Henry Henry by Allen Bratton

Author:Allen Bratton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Unnamed Press

NINETEEN

Richard was born on the Feast of the Epiphany, which commemorated the manifestation of God as a child, the revelation of Christ’s divinity to the three kings of Orient. To Richard this had meant something: perhaps it would have been going too far to say that he was literally the second coming of Christ, but he believed he was at least touched by divinity. When he was in good health, he gave the most tremendous birthday parties. Hal had never been near one—Henry would have rather he died—but Richard, ill in bed, had shown him the pictures. By then Hal had heard enough from Henry that he could articulate, inwardly, the process of degradation that had turned the Richard in the pictures into the Richard holding the pictures. Hal still envied him: at least Richard had had the pleasure before the suffering. What had Henry had? His honor, Hal supposed; good reputation.

And on Twelfth Night Henry had his own parties, which he did allow Hal to attend, once he was old enough to make conversation with adults. Richard would have been unimpressed. The parties were just like the ones Henry had given as a teenager, adapted for his cohort’s decline into middle age. Drinks, nibbles, light music, influential people with mutual interests: lowering taxes on the wealthy, raising taxes on the poor, deregulating the markets, regulating immigration, booting scroungers off the dole, increasing MP expense allowances, buying property, letting property, selling property, buying horses, breeding horses, horse shows, horse races, sailing races, rowing, polo, cricket, shooting, complaining about their wives, cheating on their wives, divorcing their wives, marrying their mistresses, cheating on the wives who had once been their mistresses, getting their sons into Eton and Oxford, golf. Henry forgave them their foibles because he believed they were his creatures. He said to them, affably, “Surely it’s in everyone’s best interest … ,” “Surely we can all agree …” Then they did their work; then Henry invited them to his parties, allowing them for a few hours the pleasure of feeling that the privilege not afforded to them by birth was granted now as a reward for their unmoving meanness. Henry didn’t understand that he was their creature also: that in exchange for the assurance of their fealty, he surrendered History and Tradition to the crude little upstarts who, behind closed doors through which Henry would never pass, made things really happen.

Tonight, there were no stars, only clouds like a marble slab laid on top of the skyline. As Hal walked up the King’s Road toward his father’s house, it began to snow. The pavement grew a white carpet that showed the imprint of his brogues. He hadn’t a hat or hood, just the jacket with the leaking lining and his favorite fisherman’s jumper. The tiles in the hall were stained with the sludge tracked in by the guests; the cloakroom smelled like damp wool. As he passed a mirror, he saw how the snowflakes in his hair had melted but stayed clinging in droplets, shining with refracted light.

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