The Making of Henry (9 page)

Henry thinks about sitting at the back, but on a sign from Lachlan shuffles in next to him. ‘Fan out,' Lachlan whispers. So Henry tiptoes to the other side of the chapel, a teak vault resembling the inside of a coffin itself, and tries to look like more than one person.

‘Norma Jean Louis Stevenson,' the officiant begins, ‘was one of those women . . .'

Henry's mind wanders off. Norma Jean . . . who'd have thought it? Did she change her name in accordance with her show-business ambitions, or was she always Norma Jean, in which case what did she think of the other one? The officiant reads from Shakespeare.
Fear no more the heat o' the sun
. Then puts on a record of the ‘Warsaw Concerto'. This is not what Henry wants for himself, to go up in smoke to his favourite tunes. Henry wants a man of God to see him off, commending his soul on its final journey, never mind whether it's the hosts of heaven that await him or all the devils of hell. At least make it a journey of dread solemnity – for what else is it, this howling passage from animal to some other form of being we can only guess at, what else, Henry wants to know, if not a passage of the utmost terror and, if we're lucky, if we make it so, if we
insist
on it, of grandeur?

Disturbed from these anticipations of his own passing by a pssst from Lachlan, Henry realises that ‘We all went up up up up up the mou-ow-ow-ow-ountain' is playing and that the conveyor belt is on the move. He begins to clap. Lachlan, too, is putting his hands together. Henry wonders if he oughtn't to toss in a ‘bravo!' Shouldn't someone have brought a bouquet to throw in after the old girl, a final tribute from the orchestra stalls? As the coffin arcs horizontally into the fires – Henry hears their roar whether or not they're lit yet – the curtains begin to follow it, closing with a juddery computerised hiss which Henry recognises. This is the sound his St John's Wood drapes make when he presses his keypad. Maybe the old lady had the same. Home from home for her then, this. The coffin has not vanished yet, nor has the final chorus of the song, when Henry's ears prick, surely, to more clapping than there was before. A third person has arrived, adding weight to the applause, though Lachlan said there would be no third person. Henry does not look round. He owes it to the deceased to see her turn the corner in her entirety. Sentimental about women, Henry. He has always liked to wave them off. But when it is all over and he can look about him, he sees a woman with the lopsided look he admires, wearing the sort of clothes he goes for too, mourning black with a shorter skirt than is appropriate, slit discreetly, and high merry-widow heels, patent, with scalloped backs.

It tells you something about Henry that he should have taken in every detail of the woman's wardrobe and coiffure – grasshopper brooch on her jacket, demure pearl earrings, inappropriate furry handbag, yak or some such, hair groomed to fall over one shoulder in the manner of Veronica Lake (that dates him), though not quite long enough to be vampish – before processing the much more salient information which is that he knows her. Don't ask him how, don't ask him why, but there, standing very close to Lachlan, close enough to be his intimate, and still absently clapping her bejewelled hands to the memory of the music-hall tune, is the waitress from his patisserie. The one who only a day or two ago owed him three pounds, and now must owe him about three hundred. The one he has been beginning to think about romantically. But who it seems is now, or perhaps always was, associated in some significant way with Lachlan.

THREE

Here we go again, Henry thinks. He has been had like this before.

‘Hovis' Belkin. Osmond ‘Hovis' Belkin, his best friend from school, did him identically half a lifetime ago, also, as chance would have it – if there is such a thing as chance – with a waitress. Is the lesson for Henry that he should stay away from waitresses? Or that he should stay away from friends?

They stay away from him, whatever he decides. Or rather, because Henry wishes to be precise about this, and to avoid self-pity, they inhabit space which doesn't have him in it.

Is that barbed wire that surrounds Lachlan and the waitress? Why not hang a sign – PISS OFF, HENRY!

Something that has tormented Henry all his life, something he felt at school, at university, still feels today when he goes to a party, a conference, a concert, the theatre even: how well acquainted everybody but Henry is with everybody else. Leave aside coincidences of sympathy or interest, where do they actually
meet
, at what Henry-free time and in what Henry-free dimension do they make contact, dock, establish intimacy, and agree, without so much as mentioning Henry's name, to exclude him? Let Henry be the first person in a room, it will transpire as soon as the room fills that every single person there except Henry is on close terms with every other. Does it happen when he goes to get himself a drink? Does it happen when he blinks? Or, as seems much more likely, was it all laid down long ago in anterior time? Was there another world before this one, a sort of metaphysical prep school, a preliminary universe, to which someone forgot to send Henry?

It would explain, anyway, much of Henry's strange behaviour towards his friends. I know, he must have thought, aspiring to those intimacies which were such a mystery and such an agony to him – I know, I know how to insinuate myself into their charmed circle and show that I am essentially the same as they are, no less approachable, no less amenable to intimacy, every bit as nice – I'll fuck their wives.

Not that he fucked anyone attached to ‘Hovis' Belkin. In so far as there was any fucking between ‘Hovis' and Henry, it was ‘Hovis' who fucked him.

Unwelcome, this memory. Highly unwelcome. Besides which, Henry hasn't got time to think about the past now, least of all his Belkin-tarnished past. He puts him away, puts him back where he's been hiding him since they were students together thirty years ago and more. Henry's excruciation-span is shrinking and he has reached the age where he can take his humiliations only one at a time.

‘Well then,' he says to Lachlan, as they're being harried out of the chapel of rest to make room for the next lot of griefless grievers, ‘you happy with the service?'

Lachlan wipes his moustache on the back of his hand. ‘So-so,' he says. ‘But then anything's more than she deserved. She wouldn't have done it for me. She told me so. She said, “If you go first, Lachie, don't be expecting me to organise you a wake. You'll have to get yourself to the cemetery.”'

Henry can't think of anything to say to this, unless it's along the lines of she must have loved you really, Lachie. And Henry finds it altogether too easy to believe she didn't.

‘Anyway,' Lachlan goes on, rubbing something from his moustache between his hands, and stamping his feet as though it's cold in the sun, ‘that's my duty done.'

And mine, Henry thinks.

And the European waitress's.

He is waiting for Lachlan to say something, perhaps to effect an introduction. Or for the waitress to fill in a few of the blanks

–
I'm an old friend of the family . . . Lachlan and I go way back
. . . I just couldn't help myself . . . He turns my insides to jelly
.
. .
He knows he only has to ask, he knows he only has to snap his fingers
and I'll come running . . .
Not that she owes Henry an explanation, Henry accepts that. It isn't as though they are affianced or anything. It isn't as though he has even asked her out. He doesn't know her name, for God's sake. Nonetheless, it was his sense that they had been agitating each other's electric fields, that there were a thousand tiny crackling unspoken anticipations between them, and that she has therefore misled him. Not breach of promise exactly, more breach of expectation, more a violation of velleity.

‘So how come . . . ?' he turns to ask her, making a gesture with his hands which takes in everything, the whole situation, life, death, him, her, Lachlan's stepmother, Lachlan. Unsophisticated, he accepts, like asking someone at a party how he knows the host. But he's past prolonging agonies. What he needs to know, he needs to know at once.

She has a way of darting her eyes sideways from under her hair, which both repels and attracts him. Looking about her, checking to see whether it's safe to come out, like some frightened creature of the forest. Except that she isn't frightened. I'll never get a straight answer from this woman, Henry thinks. She'll alway be trying to work out what I want to hear. Which is what repels him. What attracts him is more or less the same. With the added attraction that he is repelled by it.

‘I came to show my respects,' she says at last, giving her hair a sideways toss, ‘and as a favour to Lachlan – the same as you did.'

To Lachlan. A favour to Lachlan. And what's my name, Henry wants to ask her. I've been tipping you for days, you owe me a small fortune, what's my fucking name?

But at least – Henry clutching at straws – she didn't call him Lachie!

He steals a look at him to see if he can make out the lineaments of triumph, but Lachlan is preoccupied with his digestive system, rapping at his chest as though he has an urgent message to deliver to himself, and rolling silent ripples of wind up from his belly. You're welcome to him, Henry thinks, while at the same time refusing to believe she'd want him. She couldn't. Surely she couldn't. Henry's old problem – he esteems himself lower than a snake, but esteems every other man lower still.

A family of mourners, celebrants of the mysteries, attend a coffin on its august passage from the illusory world of the living to the dread solemnity of the dead. Two or three of the younger ones are wearing discoloured trainers. Already a dyspeptic red, Lachlan's face contorts with disgust. ‘Common as muck,' he mutters into his chest.

For the first time Henry, though he is in formal black from head to foot himself, sees the virtue of trainers.

A feeling of completion, akin to embarrassment, descends upon their little party. Henry knows he should go and leave them to it. He looks at his watch. From under her hair, the waitress slithers her eyes at him. ‘Do you have a car here?' she asks.

‘No, I came by taxi. Presumably you'll go back in the hearse,' he says, looking at Lachlan.

Whether because of the trainers, or because he can't forget that his stepmother had told him he would have to bury himself, Lachlan is still livid. ‘No fear,' he says. ‘They bring you here, but they don't take you back.'

‘Well, I suppose that's appropriate,' Henry says.

‘What?'

Henry shrugs. ‘So shall I call for a taxi for all of us?' he wonders.

‘I've got my car here,' the waitress says.

Though he still believes he should call a taxi for himself, Henry doesn't. He wants to go through the awkwardness of seeing who'll sit in the front seat next to her. He also wants to know whether she is one of those women who hitch their skirts up when they drive. He loves that action – the infinitesimal raising of the behind, like a deer at a waterhole, and then the dextrous tug on either side of the skirt, a gesture reminiscent of the tea table to Henry, of tablecloths being changed and smoothed, of doilies being laid, of little fingers extended to lift bone-china teacups. And is she a woman who will be content for however much thigh shows to go on showing, or will she, at traffic lights and roundabouts, be worrying her skirt back down again? Hair-raising, being driven by a woman who is conscious of her skirts. For his part, Henry can't get enough of it. Being driven by a woman full stop, but also being driven by a woman who is thinking more about her body than the road. Crash me, Henry thinks. Crash me at the moment that we are both concentrating on your thighs. And what about her high heels? Is she a woman who drives in high heels, who loves the recklessness of spiking the pedals, or will she keep flatties in her car? A stiletto
and
a flattie man, Henry goes both ways on this. It all depends on how the feet move. It all depends on whether they retain the memory and the promise of spikes.

Nothing in his life has interested Henry more than this. Woman. Never mind the phenomenology or metaphysics of woman, just woman. Just the aesthetic of her. Just the
prospect
. God and all His host could clear the sky and descend from it this very moment, could land in golden parachutes on the memorial lawn of this north London crematorium, could call his name – Henry! Henry! – could offer him that immunity from mortality he craves, yet still Henry would not be able to draw his mind away from the picture that is forming of the waitress hitching up her skirt and depressing the pedals of her car – either with her heels or in flatties, Henry doesn't care which. And what would immortality be worth, anyway, if he couldn't devote the better part of it to attending, intellectually, to such stimuli?

This isn't desire. Henry isn't even sure it has an erotic component, though it would have had, once upon a time. Now it's more what Henry would call pictorial curiosity.

The best reason Henry can think of not to die – that he will miss the female ceremonial.

And this they called hiding from the world!

So what's his motive for refusing the passenger seat when it's offered him, and for giving it to Lachlan? Does he feel he is in the way enough, just being in the car at all? Does he want to grab a better look at them together? Or does he want to postpone the pleasure of seeing her at the controls of her car at close quarters, savouring the question marks, saving it all up for a future time? Dangerous, Henry, doing that at your age. At your age you never put off until tomorrow what you can do today, given that today might very well be your last.

To be truthful, his deferring to Lachlan is neither altruism nor perversion. He means to catch the waitress's eye, and hold it, in her driving mirror. As someone long schooled in the subtleties of third-person sex – doing the best by the fact of your exclusion – Henry knows what can be achieved in the back seat, through a driving mirror.

‘Moira,' the waitress says, turning and extending her hand to Henry. Significant, Henry reckons, that she waits until they're in the car, the doors are closed and he's behind her.

‘Henry,' he responds, laughing, leaning forward. Not sure he cares for Moira much as a name – not Habsburg enough for him, he was hoping for something more along the lines of Maria Theresa or Yolande or Margarita of Savoy – but he likes the texture of her hand, warm like a baby mouse in his. He can feel her heart beat through her fingers. He holds them a second longer than he should, squat fingers with red nails, damaged by waitressing, scuffed from scrambling up the egregious tips he leaves, the skin just beginning to come loose on the bone, not promiscuously elastic like a young person's, leaping slavishly to meet every touch, but with some of the give, still, of youth. Always feeling for the life under the skin, Henry. As though dreading the day he won't find it.

What he can't tell is whether she's taken her heels off.

‘We ready?' she asks. It's like a big adventure. Three Go Home Through Friern Barnet.

‘Not yet,' Lachlan says, belting himself in. ‘Let me take one more gander at this place before we leave it. You see that smoke? Do you think that's her?'

Moira gives a little European cry. It makes Henry's heart jump. Straight out of Fledermaus. ‘That's horrible,' she says.

‘You think that's horrible,' Lachlan goes on. ‘I'll tell you something more horrible. She didn't even want to be burned. Hated the idea. Always fancied a quiet corner of the Actors' Church in Covent Garden, or failing that Berkshire.'

Moira puts one hand to her mouth, stifling another little European cry. Henry catches her eye in the driving mirror. You've taken up with an animal, Henry's eye says. Happy now?

To Lachlan he says, just to be clear, ‘I didn't know you could cremate a person who didn't want to be cremated.'

‘If you're the only kin you can do what you like,' Lachlan tells him. ‘Unless there's something written to the contrary. And she was too busy spending my money to put pen to paper. Assumed I'd carry out her wishes. A big mistake, in that case, to tell me she had no intention of carrying out mine.'

‘Then you have your revenge.'

Lachlan is still looking out of the window, following the plume of smoke. ‘I'll never have my revenge,' he says.

The windows mist over with Lachlan's bile. It's like having a ham Malvolio in the car, Henry thinks. It's not the old woman who should be lying in the Actors' Church, Covent Garden, it's Lachlan.

Moira drives for a while in silence, her face pushed forward squintily as though she is negotiating fog. If it looks like fog to her out there, Henry thinks, then why isn't she driving more slowly. Henry hates speed. He is frightened of it. Alarmed by everything, Henry is particularly alarmed by motor cars, wheels, motorways, accelerator pedals, brakes that don't work. This is why he has never owned a car himself. ‘You a faggot?' a colleague's wife once asked him, back in his University of the Pennine Way days. It was her theory that only faggots didn't drive. Well, make that only faggots and Henry. All else aside, Henry's ideal ride would be in a battery-powered bath chair driven by Lachlan's stepmother, alive or dead. Crawling pace is fast enough for Henry. What's the hurry? Where's everybody rushing?