Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

‘In that case,’ his grandmother says, throwing on a fur jacket, ‘we will come with you.’

‘Don’t take me home,’ Henry cries. ‘I am never going home again.’

But home isn’t where they are taking him. All in their furs now, like women from another country, like a family of bears strayed into town, they file out of the house, turn right into the lane, and right again, after a quarter of a mile, on to the main road which they cross, imperious as to traffic — Anastasia halting buses with a wave of her fox’s tail — until they get to Yoffey’s, where, to Henry’s unutterable confusion, they march directly to the counter, a foreign invasion — the bears, the bears are here! — and give the reason for their errand.

‘For threepence!’ old man Yoffey exclaims. ‘A family delegation for threepence!’

‘Not threepence, principle,’ Irina says.

What Henry loves about his grandmother is that she uses punctuation when she speaks. Not threepence comma principle full stop . It is from his grandmother that Henry learns that punctuation can be a weapon. With a comma you can hurt someone. And as a person who is always being hurt himself comma Henry hankers after hurting back full stop.

The other thing Henry loves about his grandmother is how upright and fresh-smelling she is. Most of Henry’s friends’ grandmothers are as hooped and vinegary as cucumber barrels. Not Irina. She stands tall and breathes a sort of floral dignity the way a dragon breathes fire. All the Stern Girls do. Henry thinks this is why they are called girls still: they have never collapsed into the shape of women. It is also, he knows, a condition of their being from South Manchester. South Manchester is long-stemmed and uses haughty punctuation, North Manchester is tuberous, like a potato, and mispronounces everything — buzz, for example instead of bus, botcher instead of butcher, and grass, to rhyme with mass, instead of gr-ah! — ssss, the stuff of stately garden parties where no two people are the same. Henry’s mother is from the South, his father is from the North. Hence the commonly voiced opinion that their marriage will not last. All the Stern Girls took ‘husbands’ from North Manchester, and look where that’s landed them exclamation mark!

Old man Yoffey’s own marriage is strong but unconventional. Though he is venerably white and wispy-haired, with small watchful red-yellow eyes like a crow’s and little bones which you can see poking through his shirt, old man Yoffey intermittently raises his hand to his wife — a woman half his age and twice his size — and on occasions even brings it down. Adjoining Yoffey’s corner shop is a bay-windowed two-storey house with a small front garden, overgrown as to lawn (grass) but with carefully tended borders, pinks to one side, burgundy pansies with amazed expressions to the other; a four-foot wall of white brick encrusted with seashells protects the garden from the curiosity of the outside world, and it is over this that old man Yoffey sometimes throws his wife. Because Yoffey is a devout man whose services to the community extend beyond the provision of saveloys and plaited bread, the finger of suspicion inevitably points at drink. Ceremonially — this is the worst that can be said of him — old man Yoffey downs a thimbleful or two of sweet red Middle Eastern wine. Not much, but for some men a thimbleful is all it takes. A model husband the rest of the time, old man Yoffey turns into a wild animal whenever there is a festival or holy day. Pity poor Mrs Yoffey, then, who goes in fear at the very time everybody else in the neighbourhood is polishing silver and celebrating.

Henry knows what the Stern Girls have to say on the subject of alcohol and he has heard tell of an occasion — or ‘incident’ as it is anecdotally referred to in the family — when his grandmother was passing just as Mrs Yoffey was coming over the wall. Henry likes to think that the incident consisted of his grandmother throwing Mrs Yoffey back, but apparently all that happened was that she had words with Mr Yoffey, that Mr Yoffey had words with her, and that Mrs Yoffey (in Henry’s imagination still on her back) took her husband’s side. Following which, Henry’s grandmother delivered herself of the opinion that the Yoffeys were a disgrace to everybody but each other, whom they richly deserved. And walked on.

That there is no love lost, then, between the grocer and the Stern Girls, Henry can easily understand. But he is still not prepared for the violence of old man Yoffey’s reaction to their peaceful deputation.

‘So for threepenceworth of principle,’ he exclaims, every one of his white wisps of hair on end now, as though he is halfway through being electrocuted, ‘you invade my shop.’

‘Hardly invade ,’ Anastasia replies.

No one in North Manchester repeats what another person has said like that, allowing it to hang in the air, to echo for ever with its own absurdity. And it goes without saying that no one in North Manchester employs the word ‘hardly’. Even Henry feels the condescension.

‘Then what would you call it?’ old man Yoffey wants to know. ‘A social visit? Have you come to see my wife perhaps? Are you here for tea and hamentash ?’

Henry has tasted hamentash and doesn’t like it much. But he has been told in Bible class that it has symbolic significance. A hamentash is a three-sided pastry, resembling the hat which the arch-villain Haman, chief adviser to King Ahasuerus, and a prototype Nazi in his own right, wore in the Book of Esther. Those who eat it, Henry grasps, are laughing at their enemies. So does old man Yoffey mean to imply that the Stern Girls have come to laugh at him, or is it Henry who is as bad as Haman?

He is shaking from head to foot whatever he thinks, old man Yoffey, the stiff detached collar he customarily wears becoming separated from its gold stud, and he is gathering up, Henry notices, all the threepenny bits in his wooden till, preparatory, Henry wouldn’t be at all surprised, to throwing them at the Stern Girls. That would be a good end to all this, would it not, his grandmother or one of her sisters being blinded by the very threepenny bit Henry did not have the courage to claim as his.

Could he stop this now? Could he appeal to Elliot who has neither moved nor looked up the whole time from the block of cheese he has been garotting with a piece of wire ever since Henry and his reinforcements entered the shop? ‘Elliot, I need hardly tell you why I’m here. My change, remember? You dropped it on the counter. I was too diffident to explain I couldn’t reach it and you were too engaged to notice. Sorry to put you to this bother.’ Would that be so difficult? With someone’s eyesight at risk, was that beyond him?

Henry never finds out what is or is not beyond him. Rather than throw coins at women, which he knows he should not do, no feast day being in the offing and no wine, therefore, having passed his lips, old man Yoffey closes his shop. ‘Get out, get out,’ he screams, ‘all of you. And as for you’ — pointing at Henry — ‘you’re banned for life.’

If he were to get up and go into the patisserie and coffee shop on St John’s Wood High Street and ask the East European waitress for his change, would he be banned for life? Henry wonders. And would it matter anyway, there being a lot less life left now for him to be banned for?

Morbid again? If only he were. Or if only he were consistently one thing or the other. The problem with ageing, as Henry sees it today — warmed by the sun and fired by the European waitress — is that you don’t. At least not where you should — in the soul. At sixty minus a few months Henry doesn’t feel a jot less verdant in the soul than he did at sixteen. True, he didn’t feel all that verdant at sixteen, but that’s not his point. His point is that he’s not prepared. Yes, yes, he will beshit himself blah blah, but that’s just the body talking. Henry is not prepared metaphysically for what’s coming. In some part of himself Henry still thinks that something might just happen, a miraculous advance in medical science or a supernatural intervention, which will make Henry an exception to the grinding determinism of mortality. ‘Here,’ Aubrey Goldman, his foul-breathed doctor for the last forty years, will whisper, slipping Henry powder in a plain brown paper bag. ‘Swallow with malt whisky and enjoy, but don’t tell anyone where you got it.’ Failing which, God Himself, showing up in the nick of time, parting clouds like opera curtains, crying ‘Hold! — enough of all this senseless killing’, and pointing at Henry, much as old man Yoffey did — ‘You, yes, you!’ — will ban him from death for life.