What Alice Knew (22 page)

William was seated in the public house off Whitechapel High Street waiting for Ella Abrams. He had arranged the meeting in order to interrogate her on the subject of her former lover. The thought made him twitch with repulsion, but he was determined to gather ammunition in his case against Walter Sickert. His brother and his sister had turned against him. Abberline was useless.

He had stopped in to see the inspector that morning and received the report of Abberline’s forgers on the subject of Sickert’s note. “They say there’s no proof that it
wasn’t
written by Jack the Ripper,” Abberline asserted, “but no reason to believe that it
was
.”

Under other circumstances, William would have accepted the verdict that the note was a potential piece of evidence that had come to nothing, but since his meeting with Ella Abrams in the shop, his attitude had changed dramatically. Suspicion of Sickert had hardened into conviction, and the note seemed to be irrefutable evidence. It was apparent to him now, for example, that the ink was the same ink used in the “Dear Boss” letter, that the
r
’s were formed in precisely the same way, and that the flourish under the signature looked exactly like a line near the bottom of that notorious letter. He had made his case to Abberline, noting that the use of Pirie and Sons paper became significant in the context of the other factors. Surely, there was more than enough evidence on which to base an arrest.

Abberline had disagreed. “My forgers assure me there are no definitive points of resemblance,” he insisted, “and they are experts in these matters.”

“Experts!” William sneered. “They are criminals, not to be trusted!”

Abberline looked surprised at the vehemence with which his colleague spoke. “I assure you they are trustworthy in this arena at least. Honor among thieves and all that.”

William grew incensed by Abberline’s light tone. “They are protecting their own livelihood,” he spit out. “The longer they delay the resolution of this case, the better for them. It’s doubtless the same for you,” he added tersely. “You have you own interests to protect. Sickert is a man of standing in society…or at least he knows people of consequence. This keeps you from arresting him.”

Abberline drew back, surprised. He and William had spent many days together by then and had acquired some understanding of each other’s character. The accusation seemed to come out of nowhere. “I assure you I have no reason to protect my social superiors.” He spoke proudly. “I would be prone, if anything, to take the side of my own class over those above me. But I advocate only for justice. I will pursue a murderer, whatever his class, and will make an arrest when there is evidence to warrant one.”

William was hardly listening and instead continued arguing in the same line in which he had begun. “When you grow up in a society in which the privileged are protected, you are conditioned to follow suit.”

Abberline stared at his colleague. It was as though William had lost touch with reality and retreated into his own world. He spoke slowly, as if to a child. “I would be the first to arrest this man, were there evidence against him. But I see no evidence. Only a desire on your part that he be guilty.”

“A desire on my part?” exclaimed William. “And why would I have such a desire?” His voice had grown shrill.

“I have no idea what motivates you; only you are privy to that. I will continue to keep your Walter Sickert under watch, but will do no more without additional reason to suspect him.”

William had not argued further but had turned on his heel and left. He felt eaten away by anger and resentment, even as he knew, behind the turmoil of his emotions, that Abberline was right. Ella Abrams had once loved Walter Sickert. That fact fed an irrational, morally ignoble jealousy that undergirded his conviction of the man’s guilt. He knew this fact at the same time that he could not disentangle what he knew from what he felt.

As soon as he left Abberline’s office, he had sent a note to Connaught Square, requesting that Ella meet him that afternoon. Perhaps the evidence he craved lay with her, or perhaps he sensed that seeing her would assuage his agitation. She had immediately written back that she would meet with him in Whitechapel, as she had business in that area. She designated a public house and an hour at which she would be there.

He had arrived early, still smarting from his encounter with Abberline, but the place had a soothing effect on his nerves. The large downstairs room was practically empty and, unlike rowdier establishments in the neighborhood, was clean and quiet, with a comforting lack of distinctiveness. He could have been anywhere, in a limbo outside of time and place, where nothing he did mattered, where he would not be held to account for his actions. He chose a table toward the back and waited for her to come.

He had been waiting almost an hour when a figure in a cloak rose up before him, causing him to jump in alarm. He had been so engrossed in his own thoughts that seeing the cloaked figure had brought back the visceral terror of the attack the week before. But in a moment, Ella pushed back the hood and revealed her face. The relief and pleasure of seeing her was as great as the initial terror, merging into what he could only describe, based on his readings from some of the Germans, as a sense of the sublime. Her beauty dazzled him, made him feel literally dizzy with euphoric wonder, as it had on the two previous occasions when he had seen her.

“It’s good of you to go out of your way at such short notice,” he said, his voice sounding muffled and unnatural to his own ears.

Ella sat down and faced him. “It’s not out of my way,” she said. “I was delivering some canvases for framing to a shop nearby. And I wanted to meet you.”

She draped her cloak over her seat and looked at him with a frankness unusual for a woman. It occurred to him, seeing her here, how much she lived between worlds: rich and poor, Jewish and gentile, male and female, and he wondered if this fact wasn’t a large part of her fascination for him. He too lived between worlds, or had swung between them, if one considered the chaos of his younger life and the settled nature of his present one. And of course, he maintained oscillation in his work. He was constantly sliding out of one field and into another, finding he could not get a grip on the discipline as it existed and needing to reshape it in light of something else. Was the mark of a certain kind of character its inability to fit into the grooves that life had established, either because of happenstance of birth or temperament? Was this the nature of the philosopher and the artist—as well as the malcontent and the misfit?

Whatever was behind it, he felt he was being pulled off the hinges of his conventional life by the sight of her. He could feel himself swerving and careening, and he clutched at something practical. “I asked you to come,” he said, trying to keep his voice level and calm, “because I wanted to know more about that…man…to whom you gave the volumes. Walter Sickert. You said you misjudged his character. What did you mean?”

Ella looked surprised. “Didn’t you meet with him?”

“Oh yes,” said William. “He is painting my sister.”

He must have registered distaste in saying this, because she smiled wryly. “And you disapprove?”

“I didn’t say that,” said William defensively. “She has commissioned him to do her portrait. I was simply curious about your comment regarding his character, since he visits her house now every day.”

“I think if he is painting your sister, you know what my comment means,” said Ella. “He only paints women he admires. I’m sure your sister enjoys his admiration. Of course, she must be prepared to share it.”

“My sister has no interest that way,” said William sharply. “She is an invalid, and he is a married man.” He spoke, realizing that he himself was a married man, though he was sitting with a strange woman in a public house in Whitechapel.

“Yes, he is married. I didn’t mean sharing him with his wife.”

“You mean that his immorality goes beyond simple adultery?”

“Simple adultery, as opposed to complex adultery?” said Ella with amusement. “Yes, I suppose that
is
what I mean.”

“In other words, there are other women,” William said pointedly and then paused. “And that’s all?”

“All what?”

“All you meant when you said you misjudged his character.”

“I should think that would be enough.”

William nodded. She knew no more, then, than that Sickert was a philanderer of the worst sort. It was not what he had been looking for, and yet why did he need more to convince him that the man was a degenerate and, by extension, a murderer. He cleared his throat nervously. There was no point talking about Sickert any longer. “I hope you don’t feel I’ve wasted your time.”

“No.” She smiled. “I don’t see how you can waste something in such plentiful supply. I am flattered that you would want to see me again. I certainly wanted to see you.”

He felt himself flush but hurried to disguise his pleasure. “It’s good you had an errand to do,” he said lamely.

Ella shrugged. “There are always errands for me to do.”

“Tell me about them.” He wanted to know more about her life.

“Oh, business for the shop. And chores for the household.” She paused. “I must make visits and receive them. My mother wants me to get married.”

“And is that what you want?”

She shrugged again. “It would be a change.”

William laughed. It was odd to think of marriage as the means to “a change,” but in a sense, that was what it was. Marriage allowed the sameness of one’s original family to be opened up, to detour from its static, familiar course.

“I should like to have children,” she mused. “There might be satisfaction in being a mother. But for that, I must find someone to marry. And so far, I have found no one suitable.”

“And whom do you consider suitable?”

“Oh, he must be Jewish and rich, and I suppose moderately attractive and interesting to talk to.”

“That’s a rather exacting set of requirements.”

“I’m sure your wife conforms to an exacting set of requirements,” she said drily.

William acknowledged to himself that she did. His Alice shared his religion and his interests and had been fully approved by his parents.

There was silence between them for a moment. He could think of nothing to say, and part of him did not feel inclined to talk. For some reason, the feeling of nervousness and discomfort he had felt when she arrived had disappeared. He sat looking at her, and she looked back without embarrassment. She then laid her arm on the table, the palm open.

It was odd how a simple gesture—an arm on a table, an open hand—meaningless in other contexts, could be so eloquent. He looked at the hand in its roundness and softness, the long fingers with the smooth nails, which had been filed so that they tapered into little white moons showing above the rosy, darker flesh. It was a hand not so different from other hands, and yet infinitely different. And it had been placed on the table expressly for him.

He gazed at it. The attraction he felt for her was intense; it was as though he were underwater, breathing through a filter. His senses felt muffled but also preternaturally alert, attuned to the presence across from him. He took his hand from his lap and placed it on her hand, his fingers intertwining with hers. It was as though he had caught a small animal that might jump away if he did not hold it tightly. Every nerve in his body was vibrating with life, his mind in a kind of frenzy of excitement and desire as he felt her pulse drumming under his fingers. He clasped her hand more tightly, and it remained still under his.

The rest was a kind of dream. A wizened little barmaid showed them upstairs without the trace of a question and opened the door to a room. It was almost bare except for a bed and a night table, but cleanly swept. Ella placed her cloak on the end of the bedstead and stood before him. He put his hand out, touched her cheek, and then let it fall to the button at the top of her dress. It was a simple dress with buttons leading from the top of the neck to the waist, where there was a wide embroidered sash. He imagined that he would unbutton each of the buttons to the waist and then, in a great sweep of his hand, pull the sash so that the whole edifice that encased her would open up suddenly, and she would be released into his arms. It was just the sort of dress he would have imagined for her—sleek and unadorned, yet intricate with its buttons from neck to waist. Everything about her was simple and strange that way—contained and quiet but also dramatic, intense, excessive.

His fingers touched the top button of her dress. A button, he thought, was itself simple but strange, a mere twist and it was undone, yet it held through all sorts of buffeting. Human skin was like that too, the way it covered the body in an unbroken casement, so solid and yet so susceptible to harm, so protective and enduring, except in cases where it was penetrated, and then there was nothing one could do. He had a sudden mental image of the photograph of Catherine Eddowes, her body opened up in a thicket of carved flesh. But the image was engulfed with the image before him: disgust eclipsed by desire.

He looked down at Ella, whose face was flushed but who registered no sense of shame. She was looking at him, and he knew that she felt the same intense desire that he felt. His hand moved, twisting the button free of the cloth. He placed his hand on the flesh of her neck, feeling the heat of her throat pulsing beneath it. She moved closer to him, her body nestling into his. He smelled the London damp on her dress mixed with the odor of her strangeness. How astonishing it was to be entangled with another body to whom one had no past, no formal relation. And yet the wonder was also that for all the strangeness of her—the difference in nationality, religion, experience of people and events—she had come to him here as he had come to her. Hadn’t it seemed from the first moment they saw each other that they were destined to embrace? So much of life was unsynchronized, where one person desired more, and the other, less. Could it be wrong to feel such mutual desire? Could it be anything but good to desire alike, so different from the case of the murderer, that incarnation of evil? For what was murder but the denial of reciprocal feeling, the imposition of one will at the expense of another’s life? He and Ella were that miracle of mutually desiring beings in the midst of a universe that was too often unbalanced, unruly, and cruel.