At first she scrabbled to try to understand the material. Then she slowed down. The narrative was formulaically circuitous, to pad it out, and formulaically titillating. It was, after all, about a prostitute. What was unusual, though, as Kit soon began to understand, what was bizarre, was the book’s explanation—Kit pulled out her notebook—of Eliza’s murder.
From the start of the 1830s, the author wrote, the big newspapers had all had their ‘tame incendiaries’, and ‘special and general criminals’, subdivisions of their more aboveboard labour force. If there was no news, news would be created. These illicit employees were ‘consummate concocters of London crimes’. Thus the destruction by fire of the Houses of Parliament in 1834, so the author asserted; and thus also, during an ‘insipid’ down patch in 1838, when the public was stuck waiting for all the excitements of Queen Victoria’s coronation, the merciless killing of a prostitute in Waterloo. The city’s heaving populace—the newspaper readership—had been notably restless, and so, ‘the initiated gentlemen of the press’, drawled the narrative, had ‘expected that something would happen to horror-strike the nation’.
Eliza had been executed to boost the sale of newspapers? Kit patted her cheek compulsively. But then, as she tried to think this nonsense through from various angles, she was led to a question she couldn’t confidently answer. Might Dickens have been accused, with much more justice, of something not dissimilar, when earlier killing off his prostitute, Nancy?—of having tried to boost his entertainment value by crassly horror-striking the nation?
When Kit had put Oliver Twist on Orson’s reading list a few weeks before, she had done nothing more than skim it herself, to remember its general feel; so she pulled a copy off the shelves now and dipped into a few of the appendices, trying to gain purchase on how it had been received when it first came out. She hadn’t much time left, though, and only just scraped getting to the dance session as it began. This wasn’t polite of her, but she naturally wished to arrive after Joe, not before him, if one of them was going to have to wait around. Let him wait, she thought.
It was a pleasantly blowy evening, an evening to be on the streets. She looked along the pavement to see if he was folded into the railings, but he wasn’t.
He was, however, inside. Kit picked him out, through a shifting crowd of bodies, leaning against the battle-worn plaster at the back of the hall, self-contained, but also perceptibly tensed; at which, entirely out of concert with her spirits, she was afflicted by a thrill of desire—at which she then thought to herself, oh shit.
All she wanted to do was to dance.
She made her way over to him. ‘So it’s definitely on,’ nervous, ‘the right way round kind of thing? I’m the girl this time?’—dropping her bag down, stripping off her jacket.
‘Hi, hello,’ said Joe. ‘You’re here, good. Yes, sure. As agreed.’
‘Thank you, thanks,’ she replied, speaking much more sincerely than she would have known to had she never attempted what she was now expecting of him.
Joe straightened up. Kit was wearing her flattest shoes. There wasn’t much between them like this. I didn’t need to ask, she thought, I made myself look—‘Okay, people,’ the instructor yelled, ‘over here. Come on. That’s right. Great. So, yes, this week I’m going to really make you suffer, okay?’ She switched on the elderly music system. ‘Let’s step it up now,’ Lucille. ‘Eyes this way. You, yes, excuse me, yes, can I borrow you, love? Yes, yes, you.’ A young man with scabbed elbows came forward reluctantly to partner the instructor. ‘Right, listen to the music,’ she yelled—they were all embroiled now—‘counting in slowly here and—Quick-quick one; and quick-quick two; and quick-quick three; and quick-quick four—again? Quick-quick one; and quick-quick two; and quick-quick three; and quick-quick four—Let’s—spread yourselves out, okay? Cooee? Let’s all have a pop at this. Find yourselves a partner. Boys and girls, in a minute you’re going to take it in turns dancing with your eyes closed, so please pay attention. Okay, ready, here’s the music—whap, three, four: QUICK-quick one; and QUICK-quick two; and QUICK-QUICK THREE; help!, QUICK-quick four; good—quick-quick one; and quick-quick two; and quick-quick three; and quick-quick four; and—’ Kit? And Kit was lost already, whirling amongst the phantom bullets, gone.
‘Bloody fucking hell, you really did it,’ she said, jumping off the hall steps onto the street, other people flooding out around her.
Joe, though thin, was so much the stronger of the two of them that even when she’d made errors, he had guided her through them by force. He was a beautiful dancer. Only a very few times in all two hours had either of them distinctly stumbled.
He had tried to help Kit back on with her jacket, but it was cut tight, and she was so unused to this gesture that it had made things more difficult for her, not less. She had flailed with her free arm trying to find the sleeve, pleased, nevertheless—on a bit of a high.
‘Did it?’ Joe repeated, catching up with her, entertained.
‘I didn’t have to think at all. It was so lovely, and—’ Kit shrugged her jacket up, ‘I just really enjoyed it. Thank you. Thank you. That was what I—’
‘I know,’ he said.
On the bus heading back into town, warmly squashed together, he asked how she was, ‘And how’s the work going?’
‘You know, Dickens is fucking interesting,’ she replied. She was in an exceptionally good mood.
‘I don’t think he’d approve of that as a compliment,’ said Joe.
Kit looked round at him. ‘Dickens? How do—? Oh no,’ she said, mortified by the expression on his face, unable to keep the pleasure out of her voice, ‘you went and read a Dickens?’
‘I’ve started one,’ he said.
‘Bleak House?’
‘No, Oliver Twist.’
‘Good God. Because of me?’
‘Of course because of you. You said it was interesting, and violent, if I recall correctly. I saw the movie as a kid, the musical, didn’t particularly remember it as violent—psychologically perhaps. I thought I might as well read it, start at the beginning.’
‘I don’t think any screen adaptations have come that close to the real thing,’ said Kit, ‘as far as I’m aware, although there have been a lot of them, I mean in the order of forty, I think; because, they make them for kids to be able to see, whereas if they were accurate to the book, you’d be talking X-rated, certificate 18. It’s a funny point, but if Oliver Twist could read the book he appears in, he’d faint away in horror.’
‘He’s a fainter too, isn’t he? You’re right. You must mean the ending, though. I haven’t got there yet.’
Kit hardly noticed the scene outside the bus as they made their stop-start way in heavy traffic. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she repeated delightedly. ‘I made you read a book.’
‘True,’ said Joe. ‘And how’s your maths coming along?’
She covered her eyes with her hands and made a small, agonised peeping noise.
‘Forget I mentioned it,’ he said. ‘It’s all right, I was joking. Tell me again what it is about Oliver Twist that interests you so much?’
Kit took a deep breath, held it tight, smiled at him, and then spoke in a whoosh: ‘For example, the death of Nancy, which you haven’t read yet but Bill Sikes bashes her to death, is objected to by modern critics as being absurdly melodramatic. But at the time Dickens wrote it—well, a few years later, 1840—Thackeray offended him deeply by describing Nancy as, “the most unreal fantastical personage possible”. Thackeray thought that if you took account of the actual prostitution element, which Dickens was forced to gloss over, then any goodness Nancy manifested would be rendered void by her immorality. And anyway, Thackeray didn’t believe in her good side. He thought it was sentimental rubbish.’
‘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, w
hich 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 t
hird 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?”’
The Twisted Heart Page 10