The Haunting of Henry Twist

by Rebecca F. John

  They go through and sit in the window, as tiny and close – it would seem to any onlooker – as a new family under the moonless sky. But Henry and Matilda are miles apart really. Matilda prickles with hope while Henry is made serene by his daughter’s proximity. Matilda plans for a future while Henry mourns the one he’s lost.

  ‘Have you got a nurse,’ she asks, ‘to feed her?’

  Henry does not explain that he has been guessing, thus far, at how to tend a baby. He does not mention that he spent more than an hour deciding whether he should give her Liebig’s formula or SMA, and that in the end his choice was without reason; that at first he rubbed the stuff onto her tongue with a little finger, ignorant of whether she could suck or swallow; that when he is completely clueless he probes the old woman upstairs for advice, though he has never asked her whether she raised a child of her own.

  Libby half-wakes with a short clucking sound and Matilda hands her, slowly, back to Henry.

  ‘Gray and I wanted children, you know,’ she confides.

  ‘It’s not too late.’

  ‘I’m forty-one years old, Henry. Besides, we hoped for years. It just didn’t happen. Eventually, we gave up hoping.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Yes, anyway …’ She gives a little shake of her head, as though she is trying to rouse herself from a deep sleep. ‘I did come here for a reason.’

  ‘To check up on me,’ Henry says and, made comfortable now by Libby’s heart beating against him, he almost smiles. Almost. He steps back and forth in front of Matilda, bobbing the baby up and down as she squawks and punches the air. She does not cry often and Henry has wondered if this is normal, but he will not risk visiting a doctor to ask. She seems healthy enough to him, despite her size. And hasn’t Vivian promised him he will know if there’s a problem? He has no option but to believe her.

  ‘To tell you that there’s a party on Friday,’ Matilda says. ‘And that you must come.’

  ‘I can’t go to a party.’

  ‘Of course you can. You’ll have to some time. There’s no occasion or anything, it’s just, you know what that bright young lot are like, and well, Monty’s in with them apparently, so there we go. I think it might just be because it’s the first of the month. You don’t have to stay long, but you do have to speak to people at some point.’

  ‘I’m speaking to you.’

  ‘Yes, and don’t think I haven’t noticed it’s the first time.’ Matilda stands and rests a hand on Libby’s back to still Henry. He obliges. ‘You’re doing well, but you mustn’t let yourself get lonely.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Of course you are … So, Friday,’ Matilda says. ‘Midnight. I’ll pop an invitation in so you have the address. Oh, and there’s a theme. Everyone wears white.’ Then, though the effort it costs her verges on painful, she kisses Henry’s cheek and lets herself out of the flat.

  From the pavement, she watches him pull the curtains. A pillar of muted lamplight shows at their centre, where the fabric does not quite meet, and Matilda stands in the bitter night and waits to catch glimpses of his shadow as he moves around the room. A baby! There’s a baby! She cannot calm the thrashing of her heart. She cannot grasp how she has persuaded herself to stand and walk out of his home when he so badly needs her. And he does need her now. Now more than ever. He can’t raise a baby alone. And here she is, and here is what she has longed for, and surely there is nothing to stop her from taking it now – though of course it must all be done well, sensitively. For tonight, she must content herself only with one more glimpse of him through a window.

  But she does not get it. The light does not fall right. And long after her hands and feet have started to sting with the cold, she submits and turns to walk away.

  With every forward pace, though, she wonders if Grayson will let her go, when the time comes. Will he give her up to a better man, or will he fight for her?

  MIDNIGHT WALKS

  He begins wrapping Libby into her pram and pushing her through the depths of London’s early hours, where they might just be safe. He has begun to worry for her health, being always indoors, and he cannot risk taking her outside in daylight. Anyone might see them, then. Anyone might grow suspicious of a man alone with a child so young, report him to the authorities, congratulate themselves for doing their civic duty as his baby is stolen from him. And so he waits for the night to age, for the day’s innocence to be chased off by drinkers and party-goers and women with a price, before he walks Libby through the city.

  Ruby would laugh at his caution; at the inverted logic of it. Hadn’t Ruby laughed all his worries away? Hadn’t she tried to hide all her own from him? One flat Saturday, when she was experiencing the very first flutterings of her pregnancy, they had taken a stroll around Regent’s Zoo. The place was quiet, emptied by the scowling threat of rain, but Ruby had thrown back her head and squinted at the clouds and decided that it would ‘hold off, for an hour or two at least’, so they had stayed. And it was them alone who stood and watched the Arabian oryx dropping their masked faces and using their horns as fencing swords, who laughed as the orangutan scratched at the orange globe of his belly, who marvelled at the size of the polar bears as they rose onto their hind legs to sniff out their dinner.

  Ruby was transfixed by the polar bears.

  ‘She must be eight foot tall,’ she said, ‘standing up like that.’

  ‘How do you know she’s a she?’ Henry asked.

  Ruby smiled and, sliding one arm around his waist, tilted her head onto his chest. ‘Oh, she has to be a she,’ she answered quietly. ‘Look how powerful she is. I’d love to be a polar bear.’

  ‘You would?’

  She turned to look up at him. ‘Don’t you laugh at me, Twist!’ she warned, screwing a knuckle into the gap between two of his ribs.

  He wriggled away from her, one hand still at the small of her back. ‘All right, all right. I’m not.’ They settled into each other again. ‘Why do you want to be a polar bear?’

  There was a long silence as they watched the two bears, startlingly white against their sandy enclosure, trundle towards their feeding cage on too-big paws then rise up again, their triangular heads searching the bars, their wide black noses pushing at the air.

  ‘Because,’ she said eventually, ‘when you’re that strong, you mustn’t be afraid of anything.’

  It was probably the closest Ruby ever came to admitting being scared. Her bravery was something she prided herself on. But Henry came to know it, her fear: it was what prompted her anger, what woke her at night, what caused her to stand straighter when she had an audience. It was what made other people think she was the most confident woman in all of London.

  He lets Libby’s pram roll to a stop when he realises that, without thinking about it, he has walked all the way to Regent’s Zoo. He can see nothing from here. He stands at an exterior wall and pauses, his ears searching the night for the sound of some animal within. What he needs now is life. Just that. Life: the affirmation of it. Overhead, the moon dips and weaves between the clouds in a complicated game of hide-and-seek, lighting then darkening the world below. Henry waits in the shadows, breath held, for another thread of moonlight to find him. And God, doesn’t he long to be found. That’s what Ruby had done for him – she had found him sinking in memories of mud, and held onto him, and now, without her, he is lost again.

  Henry closes his eyes and reaches once more for a sound, a shuffle of evidence to prove that he has company. He had done the same thing in France, hunkering low in the dark and searching for a stifled cough or sob in the quiet chorus of the night. Then, he had needed to confirm that there were still men alive out there. Now, he needs only to confirm that he is. He waits. And maybe a minute later he thinks he hears it: a deep-throated, meaty kind of bellow that he decides must be coming from the camel enclosure. He can compare the sound only to something demonic, but it is issuing from another living animal, and it relaxes him enough to slow his breathing, to persuade him to open his
eyes. And what he sees when he does, far along the street, is the figure of a man: a tall man, a slight man, his hands shoved into his pockets as he walks away, trailing a whistled tune behind him.

  ‘Jack,’ he breathes.

  But Henry cannot move more than two steps to chase after him. He is not sure, any more, why he should want to. This is not the anger he was expecting to feel. There is no surge of fury to entice him to run Jack Turner down, as he’d imagined he would, and beat answers out of him. There is no pounding temptation, rushing through his blood, to take action. Henry is motivated only to stand and watch him saunter through the city, and he is shocked by this passivity. It is born, undeniably, of relief. But why, why should this stranger in an oversized coat bring him relief? He cannot account for it.

  From her pram, Libby lets out a whimper. Perhaps she is beginning to feel the cold. Or perhaps, being able to view only the shifting sky from where she lies, she feels she has been abandoned. Henry returns to the front of the pram to allow his daughter to see him, then, dropping himself into a crouch, puts his hand to the soft protrusion of her belly. She is so delicate that he could injure her with just two fingers. She is so perfect that he aches just to look at her. And that is why he is terrified of being her father – because she is perfect and delicate and he doesn’t know if he can protect her from the world.

  ‘We’ll go home, shall we?’ he asks her, the way Ruby would have done, the question turned about on itself. He experiments with this, sometimes; with constructing sentences as Ruby did. He wants Libby to know the cadences of her mother, of herself.

  Libby considers him seriously, those little eyes filled with some unknowable logic.

  ‘Yes, we’ll go home.’ He curls his hands around the pram’s handles. ‘Home,’ he says as he steps forwards. ‘Just me and you.’

  Though he’s not entirely sure why, some part of him thinks he should invite Jack to come with them: to warm himself at the fire or drink a cup of tea. But when he lifts his head to check how far down the street he has gone, there is no trace of Jack Turner.

  The man has disappeared.

  He reappears though, for fleeting visits. He does not leave Henry alone. When Henry rides the Tube to and from work, he dances on and off it, never venturing close enough for Henry to call out to him. On Threadneedle Street, Henry catches glimpses of him peacocking through the crowds. When Henry sets out on his midnight walks, he is sure Jack follows him, echoing his footsteps, managing to conceal himself for the most part but neglecting, now and then, to hide the tell-tale stretch of his shadow. He becomes Henry’s very own phantom.

  And Henry begins to welcome the arrangement.

  He hadn’t realised it until tonight, when he was disappointed to see nothing of Jack on his walk, but truly he is growing comfortable with this haunting of his. It is all the companionship he is capable of just now.

  Wandering over to the window, he puts his nose to the glass and peers out past the fogging of his own breath. The rain has polished the road to a gleam, and Henry can see the house reflected back in it: a squat, faded version of reality. A woman stutters past, tipped forward on her heels, her head down as she swerves around the deeper puddles. He recalls a similar night, before they were married, when he’d stood waiting on Ruby like this. He had promised to take her somewhere fancy for drinks, though he was hoping, as he always did, that she would be too tired to venture out when she reached him. It was for that reason that he kept the flat a little too warm when he was expecting her. He wanted to lull her into staying here, where he could keep her for himself, where he wouldn’t have to tolerate the touch of other men’s want on her skin. The rain, working in his favour, was falling ruthlessly. He was anticipative of hours spent together; only together.

  He watched until Ruby dashed into view, her flowered umbrella bobbing and spinning above her head, her feet made invisible by the speed at which they covered the pavement, her handbag flapping in the gale that was picking up. The rest of the street was nothing more than a smudge the weather had made. But it was as though Ruby had been stencilled over it, she was so unspoiled, so sharp a picture. Henry could distinguish her every line: the red arcs of her lipstick; the black flicks at the corners of her eyes; the pendulum swing of a single pearl necklace across her chest. She was flustered – he could tell by the set of her shoulders. Pinched fingers holding her umbrella’s canopy in place, she swept her head left then right before scurrying across the road. There, she paused for a moment to flatten her skirt. Then, with a huff, she glanced up towards the window Henry was standing at. Foolish, he dropped to the floor, a soldier again caught in enemy sights. He blushed even as he did it. But he couldn’t possibly be observed waiting on her; couldn’t possibly show, though Ruby was shrewd enough to see it anyway, any sort of dependence on this bold little woman who had crashed into his life.

  He was still crouched on the floor when she rapped on the door. He was just striding into the hallway when she pushed open the letterbox and, putting her mouth to the new space, called, ‘Hurry up, Twist. I’m soaked through and desperate to take all my clothes off.’

  They had kissed there in the hallway, time punctuated only by the tap of rainwater on the tiles as it dropped from the hem of Ruby’s skirt, until Ruby had started to laugh.

  ‘What?’ Henry frowned down at her. ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s just … I spent two hours getting ready and look at me.’ With a shrug, she flicked at the dripping strands of her hair. ‘How is any woman supposed to impress her man when the sky is falling in?’

  Henry smirked. ‘Her man?’

  ‘Her man. A man.’ She rolled her eyes, slapping at his shoulders.

  Later, though, in bed, she ran a fingertip through the wing-shaped spread of hair across his chest and whispered, ‘You are mine, you know, Henry Twist. I chose you because I knew you were supposed to be.’

  Henry wakes to find himself curled in the window-seat, one hand opened to the woman who should be sitting alongside him, his palm cold and empty. Groaning against the old aches the war deposited through his limbs, along his spine, he sits up and stretches. These are the worst moments, the waking moments. He is not alone when he sleeps. Turning, he looks out into the night again, seeking another human being. There is always this now. Always this imprecise need … And then there, as if by some dark magic, as if Henry himself has summoned him, is Jack. He leans against the nearest street-lamp, his hands bunched in his pockets, one foot cocked up over the other, and he smiles and smiles and smiles.

  Henry knocks his knuckles against the glass. ‘Jack!’ he calls. ‘Jack!’ He is breathless suddenly. He is, he realises, excited. Here is his opportunity to invite Jack inside, to speak with him properly, to learn where he’s come from and where he’s going and what it is that he wants. But then Henry blinks, and in that trivial slice of a second when his eyes are closed, Jack vanishes. He vanishes so quickly that it is impossible he was ever there to begin with.

  And, ‘Ah,’ Henry says, because he needs to tell his sleeping daughter that he understands now. He does. He thinks he does. He’ll go to that party Matilda invited him to.

  THE WHITE PARTY

  He is somewhere in Belgravia, sloping about in search of the rear gates the invitation has specified he must enter by. He has been walking for half an hour, maybe a little more, and he is appreciative, as ever, of the gradual loosening of his muscles. Each time he steps his city’s streets, he remembers how much he loves this movement, just for the rhythmic pleasure of it. He ought to take more exercise, he thinks. And soon he will: one day, he’ll remove himself from the bank and never again sit to a desk. He’ll like that.

  Rounding a corner, invitation in hand, he checks the road name again and, when he looks up, realises he needn’t have. Ahead are a pair of wide black gates, their iron curls laced through with white ribbon. This is the place.

  He approaches quietly, not wanting to draw attention to himself, and eases the gate open. At the crest of a rol
ling grassy wave, the house floats: squat and old and riddled, lopsidedly, with climbing ivy. Henry does not need to have visited before to know that these people have money. It is apparent, too, that the gardens have been transformed for the party. He stands at the entrance to a dream.

  At the garden’s centre, moated by circularly arranged flower-beds, stand three ancient trees. They are leafless of course on this first day of February, but they are not bare. From every branch, loops of white material have been suspended, tied at each end so that they form low-hanging, soft-seated swings. Presently, three slender ladies lift their feet off the ground and sway themselves into action. Henry pauses a moment to watch their pendulous game, but his eye is soon drawn away, because everywhere there is something to look at. A white dance floor has been laid over the grass: it is slack, and possibly fashioned from bed sheets, but under the midnight sky it looks like footprinted snow. Tables and chairs have been spotted around, each draped in its own colourless cloth, and at the centre of each table, a single candle burns inside a glass jar. Four or five waiters swerve between multiple burning braziers, carrying shiny trays of white wine.

  ‘You made it,’ Grayson says, appearing at Henry’s side with a smile and offering his hand. They shake, touching shoulders briefly. ‘Thank God. This isn’t for me at all. They were silly-drunk when we arrived, the whole crowd. Can’t find a sensible word between them.’

  They stand and survey the gardens, Grayson dragging on a cigarette. There are perhaps fifty guests present, each dressed as the invitation dictated, though some more elaborately than others. A handful of ladies wear plain evening dresses with long gloves and appear, despite the hour and the temperature, not to be frozen to the bone. A few men have procured the correct colour trousers and teamed them with simple shirts and jackets. Most people, however, have made costumes of furs and scarves and even masks, beaded or pearled, which they hold before their faces only for brief spells before removing them to take their next drink. They battle the cold with pale velvet capes and greatcoats and ushanka hats.