The Twisted Heart

by Rebecca Gowers

  ‘Are you all right?’ said Joe. He sat down opposite Kit.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. She blinked. ‘I was just—it’s so dark already. I don’t like it when the clocks go back. It’s November, I can’t believe it. Joe,’ Kit needlessly cleared her throat, ‘you said last week that you wanted to talk to me about something. I mean, did we have that conversation?’

  ‘No rush,’ he said. ‘It can wait.’

  Kit’s heart sank. Had Michaela been right? Was he really leaving town: The End? Farr, Christine Iris, she said to herself, has this everything been, after all, so very little?

  With difficulty, she focused on the moment, tea, Buddy—food arranged on the table, cake, biscuits: ten to four.

  ‘Have you got round to telling your tutor, finally, about the Eliza stuff?’ said Joe.

  ‘No, not yet, no. I haven’t seen him.’ She could have stopped right there. Joe was trying to distract her, she felt sure. She did stop, mournfully, but then started again. ‘There is a sting in the tail to that whole story.’

  ‘That I don’t know about?’

  ‘You, my dear?’ she said, putting on a funny voice. ‘You know nothing.’

  ‘So tell me.’

  She glanced up at him. He smiled back. Life was so stupid, she thought. ‘It’s, yes—well.’ Yes, well. ‘Joe,’ she said, ‘you really want me to blab on?’

  ‘Hard to say. Does this instalment involve dismal deeds, dramatic upsets, disaster and death?’

  ‘As it happens,’ she replied, ‘yes.’

  ‘Well then, go right ahead.’

  She couldn’t help a very small smile of her own. ‘Okay. Well, in brief, you know there were loads of unsanctioned stage adaptations of Oliver Twist, during when it was coming out and everything—remember me saying?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m not sure the exact timetable, but did I mention that it didn’t take long for all dramatic versions to be banned by the Lord Chamberlain because of the violent effect on the audiences of Nancy’s death scene?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, they were; the plays were banned, even though the killing scene was usually done offstage, as far as I can tell, every surviving script I can lay my hands on. The audiences still got madly worked-up about it, so that was that: no more stage versions. And by the way, Dickens was infuriated by these adaptations. But nevertheless—and this is the thing—it’s as though the idea of doing Nancy’s murder as a performance got somehow lodged in his soul. Because, if you fast forward a couple of decades, by the early 1860s Dickens had come up with this idea of making masses of money by giving live readings in theatres of the most affecting scenes from his novels, and he particularly wanted to do Sikes murdering Nancy. His friends went to enormous lengths to persuade him it was just too dreadful, and he mustn’t.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘And for about five years, five years, they succeeded. But the compulsion was too much for him. He was overtaken by it, and he did come to enact the scene—though it was billed as a reading, presumably to accommodate the fact that acting it was still illegal—in the end, he did it, on the public stage, repeatedly. And the consequence was shock on the part of his audiences, plus a devastating toll on his health. His stage script is actually worse than the original book version, and you have to consider that he was playing both Sikes and Nancy somehow, he was kind of killing himself. Forgive me, but since you asked, I have to read you out this thing.’

  Joe laughed, gratified to have got her going.

  So be it, she thought. She looked through her bag for her notebook with growing panic. ‘I can’t find—oh God—’

  ‘Try your jacket pocket,’ he said.

  And there it was.

  Kit blew out slowly. ‘What would I have done if—’

  ‘I don’t like to think.’

  ‘Fine.’ She was thumbing through the pages. ‘But, oh yes, listen to this. This is another thing. Here’s a typical 1838 review of the novel: “We have but one objection to urge against the whole—that it introduces us to a description of life which, however faithfully portrayed, is indescribably repulsive and demoralising.” That was standard, even if—’ Kit ran a finger down to the bottom of the page, ‘even if Queen Victoria found it “excessively interesting”, so she said. But what was Dickens’s answer to this objection? The thing is, he believed that what was truly immoral was people of the sniffy persuasion failing to acknowledge that these lives of repulsive deprivation underpinned their own social order. Where has Buddy got off to, do you think?’

  ‘He’ll be here in a minute.’

  ‘I’ll stop if he arrives.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘Well,’ she turned a few pages, ‘what I meant to read you wasn’t that, it was this contemporary description of Dickens’s performance, listen: “Gradually warming with excitement he flung aside his book and acted the scene”, wait, yes, here, “shrieked the terrified pleadings of the girl, growled the brutal savagery of the murderer”. And I mean, Dickens added in gestures, right? “The raised hands, the bent-back head—” Why did it enthral him to such an extent? While he was on tour, he wrote jokingly to people like Wilkie Collins that he was going to “murder Nancy” again in the evening; or to another friend, “I commit my murder again on Tuesday, the 2nd of March”. Other times he’d say things along the lines of, you know, tonight, once again, I’m going to be killed by Mr Sikes. He said it both ways. And he was so frenziedly convincing that he felt hated by his audiences, like—yes, here, “it is quite a new sensation to be execrated with that unanimity”. He’d be plunged into terrible glooms afterwards, which could last for hours, feeling as though he might be about to be arrested. On top of which, the effect on his health of repeatedly pulling this off was so severe that he had to have a doctor on hand for every performance. He would swoon away and have to be revived before he could continue the show. People begged him to stop. His mate Forster wrote that doing Sikes and Nancy “exacted the most terrible physical exertion from him”, and even Dickens admitted that he was tearing himself to pieces. And in the end, the day did come when he was so shattered by it, he had to quit half way through his latest run of shows, greatly against his will—a few weeks after which, when he was still in a desperate state and unable to recover, he had a violent fit and shortly afterwards died.’

  ‘He died?’

  ‘Yes. Fancy that, right?’

  ‘He died?’

  ‘Yes. That’s how Dickens died, aged fifty-eight. One report says that two days beforehand he was found wandering round his garden by himself, yet again acting out Sikes killing Nancy. And a lot of the people who were closest to him ascribed his death, the single most important cause, to his insisting on performing the murder. Wilkie Collins apparently said it contributed more to killing Dickens than all his other work added together. So,’ Kit closed her notebook, ‘so this, my friend, this is the sting in the tail. If you accept the theory that Dickens was given courage by Eliza Grimwood’s murder to construct an uncannily similar and equally horrific death for Nancy—that, far from gracelessly chucking a spot of grotesque melodrama into a poorly thought-out plot, he was in fact moved to lift the event near-wholesale from the lives of the very people whose degradation he was at pains to invoke—if you accept this, if you accept that the real killing in any degree whatsoever inspired the extremity of the written one, then by extension, Eliza’s unknown murderer can be understood to have had a hand in the death of Dickens himself.’

  ‘That’s a pretty startling conclusion,’ said Joe.

  ‘Thanks. Did I make sense?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Please tell me you’re going to run this past your tutor eventually?’

  ‘Oh sure,’ she said, ‘when I’ve hammered out a few more of the details.’

  ‘What about Orson? You could impress him with a potted version, surely?’

  Kit was touched by the concern Joe seemed to be expressing. ‘O
rson?’ she replied. ‘Didn’t I say? No, sorry. It’s so weird, it’s as though he never really existed. But he’s gone, back to the States. The course director rang me up. I couldn’t tell if it was Orson’s health or someone in his family or what, but he’s gone. And we still had over fifty quid’s worth of tutorials lined up, which is extremely sad. You’re reminding me I should email him and find out if he’s okay. I was meaning to. I’ve been so busy. I felt bad for a couple of days thinking about when he tried to talk to me and how I pretty much ran away. But oh well, what do I know? Not a lot. And the real reason I haven’t emailed him is that I embarrassingly haven’t yet read his manuscript, although where was I supposed to find the time? I worked out, if it’s two minutes per page, it would take me twenty hours to get through it. Isn’t that exactly the sort of reading one ought to do in a café? I had this thought recently, that the feel of any given city is going to be determined for an individual largely by the quality of its strangers, don’t you think? I mean, presumably wherever you go you’ll make a few friends, quite possibly not unlike yourself. But it’s the people you don’t know who give you—’ There was a knock at the door.

  Joe rose to his feet, and said, with a touch of anxiety, ‘You do remember Buddy will probably be imagining you’ve had a chance to check out this diary of his, or whatever it is?’

  Buddy looked crushed in the bright lights of the kitchen.

  ‘Do you think we need to get the chimneys swept?’ Joe asked him. ‘I laid a fire a couple of days ago, then wasn’t sure I dared light it.’

  ‘I remember last time they swept the chimneys here,’ said Buddy, ‘thirty, forty-odd rooks showed up. Set up a right old rumpus.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘A while back. Ten years?’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘The downpipe from the gutter’s loose by my bathroom,’ said Buddy. ‘I’d fix it, but I’m getting a bit past it these days.’

  ‘You’re hardly past it,’ said Joe; and then, to Kit, ‘Buddy’s a pillar of the bowls club on the Marston Ferry Road.’

  ‘Oh, a toothpick,’ said Buddy, tucking himself in at the table. ‘No, it’s a shame you have to be old when you’re old.’

  ‘Maybe tomorrow or Sunday I can look at it for you?’ said Joe. He boiled the kettle and they helped themselves to the good food he’d spread out on the table.

  Kit kept quiet as their conversation turned to Frank, his virtues, and, tenderly, his failings; to building management; to the French people downstairs.

  ‘And another thing: he couldn’t write, you know,’ said Buddy, interrupting himself.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Illiterate. It’s more common than you think. Didn’t mean he was any less than he was.’ He turned to Kit, visibly connecting one thought to another. ‘You’ve not had a pop at my letters, then?’

  At Joe’s suddenly controlled expression, Kit allowed herself a smile. ‘They’re—’ she grinned at them both, ‘Buddy, what can I say? They’re absolutely fascinating.’

  Joe’s shoulders dropped with relief.

  Kit pulled a naughty face at him. ‘They’re amazing,’ she said. ‘I read them last night till three o’clock in the morning. I haven’t quite finished them yet, but blimey.’

  ‘Bloody unbelievable what they went through,’ said Buddy gruffly.

  ‘I know,’ she replied.

  Joe glanced from Buddy to Kit and back. ‘This is—the First World War?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, the Macedonian Front,’ said Kit, ‘push to retake Serbia, defeat the Bulgarians, or “Bulgars” as they said back then; win over the Greeks, whose king was vacillating and probably servicing the Germans and so on. As for the people down in Salonika, fat lot of help, knifed the British soldiers who went in with money for supplies. But the fighting conditions, God, were unbelievably bad—dreadful: typhoid, dysentery, sand flies, poisonous snakes, malignant malaria, heat so intense they could barely move. And then in the winters it was wolves, floods, boils, trench foot, and such cold that some nights half their horses would freeze to death.’ Kit made a gesture to Buddy, a motion asking him if he wished to take over the talking. But he preferred to hear someone else explain; basked, really, in Kit’s outpouring. And so, for his pleasure, she continued.

  ‘—and he’s very surprising about Christianity,’ she said, after a while. ‘He says it’s pure bunk to call the average Tommy a Christian. He says, they’re the best men in the world, immensely tough and uncomplaining, but also completely immoral, in that in their death throes they were most likely to ask him not for spiritual solace but for a cigarette. He gets quite depressed about this and says, “I hate the Anglicans”, even though he is one; and that the funeral service in the Book of Common Prayer just doesn’t begin to serve when you’re in a mud slide on the side of a mountain burying a man who has a wife and five children at home, and whose intestines have just been ripped to pieces because a bullet happened to hit his ammunition pouch. Added to which, worse than that, the—’ Kit halted because Joe’s mobile was ringing in his pocket.

  He pulled it out, listened to a voice that sounded to be apologising, and then spoke simply to confirm a plan, it seemed, that had just been proposed to him.

  Buddy and Kit sat in silence, the mood at the table deteriorating fast as, for all his intentness, Joe grew palpably distressed.

  ‘Shit,’ he muttered as he rang off. ‘Buddy,’ he leant over and patted the old man’s arm, ‘I’m so sorry, but Humpty’s—’

  ‘Right you are,’ said Buddy.

  ‘You two please carry on.’ Joe got up from the table and started to walk towards his bedroom.

  ‘Time I was off anyway,’ said Buddy. ‘Oh, Joe?’ Buddy swallowed down the rest of his cup of tea. Kit could see that Joe was frustrated by this—he was trying to get out of there. ‘Could you,’ Buddy rested his cup neatly beside his plate, ‘lend me a couple of matches?’

  ‘Not a problem.’ Joe stalked back over to a drawer and got out a multipack of matchboxes. ‘Help yourself.’

  ‘I can just—I only need—’

  ‘Please, take a box, Buddy, or, just do what you like.’ Joe went out of the kitchen.

  Buddy, raising his voice, called, ‘Right-o, I owe you a box of matches, then.’ He sniffed. ‘Lower than the lizards,’ he said. ‘I’ve no time for that lad any more, none. Joe’s too soft on him. Other night, he was sick outside my door. I heard this commotion, thought we were being burgled. And it’s not just drink,’ he said. ‘He’s all right, but he’s not right up here. He’s a bit touched, in old money.’ He tapped the matchbox against his skull.

  ‘Humpty? I know,’ said Kit.

  ‘Joe’s a wonderful boy, but, saying that, he’s too good to him. It won’t do in the end. Tell you what, though, put Humpty in the army, that’d soon sort him out.’ Buddy stood up at last, ‘I’ll be off then. Nice talking to you. Regards to Joe. Keep the letters as long as you want.’

  Kit was almost amused by the crazy idea of sticking Humpty in uniform. ‘We’ll have the other half of our conversation soon, yes?’ she said. ‘I’d love to finish reading these. Apart from anything else, I now feel like I need to make it to the end of the war.’

  Buddy gave a deep nod, then shuffled off. He was more crumpled-seeming even than he had been when he arrived.

  ‘Gone?’ said Joe, walking back in as the front door clicked shut—like stage comedy, Kit thought, standing up herself.

  ‘Yes, just,’ she said.

  ‘Kit, I’m sorry, but I think I’m going to have to jump on my bike, go looking.’

  ‘For Humpty? Where?’ she said. ‘Should I come? I mean, can I meet you somewhere?’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ he said. ‘If you’d prefer to keep out of it, I understand. It’s not going to be any fun. That was Pauly. I—I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Where will you look?’

  Joe stepped out into the hallway. ‘He thinks I may find him at The Chequers, in Jericho? Apparently it’s been mention
ed. I don’t know, but I’m going to go and see. You know it?’

  Kit nodded. ‘Can you tell me what this is about?’ she asked, unable to help herself; but at Joe’s reaction, she said, ‘No, no, sorry. That’s okay. You just go.’

  ‘By the way,’ he said in a different voice, ‘you’d read masses,’ pulling on his coat and glancing brightly at her.

  ‘I didn’t want to let you down.’ She twinkled back at him. ‘Besides, they were genuinely interesting. I’m sorry if I went on a bit. You know, you always could have stopped me.’ She put a hand to the wall, and watched as Joe checked through his pockets to see he had everything he needed.

  ‘Well,’ he replied, only partly concentrating now, ‘I’m sure you made Buddy’s day—week, probably. Month.’

  ‘A pleasure,’ said Kit, ‘and since you’d invited him anyway—’

  ‘Ah, but no,’ Joe stooped to tuck his trouser leg into his sock, ‘the truth is, he invited us first, but I told him to come upstairs. If you go to tea with Buddy it all tastes of washing- up liquid.’ Joe opened the flat door, then lingered to look at Kit again, until she felt unequal to his gaze.

  ‘He invited me too?’ she said.

  ‘He did.’

  ‘Is that a, more or less,’ she stepped forwards, ‘I don’t know why I care, but, a back-handed—blessing?’

  ‘I dare say.’

  ‘You go. I just need the loo. And then I’ll probably follow along to The Chequers?’

  ‘You don’t have to, Kit, Christ knows.’

  Again straying onto thin ice, she said, ‘Your hand—’

  ‘I don’t intend to use it for dastardly purposes.’ He took a piece of junk mail off the hall chair, pulled a pen out of his coat pocket and scribbled down his mobile number, it looked like. ‘If I’m not there, call me. I have no idea where I’ll try after that.’