The Haunting of Henry Twist

by Rebecca F. John

  Elizabeth responds slowly, unable to marry the two pieces of information Jack is offering her. ‘Why? I don’t understand why the photo …’

  ‘I don’t know exactly, but I can’t let him see that boy. It frightens me – that he might see it in my eyes, sense it. He doesn’t want to know who I was before Ruby died. He pretends we’ve never discussed it. He needs to believe I wasn’t there before. He has to, to find what he wants …’

  ‘But, what’s he looking for?’

  ‘The impossible,’ Jack answers. Finally, he opens his eyes. Elizabeth notices the rim of tears along his lower lid, but pretends she has not.

  ‘Jack, please. Clearly.’

  He turns away from her slightly, so that he can deliver his next words to the night instead of his daughter. ‘He’s searching for proof,’ he says, quietly. ‘I’m just part of the search.’ He stops and shakes his head. ‘I’m nothing but evidence. Don’t you see?’

  ‘No.’ She steps around him, so that they are face to face again. She doesn’t see, not completely. She can’t contemplate anything now but how distressed Jack is. She has to stop her interrogation. ‘No,’ she says. ‘That’s not all you are. Far from it. You’re my father, Jack.’

  ‘But I’m not,’ he answers. ‘You’ve always known that.’

  She exhales protractedly. ‘Yes, I’ve always known, but it’s never mattered. It hasn’t.’

  ‘You kept asking, Lib. Even when you were tiny, you needed to know it all, to see it all.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I know. I’m sorry.’ It has always been her curse, this need to fathom the nastiest depths of every situation, to be in possession of the absolute truth. Henry, it seems, suffers from the same affliction. ‘How can I make it up to you, old man? How about …’ she loops her arm through his and twists them both around so that they stand with their backs to the cottage and their eyes to the rest of the world, ‘… we keep a look out for that owl together?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jack says, rubbing away his tears with a quick swipe of one hand. ‘I’d like that.’

  She leans in to touch her head to his, temple to temple. ‘What,’ she asks, ‘no cutting comment?’

  And, ‘No,’ Jack answers. ‘No, not today. Today, I’m just going to be good to my daughter.’

  ‘Well, well,’ Elizabeth smiles. ‘That’s a first. I wonder how she’ll take it.’

  Rather than go to their bed alone, or wake Henry, Jack settles in an armchair and falls into sleep in the most peculiar fast– slow way. His every movement is calibrated, careful. It is a task, this folding into a chair to rest. Even closing his eyes is a chore which seems to take minutes. And yet, he is asleep before Elizabeth has left the room. She watches from the doorway as her fathers’ breathing drops into sync. They are like the pendulums of two grandfather clocks, these two, positioned side by side; they swing time away in perfect unison.

  Above the living room there is a spare bedroom, and soon Elizabeth will creep up to it, step by cautious step, one hand held between frame and closing door for too long because she is trying to muffle her every sound, because she does not want to wake those sleeping lovers. She has long imagined that when they go they will go together, as though their hearts are linked by some message system which will conspire and agree as to when to stop beating. It is her secret fear, every time she climbs towards the cottage now, that when she opens the door and moves inside, she will find two bodies, pressed together in the coldest sleep. And she is not ready for that yet. Not so soon after Ida’s mind took her body away.

  It was the saddest possible ending for Ida – a woman who had decided, when her sister was lost, to become everything they both should have been; who had loved and laughed and given with every part of herself. Ida would wake each dawn with her husband just so that they could drink that first cup of tea together, then, while Gareth tended the farm, she would bake breads or knit jumpers to give away. She would organise boys to come in and work the farm so that she and Gareth could disappear for a week, to walk along the seafront on grey Swansea days and share single ice-cream cones. When the snows arrived, and they often did so high above sea level, she would take a shovel and dig her way around the village, clearing little paths all through the streets, and when men waved her down and offered to take over, she would laugh and continue and explain to them that so many years as a farmer’s wife had made her grow strong in the back. And she’d been a fun mother, when Jack was not thoughtlessly infuriating her. While the other girls were enduring a ticking-off for wading through the river at Witches’ Wood, Ida would be sitting beside Elizabeth as she towelled her feet and asking if she’d stepped on a fish. When, later, they started sneaking off to dances and returning home after dark, their lipstick shamelessly smeared, Ida did not punish Elizabeth for kissing boys but wondered instead if they were handsome or if they were good dancers.

  She had been, in short, the mother Elizabeth has failed to be for Emma. But, God, isn’t she there, in Emma? Doesn’t Emma possess that very same simmering spirit her grandmother did? That’s a Fairclough woman right there, Henry had commented absently once, when Emma was perhaps fifteen and just beginning to brim over into her brightest, most buoyant self. Full up, she is. Full up with the world.

  The memory pulls at that deep, lonely place where Elizabeth grew her daughter. Already, Emma is so much older than that girl they’d all smiled at. Already, and it has only been a minute.

  Elizabeth is not yet ready for sleep, so she steps through to the kitchen, where she runs her flattened palm over the photo album. There are lives in there. Lives she will never really know. Lives already extinguished. She wonders how many of those people Jack has told her about today are still breathing; and whether Matilda and Grayson ever worked things out; and if Sally’s baby was properly loved; and how happy Monty really made himself with all those Bright Young People whose spark he fed off. She wonders what she will look like when she is nothing more than a photo in a photo album in a cupboard.

  But she does not like the thoughts. And so she walks again about the house, brushing surfaces, putting glasses and teacups back on their shelves, humming an unidentifiable song. It is only when Jack has been asleep for an hour, and Henry many more, that she admits to herself why she wanted to stay the night.

  There is no need for a lock on the study door. It has been an unspoken rule, this last forty-five years, that no one enter. And, as far as Elizabeth knows, no one has. Though surely Jack must have sneaked in, some late night or other, to discover how far his Henry’s work has come in more than four decades. Surely he has done that much. She pauses to listen for a movement, any movement, but there is only the long, dark swish of windy mountain nothingness passing outside the cottage and, abandoned on a cupboard top to her right, a watch, ticking out its own incessant rhythm.

  ‘Nothing,’ she whispers, and the shadows whisper it back.

  Ridiculously, her hand is nervous on the doorknob, but she turns it all the same, and pushes the door, and is confronted within by stacks of books so high, so dense, that immediately she finds it difficult to breathe. Three walls are lost to the piles of bound pages. Jack’s words had led her to suspect this, but still the extent of it is shocking. The stacks sit four, five volumes deep, nudging their way towards the middle of the room. That spying moon strays through the window to Elizabeth’s left, bleaching the scattered surface of Henry’s desk, the scrawled-on papers there, but Elizabeth does not want to read them: she does not want to spell out her father’s madness.

  She closes the door behind her. With only the dust for company, she edges along and reads the words on each spine which sits at her eye level. The Transmigration of the Soul. Metempsychosis: Studies from Life. Samsara. Rebirth, Renascence, Reawakening. She realises she is crying only when the letters of one particular title melt into incomprehensibility. The poor man. The poor man has wasted a lifetime in pursuit of certainty without once realising that it’s been there the entire time, sitting in the next room, waiting for him.

&n
bsp; When she can taste the dust, heavy and bland on the back of her tongue, she slides quickly out of Henry’s study and through the side door of the cottage to stand under the slumping sky. She breathes out. New, fast-rolling clouds tumble over the mountainside, their bruised-purple edges hardly visible against the hour, but Elizabeth strains to see them. She needs to see them, to know them. She has been afraid, all her life, of not knowing. Somewhere in the darkness embracing her, a fox yowls for her mate, and Elizabeth wishes she could yowl for hers now; that, if she called to her husband, he would hear her and come. But of course he wouldn’t. She’s on her own. That fear rolls over her again – that inside their cottage, the same cottage they built with their own sweat and love, Henry and Jack are breathing their last breaths together – and, though there is a cold cut in the air now, she cannot risk going back through the door and discovering them gone. So instead she lowers herself onto the bench she has sat on so many times with one father or another and decides that when she and Emma visit next week, she will show her daughter those old photos. She will introduce her to her past. Then, she will let it go.

  For now, though, she might simply sit here and keep watching for that bird, the way Henry and Jack have done for so many years. She might sit here, another of Ruby’s ghosts, until the sun shatters the night and she can appreciate the flushed rose ascent of the morning. She’d like that. It’s something, she’s sure now, her mother would have done.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My sincerest thanks go to my parents, for their generosity; to my wonderful friends and family, who support my endeavours by reading (or pretending to read) my words; to my lovely agent Chris Wellbelove, who is obliged to read them, and does so with a keen and kindly eye; to the brilliant people at Serpent’s Tail, who have made publishing this novel a joy, particularly Rebecca Gray, Anna-Marie Fitzgerald and Valentina Zanca; to the many thoughtful writers I’ve met in recent years, whose honest encouragement of new writers is a credit to them both personally and professionally; to Peter Florence and the staff at Hay Festival, who have offered me such exciting opportunities; and, as ever, to my readers – I hope you will fall in love with Henry and Jack and Ruby as easily as I did.

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