Howard Jacobson: The Making of Henry

They are at a family wedding in the deep South of Manchester, which is Henry’s excuse. South Manchester has always made him light-headed. Perhaps because between bombs and spiders he was born there. It is a warm night, the air silky, the trees still steaming after a summerload of rain. It was Marghanita who suggested they walk on the lawn, offering Henry her shoes to carry because the heels are high and she does not want to sink into the soft earth. He takes her elbow just the same, to be on the safe side. And is surprised by how not old it is.

‘So your studies are going well?’ she asks.

How long has Henry been waiting for this night? Sometimes it seems to him that he studies only to impress women, that he cannot at the last tell the difference between literature and love-making. Certainly when he finishes reading a long novel or an epic poem, Henry believes he should be rewarded with female favours. No act of the critical intelligence is over and done with for Henry until it has been completed in sex. What is it that stops him skipping tedious chapters but a sort of erotic conscientiousness, eking out the hours, paying for his pleasures in advance, remembering his manners? Careful reading as considerate fore-play. Things would be in their right conjunction for Henry tonight, therefore, whoever the barefoot woman quizzing him on his studies. But Marghanita is special to him and already entwined around his idea of himself as a boy of letters. Of all the Stern Girls, Marghanita was the reader. His mother, too, but his mother’s influence was direct, not misty like Marghanita’s. And besides, boys are not supposed to fall in love with their mothers. Henry’s heart might be extravagant and score Cs but it is not indecent.

It was Marghanita who persuaded Henry to specialise, if he could, in American literature. ‘Nothing happens here,’ she told him on the eve of his going off to university, ‘nothing big. All we do here is shelter. The grand themes are all American now.’

He remembers thinking there must have been some sadness in her, for her to have said that. And she had a face that easily expressed sadness; rather heavy features, like her sisters, with a broad nose and fleshy lips, but her cheekbones were finer cut than theirs, and her eyes more nervous in their movements and with more moisture in them. Marghanita is the White Russian of the family, he used to think. Of course, by comparison with his father’s relatives, or with just about anybody else living in North Manchester come to that — the hordes, the Mongols, the Bolsheviks — the Stern Girls are all White Russians. Aloof, they wrap their furs around their pale skins and sniff the cherries in their distant orchard. But Marghanita is whiter even than her sisters. She’s the disinherited one.

So he feels he owes it to her, no less than to himself, not to be another of her disappointments. Maybe he can go further and actually make it all right for her again, help her to repossess the world. He is already doing that for his mother, carrying her colours into battle. So why not Marghanita’s colours as well? Henry, knight of the thin skin, redeeming the lost dreams of older women.

‘Studies are going OK, thanks largely to you,’ he says, steering her further from the lights of the party, unless she’s steering him. ‘I must say that when I see those other poor buggers sweating over Beowulf and Sir Philip Sidney I’m not half glad I took your advice.’

‘The Americans aren’t disappointing you?’

‘Not at all. Though I don’t think I’m ever going to be a Melville and Hawthorne fan.’

‘Who’s your favourite writer these days, then?’

‘You make it sound as though I am always changing him.’

‘Or her. .’

‘Or her. But it isn’t a her at present.’

‘Ah, it’s someone very “he”, is it? Let me guess. Hemingway?’

‘No, Hemingway is a bit too outdoors for my liking. And his sentences are too short. I’m more of a Henry James man.’

He can hear, through her elbow, that Marghanita doesn’t know her way well through Henry James. ‘ The Turn of the Screw ,’ she says.

‘Yes,’ says Henry, not telling her that at his university The Turn of the Screw is considered to be very un-Jamesian James, ‘and Washington Square and What Maisie Knew and The Awkward Age .’

‘What’s The Awkward Age about?’

‘Young girls, on the face of it. But in fact, the sacred terror. The irresistibility of some people, even when you know they aren’t suitable.’

‘The irresistibility of unsuitable persons to young girls?’

Henry stops them by a fountain. A decorative swan is curled around itself, stretching its neck, as though fearful of the jet of water. From a distance he had hoped it was Leda and the swan — that monstrous coupling — but it is only a swan. The hall looks a long way away, its lights appearing to tremble in the hot damp of the night.

‘Their irresistibility to anyone,’ he says. ‘I’m not all that interested in the young girls.’

He has been carrying her shoes, diamantés on brocade, wedding shoes, light, witty, the heels precarious, not as high as Henry likes, not stilts, but concise and pointed, sharp as daggers. It is somehow wonderful to be carrying a grown woman’s shoes. But to face her and hold her as he wants he must put them down. He tries the ledge of the fountain.

‘Not there,’ she says, ‘they’ll fall in.’

‘If they do I’ll dive after them.’

‘You’re one of us,’ she laughs. ‘I bet you can’t swim.’

‘I’ll take my chance.’

His mouth is on hers. Will the lips taste old? he wonders. Will they be cracked? Will they close tight, forbidding him, or will they have too much give in them, will they yield with old person’s gratitude? No one tells you; no one prepares you for this.

A miracle, but her lips are not different from the lips of young women studying American literature at his university. Neither softer nor harder. But she isn’t kissing him back. Simply letting him kiss her. He puts his hands up to her breasts, in that case, and for a moment or two she lets him do that as well, almost as though it is part of his education that he should know what a sixty-year-old woman’s breasts feel like. And here is another miracle: they too are as unbearably round, as unimaginably firm — as undespairing and as ungrateful — as any woman’s a third her age.

Cool, like green apples they are. Granny Smith’s? Yes, exactly those, but forget the granny.

She isn’t forlorn in body, Henry exults — suddenly it’s a family matter for him again — therefore she cannot be forlorn in mind! He could cry now, except that she might not understand what he is crying for. How to tell her that he is crying for the cool apple-green resilence of her flesh?

But that is all of it he is going to be allowed to touch. ‘Not such a good idea,’ she says, pushing him gently away. Not such a good idea, Henry, being kidnapped by your great-aunts .

‘The sacred terror?’

She laughs, touching her face, checking that her mouth is where it should be. ‘No,’ she says. ‘You.’

Not such a good idea, Dad.

Nearly Marghanita’s age himself now, though nothing like so apple green and undespairing, Henry upbraids his late father. Not such a good idea, setting up this cosy keypad love nest with your mistress, enjoying a second life before you had finished with your first.

Don’t know what you’re talking about, Henry, but are you in any position to pass judgement?

I’m your son. A son passes judgement. Besides which, you are hardly in any better position to pass judgement on me — you always said you wanted me to enjoy myself.

I did. So why didn’t you?