The police did not believe him. Shaw knew Emily was a prostitute when he met her. She swore to him she had changed her ways, and now she supplemented their income through dressmaking. Emily had been a good woman ever since they had begun to live together. Her days as a prostitute were in the past, he said. He truly may not have known – unless someone had told him – that usually by 8:00 or 8:30 P.M., Emily could be found at the Rising Sun public house on “Euston Road,” as witnesses referred to it. The Rising Sun still exists and is really at the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Windmill Street. Tottenham runs into Euston Road. In 1932, Sickert did an oil painting titled Graver’s Island from Richmond Hill, which has an uncharacteristic Van Gogh-like rising sun so large and bright on the horizon as to dominate the picture. The rising sun is almost identical to the one etched in glass over the front door of the Rising Sun pub.
Letters Sickert wrote in 1907 reveal that he spent part of the summer in Dieppe and was enjoying a “daily bathe before dejeuner. Big breakers that you have to look sharp and dive through.” Apparently he was “hard at work” on paintings and drawings. He returned to London earlier than usual and the weather was “chilly” and “miserable.” The summer was cool with frequent rains and very little sunshine.
Sickert had art exhibitions coming up in London. The 15th Annual Photographic Salon was opening on September 13th at the Royal Water Color Society’s Gallery, and it would not have been unusual for him to want to see that. He was becoming increasingly interested in photography, which “like other branches of art,” said The Times, “has proceeded in the direction of impressionism.” September was a good month to stay in London. The bathing season in Dieppe would soon be ending, and most of Sickert’s letters of 1907 were written from London. One of them stands out as weird and inexplicable.
The letter was to his American friend Nan Hudson, and in it Sickert tells the fantastic story of a woman who lived below him at 6 Morning-ton Crescent suddenly rushing into his room at midnight “with her whole head ablaze like a torch, from a celluloid comb. I put her out by shampooing her with my hands so quickly that I didn’t burn myself at all.” He said the woman wasn’t injured but was now “bald.” I fail to see how his story can possibly be true. I find it hard to believe that neither the woman nor Sickert was burned. Why did he mention this traumatic event only to dismiss it quickly and move on to discuss the New English Art Club? As far as I know, he never mentioned his bald-headed neighbor again.
One might begin to wonder whether at age forty-seven Sickert was getting quite eccentric, or perhaps his bizarre story is true. (I don’t see how it can be.) I was left to wonder if it might be possible that Sickert fabricated the incident with his downstairs neighbor because it might have occurred the same night or early morning of Emily Dimmock’s murder, and Sickert was making sure someone knew he was home. The alibi would be a weak one should the police ever check it out. It wouldn’t be hard to locate a bald downstairs neighbor or find out that she had a full head of hair and no recollection of a horrific encounter with a fiery comb. The alibi may have been for the benefit of Nan Hudson.
She and her companion, Ethel Sands, were very close to Sickert. His most revealing letters are the ones he wrote to them. He shared confidences with them – as much as he was capable of sharing confidences with anyone. The two women were alleged lesbians and, most likely, no threat to him sexually. He used them for money, sympathy, and other favors, manipulated them by mentoring and encouraging them in art, and revealed to them many details about himself that he did not divulge to others. He might suggest they “burn” a letter after they read it, or go to the other extreme and encourage them to save it, in the event he ever got around to writing a book.