Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

‘And you reckon he needs to change his name to masturbate?’

‘You tell me.’

Hum-jobless Henry scratched his head. What did he know? Except that it was beyond him.

A month later, Warren Shukman, alias Mr Smith, was dead of a heart attack. Discovered, the rumour mill had it, on the floor of Birnbaum’s kosher hotel on Cheetham Hill Road.

‘Proves it,’ ‘Hovis’ said. ‘He wanked himself to death.’

‘You can’t be sure of that,’ Henry said.

‘Yes, I can. There’s no other explanation.’

‘That’s crap. There are a million explanations for a heart attack.’

‘At our age?!’

‘What are you telling me? — that at our age only wanking kills!’

‘Wanking and depression, yes.’

‘So how do you know it wasn’t depression?’

‘It might have been.’

‘There you are, then.’

‘No, there you are, then. You tell me why Shukman should have been depressed.’

‘I don’t know. Because he was a shithead.’

‘A good reason, I grant you. The only trouble is that Shukman didn’t know he was a shithead. Give me a better reason.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Yes, you can. Why do you get depressed?’

‘I don’t get depressed.’

‘Bollocks. I know you get depressed. You’ve admitted it.’

‘Only after wanking.’

‘Hovis’ Belkin threw his arms in the air in triumph. ‘My point precisely!’

When the headmaster addressed the shocked school with the news, ‘Hovis’ Belkin winked at Henry and made the sign of Onan with his hand, shaking it and rolling his eyes like a lobotomised cocktail waiter.

Finding mirth easier to deal with than grief, Henry decided to go along with ‘Hovis’s’ explanation, fully expecting to see an obituary in the local paper — Shukman, Warren. Passed peacefully away 17 March, while playing with his dick. Will be for ever missed by his disgusted parents and nauseated friends .

Later, Henry learned that Warren had been born with a hole in his heart and must have known he was on borrowed time. Hence the rush.

All the same, he accepted that Warren could have chosen another way to make the best of whatever life was left to him.

As Henry now intends to do.

A week passes, and then another, but there is still no call from ‘Hovis’ Belkin.

He could, of course, be too ill to call.

Or he could be too well. Well, ‘Hovis’ has managed fine without calling Henry for decades. And has no reason to call now.

Or, all questions of health apart, he could be too angry with Henry to ring, having read and not forgotten, or even read and long forgotten Henry’s article, forgetting not being the same as forgiving.

Or the son could have failed to pass on the message.

Or ‘Hovis’ could be both ill and well, could be ignorant of Henry’s article, could know that his son had encountered Henry underneath an ancient yew, could know that Henry had expressed concern about his health, and still could be indifferent.

Or, or, or. .

Or ‘Hovis’ could hate him for the hateful reference he wrote his brother’s cousin’s nephew’s niece or whoever the hell she was, the girl with the slovenly mind who put Henry’s career that never was to bed at last. The which being the case, it was Henry, surely, who ought to have been aggrieved, not ‘Hovis’ — but there you are, there never has been nor ever will be justice when it comes to families, or favoured girls, especially when the family’s name, and the favoured girl’s, is Belkin.

He had never liked her. Too gamine for Henry’s taste, too compact in her ruthlessness, altogether too well aimed and smart a bomb. They are all ruthlessly ambitious now, to Henry’s eye, but at least some of them have the decency to spill, to show a little uncontrol, whereas this one came all tied up and packaged, slovenly of mind but neat of purpose. What she was doing in the Pennines, a Belkin, Henry could not imagine. Maybe she was the first crocus of the spring, the sign that the season was changing. Chic, all of a sudden, to get your education at one of those institutions your uncles would never have been seen dead in. Proof of authenticity. There she suddenly was, anyway, gleaming like a silver bullet, marching to the top of her class, a friend and confidante in no time of Drs Delahunty and Grynszpan, eyeing Henry archly, saying nothing, until at last he stopped her in the corridor and commented on her name. Yes. Osmond Belkin, yes. Her father’s uncle’s brother’s whatever it was. She narrowed her coal-black eyes. You knew him, didn’t you, at school, my father’s uncle’s brother’s. . Yes, she’d heard that. And poor Henry, still blushing at the end of his life, blushed then to think that ‘Hovis’ had mentioned, maybe even recommended him. (‘Go to Henry Nagel, my dear, if it is wisdom you want.’) Then blushed again in shame for blushing, recalling the inequality of that friendship and how grovelling, till kingdom come, his gratitude.

Not that she had ‘gone to him’. Not for Nancy, on arrival, Henry’s Look at the Lits on That. Not when she had Delahunty and Grynszpan to beef up her credentials.

So why, against the grain and out of the blue, did she show up in the front row of his lectures on Pamela and Clarissa , and the following term roll along to his classes on appetence and yearning? Why did she start writing him eager essays though he wasn’t at all sure she had even officially enrolled for his course or had any appetite let alone aptitude for the subject as taught by him? (Longing? Nancy Belkin? Don’t make him laugh!) And why did she then ask him for a reference?

Was it a test?

Of his loyalty to a friend as against his loyalty to an academic subject?

Or was it a test of her? She must have known he didn’t like her. People not liked by Henry always knew it. So did she want to show that she could turn him? Demonstrate that even he, the last man of principle standing in the Pennines, was no more principled than a porcupine? One smile from a determined girl with coal-black eyes and a little bottom, Henry, and you’re putty.

Except that he wasn’t. Nothing puttyish about him at all when push came to shove. Quite the contrary. Adamantine, if anything. Henry, Man of Stone.

Henry’s motto: A man must stand for what a man must stand. And while Henry didn’t stand for much, he did stand for not capitulating to the calculations of a minx with a taste for theory.

Unless the real reason he held out against her was that she was a Belkin, and that Henry still had things to prove with Belkins.

In which case, principle was not the word for what had motivated him at all. Oh no. In that case, principle was the last word. Even if he did, in a hail of high-mindedness, put his job on the line for it. But then it isn’t entirely unknown for people to put their jobs on the line for spite, is it? Evil impulses are no less destructive of their owners than virtuous ones. Not unlike Henry, not exactly alien to his character, to have spited himself out of work.

Or, or, or. .

Be sorry for Henry. He only wants to know why he hasn’t heard from his best and oldest friend.

Moira would like him to go with her to Eastbourne. She is teaching a weekend course at the Grand and would appreciate his company.

‘Actually on the course?’

‘Well, you’re welcome, if you have a pinny to wear and five hundred pounds to cough up. But I was thinking just to be there when I finish in the evenings. To smell the sea with me and accompany me along the promenade.’

‘Will you take your highest heels?’

‘Not for walking along the promenade, Henry.’

‘I meant for bed.’

‘I’ll take whatever you want me to take.’