench by a little wall and put his fingers to his forehead where the creaking has started up again.

Ah, yes. He remembers now. Henshell Spivack, Lia’s husband. Once Henry’s second-best friend. Hensh the Mensch. That’s whose tears creaked. Until they stopped altogether. Nothing to do with Henry. By no means was it because Lia lay with him in the Pennines that her husband Henshell, who’d taken up angling all of a sudden, walked with purpose into the reservoir where he fished. They weren’t even any longer a pair, Hensh and Lia. He had been married to another woman for a decade. So why? Henry thought it was to stop the creaking. Lia, less fancifully, said it was a combination of business failure and the fact of his ever having gone into business at all, he who’d meant to make the world a better place — literally better, better in the druggist’s sense. She’d written to Henry, all those years after he’d failed to be a tiger for her, first to tell him about Henshell, and then, another year or so after that, to ask if he’d like to meet her at Heaton Park, where Henry and Henshell had horsed around as kids — rowing on the boating lake, winning toffee apples at summer fairs, rolling down grassy banks together — to help her dispose of her half of the ashes. A surprise to Henry, a sort of impiety, he thought, that Henshell had stipulated cremation. (What sort of a Jew was he — first angling and now burning?) And a bigger surprise still that the women had divvied up his remains. Civilised, he supposed, honouring the variousness of the dead’s affections. So why no smidgen of ash for him, Henry, Henshell’s erstwhile pal? Well, that was Lia’s point. Let’s scatter what we’ve got together. Not in bad taste, Henry wondered, given everything, given Henry’s habitual borrowing and the like? No, taken all round, she thought not. So they’d met and hired a rowing boat, and Henry had done the rowing, and she’d emptied the grey matter over the side, like fish food, and then they’d sat there in silence, moored to the little island, listening to the ducks, and the cries of the living, and the creaking timbers. And Henry had not been able to think of a single thing to say.

‘That’s that, then’ — Lia’s words, at last. ‘Gone for ever.’

And Henry had put a hand out to touch her, then thought better of it and touched himself instead — two fingers to his temple, where the pain was.

Too big an idea for Henry the borrower — for ever.

Always was, always will be.