The Making of Henry by Howard Jacobson

double-dealing, so that would explain it. Henry prefers women who have secrets. He has a feeling she has been unhappily married, probably more than once, and has teenage children who have left home, either to join the Cirque du Soleil or to beg on the streets in Soho. Her first husband will have been an artist from Budapest who beat her, maybe a failed opera singer, the second a house painter from Norwood, someone she met on the tube, a crackhead. You can tell Henry hasn’t lived in London long: he has a lurid idea of what happens in the place.
    As, for example, that there is a war of nerves in progress on the streets of St John’s Wood between the Muslim and the Jewish communities. Henry enjoys the prospect of the Central London Mosque’s stringy minaret at the south end of the High Street, but he wonders if it’s a provocation to those who come here to buy bagels and chopped liver. Was it built as a provocation, or were the bagel shops opened as a provocation to it?
    To Henry’s left, two Arab boys in crêpe de Chine shirts sit drinking coffee and discussing films. They regard each other under soft long lashes, exchanging dark points of light. Henry tries to remember when last anybody looked at him like that. Never. Not ever. He has missed out on beautiful boys, missed out on being one, missed out on knowing one. To Henry’s right an Israeli family are fussing over their oldest child. Sammi. Sammi too is dark and beautiful, but he doesn’t have the gift of yielding his attention to another person. Sammi might one day win a Nobel Prize, but it won’t be for quietude or empathy. Although the sun has shone for days, Sammi has found puddles on the pavement. Henry cannot remember whether it rained last night. In his apartment you don’t hear rain. Or see it: the windows of Henry’s apartment repel rain. Sammi jumps in and out of the puddles, then marvels at the marks his shoes make on the pavement. ‘Abba, look!’
    â€˜Those,’ says his father, ‘are your footprints.’
    Without appearing to change their expressions, the Arab boys look long and hard at Sammi’s footprints.
    Henry orders more Russian tea. It’s a good sign, he reckons, that the waitress is not losing patience with him, hogging a table and her time when so many people want serving. The Israelis are just leaving. A Muslim family is waiting to take their place. When the Arab boys move on, a bunch of Jewish kids will sit down.
    â€˜This is like the Middle East,’ Henry mutters to her as she takes his dirty cup away.
    â€˜It’s quieter in the Middle East,’ she mutters back.
    If she has an accent to match her appearance, Henry has yet to detect it. There is a slight labial flattening out of her ‘t’s which Henry finds attractive, like watching someone pretty slide on ice, otherwise there is nothing to say she is Austro-Hungarian. But what Henry knows, he knows.
    Sensing a dog snuffling about his feet, Henry is about to kick out. Another crazy hoping to touch Henry into giving him money? Unusual to get them this far north, but there you are, the madhouse is on the move. What stops him is firstly the possibility that the dog belongs to one of the waitress’s children – the one living rough in Soho – and secondly the realisation that although the dog is indeed on a piece of string, it is not some beggar carrying his cardboard home around who is on the other end of it, but Lachlan Louis Stevenson.
    â€˜Mind if I join you?’ He is carrying what looks like a pair of figurines – Philemon and Baucis or similar – loosely wrapped in kitchen paper towel. And a pair of brass fire tongs in a plastic bag.
    Henry repeats his easy-come easy-go shrug.
    â€˜Selling off the family heirlooms already?’ he asks, since Lachlan has the bad taste to lay them out on the table.
    â€˜Readies, that’s all. You need readies when you’ve been waiting for