The Twisted Heart (13 page)

‘Her self-sacrifice, you mean? When she betrays Sikes for Oliver, if I remember correctly? I haven't got there yet, although she's already afraid of getting herself killed.'

‘Yes, she recognises the danger from the start, which makes her doubly martyrish, I guess. And yes, she puts her life in jeopardy to save Oliver. But her self-sacrifice is even more extreme when she gets caught, because she begs Sikes not to kill her
for his own sake
, to spare him the consequences of becoming a murderer. She's not indifferent to her own fate, but she pretty much dies trying to save Bill Sikes from himself.'

‘You don't consider that melodramatic?'

‘Sure, fine. But consider, Dickens was criticised for this being unbelievable, and yet—just imagine what he can have thought when, a little while later, Eliza Grimwood's slaughter hit the press? Remember the photocopy you looked at in my room? As it happens, one of the main arguments that swirled around when people tried to interpret the details of that murder scene was exactly the following: that Eliza must have been done for by someone she knew, and wished to protect, because she had defence wounds on her hands, and yet hadn't screamed out and ensured that her attacker got caught.'

‘One–nil, Dickens.'

‘Absolutely. And I mean, in very similar circumstances, too. You have a pimp-suspect, bedroom death scene, prostitute, poverty. I guess once Eliza's killing had happened, then whatever else you wanted to say, if you were prepared to think hard about the details of the true-life case, you couldn't so easily dismiss Nancy as the most unreal personage possible. And you know, Dickens was so cross about Thackeray's comments that he wrote a retrospective preface to the novel where he answered back, and said that examples like Nancy's, of goodness in desperate and wicked circumstances, weren't
so hard to find in real life, and that she was, in effect, “true”, was “God's truth”, and on and on like that.'

‘You're sure Dickens would have known about Eliza's killing?'

‘Yes, yes,' said Kit, ‘that's as sure as can be. I mean, the case was huge. You know you said it reminded you of Jack the Ripper? Okay, Jack the Ripper happened fifty years later. But guess what I found out? When the Ripper murders got going, how did the
Telegraph
try to communicate the insanity of the thing to its readers? It said, here we go again, this is just like Eliza Grimwood.'

‘Oh really?'

‘Yes. The exact quote—'

‘Which you've memorised?'

Kit hesitated a fraction. ‘I read it today. It just sticks in my mind,' she said. ‘The
Telegraph
noted that how the women were being butchered in Whitechapel, and the manner of Eliza's death, were of “closely analogous horror”. In other words, for the
Telegraph
, whoever Eliza's killer had been half a century before, a full fifty years later that unidentified murderer remained the best available benchmark for the person known as Jack the Ripper.'

Kit did now gaze out of the window. They would soon reach the High Street.

‘All right,' said Joe. ‘All right then, I accept your judgement that Dickens probably heard about it.'

She looked back at him. ‘It's not just that. Dickens himself wrote about Eliza later on. And I mean, leaving aside his moral argument with Thackeray, he loved this kind of thing, shocking crime cases. He's known for it.
And—you know what else? Until two years previous to Eliza's murder, the Strand Theatre, where she picked up her last client the night she died, was managed by someone Dickens actually knew, called Douglas Jerrold; and it was still being managed by Jerrold's brother-in-law the night of the killing. Guess what else? On stage, the night of her death, while she was hunting amongst the audience for business—' Kit grinned at Joe and threw her arms out sideways—so far as she was able to—in a gesture of satisfaction, ‘on stage,' said Kit, ‘unbelievably enough, they were performing a version of
Pickwick
—a work
by Dickens
himself
, ta-da! I mean, of all the possibilities, it was an adaptation of a work
by Dickens
that Eliza walked out on to be slaughtered. She and her gentleman got a cab outside the Spotted Dog pub on the Strand, then trundled through the tolls on Waterloo Bridge. Can you possibly think that all these threads were in place, with Dickens not aware of any of it? Hundreds of people milled in the streets waiting for news updates from her inquest. Everybody knew.'

‘How's the thesis going?' said Joe.

Kit laughed. ‘I have to admit, I did spend most of today on this stuff, again, which was very bad of me, but I really feel as though, if I keep following these details, I'm going to stumble on I-don't-know-what.'

‘I can see that looking at you,' said Joe. He smiled, then glanced away, his whole demeanour altering in the process. ‘Is it all right if we drop in at The Forfeit?—just check Humpty's doing okay?'

‘No, no. That's fine.'

‘He's not in great shape at the moment.'

‘That's fine,' said Kit. ‘Whatever you want.'

Humpty in poor shape wasn't at all what she felt like; but she was in a carefree mood, the dancing had exceeded her hopes and she was pleased to be able to oblige. ‘Lectures going okay,' she asked apologetically, ‘algebraic geometry? Affine and projective varieties?'

‘They're going okay, yes, thank you.'

‘Good,' she said, ‘no, yes, sure.'

Humpty was slouched at the table where they'd found him the week before, at the back of the pub, slightly removed from the rest, jiggling his knee. ‘How's Baddie?' he said. Along with its bench, stools and chairs, this particular table was boxed in on one side by a decorative glass partition, designed, so it seemed, to shield any drinkers from a door to the patio at the back.

‘
Buddy
,' said Joe.

Kit felt a twinge of regret that she hadn't asked about him herself.

‘Did you take him out?' Humpty looked so pale, he could have been carved from a bar of soap. He looked, thought Kit, like Shelley in a Byron wig.

‘Yes, I did,' said Joe. ‘But you know what he's like. He's all right. Remember when the secretary died at the bowls club?'

‘Yes, but how long had he known Frank?'

‘About forty years—I think he said? Decades, certainly. But he mostly talked about other things, you know? He told me there was a lady who lived in our flat years ago, “She wasn't really a lady, Joe, and one day she started seeing a
fancy man, upped and had her hair bleached, and after she'd washed it a few times back at home”, this was—'

‘“—it turned green”,' said Humpty, ‘when they still had the old copper water pipes: “Blue rinse is fetching. Green rinse, that's another story.” You reckon she was secretly after Buddy, or what?'

‘All right,' said Joe. ‘I hadn't heard it before.'

‘Let me tell you,' Humpty sounded vacantly aggressive, ‘I've heard it all before. Fifty-five, thank you. Sixty anyone? On my right at fifty-five. Maiden bid at fifty-five. Sixty, sir? Thank you. Sixty at the back. Sixty-five? No? Anyone at sixty-five? Going at sixty. Hammer's up—'

‘All right,' said Joe flatly.

‘Haven't I got—you don't think? Me on the rostrum, sell anything.'

‘Now there's an idea.'

Joe, Kit felt, was speaking with the absolute minimum of enthusiasm his words would allow.

‘He wants me to go and live in a field,' said Humpty.

‘Really?' said Kit. ‘Who, Joe?'

‘Ah,' said Humpty, as though changing the subject. He tipped his head back and for a moment closed his eyes.

Round the partition, three young men came to their table. Kit could imagine her father muttering, ‘As if they owned the place'.

‘Oh, yes,' said Humpty, with the gesture of a person who's forgotten to explain something. He wasn't twitching any more.

‘As you were,' said the first of them.

Kit looked to Joe.

‘Kit, this is Dean Purcell,' he said, ‘and this is Donald,' he pointed to the second of them. Donald's eyes were strikingly colourless. His eye whites looked grey. He was the only person amongst them who might have been described as fat. ‘And this is Pauly,' said Joe.

Baldy Drinkwater
, thought Kit,
Ebenezer Ward
.

The third young man was much littler than the other two. Kit was pleased that it was he who sat on the stool to her right; less pleased that Donald slid in beside her to her left along the bench. Dean sat between Donald and Joe. The three of them all bore half-empty pints. They had evidently come in from smoking outside. They had very short hair, as Joe did, and Dean and Donald each wore an earring. Who they were—who could say?

‘Hey, Professor,' said Donald, ‘I've got a question for you. Is the earth the moon's moon?' He sipped his drink. ‘Like, is earth the moon to the moon? Would you know a thing like that?'

Pauly said, ‘I know. Why don't you ask me?'

Joe said, ‘What you—'

—but Dean cut him off: ‘
Think
about it. We'd be talking a
blue moon
,' he said, ‘if the earth's the moon's moon. Wouldn't it, it'd be
blue
.'

‘Green cheese,' said Donald, with a gleam in his ugly eyes. ‘Dean's little sister,' he said, ‘I mean, she's so thick, she thought the moon and the sun was the same thing until the other day she noticed them both in the sky the same time. Got her well freaked.'

‘Sixty-five,' mumbled Humpty, ‘thank you, sir. Sixty-five on the bench. Seventy, anywhere? Seventy, am I bid?'

Dean gave Humpty a sidelong glance. ‘She's just a kid, she's only eleven,' he said. He turned to Kit. ‘You should have seen her when I told her, not only the sun isn't the moon, but it's a star. That screwed her head up even worse. You know what she said, mate?' addressing himself now to Joe. ‘“If the sun's a fucking star, how come it don't shine at night?”'

Everybody liked this question. It gave rise to a feeling of communal merriment. Joe leant forwards, poised to speak, but Dean hadn't finished. ‘And you know how small she is,' he said, ‘she stands there, like—I mean upright, right? You know pelican crossings? She stands there and she bloody presses the bloody crossing button with her
nose
.'

‘The moons don't go with the months,' said Joe, ‘so some years there are thirteen instead of twelve. And on old calendars, if there was a thirteenth full moon it would be shown coloured blue, so they—'

‘Right. Cool,' said Dean.

‘—so they say, hence—'

‘Hey,' said Pauly, ‘you heard NASA's planning to put a colony on the moon by 2020?'

‘Leave it out,' said Donald.

Humpty's mumbled commentary slid once more into the snatch of quiet that followed. ‘Eighty on my left, yes. Fresh money at eighty. Eighty-five, anywhere?'

‘It's true,' said Pauly.

‘What for?' said Donald. ‘Fucking cocky-knockers. The moon? The
moon
. They should bloody leave it alone.'

‘A functioning colony?' Kit was strongly conscious that
this was the first thing she'd added to the discussion. Because, here she was sitting on her own at a table with five blokes, implausibly enough. Taken together, apart from Humpty but including Joe, they looked like what Bulwer Lytton would have dismissed as the ‘vulgar-ruffian' class, the low-end criminal element it was probably demeaning to read about. ‘That sort of leaves you feeling really helpless,' she said, ‘like a serf hearing about the crusades,' noticing, as she spoke, that Pauly's left ear didn't, the way a normal ear would, curl over at the top, but was straight-edged and virtually yellow, as though the top had long since been pared off with a knife.

‘Hark at her,' said Donald, ‘
serfs
.' He gulped his drink. ‘Hey,' he said, ‘I mean, hey, we should, you know—we should set up a quiz team.' The others scoffed. ‘No,' he cried, ‘no, I mean, I mean, we've got the moon covered, right? The professor here can do the maths. Dean knows the canals. And AX7s. Pauly knows about French polishing.' Pauly raised two fingers at Donald. ‘Fuck off yourself,' said Donald. ‘Humpty's on cricket and everything. Me and Dean, we're both geniuses on Oxford United and Mini engines. I know all
Doctor Who
stuff. And if I say so myself—' he paused to nod sagaciously at them, ‘yes, my friends, if I
do say so myself
, I know everything about everything about how to make a bitch happy between the—' His incipient boast was whirled away in a blizzard of catcalls and jeers.

Kit tried to summon to mind the huge tables in the Bodleian, the hush, the light and the high ceilings; the vast space the reading rooms seemed to provide a person for thought.

She wasn't uninterested. She felt like a trespasser trespassing. When she caught Joe's eye by accident, they exchanged a look, but to what effect, she didn't know. Behind him, a tidy young man paused uncertainly. He seemed to Kit, from her vantage point at the table, as though he might be hesitating over whether or not to join them. Maybe he was one of Joe's students. Or maybe he—

‘Like our dance club, then?'

Kit did the mental equivalent of blanching. The young man walked away.

‘Go tonight?' Dean asked.

‘Ladies and gentleman,' said Humpty, speaking with effort, ‘this, surely, is worth ninety-five of anybody's money.'

Dean twirled an imaginary moustache.

‘Have I seen you there?' Kit asked.

‘I've seen you, love. You had my water bottle off me, what, two weeks ago?—when your circuits fried? I gave you, like, the hospitality of my water bottle? You drunk my water, babe,' he said, darkly satisfied. ‘You know how priests carry knives into jails?' he said.