‘Your father?’
‘Oh, absolutely. Yes, a fine example. But I’ve been very stupid, really stupid. I didn’t ask enough questions. In particular, I didn’t realise that Humpty’s lot was operating right at the bottom end of this scale. And even then, Kit, it would somehow be different if he was just in their workshop, stuck the far side of the U-Bend, tarting up dubious pieces of furniture.’
‘I don’t know where this U-Bend place is.’
‘No, of course you don’t. It’s on one of the estates. But, Kit, what I’ve discovered—I didn’t—it transpires that in return for supplying him with God alone knows what, Humpty’s boss now has him out there, my brother, working as a knocker, essentially stealing from little old ladies. That’s what he’s been doing, my own brother. I can hardly express to you how utterly I despise even the thought of it. He says I’m ignorant and don’t understand how the world works, but—fuck.’
‘Why would they want Humpty, of all people, to do it?’
‘Oh, because of the way he sounds, right? His accent? I mean, he went to Oxford. He’s capable of charm, and absolute bullshit, and he knows exactly what he’s talking about. You’ve only ever met him on a Friday evening. As long as they make sure he’s just about holding it together on the job, I can see that he’d be perfect. And I think in the most disenfranchised part of his mind, it probably gives him a buzz to walk into someone’s home uninvited and persuade them to hand over their most valuable possessions.’ Joe tightened his hands around the rail of the seat in front of him. ‘But it’s not just what this is doing to his soul, Kit, if he still has one. He could end up in jail. How do you think he’d survive that? Fucking Jesus Christ. I mean, I thought these people were giving him a second chance. I can’t—’
Across another of his despairing pauses, she asked, ‘How did you find out?’
‘Pauly.’
‘Ah, right. And where does Dean Purcell fit in?
Joe flexed his right hand. ‘Let’s just say that where a person is inclined to smuggle small antiques, silver and so on, they’re well advised to rope in someone who knows how to disassemble cars and put them back together again. In Italy, there’s this guy in Milan—well, it doesn’t matter.’
‘You mean it?’ she said. ‘You’re seriously telling me Humpty’s in with, kind of fraudster-type burglarish smugglers, kind of deal?’
‘I’m not telling you anything,’ said Joe in thin tones, ‘except that, if this gang ever goes down and Humpty’s still with them, I don’t see how he can fail to go down too. And what I haven’t explained to you, the sting in the tail,’ he said mirthlessly, ‘is that, not only is the guy who runs this racket, Humpty’s boss, a vicious prick, but the girl Humpty’s fallen for, whose knickers he tastefully described to you the other day, she’s related to this fucker: she’s married to one of his cousins.’
A bit of a mess. A bit of a mess. They were growling along in the darkness, only four passengers on the bus, one of them up front chatting to the driver; almost a whole bus at their service, in the chill and the dark and the rain.
‘Of course, if this were in a movie, it would all be fine, wouldn’t it,’ said Joe.
Kit mentally skipped this remark, nerved herself, and pressed a little further. ‘Where does your job offer fit in?’
‘I’m sorry you heard about it from someone else,’ he said.
‘Don’t worry.’
‘What it is is: Humpty’s had this long-standing offer of work from a guy who used to teach him here. I like him a lot. He’s one of those people whose help really isn’t self- serving. He knows what he’s doing, you know? I suspect he has a bit of a past himself. Whatever, he moved to this place in Gloucestershire, an old farm with outbuildings, lots of space. Humpty could live there, everything. It would be ideal, in that it’s work, it’s someone who respects Humpty’s abilities, who’d know what he was dealing with, and it’s right away from here. But that’s also why Humpty has dreaded and resisted it, being stuck out in the countryside. I’ve been trying for ages to persuade him, long before I knew what was really going on. Then, of all things, the day after I first saw you, the very next day, I get this call asking me if I’d like to join a team for a year working on a project at GCHQ. They gave me six weeks to decide. I thought, this is a godsend, something that might finally get us back on a better footing again. I’m not naïve, but what else was there? And he agreed, Kit. He finally gave in, said that if I took GCHQ and was near at hand, he’d do it.’
‘I wonder if he’s been getting into fights on purpose, in a way, to provoke a crisis.’
‘I’ve wondered that too.’
‘So you got this call?’
‘Yes, and I cleaned up the flat—took me three days; it’s never looked so spick and span, you may have noticed—got a couple of rental agents in to look at it, no problem. I’m telling you everything now. They said they could get tenants in a week if I wanted: terrific. And through all of this, from the minute the phone call came in, I tried to put you out of my mind. I thought I’d better show up for Beginners the following Thursday, given I’d asked you; but when you didn’t come, I thought, that’s it, good, it’s over. Then the next day I didn’t know you wouldn’t go back for Intermediate instead, and I thought, fuck it. But I didn’t want to stand you up if you went. So again I went. And this time, there you were, except you were late, by which point I was so fed up that I asked you to dance backwards, thinking you’d turn me down and that would finish it. But you didn’t, Kit. You agreed. You did it. I had every reason to accept the job and no very good reason not to—until, against all good sense, I found myself thinking that, Christ, maybe I had just discovered one sitting opposite me in a little dive of a café in East Oxford, crying into her cup of tea. I couldn’t tell you what was going on because—how could I say any of this to you when we’d scarcely met?’
‘No.’
‘You kept telling me you didn’t want to think.’
They got off the bus. The rain had at last more or less stopped, but they still walked quickly, to maintain their warmth.
‘And what is the GCHQ project?’ Kit asked. ‘You didn’t say.’
‘I don’t fully know yet,’ replied Joe, speaking, she noticed, in an ordinary way; and at this she realised just how disturbed he had sounded before. ‘And I wouldn’t be allowed to say if I did,’ he added. ‘It’ll last a year, that’s all. I can take a sabbatical here if I want, that’s in the bag. The whole thing has come up very last minute, but the connections would be to everyone’s advantage.’
‘Give me a hint,’ she said.
‘No, no, you don’t understand, I’m not allowed to say—anything. We’re talking security vetting; the works. I mean, they employ mathematicians, yes? And my specialisation is in the right general area. That’s it.’
‘For code breaking? What, I don’t know—encryption?’ She watched for a flicker on his face, but he didn’t react.
With a sudden diffuse sense of relief, she laughed. ‘That would be so fantastic, Joe, if the reason I didn’t know what you did could be the Official Secrets Act rather than because I’m just too dumb to understand it. It would be much more glamorous, anyway.’ She leapt over a large puddle.
‘Glamorous, I rather think not,’ he said. ‘Oxford to Cheltenham, that’s, out of the frying pan, into the, what?—toxic waste incinerator.’
‘Joe,’ said Kit, ‘I don’t really know the answer to this. May I ask you something silly?’ She considered not proceeding, but carried on anyway and said, ‘Why did you think you might like me, in the first place?’
He sounded wistful as he replied, ‘Because you were funny, and sharp, and easily upset, and because the things that pleased you pleased you so much.’
‘You please me,’ she said.
Joe buried his hands in his coat pockets.
‘Cheltenham isn’t so far,’ she said. ‘It isn’t the moon.’
‘No, it isn’t the moon.’
‘You love Humpty, don
’t you.’
He gave her a look, and then, as though putting to her something she still hadn’t understood, replied, ‘We’re brothers.’
‘I had a conversation with him just now,’ she said, ‘well, sort of; when that woman took you outside. I think he was telling me that I was okay now or something. He said I could go with you to the state funeral for the prime minister’s legs.’
‘He talked?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why on earth didn’t you say?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You do realise they wouldn’t have been half so worried about head trauma if you’d told them he was talking?’
‘I—no. I didn’t think—I don’t know about these things. He didn’t talk, he mumbled. I’m sorry. Joe, I didn’t know.’
‘Forget it,’ he said wearily.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It doesn’t matter. Forget it. You know, Kit, not everyone would take it as a compliment, being approved of by Humpty.’
‘Did I say I was complimented?’
‘You sounded mildly chuffed.’
‘Well, I suppose I was,’ she said.
‘Well, there you are.’
She didn’t take in very much after that, until she found herself walking into Joe’s kitchen.
It was cold inside. Kit was struck anew by the blood spattered across him, but he didn’t seem bothered by it. He did wash his hands, though.
‘What do you want? Food? Shit—’ he picked up and ate some of the remains of the Battenberg cake that sat, even now, on the table.
‘A cup of tea would be a mercy,’ said Kit.
This must be what it’s like in the aftermath of a shock, she thought—cups of tea, and normality not seeming normal. She stared at the smooth, clean work surfaces and shuddered.
‘I wonder why Buddy never mentioned his letters to me,’ said Joe, pointing at them.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Perhaps because you’re a girl, that made him more comfortable about it.’
‘What, giving me stuff on funk holes, trench foot, lice shirts, Bulgarian rapists—’ Kit cast around in her mind, ‘malignant malaria, spineless Anglicans and the blast patterns made when the Germans drop their bombs on your ammunition stores?’
‘Perhaps you were the right person.’
‘Who knows? But you should read them, definitely.’
‘What’s a funk hole?’ said Joe.
‘Oh, a shallow dug-out you dived into at short notice when under unexpected fire. The troops got moved around the whole time and would adopt other people’s funk holes in vacated positions. You know what? When they didn’t have enough soldiers to man the trenches properly, because the casualties were so extreme, do you know what they did? The men would run up and down, crouching, and let off bursts of fire every few minutes, to make it seem as though there were two or three times more of them than there really were.’
Not sitting, but leaning against the counters opposite each other, they picked away at the food left on the table, and nattered. It was almost as though Joe had said nothing to Kit since the hospital. She desperately wanted time; felt she couldn’t process what she’d been told, baldly standing there in front of him.
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.
The Twisted Heart Page 23