The Twisted Heart Read Free Page B

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 windowsglittered 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