The Making of Henry Read Online Free PDF Page B

Mrs Yoffey was coming over the wall. Henry likes to think that the incident consisted of his grandmother throwing Mrs Yoffey back, but apparently all that happened was that she had words with Mr Yoffey, that Mr Yoffey had words with her, and that Mrs Yoffey (in Henry’s imagination still on her back) took her husband’s side. Following which, Henry’s grandmother delivered herself of the opinion that the Yoffeys were a disgrace to everybody but each other, whom they richly deserved. And walked on.
    That there is no love lost, then, between the grocer and the Stern Girls, Henry can easily understand. But he is still not prepared for the violence of old man Yoffey’s reaction to their peaceful deputation.
    â€˜So for threepenceworth of principle,’ he exclaims, every one of his white wisps of hair on end now, as though he is halfway through being electrocuted, ‘you invade my shop.’
    â€˜Hardly
invade
,’ Anastasia replies.
    No one in North Manchester repeats what another person has said like that, allowing it to hang in the air, to echo for ever with its own absurdity. And it goes without saying that no one in North Manchester employs the word ‘hardly’. Even Henry feels the condescension.
    â€˜Then what would you call it?’ old man Yoffey wants to know. ‘A social visit? Have you come to see my wife perhaps? Are you here for tea and
hamentash
?’
    Henry has tasted
hamentash
and doesn’t like it much. But he has been told in Bible class that it has symbolic significance. A
hamentash
is a three-sided pastry, resembling the hat which the arch-villain Haman, chief adviser to King Ahasuerus, and a prototype Nazi in his own right, wore in the Book of Esther. Those who eat it, Henry grasps, are laughing at their enemies. So does old man Yoffey mean to imply that the Stern Girls have come to laugh at him, or is it Henry who is as bad as Haman?
    He is shaking from head to foot whatever he thinks, old man Yoffey, the stiff detached collar he customarily wears becoming separated from its gold stud, and he is gathering up, Henry notices, all the threepenny bits in his wooden till, preparatory, Henry wouldn’t be at all surprised, to throwing them at the Stern Girls. That would be a good end to all this, would it not, his grandmother or one of her sisters being blinded by the very threepenny bit Henry did not have the courage to claim as his.
    Could he stop this now? Could he appeal to Elliot who has neither moved nor looked up the whole time from the block of cheese he has been garotting with a piece of wire ever since Henry and his reinforcements entered the shop? ‘Elliot, I need hardly tell you why I’m here. My change, remember? You dropped it on the counter. I was too diffident to explain I couldn’t reach it and you were too engaged to notice. Sorry to put you to this bother.’ Would that be so difficult? With someone’s eyesight at risk, was that beyond him?
    Henry never finds out what is or is not beyond him. Rather than throw coins at women, which he knows he should not do, no feast day being in the offing and no wine, therefore, having passed his lips, old man Yoffey closes his shop. ‘Get out, get out,’ he screams, ‘all of you. And as for you’ – pointing at Henry – ‘you’re banned for life.’
    If he were to get up and go into the patisserie and coffee shop on St John’s Wood High Street and ask the East European waitress for his change, would he be banned for life? Henry wonders. And would it matter anyway, there being a lot less life left now for him to be banned for?
    Morbid again? If only he were. Or if only he were consistently one thing or the other. The problem with ageing, as Henry sees it today – warmed by the sun and fired by the European waitress – is that you don’t. At least not where you should – in the soul. At sixty minus a few months Henry doesn’t feel a