The Making of Henry by Howard Jacobson Page B

guileless expression on his face. As though he’s dreaming of steam engines.’
    â€˜Well then . . .’
    â€˜Well then what? Henry, I saw him going into the hotel and I saw the woman he was with.’
    Sometimes, however urgent the matter, the rhythm of a conversation can make you flippant. ‘Anyone you know?’ Henry no sooner asks than he wishes he hadn’t.
    â€˜Of course it’s someone I know.’
    â€˜Ah,’ Henry says. The best friend syndrome, of course. His father would be capable of that. Keeping it in the circle of acquaintance. Kith and kin. Mentally, Henry goes through the possibles. His mother’s schoolfriends, the dim girls she tutors privately in G.C.E. English, her hairdresser, the cleaning lady, his mother’s cousins, his mother’s aunties . . . no, not those, not his father, it is only Henry with whom no member of the family is safe. ‘So who?’ he asks.
    She takes a deep breath, as though trying to suffocate something inside herself. The name, when she delivers it, is stillborn. ‘Rivka Yoffey.’
    â€˜Old man Yoffey’s wife? You’re joking.’
    â€˜Someone might be joking, Henry. But it isn’t me.’
    â€˜Isn’t Rivka Yoffey Orthodox?’
    â€˜Exactly. But the Orthodox, as you know, give themselves latitude. She is also without looks. And without any hair to speak of.’
    â€˜Isn’t that because Yoffey keeps pulling it out.’
    â€˜I would like to think so. But I suspect it’s because she’s been wearing a wig since she was seventeen. Her head has never seen the light of day. I doubt if much else has either. Until last Monday, that is. But I am not concerned with the whys and wherefores, Henry. I am concerned that your father should take such a plain woman to the Midland Hotel.’
    â€˜You think he should have taken her somewhere cheaper?’
    â€˜I think he should not make love to women just because they’re to hand. I think that if he must be unfaithful to me he should at the very least work hard to find someone worth being unfaithful with.’
    Henry puts this very argument to his father in his St John’s Wood home from home, where he sits, a bag of dust and bones, on the edge of his old armchair.
    Rivka Yoffey, Dad, he says. Rivka Yoffey!
    What about her?
    How could you?
    How could I what?
    What’s the appropriate language, son to father? They were always formal with each other. Protectives, Izzi Nagel once advised Henry to be well provided with at all times. Their one and only discussion of the sexual life. Be amply stocked with protectives, Henry. Followed by his blessing. Go forth and don’t multiply. Not condoms, not rubbers, not johnnies even, but protectives. So Henry can’t say how could you have fucked Rivka Yoffey, Dad? How could you have fucked that poor, sad, ugly, Torahreading woman?
    How could you have taken her to the Midland Hotel, is what he decides to ask instead.
    You’d prefer that I’d taken her somewhere cheaper?
    Funny, Henry remembers, that’s the very question I put to Mum.
    I know you did
.
    She told you?
    Of course she told me. That’s how it is between man and wife –
though you wouldn’t know that – they tell each other everything. She
said you were sarcastic about the whole thing
.
    I wasn’t sarcastic. I was just amused.
    OK, amused. I have to get the word right, don’t I?
    I think it helps. It made me laugh, that was all.
    Yes, she told me that. Some son, she said. I tell him his father is
with another woman and he laughs
.
    I wouldn’t have laughed had I known about here.
    Where’s ‘here’?
    Come on, Dad. Rivka Yoffey for a morning is one thing . . .
    Exactly what I told your mother. What’s a couple of hours with
Rivka Yo fey between people who love each other? That was why you
were able to find it funny. You knew it didn’t matter. And don’t say
if I knew it