The Making of Henry (13 page)

‘I bet you'd barely spoken to her.'

‘How little is barely?'

‘Did you know her name?'

He thinks about it. ‘Norma Jean.'

‘Did you know her name
before
the cremation?'

‘Do you have to know someone's name to mourn them?'

‘You're in mourning for her, are you?'

‘Yes. No. Listen, what is this? You think I'm affecting something I don't feel?'

‘I think you're wallowing, yes.'

It's a bit cheeky, he thinks. Never mind how well do you have to know someone before allowing her death to get to you, how long do you have to know someone before you allow her to accuse you of wallowing? Longer than this.

She comes over to him and puts her face close to his. He expects her to give off a smell of limes and she does. He expects a slight Baltic chill to blow off her also, which it does. But he doesn't expect her to put her hands up to his cheeks and then to take him by his ears. And that too she does.

‘You need a bit of straightening out, fellow-my-lad,' she says.

‘Do I?'

‘You most certainly do, yes.'

‘And you reckon you know someone in the neighbourhood who can do it?'

‘I most certainly do, yes.'

Whereupon Henry kisses her.

Which Moira takes to be assent.

But look, she's also fun to be with. She shows him around St John's Wood, even the parts he knows, telling him tittle-tattle, who owns that shop, who lives there, walking him into shop doorways where she feels him up, the minx, or getting him to ride the deep chaste escalators in St John's Wood tube station with her, up and down like hooligans, except that hooligans don't stop to admire the bronze lights and the arches and the echoing flagstones and the coats of arms – ‘Look, Henry, isn't it beautiful in here, don't you love it? it's like being in a ship' – making it an adventure for him, getting him to loosen up, to express enthusiasm, to love what's close to him, what he can have rather than what he can't. Sometimes, if they are out and Henry is being Henryish – huffy, heart-burned, mawkish, morbid – she opens her mouth and shows him that she hasn't swallowed her food. Look, Henry! Like a child. Or like someone entertaining a child. She does it once when Henry is arguing with a waiter. And another time when he bumps into someone he vaguely knows from the building and takes too long getting rid of him. Behind the person's back – Look, Henry! She likes revealing herself to him in this way, taking him by surprise, coming back from the ladies room looking elegant, for example, clip-clop in her stilettoes, and then showing him that her mouth is full of food. It is meant to make him laugh. To render him helpless with embarrassment and mirth. And sometimes it does. Just not always.

One evening, at the theatre, she opens her jacket and shows him a breast. God knows who else sees. This gesture is more to rouse him than to make him laugh, but she isn't afraid of blurring the distinctions. Coming down a staircase in a house to which they have been invited, as dinner guests, she raises her skirt and shows him she is wearing no underwear. A glacial blur. He gasps. Then she opens her mouth which is still full of food from dinner. She loves it that he is utterly confused, frightened of what she might do next. In Regent's Park with him, she gets him to take a bench immediately opposite to hers. Then she opens her legs. By now he doesn't expect her to be wearing pants.

‘My God, Moira,' he cries, looking away. ‘There are children about!'

‘Yes, you,' she says.

He doesn't know her. Never seen her in his life before. He quits the bench in what he takes to be a natural manner, walks towards the lake, engrosses himself in duck life. Swans, herons, Canada geese. Fascinating. When he returns she flashes him again.

She has coaxed him back into the car, promising not to go over thirty, even on the motorway. Hitting eighty she tries to fish his member out of his Valentino jeans. ‘These are too tight,' she says.

‘They're what's fashionable,' he tells her, ‘on older men.'

‘You're not an older man. Look at that.'

‘Don't you look at anything but the road,' he says.

‘I can do both,' she tells him. ‘I'm a woman. I'm multi-tasking.'

‘Then slow down and put my dick back.'

‘I'd rather go faster and take it out.'

‘It's not worth the risk. Not for old sperm.'

She sidewinds him a look. Who was talking about sperm. But she has to put him right about one thing. ‘Sperm doesn't age, Henry. Sperm renews itself.'

‘Mine doesn't. Mine's old man's sperm. Old wine in an old bottle. It's tired. It even looks tired.'

‘This'll perk it up,' she says, accelerating.

He searches for something to hold on to. But there is only his seat belt. ‘Moira, I beg you to slow down! Remember what you did to Michael.'

‘Michael? Who's Michael?'

‘The Greek.'

‘I know no Greek.'

And now his dick is out. Old and petrified, but out.

See!

She's showing him. Things are not the way they conventionally seem. He's been pushing, trying to get her to stay the night with him, trying to get her to commit, fall for him, become his mistress, all that sixties and seventies stuff; now, at eighty miles per hour on the M1, she is demonstrating that it isn't always he who's asking and she who's saying no.

‘If you're so frightened,' she asks him, ‘why's your cock like that?'

‘It's how I show fear.'

She swerves suddenly across three lanes, as though she's got a puncture, and effects a controlled career into the hard shoulder. ‘Then let's rid you of your fear,' she says, turning off the engine and unbelting herself.

He doesn't know whether to open or to close his eyes. ‘You can get arrested for just looking at a map here,' he says. ‘God knows what sentence a blow job carries.'

She sidewinds him that look again. ‘What makes you think you're going to get a blow job?'

The tease she is!

He puffs out his cheeks. ‘Which are you trying to do, Moira,' he says, ‘scare to me to death or disappoint me to death?'

‘Neither and both,' she laughs.
Both
, the h almost silent, the t protrusive, tapping at his nerve endings.

Then she's off, out into the traffic again.

Henry closes his eyes.

But this is how she likes him – full of trepidation. Never knowing what she's going to do, how she is going to shame or confound him, next. He is perfect for her. Heart-in-his-mouth Henry.

‘What are you so frightened of, Henry?'

How many times has he heard that said in his long life? It was the way every relationship with a woman ended. ‘What is it you fear is going to happen to you, Henry?' Though the woman, of course, would have told you the relationship was already ended. Hence the question, since it appeared to be Henry's fear that always ended it.

What was he supposed to say? Until I can face that I am earth and will be returned to earth – and you the same – I cannot continue to go out with you? I cannot risk your cutting your finger?

It wasn't as though he went out with them exactly anyway. Too risky, a man in his position, and the women married to someone else. He snuck, as they said in those American novels Marghanita had persuaded him to study, but which he isn't quite so stuck on now – he snuck up, snuck off, snuck around, and then snuck home. The moors were good for this. Would have been better had he owned a car, but it added to the romance to walk a little. Eat sandwiches by a little brook. Seek shade in summer under a tree, if you could find a tree. Climb to a water tower inscribed to a local engineer, where you could kiss and have plenty of warning if anyone was coming. Quite a nature boy he became in his first years at the Pennine Way College of Rural Technology, or whatever it was then called, considering what a nature boy he wasn't. Entwined as they were with the heart, with
his
heart anyway, he even grew to love the moors and to find a sort of consolation in their antique persistence. Nearly, nearly it made sense to live obscurely here and to die unremembered. Nearly there was nobility in it.

But when that didn't work, or when it rained, he called a taxi and snuck away, scarfed-up and companioned, in that. Lunch in a quiet pub, not a poly pub – yes, it was a poly now – on the Yorkshire side. Love over pie and ale. And sometimes a room.

Lying under wordwormed beams, Lia Spivack (Henshell Spivack's wife) had a go at getting him to roar like a tiger. Grrrrr, Henry. She clawed his chest. Bit his neck. Grrrr, Henry, grrrr. He couldn't do it. Stiff bastard.

‘I'm no good at animals,' he told her.

‘Not even a snake in the grass?' she said, not yet retracting her claws.

He knows when he's upset a person, Henry. But he also knows when someone has upset him. ‘A snake's a reptile not an animal,' he explained in a quiet voice, lighting them both a cigarette. In those days cigarettes were intrinsic to sex, regardless of how successful or unsuccessful the sex had been, no matter whether animal or human. Henry was so addicted to the combination he had to light himself a cigarette even after he'd finished merely thinking about sex. ‘But look,' he added reasonably, ‘if you want to rip me apart you can, it's just that I'm too self-conscious to make the noise. It could be a faith thing. I have a feeling we are prohibited from imitating whatsoever flyeth in the air and whatsoever creepeth on all fours, which must include tigers. It's one of the ways we knew we had put totemism behind us.'

‘Bullshit, Henry. I'm from the same faith you are. I've got an uncle who's a rabbi. He did rabbit imitations for us when we were kids.'

‘A rabbi who did rabbits? Well, a rabbit I am prepared to do.'

‘Go on, then.'

So Henry, cute as a button, twitched his nose. But even that not convincingly.

‘Considering how difficult you find it to shed your inhibitions,' Lia mused, blowing smoke into the rafters, ‘don't you think it's surprising how easily you shed your trousers?'

Henry wants to say that sex has always been his only chance, the one area, for some reason he can't explain, where he can find a little ease. It's his theory that many men who have been thought of as predatory sexually have wanted peace, that's all, a period of relief, not from sexual tension, but from reserve. Did they all start out as blushers, Bluebeard, Don Juan, Casanova, Byron, did they all pink up the moment someone spoke to them? ‘You girl, Casanova!' Did some eighteenth-century Venetian ‘Hovis' Belkin set that whole shooting match in motion with a careless remark of that kind? ‘You pansy, Giacomo!' After which no maiden on the Adriatic could count her virginity secure.

But to Lia, Henshell's wife – Henshell his second-best school friend after ‘Hovis' – Henry wants to make a more simply factual rebuttal of her charge.

‘I don't easily shed anything, Lia,' he says. ‘It isn't true. And I am not a snake. If I did, if I were, if you knew me to be, why would you be here?'

She smiles at him. He has known her for years. Henshell's bird. Henshell was still in the sixth form when he started taking Lia out. The first of them to have a regular girlfriend. They teased him about it. Fancy going steady, fancy talking about engagement rings at his age. Bought the pram yet, Henshell? Opened an account at Mothercare? Got your pension plan sorted out? But secretly they envied him. He wasn't having to go out on the prowl every Friday and Saturday night. He had in regular supply what they found it difficult to get their hands on even intermittently. And Lia herself – forgetting the impersonality of the supply idea – was a treat for all their eyes, all except ‘Hovis' Belkin's that is, for Belkin measured by a different standard, was already out of there in his imagination, gazing beyond far horizons, and set no store by local beauty. A beauty she was, though, Rubensesque, as undulant as water when she walked, always animated, black-eyed, with bright red swollen lips and bright red swollen tonsils to match, they joked, in allusion to the way she threw her head back when she laughed, and with a mind, of course, to whatever other use she put her throat to for lucky Henshell.

She smiles at him. Funny fellow, Henry. More serious than Henshell's other friends, she remembers, more hot and bothered, the least likely, had she been asked to prognosticate, to turn into her lover. But then she hadn't expected she would make a lover of any of them. Henshell was plenty, Henshell was enough for her, Henshell always would be enough for her, she thought, not imagining when she crept into his digs at Brighton and talked politics late into the night that she would one day be the wife of someone who owned six pharmacies and thought of nothing but the seventh. ‘You were a biomolecular scientist with a heart once, Henshell, you were going to make a significant pharmaceutical intervention into the Third World, now you sell shampoo.'

‘And house you in undreamed-of luxury,' Henshell reminded her.

She smiles at Henshell's one-time friend. ‘I'm bored, Henry,' she says. ‘I'd be here, whether you were a snake in the grass or not. You could just as easily say that I'm the low one. I wouldn't fight you. We've all grown up to be not nice.'

‘Not nice is another thing again. I resent the suggestion that this is what I do – serially.'

‘That's your reputation, Henry.'

‘Where?'

Her smile turns into a laugh. Not the old swollen tonsil laugh. Long gone, all that. ‘Where's where?' She makes a flamboyant gesture with her arms, all breasts, like a heroine of the French Revolution on the barricades, taking in this little everywhere. ‘Wherever you are talked about.'

Tough one, for Henry.
Wherever you are talked about
. It almost doesn't matter what they say, does it, so long as you are talked about as universally as
wherever you are talked about
sounds as though you're talked about. From the mountains to the sea, wherever men and women gather to talk about Henry . . . Choke on that, ‘Hovis' fat-head Belkin.