The Haunting of Henry Twist Read online

  ‘What could it say that’s so awful?’ Viv enquires, pouring tea into two blue-flowered cups. The letter sits on the table between them, made all the more threatening by the tiny neatness of its envelope.

  ‘Perhaps she knows,’ Henry says.

  ‘Perhaps you should tell her,’ Viv suggests, giving him a playful sideways glance.

  ‘I know, I know. It’s just … I’d hoped I could delay until Libby’s older. That way, they could see that I’m capable. They wouldn’t have any reason to fight me for her.’

  ‘And you think they’ll forgive you that, do you?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘Right. Well, then. Open the thing and put yourself out of your misery.’

  Henry pushes it towards Vivian. ‘You do it. Please, Viv.’

  ‘No chance.’ She laughs quietly. ‘It might not be from her. Maybe it’s a love letter, from that friend of yours.’

  Henry’s blood quickens at her words. Abruptly, he can feel his own heartbeat, storming in his ears. She saw, then. She saw Jack. Perhaps she happened to look from her window as he skipped down the front steps and away, dragging on his jacket, and presumed. Perhaps she has sympathy for the sort of men she will think them. But then, perhaps not, in the long run. Perhaps her words are her warning, that however well she might like him, she will have no choice but to involve the police eventually.

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Her,’ Henry repeats stupidly.

  ‘The friend. The tall one. You know.’ Viv puts her hands to her cheeks and draws the skin down, sucking in her lips. ‘The one looks like she’s missed a meal or two.’

  ‘Oh, Matilda,’ Henry answers, breathing again. ‘Matilda.’

  ‘Hmm. A little older perhaps, but attractive enough, in her way. Is there –’

  ‘She’s married.’

  ‘Shame,’ Viv muses. ‘She loves you something terrible. I’ve seen her, standing out there, deciding whether to knock or not.’

  ‘When?’ Henry asks.

  ‘Some nights.’

  ‘Which nights?’

  Vivian frowns at him. ‘You’re growing snappy in your old age,’ she says. ‘Drink your tea. And then tell me more about this Matilda. How long has she been married?’

  Henry obliges and takes a sip. The tea is weak and over-sugared: it hacks steadily through his teeth towards the nerves. ‘Ten years or so,’ he answers. Then, to change the subject, he adds, ‘How long have you and Herb been married?’

  ‘This anniversary will be our fifty-bleeding-seventh.’

  He smiles. ‘You must have hundreds of love letters.’

  ‘From him?’ Viv scoffs. ‘The seas would dry up before Herbert Moss penned a love letter.’ She glances towards the door to the next room. Only his feet are visible, the left crossed over the right, one brown slipper on, the other kicked away. ‘I wouldn’t change that for a minute, though,’ she continues. ‘He’s a bit like you, my Herb. So tough on the outside he’s brittle, so soft on the inside he’s at risk of melting.’

  She winks at him over the top of her teacup and Henry fights back a little cough of discomfort.

  ‘I knew a woman once who wrote a love letter to London,’ she says. ‘She lost two boys to the war. The first in ’16; the other right at the end. She was never the same after that. It wasn’t always obvious, you know, it was just that sometimes she’d lose parts of herself, and walking around the city, seeing certain buildings, still the same as they’d been before, and the parks, all reliably where they always had been – that was the only thing that made her feel … solid.’ Viv takes another drink. ‘So she wrote this letter to the city, because she couldn’t bear to address it to her boys. She wrote it over and over again, one every morning for a long while, and she spent each day sitting at the base of the Cenotaph, ripping them up and scattering them for the pigeons.’

  ‘For the pigeons?’

  Viv nods. ‘So they’d eat them and fly them all around London. Don’t you think that’s a beautiful story?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Henry answers. ‘It’s a bit sad.’

  ‘Oh, it’s a lot sad,’ Vivian agrees. ‘You’re right there. Doesn’t mean it can’t be beautiful, though.’

  Later, when he gets into bed, Henry considers these words again. He watches the world – so often dark – churn on outside the window and begins to long for the next flash of passing headlights: on occasion, he has learnt, a person’s sanity can be bound up in the simple hint of another human being.

  ARRIVALS

  At half past twelve, he begins wandering up and down platform one, the great wrought iron skeleton of Paddington Station curving above him. He is surrounded on all sides by the dashing and scurrying of passengers, whose hats and coats turn from black to amber as sunlight filters down over them through the gaps between the ceiling-ribs. The place smells of tobacco and oil. He takes a bench beneath the Dining & Tea Room sign. On platform two, huge mounds of mail sacks wait to be thrown on board, and as he watches, one shifts and tumbles down the others like snow down a mountainside, dragged along by its own weight. He stands again and checks the clock mounted high on the wall. The curling black hands have barely crept past the six. He must be patient for twenty-nine more minutes.

  He replied to Ida the same day he opened the envelope. You’ll find me at the memorial on platform one, he wrote. Then, feeling as idiotic and bashful as a man arranging a date, he added, I will be holding your letter.

  He has only a vague idea of what Ida might look like. The photo on his mantelpiece shows her as a girl – just two years younger than Ruby but so much less confident for it, clinging to her mother’s knees while Ruby pushes out her chest and grins. What he imagines he will see when the train arrives is a smaller, thinner version of his wife: her eyes cast low, her back not so straight, her mouth less inclined to smiling.

  It was Ruby, after all, who had escaped what she had described as an empty village full of empty people. This was an exaggeration, Henry knew, shaped by drink and Monty’s constant pleading for her to tell him everything about the ‘ancient mystery’ he considered Wales to be. But Henry also knew that Pwll was tiny and home to more grandparents than grandchildren, and that Ida had never been brave enough to run away in search of work or excitement or love. She’d never been brave enough to run towards anything. Until now.

  He shuffles through the crowds back towards the memorial. He is twenty-five minutes early, but still he worries he will miss her; that she might have caught an earlier train; that she has not received his reply and will travel to the flat without waiting for him and that, once there, Vivian will see her from the window and come down to send her away, accidentally introducing her to Libby before he gets a chance to, and that then, wild and angry, Ida will snatch his daughter away and disappear, completely, forever. The implications of his dread are far too elaborate to ever translate themselves into reality. This does not make Henry capable of dismissing them, though. He has not known rational fear since 1918.

  The bronze soldier stands, legs braced, on a plinth adorned with a plaque inscribed, 3,312 Men and Women of the Great Western Railway Gave Their Lives in Service of King and Country. Henry reads and rereads the dedication, lining ghosts up into neat battalions in his mind and trying to envisage what that number of people looks like, stood one next to the other, filing into eternity.

  Ruby had asked him about the war only once. Henry sits down again on the nearest bench and closes his eyes to savour the remembering. It was the Christmas after they got married. Or the New Year, rather, since Ruby had travelled home to visit her family over Christmas. She had refused to take him with her – next year, she’d said; once they’d had a chance to get used to the idea of him – and when he had collected her from the train upon her return, they had walked past this very memorial.

  Ruby stopped and felt for his hand. Her smile failed as she took in the statue’s Brodie helmet, slightly askew, and the greatcoat flung about his shoulders.

  �
��Did you have a tin hat like that?’ she asked, without facing him. It was a fragile thing, Henry’s past, which must be handled only with gloved hands. She had learned as much with minimal help from him.

  Henry wondered if she knew that ‘tin hats’ was what they had called them, or whether she was simply describing what she saw. ‘Most of the time,’ he answered. ‘When we were lucky enough.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say you were ever lucky, Henry.’

  He stared down at the top of her head, nearly a foot below his own, and ran his eyes along the soft outward whorls of her hair-roots. And this is what he concentrates on now – the sweet simplicity of the top of her head, the bow of which he slid his chin over so frequently. That New Year, though, he only put his hand to it and pulled her into his chest. He had not decided to bring silence down on his war before that moment when she asked him to be vocal. He just couldn’t find the words he wanted. And Ruby felt it and spoke to save his struggle. ‘Well, until you met me, that is,’ she said, wriggling round in his arms to look up at him. ‘I mean, that was the luckiest night of your life, wasn’t it, husband?’

  A passenger zips by, catching Henry’s foot with a swinging briefcase, and Henry opens his eyes to the unbroken bustle. The crowds divide and funnel towards one of Paddington’s twelve platforms, and he stands and moves against their pull to take his place before the memorial.

  He leans back into the cold stone wall and pulls Ida’s letter from his pocket.

  And when, twenty minutes later, Ida disembarks and glances around in search of Henry, what she sees are two soldiers standing side by side, their shoulders broad and proud, their heads lowered over the words of a woman.

  ‘Mr Twist?’ she asks, dipping a little to catch his eye.

  Her voice is so familiar that, briefly, Henry is unwilling to lift his chin. He considers the round, shining-black toes of her shoes, the hem of her wool dress; then, slowly, the book she clasps one-handed in front of her; and then, finally, her face. ‘Miss Fairclough,’ he manages. And she smiles, easily, widely – precisely as he had thought she would not.

  ‘Miss this, Mr that,’ she says. ‘Shall we just stick to Ida and Henry?’

  He nods. He is glad now that he looked up. The voice is close to identical. Her build too is much the same: slim but too well-proportioned for the current style. Her face, though, is different. The eyes are smaller, lighter; the cheeks thinner; the lips wider. The Fairclough sisters must surely have shattered a hundred Welsh hearts: Ida, like her sister, is beautiful. But she is not Ruby. Thank God. She is not Ruby.

  ‘I’d like that,’ he answers. ‘What book are you reading, Ida?’

  She tips the cover up awkwardly to show him the title. In her other hand, she carries a small, brown, leather suitcase. ‘Wuthering Heights.’

  Henry is not very familiar with the story: there are, he thinks, too many lovers and grudges all tangled up in one another to commit to memory. He does remember, though, that there is an awful lot of sadness held within that story. And not a little beauty, he supposes, if you look at it the right way. Perhaps Vivian’s words will prove just right to persuade Ida that he has not behaved too badly.

  ‘Are you a romantic?’ he asks, with half a smile. He has already decided that her answer will be ‘yes’. Why else read that book, with all its nostalgic wildness?

  ‘Not at all,’ she replies. ‘I just happen to like reading about the way things were, before all of this.’ Ida waves her hand at the shuffling crowds, the men who tap-tap their umbrellas to the ground as canes, the grinding of train brakes, the children who scream against the noise, the blasts and hisses of steam which spread through the station as indoor clouds, the clanging of bells, the hastening chug the engines make as the trains pull away on a new journey.

  ‘All this is progress,’ Henry says, more to keep talking than because he believes in the opinion. He does not want quiet between them yet. Quiet will force him towards his admission.

  ‘Yes,’ Ida answers. ‘And isn’t it so much better, to look back in the other direction, than to look forward in this one? We will all be turned into machines one day, Henry, I swear it. And how will we think then, when our minds are turned by cogs? Would I still miss my sister?’

  ‘I think you are a good deal more serious than your sister,’ Henry says. ‘If you don’t mind my saying.’

  They are stepping out onto the street now, where they are met by a conflict of warm sun and chilly winds. Henry watches Ida adjust her hat. She seems confident, despite never having visited London before.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ she says. ‘I always was. I took after our mother, you see, and loved to read. Ruby rather took after our father, who loved not to. In fact, I never really thought about it before, but she was always happy to plough forward, wasn’t she, my sister? Into anything. Perhaps that’s why you liked her.’

  ‘Perhaps so. I was something of a project for her, I suppose. I’m too inclined to dwell on the past myself.’

  In response to this, Ida hums. She is distracted, gazing up at the imposing frontage of the Great Western Royal Hotel. Her eyes dart over every clean, white-sandstone column; every window frame; every intricacy of ornamentation which goes unnoticed, largely, by the passing Londoners. Henry can tell she is impressed.

  ‘Have you never wanted to visit London?’ he asks.

  ‘Oh, I’ve wanted to,’ Ida answers. ‘It’s just … Well, we felt we didn’t want to bother her, once she’d set herself up with this exciting life, you know? We felt like a burden.’

  ‘Your parents, too?’

  Ida nods, then thrusts her head up higher, battling sudden tears.

  ‘But she thought you were angry at her,’ Henry whispers. ‘She thought you felt she’d abandoned you. She was going to make it up to you, she said, once the baby came. She was planning to come home for a while.’

  ‘Was it a boy or a girl?’ Ida asks.

  And, yes, it is Henry’s fault that the subject has been broached so quickly, but really he feels he ought to set matters straight. It saddens him that Ruby and her family had wasted all that time, denied each other their company, for the sake of a misunderstanding; for the sake of respect, really. Ida could have come to stay. He and Ruby could have gone to Pwll. He could have afforded the train fares. He nods his head. There will be no more denials.

  ‘Actually,’ he says, ‘I need to talk to you about that.’

  And it is easy, talking to Ida. Easier than talking has been for weeks and weeks, because this woman knew Ruby longer than he. She knew her moods and her passions and her anger – and he wants all those things back. He worries sometimes that he will remember more of the good than the bad and that, in doing so, he will retain only part of his wife.

  They sit now in the park across from the flat, on the same bench he and Jack chose that night. In the afternoon sun, they are surrounded by laughing lovers and parents with shrieking little ones and slow old couples, all turning their backs to the city and walking it away. Their talk is absorbed into open air. Their working weeks are forgotten. Henry and Ida tilt their faces into a beam of buttery warmth, talking quietly and sporadically when they manage to wade out of their own thoughts.

  Ida has succeeded in fending off her tears, even when he broke the news about Libby, and Henry admires her for it. He alone knows how hard she has fought.

  ‘We can go and see her whenever you’re ready,’ he says.

  ‘Soon,’ Ida answers.

  ‘Are you angry?’

  ‘Did you expect anything else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, there we are then.’

  ‘You know,’ Henry begins, but gently, gently. He deserves more than anger. ‘I only –’

  ‘I’m not saying you did wrong,’ Ida interrupts. ‘You did what you had to. We’d never met. Do you think I’d have packaged my own daughter off to you if it had been the other way around?’

  He says nothing. He waits. The more Ida speaks, the less of Ruby he sees in her, and he
is immeasurably glad. He has found his Ruby again – or she has found him – and, he realises now, he had been afraid that observing her semblance in Ida would make him doubt Jack. But he has thought about this, hard, in the beating depths of every night since, and he is sure now that he should never have questioned Ruby’s ability to find her way back to him. He should never have questioned his instincts. Wasn’t it on the very day of her funeral that Jack came and stood before him and called his name?

  What he can’t work out, though, is why Jack has disappeared. Unless, of course, Jack is as confused presently as he, Henry, was in the beginning. It could be that Henry’s name was the only definite Ruby managed to convey to the body she stole.

  ‘Later,’ he says, ‘I’ll take you to Monty’s. We spent a lot of time there. And to the place we first met, and … You are staying, aren’t you?’ He nods towards the suitcase, positioned between their feet.

  ‘With Daisy,’ she answers.

  ‘With Daisy? Strawberry Hill Daisy?’

  Ida nods. ‘I wrote to her, asking if I could visit, just to see the place, and she wrote back saying that the girl she shared with after Ruby had left only a few weeks ago, and that I could stay there if I liked, as long as I wanted. She even suggested I make a go of it up here myself.’

  ‘And what did you think to that?’

  ‘I thought it wouldn’t suit me very well. And it doesn’t so far. But I’ll give it a few days. A week, maybe. After all, I have a niece to acquaint myself with now, don’t I?’

  ‘You do,’ he says, standing and offering her his arm. ‘Shall we?’