Free The Making of Henry by Howard Jacobson Page B

‘Come near me with flame and I’m leaving you.’
    â€˜It’s as safe as houses,’ he’d assured her. ‘It’s no different from snuffing out a candle, I swear to you.’
    â€˜With your mouth, Izzi!’
    â€˜But nothing really goes into my mouth. No flame. I’m blowing out. It only looks as though I’m swallowing.’
    â€˜We have a child to bring up, Izzi,’ she told him. ‘You’re supposed to blow bubbles at a baby, not flames.’
    â€˜He’s not a baby. He’s a boy – or haven’t you noticed?’
    â€˜Izzi, no one wants you breathing fire over their children. When were you last asked to fire-eat at a children’s party?’
    He thought about it. ‘So far, never,’ he conceded. ‘But it just needs one to set the ball rolling. The word has to get out.’
    She sat him down and took his hands in hers. ‘Izzi,’ she said, ‘the word’s got out. People have seen our garden. They’ve seen what you’ve reduced it to. Nothing grows there any more. Nothing ever will grow there again for another thousand years. People don’t want you doing that to their gardens. They won’t pay you to torch their homes. They want you to come along in a funny hat and a bendy wand, and they want you to fold serviettes. The two things don’t go together, Izzi. You can’t work in paper and fire. Surely you can see that.’ She pleaded with him. ‘Please? Tell me you can see that. Please?’
    He hung his head. He was a good man. When a woman begged, he gave. Yes, he could see it. But she knew that in his heart he wasn’t convinced. If you couldn’t work with paper and fire that was paper’s fault. She knew what he was thinking. That he would have to find or invent paper which didn’t burn.
    Otherwise, though, as a couple
per se
, they appeared happy and well matched. He loved her for her haughty beauty and her elocution, and she loved him for his triviality. It wouldn’t be quite true to say that he entertained her, for what astonished her initially about his fire-eating, like his paper-folding, was not that he could do it but that he wanted to, a grown man; but without doubt he made the world a toy to her; made a toy
of
her some days, too – she the top, he the whip – dancing and whirling her out of herself. Away from the mothering of Henry, she cut a confident and rousing figure. How could she not? She was a Stern Girl. An exceptional Stern Girl in that she had a man who loved her. On occasions, seeing her abroad, walking briskly, throwing her head back in conversation, shaking her hair, glittering with laughter –
light!
– Henry felt she had betrayed him. Where were the migraines now?
    So was it his – heavy Henry’s – fault? If it wasn’t for him she would end it, she had said, but was she saying what she didn’t mean? Was existence a fearful thing to her, to be endured only for his sake, only when she
was with him
. Was that it? Did he draw all lightness out of her? The opposite of his father, was he? The one dispelling all oppression from a room, the other taking it everywhere he went? Certainly when Ekaterina described to Henry some event he had seen with his own eyes, or had heard about from someone else, she made it, as though for his behoof – as though that was the obligation she felt to his oppressive nature – more shocking, more humiliating or depressing, more negatively melodramatic, than it had actually been. She grew physically heavier in the telling it as well. Extremity of expression hung in jowls from her face, inordinacy of vocabulary thickened her neck. ‘I thought I’d
die
, Henry,’ she would say, gathering him into her offended bulk, actually underlining words with her fingers as she spoke, ‘I thought it was the
end
of me. Where this leaves me
now
, I have
no
idea,
none
. Maybe
something
will