Rebecca F. John was born in 1986, and grew up in Pwll, a small village on the South Wales coast. Her short stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. In 2014, she was highly commended in the Manchester Fiction Prize. In 2015, her short story ‘The Glove Maker’s Numbers’ was shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. She is the winner of the PEN International New Voices Award 2015, and the British participant in the 2016 Scritture Giovani project.
Her first short story collection, Clown’s Shoes, is available through Parthian. She lives in Swansea with her three dogs.
The HAUNTING of HENRY TWIST
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Serpent’s Tail,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3 Holford Yard
Bevin Way
London WC1X 9HD
www.serpentstail.com
Copyright © 2017 Rebecca F. John
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any similarity to real persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author
A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library
eISBN 978 1 78283 289 8
For Matthew
and
for my parents
RUBY
It is not only because of the smog that Ruby Twist fails to notice the grumbling approach of the bus on this cold, spooky morning. Though the mist is thick and fast-swirling and London squats behind it like a fading dream, Ruby hardly notices. She is not thinking of the weather, or of stepping carefully, or of the danger of the road ahead. She is thinking only of Henry. It is an embarrassing habit – one she is glad to have kept secret – but sometimes, when they are apart, Ruby finds herself rebuilding his face in her mind. She fits one fine feature over the next, word by careful word, until he stares back at her from behind her own eyes. She does it just so that she can look at him, and every time, she discovers something different about the face she knows so well.
‘Your hair is the colour of wet sand,’ she’ll say to him afterwards, as though the observation is a casual one. ‘Your hands belong to an artist.’ Today, she considers that his eyes are the deep, soft shade of green olives and that perhaps, if they have a girl, she will have her daddy’s eyes. They chose their names months ago. After a night full of ‘nos’ and ‘maybes’, they laid them out in the silence of a splintering dawn, pleated into each other beneath the quilt Ida had patchworked for them as a wedding gift. It was before the real cold came, when the baby was still a tight, invisible knot only Ruby could feel or know.
‘Harold?’
‘No! Bleddyn?’
‘What?’
‘Gruffydd?’ She was teasing. She didn’t want a Welsh name.
Henry huffed. ‘I can’t spell it, or even say it. Billy?’
‘Yes!’ she squealed. And that’s how they had continued, slinging names around until something stuck.
When Ruby suggested Elizabeth, after her own middle name, and Henry said, ‘Yes, Libby,’ Ruby had bounced up, swung herself astride him, and kissed his nose. ‘You, husband, are a perfect genius,’ she said. ‘You ought to father a thousand children and find them all perfect names. Billy for a boy. Libby for a girl. Those are the ones, definitely.’
And the choices did feel definite, in a way their earlier ideas had not. Ruby had imagined then, though she had not admitted it to Henry, that they would have at least one of each; that neither name would go to waste. Now, with only two weeks more to wait, she feels comfortable despite the taut pull of her belly. She feels light. She feels confident she can do this again and again, for Henry.
She takes a detour onto narrower Stanhope Terrace. She has time to waste and she wants to break the monotony of the straight track onto Oxford Street. Here the mist, trapped between closer buildings, spins in darker circles, and Ruby waves a gloved hand at it, as though she can persuade it to clear for her. She feels this powerful. Her heels clip-clip against the pavement. Her bright red coat flashes with each forward step. The lipstick she swept on to match it clings heavy to her lips, but it is a weight she enjoys: it reminds her of how pretty she felt this morning, when Henry stood behind her in the mirror, his hands around her stomach, and winked at her as she twisted the thick ends of her hair one way then the other.
He’s the kind of man who can deliver a wink, she thinks; he’s handsome enough for that, her Henry. She shakes her head, laughing at herself. Even here, alone, she is being smug.
As she walks down Brook Street and re-joins Bayswater Road, the world grows lighter again, and Ruby tips back her head and peers past the buildings laddering the sky to look for signs of snow. It is cold enough, crisp enough. It is the only thing that could improve today. But she knows she cannot ask for more, not so much as the ghostly flurry of snow in this early winter morning, because she has everything she has ever wanted. Almost everything. All along the street, the dark curves of men’s hats gleam in the damp air. A corner of grey suit-jacket pushes out of the whiteness then disappears again. Briefcases swing in and out of sight, gripped by disembodied hands. And Ruby reaches for the rhythms of the city. She has come to love these sounds: the clacking of feet on the pavements; the talk, passing or sustained, which gathers like rain clouds before dropping its stolen words onto strangers; the low rattling pulse of the traffic, nosing through London’s labyrinthine grid. Each is reduced to a whisper by the next. Nowhere in Wales could you locate that same jumbled din.
To her left, a long row of white Georgian houses wear the fog as a dancer might a feather boa, draped over a shoulder or looped around an arm, half-revealing themselves. Ruby had thought this place impossibly grand the first time Henry had shown her to the flat. Now, she is comfortable here. She knows every small street which darts away from the park. She has walked this way – from home to Monty’s private garden – a hundred times.
A short, round-hipped woman passes and returns Ruby’s smile, nodding at the dome of her pregnancy as if to say, ‘Yes, I know, I remember that’, and Ruby stands a little taller to push out her stomach, delight rippling through her. One day, she thinks, she will step past a younger woman and do the very same thing; she will send the most profound sort of satisfaction rushing through another expectant mother. Because Ruby knows what it is to endure a wait. She waited so long to come to London, to find a job, for Henry to propose, for the eventual dawn of their wedding day. And soon, very soon now, she will be able to stop. Then, she has decided, she will sit in the wide bay which fronts their flat, look out at the private comings and goings of the street through the opened window, and write a letter to her parents and Ida which might just persuade them to pen a real reply.
She has already planned how she will begin. She will simply say, My son has arrived, or, My daughter has arrived. And then, she realises, she will begin waiting all over again.
All Ruby has gained in these last three years, and somehow, along the way, she has managed to lose three whole people. They have not exchanged angry words, nothing like that, but a gap has opened up between the Myrtle Hill house she used to race around, trying to tempt Ida into adventure, and her Bayswater Road flat, which words do not seem able to straddle.
Sometimes, when Henry is at work and Ruby is alone, she closes her eyes and feels her way around that big detached house, trailing her own distant spirit from room to familiar room.
She enters the living room and sees her father, drying after his bath and dozing in the fire heat, his half-lit face smooth and tired, his still-straight shoulders wrapped in a towel worn flat by so many identical evenings. She sees her mother, hunched, small-eyed and content, over the next in a great line of books she has stacked into an alcove, already in the order she has decided they must be read. She wanders into the kitchen and sees Ida crouched below the sink, clutching the leg her mother has slapped and blowing the skin pale again. Elizabeth’s hands always could deliver the most unavoidable slaps, administered with a deep breath on both parts when Ruby snuck down to the sea and clambered over the rocks or tore her skirts fighting with a boy at school.
And she hears them, too.
Her mother calling from the kitchen: ‘What’s on the wireless, John?’
‘Nothing but dust, Elizabeth.’
This is how Ruby communicates with her family now – in the past. But she is sure not to mention this sadness in the letters they reply to with such brevity. She feels she would be letting John and Elizabeth and even Ida down, to set out on her big adventure and then admit to missing any one thing she had been forced to leave behind.
Twenty minutes later, Ruby is still strolling towards Monty’s, her pace slowed. She is unused to the breathlessness which comes upon her now during longer walks, but she will not curse it. She has decided not to. The houses to her left have grown into sprawling department stores. Bunches of people press their faces to spotless windows, shivering in the rectangular shadows of rolled-away awnings which drop over their heads; shop signs loom outwards, their giant letters distorted by the perspective of those on the pavement below; doorbells shake frenziedly as doors are flung open and never properly closed. The hard scents of Capstan Full Strengths and Woodbines thicken around her.
On a side-street corner, two hulking black horses stand patiently, snorting hot plumes of steam into the bitter air and shifting from leg to leg while piles of newspapers are unloaded from the cart they are harnessed to. Ruby pauses to put a hand to one of their noses. She removes a glove and touches the soft heat around its nostril. She inhales their strong, earthy smell.
Somewhere down the street, a shout bursts through the crowds and the horses prance backwards, worried. The cold reclaims Ruby’s hand and she shuffles it back into her glove, squinting towards the growing commotion. People are bobbing around, their jolting and pushing drawing attention even through the sheets of mist. More shouts go up, clanging against each other. And then there is a quicker movement amongst the shoppers, and a sharp clatter as something is dropped or thrown to the ground, and a smaller figure, a boy, pushes his way out of the ring of people and tears up the street towards her, a bag of something flying behind him like a balloon, bouncing to the rapid thump-thump-thump of his feet. Despite the month, he wears only a vest, a scarf and a pair of shorts, his socks pulled high to his blueing knees. His breath wheezes out from beneath the peak of a too-small cap. His shoes slip on slivers of invisible ice, but he does not slow. He cannot slow. He is a thief.
Ruby steps down into the road as he rushes by. Two passing men flatten themselves against a shop window to avoid a collision, and as the boy pounds away, fast as a dream, Ruby finds herself nodding a greeting to them.
‘Someone should get after him,’ the larger of the men says. His slighter companion grunts in agreement.
‘No,’ Ruby says. ‘He was hungry.’ The larger man raises his eyebrows at her. ‘Apples,’ she explains, because she had seen them, fleetingly, hard and green and beaded with watery cold, bumping against each other in the bag. ‘They were just apples.’
The man shrugs. He considers the length of her through uneasy eyes, the way people do when your stomach is stretched round with a new human being. ‘Are you hurt?’ he asks.
‘I’m fine. Thank you,’ she answers. And why shouldn’t she be, she wants to add. But she doesn’t. She never does. Ruby Twist is not interested in causing offence. She watches them straighten their coats and move off, already beginning to embellish the details of what has just happened. ‘He could have killed someone, barrelling about like that,’ the slighter one says, and while the other hums his concurrence, Ruby turns back to the horses.
‘Don’t people tell themselves the oddest things sometimes,’ she whispers. ‘Don’t they? Hmm?’
The horses watch her through sad brown eyes and chew on their bits, mouths moving as if they have something to say. Ruby wonders if the metal sends sparks of pain through their teeth in these temperatures; she wonders what it would be like, to know pain and not be able to say so. Then one of the animals pushes his warm, pink tongue out to taste the sleeve of her coat, and she laughs. Later, she will tell Henry about this, and he will ask her questions as though a simple disturbance in the street were the most important thing in the world. Henry has always done that for her – made her feel important.
At first, she had thought he was poking fun at her, this serious-looking man who had his jacket buttoned though they were at a dance; who kept his tie perfectly knotted while the rest of the room came undone; who smiled with just the two crescent-shaped wrinkles around his mouth. But Henry has never poked fun at anyone. Humour is something he only receives, with a twitch of a smile and a cough which flutters in his throat like a trapped bird.
The thrill of discovering these details has faded now, in comparison to the early days. It has been dulled by the everyday proximity of her husband. But still Ruby can’t keep her mind from wandering presently towards the pull of his neck: the specific way his beard sneaks under his jaw and down into two tapering points when he’s been too lazy to shave; of how, when she puts her lips to the thinner skin there, it is always warm. There is a width to Henry’s arms and chest which makes her, in some incidental way, proud. It shows him, she thinks, to be superior to the strings of skinny boys who parade around London, draped in all manner of vibrant, girly clothing, lamenting the fact that they missed those four unknowable years Henry refuses to speak about.
Women, she knows – every variety of woman, young and old and married and widowed – are jealous of her. But Ruby can’t hold that against them. She would be jealous, too.
She does not linger at the shop windows. Now and then, she sneaks a sideways glimpse at her hefty reflection and finds herself pleased with the new solidity of her frame, but she does not pause. She did not come out to buy anything. She came out because Matilda had asked her to and, though she and Henry had stumbled out of Coco’s Café with Matilda and Grayson only ten hours previously, Ruby is keen now to get to Monty’s garden and listen to what her friend has to say. It is Matilda’s way to be dramatic, yes, but there had been something, a cut to her voice perhaps, which had persuaded Ruby that Matilda really was hurt this time.
‘Come to Monty’s by ten,’ she’d whispered, while the men were distracted. ‘There’s something I need to ask you. Something important.’ And Ruby had promised she would.
Near the entrance to the Tube, she stops to check the road. She watches soft shadows sliding through the gloom and tries to distinguish their shapes. She listens for the mounting drone of oncoming traffic. A train of suited people rattle past her and disappear below ground, knocking her bag from her shoulder as they go, and Ruby grabs the strap of it with her opposite hand and drags it back up her arm. She has only to cross the road, turn through a complicated but rapid series of lefts and rights, and she will arrive at Monty’s. Within five minutes, she will sit down with Matilda and proffer her best advice.
She suspects that what Matilda wants to discuss is Grayson. She has noticed the snippy exchanges between them lately, the way they move gradually apart when they sit to a meal. She has thought about it carefully, just this morning in truth, in the hour before dawn when Henry flinches through his worst dreams, and she has already decided on the right words. Give him another chance, she will say – because she likes Gray, and really, deep down, she thinks he has just got a little bit lost in his love for his wife. Ruby can appreciate that. There are times when Matilda’s mood veers towards a less predictable place than the rest of them know; than they have perhaps ever known.
But, as Henry keeps reminding her, it is not her job to right all of Matilda’s wrong moods. And as she glances about herself one last time and decides it is safe to cross the road, Ruby vows that, once she leaves Matilda this morning, she will not think on other people’s troubles again today. Today, just for a while, she wants to think only on herself, and Henry, and the surfacing inkling she has that, yes, she is definitely carrying a girl. Today, somehow, the baby feels like a girl. A little Libby. Ruby allows herself to acknowledge that she has wanted a girl all along, and then she steps off the pavement.
Off the pavement and into the deafening blast of a horn.
Off the pavement and into the screech of a stranger’s scream.
Off the pavement and straight in front of one of those bright red, big-wheeled, double-decker buses which had so thrilled her the day she arrived in London; which had made her believe, finally, that she’d done it, got here; which she’d pictured, right down to the way they would shine when the rain fell on them, from her bed in the back room of her parents’ house in Pwll.
She does not recognise the impact. She does not have a chance to. The bus hits her, and the driver shuts his eyes, and the brakes squeal and groan as she is flung limply forward, and the vehicle stops just short of ploughing over her, and Ruby Twist – twenty-four, nine months pregnant, and happy, happy – is left lying in the middle of Oxford Street, her arms and legs splayed out in fractured points, the surface of her domed stomach rolling as her daughter moves about inside her. And all she can think of is the pram she can now see, upturned before her, its wheels at right angles to the pavement; the baby’s mother lying on the ground, mouth open to a silent scream, still gripping the handle between white fingers; the pram’s black hood, hooked forward, hooked forward, yes, but surely not substantial enough to protect the baby from the fall it must have had when it was tipped to the ground.
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 takes 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, proud 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.