ENCOUNTERS

He fills Libby’s days with promises. Her nights, too.
Though they are alone, he cannot bring himself to sing her lullabies. He runs through them in his mind, he invents the words he fails to remember, but when he opens his mouth there is nothing waiting behind his lips. Strings of crisp black letters melt away. He has become a sort of mute. He thinks it is because he can envisage Ruby so clearly, stuffing the flat full of songs, and it makes him feel inadequate: Libby has been denied more than half the parenting she would have known. So instead, he whispers promises into the smooth peach perfection of her ear. Promises of gentle hills and greenest fields and long bleak winter beaches they will visit, the bleached sand snatched at by frothing salt waves. They will look out at all these things, knowing that her mother looked at the very same views at one time or another, knowing that it is the land which birthed and moulded Ruby Elizabeth Twist.

Now, he carries his daughter to the window and inspects the street below. Henry had told him to come quietly, and not until after midnight, and that he must not knock the door, but he doesn’t trust him to abide by these rules.

Jack Turner, it seems, is something of a loose cannon.

When Henry caught up to him after the party, he had been trying to persuade a red-faced costermonger – cart stuffed with crusty flashes of dark-silver fish – to let him ‘help out with the heavy work’ with grins and flourishes of his slim but big-knuckled hands. ‘I’m a grafter,’ Henry heard him say. ‘The most honest-to-goodness grafter this side of –’

He did not finish the sentence. He felt Henry rushing towards him and turned away from the coster, who immediately resumed his bellowing. Seeing Henry, Jack smiled and let out a friendly little grunt, then dropped his hands into his pockets.

‘Henry,’ he said simply.

Henry stopped in front of him, chest heaving. He could not remember the last time he had run anywhere. ‘Jack,’ he replied, holding out his hand.

‘Where are you flying off to?’ Jack asked as they shook.

‘Here,’ Henry answered. ‘Just here. I wanted to … say sorry, I … I’ve had a lot of apologising to do lately, and I … Sorry, that’s all.’

‘Sorry?’ Jack laughed. ‘What the hell for?’

‘Being so rude that night, outside the flat.’

‘You had every right to be rude.’ His hand flew out and grabbed an apple from a second costermonger’s cart while the owner’s head was turned. He tossed it into his other hand then slipped it inside his jacket. ‘I was loitering. With intent, probably.’

Henry frowned at him. He was starting to regain his breath now. He was standing taller. He was still measuring the physical threat Jack posed. Though something made him want to talk to this man, be near him; if he could have, Henry Twist would have taken a measuring tape to Jack Turner and compared their every dimension.

‘You were going to rob me?’

‘Maybe,’ Jack answered, shrugging, his dark eyes widening into a look of faultless candour. ‘That, or knock and enquire after a room.’

When Henry did not speak, Jack continued. ‘Are you going to punch me for that bit of honesty? Because really, I don’t think my old brain is up to another wallop.’

‘No,’ Henry answered. ‘No, not at all. The bruise on your cheek?’

‘That was the first wallop, yes. Now, what can I do for you, Henry?’ He raised a palm. ‘Wait, before you answer that.’ He spun around and, without waiting for the coster to pause in his shouts for custom, flexed his lean arm like a strongman. ‘I’ve just the build for the work, don’t you think?’ He winked at the man, who raised a fleshy fist and pumped it at him, though without any real aggression. Retrieving the stolen apple from inside his jacket, he turned to the second coster. He spun the apple like a cricket ball then, catching it, took a large, loud bite. ‘And I particularly like your apples, sir. Best in the city.’ He began to back away and Henry followed him. The second coster shone red with the effort of staying put: he could not leave his cart unattended to chase after a thief. ‘You know where to find me if you find you need a second pair of hands,’ he called finally, then to Henry he said quietly: ‘Right, where were we?’

By that point, Henry had not known what to say. He doubted in fact that he’d had anything to say in the first place, but stepping along next to Jack, the shouts of a few street sellers bulging in the smoky air, the smell of earth-wet vegetables forcing its way into his nose and mouth, his only thought was this: how can I keep this man nearby? So he stopped, planted his feet, looked Jack straight in the eye and said, ‘Do you still need somewhere to stay?’

It was probably one of the more foolish things he’d ever done, and thankfully, Jack had already found lodgings, but it got them talking at least and Henry – undeniably relieved to be conversing with someone who had never clapped eyes on his wife – found that he didn’t want to stop. He listened as Jack told him how he’d woken on the floor of a pub some weeks ago, blood on his tongue and a pain in his head as intense and sure as hell; how the landlord had relayed an account of his being set upon the night before, for an unknown or concealed reason, and beaten halfway to death before a couple of drinkers intervened; how he could not remember a single thing preceding that hazy moment when he was roused by the glare of first light breaking through the dusty window of the Prince of Wales and found himself flat on his back, his every bone aching against hours on wooden floorboards, laid out at the mercy of God Himself and every man beneath Him.

Henry did not comment on any of this. He waited for Jack to stop talking and told him, in the most honest way he could, that strange as it might seem he was in need of a new friend. They arranged to meet three days later: after midnight, Henry had insisted, though he hadn’t explained why. And oddly, Jack hadn’t asked. This only begins to bother him now that it is five minutes to one, and he has been watching the clock tick since a minute past twelve, and he is anxious – though he refuses to dwell on the potency of this feeling – that Jack will not come.

He is still worrying his entire body into a state of rigidity at ten past two, when he hears footfalls fast on the front steps.

Opening the door, he finds Jack with his head bent down, concentrated on the ankle he is flicking about so that his snapped bootlace dances like a charmed snake. He wears the same tatty ensemble, his newsboy at the wrong angle, his braces still flaccid across his chest. His shirt, though, remains white. Henry suspects he scrubs it every night.

‘So, why all this mystery?’ Jack asks, without lifting his head. ‘Don’t know if I’m one to do as instructed, really, but it seemed I ought to in this case.’

‘Come in,’ Henry answers, moving sideways in the door to clear a path. For some reason, he is standing as though steadying himself for a fight. He shakes his free arm out at his side, releasing the tension.

‘How do I know it’s safe?’

‘What?’

‘Well, you could have something to do with my …’ Jack points to his head.

‘There’s nothing in there but a sleeping baby,’ Henry says. He has already deposited Libby safely upstairs, with Viv, just in case – but the mention of a new child is so far from threatening that surely Jack will stay now. ‘But if you don’t want to take your chances …’

Jack peers around Henry into the dusky space beyond. The lamplight seeps like low cloud between the spindles of the staircase and Henry remembers the carved out letters that fill the top steps. He hopes they are not visible.

‘I’m not sure I do,’ he says, smiling wide. ‘Let’s go and have some fun. You’re a man in need of fun, aren’t you, Henry? How about the dog track?’

‘I can’t go far.’

‘Just over to the park then,’ Jack suggests. ‘You can watch the house from there, and I can watch my back.’

‘Are you always so suspicious?’

‘I suspect only since I started getting attacked in pubs, but then, perhaps I’m just a suspicious fellow. Either way, we certainly won’t find out tonight. Shall we begin with proper introductions?’ He offers Henry his hand again and they shake roughly, each squeezing just a touch harder than is necessary. ‘Jack Turner,’ Jack says. ‘I’m pretty convinced about that much now.’

‘Henry Twist,’ Henry returns. ‘And that was never in doubt.’

They sit languid with companionship in the park, their feet dampening in the grass, their mouths shaping smile after smile. They are discovering that they like each other. And this is as much a surprise to Henry as anything, because he knows he should not be here. Tonight, it seems reckless, how often he leaves Libby with Vivian. The woman is old and tired. Each time she drops into sleep, she is chancing one more dangerous descent towards death. And he’d know nothing of it, sitting here, chatting with a man he barely knows. And what of Jack in any case? Jack might be a diversion. This might all be a set-up.

But, no. He’s being foolish now. Yes, Henry knows he should not be here, but somehow, Jack has persuaded him that it will be all right. He is persuading him, word by empty word, that he is exactly where he ought to be.

Mostly, Jack talks and Henry listens, and this suits them both. Henry still finds it difficult to sustain conversation, though it is coming back to him – like a memory long discarded then felt for again with the most tentative explorations of fingertips. Perhaps Jack’s memory will come back to him this way, Henry thinks, but he opts not to voice the thought: he does not know him well enough to offer him hope. He has made that mistake before. The first time it was his young sapper friend, Bingley, who he preached so ignorantly to of belief and fortitude when the boy was missing most of his internal organs. The second time it was his father. Twice is too often to have made that mistake. He will not make it again.

‘All right, what about work?’

Jack closes his eyes and hums while he thinks. ‘No,’ he decides. ‘Not a single thing.’ He raises his hands in front of him and cups the damp air. ‘Although, I feel like I might have worked with my hands.’ His eyes spring open and he spreads his fingers to consider their lengthy shape. ‘These, my friend, are an effective pair of hands.’

They sit side by side on the bench, the lamp-lit flat diagonally in front of them on the opposite pavement, and Henry glances to his right: Jack lounges back, his elbows propped on top of the seat’s wooden slats, his legs stretched long. He is grinning.

‘Maybe you were a carpenter,’ Henry suggests.

‘Maybe,’ Jack answers. ‘But I’m thankful now, whatever I was. I’d never have found anywhere to stay if it weren’t for these hands.’ He lifts them from the wrists and presents them again with a wink.

Henry shakes his head, not understanding.

‘I’ve got no money,’ Jack explains. ‘How do you think I’m persuading the old lady to let me stay?’

‘You’re … sharing her bed?’

‘No. God, no! I’m in the attic. I let her share mine, though, from time to time. I mean, it’s only been a couple of weeks, but it’s working out well enough so far.’

Despite himself, Henry begins to laugh. In the empty night-time park, the sound expands as though funnelled through a megaphone. Jack sits up straighter.

‘What?’ he asks.

‘It’s just … Is she really old?’

‘No.’ Jack punches Henry’s upper arm. ‘I don’t know. Forty-five, maybe.’ Then, sheepishly, laughing too, he adds, ‘Definitely not fifty.’

Henry scrunches up his nose. ‘Of course not. Forty-nine would be fine but fifty, that would just be, indecorous.’

‘Indecorous! Christ, Henry, what are you, a man or a minister? Say it as it is.’

‘I try not to.’

‘And why the hell is that?’

Henry’s father blares through his mind. Not a picture of him exactly, but a sense, like a blast of crisping meat through an opened oven door. It is not as pleasant though, this sense. It is sharper, more complex – like an architect’s pencil design, perhaps, held close to the face, the level of detail overwhelming. Henry’s father had always been an overwhelming sort.

‘No reason,’ Henry says.

‘Good, then try it.’

Henry smiles, but it is not as free as his laughter was. He feels his cheek muscles pushing against it.

‘Ah, come on,’ Jack coaxes. ‘How am I behaving, Henry, playing with the old girl’s feelings like that?’

‘Charitably?’ Henry offers.

‘Is that the best you can do?’ Jack jumps up and stands in front of Henry, arms folded across his chest, head tilted in a parody of inquisitiveness. ‘Be disagreeable. It’s liberating.’

‘Unpleasantly.’

‘Unpleasantly,’ Jack yells. ‘Come on, Henry. Imagine the scene: a lonely woman, an absent husband, a handsome young bugger like me turning up on the door. Give me a word.’

‘Disgusting,’ Henry says.

‘I’d say fucking revolting,’ Jack laughs, but immediately Henry sees the sadness behind the joke. The tears prickling Jack’s eyes are not born of amusement, and Henry wants – no, needs – to ease the fear Jack has been hiding so well, for his own sake as well as Jack’s.

He stands. ‘Revolting, then,’ he says, louder.

‘Revolting,’ Jack cries, throwing his head back and flinging out his arms. Though he still laughs, his stance reminds Henry of a writhe of pain. He looks like a man tormented.

‘Revolting,’ Henry shouts, to distract him from it. ‘Revolting.’

‘Revolting,’ Jack shouts, even louder.

And that is when the rain begins hammering down on them. They stand for a trice, their heads tipped back, their eyes to the heavens, and let drops of the sky fall onto their faces. Heavy beads drum against leaves, bending the flat membranes into gleaming curves. Grass blades cower under the downpour. On Bayswater Road, the streetlamps direct the water to the pavement like kindly theatre ushers. The entire world, it seems, is looking downwards, downwards, but Henry and Jack are looking up, and it does not escape Henry’s attention that, were it not for Jack, he would never have lifted his head.

‘Run,’ he says.

‘Run?’ Jack asks.

‘We’ll be soaked otherwise,’ Henry answers, pointing towards the flat, and they take off together, he and Jack, bolting across the road and up the front steps. Within seconds, they stand huddled on the threshold as Henry fiddles with the key. Rain batters the road, turning now to noisy hail, and a passing motorcar slows under the onslaught, its headlights marking two dribbling columns on the tarmacadam.

On nights like this, Ruby would stay awake for hours, sitting at the opened window and inhaling the smell of the rain. It was different here, she used to say: thinner in the nose. But she still loved the crackling music it made on the window-panes. She would turn towards him in bed and say, ‘Come here a minute,’ and he would grin at the funny construction of her sentences and her easy beauty, hair untamed, legs gathered up under the fluid folds of her silk chiffon nightdress, face eerily grey but alive, alive with the shifting reflections of water on glass. She’d never thought she would miss the rain that blew in off the sea at Pwll, relentless as the waves, driving, driving until you thought you could drown in it. She’d told him that a hundred times. London rain was powerless in comparison and it made her long for the drama of the coast. She did not want to go back, not one bit; there was simply a duality within her which meant that, though she was happiest here at the heart of the country, with him, she could not rid her bones, her tissue, her every atom, of Wales.

He pushes open the hallway door and steps through into the front room. And as he does, he almost feels Ruby sitting in the bay window, turned away from him, that nightdress draped like a fan over the seat. He breathes in, expecting her vanilla scent. Then Jack moves behind him, his weight forcing a creak out of a floorboard, and she fades gradually away, like a portrait left in the light and accelerated through a century in a matter of moments. It is as unalterable and devastating as that. Henry loses Ruby a thousand times a day.

The fire has been smouldering for hours, and they move towards its mellow heat together, Jack eyeing the empty cot charily.

‘Where’s the baby?’ he asks. ‘Upstairs,’ Henry answers. ‘She stays with the old woman upstairs. I should fetch her, really. I …’ He doesn’t have a good reason to present to Jack. Why should he fetch her, really, in the middle of the night? He simply wants her close by, where he can watch over her. But he doesn’t know how to explain that to a man who has either never had children, or forgotten them.

‘Then fetch her.’ Jack nods, shrugs.

And Henry does. He knocks Viv awake and explains that he is back early from the party he’d invented, that he’d been missing Libby too much to stay. He carries Libby back downstairs, cradling her, shushing her. He settles her in her cot by the fire as Jack, perched now on the arm of the settee, watches him, because suddenly he trusts this man. He does. He cannot fathom it, but he does.

‘She died, didn’t she, the baby’s mother?’ Jack mumbles the question, and Henry is confused for a moment. Surely he knows this. Surely everyone knows this. ‘Was it the birth?’

Henry takes a deep breath and explains all he can, his voice trembling, his eyes focused on the raindrops which dot the floorboards, like flung stars, between his and Jack’s feet. They have almost dried when he runs short of words.

‘I’ll find you a change of clothes,’ he mumbles abruptly then, and steps out into the hallway, away from his wardrobe.

Hand to the banister, he pauses and listens for a movement upstairs, paranoid now that Vivian or Herb will hear Jack’s voice. But why, he wonders, should that pose a problem? He would introduce him as a friend, fallen on hard times, who needs a settee for the night. And that would almost be true. Except that Henry does not look at Jack and see a friend. He realises it all at once. He sees in Jack some echo of her.

When he returns with a towel he has retrieved from under the stairs, Jack is bending over the cot, a smile tweaking the corners of his mouth as he flips his cap over his face and away again, over and away. Henry pauses in the doorframe and watches. Libby, so recently awoken, burbles happily at the game.

‘I think she likes me,’ Jack says.

‘I think she does,’ Henry answers, opening the wardrobe and pulling out the trousers and shirt he needs for work the next day. ‘Here.’ He tosses the clothes onto the bed. He is not going to work anyway.

Jack lowers his cap into the cot towards Libby’s waving hands and she makes clumsy grabs for it. Then he unbuttons his shirt and drags it off, wincing as his shoulder pivots out of his braces. The firelight shimmies over his bare torso, revealing the still-dark welts from his beating. All down his left side, along the ridges of his ribs, the bruising is a confusion of ripe red and purple; below, his hipbone is smashed and healing badly; across his chest and stomach heavy blows have split the skin, which still struggles to knit itself back together.

‘Christ, Jack,’ Henry whispers. ‘It’s been weeks. I didn’t realise it was so bad.’

‘It’s getting better,’ Jack answers. ‘It’s taking longer than I thought but the pain is lessening, almost every day.’

Henry pinches at his nose and sniffs deep, trying to draw back the tears which clog his throat. Though he does not want to think it, the thought is as obvious as the injuries strewing Jack’s body, and it fills him with relief and sadness and, more than that, doubt. Definitely doubt. In fact, he hardly dares to believe it, but he cannot deny that Jack does not look like a man who has simply been beaten. The wounds are too great, too long in mending. He looks rather like a man who has been struck, once, hard, irreparably on his left side. Struck by something huge and unyielding. Something vehicular.

‘Throw it over, then,’ Jack says, indicating the towel Henry is still clutching.

But Henry does not. He steps across the room, temporarily dumbed. He raises the towel and wraps it around Jack’s shoulders. Then, as softly as he can, he gathers the material into his palms and begins running his hands over Jack’s body.

Streets away, around corners where streetlamps stutter and past doorways so deep with shadow they can hide love or hate or anything between, through flocks of feathered and sequinned girls filing into dances and the men who hold umbrellas over their heads, and up three narrow flights of stairs, Matilda and Grayson lie in bed, coiled into one another.

They have spent the evening at Monty’s, pressed together under a blanket, sitting with their backs to the trunk of the big tree. Matilda knows it is a sycamore, but she has never mentioned the fact. She had not wanted to admit, in front of Henry and Ruby and their simple consuming love, to having the occasion to read about the identification of trees. They would never have considered engaging in such a wasteful activity while the other was close by. Now, with Ruby gone and Henry shrinking in on himself and absent, for the most part, from the garden, she could have told Grayson. She hadn’t wanted, though, to make things any less familiar.

Since the White Party, Monty’s association with the Bright Young People has grown deeper. They have begun popping in and out of his garden now, and Matilda doesn’t like or want the company. It had been their own secret place, just the four of them, and she feels it has been invaded.

Tonight, when a few of the newspaper lot had showed up, she and Grayson had risen and left without a word of discussion. They had arrived home to find the flat depressingly dank and climbed into bed, more to avoid the cold than to be intimate, rolling themselves into their sheets with shrieks and shivers. It was Matilda, in the end, who had reached out to Grayson.

Now, surrounded by nothing it seems but violent hail, her cheek against his chest, she begins to laugh. She had forgotten this feeling; of knowing a body, of expecting hands here or lips there. It is so far removed from the panic and need of loving Henry that she feels relieved. Here, right here, with her husband’s slow-softening biceps curled under her neck, she even considers that Monty has talked her into believing in something which is not real. After all, he is handsome, Henry: handsome enough to make you deem his silent brooding interesting, exhilarating, even. Maybe she has been fooled.

‘What are you laughing at, woman?’ Grayson asks, smoothing her hair back as if she is some breed of lap-pet. She has always been disappointed by her curlless ash-brown hair. She moves her head slightly against his hand to extend the contact.

‘I don’t know. I just feel like I haven’t laughed in such a long time.’

‘You lost your friend, Tilda. No one’s expected you to.’

The mention of Ruby sobers her and she props herself up on her elbows to look at her husband. Easy, uncomplicated Grayson Steck: his jaw a thicker version of what it was on their wedding day; his light-blue eyes made smaller by amassing wrinkles; his hair greying in three distinct streaks which travel backwards from his forehead to make him look badger-like. She runs a finger back and forth along the shallow V of his collarbone.

‘Gray? Do you think there’s a reason it was Ruby? I mean … do you think she was too happy?’ It is the first time Matilda has spoken Ruby’s name since the funeral, and it catches in her throat. Henry, Henry, Henry – that’s all it’s been. And yes, he lost Ruby, but Ruby lost him too, in a way. Him and everything else, her baby included. It’s Ruby she should have been thinking about. The tears are tripping down Matilda’s face before she feels the heat they create behind her nose. They are formed from pure shame.

‘No, love,’ Grayson answers. ‘I think she was unlucky. Very unlucky. And I’ll tell you something, I miss her more than I thought I would – when it first happened, you know?’

Matilda hums in response. She doesn’t want to have to commit to a yes or a no.

‘I don’t know how Henry does it,’ Grayson continues. ‘With the baby as well. I wouldn’t have the foggiest. Wouldn’t even know where to start.’

Matilda says nothing. Suddenly, her husband uttering Henry’s name makes her baulk. She doesn’t want to hear it. She doesn’t even want to think it, or share a bed with a man who is thinking it. Henry has been between their sheets too long.

Pushing herself up onto her knees, Matilda shakes her head. ‘Let’s not talk about it.’

‘No, wait.’ Grayson grasps her wrist and pulls her back down into the sheets. ‘I’ve been wanting to talk about it, actually. I didn’t want to mention it at first, in case it was a daft idea, but the more I think about it, the more sensible it seems.’

‘What seems?’

‘We should have the baby,’ Grayson replies, sitting up himself now and settling against the wall.

‘We can’t have the baby,’ Matilda mutters, closing her eyes. ‘He’s not going to give her away.’

‘But he can’t care for her himself, and go to work, and all the rest of it. And he’d be able to see her all the time, if she lived with us. Whenever he wanted. We could even tell her he’s her father, when she’s old enough. Think about it, Tilda. Properly.’

‘It’s a terrible idea.’

‘It’s the best thing for her.’

‘Maybe. But what if she was yours, Gray?’

He stops, mouth open, chest puffed, then lets out a long sigh and presses a thumb and a forefinger to his eyebrows. He grows smaller. ‘Of course I’d keep her.’

‘Of course you would.’ She shuffles closer to him and spreads her palm over his heart. ‘You’re a good man, Gray. My good husband. My good love.’ She kisses his nose between words. ‘But she wouldn’t be ours.’

‘No, I suppose not.’

‘No.’

Grayson had never once considered, before his marriage, that he would be incapable of fathering children. Or that his wife would be incapable of mothering them. Or both. They do not know whose fault it is, though they are both careful with words like ‘fault’ and ‘problem’. Once, early on, in a conversation held imprudently at a small, wobbling café table, Grayson had called them a failure – not her, them – and the fallout had been a long, hideous thing to see. Since, they have shaped their blame in other ways. With sulking, mostly. And embarrassment.

Matilda’s flirting, her attention-seeking, the shame she brings him, is another aspect of his marriage he could not have predicted, but then, so many of his ideas have changed in the last twelve years that he cannot say with any certainty what his thirty-year-old self thought or did not think. He believes in his memories of being happy with Matilda. He especially treasures a day they spent on the Tube, permitting the other a brief head start and taking turns to chase or be chased around the city before meeting eventually in Regent’s Park; and later, outside a favourite café; and as red evening crashed onto the sky, on the Mall, where they had pretended to be King George and his Queen consort. But he cannot be sure that it truly existed, this happiness. It is possible it was only a trick played on him by infatuation.

As Matilda bestrides him, he searches her face for a flicker of her younger self. He sees traces of her tonight, hidden, and all too often now, beneath hardening layers of disappointment. Soon, he thinks, they will be gone.

‘I love you,’ he says, testing the sound of that terrible sentiment. Perhaps he will never know if he really means it. Perhaps the only way to test it is to see her dragged under a bus.

‘I love you,’ she answers, but the response only makes him doubt the concept more. Something plunges inside him. He could say the rest now – the speech he’d planned on using all along, once she’d dismissed the baby idea. It wasn’t Libby she did not want: it was him, Grayson. So, if you love him, go to him, he would say. And he had no doubt she would take up the offer.

She kisses his nose again and again before straightening up. ‘Listen to that,’ she says, smiling. ‘The rain has stopped.’

‘Has it?’ Grayson asks. ‘Really?’

‘It really has,’ Matilda promises. And she is right. Outside the window, the sky is quite abruptly calm. The torrent has hounded the clouds into the distance, to burst over the English countryside. Thousands of Londoners have already ducked through their front doors, though, slamming them against the night. The city’s voice has been swept away and in the new silence, Gray puts a hand to his wife’s slender neck and whispers a different offer to her.

‘What if we tried again?’ he says.