Free The Making of Henry by Howard Jacobson

the job. Then Ekaterina met a communist, lost her head, maybe lost even more than that, and was sent to cool down with family in the old country just as the old country was facing facts – yes, the Nazis did mean what they said they meant: who’d have thought it? – and packing to go somewhere else. She lasted three weeks, just three weeks fewer than the old country, but long enough for the communist at home to have disappeared. Not that that mattered: on the boat back she had struck up a conversation with a dashing young man, also hot-footing it from a badly timed visit to doomed relatives, who told her his ambition was to be a fire-eater, which she, on account of his coarse North Manchester accent, had misheard as firefighter. By the time she realised her mistake they were already in love. ‘Another one!’ Irina Stern groaned, shaking her head. But destiny is destiny. Falling for men from North Manchester was what the Stern Girls did, no matter where you sent them.
    War stopped Ekaterina finding out at once what being married to a fire-eater would be like. Izzi was soon away, another in the long line of absent men, leaving it to little Henry to hold the fort. By the time he was three, happy Henry was the longest-serving male family member any of the Stern Girls had ever known. Small wonder that they loved him as they did.
    As for Ekaterina, the conviction which had assailed her during labour, that she was doing a wicked thing ushering a vulnerable life into a disgusting and terrifying universe, remained with her long afterwards, affecting the literature she encouraged Henry to read. At another time she could have taken the macabre route, allowing the horror of the spider which had crawled across her belly to lead her and Henry into Poe or Kafka. But no one cared for Poe or knew of Kafka and his cockroach then. Instead she went in the direction of
Jane Eyre
. Henry cannot remember how old he was before it dawned on him that
Jane Eyre
was the only book he had ever read. But it couldn’t have been all that long ago.
Jane Eyre
,
Jane Eyre
, and nothing but
Jane Eyre
. Even when the work of literature was called something else, it was still, in all its essentials,
Jane Eyre
.
    Looking back, Henry is philosophical about it. In the end what other story is there? Reclusive girl suffers agonies because her skin is thin, but finally gets to fuck the hero. Moral: the thinner the skin, the better the fuck.
    Wasn’t that, give or take, his shrinking story too? Without the bravado – all so much wind, Henry’s wife-borrowing talk, all hot air to blow away the evidence of how hard he found everything. And of course without the happy ending.
    As for what Ekaterina intended, pushing him in the direction of girlish fragility – who knows? Did she wish Henry had been a girl, was that it? Henrietta Nagel. Alice Harriet Henrietta Nagel ...Was that why Ekaterina had held him back on Christmas Day, in the hope that the waiting and the disappointment would teach him what it was like to suffer as a girl and maybe turn him into one? Another Stern Girl to add to the collection, except that not one of those girls could hold a candle to little Henry in the fragile-flower department. Home from war, Izzi gasped at what they’d done to his rosebud boy. ‘This lipstick?’ he asked, rubbing at Henry’s pouting mouth. Pampering he’d expected: ‘All my love to you, my darling, and to the spoilt one,’ he’d written from the front, or at least from Basingstoke which was as near to the front as they’d send a man who had so much of the child in him. But spoiling was not effemination. ‘Why don’t you shove him in a frilly frock,’ he asked his wife, ‘stick pink ribbons in his hair and have done?’ But all that did was to make Henry more quivery still, and to plant a confirmation in his mind for later, that the world was full of Mr Brocklehursts, brutes to those