The Making of Henry (33 page)

Is this my fault? Henry wonders. Have I been insufficiently male-possessive in my signals? Does there still hang about me a whiff of those bad old days when I used to seek confirmation of my choice in the appreciation of other men, indeed when I preferred it that other men had prior claim, so that they could attend to any obsequies necessary – lay out the limbs, comb out the hair, close fast the eyes – not me? Or is it Moira's fault? Has she been leading Lachlan on because I have allowed her to feel that it is all right for her to do so, in which case that is also not her fault but mine. All lines of guilt leading back to Henry.

‘I'm thinking,' he says, ‘that maybe we ought to be going. It's been a tiring day what with one thing and another.'

‘Don't go yet,' Lachlan says, barely flustered, ‘I haven't shown you your mention yet.'

Henry squints at him. Is this what loneliness does? Sends you round the bend?

Moira has risen from the floor. Maybe Lachlan is about to lead her into the bedroom. Maybe this time she won't refuse him. But if Henry is not mistaken she is sending him, Henry, messages with her eyes. Don't be cruel messages. Have a heart messages. Put yourself in his place messages. Do this for me messages.

‘So what's Henry's mention?' she asks. ‘I thought your stepmother never met Henry.'

‘She didn't. But here's a coincidence – she met Henry's mother.'

‘What?' says Henry.

‘What?' says Moira.

‘Just a minute, how . . . ?' Henry starts to ask, but cannot see a way to finish the question. His father had a catchphrase to which he resorted whenever he was flummoxed. Not
taugetz
– though it had an implication of
taugetz
in it. ‘How the, who the, what the, why the?' And that's all Henry can think of now. How the, who the, what the, why the? With a when the thrown in.

A wild preparatory, or is the word precautionary, thought has started to run through his brain, wilder than anything running through Lachlan's brain, assuming, after so much loneliness, that Lachlan still has a brain: Lachlan's stepmother, take this slowly, is the person who paid for his mother's bench in Eastbourne. Didn't Lachlan once tell him that his stepmother went through his fortune keeping a suite at a hotel in Eastbourne? No, that was Brighton. Unless it was Torquay. Unless Lachlan was confused. Unless Lachlan was lying. And is that why Lachlan thinks he can kiss Moira in full view, because his stepmother, for some reason, paid for a bench for Henry's mother using Lachlan's money? Is this payback time?

Gibberish, all of it.

‘I doubt,' Henry says, while Lachlan is finding the relevant pages, ‘that your stepmother could ever have met my mother. They moved in different spheres. My mother lived her whole life in Manchester. As I understand from what you've told me . . .'

‘“
Ekaterina
”,' Lachlan says, reading from a diary. ‘Wasn't that your mother's name? That's what you told me, anyway. “If you would be happy for a week take a wife; if you would be happy for a month kill a pig; but if you would be happy all your life plant a garden” – your mother's favourite saying, too, you said, when I told you it was the old lady's – what chance one of them gave it to the other? Hang on, here we go . . . “
Ran into the
Ekaterina woman on the stairs, startled like a rabbit. Something to
hide, that one.
”'

‘The world is full,' Henry says, ‘of Ekaterinas. And the Ekaterina who was my mother had nothing to hide.'

‘Ekaterinas who believe happiness comes with planting a garden?'

‘Absolutely. It's a common woman's fancy. It sounds to me like something they were all taught to embroider on comforters at school.'

‘Actually,' Moira says, ‘as it stands it's more a man's fancy. Wouldn't a woman be more likely to say that if you would be happy for only a week, take a husband?'

Henry looks at her with fury.

Lachlan turns another page. ‘Here we are. “
Saw the Nagel
woman on the High Street, pretending not to see me.” That's you, isn't it? You're Nagel?'

‘Show me that,' Henry says.

He takes the diary to the couch. An Ekaterina on the stairway, a Nagel on the High Street, what does that prove? It would depend, for starters, how many days apart. Nice of Lachlan to bend the tell-tale pages, makes the detective work a damn sight easier. June 9, an Ekaterina on the stairs; June 12, a Nagel on the High Street. Coincidence? An Ekaterina Bates living in the building and a Bertha Nagel in the vicinity, each within three days of the other. What are the chances of that? High? Low? How would Henry know. And even if he found the Christian and the surname linked, what then? Unlikely there were many Ekaterina Nagels, but just as unlikely that his Ekaterina Nagel had breath and being in St John's Wood. If there were another, that could explain the bench. A thought occurs to Henry. The year. If this Ekaterina Nagel – taking her indeed, for the moment, to be one – had turned up in St John's Wood after 1978 then it wasn't his mother. Not unless it were his mother's ghost. So June 9 when? Nineteen seventy-six. Shame. Nice try, Henry. He tries to remember what was happening in 1976. He knew where he was. Where he always was. Rotting like the Count of Monte Cristo in the Pennines. But where was his mother? Icing cakes. Travelling sometimes, yes. Demonstrating her art here, there and everywhere just as Moira had been demonstrating hers in Eastbourne. So it wasn't out of the question, after all, that his mother had been to Eastbourne too, maybe sent him a card from there, nor that she'd called in on St John's Wood, though he couldn't imagine anyone turning up for cake-decoration classes in St John's Wood. Nor was there any explaining, even if she did have pupils hereabouts, what she was doing in this building. Unless – of course! – unless she had tracked Izzi down to this address. That would explain her reluctance to engage Lachlan's stepmother in idle chit-chat. Startled like a rabbit – you bet she was. Pretending not to see anyone – you can say that again. Desperate not to
be
seen, rather. Cloak-and-dagger stuff, but also shame before the Almighty. To be reduced, at her age, to
this
. And she a Stern Girl! His poor mother. Henry had always taken it for granted that she had caught the coach that killed her in the course of a frustrated attempt – perhaps one of many – to find and bring home her errant husband. In fact, there was no evidence for this. Looked at all round, she was just as likely to have been travelling to an Ideal Home Exhibition in the capital with a bag full of icing tools. But sagas of sinfulness and retribution harmonised more nearly with Henry's nature than work schedules; it seemed in accordance with the pitiless universal laws of marriage and adultery, as Henry understood them, that she should have been sucked into the tangle of his father's deceit and died there, her death triggering his father's. Thus do carnality and its recompense cut us all down indiscriminately, the guilty and the innocent alike. Yet for all the unquestionedness of these assumptions, it never once occurred to Henry to imagine an ongoing drama of the sort that is now emerging, with Henry's lurid help, from Lachlan's stepmother's diaries – his mother locating his father's second home (he had never thought of that), his mother engaged in a tussle with his father's mistress (he had never thought of that), his mother returning to St John's Wood again and again (which alone could explain the suggestion of familiarity and frequency in the diaries), and thus embroiling herself in a hideously protracted battle for his father's devotion. Sad was how he'd envisaged it all until now. Sad, her jealous wonderings. Sad, her lonely expeditions to find the truth. Sad, the failure. And heartbreaking, for both of them, the resolution which resolved nothing. But you can forget the sadness: today, suddenly, what Henry comes face to face with – like Henry James's bad-faced stranger surprised in a thick-carpeted house of quiet on a Sunday afternoon – is raw ugliness. The ugliness of suspicions horribly confirmed. The ugliness of exposure. The ugliness of raised voices, of a brawl and, who knows, maybe the ugliness of violence. Much harder to forgive his father his easeful peccadillos if that were the case, and much harder to forgive himself, come to that, his comfortable accommodation to them. Henry remembers the time he found his father's misdemeanours funny: sorry, Mother, but Dad and Rivka Yoffey, you've got to laugh. Well, not so funny if there were shouted reproaches on St John's Wood High Street, drowning out the honking even, or blood spilled in the lobby of this quiet mansion block. Strange, though, if such things happened, that Lachlan hasn't drawn his attention to them in the diaries, folded down the pages, look, Henry, your mother plunging a dagger into your father's false heart, and his mistress weeping on the stairs, thought you might be interested.
Something to hide, that one
. Stranger still, now Henry comes to think of it, that the old woman makes no mention of Henry's father, unless Lachlan, for malicious reasons of his own, has so far kept that mention back. A distraught wife, startled as a rabbit, comes to seek out and challenge her faithless husband living mistressed like a pasha right next door, and the old woman doesn't have a word to say about it! And something else – how come she knows his mother's name? No, how come she knows his mother's
names
? Distraught wife, startled as a rabbit, with much to hide and much to hide from, comes armed, looking to prise her easily led husband from the pink cushioned arms of his wealthy mistress, comes hammering on the door, comes crying, yelling, threatening, and the old woman comes to be in possession of the Ekaterina and the Nagel. What, she stopped to chat? Hello, here to kill my husband, name's Mrs Nagel, but you can call me Ekaterina, now where is the swine? And Izzi, in all the days or weeks or months or years of his sojourn – how should Henry know how many – had never chatted likewise? Izzi who would address a block of wood if he thought there was any chance of interesting it in his origami or his fire-eating. People had intimate knowledge of Henry's father who had never met him. He was that sort of man. His charm was viral. You felt his influence though you never came within a mile of him. Now here was Lachlan's stepmother, Norma Jean, with an avowed taste for show business, living right next door and not caring to notice his existence. Agreed, there may be more to come, more revelations which Lachlan is savouring and holding back, but surely he'd be there in person, Izzi, on one or other of these folded pages, a reference point whenever Ekaterina creeps by on the stairs. Unless Norma Jean is keeping him a secret to protect herself. She the mistress, then? Norma Jean Henry's father's lover? He and Lachlan as it were cousins in sin? Though it is an evening of shocks, Henry doesn't entertain that shocking possibility for long. He looks over to the other couch where Lachlan is trying one of his anti-toxin masks on Moira. First the dog, now the woman. He doesn't have many variations as a lover, Henry notes with satisfaction. And he isn't scrutinising Henry to pick his perfect moment to tell him the next momentous news, that the old witch his stepmother and Henry's dad, the fire-eater, had made the beast. If he had that information in his pocket he'd have released it by now, Henry is convinced of that. He knows the bounder's logic. ‘Your dad and my dad's wife, therefore me and Moira. That's only fair, isn't it?' Besides which, if she'd owned both apartments, Norma Jean, as well as keeping her ducal suite in Torquay or wherever, he'd have heard Lachlan complain of it before now. Nor, had it been hers, would it have come by any means to Henry. Had it been hers, it must even more have been Lachlan's, in which case it would have been on the open market by now, along with its fixtures and its fittings. So no, definitely no, he isn't related by bad blood to Lachlan Louis Stevenson, praise be to God. For which relief much thanks, but that still leaves Henry wondering that the object of his mother's visits, let alone, come to think of it, the object of his father's, are not actors in Norma Jean's little drama, do not have so much as walk-on parts when, as neighbours, however flitting, you would expect them to be principals. Indeed, anyone would think, Henry thinks, still flicking pages – tea, telly, strudel, bed – that the one of them with whom Lachlan's stepmother was on most familiar terms was Ekaterina herself. As though it were she who were resident here, and not Izzi. Ha! Another wild thought, wilder than the last, passes through Henry's head. What if she were – he has lost possession of his verbs – what if she did, what if she had, what if . . . ? What if
what
? What if in her desolation his mother had taken up residence here, women do that, to reoccupy her independent sense of self, to have a room of her own, just to think, sort herself out, clear her head, away from the clattering demands of her husband. A quiet pied à terre where she could, intermittently, attend to her own thoughts again. No noise, no distractions, hence her fleeing Norma Jean on the stairs. How she afforded it he doesn't know, but the Stern Girls could perhaps have lent her money. But why, then, did none of them, after the event, refer to it? And why the mysterious circumstances in which it had been passed on down to him? If the apartment were his mother's to dispose of as she chose, why hadn't it gone to Henry immediately on her death? And why the intercession, so many years later, of Shapira and Mankowicz? Any number of whys. Including why had Henry jumped to other conclusions and landed responsibility for the apartment on his father. How conventional of me, Henry thinks, to lay the blame on poor old Dad, righteously supposing that any irregularity was bound to be his, because he was the boisterous one, because he reached out greedily for his pleasures, because he was the man, because men do that. When all along there was an innocent explanation, if only Henry could lay both his hands on it, involving his mother and her peace of mind. An apartment in St John's Wood, a bench in Eastbourne, God knows what remnants of her elsewhere, all testifying – how much more proof does he need? – to her longing for rest. Sad. He's got the whole thing moving to a sad beat again, the way he likes it. His poor mother, goaded into going away to find a moment's quiet. His poor father, traduced again. Sad. Sad all round. ‘
How sad she looks
' – an entry of more than usual sensitivity, not to say garrulousness, in the old woman's diary. There you are. Confirmed. ‘
Spoke briefly to
the Nagel woman in the hall, how sad she looks
.' Henry goes on turning pages, gourmandising on tristesse. Give me more sad. He finds a gloomy, which excites him less. ‘
My gloomy neighbour
.' And a mournful. ‘
Said good evening in the lift, she unable to raise
her mournful eyes. He the same
.' Henry reads that again.
Who
the same?
He
the same. He. He! So who is he? His father? Does his mother have his father over to the apartment – to discuss the marriage, to show him that she is doing well by herself, a day here and a day there, to propose divorce? Has Izzi come looking for her – is that the story? Was it Izzi who needed to get to the bottom of her absences, not the other way round? Now in Leeds – Henry had unexpectedly encountered his mother demonstrating in a Leeds department store – now in Eastbourne, now in St John's Wood? Why must you have time to yourself? You married
me. What is it about me you need relief from? What have I done
wrong? How am I supposed to feel, knowing you are gallivanting
about the country on your own, and coming back here, for your supper
and your sleep, when you should be coming home to me?
His poor father. Mournful in the lift. The two of them mournful in the lift together. Like Dante's wearied souls – anime a fannate – carnal lovers light as air, as doves called by desire –
Quali colombe, dal
disio chiamate
– entwined for ever. Breathless, troubled, ghosts in the hellish storm. Except that Dante's lovers are adulterers, float in an eternity of guilty propinquity, their closeness their desire and their punishment, whereas Izzi and Ekaterina Nagel had nothing to be punished for. They were man and wife, not fornicators. Man and wife with a little marital sorting out to do, but man and wife for all that. Their only possible crime, a touch too much worldly enthusiasm on Izzi's part, and a touch too little on Ekaterina's. And of course Henry, taking Henry to be a sort of crime himself. Henry, the sum of their too much and too little, a dove beckoned by desire if ever there was one, though desire for what he never knew because they never taught him. And still don't. Is that his fault? Is Henry looking for some guidance from his long-dead parents to which he has, and had, no right? Are they imprisoned behind their mournful grille only because he has insisted on their being there? You can come out when you tell me who's to blame. And don't ask who's to blame for what. You know for what. For
me
. A bit old to be doing this, Henry. He accepts that. A bit long in the tooth to be blaming his mum and Dad. But what's this . . . ? On a page not consecrated to the memory of his mother with a fold, and so not considered by Lachlan to be interesting or hurtful to Henry, another name. Yafi. ‘
Nice man, Mr Yafi, for his persuasion. Helped me find my keys
.' Followed, in the old woman's mothy writing, by ‘
Food, she calls
him. But bills addressed to Fouad. Not so mournful when you get to
know him.' And that's all, in a gust of icy wind, it takes. Room for a hundred misunderstandings and misprisions here, but Henry discounts every one of them. Everything is clear now. He knows what he knows. He knows what he knew already. Marghanita was Effie's child – of course she was. He had always known. And now, a second time, he knows what he had always known. His father was not the guilty party, his mother was! His father did not live here illicitly, his mother did! What was it the weeping bailiff told him at his parents' funeral? You are loved for who you are the son of, Mr Nagel. So what made him leap to the conclusion that the person he was the son of in this particular was his father? Which parent did that demean – either, neither, both? It is like being given a key to a secret chamber of his heart, the heart's equivalent of the mind's unconscious, where the answers to everything are strewn about as familiarly as your own old clothes. A gross deceit uncovered, except that the coverings belonged to Henry in the first place. His mother lived the lie – of course she did. His mother had a lover – of course she had. Fouad Yafi: that's the only detail which is truly a surprise to him. Fouad Yafi – funny the difference knowing the name makes, funny what a name does to your stomach – Fouad Yafi was the last person to take his mother in his arms and Henry is sleeping in the bed where they slept.