The Haunting of Henry Twist

by Rebecca F. John

  ‘How do you know my name?’ Henry asks.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  They stand, the width of the road apart, and as Jack pushes his hands into his pockets and takes a couple of languid paces back and forth, looking up at the house and frowning again, Henry feels a flicker of recognition. Was Jack already here when Matilda and Grayson brought him home? He can’t be sure. But there’s something familiar in the way he stands, perhaps; not the physical shape of him, but the attitude, open and easy in the quickening shower.

  Jack Turner, as he claims to be called, looks like a man who is pleased with the world; like a man who takes pleasure in every new experience. And it makes Henry uncomfortable. She used to be that way.

  ‘Why are you waiting here?’

  Jack squints at Henry as though he had forgotten he was there. He smiles. ‘I liked your home,’ he answers.

  ‘I’d like you to leave,’ Henry says. He is sure suddenly that Jack Turner means to harm him. There is no other explanation, though he fumbles for one.

  Jack lowers his head, as though he is bowing to Henry, and without another word, walks away, removing his cap as he goes so that his wetted brown hair grows instantly wavier. He swings the cap at his side. His stride is light and unhurried. When he is nearly out of sight, he begins whistling a tune, scattering cheerful notes in amongst the silvery jets of rain-water, and Henry lets himself into the flat.

  ‘It’s fine,’ he murmurs to Libby. ‘It’s nothing to worry about. He’s gone now. He’s gone.’

  Later that night, though – when Libby has woken for the umpteenth time, grumbled, wailed, been fed and dropped into sleep again – Henry finds himself sneaking to the window and peering out through the beaded glass in search of the man he sent away. He sleeps only sporadically, and each time the baby wakes him, he returns to the window. Sometimes, he thinks he sees Jack – the phantom outline of him dashing into the shadows, the wet sag of his trousers over his scuffed boots, the shine of his curls in the still-falling rain. Other times, he scans the diminishing lines of pavement to left and right until he is dizzy with it before wrapping himself back into his blankets and attempting to recapture his taunting dreams.

  Whether he sees some sign of Jack Turner or not, though, in those first moments of waking, as his eyes adjust to the intimate, lonely dark of the room, he is sure he hears two steady sounds beyond Libby’s cries: the tapping of the rain on the windowpane; and, lacing through that insistent beat, a man’s voice, whistling.

  THREADNEEDLE STREET

  Less than a week later, he returns to work. Ruby is haunting the flat. She is held within every crease of it: the loose sheets of writing paper flapping along the windowsill, left there, probably, so she could write home later that day; an errant thumb-print on the mirror-glass; the chip she made in the skirting board by throwing a shoe at him, heel-first, during an argument about, of all things, the fact that they had not argued in a while. She worried about things like that, Ruby. Their arguments, she said, were as important as their lovemaking. She believed it when she warned him that if you reached the point where you could no longer entice yourself to argue, well, then there wasn’t very much left of your soul.

  Henry had laughed at that claim. A soul was a far more complicated apparatus than she allowed for. Not that he’d said that to her. Sometimes, he felt the twelve years between them, but he would never once admit to it.

  He rides the Tube most of the way to the bank. His Tube journeys are his substitute for the nights Libby wakes through: they jolt him in and out of sleep. Before that, though, he parcels himself into his suit and sneaks Libby upstairs in the inky well of early morning. Then, having delivered her with whispered thanks to his neighbour and a kiss of his daughter’s hand, he cuts across the park to the underground entrance. Vivian has agreed to care for Libby through the menacing January days, and he is appreciative.

  On those days when the sun doesn’t puncture the clouds, he sees Ruby more frequently, more clearly. He could count her eyelashes on a dull afternoon.

  In the park, he passes a memorial bench. It is mostly unused: nearly a decade passed and memories and ghosts still keep people away. Now and then, though, he sees a man resting there, a trouser leg tacked up or the arm of a coat dangling hollowly over a sown-flat shirt sleeve, trying not to remember how it felt, six, seven, eight years ago, to sit watching the trees under the illusion of healing. He nods to them on those infrequent instances, and sometimes they nod back or hold out a cigarette to him, inviting him to share in forgetting. Sometimes, they are incapable even of that.

  Henry could avoid the bench on the way home – he could avoid it altogether – but he doesn’t. Occasionally, you need to remember why you have to forget.

  It is not the same with Ruby. Grief, he thinks, is as unique in each of its incarnations as any one person is in comparison to the next. His grief for Ruby is loud inside him. And yet, he has not crumbled as he thought he would. Now, it is as though his heart has paused partway through shattering and is held forever in a new fragmentary state, its brittle splinters scattered through his chest, like stitches, keeping the rest of him together.

  This, he is sure, is the only reason he can manage getting to work and stooping over his ledgers and moving his hand as though he is recording words and figures that mean anything.

  For the larger part of a year, since Churchill ushered them back into the gold standard, conversation at the bank has been of approaching disaster. Henry, though, has never managed to muster much enthusiasm for the doom talk that shoots off the brims of top hats and filters down into the gossip of his fellow clerks. Within the institution, they are seen as a lowly sort, clerks, and he doesn’t mind. He doesn’t need to be ‘in the know’ as some do – like O’Keefe and Green and even Yeoman, thrusting their noses up and pretending at importance because they’ve risen above the average working man. Henry’s aptitude for numbers had dropped him into banking before the war, and really, he should never have come back. He has no patience for the politics, the men who come blustering in and out worrying endlessly that this estate has been carved up, or that that house has been sold in so-many bits, or that this family has lost its god-damned-priceless history on account of the farms. Agriculture is a dirty word at the bank, but, if anything, Henry has always relished it. Its four hard syllables have the lumpy swell of unspoiled land embedded within them, and he has spent whole days before now lining other people’s wealth up into orderly columns and dreaming of shovels being thrust into wet soil and marches over muddy hillsides.

  After particularly tedious days he would try to coax Ruby into returning to Wales, where they could build a home of their own in the verdant roots of a valley invented entirely in Henry’s mind. But Ruby wouldn’t be enticed. You don’t know anything about living off the land, she would say. Besides, she had spent most of her life getting out; she certainly wasn’t going back voluntarily. Not when she had all this.

  And that is why he defied the Faircloughs and buried her under London – because she loved the city.

  He does not think, any more, about staying at the bank or leaving the bank or what will come next. He does not think of the place at all once he steps out through its doors onto Threadneedle Street. Keeping his eyes down to avoid the attentions of the waistcoated, shiny-shoed droves – men who know him well and yet distantly enough to still ask after Ruby – he heads towards heavier traffic, then strides along with its fumy flow as the Morris Oxfords push their bullnose fronts into the paths of beeping Baby Austins and black Model Ts. He drops down into the cocoon of the Tube and stands braced against the train’s electrical shudder, inhaling other people’s smoke without complaint though he has never smoked himself. Despite it not yet being six o’clock, he emerges, long after his eyes have adjusted to the stuttering artificial light below ground, into the murk of near-night and crosses the park again.

  And it feels much the same, this moving through the city, as moving through the working day. Everything which su
rrounds him shares the blurry quality he imagines a page of text presented his father with when viewed without his spectacles. All the detail is there, but bringing it into focus is impossible.

  There is one thing he does look out for during these journeys back and forth to Threadneedle Street, though. He does not intend it, but each time he turns a corner or crosses a road, he slows a little and peers around. Sometimes, he stops and puts his hands in his pockets as though seeking a wallet or a key, though he needs nothing. In the park especially, he watches every tree trunk, every hedgerow, hoping that a figure will emerge from behind them.

  He is looking for a man named Jack Turner, because he is sure, isn’t he, that he caught a flash of him on the Tube that first morning he returned to work. As a bump in the track shoved him into waking, Henry is positive he saw that strange chap stepping away down the carriage, his brown trousers slack about his legs, his newsboy tipped lazily back on his head, and he needs to know what the man wants with him. He means to get an answer out of him, the very next time he sees him. He very much means to get an answer.

  This evening, he does not go straight upstairs to collect Libby from Vivian. He lets himself, as quietly as possible, into the flat and locks the door behind him. In the hallway, he notices the soft smell of dust roaming on the air. It needs cleaning. The whole flat does. But he has no intention of doing it. He is not incapable; he looked after it himself before he met Ruby. Neither is he trying to preserve some fading scent of his wife, or the smudge her hand last made on the wardrobe door, or the shape of her sleeping body in the bed sheets – as he supposes other people might imagine if they visited. These are things his mind possesses; he does not need the proof. He simply cannot see the purpose now of anything so ordinary as cleaning.

  He wanders into the kitchen at the rear of the flat and momentarily considers making tea. Before lifting a cup or the kettle though, he wanders back into the hallway and through to the only other room he rents – the large, over-furnished square he and Ruby conducted their lives within.

  All their most important decisions were made here: where they should marry; whether they had always wanted children; what they should christen their first baby. Libby’s cot is wedged between the fireplace and the settee, where Ruby had insisted it must be positioned, sitting cross-legged on the bed, belly round but not yet enormous, and directing him to shove the cumbersome weight of it two inches this way then that way so she could watch his shoulder muscles tauten with the effort. It was only when he turned and caught her grinning to herself that he realised her game. By that point, he was sweating, and he rushed over to press her face into his clammy chest as punishment.

  He puts a hand to the place where her laughter blew against his skin and, when he looks back to the bed, sees an echo of her there, feet arranged sole to sole so that she could rest her arms in her lap and cradle the growing protrusion of their daughter. He begins again his new practice of applying specifics to the memory. Her hair was free, he knows, falling in unshaped curls which tightened into spirals at their ends. Her face was bare, showing the weak red scar on her left temple. She pursed her lips at him and said, ‘What? I’m not allowed to ogle my own husband?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have you ogling anyone else.’

  ‘Exactly,’ she replied. ‘Now, ogle me back.’

  It is not painful, this remembering. It happens by some unknown, perhaps inherent, process, and Henry wonders if it might be a mechanism of grief. What he will come to understand, though, is that really it has nothing to do with grief at all – it is only another symptom of needing someone.

  Removing his jacket and looping his tie over his head, he drifts back into the hallway and climbs to the top of the stairs. There he sits, back to the wall, knees bent into a pyramid, and puts his ear against the heavy dividing door. Heat from the Mosses’ flat bleeds through the thick wood. Seeping cold rises towards him from his right and trickles along his arm and around his neck. He is a man of halves: half warm, half cold; half anguished, half euphoric; half here, half staggering lost through the mists of a January morning in search of his dying wife.

  He listens to the wordless sounds of Vivian and Herb’s conversation lifting and falling and sometimes breaking off. Even at their age, they have the luxury of time to fill.

  Libby is silent. She sleeps long and deep with Viv, but Henry doesn’t fret about this. It is comforting up there in the always-warm rooms, Viv and Herb’s gentle voices revolving around her like the easy eddying of water. Their movements are slow and calming, smoothed by maturity. He guesses they are both into their seventies, though Herb is frailer than Viv. Where Herb has started to shrink in on himself, Viv has retained, or developed, a harder edge. They speak his wife’s name in the same generous tone, though. Did he mind, Herb had asked, reaching up to clap a palm to Henry’s shoulder, if they said Ruby’s name to the child now and then, so she could get used to hearing it? Henry had not known how to respond and Herb had explained himself slowly: things could get difficult, he said, when names stopped being spoken; he’d seen it happen.

  Henry wondered then, for the first time, if they had lost a child to the war. He’d thought them saved from that – any child of theirs would surely have been approaching middle age ten years ago – but there was something in the old man’s greying eyes that told him otherwise. Something, too, in the way Viv held Libby. And anyway, look at him, Henry – by the time Libby turned twenty, he would be fifty-six.

  He did not enquire about the possibility of a son: a Gunner or a Corporal or a Sergeant Moss who never made it home. He knows better than that.

  He dislodges a layer of dust with his foot and a little shower of it puffs outwards before sprinkling back down onto the steps. He watches it resettle, then straightens an index finger and with the tip exposes the wood beneath by carving out four letters:

  R u b y

  And once the letters are there, formed, he can’t help but repeat them. And before long, he is crouched halfway down the staircase, writing Ruby Ruby Ruby in perfect rows around the two distorted imprints his legs make where he kneels.

  It is then that Matilda knocks the door. He knows it is Matilda because she calls as she knocks. He stops and stands, rubbing his hand in the seat of his trousers. He curses himself for turning on the lamp in the hallway and emitting evidence of his presence. He wants to stay silent and wait for her to leave, but he is casting a giant’s shadow across the flat and he knows she will see it if she so much as glances through the window.

  ‘Henry,’ she calls, over and over, hardly stopping for breath.

  When he opens the door, her fist is raised, poised to bang the black paint again. She crinkles her forehead in an expression of sympathy.

  ‘Henry,’ she says. ‘Darling, Henry. Where have you been?’

  Without invitation, she enters, shuffling past him in the doorway and stepping through to the front room. Her heels thump the floorboards. Her dress swishes noisily and her coat swings wide about her legs. She is thunderous in his quiet space. She is, as always, too much.

  ‘Working,’ he answers, but Matilda does not react to this as he expects her to, with talk of it being too soon and appeals for him to come and stay with her and Grayson. She is frozen in the doorway, one hand to the frame, the other to her mouth. Side on, her face is flat, the cheekbones lengthy and wide enough to eclipse her bony features. Henry compares the pointed bridge of her nose to the fleshier design of Ruby’s and finds Matilda’s face wanting in anything resembling friendliness. It is a deficiency he has never before noticed.

  ‘Oh, Henry,’ she mutters finally. ‘It’s still here. Why didn’t you tell me? I could have had it removed.’

  Not knowing what she is referring to and lacking the desire to find out, Henry does not respond.

  ‘You don’t have to be embarrassed. I understand why you’d want to keep it. Really. It’s just, don’t you think it would be better, to pass it on to someone who can make use of it?’

  He frowns, waits.


  ‘The cot,’ Matilda says.

  Henry straightens up, pinches his lips between a thumb and forefinger, then pushes his hands into his trouser pockets. He hadn’t wanted to say this to anyone – not even Tilda and Gray. It had felt safer for her to be a secret, shared only with Viv and Herb, because everyone else had made an assumption he hadn’t felt able to correct, and the doctor had said he mustn’t think selfishly about keeping her for himself, and he was sure the man had reported him by now for abducting his own child.

  ‘It’s for Libby,’ he says.

  ‘Libby,’ Matilda repeats. ‘You would have had a girl.’

  Henry sees her tears growing, glinting, and speaks quickly. ‘We did have a girl. But listen, please, don’t tell anyone. They told me not to bring her home, and that I had to give her to Ida, and –’ He swallows the panic in his voice and closes his eyes. ‘I’m afraid someone will take her away.’

  Matilda moves towards him and wraps a hand around his forearm. ‘Where is she now, Henry?’

  ‘Upstairs.’

  ‘Upstairs? Then go and get her.’

  It is obvious she doesn’t believe him. Her fingers are at her mouth and she chews at her thumbnail, looking up at him out of a newly pale face.

  When, five short minutes later, he returns with the sleeping baby hugged to his chest, she is paler still, but she smiles wide at the sight of Libby, bundled in wool, and her tears spill abundantly then. Precisely as Henry had hoped they wouldn’t.

  ‘You called her Libby,’ she says, scooping the little girl to her breast.

  ‘It’s the name her mother chose,’ Henry replies.

  ‘Libby Twist.’

  ‘Elizabeth Ruby Twist. Libby for short.’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Matilda answers, but she doesn’t seem to be listening. She is staring down at Libby, her tears still falling, and there is a look about her eyes that Henry can’t quite fathom. He’s never seen it on Matilda before. Though he is reminded, loosely, of something or someone: perhaps his mother. ‘She’s perfect. It’s perfect,’ Matilda says, and when she says ‘it’, Henry is not entirely sure what she is referring to.