The Haunting of Henry Twist Page 21

  ‘Look around at what?’

  ‘Just … the place. The sea. Do you like the sea, Jack?’

  Buttoning up his shirt now, Jack considers the question. ‘I don’t know,’ he answers. ‘Maybe.’ He pulls his braces up over his shoulders with a wink and a grin. ‘I’ll let you know when we get there,’ he says, and then he disappears, like a shadow, into the very first fissures of the day.

  Henry rubs his hands over his face once, twice, three times, coaxing himself to rise from bed and go through to the kitchen to prepare a bottle for Libby. There is always something to prepare, something to wash, but he doesn’t curse the endless need. It is better, he has found, to keep moving when you are afraid. And that – afraid – is undeniably how he feels about visiting the Faircloughs. He doesn’t know what he will say to them, or how he will manage to hand Libby to them and declare that here is their granddaughter, or how he will explain that he hasn’t been tending Ruby’s grave. In the kitchen, he listens for a city sound beyond the trickle of birdsong, but he can hear none. London is quiet. The calm before the storm, he thinks, though he doesn’t dwell on the idea. It is only a bit of bad feeling, left behind by his dream.

  He cannot know that, short feet away, deposited carefully near his front door, flashing brighter with the emergence of each new strand of sunlight but as yet unseen, there waits one small clue that, in fact, a storm is coming. She left it there just last night, so that it would be easily found when the police arrived. She had to stack the odds. But Henry cannot know, and so he can do nothing to prevent what will happen next. He stands in the kitchen of his Bayswater Road flat and spoons SMA formula into a bottle. In the next room, Libby snuffles in her sleep and he returns to her, answering her every noise, the way his body has taught him to. He has no reason to suspect that Matilda Steck’s wedding ring is positioned just outside, waiting to be discovered. Why would he? He has never thought her capable of what she has done.

  Because it is Saturday, Matilda does not expect Grayson to wake early. Especially considering how late he arrived home: later, even, than she had. But it is only when he slides out of bed at half past six that she realises just how much she’d been hoping he would lie in this morning. It is only as she watches him swing away through their bedroom doorway that she understands she had wanted them to make love.

  There was a time when she could have spoken to Ruby about the affair. When she could have met her friend at a coffee shop on Oxford Street and let the words run out of her, hidden by the scraping of chair legs and the chatter of strangers and the chinking and rattling and squealing of hot drink preparation. Matilda knows how Ruby would have reacted. She would have arched an eyebrow when the news was delivered, she might even have grunted in disgust, but she would have made sure to stay quiet until Matilda was finished and she was in possession of all the information. Only then could she offer her instant and unalterable opinion.

  Matilda smiles at the thought. She was always so stubborn, Ruby; always so certain. If she had found out Henry was being unfaithful, she would have battered him with her words then walked out, gone back to Wales or Strawberry Hill or gone somewhere new entirely, and left her husband heartbroken.

  But Matilda is not so brave. And she is not convinced that Gray would be heartbroken if she walked out now. She is afraid he might even be relieved.

  In the bathroom, she hears the tap creak on, then the first crash of water into the cast iron tub. She knows too well the bony ankles above the feet which will step into that bath, the slight inward pull of the knees, the scar which had speared his left thigh when he’d fallen off his bicycle as a child, the rose petal of pigmented skin just above the concentration of pubic hair, the lately developing paunch, the odd heart-shaped arrangement of chest hair, the slow-narrowing shoulders. Grayson’s body is still mostly strong, but it is beginning the slip into old age now. That much is undeniable. Matilda does not think him irresistible, particularly to other women, but there must be something, something charming perhaps, which makes this teacher of his think him worth the risk to her reputation.

  Oh, she wishes she could tell Ruby. Ruby would know what to think, what to do, how to make him love her again. Though it oughtn’t, considering her behaviour, this thought seems to come to Matilda along her very bloodstream. Of course she has to make him love her again. What else is there? There will certainly be no child now. There will certainly be no Henry. She climbs out from under the sheets and steps through to the lounge in her peach cotton nightdress, the morning cold clinging to her calves and the tops of her arms. She pulls the neck tighter over her chest and bows the string. It is not her most elegant nightdress. She should make more of an effort.

  She studies the street below from her third-storey window. She knows this view. She knows that the straight line of the pavement is interrupted, for a long way, only to permit entrance to the skinny side streets which leak away from it, London’s little veins; she knows that, just a short distance away, there hides a cramped and dingy café which accommodates artists and writers and the poor unfortunate like; she knows that if she looks directly ahead she can see eight rectangular windows, arranged with soldier-like uniformity; and that in those windows, net curtains are drawn and opened and removed and cleaned and replaced with such regularity that the aspect of that building is nearly always different; and that sometimes, when those curtains do not spoil her view, she can see into other people’s lives and decide whether she has anything, anything at all, to be jealous of.

  At this early hour, all the curtains are closed. Today, in any case, she doesn’t want to consider anyone but herself. There are questions she must find answers to.

  She focuses her attention down to the place where the kerbs rise up from the road: there yesterday’s rain has amassed into two canals which reflect the new pink faults of the sky. Funny, she thinks, that in looking down she might be forced to look up.

  When the taps stop running and the flat is silent again, Matilda returns to the bedroom and, pulling her nightdress up over her head, ponders her bared body in her dressing table mirror. It’s not all bad. If she turns sideways – she does – and sucks her stomach up, just so – she holds her breath – her silhouette might pass for a woman’s ten years younger. Failing to bear children has at least brought her this: a body she might be able to bargain with. She leans in towards the glass, studiously avoiding the reflection of her breasts, hanging forward with her, pendulously, as though they are, by degrees, dissociating themselves from her body – a good cami would solve that – and uses her hands to stretch out the skin of her cheeks, her forehead, her eyes. She grabs the heavy jar of Pond’s Vanishing Cream off her dressing table and, choosing to believe, for now, in the promise of the bold red C on the packaging, sweeps a cool palmful of it over her face. She pinches her cheeks red, clamps her eyelashes in a curler and teases the tips outwards with a dab of Vaseline, bites her lips until they plump slightly. Then she reaches for a brush and drags it hard through her hair: seeking volume, she tosses her head upside down and shakes her fingers through the roots. And when, finally, she has done all she can, she rummages around for her prettiest camisole and step-ins. It has been so long since she made this sort of effort that, once she has pulled her undergarments on, she is surprised to find herself quite excited. Hadn’t they loved each other hard, she and Gray, when their nights had been filled this way? Couldn’t they do so again?

  She tiptoes over to the bathroom and, without knocking, pushes open the door. She is ready to use her hands – gently, expertly, as she had in the beginning. Upon entering the room, however, she discovers that Grayson has taken to using his own. His eyes snap open when he realises he is being watched.

  ‘Isn’t it enough?’ Matilda screams, and Gray is struggling to sit up now, to get out of the water, but he slips and slides in the tub, sending the water swaying and sloshing over the lip and onto the floor with a pathetic wet slap. ‘Isn’t it enough to be with her? Jesus, Grayson, you have to be thinking about her too.
In our house! When I’m in the very next room!’

  She spins around and slams her way through the flat with a sudden physical strength, banging the lounge door against its frame, flicking a vase to the floor where it releases just one sharp fragment of china and rolls away, kicking the legs of the dining table so that they screech over the floorboards, thumping the window with the heel of her hand. She knows he will follow her. He always has. And perhaps that is all she needs. Perhaps that is why she moons over Henry, and flirts with Monty, and neglects Grayson – because that is the only way to secure the devotion she needs, to feel like a woman, to survive. She does not stop thumping the glass until she is sure Grayson is standing behind her. When she turns, slowly, he is on the opposite side of the room, stock still and naked, the bath water streaming down his body like so many rivers, seen from a distance. He is goose-bumped all over. His penis is a tiny thing. And he is about to say I’m sorry. Forgive me. I’m a fool. Matilda is certain of it. But when he opens his mouth, different sounds come out.

  ‘Why did you stay quiet so long?’ he asks.

  Matilda answers the question the only way she knows how – with her hands. She strides across the room, lifts her arm, and slaps his face as hard as she can. The whip-crack of it bounces across the flat, already an echo. And then she is kissing him. She is grasping that familiar face, and tasting those beautiful lips, and she is kissing her husband, her Grayson, until she runs short of breath, because she doesn’t know what else to do. She doesn’t know how else to say, It’s me who is sorry.

  By three o’clock that afternoon the mid-May sun has transformed number 101a Bayswater Road into a tropical dwelling. The streets are busy with wealthy Londoners revelling in the first real heat of the year, most of the strikers have resumed their jobs and sweat now down at the docks or in the factories or over a row of just-laid stones, the birds have stopped singing and retired to the shade, Jack is many hours late back from work, and Henry is sitting at Viv’s kitchen table, cradling a cup of her over-sugared tea. He is used now to the sickly sweetness, to the residue it leaves on his teeth. He quite enjoys it.

  Viv’s kitchen door is flung open, but the breeze comes at longer and longer intervals, barely disturbing the nets at the window. Henry fiddles with the collar of his shirt. The temperature is worsening the panic swirling about in his stomach.

  ‘How is he?’ he asks Viv in a whisper. Henry wants to distract himself, yes, but he does care about Herb. In the next room, the old man snores and snorts. Viv glances through the open lounge door, as though she might find a better answer there, in the precious space which contains her husband.

  ‘Still here,’ she says. ‘He hasn’t left me yet.’

  Henry reaches across the table and captures Vivian’s hand. She is not, he knows, a woman who appreciates these sorts of gestures. But then, he is not a man who readily offers them. They understand each other perfectly. Henry nods and, when Viv nods back, he retracts his hand again. That is enough.

  Though really, there is a secret part of Henry which wishes she would hold onto him, just for a minute, because Jack is so many hours late back from work.

  He should be used now to these short absent spells. They’d happened, hadn’t they, at the start? But Henry knows that the gut-roiling sensation – of fearing someone leaving, of waiting for their return – is one that cannot simply be put aside. He knows because, as a boy, he’d spent countless nights waiting on the rodent-like scratching of his mother trying to unlock their front door when she returned from the pub.

  ‘You know, we’re going to have to leave, Libby and I,’ he blurts. He’d been meaning only to think through how best to arrange the words, how gently he could tell Vivian that, once again, a child was being taken from her.

  ‘No,’ she says, and Henry swears he sees her skin fade by a shade or two. There comes a point, he supposes, when your life starts to fail you; when you must rely on other things, other people, to keep you going.

  ‘I’m sorry, Viv. I know you love having her, but –’

  ‘And you, Henry. I love having you, too.’

  Henry’s mouth turns downwards into one of those inverted smiles. ‘I really am sorry.’

  Viv’s hand flies up to silence him. ‘Oh, I know, I know,’ she says. The beginnings of tears roll her words into softer version of themselves. ‘And, really, I can’t bear apologies. Our whole lives are so full of sorrys and goodbyes, I think I’ve decided to give up on them. Let’s just pretend you’re not going, can we, for a little while?’

  ‘I’d like that.’

  ‘Me too.’ She gulps her tea too quickly and coughs, shaking her head. At length, she speaks again. ‘A friend of mine did it once, this pretending, with her sister. It’s the best way, I think, to just pretend everything’s going to go on the same; that nothing’s changing. She was dying, the girl, you see. Eleven she was, when the TB got her. And all the way along they just kept pretending, nothing was happening, nothing was changing. And do you know what the last thing she said to her sister was?’

  ‘What?’ Henry obliges.

  ‘She said, ‘I’ve got us a basket ready for tomorrow, and we’re going to go blackberry-picking.’ It was the middle of winter, Henry, but I’d swear that little girl believed she’d be going blackberry-picking in the morning. I’d swear it because I want to swear it, do you see?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Don’t you wish you’d pretended more, Henry?’

  The answer, Henry supposes, is yes and no. He remembers a night in particular – though there were undoubtedly many quite similar nights – when he and Ruby had gone out to dinner. Afterwards, Ruby had wanted to go dancing. Ruby always wanted to dance. But Henry had refused.

  ‘I have to work in the morning,’ he’d said. ‘I have to wake early.’

  They were walking past that theatre where she’d once stood him up. Between the streetlamps and the theatre lights, she was a cacophony of reflected colour: raspberry and indigo, sea blue and sunshine yellow, lime and a deep, expensive gold. She looked like some sort of ancient queen, smothered in jewels. And, on account of the whisky he’d drunk at dinner, Henry was thinking stupid thoughts like, Wouldn’t Ruby make a wonderful queen, and, Ruby might just be made of gold underneath. But still he would not take her dancing.

  ‘You, Henry Twist,’ she said, crossing her arms, ‘are a miserable old sod sometimes.’

  ‘And you, Ruby Twist, are a bother.’

  ‘I am not.’ She frowned and stepped a little heavier: a toddler, pouting.

  ‘You are, but I love you for it.’

  ‘And I love you for it,’ she corrected, but Henry didn’t understand.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘And you love me for it,’ she explained. ‘Not but. You shouldn’t love me in spite of something. You should only love me because of something.’

  ‘Ah, so those are the rules, are they?’

  Ruby paused, just momentarily, to nod her head and smile. ‘Yes,’ she decided, ‘I think they might be.’

  ‘Good to know,’ Henry answered, playing at seriousness, and though they did not go dancing, he knew he had managed to keep Ruby happy with that touch of ribbing. He knew because she did not keep on at him for being miserable that night. He knew because, when they arrived home, she threw herself onto their bed, kicked off her shoes, flung her arms out wide and called ‘Quick, husband, take my clothes off me before I rush out and find another man to dance with’.

  But even so, yes, he wishes now he’d pretended he didn’t have work the next day and just taken her dancing. It would have meant a night spent pressed together – surrounded by people of course but also, quite blissfully, alone. It would have meant another memory.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Henry tells Vivian finally. She finishes her tea and stands to clear the cups. She winces against the stuttering movements her thinning bones force her through, and Henry averts his eyes. ‘But we can’t choose what to believe.’

  At the sink, Viv takes a long time a
bout arranging the cups and saucers, then turns to smile at him.

  ‘Sometimes we can, Henry,’ she says. ‘Just sometimes, it’s good for us.’

  THE HEAT

  The heat swarms across the country with a plague-like ferocity. In Pwll, Ida Fairclough wakes into a muggy morning and, unable to ease the headache it brings on, finds herself walking along the beach, shoes hooked over her right-hand fingers, toes kneading the sand, before the postman has deposited the first of his letters. In the valleys, the miners allow themselves to be glad, for a few very secret hours, that they do not yet have jobs to return to and share cigarettes and newspapers with their buddies, sitting outside their own front doors. Hundreds of miles away, in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, horse hooves rattle the otherwise still air as ice-cream carts are dragged out and cleaned up and taken on their first outing of the summer. Lovers sneak away from their offices on their tea breaks to rush, giggling, down quieter city streets. Cats flatten themselves under beds and dogs give up on barking and pigeons strut slower than before. Down at the docks, the men wipe their greasy brows in their shirt sleeves and curse that Jack Turner chap for not turning up, today of all days. And at his desk, beneath the single too-small window of Classroom F, Grayson Steck hides his face in his hands and decides that this is the first time, the very first time, that he has welcomed the building’s eternal cold.

  He peeps through his fingers to check his watch. The children will not arrive for another hour yet, but the next sixty minutes cannot last long enough for Gray. Readying himself for the day ahead seems suddenly an impossible task. He has such a choice to make that his brain refuses to consider anything beyond his two conflicting options. Surely, he cannot think about history. Or rather, none but his own.