The Map of Time and The Turn of the Screw. Felix J. Palma
prepared to rescue their apparently doomed love even if it meant altering the very course of the universe? And if that was the case, did he possess the same strength? Did he have the necessary conviction to embark upon what he already considered a lost battle?
However hard he tried, Andrew could not imagine Marie Kelly moving in his world of refined young ladies, whose sole purpose in life was to display their fecundity by filling their houses with children, and to entertain their spouses’ friends with their pianistic accomplishment. Would Marie Kelly succeed in fulfilling this role while trying to stay afloat amid the waves of social rejection that would doubtless seek to drown her, or would she perish like an exotic bloom removed from its hothouse?
The newspapers’ continued coverage of the whores’ murders scarcely managed to distract Andrew from the torment of his secret fears. One morning, while breakfasting, he came across a reproduction of a letter the murderer had audaciously sent to the Central News Agency, assuring the police they would not catch him easily and promising he would carry on killing, testing his fine blade on the Whitechapel tarts. Appropriately enough, the letter was written in red ink and signed ‘Jack the Ripper’, a name that, however you looked at it, Andrew thought, was far more disturbing and imaginative than the rather dull ‘Whitechapel Murderer’ by which he had been known until then.
The new name was taken up by all the newspapers, and inevitably conjured up the villain of the penny dreadfuls, Jack Lightfoot, and his treatment of women. It was rapidly adopted by everyone, as Andrew soon discovered from hearing it uttered everywhere he went. The words were always spoken with sinister excitement, as though for the sad souls of Whitechapel there was something thrilling and even fashionable about a ruthless murderer stalking the neighbourhood with a razor-sharp knife. Furthermore, as a result of this disturbing missive, Scotland Yard was deluged with similar correspondence (in which the alleged killer mocked the police, boasted childishly about his crimes and promised more murders). Andrew had the impression that England was teeming with people desperate to bring excitement into their lives by pretending they were murderers, normal men whose souls were sullied by sadistic impulses and unhealthy desires that fortunately they would never act upon.
Besides hampering the police investigation, the letters also transformed the vulgar individual he had bumped into in Hanbury Street into a monstrous creature apparently destined to personify man’s most primitive fears. Perhaps this uncontrolled proliferation of would-be perpetrators of his macabre crimes prompted the real killer to surpass himself. On the night of 30 September, at the timber merchants’ in Dutfield Yard, he murdered Elizabeth Stride – the whore who had originally put Andrew on Marie’s trail – and a few hours later, in Mtre Square, Catherine Eddowes, whom he had time to rip open from pubis to sternum, remove her left kidney and even cut off her nose.
Thus began the cold month of October, in which a veil of gloomy resignation descended upon the inhabitants of Whitechapel who, despite Scotland Yard’s efforts, felt more than ever abandoned to their fate. There was a look of helplessness in the whores’ eyes, but also a strange acceptance of their dreadful lot. Life became a long and anxious wait, during which Andrew held Marie Kelly’s trembling body tightly in his arms and whispered to her that she need not worry, provided she stayed away from the Ripper’s hunting ground, the area of backyards and deserted alleyways where he roamed with his thirsty blade, until the police managed to catch him.
But his words did nothing to calm a shaken Marie, who had even begun sheltering other whores in her tiny room at Miller’s Court to keep them off the unsafe streets. It resulted in her having a fight with her husband, Joe, during which he broke a window. The following night, Andrew gave her the money to fix the glass and keep out the piercing cold. However, she simply placed it on her bedside table and lay back dutifully on the bed so that he could take her. Now though all she offered him was a body, a dying flame, and the grief-stricken despair she had been unable to keep from her eyes in recent days, a look in which he thought he glimpsed a desperate cry for help, a silent appeal to him to take her away before it was too late.
Andrew made the mistake of pretending not to notice her distress, as though he had forgotten that everything could be expressed in a look. He felt incapable of altering the very course of the universe, which for him translated into the even more momentous feat of confronting his father. Perhaps that was why, as a silent rebuke for his cowardice, she began to go out looking for clients and spending the nights getting drunk with her fellow whores in the Britannia. There they cursed the uselessness of the police and the power of the monster from hell who continued to mock them, most recently by sending George Lusk, socialist firebrand and self-proclaimed president of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, a cardboard box containing a human kidney.
Frustrated by his lack of courage, Andrew watched her return drunk each night to the little room. Then, before she could collapse on the floor or curl up like a dog beside the warm hearth, he would take her in his arms and put her to bed, grateful that no knife had stopped her in her tracks. But he knew she could not keep exposing herself to danger in this way, even if the murderer had not struck for several weeks and more than eighty policemen were patrolling the neighbourhood. He also knew he was the only one able to stop her. For that reason, sitting in the gloom while his beloved spun her drunken nightmares of corpses with their guts ripped out, Andrew would resolve to confront his father the very next day. But when the next day came all he could do was prowl around his father’s study, not daring to go in. And when it grew dark, his head bowed in shame, occasionally clutching a bottle, he returned to Marie Kelly’s little room, where she received him with her eyes’ silent reproach.
Then Andrew remembered all the things he had said to her, the impassioned declarations he had hoped would seal their union. How he had been trying to find her for he did not know how long -eighteen, a hundred, five hundred years – how he knew that if he had undergone reincarnations he had looked for her in every one, because they were twin spirits destined to meet each other in the labyrinth of time, and other such pronouncements. Now he was sure Marie Kelly could only see his avowals as a pathetic attempt to cloak his animal urges in romanticism or, worse, to conceal the thrill he derived from those voyeuristic forays into the wretched side of existence. ‘Where is your love now, Andrew?’ her eyes seemed to ask, before she trudged off to the Britannia, only to return a few hours later rolling drunk.
Until, on that cold night of 7 November, Andrew watched her leave again for the tavern, and something inside him shifted. Whether it was the alcohol, which, consumed in the right quantity, can clear some people’s heads, or simply that enough time had passed for this clarity to occur naturally, it finally dawned on him that without Marie Kelly his life would no longer have any meaning so he had nothing to lose by fighting for a future with her. Filled with resolve, suddenly able to breathe freely once more, he left the room, slamming the door resolutely, and strode off towards the place where Harold Barker waited while his master took his pleasure. The coachman was huddled like an owl on the seat, warming himself with a bottle of brandy.
That night his father was to discover his youngest son was in love with a whore.
Chapter V
Yes, I know that when I began this tale I promised there would be a fabulous time machine, and there will be. There will even be intrepid explorers and fierce native tribes – a must in any adventure story. But all in good time. Isn’t it necessary at the start of any game to place all the pieces on their respective squares? Of course it is – so let me continue to set up the board, slowly but surely, by returning to young Andrew, who might have taken the opportunity of the long journey back to the Harrington mansion to sober up, but who chose instead to cloud his thoughts further by finishing the bottle he had in his pocket.
Ultimately, there was no point in confronting his father with a sound argument and reasoned thinking: he was sure that any civilised discussion of the matter would be impossible. He needed to dull his senses as much as he could, staying just sober enough not to be completely tongue-tied. There was no point in slipping back into the elegant clothes he always left judiciously in a bundle on the carriage seat.
That night there was no longer any need for secrecy. When they arrived at the mansion, Andrew stepped out of the carriage, asked Harold to stay where he was, and hurried into the house. The coachman watched in dismay as he ran up the steps in his rags, and wondered