The Making of Henry (10 page)

Crash me, Moira, is something else entirely. Crash me, crash me, Moira, while both our imaginations are concentrated on your thighs, is purely mental play, as abstract as a death wish, and has no bearing on his hatred of being thrown around in a tin-and-glass bubble travelling at the speed of light.

‘Are you all right?' Moira asks him. She can feel him burning up behind her.

‘I'm fine,' he says. ‘I get a little car sick, that's all.'

‘You should have travelled in the front.'

He searches for her in the mirror. ‘I prefer it here,' he says. He wants to lock her gaze into his, on the other hand he doesn't want her taking her eyes off the road. ‘Anyway, Lachlan's the one that needs looking after. He's had the harrowing day.'

‘Oh, you needn't have worried about me,' Lachlan says. ‘I'd have been happy in the boot. The open road holds no terrors for me.'

‘Nor for me,' Henry lies.

Lachlan turns round to examine him. ‘Then why are you holding on to the back of the seat, old man?'

‘Would you like to take over the driving?' Moira asks him.

‘No, no, I'm fine, honestly,' Henry assures her. He isn't going to tell her he doesn't drive. Enough that she now knows he's terrified. He doesn't need her to think he's a faggot as well.

‘You're a keen driver yourself, then?' he asks Lachlan, getting the subject off himself.

‘Was. Used to love it in the old helmet-and-goggle days. Even did a bit of rallying in my time. Now it's just up and down, up and down.'

‘From where to where?' Moira asks. Funny, Henry thinks, that she doesn't already know. Unless she's feigning ignorance. But then why would she do that?

‘To hell and back,' Lachlan says.

‘Doing what?' Henry asks. Funny that he too doesn't know and hasn't bothered to find out. Has Henry reached that age where he assumes everybody is like him, no longer with a place of work? Or does Lachlan simply give off the air of being too well connected to need regular employment, outside of flogging the family heirlooms.

‘Hogwash.'

‘Are you answering my question,' Henry asks, ‘or telling me what you think of it?'

‘That's what I'm in.'

‘You make hogwash?'

‘Don't make it, sell it. To farmers. That and other animal feeds.'

‘So you drive a big truck?' Moira wonders.

‘No fear. I don't deliver the actual feed. Never seen the stuff, wouldn't know it if I walked into a trough of it. I sell them the chemicals. And I've never seen those either. They buy out of a catalogue.'

‘Like mail order,' Moira says.

‘You've hit the nail on the head there. Soon will be mail order. Then that's me finished. Last of a dying breed. Ask yourself how many animal-feed salesmen you know.'

The car falls quiet while they think about it. Then Henry says, ‘I don't know why but I'd have picked you for an antiques man myself.'

‘Huh!' Lachlan says angrily. ‘Shows, does it? Not surprised. I always did love beautiful things, but you don't always get the chance to live by what you love, do you?'

‘You can say that again,' Henry says.

‘You have to make do,' Lachlan says, chop-fallen, ‘with the cards you're dealt. Antiques are my passion, I suppose because I was brought up with them, pigswill's my penance.'

‘Penance for doing what?'

‘Ah, that's another story. For being born, I suppose.'

The car falls silent again.

No, they're not close. Henry's impression, studying Moira in the mirror, is that they aren't a pair, not even a potential pair, else she would surely feel herself to be implicated in this last remark, shut out and made desolate by it, at the very least challenged by it into promising to make Lachlan's miserable penitential life better from this moment on. Granted, she's going too fast and changing too many lanes to kiss him, but a squeeze of his hand wouldn't be out of the question, or one of her slithery sideways glances. But Henry discerns nothing, hears not a heartbeat, sees not a flicker. They're not a pair, unless she's cleverer, unless they're both cleverer, than he takes them to be.

It's only when Moira drops them at their apartment block – for it's Lachlan's apartment block too, now – that Henry notices he's been in a BMW. Henry knows nothing about cars, and what he does know he wishes he didn't, but BMWs he recognises because that's all anyone drives around here. Anyone except a waitress, that is. A dented silver Datsun, such as you get when you call a minicab, one of those pitted vehicles that look as though they've driven through an ambush in the Balkans, that's what he thought he'd been in. What he can't decide is whether he'd have been more frightened had he known he'd been in a BMW.

There are two other things he can't decide. Whether Moira and Lachlan are a pair after all, so much not a pair do they seem determined to appear – barely a thank-you from Lachlan, who's a hand-kisser, surely, who you'd expect to slobber over any woman's hand given half a chance, let alone one who's sacrificed her day to the cremation of his stepmother. So how come not?

And what's the other thing he can't decide? Oh, yes. Whether the waitress could have bought the BMW out of the tips he's been leaving her.

‘Hovis' Belkin! Christ!

Henry isn't left immediately to his own devices. First he has to decline Lachlan's offer of a dry sherry in the old lady's apartment. ‘Hair of the dog?' Lachlan suggests while they're waiting for the lift, which strikes Henry as meaningless since they haven't had a drop yet, unless setting fire to somebody in the sticks whose express wish was to be buried whole in Covent Garden can be considered an intoxicant. Not to Henry, though. Henry is stone cold sober. And wants to lie on his bed with a cold compress pressed to his forehead – you can be sober and still have throbbing temples – and think about the waitress. Moira, yes he knows her name, but he still prefers the anonymity of waitress. Altogether, he wishes he hadn't encountered her in Lachlan's company today, whichever way one reads it. Nothing personal, but he could have done without the contamination of another party. He liked having her to himself. He was enjoying the evolution of the romance at his pace. Over tea and tips. He isn't ready yet to know her name.

And then that other name he would rather he didn't know or remember comes back to him. Belkin. ‘Hovis' Belkin.

Henry has studiously avoided the memory of Osmond ‘Hovis' Belkin since they shared a room at university, which hasn't been easy given how often photographs and appraisals of Osmond (no mention of the ‘Hovis' in latter years) have appeared in newspapers since. But you can know and not know about someone you would rather forget. There is a special chamber of the mind in which you can lock away those not conjunctive to your well-being. Occasionally, you hear them hammering to be let out, so you simply turn up the volume of everything else. Now, courtesy of Lachlan Louis Stevenson, ‘Hovis' Belkin is at large again in Henry's brain.

Thanks, Lachlan. And thanks, Moira, come to that. Because it took the two of them, didn't it. Always does. ‘Hovis' Belkin and accomplice. But in fairness, is it
all
down to the swine-feed salesman and the waitress? Lying on his bed, fiddling with the keypad to the drapes – shaded light is what Henry needs, not day, not night – he admits there is a sense in which Osmond was already due for release. More than a sense. The truth is – and Henry cannot tell a lie – he has been having intimations of his old friend in recent times. Forced intimations.

A funny thing: when Henry thinks of Osmond he catches himself thinking of his father. Not Osmond's father, Henry's. Most people come associated, he knows that. You remember them in strings. Further proof that after a certain age you might as well kick up your heels, since nothing new is going to befall you; the patterns and prototypes are set in childhood and the same characters, or at least the same stories, go on recurring. Osmond Belkin, Lachlan Louis Stevenson – different men, same narrative. So what unites Osmond Belkin and Henry's father, who on the face of it had not a quality in common? Lying on the sumptuously quilted bed it is hard to believe was once his father's bed, Henry keys the fine steel nets to close and the drapes to remain infinitesimally parted. The technology allows for that. If Henry only understood the technology. One wrong button and the bed tilts and the chandeliers go on. That how his father liked it? In the end he settles for total blackout. With which the answer to his question presents itself. Himself. What Osmond Belkin and his father had in common was
him
, Henry. Say their names, say Dad, say Osmond, and Henry feels the same pain in the same organ, that's if there actually is an organ where Henry feels it. Is there a part of the body where shame resides? That's where they separately struck at him, anyway, in the organ of ignominy. Of course he knows he can't be trusted when it comes to mortification. His skin's too thin. And he's read too much Jane Eyre. Blows rain on Henry that were never intended to be blows at all. A badly aimed compliment can put Henry's eye out. Nonetheless, if you're mortified you're mortified. No point telling the wounded body that the cut it feels is not a cut at all.

And what exactly was it that Osmond Belkin and Henry's father did to Henry, that shames him now, so long after the events, even where no one can see him, in the enclosing all-consoling blackness of St John's Wood?

They devitalised him. They impugned his masculinity.

They called him a girl.

It is Henry's first day at grammar school, and he doesn't know how anything works. ‘Are we allowed to go to the toilet?' he asks the boy next to him. ‘Do you have to put your hand up?' ‘What time is break?' ‘Where
are
the toilets?' ‘Are you supposed to write your name on the top of the page?'

The boy next to him is Osmond Belkin. ‘How do I know!' he hisses the first time. The second time he kicks Henry under the desk. The third time he says ‘Stop asking me dumb questions – you girl!'

Henry turns the colour of damson jam. In his satchel, football boots, a penknife with his initials on it – gifted to him by his grandmother – a box of pencils, razor-sharp, and rare cigarette packets for trading in the playground – the proofs of his little manliness. A new day for Henry. A new start. The world not pishing on him any more. Then slap –
you girl!

Could anything be worse for Henry? Silly question. Something can always be worse for Henry. On this occasion, teacher-worse. Catching Henry with his hands clawing at his carmine face, and thinking him to be hiding mirth not misery, Mr Frister – ‘Fister' Frister – as hair trigger as Henry himself, pulls Henry's ear – ‘Something funny, sonny? Something you would like to tell the class about? No, never is, is there? That's what's funny, that nothing ever is.'

At which injustice and misprision the tears spring like miracles out of Henry's eyes. Unseen, unheard, he hopes. But not. Give up all hope, Henry, today. Seen they are by Osmond Belkin, who has girled him once, and who girls him now a second time by passing across the desk a hanky for Henry's fountain eyes.

Asthmatic, half-blind and top-heavy, with a loaf-shaped head (hence ‘Hovis') and from a family in which experience of professional or personal failure was entirely unknown – or if known, never alluded to, the failure being sent overseas or thrown into a mental home – Osmond Belkin had his own social pressures to contend with. But by girling Henry when he did, he established an ascendancy over him which persisted throughout their school years and, more importantly for Osmond, won him the respect of other boys. Something schoolboys feel in their bones, power. Tyranny and cringing – that's what little boys are made of. Not that theirs was the sort of school that institutionalised cruelty. Henry did not become Osmond's fag, or otherwise make homo-erotic virtue of his defeat. No, on the surface they appeared equals, grew to be friends and rivals, bunked off from games together, smoked when they should have been running cross-country, fought for academic honours – the only ones they valued – and came out, by the usual measures, all square. But the early damage never healed. Henry felt judged by Osmond, under an unflattering scrutiny which, with the pitiless clarity of the too easily hurt, he knew was never to be lifted unless it should turn out to be Henry who made the splash and not Osmond. Assuming it were to go the other way – as it now seems to Henry it was written in the stars it would – Osmond's early verdict would be vindicated. Henry was a girl – no disrespect intended to the other sex – Henry was a softie, Henry was a nothing.

Was it in the company of Osmond that Henry first began to formulate his theory of anterior social space, where everybody except him laid down the friendships and liaisons they would pick up again in the course of life proper? Probably not. The likelihood is that Henry was born feeling left out of it. This can happen when your name's down for the Baby Jesus crib and your mother holds you back. But Osmond certainly intensified Henry's conviction of exclusion, by virtue of his own genius for whatever is the opposite. Think of the word, Henry. Connectedness? Incorporation? Membership? Charm? Poor Henry – how do you call what you've never had?

They were prefects, fifteen, sixteen years of age, boys on the town if you can call being on the town wearing your school blazer with the lapels turned in and having your cap folded up in your trouser pocket like a torpedo. They were allowed into the centre of Manchester a couple of afternoons a week for research purposes, that's to say for going to the Central Reference Library where they snorted at each other across the silent desks, enraging the genealogists and destitutes tracing the whereabouts of their rightful inheritances – where has it got to, where has it gone, my future, my fortune, my happiness? – after being thrown out for which they thought they might just as well slip across to the Ceylon Tea House on Oxford Road for a smoke and a plate of yellow curry. Waiting for a table, Henry marvelled at Osmond's assumption of autocratic disdain, the easy contemptuousness with which he stood immovable in the path of leaving customers, making it difficult for the waitresses to move around him, and yet knowing that they'd give him a good table and serve him promptly despite, or was it because of, that. Henry watched and watched and couldn't work it out. Certainly Osmond had grown tall since he'd cooked Henry's goose for ever on their first day at school together, but he was still a loaf-headed boy with a fat neck and a bad cough. Is it presence? Henry wondered. Is it money, can they smell money on him? Osmond came from a dynasty of surgeons. The least eminent of Osmond's uncles and cousins, the black sheep of the family, had an OBE – so was it that? Did people subordinate themselves to Osmond Belkin, a schoolboy in a blazer, in case they one day ended up beneath his knife? Or was it just the way he wore that blazer? Still Henry watched and watched. On Osmond the maroon blazer with naff blue braiding was somehow transformed into a smoking jacket, he could have matched it with a cravat and got into anybody's tent at Henley. Why couldn't Henry make
his
blazer look like that? Why did Osmond's blazer give Osmond the appearance of a world-weary, twenty-five-year-old aesthete, while Henry's blazer made Henry look like an under-age biscuit-maker from Oldham? And why, although Henry was in truth the better chatter-up of waitresses, had been given lessons in it by his great-aunt Marghanita, shown how to make a virtue of his delicacy and shyness, like Jane Eyre, and knew how to lower his eyes and let his lashes flutter, why, despite all that, did Osmond who was altogether more boorish in his dealings with them, not even bothering to blow his smoke the other way when they came to ask him for his order, changing his mind without apology, being short with them over the state of the ashtrays though it was he who'd filled them – why, explain to Henry why, when it came to an out-and-out contest, he versus Osmond for the hand of any waitress in the restaurant, Osmond would either win it or make sure that Henry didn't?