Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

This was Henry’s greatest dread — hearing from a woman on her death bed, when it was too late for him to help, that her life had been a wasted tale, a blight foretold. But at least this time it wasn’t his fault. Or was it?

He listened, not saying anything. Whenever he tried to speak she held his wrist. Just listen, Henry.

Did he never wonder, she asked him rhetorically, at the vast age discrepancies in the family, she so much younger than the other Stern Girls, so much younger, especially, to choose a name at random — she smiled at him, her eyes still bright, though her cheekbones wasted — than Effie.

Funny, Henry thinks, remembering, how much of what you don’t know, you do. Does that mean he knows more than he thinks he knows about his mother’s bench? Will someone one day say, ‘Did you never wonder, Henry. .?’ And he will recognise in a flash all it has been about?

Maybe. But who is that someone likely to be, now they have all gone?

He knew what Marghanita was going to tell him, anyway, knew immediately, as you know when someone comes hammering at your door at four o’clock in the morning, that everything was going to be different now; and yet not, because all the characters remained the same, only the plot had changed, and a plot is nothing more than the way things turn out, a mere arbitrary intrusion into the game of life, causing the pieces to be shifted right enough, and some even to be swept from the board altogether, but not affecting the overall shape of the contest, or the pleasure you take in playing. It is still chess, or snakes and ladders, or happy families.

Marghanita was Effie’s daughter — that was her flabbergasting news. Flabbergasting, but then again not. Of course Marghanita was Effie’s daughter! How could she not have been? And when had Henry really thought otherwise?

As a general fact of life, Henry had heard the story a hundred times; he just hadn’t heard it told about his own family. From what had passed the lips of Henry’s school friends and from gossip overheard in his own kitchen, he’d deduced that there were illegitimate daughters of Marghanita’s age all over Manchester, secreted in broom cupboards, handed on to the safekeeping of institutions, bartered, bandied, passed off as the offspring of their grandmothers, become their mothers’ sisters. Victims of the great provincial shame. Partly it relieved Henry, after all this time, to discover he had secrets in common with the rest of humanity; though it perplexed him, too, that the Stern Girls, with all their apparent aristocratic insouciance, turned out to be as conventional as everybody else.

But that was sex for you. Sex ironed out everything.

Henry tried a joke. ‘Was that why you all moved to North Manchester?’

But in sex there are no jokes. Not when it’s family sex. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘There was never any question of staying in the south with Effie’s belly getting visibly bigger with me, and the man unacceptable.’

‘On religious grounds, I take it.’

‘Hardly religion. Tribal is more like.’

‘Shame, I’d fancied our family was free of that.’

‘Ha!’ Marghanita said. Not a laugh, an expostulation. ‘But in fairness he was also married to someone else at the time. And three times Effie’s age.’

‘So the tribalism was the least of everybody’s worries.’

‘Never the least, Henry. But it’s sweet of you to try to think the best of us.’

‘It’s a way of trying to think the best of myself.’

‘Well, I can’t say I don’t understand that.’

A pause between them, the present too feeble to keep pace with the past. Henry felt he could hear one of them trickling away into the other, but he wasn’t sure which was trickling into which. ‘So you were born on this side?’ he finally said.

‘While no one was looking, yes.’

He leaned over to stroke her forehead. Unbidden, the recollection of stroking her breasts, that foolish and exquisite evening when he held her shoes. ‘How disappointing,’ he said. ‘I have always thought of you as a Wilmslow girl.’

‘Well, I am. I was conceived there.’

‘Ah, but I thought of you as a Wilmslow girl who had been conceived in St Petersburg.’

She smiled at him — lovely still, her smile, sadder than summer

— leaning into the pressure of his soothing hand. ‘That’s you all over,’ she said. ‘Forever wanting more than you can have. I suppose you’d like my unmentionable father to have been the tsar.’

‘He wasn’t?’

‘He was a teacher.’

‘Languages?’

‘How did you know?’

‘A guess. Effie’s language teacher, presumably?’

‘Of course. We always revered learning in our family.’

Another passage of silence between them. Learning — tick, tock. Henry the professor. The silence long enough for Marghanita to make it known to him, because she remembered how papery his skin was, that he hadn’t let them down. The sight of her expending the little energy she had on his wounded self-esteem wounded Henry still more. Did she know, then, did they all know, the bad opinion of himself he entertained? How terrible to think he’d been imagining he was sparing them when all along they’d been sparing him.

Why, had he known that he might have left the Pennines and sought fulfilment as a bookie’s runner or a shoeshine boy. He had only become a teacher in the first place to please them.

‘Yes, it’s our weakness,’ he said.

‘No,’ she said, shaking her head at him, ‘it’s our strength.’

‘So did you ever meet him?’

‘My father? No. Your great-grandmother forbade it. And Effie never wanted me to either. We wiped it out as though it had never happened. We moved here where nobody knew us, I grew up as Effie’s sister, and in the end we believed our own lies.’

‘Eminently sensible.’

‘Yes and no. Maybe if we hadn’t kept everything secret I would have understood it all better. Maybe become a wild girl, who knows, or a nun.’

‘We don’t do nuns, Marghanita.’

‘No. We don’t do wild girls, either. We just do wronged women. And as the daughter of one, I stepped into the role myself as neatly as if I’d been measured for it.’

‘Like my mother.’

She looked at him. And Henry remembers that she didn’t agree or disagree, just kept on looking and then closed her eyes.

When she opened them again it was to correct any impression she may have given that she was sorry for herself. ‘It hasn’t been a ruined life, Henry, I’m not saying that. In many ways I’ve been more privileged than most. But I think what happened knocked the stuffing out of us. It’s possible these secrets gnaw away at your insides, I don’t know. Certainly the more conscious you are of having to conceal a shaming secret, the more front you have to put on.’

‘I loved your front. I loved the sight of you marching out to right some wrong.’

‘Usually yours, Henry.’

‘Exactly. Usually mine. You were my champions.’

‘Like so many Don Quixotes.’

‘Hardly. You were always better shod than him.’

‘But every bit as mournful of countenance.’

She thought about that image, smiling to herself. Then, following an inner logic of her own, she said, ‘The situation was sadder than it needed to be, that’s what I’m saying — for all of us.’

Henry didn’t want to hear it. Not sad. Please don’t say sad.

‘Well, you were all my example, anyway,’ he said.

‘Exactly,’ she told him. ‘And look how sad you are.’

So she knew.

She was Henry’s first corpse. The one he’d been saving up.

At her request he stayed with her throughout the night, kept awake for most of it by the morphined demons that swarmed around her. In the early morning she woke suddenly, sat up in bed, the pale light bleeding her hair of all lustre, her eyes ground hollow as though by the knuckles of someone’s fist. ‘The poor child!’ she cried.