Bohemian Girl, The (2 page)

‘I certainly hope not!’

‘God ought to be allowed to laugh, surely. Jesus laughs somewhere, doesn’t he?’ Denton thought of telling Atkins an American joke - a rabbi and a priest are almost run down by a carriage, and so on - but he wasn’t sure it was relevant. ‘Is this about a woman?’

‘Now you’re offending me.’

‘It’s like you to have been led into the tent by a female. Was it Katya?’ Katya had been some sort of hanger-on at the prison (actually, Denton thought, Colonel Cieljescu’s - the commandant’s - mistress), but Atkins had been much taken with her.

‘I’ll give notice if you keep this up.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with hearing a call to God just because the voice is a woman’s. Read
Adam Bede
.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘That’s the title. Upright man who falls in love with a lady preacher. Not your usual, however.’ Atkins was a great reader of Charles Lever. ‘George Eliot.’

‘I thought it was Adam Breed.’

‘The author.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘It’s a her. England’s greatest novelist.’

‘I haven’t had your advantages.’

‘You’ve had exactly my advantages; you just made different use of them.’ This was only roughly true: both men had been in the army, both had been poor, but one was English and one American, and one was a servant and one was a figure of some notoriety, even fame. Denton indicated the notepaper. ‘Wha’dyou think?’

‘I think he’s a gent who’s coming it a little high, as you say, but I don’t see nothing suspicious. He buys a painting, finds an envelope, sends it to the person it’s intended for. Trail’s cold after so long; female has either had harm done to her or not by now.’

Denton read the woman’s letter aloud. ‘“Dear Mr Denton, I should like to come by one evening to seek your advice. I believe that someone threatens harm to me and I do not know quite what to do. If I may, I will call and if you are not in I will return. Mary Thomason.”’ Atkins had been pouring coffee and now put it down next to him. Denton said, ‘No salutation - simply “Mary Thomason”. Suggestive. Have some more coffee yourself.’

‘Don’t mind if I do. Suggestive of what?’

Denton shrugged. ‘Unconventionality?’

‘Ignorance, more likely.’

‘No, it’s a good hand, trained, and she says “I should like”. Mmmnmh. Maybe in a hurry or maybe wanting to seem businesslike, but maybe unconventional.’

‘You’re off on a hare because the thing was found behind a painting - arty stuff. You think, “Art, Bohemians, unconventionality, that’s for me!” Rushing your fences, Colonel.’

‘And how do you find something “behind a painting”?’ Denton sipped his coffee. By now, Atkins was sitting in the other armchair. ‘He can’t mean on the wall behind a painting, because he says he bought it, and I can’t believe he bought the wall, too. What he probably means is “in the back of a painting”.’

‘Not my line of work.’

‘Nor mine, but we’ve both turned paintings over.’ There were four or five on the walls, two more in the downstairs hall, both stinkers he’d bought because they were big and he was trying to fill a lot of space. ‘I suppose Aubrey Heseltine could tell us.’

‘You’re intrigued.’

‘I am. I’m guilty, or bothered, or something. A woman thinks she’s appealed to me for help, and I don’t hear her cry until too late.’

‘Hardly your fault, is it? She never sent the letter, did she? There wasn’t no stamp on it, was there? The back of a painting isn’t exactly the Royal Mail, is it? No on all counts. She thought better of it; you’re free and clear.’

‘Why did she put the letter in the back of a painting?’

‘Did she? You got no evidence.’

‘Well - you have me there. But the letter didn’t put itself in the back of a painting. Hardly “thinking better of it” to put it there, was it? The trash would be the likelier place.’

‘But you don’t know she did it. It’s moot.’

Denton studied him, or seemed to; he was really thinking of the woman and the somebody who might have wanted to harm her. ‘I think I’d like to know where Mr Heseltine bought the painting.’

Atkins put his eyebrows up and rose, gathering the cups and putting them with the ruin of Denton’s breakfast. ‘I’m off, then,’ he said.

‘What are you off to do?’

‘Stack this lot for Mrs Char and then read my Bible. Going to look for jokes. You’ve got me thinking.’

‘Good.’

Atkins got to the end of the room and put the tray into the dumb waiter and then said from the gloom, ‘Mind, I’m not to be got at with secular reasoning. I’m a saint by revelation.’

‘Nice, having a saint for a servant.’

He went on down the stairs, the door banging behind him. Denton didn’t want to rob the man of his religion if it was a genuine comfort to him, but he liked Atkins better when he was doing what amounted to a music-hall turn as a comic servant. After thirty-one years in the British army, Atkins was an accomplished batman, liar, thief and entertainer; he could cook, press, argue with creditors, give points on etiquette and do imitations of every officer he’d ever served. Denton was sure he did imitations of Denton, too, or at least had until Calvinist humourlessness had revealed itself to him. Atkins needed to be shaken out of his dumps, Denton thought; he needed to be seized by a new interest.

Well, maybe the outdated letter from Mary Thomason would fill the bill.

He went upstairs to the room that served him as both bedroom and office, littered now with the relics of life after the prison. He kicked aside the worn boots in which he’d walked out of Transylvania, the straw suitcase that had been all he could afford in Cluj, the canvas jacket he’d worn as a deckhand on a Danube steamer, and sat at the dusty desk.

It hurt him that there had been no letter from
her
. Maybe she didn’t know he’d got out. Maybe she thought he was dead; she lived in a world of prostitutes and want, read few newspapers, knew nobody. He sighed. They had corresponded throughout the trip; even in prison he had written to her, for the last weeks almost every day. Letters from her had reached him until he’d been arrested; then he had got nothing from her, hadn’t expected to, but he’d sent her a cable as they had come through Paris on their way back and had thought - hoped - he’d find a note asking him to come to see her. Maybe the cable hadn’t reached her. Maybe—

He tried now to write her a note to tell her he was alive, that he was in London, hesitating at once over ‘My dearest Janet’, settling for ‘My dear Mrs Striker’, then ‘Dear Mrs Striker’, then writing a page about not receiving letters from her at the prison and then being on the run, about missing mail, all of that, then pitching it out and writing simply, ‘I’d like to see you. May I visit?’ He sent an unhappy Atkins out to find a Commissionaire in Russell Square to carry it to the telegraph office, reply prepaid.

He sat on, head on one hand, elbow on desk, staring out of the unclean window at the back of another house forty yards away. He sighed again. The happiness of the early morning couldn’t last; left behind were Janet Striker’s silence, the mystery of the woman who had left the note in the painting, the irritating knut at the Albany who had found it.

He decided to write to him: ‘I must thank you for forwarding to me the envelope you say you found behind a Wesselons. May I call on you to discuss this matter briefly?’ Mr Heseltine, he thought, would say yes, because he suspected that Mr Heseltine was the sort of pretentious ass who would have pitched the envelope into the coals if he hadn’t recognized that it was addressed to a well-known author.

The question was, why did Denton want to discuss the matter with him at all? As so often, his own motives seemed rooted in a guilt about something he hadn’t done. His gloom deepened. The only antidote he knew was work. He would go to work; he would try to recover the novel that he couldn’t bring out of Central Europe. He had written an outline of it before he had left London six months before. It was in a drawer in the desk.

He pulled the drawer open. It was empty. He was going to shout for Atkins when he found that Atkins was standing at his door. Denton said, ‘Have you been cleaning up my desk?’

‘Not likely. You know somebody wears a black bowler and has a red moustache?’

‘Did you find a Commissionaire?’

‘’Course I did.’

‘I’m missing something from my desk.’

‘I haven’t been home long enough to pinch it. You know a bowler and a red moustache or don’t you?’

Denton was going through the other drawers. ‘I hope not. Why?’

‘Looking at us from the window of the house behind.’

‘Lives there, I suppose.’

‘Housemaid two doors up says the house is empty and to let. Then, coming back from finding the Commissionaire, I see him skulking across the way. Have yourself a look.’

They both went along the corridor to the front of the house, on this floor a small bedroom he never used. Side by side, they looked down into the street. ‘Gone,’ Atkins said. ‘I knew it.’ He sniffed. ‘Suspicious.’

‘What’s suspicious about it?’

‘He had a rum look.’

‘Probably what he’d say about you.’ Denton went back to his desk.

Atkins followed. ‘As long as I’ve come this far, I might as well get your clothes.’ Denton’s blank look made him add, ‘Air them out. Six months in the clothes press. Eh?’

‘Well, hurry up, I’m working.’ He began again to search the drawers he’d already looked through.

‘Could have fooled me.’ Atkins loaded his arms with wool suits. Going out, he said, ‘That fellow was a bad actor, I’m telling you. They know you’re back, Colonel.’

‘Who?’

‘Your enemies.’

Denton put on an old shirt and hugely baggy corduroy trousers, stuffed his feet into leather slippers and went up another flight to the attic. Could he have left the outline up there? The unfinished wood smelled the same as it had six months before - dusty, dry, resinous - and his exercise contraption seemed the same, his dumb-bells, his Flobert parlour pistols, locked in their case and hidden under his massive rowing machine. The old Navy Colt that had been with him since the American Civil War, however, wasn’t there; like his novel and his Remington derringer, it hadn’t made it back from Transylvania. The outline wasn’t to be found, either. Denton hoisted a hundred-pound dumb-bell, thought he’d lost strength in the prison. He sat in the rowing machine, looked up at the skylight to make sure that nobody had tried to break in, went back downstairs. Checking his domain, like a dog pissing at corners.

Then he sat again, trying to find if he could recall, word by word, the novel that the Romanians had thought too dangerous to return.

The outline was nowhere in the house. Nonetheless, the novel was mostly there in his head, still his if he hurried to get it down on paper. He had seen the phenomenon before when he had lost a page or two of something and had had to do it over, then had located the original, and, comparing them, found that the second reproduced the first almost exactly. Writing was concentration; writing was thought: what came hard stayed in the brain. And pulling it back out, setting it down on paper, blotted out everything else - Janet Striker, the little Wesselons, the somebody who might be looking at them from the house behind, although that was an idea of Atkins’s he thought overblown, nonetheless offensive: he hated being spied on. Even having somebody read over his shoulder irritated him.

At two, he threw the pen down and rubbed his eyes. The left one stung. He supposed he’d need glasses soon. Distance vision was good - he could still shoot the spade out of an ace at twenty yards, as he’d proven to the sceptical officer who’d run the Romanian prison. But reading and writing made the eye hurt. The idea of eyeglasses piqued his vanity, reminded him of Janet Striker, brought back his feeling of deflation.

‘I’m going out!’ he shouted down the stairs. He’d walk, he thought, clear out his brain. At the very least, he could carry the pages he’d written up to his typewriter in Lloyd Baker Street. He wouldn’t trust anybody else to do it, anyway - the only copy, its loss not to be risked a second time. He started to pull on a different shirt and trousers, then went to the stairs and bellowed down, ‘Are we still wearing black?’ Victoria had died in January; they had left London in March, the city still in mourning.

Atkins was two flights down. He bellowed back, ‘What?’

‘Are - we - still - in - black?’

‘No - we - are - not!’ Atkins padded up to the first floor, his head appearing at the bottom of Denton’s stairs. ‘New king said three months’ mourning was enough. Wear the brown lounge suit.’

The brown suit was the only one left in the press. Atkins’s revenge for the Commissionaire, he thought: Denton disliked the suit, and Atkins knew it. Passing through his sitting room on the floor below, he automatically reached out towards a box on the mantelpiece, drew his hand back. He had been used to taking the derringer from the box and carrying it in his pocket, but the derringer hadn’t got out of the prison. Still, he flipped up the lid, as if the little pistol might have materialized there. It hadn’t.

He walked to Gray’s Inn Road, then up it to Ampton Street and so across to Lloyd Square, now and then stopping to look behind him, seeing nobody. The idea of being followed by a man in a bowler and a red moustache, of being
known
, troubled him.

His typewriter was flustered to see him, as always; they embarrassed each other somehow, as if they had some intimate past or future they didn’t dare discuss. He handed over the papers and fled to Pentonville Road where, on an impulse, he swung himself up into a Favourite omnibus - except it wasn’t an impulse, for he was still thinking of Atkins’s ‘bowler and red moustache’ and wanted again to watch to see who climbed aboard. Several bowlers boarded, none interested in him and only one with a moustache, that yellow. Atkins was seeing spooks, he decided, the product of a morbid interest in religion.