The Haunting of Henry Twist

by Rebecca F. John

  By night, while the workers sleep, London is transformed into an enormous playground. Henry, Matilda, and Grayson are au fait with this only because of their association with Monty, who is rich enough to secure invitations to the treasure hunts or swimming parties the newspapers attribute to that wealthy bunch they have dubbed the Bright Young People. They do not get invited. Though Henry wishes now, idly, that they could stumble upon one of those Chelsea or Mayfair gangs, fancy-dressed and tipsy and piling into a fleet of cars to zoom out to the country and drink away whatever worries they think they have. He wishes he could get tangled up in one of their fantasies, and allow a mob of hysterical girls to dress him up as Mozart or King George or an Indian chief, and stride around some country mansion trailing flirts and admirers behind him. He wishes himself into an easier existence.

  The wish, though, is an empty one. He doesn’t really want to drink Ruby away. And with his next footstep he finds himself certain that if he saw such a gang the very next time he turned a corner, he wouldn’t even pause. He is going home, to what is left of his wife.

  Matilda, too, is thinking of parties – or rather, of being outside them.

  There was a time, before years of trying and failing, before years of blame and awful silences, when Matilda and Grayson had enjoyed these unquiet city hours. They would stand in the shadows of buildings, listening for the music within, wanting to enjoy it but unwilling to share each other with a room full of people to move nearer to its beat. They would shuffle together through the streets then, her head on his chest, improvising an awkward, forward-moving dance and laughing because, however awkward, it was theirs and only theirs. Matilda sighs. As so frequently happens when she drops accidentally into her memories, she wants now to reach around Henry and grasp Grayson’s fingers between her own. She looks for the slim span of his hand but, finding it hooked on the wedge of Henry’s shoulder blade, she is instantly repulsed by it again; by the way it hangs, limp, weak, off the proud strength of Henry’s bones.

  Not once since Ruby died has she seen Henry slump under the weight of it. Not once has she seen tears roll into his eyes. And she knows this is because he is strong, but there is a small, spiteful pulse, deep in the core of her brain, which forces her to wonder if maybe he isn’t as devastated as everyone supposes he is; which wonders – though she scrunches her eyes shut when it surfaces and tries to persuade herself that the idea does not float there – if there might be a chance.

  It does not occur to Matilda that she has always wanted what she cannot have. In childhood, she would leave her evening meals to waste whilst she scurried round the table, pinching tastes off everyone else’s plates. In her teenage years, she would chase herself into loneliness by trading other girls’ secrets or eyeing other girls’ boys. In early adulthood, she filled her head with impossible ideals and refused to settle for anything less: she would go on to teach only if it was at the academy she’d happened past that time, with the little windows that flashed just so as the sun dropped and turned the trees to magenta, and the ivy that scampered all the way to the roofs, and that doorway you could only imagine emerging from in a wedding dress; she would marry only if the man who asked her was five feet eleven inches tall, and had a pleasant nose, and ears which did not protrude too much, and eyes which slanted downwards just enough to call to mind a kindly dog but not so much as to appear miserable. Grayson had matched that description. She’d been lucky to find a man who did. But then, for all her planning, none of it had happened as she had expected it to. None of it. Gray, it transpired, was not the candidate she had advertised for.

  Matilda lets him know that every day. It is Henry she wants. And she refuses to delve far enough inside herself to question how or why, or to realise that she didn’t know she wanted him at all, until Monty showed her. She remembers the revelation now as he presented it to her – as though it were fact. With his gentle hints, his explanatory looks, Monty was not suggesting the possibility of her feelings for Henry, he was making her understand them. And Matilda did not notice that the deeper she sunk, the more buoyant Monty’s mood became. She was too busy struggling to stay afloat.

  They’d met Monty at a party, she and Gray, three years earlier. They got talking over the hectic blare of a particularly bad band and he’d soothed their fractious moods with talk of a private garden he owned, not so far away, which he allowed his friends the use of. It was, he claimed, cupping an arm around Grayson’s shoulders, a corner of paradise crammed into London’s commotion. And he was right. They visited that very night and were introduced to a young couple they found lounging over a basket of half-emptied wine bottles. Matilda has no recollection now of what they looked like, that couple, but they were entertaining, she remembers, and not so impressive as to intimidate Matilda, and it seemed, for a while, that whiling away easy, romantic evenings in the garden with them might bring she and Gray closer together again. That was why when, months later, that couple argued themselves through the gates one final time and Monty ushered Henry and Ruby through it in their place, Matilda was so disappointed.

  They were too comfortable together, this new couple; too tactile. And far too beautiful. She feared that Ruby would draw Grayson’s eye away from her. Until, that was, Monty commented quietly one day on how closely she was watching Henry. She stopped worrying then about the direction in which Gray’s eye was travelling.

  After that – in the long days and nights they spent, the five of them, sitting between the high garden walls, picnicking under the tree, sleeping in the squares of sunlight which managed to push through the mesh of buildings, getting drunk as the mottled moon cruised overhead – Monty whispered all manner of surprising things to her. Later still, he started appearing in her dreams: the white tufts of his hair; his skeletally thin face; his pale, starry eyes. His laughter had echoed through the depths of her nights, and bit by bit, he had made her understand. Montague Thornton-Wells, he had assured her, is a man who knows about love. And what he knows about Matilda is that Grayson was never the right choice for her. Henry Twist is the man she should have been with all along.

  As they approach Henry’s flat, Matilda steps slower. She gazes after a motorcar as it bumbles away. She lingers at the park railings, pretending she has seen some animal nosing through the dark. And the men slow with her, not thinking about it, not considering that she is only eking out the minutes she can spend with the length of her arm curled into the crook of Henry’s, pretending that Grayson is not there at all. Imagining, in a careless way, what it might be like if he had died too.

  Henry allows himself to be steered up his front steps like an invalid. He pauses for Matilda to open the door and follows her into the hall. He leans against the doorframe while she turns on the lamps in the front room and draws the curtains. He watches the floorboards while she fusses around, unable to look up and see another woman occupying that space. Exchanging words with her is impossible, so he waits. Then, when she has touched his face too many times, and Grayson has fidgeted in the doorway and suggested they leave, and they have let themselves out and squabbled their way down the steps – ‘You have to let him be, Tilda.’ ‘Mind your own business, Grayson.’ – he turns off the lamps and opens the curtains. He breathes out.

  Streetlamps defend the street below against the relentless shove of darkness and enough of their gentle yellow spread reaches Henry’s window for him to see the room by. He stands in the curve of the bay and studies the light which falls across the crumpled foot of the bed, settles on the sharpest edges of the wardrobe to his right, the dressing table to his left, and slips away between the cracks of the floorboards. Near the fireplace – again to his left, but nearer the window – there is a deep green two-seater settee, the cushions still plump with disuse. On top of the fireplace are two framed photographs: one of Henry and Ruby on their wedding day; the other of Ruby as a child, sitting with her sister at her parents’ feet, a Welsh wind chopping up the sea behind them. There is no photograph of Henry’s family. Scattered acr
oss the dressing table are Ruby’s hairbrush, her powder, her metal lip-tracer, and, pushed far into the corner, the lid removed and lost, the round tin of Henry’s hair cream. He has not used it in a week.

  The streetlamps pick out the shiny items, the larger surfaces. They do not find the small, empty chair pushed under the dressing table, though. They do not illuminate the wooden back of that shaky object, and so Henry concentrates on pulling the details of it out of the gloom; remembering the way Ruby used to sit on it, her legs crossed at the ankles; remembering the way it used to creak whenever she shuffled closer to the mirror. He traces the shape of her into the darkness. And this is not healthy, he knows, but he does it anyway: he begins working like an artist, thinking out the colours of her, the textures, the sweet vanilla scent of her perfume, the way she would sit in that mirror and fiddle and fiddle with the hair she could not quite bear to bob but wore forever curled and pinned away from her heart-shaped face. He works slowly, savouring his creation. He paints her into the long cherry dress which was her favourite, her arms and shoulders bared, her feet bunched up because she has not yet put on her shoes and they are cold. She is not quite three-dimensional. He continues his work, adding finishing touches to her hair, threading the different shades – some chestnut, some almost gold – through the darker brown.

  And slow minutes, or hours, later, he is still there, challenging himself to recall the exact difference in length between each of her fingers.

  Upstairs, Vivian and Herbert start bumping around and, passing over the point where a bronze helmet-shaped light fitting attaches to the ceiling, one or other of them sends its three glass bell shades swinging. Henry glimpses it as it sways into stillness. When he looks back to the dressing table chair, he finds the item empty again. It is as though the house is reminding him that they are waiting, Vivian and Herbert, Mr and Mrs Moss – Viv and Herb, as they call each other and like to be called.

  He shouldn’t keep them any longer. Them or Libby.

  He steps back through the hallway, outside, and around the side of the house to climb the staircase to the upstairs flat. They might have opened the interior dividing door, he and the Mosses, especially this morning, when Henry had knocked to ask a favour of the neighbours he and Ruby had so rarely spoken to; but it hadn’t felt right, considering how long it had been closed, and that neither party had suggested it.

  As the rain begins to fall, he puts his knuckles to the exterior door again and waits for someone to answer.

  When Vivian swings it open, she immediately lifts one erect finger to her lips to shush him. ‘She’s not long settled,’ she whispers. ‘Why don’t you come in?’

  ‘Thank you,’ Henry answers, ‘but I …’ He can converse with Vivian, just about, but he cannot sustain it for long.

  Vivian nods. ‘You’re tired. Of course. I’ll bring her through. At least come in out of that weather.’

  Henry takes one deliberate step inside and Vivian disappears to fetch his daughter. His daughter – the words do not come easily to him yet. He is not sure they ever will. It is so much more of a shock, to have a daughter with no mother than it would have been to have a son. He glances around the kitchen: at the pale blue paint on the cabinets, the rug trapped under the table, the blue and white patterned plates Vivian has lined up in every available space. The stove hurls out heat, which rolls away into the night because Viv did not trouble him to close the door and he is still standing between it and the frame. On top of the stove, a kettle and an iron warm. It is a homely room, Henry decides; a room a mother might have decorated.

  Perhaps Vivian will be the woman to ask for help when they crash, he and Libby, into the first of so many walls nature has stacked up between them.

  Vivian reappears, Libby slung low in her arms, and she and Henry creep through the series of awkward manoeuvres it takes to pass the sleeping baby over. Henry remains for a moment in the doorway, Libby held slightly away from his body, the rain falling heavier behind him.

  ‘You’ll know,’ Vivian says, pushing her hands into the front of her apron. ‘If there’s a problem, you’ll know.’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘You’ll see,’ she insists with a quiet smile. ‘Trust me.’

  And Henry wants to wrap his arms around her then, this prickly looking, certain little woman: not because of what she is saying, but because of what she is not saying. Sorry for your loss. Blessed is the corpse the rain falls on. All those things, uttered at so many other funerals, are not for his Ruby. Ruby. He wants to say her name over and over again, to anyone who will listen, because, what else is there to say which encompasses her so completely? On her headstone, he has opted only for

  Ruby Elizabeth Twist

  1901 – 1926

  Wife and Mother

  They had tried to persuade him into including a verse or something from the Bible – Matilda, Monty, the black-suited men he hadn’t seemed able to shake for so many hours. But, no. No, he had said. And Grayson had backed him up. What more could there be than this?

  Except, of course, sister and daughter. But he had not thought, at the time, and he doesn’t need to have met John or Elizabeth or Ida to know that they will not forgive him that lapse. He can only hope now that they will not travel to London to view his mistake. Ida has already vowed, in fast slanting writing, never to excuse him for burying her sister hundreds of miles from home. It might be, however, that the distance will keep them all from one more hurt, and he wants that for them, truly he does – the evasion of one more hurt.

  Moving back around the side of the house, Henry bends over Libby, catching thick trickles of water on his neck and shoulders and letting them soak into his shirt. Libby sleeps, bundled into four white layers of clothing and pressed to his chest. She is so small and light that, were he not able to see her – the frowning, not-yet-grown eyebrows; the scrunch of tiny nose; the tear caught in the corner of one closed eye – he would doubt he was holding anything at all. His eyes stay trained on her, constantly surprised by her existence, until he reaches the corner of the house. There, he lifts them to the street, searching the night for anyone who might be a witness.

  The doctor had told him he couldn’t take her from the hospital: that she was too weak; that she needed a mother; that the child was lucky to have an aunt who might take over the role. And Henry had watched this man – who had been quick and confident enough to cut his daughter from his wife’s belly; who, with every word he spoke, gave a wave of those unnaturally long, hairless hands he used to preserve lives – and fought the urge to contradict every well-considered, educated remark he made.

  Ruby’s child could do nothing but survive. Henry was certain of that. And she would do so with her father. That was why he had taken her.

  Far down the road, a couple stride further into the darkness, hands locked, their legs moving together, their uneven shadows springing into existence as they pass under streetlamps then lurching out in the blacker stretches between the posts. They disappear around a corner and Henry sighs and moves on again. They have no interest in his daughter. They have not come to take her away. The street is empty.

  The park, though, is huge and unknowable and could be concealing more or less anything. Reaching the bottom step, he stops and squints into the black columns between the trees. He senses a movement there beyond the usual shuffling of the wind over grass and water; a purposeful movement. Someone has seen him, he can feel it. Panic jolts down his throat to pierce his stomach. He thinks he is going to vomit. It is his greatest fear now that someone, some doctor or official, will come to reclaim Libby. Despite all his smaller worries, he is loosely aware that, whatever the circumstances, this is what learning to be a father means – the acceptance of constant fear – but since he has no one to share it with, he means to fight it. And fight it hard.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he calls, the words bounding through the night.

  And immediately, without self-consciousness, without shame, a man takes a forward step out of
the shadows.

  He is tall, about Henry’s equal, but slighter. His coat is a tad too big and stands emptily out at the shoulders. His newsboy is pulled so low that his eyes are lost beneath its stiffened peak, but the deep spill of a bruise remains visible, leaking out from his nose and down towards his earlobe and the hinge of his jaw. His hands are bunched into the pockets of worn brown trousers which grow darker spot by spot as the rain hammers heavier. He bares his hands and, holding his arms out to his sides, palms up, shrugs before he speaks.

  ‘Henry?’ he asks.

  Henry reverses slowly up the five steps which lead to his front door, just to stand higher than this stranger who knows his name, and once he feels the shelter of the house behind him, its three high storeys keeping the cloudburst off his back, he straightens his shoulders and curls Libby up into the dip of his neck. One hand presses her close. The other makes a fist at his side, his fingers aching with the effort of staying calm.

  ‘You didn’t answer my question,’ he says.

  The man pushes his cap back and Henry sees that he is frowning as he feels his way up and down his body with slaps of his hands. Finding nothing, he removes his cap completely and studies the inside of it before flipping it on again.

  ‘Jack Turner,’ he says eventually.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘As sure as I can be.’

  There is a stillness to this man which appears to run right to his middle. Even when he moves, he does so leisurely, as if he has just woken and the lethargy of sleep has not yet worn off. His failure to recall his own identity does not seem to trouble him.