The Twisted Heart (24 page)

‘By whom?'

‘An irrelevance, she says.'

‘Maybe to her.' Joe unwrapped a Battenberg cake from the Co-op. ‘He is the father.'

‘Of a teaspoonful of ashes, it'll be, soon enough, I'm afraid.' Kit sighed, pulled a chair out and sat down at Joe's kitchen table. ‘In all the time I've known her, she's—well, it doesn't matter. But, Joe, she's asked me if I'll go with her next week to some clinic in London, next Friday, in fact. I feel quite ill about it, but she's several weeks gone already. She could go longer, but yuk, it's all so unpleasant. I was reading this thing just the other day about subsequent prematurity, amongst mothers who abort?'

Joe, laying out the tea things, glanced at Kit from time to time as she spoke. When she had arrived at his door, the sight of him, his presence, had made her blush, and he had leant round carefully and kissed her on the cheek.

‘I think it's because I'm not really a close friend of hers. I mean I sort of am, but not really; or by circumstances more, which in a way is more like family, isn't it, who you're stuck with?' Kit began to play with the knife Joe had placed by her tea plate. ‘Of course, she and I do have a bit of history now, or witness, I suppose; but what I mean is, because I'm
not tied into her social loop, I think that's why it's me she's asked, basically—so the whole thing can just go away when it's over. No one she seriously cares about will know, sort of thing. Frankly, I can't think of anything I'd like to do less, especially on a Friday, you know? And she acted like I should have worked it all out already. But how could I? She's not sticking out or anything. God, Joe,' Kit put the knife back down, ‘I promised her I wouldn't tell anyone and now I've just gone and told it all to you, oh dear. What am I doing?'

‘Come on,' he said, ‘I don't count. Who am I going to tell? You haven't told anyone else, have you?'

‘No, no. God, no. No, and I wouldn't have told you unless I trusted you, I just—trusted you without stopping to think about it. Thank you, by the way. I know this is completely unimportant by comparison, but the business of her picking on me all the time, what I told you last week, I'm guessing now, well—that I was simply the most convenient person she could get cross with, so to speak.'

‘Doesn't she have a boyfriend, in the Amazon, you said?'

‘I know, I know. I said to her, “What about Greg?” And she said, “Greg? Who cares? I thought you didn't believe in him, anyway. And anyway, he's probably having it away with some kind of tropical rainforest gorilla”. And she said—about the putative father, the father not-to-be, in case you're interested—she said that although he's beneath contempt, well, guess what, she despises him massively anyway.'

Joe grimaced.

‘But this
morning
,' Kit couldn't keep the sorrow out of her voice, ‘this morning, after all, she said she wasn't so sure what she was doing. All week we've been having these
dreadful breakfasts and she suddenly said she wasn't quite sure she'd made up her mind to do it, and I said, she must just let me know, I would drop anything if she needed me. And she just said, “Well, mustn't grumble.” Mustn't grumble! So I don't really know what's going on at this point. You know, she talks about population control, for environmental reasons. She says, “Tell me where's the cake for the Third World: this is a nation of seventy million Marie Antoinettes.” And then—'

Kit trailed away, remembering a conversation she'd had with Michaela the previous Tuesday evening; not a conversation so much as a one-sided outburst, during which Kit had started to wonder whether she perhaps had a duty to intervene—though how?—because Michaela had said, ‘Listen to me,' increasingly desperate, ‘you don't understand, I went in with my sister when she had her baby. Her husband was still in Germany. The whole thing was
sick
. Honest to goodness, she screamed so much she was hoarse for three days, and after the actual birth I had to go out and get her cough syrup and pad things and crap knows, things for leaking breasts, and she'd got torn down there, ripped up, and, and—he came out early so she hadn't got all the stuff she needed, she'd been so laid-back about it. That's why Andrew was in Germany, because the baby wasn't due for three more weeks. So I went to the shops and everywhere was packed. And the whole time, that afternoon, it was like nowhere was the same place it was before, and I had this—this horrendous vision that every person in the crowd had, themselves, also been through this absolute horror of being
born
, and that, give or take a bit of
medication, all of them, every single human being pressing in on me, each one of them had started their life in the beginning with their mother screaming and screaming like it's the end of the entire world. I saw all these people with their mothers' screams attached to them, I can't explain it, like the most horrendous horror movie ever made. I mean,' Michaela had started trembling, ‘isn't it wrong?—that we can go around and
do
this insane thing?—of making other human beings, from scratch? Don't you think? Honestly? Because I think it's appalling. We're all appalling. Everyone's
appalling
.'

‘Are you all right?' said Joe. He sat down opposite Kit.

‘Sorry,' she said. She blinked. ‘I was just—it's so dark already. I don't like it when the clocks go back. It's November, I can't believe it. Joe,' Kit needlessly cleared her throat, ‘you said last week that you wanted to talk to me about something. I mean, did we have that conversation?'

‘No rush,' he said. ‘It can wait.'

Kit's heart sank. Had Michaela been right? Was he really leaving town:
The End?
Farr, Christine Iris, she said to herself, has this
everything
been, after all, so very little?

With difficulty, she focused on the moment, tea, Buddy—food arranged on the table, cake, biscuits: ten to four.

‘Have you got round to telling your tutor, finally, about the Eliza stuff?' said Joe.

‘No, not yet, no. I haven't seen him.' She could have stopped right there. Joe was trying to distract her, she felt sure. She did stop, mournfully, but then started again. ‘There is a sting in the tail to that whole story.'

‘That I don't know about?'

‘You, my dear?' she said, putting on a funny voice. ‘You know nothing.'

‘So tell me.'

She glanced up at him. He smiled back. Life was so stupid, she thought. ‘It's, yes—well.' Yes, well. ‘Joe,' she said, ‘you really want me to blab on?'

‘Hard to say. Does this instalment involve dismal deeds, dramatic upsets, disaster and death?'

‘As it happens,' she replied, ‘yes.'

‘Well then, go right ahead.'

She couldn't help a very small smile of her own. ‘Okay. Well, in brief, you know there were loads of unsanctioned stage adaptations of
Oliver Twist
, during when it was coming out and everything—remember me saying?'

‘Yes.'

‘I'm not sure the exact timetable, but did I mention that it didn't take long for all dramatic versions to be banned by the Lord Chamberlain because of the violent effect on the audiences of Nancy's death scene?'

‘No.'

‘Well, they were; the plays were banned, even though the killing scene was usually done offstage, as far as I can tell, every surviving script I can lay my hands on. The audiences still got madly worked-up about it, so that was that: no more stage versions. And by the way, Dickens was infuriated by these adaptations. But nevertheless—and this is the thing—it's as though the idea of doing Nancy's murder as a performance got somehow lodged in his soul. Because, if you fast forward a couple of decades, by the early 1860s Dickens had come up with this idea of
making masses of money by giving live readings in theatres of the most affecting scenes from his novels, and he particularly wanted to do Sikes murdering Nancy. His friends went to enormous lengths to persuade him it was just too dreadful, and he mustn't.'

‘I can imagine.'

‘And for about five years,
five years
, they succeeded. But the compulsion was too much for him. He was overtaken by it, and he
did
come to enact the scene—though it was billed as a reading, presumably to accommodate the fact that acting it was still illegal—in the end, he did it, on the public stage, repeatedly. And the consequence was shock on the part of his audiences, plus a devastating toll on his health. His stage script is actually worse than the original book version, and you have to consider that he was playing both Sikes and Nancy somehow, he was kind of killing himself. Forgive me, but since you asked, I have to read you out this thing.'

Joe laughed, gratified to have got her going.

So be it, she thought. She looked through her bag for her notebook with growing panic. ‘I can't find—oh God—'

‘Try your jacket pocket,' he said.

And there it was.

Kit blew out slowly. ‘What would I have done if—'

‘I don't like to think.'

‘Fine.' She was thumbing through the pages. ‘But, oh yes, listen to this. This is another thing. Here's a typical 1838 review of the novel: “We have but one objection to urge against the whole—that it introduces us to a description of life which, however faithfully portrayed, is indescribably repulsive and demoralising.” That was standard,
even if—' Kit ran a finger down to the bottom of the page, ‘even if Queen Victoria found it “excessively interesting”, so she said. But what was Dickens's answer to this objection? The thing is, he believed that what was truly immoral was people of the sniffy persuasion
failing
to acknowledge that these lives of repulsive deprivation underpinned their own social order. Where has Buddy got off to, do you think?'

‘He'll be here in a minute.'

‘I'll stop if he arrives.'

‘Don't worry.'

‘Well,' she turned a few pages, ‘what I meant to read you wasn't that, it was this contemporary description of Dickens's performance, listen: “Gradually warming with excitement he flung aside his book and acted the scene”, wait, yes, here, “shrieked the terrified pleadings of the girl, growled the brutal savagery of the murderer”. And I mean, Dickens added in gestures, right? “The raised hands, the bent-back head—” Why did it enthral him to such an extent? While he was on tour, he wrote jokingly to people like Wilkie Collins that he was going to “murder Nancy” again in the evening; or to another friend, “I commit my murder again on Tuesday, the 2nd of March”. Other times he'd say things along the lines of, you know, tonight, once again, I'm going to be killed by Mr Sikes. He said it both ways. And he was so frenziedly convincing that he felt hated by his audiences, like—yes, here, “it is quite a new sensation to be execrated with that unanimity”. He'd be plunged into terrible glooms afterwards, which could last for hours, feeling as though he might be about to be arrested. On top of which, the effect on his health of repeatedly
pulling this off was so severe that he had to have a doctor on hand for every performance. He would swoon away and have to be revived before he could continue the show. People begged him to stop. His mate Forster wrote that doing Sikes and Nancy “exacted the most terrible physical exertion from him”, and even Dickens admitted that he was tearing himself to pieces. And in the end, the day did come when he was so shattered by it, he had to quit half way through his latest run of shows, greatly against his will—a few weeks after which, when he was still in a desperate state and unable to recover, he had a violent fit and shortly afterwards died.'

‘He died?'

‘Yes. Fancy that, right?'

‘He
died?
'

‘Yes. That's how Dickens died, aged fifty-eight. One report says that two days beforehand he was found wandering round his garden by himself, yet again acting out Sikes killing Nancy. And a lot of the people who were closest to him ascribed his death, the single most important cause, to his insisting on performing the murder. Wilkie Collins apparently said it contributed more to killing Dickens than all his other work added together. So,' Kit closed her notebook, ‘so this, my friend, this is the sting in the tail. If you accept the theory that Dickens was given courage by Eliza Grimwood's murder to construct an uncannily similar and equally horrific death for Nancy—that, far from gracelessly chucking a spot of grotesque melodrama into a poorly thought-out plot, he was in fact moved to lift the event near-wholesale from the lives of the very people
whose degradation he was at pains to invoke—if you accept this, if you accept that the real killing in any degree whatsoever inspired the extremity of the written one, then by extension, Eliza's unknown murderer can be understood to have had a hand in the death of Dickens himself.'

‘That's a pretty startling conclusion,' said Joe.

‘Thanks. Did I make sense?'

‘Yes.'

‘Thank you.'

‘Please tell me you're going to run this past your tutor eventually?'

‘Oh sure,' she said, ‘when I've hammered out a few more of the details.'

‘What about Orson? You could impress him with a potted version, surely?'

Kit was touched by the concern Joe seemed to be expressing. ‘Orson?' she replied. ‘Didn't I say? No, sorry. It's so weird, it's as though he never really existed. But he's gone, back to the States. The course director rang me up. I couldn't tell if it was Orson's health or someone in his family or what, but he's gone. And we still had over fifty quid's worth of tutorials lined up, which is extremely sad. You're reminding me I should email him and find out if he's okay. I was meaning to. I've been so busy. I felt bad for a couple of days thinking about when he tried to talk to me and how I pretty much ran away. But oh well, what do I know? Not a lot. And the real reason I haven't emailed him is that I embarrassingly haven't yet read his manuscript, although where was I supposed to find the time? I worked out, if it's two minutes per page, it would take me
twenty hours
to get
through it. Isn't that exactly the sort of reading one ought to do in a café? I had this thought recently, that the feel of any given city is going to be determined for an individual largely by the quality of its strangers, don't you think? I mean, presumably wherever you go you'll make a few friends, quite possibly not unlike yourself. But it's the people you don't know who give you—' There was a knock at the door.