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.
A few minutes of padding along and she was home. She whacked the hall light button with her thumb. After you did this, the bulb remained on for exactly four minutes.
‘Where have you been?’ Michael
a stepped out of her room and pounced on Kit, successfully exuding an air of blame.
‘Evening, Mum.’
‘Come on.’
‘I went, okay? I went. I went.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yes.’
‘Hey, brilliant. Don’t tell me in those trousers. I don’t believe it. You’re the end. You look so pale. What happened?’
‘If you must know, we ended up back at his place.’
‘You’re joking me. Kit! After all the grief you’ve put me through?’
‘I’ve put you through? Bloody hell.’
‘Kit you—hey, wait a minute. You naughty girl. You didn’t just—?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Put that one away! What’s he like? Why didn’t you stay over? You’re a close one. How was it?’
Kit smiled while trying to look arch, hoping by this means to convey sophisticated amusement—after which, feebly, she added, ‘It was great.’
‘Good for you,’ cried Michaela.
And because Kit’s mood was resistless, this made her grin.
‘What’s he like?’
‘It was great,’ said Kit wearily.
Michaela narrowed her eyes. ‘Better than a slosh in the mush, I suppose.’
You are, Kit thought, a small and irritating person—infuriating, even. Infuriating Michaela, you know nothing. I dislike you, thought Kit.
‘Fancy you!’ said Michaela with a wink.
Kit grinned again, absurdly fortified by this second-hand enthusiasm; then, once again, she wilted. In bored tones, she said, ‘I’ll give you your dress back tomorrow.’
‘Hey,’ called Michaela, ‘remind me in future not to tell you what to do. And, Kit, get some proper shut-eye, for God’s sake, you look like you really need it.’ As she retreated backwards into her room, Michaela slammed her door shut, thus cutting in half her sign-off, ‘Sleep ti—’
CHAPTER 3
‘Look what the cat dragged in,’ said Michaela, swishing.
Kit got to her feet confused, exposed, her open notebook and a saucepan of custard in front of her on the kitchen table.
‘He asked me if you lived here,’ said Michaela.
Kit had assumed, without great regret, that she would never see Joe again, or at worst, that they would half acknowledge each other on the street some surprise day in the future. Michaela notwithstanding, she had hardly thought about him since the previous Friday, putting him to the back of her mind if for no other reason than to ward off shame.
She closed the notebook. She had stretched out to it instinctively, wanting something to do, to appear engaged. She wasn’t ready for this situation.
‘I knew it had to be one of these buildings,’ said Joe, ‘so long as you meant it last week about the other side of the Woodstock Road.’
‘And you just happened to ask Michaela?’ Kit delivered her rejoinder with considerable bite, hand arrested on the tabletop.
‘She wasn’t the first,’ replied Joe evenly. ‘And you left several glass slippers when you ran away.’
‘I just did happen to be coming back to this shit hole,’ said Michaela, ‘bloody Friday and there he is wandering around like a lost dog, so we have a little parlez-vous and don’t go glaring at me like that, Kit. He found me, I didn’t find him. What do you think?’
Of course Michaela hadn’t gone and found him. How could she have? As well as feeling confused, Kit now felt daft. Me, I’m the lost dog, she thought.
Almost before Joe had begun, Michaela spoke across him, ‘She would’—as he said to Kit, ‘I was wondering if you’d like to—as it’s Friday, it’s—’
Both of them stopped.
‘Feel free not to answer on my behalf,’ snapped Kit at Michaela, who was already removing herself from the scene. ‘Later, darlings,’ she crooned, as she backed merrily out of the kitchen.
‘God,’ said Kit. She and Joe, eyes askance, listened until they heard Michaela’s door close. ‘What exactly did she say to you?’
‘It’s all right,’ said Joe.
Kit had been sitting there eating custard off a wooden spoon, reviewing her notes from the morning, which she’d spent in the library. Between the library and home she had gone to the supermarket, where she’d found herself mooching past the section with tins of Bird’s custard powder—the shelf-stackers were discussing it, it didn’t come in actual tins any more—and had remembered all about Bird’s, eating it as a child. There she had stood, remembering how much she’d liked to eat custard off a wooden spoon when her mother made it, because, after her mother decanted the custard into a diamond-pattern jug, Kit had always been allowed to scrape out the saucepan. All spoons should be made of wood, she thought. She had felt pained for herself as a child, thinking how solitary that character now seemed; which had caused her to buy a container of Bird’s and extra milk, and to go home and at once make a pint of custard in a large, flat pan, letting it cool for a while because she also liked puncturing the skin. These days, her mother bought ready-made custard that tasted synthetic, had no skin, and poured over the carton lip in gouts.
‘Did you know, in—’ Kit blinked anxiously, unsure how long she’d been standing there failing to communicate, ‘—in the Co-op they put custard powder and Fray Bentos pies, yuk, and coffee sugar and I’m not sure, they put that kind of thing on the lower-down shelves, so that the old folks who like it can reach?’
She hadn’t entirely allowed herself to take in that Joe was holding a bunch of freesias. When he handed them to her, she jumped. With a gruff, ‘Thanks, thank you,’ she pulled a slender knife from amongst the cutlery in the strainer and took it to the little elastic bands wound at intervals round the stems. Jerkily, as she severed them, they flicked off onto the floor.
‘Flowers!’ she said. She sounded almost mocking. Bother, she thought.
Her empty cherry jam jar from the week before was still in the recycling crate, glass and office paper. Kit didn’t own a vase, so she retrieved the jar, filled it with water and cut the freesias short—too short, it turned out. She was making a mess of everything. She arranged the twelve stems in a crude fan shape, aware of being silent again as she did so.
When she had finished, she said, ‘I guess I’ll put these in my room.’ She didn’t want Michaela to enjoy them.
‘Christ,’ said Joe, ‘it looks like you’ve been burgled.’
Kit stared at the scene. ‘This isn’t random,’ she said, ‘at least, not to me. I’m trying to work out some stuff. This is my mind spread out on the floor. And the laundry pile,’ as luck would have it, embarrassingly heaped by the door, ‘—the house washing machine is broken. I was thinking I might just do it all myself in the bath. I was going to go to the laundrette in South Parade,’ where she had had visions of meeting a handsome boy reading Kafka by the drying machines or, more obscurely, reading Donald Barthelme.
‘This is all the space you have?’
She pulled a face.
‘Right,’ said Joe.
‘Middle of the ballot. It’s meant to be a married flat, but the college has hardly any married students this year. And then it was supposed to be being done up because it’s in such bad nick, but they fell behind and—I don’t know, they chronically lack accommodation, so the domestic bursar just decided to shove another bed into this room and—’ Kit put the flowers in the corner on the tiny mantlepiece over the tiny, boarded-up fireplace. ‘It’s fine. It’s nice being up high—high in the air. I like being on top of everything.’
‘In this one respect, at least?’
‘Thanks,’ she said. Had she positively wished him to be there, his feeling free to tease her might have been pleasant. Instead, she felt criticised.
She didn’t know what to do. Why had she gone and brought him into her room? She couldn’t believe she was entertaining a stranger in her bedroom, and the business of having slept with him only made it worse.
Friday afternoon, time was sloping forwards. She didn’t know what to do. By freak
ish chance he had succeeded in finding her; although it wasn’t so much amazing that he’d succeeded as that he’d tried. She attempted to like him for it. It put him in a different light. It almost put her in a different light. He’d come and found her, with flowers. She gestured at her desk chair, seating herself stiffly on the bed.
Of course, she hadn’t wholly forgotten, Friday, about the Intermediate class, had been passingly conscious that it would occur that evening, up out eastwards, St Christopher’s church hall, on the night side of town. But her thoughts about it, all two of them, had been restricted to wondering whether or not Joe would go, and, if he went, who his partner would be.
‘No TV?’ he said as he sat down.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I sometimes watch things on my computer.’
‘If there’s ever a programme you want to catch, come to my place,’ he said, ‘if you like.’
She clutched at this thought in a disconnected way; it was such a dull proposition. His washing machine, on the other hand? Perhaps not. Kit got up to move the jar of flowers again, which, because her arrangement was so inept, refused to appear symmetrical over the fireplace. Their smell was already clouding the room with sweetness. ‘Michaela has a TV in her room,’ Kit mumbled, ‘I go and watch rubbish with her. She gets addicted to the most crazy things, I can’t even tell you, like strongman races where they totter along carrying real cars, that sort of thing.’
She was feeling more and more claustrophobic. The flowers still looked wrong. She got up yet again, wanting to correct this one detail, if no other.
While she fretted, Joe began to read on the floor, and then picked up, an A3 photocopy she had made from microfilm of a page from an early Victorian copy of The Times. Kit turned suddenly around, alert to the rustle of paper and the subsequent depth of Joe’s silence. She had highlighted sections of the minute newsprint in yellow, and could see that he was jumping between these lurid sentences, engrossed, until he broke his own spell by reading out loud: ‘Coroner: “One of the wounds was inflicted by stabbing through the stays, and I imagine the murderer seized hold of the top of the stays on the opposite side with his left hand, and with the other hand then—” What is this?’
The Twisted Heart Page 6
