The Twisted Heart (29 page)

Perhaps Joe also felt strange, she thought. At any rate, he sounded tense as he said, ‘May I ask you something?'

‘Go ahead.'

‘Eliza Grimwood, when you first encountered the case, what made you look at it so closely?'

She couldn't imagine why he was asking. ‘I just had an instinct,' she said. ‘I had a feeling about it. And then, as you know, it rapidly turned into a puzzle.'

‘That's it? You became puzzled; wanted to get a few facts straight?'

‘Joe,' she said helplessly, ‘the times I've asked you before about your work, as soon as you've started to answer, my mind has kind of seized up and gone blank.'

‘I know,' he said. ‘That's a depressingly familiar reaction, from my perspective.'

‘But if I sat down and paid attention?'

‘I'm sure I could get you to understand it in outline.'

‘That's what I was trying to say.'

The kettle began to boil, then clicked off, but Joe didn't move.

‘What time does Humpty need fetching tomorrow?' Kit asked.

‘I have to call in the morning and find out.'

‘Not too early, I hope.'

He glanced piercingly at her. ‘You think you'll still be here in the morning?'

‘Is that—would that—would that—?'

‘As you wish,' he replied.

Would it be all right? She couldn't tell. ‘Yes. I mean, yes, maybe,' she said diffidently. ‘I'm very tired. For once I'd be pretty surprised if I didn't sleep. You look as though you will, for sure. And I was wondering, anyway, I mean, before
all this—Humpty—I was going to say, whether you'd like to go to the fireworks tomorrow? You said you liked fireworks. Have you remembered it's Bonfire Night tomorrow? I mean, the Saturday displays are all tomorrow and the weather's supposed to be clear; I checked.'

A painful look passed over Joe's face. He pulled himself together, turned away and flicked the kettle on again, got a couple of mugs out. Kit watched him while she continued to speak. ‘Of course it might not be possible if Humpty needs looking after,' she said, ‘although, if he's walking wounded or whatever, he could come too. We could decide at the last minute. It's just, I love fireworks.'

Joe put their tea on the table, pulled out one of the chairs and sat down.

Kit remained on her feet. She was speaking, now, principally to cover his silence. She had the feeling that something was very wrong, but she didn't know what. ‘My theory is that the English set them off too late at night,' she said. ‘We have such amazing sunsets this corner of the year, early November. Can you imagine if all our Bonfire Night fireworks were set off against skies that were red and purple instead of boring old black? In India, the Independence Day celebrations in Delhi, they let their fireworks off at dusk, these brilliant flares with little parachutes on, so that they take much longer to fall. It looks utterly fantastic seeing the flares drifting down against a more pearly grey and orange kind of sky, you can't imagine.'

Woodenly, Joe said, ‘So you've been to India; and Egypt. Where else?'

‘Oh.' What were they on about? ‘A few places?' she said. ‘I love travelling, but I quite get a bit down-hearted after a
while taking in everything all on my own. Joe, why are you looking at me like that?' She could hear the agitation in her voice.

He hunched his shoulders desolately, then laid his head in his hands on the table.

‘Joe? Joe? What is it?' she cried. ‘Joe?'

With a break in his voice, he said, ‘I've been waiting all this time—all this—all this
fucking
time for you to ask me to do something—anything: I needed to know you wanted me enough to—' He sat back up and stared gauntly at her. ‘I thought, I'll just stick to Fridays, and if she never once says—in
six weeks
—if you never once said to me, “Let's get together, let's do something, can we meet some other day, come to my place, I'll call you”,
anything
—then I'd know that you, you didn't really—just
once
—was all I needed. Just once.'

‘What do you mean?' She was appalled. ‘What,' she said, ‘this is some sort of Grimm's fairy tale where I have to pass
tests?
'—angrily throwing her arms out sideways to reject the notion, and smashing—there was a terrible noise—smashing the glass in the picture of the reading girl: it cracked across several ways so that the whole pane slipped, fell out and shattered on the floor. ‘No!' Kit clasped her hand—painful as it was, uncut, though the tiles at her feet were strewn now with glittering shards. She re-ran the scene in her mind, throwing her arms out but not smashing the picture.

Except, dreadfully, she had. Here was a blizzard of fragments at her feet. ‘Oh no,' she breathed. ‘I didn't mean it. I'm so, so sorry. I'll clear it up.'

‘Forget it,' said Joe.

‘I'll go now,' she said.

‘Don't go.'

‘I'll pay,' she said, staring at the pattern of slivers flung across the floor.

‘Don't be silly.'

Again she—if only; so careless, so humiliating, pathetic. ‘Anyway,' she said miserably, ‘anyway, who knows
what
they want?'

‘I do,' he said.

Kit found herself, for the second time that night, on the edge of tears. ‘Look, I just
did
suggest something. I suggested fireworks. I said about fireworks, didn't I? For your information, that equals meeting up on a Saturday, in case you hadn't noticed.'

Joe glanced at his watch, then said, ‘If you remain where you are for about three more minutes, it'll become Saturday without anybody trying.'

‘Joe—' Her legs felt weak beneath her. She pulled out a chair and sat down.

‘What I was trying to ask you just now,' he said more gently, ‘I need you to answer this, Kit. You told me—you said, the first time you came here, about facts and truths in literature, that they were understood to have a particular kind of difference in the period you're studying.'

‘Yes.'

‘So tell me,' he said, ‘with Eliza, you've been trying to get the facts as straight as possible. You've been wanting to solve a puzzle, you say—yes? But what
about
truths? That's what I was wanting you to explain. What have you learned—from this ivory horror show, as you once put it—that you
would describe as a truth? Can you answer me that? By the way, I would very much like to go to the fireworks.'

Kit retreated far inside herself. A truth? A
truth?
This wasn't something she had properly considered. Her head felt empty; her eyes were brimful of tears. If she had even acknowledged to herself the existence of this question, it was only to the extent that she had been aware, occasionally, of avoiding it—and yet, as she sat and revolved the matter in her mind, she realised that there was a truth she had started, finally, to grasp, at an indefinable moment somewhere between the library table, a dance hall, a balcony and a hospital bus stop; a truth, she thought falteringly, an understanding, that desire was—was one of the most ferocious things a person could feel; and that, if you thought to wed desire to love, then you had to love the person and desire them for all of what they were, their whole human self.

She didn't immediately speak because, as this thought came to her, she was also thinking that she must reply with great care—which she didn't do either. What truth had she learned? Impetuously, she started to say, ‘That everyone is—'

She stopped.

‘Everyone is—?'

Kit was too shy to tell Joe something so simple; but there he sat before her,
real
.

She made an imploring gesture with the hand that had smashed the picture.

‘What?' he said. The vision of her struggling caused his face to slant into a smile.

Kit gazed back at him, overwhelmed by a kind of anguish.
Instead of words, she rose once more to her feet. Without caring, she trod through the litter of glass shards, round the table, walking as a scoundrel might walk the plank. And for the first time, so she realised as he seized her, she kissed Joe passionately, passionately, for himself.

One holiday, aged about eleven, I found myself quartered in a room with a spellbinding windowsill, on which were wedged not only yellowing paperback adventures by Desmond Bagley and Nevil Shute, but also a desiccated copy of Josephine Tey's 1950s bestseller,
The Daughter of Time
. Its plot concerns a detective, confined to bed in hospital, who attempts via intermediaries to disprove the common notion that Richard III was responsible for the murder of the Princes in the Tower. This implausibly compelling tale evidently remained in the back of my mind for all the years that followed, as it was the first book I turned to when it occurred to me that I, too, could take a genuine mystery, which I had stumbled on while messing about in the Bodleian, and give it to a fictional character to solve.

It is perhaps worth noting that the nineteenth-century material cited in this book is all real. The sources of details and quotations are generally indicated where they appear on the page, but in Chapter 7 there are exceptions to this rule. The review of
Oliver Twist
that warns readers of its being, in places, ‘indescribably repulsive and demoralising', can be found in the
Atlas
newspaper, 17th November, 1838. The account of Dickens's public reading, in which, ‘gradually warming with excitement he flung aside his book', is given
by Edmund Yates in
Tinsley's
Magazine
(iv), 1869. The story of Dickens acting out ‘Sikes and Nancy' by himself two days before his death, is reported by John Hollingshead in his essay on Dickens in,
According to my Lights
, Chatto & Windus, 1900. The text of ‘Sikes and Nancy' can be found in Philip Collins's,
Charles Dickens: The Public Readings
, Oxford, 1975; while for an elegant modern analysis of how this reading affected Dickens's health, see Helen Small's essay on the subject in,
The practice and representation of
reading in England
, eds. Raven, Small and Tadmor, Cambridge, 1996. Meanwhile, as suggested in Chapter 6, Charles Field's daily log of his investigation into Eliza Grimwood's murder really can be found tucked away in a box in the Public Record Office in Kew, catalogue reference, MEPO 3/40.

All the passages in this book taken from
Oliver Twist
itself are given in their earliest known form, i.e., as they first appeared in print in 1838. In subsequent editions of the novel, Dickens felt moved to tinker with the scenes of Nancy's murder, making the language slightly less dreadful. He also cut down on his references to Bull's-eye's bloody feet.

Fiction
When to Walk

Non-fiction
The Swamp of Death