The Real Mary Kelly (31 page)

The Ninth of November
, the painting by William Logsdail of Sir James Whitehead’s Lord Mayor’s Show in 1888, is in the Guildhall Art Gallery. It is a magnificent painting, one of the finest narrative pictures of the late 19th century, and it is pervaded by a feeling of optimism. The streets still glisten with the torrential rain that had fallen during the night but overhead the sky is lightening as the last of the clouds are driven away to reveal patches of blue sky. Remarkably the Lord Mayor himself hardly features. His gilt coach is seen in the background as it rounds the bend in front of the Royal Exchange and the Bank of England, but it is the common people of London who take centre stage. Three liveried footmen fill the centre foreground of the picture, strutting towards the viewer with their beadles’ staves as if to herald a new dawn, but they are framed on either side by ordinary Londoners: old women in bonnets and shawls, top-hatted City gents, policemen and children perched on their parents’ shoulders to get a better view. It is a depiction of hope, of a new beginning. Whether Logsdail was influenced when he painted it later from his sketches by the knowledge that within a couple of hours and less than a mile from the scene he presents, the body of Mary Jane Kelly would be discovered and the brief era of Jack the Ripper would be over, is unlikely, but it is impossible to escape the sense of a fresh start that it conveys.

The tragic saga of Jack the Ripper is actually a love story. It is the tale of a lonely, dysfunctional man’s obsession for a beautiful, lively young woman. Their introduction was possibly a prank that went wrong. Who could have forecast that Francis would fall headlong for a girl so much his opposite? Elizabeth had little education or intellect. She was what would today be called a party animal. What mattered to her was the company of friends, music, dancing, laughter. Francis was by contrast a solitary man. Any conversation longer than a few minutes became a burden from which he had to escape. The idea of singing or dancing would have horrified him. What he sought was love, tenderness, understanding, the very things that had been denied to him by doctrinaire parents fixated on their own cranky theories on the upbringing of children. Who knows that, given time, he might have learned to socialise, he might have fathered children to whom he could have shown affection such as he had never experienced. When the object of his desire deserted him it was more than he could take. He sought her out, beseeched her to come back to him, to give it another try, but Elizabeth had never been in it for anything other than a laugh. The idea of spending the rest of her life with this strange, reclusive man was unthinkable.

For his part the prospect of losing the only other human being for whom he had felt real emotion was unbearable. It brought back all the old bitterness, the sense of failure and disappointment, the inability to please his father. It festered within him and eventually came out like an abscess being lanced in the 12-week orgy of killing that finally drove him to destroy the only thing he loved. The rest of his life must have been passed in a kind of numbness where he did a mundane job automatically and tried to blot out of his mind the terrible thing that he had done.

In the end it was no good. He couldn’t forget Elizabeth, the few times that they had been happy together, the sound of her laughter, the wonder on her face as she saw Paris for the first time. The remorse grew and grew until eventually it overwhelmed him. He may have made a final pilgrimage to see the places that they had known together, culminating in a visit to her grave. Then he returned to his room in a humble cottage in West London and attempted to atone with his own life.

And even that was a failure.

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