Howard Jacobson: The Making of Henry

Well, what did he expect? What right to be invited did he have? He had thought ill, written ill, spoken ill of his old friend. He isn’t even sure that he is sorry ‘Hovis’ is dead. How do you tell? Had he been seeing ‘Hovis’ on a regular basis he would presumably be feeling the lack of him. The clocks stopped, the stars not in their places, the sun blotted out of the heavens, all that. But he’s been getting by ‘Hovis’-less for half a lifetime. So how to measure the difference? Wordsworth castigated himself for forgetting, in a surprise of joy, that a beloved person was no longer there, turning to share the transport with her when he ought to have remembered, when he ought never not to have remembered, not for the least of a division of an hour — Henry loves that ‘least division’ — that she was gone. There’s scrupulousness of conscience for you, since for less particular men there can be no greater love than to imagine the dead among the living, to feel them by you so vividly that it is as though they have never left you. So can it work the other way, that you remember to forget rather than forget to remember? In which case Henry, too, is a marvel of sensibility in that he seems to be remembering to forget ‘Hovis’ more and more with every hour that passes. Let Henry be surprised by joy and he won’t be turning to share its transports with ‘Hovis’.

‘Hovis’? Who’s ‘Hovis’?

But Henry knows himself. Or maybe he knows ‘Hovis’. His friend will be waiting for him one of these nights, no doubt about it. He will come for Henry in the darkness and bite his heart out. Henry just wishes it would happen soon. The waiting to feel something is killing him.

‘Mind if I leave him with you?’

Henry jumps. He has not been in the land of the living. And now here are Lachlan and Angus, man and dog, breathing bad digestive systems into his face, Lachlan’s marginally the worse.

As though reading his mind, Angus shows Henry his tongue. Aaaah! Nothing wrong with my insides. Just the smell of curried dog biscuits.

‘Depends how long you’re going to be,’ Henry says.

Lachlan is wearing a suit that seems to Henry to be in about seven pieces, though when he counts he sees it’s only trousers, jacket and waistcoat. It’s the number of pockets in the waistcoat that does it, and the amount of stuff Lachlan has spilling out of them. Watch chains, handkerchiefs, dog lead, heirlooms. He nods in the direction of the antique shop across the road, man to man, incorrigible, the way some men want you to know that they can’t stay out of betting shops or public houses.

‘Turns out you were right,’ he says, producing from somewhere on his person — Henry’s father would have been proud of such legerdemain — the framed photograph of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Samoan grave. ‘Not his signature. I’ve had it checked.’

The words bury themselves in his chest, like daggers, making Henry feel it’s all his fault.

‘Well, it stood to reason,’ Henry says. Not exactly an apology, but it’s the best he can manage.

Lachlan bangs wind out of his oesophagus. ‘Not to mine it didn’t,’ he says. ‘But there’s just a chance they won’t spot it over there. Be back in a couple of shakes.’

Henry watches him go. Purposeful, but with a weary roll of the shoulders. The air slowly leaking out of him. Is there enough left, Henry wonders — enough air and enough heirloom — to keep him going through his old age? Or will he have to sell the apartment soon, as well, and then be reduced to waiting and gigoloing once more in Eastbourne or Torquay or whatever it was. He has that look. A man forever in the process of drowning, like his hat.

Is that what Angus knows? Is that what he sees as well, and is that what this is all about — the dog aware he has to find a new master quick, quick, while he too still has his looks?

Henry pats him, just for the hell of it. Angus, still roguishly neckerchiefed — does Lachlan make him sleep in that thing, Henry wonders — turns up his eyes in return, not pools of love but lakes of it, oceans of brown devotion.

Cynical bastard, Henry thinks, going on patting.

Then suddenly the dog is wriggling from under him, sniffing the air, wagging his tail frantically, seeing his old master on the other side of the street.

‘He only went five minutes ago,’ Henry says. ‘What’s the excitement?’

But who can say how long five minutes feels to a dog. Especially to a dog who’s desperate.

He is at the kerb, trying to remember all he’s been taught. Looking left, looking left again, nosing piss, smelling shit, confusing smell with traffic.

‘Heel!’ Lachlan shouts. ‘Stay there, boy!’

Henry reaches out to grab his collar or his neckerchief, but Lachlan has done his own looking left and then left again, and is giving the dog the OK. ‘Come on, Angus.’ Crouching and clapping his hands. ‘Come on, boy.’

And Angus is off, ears back, tail going, into a tumult of horns. What happens next Henry doesn’t know. What happens next has never been Henry’s strong point. Next was what his father always took care of. ‘You stupid old fool!’ he hears himself say, but the words are no sooner uttered than they seem to belong to another time, another life even. How many cars have slithered into one another — not crashed, it’s all too sedate and balletic to be called a crash — that, too, Henry doesn’t know. No screeches of brakes, no crunch of metal, for all that the implicated vehicles are four-wheel drives, Armageddon trucks strong enough to take out a buffalo. Behind his eyes Henry sees a wheel spinning in yellow moonlight. Immobile, he watches it, though no car is on its back and the sun is shining. What is more, the car’s wheel spins in eerie silence, whereas this is St John’s Wood High Street, and with the volume inexplicably turned up — expostulation, recrimination, astonishment (though such things happen every day): voices yelling into mobile phones, the sound of texting, hooting, honking. The madhouse.

‘What the fuck is honking going to solve?’ Henry wants to shout.

But then what the fuck is Henry shouting going to solve?

Or Henry’s doing anything? It’s written across his face — I’m better staying put, leaving it to others, those with presence of mind, the quick-witted, the capable, the brave. Those who are living at this moment, and in this place.

How long does it take him to recognise the middle vehicle, the one that slid into the one trying to miss Angus, the one that has rotated gently in the middle of the road as though on a turntable in a showroom window, and is now pointing back to front? Not good at cars, Henry. All look the same to him. Even when they’re jeeps. But something rings a bell, number plate maybe, or alpaca cardigan visible from the rear window. Moira! Jesus Christ! Moira’s in the middle of all this! He is only a few yards away but in the time it takes him to get to where she is he has given up on her. What if she is cut? Henry cannot help a woman who has cut herself. What if she is badly hurt? What can Henry do for a woman who is badly hurt but feel her pain, howl for her, suffer in the same place she suffers. He is not a nurse, Henry. He is a man who understands the agony of women. He is their spiritual alter ego, which is not much use to them in a car crash. And because he cannot help them he can only give up on them. Their fault for not being immortal. Her fault for being just like other women in the end. Nausea, is it? Disgust? Ashamed of her for bringing the disgrace of death upon them both? Be all right, he says. Please be all right. But even if she is all right this time she can’t be all right for ever, can she? Not the way she drives. Postponement is the best he can hope for. Already he can see her as a ghost, fading, leaving him, gone.