Howard Jacobson: The Making of Henry

Hold the roll with one hand and with the other pull the inside paper gently. Your beanstalk will grow and grow and grow!!

For the same reason, presumably — though he has borne no children to entertain in this way, and hasn’t looked at the instructions for half a century — Henry can still remember how to make the paper beanstalk.

So that’s what he does, he makes a couple, using unread newspapers containing ‘Hovis’ Belkin’s obituaries, remembering to cut as straight as he can, and to fold back the flaps, and to pull the inside papers gently, and then he stands them on either side of the bed — suitably Middle Eastern they look, too, more like palm trees than beanstalks — from which his father was excluded.

The poor child.

A week or so later a letter arrives for Henry. From Eastbourne Council, Cleansing Department. Permission has been granted to inform Mr Nagel that the bench erected in his mother’s name was kindly donated by the family of Mr Fouad Yafi.

So that’s that. Ends tied up. Neat as a button. No more to say.

‘Would you surmise from that,’ he asks Moira, ‘that Fouad Yafi himself is dead?’

‘I would,’ she tells him. She is sitting at Henry’s dressing table, that’s to say his mother’s dressing table — funny how Levantine it suddenly looks with its floral inlays and ornamental mouldings — putting up her hair. Nymphlike.

He has taken to calling her that. ‘My nymph.’

‘Ha — some nymph!’ is her accustomed response.

Henry wonders how he ever managed without a nymph to greet him every morning. All those years, nymphless — because another man’s nymph is not your own any more than is a nymph who is merely passing through. All those mornings. Thousands of them. Amazing.

‘Me too,’ he muses. ‘But I wonder when he died. I wonder how close to my mother. It would be touching to think he wasn’t able to survive her long. If he did survive her, though, wouldn’t he have donated the bench? Him personally. A love-offering. Like the Taj Mahal. But if he didn’t, and if the bench truly was put up by the family, how come it wasn’t dedicated to them both? Do you suppose the family couldn’t come at that?’

‘Too many imponderables there, Henry,’ Moira says. ‘And I have a feeling you’re searching for a slight.’

‘Only a slight slight.’

‘If they wanted to slight your mother, Henry, they wouldn’t have paid for a bench at all.’

Henry thinks about that. ‘True. But there is such a thing as a half-regard. They may have felt well disposed to her, but not disposed enough to see their father’s or their uncle’s name — whatever their relation to him — entwined with hers. A Jewess, don’t forget. Like you.’

‘Henry!’

‘And then, if Mr Yafi did die all that time ago, how come they have only just got round to offering me this place? His wife could still have been alive, I suppose. But then again —’

‘Does this matter, Henry?’

‘Only in that I’d like — no, it doesn’t matter. It’s just that I want it to have been right, through and through, for them. And then, you know. .’

‘I don’t know. What?’

‘Well, if I can square it for them, I can square it for Dad.’

‘Isn’t that a bit idealistic? Do you really think it would make a jot of difference to him how it was for them?’

Henry suddenly doesn’t like her. Common sense: whenever she tries to send a blast of cold common sense through his cogitations, he doesn’t like her. There’s a reason, he wants to tell her, why they call common sense common. Taugetz , Henry, his father might well have chosen to say at the very same moment. But his father’s taugetz wasn’t common. It refused imaginative cooperation right enough, but not in the name of common reason. It had the grace to descend into other-worldly daftness. Taugetz, taugetz, taugetz. Let’s mess about. If you insist on being oversophisticated you’re on your own; I can’t join you. Which wasn’t quite what Moira was doing. Moira was refusing to see what he saw, because she believed it wasn’t there. Make a difference to your dad! How could it make a difference to your dad? But it was obvious to Henry, and should have been obvious to Moira, why it would have made a difference to his dad — because he was a man of immense reserves of decency, sympathetic decency, and would have wanted his wife happy even in her faithlessness, would have wanted her loved by someone kind, treated with consideration, remembered fondly, a credit to them both.

Taugetz . Well, maybe. Maybe Henry is imagining a father in the image he would imagine for himself. And maybe he is only annoyed with Moira because she won’t indulge his idealism.

He makes an appeal to her. ‘Seen all round,’ he says, ‘and in a long life, though they were cruelly denied that, I grant you, there are errors and brutalities which can be absorbed back into the original edifice — I mean of the relationship if not the marriage — which can be understood to be a part of it anyway, as further interesting contributions if you like, and not just dismissed automatically as fallings off that can never be forgiven. I think it would have made a difference to my father, yes, and added to his own sense of worth, that my mother wasn’t being messed about, that she was well regarded, that she hadn’t stepped below herself, that she was doing something that made her feel happy and worthwhile even though it broke his heart. Yes, I think that.’

She hears the irritation in his voice. And the disappointment too. It’s how she knows that all this is of importance to her as well — the fact that it hurts her to be a disappointment to him.

She has a way of putting her teeth together when she is angry with herself which he likes. There is something of the schoolgirl in it. A sort of resolution, made in the presence of the head-mistress, to do better. ‘Well, you must forgive my surface cynicism,’ she says. ‘I have no right to make assumptions about your father. But have a heart, Henry — you are heavy going just at the moment, heavy on yourself particularly, and is it so terrible of me to want to lighten things for you?’

‘No,’ he says, going over to her and blowing in her hair. ‘No, it isn’t.’

Bracing, her hair. Like a breeze coming in off the Bay of Riga, if Riga has a bay. Knowing Henry’s geography, it could simply be the word rigour he’s thinking of. Moira’s rigorous good manners to him, her rigorous protection of his feelings, and her rigorous clarity in the matter of her own meanings. Like a breeze coming in off the Bay of Rigour. You can misjudge women, Henry thinks, if you go only on the furry bags they carry.

He considers himself a lucky man. Have a heart, Henry — you are heavy going just at the moment . What has heavy-going Henry done — heavy going from the moment his mother went into protracted labour with him — to deserve a woman who tells him that he is heavy going just at the moment ?

If that isn’t tact bred of benevolence bred of love, he doesn’t know what it is.

Thank you, God, for finding me such a person. Now organise for me to live for ever with her and You’ll be a mensch.

Once upon a time Henry entertained the fancy of meeting his father’s mistress. Strange, because when he tries to recapture the fancy it seems to be of ancient origin, like an imagining from childhood, but he cannot understand how this can be since sure knowledge of one mistress in particular, as opposed to mere suspicion of a string of Rivka Yoffeys, with maybe someone special in London thrown in for good measure, came only with the letter from Shapira and Mankowicz. Was the fancy wish-fulfilment, then? Do boys desire their fathers to have mistresses as intensely as they wish their fathers not to have their mothers? All very simple to explain if that’s the case. Go to her, Dad, go enjoy the rest of your life, and leave Mum to enjoy the blessings of conjugality at my hands.