The Haunting of Henry Twist

by Rebecca F. John

  She turns another page. They are sitting in a garden now, Henry and Ruby and another, older couple. Elizabeth pins them with an index finger.

  ‘Who are these two?’

  Jack spins the album around to face him. ‘That is Grayson Steck,’ he says, pointing needlessly at the man grinning into the camera. ‘He was a friend.’

  ‘Of Henry’s?’

  ‘And Ruby’s. That’s his wife, Matilda.’

  ‘Did you ever see them, after you left London?’

  Jack shakes his head.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She was dreadfully in love with Henry,’ Jack answers. ‘It was better for her to stay away from him.’

  ‘Was there anybody in London not in love with Henry?’ Elizabeth says, pulling the album back towards her.

  Jack laughs. ‘Not many people.’

  ‘But he chose you.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  Elizabeth huffs. Always this vagueness with Jack. And maybe it’s because of the heat, or because she is impatient for Emma’s visit home, or because she’s been at the cottage for nearly an hour already and Henry still has not opened his study door, but she does not think she can stand it one second longer. She glances through the kitchen window at a rectangle of the world split equally into flat blue and bright green. It’s too good to be true, that view. It annoys her further.

  ‘Jack,’ she says, propping her elbows on the table and pressing her bunched fingers to her temples until the skin whitens. ‘Please.’ And Jack, recognising her exasperation, decides to disclose some truth. Elizabeth can see it moving through him – the fact, kicking its way to the surface. He is about to say: ‘Your mother was a showgirl’, or, ‘Your father was rich as a king’. He is about, perhaps, to reveal where he came from. And that is the biggest mystery, isn’t it? Jack Turner did not spring into life already grown: once, that man was a child. But he doesn’t say anything at all, in the end. Because at that exact moment, as if he divines that there is something happening he must put a stop to, Henry cracks open his study door and steps into the kitchen.

  Instinctively, Elizabeth slams the photo album shut.

  Her mother once told her that Henry Twist had more fear running through him than blood. The war did that to some men, she said. It pushed them in on themselves, silenced them.

  Henry, though, had not always been silent. Elizabeth can remember days – and not enough of them, perhaps, but there were definitely days – when she would go up to the cottage to visit her fathers and find him as loose and easy, almost, as Jack. She knows that once, at least, she’d climbed up onto the slatted pen fence as Henry was feeding the pigs they’d kept then and that they’d pretended at throwing each other into the boot-sucking mud within. She can recall the blue-and-white striped dress she was wearing, the ankle socks, the way the wind dragged her ponytail across her eyes. She can see the smile Henry wore as they messed about at that fence, laughing at the snuffling of the hungry pigs then putting down more food so that their noise never subsided. She knows also that he used to come down off the mountain occasionally. When she was very small, a woman called Viv had written to tell him that her husband had died, and he had gone to the funeral. Elizabeth remembers her mother explaining that one of her fathers would be away for a few days; that he had to travel to London to say goodbye to a friend. She remembers that clearly, because she had never seen Henry away from the cottage and she couldn’t imagine him in any other setting. He was as essential to that mountain as the sky above it and the town below as far as Elizabeth was concerned. In bed that night, she had worried that without him the whole thing would crumble; that she’d wake in the morning and open her curtains to find a great gaping space where once her fathers’ mountain had stood.

  And that’s how she thinks of it still – her fathers’ mountain – because no one else has lived on it, before or since. Henry and Jack built this cottage with their own hands. They have told her of that late summer a hundred times over, but today, Elizabeth wants to hear their words again.

  ‘Really?’ Jack asks. ‘Haven’t we bored you with this story enough times?’

  ‘You haven’t bored me with it once.’

  From his place across the table, Henry smiles. ‘You’re a beautiful liar, you know. We bored the life out of you when you were a child.’

  Elizabeth wants to stay angry at him, for only now emerging from that stuffy old study, for having wasted so much time he could otherwise have spent with her and Jack and Emma in there, for becoming the obsessive creature he presently is. But he smiles, and those soft-green eyes disappear into creases, and she can’t. He is an old man now, her father. He is inching towards his end.

  ‘How so?’ she asks. She just wants them to keep talking. She wants them to do that thing they sometimes do, when they talk their way so far into their past that they forget she is there in the room. It was such a definite part of her childhood, that vanishing act they performed together. It is comforting still.

  ‘With all our stories,’ Henry answers.

  ‘I love your stories.’ And she does. She just wants more. She wants to know it all. She wants to know what came before their arrival in Wales.

  ‘You’re humouring us.’

  ‘No,’ Elizabeth protests. ‘I really do love them. I’m made up of your stories.’

  Jack rolls his eyes. ‘You’re made up of getting what you want, Miss Twist.’

  She grins and settles back into her chair, knowing that soon they will begin to tell her of how the summer had been a long one, and lucky for them it was, because when September strolled in all they had were four exterior walls, an open doorway and two badly aching backs. They would work until, degree by slow pink degree, the light deserted them. Then they would lie in the grass like inverted stars, taking turns to knead their way down each other’s spines. They would return to the beds – two singles, of course – Ida had secured them with a local unmarried farmer by the name of Gareth, only when they were sure the man had long retired for the night and they could attempt to silently slide the heavy wood-framed objects into a double.

  Here, they would smile, and Henry would blush a little, and they would admit that the attempt was never very successful: the bed legs would thump against the floorboards, and they would spook themselves into laughter, and Gareth must surely have known their game. But Gareth was a kind-hearted fellow and he said nothing through those weeks they spent sitting to a toast and bacon breakfast with him each morning. He was as gentle in his manner as he was strong in the shoulder, and perhaps that contrast was what Ida loved about him in the end. With Henry and Jack and Libby to bend her life around, she had needed the simplicity of a man like Gareth. She married him the Christmas after the Twists arrived, and fell in love with him slowly, over so many years that she could never say for certain when the feeling had begun. It was like an ancient tree, she would say, her love for Gareth: everyone knew it was old, but no one could tell you its exact age.

  Most times, when they tell her of that summer, Jack’s narrative drifts towards this claim of Ida’s. Perhaps, Elizabeth thinks, it’s because he wishes Henry could love him so simply. And she hopes he includes that part of the story today, because she misses Ida. She misses her badly. She is still counting her absence in months. And one day, she thinks, Emma will grieve her this same way. The thought drags through her middle, like a balloon tied by its string to a newly dropped stone. Just the idea is unbearable. She attempts to talk over it.

  ‘Start with the owl,’ she says.

  ‘We told you about the owl?’ Jack replies. ‘See, you have heard this too many times.’

  But Elizabeth insists, and she is able to listen for long minutes then as the two men describe how the barn owl had taken up residence in a corner of their unfurnished home, and how, once they’d watched her float in for two or three nights, like a tiny snowdrift, her pale chest proud and puffed, her dark eyes round and fearful, they hadn’t the heart to chase her away. Instead, when at the conclusion
of their work they reclined on the grass to rest, they waited to catch sight of her, a spectral dot closing slowly in. Aged around twelve, Elizabeth had asked, precociously, how they could possibly know it was the same owl, returning each night. And Henry had informed her, patiently, that their owl had not had the normal tan and steel mottled wings of other barn owls; their owl had been pure white.

  She thinks now that perhaps they had seen it as an omen, that owl, all white and unnatural – as unnatural as they were. Henry and Jack have endured their fair share of trouble since they arrived on the mountain. And that summer, that first hopeful summer, filled with the constant satisfying smart of physical labour through their muscles, and daily picnic visits from Ida and Libby, and the fresh olive and emerald promise of a new country unfurling before them, they must have feared it. They must have felt it coming. They must have been searching reassurance. The appearance of a beautiful, ghostly bird must have seemed like just that.

  ‘Have you seen one since,’ she asks now, ‘a pure white one?’

  Jack shakes his head.

  ‘We still look, though,’ Henry says. ‘Most nights. At dusk.’

  Elizabeth sits up, excessively shocked by this. ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jack answers, laughing. ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just … I hadn’t imagined …’

  ‘What?’ Jack jokes. ‘That we like each other?’

  ‘That you … stand outside watching the sky. Romantically!’ She slumps back into her chair. She feels a little drunk. Because of the heat, she supposes, and the exhausting week she’s just blundered through at work, and the fact that, for some reason she doesn’t wish to examine, she is finally pulling some truths from her fathers.

  ‘We’ve had a good life, me and Jack,’ Henry confides, his words turned about on themselves by four and a half decades in Wales. ‘I don’t want you to ever think otherwise, Lib. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘No, really, I need you to understand.’ He reaches across the table to grab her hand and, though the sensation is odd with all these years of careful father–daughter distance between them, she lets him. His skin is loose and fragile: it reminds her of that flimsy packing paper, so easily torn. She studies the fingers wrapped around hers. The width of the knuckles betrays that these hands were strong once. Now, they are growing weak: it is visible in the veins which push away from the flesh, as though their connections have gone slack; in the smattering of darker spots which map a messy route up and under his shirtsleeves; in the ease with which his wedding ring swings around and around the digit. All these years and still he hasn’t removed that ring. She wonders if it bothers Jack.

  ‘I do understand,’ she says, catching Henry’s eye. She nods solemnly. ‘I promise I do.’

  ‘Good,’ he replies. Then, rising, he rounds the table to kiss the top of her head. ‘We’ve had a good life, us three,’ he mutters. ‘It’s been a good life.’

  When thick, eye-widening darkness finally scales the mountain, sticky with the effort, Elizabeth decides she will stay the night. She can visit Gareth in the morning, when the walk down is safer. He would beg that of her, Gareth, the third man who has acted as her father, though she has never named him as such.

  ‘You don’t mind?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Jack answers. ‘I’m glad of the company.’

  Henry curled into sleep hours ago and they sit now, Elizabeth and Jack, one either side of his sleeping form, on the armchairs flanking the settee he lies across. The lamps which light the room trail shadows like bridal trains, and they whisper into them, enjoying the naughty atmosphere they are creating. All of Elizabeth’s naughtiest childhood memories involve Jack. They would infuriate Henry and Ida by taking unplanned jaunts into the mountains and not returning until the bats led them home; by sneaking to the sweet shop and charming Mr Doyle into filling paper bags to bursting with toffees which they’d sit on the pavement outside to demolish, ruining their dinner; by always, somehow, managing to acquire a bloody nose or a bruised shin or a scraped knee.

  ‘Jack …?’

  He returns her whining intonation. ‘Yes …?’

  ‘Is there a photo of you in that album, from back then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Liar.’

  ‘Oh, all right.’ He pushes himself out of his chair and goes to retrieve the album from the kitchen table. Elizabeth rises to follow him. They bend over the table together as he flips from page to page, years cartoon-flickering by. He stops near the back of the substantial volume and slides two fingers cautiously under the top edge of a photograph of Ruby and Ida, sitting before their parents on the shore, at Pwll she supposes. It pops free of its four corner-tacks. Beneath, there is a second image: a boy just spilling over into manhood, perhaps seventeen years old, in uniform.

  ‘Jack,’ she says. ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Sixteen,’ he answers. Then, with a wink, ‘Though I was claiming eighteen, naturally.’

  ‘Always misbehaving.’

  He laughs. ‘Always. I think we might have had that in common, your mother and I.’

  ‘It’s funny you never met her,’ Elizabeth says.

  ‘I know. I think I’d have liked her, you know. She had sass, that girl.’

  ‘It won’t be long before Emma’s as old as she was.’

  ‘Make a man feel his years, why don’t you?’

  Elizabeth smirks. ‘Isn’t that what daughters are for?’

  She wanders towards the light, photo in hand, and tilts it this way and that, searching its every detail. He is beautiful, this younger Jack. He stands straight, pleased with himself and the uniform he has managed to cheat his way into. There is a gleaming point of pride on each of his cheeks, where the flash has caught his smile. His eyes are dark, brilliant, deep as love itself. It’s a wonder so many of those London women fell for Henry when there was Jack, too, standing beside him.

  ‘Why do you hide this?’ Elizabeth asks. ‘It’s brilliant.’

  Jack shrugs and, turning away from her, begins shuffling the items on the table around: a salt shaker, an empty glass vase, the cold teapot she abandoned there an hour ago. He moves them from their places then slides them back again.

  ‘Oh, come on, Dad. It’s been so good today, getting to know things.’

  ‘Then why can’t you be content with it?’

  ‘Because there’s always something more.’

  ‘Of course there’s always something more. There always is. You can never know everything, darling girl.’

  ‘You know everything about Henry,’ she says.

  ‘I do not. What would make you think that?’

  ‘Well,’ Elizabeth pauses, lost for a moment in where her argument is going. ‘All these years …’

  ‘In all these years, Lib, he’s only ever shown me what he wanted me to see.’

  She leans against the Welsh dresser, the wood a hard truthful line across her back, and crosses her arms. ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘It is. I’m certain of it. Do you want to know why?’

  Elizabeth nods.

  Jack reinstates the whisper they have just lately discarded. ‘I know because I wasn’t Jack when that photo was taken.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Elizabeth hisses. ‘Who else could you be but Jack?’

  Jack runs two hands up the back of his neck, rubbing at the bars of tension there, and bit by bit he explains it all again, the same way he did forty-five years ago, right up to that last night at Monty’s, when they drank themselves honest and dealt themselves new lives. He explains it all again, except this time, he tells the whole truth.

  ‘Come here,’ he says, indicating the back door.

  Outside, they take a few measured steps away from the cottage, their feet cautious over the uneven ground. The moon is the perfect end of a telescope, pointed down at them. It is as though they are spotlit, standing centre stage. And they are, really, Elizabeth supposes; they are at the pinnacle of their own life stories. Ev
erything to come, all of it, is unknowable. The future must be plunged into on faith alone. For no particular reason, she imagines herself taking a few steps more into the darkness, towards some precipice she might fall from. The thought of that endless freefall turns in her stomach. It is a peculiarity of human nature, she knows, to fear falling when we are safe. It is how we fight the drop into sleep. It is how we surrender to love. We fall and fall and fall.

  At her side, Jack takes one long, hard breath, like a man readying himself for a dive into the deepest water. Perhaps he feels it too. Perhaps whatever truth he is about to speak will be his fall.

  ‘Jack …?’ she prompts.

  He closes his eyes to find the words. ‘I never went any further backwards,’ he says. ‘I never went all the way to the beginning, and he never seemed to notice. Or he just didn’t want to know.’

  ‘And where was the beginning?’

  Jack shakes his head.

  ‘It was so long ago,’ Elizabeth prompts. ‘It doesn’t matter now.’

  ‘Of course it does. All of it matters. All the jobs I worked, and all the people I conned, and all the days I fought in that uniform. They’re what Jack is made of. You said it yourself. You’re made up of our stories.’

  ‘That’s –’

  ‘Different? How?’ He does not wait for her to answer. ‘No. He can’t ever know, Libby, but there were men. There were men before there were women. Do you see? It’s important, the order. There were men when I wore that uniform – that’s why I don’t show him the photo. He can’t know. He can’t guess.’