The Haunting of Henry Twist

by Rebecca F. John

  Henry is sure of all this. He has to be. And when, one long exhalation later, sleep finally claims him again, it does not even stall the thought, which continues unimpeded, the same way tomorrow’s early train out of Paddington will along its track. And on it will be Henry and Jack, rolling away, rolling away fast, and it will all be behind them, all of this. Behind them, turning to smoke.

  ELIZABETH

  As she strolls up the path towards the cottage, Elizabeth Foster peels off her thin white cardigan and hangs it over her shoulder from one erect finger. Even here, where there is always a cool wind, the air is thick, weighted-down. The grass fails to tremble. Heat gathers itself up into long planks and beats down against the earth, insistent as a pulse. It is July. It is 1971. Elizabeth moves at a crawl.

  A few steps later, she stops and turns to look over the village. Her village, as it once was; and continues to be, she supposes, though she has not lived here in the last twenty years. Today, it is pretty. House windows spark sunlight back up into the mountains. The slate roofs gleam as though polished. Elizabeth also knows it as it might be, ragged with clinging to the valley floor when the weather storms through, throwing trees about, dislodging chimney bricks, running the streets into rivers. But this does not prevent her from loving it. She knows this place. She became Elizabeth here.

  Below her, a red mini rattles out from between the houses and into open space, then turns towards town. Though it is moving away, the puttering of its engine spoils Elizabeth’s mood a little and she resumes her walk, the steep incline creating a balled-up pressure in her calves which is both painful and pleasant. She doesn’t get much exercise these days. There is satisfaction in that ache.

  In front of her there appears to be nothing but grassland, but Elizabeth knows that when she reaches the next turn in the path the cottage will become visible. Two-storeyed but low to the ground, its walls are the white of freshly washed sheets: it sits in the rough landscape like a fallen cloud. A washing line, nearly always full of men’s clothes, runs parallel to it, and as Elizabeth follows the curving stone track she sees that today six or seven pale-coloured shirts are pegged out, hanging still and dripping dry. She thinks she can hear each individual drop tapping the ground, but it might just be the insects clicking. There are so many infinitesimal noises up here on the mountain. Sometimes, when she visits, Elizabeth stands out in the garden and just listens, believing she can hear the squelchy throbbing of her own heart. She does it to silence the worry which swamps her whenever she calls on her father.

  She hoists her handbag further up onto her shoulder. Inside, she has Emma’s university photos: the celebrations of the end of her first year. Elizabeth had asked her father to be there when Emma got home for the holidays, but as usual, he had refused. He didn’t want to spoil anything, he said; he was too old for that sort of thing. Elizabeth knows what his refusal was really about. Like so much else in his life, it was made by fear.

  She pauses again, the cottage in full view, and pulls at the front of her blouse to encourage some air inside. There is a line of stickiness between her breasts she wants to wipe away, but will not, in case one of them is watching from the window.

  The back door swings open, the dark wood moving away from the walls like a tiny wing, and Jack steps out, another load of washing cradled under his arm: trouser legs dangle over the sides of the basket. Still spry in his seventies, he whistles as he descends a couple of steps, crosses a strip of lawn, and sets the basket down beside the line’s side pole. It is as he lifts the first pair of trousers and flaps the water from them that he sees Elizabeth.

  ‘Libby,’ he says, his face spreading out into that happiness only children ever summon in their parents: that silly, wide-open sort of delight.

  Elizabeth wonders if she smiles that way at her daughter; if it embarrasses Emma. It used to embarrass her when she was a teenager. Her own mother, opening the front door as she arrived home and grinning that way. Her own mother, walking past whilst she was lingering at the bus stop with friends and grinning that way. ‘Mam,’ she used to breathe, before bundling her backwards into the hallway or waving her away.

  Despite having brought up her own daughter in England, Elizabeth instilled that sound in Emma before there was even the slightest chance of her repeating it. Mam. She would not answer to the softness of ‘mum’.

  Elizabeth smiles and pushes herself to resume her walk. Already, her mind is on a long glass of lemonade and the bench which waits in shadow on the other side of the cottage. She and Jack often sit there during her visits, watching the stirrings of the village below and passing fragments of their lives back and forth. Sometimes, with a lot of careful work, she unearths some hint of the man he was in London: a unique scent at a party he once attended, or a name to which Elizabeth can attach no face. And sometimes, in those moments, she sees Jack as he must have been: tall and slim and handsome as anything with his dark, curling hair and his deep, brown-marble eyes. Only now has his hair started to splinter into grey.

  He laughs at her when she speaks of the Jack she imagines, strutting about the city with an unbreakable smile and some scheme always in the working. She does not know how accurate this image is; how exactly she envisages the way he would shove his hands into his pockets as he walked, or the easy loping movement of his body before the years got hold of it. Jack will not tell her. There are a thousand things Jack will not tell her.

  ‘Here,’ he says as she reaches him, passing her a pair of trousers to peg. ‘Help an old man out.’

  ‘Haven’t seen any old men around here,’ Elizabeth answers, lifting her hands to the task.

  ‘Ah, always the charmer,’ Jack smiles. ‘You must get that from your mother.’

  ‘Which one?’

  She says it too quickly; she knows she does. She does not want to sound flippant. Jack pings a sideways glance at her, fast as a freed spring, then smiles into the clothes. He understands this battle: they have been play-fighting it for thirty years.

  ‘That’s hers, too,’ Jack says. ‘That tenacity. You’re a grown woman, Lib. Stop being so nosey.’

  ‘Never,’ she replies, smiling back.

  What Jack sees when he looks at her, Elizabeth cannot suppose. An elegant woman at five foot seven, she is, she knows, still attractive at forty-five. Men still watch her in the street. Her hair, which curls at the ends and is lighter now, in the summer, moves between a sandy colour and a more even brown. But her eyes are dark, almost as dark as Jack’s, and she has concluded – though she has tried to avoid such conclusions her entire life – that she resembles him a lot, not least in complexion. Odd, that she should look like this man. Her thoughts make her overly aware of her appearance, and she pushes out her bottom lip to blow her flick of fringe away from her forehead. Emma had talked her into chopping into her hair so that it rose up around her face this way, and she likes it now. She likes the feel of it, just brushing her shoulders. It makes her feel younger.

  ‘Em will be down next week,’ she says, to change the subject. She cannot tackle it again until she has had that lemonade. She is too hot.

  ‘She shouldn’t waste her time with old sods like us,’ Jack murmurs. Elizabeth knows he says it only because he feels he must. He doesn’t want anything for Emma but parties and dancing and fun. He hardly even wants her to study.

  ‘She wants to spend time with you old sods,’ Elizabeth tells him. ‘She can’t forever be flitting around with her friends, anyway. They’ve got families to visit, too.’

  ‘Is there a man?’

  ‘Not that I know of. I don’t ask, though.’

  Jack nods seriously. They have finished pegging the clothes now and they wander around the side of the cottage to stand facing the lazy-bodied sun. It bleeds white hot across the sky. In the distance, a flock of unidentifiable birds fold into each other and then disperse, as tiny and weightless as pollen on the wind.

  ‘Jack,’ Elizabeth whines. Funny, how being home strips the last forty years and calls back
that particular whine: the rising tone toddlers use for ‘why’.

  ‘Yes, love.’

  ‘Are you ever going to talk about it?’

  ‘No,’ Jack answers. ‘I made a promise.’

  Elizabeth leans back against the cottage wall and closes her eyes. There is a film of moisture on her eyelids. Soon, she will go inside and splash her face.

  ‘Have you kept every promise you’ve ever made?’

  ‘No,’ Jack says. ‘But I’m keeping this one.’

  ‘Are you ready to go in?’

  ‘Absolutely not. Look at this. You’ve got to appreciate this, Lib.’ She laughs as he pleats down onto the ground and stretches his legs out in front of him, shaking his feet left and right like a pair of windscreen wipers. ‘I spend far too many days looking down there into cloud soup.’

  ‘Maybe you just shouldn’t look,’ Elizabeth replies, settling next to him, the stone path hard against her backside, ‘on bad days.’

  ‘Actually, I think maybe you grow out of good days and bad days when you get to my age.’

  Elizabeth does not want to tackle the subject of ageing, not now, not with the sun on her face and a thirst in her throat, so she lifts a hand and taps at the window above her right shoulder.

  ‘I’m here,’ she calls.

  ‘And we’re always glad of it,’ Jack adds quietly. But Elizabeth’s greeting is not answered and they do not rise to go inside. Not yet. There is plenty of day left for that.

  In the kitchen, Elizabeth sits at the dining table and stares at the cupboard door of the Welsh dresser, which has been left ajar to reveal a thin slice of darkness. Her eyes are still adjusting to the indoors light, and she squints at it, trying to distinguish exactly how wide it is. It is an innocent enough action – she wants to see clearly again – but she is also aware, in some secret part of her mind, that hidden inside are hundreds of photographs, slipped messily into various albums. Elizabeth knows they are there, not because she has viewed the photographs lately – or at all, in fact – but because she holds a memory, perhaps thirty-five years old now, of opening that cupboard door and discovering them, leather bound or cloth cased, and all coated with a layer of furry dust; of being told, quite definitely, that they were not for her eyes; of having to pull her hand quickly away from the slam of wood against wood. Never, before or after, had she been so frightened by her father. The set of his face that day made her imagine them ugly things, those photographs; disturbing things.

  To her right, not fully in her sightline, Jack is busying himself with pouring that tall lemonade she’d been craving. One for her, one for him. No third glass.

  ‘I’ve got some photos of Em for you,’ she says. She is distracted, not really thinking through the words. As she speaks, she pushes one hand into the handbag which hangs off the back of her chair and retrieves them. ‘Perhaps you’ve got an album to slot them into somewhere?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Jack answers. ‘Or I could hang them. I’ll find a couple of frames … So, how’s work?’

  He bangs two glasses down on the table then, with a flick of his wrist, spins one dining chair around and straddles it, the way a twenty-year-old man would. As he settles, he winks at Elizabeth. Libby, as she has always been to him. When she had gone through that teenage stage of wanting to change every last thing about herself, Jack alone had refused to revert to her full given name. ‘You were Lib the day I met you,’ he’d said, ‘and you’ll still be Lib the day I die.’

  ‘Fine,’ she answers. ‘Good. Nothing new.’

  ‘There’s always something new. Every single day.’

  ‘Is that so?’ she smiles. ‘We’re feeling philosophical today, are we?’

  ‘Am I ever anything but? I am a wise man, Libby Twist,’ – he never has used her married name – ‘and you’d do well to remember it.’

  ‘Maybe I would remember it, if you behaved accordingly.’

  ‘Maybe I’d behave accordingly, if I were a boring old man.’ He pops his eyes and swigs from his glass, hiding his smirk against its rim. The rush of bubbly liquid down his throat is too fast and he starts to choke, bending forward over the table.

  ‘That’ll teach you,’ Elizabeth laughs, but her heart isn’t truly in this teasing – their own private ritual – today. She’s started something, in mentioning the photo album, which she does not feel able to stop. Whilst Jack recovers from his bout of coughing, she stands and moves towards the cupboard. There, she drops onto her heels and catches the knob between thumb and forefinger. The albums, she finds, are neatly stacked: not the chaotic towers she had been recalling. She lifts one from the top of the first pile and carries it back to the dining table.

  ‘Don’t, Lib, please.’

  ‘Why not?’ she shoots back, but Jack cannot answer this one and he stumbles over his words.

  ‘It’s not … Because … I just … Ah, come on. Looking in there is just going to make you maudlin.’

  ‘I solemnly swear not to become maudlin,’ Elizabeth recites, one hand pressing her oath to the air, the other already opening the covers. The very first photograph breaks her vow.

  In it, her mother – her first mother – is sitting on the edge of a small pier, her legs dangling over sharp-peaked water. It must be cold, for she is overwhelmed by woollen layers: her hands, which grip the pier’s edge, are lost to the sleeves of a dark, calf-length coat; her chin juts over the doubling of a thick scarf as she peers down into the spiking sea; and her legs kick out – the right forwards, the left back as this particular image is snapped – so that her skirt folds up a little and reveals her ankles to the blackening sky. Her feet, Elizabeth notices with a smile, are bare. Though the puff of breath rising from her mouth betrays the bitter temperatures, she looks as though she is about to jump in. Perhaps she did. Elizabeth scans the photograph for her shoes and finds them discarded in the foreground, one tossed onto its side, the other sitting the right way up. She wonders if she put them back on before she left, or whether she wandered along the seafront like that, her arm hooked into her husband’s, her feet collecting millions of sand grains onto their soles.

  The stories she’s amassed about Ruby over the years convince her of the latter.

  She lifts her head to find Jack staring at her, his hands spread flat halfway across the table, his lips making a sad smile. He exhales, loud and acquiescent. Something is different today – she’d felt it even before she got here. Something has changed, or is about to change. She waits.

  ‘All right,’ he says. ‘I give up.’ Henry has never actually forbidden them from talking about Ruby, but they know, they’ve always known, that he is incapable of sharing that particular past with them. ‘She’s magnificent, isn’t she?’

  Shouldn’t you say beautiful? Elizabeth wants to ask. Isn’t that how women want to be described? But Jack is right. Just sitting there, at the water’s edge, her face in profile, her legs moving forever with the sea, Ruby Twist is magnificent. Elizabeth nods her head. She wouldn’t even know how to spark like that.

  She flicks to the next page. Here she finds images of Ruby and Henry: sitting outside a café, leaning into each other as a waiter or a diner captures the way in which her confidence only complements his shyness; wound around each other at some dance, Ruby showing him off by looking at him and only him when the rest of the room surely couldn’t have resisted the pale drape of her dress over her body. They are magnetised, these two. They cannot function, it seems, unless they are in physical contact. They are the most intense of lovers. Elizabeth had known, of course, that Henry and Ruby were married, but she couldn’t have known how deeply they had been embedded in one another. Naturally, there is no sign of Jack in the photographs. Or her mother. And perhaps that’s partly why she’s never been allowed to view them. It undermines all their memories, those four people who have each claimed her as their own, to be reminded that only two of them were there to begin with.

  She is aware, of course – though only in the blurriest possible way – of how her
family came to be what it is. What she has always wanted, though, is to be able to feel it; to be overwhelmed by the sounds and the smells and the sights of it; to be able, though it might seem as maudlin as Jack suggests, to mourn what everyone else mourns without having to invent the details.

  There is no discovery now which can satisfy Elizabeth. The glamorous dresses Ruby wears; the way her nose crinkles when she smiles; the way she glares sometimes into the camera, serious as a schoolmistress – none of it is enough. Elizabeth’s questions have gone too long unanswered. Still, she is thrilled by the images. She turns another page. Jack, she’s sure, will soon slip up and start telling her the stories behind each one.

  ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I’m in this one!’

  ‘Really?’ Jack asks.

  Elizabeth points out the small but visible protrusion, the way Ruby is glancing down at her stomach and the unknowable thing held within. At her.

  ‘There.’

  It is a shock, this evidence of her existence. The photographs seem so long ago, the clothes and the settings and the poses so strange to her, that Elizabeth can barely reconcile the people who fill them with her own life. How can that woman, with her curled brown hair and her smile and her love, have created her, Mrs Elizabeth Foster, Professor Elizabeth Foster, who walks from her front door to campus every morning to begin lecturing on the books which saturate her brain; who shares hours-long phone calls with her own, lovely, grown-up daughter; who needs her husband so painfully that his presence in a room still soothes and excites her as completely as it did when they met twenty-six years ago; who, whenever she is out of the country, misses the particular kind of rain that falls over her fathers’ cottage; who has known more parents than she’s ever been capable of coping with? Surely she could only have been a disappointment to the woman in these photographs.