Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

Occasionally she passes on an item of gossip. Henry has his fingers in her belt and isn’t listening. It’s music between them, that’s all.

There are glossy giveaways in Newsweek which Henry rolls into balls and throws at the seagulls. In their bullying and persistence, the seagulls remind him of people he has known. Grynszpan and Delahunty.

Moira hits his hand. ‘Don’t make litter,’ she says, still reading.

‘Why? Are you frightened the Cleansing Department might catch me.’

‘Did you post that card to them?’

‘Of course I posted that card to them.’

‘You might hear when you get back.’

‘And I might not.’

‘Do you want to hear?’

‘Of course I want to hear. Why wouldn’t I want to hear?’

They are still making music only to each other, barely attending to the words.

‘I know you,’ she says. ‘You go off things. You get all worked up, then you think better of it.’

‘Well, I’m not going to think better of my mother, am I?’

‘No,’ she says. She is engrossed suddenly. ‘No, I don’t suppose you are.’

He has taken to smoothing the side of her skirt, rubbing her flank in the sun. The flesh and bone of her.

‘Henry,’ she says, lowering the paper, wanting his attention. ‘That person you wrote an article about, the one I found on the Internet, the film man. .’

‘What about him?’

‘I think he’s in the paper.’

‘Moira, he’s always in the paper.’

‘Is he called Osmond Belkin?’

Henry puts up a hand. ‘Please don’t read anything aloud to me about Osmond Belkin. Not today. It’s too nice here.’

She folds the paper on her lap and leans towards him. ‘Listen to me, Henry, were you very good friends?’

‘Once upon a time.’

She pulls him to her, holding his face. ‘Darling, I’m so sorry,’ she says.

‘What?’ Henry fears a knighthood or a Nobel Prize. ‘What have they given him?’

Her eyes are like seas, sucking him in. Infinite in their consolation.

‘I’m so sorry, darling,’ she says. ‘He’s died. I’m so sorry.’

‘Darling’ — Marghanita ringing him at his office in the Pennines all those years ago — ‘I’m so sorry.’

Daddies turn your face away. Mummies break the news.

So who breaks the news when your mummy and your daddy die? The next mummy.

She is worried about him, sliding her shifty eyes from the road to see how he is taking it.

‘Just concentrate on your driving,’ he tells her, ‘or we’ll be next.’

She has changed her car. Not the make — it’s still a BMW — but the nature. Now, like everyone else in St John’s Wood, she’s driving an adventure wagon, the domestic version of the tank. Henry reckons it’s the fear of Armageddon that explains this. When they blow up St John’s Wood, you’ll need a four-wheel drive to negotiate the rubble. The human imagination can only cope with so much disaster, and a rough terrain is as far as anyone has got. Come Judgement Day they’ll all be masked and in their Range Rovers, but still shopping in the High Street. That’s the advantage of a four-wheel drive — there’s plenty of room for babies in the back seat and provisions in the boot, and you get a good high ride so you can spot the parking spaces in good time.

Sweet, expecting parking meters to be standing and operative. And sweeter still, anticipating using them once civil law has broken down, considering that you never took a blind bit of notice of them before.

In the meantime the High Street is getting narrower by the day with armoured vehicles advancing three abreast on either side, at speeds commensurate with reconnoitring the new season’s stock in the windows of the women’s fashion shops.

‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ she asks.

He is never all right when she is driving. He would say he is most afraid of her driving when they are on a motorway, were it not that Moira made everywhere a motorway.

‘I’m fine,’ he says. ‘Who are you honking?’

Silly question. He knows who she’s honking. She’s honking humanity.

And how fine is Henry?

A tough question. Never seek to ask for whom the bells tolls

— Henry is familiar with all that. Having run through his family, death might claim already to be an intimate of Henry’s. In fact that’s not the case. They are not yet on speaking terms. Henry doesn’t mean to be unkind to his family, but their removal wasn’t personal. It was on a different time line. By nabbing ‘Hovis’, however, death has signalled his intentions. Now it’s the turn of your lot, Henry.

One day, though Henry can’t nail it down, ‘Hovis’ threw money at him, coins and notes. Money which Henry had lent ‘Hovis’ and which he had asked to be returned to him. ‘Here, have your shitty money,’ ‘Hovis’ had declared, tossing it into the air and showering Henry with it. Henry can’t remember where this happened. Or exactly how old they were at the time. Or why he had lent money to ‘Hovis’ in the first place, since ‘Hovis’ was never short. Or why it had been necessary to ask for it back. Or why ‘Hovis’ had been so angry with him for doing so. All he can remember is the mortification. Having your own money thrown back at you, the refutation of your original generosity, the demonstration, in other words, of your meanness. For it is meaner to sue for the return of a loan than it would have been to refuse it in the first place. What troubles Henry is that he does not recognise himself in this event, but is ashamed of it nonetheless. Is that what remains, after all that time and all those changes — the shame? Is shame the sole immutable entity?

Who wronged whom in that recollection? Suddenly it is important to decide. Why? Henry knows why. It is because ‘Hovis’ is dead, and the living owe the dead reparation. If Henry wronged ‘Hovis’, now is the time for Henry to acknowledge it.

This is what he is doing in the front seat of Moira’s BMW jeep, when he’s not dodging the oncoming traffic. He is going through the list of all the wrongs he ever visited on ‘Hovis’. Yes, there is the question of the wrongs ‘Hovis’ visited on him, but they do not apply now, ‘Hovis’ having seized the advantage yet again and died first. And would ‘Hovis’ have been making conscientious mental reparation to Henry, had it been the other way round?

‘Sorry, Henry, for calling you a girl. Sorry if that contributed in any measure to your having a shit life. Sorry for having such a good life myself. Tactless of me. Sorry about that.’

Fat chance, Henry thinks. But such certainty is itself a perpetuation of an older wrong. Still at it, Henry, still thinking ill of your best friend? Who, alas, can no longer defend himself.

Am I glad? Henry wonders. Am I, in some small disreputable part of myself, glad that he is dead?

He hears the tears well up for ‘Hovis’. Hears them muster, hears their pricking behind his eyes, like the sound of needles going into tracing paper, but they don’t fall. Won’t fall. Well, Henry is damned if he is going to castigate himself for that. He has cried a lot in Eastbourne. Even the softest-hearted man can run out of tears temporarily. Besides, there is a tight band of pain across his chest. His pulse is not even. There is a dull pain in his head, at the very top, where the skull feels thinnest. And the woman he loves is concerned for him. All these are signs, surely, that although he isn’t weeping, he is in genuine distress.

Yes, but is he in distress for ‘Hovis’?

Or is he in distress because he isn’t?

Moira wants to know if he would care to stop for tea.

‘I am all right,’ he says. ‘I would care to go slower, but otherwise I am all right.’