The Making of Henry (31 page)

Occasionally she passes on an item of gossip. Henry has his fingers in her belt and isn't listening. It's music between them, that's all.

There are glossy giveaways in
Newsweek
which Henry rolls into balls and throws at the seagulls. In their bullying and persistence, the seagulls remind him of people he has known. Grynszpan and Delahunty.

Moira hits his hand. ‘Don't make litter,' she says, still reading.

‘Why? Are you frightened the Cleansing Department might catch me.'

‘Did you post that card to them?'

‘Of course I posted that card to them.'

‘You might hear when you get back.'

‘And I might not.'

‘Do you want to hear?'

‘Of course I want to hear. Why wouldn't I want to hear?'

They are still making music only to each other, barely attending to the words.

‘I know you,' she says. ‘You go off things. You get all worked up, then you think better of it.'

‘Well, I'm not going to think better of my mother, am I?'

‘No,' she says. She is engrossed suddenly. ‘No, I don't suppose you are.'

He has taken to smoothing the side of her skirt, rubbing her flank in the sun. The flesh and bone of her.

‘Henry,' she says, lowering the paper, wanting his attention. ‘That person you wrote an article about, the one I found on the Internet, the film man . . .'

‘What about him?'

‘I think he's in the paper.'

‘Moira, he's always in the paper.'

‘Is he called Osmond Belkin?'

Henry puts up a hand. ‘Please don't read anything aloud to me about Osmond Belkin. Not today. It's too nice here.'

She folds the paper on her lap and leans towards him. ‘Listen to me, Henry, were you very good friends?'

‘Once upon a time.'

She pulls him to her, holding his face. ‘Darling, I'm so sorry,' she says.

‘What?' Henry fears a knighthood or a Nobel Prize. ‘What have they given him?'

Her eyes are like seas, sucking him in. Infinite in their consolation.

‘I'm so sorry, darling,' she says. ‘He's died. I'm so sorry.'

‘Darling' – Marghanita ringing him at his office in the Pennines all those years ago – ‘I'm so sorry.'

Daddies turn your face away. Mummies break the news.

So who breaks the news when your mummy and your daddy die? The next mummy.

She is worried about him, sliding her shifty eyes from the road to see how he is taking it.

‘Just concentrate on your driving,' he tells her, ‘or we'll be next.'

She has changed her car. Not the make – it's still a BMW – but the nature. Now, like everyone else in St John's Wood, she's driving an adventure wagon, the domestic version of the tank. Henry reckons it's the fear of Armageddon that explains this. When they blow up St John's Wood, you'll need a four-wheel drive to negotiate the rubble. The human imagination can only cope with so much disaster, and a rough terrain is as far as anyone has got. Come Judgement Day they'll all be masked and in their Range Rovers, but still shopping in the High Street. That's the advantage of a four-wheel drive – there's plenty of room for babies in the back seat and provisions in the boot, and you get a good high ride so you can spot the parking spaces in good time.

Sweet, expecting parking meters to be standing and operative. And sweeter still, anticipating using them once civil law has broken down, considering that you never took a blind bit of notice of them before.

In the meantime the High Street is getting narrower by the day with armoured vehicles advancing three abreast on either side, at speeds commensurate with reconnoitring the new season's stock in the windows of the women's fashion shops.

‘Are you sure you're all right?' she asks.

He is never all right when she is driving. He would say he is most afraid of her driving when they are on a motorway, were it not that Moira made everywhere a motorway.

‘I'm fine,' he says. ‘Who are you honking?'

Silly question. He knows who she's honking. She's honking humanity.

And how fine is Henry?

A tough question. Never seek to ask for whom the bells tolls

– Henry is familiar with all that. Having run through his family, death might claim already to be an intimate of Henry's. In fact that's not the case. They are not yet on speaking terms. Henry doesn't mean to be unkind to his family, but their removal wasn't personal. It was on a different time line. By nabbing ‘Hovis', however, death has signalled his intentions. Now it's the turn of your lot, Henry.

One day, though Henry can't nail it down, ‘Hovis' threw money at him, coins and notes. Money which Henry had lent ‘Hovis' and which he had asked to be returned to him. ‘Here, have your shitty money,' ‘Hovis' had declared, tossing it into the air and showering Henry with it. Henry can't remember where this happened. Or exactly how old they were at the time. Or why he had lent money to ‘Hovis' in the first place, since ‘Hovis' was never short. Or why it had been necessary to ask for it back. Or why ‘Hovis' had been so angry with him for doing so. All he can remember is the mortification. Having your own money thrown back at you, the refutation of your original generosity, the demonstration, in other words, of your meanness. For it is meaner to sue for the return of a loan than it would have been to refuse it in the first place. What troubles Henry is that he does not recognise himself in this event, but is ashamed of it nonetheless. Is that what remains, after all that time and all those changes – the shame? Is shame the sole immutable entity?

Who wronged whom in that recollection? Suddenly it is important to decide. Why? Henry knows why. It is because ‘Hovis' is dead, and the living owe the dead reparation. If Henry wronged ‘Hovis', now is the time for Henry to acknowledge it.

This is what he is doing in the front seat of Moira's BMW jeep, when he's not dodging the oncoming traffic. He is going through the list of all the wrongs he ever visited on ‘Hovis'. Yes, there is the question of the wrongs ‘Hovis' visited on him, but they do not apply now, ‘Hovis' having seized the advantage yet again and died first. And would ‘Hovis' have been making conscientious mental reparation to Henry, had it been the other way round?

‘Sorry, Henry, for calling you a girl. Sorry if that contributed in any measure to your having a shit life. Sorry for having such a good life myself. Tactless of me. Sorry about that.'

Fat chance, Henry thinks. But such certainty is itself a perpetuation of an older wrong. Still at it, Henry, still thinking ill of your best friend? Who, alas, can no longer defend himself.

Am I glad? Henry wonders. Am I, in some small disreputable part of myself, glad that he is dead?

He hears the tears well up for ‘Hovis'. Hears them muster, hears their pricking behind his eyes, like the sound of needles going into tracing paper, but they don't fall. Won't fall. Well, Henry is damned if he is going to castigate himself for that. He has cried a lot in Eastbourne. Even the softest-hearted man can run out of tears temporarily. Besides, there is a tight band of pain across his chest. His pulse is not even. There is a dull pain in his head, at the very top, where the skull feels thinnest. And the woman he loves is concerned for him. All these are signs, surely, that although he isn't weeping, he is in genuine distress.

Yes, but is he in distress for ‘Hovis'?

Or is he in distress because he isn't?

Moira wants to know if he would care to stop for tea.

‘I am all right,' he says. ‘I would care to go slower, but otherwise I am all right.'

‘Are you sure?' she says, looking sideways at him, taking one hand off the wheel and resting it on his knee.

‘I am sure.'

His voice is grave, as befits the gravity of the day. Grave and brave.

Suddenly, he discovers an impulse in himself to laugh. What is he doing being grave and brave?! The effrontery of me, he thinks. Pretending to feelings there is every chance I do not have, because if I had them I would not be questioning their whereabouts. What a fraud!

He turns to look at Moira, squint-eyed at her wagon wheel, driving as always like some vengeful charioteer, fired with vendetta. ‘Do you know what?' he says, not at all sure that he can prevent the laughter erupting from his chest. ‘Do you know what? . . . I think I might be too all right.'

‘That's normal,' she says. ‘It'll take time to sink in.'

‘No,' he says. ‘I mean more than that. I think I might be relieved he's dead.'

‘Well, that too is a normal feeling,' she says, rubbing the palm of her hand into his knee, making absent-minded circles of condolence, ‘if he's been suffering a long time.'

‘You're not hearing me,' he says, knowing he can't stop it now, knowing that the laughter must have its way with him. ‘What I'm saying – ha! – is that I'm glad, for
me
. . .'

But when the laughter comes it isn't what he thinks it is. It is, after all, an outpouring of grief.

Which gives Moira the opportunity to swerve from the fast lane to the slow lane without acknowledging the middle lane, and bring him skidding on to the hard shoulder, where, on her shoulder, and for the second time in as many days, he sobs like an abandoned baby.

And then there are the obituaries for Henry to contend with. Full-blown obituaries too, big pictures of ‘Hovis' at his most loaf-headed, some of the eulogiums three-quarters of a page in length. Call no man happy until he's dead. Well, you can say that again, muses Henry at his little table on St John's Wood High Street, immured in newsprint. Who will ever speak this warmly about a man until he's cold? Osmond's illness bravely borne, his beautiful devoted wife, the children in whom he took, etc., etc., and who took in him blah blah, the grandchildren in whom he took still more, his going where others had not dared, his unparalleled contribution to neo-realistic cinema in a country which, before he had the foresight, heigh-ho, an intellectual among entertainers, an entertainer among intellectuals . . .

Yes, yes, Henry thinks, a giant among dwarves, a dwarf among giants, a man among girls, a girl among men – except that that's him, Henry, about whom not a word will be written when his turn comes. So call no man happy until he's dead, and not very men happy even after that.

‘This a good idea?' Moira asks him. She is serving him this morning, as in the old days of their courtship, harassed in her maid-of-all-work flatties. Only she has a better understanding today – now that he has divulged all to her – of his unpleasant nature.

Though having coming clean in the car, Henry is in denial on the pavement. ‘Is
what
a good idea?'

She flicks his paper. ‘That.'

‘Why shouldn't it be? He was my friend.'

She leaves him to it.

He has a reason for going through each obituary painstakingly. Spare his blushes, but Henry is looking for some mention of himself. ‘
As Belkin said in his last recorded interview, the unseen
influence on his work was and always had been Henry Nagel, the
childhood friend without whom . . .
' That sort of thing. Insane, he knows it. But madder hopes are realised. People win lotteries at however many millions to one. How many millions to one against Belkin expending his dying breath on Henry? Or against an obituary writer who has done his homework coming up with Henry's name – school friend, rival, sometime critic, and so on. Fewer, surely. Easier to be remembered in an elegy to an old mate, at least, than to thread a camel through the eye of a needle.

Whether or not, there is no mention. As he was removed from Osmond's life in life, so Henry is removed from Osmond's life in death.

The which being the case, there is nothing to stop Henry sliding into a broiling ravine of resentment and left-outness.

Doesn't being alive help the smallest bit? The daylight? The soft air? The blue of the sky? The warm populousness of the street? The sounds of voices, footfalls, music, traffic, honking? The fact that he has Viennese coffee and sachertorte on a china plate before him? Moira? Whereas ‘Hovis' is deaf and blind now, without touch, without smell, without future, a disgrace?

No, nothing helps. What Henry wants is a mention. Or better than a mention, an obituary of his own. His photograph in the papers, his life told and retold in all its epic heroism, his dates commemorated as though history is not complete without them.
Osmond Belkin – 1943–2003
. There it is. Irrefutable. The span of time arched like a bridge over obscurity. Sure, it's time passed, time done with, but those years have passed for Henry too, and who would bet on his bending history to his will in the years that are left?

Even vanished, ‘Hovis' has the beating of him.

Moira comes out again and sits with him. ‘Look how lovely the day is,' she says.

‘Yes,' he says.

‘We could go for a walk after lunch. Do the park.'

‘Yes,' he says.

She means well. She is the voice of life to him. But what does life have going for it when the sirens are calling you from the other place?

‘Snap out,' she says.

‘Yes,' he says. He would like to. But he's in deep trouble. He might not know much about much, as they used to say in the Pennines, but he does know that once you start envying the dead you are in deep trouble.

FOURTEEN

A letter arrives from Cleansing. They cannot tell him who donated the bench in his mother's name. Data protection. If, however, he can show exceptional circumstances . . .

‘We're going round in circles,' he says to Moira.

‘Write to them again,' she tells him.

‘Saying what?'

‘Saying that if they will not make you acquainted with the donor, would they please make the donor acquainted with you. Normal business practice, Henry. You make your address available to the protected party. You can even send them a stamped addressed envelope.'

‘And what if the protected party's dead?'

She is losing patience with him. Him and death. ‘If he's dead then that's the end of it.'

‘What makes you think it's a he?'

‘Oh, for fuck's sake, Henry.'

Time was, a bit of horseplay might have followed that. But Henry's gone ghostly on her again.

So she takes him to the salt-beef bar for dinner. When all else fails, salt beef does it for Henry. Red meat, yellow mustard, green sweet-and-sour cucumbers. Primary colours. Make sure everything's bright and keep the appeal simple, she's discovered that.

She has her salt beef lean. ‘In which case,' Henry requests, ‘can I have your fat?'

See? Already he's cheering up.

Henry doesn't tell her that a dead friend can affect you like that. One minute you're down, the next . . . well, the next you're not.

As it is, today he is half tempted to ask for ‘Hovis' Belkin's fat as well.

He is even teaching her a game they used to play in the salt-beef bars in Manchester when they were boys, he and ‘Hovis'. Spot the Wej. She's Jewish. She's Jewish. He's Jewish. So's he. That's four points to me. Those two, however, aren't, so that's two points to you!

‘Not much of a game in this joint,' she said. ‘Everyone's Jewish who comes here. Except me.'

She is continuing to insist she isn't Jewish, isn't from the Danube or the Baltic.

‘You're called Aultbach,' he reminds her. ‘How can you not be Jewish?'

‘I'm only called Aultbach because I married Aultbach.'

‘And you're telling me that a man called Aultbach would marry someone who isn't Jewish?'

‘Aultbach's barely Jewish himself.'

‘When it comes to being Jewish there is no barely,' Henry explains.

‘Exactly,' she says, ‘and I am not Jewish at all.'

It's funny but he has never asked her maiden name. Maybe he doesn't want to hear it. Moira Smith, Moira Pilkington, Moira Ainsworth – he'd find any of those hard. They wouldn't stop him loving going up and down escalators with her, but they might dissuade him from doing it so often. It isn't the Jewish bit he needs, it's the foreign. He needs her to come from somewhere else.

Here has Henry in it. Somewhere else hasn't. So come from somewhere else, I beg you, Moira.

He wants to play, anyway, whether she does or she doesn't.

‘They are!' he shouts. ‘That's two more points to me.'

She wants to know how he knows. Still pretending that she needs guidance in Jewish and the opposite-to-Jewish ways.

So he goes along with her subterfuge, and explains. It's to do with the manner in which the sandwich is addressed. True, all people temporarily assume a Jewish air when they enter a salt-beef bar, especially at the moment of examining the contents of their salt-beef sandwich. Indeed, you can almost say, if you are irreligious and given to the joys of stereotyping, that this is precisely wherein being Jewish lies – in choosing to order a salt-beef sandwich and then examining it minutely, either for too much or for too little, or for too fatty or for too lean, or for too dry or for too wet. But look more attentively and you discover that Gentiles also open up their sandwiches to count the pieces of salt beef. The difference being that when the Gentile has finished examining his sandwich he eats it – see him? a point to you! – whereas the Jew invariably calls the waiter.

‘I never call the waiter,' she says. ‘Doesn't that prove I'm not Jewish.'

‘No,' he tells her. ‘The only reason you don't call the waiter is that you wait yourself. It's the freemasonry of the profession that stops you. But if you're having trouble with Spot the Wej let's go down market and play Dodge the Draught.'

In fact, you don't so much play Dodge the Draught as watch other people playing it. Why? Because it can help in playing Spot the Wej, the easiest way of spotting Wejs being to notice whether or not they are prepared to sit in a draught. If they huddle together shivering and shouting for the manager, demanding that he find them a table where there is no draught, they are Jews. If, on the other hand, they are perfectly happy sitting in the draught, and what is more haven't noticed any draught, because there
is
no draught – Henry laughs, expounding this – they are Gentile.

‘Oughtn't you to have grown out of this by now, Henry?' Moira asks him, folding her arms and looking at him evenly – which isn't easy for her. ‘Aren't you a bit old to be finding this amusing?'

He starts as though she has pinched him. ‘Aren't you a bit old for this, Henry?' His mother's words, precisely. They were out together, taking tea – where were they? – some hotel, the Midland, yes, the Midland, scene of his father's . . . but he doesn't want to remember that, by the by all that, done and dusted, what he prefers to remember is taking tea, pouring tea, picking cucumber sandwiches from a silver platter, laughing with his mother, agreeing that the dinky oblong of white sandwich with its crusts removed is always the best thing about tea, better than the scones, better than the little cakes, or fancies as they called them in those days, but whether this was before or after she'd become a decorator of cakes herself, that he can't remember, but it must have been after her Nietzsche period because there was something Nietzschean about her attitude, indeed long after, else she would not have been wondering whether he wasn't a bit old for what he was doing, which was playing Spot the Wej.

‘It's just a game, Mother.'

Funny, isn't it, what happens to the status of the game between a mother and her son. If Henry, in spite of all his heaviness, liked a game when he could get one, to whom did he owe his love of games but Ekaterina? Ah . . . boo! – who taught him that? Who hid herself behind the chair? Who appeared again from behind another? Who made his dolls talk? Who put him, Henry, at the centre of Schubert's Fifth Symphony? And then, when the boy has mastered play and become a man, who doesn't find any of it funny any more? The greatest difference between the sexes – that men will play and play and play, and that the women who showed them play, won't.

‘
Just games
have stolen half my life away, Henry.'

He hung his head. He didn't like being stopped mid-play. It made him feel foolish. No one likes having to choke on their own enthusiasm, the shy – who don't easily show enthusiasm in the first place – least of all. But he was his mother's boy and had read his mother's books. The greatest of all tragedies in Henry's eyes – a woman whose life has been stolen half away.

She was wearing a lovely floaty dress made of flimsy materials, in a print of faded flowers, the flowers you associate with elderly ladies living on their own. The flowers of loneliness. Blow on her, Henry thought, and that was the other half of her life gone.

He wanted to know, though, if she'd have felt the same had he been playing Spot Somebody Else, Spot the Serbo-Croat, for example, or Spot the Irish Catholic.

She thought about it. Probably not.

‘So it's the Jew thing.'

‘No,' she said. ‘It's the self-conscious Jew thing. I think that's childish, Henry. No one's asking you to pretend you're somebody other than you are. If anything, I like it that you're not in flight from any of that. But it's provincial to keep going on about it. And insecure. In my experience people who can't stop making jokes about their identity aren't easy with it. The man of the world accepts who he is and the influences which have made him, and then gets on with living in the world. The big world.'

He was stung. Provincial? Henry! Whose head no sooner hit the pillow every night than it was filled with dances from the Danube.

‘Isn't it a Jewish speciality,' he said, ‘to enjoy making jokes at our own expense? Hasn't that been the saving of us, our comic self-awareness?'

‘Well, if you call that
saving
, Henry . . .'

‘You know what I mean. It's our survival strategy.'

‘I call it rubbing at an itch. If you leave it, the itch will eventually go away of its own accord. But of course it feels like relief while you're rubbing.'

She had the power, like no other woman, to shame him. Was that all he was doing, rubbing at himself? Was he no better than Warren Shukman who rubbed himself to death?

Was Henry's Jewishness his dick?

Was Henry's dick his Jewishness?

He reddened, having consciousness of dick at the table with his mother. ‘You think I'm a footler, I know,' he challenged her, once he'd allowed his high colour to subside. ‘You think I'm a footler like Dad.'

Interesting. For a brief moment, although all he was really doing was bringing the conversation back to the point from which it started – capitulating to her, if anything – she flashed fire at him, refusing the alliance. Come the showdown, Henry, it might not be me and you against your father after all. You never know with lovers – and they had been lovers, Ekaterina and Izzi – even those closest to them, even the beloved boy-child, fruit of their union, even Henry never knew the depth of their loyalty to each other at any time.

‘At least your father,' she said, ‘has never been hung up on Jews.'

‘Ma, I'm not hung up.'

She leaned across and patted his hand. Worried about him. But absent too, as though she had left him behind. Which is not meant to be the way of it. In a properly ordered family it is the son who leaves the mother behind.

‘Where are you?' Moira asks him, waving her hand in front of his eyes. ‘Where have you been?'

‘Thinking that you're right. I am a bit old for this silly game. But if I tell you in my own defence that “Hovis” and I used to play it in Manchester in the coffee bars nearly half a century ago, you will understand why it's on my mind.'

‘Was he Jewish? I didn't realise that. There was no mention of it in anything I read.'

Is she right? Henry casts his mind back. Maybe she is. No mention of the J word in anything he'd read either. As why would there be? A citizen of the world, Osmond Belkin. A player in that big world which Henry's mother wanted Henry to inhabit.

But Henry, for no reason he would be able to argue successfully in a court of law, thinks every J should keep the J word somewhere about his person. It's even possible he feels punitive about it. If it's been good enough for me, it's good enough for you! Suffer! This might account for the obduracy with which he persists in interesting Moira – who couldn't be less interested – in continuing their game. ‘One point for you,' he shouts, nodding in the direction of the door. ‘This one's definitely Gentile. In fact two points for you, he's got a dog with him.'

‘How do you know the dog's not Jewish?'

‘In general because no dog is Jewish. But in this particular because it's Angus.'

Moira looks up and waves at Lachlan.

Henry wonders whether Lachlan knew he was going to find them here – by them, he means Moira – because he is spruced up, his hair shining and cleanly parted, his moustache bristling, the whole person bathed and dewy, as though newborn. More and more, Henry has been noticing, Lachlan presents himself this way to Moira. Like a gift from God. Henry has been trying it himself, but is no match for Lachlan. He can do clean and eager but he cannot do the elderly male equivalent of Venus rising from the waves. There is some absurdity in it at last, Henry reckons, doing a cherub when at best you're Bacchus; though no such squeamishness appears to inhibit Lachlan.

He is wearing a spotted red handkerchief about his throat, piratical. An identical handkerchief is tied around the throat of Angus.

‘Sweet,' Moira says. ‘They look like a couple of bounders on the town.'

‘If I were a woman faced with those two,' Henry mutters, ‘I'd choose Angus.'

‘Then we can have a foursome,' Moira says out of the side of her mouth, still waving.

But Angus looks like missing out on his big chance. ‘Sorry,' one of the young waiters apologises at the door, making extravagant wipe-out signals with his hands, ‘we do not allow dogs in the restaurant.'

Lachlan's face goes from baby pink to ulcer purple in an instant.

‘Shame,' Henry says to Moira, ‘he'll have to eat somewhere else.'

Moira wonders if she ought to have a word with the manager.

‘Don't waste your time,' Henry tells her. ‘He knows his customers. Jews who won't eat under a draught are hardly going to eat near a dog. Even the goyim won't eat with dogs, and they sleep with them.'

Lachlan is blowing out his cheeks, threatening to complain to someone higher up. (Who? Henry wonders. Is there an ombudsman for salt-beef bars?) But if it's a battle of attractions between Angus and Moira – Moira in a V-neck violet cardigan as spiky-haired as one of her bags (alpaca, is it?), loose and clingy all at once, the buttons of her nipples visible even from the street – Angus is doomed to be on the losing side. A minute later he is trussed to a parking meter, looking forlornly into the restaurant. Henry shifts his chair. He cannot eat a salt-beef sandwich with a dog envying his every bite, let alone gazing at him with forbidden love.