Bohemian Girl, The (28 page)

‘Gone?’ Denton had a vision of some sort of demolition, London nowadays gobbling up older buildings as if they were chunks of candy.

‘Closed. Coppers raided it. After Oscar’s trial, the Baths put out the word that it had gone out of the man-and-boy business entirely. I was told that as gospel truth. Maybe it was, for a bit. However, they started up again, Tuesday and Saturday evenings. Did regular business other days, other times. Perfectly respectable. But Tuesday and Saturday after seven, if they knew you, the old times were back. Never there myself, but my understanding is it was a bit like Smithfield Market. Very little love lost, if you follow me.’

His glass was empty. Denton ordered another, but Crosland insisted on paying for his own this time. ‘Sure you won’t have something yourself ? Always like to be hospitable. Failing of mine. Anyway. The police raided it last summer, probably to make an example. Some very well-placed people got snagged in the net. It never made the papers, except for “Closing of Mayfair Landmark” sort of pieces, kind of thing would let would-be patrons know that the cat was out of the bag. I wrote something m’self, “Memories of the Mayflower Baths”, that was as innocent as a maiden’s dream but capitalized on the moment - editors looking for stuff that would titillate. A dozen boys went up on charges, couple of minor gents - public indecency, that sort of thing, nothing huge - and the point was made. Owner doing time for endangering public morals. It’s going to reopen, I’m told, as a therapeutic spa for ladies. New name, of course.’

‘You know the names of the people arrested?’

‘Arrested, yes. Detained, no. The tale is the coppers swept up about thirty people but let most of them go at the door of the magistrates’ court. Some rather soiled drawers that night, they say. Names we’d recognize if we heard them.’

‘Himple? Crum?’

Crosland shook his head. ‘Himple the artist? Always rumours about him. You know anything I can use?’

Denton shook his head. ‘When exactly was the raid?’

Crosland raised a finger. He began to spread the coat’s big pockets with both hands, peering down into the messes of papers; at last, he drew out a small black notebook. He leafed through it. The pages looked like damp leather, thick and soft with use. ‘August the seventh.’

‘That was the day of the raid?’

‘Night. Coppers went in the door at nine-forty-five, August the seventh.’

Denton put out another shilling. ‘Worth every penny.’

A day before Mary Thomason had written her letter. Two days before Erasmus Himple had left for the Continent.

When he got home, there was a note from Janet Striker: ‘I am going away for a little. Ruth Castle will know how to reach me.’ He flushed and swore, then saw himself, a large man about to have an infantile tantrum.
She has the right to do what she wants.
It was difficult to tell himself that and mean it, yet he had to: sometimes when he looked at her, he saw a look of something like absence, and he knew she was away in one of the dark places to which he would never be admitted. He had them, too, those sinks into which the inevitable sorrows of being alive were poured and, for the most part, covered over. But it hurt that she had gone to get away from him, for that was what he was sure she had done. And damn Ruth Castle, of whom he was thoroughly sick and whom he didn’t want to see. Not now, anyway. Maybe it was not having a book to write, something to concentrate on. Maybe in a few days. Maybe Janet would come back quickly. Maybe—

He crushed the paper in his fist.

‘Do you speak French?’

Heseltine’s reactions were a semiquaver slow, as if he were thinking about something else. ‘A bit.’

‘I want to go to France for a few days. I need a translator.’

Again, the delayed response, and then a flicker of what might have been suspicion, some recollection perhaps of the discussion of the Mayflower Baths: what was Denton proposing? Heseltine’s cheekbones got some colour. Denton said, ‘It’s about the girl who sent me the note. You said you wanted to try to help her.’

‘In France?’

‘Her brother.’ He told him quickly about Erasmus Himple.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I don’t either. Something happened in Normandy. They were supposed to stay the summer, but after a month they packed up and went to the South of France. Then Himple fired him. Something started in Normandy, I think. Maybe a lovers’ quarrel.’ He kept his eyes on Heseltine’s. The younger man’s cheeks got bright spots high on the cheekbones. ‘It might do you good to get away. Get a new perspective on things.’

‘I wouldn’t dare take Jenks.’

‘Neither of us needs to take anybody. We can be there in a day, back in another couple. It isn’t as if we’d be staying at the Ritz.’

‘My French is terribly rusty.’

‘Rust is better than no metal at all. I’d just get the spike and shout at them.’

Denton insisted that they could start the next day; he didn’t say that the post-partum depression of having finished the book now gripped him. Heseltine at first demurred, then became almost manic, swinging from torpor to excitement. Now he was sure he could be ready in an hour. They could take the night boat. Anything was possible.

Denton bought two tickets on the morning train and the Le Havre boat. Atkins made a face when he told him but didn’t ask to go. In fact, he made it clear he wouldn’t go on a bet. ‘Had enough travel, thank-you-very-much. Roast beef of olde England’s plenty good enough for me.’

‘You mean you have other plans. How’s the moving picture?’

‘As it happens, we’re scheduled to do the Battle of Ladysmith day after tomorrow, but that’s nothing to do with me and France.’

‘How’s the housemaid?’

‘An insufferable little monosyllable, is how she is. My pal with the picture machine has decided he’s sweet on her. Disgusting.’ He was picking up Denton’s supper tray to take it back to the Lamb. ‘I can get you somebody from an agency if you have to have an attendant on this jaunt.’

‘Much as I hate to hurt your feelings, I don’t need anybody.’

‘Hard to believe.’

‘I lived most of my life without somebody to pick up after me.’

‘That was then, General. Times change.’ Atkins cocked a cynical eye at him. ‘You going to a respectable hotel?’

‘There are no hotels. There’s some sort of village inn.’

‘Oh, well. Wear the old brown tweed. Frenchies won’t know any different.’

Denton didn’t dare let Atkins pack for him after that exchange. He got a somewhat chipped and scuffed pigskin valise out of a wardrobe and put a couple of shirts and collars and a set of woollen combinations in it - it was now almost December - and threw in extra stockings and then stood looking around the room, thinking about what else to pack. A flannel nightshirt, of course. What else would he need?

He decided that the answer was court plasters - he anticipated a lot of walking - and he found one in his desk, then remembered that he owned somewhere a small leather case of plasters, the perfect thing because it came with scissors. Where was it?

At the bottom left of the desk was a drawer he never used except as a place to throw things he wouldn’t want again but couldn’t quite throw away. He grasped the brass handle and pulled hard, because the drawer was always slow to open. To his surprise, it shot back towards him. He bent over it, seeing a lot of useless stuff, through which he tunnelled. Towards the bottom was a small basket in which he found the court-plaster case. Below the basket was only - or should have been only - a pistol almost as ancient as his Navy Colt, a Galland .450 with a curious contraption under the barrel that allowed barrel and cylinder to be moved forward for loading. The pistol was huge and heavy; he had got it for a few shillings from a pal of Atkins’s who had been ‘caught short’ for money. For a while, he had used the gun as a paperweight; then he had thrown it into the drawer.

Where it now most certainly was not. He understood why the drawer had opened so easily now - no mass of iron to weight it on the rails.

He searched the drawer again, then the entire desk.

‘Jarrold,’ he said aloud. Munro had asked him if Jarrold could have stolen any of his guns and he’d said no. He’d entirely forgotten the awkward old weapon.

‘Dammit!’

He wrote a note to Munro and left it with Atkins to be posted first thing in the morning. When he told Atkins about the missing pistol, he said only, ‘Crikey.’

The village inn at Hinon turned out to be less an inn than what Denton’s English friends called a dosshouse. Downstairs was a café; above it were several rooms where, he learned later, the proprietor stowed the village drunks to sleep it off. This happened on Saturday nights, however, and in the middle of the week the rooms went unused - unheated, grubby, bare. The room they were shown - ‘the best room’ - had a nominally double bed in painted and chipped iron, its mattress deeply furrowed in the middle. The bedspread had been darned in half a dozen places, then given up, the most recent tears left unrepaired. Except for a candle and a tin-topped washstand, that was it. The
cour
was down a corridor and then down a flight of unpainted, much-worn stairs, through a door and across a yard that was decorated with piles of horse dung. There were a long metal urinal and a single stall, its walls and floor soapstone, a hole to squat over.

‘It could be worse,’ Heseltine muttered. ‘The family
live
here and use the same facilities all the time.’

‘Hell of a place to get drunk in,’ Denton said. Nonetheless, he felt rather sprightly, action brightening his gloom over Janet Striker.

‘
Monsieur le propriétaire
says that he puts them in the rooms when they can’t stand up any more, but they come down to use the
cour
and end up sleeping in the manure.’

‘Kind of makes you understand why they move to the city. You going to be able to put up with this?’

Heseltine snorted. His colour was better, his eye livelier. ‘I’ve seen lots worse in the army.’

Denton told him to insist on two rooms, but it turned out they couldn’t have two. Only the one was made up (as what? Denton wondered) and
madame
didn’t like to climb the stairs to do another. Denton demanded at least more blankets and did manage to get those - he had to carry them up himself - and arranged them on the floor so that Heseltine could have the bed. ‘I don’t want to keep rolling to the middle and finding you’re already there,’ he said. Heseltine seemed relieved, but in the midnight darkness he swore and lit the candle and lay down on the floor himself. The bed was full of bugs.

‘That was rather desperate,’ Heseltine said next morning. They had been up at daylight, walking the village streets until they could be off. ‘I’m all over bites.’

‘The floor was no better?’

‘They came with me in the blanket. I thought some might make their way over to you.’

‘Not so many. For a man who was eaten alive, you seem pretty cheerful.’

Heseltine blushed. ‘It’s good to get away, even to bedbugs.’ Still reticent despite a day and a night together, Heseltine perhaps regretted his earlier confidences.

They had hard rolls and little coils of butter and milky coffee in the café. Men from the village came in and stared at them.

‘We seem to be good for business.’

‘They’re not buying anything.
Monsieur
keeps shooing them out.’

The villagers were an unappetizing lot. Stout, red-faced, they were mostly agricultural labourers or small farmers whose hands proclaimed their work. Denton wondered if they had ever been more than ten miles from the village. Half of them affected expressions of great slyness, the rest of great stupidity. ‘I’ve seen better-looking people in the steerage of an immigrants’ ship,’ he said.

‘The immigrants are the ones who are bright enough to leave.’

They rented a rickety one-horse carriage to make the search for the place where Himple and Clum had stayed. Heseltine had asked the proprietor of the café, but he had said he knew nothing about any ‘English milord’. Heseltine said he thought the man was put out because Himple hadn’t stayed with him.

‘He must have seen one of the rooms.’

The horse was a surprisingly good one, with a trot that spun them over the unpaved roads, puddles from recent rain splashing up from the wheels. At each farm, each crossroads, wherever they saw people, Heseltine asked after
un milord anglais qui peint
, and now and then they got a waving arm and gabbled instructions that, Denton found, Heseltine only partly understood. He learned, himself, to recognize the phrase
le milord qui peint
, which he heard as ‘le meelor key pent’, until he could repeat it himself. He tried it on a woman who was standing at a wattle fence to watch them go by; her answer was voluble and entirely incomprehensible.

‘I’ll let you ask the questions,’ Denton said.

‘It’s always the way - you put the question together in your head, and then the answer absolutely goes by you like an inside-out umbrella in a gale. I don’t pretend to understand everything they say.’ Heseltine was driving, the reins held expertly through his fingers. He flicked them on the horse’s back. ‘Anyway, the local accent is ferocious.’

‘You’re doing fine.’

The day was cold but dry. Pale sunlight warmed their backs; clouds like streaks of whitewash lay against a soft blue sky, and the rows of poplars, like slow, uncertain dancers, waved their tops in the wind. Heseltine said that many painters came there. Denton asked him why.

‘It’s very picturesque.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Oh, you know - lots of old churches and things, peasants in quaint costumes - that sort of stuff.’

Denton didn’t think the peasants were quaint. The men wore short jackets like the one he’d seen at the party with Gwen John; the women wore lace caps and, some of them, enormous white collars. Were they quaint? And why was ‘quaint’ paintable? ‘I’d think a painter would want to paint what’s usual. The real world.’