The Bad Sister (29 page)

I have also put down as best I could my own impressions of the characters and setting of this odd tale; but if it hadn't been, once more, for Tilda, I would not now be in possession of a second, and vital, piece of oral evidence.

‘The last time I saw Eliza,' Tilda said, ‘on the day before we went round to call on her, she was sitting at a table by the window – she must have pulled the sofa across after that – and she was dictating a message into her answering-machine. I remember, because she was such a long time speaking, and I thought maybe she dictates addresses and phone numbers of somewhere she's going to.'

It was a weird feeling, calling the number of a person you know to have disappeared – and who, possibly, is also dead – but call I did.

Ms Eliza Jekyll's message, to whomsoever it may concern,
is presented here, after Dr Crane's dictated jottings, in order to solve the mystery.

I was surprised to receive a letter from Eliza Jekyll on the day after her dinner party. May the eighth. We'd had a pleasant evening; it had been good to see an old friend in a less, I suppose one would have to say, exalted state than she had manifested on the infrequent and unsuccessful occasions of our meeting over the last year; and I must admit to a feeling of slight complacency on opening the envelope. Eliza was, in all probability, writing to thank
me
for coming to her dinner, and for openly resuming our friendship. That this was hardly the case was soon painfully evident.

I reproduce the letter in full, in the interests of medical science. And, I plainly confess, as a proof of my irremediable guilt in this grim and unsavoury business. My blindness and insensitivity as a member of the medical profession have led, in the main, to a state of affairs so appalling that no memory can encompass it without turning the corner from sanity into silence and madness.

This, as I know, is the path which is marked out for me. Yet my first reaction to Ms Jekyll's (hand-delivered) letter was that it was my correspondent who had gone mad.

I had to move a patient to my partner Dr Bassett, all of which caused a good deal of inconvenience all round, but I went to the flat in Nightingale Crescent, half convinced, as I say, that I would have a duty to have my friend committed to a mental asylum by the end of the call.

Mrs Poole, as obviously arranged, let me in. But as far as a speedy exit from the flat went, this was not to be. I won't attempt to reproduce her speech, but the gist of what she said – and she was alarmed – considerably – I could see, amounted to a strong suspicion that violent and unpleasant scenes were taking place on the premises. There were tables overturned when she came in this morning, she said – and further signs of a struggle. That woman was back. That Mrs Hyde. And she was attacking her benefactor, who'd never in her life – and Mrs Poole knew this for a fact – done anything wrong. Miss Jekyll was hiding her somewhere here. And – this was the worst of it – when Mrs Poole had been coming back late from the pub with her husband and her sister-in-law last night, she'd heard such a sound coming out of this floor, such a sound as you couldn't for the life of you describe.

I asked Mrs Poole if she could nevertheless try. I was frightened myself, I have to admit: and all the while we stood there talking I was keeping my eyes on this little cupboard in the corner of the room furthest from the window, with its dream-like oddly disconcerting picture – like a Romantic opium scene, I suppose you might say – of a girl in a ball-dress with bare shoulders sitting at a desk on a great sweeping balcony and beyond rocks and the sea. The noise had at first been just a woman weeping, Mrs
Poole said. But after that – her sister-in-law had said it was like a lost soul. And Mrs Poole, as if suddenly embarrassed by herself, proceeded to inform me she had to get to the shops before early closing and left the flat with all the bustle and sound of a denizen of this earth, lost soul or no.

I was both relieved and faintly alarmed by her going. But I went, steeling myself, to the squat little cabinet, knelt down, and opened the third drawer.

There, sure enough, was a twist of white tissue paper.

And there, on the back of a half-scrumpled envelope, was the name and phone number of London's most notorious doctor – a man who had deliberately allowed the deaths from overdoses of at least two world-famous rock stars; a man known to ask no questions while supplying lethal amounts of anything from amphetamine to crack, or heroin.

It wasn't hard, when I cautiously undid the twist of paper, to recognize the drug. We'd had enough patients in casualty at St Charles – young, nearly all of them, and supplied with the stuff no doubt at the clubs from which they were carried unconscious to an ambulance. So Eliza Jekyll – I must say that my brain reeled at the thought of the composed and beautiful Eliza a secret addict of the most destructive and, as yet, largely unknown in its long-term effects, substance on the black market: by name, Ecstasy.

As I still knelt there, the doorbell rang. And, as I paused, wondering what these ‘further developments' were going to turn out to be, it sounded again and again, with a desperation that seemed to come right through the entryphone system and into the room.

‘Yes?' I said finally into the receiver – and beginning to be properly afraid, I have to admit, for the shuffling, whimpering sounds on the other side of the door were unmistakably those of the person – or thing – with its finger jammed down on the bell.

Of course, there was no answer. I didn't press the buzzer, but went to fling open the door of the flat.

The account of what followed must not be taken as a symptom of the increasing confusion and partial paralysis of the central nervous system which has succeeded the revelations of that brief quarter of an hour in Eliza Jekyll's flat. I was able to dictate notes immediately on return to my practice – with the door locked, it goes without saying – for fear that a colleague or patient might hear this tale of the – apparently – impossible.

Mrs Hyde stood at the door. The murderer of Jeremy Toller, subject of a worldwide police search, stood in front of me, hunched, whimpering, bedraggled, hand outstretched.

‘Did you open the cabinet, Frances?' said the creature (for so, to my bitter shame, I confess I saw her). And, coming into the flat and pushing the door violently shut behind her – ‘I was sent by Eliza. She sent me, Frances, to collect the—'

Here Mrs Hyde stopped, as she saw the twist of paper in my hands. Before I could pull away from her she was on me. Her teeth went into my neck – there was a vile smell clinging to her clothes, which were grey and streaked with grease as if she'd been sleeping rough in a railway station, as if, almost, the smell of sulphur she had on her had come up out of the ground to envelop her filthy clothes and cardboard shoes.

She was strong, that woman. Mrs Hyde had my arm in a half-Nelson – the hand that held the twist of paper soon relinquished its burden – and she leapt away from me, to press the contents flat down on the table.

On the round rosewood dining-table where only last night we'd all sat and discussed the coming Picasso exhibition and the Impressionist treasures from the Hermitage, Mrs Hyde sifted her drug and funnelled the paper to bring to nostrils gaping and greedy for the fix.

I should have known. And yet – how could it be? For, close to fainting, I saw the body of the most hated, the most vilified, the most hunted woman transform, translate itself, and, worse, for it should not be, to a form of beauty.

As the stooping shoulders straightened, the neck rose straight to bear a head – still dirty, true, but appearing now simply muddied by some rustic idyll or purposely for a glossy magazine sitting – that in its confidence of beauty and arrogance literally took my breath away. And the smile! Eliza's sweet, taunting smile, which I had seen her use to such good effect on Sir James Lister and others, was beamed steadily, and totally unselfconsciously, on me.

‘You see, Frances,' said this apparition, moving now to the hall and a line of fitted cupboards hidden in the mirrored walls. ‘You have been treating me all along. But when you took me off the little helpers you first put me on so long ago, I was driven to find another to take their place. And Dr Ruby brought me back – well almost from the dead!'

I couldn't find any words. It was as if – and this was perhaps the first onslaught of the famously rapid degenerative disease which has me in its grip – I had words stuck deep down in my throat and no muscle that would haul them up. I tried to ask Eliza, as she flitted into the bathroom and reappeared gleaming-faced and bright-eyed and as she wafted from the cupboard door in green raw silk suitable for the lovely May day outside, how she could fail to give herself up to the police: how she could live with the knowledge of the guilt of her crime.

But no words came.

And, with a backward, mocking glance at me, Eliza Jekyll walked out of the flat. 

Yet the ultimate blame is mine.

I treated Mrs Hyde for anxiety. Three years ago I prescribed Anxian; and on a repeat prescription that demanded no vigilance from me.

In January this year Mrs Hyde called me. She said she was desperate. I saw evidence of neglect of her children and home. She admitted to violent impulses but would not divulge their exact nature. I prescribed Mrs Hyde's withdrawal
from tranquillizers and advised a healthy diet and early nights. 

It is only recently that the effects of withdrawal from these drugs have become known to the medical profession – and to the public at large. Heroin withdrawal symptoms are compared favourably with the effects.

By failing to keep in touch with the most recent discoveries on the nature of these Pharmaceuticals and by continuing to allow Mrs Hyde to cash a repeat National Health prescription for them, I was surely condemning her to a state of dangerous disorder.

It is hardly surprising that, doubtless after reading one of those obnoxious newspaper articles, she went to the disreputable Dr Ruby.

Nothing can ever explain the personality change: its swiftness and its absoluteness. But we, as members of the medical profession, still have much to learn on the subject of personality disorders and their causes, both physiological and social.

I will not condemn Eliza to a lifetime in prison, and leave these notes for whomsoever shall find them – but only after my own death and/or the final disappearance of Ms Jekyll/ Hyde.

This is 229 46052. I'm afraid I can't answer your call at the moment. Please leave a message and speak after the bleep. 

I have one last statement to make.

I am as I am: I was brought up to believe in happiness; and my parents and schoolteachers gave me nothing but love and encouragement. I had no idea of the reality of life, of the pain and suffering which once was considered an integral part of it.

When the inevitable breakdown – for someone imbued
with impossible dreams of happiness as I was – finally came, I was in no way capable of dealing with it.

My husband left me.

I became a slut. I struck my children.

My ex-husband's last visit to me was on the twelfth of February. He lives all round the world, and I live round these gardens, where I walk like a prisoner three times a day, rain or shine.

Sometimes I think of the man who comes to visit me as the rapist, and sometimes as the old rock star who owns the building and wants to tear it down and put it up again without me. Or the man who I went to see when I first took the drug and I put my hair up high and painted my nails and went out in high heels.

And he gave me the job. In the gallery.

But already the make-up wore off too soon, tired, tired.

And the meals lie round the kids' plates like a slug.

So on the nights when the birds first begin to mate, I went out in the frost and the room I'd rented and furnished on my new salary lay behind me like a Christmas decoration, and I killed the man as he came to lock up his precious family.

IT WOULD HARDLY
be possible to make sense of a cursory message of this nature if it were not for Mara Kaletsky, who came to see me today and explained, after much beating about the bush, she ‘had been keeping something from me all along'.

On the night of Eliza's disappearance, Mara says – before the final struggle overheard and reported by Grace Poole – she had gone round to the flat in Nightingale Crescent: first, as she points out with a trace of indignation, to demand why Eliza had done nothing to save her exhibition at the Shade Gallery; second, because she had ‘a funny feeling that something was going on, and she couldn't say exactly what'. What she did see, in fact, was both surprising and intensely familiar to her, of course – for the features of Mrs Hyde, cut up and pasted down in so many of her collages, seemed, when the door of the elegant apartment was opened, to be fleetingly but unmistakably imprinted on the face of Eliza. It was like, Mara says, one of those images you get when you're half asleep – eidetic visions, she calls them (her next show will, she says, be composed of them, ‘photographs from the sleeping brain') and there was an uncanny sense of unreality in Ms Jekyll's features – for a split second – as she opened the door and led Mara through into the mirrored hall. ‘I've never experienced anything like it. Really – like hallucinating someone. And no wonder I thought so, because by the time we reached the window – it was a dark August day, remember, with the trees outside almost blocking the sky – and light came in on her, there was Mrs Hyde standing in front of me as plain as day.'

It was then that Mara decided to load her eternal video
and shoot a roll of film. It's her response, one must suppose, to any situation – and perhaps Mara is no more than a presage of a world where the sole survivors are machines; where the images of people, imprinted like Fayoum portraits at the neck of ancient Egyptian tombs, speak in solitude and isolation to each other across time. Mara, it seems, has no way of answering human distress or communication other than to record it – yet Eliza Jekyll, doubled in her self and craving a true mirror image, clearly was as keen to speak into camera as any actress long starved of a part.

Mrs Hyde is speaking. It's eerie, to see the gardens framed by the french window behind her head: the gardens where the man lay dead in February. And it's shocking, somehow, to see her in Ms Jekyll's ornate quarters – though these, by now, are topsy-turvy with dirty clothes and broken plastic toy telephones, the detritus of a woman's life with children.

‘I always had to tidy them away. If they offer you jobs they don't want to see a toy – a nappy – no.

‘At first I pushed things under the chairs and into the cupboards. But then my big break came. I was able to rent this place – next to my own impossible flat – and I was offered a job almost straight away.

‘But first I should describe what my life has been.

‘I was born and grew up in London. I went to art school in Oxford when I left school – it was there I met Jean Hastie. I'd have thought she'd have been more helpful to a woman in my circumstances. But, of course, she doesn't understand.

‘I was just starting my first job, designing textiles for a big firm in the Midlands, when I met my husband. He was a journalist, doing pieces on working conditions, Trade Union legislation, that kind of thing.'

Here Mrs Hyde pauses, and Mara brings the camera right up to her. But she turns away, losing that face in the shadow from the rich, interlined curtains her new persona had put up to impress the clients and keep out the undesirable
elements of the world. All the same, the shudder of revulsion at her appearance remains: what is it about her except that she is clearly poor and ground down by life? What is it, other than the mesh of lines which seems, by catching her face so tight in its grasp, to have shrunk her head so that she appears to be both preserved, her head like a pygmy's head kept by a collector or hunter; and infinitely decayed, as if she could at any time disintegrate altogether, leaving on Mara's screen a pure, blank roomscape. Or is it just the reality of life's hard writing on her that makes her, seen through the eyes of guilt, so alien? Aren't there a vast number like her – persecuted by a hostile state? And facing hostility and fear from the public too?

Speculation of this kind is, however, countered by Mrs Hyde's succeeding statements. One can only wish, if the woman is found and brought to trial for the murder of Jeremy Toller, that she had not made this utterance: sympathy would otherwise surely have been forthcoming, for her position was, after all, not an enviable one, even if only too common.

‘I may say,' comes the voice of Mrs Hyde from the deep shadows by the curtain, ‘that I was charmed by my husband – many were and still are – but I soon saw that there was no love there for either of us and knew I would soon be on my own.

‘By this time I had two babies, eighteen months apart. The flat in Ladbroke Grove, on a fixed rent, was possible to find in those days – and it was the area where I had grown up – though it's changed now, of course, beyond recognition.

‘I went on Social Security because there was no way at all that I could bring up these two young children and go out to a demanding job. I had no living relatives and only a few people who remembered me from the past. They, too, seemed sealed off in their worlds of trying to survive on little money and as single parents.

‘I kept the kids clean and I cooked for them. They played in the communal gardens, but as the posh people moved in,
their children threw stones at mine. Soon they were too frightened to go out there and we were all cooped up together in the flat.

‘About this time I started having the dreams. Sometimes my husband came and saw me and sometimes I saw him in the dreams, and when he came we fucked occasionally, but it was hard because of the children. One night I dreamt I saw a tear the size of a big diamond lying on my hand and I felt a terrible grief inside, as if someone I knew very well – and loved – had died.

‘When I woke, every morning after that, I knew some terrible change had come over me.

‘Where I had been lithe and supple, with a dancer's legs and quick movements, I became slow and plodding as a sack of potatoes being dragged along the street. My neck shrank into my shoulders and my back began to develop a dowager's stoop, as if I was in turn dragging a great load of people through the world.

‘But the waking moments were the worst. I would open my eyes – woken nearly always by a scream from one of the kids – and, for the first times at least, I had to do my best to repress a scream myself.

‘There would be a hand lying on the pillow next to me.

‘The hand was grey and wrinkled, and it was like a dead person's hand, limp and a darkish purple where the grey skin wasn't puckered by the join of finger and thumb. And – of course – it was my own ageing, defeated, accusing hand.

‘I couldn't bear it. As the dreams went on, and I woke each time to the sight of this lame, dead piece of tissue and bone – which seemed more and more to stand for all of me, to be none of me but clearly what I had become – I began to cry and lose my temper with the children, and find pleasure only in plunging my hands in soap and suds so scalding hot that the little, half-broken Ascot over the sink would practically splutter itself out at the pressure of it.

‘When I'd been hitting the kids so much I knew there might be a real battering in the night – an empty cot – a
social worker called (and the nosy Mrs Poole was already round when I was shouting in a voice I didn't even know, and the kids were yelling like stuck pigs) and I went to Dr Crane at the Walmer Road practice.

‘Well, the Anxian just made me cry the more. The world was grey, entirely grey. I threw out the pianola, which my husband had played once and which had some kind of a hurdy-gurdy colour to it, I suppose – and I watched it going grey in the little patch of balding grass that stands for a “patio” at this end of the communal gardens. The more I cried, the more the kids screamed. I tied them in their cots, but the social worker came again – and Dr Crane said they'd have to go.

‘She was kind, Frances Crane. She didn't like people's kids being taken away. She put the drug under my skin, in the flesh just below that terrible hand. Nothing much happened at first – but then the dreams began to change and so did I.

‘You can't imagine what it's like when your youth comes back – and beauty, and more – and the figure and the quick step to go with it. It only happened gradually at first, but I found out that if I took the pills my friend Marge gets from Dr Ruby from time to time it had some effect on the hormone drug and I could turn – just like that – into the person I had been. Yes, into me! Eliza! Where had I gone? Who had I been? But now – when I wanted, I was me!

‘For I couldn't have it all the time. It wore off, faster and faster – but of course, as you know, Mara, I was at first Ms Eliza Jekyll most of the time and I went for the interview with Sir James Lister and I got the job running the Shade Gallery in Portobello Road.

‘It was a long time since anyone had fancied me, and I couldn't think at first what Sir James was doing, making those funny faces and rolling his eyes, when I sat opposite him at the interview. Then he bent down and gave me a little kick under the table, and I knew it was OK.

‘I loved the power. Men would do anything for me. It
was no problem getting this flat – from which of course I could go next door to my children – and the same landlord that had been round threatening “me” only the month before, was all over “me” as Ms Jekyll. But then I was paying a “commercial” rent, wasn't I, as Ms Eliza Jekyll?

‘And I liked doing up the flat and giving dinner parties. The children went into a private nursery school. But one thing I desperately needed – and that was to buy the flat, the landlord was offering the freehold to those tenants who wanted them – and I wrote to Jean Hastie, asking her to do a conveyancing job for me.

‘For if Mrs Hyde was the poor poor – that is, too poor to exist without State support – and even that dwindling (legislation changed for flat-renting so as sure as anything she'd be evicted from Ladbroke Grove) – then Eliza was the “rich poor”, the individual encouraged to take out a hundred per cent mortgage: which “I” could, of course, with a job at the Shade and the hint from Sir James that I'd go on to run his design business in the South West.

‘Jean was very stubborn; but I couldn't ask a London solicitor, who might know who I was. And, as my fear grew that my strange condition would become known, I realized I had to find and destroy those pictures of “me” that you had taken, Mara – of both of me, that is – for fear that the pieces of the collage might be put together by some bright guy one day and I'd be rumbled. I went and hunted outside your studio, by the canal in Kensal Rise …

‘As the fear grew, so did the rapidity with which the drug wore off. One day, coming back from Portobello Road where I had successfully been Eliza all day, I could feel myself change – and at the same time I could see Sir James Lister walking down Rudyard Crescent and coming towards me. Oh, brother! I said to myself. And – I have to tell you – the sensation of pure violence that poured through me was the most wonderful sensation I have ever had in my life. I was bow-legged by now, and my back was hunched up – and my hand, on the wheeled shopper I was pushing
back with fine foods for the kids' supper was like the claw of some predator …

‘And as he passed me I lunged at him and I ran him down. Well, I bumped into him hard, you might say …

‘And all he saw was a poor, foul-smelling woman (for some reason these changes back to Mrs Hyde were always accompanied by a strong, unbearable smell, like escaping gas, and I always carried a raincoat with me, to cover the shrinking body and the odour of putrefaction).

‘“Hey there!” he shouted.

‘But he didn't think it worth his while to go after me. This man who had tried to fondle my breasts only an hour before! Who had invited me to a Valentine's Day lunch at the Pomme d'Amour restaurant in Holland Park Avenue!

‘But that was a date, of course, that I was in no position to take up …'

‘On the night of the twelfth of February – just a few days after this – I gave my dinner party. I was worried about you finding out the truth, Mara, because you had been behind me in the street when I ran at Sir James … but you didn't seem to think anything strange was going on whatsoever.

‘I knew better. My dreams had come back again, and the night before I'd heard the birds getting ready for an almighty burst for spring.

‘I was Mrs Hyde … unexpectedly and terrifyingly … more and more often; and that night I knew I was poised, like a china cup that might fall from a shelf at the slightest tremble of the earth, and go into a million different pieces.'

‘The landlord had been round to Ladbroke Grove and had informed me that I must pay a large sum towards the renovation of the “common parts” of the building. I told him I wouldn't; and he told me there were a good many ways of getting me out.

‘That was the day before. On the evening of the dinner, my husband – or ex-husband as he is – came to “see the kids”. I wanted him out. He'd spoil my play for the big job
with Sir James – and I was prepared to go all the way for it, I can tell you. Turning up just when he knows it'll wreck the chance of a new life for me – the no-maintenance fucking bastard.'

Mrs Hyde paused again. Then she stepped out from the folds of the curtain; and, as Mara records, something like the beginning of a return transformation must have been taking place, for she looked taller, handsome, almost.

‘I got him out in the end,' says this new apparition. ‘But it tired me, I can tell you, Mara. By the time the guests – and the food and the waiter – came, I was a wreck.