The Haunting of Henry Twist

by Rebecca F. John

  ‘Will I see you before the night’s out?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes. But, I don’t know where –’

  ‘Ah.’ Monty feels around inside his jacket, finds an invitation detailing the particulars of the Dawn Party in a coiling cursive, holds it up, turns over the envelope, and points to the address scrawled on the reverse.

  ‘It’s you!’ Matilda almost shouts. ‘You organise all the parties. But, it must be so exhausting. I thought you only provided a venue. I thought they organised everything. I thought –’

  ‘We all thought,’ Henry agrees.

  ‘Thinking is a dangerous game indeed,’ Monty grins. ‘And I don’t organise them all, Tilda dear. But some, yes. I’m a lonely old man, and sometimes I want to watch young, beautiful things pretending at life. You can understand that, can’t you?’

  Henry shakes his head, smiling lightly. He does understand. ‘And we weren’t young and beautiful enough for you.’

  ‘No,’ Monty replies. ‘No you weren’t. Not without her.’

  Henry nods. ‘That I can understand,’ he says. Then he turns and strides away across the garden. He needs to find Jack. He needs to tell him the good news. And he needs to collect Libby, and pack up his belongings, and thank Viv, and say goodbye to Herb. He needs to sit one last time in that window where his wife sat, missing her parents and her sister and the rain, and touch the pane her breath once misted over and promise her that he will do the best he can; that he will take their daughter home; that there is not a single thing he will forget.

  At Henry’s back, Matilda releases her husband’s hand and swivels away from him. Though she ought not to have, she has felt Monty’s words. She feels them still, hard inside her stomach and tight around her windpipe. They are not enough, without Ruby. She is not enough. She never has been, never could have been, never will be. That Henry should ever love her was a ridiculous idea. That Grayson should continue to love her is preposterous. She is a revolting human being. She has grown ugly on the outside. She always was ugly on the inside. And perhaps that is why she cannot give her husband a baby – because nature recognises her as an awful thing.

  ‘Well, that was fleeting,’ Monty says, taking another drink.

  Grayson grumbles something in response, but Matilda doesn’t hear it. She doesn’t want to. She stands.

  ‘Wait!’ she shouts. In the heat, her voice is weak, listless. It jams on the air. She is afraid it will not reach Henry, but then perhaps it oughtn’t. She sits again with a sigh. And as she does, so Henry stops, turns, and waits – as she has asked him to. His face is pale under the moon, his hair silvered, his shoulders so straight that it makes Matilda ache. There he is, that brave man. The man she has cried and longed and hurt for. And still, even now, he is someone else’s man. Perhaps he always will be.

  Henry shrugs, asking her what it is he is waiting for. At her side, Grayson crosses his arms over his chest and cocks his head. Across the table, Monty shoves a sigh out through his nose. Saturated city yards away, that trumpeter takes another run at ‘Tin Roof Blues’, stretching it longer this time, loving it harder, worshipping it. He had not done it justice before. It had not been right. He is asking his instrument for the chance to try again. And Matilda is asking for the very same – the chance to try again – and she must ask for it boldly.

  ‘It’s Jack,’ she says. ‘It’s about Jack.’ And Henry takes a single, involuntary step towards her. ‘I know he’s missing. I know where he is.’

  THE SEARCH

  Head down, eyes up, Henry marches through the heat-blotched darkness, one white shirt sleeve descending in slow rotations, one brown shoelace undone and rippling, both fists clenching and unclenching metrically at his sides. He does not know where he is going. He has not yet heard Matilda’s confession. He knows only that he must move, and keep moving, in the same way as a shark must keep circling the seas if he is to continue to breathe. Moving, in any direction, might bring him closer to Jack.

  Behind him, Matilda scurries along, pumping useless words out from between wine-slicked lips.

  ‘I’m sorry, Henry, darling … I thought it was for the best … Won’t you listen to me, Henry, darling? Please?’

  Her footsteps punctuate her pleas, marking irritating little commas. Her breathing is growing heavier. She is struggling to keep up.

  ‘Go away, Tilda.’ Henry pushes the command through ground teeth. She has done something terrible. He knows it. He always has been wary of Matilda Steck.

  Naturally, Ruby had been kinder.

  He recalls how, one late night, they had left Monty’s and taken the Tube to some unfamiliar part of the city, keen to be free of Matilda. They had sat in an empty coach, Henry straight-backed and wide-legged on the dusty green upholstery and Ruby curled into him, her cheek resting on his shoulder.

  ‘You shouldn’t be so cruel,’ Ruby said. ‘She has a thing for you. She can’t help it.’

  ‘Well, she should try.’

  Ruby, sleepy, yawned through her next words. ‘I, for one, don’t blame her. Who wouldn’t want you?’

  ‘Anyone with a bit of sense,’ Henry muttered, and Ruby sighed out a laugh.

  ‘You have a point there, husband. You are terribly difficult, at times.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  She nodded her head and they sat for a while, listening to the lopsided two-beat the train was rocking out, inhaling the stale, damp smell rising out of the seat fabric. Soon they were both asleep, pleated into each other, Henry successfully fending off his nightmares for a trice, and Ruby dreaming – or so she told Henry when they woke – about she and Ida, standing on the rocks at Burry Port and watching the waves flick their bleached manes at the shore.

  ‘I don’t even know if that really happened,’ she said.

  ‘Why would you doubt it?’ Henry asked. They were off the Tube and walking, seeking a café that had yet to close. They had agreed, upon leaving Monty’s, that they would not return home until the sun pushed open the next pale morning. It would be fun, Ruby had assured Henry. They could watch their past fade and their future colour, just for the hell of it. They could pretend that there was nothing but them and that – the slow turning of their life together.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she answered. ‘It just seems too easy for a memory, you know. I feel like there’d be something unpleasant in it, if it was real. An argument I’d had with someone, or a fear, or a worry. There’s always something. Nothing is that pure.’

  Henry understands that sentiment now. Isn’t his every memory of her tainted, in some small way, by her loss?

  But he cannot think on that now. He has to find Jack. He has to. Jack is in possession not only of the only sliver of a future Ruby might now have; he is in possession, too, of Henry’s future. Henry will not lose him. He would not survive it.

  Behind him, Matilda is still talking; pleading rather, her voice louder than before.

  ‘Stop, will you! Just stop and let me explain!’

  And because Ruby is gone, and Jack is missing, and Matilda was his friend once, he does. Henry stops and turns to consider her. He allows her the opportunity to explain.

  Matilda stands perhaps five strides distant, a shaky figure in too few clothes since her hat has been discarded and she did not stop to pull on her shoes when they left Monty’s. She is girlish in her stocking feet. She is small. She is, Henry realises gradually, audibly sobbing. And she looks, well, she looks calamitous: her fingers have worked tangles into her hair; her mascara strikes black lightning bolts down her cheeks; her lipstick, dislodged by a frustrated swipe of her hand, is a scarlet bruise, bleeding across her chin. Any onlooker would think her the wronged party here. Any onlooker would see an injured woman, not a plotter, a schemer, a … what? Henry doesn’t know. And yet he is aware that he soon must.

  He breathes deep, trying not to reach the worst possible conclusion. But what if she’s done it? What if she’s reported Jack to the police, had him arrested? He’d be killed in prison. Henry would have
to find some way to break him out.

  ‘Henry –’ Matilda begins, but Henry silences her with a single glance. He can’t stand any more of her whining or imploring. He wants – no, he needs – only the facts. He closes his eyes to a fleeting prayer. Then, breathing deep, he voices the question he must.

  ‘What have you done?’ he asks.

  Between the grey stone walls of Monty’s garden, his suit jacket draped over the chair he sits on, his feet crossed at the ankles, a deep two-pronged ache spreading down the back of his neck, Grayson stares at his own elongated reflection in the thin curve of his wine glass. He does not rise to chase after his friend, or his wife. After all, he knows nothing of Jack’s whereabouts – he cannot help Henry. And he has no desire to help Matilda. She has, once again, done something he will be ashamed of. That much was obvious in the way she ran off, without a single glimpse back in his direction.

  ‘So, Steck,’ Monty murmurs. ‘She’s gone again. I’m sorry, old chap.’ He stands and reaches across the table to clap Gray’s shoulder, and Grayson falls into the older man’s grasp. He closes his eyes against the ghost in his wine glass: that ageing, unloved thing. He grabs Monty’s elbow and holds on, tight. He is, he is discovering, a man in need of mooring.

  ‘Yes. She’s gone again.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Me?’ Grayson considers the question for a moment. He holds himself in his mind and ponders his own physical weight, the mess of bone and blood and flesh and muscle that has somehow knitted itself together into him, Gray, a husband who has found himself in possession of one miserable wife and one frightened mistress with a child on the way. On the way. Even the phrasing stirs up a panic at his middle. It is an unstoppable force, this child: it is on the way.

  ‘Yes, you,’ Monty says.

  ‘I have somewhere I need to be,’ Grayson answers.

  ‘You too, hmm?’

  ‘Sorry, Monty,’ Grayson says, standing now. He has seen the sadness in Monty’s face: the droop about his eyes, the downward shuddering of his lips. It’s clear he does not want to be left alone. ‘I really do have to go. You’ll be all right, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course!’ Monty waves him away. ‘Go. Do what you must.’

  And though he ought to be a better friend, Grayson does go. He leaves Monty to his loneliness, and within half an hour he is again knocking at Sally’s door.

  She lets him in with one of those tight downward smiles more inclined to be accompanied by tears than joy and, still standing in the hallway, starts unbuttoning his shirt. Gray kicks the door shut with his heel and tries to kiss her, but she won’t allow it. She dodges him. So instead he watches her go about her work, the graceful way her fingers liberate one button and then the next breaking his heart because she is so fragile, this woman; she is so small and fragile. And yet, in the half-light which spills outward from one green-shaded lamp, she is also a thing that sparks. She is a jewel. She has the deepest sort of strength.

  ‘Are you drunk?’ she asks.

  ‘A little.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Why would you want –’

  Sally closes her eyes and presses her cheek to his chest. ‘Sssshhhh,’ she says.

  And Grayson, as usual, obeys. When she links her hands around his middle, he echoes the movement. When her breathing slows, he matches his respirations to hers. He catches, emanating off her skin, the clammy scent of too much moisturising cream. She must be covered in it, he thinks. Beneath her nightdress, she is surely slick to the touch. He lifts the nightdress over her head and, dropping it to the floor, runs his hands over her bared back, but it is not the beginning of a sexual act, this: it is simply an exploration. He is exploring the woman inside whom a part of his own self has attached itself and begun, unbelievably, to grow. He brushes his palms over her upper arms, he loops his fingers around her wrists, he measures the gentle tapering of her waist, and only then, when he has touched every other possible part of her, does he turn her around, pull her tight to his chest and stroke the still-flat plane of her stomach.

  ‘Sally,’ he whispers.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We’re going to be parents.’

  ‘I know.’

  He hears the smile in her reply and, taking his cue, speaks into her ear, her hair shifting where his breath hits it. ‘I’ve been thinking of names,’ he says.

  This – a slow coming together, words she’d been waiting to hear – would have weakened Matilda. She would have turned into him and smiled and waited to hear his suggestions. But Sally is new and different, and he still has so much to learn about her. He must remember to adopt a more observant approach. Starting tonight, because he has just learnt, this very moment, that talk of names, pacification, is not what she wants. He has felt her stiffen in his hands.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ she says. ‘We can’t do any of that, not until she knows, Gray. I’m sorry, but not until then. It’s too hard.’

  And there she is again, the woman he promised his whole life to, standing between them, reduced to a ‘she’.

  Grayson wouldn’t have thought it possible for Matilda to fade so far from his considerations before he met Sally. The day they’d married – no, before that even – Matilda Fellows had scorched herself onto his brain matter, like a brand mark on the rump of an animal, so that every thought he had, every idea or concern or whim, was laced through with her. She was the rings that run through the trunk of a tree. Or the layers of rock which stack up to form a cliff face. She was part of him, good or bad. And he was part of her. And even when she stormed, even when she lashed him with her tongue or battered him with her eyes, there she was. Immovable. However much he might have wanted to rid himself of her, Matilda was tangled in his person. Was that love, then?

  He tries to think of other things he has loved, to draw a comparison, and ridiculously he can come up with nothing but his Lee-Enfield. Excepting a palm’s worth of women, he has never loved anything so much as that rifle. But then, it did keep him alive through the long slog of 1916, so he supposes that’s excusable. He feels for the smooth eight-pound weight of it, still familiar in the muscles along his hand and forearm ten years on. He could shoot that thing blind, even now. He knows the flat polish of the butt, the womanly curl and flick of the trigger. Gray had clung to that rifle as though it was made of gold. It was gold, to him. He had cleaned it daily, checked its every function near-hourly. At night, he had slept with it tucked along the length of his body, the butt against his ribcage, the whole item warmed by the blanket he shared with it.

  He’d lost it in Malta, when his sleeping battery had been shelled and they’d had to dive for cover, every last one of them. Of course, Grayson had gone back to his makeshift bed to retrieve it later, but it was gone – pilfered, he suspected, by someone in close proximity. For weeks afterwards, though he’d found himself a replacement rifle relatively quickly, Gray had looked suspiciously on any man who lifted a Lee-Enfield. He was convinced he would know his rifle on sight. He knew its every nick and indentation, the particular shade of its wood. His very own fingerprints were imprinted on it. Hadn’t he shed a secret tear for it that night, for God’s sake?

  But that was need, not love. And he does not need Matilda or Sally, not in that essential way, not to survive. He never has. He is a man, it seems, incapable of anything more than want. And perhaps that is adequate, so long as he makes a secret of it: why not let them, both of them, think he would die without them? It is only a small deception.

  ‘I am going to tell her,’ Grayson says.

  ‘Really?’ Sally lifts her face to his and he nods.

  ‘Soon,’ he promises. ‘I’ll tell her soon.’

  ‘And what then?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Grayson answers. ‘I don’t know yet.’

  Though she cannot guess where they are going, Henry and Matilda are travelling again. Fast. Matilda hangs just a step or two behind him, no longer pretending that she cannot keep up. Her wallowing had transformed into tr
ue, deep-seated dread once she’d said the words, observed the new set of Henry’s face. Never before has she seen him look so volatile. And that is why she must stick with him – because it is her responsibility now to ensure that he doesn’t do something stupid.

  She does not plead with him to slow down or talk to her. Unusually, and but for the wheeze of her breath, Matilda remains silent. She has done real wrong. She has to right it.

  Running to match Henry’s quickening strides, she stays with him as he rushes down the centre of Fleet Street, the jostling buildings which are the stones in its claustrophobic walls rising above them, the streetlamps dangling pendulously from their strung-out cables to light up the asymmetric sign for the Yorkshire Evening Post, the square temple-like frontage of Newspaper House, the palatial columns of the Daily Telegraph building. Matilda cannot concentrate fully on which streets they turn on to, then off, then back on to again. The hot, honey-coloured summer moon gleams over the pavements and shows her a stall, closed for the night, which boasts Gateway Tobacco, and, above locked doors, signs for Haircutting and Shaving, the Cottage Tea Rooms, Baker’s the Tobacconists, A.B.C Tea Rooms, Judge’s Postcards, Finch’s Wines from the Woods. But Henry is running now, running, and she is running after him, and she has no time to think about where all these turns are taking them.

  On the corner of the Strand, they career past a J. Lyons. Then, before she knows it, they are tearing towards the Hippodrome, and for a moment she is loosely aware of the names presented on its sandy exterior – Rosie Moran and Robert Hale, who might just be performing in a musical comedy – and then the names disappear, because it is busier here, and there are more people to stop and gape at she and Henry, thumping by, and Matilda is both embarrassed and thrilled to be, ever so fleetingly, at the very core of their attentions. There is no need to enter the theatre. Here it is. Life. Happening right in front of them. And she has made that happen. She has. Matilda Steck – though she would adopt Twist as her name, of course, if she were truly a character in a drama. Why wouldn’t she? After all, fiction is the only freedom a person who knows unanswered love is ever offered.