The Haunting of Henry Twist Read online

  ‘I’ve seen you naked,’ Henry answered, grinning.

  She smirked then stuck out her tongue. ‘It’s not about seeing me naked,’ she said. ‘It’s about knowing me naked.’

  ‘And I do. I know the bones of you.’

  ‘Do you promise?’

  Henry finished undressing and climbed into bed. ‘I promise,’ he said. ‘I know how happy you are when you dance, and that you miss your sister more when it rains. And I know that you’re braver with your body than you are with your feelings. And that you talk too much when you’re scared.’ He flicked the bed sheets aside for her to get in. ‘What I haven’t worked out yet is what you’re scared of right now.’

  ‘You, of course,’ she replied, standing so that she didn’t have to meet his eye as she spoke. ‘Isn’t that obvious?’

  ‘Me? What would I ever do to hurt you?’

  ‘Henry.’ Removing only her jacket, she curled into their bed and put her cheek to the breadth of his chest. She sighed her answer. ‘You could leave me.’

  He sits down on the empty settee. The fire is black and long dead and he pokes a toe at an escaped nugget of coal. Rising morning sunlight slants slowly across his back and he shifts so that Libby can feel its heat on her face. She flutters her eyelids against it. Henry rests his chin on top of her soft, fusing skull. Here she is – Elizabeth Ruby Twist: a complete, living, thriving, laughing person. A person Ruby will never meet.

  ‘It was you,’ Henry whispers to the photograph above the fireplace. ‘You left me. You left me.’

  But still the idea is not one he can credit. Ruby wouldn’t have allowed it. Ruby would have fought, harder than she’d ever fought for anything. And that is why he believes – though he would have sniggered and dismissed the concept in anyone else – that she has deposited some fraction of herself in Jack.

  Henry’s certainty makes him suddenly desperate for Jack, and he goes back to the window to watch the street whilst he waits. To be desperate for a man – it is at once incomprehensible and entirely ordinary, because he knows, he knows, he knows that there is something of her in there, and he will not let it go.

  But perhaps, he thinks, he could consult a medium, someone who deals in these matters, to help him explain it all to Jack. The only theory he can muddle together is that Ruby and Jack died at the exact same moment and that, in striving to return to her body, she found herself in the wrong place. He cannot broach the subject with theories and possibilities, though. He needs definites. He needs someone to tell him, with a smile and a certain nod of their head, that people can come back; and that when they do, they might be slightly different; and that, though their knowledge of the past might be confused, it could reorder itself, given time.

  It is what he needs to believe. And he needs Jack to believe it, too.

  He could not endure being left behind again.

  At eight o’clock, short minutes after deep navy darkness has slithered over London, Henry takes Libby upstairs to Vivian for the night, and he and Jack leave for Monty’s. City lights spark on and shut off, imitating the stars, and as they walk Henry grows quieter. As if in response, Jack grows chattier.

  ‘So, what are the rules here? I mean, this is all a bit daring, isn’t it? A week ago we couldn’t even go to the pictures, and … How many people are going to be there, anyway? Henry?’

  ‘I told them I had a friend staying,’ Henry answers. ‘They’re expecting you.’

  ‘But what if someone works it out? Works us out?’

  Henry stops and leans in closer to whisper to Jack. ‘I thought you didn’t care if you were called a nancy.’ He smiles shyly. ‘You are that you are, Jack. You are –’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Jack protests. ‘It’s just …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Elizabeth,’ he says. ‘What about Elizabeth?’

  Henry takes his hands from his pockets and, removing his hat temporarily, pushes them, left then right, over his slicked hair. ‘Ida is happy that she’s happy,’ he answers. ‘Nobody could justify taking a child from her father when the family is content with the arrangement. I’ve thought about it. And Ida gave me her word she would speak for me, if she needed to. I’m not half so worried about Libby as I was.’

  ‘That would all change, Henry, you know that. If Ida, or her parents … If they knew –’

  ‘They’re not going to find out because we arrived at a single party together.’

  ‘You can’t be –’

  ‘I am. I’m sure. In any case, we’re just two chaps attending a party. Nothing more, nothing less. Not to anyone else’s eyes.’

  ‘I think we might be a bit ignorant to believe that,’ Jack mutters.

  And they might. Henry agrees. But he feels bolder when Jack is standing next to him. He feels braver. Jack fiddles with the lapel of his jacket. He has borrowed one of Henry’s suits, black, and wears the waistcoat buttoned and the jacket loose – as Henry does, though he wears grey. Each man has on a fedora to match his suit, the front of the brim snapped down. Each has his tie smartly knotted. Neither looks very much like a king, but then neither has the money or the inclination to play dress-up. They want only to enjoy a night out together. They have not considered that, handsome as they are in their sharp ensembles, they will be kept apart most of the night by various women dressed as various queens.

  Henry swings open Monty’s gate and steps inside first. Though they do not touch, he can feel Jack close at his back, fidgeting with his clothes. Henry, too, is beginning to panic, but he is soon calmed by the sight of the garden, which has again been transformed and does not bear the least resemblance to the place he visited after the funeral.

  Fairy lamps, strung from the trees and along the walls, cast a rich glow around the oblong of land. At the far end of the garden, as distant as possible from the trees, a long, honey-coloured, double-peaked tent has been erected. Clearly visible within it is a heaped banquet table and, where there is space, circular gatherings of cushioned chairs. In the middle of the garden, on top of a mahogany table with delicately sculpted legs, is a large, blaring gramophone, its gold nonagonal horn glinting. And around that central point, couples spin hip to hip, necks stretched long as swans, the Charleston and the black bottom abandoned tonight in favour of a waltz they have deemed more regal. Men in doublets and breeches and women in corsets and petticoat-puffed skirts slot themselves seamlessly into the triple-time music, a few nips of this or that no doubt aiding their grace.

  ‘Do you remember how to dance?’ Henry asks.

  ‘No,’ Jack answers, ‘but I’m going to enjoy learning.’ He winks and claps Henry on the shoulder, and Henry tenses a tad, though he thinks he hides it well enough: he disguises it as an adjustment of his jacket.

  ‘Go and find a partner,’ Henry suggests.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really,’ Henry says, because he can see Matilda approaching now, and fear has seized him. He does not want to introduce Jack to her. Or anyone else, for that matter. Jack feels like his very own secret, like a thought or a dream that might spontaneously fragment should his friends lay eyes on it.

  And so, in his peripheral vision, Henry remains aware of Jack – a long, wiry figure, walking away to find a drink and a willing dance teacher – but the person he watches is Matilda, who is strutting quickly towards him, her pace made more maniacal by the orchestral beat issuing from the gramophone. As the insistent piano part is joined by trilling violins, a viola, a more solemn cello, flutes, a smooth oboe and finally a majestic French horn, Matilda weaves through the spinning couples, shoving at those people who swing too close, her face pinched and pale. Henry is sure she will say something nasty about Gray when she reaches him, and he doesn’t want to hear it. Grayson is a good friend; a good husband, too, as far as Henry knows. He is hardly ever responsible for the bouts of belligerence which sometimes grip his wife.

  ‘Which Queen are you?’ Henry asks, smiling, once she is within earshot.

  Matilda stops at his side,
resisting, as always, the urge to touch him. The need makes her jittery. ‘A generic one,’ she answers, swallowing the ‘darling’ she usually addresses him with. Her anger has not dissipated yet. Already, though, standing beside Henry, she can feel it shrinking, cowering, pulling in on itself like a hiding animal. It is as if she is eighteen again, and so ready to be in love that she can feel it even before she has found the man.

  ‘Where did the crown come from?’ Henry asks, nodding at it.

  ‘It’s a tiara.’

  Although she is corseted, Matilda wears a narrower dress than many of the party guests. It is of some light, nameless colour, overlaid with lace, and is only just grand enough for the tiara styled into her hair.

  ‘The tiara, then.’

  ‘Monty.’

  ‘Is it real?’

  Matilda sighs loudly. She stares at the dancers rather than share a look with Henry. ‘I don’t know, Henry. I think it might just be … I see you brought your friend.’

  Jack is walking slowly around the garden’s boundary, smiling as he goes. Where he finds climbing vines or the trunk of a tree, he drags his fingers over them, enjoying the different sensations. When women catch sight of him – and many of them do, Henry notices – he nods and grins, then moves off before they have a chance to approach. As Henry and Matilda watch, he stops and leans back against the wall: one hand in his pocket, he taps the other against his leg with the music.

  ‘How did you know it was him?’ Henry asks.

  ‘I saw you arrive,’ Matilda says. She did: the explanation is in part truthful. The memory of he and Henry together, though, churns inside her.

  ‘Jack Turner,’ Henry says.

  ‘Where did you meet?’ Matilda asks, taking a drag of her cigarette. Determined to wear the look well, she had practised before a mirror prior to smoking in public. She had measured each movement precisely, adjusting her hand or wrist or elbow by the smallest fractions until she had it right. Now, she releases her coil of smoke and positions her arm like a ballet dancer, unrolling from the wrist until her cigarette holder points diagonally away from her and traps the reflection of the fairy lamps in its fiery design.

  Henry does not comment on this. He does not seem to notice the change.

  ‘Nowhere. We just … We’ve always known each other, in a way.’

  ‘Old friends,’ Matilda says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Jack Turner?’

  ‘Yes,’ Henry answers.

  ‘Jack Turner,’ she breathes, releasing another smoky spiral. ‘And Henry Twist.’

  They dance and drink and flirt and fondle past midnight. Then past one o’clock, two o’clock. Finally, at somewhere around three, someone flops to the floor, and after that rather than dance the guests simply mill from group to group, seeking people to slink away into darkened corners of London with. Henry and Jack have removed some chairs from the tent and they sit in front of it now, Monty to their right, and Matilda and a late-in-arriving Grayson to their left. None of Henry’s fears have yet transpired. In fact, Jack is getting along well with the men. Matilda, however, has been in a filthy mood all evening, her silences interrupted almost solely by exaggerated huffs and sighs.

  Henry has not enquired as to why. He has no sympathy, and even less patience, with her behaviour. Ruby was the sort of woman who voiced her complaints, stridently. And he appreciates that more than ever now: it gives him one more thing to remember.

  Tonight, what he recalls is their very first argument, on the pavement opposite Daisy’s Strawberry Hill flat. Him grinding his teeth and hissing at her to be quiet. Ruby shouting, her accent thickened by frustration, because he had messed up and their wedding-day plans would have to be changed. Daisy opening a window, leaning out and warning them, in her most sarcastic voice, that hers was ‘a respectable position, where the streets were quiet and the bedrooms were reserved for argumentations’.

  ‘And what are you smirking about, Twist?’ Monty asks.

  Henry shakes his head. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘In that case,’ Monty winks, ‘I’m sure we didn’t want to know anyway.’

  ‘Don’t be such a dirty old man, Monty,’ Grayson laughs.

  ‘Oh, come on, who would fill the role if I didn’t?’

  ‘Nobody. That’s the preferable option.’

  ‘Nonsense.’ Monty swigs the last of his drink away and throws the glass over his shoulder. It lands five or six feet behind him and rolls to a stop, depositing a glistening trail of clear liquid. ‘It’s what everyone’s here for.’

  And, as if conjured by his words, a couple of girls appear from inside the tent, throwing obvious looks at Henry and Jack.

  ‘Come,’ Monty calls, beckoning them. ‘Come and sit, Your Highnesses. You are most welcome at our humble court.’ He stands and bows to kiss their hands, which they offer, slow and deliberate. Soon, the two are sprawled on the grass, laughing at Monty’s bad jokes and glancing from Henry and Jack to each other and back again in a flirtatious routine so complicated that Henry thinks they must have choreographed it while they layered up their costumes. They introduce themselves as Muriel and Lillian – names which pass through Henry’s consciousness without being retained. At one time, before Ruby, he would have allowed them to seduce him. Now, however, he is incapable of anything but worrying that one of them might interest Jack.

  ‘And what is it you do, Muriel?’ Monty is prompting, but Henry is not listening. His head is boiling and his throat is tightening and his stomach is hollowing itself out because Muriel is lovely, and his brain is refusing to show him anything much beyond Jack clambering on top of her in Henry’s own bed.

  ‘You’ve gone quiet, Twist,’ Grayson observes a few minutes later.

  ‘He’s a shy fellow, our Henry,’ Monty puts in. ‘But he’s handsome enough to make up for it, don’t you think, ladies?’

  They giggle in reply.

  ‘That handsome!’ Jack teases, twirling his glass between his palms and bending forward to rest his arms on his knees. ‘You must think him very handsome indeed, Monty.’

  Henry feels the blush climbing his body and, whilst he wills it to fade, he cannot take control of it, because he is thinking now of the way Jack’s lean shoulders look under his jacket, reaching forward like that, and the gently indented column of his spine, and the slight dimples at the base of his back. They are still accompanied by a trace of disbelief, these thoughts. But he cannot dwell on that trace, cannot justify it by labelling himself a nancy. He refuses to. He craves Jack – that much is undeniable. So he leaves it at that.

  ‘I’m probably not the best judge, I’ll grant you,’ Monty laughs. ‘But these lovely ladies seem to agree with me.’

  ‘You’re actually making him colour,’ Grayson says.

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘No,’ Henry protests. ‘You’re not, no.’

  And the claim would have marked the end of the teasing, he suspects, had Matilda not chosen this exact moment to stand and make some announcement.

  She moves abruptly, knocking her chair backwards onto the grass in the process. It lands with a dull thud. ‘Jesus Christ,’ she almost-shouts, ‘are you all truly this stupid?’ A few nearby guests squint at her before returning to their conversations, their questions apparent in their shrugged shoulders, their furrowed brows.

  Grayson stands with her, raising his hands as though to calm a spooked horse. ‘Tilda?’

  ‘No,’ she snaps. ‘No. You can sit back down. Go on, sit back down.’

  Grayson obeys and Matilda stalks back and forth, rubbing her black eye make-up down her cheeks. She wobbles momentarily, her heel sticking in the earth and serving only to make her angrier. Her shoulders are high, prickling.

  She’s going to say it. How she found out, Henry doesn’t know, but she is going to say it, he can feel it, and it’s like the dark before a big push again, and dread is spreading through him like fire: that same unstoppable lick and burn. Waiting into those nights, Bingley always at his side, Henry
would retreat further and further into himself. He’d close himself off to the sounds of the other men, passing cigarette stubs from mouth to mouth, passing crumpled photographs from hand to hand, passing insults about in an attempt to block out what was coming with the morning. He’d wash, if he could, and ready his boots with the same caring touch with which a mother would tend a newborn. Then he’d lie down, and close his eyes, and fight the loosening in his bowels.

  ‘How is it you’re so calm?’ Bingley had asked him one time. The night was oven-hot; bugs of some description stuck on the air and to the men’s skin, and no matter how fast they were swatted away, each one managed to leave that itchy bump behind them – the swelling red evidence of the fact that soon Henry and Bingley and every other soldier on the continent might be nothing more than rotting flesh, ripe for insect consumption.

  ‘I’m not calm,’ Henry replied, opening his eyes and sitting up again, his routine fatally disturbed.

  ‘You do a bloody good impression of it.’

  ‘What else is there?’

  Bingley considered this, chewing at the sharp edge of a cracked fingernail. ‘There’s talking the thoughts away.’ The approach Bingley clearly wanted.

  ‘Talk, then,’ Henry conceded. He had not known then, of course, what would happen to Bingley the next day, but he was glad in the end to at least have given the boy what he wanted.

  ‘What about?’ Bingley asked.

  ‘Tell me about your family,’ Henry answered. Earlier on in the campaign, there would have been jeering at this sort of talk. Men would have cuffed boys about the ears and called them sissies. Boys would have blushed then got their dicks out, to hide their shame. But all that was over with. The few men nearest to Henry and Bingley moved closer to listen, each of them painfully jealous of their own simple pasts.

  ‘At home,’ he began, leaning back and locking his hands behind his head, ‘I’m apprenticed to a carpenter. And we live in this tiny terraced house – on Hawthorn Road, that’s what my road’s called – my parents and my three little sisters and me. Fifteen, eleven and nine they are, my sisters, and every morning we have breakfast together, all six of us, and we scream at each other most of the time. Really scream, you know? Because someone has eaten the last slice of bread, or there’s no milk left.’ Bingley laughed as he said this, the laughter catching wet in his throat. ‘Or because it’s early and we just want to scream because another day is starting in a way we might not want it to. Selfish things like that. But we like each other best when we scream, I think. Or we will when I get home. ’Cause I’d fight for those girls, you know. I’d bloody fight for them. For all I’m worth.’