The Making of Henry (3 page)

Who cares about a threepenny bit anyway, even in 1950s Heaton Park where there are trees but money doesn't grow on them. Not Henry's parents. Threepence? We pish on threepence! They aren't rich, the Nagels in the little sunshine semi from which, if you stand on Henry's bed when the sky lifts, you can see the grey-green fringe of the Pennines – but they are bounteously charitable and forgiving. Except that today they aren't. Explain that. By what law must the mortified always be mortified a second time? Let some little muscled Philistine, member of the Hitler Youth, nephew of Attila the Hun, come swaggering home threepence-shy and no one says a word. Threepence? Ha! We pish on your threepence. But because it's heart-stop Henry, the world falls in. Go back, Henry, and explain. Go back and take what's yours.

Which he cannot do.

Go back, Henry, taking the bread and the saveloys and the horseradish with you, show them your bill, tell them how much you gave them, and then ask for your threepence change.

Which he cannot do.

He shakes his head. Tears rip his eyes like torn paper.

The door. There's the front door, Henry. Now go. And if you are not able to come back with the threepence, do not bother to come back at all.

As though at nine he has alternative accommodation.

Henry's father, the late Izzi Nagel, sits on the edge of his armchair, never comfortable, never at home – hard to imagine him at home here, of all places – and shakes his head.
You want
to know why no one says a word to the nephew of Attila the Hun?
Do you? It's because he doesn't come back from the shop without the
threepence
.

No, he just burns the shop down.

His father shrugs. In a harsh world you have to do what you have to do.

So you would rather, Henry says, that you'd had a Nazi storm trooper for a son?

His father shifts his bulk and sighs – a poor ghost driven to extremity by an extremist son.
If that's my only choice – a Nazi
storm trooper or a crybaby, maybe I'd have preferred the Nazi, yes.
Then immediately takes it back, wiping the slate clean with his sleight of hands. UNCLE IZZI – ILLUSIONIST, FIRE-EATER AND ORIGAMIST, his card says. Herzschmertz Henry still carries one in his wallet. Queer to have had a father who always wanted to be called uncle. Almost as queer as to have had a father who always wanted to be called an illusionist and all the rest of it. Not a very good illusionist, fire-eater or origamist – but then you couldn't expect his card to say that. And he did what he could, Henry concedes, with the hands God gave him.

He opens them now, palms towards himself, holding back the tide of his old exasperation with his son.
For your own good, Henry,
we sent you back to Yo fey's. We pished on the threepence, but we
couldn't allow the world to pish on you.

So all this you did for love of me?

All this we did for love of you. To make you strong.

And you don't think you might have loved me more – and made me stronger – by leaving me alone?

Parents can't leave children alone, Henry. You bring a child up,
you don't leave it alone
.

You could have been a little more sensitive to the particular child I was.

You weren't short of sensitivity. You were dying of sensitivity.

Dying of my mother, you mean.

Dying of your mother's way, yes.

Except that you wouldn't let her have her way.

Ha! You think I was able to stop her? You think you are not your
mother's son? Who taught you to shrink from everything? Who taught
you not to put a hand out and take what was rightfully yours
.

More difficult than you think, Dad, knowing what's yours and what isn't.

Never stopped you, Henry, taking what wasn't.

That I got from you.

That you got from her, God rest her soul. It's when you don't know
what's yours that you start taking other people's.

I never took, Dad, I borrowed.

And that makes it better?

No, that makes it worse.

Exactly. Thank you. That's what they did to you. They patshkied
around with your sense of ownership.

They?

They, she. Same difference. She was theirs, you're hers. Take my
word for it – she spat you out, Henry
.

And?

And look at you
, his father refrains from saying.

Henry isn't listening anyway. His father wants it done and dusted. Henry the mother's boy, end of argument. Henry his mother's will on legs. But Henry has not yet decided whose boy he is. Where's the hurry? Maybe when he's seventy or eighty. Maybe when he's ninety-four, like his neighbour, all will become clear and he can expire. But for now he prefers to scratch his head over himself. Keeps him young.

Enough, that all this they did for love of him.

And now they're dead.

And they're not the only ones. He can count them off. Just get him started. Irina, Anastasia, Effie . . .

Nothing changes. Sitting out on the High Street the following afternoon, drawn by the sun – he must have sun, madhouse or no madhouse – Henry flirts with the East European waitress. Henry must have East European waitresses. Ah, the old country, he thinks, though the only old country Henry knows is this one. But Eastern Europe is in his bones – Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, Prague. And so are raddled women with too much rouge on their cheeks and too much gold on their fingers. Henry's downfall, his love of raddled women. In Henry's wild heart – the only part of him that was ever wild – it is always Vienna in the snow and the radiators on and the blinds drawn and the ‘Emperor Waltz' playing on a faraway barrel organ and an Austro-Hungarian countess with twisted teeth waiting for him under the blankets. Hence St John's Wood High Street, which is the nearest Henry will ever get to the Austro-Hungarian Empire now.

Nothing changes. How to retrieve the threepenny bit, how to get his change from the East European waitress. ‘Here,' he'd said, handing her a five-pound note when she brought him out his Viennese coffee, not waiting for a bill, ‘save your feet.' Showing that he'd noticed her feet, dainty like the feet of all East European waitresses, in maid-of-all-work flatties. Henry likes that look. A meteorologist of women, Henry knows what it portends. Red sky at night, shepherd's delight; flatties by day, stilettoes for play. She'd smiled at him as she turned, hooking a stray curl of yellow hair back over her ear. Hair the colour of custard. Her smile an inbred Habsburg smile, the lips pendulous and just a little crooked. Hair the colour of curdled custard, now he comes to look again, and the crooked mouth wary. Like him, she's too old to be doing this. But wariness, too, is a detail Henry likes. The wary, he remembers, bite. Thus has Henry missed out on history, not noticed the twentieth century or its passing – war, famine, communism, capitalism, the birth and death of nations, genocide – so engrossed has he been in women.

Unless, of course, he chose to be engrossed in women
in order
to miss out on history.

Don't look, Henry
– who told him that?
Try not to see
. Which
one
of them told him that?

She hasn't returned with his change, the European waitress, though he has been out on the street with his coffee, taking up a table in the madhouse and enjoying the sun, for thirty minutes. Forgotten, that's all. Forgotten his three pounds, of which he would have given her one anyway. So who cares? What's three pounds in St John's Wood High Street? Get up, leave, and let her have the three pounds. Let her even think he always
meant
her to have the three pounds, for he has a lordly air, Henry, born of not noticing what's going on around him. But what if this is not lordliness after all, but cowardice? Afraid to ask, afraid to cause a fuss, afraid to be thought small-minded, afraid to look Elliot Yoffey in the face, is his insouciance in the matter of three pounds (minus one for the tip) just absence of ordinary adult competence? Fifty years on, is Henry still allowing the world to pish on him?

Back home, on the edge of his armchair, his father will be waiting.
Go back and ask for the money, Henry. Learn to take what's
yours. There's the door. Be a man.

And what will Henry do then?

Wrong to have said that at nine Henry has no alternative accommodation. He has his grandmother's mock-Tudor gingerbread house, which feels and smells like the country though it is only round the corner, left out of his sunshine semi then up the lane, opposite the entrance to the park, in what is known as Jews Row. Widowed, Henry's mother's mother lives with her three straight-backed widowed sisters. In truth, the oldest, much the oldest – Effie – has never had a husband, Anastasia still has a husband somewhere, and the youngest, much the youngest – Marghanita – never quite brought hers to the point of marriage, but ‘widowed' is what they have settled on all round. Girls, they are known as. The Stern Girls. Not to be confused with the Stern Gang, though they are all ‘widowed' suspiciously early. Widowed and returned to their maiden names.

They are at home when Henry arrives with his satchel packed. Effie is playing Schumann on a small upright piano, Anastasia is sewing, Marghanita is reading Scott Fitzgerald, and Irina, his grandmother, is staring out of the window, as though waiting for Sir Lancelot. Tirra lirra, Henry should be singing, given how much he adores his grandmother, but he has just been told to get the threepence back or never return home, so he is not in a chivalric mood.

‘They've chucked me out,' he tells the Stern Girls.

‘Who's chucked you out?' they ask in chorus.

‘My mother and my father.'

They know what that means. His father has chucked him out. His mother is one of theirs, therefore she would never chuck Henry out. Husbands you chuck, boy children you don't. But Henry's father has his own way of doing things. Not that they believe his father has chucked Henry out either.

When they have listened to his story they each produce a threepenny bit from their purses. ‘Keep three and give one to your father,' his grandmother tells him, pinching his cheek.

Henry shakes his head. He can't do that. Lie?
I cannot tell a
lie. But whether that's because he is made of honesty or because he is afraid he will be found out he doesn't know. He suspects the latter. Henry is thin-skinned – he has heard his mother talk about it as an established medical fact: ‘Henry has thin skin, you know, not like his father who has the hide of an elephant' – which means he feels everything even before it's happened, and has no protection against consequences. If he lies about the threepenny bit his lie will show through him, and there is no knowing where it will end except for knowing it will end badly.

‘In that case,' his grandmother says, throwing on a fur jacket, ‘we will come with you.'

‘Don't take me home,' Henry cries. ‘I am never going home again.'

But home isn't where they are taking him. All in their furs now, like women from another country, like a family of bears strayed into town, they file out of the house, turn right into the lane, and right again, after a quarter of a mile, on to the main road which they cross, imperious as to traffic – Anastasia halting buses with a wave of her fox's tail – until they get to Yoffey's, where, to Henry's unutterable confusion, they march directly to the counter, a foreign invasion – the bears, the bears are here! – and give the reason for their errand.

‘For threepence!' old man Yoffey exclaims. ‘A family delegation for threepence!'

‘Not threepence, principle,' Irina says.

What Henry loves about his grandmother is that she uses punctuation when she speaks.
Not threepence comma principle full stop
. It is from his grandmother that Henry learns that punctuation can be a weapon. With a comma you can hurt someone. And as a person who is always being hurt himself comma Henry hankers after hurting back full stop.

The other thing Henry loves about his grandmother is how upright and fresh-smelling she is. Most of Henry's friends' grandmothers are as hooped and vinegary as cucumber barrels. Not Irina. She stands tall and breathes a sort of floral dignity the way a dragon breathes fire. All the Stern Girls do. Henry thinks this is why they are called girls still: they have never collapsed into the shape of women. It is also, he knows, a condition of their being from South Manchester. South Manchester is long-stemmed and uses haughty punctuation, North Manchester is tuberous, like a potato, and mispronounces everything – buzz, for example instead of bus, botcher instead of butcher, and grass, to rhyme with mass, instead of gr-ah!-ssss, the stuff of stately garden parties where no two people are the same. Henry's mother is from the South, his father is from the North. Hence the commonly voiced opinion that their marriage will not last. All the Stern Girls took ‘husbands' from North Manchester, and look where that's landed them exclamation mark!

Old man Yoffey's own marriage is strong but unconventional. Though he is venerably white and wispy-haired, with small watchful red-yellow eyes like a crow's and little bones which you can see poking through his shirt, old man Yoffey intermittently raises his hand to his wife – a woman half his age and twice his size – and on occasions even brings it down. Adjoining Yoffey's corner shop is a bay-windowed two-storey house with a small front garden, overgrown as to lawn (grass) but with carefully tended borders, pinks to one side, burgundy pansies with amazed expressions to the other; a four-foot wall of white brick encrusted with seashells protects the garden from the curiosity of the outside world, and it is over this that old man Yoffey sometimes throws his wife. Because Yoffey is a devout man whose services to the community extend beyond the provision of saveloys and plaited bread, the finger of suspicion inevitably points at drink. Ceremonially – this is the worst that can be said of him – old man Yoffey downs a thimbleful or two of sweet red Middle Eastern wine. Not much, but for some men a thimbleful is all it takes. A model husband the rest of the time, old man Yoffey turns into a wild animal whenever there is a festival or holy day. Pity poor Mrs Yoffey, then, who goes in fear at the very time everybody else in the neighbourhood is polishing silver and celebrating.