Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

Of course, while they both remained above the ground you couldn’t discount the possibility that Henry would one day re-enter Belkin’s life, and that Belkin would one day re-enter Henry’s. Nothing’s over until it’s over. Who could say for sure that they wouldn’t meet somewhere — by the ancient yew in Totter Down graveyard, say, or outside the paper shop on St John’s Wood High Street, ‘Hovis’ grey-skinned, wasted, hobbling on a stick — and that the sight of healthful Henry with his hand on Moira’s clavicle wouldn’t force him to re-evaluate the pattern of their history? Would ‘Hovis’, in those circumstances, have cast a dying man’s lascivious eye on Moira, one part defunct desire, three parts envy? Or would he have found a way of communicating to Henry that in his view — for what it’s worth, old man — he had bombed again, come up with yet another undesirable, a mere nobody from here instead of one of the glittering somebodies from there?

Now Henry will never know.

It should be a liberation. Now I don’t need to wonder. Now I, Henry the Conqueror, sole possessor of the field, can get on with my life, uncriticised, undetracted, uncompared.

But old habits die hard.

And the dead are never vanquished.

About Lachlan, at least, Henry need have no fears. Lachlan’s heart belongs to Moira.

Henry watches him with a feeling akin to affection. Whatever else you outgrow, you remain duty-bound to be fond of a person who is fond of those of whom you are fond. Common humanity, Henry thinks, demands that I accept him, as ‘Hovis’ Belkin never accepted me, as a man made of the same stuff I am. He threw his bowler hat into the Thames and never had a happy day again, I threw myself into the Pennines and have not been able to look at myself in the mirror since. We are the same.

But it isn’t easy when the belching starts.

‘Love to,’ Moira says, when Lachlan asks them back to his apartment for a snifter.

It turns out he has something interesting to show Henry. Some antique he wants me to buy, Henry thinks. Though he notices there is precious little left, Lachlan selling his own inheritance from under him — again. He would like to make an excuse and leave Moira to do the decent thing by the pair of them, but he accepts this isn’t wise. It will either look as if he’s being rude or being louche. This is the price he pays for having a twisted soul — no one ever takes his motives at their face value.

Not even Angus, who is never more wary of Henry, these days, than when he shows him some attention.

‘Do you mind,’ Lachlan says, looking at his watch the minute he lets them in, ‘if I just nip the telly on to catch the news?’

There are rumours that the police have cracked open a terrorist cell operating in St John’s Wood, a small sack of white substance which might easily be ricin has been found, and a map of the London Underground. Lachlan wouldn’t be at all surprised if the cell turns out to have been in this building.

‘There are some shady-looking characters around here, I can tell you,’ he says, as though Henry and Moira don’t live around here themselves.

‘Yes, but they’re all over eighty,’ Henry says. ‘Except for us.’

‘That’s why it’s ideal.’

‘Yes, ideal for dying in.’

Rude of him, but Lachlan doesn’t seem to notice. He is busying himself, now at the drinks cabinet, now in the refrigerator. In between which he doesn’t seem able to decide whether to put his red-and-white neckerchief back on or keep it off. Henry catches him checking his reflection in the mirror. Aha, so it’s a vanity thing. Henry wonders if Lachlan knows something that he doesn’t, that women like a pirate’s scarf around an old man’s accordion neck almost as much as they like it around a dog’s. Sea dog — is that the reference?

‘The perfect place for retirement, yes,’ Lachlan says, ‘and for that very reason the perfect place for terrorists.’

‘You’ve forgotten,’ Henry reminds him, ‘that we’re right opposite a mosque.’

‘So?’

‘Don’t you think that makes us a bit conspicuous?’

Lachlan, back in his red-and-white neckerchief, looks at Moira, as though to wonder how she puts up with him. ‘My very point,’ he says. ‘We’re so obvious the police wouldn’t dream of looking here.’

‘But I thought the whole point of your supposition is that they have looked here.’

‘Let’s just wait and see, eh,’ Lachlan says, closing one eye at Henry.

While they’ve been talking, Moira has been watching television. ‘It’s a false alarm,’ she tells them. ‘The cell appears to be a family of Israelis. The ricin was matzo meal.’

Lachlan isn’t convinced. ‘And the map of the London Underground?’

Henry goes to the window. Checking the skyline. Most days it’s still there, but one day it won’t be. It’s just a question of who goes first — Henry or the city. On balance, Henry would like it to be the city.

When he turns back into the room he sees Lachlan putting what looks like a surgeon’s mask on Angus. Because the mask is designed to loop around the ears, Angus can’t keep it on.

Something in the material makes the dog sneeze. Would not have made a good surgeon, Angus.

Moira is laughing. ‘Poor Angus,’ she says. ‘His ears are too floppy.’

‘I’ll have to see what other sort they do,’ Lachlan says. ‘There’s no point me staying alive if Angus pops his.’

‘Do you really suppose those are going to be of any help?’ Henry asks. A box has appeared suddenly, on a coffee table — one of the last remaining items of furniture belonging to the old lady — containing fifty high-bacterial filtration-efficiency procedure masks. ‘Well, obviously you must,’ he continues, ‘if you’re buying them by the boxload.’

‘I bought out John Bell & Croyden’s entire stock. Do you want a box or two yourself? You’re welcome. I’ve got a few rolls of tape to spare as well.’

‘Is that to tape up the terrorists?’

‘Doors and windows, old man.’

‘They don’t look taped to me.’

‘They aren’t.’

‘So when do you tape them, when the crop dusters appear in the sky? Won’t that be a bit late?’

Lachlan taps his nose. For a moment Henry takes him to mean that he’ll be able to smell the chemicals before they have time to worm their way (if that’s what chemicals do — don’t ask Henry) into the apartment block. But what he actually means is that there’ll be some warning, that we’ll all be in the know and able to take precautions, provided we have the masks and the tape, and provided we’re at home, and provided we are not asleep, and provided we have the telly or the radio on. And provided, of course, that we have the wit to listen.

‘That’s a lot of provisos,’ Henry says.

Lachlan shrugs. ‘Suit yourself. Better to be safe than sorry, we say — don’t we, Angus?’

Half masked, half not, Angus gives another sneeze. Suave, inodoro, no irritante , it says on the multilingual box. Doux, sans odeur, non irritant . But then it doesn’t mention anything about dogs. It seems a shame, Henry thinks, that there should be terrorists at this very hour plotting harm to Angus, who, whichever way you cut it, has to be accounted an innocent party.

Moira is sitting girlishly on the floor with her knees drawn up to her chin — showing too much leg, Henry thinks. Not fair to Lachlan, as it would be not fair to Henry were those legs not available to him, at other times, to caress. Just behind the knee he likes, just where the anterior flesh of the thigh begins to swell. Something else Henry loves to do: to weigh the underthigh in his cupped hand, to calculate its sway.

She is looking at some old notebooks Lachlan has dug out for her. His stepmother’s diaries. Leather-bound, of course. The best Lachlan’s money could buy her.