Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

‘At least your father,’ she said, ‘has never been hung up on Jews.’

‘Ma, I’m not hung up.’

She leaned across and patted his hand. Worried about him. But absent too, as though she had left him behind. Which is not meant to be the way of it. In a properly ordered family it is the son who leaves the mother behind.

‘Where are you?’ Moira asks him, waving her hand in front of his eyes. ‘Where have you been?’

‘Thinking that you’re right. I am a bit old for this silly game. But if I tell you in my own defence that “Hovis” and I used to play it in Manchester in the coffee bars nearly half a century ago, you will understand why it’s on my mind.’

‘Was he Jewish? I didn’t realise that. There was no mention of it in anything I read.’

Is she right? Henry casts his mind back. Maybe she is. No mention of the J word in anything he’d read either. As why would there be? A citizen of the world, Osmond Belkin. A player in that big world which Henry’s mother wanted Henry to inhabit.

But Henry, for no reason he would be able to argue successfully in a court of law, thinks every J should keep the J word somewhere about his person. It’s even possible he feels punitive about it. If it’s been good enough for me, it’s good enough for you! Suffer! This might account for the obduracy with which he persists in interesting Moira — who couldn’t be less interested — in continuing their game. ‘One point for you,’ he shouts, nodding in the direction of the door. ‘This one’s definitely Gentile. In fact two points for you, he’s got a dog with him.’

‘How do you know the dog’s not Jewish?’

‘In general because no dog is Jewish. But in this particular because it’s Angus.’

Moira looks up and waves at Lachlan.

Henry wonders whether Lachlan knew he was going to find them here — by them, he means Moira — because he is spruced up, his hair shining and cleanly parted, his moustache bristling, the whole person bathed and dewy, as though newborn. More and more, Henry has been noticing, Lachlan presents himself this way to Moira. Like a gift from God. Henry has been trying it himself, but is no match for Lachlan. He can do clean and eager but he cannot do the elderly male equivalent of Venus rising from the waves. There is some absurdity in it at last, Henry reckons, doing a cherub when at best you’re Bacchus; though no such squeamishness appears to inhibit Lachlan.

He is wearing a spotted red handkerchief about his throat, piratical. An identical handkerchief is tied around the throat of Angus.

‘Sweet,’ Moira says. ‘They look like a couple of bounders on the town.’

‘If I were a woman faced with those two,’ Henry mutters, ‘I’d choose Angus.’

‘Then we can have a foursome,’ Moira says out of the side of her mouth, still waving.

But Angus looks like missing out on his big chance. ‘Sorry,’ one of the young waiters apologises at the door, making extravagant wipe-out signals with his hands, ‘we do not allow dogs in the restaurant.’

Lachlan’s face goes from baby pink to ulcer purple in an instant.

‘Shame,’ Henry says to Moira, ‘he’ll have to eat somewhere else.’

Moira wonders if she ought to have a word with the manager.

‘Don’t waste your time,’ Henry tells her. ‘He knows his customers. Jews who won’t eat under a draught are hardly going to eat near a dog. Even the goyim won’t eat with dogs, and they sleep with them.’

Lachlan is blowing out his cheeks, threatening to complain to someone higher up. (Who? Henry wonders. Is there an ombudsman for salt-beef bars?) But if it’s a battle of attractions between Angus and Moira — Moira in a V-neck violet cardigan as spiky-haired as one of her bags (alpaca, is it?), loose and clingy all at once, the buttons of her nipples visible even from the street — Angus is doomed to be on the losing side. A minute later he is trussed to a parking meter, looking forlornly into the restaurant. Henry shifts his chair. He cannot eat a salt-beef sandwich with a dog envying his every bite, let alone gazing at him with forbidden love.

‘Have you ever heard such nonsense?!’ Lachlan says, joining them, out of breath.

Moira kicks Henry under the table. She doesn’t want him telling Lachlan that his dog is not kosher.

‘Poor Angus,’ she says. ‘Will he be all right?’

‘Well, he won’t be hungry, if that’s what you mean. He’s had his.’

‘And even if he hadn’t, he could always eat shit,’ Henry decides not to say, plumping instead for some inanity about loneliness being good for the character.

Moira looks at him. ‘Of a dog?’

Lachlan is trying to cool himself down. Hyperhidrotic Henry feels almost sorry for him. As a perspirative man himself he knows how dismaying it is to come out of your house as odoriferous as a daisy and have circumstances flood you back into a tropical rainforest of discomfort. But he had it coming. People with dogs have it coming.

Choosing to make a virtue of his condition, Lachlan unfastens his neckerchief and mops his moustache with it. ‘Whew!’ he says. ‘These petty Hitlers.’

Moira kicks Henry under the table again, lest he is thinking of reminding Lachlan that Hitler’s biggest crime wasn’t banning dogs from restaurants.

‘Anyway,’ she says. ‘How have you been?’

She is wearing her hair up, the way Henry has noticed that Lachlan particularly likes it, piled to one side, teetering. Henry likes it too, the uncertainty, the imminence of cascade, and of course the asymmetry. Once upon a time Lachlan’s liking it would have counted more than his own liking it — the old second opinion routine. But not any more. I am becoming a conventional man, Henry thinks. By the time I’m seventy I will be wanting a woman of my own and wanting her just for myself.

That’s if he gets to seventy. ‘Hovis’ Belkin, he reminds himself, barely got to sixty.

Henry feels his throat tighten. Grief, he hopes. Please God, make it grief.

There was never any serious woman competition with ‘Hovis’, Henry finds himself remembering, unless you count ‘Hovis’ having always somehow known the provenance of the women Henry took out. Certainly no borrowing any of Belkin’s wives, if only for the simple reason, all else aside, that Henry never got to clap an eye on any of Belkin’s wives. Always out of sight, they were, in another country, on another plane, unavailable to the contamination of Henry’s curiosity. And there were no problems the other way, either. It was pretty much the done thing, when Henry was at university, to have a crack at the female company your friends were keeping. Lawless times, the sixties, when sex overrode all other considerations. You gave your woman a piece of your mind when you found her in the arms of your several flatmates, but not your flatmates. The latter were exempt from criticism, driven by a natural force over which they had no control. The woman was different. The woman was meant to be a repository of decency and fidelity. The potential mother of your children, for Christ’s sake! But Henry never came home to find his girlfriend of the hour in ‘Hovis’ Belkin’s arms. Not once. Not ever. How strange was that?

Of all the ways there are of betraying your best friend, this, Henry reckons, is the hardest to forgive: not betraying him, sexually, at all.

Henry had his own suspicions as to why ‘Hovis’ was aloof, and those suspicions did not include ‘Hovis’ being honourable or gay. ‘Hovis’ kept his hands off Henry’s women because he didn’t rate them. Because he wasn’t tempted. Because they weren’t the business. It was terribly insulting, and Henry for a long time sought alternative explanations, but that was the truth of it: ‘Hovis’ was only ever Henry’s friend, and therefore only ever Henry’s rival, for as long as it took him to get away. For ‘Hovis’, real life was whatever happened afterwards. And in that afterwards everything that pertained to Henry vanished like a dream.