The Twisted Heart Read online

  On the short return bus ride down the hill to town, Kit felt furious. She often thought about joining this or that club, society, about attending events, getting out, meeting people. She would think about it, would revolve the idea in her mind, would feel she had understood whatever it was she wished to understand, and would then proceed to remain at home. The scheme of a dance club, of really going to one—the fact that she had done it had been an exception.

  Now, trailing along in the traffic past the drearily colourful little Cowley Road shops, murals, tawdry and decayed; now, sitting on the bus in a bad mood, it felt to Kit as though she had left the dance class expressly to avoid, as he had said he was called, Joe; though the fact was, she hadn’t known he existed until after she’d got outside. She wished she had walked back down into town, he wouldn’t have caught up with her then; but she had wanted, and did want, to fit in time at the library, and it was late.

  For an instant what felt like another hand settled lightly on her head, the gesture of a priest. But it turned out to be the elbow of a young man who, as he walked past her seat, paused to get the zip up on his jacket. Kit shook herself, faintly disgusted.

  She had left the club because she’d been too tall, and because she’d had the sense that depression was gathering, not within her exactly, but at the edges of the experience. She had had the powerful sense that if she didn’t get out while the going was good, it would cease to be good; that the going barely was good, in fact—was pretty weird, you might say—but that the thing was still at a stage where it would be possible to think about it afterwards as having been good, maybe, viewed in retrospect; the stamping, for example, humorous. She could still be funny about it speaking to someone who hadn’t been there, about the self-regarding boys and the girls with their glue-hard hair—if she chose, and had anyone to speak to.

  Had she stayed, however, she didn’t doubt that she would very soon have reached the point where going to a dance club would have seemed like something she should have known from the start was a mistake, a girl like her, going to a dance club off up out eastwards from town. It almost felt like a mistake now, either despite her having been asked back, or because of it—because he, so-called Joe, had made her wonder really why she had gone: Joe. He had looked capable; but capable of what, she had no idea.

  When the bus reached the High Street, Kit walked along the aisle from the back to the middle exit, stooping to pick up a wallet-sized zip bag that lay on the floor. Ahead, the Queen Street stop was already blocked by several other buses, so Kit’s driver pulled up short. Kit made a hasty offer of the bag to the nearest passenger, a woman, who took it from her in confusion. ‘Oh my God,’ she said, then, ‘Thanks. You’re a star.’

  The driver bent round to see what was happening. Kit scowled back at him.

  As she ran over the High Street she said to herself, you’re a star. You’re a star!

  She loped up the Old Bodleian Library’s main staircase two steps at a time. These steps always felt wrong to her. She assumed their dimensions had been worked out so far in the past that even tall people had been short then. At any rate, one step at a time reduced her to mincing her way up, while two required an over-long stretch, and what she considered uncouth athleticism.

  Happily, going down was different. Unless she was positively unwell, Kit liked to rush down this staircase one step at a time as fast as possible, giving her a buzz akin to riffling her thumb through a 900-page paperback.

  She had ordered for herself, on a whim, two different editions of the novel Eugene Aram, based on the life of a real murderer, and written by Dickens’s friend, Bulwer Lytton. She also expected to find waiting in her name a clutch of W.S. Hayward’s so-so erotic novels. These Kit had ordered from the library’s low-frequency storage dump in case there was any merit in recommending them to her sole student, Orson McMurphy, whose name, she now realised, made him sound rather like a late nineteenth-century Ontario cattle thief.

  Kit slipped through the swing doors of the upper reading room and attempted to walk noiselessly across its exasperating cork floor. She didn’t want to draw attention to herself, not that it was any big deal. Who spent their Friday nights in the library before the start of a new academic year? Outcasts and lunatics, was her answer to this question, or more bracingly, those with nothing better to do.

  She strolled light-footed past the ranks of vast work tables, towards the issue desks, about to have to retrieve a stack of mid-Victorian erotica, oh dear. She had long since stopped needing to give the librarians her name. They recognised her as ‘Farr, Christine Iris’, and would hand her her books in silence. The regular librarians, Kit thought, were like barmaids to her mind, with the upper reading room her favourite mental watering hole. What’ll it be tonight? I’ll take a half of Bulwer Lytton with a low-grade erotica chaser, thanks. And what did the librarians care? They didn’t care. Would they even know what the books were? Presumably not. Nevertheless, The Soiled Dove, Skittles in Paris, Anonyma.

  The reading room was calm and warm, peaceful, concentrated, enclosed by the vision of nightfall. The great windows glittered where light from the ceiling lamps reflected off the insides of the panes. Kit took seat 103 and stared out through the glass at the looming roofline of huge, ancient buildings, each one caught in its own dense dose of sickish electric glare.

  She was back in a good mood because she had questions in her head that intrigued her to which she was about to find out a few answers. What a blessing so much of the trash she wished to consult had survived the purges of well-informed librarians long ago. The Soiled Dove, though, 1865, oh God, she thought.

  It proved to be a pathetic story. The Honourable Plaistow Cunninghame liked to arrange fake wedding ceremonies for himself, performed by his good friend Black, and would then debauch his latest supposed bride for as long as she amused him—so far, so hackneyed. His career had reportedly begun with the apple-cheeked, country-girl type, figured in the person of Dolly Dimsdale; but at the novel’s start he could be found upgrading to the sweet-natured and well-bred, though inadequately protected heroine, Laura Merrivale. How enchanting when she remarks, ‘Papa says I am playful.’

  Kit whisked her way through three hundred pages of wickedness to the point where Cunninghame, in a contrary and drink-sozzled fit, had been reduced to hurling himself out of an upper-storey window, with the conclusive result, the next sentence, that his ‘brains bespattered the roadway’. And a couple of pages after that, there was Laura Merrivale frozen to death on a bench in the Mall at half past three in the morning. Tough for both of them, but quite a thrill for the reader.

  Hayward’s last word on the subject, which Kit scribbled down in her notebook, was, ‘Life exposes those who enjoy it to many vicissitudes.’ In brackets, she added childishly, ‘On the other hand, life’s just wonderful for those who don’t enjoy it, right?’ There was one other quote, regarding the Honourable Plaistow Cunninghame, that she couldn’t resist: ‘He had commenced his holocaust to the Moloch of lust when he was very young, for he was naturally depraved and vicious.’

  Kit rolled this phrase luxuriously around her mind. A middle-aged man squeaked across the cork tiles behind her, a reader coughed, a couple of people murmured a greeting. How many of them, she wondered, were contemplating in their blood some small contribution, quite soon—that night preferably—towards their own little holocaust to the Moloch of lust?

  And so immediately did she form a reply to this question, if not quite an answer, that she found herself mouthing, ‘You take your chances.’ Kit glanced sideways, having talked to herself, to see whether anyone was perhaps observing her, around or over the wooden screen fixed along the centre of her table. What her eyes finally met, however, was the reading room clock. She didn’t want to be chased out when the place closed for the night. No more time for Skittles and Anonyma, with their merry vales and dim dales—the erotics of deluded consent. It was more urgent that she press on with Bulwer Lytton and his attempts to justify exploiting in
fiction the case of an infamous, true-life murderer.

  She opened the earlier edition of his novel, 1831, and read the preface at speed. Eugene Aram, though he had, yes, been a killer, had also been a scholarly gentleman, hence neither a ‘vulgar ruffian’, nor a ‘profligate knave’. In other words, Aram had been no dismal, commonplace, ordinary murderer, but an intriguing ‘anomaly’, fine, well, nothing new in that argument.

  Kit slowed her pace, read properly, compared the earlier with the later preface, jotted down a few notes, felt an abrupt burst of fatigue, jumped up, handed her books back in, and wondered, ashamed, what Hayward would have made of the name, ‘Fanny Price’. As she skimmed down the Bodleian stairs, she recalled the frame of mind she’d been in coming up them and thought, this is a silly existence I’m leading—which was fine so long as she didn’t care.

  Which led her to ask herself, as she quit the library, what the point was to caring, about anything? For example, why had Joe, if that was really his name, smiled at her on parting? It hadn’t felt fair, somehow, the fact that he had smiled as he turned away.

  It was dark outside. Kit crossed Broad Street, briefly slewing the axis of her shoulders so that she would pass untouched through a group of revellers, drinkers, loud voices, along to St Giles and beyond, up the Woodstock Road—pale, late-blooming roses glimmering in a front garden—strode at her usual swift pace as soon as this was possible, quarter of an hour to where she lived in a tiny room on the top floor of what had once been a substantial mansion.

  It still was a mansion in its brickwork, but the building had been crudely converted years before into graduate lodgings. Kit took it that her own room had originally been quarters for a suffering maid or two. Below her, on the family floors, other residents of the house had scored a drawing room, a parlour, a visitor’s room, what have you.

  Kit slipped up to the attic flat, surplus married quarters awaiting renovation, and went into her own room. She shut the door behind her—not a confirmed habit—and began to dance with herself the fastest dance she’d learned in class, though she did this in a quiet, hoppish way; quiet, so that if he was in, she didn’t disturb the boy who lived beneath her; hoppish, because strewn across her floor there lay a mass of papers and books.

  Hoppishly she twirled, her arms curved out in front of her, in ghost position, imagining being held. And if nothing else, she was being held, by her thoughts.

  After a few such solitary minutes, Kit took a leap to her desk chair, landing with a gleeful thump on her bottom. ‘Zip, zip, zip!’ she cried. She switched on her computer and set to, copying out scribbles from her notebook:

  N.B. 1831 preface to Eugene Aram = Bulwer defends having tampered with the ‘historical’ record on the grounds that his alterations constitute moral improvements: ‘With the facts on which the tale of EUGENE ARAM is founded, I have exercised the common and fair licence of writers of fiction.’ But nine years later, after being attacked for writing on such a dubious topic in the first place, he produces a new preface = ‘Did I want any other answer to the animad-versions of commonplace criticism, it might be sufficient to say that what the historian relates, the novelist has little right to disdain.’

  Meaning what? In 1831, if Bulwer’s version was moral, that trumped the need to be factual, but in 1840, if it was factual, that released him from the requirement to be moral? Yes? No?

  Kit tried for about ten seconds to work out whether or not these positions were mutually exclusive. Anyway, rubbish, she thought. Weren’t the murder details, true or false, intended principally to be entertaining? Of course they were. She abandoned the subject in order to construct a new reading list for Orson. It had been amongst a heap of flyers on a shelf below the pigeon holes in Orson’s lodging block, before she’d been given his email address, that she had found the leaflet that advertised the St Christopher’s Social Dance Club. It was your fault I went, she thought, mentally addressing Orson in words.

  He had done his Oliver Twist essay for her in week one of his course. Week two, this week, he’d done a second essay, on lawyers’ clerks. Now Kit wanted him to think about the alluring character of the woman detective in nineteenth-century British police fiction. ‘Orson: Week Three’, she tapped, ‘Reading + Questions to Bear in Mind’.

  Some time past eleven, exhausted and growing dull, Kit creaked up onto her feet and went to the kitchen. The moment the idea of supper struck her, she wanted to eat; but as she was still deep in mulling over facets of her work—facts, stories, murder—she experienced a blur of disappointment when she discovered Michaela, who had the other room in the flat, perched on the kitchen table with a chocolate biscuit. Still, another human being to talk to.

  ‘Been out?’

  ‘Library,’ said Kit.

  ‘Do I smell?’ Michaela pushed a stray crumb into her mouth with the back of her hand.

  ‘Not from here.’

  ‘Good. Look at us,’ Michaela waved her half-biscuit expansively, ‘Friday night. Bloody useless.’

  Kit girded herself. ‘Ah, but beforehand, you’ll be amazed to hear, I went out dancing.’

  ‘I completely don’t believe you. Where? I mean, seriously?’

  ‘I went to a club—yes, “seriously”—over in East Oxford. Not what you think, a club in the sense of learning how to do—a kind of a mix-up of styles, I don’t know, Latin steps and different kind of things like that. It was really funny.’

  ‘Kit, I’m amazed. Good girl. Good work! I would’ve never believed it. And those dance clubs. I mean, it’s so uncool it’s almost cool again.’ Michaela shook another biscuit out of an expensive-looking tube. ‘Any blokes?’

  ‘I’d have expected you to ask me that first.’ Kit leant on the fridge, a small, student-grade appliance. She put her elbow on top of it and rested her hip against her hand. ‘Strangely enough, I did get this bloke wanting to know if I’d be going back next week. But it was a trial thing, the class I mean, and I wasn’t even in the right level, although it was okay actually, I coped. But, basically, I don’t think I’m going again.’ She shrugged with false cheer, slopped over further and opened the fridge to assess her supply of one-person food containers and packets. Already she was in a state of regret that she’d mentioned the dancing merely for the thrill of giving Michaela a surprise. She was happy to be a witness to Michaela’s own ups and downs, indeed somewhat relished the details, but was herself by habit reticent.

  ‘I didn’t know you danced in, like, a properly got-together way,’ said Michaela.

  ‘I can’t claim it was proper; but my father sent me to ballet lessons as a kid. He wanted me to learn to walk tall, which worked, I have to admit, although I used to loathe it—’ coleslaw, garlic bagel, fudge yogurt, ‘—wriggling about with a crowd of midgets in pink tutus, and all I had was a black leotard—ask my mother. Fucking hell. And anyway—’ couscous with sweetcorn and red pepper, two days over its sell-by date, ‘anyway, I spent half my time lying on the floor next to the piano because of nose bleeds. But he said, “If you slouch, it’ll make you look even taller.” He thinks no one’s going to marry me. There was this pair of ancient dinner ladies at my primary school who used to say, “You could be a Bluebell Girl when you grow up.” Have you heard of them, Bluebell Girls?—a particular sort of six-foot, Parisian stripper.’

  ‘Talking of slouching,’ said Michaela, ‘you know Mr Fleet who does maintenance stuff round by the back bicycle lockups in college?’

  ‘Mr Fleet, yes.’

  ‘He came up to me this afternoon and started talking about his wife. So what was I supposed to do? He starts telling me about how he thinks she’s stopped loving him, and he says, “My wife doesn’t kiss me properly any more. She only kisses me like this.” And he says, “Look, I’ll show you.” And I’m thinking, crap, he’s going to kiss me. By the way—no, sorry—no—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘No, doesn’t matter. So, yes, he takes my hand and sort of—kind of flutters his mouth just over it, just—I—I mean, Ki
t, it was one of the sexiest things that’s happened to me in ages.’

  ‘Well, well,’ said Kit with a guttural purr.

  ‘Yes, I know. And now I can’t work out where to leave my bike.’

  ‘How about—the back bicycle lock-ups in college?’

  ‘I’d rather drink a pint of piss.’

  ‘I thought you enjoyed it.’

  ‘Pay attention, Farr. I didn’t say I enjoyed it.’

  ‘All the same, Mr Fleet.’

  ‘Give up,’ said Michaela.

  Kit assembled a plate of mixed leftovers and began to eat standing.

  ‘Was he fit?’ Michaela asked. ‘Fanciable?’

  ‘Who? No. That is, God knows, I don’t know. Anyway, I’m not going back.’

  ‘Come on, why not? Seriously, you’re both into dancing, right? Why not?’

  ‘I didn’t go to this thing because I like dancing. I wanted to dance—’ Kit choked on a mouthful of dankly chilly supermarket quiche, ‘—to, you know, excuse me, get lost in it, kind of—’ the wet pastry was proving horrible to get down, she had to swallow three times, ‘sorry—to enjoy being a bit out of it, you know? Like why I go to the cinema all the time. It was meant to be the same thing, just with more burn.’

  ‘How many times this week?’

  ‘What, the cinema?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh. Every day? Except today, actually.’

  ‘Honestly. Should I be worried?’

  ‘I don’t know. The death tally is in the order of, well, God, seven named characters, plus a pogrom, yes, plus a comical, multi-vehicle pile up with explosions, plus a bit of the First World War in the trenches, yet again, bore, bore.’

  Michaela looked disapproving. ‘Just tell me this,’ she said, ‘is there any reason not to go for him, that you know of?’

  Kit didn’t answer—didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t. She sat down at the table as Michaela slid off it. Michaela didn’t leave, though. She started to make them both cocoas, with Kit’s milk, Kit noticed.