THE SEARCH

Head down, eyes up, Henry marches through the heat-blotched darkness, one white shirt sleeve descending in slow rotations, one brown shoelace undone and rippling, both fists clenching and unclenching metrically at his sides. He does not know where he is going. He has not yet heard Matilda’s confession. He knows only that he must move, and keep moving, in the same way as a shark must keep circling the seas if he is to continue to breathe. Moving, in any direction, might bring him closer to Jack.

Behind him, Matilda scurries along, pumping useless words out from between wine-slicked lips.

‘I’m sorry, Henry, darling … I thought it was for the best … Won’t you listen to me, Henry, darling? Please?’

Her footsteps punctuate her pleas, marking irritating little commas. Her breathing is growing heavier. She is struggling to keep up.

‘Go away, Tilda.’ Henry pushes the command through ground teeth. She has done something terrible. He knows it. He always has been wary of Matilda Steck.

Naturally, Ruby had been kinder.

He recalls how, one late night, they had left Monty’s and taken the Tube to some unfamiliar part of the city, keen to be free of Matilda. They had sat in an empty coach, Henry straight-backed and wide-legged on the dusty green upholstery and Ruby curled into him, her cheek resting on his shoulder.

‘You shouldn’t be so cruel,’ Ruby said. ‘She has a thing for you. She can’t help it.’

‘Well, she should try.’

Ruby, sleepy, yawned through her next words. ‘I, for one, don’t blame her. Who wouldn’t want you?’

‘Anyone with a bit of sense,’ Henry muttered, and Ruby sighed out a laugh.

‘You have a point there, husband. You are terribly difficult, at times.’

‘Is that so?’

She nodded her head and they sat for a while, listening to the lopsided two-beat the train was rocking out, inhaling the stale, damp smell rising out of the seat fabric. Soon they were both asleep, pleated into each other, Henry successfully fending off his nightmares for a trice, and Ruby dreaming – or so she told Henry when they woke – about she and Ida, standing on the rocks at Burry Port and watching the waves flick their bleached manes at the shore.

‘I don’t even know if that really happened,’ she said.

‘Why would you doubt it?’ Henry asked. They were off the Tube and walking, seeking a café that had yet to close. They had agreed, upon leaving Monty’s, that they would not return home until the sun pushed open the next pale morning. It would be fun, Ruby had assured Henry. They could watch their past fade and their future colour, just for the hell of it. They could pretend that there was nothing but them and that – the slow turning of their life together.

‘I don’t know,’ she answered. ‘It just seems too easy for a memory, you know. I feel like there’d be something unpleasant in it, if it was real. An argument I’d had with someone, or a fear, or a worry. There’s always something. Nothing is that pure.’

Henry understands that sentiment now. Isn’t his every memory of her tainted, in some small way, by her loss?

But he cannot think on that now. He has to find Jack. He has to. Jack is in possession not only of the only sliver of a future Ruby might now have; he is in possession, too, of Henry’s future. Henry will not lose him. He would not survive it.

Behind him, Matilda is still talking; pleading rather, her voice louder than before.

‘Stop, will you! Just stop and let me explain!’

And because Ruby is gone, and Jack is missing, and Matilda was his friend once, he does. Henry stops and turns to consider her. He allows her the opportunity to explain.

Matilda stands perhaps five strides distant, a shaky figure in too few clothes since her hat has been discarded and she did not stop to pull on her shoes when they left Monty’s. She is girlish in her stocking feet. She is small. She is, Henry realises gradually, audibly sobbing. And she looks, well, she looks calamitous: her fingers have worked tangles into her hair; her mascara strikes black lightning bolts down her cheeks; her lipstick, dislodged by a frustrated swipe of her hand, is a scarlet bruise, bleeding across her chin. Any onlooker would think her the wronged party here. Any onlooker would see an injured woman, not a plotter, a schemer, a … what? Henry doesn’t know. And yet he is aware that he soon must.

He breathes deep, trying not to reach the worst possible conclusion. But what if she’s done it? What if she’s reported Jack to the police, had him arrested? He’d be killed in prison. Henry would have to find some way to break him out.

‘Henry –’ Matilda begins, but Henry silences her with a single glance. He can’t stand any more of her whining or imploring. He wants – no, he needs – only the facts. He closes his eyes to a fleeting prayer. Then, breathing deep, he voices the question he must.

‘What have you done?’ he asks.

Between the grey stone walls of Monty’s garden, his suit jacket draped over the chair he sits on, his feet crossed at the ankles, a deep two-pronged ache spreading down the back of his neck, Grayson stares at his own elongated reflection in the thin curve of his wine glass. He does not rise to chase after his friend, or his wife. After all, he knows nothing of Jack’s whereabouts – he cannot help Henry. And he has no desire to help Matilda. She has, once again, done something he will be ashamed of. That much was obvious in the way she ran off, without a single glimpse back in his direction.

‘So, Steck,’ Monty murmurs. ‘She’s gone again. I’m sorry, old chap.’ He stands and reaches across the table to clap Gray’s shoulder, and Grayson falls into the older man’s grasp. He closes his eyes against the ghost in his wine glass: that ageing, unloved thing. He grabs Monty’s elbow and holds on, tight. He is, he is discovering, a man in need of mooring.

‘Yes. She’s gone again.’

‘And you?’

‘Me?’ Grayson considers the question for a moment. He holds himself in his mind and ponders his own physical weight, the mess of bone and blood and flesh and muscle that has somehow knitted itself together into him, Gray, a husband who has found himself in possession of one miserable wife and one frightened mistress with a child on the way. On the way. Even the phrasing stirs up a panic at his middle. It is an unstoppable force, this child: it is on the way.

‘Yes, you,’ Monty says.

‘I have somewhere I need to be,’ Grayson answers.

‘You too, hmm?’

‘Sorry, Monty,’ Grayson says, standing now. He has seen the sadness in Monty’s face: the droop about his eyes, the downward shuddering of his lips. It’s clear he does not want to be left alone. ‘I really do have to go. You’ll be all right, won’t you?’

‘Of course!’ Monty waves him away. ‘Go. Do what you must.’

And though he ought to be a better friend, Grayson does go. He leaves Monty to his loneliness, and within half an hour he is again knocking at Sally’s door.

She lets him in with one of those tight downward smiles more inclined to be accompanied by tears than joy and, still standing in the hallway, starts unbuttoning his shirt. Gray kicks the door shut with his heel and tries to kiss her, but she won’t allow it. She dodges him. So instead he watches her go about her work, the graceful way her fingers liberate one button and then the next breaking his heart because she is so fragile, this woman; she is so small and fragile. And yet, in the half-light which spills outward from one green-shaded lamp, she is also a thing that sparks. She is a jewel. She has the deepest sort of strength.

‘Are you drunk?’ she asks.

‘A little.’

‘Good.’

‘Why would you want –’

Sally closes her eyes and presses her cheek to his chest. ‘Sssshhhh,’ she says.

And Grayson, as usual, obeys. When she links her hands around his middle, he echoes the movement. When her breathing slows, he matches his respirations to hers. He catches, emanating off her skin, the clammy scent of too much moisturising cream. She must be covered in it, he thinks. Beneath her nightdress, she is surely slick to the touch. He lifts the nightdress over her head and, dropping it to the floor, runs his hands over her bared back, but it is not the beginning of a sexual act, this: it is simply an exploration. He is exploring the woman inside whom a part of his own self has attached itself and begun, unbelievably, to grow. He brushes his palms over her upper arms, he loops his fingers around her wrists, he measures the gentle tapering of her waist, and only then, when he has touched every other possible part of her, does he turn her around, pull her tight to his chest and stroke the still-flat plane of her stomach.

‘Sally,’ he whispers.

‘Yes?’

‘We’re going to be parents.’

‘I know.’

He hears the smile in her reply and, taking his cue, speaks into her ear, her hair shifting where his breath hits it. ‘I’ve been thinking of names,’ he says.

This – a slow coming together, words she’d been waiting to hear – would have weakened Matilda. She would have turned into him and smiled and waited to hear his suggestions. But Sally is new and different, and he still has so much to learn about her. He must remember to adopt a more observant approach. Starting tonight, because he has just learnt, this very moment, that talk of names, pacification, is not what she wants. He has felt her stiffen in his hands.

‘Don’t do that,’ she says. ‘We can’t do any of that, not until she knows, Gray. I’m sorry, but not until then. It’s too hard.’

And there she is again, the woman he promised his whole life to, standing between them, reduced to a ‘she’.

Grayson wouldn’t have thought it possible for Matilda to fade so far from his considerations before he met Sally. The day they’d married – no, before that even – Matilda Fellows had scorched herself onto his brain matter, like a brand mark on the rump of an animal, so that every thought he had, every idea or concern or whim, was laced through with her. She was the rings that run through the trunk of a tree. Or the layers of rock which stack up to form a cliff face. She was part of him, good or bad. And he was part of her. And even when she stormed, even when she lashed him with her tongue or battered him with her eyes, there she was. Immovable. However much he might have wanted to rid himself of her, Matilda was tangled in his person. Was that love, then?

He tries to think of other things he has loved, to draw a comparison, and ridiculously he can come up with nothing but his Lee-Enfield. Excepting a palm’s worth of women, he has never loved anything so much as that rifle. But then, it did keep him alive through the long slog of 1916, so he supposes that’s excusable. He feels for the smooth eight-pound weight of it, still familiar in the muscles along his hand and forearm ten years on. He could shoot that thing blind, even now. He knows the flat polish of the butt, the womanly curl and flick of the trigger. Gray had clung to that rifle as though it was made of gold. It was gold, to him. He had cleaned it daily, checked its every function near-hourly. At night, he had slept with it tucked along the length of his body, the butt against his ribcage, the whole item warmed by the blanket he shared with it.

He’d lost it in Malta, when his sleeping battery had been shelled and they’d had to dive for cover, every last one of them. Of course, Grayson had gone back to his makeshift bed to retrieve it later, but it was gone – pilfered, he suspected, by someone in close proximity. For weeks afterwards, though he’d found himself a replacement rifle relatively quickly, Gray had looked suspiciously on any man who lifted a Lee-Enfield. He was convinced he would know his rifle on sight. He knew its every nick and indentation, the particular shade of its wood. His very own fingerprints were imprinted on it. Hadn’t he shed a secret tear for it that night, for God’s sake?

But that was need, not love. And he does not need Matilda or Sally, not in that essential way, not to survive. He never has. He is a man, it seems, incapable of anything more than want. And perhaps that is adequate, so long as he makes a secret of it: why not let them, both of them, think he would die without them? It is only a small deception.

‘I am going to tell her,’ Grayson says.

‘Really?’ Sally lifts her face to his and he nods.

‘Soon,’ he promises. ‘I’ll tell her soon.’

‘And what then?’

‘I don’t know,’ Grayson answers. ‘I don’t know yet.’

Though she cannot guess where they are going, Henry and Matilda are travelling again. Fast. Matilda hangs just a step or two behind him, no longer pretending that she cannot keep up. Her wallowing had transformed into true, deep-seated dread once she’d said the words, observed the new set of Henry’s face. Never before has she seen him look so volatile. And that is why she must stick with him – because it is her responsibility now to ensure that he doesn’t do something stupid.

She does not plead with him to slow down or talk to her. Unusually, and but for the wheeze of her breath, Matilda remains silent. She has done real wrong. She has to right it.

Running to match Henry’s quickening strides, she stays with him as he rushes down the centre of Fleet Street, the jostling buildings which are the stones in its claustrophobic walls rising above them, the streetlamps dangling pendulously from their strung-out cables to light up the asymmetric sign for the Yorkshire Evening Post, the square temple-like frontage of Newspaper House, the palatial columns of the Daily Telegraph building. Matilda cannot concentrate fully on which streets they turn on to, then off, then back on to again. The hot, honey-coloured summer moon gleams over the pavements and shows her a stall, closed for the night, which boasts Gateway Tobacco, and, above locked doors, signs for Haircutting and Shaving, the Cottage Tea Rooms, Baker’s the Tobacconists, A.B.C Tea Rooms, Judge’s Postcards, Finch’s Wines from the Woods. But Henry is running now, running, and she is running after him, and she has no time to think about where all these turns are taking them.

On the corner of the Strand, they career past a J. Lyons. Then, before she knows it, they are tearing towards the Hippodrome, and for a moment she is loosely aware of the names presented on its sandy exterior – Rosie Moran and Robert Hale, who might just be performing in a musical comedy – and then the names disappear, because it is busier here, and there are more people to stop and gape at she and Henry, thumping by, and Matilda is both embarrassed and thrilled to be, ever so fleetingly, at the very core of their attentions. There is no need to enter the theatre. Here it is. Life. Happening right in front of them. And she has made that happen. She has. Matilda Steck – though she would adopt Twist as her name, of course, if she were truly a character in a drama. Why wouldn’t she? After all, fiction is the only freedom a person who knows unanswered love is ever offered.

But this is not a theatre show, and Henry does not eventually tire and fall exhausted into her, the woman he has just realised he adores. Panic keeps him running. And regret keeps her chasing him. And smog pools about them as they veer onto narrower streets, and steer around tighter corners, and stumble and rick their ankles, and soon, Matilda fancies, they are lost.

Henry slows to a walk.

‘Where are you going?’ she manages to gasp out, but Henry does not answer. He stops and glances one way then the other along the street, he straightens his shirt, he fidgets with the waist of his trousers, he stoops to tie his shoelace, he wipes the sweat off his forehead and upper lip, he coughs. He does everything he can to avoid looking at Matilda.

‘To Sybil’s,’ he says.

At the mention of a woman’s name, Matilda’s skin goes cold. It is her eighteenth birthday again, and she is watching her cousin Annabel sneak bare-footed into a large storage cupboard, her fingers jumbled in Elliot Condon’s – the first boy Matilda had decided to love.

‘Sybil’s?’ she asks, because she can’t not ask, and Henry nods. He paces back and forth, nodding. He pinches his lips between his thumb and his forefinger – the way he does when he feels he is not in control – nodding.

And this, Matilda fathoms now, is exactly why she loves him. Not because he is handsome and brooding, though he is undeniably both of those things. Not because he can send a particular frown at a person which makes their heart start beating faster. But because she has found someone who holds inside himself the same levels of fear as she does. They live off it, she and Henry. Their blood runs with it. For that reason alone, she knows they could never be together. But then, she does not love him because he is good or clever or right, or because he would make her happy. She loves him because she loves him. It is as simple and as impossible as that. She loves him because she doesn’t know how not to.

‘Sybil will know,’ Henry says. ‘She’ll know for certain.’

‘Know what for certain?’

‘What do you think?’ he shouts. ‘Where Jack was taken. Where you had Jack taken.’

In the stillness, Henry’s words snap and spit, and Matilda flinches as though an electric shock is passing through her. Perhaps it is painful for her, receiving his anger. Henry doesn’t care. She deserves every bit of it, and more, but he makes an effort to calm himself all the same. He can’t spare the time, even to hurt her. He has to speak to Sybil.

A cat, blacker than this particular night, tiptoes along the pavement towards him and Henry pauses to watch it for long enough to realise that he does not know which building is hers. He can’t remember. And he can’t believe he can’t remember. It has been only months since he first sought her out. The door numbers must be there somewhere, buried in his mind, but no, he thinks as the cat draws level and hisses at him from the back of its throat, he can’t access them.

Coming to Sybil’s is a long shot in any case, he knows that, but he can dredge up no better idea. And when Henry can think of nothing positive to do, he acts. That is his instinctive response – to do, good or bad.

It had been the same when Bingley was killed. The boy was still spilling ropes of bloody intestine when Henry decided he had to find a woman that night. And it sounds callous, Christ it sounds callous, even in his own mind, but it’s true. Bingley was still breathing, battling when Henry started planning what he would do once the boy was dead. Even as he was encouraging Bingley to ‘Hang on in. Just hang on in for a few more minutes. Just until someone comes to help. Just until then,’ Henry was thinking that she must not look anything like his mother, this woman he would pour his guilt into; she must be small and shy and dark eyed, and nothing at all like his mother.

Bingley had not attempted to speak at the end. But Henry, selfish Henry – unable to stand the deafening, gun-blasted silence – had pulled the words from him.

‘Tell me about Hawthorn Road,’ he coaxed. ‘Tell me about your sisters.’ Then, when eventually he felt Bingley go slack in his hands, ‘What’s your name, Bing? Your first name?’

Bingley’s reply rattled up from his core. ‘Jack,’ he said.

And Henry took off then. He left Bingley, Jack Bingley, there on the ground, his middle blown to bits, his eyes dulled by staring up towards hopes of heaven, his helmet removed to reveal his perfectly intact, smooth-skinned face, and he walked away. He walked until he was out of sight, and then he ran. He ran over other bodies, bodies that had not been his friends; he ran until the mud beneath his feet grew harder and he could move faster; he ran into a thicket of thorny bushes, which clawed at his hands and ripped free thin strings of flesh, but which led him towards trees, lots of them, and the opportunity to run harder; he ran through centuries-old tree trunks until his legs were burning and his eyes were streaming and his lungs were fit to explode, and then he kept going, he kept going, because he’d known that they’d stumbled into the path of mortar fire, he and Bingley, he’d sensed the descending whir of a shell, and he’d ducked, he had, he’d thrown himself flat to the ground, he’d saved himself, and though he could have given a warning shout as he dropped, or grabbed Bingley’s arm and dragged him down too, he hadn’t. He’d thought only of himself. He, Henry Twist, had killed Jack Bingley.

In the early hours of that morning, Henry found his woman.

He had travelled perhaps fifteen miles across a country he did not wish to know and discovered himself, moonlit, in a mostly abandoned village. He did not bother to attempt to hide, or to remove his uniform before stepping through the streets. If he got shot, well then, hadn’t he been expecting that bullet for two whole years now? Hadn’t he imagined the specific spot where it would enter his body, just below his ribcage, left side, obliterating his birthmark? But there was no one around. No one, it seemed, could find the energy for killing at this time of night.

He did not have to search out a woman. He did not have to haunt hotels or pubs or walk his lady home pretending at innocent concern that she make it there safely. As he wandered along, the shutter of a house window opened and someone called to him with a ‘Pssst!’

Henry spun around, seeking the sound.

‘Go out of the streets,’ a voice said. ‘You shouldn’t be in the streets.’ Then, when he did not move, ‘Wait. You wait.’

Seconds later, a door opened.

She was around thirty, he supposed. Older than he. She wore a loose cotton shirt and what appeared to be men’s trousers. She leant against the doorframe, one bare foot tucked around the opposite ankle, her head tilted to the wood, and gestured for him to come closer. Henry did not oblige. It was unrealistic to think this woman, with her meandering, thickvowelled accent, meant him anything but harm. He was in a foreign country. He was a soldier. He was ruining great long bands of her birthplace, churning up chunks of the land with boots and bullets and hatred. He had not washed in nearly a week. He was covered in other men’s blood.

‘It is dangerous,’ she said.

‘Then why did you open the door?’ Henry asked.

In other circumstances – circumstances Henry could hardly recall – the encounter might have been considered flirtatious. They had turned to face each other. Their eyes were busy measuring the other’s body. There was a crackle, a pull in the air between them, drawing them towards each other, which they might yet decide to fight.

‘Because you are not the dangerous.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I see you.’

Henry took a single step towards her. She answered it by dropping her gaze briefly, playfully.

‘What do you see?’

She smiled, for the first time, and it was a brilliant thing to see. Her cheeks rose, her eyes crinkled at the corners, but what made Henry go inside was this: that smile undulated through her entire body. Her shoulders slumped, her chest fell, she dipped a couple of inches lower as she shifted her weight from one leg to the other, and then she righted herself again, returned to her full height, showed him the woman she wanted to show to the world. Henry couldn’t remember the last time anyone had smiled so honestly at him.

He stepped across the street and took one of her hands as she answered.

‘I see,’ she said, ‘a man sick with hurting. A man who wishes not to hurt any longer.’

‘Yes,’ Henry nodded.

‘A man who wants.’

‘Yes,’ Henry nodded again. And of course it was too easy. Afterwards, she would ask for money, her eyes filling with the regret which would persuade him that she hadn’t done this before the war; that she hadn’t been this before the war; that when he told her he didn’t have any money, and she held on to him anyway, pressing her head to the top of his so that her neck cradled his jaw, it was just because she wanted to.

That night, with that woman, had been the saddest of Henry’s life. Until Ruby, of course. Until that. And he had promised himself he would tell Jack about it – Bingley’s loss, not the Frenchwoman – but he hasn’t yet. He hasn’t had the chance.

‘Henry?’ Matilda says again, and Henry wonders how many times she has spoken his name; how many times she has uttered it to herself. She voices it like a prayer.

‘Yes?’ He studies the cat, which, having had a complete change of heart, is orbiting his ankles now, releasing its mechanical little purr. A madman, he supposes, might see his lost wife even here, in the bony body of a straying cat. Is it any more rational, then, to see her in a man? Perhaps not. But either way, he cannot be without that man. He cannot. He has never known it so clearly as he does now.

He turns to Matilda, who has not yet responded, and forces himself for once to look straight into her eyes. She withers a tad. Henry knows he could have her any time he wanted. He also knows that that time will never come.

‘I need to get him out,’ he says.

‘I know.’

He pinches his top lip between thumb and forefinger as he speaks, as though the words need the support. ‘Then help me.’

‘I don’t know how. Truly, Henry darling, I don’t.’

Turning, Henry looks both ways along the street, deciding on a direction. In the distance, a clinch of party-goers stumble over the pavement. To Henry, they are five shadows, two taller and broader than the others: two men, three women. One of the men sings loudly, carelessly, his arms flung out into the shape of a crucifix. One of the women hangs around the singer’s waist, laughing at his atonal performance. And for a moment, Henry envies them, this easy couple, on their way to or from a party. Later, they will make love and forget all about the rest of the ugly world.

He waits for them to vanish into the night then steps carefully over the cat and, as the animal slinks away, begins walking, then marching, away from Matilda. Then back towards her. Then away again.

‘Sybil,’ he calls. ‘Sybil!’

His shouts and his footsteps beat a desperate rhythm. He wheels around and re-treads the same path, calling over and over. Matilda stands and watches, biting at the inside of her cheek in an attempt to stem her escaping tears. Sybil’s name clogs up the air like chimney smoke.

‘Sybil!’

Soon, Henry’s voice is growing stringy, strained, but he does not stop, and then, abruptly, there she is – Sybil Brown – standing before him, her hair shining its way right down to the ground.

‘Is she right?’ Henry demands, pointing at Matilda. ‘Did they take him?’

Sybil nods.

‘Are you certain?’

‘As I can be.’

‘Then where? Do you know where?’

‘Pentonville.’

The word winds Henry and he staggers backwards slightly, as though he has taken a blow to the stomach. He wasn’t ready for it. He wasn’t ready to believe it.

‘Thank you, Sybil,’ he says slowly. ‘Thank you.’ He moves forward to clasp her shoulders, to kiss her cheek, but Sybil shakes him off.

‘Go on, then,’ she says. ‘Go and find him.’

Matilda waits until Henry has receded into miniature before acknowledging Sybil. The woman wants to speak to her, Matilda can feel it. It is as palpable as the pulsing and wheeling of birds overhead, or the cling and drag of water around your feet. Matilda is sure she does not want to hear what Sybil has to say. She does not want to hear what anyone has to say. But Sybil speaks anyway, her voice soft as daydreams.

‘I understand why you would love him.’

‘No you don’t,’ Matilda answers. ‘Not really. How could you?’

Sybil does not argue against Matilda’s snappy answer. She only puts her hand to Matilda’s shoulder, smiles, and continues.

‘And I think he must be a very difficult man to love. You have my sympathies.’

‘I do?’

When she had last been offered anyone’s sympathies, Matilda cannot recall. She has been fighting, it seems, for so long. Even when she had gone to bed with Grayson, she had been fighting, hadn’t she? Fighting to remind him. Fighting to keep him. Her every touch, however affectionate, had been a battle strike. And so had his. She sees that now.

‘Why would you be so kind to –’

Matilda is about to say ‘me’ – that tiny, massive word. But when she looks to the place where Sybil was standing, the psychic is gone. There is still a warmth at Matilda’s shoulder, though: an unmistakeable warmth, on the spot where Sybil laid her palm. Matilda presses her own palm to it.

‘Me,’ she says finally, releasing a small laugh into the tacky air. ‘Of course, me.’