The fire has been smouldering for hours, and they move towards its mellow heat together, Jack eyeing the empty cot charily.
‘Where’s the baby?’ he asks. ‘Upstairs,’ Henry answers. ‘She stays with the old woman upstairs. I should fetch her, really. I …’ He doesn’t have a good reason to present to Jack. Why should he fetch her, really, in the middle of the night? He simply wants her close by, where he can watch over her. But he doesn’t know how to explain that to a man who has either never had children, or forgotten them.
‘Then fetch her.’ Jack nods, shrugs.
And Henry does. He knocks Viv awake and explains that he is back early from the party he’d invented, that he’d been missing Libby too much to stay. He carries Libby back downstairs, cradling her, shushing her. He settles her in her cot by the fire as Jack, perched now on the arm of the settee, watches him, because suddenly he trusts this man. He does. He cannot fathom it, but he does.
‘She died, didn’t she, the baby’s mother?’ Jack mumbles the question, and Henry is confused for a moment. Surely he knows this. Surely everyone knows this. ‘Was it the birth?’
Henry takes a deep breath and explains all he can, his voice trembling, his eyes focused on the raindrops which dot the floorboards, like flung stars, between his and Jack’s feet. They have almost dried when he runs short of words.
‘I’ll find you a change of clothes,’ he mumbles abruptly then, and steps out into the hallway, away from his wardrobe.
Hand to the banister, he pauses and listens for a movement upstairs, paranoid now that Vivian or Herb will hear Jack’s voice. But why, he wonders, should that pose a problem? He would introduce him as a friend, fallen on hard times, who needs a settee for the night. And that would almost be true. Except that Henry does not look at Jack and see a friend. He realises it all at once. He sees in Jack some echo of her.
When he returns with a towel he has retrieved from under the stairs, Jack is bending over the cot, a smile tweaking the corners of his mouth as he flips his cap over his face and away again, over and away. Henry pauses in the doorframe and watches. Libby, so recently awoken, burbles happily at the game.
‘I think she likes me,’ Jack says.
‘I think she does,’ Henry answers, opening the wardrobe and pulling out the trousers and shirt he needs for work the next day. ‘Here.’ He tosses the clothes onto the bed. He is not going to work anyway.
Jack lowers his cap into the cot towards Libby’s waving hands and she makes clumsy grabs for it. Then he unbuttons his shirt and drags it off, wincing as his shoulder pivots out of his braces. The firelight shimmies over his bare torso, revealing the still-dark welts from his beating. All down his left side, along the ridges of his ribs, the bruising is a confusion of ripe red and purple; below, his hipbone is smashed and healing badly; across his chest and stomach heavy blows have split the skin, which still struggles to knit itself back together.
‘Christ, Jack,’ Henry whispers. ‘It’s been weeks. I didn’t realise it was so bad.’
‘It’s getting better,’ Jack answers. ‘It’s taking longer than I thought but the pain is lessening, almost every day.’
Henry pinches at his nose and sniffs deep, trying to draw back the tears which clog his throat. Though he does not want to think it, the thought is as obvious as the injuries strewing Jack’s body, and it fills him with relief and sadness and, more than that, doubt. Definitely doubt. In fact, he hardly dares to believe it, but he cannot deny that Jack does not look like a man who has simply been beaten. The wounds are too great, too long in mending. He looks rather like a man who has been struck, once, hard, irreparably on his left side. Struck by something huge and unyielding. Something vehicular.
‘Throw it over, then,’ Jack says, indicating the towel Henry is still clutching.
But Henry does not. He steps across the room, temporarily dumbed. He raises the towel and wraps it around Jack’s shoulders. Then, as softly as he can, he gathers the material into his palms and begins running his hands over Jack’s body.
Streets away, around corners where streetlamps stutter and past doorways so deep with shadow they can hide love or hate or anything between, through flocks of feathered and sequinned girls filing into dances and the men who hold umbrellas over their heads, and up three narrow flights of stairs, Matilda and Grayson lie in bed, coiled into one another.
They have spent the evening at Monty’s, pressed together under a blanket, sitting with their backs to the trunk of the big tree. Matilda knows it is a sycamore, but she has never mentioned the fact. She had not wanted to admit, in front of Henry and Ruby and their simple consuming love, to having the occasion to read about the identification of trees. They would never have considered engaging in such a wasteful activity while the other was close by. Now, with Ruby gone and Henry shrinking in on himself and absent, for the most part, from the garden, she could have told Grayson. She hadn’t wanted, though, to make things any less familiar.
Since the White Party, Monty’s association with the Bright Young People has grown deeper. They have begun popping in and out of his garden now, and Matilda doesn’t like or want the company. It had been their own secret place, just the four of them, and she feels it has been invaded.
Tonight, when a few of the newspaper lot had showed up, she and Grayson had risen and left without a word of discussion. They had arrived home to find the flat depressingly dank and climbed into bed, more to avoid the cold than to be intimate, rolling themselves into their sheets with shrieks and shivers. It was Matilda, in the end, who had reached out to Grayson.
Now, surrounded by nothing it seems but violent hail, her cheek against his chest, she begins to laugh. She had forgotten this feeling; of knowing a body, of expecting hands here or lips there. It is so far removed from the panic and need of loving Henry that she feels relieved. Here, right here, with her husband’s slow-softening biceps curled under her neck, she even considers that Monty has talked her into believing in something which is not real. After all, he is handsome, Henry: handsome enough to make you deem his silent brooding interesting, exhilarating, even. Maybe she has been fooled.
‘What are you laughing at, woman?’ Grayson asks, smoothing her hair back as if she is some breed of lap-pet. She has always been disappointed by her curlless ash-brown hair. She moves her head slightly against his hand to extend the contact.
‘I don’t know. I just feel like I haven’t laughed in such a long time.’
‘You lost your friend, Tilda. No one’s expected you to.’
The mention of Ruby sobers her and she props herself up on her elbows to look at her husband. Easy, uncomplicated Grayson Steck: his jaw a thicker version of what it was on their wedding day; his light-blue eyes made smaller by amassing wrinkles; his hair greying in three distinct streaks which travel backwards from his forehead to make him look badger-like. She runs a finger back and forth along the shallow V of his collarbone.
‘Gray? Do you think there’s a reason it was Ruby? I mean … do you think she was too happy?’ It is the first time Matilda has spoken Ruby’s name since the funeral, and it catches in her throat. Henry, Henry, Henry – that’s all it’s been. And yes, he lost Ruby, but Ruby lost him too, in a way. Him and everything else, her baby included. It’s Ruby she should have been thinking about. The tears are tripping down Matilda’s face before she feels the heat they create behind her nose. They are formed from pure shame.
‘No, love,’ Grayson answers. ‘I think she was unlucky. Very unlucky. And I’ll tell you something, I miss her more than I thought I would – when it first happened, you know?’
Matilda hums in response. She doesn’t want to have to commit to a yes or a no.
‘I don’t know how Henry does it,’ Grayson continues. ‘With the baby as well. I wouldn’t have the foggiest. Wouldn’t even know where to start.’
Matilda says nothing. Suddenly, her husband uttering Henry’s name makes her baulk. She doesn’t want to hear it. She doesn’t even want to think it,
or share a bed with a man who is thinking it. Henry has been between their sheets too long.
Pushing herself up onto her knees, Matilda shakes her head. ‘Let’s not talk about it.’
‘No, wait.’ Grayson grasps her wrist and pulls her back down into the sheets. ‘I’ve been wanting to talk about it, actually. I didn’t want to mention it at first, in case it was a daft idea, but the more I think about it, the more sensible it seems.’
‘What seems?’
‘We should have the baby,’ Grayson replies, sitting up himself now and settling against the wall.
‘We can’t have the baby,’ Matilda mutters, closing her eyes. ‘He’s not going to give her away.’
‘But he can’t care for her himself, and go to work, and all the rest of it. And he’d be able to see her all the time, if she lived with us. Whenever he wanted. We could even tell her he’s her father, when she’s old enough. Think about it, Tilda. Properly.’
‘It’s a terrible idea.’
‘It’s the best thing for her.’
‘Maybe. But what if she was yours, Gray?’
He stops, mouth open, chest puffed, then lets out a long sigh and presses a thumb and a forefinger to his eyebrows. He grows smaller. ‘Of course I’d keep her.’
‘Of course you would.’ She shuffles closer to him and spreads her palm over his heart. ‘You’re a good man, Gray. My good husband. My good love.’ She kisses his nose between words. ‘But she wouldn’t be ours.’
‘No, I suppose not.’
‘No.’
Grayson had never once considered, before his marriage, that he would be incapable of fathering children. Or that his wife would be incapable of mothering them. Or both. They do not know whose fault it is, though they are both careful with words like ‘fault’ and ‘problem’. Once, early on, in a conversation held imprudently at a small, wobbling café table, Grayson had called them a failure – not her, them – and the fallout had been a long, hideous thing to see. Since, they have shaped their blame in other ways. With sulking, mostly. And embarrassment.
Matilda’s flirting, her attention-seeking, the shame she brings him, is another aspect of his marriage he could not have predicted, but then, so many of his ideas have changed in the last twelve years that he cannot say with any certainty what his thirty-year-old self thought or did not think. He believes in his memories of being happy with Matilda. He especially treasures a day they spent on the Tube, permitting the other a brief head start and taking turns to chase or be chased around the city before meeting eventually in Regent’s Park; and later, outside a favourite café; and as red evening crashed onto the sky, on the Mall, where they had pretended to be King George and his Queen consort. But he cannot be sure that it truly existed, this happiness. It is possible it was only a trick played on him by infatuation.
As Matilda bestrides him, he searches her face for a flicker of her younger self. He sees traces of her tonight, hidden, and all too often now, beneath hardening layers of disappointment. Soon, he thinks, they will be gone.
‘I love you,’ he says, testing the sound of that terrible sentiment. Perhaps he will never know if he really means it. Perhaps the only way to test it is to see her dragged under a bus.
‘I love you,’ she answers, but the response only makes him doubt the concept more. Something plunges inside him. He could say the rest now – the speech he’d planned on using all along, once she’d dismissed the baby idea. It wasn’t Libby she did not want: it was him, Grayson. So, if you love him, go to him, he would say. And he had no doubt she would take up the offer.
She kisses his nose again and again before straightening up. ‘Listen to that,’ she says, smiling. ‘The rain has stopped.’
‘Has it?’ Grayson asks. ‘Really?’
‘It really has,’ Matilda promises. And she is right. Outside the window, the sky is quite abruptly calm. The torrent has hounded the clouds into the distance, to burst over the English countryside. Thousands of Londoners have already ducked through their front doors, though, slamming them against the night. The city’s voice has been swept away and in the new silence, Gray puts a hand to his wife’s slender neck and whispers a different offer to her.
‘What if we tried again?’ he says.
AN UNWELCOME LETTER
When the single white envelope drops through the letterbox, Henry is sitting on the stairs in his hallway, counting and recounting the ten days which have passed since he last saw Jack.
True, they did not plan to meet again. Jack has not broken an arrangement. But Henry had thought an agreement implicit in the fact that Jack had not retreated from his touch. In truth, he had seemed to want it, once his initial shock had lessened and the stringy pull of his muscles had loosened. He had stood, still and relaxed, and allowed himself to be dried, then removed from his wet trousers and fitted into Henry’s, which swung an inch or so wide at the waist. He had lounged on the settee before the sputtering fire, his chest still bare, and permitted Henry to feel his way along his ribs in search of fractures.
‘We used to do this in the army,’ Henry said.
‘Maybe I did, too,’ Jack answered.
It was different, of course, with just the two of them present, but Henry was not uncomfortable, and Jack didn’t seem to be either. It was not what it might have looked like, to cynical eyes. It was the first time since that January day that Henry had felt normal.
He considers the letter on the floor below him and decides not to fetch it yet. He has the only word he wants here, beneath his fingertips. He continues from where he left off: Ruby, Ruby … It is feasible that Jack grew disgusted by their behaviour later on, when he went back to his attic and his old lady, or when he persuaded some younger woman he had flirted with at a nightclub to disappear into a dark corner with him and recalled the feel of a woman’s skin against his own. Henry does not know how he spends his days – but perhaps, under those circumstances, he might have looked back and labelled the whole episode as just a little bit odd. No, Jack would not employ such a bland word. It would be one extreme or the other for him. Because, whatever Henry had said about the army, it was not a time of war. They had not felt their bodies pulled together by the blood-deep fear of taking or sustaining lives. They had stood, face to face, and Henry had touched Jack with the same hesitant need with which he had touched Ruby, before they were married.
Jack had let him.
In the next room, Libby squawks awake and Henry descends the stairs. On the way, he picks up the letter and deposits it on the table beneath the hall mirror. There, he hesitates, and catches in the glass the reflection of the last seconds he and Ruby spent together. At six o’clock in the heavy dark of this March morning, his wife, weeks dead, appears before him piece by piece, like a jigsaw being slotted together. She smiles at him across one imperial foot and the afterlife.
‘Ruby,’ he murmurs.
She was wearing red, her coat pulled over her swollen stomach – over Libby, who was still a balled-up wealth of possibilities then. Boy or girl. Dark or fair. Henry has come to know her as an uneven mixture of her parents: Ruby’s dark eyes; Ruby’s ruddy skin; his own sandy hair. Ruby’s temperament, he suspects. But then – then he had thought more about the tight sensation of Ruby’s distended abdomen as he looped his arms around them both. He had winked at Ruby – the best way he knew to tell her she looked beautiful. And now, he performs these movements again, gently applying his hands to the emptiness that used to be her, and whispering into her neck, ‘I’ve got you. I’ve got you.’
He returns to the bank sporadically. They excuse his absences – at Yeoman’s persuasion, he expects. They excuse his silences, too, as he sits before his adding machine, pressing the numbers, pulling the crank, watching the wheels turn and never once considering whether or not the figures displayed are the ones he ought to be seeing. They excuse his mistakes. He is surrounded incessantly by the pecking of typewriter keys, the clacking of heels on the floor, the undertones of philandering male clerks and
the giggles of their female targets. Uninterested in the work, he has turned down promotions in the past but he wishes now he had taken them, solely for the benefit of a more private office.
Today, he is first in. The flat ejected him with the first breath of dawn and the promise of something unpleasant inside that envelope. He knows from the hand who has signed it, with a formal ‘sincerely’, and he is afraid to liberate the slanting sentences within. He sits at his desk, barricaded from the sad, high-ceilinged magnificence of the office by a deltoid of lamplight, and, palms flat on yesterday’s ledgers, rests his forehead on his arms.
He is not aware of Yeoman, standing behind him, until he speaks.
‘Go home, Twist,’ he says quietly.
Henry lifts his head. ‘I can’t.’ What he means is, he shouldn’t. He is embarrassed when he remembers all those people who carried on after the war; carried on without their husbands or their sons. He has lost only half of what his colleagues think he has lost and still he cannot function properly, cannot complete a working day, cannot speak as he used to speak. He wonders if a man can be stripped of his bravery. Or whether the thing itself is more a commodity than a trait: like money, which can be known in plenty at one moment and entirely depleted the next.
‘You can. Look, you’re not doing anyone any favours here. You haven’t had enough time.’
Henry studies Yeoman’s sagging face; the downward slope of skin around his eyes and mouth. In the past, they have wasted evenings together, he and Yeoman, laughing themselves drunk at bars or eating dinner with Mrs Yeoman. They are friends. They used to be.
‘What if there isn’t enough time?’ he says.
But he takes his friend’s advice, anyway. He stands, claps Yeoman on the shoulder, and steps out of the bank long before nine o’clock ticks around.
By ten, he is sitting at Vivian’s kitchen table, nursing his daughter and conversing in murmurs as Herb naps in his armchair beyond the lounge wall. Heat from the stove smothers the room. Libby purrs in her sleep, her lips clamped around the tip of Henry’s little finger. He would like to believe she holds some link with her mother that can’t be severed by death – they say, don’t they, that children are more open to communication with the spirits. But he doesn’t believe it. Not really. He knows that if Libby has any sense of Ruby at all, it is only of the sightless black protection of her womb, the steady drum-beat of her heart.
The Haunting of Henry Twist Page 8