Howard Jacobson: The Making of Henry

‘Look,’ she says, ‘I’m going to be a little while longer exchanging addresses with these idiots. The police are here as well. It’s ridiculous, it’s not as though anyone’s hurt, or anyone’s to blame. Except, I suppose, poor Angus. And they won’t be charging him. So I’ll be home when I’m home. It shouldn’t be too long.’

Home? She has never called it home before.

‘I’ll come out and help you.’

‘No, don’t. You stay with Lachlan. Be nice to him.’

‘I have.’

‘I know.’

‘I really have.’

‘I know, I know. Don’t stop.’

‘I miss you,’ he says. Not his usual locution. Not a notion he is accustomed to trusting himself with — missing. Start telling people you’ll miss them and it’s like inviting the earth to crack open its foundations around you. Of course you’ll miss them, that’s what they’re for, for you to miss through eternity.

‘Me too,’ she says. ‘It’s all so sad. But listen, when you think you can safely leave Lachlan you could pop across the hall and start to run me a slow hot bath. And you could see if you can dig out some massage oils. I’m half dead. I’ll be needing you to revive me.’

‘Righto,’ he says. He doesn’t want to get off the phone. He wants her to go on talking. Put the phone down and she’ll be gone. ‘And yes, you’re right — it has been sad.’

She will die on him, that’s what he knows. If he doesn’t die on her, she will die on him. Her voice will stop. Impossible to imagine, but he must imagine it. In the meantime. . well, he will massage her. Keep the blood in circulation. Keep her in circulation.

Lachlan pours him another Scotch. He is beginning to look at Henry the way Angus used to. What you get when you go around kissing people on the head, Henry acknowledges. Or accepting them into your nostrils. God and Adam must have looked at each other this way, too, for a day or more. Until Eve.

‘I suppose you’d think I was being morbid,’ Lachlan says, ‘if I sat here with him on my lap.’

No, Henry doesn’t think that’s morbid. No. And anyway, what if it were. To be truthful he would like it himself, to linger here a little longer on this elderly St John’s Wood afternoon, a Scotch in his hand and the curtains closed, thwarting the encroachment of the cruel light, seeing Lachlan with Angus warm for the last time on his knees, trying to remember what the dog was like, which is becoming difficult already, thinking about running a bath for Moira, waiting for her to come home — home , her word — waiting for her to die, oiling her shoulders, reviving her.

It’s like a vision of his future. An old fart, a dead dog, and a woman he can’t trust not to leave him, one way or another.

Could be hell, Henry thinks.

Then again, could be the making of me.