The Haunting of Henry Twist Read online

  Ruby tries to step forward, to help right the capsized child, but she finds she cannot move her legs. She reaches out, but there is only a trembling from her arms. She does not understand why no one is rushing towards them, this mother and baby, and so she calls.

  ‘The baby. The baby,’ she says.

  And then there is a voice at her ear, a man’s voice, and it is saying, ‘Don’t worry, love. We’ll take care of the baby. Don’t you worry now. We’ll take care of you both.’

  And she wants to say, No, no, not me. The baby. That baby. But she has lost all her words, and she closes her eyes with the effort of trying to find them, and there is no trace of Henry behind her lids now; there is nothing there but the black square of an upturned pram against the white glare of the morning, and the heart-stopping possibility that the baby is hurt. That heart-stopping possibility.

  A JANUARY FUNERAL

  He lies with his arms behind his head, hands folded under his neck in an inversion of prayer, and watches the fluid seesaw of long branches against the paling sky. Around him, music plays on, words and laughter and sighs slotting into its happy rhythm, but he has ceased to hear any of it. He looks to the sky. Far above him, a distant bird, elevated by invisible twitches of feather, weaves through shrinking patches of clean blue space; the clouds stroll steadily along on their endless carousel rotation. And above the clouds … Heaven, perhaps. Perhaps.

  Henry is not so sure any more.

  He follows the bends and springs the wind forces out of the branches. The tree is alive with them, the twigs reaching out like fingertips, except that the cracked brown is too dark against the sun-shone white to resemble skin. He has dedicated the last half an hour to fathoming what the colour reminds him of and he knows now: last year, he’d found a nest of robins outside the flat, huddled uselessly close in their bowl of twigs, dead. And he wonders now whether the mother bird abandoned them voluntarily or was taken by a predator. It is important today, in a way it could not have been then, whether she made a choice; whether she fought hard enough to stay with them.

  He hadn’t shown Ruby the robins. Not because she would have been disgusted, as other women he’s known might, but because she would have mourned their loss. She would have held one in her delicate palm and inspected its tiny, curled-in potential, and hated that she hadn’t noticed them tucked down beside the steps and brought them inside. She would have hoped the mother to safety. And so Henry imagines it fluttering around above him now, brown wings trembling and tilting, separated from her offspring but very much alive. Still very much alive.

  He chooses this as his truth, because that’s what the truth is to him now – something he must choose to believe in – and what he believes is that her last minutes were the most serene. He has to give her that much.

  At intervals, shadows pass over him, but he does not move to see who they belong to. He would rather guess at Yeoman’s clipping pace, or Green’s polite coughing, or Daisy’s stifled sobs. He does not know who informed these people. It was not him.

  As each person passes, and Henry decides on their identity, he invents a scenario in which he shows up on their doorstep with the news. He watches himself steered into a kitchen where bread is baking and he finds sleep, face down on the table, to the heavy tick of a grandfather clock. He sees himself perched on a leather settee in a drab green lounge, staring at an untouched whisky glass. And when he runs short of guests to invent stories around, he can’t help but suppose himself back on a distant field, the sun squeezing the last trickle of moisture down his neck as mercilessly as a hand wringing a sponge dry, his feet aflame with infestation of a sort he refused to investigate. He would wish himself there today, if it were possible. Even that place was preferable to this.

  What he had been thinking on then he can’t imagine now. He knows that he and Bingley had long ceased exchanging vulgar words about the time elapsed since they’d last seen a woman. He suspects they had abandoned talk altogether at that point, but he cannot be sure and he doesn’t want to dwell on the issue, so instead he runs his mind over every last shape that view was comprised of: the long ripple of the land; the flat wedge of black sky; a far-off, delusory block of darkness which might just be a farmhouse, with a family inside, laughing and eating and dreaming and washing in cold, clean water.

  Henry is using thoughts like these – remote, unremarkable ones really – to keep himself together. Because he is sure now that he could let go, just as the leaves of this tree did as the summer blew away, and allow the wind to take him. He could leave his body behind. He is capable of that – of releasing himself from it, like a man from his suit jacket at the end of an impossibly long day, and flinging it aside. What is the use, in any case, of a body that can fail him so spectacularly; that can begin to crumble, from the heart outwards, until there is nothing left? Because that is how he feels. As though, soon, there will be nothing left.

  Through last summer and the one before, he and Ruby had lain beneath this tree and watched the leaves shiver and flip and rest; watched darkness slot into their puzzle-piece gaps; watched each other’s faces claimed gradually by strips of shadow.

  Now, they are bare, he and it – so bare that they do not feel the day’s frost settling its intricate web over them. Henry is in his shirt sleeves, the white cuffs folded up to his elbows, but he does not notice the goose bumps which dot his skin. He does not notice the specific movements of the people around him, or the shift from song to song, or the dancing. He notices only the sky, and he stares hard at it, trying to forget that, with the dimming of the day, it is beginning to turn the same chalky colour as dead skin – a colour so dense and definite and ugly that it can etch itself permanently onto your brain.

  ‘Henry. Henry, darling,’ she says. ‘Please get up now. You’re going to freeze.’

  She speaks to him as though he is a child, despite having none of her own. Women are born with it, he thinks, this way of looking and feeling and wanting to care; of promoting other people’s needs above their own. He is not sure he can find the same will within himself. If it was the other way around, would he ignore the guests in favour of leaning over her, his face tight with worry as he patted and cooed and pretended he could empathise? He suspects he would not. And so, if he were capable of summoning any feeling at all now, Henry supposes that he could manage, just, maybe, some admiration for her selflessness.

  She is good to him, Matilda. She is kind.

  Kindness, though, is not what the other guests at the funeral see. They hint at what they see with glances and frowns and lifts of their eyebrows. They will talk about it when they get home, allowing the words they’ve been storing like held breath to spill out as they fold their mourning clothes away. They have seen the way she watches him, fusses over him, screws the heel of her shoe into the ground whenever she is near him. They have seen the way her hands reach, quite independently, towards him. And they have thought already today, and many times over, that perhaps Matilda and Ruby were not such good friends after all.

  Grayson stands near the gate, sipping his drink and ignoring the suspicion that foams up around his wife. He ignores it because he must; because he knows from experience that not ignoring it would only make matters worse. Matilda has always presented him with these sorts of choices – between bad and worse, between worse and worse still.

  That she loves Henry is clear. The knowledge of it thunders through Grayson’s veins, the way his own blood did in those newest of days, when he and Matilda would wait for the spread of darkness and slip hand in hand through London’s streets, just walking, their need for each other tightening with every step. It makes for a swimming sensation in his ears, to see her bent over Henry, wishing his eyes towards her when it’s clear all the poor sod wants to do is gaze up at the sky and pretend his own wife is not dead.

  Grayson leans back into the dubious wall of greenery behind him. The branches give slightly, sucking him in amongst the foliage, but they soon find a way to support his weight and he t
akes a cigarette from his inside pocket and props it between his lips.

  If it was Matilda, he wonders, would he lie on the ground as though he was not surrounded by people? Would he block out the chattering of guests and the pattering of cold shoes on hard ground with the belief that, if he watched the heavens for long enough, his soul would simply detach itself and go chasing off after his woman? Would he appear, to all intents and purposes, to be dead himself? He thinks probably not. And that is why Matilda loves Henry over him. Because Henry Twist is a man improved by love, sustained by love, made more than a man by it. And Grayson Steck is a man who sees it as something of an illusion, really, now that his lust for Matilda has long since been satisfied.

  When he looks at her these days, what he sees is a tall, drawn woman he doesn’t know all that well. A woman he wouldn’t conceive of making love to in daylight, as he suspects Henry did Ruby. A woman who once during their courtship dragged him, laughing, up the steps of someone else’s house, pressed him against the front door and murmured, ‘Let’s pretend this is our home. Open the door and call to me, Gray. Call to me. I’ll always come.’ Who, when he could not find his black tie this morning had barely looked at him before spitting, ‘Is there anything you can’t ruin, Grayson?’

  Is there anything you don’t want me to ruin, Matilda? was what the voice in his head had said. What had escaped his lips was only, ‘Tilda …?’ And she had not answered the question the way she used to, with her hands.

  Her hands had mapped their courtship from the start: told him when to kiss her, when to embrace her, when to first dare to unbutton her blouse. And that is why he stands, pressed into the scratchy hedgerow and smokes and smokes when he should be helping his friend – because he can’t bear to watch her put her hands on Henry’s shoulders and beg him to sit up and mourn with the rest of them. He manages to smile when he is smiled at first: the guests are all at it, throwing tight-lipped grimaces back and forth, their grief not quite allowing happiness into their eyes. But Grayson understands that they are enjoying, in some quiet way, the funeral Monty has helped organise.

  They had returned from the church expecting nothing more than food and drink on the ice-packed earth. They were huddled in layer upon layer of clothing, their hands pushed into gloves, their chins tucked inside scarves, their backs already hunched against the temperatures since they couldn’t possibly all squash into the summer house. What they had found between the high stone walls of the garden was a small jazz band, positioned neatly in the middle of the weather-waned space, the four men clad in dark suits, their polished brass instruments poised in stiff hands. Eight flapper girls surrounded them, their slim legs almost hidden by their long, straight dresses, their jewelled hairpieces glinting in the afternoon glare. As soon as the wrought iron gate was opened, the music had begun and the girls had started to dance. And later, warmed by two or three songs, they had thrown off their coats and pulled people away from their companions to join in.

  Since, the funeral has become something resembling a party: the drummer turns his sticks between nimble fingers; the trumpeter arches backwards and dips forward, following the undulations of his notes; couples twizzle and flick their feet to the stop-time beat, dancing the black bottom. And between dances, guests tip flutes of champagne into open mouths and kiss each other’s cheeks before swapping stories about a young woman who has been dead for exactly seven days.

  A young woman whose husband has lain unmoving on the ground since Grayson steered him into the garden.

  Grayson has not partaken. Neither, naturally, have Matilda and Monty. The activity was intended for those who knew Ruby less well, and, looking around again, Grayson begins to suspect that perhaps some of these people didn’t know Ruby at all. There are too many of them. They are familiar only by type. Monty, he realises, has populated the garden with his cronies. But it suits Ruby, this easy chaos her funeral has danced into. It has an optimism about it, and he is glad Monty thought of it. He is glad that, for most people at least, today has not been entirely miserable.

  He takes his cigarette from between his lips and raises his glass to the sky: his own private salute. To Ruby.

  Two hours pass. A little more. The musicians pack their instruments back into battered cases. The guests start leaving, two or three at a time. Despite the dancing, they are shivering; their fingernails show purple-blue curves. But they smile as they touch hands with Matilda – who has taken control since Henry lay down beneath that tree – and say things like, ‘I’m glad we did something different, for Ruby,’ or, ‘She would’ve laughed at this, Ruby.’ Her name is like sour fruit in their mouths, uncomfortable and welcome at once. And they smile through this, too, because they remember, today, that someone else has it worse than them.

  Though his inertness unnerves them, some edge closer to Henry and say difficult things before they go. ‘We’re sorry, Henry.’ ‘We’ll miss her, Henry.’ They stare at the perfect symmetry of his face, the subtle uplift of his nose tip, the thickness of new hair around his lips, and they imagine, while they wait for him to respond to their words, that he will be remarried within the year with looks like his.

  Henry does not hear their words. He only continues to stare, unblinking, at the liquid routine of the bare branches above. He moves with them. He writes Ruby across the clouds with his eyes. Ruby Twist, as she has been for just two years. He should be glad she will be buried with some small part of him, that her gravestone will flaunt his love for her, but he cannot conjure the feeling.

  She had been Ruby Fairclough when they met, at a party he didn’t want to go to and didn’t want to stay at until he saw her, young and small-seeming under the white, high-arched ceiling. She wore a dress of the unnameable colour inside a shell and pink lipstick. She appeared so sure of herself that he was afraid to offer her his company – afraid in a way he’d never known before around a girl, because of a girl. So instead of introducing himself, he just watched her, turning and shaking her feet, sending the pearly fringes of her dress flapping, swinging her arms in time with her girlfriend, her dark, tucked hair loosening, and her smile never faltering through all the minutes of that frantic Charleston. He watched and he waited and eventually her dark eyes found him, playful, in the spin of that bubbling room. And before that – before she came to the bar and stood in front of him, hands to her hips, and said, ‘So, are you going to wear that awful worried look all night?’ – he had been as alone as he is now. Except he hadn’t felt it.

  There had been other women. He’d never pretended otherwise. He’d never needed to, because, whatever had happened before her, Ruby had understood right away that he had never loved. He unleashed something almost savage on her in the beginning: he held her too close; he worried too much; he grew tense and angry through the shortest absences. And she struggled to tolerate the force of it, until she found him tearful with the fear of needing her one night and began, slowly, to teach him how to love simply.

  ‘Henry, love,’ Matilda says. ‘Why don’t you eat something?’

  She is sitting at his side. She has been there for some time, a mostly unmoving weight which Henry is aware of only occasionally: when she does move; when she speaks. Monty is there, too. And Grayson, further away, moving amongst or away from the people who stand about now the music has stopped, glasses in their hands, plates in their hands, hands in their hands. They laugh, some of them. He hears them, though only faintly, because they are far away, these people he knew. He cannot remember their names or their faces. He does not try to. They will move off, pair by pair, into bigger crowds of people he does not know or care to know. They will walk the city streets, passing strangers without so much as a smile or a hello, passing strangers with suspicious nods and closing fists. On every city street, at this very moment, people pass and pass and pass each other, their feet clicking and slapping faster and faster, their steps echoing through the stacked crates outside grocers’ shops, or rattling the windows of clothing boutiques, or bouncing off the thick, pro
ud walls of heaped up one-room homes and towering, sharp-roofed churches. And amongst all of that, cars hoot and puff and grumble, horses snort and toss their manes, birds snap their wings and panic from chimney to chimney. And below and through the press of London, trains smash their straight-tracked ways, stopping and starting, sucking people in and spilling people out. This is the way of the city. This is its endless life. It does not stop when starving boys thieve bags of green apples from careless shoppers, or when wives lock their husbands out or in to end their faithless ways, or when girls tire of teasing men and take other girls as their lovers, or when men make the pavements their pillows, or when young women in their final easy weeks of pregnancy fall under the wheels of too-late-in-braking buses.

  It will not stop because a man has lost his wife and feels like his body is crumbling from the heart outwards.

  But a person can stop within it. A person can choose to fight its drag and flow. And outside the flat Henry and Ruby shared, standing on the frost-wet pavement, his hands pushed far into his pockets, his cap pulled low, surveying the white stone exterior of the building through dark, deep-set eyes, is a man who has chosen to stop. A man who will not move again until he encounters Henry Twist for the very first time.

  THE STRANGER

  When the garden is finally empty and the sky has collected all of its light up into one tight, brilliant ball, Grayson and Matilda walk Henry home. They stand one on either side of him, Matilda talking continuously and Grayson filling the spaces she must use to breathe with hums and agreements. They walk backwards along the route Ruby took that day, but Henry does not remark upon this. He still has not spoken. The night is icy and sharp-smelling and where Ruby saw crowds of shoppers, they see only shards of moonlight on glass; where she stopped to put her hand to the muzzle of a horse, there is no sound beyond Matilda’s voice but the crackle of the secret parts of the city lighting up and shutting their doors against the dark, miserable, workaday parts of it.