The Twisted Heart (7 page)

Whatever they both thought they were up to, it was over fast. As Kit reorganised herself in Joe's bathroom, she felt restless relief. She still couldn't tell really what she made of him, or why she was there, why on earth she'd acquiesced. But what she did know, with baleful certainty, was that she hadn't been much fun, and that it was all over, and that that was it.

It wasn't that you couldn't fake pleasure, she reflected, seating herself on the loo and trying to manage a trickle of pee not too loud. Supposedly that was the single greatest advantage women had over men, the ability to fake it, as much as you liked. But faking pleasure was one thing—even, obscurely, faking it to yourself—that was one thing. Having a stranger inside you was another, and not a business over which you could be very much deluded.

She wiped herself, pulled up her knickers, she didn't like them any more, washed her hands, dried her hands,
put on her trousers, put her shoes on, flushed the loo, glanced round the bathroom to check it wasn't disarranged—it was possibly the neatest bathroom she had ever been in—then looked in the mirror and saw in the glass her freakishly lit-up face.

She had planned to go straight home, but he was waiting for her. He said, ‘Let me cook you something.'

‘You don't have to.'

‘I don't
have
to. Would you like an omelette, salad? I have some great olives. Or are you tired? You need to sleep?'

Kit stared down at her feet.

‘Anchovies?' he said. ‘Fresh herbs?'

‘Okay, all right.'

‘And I have some great bread.'

‘Okay.'

‘Right. More wine?'

‘Sure.'

Well now, she thought, surprised, pulling out a chair from the kitchen table, which caused a cold scraping noise on the tiles—well now, at least I get a free meal out of this; kind of
expensively
free, but in a free kind of way.

She sat limply and watched. He was careful, when he cracked the eggs, to get the shells straight in the bin. When an olive fell off the spoon onto the counter where he was working, he wiped up after it at once. He arranged the bread in a pan in torn slices to warm it in the oven, but tore the loaf carefully over the sink. He hadn't been like this in bed.
As someone who wore skirts with moth holes, Kit was unimpressed.

He turned abruptly. ‘Okay?'

‘Could I have some water?'

‘Glass in there,' he said, gesturing with an elbow at a wall cupboard. ‘It'll have to be tap, I'm afraid. I don't drink water so I don't ever buy it.'

‘You don't drink water?'

‘I don't know, probably a glass every couple of weeks.'

‘You had a bottle at the dance session,' said Kit.

‘That was given to you by a friend of mine.'

She was oddly dismayed by this answer. He'd had a friend there? Boy, girl? Who on earth?

‘I don't sleep well either,' said Joe, tripping her thoughts another way.

‘Oh.'

He laid mats down on the table: mats for the plates, a mat for the salad, two trivets, a silver salt cellar, Georgian—Kit's grandfather had had one the same. ‘Some nights I feel like there's hardly any point in going to bed unless there's someone else there,' he said. ‘Obviously you sleep so you're in a fit state for the next day, but why give up on the day you're in just to ensure the next one, when there's absolutely nothing to choose between them?'

‘Don't you simply get tired?' she asked.

‘No. Well, yes, I do. But, like you maybe, I find it hard to fall asleep whether I'm tired or not. Alone, I find it hard to fall asleep.'

Don't keep saying that, she thought.

‘Sometimes I go to bed,' he said, ‘and then I get up again
and go out walking, you know, three, four in the morning—and fast; fast.'

‘You do walk quickly, I noticed,' she said. ‘It's pleasant to me, personally speaking, as someone with a long stride.' She didn't mention it, but often, when she walked alone, she sang.

‘No, but I'm talking
fast
,' he said, ‘because then, when I'm going down all these streets and they're empty, and the greater part of Oxford's population is unconscious—although, you'd be surprised how many invitations I've received at four o'clock in the morning—' He lost his thread. He was filling up her wine glass again, but she'd had enough. She was asking herself, not for the first time, how it was possible to kiss a person you didn't really know; or rather, what that kiss exactly
was
.

Their talk turned, in dilatory fashion, to politics, the arts, subjects of the day, matters over which they had, if any, uninvolving influence: student misbehaviour, the city's rat population, disasters in China. They despatched several of these topics between them as Joe cooked, before Kit said, ‘What about your work? I mean, about your work—what is it exactly that you do? You didn't say.'

‘Don't ask.'

He omitted to turn round this time, nor did he speak with emphasis, yet it was clear to her that he meant it:
don't
ask
.

Perhaps he's a vivisectionist, she thought.

‘You?' he said.

‘Oh,' Kit pulled a loopy, apologetic face, which, with his back turned, he didn't see, ‘well, I hate to say it, but
my
work is fantastically interesting and I don't mind in the least being asked.'

‘Go on then.'

‘I—' How to begin? She blundered about in her mind trying to formulate the right first sentence. It wasn't as though she hadn't answered this question before.

‘Give me a précis.'

‘You sure?'

He glanced round at her. ‘Give me a précis, woman.'

Kit said nothing.

‘Very well, what discipline are you in, and what are you working on at the moment?'

She breathed in deep. ‘DPhil in English, nineteenth century. The past couple of weeks I've been tackling my introduction, which I rather bypassed at the start. Roughly speaking, I'm looking at the use made in their work by some of the more substantial Victorian writers of real crimes, bearing in mind the complicating factor that, in their way of looking at it, you could legitimately draw distinctions between factual truth and, as they conceived it, higher moral truths; but also bearing in mind that, increasingly, from the 1830s onwards, writers were prepared to use quite recent real crimes in their novels, so that where they changed the details, their original readers couldn't avoid comparing the fictionalised result with a more accurate version they would remember from the newspapers—something we miss out on, reading these books now. Added to which, detectives were considered corrupt back then, yet they were seeking the truth, a little like these authors themselves, in a way. In fact, the first police detective unit in England, 1842, was a clandes
tine operation—the government kept its existence secret from the public.'

‘It did?'

‘For fear of massive disapproval. Just for starters, people thought it was terribly wrong for detectives to be in plain clothes. This wasn't playing fair. It was deemed un-Christian, kind of thing.' Kit leant back in her chair and laid her hands down flat on the table. ‘Well, bore, bore,' she said.

‘Don't go. Food's ready.' Joe put a plate on her place mat, remembered napkins, pepper, bowls for the salad.

‘Start,' he said, cooking his own omelette.

‘Blimey.' Kit tucked in, eating fast. It was the best meal she'd had in ages as well as the smartest, and she was deeply hungry.

‘So. So you're working on Victorian true-crime detective fiction, is that right?'

‘Admirably concise, yes; and n.b., police detectives only. This is delicious, by the way. Yes, and I'm teaching for the first time. I have my first-ever pupil. You won't believe this, but he's called Orson.'

‘Orson?'

‘Orson McMurphy.'

‘Which college?'

‘None. He's in digs with some outfit called Milkweed Hall or whatever. No, I'm kidding. But the small print of the thing is that he's studying
in
Oxford, not
at
it, although considering all the people who teach the courses do appear to be
at
Oxford, I suppose it isn't a complete con. I don't know. He's American, from some expensive little Liberal Arts place
in the Midwest. I don't think anybody's taught him much before—well—but he's sharp. It's interesting. Basically, he said he wanted to write a piece on early detective literature, so they dug me out to help, and I persuaded him, for my own convenience, to focus on
Bleak House
.'

‘Why's that?' Joe sat down opposite her with his own food.

Kit suddenly
really
wanted to go. She'd had enough. She had walked, talked, drunk with, gone to bed with, and broken bread with this man. She had shattered herself dancing with him backwards. It was enough. Who was he? She would have talked about his work, except he'd twice told her not to, and she was too tired to parry or think up some other gambit.

She struggled to finish her food, before retrieving his question from the back of her mind and responding mechanically, ‘It's the first great English example. It has a detective in it who's based on a real detective called Charles Field, and it also has other, recognised detective standins—a lawyer's clerk; the detective's wife. In England, before detectives-proper existed, along with humble police inspectors you also had lawyers' clerks and insurance men as functionally the detective class. Actually, Dickens started out as a lawyer's clerk, but not in a good way. Still, that's by the by. What I'm doing for Orson is a more or less Dickens-and-detectives thing, starting with
Oliver Twist
, and blah, blah, blah. I teach him on Thursdays, then I email him his next reading list on the Friday, after I've chatted to him in the tutorial to find out how he thinks he wants to slant things next—makes him feel he has input.' She
smiled to herself. ‘I was instructed to involve him in the process.'

‘Right. And
Oliver Twist?
That fits in how?'

For a split second this question pleased Kit, the fact that Joe was interested enough to ask—or was prepared to pretend, in plausible style, to be interested.
Nobody
was interested. She continued to smile, while saying diffidently, and sounding, she thought, about ninety, ‘Oh, I won't go on.'

He responded with a believable noise of dissent.

What to do? Kit sighed. Truly, she wanted to leave now. But there sat this person she hardly knew, waiting for her to speak. ‘Okay,' she said, not quite patiently, ‘
Oliver Twist
, Dickens started it the beginning of 1837, before the detective department existed; we're talking the year Queen Victoria came to the throne. He originally conceived it as just a few instalments of pretty blunt polemic about the poor, and only afterwards had this brainwave to bump it out into a full-length, crime-novel-romance thing. If you take the plot apart, it really doesn't work well at all. But he couldn't revise the opening as it was already in print, which left him with crazy narrative problems to unravel; plus he'd landed himself with this goody-goody, orphan-waif hero to carry a whole book. But he hashed up a longer plot regardless, and—so, yes, it's incredibly violent in parts, and all the crimes in it effectively solve themselves without police work, that's the basic point. What I'm saying is,
Oliver Twist
was simply so Orson could draw fruitful comparisons across from the start of Dickens's career to
Bleak House
, which was 1853, in the middle.' She looked Joe in the eye and said, a little insolently, ‘Get?'

‘Put like that, I do.' He offered her apples, biscuits and cheese, coffee; but Kit refused them all.

‘Speaking of work, honestly—' She stood up and pushed her chair back in under the table, walked out of the kitchen to the little hallway, put on her coat—Joe followed her, and helped her—she picked up her bag and heard herself say, ‘Thank you for a lovely meal, I really must be off.' It occurred to her that this was ludicrous from someone who'd done what she had that evening. Nevertheless, her assemblage of words succeeded in rendering the moment sufficiently formal that it felt as though they might almost shake hands.

‘Well—thank you,' said Joe; and then, leaning on the phrase slightly, he said it again, ‘Thank you.'

Kit nodded and was already through the door when he added, ‘You're all right? Should I see you home? I don't know where you—'

She glanced back at him and waved westwards. ‘I only live the other side of the Woodstock Road. I'm fine. Thanks.' And before he could speak again, she had taken flight down his staircase in the manner of one of her exits from the Bodleian.

As she stepped out onto the street, Kit took a great gasp of chilly air.
Farr, Christine Iris
, frolicsome and rollicksome, bloody fucking hell, she thought. All she had done was to say ‘yes' a couple of times, instead of no; but it was as though everything was her fault. What
everything
itself added up to, she still couldn't say, except that her whole life felt like a meaningless screw-up.

She sobered as she trod along in the cold. There were,
she reflected, no rules. There was no one to ask. You made it up as you went. That was it. Precedent was bunk. Whose precedent? Everything was your own fault. So, she'd gone to a dance club, had danced with an unknown man, had, in the face of trenchant expectation, and to the seeming contempt of the other representatives of her sex, danced with him the wrong way round—after which, for no reason whatsoever, she had slept with him. Dressed up right, in another girl this could absolutely have sounded to Kit, well, sparky and adventurous.

But in herself, it felt like the pits. There had been moments, as when he'd asked her about
Oliver Twist
: he had actually been listening. So, fine, she thought woefully, so he paid by listening to me gab.