THREADNEEDLE STREET

Less than a week later, he returns to work. Ruby is haunting the flat. She is held within every crease of it: the loose sheets of writing paper flapping along the windowsill, left there, probably, so she could write home later that day; an errant thumb-print on the mirror-glass; the chip she made in the skirting board by throwing a shoe at him, heel-first, during an argument about, of all things, the fact that they had not argued in a while. She worried about things like that, Ruby. Their arguments, she said, were as important as their lovemaking. She believed it when she warned him that if you reached the point where you could no longer entice yourself to argue, well, then there wasn’t very much left of your soul.

Henry had laughed at that claim. A soul was a far more complicated apparatus than she allowed for. Not that he’d said that to her. Sometimes, he felt the twelve years between them, but he would never once admit to it.

He rides the Tube most of the way to the bank. His Tube journeys are his substitute for the nights Libby wakes through: they jolt him in and out of sleep. Before that, though, he parcels himself into his suit and sneaks Libby upstairs in the inky well of early morning. Then, having delivered her with whispered thanks to his neighbour and a kiss of his daughter’s hand, he cuts across the park to the underground entrance. Vivian has agreed to care for Libby through the menacing January days, and he is appreciative.

On those days when the sun doesn’t puncture the clouds, he sees Ruby more frequently, more clearly. He could count her eyelashes on a dull afternoon.

In the park, he passes a memorial bench. It is mostly unused: nearly a decade passed and memories and ghosts still keep people away. Now and then, though, he sees a man resting there, a trouser leg tacked up or the arm of a coat dangling hollowly over a sown-flat shirt sleeve, trying not to remember how it felt, six, seven, eight years ago, to sit watching the trees under the illusion of healing. He nods to them on those infrequent instances, and sometimes they nod back or hold out a cigarette to him, inviting him to share in forgetting. Sometimes, they are incapable even of that.

Henry could avoid the bench on the way home – he could avoid it altogether – but he doesn’t. Occasionally, you need to remember why you have to forget.

It is not the same with Ruby. Grief, he thinks, is as unique in each of its incarnations as any one person is in comparison to the next. His grief for Ruby is loud inside him. And yet, he has not crumbled as he thought he would. Now, it is as though his heart has paused partway through shattering and is held forever in a new fragmentary state, its brittle splinters scattered through his chest, like stitches, keeping the rest of him together.

This, he is sure, is the only reason he can manage getting to work and stooping over his ledgers and moving his hand as though he is recording words and figures that mean anything.

For the larger part of a year, since Churchill ushered them back into the gold standard, conversation at the bank has been of approaching disaster. Henry, though, has never managed to muster much enthusiasm for the doom talk that shoots off the brims of top hats and filters down into the gossip of his fellow clerks. Within the institution, they are seen as a lowly sort, clerks, and he doesn’t mind. He doesn’t need to be ‘in the know’ as some do – like O’Keefe and Green and even Yeoman, thrusting their noses up and pretending at importance because they’ve risen above the average working man. Henry’s aptitude for numbers had dropped him into banking before the war, and really, he should never have come back. He has no patience for the politics, the men who come blustering in and out worrying endlessly that this estate has been carved up, or that that house has been sold in so-many bits, or that this family has lost its god-damned-priceless history on account of the farms. Agriculture is a dirty word at the bank, but, if anything, Henry has always relished it. Its four hard syllables have the lumpy swell of unspoiled land embedded within them, and he has spent whole days before now lining other people’s wealth up into orderly columns and dreaming of shovels being thrust into wet soil and marches over muddy hillsides.

After particularly tedious days he would try to coax Ruby into returning to Wales, where they could build a home of their own in the verdant roots of a valley invented entirely in Henry’s mind. But Ruby wouldn’t be enticed. You don’t know anything about living off the land, she would say. Besides, she had spent most of her life getting out; she certainly wasn’t going back voluntarily. Not when she had all this.

And that is why he defied the Faircloughs and buried her under London – because she loved the city.

He does not think, any more, about staying at the bank or leaving the bank or what will come next. He does not think of the place at all once he steps out through its doors onto Threadneedle Street. Keeping his eyes down to avoid the attentions of the waistcoated, shiny-shoed droves – men who know him well and yet distantly enough to still ask after Ruby – he heads towards heavier traffic, then strides along with its fumy flow as the Morris Oxfords push their bullnose fronts into the paths of beeping Baby Austins and black Model Ts. He drops down into the cocoon of the Tube and stands braced against the train’s electrical shudder, inhaling other people’s smoke without complaint though he has never smoked himself. Despite it not yet being six o’clock, he emerges, long after his eyes have adjusted to the stuttering artificial light below ground, into the murk of near-night and crosses the park again.

And it feels much the same, this moving through the city, as moving through the working day. Everything which surrounds him shares the blurry quality he imagines a page of text presented his father with when viewed without his spectacles. All the detail is there, but bringing it into focus is impossible.

There is one thing he does look out for during these journeys back and forth to Threadneedle Street, though. He does not intend it, but each time he turns a corner or crosses a road, he slows a little and peers around. Sometimes, he stops and puts his hands in his pockets as though seeking a wallet or a key, though he needs nothing. In the park especially, he watches every tree trunk, every hedgerow, hoping that a figure will emerge from behind them.

He is looking for a man named Jack Turner, because he is sure, isn’t he, that he caught a flash of him on the Tube that first morning he returned to work. As a bump in the track shoved him into waking, Henry is positive he saw that strange chap stepping away down the carriage, his brown trousers slack about his legs, his newsboy tipped lazily back on his head, and he needs to know what the man wants with him. He means to get an answer out of him, the very next time he sees him. He very much means to get an answer.

This evening, he does not go straight upstairs to collect Libby from Vivian. He lets himself, as quietly as possible, into the flat and locks the door behind him. In the hallway, he notices the soft smell of dust roaming on the air. It needs cleaning. The whole flat does. But he has no intention of doing it. He is not incapable; he looked after it himself before he met Ruby. Neither is he trying to preserve some fading scent of his wife, or the smudge her hand last made on the wardrobe door, or the shape of her sleeping body in the bed sheets – as he supposes other people might imagine if they visited. These are things his mind possesses; he does not need the proof. He simply cannot see the purpose now of anything so ordinary as cleaning.

He wanders into the kitchen at the rear of the flat and momentarily considers making tea. Before lifting a cup or the kettle though, he wanders back into the hallway and through to the only other room he rents – the large, over-furnished square he and Ruby conducted their lives within.

All their most important decisions were made here: where they should marry; whether they had always wanted children; what they should christen their first baby. Libby’s cot is wedged between the fireplace and the settee, where Ruby had insisted it must be positioned, sitting cross-legged on the bed, belly round but not yet enormous, and directing him to shove the cumbersome weight of it two inches this way then that way so she could watch his shoulder muscles tauten with the effort. It was only when he turned and caught her grinning to herself that he realised her game. By that point, he was sweating, and he rushed over to press her face into his clammy chest as punishment.

He puts a hand to the place where her laughter blew against his skin and, when he looks back to the bed, sees an echo of her there, feet arranged sole to sole so that she could rest her arms in her lap and cradle the growing protrusion of their daughter. He begins again his new practice of applying specifics to the memory. Her hair was free, he knows, falling in unshaped curls which tightened into spirals at their ends. Her face was bare, showing the weak red scar on her left temple. She pursed her lips at him and said, ‘What? I’m not allowed to ogle my own husband?’

‘I wouldn’t have you ogling anyone else.’

‘Exactly,’ she replied. ‘Now, ogle me back.’

It is not painful, this remembering. It happens by some unknown, perhaps inherent, process, and Henry wonders if it might be a mechanism of grief. What he will come to understand, though, is that really it has nothing to do with grief at all – it is only another symptom of needing someone.

Removing his jacket and looping his tie over his head, he drifts back into the hallway and climbs to the top of the stairs. There he sits, back to the wall, knees bent into a pyramid, and puts his ear against the heavy dividing door. Heat from the Mosses’ flat bleeds through the thick wood. Seeping cold rises towards him from his right and trickles along his arm and around his neck. He is a man of halves: half warm, half cold; half anguished, half euphoric; half here, half staggering lost through the mists of a January morning in search of his dying wife.

He listens to the wordless sounds of Vivian and Herb’s conversation lifting and falling and sometimes breaking off. Even at their age, they have the luxury of time to fill.

Libby is silent. She sleeps long and deep with Viv, but Henry doesn’t fret about this. It is comforting up there in the always-warm rooms, Viv and Herb’s gentle voices revolving around her like the easy eddying of water. Their movements are slow and calming, smoothed by maturity. He guesses they are both into their seventies, though Herb is frailer than Viv. Where Herb has started to shrink in on himself, Viv has retained, or developed, a harder edge. They speak his wife’s name in the same generous tone, though. Did he mind, Herb had asked, reaching up to clap a palm to Henry’s shoulder, if they said Ruby’s name to the child now and then, so she could get used to hearing it? Henry had not known how to respond and Herb had explained himself slowly: things could get difficult, he said, when names stopped being spoken; he’d seen it happen.

Henry wondered then, for the first time, if they had lost a child to the war. He’d thought them saved from that – any child of theirs would surely have been approaching middle age ten years ago – but there was something in the old man’s greying eyes that told him otherwise. Something, too, in the way Viv held Libby. And anyway, look at him, Henry – by the time Libby turned twenty, he would be fifty-six.

He did not enquire about the possibility of a son: a Gunner or a Corporal or a Sergeant Moss who never made it home. He knows better than that.

He dislodges a layer of dust with his foot and a little shower of it puffs outwards before sprinkling back down onto the steps. He watches it resettle, then straightens an index finger and with the tip exposes the wood beneath by carving out four letters:

R u b y

And once the letters are there, formed, he can’t help but repeat them. And before long, he is crouched halfway down the staircase, writing Ruby Ruby Ruby in perfect rows around the two distorted imprints his legs make where he kneels.

It is then that Matilda knocks the door. He knows it is Matilda because she calls as she knocks. He stops and stands, rubbing his hand in the seat of his trousers. He curses himself for turning on the lamp in the hallway and emitting evidence of his presence. He wants to stay silent and wait for her to leave, but he is casting a giant’s shadow across the flat and he knows she will see it if she so much as glances through the window.

‘Henry,’ she calls, over and over, hardly stopping for breath.

When he opens the door, her fist is raised, poised to bang the black paint again. She crinkles her forehead in an expression of sympathy.

‘Henry,’ she says. ‘Darling, Henry. Where have you been?’

Without invitation, she enters, shuffling past him in the doorway and stepping through to the front room. Her heels thump the floorboards. Her dress swishes noisily and her coat swings wide about her legs. She is thunderous in his quiet space. She is, as always, too much.

‘Working,’ he answers, but Matilda does not react to this as he expects her to, with talk of it being too soon and appeals for him to come and stay with her and Grayson. She is frozen in the doorway, one hand to the frame, the other to her mouth. Side on, her face is flat, the cheekbones lengthy and wide enough to eclipse her bony features. Henry compares the pointed bridge of her nose to the fleshier design of Ruby’s and finds Matilda’s face wanting in anything resembling friendliness. It is a deficiency he has never before noticed.

‘Oh, Henry,’ she mutters finally. ‘It’s still here. Why didn’t you tell me? I could have had it removed.’

Not knowing what she is referring to and lacking the desire to find out, Henry does not respond.

‘You don’t have to be embarrassed. I understand why you’d want to keep it. Really. It’s just, don’t you think it would be better, to pass it on to someone who can make use of it?’

He frowns, waits.

‘The cot,’ Matilda says.

Henry straightens up, pinches his lips between a thumb and forefinger, then pushes his hands into his trouser pockets. He hadn’t wanted to say this to anyone – not even Tilda and Gray. It had felt safer for her to be a secret, shared only with Viv and Herb, because everyone else had made an assumption he hadn’t felt able to correct, and the doctor had said he mustn’t think selfishly about keeping her for himself, and he was sure the man had reported him by now for abducting his own child.

‘It’s for Libby,’ he says.

‘Libby,’ Matilda repeats. ‘You would have had a girl.’

Henry sees her tears growing, glinting, and speaks quickly. ‘We did have a girl. But listen, please, don’t tell anyone. They told me not to bring her home, and that I had to give her to Ida, and –’ He swallows the panic in his voice and closes his eyes. ‘I’m afraid someone will take her away.’

Matilda moves towards him and wraps a hand around his forearm. ‘Where is she now, Henry?’

‘Upstairs.’

‘Upstairs? Then go and get her.’

It is obvious she doesn’t believe him. Her fingers are at her mouth and she chews at her thumbnail, looking up at him out of a newly pale face.

When, five short minutes later, he returns with the sleeping baby hugged to his chest, she is paler still, but she smiles wide at the sight of Libby, bundled in wool, and her tears spill abundantly then. Precisely as Henry had hoped they wouldn’t.

‘You called her Libby,’ she says, scooping the little girl to her breast.

‘It’s the name her mother chose,’ Henry replies.

‘Libby Twist.’

‘Elizabeth Ruby Twist. Libby for short.’

‘Of course, of course,’ Matilda answers, but she doesn’t seem to be listening. She is staring down at Libby, her tears still falling, and there is a look about her eyes that Henry can’t quite fathom. He’s never seen it on Matilda before. Though he is reminded, loosely, of something or someone: perhaps his mother. ‘She’s perfect. It’s perfect,’ Matilda says, and when she says ‘it’, Henry is not entirely sure what she is referring to.

They go through and sit in the window, as tiny and close – it would seem to any onlooker – as a new family under the moonless sky. But Henry and Matilda are miles apart really. Matilda prickles with hope while Henry is made serene by his daughter’s proximity. Matilda plans for a future while Henry mourns the one he’s lost.

‘Have you got a nurse,’ she asks, ‘to feed her?’

Henry does not explain that he has been guessing, thus far, at how to tend a baby. He does not mention that he spent more than an hour deciding whether he should give her Liebig’s formula or SMA, and that in the end his choice was without reason; that at first he rubbed the stuff onto her tongue with a little finger, ignorant of whether she could suck or swallow; that when he is completely clueless he probes the old woman upstairs for advice, though he has never asked her whether she raised a child of her own.

Libby half-wakes with a short clucking sound and Matilda hands her, slowly, back to Henry.

‘Gray and I wanted children, you know,’ she confides.

‘It’s not too late.’

‘I’m forty-one years old, Henry. Besides, we hoped for years. It just didn’t happen. Eventually, we gave up hoping.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Yes, anyway …’ She gives a little shake of her head, as though she is trying to rouse herself from a deep sleep. ‘I did come here for a reason.’

‘To check up on me,’ Henry says and, made comfortable now by Libby’s heart beating against him, he almost smiles. Almost. He steps back and forth in front of Matilda, bobbing the baby up and down as she squawks and punches the air. She does not cry often and Henry has wondered if this is normal, but he will not risk visiting a doctor to ask. She seems healthy enough to him, despite her size. And hasn’t Vivian promised him he will know if there’s a problem? He has no option but to believe her.

‘To tell you that there’s a party on Friday,’ Matilda says. ‘And that you must come.’

‘I can’t go to a party.’

‘Of course you can. You’ll have to some time. There’s no occasion or anything, it’s just, you know what that bright young lot are like, and well, Monty’s in with them apparently, so there we go. I think it might just be because it’s the first of the month. You don’t have to stay long, but you do have to speak to people at some point.’

‘I’m speaking to you.’

‘Yes, and don’t think I haven’t noticed it’s the first time.’ Matilda stands and rests a hand on Libby’s back to still Henry. He obliges. ‘You’re doing well, but you mustn’t let yourself get lonely.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Of course you are … So, Friday,’ Matilda says. ‘Midnight. I’ll pop an invitation in so you have the address. Oh, and there’s a theme. Everyone wears white.’ Then, though the effort it costs her verges on painful, she kisses Henry’s cheek and lets herself out of the flat.

From the pavement, she watches him pull the curtains. A pillar of muted lamplight shows at their centre, where the fabric does not quite meet, and Matilda stands in the bitter night and waits to catch glimpses of his shadow as he moves around the room. A baby! There’s a baby! She cannot calm the thrashing of her heart. She cannot grasp how she has persuaded herself to stand and walk out of his home when he so badly needs her. And he does need her now. Now more than ever. He can’t raise a baby alone. And here she is, and here is what she has longed for, and surely there is nothing to stop her from taking it now – though of course it must all be done well, sensitively. For tonight, she must content herself only with one more glimpse of him through a window.

But she does not get it. The light does not fall right. And long after her hands and feet have started to sting with the cold, she submits and turns to walk away.

With every forward pace, though, she wonders if Grayson will let her go, when the time comes. Will he give her up to a better man, or will he fight for her?