Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

No, Henry thought, a party is not a party. A deceit is a deceit but a party is not a party. So, yes, since she asked, he believed it was a crime to let his father believe what wasn’t true.

Marghanita, older, wiser, and in the unfamiliar role of apologist for her brother-in-law’s family, thought not. She quoted Graham Greene at him. ‘In human relations, Henry, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.’

No, Henry said. That doesn’t apply. It wasn’t as though they were sparing him bad news. He didn’t have cancer. They weren’t going to sell him. And anyway, what’s with the Graham Greene? Are we Catholics suddenly?

Oh yes, they were sparing him bad news, Marghanita believed. They were sparing him the news that they couldn’t otherwise afford to do a single thing for him. It was Pesach or Izzi, so they did what was intelligent and lied and made it both.

And when he found out what sort of trick they’d played on him?

He’d laugh. Or at least he’d be old enough by that time to understand and to forgive.

Trouble was, he found out sooner than he was meant to. ‘Izzi, go next door and borrow some salt’ — that was what did it. They forgot that what he’d find next door, at Maxie Eisenklam’s house, was an identical party — same songs, same matzo, Maxie Eisenklam being made a fuss over for asking the same questions — and Izzi knew it wasn’t Maxie’s birthday. Though he asked, just to be on the safe side. ‘What, Maxie, is this your birthday party too?’

‘Not to be thought about,’ were Ekaterina’s words to her sister. ‘Unimaginable, their laughter. Unimaginable, what he must have felt.’

But Henry can imagine it. Henry can hear it in his head, the shame being piled on shame. The conviction that there will never be a single day from now on when you do not think of this and burn up with the disgrace of it.

Marghanita meant him to remember his father in this story, but he would have wished to remember him some other way. The sadness which once befell a parent is like no other. The humiliation of a parent when young is a historic pain a child should be spared all knowledge of.

Who knows, it is possible that Ekaterina was more upset for Izzi than Izzi had been for himself, and that Marghanita was more upset for Ekaterina, and that Henry is even more upset for all of them.

Is that what lives on longest, the sadness? The proof of our being weak, not the proof of our being strong?

Is there such a place where Henry can be buried, where every grave commemorates a weakness or a shame? A graveyard of the humiliated? Here lies Henry who had thin skin. Sadly missed for being sad. To know him was to be embarrassed for him.

He stays on the bus until it reaches its terminus, then does the same with whichever bus comes next, until he feels he’s far enough. Totter Down, he arrives at. ‘Is there a church here?’ he asks a girl with a stud in her navel. She shrugs her shoulders, showing more belly. ‘Dunno.’ A black street sweeper astride a giant vacuum cleaner points him in the right direction, past the golf course, past the other golf course, past the pub. ‘Does it have a graveyard?’ Henry asks, not wanting to labour, in the heat, for nothing. The street sweeper laughs. Maybe Henry has the air of a man intending to bury himself in Totter Down. ‘I think so,’ the street sweeper says. ‘You walking?’ Henry nods. ‘Then you’ll need it by the time you get there,’ followed by another laugh.

Henry doesn’t like Totter Down. It’s for the motor car — not another soul, once he’s hit Totter Down Village Lane, out walking. The houses are expensive and gated. They have no natural way of looking. They are all approximating to some idea of somewhere else or some other time. He can smell bad money. Gangster money. Football money. Opportunity knocks money. You make your pile and then you barricade yourself against the world in a house that isn’t anywhere. So who’s the misanthropist here, Henry asks, me or them? At least I’m living in a mansion block that looks like a mansion block with a pigswill salesman for a neighbour. At least I’m keeping company with a waitress.

The road arches and twists. The traffic roars past, honking at nothing. From behind the gates a dog snarls. Country life.

It takes him half an hour to find the church. Just beyond a row of Spanish villas he sees the spire, and then, if he’s not very much mistaken — and no, no he isn’t — a yew. There’s a find! An old yew, too, he thinks. He has read — or was it ‘Fat Frieda’ who told the class? — that yews can live to a thousand years or more. He has no way of knowing if the Totter Down yew is as old as that, but it appears to be petrified with age, its bronzed bark twisted like Laocoön, pitted with barnacles as though it has been at sea for five hundred years, at its heart a whorled hollow, black and damp, resembling an entrance to the underworld. Abandon hope, it mutely warns, all ye who enter me. Henry walks round and round it. From no angle is it a comforting or companionable tree. It sucks in the light, just as Henry once feared he sucked away his mother’s lightness, converting it to gloom — not only single in its darkness, as Wordsworth saw, but single- minded , having no other will or purpose but to send down darkness, so there should be absolutely no mistake, not a glimmer of expectation, not a chink of lighted hope, to where the sightless dead lie. No eyes on these branches. No one watching. Not a soul. But at least there is no confusing death’s meaning here. Always in our hearts , be blowed. Gone, that’s what. Gone away, gone under, gone for ever.

Henry takes a turn around the graveyard, not looking, his mind closed down.

And then, just as he is leaving, a figure appears from behind the yew, for all the world a visitant from the nether regions come up through the lightless trapdoor in the tree. Harrowed with fear and wonder, Henry starts. Not because the figure is ghostly in the sense that he is vile and loathsome like Hamlet’s father, rotten, rotting, scabby from having dwelt among the dead, vengeful, jealous of the living, a disgrace. But because he is ghostly in the sense that he is Henry’s best and oldest friend, not seen for thirty years or more — Osmond Belkin, unless too many graves have robbed Henry of his wits. . Osmond ‘Hovis’ Belkin to the very tips of his soft smoker’s fingers.

Henry’s heart hammers in his chest. Is this happiness? Is hammering Henry happy suddenly?

He throws open his arms. ‘“Hovis”! My God! What in hell’s name are you doing here?’

The man steps back from Henry’s wild embrace.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘you have the wrong person.’

Henry peers at him. Loaf head, well-kneaded flesh, squeezed sardonic eyes, top-heavy, but confident that the space he occupies in the world is his by right. ‘“Hovis’’,’ Henry repeats. It is almost an entreaty. ‘“Hovis”!’

The man returns him a half-apologetic expression. Meaning, I would be if I could be. But also meaning, you are a bit of a girl, aren’t you, not knowing who you know and who you don’t.

How long does it take Henry to realise what he has done? Five seconds, an hour, a year? Stay, illusion! But the illusion is time itself. The man before him cannot be more than twenty-five or thirty. Henry has forgotten that Osmond is sixty or thereabouts and will not look now as he did when Henry saw him last. No, it wasn’t, isn’t, happiness. A great depression seizes Henry. That nausea of returning consciousness, as after fainting. It is as though half his life has been taken from him in an instant, been peeled from him, during the few moments he has been asleep, like loose skin.