Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

‘Will you wear no underwear?’

‘Not for teaching pastry-making, Henry.’

‘I meant for walking along the promenade.’

‘Whatever you want.’

Is she real? Sometimes Henry has to pinch himself to make sure he’s still among the living. In Henry’s world women do not say ‘Whatever you want’. No woman that Henry has known personally in the last twenty-five years, or that Henry has heard tell of in that time — no fabled woman about whom men whisper to one another over drinks, no ignis fatuus of any realistic man’s imagination — is accommodating in the way that Moira is. Not that she is yielding, or subservient — quite the opposite. The policy of taking Henry in hand, which she instituted from their very first evening out together, remains in strict force. There is work to be done on Henry, alterations to be made, they both know that. And who’s to say that Henry isn’t already a nicer, sweeter, happier person than he was? But the wonderful thing about Moira is that she does not believe that change always has to be painful. If Henry enjoys himself in the process of becoming a different man, that’s fine by Moira. It’s like bringing up a child. You give a bit to get a bit. Which is fine by Henry too. She wears her highest heels and no underwear, and he does what he’s told.

On her part — this is how Henry understands it — it’s an act of material intelligence. Call it bourgeois, call it Viennese, call it Moira’s genetic inheritance, call it what you like: what Moira understands is that there’s no satisfying the inner man until you’ve soothed away the frustrations of the outer. There is no hierarchy here, no higher being and no lower. The tactile pleasures of the world need no apologising for.

It might also be her calculation that if Henry is ghostly half the time, giving her the impression that she’s only borrowing him from someone else, that soon he’ll be on his way again, drifting, drifting from her, then anchoring him in the material things he loves is wise all round.

Is no underwear a material thing? Perversely, yes. It is.

Material enough to get Henry to agree to accompany her to Eastbourne anyway; the thought of Moira naked underneath her clothes in an unaccustomed place, her skirts in a losing tussle with the salt winds, all the persuasion he needs, though he is otherwise happy where he is in St John’s Wood and doesn’t feel in want of a holiday. After the Pennines, St John’s Wood is a holiday.

‘One other thing that occurs to me,’ she says, the day before they go away, ‘do you think it would be fun to take Angus?’

‘No,’ Henry says. He is already packing his case. Or rather, because he did most of his packing yesterday, he is repacking. He likes to look ahead, Henry. He likes to go to sleep knowing that everything is taken care of. Come the call, Henry will be ready.

‘That it? Just no?’

‘When you say Angus do you really mean Angus or is Angus a euphemism for Angus and Lachlan? Because I definitely do not want to go to Eastbourne with Lachlan.’

‘Of course I don’t mean Lachlan.’

‘Good.’

‘So are you all right about the dog?’

‘No. I definitely do not want to go to Eastbourne with Angus either.’

‘It would be nice for you, you could walk him while I’m teaching.’

‘Moira, the last time we took Angus anywhere he lay in the back of the car whimpering and being sick.’

‘That was because you’d locked him in the boot.’

‘Only because he’d been lying on the back seat whimpering and being sick.’

‘He isn’t used to travelling, the poor thing.’

‘Yes he is. Lachlan takes him everywhere. What he isn’t used to is travelling at 140 miles per hour in built-up areas.’

‘I’ll go slower.’

‘You won’t. It is not in your power to go slower. Nor would I want to travel with Angus even if it were. A car is too confined a space for me and a dog, and I do not want to walk behind him in Eastbourne, picking up his shit every hundred yards. I don’t pick up dog’s shit, Moira. That was never in God’s plan for me. No adult human should stoop to pick up a dog’s shit. Some get a buzz out of it, I know that. Homosexuals and the like. In another era they’d have licked lepers’ sores and been called saints. Now they pick up dog shit. But Leviticus prohibits it. Whosoever stoopeth to pick up dog shit, yea even with a plastic spoon, shall be stoned; it is an abomination.’

‘So that’s a no, then?’

Henry goes on with his packing, repacking what he packed yesterday, and re-repacking what he’d repacked this morning. He doesn’t say what he is thinking, that Eastbourne is an opportunity to go looking at some new graveyards — plots where the dead may sniff the sea — and that he doesn’t want a dog tailing after him between the graves, digging up bones.

Boring into his back, Moira’s eyes signal a terrible promise. She will have him picking up dog shit, and loving it, before she’s through with him.

He has never been to Eastbourne. He knows it by repute, for some reason or other, but he can’t remember why. Did a person of his close acquaintance come from Eastbourne? Has someone dear to him retired to it? Or school friends — was there a summer school in Eastbourne, one of those camps to which Henry was never invited and where everybody else laid down those intimacies from which he was thereafter excluded? Eastbourne, Eastbourne. . It rings bells. Unless he knows it only from Henry James, as a place where adulterers more twisted than Henry Nagel bought golden bowls or brazened it, arm in arm, at country-house weekends. Except that James liked to send his adulterers to cathedral cities, and Henry doubts there is a cathedral in Eastbourne.

Moira busy in the hotel conference centre, miked like an airline pilot and kneading dough, Henry ventures out. Of the same mind, the doughty old. Not knowing what to wear any more, confused by what is and isn’t in the shops, denied their sensible flat caps and stout shoes, they are reduced to baseball hats and trainers. Only the sticks remain the same, and the swollen ankles, and the prevalence of widowhood — a dozen blue-bobbed hobbling dames to every rheumy gent. No more adulteries for this lot. You whiff the sea and if you’re lucky you remember. And that’s that.

Henry watches a survivor — one of the eligible, own limbs, own car keys, own car even — negotiating himself into his vehicle. Gingerly, first the left leg, testing, testing for unfamiliar obstacles, testing for distance to the pedals, testing that the car still has a bottom, then, no less gingerly, the right, as though entering foreign space, a lift shaft maybe, afraid that the lift has long gone, and there is only darkness and a long drop now. Braver than Henry, anyhow, who was frightened of cars at eighteen, never mind eighty.

The world’s your oyster, old boy, Henry thinks, watching him pull out into the traffic, all his lights on, his indicators flashing, his window wound down, for him, too, one more whiff of the sea.

Henry isn’t sure what he thinks of the sea hereabouts. Not worth looking at from this part of England, the sea. It holds no promises, wafts on its currents no aromatic seductions from far away. It’s only France out there. Or Belgium. Politics apart, the Eastbourne sea — the Channel, is it? — might just as well have been concreted over, so little of what you want a sea to do for you does this sea do. But he likes having it at his shoulder, a drop into nothingness, as he ambles in the direction of Beachy Head, the promenade gradually turning into cliff, the vegetation becoming saltier, stranger and more tenacious, on edge, like a hermit’s garden.

By Henry’s standards the walk is quickly turning into a climb. He stops to inhale the salt air, and almost faints. In his Pennine days air was not a problem to him. Sometimes he stood outside his cottage for no other reason than to breathe it in. I am, after all, a man like other men, he would tell himself. I live on air. But that was then. Now, after however many months away, his lungs have grown accustomed to the BMW fumes of St John’s Wood. He steadies himself against a bench, not wanting to sit down, because if he sits he probably won’t want to rise, and looks back the way he’s come, back over the groyny beach, the bandstand and the pier. It isn’t pretty, except in the sense that all signs of life are pretty when viewed from a distance. This must prove, Henry reckons, that God, if there is one, is benign. You cannot take the distant view of humanity and not be touched by it. Ask those who walked upon the moon.