Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

He loves slipping his hand inside the back of her cardigan, or a little way down the waistband of her skirt, or into the cuffs of her shirt if she’s wearing a shirt, or under the narrow straps of her summery top, or into the sleeves of her jacket. If she’s lying across him, with her feet up, he loves feeling about in her shoes, and if her feet are bare, loves making forays between her toes.

He can’t stop playing with her. This is how he would have been at five or six had the right girl only given him the chance, but since then he’s enjoyed the company of many women close up, and worked with countless numbers more, few of whom he hit it off with, it’s true, but still, they were women — so why, suddenly, is this woman such a novelty to him?

He loves fiddling with her rings when she’s sitting idly, staring at seagulls, with her hand in his. He loves unfastening her watch strap and then fastening it again. He loves taking off her earrings and absent-mindedly feeling their weight, then clipping them back on — assuming he hasn’t broken them by then. He can’t keep his hands off her or her things. At any moment he expects her to turn on him and tell him to leave her alone, to keep his filthy interfering mitts off her and her jewellery, to give her a moment’s peace; indeed it sometimes occurs to him to wonder whether he isn’t doing everything in his power, perversely, to provoke such a rebuff; but it never comes. She doesn’t shock him by opening her mouth or showing him rude parts of her body as much as she used to — they know each other a little too well now for that — but every so often she does revert to her old tactics, as when today, in broad daylight, posing for his camera at the end of the pier, she whips her top up a fraction of a fraction of a second before he clicks. And she wouldn’t be doing that — would she? — if she wanted him to leave her alone.

As for his even possessing such a thing as a camera, who can explain that? Henry hasn’t owned a camera since his parents, thinking to cheer him up and make him interested in things outside his head, bought him a Brownie 127 and binoculars in matching leatherette cases for his sixth birthday. In the intervening years Henry has had no need for any sort of recording device. No camera, no tape recorder, no Walkman, no video, no DVD, no nothing. ‘What is it I’d want to preserve?’ he would have answered anybody surprised by this asceticism. The prig he was. But now Henry is preserving like a mad thing, snapping Moira at every possible opportunity, hoping to record her every mood and movement, even asking passing Japanese if they’d be good enough to snap the pair of them together — Henry who has always been too embarrassed to ask anyone for anything, fearing the sting of refusal.

He is even the owner of a photograph album, the first of his adult life, into which he affixes her, remembering to write the name, the place, the date, on the back of every photograph. Not beautifully like his mother. Henry is not in possession of the idle calm of copperplate. Spider-scrawl, befitting the spider he has been — that’s Henry’s hand. Words written to make words indecipherable. Explain that. Has anyone investigated the psychology of a bad hand? The hurry of it. A man of words who cannot get the words out of his fingers soon enough. Even Henry’s signature is stillborn. Explain that.

But if it’s an instinct for death, he’s fighting it. An album after all, however you deface it, is a vote for sempiternity. And he is trying to slow his hand down, releasing the pressure on the pen, clasping the other hand about his writing wrist, hunching his back, biting his lip, forming each letter like a little drawing in itself, the way he was taught to do at primary school.

He is a boy again. She has done this for him. She has given him back the verve he never had.

‘Life,’ he exclaims, ascending or descending stairs with her, enjoying escalators where he can stand behind or in front of her, feeling their bodies exchange stature as they go up and down, now him higher, now her. ‘Protean life, everything in flux, nothing ever the same.’

‘Jesus, Henry,’ she says, ‘can’t we ride an escalator without you becoming a philosopher.’

‘Just be pleased,’ he tells her from the lower step, whispering into her neck before it rises from him, eluding his breath, the small of her back now level with his lips, and even that escaping him, vertebra by vertebra, ‘just be pleased you make an old man happy.’

And is she? Well, it beats having him like Hamlet’s father’s ghost, starting like a guilty thing upon a summons, hardly anchored to the earth at all.

A doting lover beats a spectral one any time.

Now all she has to do is convince him his happiness is not the proof that he is at death’s door.

Though he has promised not to involve her in the morbidity of benches, they do occasionally have to rest their legs and sit on one; but only on the understanding that she will sweep it first for plaques, dedications or allusions of any other sort which might destroy his spirits.

‘It’s like having a minder,’ Henry says. ‘Will you now check under the bench for explosive devices?’

‘ You’re the explosive device,’ she says. ‘I know where the bomb is. My role is to make sure there are no circumstances in which it might go off.’

He likes the idea of that: Henry the Bomb. Even if the only fallout, these days, is tears creaking in his temples.

On the morning of the day they are due to drive back to St John’s Wood, they sit looking out to sea, enjoying the sun on their faces. On his face, to be precise. Being pale of skin, Moira has to be careful and does not venture out into the sun until she has rubbed sunblock deep into her pores. Henry is amazed at the numbers of tubes and jars of sunblock of varying factors of impermeability she possesses. But by allowing him to apply them for her she forestalls criticism.

‘Choose one for me, Henry,’ she said, this morning.

He wanted to know on what principle.

So she took him through the science: UVAs, UVBs, fierceness of sun divided by time exposed to it determining desired degree of screening. But already she had lost him.

‘This one,’ he said, picking the first to hand, a five- or six-year-old at the seaside, confusing the good time he never had with the telling-off he did.

‘That’s lipsalve,’ she told him.

‘That you don’t need,’ he said, bending to her lips and salving them with his own.

Henry loves kissing her full on the lips.

She wants to read the papers before they go. An old holiday indulgence of hers, reading the paper in the sun, in 50 units of SPF.

She has no preference. Whatever takes her fancy. This morning it is The Times . Henry is reading Newsweek . No reason. He too takes up whatever catches his eye. Whatever doesn’t have news in it, preferably. And not too many stories of the sort that might upset him — other men’s success, etc. Comes to mind that Berryman poem, 53 in The Dream Songs –

It takes me so long to read the ’paper,

said to me one day a novelist hot as a firecracker, because I have to identify myself with everyone in it, including the corpses, pal.

Though Henry’s reasons are not so hotly empathetic. More about identifying himself with everyone not in it. As for actually subscribing to a paper, of knowing what your convictions are, of submitting them to flattery and indulgence every morning — the very idea strikes him as ridiculous. His own ignorance saved him here. Quite old, Henry was, before he could tell the difference, politically, between the Guardian and the Telegraph . Just hadn’t noticed. Never been brought up to notice. His mother always too busy in some other world of affrighted feeling to need newspapers, and his father only ever buying them to cut up. Guardian, Telegraph — who cared? When it came to dodging tales of other men’s success, there was nothing in the end to choose between them. Moira, too, does not ‘have a paper’. It’s another reason they get on. They are both random in their belief systems, not knowing on whose side in any argument they’ll wake up. Moira reads to pass the time, and Henry to vex himself.