The Haunting of Henry Twist

by Rebecca F. John

  Two days later, when she hears news of the Flying Scotsman being derailed near Newcastle, she realises that those clock hands are approaching their chime. And now she can see the inner workings of it, as though she has prized the back off a pocket watch and bared all the tiny wheels and cogs whirring away within to the world. And yes, yes, she thinks. This is just the time for derailing things.

  DERAILMENT

  A different day. Night, in fact. Matilda sits again beneath the sycamore in what the newspapers have dubbed the Garden of Depravity and sucks at the end of her cigarette holder as she watches the staff setting up around the summer house at the other end of the lawn. But for a smattering of stars stuttering through an odd-shaped break in the clouds, the night is black. The garden, though, is beautifully lit. Miniature gas lamps, perhaps four feet in height and of a sort Matilda has never before seen, have been placed all around; she imagines for a moment that they have been especially made for the occasion, before dismissing the idea as too extravagant, even for the Bright Young People. Though that kind of extravagance is exactly their style.

  Tonight they are making up the garden as an open-pit mine, complete with empty wheelbarrows, detached and abandoned wheels, planks of wood painted to resemble the side panels of trucks, and strewn-about stones and rocks some poor girl of Monty’s must have carried in.

  Secretly, Matilda is disgusted by it all. These people are the victors, really: indirectly. It seems they always are. They are happy, though, to celebrate the victory the losers should have known – and just one day after the loss. There are still working men wandering about London this very evening, mourning their futures. Matilda has heard a couple of small gangs stumble past on the other side of the wall, voices loud with drink, searching out another pint glass to stare their disappointment into.

  She also knows, though – or suspects at least – that once the party begins, she will delight in it as much as any of them. She will toss back cocktails and dance and forget all those people the guests have come dressed as. There are certain varieties of guilt which can simply be pushed from the mind and left to fall to their destruction.

  She takes another long drag on her cigarette. She is convinced that, after all these weeks, the scent of the smoke has begun to feel its way into her skin, like a cream rubbed over and over the face until it fills in all the little cracks around the eyes and mouth. Had she wanted that to happen the day she picked out the tortoiseshell holder? Presently, she can’t recall what her intentions had been. And nor do they matter. It’s not a choice any more. The tobacco has her.

  She squints through her own weak-grey exhalation at Monty’s staff, scurrying around in the middle distance, filling glasses and wrapping beef sandwiches in brown paper and string to drop into the scrubbed-clean wheelbarrows. There are four of them – four girls, all clad in identical dresses. Matilda knows Monty keeps them around more for their looks than their abilities, but still the dresses are ridiculous. Not in the least bit practical. They remind her of the china doll she was gifted on her fifth birthday. Her mother had already christened it – Marianne – and initially Matilda had loved it. Loved her. At night, however, when the curtains were drawn and the nursery door was pulled shut and Matilda was deserted to the darkness, Marianne used to stare at her, those little glass eyes gleaming, hypnotising her into staying wide awake. And so, after two weeks of hardly any sleep, Matilda had subjected Marianne to a violent and unfortunate end. The shattered china pieces she left at the bottom of the staircase, for her mother to discover.

  Monty appears at the gate and, with a wave for Matilda, begins showing around a tall, spectacled man. At short intervals, the stranger releases an emphatic laugh, tipping back his head and flicking a back-handed slap into Monty’s upper arm.

  The Victory Party has been dubbed such by requirement. Fun can’t be had at a Defeat Party. Having been organised in such a rush, though, it does not boast the usual parchment paper invitation. An envelope heavy with the thick black lines and curves of calligraphy has not been delivered to anyone’s door. Instead, a time and theme have been agreed in passing conversations and the usual crowd is expected at ten o’clock. Grayson is expected beforehand, at nine, but Matilda supposes he will be late. He is forever late these days. Since her.

  Matilda has not yet discovered her name. She has considered that she should let the situation run a while, to see if perhaps Gray will give the woman up of his own accord. But there is an obvious risk to that strategy – namely, that Grayson will give her, Matilda, up instead.

  She ought to be fine with it all, of course. She remembers now. That was what she’d hoped for when she’d sat at her mirror practising how to flourish her cigarette holder. She had wanted to be like the girls who party at Monty’s, swapping lipsticks and husbands. What she hadn’t anticipated was how painful it would be to share Gray. Her Gray, as he has been for so many years.

  Had been. Had been. That is an idea she will have to get used to.

  Matilda beckons one of the girls, motioning for a drink: anything will do. She does not know what to do but calm herself with intoxicants. Once, she would have been able to confide in Ruby, but Ruby – only five and a bit months dead, not even rotted to bone yet – feels like a much more distant memory. To Matilda’s mind, the poor girl should already be a skeleton, her flesh taken as quickly as her future. But she knows it is much more unpleasant than that; that perhaps Ruby has passed that stiff, blue-tinged stage and is already beginning to fall away, her perfectly dainty features distorted and then stolen by feeding insects. Matilda has no idea how long all that will take, but she refuses to contemplate it any further. It makes her feel that, somewhere deep in her own stomach, one of those insects is going about its work, hollowing her out. God, she misses Ruby sometimes. Before envy had grasped hold of her, Ruby really had been able to make Matilda smile. Drink in hand now, she hums to distract from her thoughts, pushing the notes up and down a major scale as though they are physically heavy. Mercifully, her horrible singing voice is not heard by anyone. The city sucks it up and silences it, along with her hurt.

  Later, the temporary miners flow over the garden like particles caught in the same current of water. They are identically dressed – men and women – in brown slacks, creased grandfather shirts and newsboys. As they dance, the women’s bobbed hair falls out from under their caps to swing around their jaws, but they do not pause to re-pin it: they simply sweep it behind their ears and carry on, shifting from partner to partner, from dance to dance. They are a thoughtless mass, the temporary miners. They move on instinct. They have none of the organisation the real miners boasted.

  The point around which they eddy is a four-piece jazz band: three men, on drums, saxophone and double bass, and one extraordinary woman, whose voice seems to find empty splinters of air through which to lace itself.

  For Matilda, the scene moves too fast. Where others seem to see hands to grasp, she observes only streaks of pale motion; where they find a space to kick their legs into, there is, to Matilda’s eyes, a thickly populated forest of rippling brown slacks. Because rather than concentrating on the dancers, she is thinking closely on her drink. She is using it to quiet herself. With each sip, she imagines she can feel it swilling down her throat and vortexing around her bloodstream. She cannot drink too much tonight, but she wants to feel tipsy. She wants her eyes to swim aimlessly around, lost in their sockets. She wants, as ever, to feel not that she’s sinking, but that she’s floating, floating towards something new. Tonight, a single, slow-drunk drink and her imagination must be her medicine.

  She closes her eyes and when, some time later, she opens them again, Monty is sitting beside her. He does not wear a costume. Instead, he has on an everyday grey suit.

  ‘Well?’ he says.

  ‘Well, what?’

  Monty glances over at the guests. These are not his parties any more: not really. Ever since he revealed his secret little plot to the Bright Young People, they have increasingly treated it as their
own. Treated him as their own. At such close range, all that is visible on his face.

  ‘What will we do now?’ he asks.

  ‘Grayson’s doing one of the teachers at his school,’ Matilda answers.

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  Matilda shrugs. ‘I just do.’

  ‘Ah, I’m sorry Tild,’ Monty says, shuffling closer and hooking an arm around her shoulders. They lean back against the tree trunk together. ‘Are you certain, though? I mean, Grayson. I wouldn’t have thought he’d …’

  ‘Positive, Monty dear,’ Matilda says. ‘I’m definitely positive. He shuffles off somewhere late at night. And he never comes straight home after work these days. It’s more than that, though. It’s as if I can see it on him, almost as though he’s wearing her. It truly is the most awful thing.’ She sips at her water.

  ‘As awful as Henry and Jack?’ Monty whispers.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Equally awful?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘More awful?’

  Matilda pauses. She has never conceived of pain being comparable along a scale, but it’s quite a thought. It might be a good way to order things – because if pain is comparable, then surely love is too. It doesn’t have to be, I love Henry therefore I do not love Grayson, or even the reverse. It might simply be, I love this man so much and this man so much. In which case, it is quite possible for her to be hurting for two different men at the same time, equally or unequally.

  ‘They’re just as awful as each other,’ she says slowly.

  ‘You’re smiling,’ Monty replies, frowning at her. ‘Why are you smiling?’

  ‘They’re just as awful,’ she says again. She knows now that she’s right in what she has been planning. Before, she had been distracted by the new jealousy she was feeling at Grayson’s betrayal, but Monty has focused her. He has made it simple. She has to follow up on what she’s found out about Jack. She has to. ‘What time is it?’ she asks.

  ‘Gone eleven,’ Monty answers.

  ‘Gone eleven? Already?’

  Monty nods and Matilda snaps into a standing position.

  ‘I have to go.’

  ‘But Gray’s not here yet,’ Monty protests.

  ‘Exactly,’ she answers. ‘Exactly.’

  Monty stands and puts a gentle hand to her waist. The smile has worried him and he is suddenly remorseful. ‘Listen,’ he begins. ‘I need to talk to you … You’re not going to do anything silly are you, because really, I need to –’

  ‘Montague,’ she says. ‘Whatever it is, tell me tomorrow.’ She cups her palm around his cheek, letting the bristles of his beard scratch against the soft skin there for a moment. ‘You’re a good friend to me. Tell me tomorrow.’

  And before Monty can blurt out his regrets about how unfairly he has treated her – in those opportunistic moments when he has teased her about Henry, when he has tricked and persuaded her into feeling more than she ought to – she is walking away, and Monty cannot bring himself to call after her. Back straight, arms stiffened into oars which drive her forward, in the last minute she has somehow acquired a kind of ferocity; a determination, perhaps, which he has never seen in her before. She reminds him, just a little, of Ruby. And he’d never want to change that. Whatever the cost.

  Though he knows he has now been late for nearly three hours, Grayson checks his watch again. He is breathless. Lying on his back, wrist held up to his face, he matches his inhalation, then his exhalation, to four ticks of the second hand. In, two, three, four. Out, two, three, four. With each count, he makes a little bob of his head, as if he is a swimmer, timing carefully those strokes he uses to surface for air. He is surfacing for air, really. His marriage has been a hand on the back of his neck, holding him under, and Sally is the force which has loosened the grip.

  He sees her watching him from the corner of his eye and smiles at her silent laughter.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asks.

  ‘Breathing.’

  ‘Is it something you have to concentrate on?’

  He does not stop counting. He speaks in the transitions. ‘At. The. Moment. Yes.’

  Sally rolls nearer to him, tucking the sheets tightly around them, and laughs into his shoulder. Grayson is beginning to feel embarrassed that every hour they spend together is spent here, in bed. It cheapens her, he thinks, but Sally doesn’t seem to see it that way.

  ‘What time did you have to leave?’ she asks.

  ‘Half past eight,’ Gray mutters.

  Sally props herself up on her elbow and slaps at him with her other hand. ‘Half past eight? Jesus, Gray, it’s got to be near midnight. She’ll kill you.’

  ‘She’ll already be too far gone for that.’

  This is what his wife has become to them: a ‘she’ they mention only when they are not making eye contact. The triteness of it rankles Grayson. He has to be careful not to snap at Sally on the odd occasions they do mention Matilda, but those occasions are rare and mostly he manages not to upset her. And it’s new to him, this: being able to think and speak freely, without argument, with reproach. It is as though he is a performer onstage, who can act just exactly as he pleases, because the audience will never see him for what he really is. Sally does not see him for what he really is.

  But then, does he really see her? They are performing for each other, surely. She cannot be this sweet. She cannot be this in awe of a paunchy, middle-aged schoolteacher. There must be some benefit in it for her that Grayson has as yet failed to recognise.

  He turns onto his side to better breathe Sally in. She leaves talcum powder and coconut shampoo in his nose.

  ‘Let’s go out somewhere,’ he says.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Anywhere.’

  ‘We can’t, Gray, you know that. What if one of the children sees us?’

  ‘It’s the middle of the night.’

  Sally smiles at the ceiling. ‘And if you think they’re asleep, you must be getting old.’

  ‘But they wouldn’t be about so soon after the strike. Come on, Sal. I want to show you off.’ He leans in and kisses the soft, always-warm bend of her elbow joint. This is his favourite part of her: smooth as blood.

  ‘All right,’ she says. ‘All right. Give me ten minutes.’

  Grayson doesn’t believe she will be ready in ten minutes. He settles back into the pillow to doze, but just as he feels himself growing light and careless, she speaks. ‘Let’s go then.’ And when he opens his eyes she is pulling on her hat.

  Outside, they walk for a while, away from that square of London which contains Grayson and Matilda’s flat and Monty’s garden and most of Grayson’s recent memories. They link arms as though they are an honest courting couple. Sally starts to laugh again and Grayson realises, when she indicates it with her eyes, that he is strutting like a pigeon, chest puffed, head high. He truly is showing her off. To an empty street.

  Gray smirks. ‘All right,’ he says, stopping. ‘There’s nothing else for it – we’re just going to have to stay here until someone passes.’

  ‘And what will you do then?’

  ‘I’ll nod my head and say “good evening” and make sure they see the beautiful woman on my arm.’

  ‘And will you introduce me as your wife, Grayson Steck? Will you say, if asked, this is Sally Steck, my wonderful lady wife?’

  Grayson considers the pavement, then the tiny toes of her shoes, then the undulations of her legs. His pupils crawl up her body until, eventually, he is eye to eye with her again.

  ‘I’d love to do that, Sally.’

  ‘Because you think me beautiful,’ she prompts, shaking her hair.

  ‘Because I love you,’ he replies. And there he is, saying those words again, and never, never, knowing if they are true.

  At some lonely minute past midnight, Matilda storms through the docklands, moon-eyed, her mascara leaking down her cheeks on account of the wind. At measured intervals, she wipes it a
way. She is here on serious business. She has to look proper.

  To her side, the Thames slops towards the sea, its noisy surface twinkling like it is home to a thousand fallen stars. Little fishing vessels, roofless and engineless, cluster around the bows and sterns of larger boats, jostling for space, their wooden bodies creaking with the effort. The larger boats sit more calmly in the water, lounging, their tall funnels open to the bitty rain. In the distance, Matilda can see Tower Bridge, spanning the river with its two giant’s footsteps.

  She would, she thinks, have brought Victoria here, to walk hand in hand over the bridge with her mother on a sunny day and look down at the boats. And at her side, Victoria – her black hair pigtailed into two red bows, her shoes shone to perfection, her skirt pushed out into a shuttlecock about her slender legs – would have been admired by every passing stranger. She would have been a delicate, otherworldly child, Victoria Steck, with pale skin and bright green eyes. She would have been a sprite. But, God, she’d have been tough. Tough enough to play at soldiers with her brothers; tough enough to refuse the boys who would try their luck when she reached her teenage years; tough enough to grow into a woman so beautiful, so sure of herself, that men feared for their sanity around her. Yes, Matilda’s daughter would have driven men mad, if only she had managed to battle her way into existence – Matilda is sure of that. Just as she is sure that she would have been happy, if only she could have birthed the children she so frequently dreams life into. She would have been happy.