Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

Hidden among the others, Henry felt his soul shrivel to the size of a peanut.

And thus, says Henry aloud to himself on the bus, did Osmond Belkin steal the credit for the credit as well as the credit for the blame.

‘So how was your day?’

Moira is waiting for him when he gets home, a bottle of wine open, olives in a bowl, squares of cheese.

‘I thought you were teaching tonight,’ he says.

‘I was. I’ve finished. Now I can concentrate on you.’

Henry looks at his watch. It is later than he thought. How long they extend, these days of summer, when ghosts get hold of them.

‘When you’re not concentrating on me,’ Henry asks, ‘are you aware of me?’

‘Do you mean am I thinking of you?’

‘Yes. Am I there, a constant, or do I go when I’m gone in person and you have other things to occupy you?’

She thinks about it. She is dressed, the way he likes her, for going out. Heels, skirt with a taut quiver, hair up so he can see her neck. They have agreed that she should keep a housecoat here, or a kimono that matches Henry’s, but Henry feels not yet. This is not domestic caution. Henry is not fussy about personal space. He simply isn’t ready to dispense with the image he has of her, as a person of the city. The inside he can do himself; Moira’s role is to carry the hum of the streets about her person.

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I am aware of you. I might not be thinking of you, but you’re there like background music.’

‘Muzak, you mean? As in a lift or a supermarket.’

‘No, not Muzak. More like, I don’t know — a distant waltz.’

There you are, Henry thinks. She is Viennese.

He smiles at her. ‘Thank you,’ he says. Coyly for him. He likes being a distant waltz.

‘And me?’ Moira asks. ‘When I’m not there. .’

‘My dear, you’re always there.’

‘No, come on. I answered you fairly. Now you me.’

He paces the carpet. Has she been there with him today? At the gravesides, yes. A figure weeping over his remains. Bent, clearing away weeds, scraping moss from his stone, so that his name can still be read. And not simply as a spectator either. She has been dead alongside him also, plant food, reunited at last in the roots of a rose bush. But in the way he wishes to be told she thinks of him, a vibrant presence, no, it hasn’t been her best day. Belkin’s fault. Belkin empties his mind. Always has. And more, Belkin turns him against his own. If he is to be honest with himself he must admit to a faint sense of relief, no more than that, that Moira didn’t accompany him today to Totter Down. Why is that? Because he doesn’t want to be judged and reported as an engaged man by Belkin’s son? Because he doesn’t want Mel Belkin to meet Moira and form an opinion of her? Strange. Can he really have allowed the negative influence possessed by Osmond Belkin to be passed on automatically to his son, a person Henry has never met until this day and has no reason to respect for his judgement about anything? And more than that, what’s so wrong with Moira that Henry should be reluctant for a Belkin to see her?

I fear cynicism, Henry has often admitted to himself. I fear cynicism more than I fear anything. I fear the judgement of one who thinks the world amounts to nothing. More specifically, I fear the judgement of one who thinks I amount to even less. He knows what he has done with Belkin. He has invested him with that power of cynicism, chosen him, rightly or wrongly, to be the one who sees through everything. In Belkin’s eyes, Henry Nagel ceases to be. But it is always possible, he accepts, that Belkin neither wants this part nor fits it. And that the cynicism Henry dreads is his own.

So is it he, Henry, who is obscurely ashamed of Moira, for no other reason than that it is he, Henry who is nothing, who has chosen her?

‘You are taking one hell of a time to answer,’ she tells him.

‘Am I?’

He can see that she is momentarily frightened. Whereupon, flooded with the most intense love for her, he folds her in his arms.

But they both know that isn’t an adequate response to her question.

‘Has anybody called?’ he asks her in the morning.

‘You’re here. You’d know.’

‘No, I mean last night, before I got in.’

She shakes her head. But is curious to be told, her face a question mark, whom he is expecting a call from.

Another woman? Even when it’s not spoken, the question angers him. Always the same, always their first thought.

She feels the irritation stiffen his body. She knows what he thinks he knows she’s thinking. ‘Don’t blame me,’ she says. ‘It’s your doing. It’s what you do. You create foreboding.’

‘I make you feel I’m waiting for a secret phone call? If it were secret why would I ask about it?’

‘You’re shifty,’ she says. ‘There’s always a bend in your transactions.’

Interesting. He thinks there is always a bend in hers. She has a bent face. It’s what he loves her for. So do they love the same in each other?

‘I’m waiting to hear from an old friend,’ he tells her.

She waits for more. Which old friend? Why are you waiting? What has occurred?

But he is not going to tell her that it’s the old friend she’d found on the Internet, the one he’d denounced in print. He’s too bent to get into all that.

She makes him coffee. He has tried to interest her in tea from his samovar but she doesn’t find the ceremony as cute as Henry does. ‘This tea’s as weak as piss,’ she told him. Fine. Henry lets her make coffee. He has always been like this. He will change his habits for anyone. They are only borrowed anyway. Such accommodatingness makes him easy to live with, he believes. But also, as Moira has explained, frightening. The man who is accommodating to you will be accommodating to someone else. ‘I like a man to be rooted,’ she told him.

‘Then root me,’ he said.

She has to be off. Her stint at Aultbach’s. . t,t,t.

He kisses her, trying to apprehend her tongue with his teeth. ‘Don’t Ault — t,t,t — me,’ he says. So she does.

Queer, being so in love. It is not unknown to him, quite the opposite, but being in love again is strange, stranger each time, because each time is necessarily new territory — he has never been in love this many times before, and of course never at so advanced an age.

So how not well is ‘Hovis’?

Sex and death. Brutally obvious, but there is nothing Henry can do to fight it. The more in love he feels, the more his thoughts tend to ‘Hovis’ Belkin, and the more he thinks of ‘Hovis’ not well, not well at all, he gathered, the more intensely alive because in love he feels.

So how not well is ‘Hovis’? And how not well would Henry want him to be?

After coffee, Henry needs his samovar after all. Piss-weak tea, a morning of it. Tangy — pissy, she is right — on the teeth. Awash with the past, as tea famously always is.

You liked him, Dad.

Which one is he, again?

Oh, enough of that. You liked him, that’ll do. And now he isn’t well. You know, really isn’t well.

How old is he?

My age?

So older than I was.

Dad, most people are. They cheated you. But ‘Hovis’ will no doubt be thinking they’re cheating him. No one gets enough.

Well, you look well, Henry.

And feeling it. But what ought I to do, what ought I to feel about my friend?

If you don’t know, he isn’t your friend.

Henry thinks about that.

Well, we had our differences. But I still don’t like it that he’s ill.

For him or for you?

For him. For me it could be OK, that’s part of what I don’t like. The growing callousness.