DOUBT

He stops running only when he feels his lungs might burst. And even then, he does not stop walking. He strides on towards home, his head pounding, his breath heaving, his arms swinging as an imaginary soldier’s might. Henry knows that real soldiers do not move this way. In Belgium, those who still had arms to swing had long lost the drive to force them through such a pointless arc.

Behind him, Jack – the fitter of the two men now, though it might have been different once – matches his footsteps.

‘Nobody was angry,’ Jack says. ‘Come on, Henry. Did you think it could go any better than that, after what Matilda did?’

‘No.’

‘Then did Monty say something?’

‘No.’

‘Will you slow down? Christ, Henry!’

Henry stops and spins around. The two men almost collide. ‘Christ, Jack,’ he spits.

‘Christ, Jack? What do you mean ‘Christ, Jack’?’

Henry scrubs at his face with both hands, trying to ignore the reek of stale alcohol which fumes off them. He paces back and forth across the pavement, shaping more of a circle really in the narrow space. They are on Bayswater Road now, just a little way from the flat. A line of oak trees leads the way home, their branches tangled in their neighbours’ and casting a web of shadows onto the street below. Henry grips the black spears of the park railings in tight fists and, like a man imprisoned, rattles them until they make a deep, hollow-sounding twang. Then, unsatisfied, he turns and kicks at the nearest lamppost. There is a clang of shoe on metal and the light sways above them, but neither Henry nor Jack looks up at it. They’ve made eye contact now, and they cannot break it.

‘We shouldn’t have gone,’ Henry says, quieter this time.

‘I know.’

‘We can’t do it again.’

‘We don’t have to.’

‘But there are things, other things, like … work, and … I have to move out of the flat, and … Libby will have to go to school, you know? Libby will have to …’

‘Grow up.’

‘Yes. Grow up. And how can she do that, with –’ Henry stops and flicks his hand between himself and Jack: it trembles like an indecisive weather vane.

‘Two men,’ Jack whispers.

‘Two fathers,’ Henry whispers back. ‘And, what should we do, Jack … Jack. You’re not even sure that’s your name!’ He attempts a laugh, but it withers. ‘What should we do?’

He hasn’t the strength to stop the tears coming. He’s had too much to drink, and too little sleep, and he’s been collecting them for too long a time. They gather and fall. Jack shifts forward, slides a hand around Henry’s back, and pulls them together chest to chest.

‘Don’t,’ Henry says.

‘There’s no one around,’ Jack murmurs.

‘Someone might pass.’

‘No one will pass.’

Jack wraps both arms around Henry and clings to him as he sinks to the ground. On the pavement, he speaks over Henry’s shoulder, not caring if the world hears his words.

‘We’ll work it all out,’ he says. ‘I know what you think. I do know, Henry. I don’t know if you’re right, I don’t even know if I believe it’s possible, but I do know what you think, all right? All right?’

Henry does not answer immediately. He attempts instead to think his way back to last year, when Ruby was here and Libby was not and he recognised the shape of his life; when it was travelling in the direction he had pointed it in. Already, the reality of that past is being distilled. Each day or week or month he spent with Ruby is being condensed into a singular picture or sentence.

‘How?’ he asks eventually.

‘Because I know you,’ Jack says. ‘I know what’s inside you, all right, right down to your bones.’

And though this is the very first thing Henry wants to hear, it is perhaps the very last thing Jack should have said, because, sitting on the steps outside the flat, hatted and coated, a small brown leather suitcase at her feet and an angry woman’s letter folded into her pocket, is Ida Fairclough.

Morning has not yet begun to open up the darkness and, in the near-black canopy of shade the building creates, she is invisible. In the cavernous quiet of half past four, though, she can hear almost every word Henry and Jack speak to each other as their sentiments echo along the street. She can hear, too, that Henry is crying. She cries with him, silently, hunched around Matilda’s letter, because she understands its jumbled message about deviants and perversions now, and because she understands that, wherever he is seeking his comfort, this man, this proud man, is crumpled on the cold ground aching for her sister. Hurting for her. He is made weak by his need for Ruby. Whatever the circumstances, Ida wishes someone would ache for her that way.

She peeps over the wall. Henry and Jack are still huddled into each other on the pavement. She lifts her suitcase and tiptoes down the steps, considering slipping away and returning another time – she is sure Daisy would put her up for a night or two – but just as she turns in the opposite direction, she is spotted by the man she knows only as Jack.

‘Hello?’ he calls, rising.

What choice does she have then but to turn back and walk towards these two so rudely discovered lovers?

‘Henry,’ she says when she reaches them. ‘I am sorry to sneak up on you in the middle of the night. It’s just that, I received a rather dramatic letter … But first, how are you?’ She passes her suitcase into her left hand and offers him her right.

‘Ida,’ he responds dumbly. They stand, Henry and Jack, side by side, shuffling from foot to foot like bashful children. And though Ida feels she has caught them in the midst of a naughty scheme, she is determined not to show it. She is too proud to allow any sort of hysterics in the street.

‘Shall we?’ she says, indicating the way but arranging her hand awkwardly, as though she is a shop girl demonstrating the quality of some item of clothing.

And: ‘Yes,’ Jack answers when Henry does not. ‘Yes, we should.’

In the front room, Ida stands in the curve of the window whilst Jack builds a fire. Henry, balanced on the edge of Ruby’s shaky dressing-table chair, thinks that it is not cold enough for a fire. He understands, though, that Jack needs a task to occupy himself with. They are uncomfortable, all three of them. Their words, when found and blurted into the silence, are tinny and disconnected – as though they are arriving along a telephone wire.

‘It was Matilda, wasn’t it?’

‘Do you need to ask?’ Ida says, allowing herself a tiny smile. ‘She obviously fell for that look of yours.’

‘I don’t think it’s about –’

‘Of course it is,’ Jack puts in. ‘It’s about you.’ The flames are catching now, jumping towards and away from each other, towards and away. He stands, stretches, and settles on the settee, positioned between Henry and Ida. He is ready to play referee.

‘I’ll have to beg your forgiveness for a second time,’ Henry says, his voice low but his head high. ‘And in as many meetings.’

Ida lowers herself onto the windowsill and removes her gloves, then lays them out flat beside her, smoothing the creases away. She crosses her legs. ‘Perhaps,’ she says, ‘an explanation, rather than an appeal.’

‘You’re not furious?’

‘I might be. I don’t think I should decide before I’m made aware of the details, though, do you?’

Henry hides his face in his hands, trapping the sigh he releases. ‘How did you get to be so reasonable, Ida?’

‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

‘Your sister wasn’t.’

Ida smiles. ‘No,’ she says. ‘She wasn’t, was she? I loved that. Not that I ever would have admitted it … Anyway. I’m ready. I’m listening. Begin at the beginning.’

The two men share a glance and, feeling the privacy of it, Ida makes a show of peering around the room. There is still so much of Ruby here: the photographs on the mantel; a pair of black shoes placed next to the wardrobe; the bits and pieces scattered over the dressing table; a diamanté and white-feathered headband hanging from the mirror there. Amongst these items Ida feels – at the back of her neck and through the hairs on her arms – a certain presence which, she imagines, many people would mistake for a ghost. She knows though that it is not Ruby who haunts her, but her own guilt. Ida Fair-clough begrudged her sister the life she chose. She was envious. And her envy made her stay away from the woman she so longs to reach now: a woman who is forever unreachable.

‘It was the day of the funeral …’

Ida takes a deep breath and straightens up. Then turns to Jack and nods. ‘Please,’ she says. ‘Carry on.’

And so he does. He guides her, move by careful move, from that night in January when he walked whistling away from Henry for the first time, through his every important recollection – their meeting at the costermonger’s cart, his muddled memories of what happened at the Prince of Wales, the lies he told to acquire work at the docks – right up to the moment when he and Henry decided to venture out to a party together. Some of it Henry has not heard before, and he sits, chin resting on the pillar of his forearm, and takes it all in.

Naïvely, perhaps, he trusts Jack to offer Ida only the appropriate details. It is clear that Jack wants to unburden him of telling the story, and Henry is grateful. He hasn’t the stomach for it. Not so soon after Matilda’s antics. Besides, he does not possess enough words to tell Ida all he wants and needs to tell her. He doubts there are enough words.

Listening to Jack speak, though, he realises that he has asked too little of him really. He should have demanded wheres and whens and hows. He could not ensure Libby’s safety around a man he did not know. And yet, he has seen Jack lift his daughter from her cot and cup her so carefully against his chest that you would suppose her made of the finest glass. He has seen him sit her on his lap to play the silly clapping games which so thrill her. He knows – with a certainty so absolute that it cannot be challenged, even in retrospect – that Elizabeth Twist adores Jack Turner, and that the reason for that adoration is familiarity.

Libby recognised Jack the instant she first saw him.

As they talk, another morning blooms gold over the city, spreading in wide warming slants over rooftops and alleyways, streets and parkland, and eventually forming a sort of halo around Ida, who listens intently to Jack, blinking away her tiredness. Henry has seen a thousand London dawns. Now, he wonders again what it would be like to watch the sun emerge each day over the tops of the Welsh mountains. He should have taken Ruby home. He should have insisted. She would have fought him at first, yes; she would have shouted and raged at his going against her wishes. A fight, though – one simple argument or a hundred more complicated contests, it matters little now – might just have kept her alive.

And then there is Jack. Who or what could have kept him alive, as he was before he was attacked?

Henry has not forgotten the woman and the two boys who visit Jack’s dreams. When he is brave enough, he sees them for what they are. And he considers then that the smallest of their choices – to meet him from work or to wait for him at home, to take a walk with him or to join him later – might have ensured that a woman still had her husband and two children still had their father. These meaningless moments, these are the points lives pivot on.

‘Can I be blunt, Mr Turner?’ Ida asks.

Jack, perched now on the back of the settee, opens his hands, as though he is releasing from them a snared bird. ‘Of course.’

‘Well, it seems to me that there is nothing for you here but Henry. You can’t be after his money, or his home. And, in any case, it would be far easier to acquire a rich wife if security was what you sought. You don’t have to persuade me of your good intention. But what I can’t understand – and you must forgive my impudence here, Jack – is what Henry wants with you.’

They turn their eyes on Henry, who feels his colour rising.

‘I mean,’ Ida stutters on, ‘he’s not a man who is inclined towards … men. Not in the way … Not as …’ She huffs, exasperated by her own spinelessness. ‘You married my sister, Henry. You adored her.’

Standing, Henry removes his waistcoat and unbuttons the neck of his shirt. He needs breathing space. It has always been the same for Henry – that what he needs most in times of crisis is physical space. War had given him that, at least. But the bank hadn’t, and London doesn’t, and his parents’ house had not. As a young man, he had rushed off in any which direction in search of it. When he was sixteen and his mother disappeared for a fortnight with a man she met at the pub, he had walked a hundred miles – he’d measured them – just to tramp the thoughts out of his head. A year or so later, when his father fell down the stairs and snapped his ankle and his mother lolled about on the settee in tears for days, finally blaming herself for her husband’s pain, Henry had cycled London small; he had learned every last ugly angle of it; he had folded the map of it into his mind so that he could open it up again, whenever he needed, and view the sprawling scale of the place.

He hasn’t been able to do anything like that since Ruby.

‘Ida,’ he says finally. ‘Do you believe in the afterlife?’

‘I do not.’

‘No. Neither did I.’

‘But,’ Ida prompts.

‘But –’

From above, as though in response to the subject matter, there comes a loud crack: the sound of thick ice fracturing, or wood splitting under an axe. It makes them all jump. They look around the room, searching the inexplicable interruption. Though it is not apparent they continue, in silence, to seek it – as people will. And then there comes a second sound, a voice, and Henry realises that the crack was that of a door, long since unopened, being wrenched from its frame.

He strides into the hallway.

At the top of the stairs, the heavy oak divide between his flat and the Mosses’ creaks ajar. A dust-storm plumes and swirls at ankle height. And, as Vivian steps from her own home into Henry’s and descends towards the odd gang below, so she obliterates the letters he had so carefully marked out. Ruby’s name, running continually across her path, goes unnoticed as Vivian edges down, Libby pinned to her side. So too does the spot where the letters R u b y are replaced by four different letters: J a c k.

Vivian’s bedroom-slippered feet return the dust to simple dust.

‘Everything all right?’ she mouths as she passes the baby over.

Henry nods.

‘You had me getting worried there, you know.’ She keeps to a whisper. ‘Talk, talk, talk, and you not coming up to fetch the child. I hope you don’t mind –’ She indicates the door.

‘Not at all,’ Henry answers.

Jack and Ida appear in the hallway and Vivian, embarrassed at being seen in her dressing gown and fidgeting with its collar, sends them a little smile.

‘We had some things we needed to discuss,’ Henry explains. ‘This is Ida. Ruby’s sister.’

Ida offers Vivian her hand and they shake.

‘A beauty,’ Viv says. ‘A real beauty. And you are?’ She extends her hand to Jack.

‘Jack,’ Henry says. ‘This is Jack.’

‘Jack?’

There is a stroke of silence, as thinly unpleasant as a note dragged out across violin strings.

And then: ‘My fiancé,’ Ida announces, slipping her hand around his waist. ‘He’s my fiancé. We came to visit this little lady.’ She releases Jack again and moves forward to take Libby from Henry. ‘And haven’t you grown big?’ she says to Libby, who studies her from beneath a serious brow.

‘She certainly has,’ Viv agrees, standing slightly taller. Perhaps, Henry thinks, she is proud of her part in his daughter’s life. And really she ought to be. She has fed her and sung to her and rocked her to sleep.

Henry is proud, too: not of what he has done for Libby, but of what she has done for herself. Shortly after her birth, when that clever, skinny doctor had told him that her traumatic arrival would make her weak, he had appealed to one of the nurses, who – likely out of pity for a man who had become a widower and a new father on the same day – had insisted that it could go either way. His daughter might long be affected by the circumstances of her delivery, she explained. She might be weaker than the average child, her brain might be slower to develop. Or, she might thrive just the same as any other full-term baby. Libby, like Ruby before her – and like Ida, Henry supposes, considering how she is taking the news of he and Jack – is strong. And he takes no responsibility for that. She has grown strong all on her own.

As if hearing Henry’s thoughts, Jack says, ‘She’s a tough little thing.’

And they all hum in agreement, united and quieted by their admiration for Libby, bending towards her like flowers reaching for sunlight.

When the clock in the next room rouses its hands to shudder and click past eight, Jack, Ida and Vivian are still lingering in the hallway, discussing Libby’s many virtues. Standing idly between them, Henry listens, saying nothing. The opportunity to explain Jack to Vivian has, thankfully, been denied him. With it, however, went his chance to inform Ida of the appointment Monty helped him make in a clutch of stolen moments last night. ‘Ten tomorrow morning,’ Monty had said with a wink. ‘Don’t be late.’

And Henry doesn’t intend to be. He would not dream of keeping Miss Sybil Brown waiting – not when he has such important questions to ask her.