The Making of Henry (11 page)

‘She likes you,' Osmond said to Henry, motioning at the girl who poured the tea, a willowy Sinhalese with long brown legs and eyes bigger than dates, at present pouring someone else's, but definitely looking their way.

‘Shush!' Henry said, ‘you'll embarrass her.'

‘Embarrass
you
more like.'

‘All right, shush you'll embarrass me.' Making a virtue of his debility, Henry allowed the lovely Sinhalese girl to see the colour play beneath the thinness of his skin. ‘A woman appreciates it' – Marghanita's words – ‘when a man comes apart for her.' So Henry came apart for her.

‘More hot water for my friend,' Osmond called. ‘And a cold towel.'

The girl approached their table and bent in places Henry did not know were bendable, and smiled at him. Him, not Osmond. ‘Ceylon tea makes you hot,' she said. ‘It cleans the pores.' Cleans his pores, not Osmond's.

‘It's not the tea,' Henry dared to say.

And now she lets him see the colours which swim beneath the fineness of
her
skin.

‘My friend would like to know . . . ' Osmond began.

‘His friend would not like to know anything,' Henry interrupted, ‘which he cannot ask for by himself.'

‘So go on,' Osmond urged him. Grinning. Smoking. Blowing grinning smoke rings.

‘So what's your name?'

The girl took longer than was necessary to rearrange their tea things. ‘Yours first,' she said.

‘Henry.'

‘OK, I'm Sandra.'

‘Shandra?'

‘No, Sandra.'

‘Sandra? You don't look like a Sandra.'

‘Don't I? Well, that's my name. Sandra Weinglass.'

‘Sandra Weinglass? From Ceylon?'

She laughed. ‘Who said anything about Ceylon? I'm from Didsbury.'

‘Wej,' Osmond whispered through his smoke. Back slang. Wej, Jew. Jew, Wej. Back slang and putdown. Because Osmond knows what Henry doesn't. ‘She's Wej, you shmuck.'

One Wej is meant to recognise another Wej. It's in the genes. It's to help in the mayhem after the Cossacks have been through. Let me assist you, Wej to Wej, because no one else will. And then at last the obligation becomes a pleasure. Hi, you're Wej, I'm Wej. Let's dance, let's marry, let's have Wej babies. That's how it's supposed to work. Unless you're a shmuck. Unless you're a girl. You girl, Henry. And now Henry is so much of a girl – because you're not meant to confuse Didsbury with Colombo either – that, all Marghanita's efforts notwithstanding, he is unable to proceed with his suit.

‘You're blushing,' Osmond observes, laughing. ‘You've gone all pink.'

Pink.

Why don't you just stick pink ribbons in his hair and have done?

Henry does not grow up to be a freedom fighter. He lets prisoners of conscience languish in foreign jails. He doesn't save the children, or the elephant, or the planet. But he is on the front line of the war against animadversions on another person's blushes. The beginning and the end of Henry's political system, his Social Contract: you don't tell a person he's gone pink, you don't make a person go pinker than he already is, if you have an ounce of humanity in you, you look the other way, be glad it isn't you, and shut your fucking mouth.

But that is not the end of it. Nothing is ever the end of it for Henry. A week later he turns up at a party at Osmond's house and is let in by the waitress. Sandra. Not waitressing tonight, oh no, but hostessing, at home, a helpmeet, a familiar, and God knows what else to Osmond.

‘Hi, Henry.'

And Henry is so astounded, so confused, so put out, so utterly disarranged, that he never does find a way of asking whether Osmond had been back to ask her out, or had done it there and then, under Henry's burning nose, or had known her all along, known her well, known her intimately, even while he was encouraging Henry to make a girl of himself at the Ceylon Tea House.

Henry hasn't seen Osmond for thirty years, but if he were to pass him in the street today, on St John's Wood High Street say, or strolling by the boating lake in Regent's Park, Henry knows in the pit of his stomach that he would feel all the old inferiorities. Though Osmond Belkin has lived in Los Angeles for the whole time Henry hasn't seen him, on Mulholland Drive itself for all Henry knows, the eventuality of such a meeting is not as unlikely as it sounds. Like Henry, Osmond Belkin has quietened down – though where Henry has gone from scarce to invisible, Osmond has gone from extremely prominent to just a little less so. A film man, Osmond Belkin, as he always promised he would be. Producer, director – don't ask Henry, what's the career of ‘Hovis' Belkin to Henry Nagel? But his health is not the best, and he has grandchildren he wants to see. Lots of grandchildren. Grandchildren, as Henry puts it to himself, coming out of his fundament.

Cruel, that Belkin should have beaten Henry at having families as well. But that's what happens when you get in first with the insult. Had Osmond Belkin not seized the advantage and established Henry as the failure of the two, would he ever have made it as a film-maker? Suppose Henry had thrown the first stone, calling Osmond ‘fat boy' or ‘loaf head' or, best of all, ‘fatty four-eyes who can't breathe properly' – would it then have been he, Henry, who ended up with the three-swimming-pooled mansion and succession of beautiful wives to go with it, while Osmond languished teaching media studies at the University of the Pennine Way? Such are the eternal questions, centring on the arbitrariness of destiny, a man revolves in his head when the better part of his life is behind him and has amounted to nothing. But they are not now, and probably never were, germane to anything. What matters is that Osmond Belkin is known to be back in England, or known to be thinking of coming back to England, to see his children and his grandchildren among other reasons, and that his children and his grandchildren, some of them anyway, are bound by demographic likelihood to live in or around St John's Wood. Which means that any day Henry could run into him, walking his offspring, wheeling a pram or just jogging in the park with one, or maybe all, of his beautiful wives, and American spring-loaded trainers on his feet.

You liked him, though, didn't you, Dad?

Did I? You'll have to remind me which one he was
.

The fat one with the loaf head. You liked him because he egged you on. You blew fire for him in the garden.

I entertained a lot of your friends.

No, but for ‘Hovis' you went that little bit further. You bent nails for him too. And for him you tore the Manchester telephone directory into a hundred dancing girls.

He must have been an appreciative audience
.

Oh, he was. He roared with laughter.

Well then
.

Dad, he was taking the piss.

Yeah, out of you!

You bet out of me. Out of me for having a father who did what you did.

I thought you said he enjoyed what I did
.

Think of it, Dad. His father was a surgeon. He had another idea of fathers. When I went to his house his father put on Brahms' Clarinet Quintet.

So maybe he was envious of yours.

Think that if you like. It hardly matters now anyway. But you played the fool for him. He paid, you jigged.

You always had a queer way of explaining a good time, Henry.
We had some fun together.

So now you remember him.

What I remember is the warped construction you put on everything.
I can't explain. You're the intellectual. But it looked like jealousy to
me. Maybe you were just jealous of everybody, Henry. Maybe you
were jealous of your friend whatever his name was because he amused
me. Maybe you were jealous of me because I amused him. What I
don't understand is why you were so jealous of people who liked to
enjoy themselves, considering how little value you attached to enjoyment. You explain that to me
.

He diminished you, Dad.

You mean he diminished you
.

Same thing.

Since there's no knowing for sure what's happening between them, Henry has decided to proceed as though nothing is.

They're all on the lonely side, all three of them, that's sufficient explanation for everything. Not nice, not easy to swallow – Henry no more likes the idea of sharing his humanity with other people than he likes the idea of sharing the European waitress – but at least he can do something about the waitress: he can ask her out before Lachlan does, or before Lachlan does again.

And now Henry is in love.

He can't eat. There is an obstruction where the food should pass. He can't drink either, all fluids gathering in a dam halfway down his oesophagus. Intermittently the dam bursts, leaking acids into Henry's system. This is how you know you're in love when you're Henry's age. It feels like indigestion. So anyone observing Henry and Lachlan when they meet on the stairs would guess they were competing to see who could hit his own chest harder. Some mornings they do no more than burp at each other as they pass.

When Lachlan has Angus with him, the dog folds himself even tighter around Henry's leg, waiting for the aftershock of the convulsions which shake Henry's frame. For Angus, too, associates bad digestion with love.

But it's not Angus with whom Henry is in love. Tough on the dog, but love's cruel that way. More than ever Henry doesn't want Angus's hairs on him. He's got new clothes. He thought he had his dressing right before he came to live in St John's Wood. He was dressing into his age, he thought. Big loose cardigans, voluminous corduroys, though not of the farmer's sort, russet colours – greens, browns, ochres – becoming the autumn of his life and the profession he no longer enjoyed. But that's not how a man is supposed to look down here. In the shops on St John's Wood High Street Henry finds clothes that defy age. Not the tennis shorts, he hasn't gone that far. Italian shirts with deep collars suit him though, worn open to show a lot of sternum, to establish that his chest hairs haven't yet turned completely white, though that doesn't deter them in St John's Wood either. And he's in Valentino jeans – he, Henry, a man who has scorned denim all his life. And soft ankle boots with square toes. This, of course, for the daytime. For nightwear it's Armani, no questions asked. Midnight black, made of crêpy materials which flatter his bulk, the shirts creamy with high collars that make his head look as though it's buried in his shoulders, like his autochthonous neighbours in the Pennines – but that's the fashion. The shoulder bag he's still thinking about. It's a bit of a jump, the shoulder bag, for the son of a northern fire-eater. But he knows, watching men in their seventies and eighties even, parading arm in arm, braceleted and medallioned and shoulder-bagged – and these are the straight men, these are the husbands and fathers – that it's only a matter of time. Sad? Well, who can say. It's sad that a man has to lose his shape, that his abdomen has to thicken and that his joints must grow stiff. But you have to wrap it all up in something. And what's the alternative now that at sixty you are still up and about, however precariously? How are you supposed to look? There's need of a new couture, without doubt, to meet the new demand for geriatric chic, but until it comes along Henry has to settle for looking like one of the grandfathers of the Mafia.

And the waitress seems to like it.

Moira Aultbach, that's her name. Sounds better when you run the two halves together. Still not Elisabeta-Adelheid of Saxe-Coburg, but an improvement on just Moira. She gives Henry her card when he puts the proposition to her at his favourite pavement table. Yes, she'll go out with him, but he ought to have her number, just as she ought to have his, in case either needs to change the time. That's good: she's put flux on the table. Everything swirls in Henry's head. She flushes, seeing him go morally at the knees, pulling at her lopsided hair as though she is trying to centre it. Henry hopes that doesn't mean her overall crookedness was purely predatory and that she is going to straighten herself out for him now they've fixed a time and a date. Except that they might not have fixed a time and a date, which makes him feel heady again.

He isn't sure how the etiquette of tipping is changed by what he's done. Do you go on tipping a waitress you're taking out? And if you do, oughtn't you to tip her more? But how much more can Henry tip? A tenner for a Viennese coffee's about the limit, isn't it? Just this once, as a sort of foretaste of the munificence she can look forward to, he gives her twenty. ‘Save your legs,' he says.

She smiles at him and shakes her head. ‘Take it back,' she says. ‘Today the coffee is on me.'

Can a waitress do that? It's only when he is across the road in Alfredo's, trying on belts, that it occurs to Henry to recall that the patisserie is called Aultbach's.

So he's been tipping the proprietress. Is he a girl or what?

FOUR

She's still married.

‘I don't know if that puts you off,' she says.

‘Why should it?' Henry asks.

‘Well, some people don't want the baggage. Aultbach's no problem. We get on fine, he's got a girlfriend, and we both felt it would be a shame to break up a successful partnership.'

‘You mean the marriage?'

‘No, the patisserie.'

‘He still works there?'

‘He makes the patisseries.'

‘The strudel too?'

‘Everything.'

‘Well, it's good strudel,' Henry allows.

‘Everything Aultbach does is good,' she tells him. ‘He even made a good husband for a while.'

Henry has never been sure about women who invoke their husbands by their surnames. He can't quite put his finger on the offence. Cuteness? The dysfunctional family version of talking about yourself in the third person? But in this instance he is more forgiving. He likes the faint trace of a lisp with which Moira pronounces Aultbach, the rabbinic lapping of the t.

‘So what changed him?' he asks.

‘I changed him. Or rather I changed me.'

‘What did you do?'

‘I fell in love with one of my students –'

‘Hang on,' Henry says, feeling that she's pinched his line, except that he didn't exactly ‘fall in love' with his students, not Henry, more, well, whatever it was he did. ‘Hang on, are you telling me you're a teacher on top of everything else?'

He thinks he might be disappointed. He doesn't want her to be a teacher. He's done teachers.

‘What everything else?'

‘Well, waitressing and proprieting and looking beautiful and everything.'

She inclines her head. Why thank you, Henry. ‘Just pastry-making,' she says. ‘I teach it a couple of nights a week at a college in Camden. That's how I met Aultbach. He was a student too.'

Henry is relieved – she isn't a teacherly teacher, then – but also astonished. ‘That's amazing,' he says. ‘My mother taught cakes.'

‘She was a pastry chef?'

‘God no. She wasn't any kind of chef. She didn't know how an oven worked. She just showed people how to decorate cakes.'

‘Ah,' Moira says, letting Henry into a world of precise distinctions and hierarchies, ‘cake decoration is another thing again.'

‘I know,' Henry says, quickly pulling an anti-grandiosity face on his mother's behalf. ‘It was an entirely unconnected activity. Her skills began and ended with decoration.'

‘You're saying she didn't bake at all?'

‘Not so much as a biscuit. She had been brought up to stay out of the kitchen. Couldn't even remember where it was most days. Then out of the blue she discovered she had this talent for armatures and icing. I had already left home so I'm not witness to what exactly happened, but family legend has it that she was expecting friends round for tea and dropped the cake she'd bought. As there was no time to go out and buy another, her range of choices was limited to doing without cake altogether or repairing the one she'd damaged, in which latter course –'

‘In which latter course!'

‘I was an academic. Not your sort of teacher. Nothing useful. That's how we used to speak. In which latter course she succeeded to such effect, in her view, that it looked a damn sight better when she'd finished with it – the cake, I'm still talking about – than when she'd bought it. It was like a blinding light. Suddenly she wasn't frightened of food. The next day she enrolled in a class and what seemed like a week later she became a teacher.'

Moira points her face. ‘It takes longer than that to train as a pastry chef,' she would have Henry know. ‘Almost as long as it takes you to finish a sentence.'

Henry rides with the compliment. ‘I'm sure it does. But my mother was in a hurry. My father was leaving her alone a lot and she needed an interest.'

‘What was he doing?'

Always hard for Henry, this. ‘Well, he began life as an upholsterer. Then someone burnt his workshop down and he became a fire-eater.'

‘He didn't!'

‘He did.'

‘Professionally?'

‘Well, in the sense that he called it his profession. But not in the sense that he earned a living from it. And don't ask whether it was he who burnt his workshop down. The police looked into that. It wasn't. His bookkeeper burnt the workshop down. A coincidence, though, I grant you. But then life is coincidence. Look at you and my mother.'

She does, falling silent for a moment, apparently not certain what she thinks about coincidence in this particular.

They are in a dark panelled booth in a Hungarian restaurant in Soho, eating dumplings. A heavy
ancien régime
meal had seemed just the ticket to Henry. He wanted to nail her down. Eat a light meal with a woman on your first date, and she'll be polishing off seconds with someone else before the night's over. Toast her in ox blood, bog her in goulash and dumplings, and chances are – if she lives – she's yours for ever.

‘So you were telling me about your life,' Henry says, trying to call her back from wherever unwelcome synchronicity has taken her.

‘Was I?' She is rooting in her furry bag for a handkerchief. She must have a collection of furry bags, Henry thinks, for this one seems unfamiliar to her, a thing of depths she has never previously plumbed, full of objects she appears not to recognise. Henry too believes the hairs to be longer and more quilled than on the one she carried at the crematorium. Anteater? Aardvark? Or is he confusing the bag with the way she is snuffling through it?

‘You were telling me what happened when you fell in love with your student.'

‘With Aultbach?'

‘No, the other one.'

She dabs her nose, as though she is staunching a wound, with the little handkerchief she has finally found but which she gives the impression of never having seen before. ‘Which other one?'

‘Ah,' Henry sighs. So there's a list! He feels fluttery in the stomach suddenly, as though his insides have fallen away. Which is extraordinary, considering how much he's eaten. But retrospective jealousy – a list without him on it – does this to him. ‘Well, let's just stay for the moment,' he says, offering to be urbane, ‘with the one who caused Aultbach to stop being a good husband.'

‘Michael. He was Greek. Very beautiful. But very dependent. He wanted a mother more than he wanted a lover.'

‘And you?'

Another dab, pitched somewhere between nostalgia and provocation. ‘I just wanted Michael.'

‘Hence Aultbach's . . .'

‘No, Aultbach didn't mind. He has very modern views, Aultbach. He would sell me into slavery for a night and not bother as long as I'm there to open the patisserie in the morning.'

‘You call that modern?'

‘He isn't possessive.'

‘So what happened?'

‘I crashed his car.'

I knew it, Henry thinks. I knew I should have called for that taxi. ‘I see,' he says. ‘Presumably you were going to see Michael at the time.'

‘No. I had Michael with me. But Michael wasn't the problem. The problem was the car. Aultbach had just bought it. A brand-new lemon Porsche with personalised number plates. He cried like a baby when he saw what I'd done to it.'

‘And Michael?'

‘He also cried. I broke both his legs. Did I tell you he was a footballer?'

Henry opens wide his eyes in alarm. ‘Stop,' he says. ‘I'm not sure that I'm in the right league for you. I don't do cars. I don't do football. I don't do personalised number plates. I don't do slavery. I don't even do pastry. In a few months I will be eligible for a senior railcard. All I can offer are cut-price trips to the seaside. Shall we call a halt to it now, before pity enters?'

She twists a smile at him and puts a hand on his wrist – part placatory, part flammable. Henry likes and fears the size of her hand, half as big again as his own; he also likes and fears the weight of her jewellery: a gold bangle he hasn't seen before, a huge silver watch with a third of its face scooped out moonily, not unlike hers, and a row of rings she presumably removes when she is waitressing. Though Henry loves a woman to have a past, sometimes a past can be too much for you. He's too old. It had to happen, and now it has. Whatever the jingling weight of her jewelled hand on his wrist says to the contrary, he is past it.

‘What's age?' she asks.

‘Age is what kills you,' Henry says. ‘That and your driving.'

She slaps his hand. Naughty boy.

And in that second Henry goes from wondering whether he is up to it to wondering whether he
wants
to be up to it.

The old faint Henry heart. There's something wrong with his machinery. Always has been. His cogs slip. At any time in a friendship or an amour the reason for proceeding will suddenly escape him. Decency requires that you go on, he knows that. You can't keep walking out in the middle of things. But then if he does go on, there will be that dire sensation of pointlessness afterwards, of spirit expended to no explicable purpose. Nothing to do specifically with sex, any of this. Henry is not a tristesse merchant. If anything, he understands better after sex why he has bothered than he does after almost any other activity. At least in sex there's sex. But what is there in friendship again? What's that for?

He is not his father's son.
You never know when you'll need a
friend, Henry
.

Don't you, Dad? I rather thought it was the other way round, that your friends always knew when they needed you – which was all the time. Who was that blind old bastard who got you to walk him half a mile to the Variety Home every morning for fifteen years, promising he'd leave you his ceremonial origamist's robe, then made you pay a thousand quid for it on his deathbed?

Seven hundred and fifty
.

And how come you stayed on good terms with the bookkeeper who burnt your workshop down?

Harris? He didn't do it deliberately. He was upset
.

And what about your Austin A40?

That he did burn deliberately
.

But you stayed his friend.

He was still upset.

And Finkel?

What did Finkel do wrong?

He tried to steal your wife, Dad.

This from you?

I never stole. I borrowed.

Finkel too borrowed
.

Yeah, your life savings.

Well, that's better than your wife
.

His mother, on the other hand, was like him. She tired of people. After a brief intimacy she couldn't see the point of them. Company gave her migraines. It's very likely, Henry thinks, that she couldn't see the point of him in the end. Is that possible? Can a mother run out of interest in her child? Henry suspects it happens all the time. But that doesn't mean he's happy about it in his own case. If he became uninteresting to his mother, wasn't that her fault? Hadn't she
made
him uninteresting? Her Jane Eyre boy. Of course he bored her. Who wants a Jane Eyre boy? But she should have thought of that sooner.

Heart-heavy with ox blood, goulash and self-reproach, Henry focuses on the positive aspects of the waitress. Her custard hair, her asymmetric looks, the something ironical about those demure pearl earrings, the way she laps the t in Aultbach, the fact of her still being married to Mr Aultbach, the feelings she had for Michael – ‘Michael, I wanted Michael' – her red-and-gold hands, nicely aged, which he imagines gripping the wrists of the men she teaches in her kitchen – this is the way to beat a batter, not like that, like this – her spiked shoes, the thought that she might be carrying on with Lachlan. Then he invites her back to his place.

Still doing it. Senior railcard in the mail and he is still asking women back to his place.

Is he mad or what? Was he always mad?

At a sherry party at the closing of the first day of his new job, his first job, his only job, at the Pennine Way College of Rural Technology (later to be a polytechnic, later still to be a university, but always a tech in Henry's heart), Henry asks the wife of his head of department (Liberal Studies – so why not?) to go back to his place. It's only when she astonishes him by agreeing that he remembers he doesn't have a place.

Maybe she knew that.

He escorts her out, under the Pennine moon, kisses her clumsily, then says, ‘Now what?'

‘You're asking me?'

A difficult one for Henry. What's worse – pretending to have lost desire, or admitting to not having a place? He does neither. He suggests they spend the night in nature.

‘Out here?'

‘Not out here exactly, more out there.' He points to where the moors begin, just beyond the library. The advantage of a moor-land tech.

That's when she astonishes him by agreeing again.

And that's also when Henry first realises how utterly miserable everybody's wife is.

‘How old are you?' she asks him.

‘Twenty-four.'

‘Do you know how old I am?'

‘Thirty-four?'

‘Forty-four.'

‘You'd never think that,' Henry says.

She spreads her jacket under her. ‘Thank you. When you're my age, how old will I be?'

Henry thinks about it. ‘Sixty-four.' Then feels he ought to add, ‘but I'll be forty-four.'

‘And who will be sitting on my jacket with me then?'

‘Probably lots of people,' Henry says.

‘People?'

‘Men. Lots of men.'

She begins to cry, or at least to do something that reminds him of crying. ‘So that's what I've got to look forward to, then, is it? Being a whore in my sixties. A whore on a moor.'

‘Who said anything about being a whore?' Henry says. ‘You don't feel you're being a whore now, do you?'