The Making of Henry Read Online Free PDF Page A

miss out on history.
    Don’t look, Henry
– who told him that?
Try not to see
. Which
one
of them told him that?
    She hasn’t returned with his change, the European waitress, though he has been out on the street with his coffee, taking up a table in the madhouse and enjoying the sun, for thirty minutes. Forgotten, that’s all. Forgotten his three pounds, of which he would have given her one anyway. So who cares? What’s three pounds in St John’s Wood High Street? Get up, leave, and let her have the three pounds. Let her even think he always
meant
her to have the three pounds, for he has a lordly air, Henry, born of not noticing what’s going on around him. But what if this is not lordliness after all, but cowardice? Afraid to ask, afraid to cause a fuss, afraid to be thought small-minded, afraid to look Elliot Yoffey in the face, is his insouciance in the matter of three pounds (minus one for the tip) just absence of ordinary adult competence? Fifty years on, is Henry still allowing the world to pish on him?
    Back home, on the edge of his armchair, his father will be waiting.
Go back and ask for the money, Henry. Learn to take what’s
yours. There’s the door. Be a man.
    And what will Henry do then?
    Wrong to have said that at nine Henry has no alternative accommodation. He has his grandmother’s mock-Tudor gingerbread house, which feels and smells like the country though it is only round the corner, left out of his sunshine semi then up the lane, opposite the entrance to the park, in what is known as Jews Row. Widowed, Henry’s mother’s mother lives with her three straight-backed widowed sisters. In truth, the oldest, much the oldest – Effie – has never had a husband, Anastasia still has a husband somewhere, and the youngest, much the youngest – Marghanita – never quite brought hers to the point of marriage, but ‘widowed’ is what they have settled on all round. Girls, they are known as. The Stern Girls. Not to be confused with the Stern Gang, though they are all ‘widowed’ suspiciously early. Widowed and returned to their maiden names.
    They are at home when Henry arrives with his satchel packed. Effie is playing Schumann on a small upright piano, Anastasia is sewing, Marghanita is reading Scott Fitzgerald, and Irina, his grandmother, is staring out of the window, as though waiting for Sir Lancelot. Tirra lirra, Henry should be singing, given how much he adores his grandmother, but he has just been told to get the threepence back or never return home, so he is not in a chivalric mood.
    â€˜They’ve chucked me out,’ he tells the Stern Girls.
    â€˜Who’s chucked you out?’ they ask in chorus.
    â€˜My mother and my father.’
    They know what that means. His father has chucked him out. His mother is one of theirs, therefore she would never chuck Henry out. Husbands you chuck, boy children you don’t. But Henry’s father has his own way of doing things. Not that they believe his father has chucked Henry out either.
    When they have listened to his story they each produce a threepenny bit from their purses. ‘Keep three and give one to your father,’ his grandmother tells him, pinching his cheek.
    Henry shakes his head. He can’t do that. Lie?
I cannot tell a
lie. But whether that’s because he is made of honesty or because he is afraid he will be found out he doesn’t know. He suspects the latter. Henry is thin-skinned – he has heard his mother talk about it as an established medical fact: ‘Henry has thin skin, you know, not like his father who has the hide of an elephant’ – which means he feels everything even before it’s happened, and has no protection against consequences. If he lies about the threepenny bit his lie will show through him, and there is no knowing where it will end except for knowing it will end badly.
    â€˜In that case,’ his grandmother