And with that, she squalls out of the station and back onto Ladbroke Road, where she can breathe again, where she can breathe.
A PRIVATE PARTY
On the gate which separates Monty’s garden from the rest of London, a note hangs from a piece of string looped around one of those elaborate iron whorls. It has been hastily written – that much is apparent in the hand, which slopes downwards and grows larger as it progresses across the paper; in the improvised way the two holes accommodating the string have been punctured with a pen nib, leaving inky trickles of evidence. Despite its unattractive appearance, however, it proves an intriguing note, to those it was not intended for. A number of times already today, passers-by have paused to read its words, to puzzle over them, to imbue them with invented meaning. Some hours ago, a lady walking a small black poodle had lingered there for minutes on end, wishing it was clearer, longing to follow its clues towards some naughty adventure or other. She’d read about the Bright Young People. Incidentally, she’d whispered about them with a luncheon companion only yesterday: she had been seeking them for months, hoping to secure an invitation. Gentlemen, too, have stopped to scan the message, some deciding it a silly love riddle and moving on with a grin or a tut, others checking about themselves for onlookers before turning it over in their hands, seeking more information. But none of these passers-by can make any real sense of the thing. This note on a gate in a London street, though seen by many, belongs to only a select few. It reads:
M, G, H and J,
You are all, without the most miniscule of doubts, some of the most idiotic people I have ever had the pleasure of knowing.
You could create a drama in a nunnery.
Now, kindly convey yourselves to the house. I’m expecting you.
I’ll provide refreshments, but only if you’re good!
M T-W
Matilda, appropriately enough since hers is the first initial, is the first to happen upon it. She does not stop to give it a second read. She turns, as instructed, and makes her way directly to Monty’s house, the address of which she knows by heart, of course, from the back of those parchment paper invitations.
She finds the place just as grand as she had expected. She understands then why Monty doesn’t invite just any friend back here: to show anyone this much wealth, you’d need to trust them completely. It is a townhouse set over five storeys, and, when she tilts back her head to take in the full scale of it, she finds her neck aching with the strain of sending her eyes right to the top. It rises forever, this house. It frowns down at you. At street level, two Corinthian columns guard a black front door, set amongst panels of glass. Above that, on the upper four floors, the stretch of smooth white paint is interrupted by windows lined up in triplicate, which glow orange in the sinking twilight and open onto neat white-balustraded balconies. Number 8, Matilda thinks, is stacked up like the tiers of a royal wedding cake. And so naturally does the image sit in her mind that when she approaches the door and lifts the knocker, she almost expects it to yield to her touch, as sugared icing would.
The door is opened by a footman, as tall as he is young, who stands puffed with pride in his white shirt and dicky bow, and instantly Matilda loses her words. Why is she here? She can’t be sure. Her mouth opens, eager to fill the silence, but she finds no explanation. Thankfully, a breath or two later, the footman comes to her assistance.
‘Mrs Steck?’ he ventures.
‘Yes!’ Matilda replies, too loud. ‘Sorry. Yes. How did you know?’
‘It’s a private party,’ the boy smiles, stepping backwards to usher her inside. ‘We’re expecting just one lady guest this evening. Please,’ he continues, ‘allow me to show you through to Mr Thornton-Wells.’
Henry and Jack are walking through their city, roughly ten counted strides apart, burdened by piles of stuffed-full bags. Jack is ahead, limping heavily but trying hard not to. Already his bruises have ripened, mapping the right side of his face with three colourful new continents. He is scattered all over with scrapes and lumps and splinters of split skin. Back at the flat, Henry had attempted to clean his wounds, but with access only to cold water and a cloth, he had not made a great job of it. In the fading light, Jack is pitiful.
Behind him, Henry moves in half-steps, not wanting to rush him along. Moving slowly makes it easier, in any case, to be watchful of his surroundings. He is hyper-alert now: in soldier mode again. It was easier than he’d imagined it might be to snap back, to glance down a street and calculate the number of people on it, the quickest route off it, the length of time it might take to march down it. He knows, for instance, that presently there are nine people within range of a rifle: two couples, married he decides, who strut arm in arm, their feet precisely matched; a line of three men, each of them smaller than both Henry and Jack, who are likely on their way for an after-work tipple; a lone man, who fairly clips along, a rolled newspaper held in one hand and a cane he doesn’t seem to need in the other; and, nearest to them and travelling nearer, a lady in her early fifties, Henry would estimate, who keeps her silvering head low as she whistles her way home, or away from home. Henry plots them all on his mind like constellations of stars: those closest to him, the greatest threats, burn brighter than the rest.
He clears his throat, once, significantly – the ridiculous code they have concocted. Jack answers by echoing the sound. A single cough means he is all right, he can carry on. Two would mean he was struggling, he might have to stop. Three – the emergency cough – was to be used if and when Jack felt under threat. Henry considers now that the order should perhaps have been reversed. In the case of an emergency, Jack might not have time to discharge the rapid tripartite Henry has forced him to agree to.
He sneaks a glimpse at Libby, tucked into the pram he pushes, her snub-nose reddened to a slight glow in the chilling air, her round eyes sparking at him. They are like worlds, this little girl’s eyes. They are like deep dark worlds. They had smiled at Viv when they had said their goodbyes, exactly as her mother’s would have.
Henry had hoped to spend more time with Viv and Herb. He’d wanted to set Libby down on the floor of their flat and murmur through some purposeless conversation as she crawled about, dragging her blanket and easy joy in her wake. He’d wanted her to make Herb smile one more time, for Viv’s sake. But they had had to rush, he and Jack. They have not spoken yet about what really happened in Pentonville, but what choice did they have but to move fast? After all, it seems Matilda only tricked the police into releasing him. They might realise the deception, want their revenge. Someone else, spurred on by her apparent bravery, might make an accusation of their own. Either way, Bayswater Road does not feel safe any more, and so he had been forced to leave Viv with nothing more than an embrace.
‘You’ll write me, won’t you?’ she’d said, holding on tight to the tears in her eyes. ‘You’ll let me know where you end up?’
‘Of course I will,’ Henry had answered, folding his arms around her. ‘Of course I will. I promise.’ Then he’d kissed her cheek, shaken hands with Herb, locked up 101a Bayswater Road for the final time and walked away.
And now here he is, trailing Jack across London, armed with nothing much more than a vague plan, a bundle of clothes and his family. He touches a tentative hand to the back of his neck. His anxiety is a dull pain which pulls at his brain, pulse-like, making clear thinking impossible. But this much he knows: he is walking towards his future. That is what he needs to tell Ruby, what he has to explain to her, what he hopes she can forgive him for. That is the sentiment he’ll be carrying when he visits her grave for the very first time. And, God, he hopes there will be flowers, deposited by some kindly hand before the stone on which her name is written, because he cannot stand to look down and remember the way he last saw that square of ground – opened to the sky and too many eyes and his wife. He cannot stand it.
Darkness drops like an anchor. And luckily so, for they need something to hold them in place, this eddying collection of people. They are
strewn about the room as though deposited there by an accidental tide. Monty stands before the double windows, smiling through closed lips, an untouched drink held up on an idle wrist. Matilda perches on a chair edge, her head lost in her hands. Across the room, sharing a two-seater settee, Jack and Grayson look in opposite directions, one man biting at a thumbnail, the other sucking furiously on a cigarette. On the rug in the centre of the floor, Sally Emory crosses and uncrosses her ankles, straining not to reach out and touch Libby, who has been set to sleep there. And Henry, back to a shut door, watches them. He watches them, and he finds, in the spaces between the words they are shoving back and forth, his decision. The letter he will write later, to Ida, gathers in his mind as insistently as storm clouds, the words finding their own unstoppable way together.
‘You won’t stay?’ Matilda asks. ‘Not even … Not for anything?’
Henry shakes his head. No.
‘But –’
‘Tilda,’ Grayson warns. They can feel, all of them, that she is about to start begging. They can feel it, and they are embarrassed by it. But Matilda does not care one jot for their embarrassment. She is facing a future devoid of this man and this child, and despite her best intentions, she cannot deny that the pain of it is already at her stomach, gnawing deep. Ahead of her stretches the rest of a suddenly empty life, during which she will never again sit opposite Henry to a meal while he and her husband drink and laugh and drink; never again lift Libby to her shoulder and know that smell she has, like the heat of sun on stone, present in her nose. She cannot conceive now of why she had needed more when she could have had, and continued to have all those things, those wonderful things, those real things. She could have taught that little girl just how incredible her mother had been; she could have helped to raise her, in her own way. Why, then, had she had to push? Why had she been so greedy? She is aware of the reason. She is aware of it though she wishes she weren’t. She, Matilda Steck, is selfish – she always has been.
‘You can’t stay where you’re not welcome,’ Jack says, his words gentle. Henry has implored him to remain composed, just through this one last night with these people, just so that they can stay off the streets until morning. And Jack is trying, hard.
‘But you are welcome here,’ Matilda returns, deliberately misunderstanding. ‘Hasn’t Monty said so? Haven’t you, Montague? You want them to stay, don’t you? Don’t you?’
Monty responds at his leisure. He’s enjoying this: the heartbreak, the tension. ‘I’ve said so,’ he answers.
‘But not everywhere,’ Henry says. ‘We’re not welcome everywhere. We never will be.’
‘You don’t know that!’ Matilda almost wails.
Henry growls back at her, his voice low but rough. ‘You’ve proved that.’
‘Well, I’m sorry, I’m sorry I –’ She stops when Sally adjusts her ankles again and the movement catches her eye. She cannot look at the girl without feeling physically sick. How can she, knowing what she now knows, having noticed what she has noticed? She cannot believe Grayson was so ignorant as to think that she, Matilda Steck, barren Matilda Steck, would not sniff out a pregnant woman. She would be the country’s most successful detective, if the only suspects she had to seek were expectant mothers. ‘I was trying to help.’
‘Who?’ Henry asks.
‘You.’
‘Me, or yourself?’ he mutters, blushing at the words. They have never acknowledged her feelings this way: verbally, soberly. Not Henry or Grayson or even Matilda. Doing so now makes them feel like she is standing in the middle of the room howling ‘But I loved you’. Each of them, excepting Monty, stares at the polish of the floorboards, listening to the silent rumour of that awful, beautiful sentiment, caught on the air.
Sometimes, Henry wonders whether he should have spoken those words to his parents, whether he’d have grown into a better man if they had ever spoken them to him. But, no – the idea is a wasted one. The last time Henry saw his father he was slumped on the front doorstep of their home, spittle hanging like slung ropes from his lips to his chest, his shoulders crumbling into the sleeves of his shirt, one foot removed from its shoe, one knee drooling streamers of blood down the length of a bony shin. Henry had extricated him from a street brawl that night. He’d been rewarded with a blow to his left temple, delivered by a hand near-identical to his own: that he had accepted. When the old man had drawn a knife, though, and started sculpting the dark with it, Henry had been forced to show his father just how much strength he had acquired since his boyhood.
Later, Henry said goodbye to him without being heard, while he slept off the lesson his son’s fists had taught him, and in truth, he does not know for sure now if the old man is alive or dead. He suspects, however – and he accepted the suspicion as fact a number of years since – that the bloody fool drank himself to death. Remarkably, the only comfort Henry can pull from this is that the news of he and Jack will not reach Alfred Twist. Never will he have to begin an unresolvable argument with the man he always hoped for, even through that final fight.
In Monty’s drawing room, there is a shift in the conversation. Somehow, despite his fear, his anger, Henry had managed to mute the exchanges crisscrossing him for a minute or two. Monty’s voice finds a way to reinstate his attention.
‘I suggest a game,’ he says. ‘Wouldn’t a game ease the mood, friends? Don’t you think?’ He steps towards Sally and Libby, so that he is standing at the heart of the gathering, pivotal – the position where he is most content. The suggestion is ridiculous enough to silence them. ‘How about poker? Just a couple of silly hands, no money? Anyone?’
Grayson, eager to soften the encounter, responds first to the invitation.
‘If not money,’ he enquires, his lips spilling cigarette smoke, ‘what will we play for?’
‘Ah,’ Monty smiles. ‘How about truths?’
‘Truths?’ Jack asks, and Monty smiles wider.
‘What else is there?’
They allow themselves to be ushered into a room which Monty has surely had designed as a gambling den. At the room’s middle, beneath a five-armed chandelier and atop a woven circular rug, there sits an enormous round table, already laid with playing cards. The remainder of the space is largely empty: there is an alcove piled with books, the battered spines of which are crammed together at every possible angle; beside it, a leather armchair; and against the opposite wall, a leather settee, a standard lamp and a drinks trolley, its treasures glinting in the candlelight. Henry imagines Monty insists on candlelight only in this room, for the drama of it, for the added tension a flame made to stutter by quickening breath would create.
They take the places Monty allocates them in near silence, uttering occasional words of apology as they bump elbows or chair legs. He does not organise them accidentally – Henry sees that right away. He puts Matilda alongside Sally, he sandwiches Grayson between Henry and Jack. As usual, he is playing more than one game.
‘I’ll deal,’ he announces, settling in his own chair, and, like fools, they wait for their hands to be dealt. There is a stretch of time then interrupted only by the shuffling of cards between fingers, of glances over the top of fanned hands, of coughs and sniffs and hums and obdurate looks. Ridiculously, they are nervous. They are sitting to a game of poker, nothing more. But they feel, somehow, that what each of them is playing for is their life.
Sally folds first, hands trembling. She is followed by Jack and Monty and, not far behind them, Matilda. Only Grayson and Henry show their cards. Grayson lays a two pair across the table: two kings, two sevens. Henry trumps it with three of a kind and the slimmest hint of a smile.
‘So,’ Monty says, like a schoolmaster leading an assembly. ‘The truth must be one of yours, Gray.’
Grayson glares at Monty. ‘What do you want me to say?’
Quite why they feel so bound by the rules of this game, Henry cannot fathom. He is aware though that, had the losing hand been his, he would not have refused to reveal his truth. He would not
have spoiled the game.
Monty takes a slow sip from his glass, holding the liquid in his mouth for a moment or two before swallowing.
‘How long have you been sleeping with our new friend here?’ he asks, indicating Sally with a flick of his eyes.
‘No,’ Matilda interjects, before Gray has chance to draw a breath. ‘No, I’ve got a better question … How long have you known, husband, that she is carrying your child?’
She chases the question with a slug of red wine. A few droplets of it escape her lips and scatter across her chin, like beads of fresh blood. She dabs them away with a napkin then folds it neatly back onto the table.
Grayson gulps and gulps again, trying to loosen his throat, but still the words, the only small words he can manage, are emitted as tight, knotted things. ‘Not too long,’ he replies.
Though Matilda had been sure from the start, this confirmation of her suspicions is too much and she wretches into her cupped palm, the convulsion starting low in her stomach and rippling all the way up to the back of her neck. She is a bird, regurgitating its hunted food for its young. Except, of course, that the regurgitation is for someone else’s young. Not her own. Never her own. She stands and staggers from the room, her palm still pressed to her mouth, holding in her shame. She slams the door behind her and then she is out in the hallway, invisible to them, and they are listening to her throwing up on the other side of the wall. They are listening to the hot expulsion of her grief. They are listening to something so private that each of them bows their head and stares at the table before them, as though they are engaged in prayer.
The Haunting of Henry Twist Page 29