Howard Jacobson: The Making of Henry

I enjoyed myself in my own way, Dad.

No you didn’t. You never enjoyed yourself, not even when you were shtupping your best friends’ wives. ‘No pleasure without pain,’ you used to tell me, ‘and for the moment I’m concentrating on the pain part — it’s called existentialism.’ So when came the pleasure, Henry?

I’m waiting for it.

You’re too late, Henry .

Maybe I am. But at least I wasn’t so deluded as to suppose I could come by it by looking in two places at the same time.

A pity you weren’t. A pity you didn’t have the decency to try a little secrecy. You could never keep out of your own backyard.

It was the only yard I knew.

That was your fault. I tried to get you out .

The way you got out?

A man has one life. He has to see the world .

So you’re admitting this was your home from home.

This? I’ve never seen the place before .

But then you wouldn’t tell me if you had.

Of course I wouldn’t. Every heart must have its secrets, Henry — T. E. Lawrence. I learned that from you .

D. H. Lawrence.

Whoever .

These warm days!

The old woman’s corpse isn’t of course rotting, not after only twenty-four hours, but Henry isn’t able to stay indoors. Opposite where he lives is a small park which abuts a church. The Little Park, locals call it, by way of distinguishing it from its big brother, Regent’s Park. Once the park was the graveyard for the church, now it’s a place for sitting and wheeling and watching your children. But it’s Thistle Meadow Henry likes best, the part still given over to the dead, a tumble of long-neglected head-stones, barely one of them upright, the names of those they were erected to commemorate eaten away by time and the poisons of the city. Tautology, Henry. Time is the poison of the city.

If this were still a place of burial, Henry would think of bringing his parents’ bodies down to be closer to him. Get them out of the horror of North Manchester. Give them some of the warm south. In the case of his mother, give her some of the warm south back !

But it would be tactless, wouldn’t it, questions of faith and practicability apart, to remove them as a pair to this place of betrayal. Stand among the stones and you enjoy good views of the love-nest mansion block; narrow your eyes and the building looks striped from here, pink and vanilla, like Neapolitan ice cream. A pink mist.

Did his father come here, he wonders, and narrow his eyes so that a pink mist was all he saw? Doubtful. His father was not a wanderer among graves the way his son is. Didn’t like getting his feet wet, his father, and the earth is always damp between gravestones.

Nonetheless, pink was what drew his father, no doubt about that. Henry doesn’t know why, but pink is the colour he has decided to give his father’s mistress. Blancmange pink. He imagines her as a cushion. That’s why his father couldn’t say no to her. She was of another hue, another substance, of another sort of comfort, to his mother.

Henry is here often for a newcomer to the area. The squirrels recognise him and know not to bother him for food. Another regular visitor supplies those wants, a man with holes in his beard who keeps his breadcrumbs in a plastic bag and clicks his tongue to make the squirrels come to him. Freak! Henry is a non-feeder of animals. He wants the squirrels, and any other of God’s creatures come to that, to know just by looking at him that he is on some other errand. That he is above their squalid concerns — eat, shit, eat, shit. He wants there to be no mistake about that. And there isn’t. The squirrels do not even start at his footfall. And the birds stay in the trees.

In truth Henry no more cares for getting his feet wet than his father did; but he has things to think about that require the presence of the dead. Walking between the gravestones, Henry believes he has the dead on his shoes.

Anyone watching him crossing and recrossing the high street, going out of his apartment block into the park, then out of the park back into his apartment block, flinging himself against the locks each time, would quickly see what the trouble is. Retirement. You don’t have enough to do, old man. What you need is a hobby. Stamps. Grandchildren. An allotment.

Not that Henry is retired. He isn’t gainfully employed, but between gainful employment and retirement there is a world of occupation. If Henry were an actor he would say that he is resting. In actuality Henry is in suspense, consequent upon his having handed in his resignation. But that’s still not to say he has retired. To all intents and purposes Henry continues to do what he has always done, only without a place of work, without a job description, without students, and without pay.

In which case why did Henry offer to go? A ticklish question, to which the approximate answer is that they made him.

But at least the waitress has woken up to his presence. It’s taken six visits in two days — would have been more had the tables not been occupied on some of his essays on her attention — and any number of large tips, since Henry reckons that once you’ve waded in big to get someone’s attention you’ve got to keep upping your stake. So yes, at eight pounds a Russian tea and a tenner per cup of Viennese coffee she’s noticing him now. ‘Save your feet,’ he has to say every time he orders, handing her a note and making that easy-come easy-go expression with his shoulders which he imagines to be native to people from the old country. It’s become a little joke between them — ‘Save your feet’ — touching on questions of energy and age, and establishing Henry’s interest in her person. ‘That’s if I have any feet to save,’ she has said to him this afternoon, signalling with her eyebrows how much she has to do, what with a cricket match at Lord’s finishing early, and everybody wanting cold drinks and ice-cream sundaes.

She is wearing white lipstick, unless it’s lipsalve, which either way Henry for some reason likes, and her custard hair is tied in an asymmetric left-leaning brush, making her face look lopsided, which Henry also for some reason likes. Scientists of the face say that lopsidedness denotes dishonesty or double-dealing, so that would explain it. Henry prefers women who have secrets. He has a feeling she has been unhappily married, probably more than once, and has teenage children who have left home, either to join the Cirque du Soleil or to beg on the streets in Soho. Her first husband will have been an artist from Budapest who beat her, maybe a failed opera singer, the second a house painter from Norwood, someone she met on the tube, a crackhead. You can tell Henry hasn’t lived in London long: he has a lurid idea of what happens in the place.

As, for example, that there is a war of nerves in progress on the streets of St John’s Wood between the Muslim and the Jewish communities. Henry enjoys the prospect of the Central London Mosque’s stringy minaret at the south end of the High Street, but he wonders if it’s a provocation to those who come here to buy bagels and chopped liver. Was it built as a provocation, or were the bagel shops opened as a provocation to it?

To Henry’s left, two Arab boys in crêpe de Chine shirts sit drinking coffee and discussing films. They regard each other under soft long lashes, exchanging dark points of light. Henry tries to remember when last anybody looked at him like that. Never. Not ever. He has missed out on beautiful boys, missed out on being one, missed out on knowing one. To Henry’s right an Israeli family are fussing over their oldest child. Sammi. Sammi too is dark and beautiful, but he doesn’t have the gift of yielding his attention to another person. Sammi might one day win a Nobel Prize, but it won’t be for quietude or empathy. Although the sun has shone for days, Sammi has found puddles on the pavement. Henry cannot remember whether it rained last night. In his apartment you don’t hear rain. Or see it: the windows of Henry’s apartment repel rain. Sammi jumps in and out of the puddles, then marvels at the marks his shoes make on the pavement. ‘Abba, look!’