CONFESSIONS

Henry’s approach is far from hushed. He steps fast, allowing his shoes their uneven click-click, click-click. When his lungs start to burn he realises he is not breathing, and he gulps at the air like a newborn tasting it for the first time, his nostrils pumping, his lips pursing to drag in more oxygen, more oxygen. His breath, cut short, is loudened by his fear. These sounds are of no consequence, though. They are disguised by the constant grind of the city, of business owners sweeping their front steps clean and flinging open their doors, of gramophone needles carving out songs, of people slamming their doors as they set off for work or throw out their cats or wave goodbye to their lovers. And no one is searching for him anyway, as far as he knows.

In the eerie flat-light of predawn, Henry charges unnoticed along Wheelwright Street, following the high brick wall which marks Pentonville’s perimeter. Beyond it, at intervals, the blunt end of a particular block flashes into view then out again, in then out, but Henry takes little notice of it. He does not know which block it is, or which Jack is being held within. Pondering the prison’s exterior will not help. He needs to get inside.

He veers right onto Caledonian Road, the heavy thwap-thwap-thwap of his footfall echoing the thud of his heart. With each beat, he sends an appeal of sorts to Ruby: a prayer, perhaps. Please don’t … Please help … Please come. Each plea starts with the same word. They all end, too, with the same word: Jack, Jack, Jack.

Further down Caledonian Road, he stops. Before him a large, ornate archway leads to a locked wooden door. He stares up at the façade which looms over him: windowed and ivied and proud, it is an exaggeration, a grim fairy tale. The outrageous idea he had been entertaining as he stormed here – of clambering the walls, of appearing at the bars of Jack’s cell – he has already had to relinquish. The entranceway alone is impenetrable. Of course it is. It’s a prison, for God’s sake.

But from the second Sybil nodded ‘yes’ and confirmed the fears he’d been trying to dream away, Henry was a soldier again. He will not give up yet.

To his left, he knows, is a mostly empty road: just one man lingers in a doorway, leaning into the shadows, kissing a cigarette and watching; a worker, perhaps, spat out by the strike. To Henry’s right: Matilda. He flexes his knuckles and tries to think his way to an adequate plan, but his brain is failing both him and Jack. It had been the same in France, in Belgium – he was a fighting soldier, not a thinking one. That had always been his biggest weakness. What he needs now is a strategist. And evidently, here she is. Matilda Steck, it would seem, is the most cunning strategist he knows.

‘Tell me what to do,’ he says.

He breathes deep, trying to still himself. She has caused this. She has. He will never forgive her, whatever her reasoning. For now, though, he might be able to use her.

‘I don’t know, Henry darling. I really –’

He hisses over her nonsense. ‘Tell me what to do, Matilda. You did this. You. You can put it right.’

‘I can’t … I don’t …’

She snivels between words. Henry cannot turn to face the flowing self-indulgence. He concentrates on the aspect of Pentonville prison, counting the windows to pacify himself.

‘What did you report him for?’

There is so much she could say now that Matilda has to pause to take control of the words. She holds them like a heap of apples too abundant for her arms, and though she tries and tries to balance them, she fails: she can only watch them as they roll out of her reach.

She reported him for being what he is: a conman.

And that is what she ought to tell Henry. She had begun with the docklands, walking every last inch of them and talking, talking to man after man after man, searching for anyone who might have known Jack Turner before he paraded into Henry’s life. It was exciting, really, letting the workers whistle at her and sometimes winking in return, feeling the deep heave and drag of the water so close by, growing accustomed to the burly stink of the sea at the back of her throat. At St Katharine Docks, the scents which invaded her nose were even more peculiar. She couldn’t pinpoint them until she recalled knowing, in some neglected part of her mind, that the trade which floated into St Katharine’s was of the most exotic kind: casks of wine, perfumes and ivory, piles of sugar and rich-coloured spices, shells and rum and marble. These were whole new worlds, held tight within her London, and she came to love exploring them. She was a detective, a private investigator on a case. She was, as always, the main character in her story; except now she was in full control of it. She could make this game as small or as big, as playful or as serious, as she wanted.

As it transpired, she was good at inviting information out of people. Matilda had always been possessed of a certain human intelligence: her parents had been proud of it; her mother had mourned her relinquishing it, so soon, to marriage. But here she was, putting it to use, and it was thrilling. Every new fact or guess or rumour spurred her on to seek another. And by and by, Matilda Steck unveiled Jack Turner.

‘Matilda,’ Henry says again. ‘What did you report him for?’

Henry knows the answer to his question. He knows it because he was part of it. But presently he is helpless, and he needs to talk his way into believing that he can undo what she has done. He needs words to dislodge the preposterous pictures his mind is showing him of Jack, beaten and beaten again, until he can no longer speak sensibly and Henry is just another tangle in the mess that’s been made of his brain. Or Jack, held not in prison but behind other bars, in a human zoo: an exhibit displaying the perversion of nature, positioned alongside a hunchback or an albino. Or Jack, made so sorrowful by his incarceration that he begins to simply disintegrate, parts of him breaking off and folding away into the loneliest depths of the nights, until nothing remains but the clothes he once stood in and the implications of his crime.

The images are asinine. When removed, though, from the person you love, Henry knows that even the most beautiful thoughts can be disfigured.

The person you love. The person he loves. It is the solitary occasion on which he has considered Jack in such simple, complicated terms, and the thought jars inside him. The person he loves. Is that really who Jack is? Suddenly, he cannot imagine what should come of it. Even if Jack is pardoned, they cannot be a normal couple. And surely, they cannot choose to live forever on the run from themselves. They cannot share a home, or raise a child, or expect people to believe that they are only bachelors keeping each other company. They cannot risk, always, being locked up. There are pansies all over the city, of course, but those men have wives and respectable jobs and enough money to pay for private places; they quell their desires only to resurrect them at the right kind of parties. Yes, there are pansies all over the city, but Henry is not one of them.

Perhaps he should recognise this as an opportunity, then. He looks to Matilda. She has shrunk into herself, like a piece of rotted fruit. She stares at the ground and says nothing. Yes, perhaps this is an opportunity for Henry to remove himself from temptation, because he has never wanted any other man. It has only ever been Jack. And ought he to chance losing his daughter to be with a man whose past and present and future is an unsolvable mystery? No. Jack Turner could be anyone at all. Henry could walk away now; he should walk away. He could start again, with a woman like Ida, and watch Libby raised as Ruby intended. He could … He could …

Matilda’s heart is fighting so hard to ram its way up her throat that temporarily she cannot speak, cannot tell Henry what he needs to hear.

‘Tell me …’ he keeps saying. But Matilda cannot decipher the rest of the sentence. The words are muffled by a new and peculiar distance between them: most parcel themselves up and flit away to hide in London’s smog. She will not hound this man any more. ‘Tell me …’

What? she wants to yell. That his real name is Roderick or Fred, or George or Robert or Thomas? That he is just a barman who pulls scams on grieving spouses? That she has tracked down men he worked with, and then paid dock workers to seek out the women he fooled with, and that they have all of them confirmed that Jack Turner is a total phoney? That she has reported all of this to the police because she was jealous, and because she wanted Henry to love her, and because she will never, never believe that two men should raise a child together.

But she will not say any of it. She vows it to herself there on the street outside Pentonville prison. She will not make those confessions, because, in spite of all the rest, she cannot watch Henry’s heart break again.

‘I told them,’ she says, shoving her voice past the constriction in her windpipe, ‘that I’d witnessed him … sodomising another man.’

‘And,’ Henry prompts.

‘And that I couldn’t identify the other man involved.’

‘Because that other man was me,’ he says, needlessly.

‘Because that other man was you,’ she confirms, her voice quivering. Abruptly, she is cold. Her teeth chatter frantically; her shoulders stiffen; her veins run to ice. Another word, or a sound, is trying to escape her. No, perhaps. Or maybe Stop. Because it is entirely wrong, this. All she has wanted, all these months, is for Henry to hold her the way she saw him hold Jack. Nothing more. And she has tried to ruin them for it. She has. And they were never hers to ruin.

Her thoughts shoot across the city, to Grayson, and she turns immediately to go to him: he, at least, is hers to wreck. He, at least, is hers.

Henry does not watch Matilda rush away. He does not notice her go. He is caught in a budding recollection of Ruby: of a summer dusk when he had arrived at her Strawberry Hill flat with a bunch of white tulips. They had arranged to meet an hour later, at Richmond Park, the Roehampton Gate. Ruby had asked if they could go the week before.

‘I want to walk and walk in there,’ she told him, ‘until we are hopelessly lost.’

‘Why?’

She scowled at him. ‘Because I want to see the deer.’

‘Why should we need to be lost for that?’

‘We’re just people, Henry,’ she answered. ‘We’re not going to be able to track them down; not if they don’t want us to. We’ll just have to get lost, and hope we stumble across a deer who’s a little bit lost, too.’

The sentiment was charming, and Henry had agreed to the funny plan. He had wanted, though, to bring her flowers. And he hadn’t wanted her to traipse them, wilting, all around Richmond Park. That was why he’d come to the flat. His knock was answered by a faraway call, then an invitation inside. She spoke to him, invisibly, from her bedroom.

‘You are offensively early, Mr Twist!’

‘I know,’ he answered, perching on the arm of the settee, the tulips held at his chest like a bridal bouquet.

‘Then why are you here?’

‘I couldn’t wait to see you.’

She popped her head around the doorframe and crinkled her nose up at him, the way she did when she was happy. ‘Aw. You’re forgiven then.’ She disappeared again. ‘And thank you, for those.’

‘I’ll just –’ He was going to say put them in a vase, but she spoke across him.

‘No! Don’t come in here.’

Henry laughed. ‘I wasn’t going to, but now I’m curious, Miss Fairclough.’ He crept nearer, teasing her. ‘What are you hiding in there?’

‘No!’ she shrieked. ‘Don’t! I’m only half put together.’

‘What?’

‘I’m only half … ready. I’ve lost a stocking and now … Henry!’

Unable to resist her, he was already standing at the doorway, looking in as she rummaged around in her crumpled bedclothes for the missing item. She wore only her one found stocking, her brassiere and her step-ins, and God, she was so much shapelier, so much more beautiful then than she was hidden beneath those box-shaped dresses, that he wished she would never clothe herself again. Kneeling on the bed, she lifted her pillow and aimed it at him.

‘Out!’ she ordered. ‘You can’t see me in pieces like this.’

‘You’ve never been more beautiful than you are in pieces,’ Henry said, smiling.

‘Oh.’ She dropped her sham anger with the pillow and stood still before him, letting him see her body: the perfect inverted parentheses of her waist; the cream-smooth swell of her hips. ‘I suppose that’s because you want to put me back together, is it?’

He didn’t. Ruby did not need Henry to fix her.

But, he thinks now, if the best he can offer Jack is that he’ll be there to piece him back together when he gets out, he will not deny him that. He’ll wait. If the only way he’ll ever reach Jack again is by pressing his palm to a barred hatch in a steel door for an hour or a minute or a heartbeat, that is what he’ll do. He’ll hold Jack. And Jack will respond by meeting him the only way he can, by matching his hand to Henry’s. And there they will stay, pressed one to the other, holding each other together, until time or contempt forces them apart.