Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

Henry went cold. ‘Hush,’ he said.

She was frantic, looking about her, the tears pouring down her cheek. ‘The poor child!’

‘Hush,’ he said, taking both her hands.

But she wouldn’t let him have them. She needed her hands to make space in front of herself, a swimming action, taking her away, or a gesture of rage, hitting out at whoever was hindering her.

Then she looked deep into Henry’s eyes. ‘That poor child!’ she cried. ‘That poor, poor child!’

He didn’t ask her who she meant. Couldn’t bear to hear the answer, supposing she had an answer in her. Wanted it to be no one, no one she knew, no one he knew, no one at all.

She fell back on her pillow and began to snore deeply. Tired out, Henry dropped into sleep himself. When he awoke, an hour later, he realised she was silent. He could feel the cold around him.

He wanted to do something for her, smooth her hair back, kiss her lips, shut her eyes the way they did in books and films. But he wasn’t able to look, afraid of seeing an expression on her face which would break his heart, dreading the texture of her skin, dreading discovering that she had begun to crumble like old stone, or become as papery as parchment, already. Above all he was terrified that his father had been right all along to keep this from him, because his father knew him, and knew he wasn’t up to it.

I was, Henry. I was always right about you. A father knows.

So he stole out of the room — understanding that if he failed to hold himself together he would come apart for ever — and rang the doctor.

The disgrace of it.

And never saw her face again.

He doesn’t want to go home yet. He would like another day.

‘Not if you’re going to be morbid,’ she tells him. ‘Not if you’re going to go on about benches.’

He promises her he isn’t. He just wants to be with her, beside the seaside.

‘I’ll have to ring Aultbach, he’s expecting me in the shop tomorrow.’

‘Ring him.’

‘And we are supposed to be going out with Lachlan tomorrow night.’

Such a wild life they lead.

‘Then ring him as well.’

He doesn’t mind. He has always liked the woman he is with, on borrowed time, to be busy with other men. It releases him a little of the burden. Means he won’t be their only mourner. Means his won’t be the only tears. And, yes, makes him a little jealous.

Not that he is in need of the stimulus of sexual rivalry in Moira’s case. On his own account he can’t have too much of her. He has reached that stage in a love affair, what some would call its climacteric, when everything about the woman fascinates you, when any angle you see her from enhances her beauty, when you attend so closely to the way she makes herself up and dresses that it is as though you are on the other side of her — not just under her clothes but under her skin, become as subtly conjunct to the movement of her body as cartilage — and when you cannot imagine how existence was ever possible any other way. The seaside is partly, though not entirely, responsible for this. Henry has always been more in love by the seaside than anywhere else. It could be the air, or the sensation of being driven to the brink — the seaside being as far, topographically, and therefore erotically, as you can go. Or it could be associational — Henry remembering how much he missed not having a little girlfriend in the days when his parents took him to Southport and Morecambe and New Brighton. What age was he then? Five, six? It starts early, started early in Henry’s case, anyway. He was a worry to Ekaterina and Izzi, he remembers, so downcast did he become the minute they took him away. ‘We could have left you behind, Henry, would that have suited you more?’ — his father speaking. ‘Come on, darling, brighten up, we’re only here for a few days more!’ — his mother. But he could hardly have told them, could he, that there was nothing the matter with him that a fuck wouldn’t have put right. Did he mean a fuck? He couldn’t have. He was years from knowing what a fuck was. But there is a premonition of sexual intercourse from which you can suffer when you’re five or six. You know you want the warm proximity of a girl. You know you want to exchange the liquids which swim about in her eyes with the liquids which swim about in yours. You know you want to vanish into her and suffer obliteration — even though you don’t necessarily know the word for it — at her hands. And you anticipate the pain you will feel when the heart she gave to you she gives now to another. Put it this way: limited as was little Henry’s knowledge of romance at that age, everything he wanted then, together with everything he feared, did indeed come to pass more or less as he’d anticpated it would.

Now, as he moves in on his second childhood, his idea of sex is returning to that earlier, more primitive form. Talk, holding hands, companionability, the condition of being chums, before or after or even in the absence of coition.

Ask Henry to enumerate his reasons for loving Moira and it will be a long time before he gets on to bed or bodies considered carnally. He loves holding hands with her. Lacing fingers, crooking thumbs, swinging as they walk. Hence the particular advantage of the seaside. You can stroll with your hands laced and swinging for miles, whether on the beach, or along the promenade, or up and down the pier. As a child he knew with certainty that that was what beaches and promenades were for. Hence the cruelty of his single state, aged five.

He loves putting his arm around her shoulder. Perhaps stroking her custard hair, perhaps not. Just leaving it on the clavicle can be enough.

He loves feeling her neck. The tracery of veins and whatever else. He doesn’t know what’s in there. The body, as a machine, isn’t his subject. But he loves feeling life being pumped through, the messages to and from the brain trembling his fingertips. Her neck being long and slender, the skin very fine, Henry is just about able to decipher with his touch what the messages are saying.

He loves nuzzling her. Stopping mid-walk and burying his face in her shoulder, blotting out the light, blind to anything but her smell, or blowing in her ear, which she starts from, laughing, skittish, ticklish. Make a person laugh and you part them from themselves. Henry loves doing that to Moira — uncoupling her.

And she uncouples wonderfully, like a starburst. All the air around her, peopled by her.

He loves sliding his arm around her waist, encircling it, possessing her slenderness, having her, almost as though he’s wrestling her, which of course he isn’t, on his hip.

He loves walking so close to her that he can feel the warmth of her thigh against his. She is cooler at every point than he is, so limb on limb he ought not to be able to feel her heat, but he can.

He loves coming up behind her, if they’ve been parted infinitesimally, and putting his hands on her hips, or, moving further in on her, placing the flats of his palms on her belly, feeling the declivity either side — the ilium, is it? Ilium with its topless towers — the wad of flesh on the bone which is shaped like an ear, and which he reckons, if he blew into it, would also make her laugh.

He loves buying her an ice cream and unwrapping it for her — his boyish gift, all his pocket money gone. Or he loves it when she says no to ice cream but darts at him suddenly, like a predatory bird, to steal a lick of his, looking up at him from under his chin, the scene of the theft, her eyes smiling, her lips wet and cold, enjoying the unaccustomed angle.

He loves that — looking down at her. And also looking up at her. Though that’s moving closer to the carnal than he is willing to do in this enumeration of what he loves.