The Twisted Heart (19 page)

Joe looked down into his lap and said quietly, almost to himself, ‘Although I wanted to hit him, the
reason
I wanted to is that I'm so sick of being in a position where doing something like that, where hitting someone, is even remotely imaginable.'

Kit found herself at a loss for how to reply, so she merely gave Joe back his line a little altered, as if this were a psalm: ‘You wanted to hit him because you didn't want to have to.'

‘Kit,' Joe flicked a look at her for a second, ‘I should tell you, I want to tell you—Humpty, even for him, Humpty's in a bad way. I have a bad feeling about it. Christ knows, we've been through enough with him already in my family, but, right now—this isn't a great time, and,' Joe was looking all around the restaurant now, ‘he got sent away to Milan to get him out of the way, I deduce, which may be the last favour any of them ever does him—' he shook his head. ‘I wish I'd met you when things were simpler, but they just aren't.'

Kit paled. His finishing remark sounded oddly rehearsed, and it arose in her mind that perhaps this was it, that Joe was preparing to terminate their friendship, Michaela had been right:
The End
. Michaela—‘I know someone who could get him a job,' Kit said, ‘in a bottle factory, near Rochester, Humpty. You—' Joe was visibly flinching, Kit began to get in a snarl again—‘last week, you said—I found out for you in case it was a help.'

‘You spoke to someone about my brother?' he asked, his tone caustic.

‘I didn't say who it was about.'

‘I'm glad to hear that,' still icy.

‘I just asked about it,' she said, adding without conviction, ‘for his own sake.'

‘A
bottle factory?
'

She quailed. ‘Isn't that—the kind of thing he might do?'

‘He's a furniture restorer,' said Joe crushingly, ‘a craftsman. A fucking bottle factory, I'm not so sure. You know the Mackintosh desk in the flat?' His voice began to rise. ‘You don't just decide to send my brother away and stick him in a fucking factory, Kit. Where did you get that idea? What—have you found him somewhere to live?'

She felt sick. Joe was swearing at her. ‘I'm sorry,' she said. ‘I'm sorry. I didn't realise—I didn't know what he did. He keeps saying about living in a field. I didn't decide anything. It was just—' She remembered now, the first time she'd met Humpty, saying to Joe afterwards, ‘In at the deep end,' and Joe saying, ‘This is nothing like the deep end.'

The waiter came, crashed their plates together, and said, ‘Can I bring you the menu?'

Joe cleared his throat. ‘Kit?'

‘No, no, I'm good,' she said.

‘Coffee?'

‘No thanks.'

She tried to split the bill with him, but he wouldn't let her.

Outside, the temperature had dropped so far that their clothing was no longer adequate to keep them warm. Kit hugged her coat around her tighter than the job done by
the buttons. A thick fog was making everything damp now, not just the air.

‘This way?' said Joe, pointing up towards the Woodstock Road.

Kit nodded.

‘Do you want to take a bus?'

‘Walking's fine,' she said, and thought that, this way she could pace herself into readiness for a fumbled goodbye. Perhaps he really was going to finish it, was just waiting for a suitable turn in the conversation:
The End
. ‘Unless you want to, I mean,' she said. She looked round at Joe, startled by a misapprehension that he was choking. He had merely cleared his throat. He seemed so much more definite to her than she felt she was herself, with his low voice, scarred fist, and his eyes, that her tallness didn't compensate for how slight he made her feel.

They proceeded to walk, and spoke about this and that, woodenly at first, before a sham ease came over their conversation. They strolled along together through the stage-set fog, chatting like friends, until, all too soon, they drew near to Kit's home.

‘Where are we going?' she said, birdlike in the tilt of her head, and was almost fearful when Joe suggested coffee at his flat.

As they turned down his street, Kit recognised the elderly gent who emerged from the mist into a pool of street-light ahead of them. ‘There's Buddy,' she said. It was intrinsically quaint to her to be able to call an old man, ‘Buddy'.

‘Yes, right, you met,' said Joe.

‘Joe,' said Buddy, with a well-worn nod; and then, staring around, he said, ‘How about this, my word. And you can just smell winter, the sniff of it.'

‘Kit,' said Joe, introducing her.

‘Evening,' said Buddy. ‘I won't keep you. This feeling keeps—reminds me of when I was a boy. My father died when I was twelve: didn't really know him. Bit of a reprobate, like Humpty.' Again the gruff nod to Joe. ‘I went to the Public Record Office at Kew the other day. Very interesting. Read all his dispatches from the Second World War.'

‘The Public Record Office,' breathed Kit, thinking, of
course
.

‘Gave an account every month, two figures at the end of each: so many wounded, so many dead. He filled them all in till he got his fingers shot off and became one of them. Never took a bullet again.' At this, Buddy sounded almost regretful. ‘He died of a fever in the end. To be honest,' he said, ‘not many young take an intelligent interest in the war these days.' And then, returning to where he'd started, ‘This fog reminds me of when I was a boy.'

‘Absolutely,' said Kit, touched with excitement: she hadn't really been listening. The Public Record Office, how could she not have thought of it? Imperatively, yes, she must check their catalogue—because, what if they had holdings on Eliza? ‘Brilliant,' she said.

Buddy took stock of her, surprised. ‘Well, in that case,' he said, ‘I've a little something you might like to look at.'

‘I—yes?' Kit glanced round at Joe for help, whence no help came, only a smile.

‘He wasn't much of a correspondent,' said Buddy, ‘but
I've my grandfather's letters from the Great War, and they're a gold mine, a treasure trove, mostly the Macedonian front. He was a padre, but he insisted on sticking with his battalion when most of the chaplains flunked it. Spent months in front of the guns, took services in the trenches, constantly under fire. Had to organise the burial of the dead, a massive job in this case, out on the mountain slopes.'

‘Thank you
so
much,' said Kit. She had begun to concentrate now. ‘I'll look forward to that. It sounds excellent. But you mustn't trust me with anything too precious.' This funny old man had supplied her with an opportunity to be kind, to appear kind; and yet, a first-hand account of the horrors of trench warfare, let alone Orson's 600-page novel—where was she going to get the time? Oh God, what a messed-up day.

‘Don't you worry about that,' Buddy was saying. He gave Joe a wink—of approbation, it seemed, a not-bad sort of a wink, evidently with reference to Kit. ‘Won't keep you. Cheerio for now, then,' he said.

As Buddy ambled off, Joe murmured, ‘That made him happy.'

‘No, well,' said Kit, ‘I'm extremely grateful he made me think of the Public Record Office.'

‘You think you'll go? Keep hunting?'

‘If they have anything, yes.'

Joe nodded at this information. He let them into the house, the front hall of which wasn't much warmer than outside.

‘Where do you imagine Buddy was off to?' said Kit, as she hung up her coat. Her heart began to race at what she was doing.

‘Buddy?' said Joe. ‘You mean, will he be back soon, and will he come straight up here with his war notes?'

‘Exactly. A hundred per cent spot on, because I—' a nervous carelessness overtook her, she didn't want the day to end badly—didn't really want it to end at all, ‘because—I quite feel like taking all your clothes off; but, if Buddy's going to show up, yes. I mean, he was going away from the house, right, wasn't he?'

‘If Frank hadn't just died—' said Joe.

Ah, he was turning her down. That was a
no
. Kit's heart thumped yet harder inside her. A ‘no', then. Ah. Well, never mind. So what? Did it matter?

She yelped as Joe slid his icy left hand under her tee shirt, and pulled sharply away from him—a reflex. ‘Sorry,' she cried, clutching the cold imprint of his hand on her belly. ‘Sorry. I'm sorry. Sorry.'

He looked at her. ‘Finished?' he said.

‘Yes.' All of a sudden they were joking together with their eyes. Kit listened, in pantomime, for footsteps on the stairs, then said, ‘Well, this is a silly situation.'

‘Only quite,' Joe replied. ‘Anyway, Buddy's no fool.'

‘Let's go out on the balcony,' she said. ‘Let's jump out of the window.'

‘Why? It's freezing.'

‘Please.'

‘Kit—'

‘Please.'

Outside, aloft, up above the great array of back gardens, visibility was so poor that it hardly extended over the
balcony's rim, apart from the weak glow of lit windows trailing away to either side. Across Joe's vertical flower beds, innumerable spiders' webs gleamed with water droplets. The sodden air was heavy also with the scent of wood smoke, and there was a light splashing sound as drips fell from gutters and soaking trees. The scene was strange, yet earthly; quiet, but also fantastical.

Kit communicated her next thought with one eyebrow and a gesture of the hand.

‘Out here?' said Joe. ‘You mean it?'—his voice subdued by the deadened air. ‘I'm at your mercy, I'm just asking.'

‘Out here,' she replied, with artless determination.

‘This puts a whole new slant on the concept of a blanket of mist.'

‘Blankets would definitely be good,' she said, ‘and,' stooping back in through the window, ‘we could—' she began to attempt what she was describing, ‘get your mattress thing—' She hefted it towards her. After all, she understood now how he organised himself, when he lay out on the balcony and thought about maths.

Joe laughed, climbed back inside, disappeared, then returned with a heap of bedding. ‘Pillows, two blankets, a quilt,' he said. ‘This is going to be uncomfortable.'

‘I'm not fussed.' Kit took a deep breath. ‘We could be on the moon out here.'

Joe looked up into the invisible distance. ‘Not that you get mists on the moon.'

‘No.' Not that you did.

‘Also cold, though,' he said.

And these were the last words either of them spoke, ‘also
cold though'. Whatever else they might have said, understood or not understood, they put it aside for now. Nobody wanted them, nobody cared, as the fog lent a kindly, obliterating halo to their wishful human forms.

Kit crawled out of bed, her hands shaking. The past few days she had suffered a series of debilitating headaches, though she felt mysteriously sure now that she was clear of them; only her hands, and the dullness of fatigue, slowing her down. Friday: it should have been a high point of the week. But maybe not this time.

She had parted from Joe seven days earlier unsure she hadn't offended him, and had become increasingly stricken since at the thought that her generous attempt to get rid of Humpty had been really a big mistake. She had become convinced that Joe must still be planning to drop her—he could make do with the quality-goods blonde, right?—that in the unfortunate minute that she had spoken of the bottle factory, he could only have relegated her to the position of false friend. After all, real life wasn't like some pulp Victorian novel where you sent your unwanted relatives away; and even if it were, nine times out of ten, she thought wryly, in a book of that kind, the dreadful relative came back at the end and made things worse.

Kit brushed her teeth, her hands still unsteady. Joe had made a date with her the previous week to meet at the club this evening, it had been almost the first thing they'd discussed. But whether the date still stood, she didn't know. She had felt confused when she'd climbed back in off the
balcony; euphoric, wrung out, and so suddenly angry that she hadn't wanted to speak—hadn't asked about it, hadn't been told.

She would go to the dance hall in the hopes he might be there, but wouldn't expect it.

First, though, right now, Friday morning, she was going to make a lightning trip to London. It wasn't a sensible plan but she was doing it anyway. She hadn't gone on Wednesday as she'd intended, had slept through her alarm and woken in a haze at around eleven. But today, here she was awake in time, and, if shaking, still determined.

She got herself out of the house and stumbled along the cold and quiet streets to the railway station, picturing for no good reason how it might have been had she been murdered on Joe's balcony, killed like Eliza or Nancy, but out on a balcony, a great amount of blood spurting scarlet over the rail and falling down, down, down through the fog, to the untended garden below. 

On the train Kit slept again, densely. She awoke at Paddington feeling sick, dozed on the Underground to Kew, drank a large amount of coffee in the Public Record Office cafeteria, then made her way up to the main reading room to work.

She had ordered in advance two murder confessions, the sum total of relevant material she could find listed under ‘Grimwood, Eliza'. As these had to be
false
confessions, Kit was very aware that she didn't really have much excuse for bothering with them, interesting though they might prove, in their own way.

Buried amongst the correspondence in the first of two boxes was a letter that implicated a girl who had supposedly admitted to killing Eliza out of jealous affection for Eliza's last client. The tenor of the note was frankly unconvincing. The second box yielded up a confession made directly by a pathetic individual, ‘of extreme bad character', who had hoped by this means to get himself discharged from the army, preferring prison. As he turned out to have been unavailable at the time of the murder, this wasn't convincing either. What the documents did both show, however, was that raising the Grimwood case at this time was a sure-fire way to get yourself noticed. In the 1840s, if you claimed to know who had killed Eliza Grimwood, even where the chances of your being right were unbelievably slender, the police would still be summoned. The government had continued to be anxious to see the thing solved.

It took Kit all of twenty minutes to decipher the two relevant bundles of papers. And that was that. She had come a long way for nothing.

She was still deeply tired, and didn't at all feel like setting off back to Oxford again at once, so, with half-hearted curiosity, she began to look through the other miscellaneous documents in the boxes before her. Most appeared to have been stored together on the sole ground that they had been sent in the same general period to the reigning Under Secretary of State: a letter agitating for road improvements around Bolton in the Moors; a copy of a pamphlet aimed at the rate payers of Newbury, traducing ‘the American, whom you have the misfortune to call your Rector'; and, as Kit read with particular sympathy, a furious epistle from a Mr
Cox, who believed he had been unfairly refused permission to read in the British Museum Library.

As Kit drew close to emptying the second box, and was on the point of pulling herself together and leaving, she turned over a loose file that made her heart jump. Uncatalogued but unquestionably real: she caught her breath and bent down closer to the near-impenetrable, nineteenth-century script—here, no,
yes
, God Almighty, was the official police record, Charles Field's handwritten, signed police notes, every last detail, logged by him day after day as the investigation unfolded, of every step he had taken, every false step, all the evidence he had gathered, everything, in his painfully unsuccessful attempt to track down Eliza's killer. 

Kit stood with her arm around the bus stop, her knees sagging, trying to relive the moment of her discovery. Hard to believe she had been in Kew only a few short hours before. She and Joe hadn't had time to speak before the dancing began. They had simply smiled their greetings, and she had then more or less collapsed into his embrace, so wiped out had she felt, weakly elated and unhappy—thrilled that he was there, but worried, even though he
was
, that he didn't much trust her any more.

And then, well into the first hour of steps, Joe, without warning, had broken ranks and begun to turn her round and round in their corner at the back, ignoring everyone and—he had concentrated them, blindly but on purpose, within their own primitive dance: one
two
, one
two
; one
two
, one
two
; Lucille yelling ‘Hello?' at them, ‘Hello?
Hello?
'—they ignored her as well—the pair of them dancing seamlessly as one, lost in rhythmic oblivion, tranquil.

They had continued like this, just as they pleased, until the music next stopped, when, still without speaking, they had left. 

‘So, hello there.' Joe also grasped the bus stop, with his good hand. The other, Kit noticed, he was still protecting. He sounded okay though, cheerful.

‘Hello, yes, hello. How are you?' Kit replied.

‘This is where I first spoke to you,' he said.

‘Yes. Yes, and I thought you were some kind of—what? I don't know. Because of the way your hair is cut so short, and you look like—tough, you know.'

‘Perhaps you'd better not explain,' he said humorously.

Nearly November, the frost in the air was making her nose prickle. There had been heavy rains earlier in the week, but the sky, now, was clear, clean, black, star-strewn, icy.

‘Come to my place. I'll give you a feast,' said Joe.

Kit let out a small cry of dismay.

‘What?' he said. ‘I got artichokes. What is it?'

‘What about The Forfeit?' she said.

‘We don't have to. Humpty's in Milan. I'm completely free. Come to my place. I need to talk to you.'

Kit didn't know how to proceed. ‘He's still in Milan?' she said.

‘Oh, yes,' said Joe, ‘last week, when I told you he'd gone, I thought he had, but he turned up the next morning about six a.m. Christ knows, if you'd stayed the night instead of scarpering, you'd have seen him. But anyway, there he was,
six in the morning, in a terrible state, fuck it. Turns out he and Pauly didn't manage to leave until Tuesday; something about the car they were using.'

‘Bloody hell, I've totally messed up,' said Kit, feeling fraught.

‘What do you mean?'

‘You know I told you I have a brother, much older than me, Graham?' she said. ‘Do you remember? I only usually see him a couple of times a year? Well, he phoned me up today at lunchtime, when I was in London, and said could I have a drink with him this evening because he was coming to Oxford for a meeting tomorrow, and where did I suggest, and—it's just, he called me out of the blue, so I thought the best plan was The Forfeit because—I was going to say the pub around the corner, but I couldn't remember what it's called and, and listen, you don't have to come. I can have a quick drink with him then meet you at your place, if that's good. A really quick drink, fifteen minutes, is that all right? He'll understand. He's probably there already because he said he'd arrive before we finished at the club, because I didn't know we'd leave early. I wasn't even sure you'd come. I thought you might not,' she said falteringly.

‘Why?'

‘Let's not talk about it.'

‘We forgot to exchange numbers last week.'

‘True.'

After a pause, Joe said, ‘See that pied wagtail?' and pointed at one that was bobbing along the pavement.

‘I like them,' she said.

Joe looked back up at her. ‘You thought I might not come, but you came anyway? You're a funny combination of being
happy and scared. At least, I thought it was funny at first,' he said. ‘I've come to wonder whether the two don't go hand in hand.'

‘Well, my impression,' replied Kit slowly, ‘is that you are a bit too weary at life to be scared much of anything.'

The traffic roared past them as each considered what the other had just said. ‘I think I've become more scared since I met you,' remarked Joe, after a while.

‘Oh,' she said, ‘sorry.'

And he said, ‘If you ever had anything to apologise for, it isn't that.'

Kit shivered as her body warmth began to dwindle. ‘Did you see the sun setting before class?' she asked, ‘how red it was? It was blue-black that way,' she gestured vaguely east, ‘and then, that way,' westwards, ‘the horizon was ablaze, but with a couple of low-lying clouds in long streaks above, in this lovely, threatening, purplish colour? And above that, the aeroplane vapour trails were lit right up making brilliant orange squiggles over the sky, like the after-image on your retina when you stare at a lightbulb filament, except, I mean, all up in the sky.'

‘It was beautiful this morning too,' said Joe.

‘Yes,' she replied eagerly. ‘But like they said before—Humpty's friends, remember?—this evening it was the sun and the moon both there at the same time, and the sun was rich and scarlet and blurry, and the moon—' she waved a hand at it, rising, three-quarters full, ‘well, it's incredibly distinct right now, incredibly precise. It was really possible to understand, looking at them both at once, that they're these orbs out in space, and we are too. You know the clocks
go back this weekend? I hate it. Look, here comes a bus. What am I saying? Sorry. Yes, I—'

They got on and settled in side by side.

‘How was your sudden-death talk?' Joe asked. ‘And you said you went to London today?'

‘Yes,' she replied, exhaling bleakly. ‘Oh. This week's been very up and down. The seminar, I survived—I think. I hope. People did at least laugh here and there. I don't know. It was okay. I should have done it better. My stomach was in complete knots while I was speaking, but I think my voice sounded normal. I hope so. Michaela's been being incredibly narky, still. I mean she's been being unpleasant for ages, for no reason I can make out. She seems to have this permanent bug up her butt: so critical.'

‘About what?'

‘Oh, stupid things, anything, small things. My clothes, for example.'

‘What about them?'

‘Exactly. Anyway, I don't care. I'm completely out of it at the moment,' said Kit. ‘God, last Saturday I had to go to a lunch thing at the Master's Lodgings, and I was talking to this bloke about what I did, just blabbing on in a superficial way, and for the life of me I couldn't remember whether I'd already asked him what he did or not, you know—in, you know, our opening exchanges. I was talking to him pretty much on automatic pilot, thinking, if I ask him what he does and he's just told me, I'll give the impression I'm completely uninterested by him—which I was, by the way. But if I haven't already asked, and I
don't
ask, he'll think I'm rude.'

Joe laughed. ‘So what did you do?'

‘I decided to ask, possibly
again
, and then be ludicrously interested whatever he replied. But just at the point of me getting the words out, he got taken to talk to this virus expert person, so I was effectively rude anyway, and may well have seemed uninterested as well, I don't know. I mean we're talking last Saturday lunch. It still qualified to me as basically the morning after the night before—so far as I was concerned. And you know about the night before.' She glanced at Joe under her lashes.

‘I'd say the sacrifice in civility was worth it,' he replied, with a little smile of his own. ‘And tell me about London quickly, before we tackle your brother?'

‘He's a sweetheart.'

‘I'm sure.'

‘No, well, I got a train to Paddington this morning, got the Tube miles across London to the PRO—I mean, why exactly is the Underground so hot, when it is underground?'

Kit had intended this question to be rhetorical, but to her surprise, Joe replied, ‘In large part because the friction caused by the movement of the trains through the tunnels heats up the surrounding air.'

‘Oh,' she said, ‘what a wonderful thing to know.'

‘I have a friend who worked as an engineer on the Jubilee Line extension.'

‘Very good. Brilliant. Have you been there?'

‘Where? The Jubilee Line extension? Oh, the Public Record Office. Me? No.'

‘I kind of liked it. They have this mosaic globe sculpture outside, called something like, “The World as Seen by Representative Lunatics”.'