Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

But wait — just suppose that Eastbourne had been witness to some time of peace his mother and his father shared and wanted, for whatever reason, to keep secret, why then wasn’t the bench dedicated to his father too?

It bewilders him, and hurts him more, his mother’s memory commemorated separately from his father’s. The bench asserts a rupture which wasn’t true to the facts. But a bench with a little plaque on it is a fact, insists for ever its version of events. How many thousands of people will now pass, have passed already, to whom the one great incontrovertibility of Ekaterina’s life — her love for Henry’s father — will remain unknown?

It is as though, Henry thinks, my father has been wiped out of her life. It is as though this bench as much excludes him as it perpetuates her. A monument to the not-thereness of his father.

Henry runs his fingers through his hair, halfway to distraction, wondering whether he should go the whole hog, and begin howling at what they’ve done — whoever they are — to his parents’ memory. It’s a decision, whether to go mad or not. He has always been sure of that. And it’s a decision, whether or not to go to pieces. You lose control or you don’t. It’s in your hands.

In the end, he decides against. He doesn’t have good enough cause. Never properly paired himself, he has been a sentimentalist of pairs all his life. And that, surely, is all that’s operating in this instance. Sentimentality. Wanting to see his mother and father, who died apart, while one of them was on an errand of sorrow and suspicion, united in love for ever. Sentimentality, pure and simple. Which is not an adequate justification for going mad. A quiet tear would be more appropriate. Una furtiva lagrima . And a sprig of something — thrift, fleabane, herzschmertz — to tie to the backrest. So he plucks a little purple flower he finds growing between stones, and lacking any of the ways of nature, attaches it, just above his mother’s name, with one of his shoelaces. Not pretty, but nothing Henry does is pretty. ‘There,’ he says, ‘from me and Dad.’

After which he is not fit to do anything but squat down on his haunches, whatever the stiffness in his back, and sob his heart out with grief, with strangeness, with everything he doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know.

The furtiva lagrima become a raging torrent.

Henry’s sky fallen in.

Another of the reasons he loves her: she likes finding a solution to a problem. Uncertainty for Henry comes in swarms which he allows to buzz around his face. Moira’s tactic, on the other hand, is to take a swat to them.

‘Who is responsible?’ Henry has been saying all morning, as he was saying all the night before. ‘Who did it? Who put it there? And why?’

‘I’ll ring and find out.’

‘Who will you ring?’

‘The council.’

‘Which council?’

‘Eastbourne Council, Henry. Which council do you think?’

‘Will they know?’

‘I’m going to ring them and find out.’

‘When?’

‘Now.’

And she does. Without slowing her step — they are strolling along the promenade, in the direction of the pier; no more benches for Henry on this trip — she actually rings directory enquiries on her mobile, and then the council.

Henry looks on in amazement. First of all, how does she know to ring the council; second, where does she find the resolution to ring the council? For these skills alone he’d marry her, assuming she’d want to marry him, which is by no means a foregone conclusion given that he has never had the first clue who to ring on any matter, nor the will to make the call when someone tells him.

‘Cleansing,’ she repeats. ‘OK, I’ll try them. Can you put me through?’ Then to Henry, in case he hasn’t heard, she mouths, ‘Cleansing.’

When Cleansing answers, she hands the phone to Henry who fumbles it, as though afraid it has a poison bite. ‘I don’t suppose you can help me,’ he begins, at which Moira snatches the phone back from him. ‘Negative bastard,’ she says, then has to explain to the person in Cleansing that she doesn’t mean him.

In fact Henry is right in his supposition. Cleansing isn’t able to help him. Not immediately, at any rate. You can’t just go around asking the authorities who donated such-and-such a bench on the cliffs at Eastbourne.

‘Why not?’ Moira wonders.

Data protection.

‘Can you tell me whether the person who donated the bench specifically asked to be data-protected?’ she asks.

No.

‘Why would that be?’

Data protection.

But they are prepared to countenance special circumstances. If Henry writes in to Cleansing, they tell her, and explains what he wants to know and why, they will consider his case on its merits.

‘Then I’ll write,’ Henry says.

But Moira knows about the future tense when Henry uses it. Future never-never. She buys a postcard of the front at Eastbourne, sits Henry at a table in a café, wipes it expertly, passes him a pen from her furry handbag, and says, ‘Write!’

‘I can’t send a card of Eastbourne to Eastbourne council,’ he says.

She takes no notice of his epistolary niceness. ‘Write!’ she orders him.

No disrespect to Moira, but he needs Marghanita.

What is all this, Marghanita? Was it you? Did you and she come here when she was fed up with Dad? Was that the peace she found in Eastbourne? Relief from him? Relief from thinking and worrying about him? Relief from the triviality? Relief from the insult of his restlessness?

Actual peace, was it? Simply a cessation, for a while, of his demandingness? Forget the mistress or the mistresses — simply a holiday from the torches and the origami?

It isn’t so much an answer that Henry wants — this is where Moira, with her love of solutions, gets it wrong — it is more the wallowing in the questions.

And Marghanita was the best of all people to wallow with. Towards the end, when intimacy between them held no ambiguities, she was forever calling him over to her side to whisper another secret in his ear. For the most part he didn’t know the people she was divulging secrets to him about, the majority of whom had been dead and gone long before Henry had arrived on the scene, that’s if they had ever enjoyed independent being outside of Marghanita’s imagination at all. But that didn’t matter. What stirred him was the heat of the confessional, the animal warmth of a soul ridding itself of all it knew. Come, Henry, she would say, crooking a finger. Almost komm, kommst du , the Yiddish into which all Jews, even the least Jewish, even the most white like Marghanita, must eventually fade, as Henry himself will when the time comes, wenn es so weit ist . How comforted he felt when she beckoned him to her, like a small animal nuzzling into the heat, enjoying the warmth and the odour of the straw, absorbing the unutterable voluptuousness of family.

She saved the best to last, Marghanita. When she was very ill, Henry stayed with her, sleeping on a couch she had ordered him to bring close to her bed, her hand in his, passively, like a child’s. Spurred on by morphine, demons crowded round about her in the dark, waking her suddenly with cries which she could not distinguish from her own. She fought them from her, picking them from the sleeves of her nightdress. ‘Don’t bother,’ she told Henry when he tried to help her, ‘they aren’t really there.’ So in the end, despite his doubts, she seemed to know the difference after all between her real assailants and the false. Which made him more disposed to believe her when she told him that her woes began earlier than he supposed, earlier than she’d ever told him, far earlier than her great disappointment in love. ‘My hopes weren’t so much dashed exactly, Henry, because strictly speaking I never had hopes. A better explanation is that things turned out as they were bound to.’