The Making of Henry by Howard Jacobson Page B

he couldn’t tell the difference. “The higher up the mountain, the greener is the grass. We met a silly billy goat who wouldn’t let us pass.” That was him – the billy goat. No fool like an old fool. Come on, Angus.’
    â€˜And nobody’s clapped her since?’
    â€˜Lord, no. So I promised I’d arrange it. When the coffin goes through the curtain, a brief hands-together. That’s all. No encore. I’ll pop a card with the time and place on it under your door. You can come in the hearse with me, if you like. Arrive in style.’
    So who’ll clap me when the curtain closes, solipsistic Henry wonders. And for what?
    Henry knows better, at last, than to go through the list of his achievements. But that’s only because he has progressed, in recent times, to counting his mourners. Same sum. Same total.
    Does Henry feel, then, that his has been a disappointing life? No. Henry feels his has not
been
a life. If Henry had lived a life he would not be able to remember his childhood so vividly; too many other things would have intervened and misted his childhood over. But nothing has intervened. The people he thinks about and whose names he hasn’t misplaced are all from
then
. No one else has stuck. Who are they, the people of just the other day? What do they look like? What are they for? Go on, Henry says, impinge! But they won’t. The surface of his middle years, rapidly becoming his late years, has grown too slippery. Nothing adheres. There was his childhood – say from zero to twenty-one; all right, say from zero to thirty – then whoosh! (he teaches, he is borrowed by his friends’ wives, he resigns, he moves to St John’s Wood, he meets a dog) and suddenly it’s now.
    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,