Bohemian Girl, The (11 page)

‘The Slade keep her name on a list. She’s some sort of preferred haven for new students - her record is good, I suppose. The woman I dealt with said that Mrs Durnquess was “trusted by the parents”, whatever that means. I can’t imagine that parents with a girl at the Slade know much of what goes on, unless they live in Euston Square.’

She rang the bell. Thirty seconds after a second ring, an adolescent with an Irish accent opened the door. Without waiting to hear what they wanted, she said, ‘No rooms - all gone.’

‘I want to see Mrs Durnquess, my girl.’ Janet Striker’s voice could have gone through steel.

‘Oh, yes, ma’am. Didn’t look properly at you, I’m so sorry, ma’am. I’ll git her direct.’

‘May we come in?’

‘Oh, oh, sure you may, ma’am, I’m all to sixes and sevens today - forgive the mess the students make please, ma’am - and sir - I’ll just git—’ She was off down the corridor that ran the depth of the house. A door on their left had once led to a front parlour, Denton supposed, now rented to somebody trustworthy enough to keep the front window curtains closed. On their left, a staircase ran to the upper floors, once-figured carpet climbing it wearily, held back from collapse by tarnished rods. The banister and newel showed signs of many collisions. The place smelled of boiled meat.

‘I’ve seen worse,’ Denton murmured.

‘I live in worse.’

The Irish maid appeared again at the far end of the corridor, waving them towards her. Her hair hung down in sweaty curls from a grubby cap. She was fastening her sleeves, which had been unbuttoned when she opened the door, as if they had been rolled up. ‘Miz D will see you in her parlour,’ she said, and, pointing at the last of the doors, vanished.

A voice answered his knock. The open door showed a room chock-a-block with furniture, perhaps all the ‘good’ pieces of the entire house, the rest left for the tenants. A chesterfield sofa was assumed to double as a bed. The walls were covered with paintings, cows much in evidence, the frames jammed against each other. On the shore of this sea of clutter, a vast woman sat where she could get the light from a window. Her black dress and cap aimed for austerity; her huge excess of flesh argued indulgence. ‘I am Mrs Durnquess,’ she said. ‘I don’t get up.’

‘Not at all.’ Janet Striker walked into the room as if she owned it and presented a card. ‘I am Mrs Striker of the Society for the Improvement of Wayward Women. This is one of our patrons, the well-known man of letters, Mr Denton. Our business is beneficent, Mrs Durnquess: we seek the whereabouts of one of your tenants.’

‘My tenants’ whereabouts are here, or they aren’t my tenants. I am ever so particular.’ Her accent suggested to Denton a forced gentility, but he was poor on the English of the English; anything with a dropped H was to him ‘Cockney’, most else ‘genteel’.

‘We hoped you could help us.’

‘I’d be ever so happy to help you, Mrs - mmm - Strickers - I don’t have my right glasses on - and at once when I am apprised who the person might be.’

‘A young woman named Mary Thomason.’

The fat face pouted. Some delicacy had been denied it. ‘Gone,’ she said.

‘Ah.’ Janet sounded to Denton as forced as the landlady; he’d never heard her put on the full gloss of the middle class before. ‘As we feared. Gone from our ranks, too - oh, not as one of our clients, not one of
the
women. Rather, a volunteer. A helper.’

‘Gone.’ Mrs Durnquess sighed. ‘Not like some, not folded up her tents like the Arabs in the middle of the night and as quietly stole away down Fitzroy Street. No, she was a good and honest girl; she paid her rent and a week ahead, but she has gone.’

‘May I ask when? We have missed her since August.’

‘It
was
August. Won’t you sit down, Mrs mmm, and you, sir. I stand so little any more, but I know it is fatiguing. The Queen Anne side chair is quite comfortable, or the Récamier. Yes, it was August. She left me a note and a shilling, and she disappeared.’

‘Do you know why?’

The head, topped with grey sausage curls that might not have been entirely real, bobbed up and down. ‘Her father. An accident at the works. I have only the haziest idea of what a works may be, and it suggests a level of society not of the best, but she was a good, sweet girl with manners well above that station.’

‘She told you in the note that her father had had an accident? And so she was going home to be with him? And where was home?’

Mrs Durnquess waved an arm from which flaccid muscle hung like dough. ‘The west.’

‘Cornwall? Devon? Wales?’

‘Mary was an artist and suffered the artist’s flaw of inspecificity, though it is inspecificity that makes them artists. Many of my tenants are artists, or artists in embryo. When the late Mr Durnquess passed away - also an artist, twice accepted annually at Burlington House but not, alas, an RA - I was left with only this house and his paintings.’ A fat little hand waved at the walls. ‘I survive by renting rooms that were formerly my domestic haven to students in that great cause - Art.’

‘Ah.’ Janet glanced at Denton. ‘Mr Denton has spoken with her employer.’

‘The man Geddys? Hmm-hmm. I never approve of older men and younger women. Not to suggest that there was anything. I disapprove of speculation, especially on that score. But—’ She raised her tiny, blackened eyebrows. ‘He saw her home from work more often than perhaps a
gentleman
ought to have done.’

‘Could she have run off with him?’

‘Oh!’ It was a breathy little yelp. The thought of running off had a very strong effect. ‘To Gretna Green? I hardly think. I had required to speak with him in January and reminded him that we must appear to be upright and to
be
upright. People, I said, must not be given cause for scandal. I required to know what his seeing her home meant.’ She pulled herself up a little, sniffed. ‘He was - is - a very
smooth
man, if made somewhat unattractive by a physical affliction. I told him I was not subject to flattery or sham. He took my meaning and said quite forthrightly that he saw Mary home because she was in his employ and she was a naive, sweet creature in a city full of risks. I gave him what I refer to as the benefit of the doubt. It is true, after all, that a child like Mary was vulnerable, to put a point on it.’

‘And that was the end of it? A note and a shilling?’

‘Why, no, there was her brother. Next, I mean. In her note, she said that her brother would come for her things, and the brother would bring another note from her as his bona fides. And so he did.’

‘And what sort of man was he?’

‘Why, somewhat like Mary. One could see the family resemblance. Bigger, to be sure, manly, rather poorly spoken, I fear - taking after the father, I suppose. Mary spoke like a gentlewoman. But he had the aforementioned note, and he gathered up her things, and that was the end of it.’

Denton leaned forward. He was sitting on a chair with a horse-hair seat, very high in the middle, and he risked sliding off if he didn’t keep his balance. ‘And her things?’

‘She wasn’t wealthy in the things of this world. He brought a little trunk and a man to carry it, and he put her things in it and away they went.’ She waved the other arm towards Euston.

Denton asked more questions about the brother, but she had told them what she knew. As for the man who carried the trunk, she said, ‘My maid, Hannah, dealt with him.’

Mrs Durnquess said she was fatigued then and would she excuse them, and she pulled on a tasselled cord that hung from a cast-iron arm up near the moulding. Janet Striker tried one or two more questions, but they’d got what there was to get; half a minute later, they were out in the corridor. Slow, thumping footsteps announced the Irish maid, who appeared in a narrow doorway, sleeves pushed up again, face red. ‘Going, are you,’ she said.

Denton gave her a shilling. ‘We’re looking for Mary Thomason.’

‘Who’s that, then? Oh, the little thing that was up in Seven. She’s been gone for ages.’

‘Going on three months, I think,’ Janet Striker said.

‘And me the only servant in the place, it seems like years.’

Denton gave Janet a look that meant that he wanted to do this one himself, and turning back to the maid he said, ‘Your name is Hannah.’

‘And what if it is?’

‘Hannah, Mrs Durnquess says you dealt with Mary Thomason’s brother.’

‘Sure, there was no “dealing with” him. He come, he got what he wanted, he left.’

‘What did he take?’

‘And how would I know? He brought a box with him; I suppose it was heavier when he left than when he walked in. He didn’t fill it with nothing of
ours
, you may be sure.’

‘Did you stay with him while he got the things?’

‘Not me. Haven’t I got plenty else to do than watch somebody fill a box? He emptied the room of her stuff, that’s all I know. Little enough she had, poor thing. A lot of art stuff. When the brother was gone, it was gone. I got the work of cleaning the room, of course, but she’d left it pretty good.’

‘Did she have friends in the house?’

‘If she did, I never saw them. Madam don’t like visitors, and she don’t like to-ing and fro-ing between the rooms. She hears the footsteps over her head, she raises the roof. Of course, I’m the one’s supposed to set it right.’

‘Did you ever have to set Mary Thomason right?’

‘Her? No, she wasn’t the sort. Quiet.’

‘And the brother? Did he ever visit her?’

‘Never saw him before. Little cock o’ the walk, if you take my meaning. Fancied himself, I thought - couldn’t be bothered to carry the box, but brought a man to do it.’

‘And where did they go?’

‘You think I have the time to watch folk off the premises? They went, that’s all, and good riddance. He give me tuppence. A
great
gentleman, I don’t think.’

‘And the man? Did he help the brother pack up her things?’

‘Not him. Half drunk he was, and the brother wouldn’t have him in the room at all. I had to take him to the kitchen to keep him from skulking about and doing who knows what. He wasn’t a bad sort, oney in my way, and a bit deep in the beer for the time of day.’

‘Do you know the man?’

‘Me? Know some layabout that pushes a cart? I’m a decent girl.’

‘He didn’t give you a name.’

‘Oh, he did, like he expected me to shine it up and put it on the mantel for a keepsake. “Alf ”. If he’d had more front teeth and a clean shirt he’d have been about half the man I’d care to spend five minutes with.’

‘Old or young?’

‘Born old and got older quick, would be my guess. A lot older than me, I can tell you.’

‘Did he say where he could be found?’

She laughed. The laughter transformed her; he could see the robust farm girl she had been a year or two before. She pushed some hair back from her forehead. ‘I give him a cuppa tea and one of me scones and he tried to -’ she glanced at Janet - ‘to what you’d call take a liberty with me, and he said if I was lonely I could always find him in the arches behind St Pancras station. I laughed in his face! I’d have to be dead lonely because there was nobody left on God’s green earth before I’d go prowling for the likes of him!’

Denton said she had a hard row to hoe, and he gave her another coin. She showed them out, and he heard her footsteps clumping back towards the rear of the house. On the pavement, he said to Janet Striker, ‘Well?’

‘My very thought.’

‘At least we know that Mary Thomason’s gone.’

‘To “the west”. Not very helpful.’

‘I think I’ll go looking for Alf.’

‘My very intention.’

They were walking towards Euston Road. At the corner, Janet Striker swung round and looked back at the house. ‘At the Society, we tell girls who’ve taken to the street that they’d have a better life in service. You see a girl like Hannah, you wonder.’

‘She’d be better off back on the farm.’

‘Oh, aye, except for the starvation.’

They crossed Euston Square and turned towards the Midland Railway station. The great medieval bulk of the station hotel loomed above the other buildings, its towers and walls like one of Ludwig’s wilder fantasies. Denton said, ‘“The arches behind St Pancras”. Where the rail lines cross St Pancras Road, I think.’

She took his arm. ‘I go to Old St Pancras Church sometimes. Bits of it were put up not so long after the Romans left.’

‘I didn’t know you go to church.’

‘No, I expect not. You don’t?’ So they talked, wading painfully through their ignorance of each other. Church-going, the war news, did he have old friends, ‘being political’ - were these issues worth testing each other on? Odd and unpredictable, the doors one opens to try to find the other person.

He told her more about Albert Cosgrove, muted the encounter in the dark house, the knock on the head. Reminded, by a roundabout linkage, of his back garden, he said, ‘Dammit - I promised Atkins I’d get somebody to dig. Sorry - not your concern—’

They turned down St Pancras Road, and the crash and rumble of Euston Road fell away. Here, the traffic was mostly carts and wagons, the odd bus, a cyclist dodging in and out. She said, ‘Do you really need somebody to do physical work?’

‘I don’t think a woman would do.’ He thought she meant her Society.

‘Would you take a Jew?’

‘I’d take a Hottentot.’

‘If a man named Cohan shows up at your door and says I sent him, put him to work.’

The street seemed to grow older as they walked, brick changed here to stone. Denton was aware of the plain-clothed policeman following them. Felt a stab of annoyance, wondered if it was because of something to do with Mary Thomason - hardly, as he’d gone to the police about her - or Janet Striker, or simply the fact of being watched. For whatever reason, he was tired of that presence always back there.

Ahead, the railway tracks crossed above them on a stone roadbed held up by massive arches, the central one open for the road itself, the others turned into small factories, machinists’ works, the odd rag-and-bone shop. They asked at only two of them before a red-faced man in a soft cap shouted ‘Alf the carter?’ over the rumble of iron tyres on macadam. ‘Cross under, third arch on the right. Though he might be out jobbing.’