Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

But why, then, the folderol of imagining actually meeting the mistress, Henry is unable say. Unless the mistress is a further mother — alternative and supererogatory — which boys also crave. So was Henry hoping not only to retrieve his first mother from his father’s thieving hands, but also to nab the second one into the bargain? Did he want everything his father had?

Honesty-box Henry concedes there could be something in this, because the fancy, in so far as he can remember it — and he can, oh yes he can — entailed the mistress being struck by Henry’s charms, not flirting with him exactly, but registering wherein he was his father to a T, though with youth and a degree in girls’ literature thrown in, and wherein he was another and no less fascinating person altogether.

Whether or not Henry is right that the fancy is of remote unconscious origin, it must, over the years, have been subject to many accretions — like one of Grynszpan and Delahunty’s palimpsests of suppressed female creativity — because now the mistress is talking to Henry of his father as a man very much alive, and now she is lamenting him, tears brimming in her black eyes (fathers’ mistresses must have black eyes), her ringed hands (ditto) — painted fingers browned in sun and experience, lined with sensuality and grief — seeking Henry’s own for comfort. ‘Not possible, you will understand, simply out of the question for me to live here any more’ — an obvious interpolation, for Henry knew nothing of a ‘here’, of St John’s Wood or its environs, when the fancy first took hold — ‘not within a hundred miles of here, nor anywhere that reminds me — I know you’ll understand this — of Regent’s Park, which we so loved.’ The face averted. Hand pressed on Henry’s. Henry’s head big to bursting with the idea that his father loved a park. Did he torch it? he wondered. ‘What we would like’ — the mistress putting celestial quotation marks around the ‘we’ — so Henry was not the only one still in communication with his long-abducted father — ‘is for you to have it.’

‘The park?’

‘The apartment.’

Irrelevant now, all of it. The mistress even deader than the father. A ghost of one who never was, let Henry conjure all he will.

But Henry does wonder if he doesn’t owe it to all concerned parties to try to form a comparable image, without the finger-touching, of Fouad Yafi.

Would have been nice, wouldn’t it, to have met the man who loved his mother so deeply as to have accommodated her son. Would have been nice to have said thank you. Thank you for what you’ve done for me, thank you for what you did for Mum. And you will understand if I do not thank you for what you did for Dad. Failing that, taking Mr Yafi to be dead, it would also have been nice to meet the in-laws. The extended family. The machatonim , as they’re called. Me Nagel, you Yafis. Me Jew, you Arabs. Shalom !

Could a lasting peace between Arab and Jew have grown out of this? Why not? You have to start somewhere. And it would have been a scream, would it not, had Henry who knew nothing of the political affairs of the world been an agent in their change. All those years in hiding from event in the Pennines — were they but a preparation, like Christ’s days in the wilderness, or Cromwell’s in his garden, for this? A peace prize, thereafter, for Henry? The ultimate vindication of his humane ignorance of things. To say nothing of his mother’s. For if anyone really deserved the prize, it was her surely, not Henry. Ekaterina Nagel who found peace here between Arab and Jew.

In waves it is borne in on Henry how bold, viewed from every angle, his mother’s adultery was. From Jane Eyre to a pasha’s pavilion in a single bound — all right, to an over-upholstered apartment in St John’s Wood — but still, quite a journey. Though then again, wasn’t that a version of Jane Eyre’s story too? What quiet girls do — they make their way. What Henry has done, no less. From Jane Eyre to a pasha’s pavilion, pausing only, for most of his waking life, at a poly in the Pennines. And all thanks to his mother.

Could it be that he was always wrong about her? And therefore wrong about himself? That she hadn’t taught him to shrink from life at all, that he had done that by himself? That it wasn’t her thin skin he had inherited, but, if anybody’s, his father’s? Henry would like to be finished with all questions of skin now, thick or thin. Time, at his age, to be done putting your papery wrist to your ear and listening to the unprotected humming of your blood. Time to be getting ready to have no skin. But his father has not let him alone about his skin in more than fifty years. Still doesn’t, when Henry invites him along for one of their dusky evening chats — though Henry does less of that now he has Moira to converse with. You would think, listening to him, that there was more skin on the old man dead than there had ever been on Henry alive. Easy, Henry, easy. Watch that skin now .

Henry would like to say a few words to his father about this. Not have a few words. The son has heard the father out on the question of the son’s translucency long enough. Finally, Henry has rumbled him. ‘It’s not my skin we’ve been discussing, birthday boy — Passover-birthday boy, get me? — it’s yours! That’s how you always knew so much about it, why you hated it and mocked it, and why you always happened to be at the right place at the right time, clomping your great paraffin-smelling hand over my fainting eyes. Cut from the same cloth, Dad, extruded from the same sheet of newspaper — was that what you dreaded? Not another Ekaterina on the planet, but another you? Well, you had less to be ashamed of than you think. You were who you were. And I am who I am. Now rest in peace. But before you do, hear this. .’

Hear what? Henry can’t think of anything. That’s to say he can think of everything, but neither of them has time for that. It’s Moira who tells him what to say. ‘Say nothing,’ she says. ‘Just buy him a bench. I’ll ring Cleansing at Eastbourne. Maybe they can find a place for it next to hers.’

In St John’s Wood High Street the summer is eking out the last of its gederem. Gederem meaning bowels, but by implication strength. One of his father’s favourite words. In the same way that Izzi loved carveries he loved intestinal Yiddish. Kishkes another one. A hard-working man shleps his kishkes or his gederem out. And Izzi Nagel worked hard. At his upholstery, at his fire-eating, at being married — well, who can say? — and certainly at being Henry’s father. Whoever spends time with Henry has to work hard. Should Henry put that on the bench? — IN MEMORY OF IZZI NAGEL WHO WHATEVER ELSE THERE IS TO SAY SHLEPPED HIS KISHKES OUT FOR ME — HIS LOVING SON.

Moira thinks not.

Moira is another one who shleps her kishkes out spending time with Henry. And she has already made it clear she doesn’t want those words on her bench either.

She is out, delivering. Honk, honk. Henry can hear her all over NW8. He is out, walking, but his nerves are on edge. If you pass between two lovers text-messaging each other from opposite corners of the street, will radiation pass through your body? Will they open you up and find the message burnt into your heart? Miss you. Hate you. Meet you in an hour. Drop dead.

If you cross the road at your own pace and a demented motorist honks at you, are you within your rights to pull him (or her) out of his car and beat him to a pulp?

It’s not beyond him to do that. He is still just strong enough, provided the motorist doesn’t resist.

Better to be sitting. He buys papers, which is always a mistake, and finds a table at Aultbach’s. He orders a plunger of coffee for no other reason than that he wants to hear himself say plunge, and allows the papers to swallow him up. Bad news. What other sort is there? You open the page and tumble headlong into it. Today, just Henry’s luck, a report of Osmond Belkin’s memorial. Held at the British Film Institute. Fear no more the heat of the sun, a recorded extract of The Blood Donor , clips from Osmond’s best movies, all that. No mention of Henry’s article. No ironic reference to that great, resonating misjudgement — ‘I am persuaded he does not think as he ought on serious subjects.’ And no reference to the man who made it. No, no Henry. Nor any whisper of Henry. Henry not invited, as he had not been invited to the funeral, though Mel Belkin knew well enough, had he kept the torn-off corner of Henry’s A to Z, where to find him.