Finding Henry Applebee

Prologue

A Pollock on the Floor

KING’S CROSS STATION, LONDON, DECEMBER 6: DEPARTURE, 8:33 A.M.

Henry

What it all came down to, in the end, were the contents of a small brown suitcase, stored within stretching distance under the bed.

By Henry’s own admission the case itself was unremarkable. Scuffed and shabby, it had mouldered, half-hidden in the semi-darkness on a slightly dusty, carpeted floor. The handle, which was made of a robust, finely crafted cowhide leather, had grown ragged, and the once shiny metal clasps designed to spring open with a conspicuously satisfying click were tarnished and dull. And yet, Henry reminded himself, appearances can be deceptive; what mattered to him lay meticulously preserved within.

He kept a firm grip on the suitcase’s handle as he made his way onto the teeming concourse at King’s Cross train station. It was still early, the air charged with a melee of arrival and departure announcements, the throb of engines, the irritable drone of traffic from the nearby Euston Road. Henry felt a carousel of emotion crank into gear inside him. Focus! he told himself. Don’t let yourself get distracted until you’re seated on that train…

He drew to a stop in the centre of the concourse and placed his suitcase at his feet. Overhead, an indistinct mass of words blurred and flickered on the electronic departure board. Henry rubbed his eyes and tried desperately to remember his Mantra of the Day:

‘Applebee,’ he mumbled under his breath. ‘My name is Henry Applebee…’

Steadying himself with his walking stick, Henry lowered his gaze to the granite-grey concourse floor. Tiny spots of blood were raining down upon it, just inches from his black Derby shoes. It took him a moment to grasp where the blood was coming from, then he raised his hand to his face and realised with a start that it was trickling from his nose.

Henry’s heart sank. The sharp slick of red struck a violent chord of colour amongst an uninspiring sea of grey and black, navy and taupe – flat, wintry hues which hovered like low-lying clouds around the shoulders of the commuters who stood transfixed before the overhead departure board, or scurried backwards and forwards, zigzagging continuously across his path.

‘Whatever you do next,’ he said in a valiant attempt at calm, ‘DON’T PANIC!’

Henry’s eyes darted to the dizzying conveyor belt of faces sailing past him. One or two of his fellow travellers turned and cast a cursory glance in his direction. The majority, he noted, barely seemed to register him at all. He wondered if they were repelled. Perhaps they were just far too absorbed in the busyness of their own lives to notice an old man with a bloody nose?

He teetered, incredulous, as blood continued to gush in slow motion from his body and began to form an expanding pool of crimson on the floor.

It was out of his peripheral vision, as he detected the ferrous taste of metal trickling down the back of his throat, that he suddenly saw the figure of a girl running towards him. Henry scanned the outline of her face, caught the lightness and the ease with which she moved. For one brief instant, he debated whether she might be an angel. But then, as she drew closer, he saw to his relief that she was just a girl, an ordinary teenager like any other, probably seventeen or eighteen at most. Besides – now that he came to think of it – wasn’t an angel supposed to materialise in a nimbus of white light? Not arrive sprinting, dragging a wheelie bag behind her and spilling milky coffee from a paper cup onto the floor…

As she approached the centre of the ever-widening circle in which he now found himself, the frothy liquid splattered left and right, merging with the bloodstains on the ground.

Henry and the teenager stared in unison at what they had done.

‘It looks like a Jackson Pollock,’ he said, marvelling, despite himself, at the effect. He pointed at the evolving creation with his stick. ‘I think the technical term is “drip painting”.’

The girl scraped her long, mousey hair behind her back and tilted her head to one side. She was standing right next to him now, eyes narrowed, lips pursed in contemplation.

‘Looks to me like the inside of my head,’ she replied in a lightly accented voice. ‘When I’m having a bad day. A day full of demons.’

Henry thought this was an interesting analogy, but he was too distracted searching for something to stem the blood flow to express the fact out loud. He patted the pockets of his overcoat and noticed that the fringes of the girl’s multicoloured scarf were stained with thick, wet splashes of coffee.

Silently, he berated himself.

‘It’s dramatic, though,’ the girl continued. Her tone was attentive, her pale eyes keen, unwavering. ‘Like an explosion of light and dark.’

Turning at last to face him, she pressed a pocket-sized packet of tissues into Henry’s palm.

Henry fumbled, his stiff, papery fingers tugging clumsily at the slippery semicircle of perforated plastic.

The girl edged closer and cupped her hand around his arm. ‘Are you okay?’

Henry nodded. Instinctively, he felt that he should ask her name, discover the identity of this troubled, angelic stranger who had rushed, unbidden, to his aid, but his heart was still jackhammering beneath his ribs.

It was the damnedest thing… Half of him had expected to see his life flash before his eyes, and yet surely this wasn’t his time? Not here. Not now. Not when his journey was only just starting to unfold?

He blinked several times in succession in an effort to ground himself more fully in his surroundings.

The irony of the situation weighed on him like sin.

Here he was, once again in a bustling train station (albeit one on a much grander scale), ready to resume where he had left off all those years ago, the night of a snowstorm, and of a slow-curling flame…

Henry raised his head. Fixed his gaze on the soaring latticework of white metal girders which strained and arced, crisscrossing like a giant sugar cage high above the station concourse. He felt the girl take the tissues from his hand. There was a moment’s hesitation, and she began to wipe the trails of blood from his chin.

Henry kept his head held high and inched his foot discreetly along the ground, searching for his suitcase. He found its flat, armoured surface with his heel and gave an inner sigh of relief. It was still there. Everything was fine. His plan was all on track!

In the expectant space before him, Henry sensed the Pollock seeping into the concrete, morphing like a kaleidoscope and creating wondrous new forms, until the blood slowed into droplets, and finally into nothing at all, so that all that remained were shiny swirls of milk-white and scarlet and caramel-brown; a promising – if unexpected – explosion of light and dark on a once empty floor.

1

The Notebook

KENTISH TOWN, LONDON, DECEMBER 5: JOURNEY EVE

Henry

My name is Henry Arthur Applebee. I’m eighty-five and counting, with an arthritic knee, a healthy head of hair and all my faculties, though not all my own teeth. I’ve had a pretty good life, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have any regrets. Anyone who gets to my age and says they have no regrets is either deluded, or senile, or both. When all’s said and done, the facts remain as follows:

I may be old, but it doesn’t mean I don’t still have any dreams.

Who’s to say there’s an expiry date on achieving your goals?

Is it ever too late to right a wrong?

Now that Devlin’s gone, I’ve learned that establishing a focused and precise daily mantra can be a very effective way of ensuring your marbles are still intact. ‘Stay engaged in life!’ – that’s what they say when you retire. Then, as time hurtles by and everyone you know starts dropping around you like flies, it’s: ‘Keep your mind active. Cultivate a hobby. Join a community group!’

But for me, it all comes down to my notebook. The Revealer of Secrets. The Holder of Truths. The place where those I’ve loved reach out – right from between these very pages – and, grinning, take me by the hand and say, ‘Come in! Don’t be shy. You want us to show you something marvellous?’

It began, somewhat prosaically, with Adam Donnelly, a young man from Wyedean who called in to see me at the start of July. Banjo and I had been managing just fine on our own up until then. But visitors have an annoying knack of stirring things up; of reminding you there’s a whole sprawling world beyond the confines of the one you’ve learned to inhabit by yourself.

‘We’d like you to write an article for the Wyedean quarterly magazine,’ Adam D. said. ‘It’s for a retrospective we’re running on former members of the teaching faculty, and as our most senior contributor, we’ll be featuring you in our cover story. You’ll be the poster boy for excellence! For a life well and truly lived.’

A small weight snowballed inside me. ‘Will anyone still be interested?’ I asked. This was not false modesty; on the contrary, I was positively taken aback. The corners of Adam D.’s mouth veered upwards. ‘You’re one of Wyedean’s most esteemed former language teachers, Mr Applebee. The board thinks a self-penned profile will be illuminating not just for the current staff and pupils, but also for your peers.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I see. Are any of them still alive?’

I hadn’t heard from Wyedean in a long while and the request puzzled me. ‘What kind of illuminations are you looking for?’ I asked. ‘Anything uplifting,’ he replied. ‘Anecdotes, observations, greatest achievements. That kind of thing. It’s a tough world our pupils are facing. Hugely competitive. Our aim is to buoy them up with as much support and inspiration as we can.’ Adam Doolally drummed his fingers on the arm of my wing-back chair and smiled encouragingly once again.

Doubtful as to my ability to either illuminate or inspire, I nodded. Signed on the dotted line, as they say. It was only after he’d gone that the full magnitude of the task hit me: academic career aside, I couldn’t think of a single event in my life which might reasonably qualify as a ‘greatest achievement’. Nothing worthy of the inspiration-hungry readers of the Wyedean quarterly magazine, at any rate.

How in the name of all that’s holy does a senior citizen, occasional UFO spotter and Francophile reduce eight-and-a-half decades (and counting) of life to a fifteen-hundred-word article? It felt remarkably as though I were being called to account. ‘Impress us!’ Wyedean seemed to be saying. ‘Tell us what you know. What you’ve learned. Show us who you are.’

Bells of panic filled my chest. (Never a good sign at my age.) What Wyedean wanted was insights, the Happy Ever After. But what about the areas of my life where I’d failed so spectacularly? What on earth was I supposed to say about those?

I decided to narrow my focus and stick to the long, seamlessly interchangeable years spent teaching hormonally fuelled adolescents to conjugate French verbs. It was quite staggering, when I came to think about it. Entire decades had slipped by. Decades filled with page after page of Verlaine, Gide, Maupassant, Baudelaire. It was extraordinary, the degree to which I’d buried myself in those pages. Revelled in their majesty. Wallowed – privately – in their pain.

To Wyedean, I was still Mr Applebee: devoted (and, it would seem, fondly remembered!) former Head of French; but to me I was just Henry, the gauche, skinny teenager running around the streets of Chalk Farm with Devlin, yet to put on the uniform, yet to meet the girl.

When the article was finished, I dropped it, shamefaced, into the post box and tried desperately not to think of it as a lie. An evasion, maybe, but then how could they know it was the things I didn’t put in – the personal things, the things buried at the bottom of a dusty suitcase – which had defined me?

Changi… Sunburn so bad the skin peeled away from my chest in sheets. Everyone told me to keep quiet about that. It was a punishable offence. The officers would scrub the blisters with salt water if they got wind of it. I grew up so fast, I barely recognised myself when I arrived back home.

And then, when I did so, I climbed a staircase and there she was. The very last thing I was ever expecting to happen to me, Fra–

Henry’s hand jerked abruptly from the page. A noise (a grunt? A cough? A chuckle?) filtered through the wall from the spare room.

‘Devlin?’ he whispered. ‘Devlin, is that you?’

Henry cocked his good ear to one side, but all he could make out was the steady ticktock ticktock of the carriage clock on the mantelpiece. He held his breath, the curvature of his spine straightening by degrees until finally, he felt it: his brother’s voice, brushing like dew against his skin.

Evening, Henry. How’re things?

Henry wiggled his finger in his ear. Devlin. Where does one begin to capture the essence of a man whose character had been so large, so utterly irrepressible that even in death his exuberance couldn’t be contained?

Don’t keep me guessing, Devlin continued. How’s tricks? What’s going on?

Henry settled back into his chair and attuned himself to the frequency, as though he’d stumbled across some strange, transcontinental broadcast on the radio. ‘I’m fine,’ he replied to the room at large. ‘Fine, that is, aside from the fact I’m sitting here, in my living room, talking to you.’

He stared into the flat, empty space ahead of him and beamed.

Following up his Wyedean article with a notebook of ‘recollections’ (memoirs seemed too worthy a concept, too weighty, too proud) had been the result of an overwhelming urge to continue writing, only this time Henry was determined to do it for himself alone – no expectations, no limitations, no holds barred. What he hadn’t bargained on was the way the focused bursts of concentrated silence gave rise to many strange and wonderful occurrences, not least of all these fleeting, otherworldly conversations with Devlin, two years gone.

Occasionally, like today, Henry answered him out loud, but he didn’t like to make a habit of it in case he forgot himself and did it in public. Next thing you knew, if anyone saw him chuckling or talking to his dead brother while he was queuing for his pension at the post office, they’d be carting him off to the funny farm.

‘I’m going away,’ Henry ventured with a faint whiff of heroism. ‘And the truth is, I don’t think I’ve ever felt so simultaneously terrified and exhilarated at the prospect of anything in my entire life. I leave for Scotland tomorrow morning on the nine o’clock train.’

He lowered his gaze. Deep inside his chest, his heart began to quiver.

Away? Devlin’s voice, bolder now, slipped a little further beneath Henry’s skin. It’s her, isn’t it? The girl? Don’t tell me you’ve actually gone and found her after all this time?

Henry bristled. ‘She has a name, Devlin. And as to finding her, yes, it would seem to be the case.’

There was a momentary pause.

Hellfire. So what’s the problem?

Henry shifted in his seat. ‘Well – if you must know – I’ve had a premonition. But I won’t be stopped,’ he added in a tremulous voice. ‘Not by you. Not by anyone.’

Have you finally gone loco? Devlin shot back. When have I ever discouraged you from doing anything? The way I remember it, it was always you who’d be running after me! Ah Jesus, Hen, what’s with the premonition, anyway? I leave you alone for two minutes and you’re moonlighting as some kind of oracle? Sounds to me like someone’s got way too much free time on their hands!

There was another brief pause. Well go on. Let’s have it then.

Just the tiniest bit miffed, Henry cleared his throat. ‘That despite all my hopes and prayers for the contrary, nothing at all is going to go to plan.’

He sucked in his cheeks and waited for Devlin’s disembodied response. When it didn’t come he shook his head, waited, shook it again, but the signal – for want of a better word – was gone.

Alone once again, Henry slipped off his tortoiseshell glasses, rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and rose stiffly from his chair. He carried his notebook into his bedroom and placed it next to a jar of Vicks VapoRub on the bedside table. Banjo, his Parson Russell Terrier, padded into the room behind him and hovered at his side, his ears drawn back, his face full of mistrust.

‘Banjo, come on now, get out from under my feet,’ Henry said gently.

On the eiderdown, his small brown suitcase lay open and ready, the air around it lightly tinged with must. A faint tremor rippled upwards from Henry’s fingertips as he stepped towards it, and with painstaking care and attention proceeded to remove a series of bundles from the elasticated pocket running along its side:

1 1. a silver hair-slide, a pearl and diamanté butterfly perched on its tip, wings spread;

2 2. a uniform cap, field service, blue-grey;

3 3. a paper napkin the colour of turned cream, bearing the faintest imprint of coral lipstick;

4 4. a picture postcard, the back of which was filled with a seemingly random miscellany of words and phrases, each forward-sloping letter jostling against its neighbour like links in a tightly woven chain;

5 5. a jagged strip of dark red velour.

Henry unwrapped each item individually and turned it over in his hand. Raising his gaze, he cast a surreptitious glance at the alarm clock by his bed.

Twelve hours exactly to departure.

One memory at a time, Henry placed his past back in his case. His preparations complete, he made his way back to the living room and lowered himself into his wing-back chair with a cup of Ceylon Orange Pekoe and three custard creams.

‘Amended Mantra of the Day,’ he said, turning to Banjo’s upturned face. ‘No matter what age we reach, or however much our lives may settle beneath the inevitable cloak of familiarity, it is never, ever too late to be amazed.’

Henry wondered what the people from Wyedean would say if they knew the context behind his words. That he was a fool, probably. That after a lifetime of so-called academic excellence, how banal, how unoriginal of him to admit that what mattered to him most now was love.

He shifted his gaze to the antiquated furniture and mountains of yellowing books as though viewing everything for the first, or last, time. He would not return. The world could mock him all it liked, he wouldn’t give up until he’d said the words he needed to say to the only person alive who mattered to him now.