‘Why not,’ Ida answers, unable to hold onto her anger when there is a baby to meet. Grabbing her case, she straightens up and smoothes out her dress with a palm before hooking her arm through his.
‘You know,’ he murmurs as they step towards the flat, ‘I’m glad you’re going to stay a while.’
Ida laughs at this and Henry frowns at her. ‘What?’
‘She told me about that look of yours, my sister,’ Ida explains. ‘She said you could make women fall in love with you with a single glance – this look, all tormented and moody, even when you were happy. And I’m sure that was it.’ Henry opens his mouth to protest but Ida carries on. ‘But don’t you worry, Henry Twist, I am not a woman who falls in love with sad looks. Or with her sister’s husband, for that matter.’ She is still laughing, her head shaking back and forth in disbelief. ‘What a girl, to even know how it is you would look at another person. I never saw her like that … She must have loved you very much.’
‘I’m sure she did,’ Henry answers softly.
‘Me, too,’ Ida agrees, the laughter still caught in her cheeks. ‘Me, too.’
That first night, Henry escorts Ida to Strawberry Hill and rides the Tube back to Bayswater Road, painting pictures of Ruby onto the blackened windows: the naughty slant of her smile when he returned from work one birthday to discover she had completely emptied half of their front room so that they could slow-dance before the window until the sun came up; the frightened flash in her eyes when she did not fall pregnant in the first months of their marriage; the tightening of her when he sank away into the past and refused to let her follow him; and, always, her arms swinging in time to that Charleston the night they first met.
As he shoots from tunnel to tunnel, Henry pretends he is leaving these images behind him, like a film reel of his married life seen through the rectangular wood frames of the Tube train windows, and imagines how it would be if every passenger who followed him under London saw, along the way, Ruby Twist, brought to cinematic life.
That, he thinks, is the sort of gift he would like to give her – a memorial, like the soldier in the train station. But a moving one. Because Ida was right. Ruby would not want to stay still.
And Ida doesn’t seem to want to either. In the days that follow, she learns to find her way from flat to flat. She appears on his doorstep unannounced, with a scruffy teddy she has bought Libby, then a cake she has made, then a bonnet Daisy has knitted. He does not complain about her telling Daisy. Now that Ida knows, and has written to her parents to let them know too, what does it matter? If the doctors try to make him hand her over, he feels sure Ida will take his side. And why should they make him, anyway, with Libby doing so well? They have made it through the worst. He even starts taking her out in her pram during the day – it feels safer, with Ida walking alongside him – and parading her around at Monty’s for everyone to admire. In the course of a week, his life changes.
He refuses to consider that he has only three months’ rent to his name and ought to beg back his job.
He refuses, too, to seek out Jack, though he thinks about him constantly. But where would he start? He doesn’t know the address of the old lady with the spare bed in her attic. He doesn’t know where he might find the Prince of Wales pub, and even if he sought it out, Jack would not be foolish enough to return to the scene of his beating. Some days Henry manages to persuade himself, on occasion for hours at a time, that there is no Jack Turner; that his grieving mind simply invented a man with a back straight enough to carry his heaped worries. But really he knows that his mind did not gift him a creation, because there was that time, after the White Party, when he had stood in the street and spoken to a real, living man. People saw him do it. The costermonger raised his fleshy fist.
It seems that a moment’s doubt, however, is all it takes to draw Jack back to him, because the night after Ida leaves to return to Pwll, Henry is woken by a whistling.
At first, he thinks it a dream, and turns himself back into sleep. But the sound persists, and when finally he goes to the window and pulls the curtain, there is Jack, standing in the narrow umbrella of light beneath a streetlamp, his eyes raised to the flat, his mouth pursed around his tune. Seeing Henry’s head appear between the curtains, he stops and lets his lips open into a smile.
His first words, when Henry opens the front door to him, are these: ‘So, who’s the woman?’
THE GATHERING of HOPE
Matilda arrives at Monty’s alone and, slotting her key into the lock, rests a hand on the black iron scrolls of the gate briefly before letting herself through. It is early, before nine, and the sky is low with undropped rain. Laces of liquorice cloud weave their way between the highest buildings. She left home as soon as Grayson departed for work.
They are not meeting until four, but over the last week she has observed Henry’s movements and she knows that, most days now, he walks Libby through the city as the first thin chinks of morning appear. Ida has been a good influence on him. And a bad influence on Matilda, who, from the first second she saw Ruby’s sister, felt the belief she had so carefully been building race impossibly away from her, like a yacht caught on stormy waves. How could she replace Ruby, when her sister was so much better fitted for the job? How could she mother that child, when a younger woman was there to snap up the role?
The jealousy, upon seeing another beautiful woman standing at Henry’s side, and seeing strangers assume she was his wife, and seeing that Ida was somehow immune to the feelings this assumption would bring about in most, no, all other women, was to Matilda akin to the surging hatred she is gripped by when she passes careless mothers pushing prams in the street.
She has been forced, once again, to admit to herself love which will not be returned.
As an adolescent, she had been too arrogant to believe she would ever know this sort of hurt. In her earliest years, Matilda and her parents existed – and exist still – within a triangle of freely given affection. When she first met Grayson, that triangle bulged out into a square. And she had imagined, innocently, that the shape would continue to grow as she delivered one, two, three children.
On her wedding day, she already had their names picked out, ready to present to Grayson on their wedding night. First, there would be Victoria. Then Michael. And finally, little Leo. She spaced them an even three years apart, so that Victoria, six by the time Leo made his appearance, would have the pleasure of helping her mother nurse a baby. There was no detail of these predicted children too small for Matilda to have pictured. The freckles which would scatter Victoria’s nose; the lick in the front of Michael’s hair which would flick it forever outwards; the shrill rise of Leo’s overtired cry; the gleaming black locks they would all share; the squeals they would emit as they chased each other up and down the staircase of the house the Stecks would live in when they were a family of five. Matilda knew these things. Nature, she thought, must have implanted traces of knowledge somewhere deep inside her, to encourage her in the act of procreation.
If she were a better person, Matilda would have asked Ruby if she felt the same way before she fell pregnant; she would have shared the anticipatory joy of it. By then, though, Matilda had been childless for more than a decade. And bitter for at least three quarters of that time. She could not allow her friend the happiness she herself had been denied by … she does not know what by.
Reaching the sycamore, she drops onto a blanket which sags sadly on the grass, abandoned by some clutch of Bright Young People last night, no doubt. Matilda wrinkles her nose. An article in the papers yesterday had lambasted them for tearing up an unoccupied house on Kensington Park Road whilst the owners were away on the Continent, and Matilda looks now at the mess surrounding her and imagines the destruction those poor people had returned to. But this is always the way, afterwards: a smashed glass, a wine-stained dress, cake crumbs trampled into the floor – the next day, they make a party a sad thing to remember. Or so Matilda has always thought. But there, in the moment … She
recalls lifting her feet and straightening her legs in front of her on the swings at the White Party; she recalls swaying wildly forwards then back, forwards then back, grinning as she studied the swell and ripple of her skirts. She had anticipated each backward swing, preferring it to the forward tilt which made her feel she was falling, and she wonders now whether it is the same for other people. It could be that it is only she who sees sadness in the mess happiness leaves behind, only she who feels an affinity for the particular direction in which a swing swings.
And, yes, the more she thinks about it, the more she begins to see that she has never allowed herself to venture towards middle ground. It is too vague, and, therefore, too scary a place. So, she loves Gray, or she hates him. She blames her childlessness on herself or, by turns, on anyone and everyone else. And perhaps that is why, when she cannot bring herself to love Grayson, she loves Henry – because he is silent while Gray likes to talk, and he is serious while Gray likes to joke. Henry Twist and Grayson Steck are opposed in every possible way.
Matilda cannot begin to predict how Henry would react if she shamed him as she has shamed Grayson. She does not believe Henry would endure it. Not without retaliating. And though she does not think him capable of it really, she is bombarded by the thought that another man might strike her, should she neglect him the way she has Grayson, and the man in her mind is Henry, and the prospect of him looming over her, fist clenched, sparks within her a flash of excitement.
Sometimes, she deserves to be punished.
At midday, when Monty wanders into the garden in search of company, Matilda is still there. Some clutch of younglings has fashioned a swing in the sycamore, like those which were suspended from the trees at the White Party, and Matilda is swinging further and faster than she ought to given the makeshift design, her head tipped far back, her hat upturned on the grass beyond her where the wind has cast it, hours-old tears shining shaky lines down her face. The branch above her creaks and groans like a hundred-year-old man. The liquorice clouds of hours before have not burst: they have ruptured and drifted apart in their own soft way to reveal, piece by irregular piece, a day as mild as single cream.
‘Tilda,’ Monty calls.
She rights her head. ‘Monty,’ she says, smiling. ‘I was waiting for someone.’
‘And did he come?’
‘Who?’ she asks, pretending ignorance.
‘Someone, of course.’ He winks.
Matilda thrusts her heels into the earth to still herself, scuffing the navy leather. ‘No,’ she answers. ‘Actually, he didn’t. But you’re here now, Monty dear, and I couldn’t be happier to see you.’
Cheeks are kissed and Monty stands tall – though not quite as tall as he used to, even so short a time as a year ago. He pretends to adjust his tie with a grin. ‘Nor I you,’ he says. ‘Though had I known I had a hot date waiting for me, I wouldn’t have lingered so long over breakfast.’
‘You should never linger, Montague dearest,’ Matilda says. ‘It’ll make an old man of you. Of all of us.’
‘I don’t suppose there are many things that could make an old man of you.’
She slaps his arm gently as he settles a shoulder, a hip, against the tree trunk. ‘You know what I mean, cheeky.’
‘I’m not sure I do,’ Monty answers. ‘Are we being serious for once?’
‘I think we might be.’
‘Wait a moment then while I put on my best serious expression.’
Even on those rare occasions when they do discuss the important things, they do so in this same playful way. It is, Matilda thinks, an affliction of their generation. No, of their time. Many years more will have to pass before anyone can complain or worry about anything much without feeling outrageously hypocritical.
‘Do you think he is the way he is because of the war?’
‘Henry?’ Monty asks.
‘Yes.’ She might well have been talking about her husband. He saw it, too: whatever ‘it’ consisted of. Grayson had told her once that she would never be able to visualise it, and that she must never try.
Monty sighs kindly. ‘What do you really want to know, Matilda?’
‘I don’t know.’ She stares across the garden at the summer house, so that she doesn’t have to look Monty in the eye. The wind, which has blown itself into some other part of the city now, has left the door ajar but she has not been inside. They hardly ever use it. You cannot watch the sky from in there. ‘I suppose …’ She feels a fool, but she also feels that if she doesn’t speak these words, they might just burst out of her some other time. ‘I suppose I want to know if there’s a chance.’
‘What do your instincts tell you?’
‘Instinct is a liar,’ Matilda answers. ‘And a sycophant. It only tells you what you want to hear.’
‘Some people might call that hope,’ Monty offers.
She swings apart from him so that it seems she is moving forward while he moves back, and they become in her mind the two mechanisms of a clock, one the tick, one the tock, which must never come together. And perhaps this is Monty’s curse, she thinks, glimpsing him at perfect arcing intervals, because despite his best efforts to keep them close, people are forever moving away from Montague Thornton-Wells. She’s noticed the tendency amongst the Bright Young People lately, too: how they always have to ‘rush off’ once the wine bottles are emptied; the cruel way they laugh, sometimes, when he asks them to stay a little longer. Monty gives his entire self to his friends, and they are quite willing to take it. Poor man.
She ought to stop this childish swinging and give him her full attention. But she can’t, not yet. Beyond the garden walls London clatters on timelessly, never pausing, never resting, and Matilda finds herself exhausted by it today. She concentrates on the clock sounds she is imagining until they start to grow louder in her mind: loud enough to drown out everything but the awful onward march of her hope. Monty is right. It’s hope. She has wasted most of her life on hope. And now, at forty-one, she has no choice but to conclude that it is not the positive disposition everyone supposes it to be. Really, she must learn to stop.
Some crowded miles away, Grayson stands before the second-storey window of an old Gothic building and addresses five rows of young, uninterested faces. At intervals, he taps his blackboard with his cane, but more to snap the boys awake than to emphasise a fact. ‘I would like one of you –’ tap ‘– to please tell me –’ tap ‘– in which year –’ tap … Weak sunlight separates into long fingers, like a spread hand, as it falls through the glass, but it does not irradiate the room. There is no penetrating the gloomy depths of Classroom F: the ceiling is too high, the window too narrow, its occupants too eager to be released. Naturally, there are always one or two children who are keen to learn. In this particular class, there is just one – Baker – who sits straight in his chair and writes in his lap in an attempt to hide his application. He knows the answers to every one of Mr Steck’s questions, but he will answer none, and Grayson is too sympathetic to single him out.
‘Thompson?’ he says, sensing the forced response will be wildly inaccurate.
‘Not sure, sir,’ Thompson replies.
‘Then make an educated guess,’ Grayson coaxes. The boy next to Thompson yawns, wide and apologetic, behind his hand.
Grayson has never had much time for the Education Officers or the Institute of Education or the Board of Education, or whatever other titles the rule-makers have attributed to themselves over the years, but he thinks there is something in the idea being tossed about recently that open-air schools, or at least upgraded ventilation, could improve learning. Wouldn’t it be more pleasant to lift up the desks and shuffle outside with them on a fine day like this than to file behind these heavy wooden things boys were carving their initials into fifty years before Grayson was born?
It would be more pleasant for him, at least. Especially now that the days are protracting, growing milder. He would like to witness the odd flower blooming.
He turns to write som
ething on the blackboard, performing an elaborate rotation so that he can glance out through the window at the sky. By four o’clock, he will be at Monty’s, swilling the day away with a glass of something strong.
‘Was it 1603, sir?’
‘Yes!’ Grayson spins back round to face his class. ‘Yes it was, Thompson.’ He points his cane at the boy. ‘I am thoroughly impressed with you.’
Thompson looks down at his hands and fights the smile which pulls at his lips. And it is in moments like these, when Gray manages to impart some sliver of knowledge, that he remembers he would have made a good father. Possibly even an inspiring one. He mourns his could-have-been children in fleeting public silences. Then he clears his throat, pushes his reading glasses up his nose, and returns to the matter at hand – teaching.
A decade of disappointment is quite enough.
The great dark slab of his classroom door edges open and he calls for his visitor to enter. One hand around the wood, she leans in.
‘Miss Emory. What can I do for you?’
‘I wondered if we might have a word after class, Mr Steck?’
‘Of course,’ he answers. ‘I’ll wait at the end of the day.’
Sally throws him a small, red-lipped smile and ducks back out of the doorway, almost as though she is curtsying. From the corner of his eye, Grayson catches Thompson miming a whistle. He slaps the blackboard, hard.
‘Master Thompson, did you have to spoil your moment of glory? I was almost feeling proud of you just then.’
‘Sorry, sir,’ Thompson mumbles. But Gray understands why he did it. Miss Emory – all of what? Twenty-two? – is the school’s newest recruit. Big-eyed and pink-cheeked, she tiptoes through the corridors, sending her skirts fluttering around her slender calves. Her hair, blonde, almost-red, is cut into a pretty bob and forever shining. Her lips part into ready smiles as she fixes you with the unfathomable emerald stare of a cat. And there is something undeniably deliberate about it all, Grayson has decided. Miss Emory is a performer.
The Haunting of Henry Twist Page 10