AN UNWELCOME LETTER

When the single white envelope drops through the letterbox, Henry is sitting on the stairs in his hallway, counting and recounting the ten days which have passed since he last saw Jack.

True, they did not plan to meet again. Jack has not broken an arrangement. But Henry had thought an agreement implicit in the fact that Jack had not retreated from his touch. In truth, he had seemed to want it, once his initial shock had lessened and the stringy pull of his muscles had loosened. He had stood, still and relaxed, and allowed himself to be dried, then removed from his wet trousers and fitted into Henry’s, which swung an inch or so wide at the waist. He had lounged on the settee before the sputtering fire, his chest still bare, and permitted Henry to feel his way along his ribs in search of fractures.

‘We used to do this in the army,’ Henry said.

‘Maybe I did, too,’ Jack answered.

It was different, of course, with just the two of them present, but Henry was not uncomfortable, and Jack didn’t seem to be either. It was not what it might have looked like, to cynical eyes. It was the first time since that January day that Henry had felt normal.

He considers the letter on the floor below him and decides not to fetch it yet. He has the only word he wants here, beneath his fingertips. He continues from where he left off: Ruby, Ruby … It is feasible that Jack grew disgusted by their behaviour later on, when he went back to his attic and his old lady, or when he persuaded some younger woman he had flirted with at a nightclub to disappear into a dark corner with him and recalled the feel of a woman’s skin against his own. Henry does not know how he spends his days – but perhaps, under those circumstances, he might have looked back and labelled the whole episode as just a little bit odd. No, Jack would not employ such a bland word. It would be one extreme or the other for him. Because, whatever Henry had said about the army, it was not a time of war. They had not felt their bodies pulled together by the blood-deep fear of taking or sustaining lives. They had stood, face to face, and Henry had touched Jack with the same hesitant need with which he had touched Ruby, before they were married.

Jack had let him.

In the next room, Libby squawks awake and Henry descends the stairs. On the way, he picks up the letter and deposits it on the table beneath the hall mirror. There, he hesitates, and catches in the glass the reflection of the last seconds he and Ruby spent together. At six o’clock in the heavy dark of this March morning, his wife, weeks dead, appears before him piece by piece, like a jigsaw being slotted together. She smiles at him across one imperial foot and the afterlife.

‘Ruby,’ he murmurs.

She was wearing red, her coat pulled over her swollen stomach – over Libby, who was still a balled-up wealth of possibilities then. Boy or girl. Dark or fair. Henry has come to know her as an uneven mixture of her parents: Ruby’s dark eyes; Ruby’s ruddy skin; his own sandy hair. Ruby’s temperament, he suspects. But then – then he had thought more about the tight sensation of Ruby’s distended abdomen as he looped his arms around them both. He had winked at Ruby – the best way he knew to tell her she looked beautiful. And now, he performs these movements again, gently applying his hands to the emptiness that used to be her, and whispering into her neck, ‘I’ve got you. I’ve got you.’

He returns to the bank sporadically. They excuse his absences – at Yeoman’s persuasion, he expects. They excuse his silences, too, as he sits before his adding machine, pressing the numbers, pulling the crank, watching the wheels turn and never once considering whether or not the figures displayed are the ones he ought to be seeing. They excuse his mistakes. He is surrounded incessantly by the pecking of typewriter keys, the clacking of heels on the floor, the undertones of philandering male clerks and the giggles of their female targets. Uninterested in the work, he has turned down promotions in the past but he wishes now he had taken them, solely for the benefit of a more private office.

Today, he is first in. The flat ejected him with the first breath of dawn and the promise of something unpleasant inside that envelope. He knows from the hand who has signed it, with a formal ‘sincerely’, and he is afraid to liberate the slanting sentences within. He sits at his desk, barricaded from the sad, high-ceilinged magnificence of the office by a deltoid of lamplight, and, palms flat on yesterday’s ledgers, rests his forehead on his arms.

He is not aware of Yeoman, standing behind him, until he speaks.

‘Go home, Twist,’ he says quietly.

Henry lifts his head. ‘I can’t.’ What he means is, he shouldn’t. He is embarrassed when he remembers all those people who carried on after the war; carried on without their husbands or their sons. He has lost only half of what his colleagues think he has lost and still he cannot function properly, cannot complete a working day, cannot speak as he used to speak. He wonders if a man can be stripped of his bravery. Or whether the thing itself is more a commodity than a trait: like money, which can be known in plenty at one moment and entirely depleted the next.

‘You can. Look, you’re not doing anyone any favours here. You haven’t had enough time.’

Henry studies Yeoman’s sagging face; the downward slope of skin around his eyes and mouth. In the past, they have wasted evenings together, he and Yeoman, laughing themselves drunk at bars or eating dinner with Mrs Yeoman. They are friends. They used to be.

‘What if there isn’t enough time?’ he says.

But he takes his friend’s advice, anyway. He stands, claps Yeoman on the shoulder, and steps out of the bank long before nine o’clock ticks around.

By ten, he is sitting at Vivian’s kitchen table, nursing his daughter and conversing in murmurs as Herb naps in his armchair beyond the lounge wall. Heat from the stove smothers the room. Libby purrs in her sleep, her lips clamped around the tip of Henry’s little finger. He would like to believe she holds some link with her mother that can’t be severed by death – they say, don’t they, that children are more open to communication with the spirits. But he doesn’t believe it. Not really. He knows that if Libby has any sense of Ruby at all, it is only of the sightless black protection of her womb, the steady drum-beat of her heart.

‘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.