Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

‘I’m sorry,’ the man says again, seeing his distress.

Henry looks him over. He is wearing linens, well pressed, a cardigan about his shoulders, good Italian casual shoes — if he is out walking, he is not intending to walk far — a large expensive watch, an unnecessarily sleek belt, and aftershave almost certainly by Georgio of Beverly Hills. Rodeo Drive clothes, unmistakably, but worn as Henry has seen their equivalent worn with similar swagger in earlier days in Manchester. He is in no doubt now who he is talking to. And why the name ‘Hovis’ might not ring any bells with him. No man tells his family everything.

‘Me that should be sorry,’ Henry says, extending a hand. ‘I used to be a good friend of your father’s. You’re Osmond Belkin’s son, don’t even bother to tell me you’re not. I’m Henry Nagel.’

The young man takes his hand. Not as warmly as Henry would have hoped, but a shake’s a shake. ‘I think I’ve heard of you,’ he says. ‘I’m Mel Belkin.’

Henry is disappointed. What did he expect to hear? That Osmond had called his son Henry?

I’d have settled, Henry thinks, trying to be grown up about it, for the boy’s at least knowing who I was. Henry? Not Henry Nagel? Not ‘the’ Henry Nagel? Come, let me embrace you. I’ve never heard my father speak of you with anything but love and admiration.

‘And what,’ Henry says, opening the palms of his hands, as though to measure the inappropriateness of Totter Down to their encounter, ‘you live in these parts?’

‘Dad’s taken a house up here.’

‘He’s in the country, then? I had no idea.’

Mel Belkin bites his lip. He pulls a cigarette from his shirt pocket, not offering Henry. Osmond used to do the same. He lights it like his father too, virginally, as though it is his first and very probably his last. ‘Yes, he’s here,’ he says in a precautionary way. Meaning, if Henry understands him right, he’s here but doesn’t want that to be generally known. ‘And you,’ he asks, not without alarm, ‘do you live round here?’

‘No,’ Henry says, pointing back over his shoulder to where he thinks London is. ‘I’m in St John’s Wood. I’m just here’ — why is Henry here? — ‘to take the air.’

‘You’re a long way from home.’

‘Am I? Sometimes I jump on buses and see where they take me.’

‘Quite a coincidence, then.’

‘It certainly is. But I am very glad of it.’

‘And you like graveyards?’

‘I do, yes. Yourself?’

‘Yes. I’m working on a vampire script.’

‘I thought for a moment,’ Henry says, ‘that that was what you were.’

‘A scriptwriter?’

Henry laughs.

‘Oh, sorry, you mean a vampire?’

‘Well, more a spook.’

‘Was that before or after you thought I was my father?’

Henry laughs again, though he doesn’t know why. Unless it’s simply funny, meeting your best friend’s son for the first time, the dead spit of his father, and not liking him much. ‘We were very close in our time,’ Henry says. ‘I’d love to see him.’

The young man stretches his jaw. ‘He isn’t well,’ he says.

Henry looks into his eyes. ‘How not well?’

Another pause, another pull at the cigarette. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘is there some way we can contact you? Do you have a card or something?’

A card? Henry? Some joke. A man has a card when he knows who he is and what he does. And when he believes his future is worth investing in. Occasionally Henry has thought about getting himself a card, but what’s the point? He’ll have a thousand printed, use three, and the rest will be found in their little box by his executor. Not that he has an executor either.

He frisks himself, anyway, for the form of it, at a loss to understand why, of his usual stack of cards, not one is about his person.

‘I’ll write my number down,’ he says, tearing a corner off the back page of his A to Z.

The young man holds Henry’s number at a distance from his face. He seems faintly disgusted that this is the best Henry can come up with. It’s even possible — since he’s a Belkin — that he disapproves of the numerals.

‘And you,’ Henry says, ‘do you have a card?’

But it is as if Henry has not spoken.

‘I’ll tell Dad I’ve seen you.’

Henry looks down, not wanting to see the deadness in his friend’s son’s eyes. ‘How not well?’ he asks again.

Mel Belkin taps the torn-off corner of the A to Z. Meaning — well, meaning whatever it means. He shakes Henry’s hand again, but with no more warmth than the first time. If anything, with less. ‘Sorry,’ he calls back after they have separated, ‘what name should I say it was again?’

Riding the buses back, Henry remembers how he and Osmond were suspended from their junior prefects’ duties for a term, for wrecking a production of Twelfth Night mounted by their sister school. In fact, they had not really wrecked the play, merely masterminded a disturbance which brought it to an earlier conclusion than was usual, before all the mistakes of identity had been cleared up, before any nuptials had been entered into, and before Malvolio could make his chilling promise to be revenged upon the entire cast. In this way, Osmond argued to the headmaster, Olly Allswell, MA, they had been responsible for an entirely new reading of Shakespeare’s hackneyed comedy, one which was neither too conventionally happy nor too problematically black, but rather where irresolution and uncertainty were allowed to go on teasing and troubling the mind.

‘You are not yet too old or too big, Belkin,’ Allswell had retorted, ‘to be given six of the best.’

‘Sorry, sir,’ Osmond Belkin had said. ‘Just trying to put a decent gloss on our behaviour, sir.’

But it was Henry who was unable to stop himself snorting with mirth, and it was Henry who ended up getting five strokes of the cane.

‘Thanks a lot, turd,’ Henry said as they left the headmaster’s office.

‘Don’t blame me,’ Osmond told him. ‘You were the meshuggener that laughed.’

Causing Henry, still in the headmaster’s hearing, to burst out laughing all over again, remembering ‘Hovis’s’ justification for what they’d done.

In fact, Henry had been more responsible for the disturbance at the girls’ school than Osmond. Together they had egged on their party — comprising everybody doing fifth-form English at the boys’ school, even Brendan O’Connor who was already contemplating the priesthood — to cheer when the scenery wobbled, to clap the moment someone forgot their lines, and to wolf-whistle as Viola, pretending to be a man, stroked her false beard and slapped her thighs. But it was Henry who made the more noise, shouting ‘Behind you!’ and ‘Oh, no you don’t!’ whenever the play descended into pantomime, which was most of the time, and ‘Not funny!’ whenever Feste (Fiona Shatzkes) shaped one of his laborious jokes, and ‘Pervert!’ whenever Olivia (Sally Rotblat) looked longingly into the eyes of a person doubly the same gender as her own. He was overexcited. He had never been inside a girls’ school before, never been surrounded on all sides by girls, and never seen so many girls in doublet and hose on one stage at one time. He couldn’t help himself. It was like discovering within him a person he had never known was there. He had been brought up to be retiring, to be considerate of the feelings of others and to appreciate Shakespeare, and here he was, all at once, being none of those things.

‘I am everything that’s bad,’ he told himself as it was happening, ‘and it is marvellous.’

What made the liberation marvellous, of course, for a boy Henry’s age, was that it wasn’t a little bit sexual or even a lot sexual, but that it was completely sexual. At a bound Henry had gone from shrinking diffidence to exhibitionism, to libertinage, to violation, to ravishment, to ejaculatio praecox , to wanting to do it all over again. Had someone told Henry he hadn’t just fucked the play he had fucked the entire girls’ school, he would not have demurred. That, exactly, was how it felt.