The Detective and Mr. Dickens (25 page)

I probably would not report this meeting at all, if it did not ultimately have relevance to the story I am trying to record in this memoir. Perhaps, when this story finds its audience in another time and place, it and I will not be judged so harshly as I feared I would be, if this meeting came to light under the censorious gaze of my own age.

As I write this secret memoir, I cannot help but feel that it should be as meticulously plotted as a novel. But real life doesn’t happen like a novel. Sometimes things which are not part of the plot occur in the midst of heated plot development. What is the writer to do? Simply forget some events and only emphasize others? Or, report the events of reality as they occur? That is why I am writing of this meeting, because it helps me to understand what my story is all about, and why I am writing it down after all these years.

That afternoon of Dickens’s and my visit to Lord Ashbee’s impressive collections, I stepped down from our hired cab at the end of my narrow street, and waved as St. George clattered away. I was pleasantly drained yet exhilarated at our afternoon’s adventure as I walked to my lodgings at number seventeen. I lived in two small rooms with a pantry, off Longacre on West Dickson Street, a cozy suite of bachelor digs. The afternoon was closing fast, the sun blinking feebly through the grey overcast.

“Mister Collins, sir?” came a voice from the shadows of a crevasse between two stone buildings.

It was Irish Meg Sheehey’s voice. When she stepped out into the waning light, she was like a luminous apparition painted on some sensual Renaissance canvas. Her fiery hair, her dark eyes, her dusky skin, the heave of her bosom, caused by the low cut of her dress and her careless laces, all contributed to an impression which for days had haunted my heated imagination.

“Mister Collins,” she repeated. “I must speak with you.”

“Why Meg, hello, yes, it is almost dark, speak to me, of course, yes, I’m surprised to see you, Meg,” I stammered on like a flustered twit.

We stood there in the street in silence for a long moment, our eyes meeting. All I could see was the soft heave of her chest against the taut laces of her dress, the seductive invitation in her eyes, the bold cock of her head. What I failed to see was the fear and pain behind her eyes, her desperation. It was a long and riveting look. When it was finished, we both knew that it was no longer possible for either of us to lie to the other. It was as if in that long, penetrating look we had stripped each other naked. The normal hypocrisy of everyday life somehow seemed out of place in that quiet street with those soft shadows gathering around us like bedclothes.

“Yes, Meggy,” it seemed so proper to call her that as if we had become chums, “what can I do for you? What is it? Are you in distress?” And I have called Dickens St. George!

“No sir, but can I ’ave a few words with you, sir?” she answered quietly. “I needs to talk to someone.”

“Yes?” I was too confused by my own emotions to realize that she had not yet stated her business, because she was waiting for me to invite her in out of the public censure of the street. “What is it?” I repeated, and I stood there, thoroughly insensible to the look of the whole affair to whatever passersby there might be.

“’Ere, sir?” she prompted me.

My neck swivelled here and there, looking about, as her meaning suddenly pricked my consciousness of where we were, and how it must look. “No, yes, of course, let us go in,” I blurted out. “We can talk in the privacy of my rooms.”

Even as I said it, I saw the door to my rooms closing behind Meggy and my other self; I saw Meggy and that dark self clasped in each other’s arms; I saw Meggy and myself in bed in my rooms, naked, primal, damned.

We made the entrance to my building without being seen, and climbed the stairs undetected. The wooden door swung silently closed behind us and we were alone.

Suddenly, standing facing her in the fading light of my sitting room, terror burned like a hot wire straight through me.
What was I doing?
I was a gentleman, and I had admitted a common woman of the streets into my private lodgings. I was already compromised.
What a prig you are!
some other voice croaked.

“What is it I can do for you, Meg?” I asked. “Is it about the murder case? Have you been threatened?”

“No sir, no. I needs to talk to someone. ’Bout me. That’s all.”

“I am afraid I don’t understand. If you are in some kind of trouble, would it not be better to discuss it with Inspector Field?”

“Inspector Field don’t care ’bout me.” The words virtually exploded from her. “In ’is book I’m just a street ’ore, an animal like all the other creetures ’ee pushes an’ pulls an’ dangles aloft for ’is amusement an’ uses for ’is purposes. ’Ee don’t care for me. ’Ee summons me to ’is rooms an’ ’as me. If ’ee knew I’d told you that ’ee’d ’ave me taken up, ’ee would. If I die ’ee’d just git summat else for ’is informer. Wouldn’t even remember my name in a fortnight.”

Though she never raised her voice, there was a violent despair in her words, a desperation and bitterness that frightened me.

“I don’t want to die that way,” her voice quickened. “Not in the streets. Not in a ’ole in the water. Not like Mister Dickens’s Nancy, beat to death. Not from the pox or consumption. I want to be a normal person, not a gin-soaked old ’ag. I needs ’elp to be so, to change. Please, I needs ’elp.”

It was such an impassioned plea, so elegant in its way. She was so sure and clearsighted in her perception of her self, her world, her terrible future. For a woman of her class in our age in the city of London, there were so few alternatives. She was very perceptive about what her future would be if she remained on the streets.

“But Meg,” I said, the uncertainty quavering in my voice, “why me?”

“I comes to you because you’re a gentleman an I sees the way you look at me.”

I stared at her.

“You’re my only chance, Mister Collins,” she went on, warming to her performance. “You look at me different from all the others.”

She is using all of her feminine wiles to entrap me
. I considered my position, but I could not take my eyes from her breasts rising against the flimsy top of her dress. I remembered the first time I had seen Irish Meg, my immediate attraction, which I had, just as immediately, driven down into hiding in the underworld of myself.

“What? How do I…” I stammered, then pulled up short.

She perceived my confusion, and it gave her courage.

“You want me, I can tell, but you also look at me like I was somebody, a ’ooman bein’, not just a thing to be bought an’ used an’ thrown out after. Not just a dirty street ’ore,” she spat that epithet. “I’m not that to you, am I, Mister Collins, am I?” She was not begging. Her question was more a challenge than a plea for approval.

“No, Meg, of course not,” I said, looking levelly at her, and (to my own consternation) realizing that I meant it. Yet, I did not wholly mean it. I wanted her as a whore. I could not avoid the fact that her being so readily available was the genesis of my attraction for her.

“I see ’ow you looks at me. You’re lookin’ at me that way now. Like you want me, but you don’t know what to do with me.”

“Yes, I do look at you, think of you.” I realized that we were in a contest for control. Suddenly, that other room from the night before intruded itself upon my fantasy; a man alone with a woman in his lodgings, the door closed, it had ended in murder. What
was
Irish Meg doing in my rooms? Had she come to seduce, and then blackmail me? To murder and rob me? Was her accomplice, Tally Ho Thompson perhaps, waiting outside?
What a nervous twit you are!
I thought, trying to mock away my misgivings.

“The very first night, I seen the way you looked at me,” she repeated more boldly, “an’ I said to myself ‘this one’s interested, ’ee is, this one’s all eyes ’ee is,’ an’ I couldn’t help but laugh. You want to buy me, don’t you? Try me? It’s easy. All it takes is coin. Or power, the kind that Field ’olds over me.” She said the last bitterly, and then repented mentioning his name. “Oh, sir, on your ’onner as a gentleman, you must never say that I spoke ’is name ’ere. ’Ee’d ’ave me taken up.”

“Inspector Field? He uses you…in
that
way?”

“’Ee does.” She said it boldly, with no reticence or guilt. “An’ I ain’t the only one. ’Is wife died, you know, couple of years ago, of a fever. ’Ee doted on ’er. ’Ee is very gentle with me when we’re in that way. Oh, God, ’ee must never know I said any of this.”

“He will never know from me. I do not want to buy you, to have you that way.” Her eyes fixed upon mine, and flayed away all the hypocrisy of my surface life as a proper gentleman, accused me, charged me, sentenced me, and pardoned me, all in one fierce, riveting look.

“Yes, I want you,” I heard myself confessing aloud. I could not believe that I was allowing my private dreams to see the light of reality. “I cannot deny it.”

Her eyes never wavered from mine, but her face relaxed, lightened around the corners of the eyes and mouth, as if a cloud had suddenly passed across the face of the sun.

“…yet I could never bring myself to buy you for an hour or a night,” I finished.

“You can be anythin’ you want to be, do anythin’ you want,” she said, breaking her spellbinding silence. “You can think what you want to be, an’ then you can make your thoughts come alive. You could make yourself fall in love with me, Mister Collins, if you thought about it long enough.”

She moved closer, her face tilted up to be kissed, her eyes mesmerizing me. Now, twenty years since Irish Meg looked at me in that way, I realize that what she was defining was the power of invention of the novelist, that I had been pursuing under the mentorship of Dickens. What Irish Meg was saying was, that a person (or a writer) need not be bound only to private dreams (or fictions), that he could venture out into the world, and invent a life in reality as well—invent a life, and then live it, a life born out of art.
That is why Dickens goes out to walk the streets late at night
, I realized.
That is why Dickens so enjoys taking such risks in the real world
. A writer could take a single image—a London fog or a moonlit woman in a white dress—and turn it into an elaborate fiction, then he could follow that fiction wherever it might take him.

“Yes, we can be anything we want to be,” I agreed. “We can change, make ourselves better than we are.”

“You can…because you’re a man. A woman ain’t that lucky. I’m a woman in a world where wimmin are nothin’, worse than nothin’ if they’re alone. Maybe in novels wimmin can change, be on their own, find jobs as governesses an’ the like, but it ain’t that way in real life on the streets.”

“What is it, Meg? Tell what you want of me. I desire to help you.” I wanted to reach out to her, take her in my arms, but I could not move.

“I wants to leave the streets, sir. I can read an’ write. I wants to work for a gentleman like yourself or Mister Dickens. Could you ’elp me, sir? I would do all your bidding. I would be off the streets an’ yours for only your private purposes.”

Slowly, I began to feel the heat rising in my blood. Irish Meg stood before me, willing, petitioning, and I knew that I could simply reach out and touch those dusky breasts rising to each voluptuous breath she drew. I knew that she would counterfeit love for me, employing all of the oft-rehearsed gestures and roles of an accomplished actress. How ironic that both Dickens and I should be captivated by such adept actresses. Some sentiment within my confused, divided self made me hang back, because I knew that I would possess only art, not life.

Her eyes never wavered. They challenged me. It was as if her eyes were asking me out of a street-worn curiosity: “You know you ’ave me, my fine young gentleman, now just what is it you propose to do with me? Use me an’ pay me, as one pays a cabman for the convenience of ’is ’orse?”

“You want me,” she said once again (yet there was a quiver of fearful desperation in her voice). “I can see it when you looks at me. You wants to love me. But can you? Could you love one ’oose bin a ’ore? Or do you just wants to own me?” She paused to draw a breath which drew my eyes to her rising breasts. “I wants ta be loved, I do. But men can’t love the likes o’ me. I’ve seen lies told in the name o’ love. I’ve seen hexploitation passed off as love. Love don’t come ta ’ores. Only the river comes. I’m runnin’ from the river. I don’t care ’ow it’s done. I just want to escape the streets before I die. That’s why I come ta you.”

My voice, my words, yet I knew not what I was saying. She had carried me away as if on a tide. “Yes, I want you,” I said. “I want you as all the others want you, yet I cannot buy you. Ours is an attraction of bodies, yet we are still beings with hearts. You are here because your heart still retains some shred of its humanity; your heart can still hope for some real life despite all the falseness which has imprisoned it.”

As the words tumbled from me, her eyes widened as if surprised, like that night on the river when I gave her my scarf. I could not pull my eyes from hers.

“Can’t buy me?” she seemed puzzled.

“No,” I said, though I wanted to.

“Why not? Anyone kin buy me.”

Now, the desperation was in my voice. For some reason, it was suddenly important that I make her understand. “Do you think that all men are incapable of love?” I did not wait for an answer, but rushed headlong on. “Do you believe that all men simply want to buy and own women? If you believe that, then there can be no love because you will not allow it.”