The Making of Henry (4 page)

Henry knows what the Stern Girls have to say on the subject of alcohol and he has heard tell of an occasion – or ‘incident' as it is anecdotally referred to in the family – when his grandmother was passing just as Mrs Yoffey was coming over the wall. Henry likes to think that the incident consisted of his grandmother throwing Mrs Yoffey back, but apparently all that happened was that she had words with Mr Yoffey, that Mr Yoffey had words with her, and that Mrs Yoffey (in Henry's imagination still on her back) took her husband's side. Following which, Henry's grandmother delivered herself of the opinion that the Yoffeys were a disgrace to everybody but each other, whom they richly deserved. And walked on.

That there is no love lost, then, between the grocer and the Stern Girls, Henry can easily understand. But he is still not prepared for the violence of old man Yoffey's reaction to their peaceful deputation.

‘So for threepenceworth of principle,' he exclaims, every one of his white wisps of hair on end now, as though he is halfway through being electrocuted, ‘you invade my shop.'

‘Hardly
invade
,' Anastasia replies.

No one in North Manchester repeats what another person has said like that, allowing it to hang in the air, to echo for ever with its own absurdity. And it goes without saying that no one in North Manchester employs the word ‘hardly'. Even Henry feels the condescension.

‘Then what would you call it?' old man Yoffey wants to know. ‘A social visit? Have you come to see my wife perhaps? Are you here for tea and
hamentash
?'

Henry has tasted
hamentash
and doesn't like it much. But he has been told in Bible class that it has symbolic significance. A
hamentash
is a three-sided pastry, resembling the hat which the arch-villain Haman, chief adviser to King Ahasuerus, and a prototype Nazi in his own right, wore in the Book of Esther. Those who eat it, Henry grasps, are laughing at their enemies. So does old man Yoffey mean to imply that the Stern Girls have come to laugh at him, or is it Henry who is as bad as Haman?

He is shaking from head to foot whatever he thinks, old man Yoffey, the stiff detached collar he customarily wears becoming separated from its gold stud, and he is gathering up, Henry notices, all the threepenny bits in his wooden till, preparatory, Henry wouldn't be at all surprised, to throwing them at the Stern Girls. That would be a good end to all this, would it not, his grandmother or one of her sisters being blinded by the very threepenny bit Henry did not have the courage to claim as his.

Could he stop this now? Could he appeal to Elliot who has neither moved nor looked up the whole time from the block of cheese he has been garotting with a piece of wire ever since Henry and his reinforcements entered the shop? ‘Elliot, I need hardly tell you why I'm here. My change, remember? You dropped it on the counter. I was too diffident to explain I couldn't reach it and you were too engaged to notice. Sorry to put you to this bother.' Would that be so difficult? With someone's eyesight at risk, was that beyond him?

Henry never finds out what is or is not beyond him. Rather than throw coins at women, which he knows he should not do, no feast day being in the offing and no wine, therefore, having passed his lips, old man Yoffey closes his shop. ‘Get out, get out,' he screams, ‘all of you. And as for you' – pointing at Henry – ‘you're banned for life.'

If he were to get up and go into the patisserie and coffee shop on St John's Wood High Street and ask the East European waitress for his change, would he be banned for life? Henry wonders. And would it matter anyway, there being a lot less life left now for him to be banned for?

Morbid again? If only he were. Or if only he were consistently one thing or the other. The problem with ageing, as Henry sees it today – warmed by the sun and fired by the European waitress – is that you don't. At least not where you should – in the soul. At sixty minus a few months Henry doesn't feel a jot less verdant in the soul than he did at sixteen. True, he didn't feel all that verdant at sixteen, but that's not his point. His point is that he's not prepared. Yes, yes, he will beshit himself blah blah, but that's just the body talking. Henry is not prepared metaphysically for what's coming. In some part of himself Henry still thinks that something might just happen, a miraculous advance in medical science or a supernatural intervention, which will make Henry an exception to the grinding determinism of mortality. ‘Here,' Aubrey Goldman, his foul-breathed doctor for the last forty years, will whisper, slipping Henry powder in a plain brown paper bag. ‘Swallow with malt whisky and enjoy, but don't tell anyone where you got it.' Failing which, God Himself, showing up in the nick of time, parting clouds like opera curtains, crying ‘Hold! – enough of all this senseless killing', and pointing at Henry, much as old man Yoffey did – ‘You, yes, you!' – will ban him from death for life.

Totally absurd, given that after its failure to resuscitate either his father or his mother, Henry doesn't have any faith in medicine, especially as practised by Aubrey Goldman, who omitted to warn his mother of the dangers of sitting in the front seat of a bus, and his father of the risks of taking mistresses; doesn't hold with happy endings; and in God doesn't believe at all. But exemption is his only theological answer to extinction. No life afterwards for Henry otherwise, no scholarship to a heavenly university, no transmigration of himself into the universe, no celestial essence of Henry insinuating itself into matter. It's exemption or it's nothing.

In order that he should enjoy what? More of the same? If anyone is going to be exempted, shouldn't it be the joyous, the kind-hearted, the exuberantly fleshly even? To those who have loved life shall more life be given. By which law Henry ought to have been dead and buried forty years ago.

This, of course, is where the waitress comes in. Not only is she hanging on to Henry's change, she holds in the palm of her hand Henry's right to an eternal life. For his interest in her is proof that he is a deserving case. One of the exuberantly fleshly.

Sitting in a hospital waiting room once, in the days when he had loved ones to worry about and wait for, Henry filled out a questionnaire in a women's magazine. Did he in a general way love wisely or too well – that, if not in so many words, was the test. When he met someone who attracted him did he A) think about her a bit (it was think about ‘him' actually, but Henry could transcribe); B) think about her most of the time; or C) think about her ceaselessly to the detriment of everything else in his life. Furthermore, when he met someone who attracted him did he A) worry about whether she was suitable; B) move carefully initially, checking up on her and taking other people's advice about her suitability; or C) throw all caution to the wind and to hell with whether she was suitable or not.

C – Henry answered C to every question, making him, when he came to check his score, an incorrigible romantic, great fun to be with, but not, as yet, a sound marital bet. He was also, he was warned, in danger of being hurt, getting pregnant and contracting HIV.

Does loving your grandmother erotically make you an incorrigible romantic? One of the exuberantly fleshly? No opinions as to that in
Teenage Harlot
. Henry knows the answer, anyway. You cannot love your grandmother erotically. Nature makes provision against such things. Age difference, for example. And a slap from your grandmother. But when a man loves his grandmother in a younger version of herself – in her baby sister say, in the body of Marghanita to be precise – where's the harm? There is, as far as Henry is aware, no canon fixed specifically against loving your great-aunt erotically.

Back from Yoffey's, the Stern Girls make him tea and give him biscuits and ask him what he is going to do now. Though Henry has declared he will never again return to his home, having in effect been expelled from it – the first of two expulsions in one dramatic day – his grandmother and her sisters explain it is not such a good idea for him to go missing, or for them to provide him with asylum until they have informed his parents. ‘Otherwise it would be kidnap, Henry,' Marghanita explains.

‘Then kidnap me,' Henry pleads.

One by one they take him to their bosom. ‘If only,' Effie says. ‘Don't think it hasn't occurred to us,' says Anastasia. ‘One day, one day,' Marghanita promises him. ‘We don't need to,' his grandmother says, pressing the flats of her cool hands to his temples. ‘You already belong to us. You are our hope.' But it is she who rings his parents.

Henry overhears the telephone conversation and knows his father, seconded by his mother, is putting obstacles in the way of Henry's changing his address. There's his tea. The Girls will make it for him. There's school in the morning. Henry has his satchel. There's the small disciplinary matter of the threepence change: Henry has been told what Henry must do. Yes, but Henry has tried asking for it, honestly he's tried, the Stern Girls can vouch for that. And? And? Henry can detect his grandmother trying to find a way of turning what has happened to Henry's advantage. But what has happened is what happened. Henry has been banned from the shop which stocks Henry's father's favourite horseradish.

‘Banned?'

‘Banned.'

‘For how long?'

‘I think the term was life, Izzi. But you know how these people use language – life doesn't always mean life for them.'

Silence at the other end of the phone. At last, though he is nowhere near the phone himself, Henry hears his father saying ‘Okey-dokey', and the receiver going down.

‘Trouble,' Irina says.

‘We could lock the doors,' Henry suggests.

But it isn't trouble here his grandmother is afraid of. It's trouble at the Yoffeys'. The Stern Girls have all taken ‘husbands' from North Manchester and know what rough resolution an okey-dokey portends. An unwillingness to be okey-dokeyed is why none of them have husbands from North Manchester any longer.

They also know the fierce loyalty of which their uncouth in-law is capable. Banishing your own son from his own house in order to make a man of him is one thing. Having someone else banishing your son from a grocery shop for life is another. Outraged in his affections, Izzi Nagel is off to war, codeword ‘Okey-dokey'.

‘If we open the windows,' Marghanita says, ‘I bet we will be able to hear what happens.'

Henry looks alarmed. The sound of broken glass and breaking bones – is that what his failure to pick up the threepenny bit is going to lead to next? Old man Yoffey dead on his sacks of potatoes, Elliot Yoffey struck dumb, that's to say even dumber than usual, Mrs Yoffey a widow, and Henry's dad on death row? Seeing his trepidation, Marghanita, laughing, puts her hands on Henry's ears. Warm on his neck her laughter. If he turns round will Marghanita bury his eyes in her chest? Henry turns, and yes, Marghanita will.

Warm in his eyes, her chest.

As for the Yoffeys, that's soon settled. Leave things to the men, the men will sort them. Threepence? We're going to fight – two grown men, two pillars of our community – over threepence?! From behind the storeroom curtains Mrs Yoffey watches her husband pour a couple of small glasses of sweet red Middle Eastern wine. Here's to you, Mr Nagel – call me Izzi. And to you Mr Yoffey – call me Leo. Thirty minutes and a phone call later Leo and Izzi are getting Henry and Elliot to shake hands. This is the first time that Henry realises Elliot is not just mute with him but mute with everybody. Mute by nature, mute in the medical sense, just as Henry is thin-skinned. Henry's father, Uncle Izzi the illusionist, makes a threepenny piece appear from behind Elliot's neck and magics it into Henry's pocket. Henry who has seen this done a hundred times forces a weak smile; Elliot, for whom every instance of everything is the first, breaks into an idiot grin. Later that evening, while Henry is being tucked into bed by the Stern Girls – ‘All right, you can have him for one night,' concedes Henry's father, flushed with syrupy red wine and that consciousness of success which only a conciliator can know, ‘but don't spoil him' – Rivka Yoffey is being thrown over her garden wall.

Henry is twenty and very drunk on syrupy red wine himself when it occurs to him to put his arms around Marghanita and kiss her mouth. How old is Marghanita? Fifty? Fifty-five? Sixty? You can't tell when you're twenty. But what Henry can calculate is that when she's a hundred, Henry will be sixty himself, give or take. Too far gone to worry, in other words. Not that he's thinking of proposing marriage to her anyway. All Henry wants is to kiss her mouth and feel her breasts.

They are at a family wedding in the deep South of Manchester, which is Henry's excuse. South Manchester has always made him light-headed. Perhaps because between bombs and spiders he was born there. It is a warm night, the air silky, the trees still steaming after a summerload of rain. It was Marghanita who suggested they walk on the lawn, offering Henry her shoes to carry because the heels are high and she does not want to sink into the soft earth. He takes her elbow just the same, to be on the safe side. And is surprised by how not old it is.

‘So your studies are going well?' she asks.

How long has Henry been waiting for this night? Sometimes it seems to him that he studies only to impress women, that he cannot at the last tell the difference between literature and love-making. Certainly when he finishes reading a long novel or an epic poem, Henry believes he should be rewarded with female favours. No act of the critical intelligence is over and done with for Henry until it has been completed in sex. What is it that stops him skipping tedious chapters but a sort of erotic conscientiousness, eking out the hours, paying for his pleasures in advance, remembering his manners? Careful reading as considerate fore-play. Things would be in their right conjunction for Henry tonight, therefore, whoever the barefoot woman quizzing him on his studies. But Marghanita is special to him and already entwined around his idea of himself as a boy of letters. Of all the Stern Girls, Marghanita was the reader. His mother, too, but his mother's influence was direct, not misty like Marghanita's. And besides, boys are not supposed to fall in love with their mothers. Henry's heart might be extravagant and score Cs but it is not indecent.