The Making of Henry (6 page)

This is something he would like to talk to his father about. His father managed to extend his childhood from zero to fifty-five, Uncle Izzi, illusionist, fire-eater and origamist, turning up at parties with a stack of newsprint and a travel bag of paraffin-smelling torches, more excited than the infants he was performing for, so that when he died he died, in Henry's eyes, a child – ‘Jesus came down to gather flowers / And on the way he gathered ours' – as cruel an instance of infant mortality as any Henry had read about in any Victorian novel. Yet the world mourned him as a man. Such a man! What a man! Some man, Henry, your father!

No one said, ‘Some child, Henry, your old man!'

What Henry would like to know from his father, who has had a long time to think about it, is whether he believes he was cheated of a grown-up existence, denied the chance to find out what not being a child was like . . .

You mean like you, Henry? A little old man from the moment you
were born.

. . . or whether, if his father will allow him to finish, he believes he had the best of it, never growing up to know bitterness and defeat.

Because I was too busy, Henry, keeping consciousness of bitterness
and defeat from you
.

You can see why Henry doesn't want to go home some days, however much he doesn't want to be out. But you can't take over someone else's past and hope to escape a colloquium with ghosts.

So why isn't Henry speaking to his lamented mother? He is, but she understands him too well. When Henry speaks, the sockets of her dry eyes fill with sadness. It's the seduction it always was. If he allows her, she will pull him down with her into the blackness, where she can shield him from all harm. Keep the clanging world away from him. And have him in an early grave.

Was that what they fought over, Ekaterina and Izzi Nagel, was that really the trouble between them – the saving of Henry? Was she rehearsing her version of the truth when the coach crashed?
Your
son . . . And then bang!

Was he answering her, the fire-eater, when his heart gave out?
My
son?
My
son, you call him! And then
oy gevalt
!

To save Henry from the world, Ekaterina Nagel came as close as was within her power – short of jumping him from the summit of the pyramid of Cheops – to stop him being born at all. He should have been the Baby Jesus. As far as the nursing home was concerned he already
was
the Baby Jesus, that honour going to the first child to show its nose on Christmas Day, and little Henry being more than halfway there. Seeing as Henry's nearest rivals were of Singaporean academic and Nigerian diplomatic parentage respectively, and in the Nigerian case were thought highly likely to come out twins, there was undoubtedly some
faute de mieux
favouritism in this. Whatever else there was to say on the subject, at least in Henry the Baby Jesus would be single, white and with a fifty-fifty chance of being male.

So why did Ekaterina hold back? Bombs and spiders. Given the situation vis-à-vis the aerial war with Germany, Irina Stern had insisted that South Manchester was the only place for her daughter's confinement and to that end had found a nursing home not very many miles from Alderley Edge. Izzi was a young soldier stationed outside Basingstoke, waiting to be sent overseas to entertain other young soldiers with his sleights of hand, and he had no views on the matter other than that he wanted his wife to be safe and his son – though he had a feeling it went against the grain faithwise – to be the Baby Jesus. What no one had counted on was the inaccuracy, not to say the irreligious-ness, of German pilots, dropping bombs in the vicinity of Alderley Edge on Christmas Eve while aiming for Ellesmere Port. As soon as Ekaterina heard the explosions she reversed her labour, ignoring all exhortations to push for Christ's sake. In the early hours of Christmas Day, with the prize still there for the taking and the sky clear, Ekaterina did begin to push, but went into reverse again on account of a spider with long sticky legs crawling across her belly. Talking about it later, with a shudder, Ekaterina multiplied the spiders which had taken advantage of her helplessness, increasing not only their number but their size. She wasn't superstitious and didn't hold with omens, she simply refused to bring a child of hers into a world which had such horrors in it. By mid-afternoon her fears had been almost stilled: this was rural England, the countryside, and in the country even the cleanest nursing home could not be one hundred per cent insectproof. As for the offending insect itself, it was just a daddy-long-legs left over from the summer, looking for somewhere warm to hide. ‘On my stomach!' Ekaterina cried. ‘Shush,' they told her. ‘Across my baby's brain!' ‘Shush,' they told her. ‘Shush and push.' And thus, at four o'clock on a dark December afternoon, the Saviour's birthday, Henry Nagel was delivered, with a brief scream and a cough of blood, into an existence marred by bombs and spiders. But by that time he was too late to make it as the Baby Jesus. The honour of being the Redeemer for the day had fallen to Taiwo and Kehinde Mabogunje, sleeping soundly in a crib decorated with crêpe paper, silver cut-out moons and shepherds.

A family joke for years afterwards, beloved of his father. ‘How do you like that? A Yiddeler, two Schwartzes and a Chink. Some choice, eh?'

They brought it out the way you bring out old photographs. Henry remembers the tears of laughter, and maybe of sadness too – regret, horror, who can say? – streaming down his mother's cheeks. Now the family would go to prison just for smiling inwardly at the comedy of colour.

Henry's view is that there was more racial harmony when no one was trying to promote it. But then who of any importance cares what Henry's views are, Henry no longer being in any position to influence events, even in the Pennines.

Take that ‘no longer' with a pinch of salt, Henry feeling sorry for his present self – the truth is Henry never
was
in any position to influence events.

Ask what did for Henry professionally and you have to go a long way back. All the way to his not being the Baby Jesus, probably. Takes away from a boy's outgoingness, that sort of thing. Accustoms him, as a matter of aesthetical necessity no less than manners, to holding back.

There are those who would say it was reclusiveness that did for Henry from the off: social reclusiveness in the sense of not wishing to appear too forward, or simply not wishing to appear at all, and political reclusiveness – a sort of intellectual absenteeism – in the sense of not liking the ideas which were being exchanged around him, and therefore not attending to them. A man out of sympathy with his age, eh, Henry? Like Lucretius in Matthew Arnold's understanding of him, who, ‘overstrained, gloom-weighted, morbid', turned from the varied and abundant spectacle of Roman life, and ‘with stern effort, with gloomy despair', riveted his eyes on the ‘naked framework of the world', looking for essences where other men sought appearances, and as a consequence retreating further and further into ‘disenchantment and annihilation'. Might sound tosh as applied to Henry, turning from the varied and abundant spectacle of life on the Pennine Way, and toshier still considering that the essences in which Henry sought consolation were the wives and girlfriends of other men, but we can only report on life as it feels to us, and that was how life felt to Henry. The world was a blank to him; he approved and noticed nothing unless he was in love with a woman. Then he approved and noticed nothing but her. It meant you got a good deal if you were the woman. It meant you got a lot of Henry. But of course that was only a good deal if a lot of Henry was what you wanted. And if by a lot you understood intensity rather than duration.

Not so much a little touch of Harry in the night: more a healthy dollop of Henry over the fortnight.

A refined and disenchanted reclusiveness, a principled absenteeism, what you might call a dandified old-fashionedness – modern but not adequate to modernity, was Arnold's summation of Lucretius – and a subtly-fibred sympathy, breathed in from his mother, for women to whom life had been cruel: those were the qualities, anyway, for which Henry, not least as a teacher and exemplar to the young, wanted to be admired. In fact, his fellow teachers thought he was hoity-toity, ludicrous and ill-educated; up himself and as often as not up someone he had no business being up. If you wanted the authoritative account (without the Lucretius) of Henry's academic fall from nowhere to somewhere even lower, then that was it: a pathetic figure without provenance or curiosity, who hoity-toitied and hanky-pankeyed himself out of professional contention, hoity-toitied and hanky-pankeyed himself out of promotion, and finally hoity-toitied and hanky-pankeyed himself out of a job.

Their right to think vulgarly if they so choose, but Henry sees what happened differently. Henry believes he isn't teaching young persons how to think aloofly any more because young persons have finally cottoned on to the fact that he doesn't like them. As far as Henry is concerned a conspiracy of the childish runs the world – a magic number of the world's most influential children (‘We are the Bilderbergies, happy girls and boys') meeting every Christmas and Easter in a secret candyfloss garden on an invisible lemon meringue island somewhere off the sugary coast of Never-Never Land. Irk them and you've had it. Henry engaged their baby wrath by writing one of their number a letter of recommendation without crayoning in a little house bathed in eternal sunshine. Henry forgot the golden rule and made it rain. Or maybe he didn't forget, maybe he just
wanted
rain. He was getting pretty depressed, anyway, Henry, the oldest person teaching in an institution which was the mirror image of his soul – remote, unacknowledged, irrelevant, forgotten. A university they called it – the University of the Pennine Way – but before that it had been a polytechnic, and before that a college of technology, and before that a place for keeping hairdressers on day release off the streets, and before that a Spinners' Institute, and before that Henry had no idea. A playschool for Bilderbergies? Change the name and you change how people feel about themselves, that's the thinking. So by writing a poor student a poor reference, Henry effectively unravelled a century or more of cosmetic nomenclature, thereby adversely affecting not only the student's self-esteem but everybody else's not excluding his own. Especially his own. The place was Henry's life. He had been teaching there before the vice-chancellor was born.

Put Henry into a trance and regress him and you'll find that he'd been teaching at the Spinners' Institute even before he was born himself.

Stuck-up, Henry?

Hardly.

Just stuck. Stuck in the Pennine mud.

And stuck in his mother. Stuck fast within her resistant womb, stuck fast between her milky breasts, stuck fast in her disapproving mind.

Open the door and let me out, Ma!

Except that Henry has always rather liked it in there.

‘Now we're going to make you a professor,' Henry's mother tells him, sitting him on her knee and getting him to read the words she points to with her lovely slender-knuckled fingers. ‘First the title . . .'

Little Henry, aged three and a half, over the moon, puts his arm around his mother's neck and bites his tongue. ‘The. Awkward. Age.'

‘Bravo! Now Chapter One. “Save when it happened to rain Vanderbank always walked home, but he usually took a hansom . . .” What's a hansom, Henry?'

‘A two-wheeled cabriolet, Mummy.'

‘
Bravissimo
! Now you continue.'

‘“But he usually took a hansom when the rain was moderate and adopted the preference of the philosopher when it was heavy.”'

‘Excellent, Henry. So what do you suppose that philosophic preference would be?'

‘Staying in?'

‘Good boy. Now let's hurry up and finish this and then we can start on
The Ivory Tower
. . .'

. . . Well, every man who is unhappy idealises his childhood. Henry can't put a name to what he first read with his mother but he is sure it had nothing to do with those ghosts and wizards reputed to be dear to the imaginations of children. Enough that Ekaterina was married to a wizard, and that they would all be ghosts soon enough.

The literature of excruciation, that was Ekaterina Nagel's gift to Henry. The poetry of alarms and perturbations. Strange, because on her own account Ekaterina was not a timid woman. She had grown up without too many men around, her mother and her mother's sisters sardonically shedding or mislaying them in an early trial run of the century's later phallophobia – nothing neurasthenic about it in their case, simply a contempt borne out by experience, what happened when you met a man from North Manchester, and you always
did
meet a man from North Manchester. Being a girl in these liberated circumstances, where there was money enough to help you hold your head high, men or no men, was exhilarating for Ekaterina. Tall and straight with green eyes and good diction – ‘gr-ah!-ssss' and ‘rather' – Ekaterina Stern was expected to pursue the logic of her mother's and her mother's sisters' independent braininess, put into practice all their ambitions, and be the first of them to go to university. Professor Ekaterina Stern! It had such a ring that her mother didn't understand why they couldn't skip the qualifications part and just give her the job. Then Ekaterina met a communist, lost her head, maybe lost even more than that, and was sent to cool down with family in the old country just as the old country was facing facts – yes, the Nazis did mean what they said they meant: who'd have thought it? – and packing to go somewhere else. She lasted three weeks, just three weeks fewer than the old country, but long enough for the communist at home to have disappeared. Not that that mattered: on the boat back she had struck up a conversation with a dashing young man, also hot-footing it from a badly timed visit to doomed relatives, who told her his ambition was to be a fire-eater, which she, on account of his coarse North Manchester accent, had misheard as firefighter. By the time she realised her mistake they were already in love. ‘Another one!' Irina Stern groaned, shaking her head. But destiny is destiny. Falling for men from North Manchester was what the Stern Girls did, no matter where you sent them.